Judge Dennis Davis and Professor David Peimer
Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil
Judge Dennis Davis and Professor David Peimer - Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil
- [David] Thanks Wendy.
Okay, so David and Dennis, I will call you a tiny bit . So I’m giving David his… So he’s going to have a barbecue today, so I will just get that sorted and started. Isn’t that nice that he’s having a barbecue and he is actually having, and he’s having about 30 or 40 friends? All vaccinated. Everybody’s been vaccinated. Isn’t it, isn’t it something, that?
[Dennis] That I can even think of that.
Exactly.
Yeah, it’s wonderful.
Well I’m jealous-
Fantastic.
[Judi] Because I’m looking forward to that cheesecake Wendy makes.
Yeah, the cheesecake-
I’m having my second vaccine tomorrow.
Cheesecake. Mm.
Ah, good, David. That’s good.
[David] Yeah, no, no, thanks, Dennis.
And we wait til like October but it may come.
Ah, no.
It will come.
No, Dennis-
It will come.
[Wendy] Blue skies ahead.
I feel for him.
So we’re going to have, in the garden we’re going to have 10 separate tables, everybody has to bring their vaccination certificates. I’m like, I’ve become the police.
Good.
Good.
So, so, so he was, and for his 30th he was in lockdown all alone in San Francisco and I felt so bad for him. So, so yeah. So last night after Shabbat, when everybody had gone and I didn’t need the ovens anymore, because we had a couple of the out of towners here, I made his favourite cheesecake. When all the kids used to come to my house for cheesecake when they were growing-
[Judi] It’s definitely not just David’s cheesecake, Wendy, it’s a fabulous cheesecake and everybody should have your recipe. It’s fabulous.
With pleasure-
And we missed you in…
It’s actually Jill Moralevitz’s recipe. You missed me in London? Me too, I miss being there, I promise you. You miss the cheesecake.
Yes.
You have to bring that cheesecake.
Yeah, it’s a combination. It’s a combination of Jill Moralevitz. I’m happy to share, whoever wants the recipe I’m happy to share it. I’m sure Jill and Cheryl… We actually, we all make it. We have a group of friends, South African cheesecake, and we’ve all altered it a little bit. So it’s a variation of the theme, of a theme. How are we doing for time?
Nothing like a good cheesecake.
Okay, well it’s great to talk about cheesecake because we’re going to just be moving on to…
We’re happy having a seminar on cheesecake.
[Judi] That’s okay, people are asking for the recipe already. Don’t worry.
Yeah, the banality of cheesecake.
Isn’t it?
Now you see, David, people didn’t realise-
[David] The unbearable happiness of cheesecake.
Yeah, Hannah Arendt made a good cheesecake. Grandma Arendt.
Okay.
Exactly. All right, so before I hand over to you I was going to say it’s all about the ingredients and it’s all about the quantity and it’s about how long you want to be, you know, how long you’re in the oven. So, definitely, I will with whoever wants it. And okay, guys, over to you, “Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil.” And welcome back, everybody, love you to have you with us.
Thank you very much.
We will… Thank you.
Visuals are displayed throughout the presentation.
Yeah, thanks Wendy. And me, again, just start by saying, it’s my first opportunity to do so, what a wonderful evening last Sunday was and how remarkable this entire enterprise has been. And just one thing on that, if I may, you know, people say to me, “How long have you known David Peimer, and have you been friends for many years?” And I say, “Actually we’ve never met, other than through Zoom, even though we are very good friends now, thanks to this process.” Which just goes to show you the extraordinary achievements of this Lockdown University this way, and friendships and connections and intellectual engagements have been encountered. But tonight we are dealing with Hannah Arendt.
Dennis? Dennis, may I jump in and just say also that David and I studied English together at Wits, but because I was K and he was P we were not in the same little group.
So that just goes show.
I know. Incredible.
We were in lecture theatre, so we never met either.
Dennis, sorry-
So it really feels… And I feel like I’ve known David… Yeah, over to you.
Okay.
Sorry.
I have to jump in and say can I, at the beginning, thanks so much to Alan and Trudy and to this amazing team. And Judi and Shauna. It was amazing last Sunday, and thank you. And to Dennis, okay, he’s become my dear, dear friend and we’ve only met through you Wendy and Zoom. Okay. And thank you. And I just really appreciate everything that has happened over the last year. I think it’s important, as Dennis was saying, to just say this upfront and how much is appreciated. Okay, over to you. And thanks to-
Okay, so… Yeah, thanks. So the way we’re going to do this evening, or morning, or whatever time it is that you are listening to this, is we obviously can’t deal with Hannah Arendt and her full spectre of work, ‘cause that’s extraordinary and would require a number of sessions. This session is concentrating on this concept of the banality of evil that she articulated in her book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” And we will also touch upon, towards the end of our talk, the comment that she made in the same book about the Judenrat and the responsibility of Jews during the, during the period of the ghettos in the holocaust. One other thing, the way we are going to try to conduct this particular lecture, slightly differently from what we’ve done previously, because what we intend to do here is have something of a debate. Not a forensic debate between a prosecutor, who essentially is going to prosecute Arendt and a defence counsel who’s going to defend her, but rather to put two slightly different nuanced views on the table, one by David, one by myself, so that you, all of you listening to this particular session will be able to make up your own minds and have your own discussions, and maybe this will prompt further conversation in relation there too. So back to Arendt.
The dates 1906 to 1975, I must say when you watch many of the clips of Hannah Arendt you can understand why she might not have lived as long as possible because she was a great smoker and you see her sort of smoking at every session. She was born in a secular Jewish home in Germany. Her mother was an ardent social democrat. And she finally, to cut a long story short, she went and studied, obtained a doctorate under Karl Jaspers who is a famous philosopher on the work, “Love and Saint Augustine.” Which itself is a particular interesting topic. During her stay as a doctorate student she began an affair with Martin Heidegger, which itself is particularly interesting because Heidegger, who is a extraordinarily important figure in existential phenomenological philosophy, of course was a Nazi and he had become, somewhat later he had become the rector of Freiberg University, left that in '34, but continued to be in the Nazi party right through until the end of the war. And then there was controversy thereafter when Arendt met up with him again. But that again is for another topic but I just thought I’d put that on the table. She was interned in Nazi Germany, she finally escapes to Paris where when the Nazis invade France she finally escapes and gets to the United States of America in 1941. By 1944 she was the executive director for the commissioner on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction.
And that’s not unimportant because of the fact that she therefore was intimately involved with Jewish affairs during that particular period and then moved onto Schocken Books thereafter. Of critical importance with regard to her academic achievements, we’ll say a book which will be, or three volumes actually, which will, consolidated in the book, which will be discussed and referenced somewhere during the session, which is “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published in 1951. Of particular importance to us is the fact that in 1961, Arendt, who by then, as I say, was a considerable figure in intellectual life, V-Day, a number of publications, including “The Origin of Totalitarianism,” travelled to Jerusalem on behalf of the New Yorker magazine to cover the Eichmann trial. And it was the articles that she published in the New Yorker which were consolidated and amalgamated to produce the book “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” And that is really the text which we are going to concentrate on this afternoon, morning, in relation to her treatment of Eichmann in general and the banality of evil concept that she articulated in particular.
Now to begin the debate, I’ll begin the discussion, we thought just to give you a flavour of Hannah Arendt, who she was and what the context was, and to fill in, as it were, the details of this very sketchy introduction that I have produced, we were going to give you a clip from a film on Arendt which was made in 2012 by the famous German director, Margarethe von Trotta, who of course is married to another famous director called Volker Schlondorff, and he produced an enormous battery of great work. In this film Barbara Sukowa plays Hannah Arendt. Of course von Trotta herself famous for a number of films including “The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum,” “The German Sisters,” and a series of others, but she made this film about Arendt and what we’ve got for you is a short clip from the film, which essentially will give context to why Arendt went to Jerusalem and something of the critical issues with regard to the background that will inform the debate that follows. So what is now going to happen is you’re going to watch a short clip for about five minutes and then I’m handing it over to David to develop the concept of banality of evil and thereafter let the debate commence. So if we could see the clip now, that’d be great.
Sure, thanks so much for that Dennis. Just to add that one quick thing, it’s very interesting, just for context, that this is made by a German director and with German actress as well, obviously.
Yeah, Barbara…
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay, and this is the clip coming up now.
Video clip plays.
[Narrator] Philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the famous phrase, the banality of evil. Now a new feature film shows the woman behind the provocative ideas.
[Narrator] 1961, Hannah Arendt on her way to Jerusalem on assignment from a New York magazine. 20 years earlier, she had fled from the Nazis to the United States. Now this philosopher and writer is to report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann who organised the murder of millions of Jewish people.
[Interpreter] This is a woman who thinks, “How can you show that? How can you show thinking in the medium of film?” I approached it very hesitantly.
[Narrator] Filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta spent years researching her subject. Getting funding was difficult too. This is the first film ever made about the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt. Now Hannah Arendt’s critical unorthodox way of thinking is being rediscovered in the humanities. For example, by the political scientist, Wolfgang Heuer.
[Interpreter] Hannah Arendt was very critical, very curious, and she had a great sense of humour. She said, “I make jokes that only hit you later.” That was her way of thinking.
[Narrator] At the age of 14 she began reading philosophers like Kant, Plato and Aristotle.
[Interpreter] For me it was a question, either I can study philosophy or I can kill myself.
[Narrator] The rise of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany politicised Hannah Arendt, she fled from her native Germany initially to France, then to the United States. In New York the shock of the Holocaust led her to develop her theory of totalitarianism, that all powerful forms of the state, like national socialism and Stalinism, can arise only through terror and that only the ideas and actions of individuals can prevent them. Her book, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” made her world famous and so she was asked to cover the Eichmann trial.
To Hannah, in honour of her trip to Jerusalem.
[Narrator] The trial in Israel polarised opinion from the beginning.
You, one of us will be present for this great trial.
[Narrator] Hannah Arendt had expected a monster, after all, Adolf Eichmann was responsible for the mass murder, but what she found seemed to be an average man who hid behind his orders.
[Interpreter] Eichmann is an antagonist, that’s the real jewel. The real antagonist in the film is Eichmann. He is the thoughtless one who leaves the thinking to others, to the Fuhrer, and she is the one who thinks for herself. Those are the two adversaries.
[Narrator] Arendt’s thesis of the banality of evil set off a scandal. She depicted Eichmann not as a demon but as a pedantic bureaucrat. She also addressed the role of the Jewish councils that were forced to cooperate with the Nazis, in the 1960s this topic was taboo.
Thank you, Fred.
[Narrator] She was treated with hostility and ostracised. Even close friends broke with her. She received murder threats.
[Interpreter] The story that I’d made accusations against the Jewish people is a malicious propaganda lie and nothing else.
[Interpreter] The expression, “banality of evil,” is sometimes misunderstood to mean that evil is banal, unimportant, incidental, every day but what the expression really means is that evil is not monstrosity but unthinkingness and that terrible crimes can be committed at a desk. That’s what banality of evil means.
You are trying to distract me.
Never.
I refuse to explain myself to these dimwits.
[Narrator] But Hannah Arendt stuck to her theories. She was stubborn, not only in her ideas but also in daily life. She did what she wanted, even with the whole world against her.
[Interpreter] She wasn’t sober and scientific, she was a very vibrant woman, a very passionate woman. She thought a lot and thinking was her main interest, but she did it in a very passionate way.
[Interpreter] She’s becoming more and more known. She is increasingly becoming a true intellectual witness and analyst of the last century.
[Narrator] How do you show thinking on a movie screen? Actress Barbara Sukowa brings Hannah Arendt’s political theories to life and makes them understandable.
Okay, as Dennis mentioned, this is just a short introduction to the film about her life. And as Margarethe von Trotta says at the end there, she is really taking on serious significance as a political philosopher of the last century, more and more. And her book, “Origins of Totalitarianism,” is brilliant and there’s some fascinating chapters there about South Africa during, before apartheid and into war times and before the First World War, during colonial times as well. Anyway to get onto her here, there are a couple of quick pictures just to show. This is Hannah Arendt… Moving on in her life. Just want to try and show the humanity in her and in her, her being, if you like. 'Cause we can’t gloss over her studies as a young woman to go, and especially in those days, to Germany, to study the PhD, you know, all the rest, to study with these people who became these, some of these leading philosophers, Jaspers and others. And then later in life. Okay. What this today is really going to focus on is this, as we were saying at the beginning, what does she actually mean by banality of evil? And that’s the primary focus for us for today. Because it’s an extraordinarily provocative thought and it can lead to sloganeering, it can lead to misunderstanding, to fashionable, ideological testing.
Many, many ways of banding this phrase around, you know, sort of naive bureaucrat, pen pusher and so on. For her, and this is what she writes, “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.” So all of this today, Dennis and I are going to have this debate, 'cause we do have slight differences and we’ve agreed that this will be an experiment for us not to necessarily compliment everything but to, together, to look at the profundity of her thinking, perhaps from slightly different perspectives. What on earth do these two and a half lines mean, which we will try and tease out and share. Hannah Arendt never said that Eichmann was not an anti-Semite or was not a Nazi in every fibre of his being. It is precisely his absolute symbiosis with the Nazi world, the so-called normalisation of its ideology and racist norms, despicable and flagrantly immoral but nevertheless legitimate and lawful within the Nazi world, and enjoying the ascent of the German moral majority, that normalisation is the embodiment of the banality of evil. It’s not just the image of this guy as a pen pusher, bureaucrat, et cetera, that’s obvious and that’s banal and stupid, in my personal opinion.
What it really is, is a failure to think. And what does she mean by that? When one does think about what is evil and how it is embodied in the 20th century. The second thing is that she comes from the tradition of German and central European philosophical thinking in the early part of the last century which is obsessed with various, the industrialization, managerialism, mechanisation of human existence, and structures of human society. She’s emerging from a philosophical tradition there and is shocked and stunned. Can’t look at the old concepts of evil, going back to religion and good and evil, not even Nietzsche and his ideas, but a whole new approach is required. Compare that back to pure psychotic selfishness, or psychopathic characters only even, something else is cooking and she’s trying in her best to grapple with something of it. And it’s in that context that she works within a western, in particular central European, philosophical tradition to try and tease out what is going on that can be learnt about this word evil from the 20th century.
And, just to go on here, and the idea is that it’s the normalisation of these ideas of racial purity, of superiority, of racial leading to hate, obviously, of antisemitism, these ideas of the Aryanization, all of these ideas which we know so well, what happens when they become the norm? What happens when they become the norm, agreed to by a majority in a society, whether out of fear, or career advancement, or out of ideological commitment and belief, or a combination, what happens when they become the norm and the dominant way of thinking amongst most people who believe the prejudice, who believe the lie, who can no longer see it as a lie or a prejudice but believe it? We have so many examples, and I’m not trying to equate at all ever the holocaust with apartheid or, you know, with the creeping fascism of our times today, but what happens when lies are believed and taken as the norm? What happens when prejudice of any kind is taken and becomes the norm and most people subscribe to it? An extraordinary shift in philosophical thinking about the idea of prejudice and evil and hate start to come 'cause we cannot think from another person’s shoes, we are stuck in our own way of thinking, in one person’s shoes delivered by a Fuhrer, the Fuhrer, and all of that that comes from it through the propagandistic media.
“The 'banality of evil,’ when immoral principles become normalised by unthinking people. Evil becomes the every day, people going about their daily lives become complicit actors in systems that perpetrate evil.” They may not think it, they may not act, but the mere, even their inaction, their lack of thinking from another perspective, to go into another person’s shoes. What is it about if I look, sit in another, stand in another person’s shoes to see it and think from that perspective I’m forced to change? I have to believe the cliches of the dominant ideology. At the end of, just before being hung, Eichmann said, these are his last words, “After a short while, gentleman, we shall meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.” It’s such… It’s such insane cliche. As if the grandiosity of his own hanging is so much linked to the whole history of the world and everything else. The grandiosity of self importance, of naive, of deluded narcissism here for me shows that he was full of the cliches of a particular way of thinking. The ideology of the hell of narcissism. He could not think in another way.
Even at the moment before his death, the moment just before his hanging, he’s sort of, as if he’s this grandiose, you know, character marching forth gladiatorially. You know, it’s an extraordinary set of case in the mind that become the dominant way of thinking, that become normalised. Okay, a couple of things here that I want to mention linked to this is, sorry to go back to this here, is the conformity to what is expected as part of a group and the group ideology. Whether, as I said, through fear, or belief, or the right thing to do, or career advancement, all of these things together become the dominant way of thinking that most people will buy into and become part of that. This is what she means, for me, by the failure to think and the evil linked. It is necessary for human beings, in my opinion, to make sense of events. We need to make sense. To explain how hardships and horror came about, to have a vision of how they can be resolved. And we rely on others, most people I think, most people rely on others to tell them, to tell us what is the narrative of understanding of our times, in our own times, in these times. Philosophically, this is what Arendt, I think, is trying to look at and saying it’s different to the previous centuries.
Foucault argues that every, that societies need a theory of knowledge and if you come up with a theory of knowledge which explains most of the problems, difficulties, and a way out that most people will then buy into that becomes their dominant ideology, it becomes their dominant belief system, and it’s very hard for them to break from that and to see from another perspective. And for me, Arendt is saying, the failure to think, the failure to see from another perspective what has become so ingrained in a dominant ideology is part of her understanding of this banality of evil. It is that precise process of normalising the only one way of thinking, inability to think in other ways, which we can apply to many things in life. And I don’t only mean, obviously, you know, the minor things but the primary belief system of people in life. We have the example, you know, I’m not trying to, again, equate South Africa at all, ever, to the Holocaust but what’s been going on about, you know, so-called conspiracy theories, lies, about the virus, what Mbeki has said about AIDS in South Africa and killing hundreds of thousands.
How certain people can articulate a way of worldview so that so many others become unthinking about it or minimally challenging and seem to go along with it in societies through the world. And she’s saying this normalisation, again, becomes part of the sad, tragic, grotesque banality. People do great wrong, not because they are unaware of what they’re doing but because they consider it right. They believe it. This is because they identify with a dominant group whose ideology justifies that they can destroy others. Far from being the monster she thought, Eichmann he was terrifyingly normal. Not just as a, as a guy in a, in a suit and, you know, sitting there, man behind the glass booth, et cetera, he carried out his murderous role with calm efficiency. Not due to an abhorrent, warped, psychopathic mindset but because he had absorbed the beliefs, the principles of the grotesque Nazi regime so unquestionably. Eichmann embodied the unspeakable horror of the actions which were defined not so much by independent thought but by the absence of his own independent thought. And that absence of one’s own independent thought is the banality of evil.
Again, I’m never trying to equate South Africa to Holocaust, or anything else, ‘cause I believe the Holocaust is totally unique, the most unique, horrific event in human history, but I’ll never forget when I happened to be, when I was in the white, in the South African army, and a commandant coming to me and saying he was never going to, he wasn’t prepared to die for an apartheid bench. And it struck me, in the early eighties that was the beginning of the end for me personally. I could see it, of the end of apartheid. Because he could think from another perspective as opposed to the corporals and the sergeants, and so many of the others, who could not think through hell or high water of another perspective except that black people were primitive, stupid, evil, savage, et cetera. So the banality of evil comes about when everyday life, every day ordinariness becomes dominated by this theory of knowledge, as Foucault would say, this dominant belief system and people cannot step into another pair of shoes to understand it. The context is that there is, she believed that we lived in a connected web of shared conventions, shared way of being conditioned, in western society in the early to mid 20th century. And this web shapes our thought and behaviour to we are have a dim consciousness of it even.
Perhaps we only really notice it when somebody challenges, or doesn’t conform. Are we aware of our biases and learned behaviours? For Arendt the answer is largely, no. It’s precisely our tendency to adopt beliefs and judgments given by others with minimal thinking that allows the banality of evil through a one-dimensional thought process to flourish. And if we’re not careful, evil principles gradually do emerge to become the new normal. It’s only by being awake to different viewpoints that we start to be aware of what we’re conforming to and what we’re not. Only by thinking for ourselves that we avoid drowning in a tidal wave of one belief system, one customised approach to understanding our world. Jane Elliot, I’m sure many know, in the sixties did that extraordinary experiment with school kids where blue eyes and brown eyes. You know, this is just after the assassination of Martin Luther King that she did it. She said, “Okay, you’ve got blue eyes, you’re smarter, intelligent and more ambitious, and better, superior, than brown eyes.” And immediately the kids changed.
Those with brown eyes felt terrible, low self-esteem, low confidence, and so on. And those with blue eyes, superior, strong, confident, and started to bully. And the next day she switched it and the blue eyes became the brown eyes, superior, inferior switched. And an extraordinary experiment was that amongst these kids, school kids, and they said, “Well, they realised an awareness towards prejudice. That you’re not born a bigot, but one learns it and one can therefore unlearn it.” So that experiment is fascinating and I think could bare a repetition or perhaps some educational legs in today’s world. The other idea of Hannah Arendt linked to this is that evil isn’t the Richard III, you know, I’m determined to prove a villain. He’s too aware, he’s too self-conscious, “I’m going to be a villain, I’m going to be evil,” et cetera. “I’m going to be the psychopath.” Et cetera and so on. Richard, Macbeth, Iago, and so on. This is different to the majority of it, which was part of the western tradition. This is different to the majority of people coming into an understanding of this is the norm, to believe in a certain way. We resist evil by not being swept away by the dominant belief system, but by stopping ourself to think in another way and not delegating our mind to other people.
So it’s, I think that there’s something in all of this for me which in a way gives a sense of Arendt and her understanding of this phrase, banality of evil. And if I may just add a couple of other quick points before handing obviously over to Dennis, is the other idea is that the mechanism, which is briefly mentioned in her book, “The Human Condition,” where she comes from the context of the early part of the 20th century, which Kafka touches, you know, that we not only live in a bureaucratized world and forms and paperwork, et cetera, but that human beings are detached from emotional reality. Human beings are trained to become numbers, figures, et cetera, in this vast spectrum of the emerging technological society. The extraordinary achievements of technology and the effects on how it can shape and condition our human minds. And that detachment is part of it.
And the man, she called it the managerialist approach. That the managerialist sense, which is linked to Kafka of course, and not only bureaucracy, it’s the managerialist world and the managerialist mindset more profoundly that is the predominant mode of thinking in the early and to mid and later parts of the 20th century and is a requisite for totalitarianism to take root and for evil to take root because it requires a certain detachment of the human condition to emotion, to conscience, to moral judgement , to ethic and so on. And in her book, “The Human Condition,” which was her last book, she has the image of the Sputnik, the first spacecraft, the Sputnik going up, and that’s the first image in her book, “The Human Condition.” Why? Because it is a detachment from thought that challenges, other ways of thinking. One idea, one approach, and it’s actually not even earthly anymore, to be highly metaphorical and poetic if I may for a moment, metaphorically it’s to be so detached that the thought is there. Of course there’s other ways of thinking, absolutely, where there’s metaphor as well, but she chose to interpret this metaphor in one particular way. Then if I can mention a couple of final phrases here from Ian Kershaw, the great British historian, “The Nazis didn’t just obey Hitler, they worked towards him, seeking to surpass each other in their efforts.”
Now this is a fascinating approach which for me emerges from Arendt. They’re trying to outdo each other almost to satisfy not only Hitler, but the ideology of Hitlerism and the ideology of the grotesque and horrific Third Reich. Kafka, “The bird seeks the cage.” One of the great images of Kafka, captures for me all his work and so many other writers to come, the individual, who can fly, as human nature rather often seeks the cage, the cage of given beliefs, the cage of given ideologies, of received thought systems, received theory of knowledge, security, comfort of prejudice that is learnt. The bird which can be free rather seeks the cage. “Evil tends to appear in the guise of good,” Brodsky. What he means by the guise of good is that of course the so-called normalisation of thoughts, which are evil, become normal belief systems and appear in the guise of good in that way. He doesn’t mean it in the more classical and traditional way of thinking, but it must give shape in the dominant society in the guise of good. People with blue eyes are good, brown eyes, bad. Solzhenitsyn, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart? During the life of any heart the line keeps changing and at times he is close to being devil, at times saint.” Steinbeck’s phrase I think is fascinating, to end with, “It isn’t that evil wins, it never will, but that it doesn’t die.” And finally, Scott Fitzgerald for me, his understanding of intelligence is, for me, a profound thought which to link to Hannah Arendt, “Intelligence is the ability to see both sides of the same story, and still act.” Which means, yes, one can see the belief system of Nazism and the evil and the grotesque horror, but then once one has the ability to think and step into the shoes of the counter thought to that, whether it’s blue eyes, brown eyes, whether it’s anti-Semitism and hate and prejudice, or whatever, one is forced to change. When one does step into the shoes and think of the same thing from another point of view one cannot then carry on in the same way of thinking. And to go back, the failure to think, because once one goes into thinking about what is evil, what is the learnt belief and system that I’ve been conditioned to believe in? As soon as that happens, for Arendt, one steps into other’s shoes and sees the same thing from another point of view. And that precise inability to step into the shoes, to normalise the one way of thinking, that’s the banality of evil. Dennis, over to you.
Okay, thank you David. I, let me say this right up front, that if Arendt had said what you just said, I would have no quibble. But the problem is she didn’t say what you just said, not in-
She did.
But not in that book. That’s the thing. You’re absolutely right, if you take a whole perspective of her work no doubt about it, that what you have said can be justified entirely in Arendtian work, no doubt. For example, in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” she writes, “The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.” And so that captures in, I think, one sentence exactly the fundamental point that you’ve been making and I have no, not only have I no quibble with it, I applaud that analysis. That’s absolutely correct. The problem was that when she then got on to Eichmann it sort of didn’t have that level of clarity. She wrote, “What Eichmann said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others and hence against reality as such.”
Or, to quote that which you have already referenced, but let me give the quote, “Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would’ve been further from his mind to determine with Richard III to prove a villain. Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement he had no motives at all. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realised what he was doing. He was not stupid, it was sheer thoughtlessness.” Now that leads to the fundamental analysis that what Nazi bureaucrats and civil servants, including Eichmann, were engaged in was in fact the conveying and deportation of Jews to death camps. It was entirely directed on this line of argument towards the establishment of lists. The development of transport schedules. In other words, in the execution of a series of technical tasks for purely logistic ends. Their actions were consequently evaluated in terms of yield and efficiency rather than of their ultimate human and therefore moral consequences. Now that is definitely what she was saying. For me there are a series of problems with that. The broadest one is it lets people off the hook because it essentially says that they’re captors of an ideological machinery, as it were, which essentially renders them thoughtless to do anything else. And that can’t be, there has to be human responsibility.
And indeed, as Ian Kershaw, whom you’ve quoted, has written, “Nazis didn’t obey Hitler, they worked towards him, seeking to surpass each other in their efforts.” By the same token, they also had a large to give discretion. And in that discretion the question is, what were they doing? Or as Laurence Rees has written in a book on Auschwitz in “The Final Solution,” it was this, the discretion, that made the Nazi system so dynamic. It was the, it was effectively the thought, in inverted commas, of the bureaucrats that rendered it as pernicious as it was. Furthermore, if you, if you’d go drill down to Eichmann himself, in other words, if David is right generally that it is ideological constructs, and they definitely are very, very powerful in constructing thoughtlessness in the way David defines it, which is what I take to mean that you can’t, you can’t see another side, you can’t see anything else, but I think Arendt is going further than that saying, “We’re just bureaucrats pushing through paper.” Then when you get to Eichmann himself, David Cesarani’s book on Eichmann is a devastating critique of this analysis because what it shows is that Arendt’s analysis was at best naive, not least was because she only attended the start of the trial. Eichmann worked hard to undermine the charge that he was a dangerous fanatic by presenting himself as an inoffensive pen pusher. Arendt then left. Had she stayed, says Cesarani, she would’ve discovered a very different Eichmann, an Eichmann who identified strongly with anti-Semitism and Nazi ideology, a man who did not simply follow orders but who pioneered creative new policies, a man who was well aware of what he was doing and was proud of his murderous achievements.
And indeed he quotes her, sorry, he quotes Eichmann as saying, “If of the 10.3 million Jews we had killed 10.3 million then I’d be satisfied. I would say, 'All right, we’ve exterminated an enemy.’” In other words if we want to have a hermeneutic debate of what thought is, true there was thoughtlessness but that this was simply a bureaucratic pen pusher who essentially did nothing more than effectively act as a bureaucrat in this way I’m sorry to say I would differ in this regard. Now there is, that leads us to, I think the inquiry that David has pointed us in the direction and I don’t want to dismiss this, I agree with that entirely, and that is we have to look at how that reality is constructed. We have to look at why it is that people do obey orders in terms of reality which has been constructed by society for them. Now it’s interesting, and I always draw some inspiration from the parashat hashavua, the reading of the Torah that we read, the in which we read about the development of leprosy. And in the notion of leprosy we also read that leprosy was caused by , evil speech.
And the rabbis say that the reason why, the perpetuation of evil speech against another, is so fundamental a crime that it was visited with leprosy and therefore a form of quarantining as it were of that group of people from the rest of the community was because Judaism is a language of words and our tradition is that the world was created by words. In a way, if you read the Torah, God created the Torah and we read through words. But just as a world can be created through words, we believe, a world can be destroyed by words. And if the words are such that they are designed to divide us from the other and they grain the traction that they do, unquestionably that gives rise to various forms of construction of reality. Which doesn’t mean that people are thoughtless, it means that to a large degree the only thought that they have is within the confines of that particular context. There lies the serious analysis. And the problem is that Arendt knew that V-day, my first quote, but not necessarily the Eichmann case. Now much has been made over the years that the banality of evil point was substantiated by the two famous social-psychological experiments to which I made reference last week.
That is the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments which supported the proposition that people are capable of extraordinary acts of evil, and that inherently within that is that concept of thoughtlessness to which Arendt referred. The point is that if you look at the more modern theories which have been developed through empirical studies, and I refer, I could refer to a whole bunch but for the purpose of this debate there is a study in 2006 which was called the BBC Prison Study and it showed that people are prepared to take orders, it is true, when they identify with the cause of the leader and that the question of administrating sort of torture and punishment is, to quite a considerable extent, derivative from the notion of association with the leader. And so the point I’m simply making is that unquestionably, as a description of what was going on, the banality of evil has significant traction. But you’ve got to go further than just simply this idea that no communication was possible with Eichmann, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of safeguards, that is a level of thoughtlessness.
In short, what I’m trying to say is that the true horror of Eichmann, and his like, is not that their actions were blind, it is that they saw clearly what they did, they believed it was the right thing to do, and we therefore have to essentially ask ourselves, “Why did they think it was the right thing to do? How does society reach a particular point where they thought it the right thing to do?” Now that has enormous lessons for us today. One of the reasons that is regarded as so heinous a crime within Judaism is because the rabbis understood very well, go down that route of disparaging people, of calling them cockroaches, as occurred in Rwanda, or of having no level of similar civilization to us, apartheid, or alternatively being human vermin, which was effectively what the Germans had been reduced to insofar as Jews and others were concerned, and that’s where you lead to. You lead ultimately to the worst and most unprecedented of all evil, the Holocaust.
And so what I’m trying to say is that both from a social-psychological perspective, and it is true, we can analyse a whole host of these particular people from the point of view of psychopathy, from the point of view of neuroscience, which has added enormously to our knowledge on this, and I have no time to develop that line of a research inquiry for the purposes of this evening. But what I wanted to say, bluntly put, if you look at all of that we have to broaden the lens to understand from where Eichmann came. So summary, in broad terms, I would want to suggest that simply leaving the analysis as bureaucrats who were pen pushers striving for efficiency in the particular task that they did as a analysis, an explanation of what went on, and then using the term banality of evil to describe that is not sufficient. You have to do, I think, what David was suggesting, which is broaden the lens, lift the analytic gaze and look at why this occurs.
Now, again, I concede that there are psychological and psychiatric reasons for this, which I’ve suggested we can inquire into, but there is the broader concept of the construct of reality, of the totalitarian structure which develops in administrative machinery and dehumanises people to the extent that what they do they think is correct. But then on a narrower line, Eichmann, as a person, was no bureaucrat, Eichmann was proud of his achievements, if Arendt had stayed and listened to the cross-examination. Eichmann was relevant to the construction of the horror which engulfed Jews throughout the Nazi period and Nazi reign and Eichmann effectively sought, as it were, to be recognised for these great achievements. Now we could call that thoughtlessness, if we mean by that the inability to actually see any other conception of reality.
But to say that he was thoughtless by meaning just a pen pusher and a bureaucrat, which regrettably is a difficulty that is inherent in the way Arendt described the process in her fleeting engagement with the trial, is to put it to, perhaps mildly, an unfortunate analysis. Now we can debate these questions, but it does seem to me where there’s common cause between us is that the broader analytic is where we need to go and we need therefore to, as it were, look at her whole body of work which I think if she had connected it would’ve got us to where we are in this evening in our analysis. And, David, I’m happy to cede the floor to you before just making a couple of remarks about Judenrat.
Dennis, thanks so much and I hear very much what you’re saying and in the wonderful spirit of discussion and debate, I would just, just one or two things.
[Dennis] Sure.
For me, her idea is, the banality of evil, is the, when she says the failure to think it is about how a particular construction of the reality and a particular belief system becomes normalised and one can only think within that paradigm and people cannot think outside of it or in different ways and become so conditioned. So I think it’s more that and how that, what that leads to rather than just the presentation of the self as a pen pusher and bureaucrat. I think that’s the kind of image, and I know that’s become, you know, you know, very much pushed out there. But I think what, digging in, and, absolutely as you’re saying, it comes from interviews with her afterwards where she had tried to clarify what she meant by the phrase banality it comes out more and more. But that key phrase that I showed at the beginning, those two and a half lines, that is in the book and that is what she was trying to, I guess, get at but perhaps didn’t clarify as well as possible in that book.
The other thing about which I do need to differ, because I agree with Milgram, and I know, you know, as you and I both know, the BBC and the other, the later versions and partial debunkings of Milgram’s experiment, it was redone in Poland in 2017 and 90% obeyed the authority of the leader. And I agree that the criticisms have been… And it was done in France on TV, 81%. Jerry Berger redid it in America at Santa Clara, 2009, 70%. Milgram 65%. Where… It’s still… The authority of the leader is still, in the Milgram original, through the figure of the scientist leader. And if the scientist is telling the people who are in the experiment what to do it becomes the leadership of the ideology of scientists that they all accord to and that they follow and he becomes, if you like, the authority leader figure. So… And I understand and I agree with you with those criticisms. But I think for me overall and, you know, we are happy to differ, the Milgram idea still lasts and I know that links more with her idea in terms of obedience and authority. Back to you Dennis, before the Judenrat-
- Okay, yeah, thanks David. I’m not going to debate this with you. Safe to say there’s a huge literature of published studies also being questioned. There is a very fine article in the 2019 “American Psychologist” by Le Texier which reviews all of the literature and which, I think, comes to the point that there were huge methodological difficulties with both Milgram and Zimbardo, and one has to broaden the consequences. But I don’t have time to delve further. So let’s just say a little bit about the Judenrat. What she said, Arendt, and, of course, as David and I have discussed, it’s only a couple of paragraphs oddly enough which then got her into even more trouble than in fact the banality of evil analysis did. She said the following, “The members of the Jewish council were, as a rule, the locally recognised Jewish leaders to whom the Nazis gave enormous powers, until they too were deported. To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story, in the matter of cooperation there was no distinction in the highly assimilated Jewish communities of central and western Europe and the Yiddish speaking masses of the East. In Amsterdam, as in Warsaw and Berlin, as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of the vacated departments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until as the last gesture they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation.”
And therefore it was this passage, this idea that the Judenrat, the Jewish councils, were collaborators in the evil and that therefore, to a large degree, this was the darkest chapter of the whole story which was the controversy. I am only going to make two points. Firstly, I’m going to refer to Primo Levi where he said, I think quite rightly, that, “I believe that no one is authorised to judge them, not even those who lived through the experience of the , of the concentration camp, and even less those that have not lived through it. I would invite anyone who dares pass judgement to carry out upon himself with sincerity a conceptual experiment. Let him imagine, if he can, that he has lived for months or years in a ghetto tormented by chronic hunger, fatigue and humiliation, that he has seen die around him, one by one, his beloved, that he’s cut off from the world unable to receive or transmit news, and that finally he’s loaded onto a train 80 or 100 persons to a box car, travels towards the unknown blindly for sleepless days and nights, is off and is at last flung inside the walls of an indecipherable inferno, he’s then offered a rigid either or immediate obedience or death.”
Now I accept that he’s talking to a considerable extent about what happened in the concentration camps, but he also mentions the ghettos. And I think that kind of sanction, or that caution, about using a moral evaluation in such circumstances is well taken. Secondly, there is a vast body of literature, I was particularly influenced by Doron Rabinovici’s, “Eichmann’s Jews: Jewish Administration of the Holocaust Vienna, 1938 to 1945,” which shows, I think, absolutely compellingly that Arendt’s throw away comments about the Judenrat are totally de-contextualized and have no real understanding that what in fact happened. That is that the Jewish councils in their behaviour, you have to understand that the Nazi crimes defied logic, they went beyond the imagination. The Jewish officials assumed that the Nazis would keep the victims alive as long as they exploited their labour. In fact, the mass murder, says Arendt, concedes went beyond any imagination. And the the truth about it was that whilst there were those who clearly collaborated more than others the study Rabinovici shows quite clearly that there were those who tried very hard to do the best they could under appalling circumstances, circumstances where it was almost impossible to know quite frankly what the rules were, given the way the Nazis behaved, given the conditions under which they were, and given the fact that they were utterly powerless.
It is wrong to suggest that they had power, they had minimal power at best. And whilst, yes, there were some collaborators, to generalise that as a whole seems to me, again, to employ Levi, to actually be found guilty of judging those through an experience which was utterly and completely incomprehensible and not subject to the kind of rational judgement of sitting in New York and writing a book about it. Which is why I think Arendt was rightly criticised for that. There is much more one can say, but I think it’s generally a view now that the particular comments she made need to be subjected to a nuanced analysis between those who might have collaborated more than they should have and those who tried to do the best under appalling,, evil circumstances. So, David, I think we’ve come to the appointed hour, so should we take questions?
Yeah, can I just make two quick points to counter, Dennis?
You can, of course. Of course, go on.
Okay. And I agree in entirely, I think Hannah Arendt is completely ridiculous and completely out of whack when it comes to the Judenrats. I think it’s nonsense what she’s writing. I think it has no philosophical foundation. I think it’s more written, well, for another context of newspapers or something. It’s ridiculous, for two reasons. Number one, there were no Judenrat with Einsatzgruppen. Millions were killed, slaughtered, bullets, and there’s hardly any Jewish council, any Judenrat, in all of those areas of the east where the Einsatzgruppen were doing it within hours, within a day or two. So it makes complete nonsense of what she’s saying. I think that’s the one point. The second is, and this is an interesting, which I also have from Primo Levi, talking about Chaim Rumkowski. “Had Rumkowski,” this is Primo, “had Rumkowski survived no tribunal would have absolved him, nor certainly can we absolve him on the moral plane. But there are extenuating circumstances, an infernal order such as national socialism exercises a frightful power of corruption against which it is difficult to guide oneself.
To resist it requires a truly solid moral armature and the one available to Chaim Rumkowski was fragile.” I just throw it out as an interesting thought from Primo Levi. But the other one, which is the bigger question we are looking at today, her comment on the Judenrat is, I think, completely ridiculous. I agree completely. So just, if I may pull it together, you know, what Dennis and I have tried to do is deal with this phrase of hers, which is profoundly provocative, it’s still causing enormous dissension, rage, partial agreement, and we’ve tried to work together to, in the spirit of gracious debate, as Dennis would say, to tease out some of the ideas of Arendt, because she’s becoming more and more a profound philosopher who at least philosophically provokes ideas around what on earth does it mean for ordinary people, or people, you know, from the 20th century on to commit such horrific and grotesque, the greatest evil of all time. Does it differ, notions of evil before, notions now, to try and throw out some of these ideas which come from, and I agree entirely, her extraordinarily provocative phrase. And I guess that’s it for today, Dennis.
- Okay, so let’s look at the questions. I won’t go through them all ‘cause they’re a huge amount but let’s try to do some of them. Q&A and Comments:
Q: “I wonder if you could say a few words about the decision to speak in France, re the Sarah Halimi case?”
A: That’s an interesting question, obviously in the light of what we are talking about. For those of you who don’t remember, she was a Orthodox Jewish woman who was brutally murdered in 2017 by somebody who was heard to say, “Allahu Akbar” and clearly was associating himself, or so everybody seemed to think, with extreme Muslim group and killing Jews and she was killed. He was tried, a man called Traore, he was acquitted by the court for the basis that he, on the defence that he had smoked so much cannabis that he was not able really to formulate the criminal intention. The supreme, the Court of Cassation last week has in fact upheld the decision of the lower court. It is a deeply disturbing decision. Macron criticised the earlier court and I thought probably rightly, but it’s difficult for me to say more because of course I haven’t read the evidence to this affair.
Q: Could it be that somebody is so smoked up as it were that you would have to at least not be able to say that they had the requisite criminal intent?
A: Yes, certainly. We’ve done that, I’ve done that in my career, but it’s rare and it requires an enormous amount of proper psychiatric evidence. I obviously haven’t read the records so I can’t comment further.
Q: “Has there been anything more on the UCT professor?” Number of questions on that.
A: I certainly have written to the university. I’m told, in the reply, brief reply, simply this, that they’re investigating. I will be following up, I’ve heard very little more. I have an understanding, or so I read, that the Jewish Board of Deputies, et cetera, are going to pursue the matter further but I can’t tell you very much more than other than if I get any information by next week I shall tell you.
Q: “What do the presenters think about Deborah Lipstadt’s book critiquing Hannah Arendt?”
A: It’s a really interesting book and I, in fact, I had the privilege of interviewing her at the Franschhoek book fair a few years ago in Cape Town. And it does seem to me there ought to be a compelling case. But again, it’s an enigmatic, it’s the enigma of the banality of evil phrase, and the point that David and I have been grappling with, which essentially makes it difficult to evaluate whether Lipstadt is correct. In other words, what I’m trying to say is if we take the broader horizon that we’re talking about it may not be, but it’s well worth reading. And of course the advantage that Deborah Lipstadt had was she had an enormous amount of material by the time she wrote it, more than 40 years after Arendt, which gives it a perspective. David, the next question is for you, whether you’re related to Judge Peimer.
- Yeah, thank you very much, Alan, that was my father, he was my father.
Q: Yeah. Monty asks the question, “Hannah Arendt supported segregation in the United States, the right to free association,” as she said, and therefore discrimination has greater validity than the principle of equality. Could you… It could make a lecture.
A: Well, it’s true that in an article called, “Reflections on Little Rock,” she did write about this particular problem, and it has certainly appeared that she was sailing rather close to the wind that you suggest, Monty. It has had elicited quite a lot of academic debate one way or the other and there are those who say you have to read it in slightly different contexts but I agree with you, it would make a very interesting lecture.
Q: Romaine, perhaps you want to answer this, David, “Freud identified capacity for destruction in all of us, did she find this helpful?” That’s Arendt.
A: Thanks, Romaine. Yes. I mean, she said… Hannah Arendt said that there isn’t an Eichmann in all of us, there isn’t an Iago, a Richard III, a Macbeth, et cetera. She disagreed with that later in interviews, but not in the book. And I disagree with her, I think that I agree with Freud, and I agree with Shakespeare more, that I think the, and Solzhenitsyn phrases that as well, the quote that I showed at the end. I think there is an element, not necessarily of Eichmann and that extreme, but I think there’s a capacity for self-destruction and destruction of others in all of us and I go more along the lines of, you know, some of the ones I mentioned, you know, Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn, et cetera, Freud.
- Right.
Neighbours. Would you say that it’s been complacent?
Did you say that it’s been complacent? No.
[David] Not sure what you mean.
I don’t know what you mean. Sorry about that.
Q: Neema, “How did she rationalise the relationship with Heidegger?” We could have a whole lecture on that. It’s a very complex-
- [David] We could have.
A: And I’m not sure we have time for that now. But the answer is, I suppose bluntly put, I don’t think she did. What I mean is she didn’t do so satisfactorily, let me put it that way. But I mean there’s a whole relationship there, very complex. Heidegger was a complex figure himself, given the fact that he still used, in fact enormously influential in philosophical thought. But I think we don’t really have time.
Q: Marion, Marion Jewel, “Is Arendt saying that evil is based or founded in mechanistic and bureaucratic actions, following the principles of leaders?” David, do you want to…
A: I, yeah, Marion, thanks. I would say no. She’s saying that evil is founded on a failure to think out of the so-called, the received so-called normal belief systems with which the majority agree with to live by in a society. And if that can be in a dictatorship, that is one dimensional way of thinking. You know, all bananas are bad, all apples are good. It’s a very binary way of thinking. And she’s saying try to break out of that construct. And I’m sorry to use such a simplistic example, and I don’t mean to relate it to the holocaust in the slightest, but to give her way of philosophical thinking, what she means by a failure to think and what becomes normalised and what doesn’t become normalised in a dictatorship becomes a dictatorship of a mental way of thinking, a kind of mental apartheid, as opposed to a more subtle way of thinking in different people’s shoes about the same thing. The, sorry, the performance of it may be mechanistic and bureaucratic and corporatist and managerialist, but that’s the performance of it, that’s not the value system or the belief system itself.
Q: Well, Warren, my old friend, thanks for asking a question that no doubt as many other questions they have done over many years going to get me in to trouble, “What would you like, we’d like to hear your view, a big lie that the 2020 US election was stolen. Is that a prime example of banality of evil?”
A: I’ll tell you what it is an example of is exactly what we’ve been talking about this evening, was how you can construct a reality in which people are located which is completely absent from a reality. In other words, an alternative reality. And the scary thing about the United States of America is just how many people have bought into that and how through Fox News, social media, et cetera, a construction of reality has taken traction in the United States which unquestionably jeopardises the long-term future of democratic rule. In fact, I was fascinated the other day to listen to a webinar of Martin Wolf, the chief economist of the “Financial Times,” who said, in relation to this particular point, “It’s almost inconceivable that we talk about now something that is real, is can American democracy last in the light of this alternative reality?” And whilst that may be, as he conceded, something of an exaggeration the fact that we even debate it indicates the traction of particularly the alternative universe which very much, I think, fits in to the way in which the banality of evil is then located.
Q: Nicky, “Arendt said that only the actions of individuals could prevent totalitarian regimes, what did she mean by that?” Since I asked the last, answered the last one, David, do you want to have a…
A: Okay, just to say here, what she meant is that first one had to develop a way of thinking which didn’t conform to the dominant norm. So if one believes that vaccinations are bad, or that there is no virus, or Mbeki that AIDs is a western disease, et cetera, et cetera, then one first has to have a different way of thinking from that dominant so-called norm, dominant way of thinking which has become the norm in a society, challenge it, and then act. And, whether totalitarian or not. And that’s linked to what Dennis was saying about yes, there can, you know, America could change, the big lie, it can be seen as a first step. It may or may not, we don’t know, but this is where it begins. Alternative facts is a phrase for alternative ways of representing reality. We have so many going on at the moment in the world.
Q: Okay, so then the next one we’ve partly answered, Martine, the question of can humans, was she saying that they can’t be inherently evil? I think we’ve answered that. Is she excusing this kind of behaviour by saying it’s becoming all right?
A: Not at all. I think that’s where David and I totally agree. Not at all. There’s no sense here. And remember this, Martine, she actually, at the end of the book on Eichmann, she’s one of the people who actually thinks that he should have been executed. He should have actually been subjected to the death penalty. So no, there’s no reason that she does that at all.
Q: Myra, this question is: what is going on is political expediency?
A: I accept that there’s a huge amount of going along to get along sheep mentality. I think that’s true. And I, and we know that people develop a sort of amorality simply because let’s just do this for the quiet life. And that that is true in South Africa as well, and increasingly at the moment where sorts of all sorts of outrageous conduct is just let to go. But I’m, it’s a part explanation. But I think the broader explanation of why it would be that an Eichmann in Nazi Germany, and again, I don’t, I, like David, do not want to equate apartheid with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust as such, but what I do want to say is that you look at Eugene De Kock, this is not just a question of political expediency, this was, in a sense, a kind of conduct that had to be subjected to the kind of analysis that we’ve spoken already.
Q: Is this different from Gramsci’s concept over Germany?
A: Well, let’s have a whole debate about the Gramscian conception over Germany. But the answer is that in broad terms, yes, if you can develop an ideological framework which essentially becomes the dominant one, that’s what he was concerned about. And of course prison notebooks deals extensively with this particular debate. I’m just anxious about time, I’m also anxious about the fact that Judi has a barbecue to prepare, which is much more important.
Q: Myra, “How do you think this thought process could be used in regular life when somebody commits a murder? Maybe all should be forgiven.” Not quite sure I understand that. I don’t know if you do, David?
A: No. I don’t think anyone should be forgiven.
No. I don’t think it’s about, I don’t think she’s dealing with a question of forgiveness, I think she’s trying to understand, and what Dennis and I are trying to understand here together, what is meant by that provocative phrase, “banality of evil?” How it’s presented, how it’s performed, and a philosophical understanding of it, really. I don’t think it’s dealing with forgiveness or not. And let’s never forget the support from her and I think pretty much most people, everyone, not forgiveness of Mr. Eichmann, but obviously to execute him.
So Bobby, yes, I agree, if Arendt had articulated a theory as capable and far reaching as Dr. Peimer I think her ideas would’ve been less controversial. That’s precisely the point I made, and I’m sure David would regard that as a huge compliment too.
No, I won’t because I agree with a lot of what Dennis said. But what I would say here is that I’m trying to, I’m trying to give a context for Hannah Arendt because we all live in context and the context of her studying philosophy, being a political philosopher, you know, and her Jewishness, et cetera. So we’ve got to see the writing and the understanding in that context as well. And some of the later interviews where she tries to expand on what she meant by the phrase banality of evil.
Yeah, I’m just looking down here because there’s so many, I’m not sure we can get through all of them at all.
Yeah.
Q: I do think that you’re right, Kirk and Andrea and Leonard, talking about gun control, and Kirk and Andrea talking about the social media.
A: I think we’ve basically, I would agree entirely on certainly the way in which the… I mean, for those of us who live outside the United States of America, the lack of gun control is utterly incomprehensible to be perfectly honest. And of course, again, comes back to much of what we’ve been talking about earlier. Let me get this.
Q: Gerald, “If as you say the Holocaust is unique, how can a concept like for both apartheid, it and apartheid, maybe most people think, don’t think, you know, in sense of term, but some failures I think are surely more evil than others. What makes them more evil can’t be the banality, it covers so many cases.”
A: Well I suppose all I want to say about that is I think banality of evil can cover both cases. The fact that one may be more, more even more grossly evil than another does not necessarily mean the analytic can’t be employed to both. Indeed, I think both of us have been saying, assuming that it can. And that doesn’t at all reduce from our analysis that the one obviously is unique. And the other was unique, but perhaps in not quite as gross a way. That’s all. In a horrible way.
Can I add in there, Dennis, is that I think also for the Holocaust, as we showed when we showed the Wannsee Conference clip, it’s always in the context of the managerialist corporatist image. That the Germans, in terms of the Holocaust, are trying to maintain and the industrialization, and the use of such technology, industrialization, in terms of the Holocaust, on every level, of what that means, from the transport, to the trains, to the schedules, to the pen, to, you know, to the desk, to the horror of the people in the camp itself, the guards, you know, all of that is what is, and obviously the extremity of it is utterly unique in human history.
Right?
It’s not the same as that.
Let’s just scroll down, take two or three more.
Q: There is an interesting one here from Bev, “Can you help reconcile that there was certainly a banality in meeting the death quotas, the fact of so much cruelty in the killing by cruelty surely implies that there must have been individual human intention, the human desire to create suffering above the bureaucratic requirement?”
A: Well I think that’s really what we’ve been talking about. And I think if I could marry the analysis, David can correct me if I’m wrong, if you’ve got a situation whereby, going to quote Arendt, that you’ve got a totalitarian regime where people only see one reality, in a sense the victims have been reduced to not being human. That’s why, as I say, the parsha is so interesting this week. By prohibiting evil speech because the consequences of the of words creating a world can also destroy a world if you extrapolate. And so, therefore, to a large degree it’s not that there’s not culpability, it’s not that there isn’t responsibility, but what we are trying to do is explain how on earth that happened in the first place and looking at Arendt’s concept of banality of evil in that regard. David-
Can I mention what Hannah has said about and the blue eye, blue brown eyes research?
No, sorry, why don’t you just take that as the last one? Yeah. Take that as well.
Okay. And I have to say it because Joanna is one of the very few people who are my complete inspiration in life, one of the most remarkable human beings I’ve ever met, and have the privilege to know. And I agree, it did cause mental disturbance later. It was done in the early sixties, as you know, Joanna, too well, and also before the whole notion of ethics and, you know, sort of the ethics of doing psychological experiments was really formulated. I just wanted to bring it out as an example of a very fascinating experiment.
Okay. I think, David, I mean, it’s really quite late. I think-
Yeah. No, I agree.
We should let Judi go. I’m sorry for not-
[Judi] Oh, no, it’s absolutely fine, everybody. Don’t worry.
No, no, Judi, there’s so many questions we’re not going to get through this in hours. I need to…
[David] Okay.
I’m going to… I mean, I’m in your hands. I’ll carry on, but, dunno, Wendy, it’s up to you.
You know what, I don’t… I… If Judi needs to jump off-
[Judi] No, it’s absolutely fine if you want to continue.
All right, I’ll take a couple more. Just, I’m scrolling down. I’ll scroll down, see what there is. I’m looking.
Q: Dennis? Dennis, let me ask you, where does, what’s the role of conscience in all of this? Where does the super ego… Where does the super ego fit into this? Also, you know, we can just look at… Go on.
A: The super ego can only, from my perspective, if I can, Wendy, the super ego only comes in within the context of belief in a certain given belief system. So the super ego structure, the super ego’s role is within that. So if I believe that all tall people are this, this and this, all short people are that, that and that, and I’m stuck with that belief then the super ego has to fit with a whole belief system and a large ideological system of that.
David, let me just jump in. But you’re talking about a primary belief system. You know, there are many people that were involved where there were secondary belief systems. They weren’t primary belief systems. So it’s really interesting to understand the actual-
It’s a complicated… It’s a hugely complicated question in this regard because we also know that a number of these people who were involved in murdering, including some of the soldiers who would’ve shot people, et cetera, suffered incredible sort of psychiatric trauma thereafter, which indicates conflict. In other words, it would be wrong to use, you know, a sort of static approach where you say simply because there’s a prevailing ideological framework within a society that means that everybody acts as an automaton. That would be problematic, and it is problematic. And that is why, you know, I differ in relation with Milgram and Zimbardo because it seems to me that psychology and psychiatry have in a sense broadened the lens considerably. Particularly influenced I might add by a new book which is going to come out, I’ve got the page proofs of it, by Professor Dan Stein, professor of psychiatry at UCT. An absolutely extraordinary book which reduces the entire field to language for the layperson, but in an unbelievable way. And precisely he’s made some of these particular points. All right, let me see if there’s anything else that, yeah. Gee, there’s so many points there, I just don’t know… Oh, thank you very much.
I, yeah, I will give you, I’ll post, Joanne, the title of the article, the 2019 article by Le Texier. I’ll give it to Judi, or in fact if you want to just email me at judgedennismartin@gmail.com and that’ll save Judi from the bother and I will send the article to anybody who wants it. Yeah, you see a lot of these questions sort of repeating themselves, not because people are repeating but because these are particularly provocative issues. I’m just scrolling through it. I think we’ve basically covered almost everything that everybody-
Right.
So, David, thank you once again for, for-
[David] Thank you, Dennis.
Very civilised debate. If everyone, the cases that I had in my courtroom would have two councils who’ve been so polite I would’ve come very far.
Thank you, my dear wonderful friend, Dennis. Okay, judge and professor.
Thank you to everybody.
And fellow intellectual.
We’ll speak later with you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, sir. And yes, thanks, Judi. Thanks for manning this.
Thanks, Judi.
Thanks Judi.
Thank you, everybody. Wendy, thank you and have a wonderful, wonderful cheesecake afternoon.
Okay, barbecue. Thank you.
We’re jealous. We’re jealous, Wendy.
For not being able to share it.
Honestly, if I could, I would.
[Dennis] I know, I’m only joking.
I love to share.
You have to share it.
Okay, enjoy.
So, Dennis, David… Dennis, you and David, we are connecting in about an hour and a half. Is that okay?
Yeah, okay. Take care.
Look out for my email. Okay, everybody.
Thank you, bye.
Thanks so much.
Thanks for joining us.
Take care.
Take care.
Enjoy the cheesecake. Judi, thanks.
[Judi] Bye bye, thank you.