Dear ,

This week's subject line is the title of a book by Elizabeth Minnich, this week's featured writer and a woman I am fortunate to know.

I had the great privilege of encountering Elizabeth and her The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking back in 2013. Serving the role as a reader of this work, and engaging in conversation about its contents, was, well, thought-provoking in all the best ways, and I'm honored to share this book with you, a book about which Stephen Bloch-Schulman, associate professor of philosophy at Elon University says: "While I believe it is an ever-present possibility that books can actually make us better people, I see it as quite rare that they either try to or are successful in doing so: I am convinced that this one can." As am I. 

Chances are that you too have been troubled by current events. You may have even asked a question that Elizabeth grapples with throughout her book: What, how, are they thinking? 

Are "they" thinking? Are we? How can we become better people, confront evils around us, if we are not willing—and able—to truly think about what is happening?

Image of Rodin's "The Thinker" in the Rodin Museum in Paris courtesy of Joe deSousa.

In regard to these questions, Elizabeth's book has so much to offer that I had a very hard time choosing an excerpt that would do it justice. So I've decided to make an exception to my usual format. I'm sharing some background from the introduction of The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking here, and you'll find two sections from Chapter 3 below. (Followed, as usual, by a prompt.)

Elizabeth Minnich, while a member of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of The New School, took an advanced seminar with  philosopher political Hannah Arendt: “Political Experiences of the 20th Century.”

“I wrote my first paper for her,” Minnich says, “as an attempt to solve a puzzle I did not yet know came from my depths and would, in differing forms, drive me for decades more: how could so many deeply idealistic people, in this case Communists in the early days of the Soviet Union, have failed to see, and to stop, what was happening as Stalin took power?”

Minnich came to realize that “It was extraordinarily difficult . . . to think outside of the ways they had for so long thought, to question what they had believed so fully that it had given meaning to virtually all moments of their daily lives.”

Later, Minnich served as a teaching assistant to Arendt, who was “still dealing with the impassioned criticism of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).”

Minnich goes on to say, in a section called HANNAH ARENDT, “THE BANALITY OF EVIL”:

“Arendt’s thoughts about Eichmann, a significant perpetrator
of the Holocaust, had taken her to conclusions for which many

people evidently were not ready. It was not only that there was

a lot of disagreement that struck me; it was how vitriolic and

highly personalized it often was. Right or wrong in her

interpretations, Arendt’s thinking had clearly gone off the tracks

many people required even to listen. I was troubled and

fascinated by blocks to thinking that were anything but ‘merely’

intellectual in their effects. That was what Arendt’s ‘report’ on

Eichmann explored: what being ‘thoughtless’ meant in the

highly specific instance of Adolf Eichmann. Those who could
not listen to Arendt’s thinking were realms away from
Eichmann, of course, as, in different ways, were the
Communists who could not stop believing in Stalin, and my
family’s white neighbors who were so frightened of change in
their suburban enclave. Nonetheless, my interest in the version
of my question that focuses it for me intensified: What, how,
are they thinking? Are we thinking?

In the next section of her introduction, THE EVIL OF BANALITY, Minnich writes:

Reflecting on Arendt’s work and its early reception by good
people who were deeply pained, I found myself reversing her
[in]famous phrase and, having done so, thinking that perhaps
it would have helped had she spoken, as she did not, of
“the evil of banality,” rather than—or, as I now think, in
addition to—“the banality of evil.” To think of evil as “banal”

was then altogether too difficult: these were times in which

“unthinkable” went with “evil,” with the Holocaust—unthinkable,
unspeakable, radical evil, the very opposite of “banal.”

The evil of banality has haunted my thinking ever since it

occurred to me, illuminating Arendt’s work, especially her use

of “thoughtlessness” to describe what was most extreme,

most striking, about the man on trial in Jerusalem but then

also much more of her work, and that of other philosophers

to whom I turned (Plato’s Socrates, Heidegger, Husserl,

Jaspers, Dewey, Addams, James, Weil, among others).

So, whatever else I have been doing, studying, teaching,

writing, I have continued since that first paper I wrote for

Arendt reading memoirs, novels, interviews, studies that offer

the chance to get in close to what and how people caught up

in extraordinary events as perpetrators, as resisters, as

victims, as immediate observers were thinking—or not—

about what they were doing.

Perhaps this focus on making sense, on thinking, is bizarre on

my part. I have been told that it is, and all the more often as,

in the first decades of our new millennium, so much pressure

has been brought to bear on schools at all levels to “deliver

content,” to “hold people accountable” for at all levels to

“deliver content,” to “hold people accountable” for achieving

pre-set “outcomes”—in short, for the production of predictable

products measurable by the sort of standardized evaluation

methods that are precisely not suited for the free act of

thinking (which Socrates, perhaps the Western exemplar of thinking, likened without contradiction to a wind that blows

everything down; a stinging fly that awakens; an electric eel

that paralyzes). But I realize now that, since my first

encounters with dramatic injustices that did not shatter my

own life but that have haunted and driven it, I have increasingly

felt that understanding thinking—and so also thoughtlessness,

and so also banality in its many forms—is for me the most

pressing moral and political quest.

What were you thinking?! we say to a friend, a child, someone

we are interviewing when we just plain cannot imagine how

a thinking person could have done that, whatever it was.

At root, that is the question of this book, which is informed

by a lifetime, now, of pursuing such questions, many

experiences and conversations, reading, and research. More

recently I have had invitations to talk with wonderfully

thoughtful and morally serious audiences in classes, academic

gatherings, conferences on genocide, community groups, and

it is that thinking, as engaged as it is with the world and others,

that I bring to you now in the hope that you will join in.

Elizabeth Minnich will be discussing her book at Park Road Books this Thursday, June 28th at 7:00 p.m. Details here.

My thanks to Elizabeth for doing so much good thinking about thinking, and sharing her research and insights with others.

And my thanks to you for being a person willing to think about the banality of evil and the evil of banality in hopes that we can "get to the heart of the matter" of how to stand up for good.

Love and light,

Maureen

 Meet Elizabeth Minnich

Immediately after college, Elizabeth Minnich took off for India on a Fulbright Fellowship to teach English and study Bharat Natyam (classical Indian dance). A year later, she began her doctoral studies in Political Science (big mistake) at the University of California, Berkeley. She finished her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the New School's Graduate Faculty for Social Research while teaching in NYC. In her last years there, she served as Hannah Arendt's teaching assistant while Arendt was defending her then-controversial concept, the banality of evil. 

Elizabeth has been learning, teaching, being an administrator, and trying to comprehend our madly mixed world ever since, a project that has resulted in a fair number of publications: writing, like teaching, is a fine way to think with others about really interesting, pressing problems. For Elizabeth, interesting problems tend to be those in which political and moral concerns come together. Her first book, Transforming Knowledge, won a national award, and her work can be found in anthologies, textbooks, magazines, and journals. She has also practiced what she calls her "field-work philosophizing" through work with projects, on boards, and in communities. Presently, she is a Distinguished Fellow with the Association of American Colleges & Universities—and still writing in order to figure things out.

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What Elizabeth says about WordPlay

"I worked on The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking for many years—not consistently, always while also doing and writing and publishing and teaching other things. I needed to work on it: it was a personal quest to understand how something like genocide, like enslavement, is humanly possible. Finally, I realized I had to do something with the piles of paper, the computer files, even though that seemed impossible. I had knit a huge, baggy sweater that had too many arms. I had never worked with an editor except one assigned by a publisher for an accepted manuscript before. But there I was: the cartoon balloon over my head said, I need help. I asked around, found and met Maureen, and agreed to send her my mess of pages.

And then: I sat down and organized, re-wrote, cut, and did the very things I thought I could not. How could I send this smart, thoughtful woman, good writer that she is, such a mess? With her in mind—and that is the crucial part: a particular person whose judgment and advice I valued as disinterested, professional—I actually was able to do what otherwise I could not. And when she did read it, talk with me, make some suggestions, I was entirely retrieved. She got it, kindly admired it, discussed it, and, although she also did more editorial work, that is all I really needed and remain grateful for. 

Sometimes, you just need to have the right reader in mind, and then you can do your work. This is an editorial role not often enough recognized. Maureen did recognize and fulfill it. I finished my book, and the first publisher I approached took it."

Featured Writing

An excerpt from

Chapter 3 

of

The Evil of Banality:

On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking

​​​​​​​by

Elizabeth Minnich

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REVERSING

Faced with many such examples, I have discovered that there is a great deal to learn from my reversal of Arendt’s concept as a way to go deeper into the on-the-ground meanings of the banality of evil. It holds before us the lack of congruence between monstrous acts and the petty people who do them, between the horrors of plague and its cause, a mere bacillus. And then, well before we get to the actual doing of evil when systems have gone bad, we encounter and have to face up to the evil of banality that makes so many of us vulnerable to being thus changed.

Here, too, we have to reflect on meanings. Neither of these phrases—the banality of evil, the evil of banality—at first seems quite right by our more common use of these words, as reactions to Arendt’s concept keep making evident. There is nothing at all “banal” about what we want to mean by “evil,” and it seems absurd to attribute “evil” to the “banal.” The faith that there is a moral, epistemological, and ontological chasm between the dully ordinary and the monstrous extraordinary recurs here, as it does every step of the way. We cannot just change our minds about that once and be done with it. Arendt herself, as we have seen, struggled for decades to understand the insight that she shared with her teacher and friend, the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Ways of thinking that I believe can turn out to function as a kind of excuse— key among which is the conviction that evil is by definition and always radical—persist because they do work for us.

In good enough times and places, unreflective assumptions, including those we make about the chasm between good and evil but hardly it alone, shield us from the tiring daily demands of realities on our attentiveness, and so from a felt need for moral reflection. In rotten times, unreflective assumptions shield us from the searing realities with which even silence makes us complicit—and right there, in such shielding in good as in rotten times, lies a germ of their complicity with the evildoing that requires many of us to happen at all.

We are all, if to varying degrees, practiced in avoiding awareness of things that might divert our attention from a task, irritate us, trouble us emotionally, challenge us morally. We practice allotting our attention daily. If we did not, we would find it hard to get through a day, to do our jobs, to focus on a friend, a child, learning a new computer skill, deciding whether to do this rather than that in response to a friend’s need.

We are also therefore all too able to see in the first dead rat in the street nothing but a bother, an embarrassment to our establishment, another sign of the ineptitude of our municipal service providers. Even if the rat spewed blood from its mouth, staggered, died at our feet, and evidently ought to have caught our full attention, we can manage to keep walking and remember it later only as a bit of gossip to tell a friend over coffee so we can enjoy sharing a frisson of shock.

A German diarist, the linguist Klemperer mentioned earlier, attuned to observing even small shifts in meaning, wrote one day early in the rise of the Nazis, but not before there was evidence of their brutality: “On the way home from the theater, [I]  noticed a colleague who was ‘anything but a Nazi’ wearing a discreet swastika lapel pin. Why? I asked. ‘Well! Why not? I’m no risk-taker.’”3

When the majority of basically decent people do not refuse to go along with the early small changes by means of which regimes, social orders, cultures, economic systems, historical eras, religions take over definitional power of “good,” of “decent,” of “ordinary,” a very dangerous slide has already begun. There is no awareness, no judgment—or, awareness is only as processed through no longer apt categories, and thus no effective judgment. As in Camus’ tale of a city struck by the plague, most of us, forced finally to see what is happening, then call on the kinds of judgment we have learned to depend on—as Camus’ character, Father Paneloux, judges the plague to be the act of a just God winnowing the good from the bad among his flock. Thinking about thoughtlessness; the out of touch end of the thinking continuum; the role of clichés, conventions, insider concepts, prejudgment categories; people accepting early, lead-in system changes; deflected awareness—these together suggest a relation of banality and evil at all times.

This—the implication of what seem very small things with the
worst of all—brings us to the very heart of the matter.

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

Having dramatically said that, I have to observe that in the dominant tradition of the West, we want the “heart of the matter” to be almost anything other than thinking or its opposite, thoughtlessness. Pale and wan, thinking, is it not? Really not the sort of thing that could possibly enable good, strengthen us to go against the grain of a difficult world, let alone in its absence as thoughtlessness actually enable evil. We need to change hearts, not minds, not thinking, to make people really care for each other, the environment, justice, peace, do we not? Perhaps I have gone off on the wrong track.

I am often asked, Why do you not speak of love? Isn’t that
what really matters?

I do invoke love and its failures sometimes, but not, in any case, without a whole lot of attention to thinking. Thinking is how we make sense of what is happening, what is before our eyes, in our memories, in our hearts and bodies. It is the activity of consciousness, of awareness, and we cannot develop consciences that attune us well to the world and others if we are unaware of—inattentive to—our thinking. Nor, when we become aware, can conscience develop further to become illuminating (if never a certain guide) without reflexivity and reflection, without our being thoughtful even about our own thinking.

Love and care can go as wrong as reason when we are not thinking, being attentive, reflecting. We are as responsible for thinking about our feelings as about anything else. “I loved . . .”; “I hated . . .”; “I desired . . .”; “I feared . . .”: these are every bit as complex, or superficial; clichéd, or profound; apt, or wildly inappropriate as any other report from our consciousness we might make. Feelings too can be the result of inattentiveness; unthought-through, they too can be banal—and deadly. Both Eichmann and Stangl spoke to their interviewers about their lack of hatred for Jews, of their respect and fondness for some people who were Jewish. Stangl, out of touch as he was, even got his feelings hurt when a young Jewish man he thought was a “nice boy” when he knew him as a forced worker held in Treblinka later testified against him. These Nazi murderers seem to have thought their lack of personal hatred for their victims mattered, and that people needed to understand that about them.

I would suggest that having felt respect, friendship, fondness for people who were Jewish when that was a death sentence they themselves were carrying out helped them do their job with a clearer conscience and contributed to protecting them from the overwhelming guilt, and the shame, they so strikingly did not feel afterwards. They felt themselves to be good people. They had not descended into ugly, crass hatred of their victims; they make a point of telling us about the crude men they encountered who did hate, marking themselves as superior. Morally superior. Because they continued to have the feelings of decent folks while they did horrific harm. No, I do not think feelings, including love, are a more reliable prod to moral reflection and action than attentive, reflective, free thinking.

~ from The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking, available on Amazon here.