By Guido Maschhaupt
UCR Class of 2013
In May 1960, Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped in Argentina by the Israeli secret service and transported to Jerusalem to stand trial for his war crimes in WWII. Eichmann was the head of the logistics department charged with finding an efficient solution to the ‘Jewish Question’. Therefore, especially to Israel, he was seen as the ultimate embodiment of evil. The entire trial was recorded and broadcasted.
In this context, Hannah Arendt has written an outstanding, philosophical text named “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”. She realized, as she studied the man standing trial for unprecedented war crimes, that he was not an evil Nazi that wanted nothing more but to kill Jews out of conviction. In fact, he was a bit of a dumbstruck, slow-minded and downright banal individual. He answered the questions of the prosecutor with a combination of slow wit and “I was just doing my job” was an oft-heard retort. Arendt was fascinated to see how the most normal individual can do the worst of evil and consequently developed her concept, “banality of evil”.
Eichmann was a simple man with a talent for organization. He was happy to do a job in which he could excel. He was part of an extensive and pervasive bureaucracy. Weber argued the best bureaucracy supports an ideology of efficiency and dehumanization, in which people are treated as cases, not humans. Being part of such a system, in which even the rule of law justifies actions undertaken, in which the paramount importance of one’s job is to follow the rules, individuals can drift further and further away from affiliating with the goals of the system and instead start caring more about the effectiveness of the system itself.
It was important to Eichmann that the Final Solution was executed as well as possible, not because he had a hate towards Jews, but because it was his responsibility, assigned by his superiors and he wanted to do it well. It became clear to Arendt that an individual like Eichmann was not evil by nature, contrary to popular belief. But he was guilty of another crime. He had not been “thoughtful” of his actions, thereby failing to use the most important capacity of humankind: thinking.
Whilst being wary of falling in the trap of Godwin’s Law (comparisons to Nazi-Germany tend to remove all credibility from arguments), it is still important to inquire how these ideas might apply to us today. Eichmann was an extreme case indeed, but the “banality of evil” concept will be forever relevant. It is a state of complacency, in which we fail to challenge our own actions and beliefs, individually and collectively. We shield ourselves from it, because truly confronting it would be very inconvenient. It is better to just do one’s work unquestionably. It is also a normalization of practices that in other contexts would be unacceptable. Sometimes institutionalization and ideology make certain practices such a “matter of fact”, that the question of right or wrong is no longer the issue, but only one of efficiency. It is a mistake to think this does not happen anymore in our day and age.
For example, consider the bad working environments of people in low-wage countries that exist to provide us with affordable products. Corporations are inherently bound by the logic of utility maximization. When labor became too expensive in Western countries, it was a completely rational step to move production processes elsewhere. It is not inherent to capitalist ideology to incorporate mitigation of negative effects in corporation policy, but contingent on choices of the management. This logic is completely normalized in our society; we expect corporations to act in such ways. On our own territory we have constructed elaborate legal systems to humanize the capitalist system, proving that our society does not approve of this. But it is exactly this dissent with exploitation that makes it so incredible that we have found a way to deem inhuman practices acceptable when they take place outside of the jurisdiction of our labor laws. It seems to have become a “matter of fact” that people outside of our world are treated as “less-than-human” and we happen to reap the benefits from it. It is not something we like, but it has been so normalized that we have accepted it to be an inherent part of the system. Perhaps we are also suffering from a mild case of the “banality of evil”.
Guido Maschhaupt, class of 2013, is an Anthropology and Politics major from Amstelveen, The Netherlands.
