The banality of indifference

Rev. Marisol Caballero
April 27, 2014

The phrase “the banality of evil” refers to how evil can often wear a fairly “normal” exterior. On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, we’ll explore the concepts of “evil,” “good,” and all of the gray area in between.

Tonight, at sundown, until sundown tomorrow, marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, known as Yom HaShoah, or day of destruction. The well-known slogans remind us to, “Never forget.” And to, “Never let it happen again.”

Recently, I began studying philosophy professor, Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem, a Report on the Banality of Evil” and the controversy that has surrounded it since its publication. I remembered the phrase, “the banality of evil” one day when I was listening to NPR and heard the account of yet another school shooting. For a split second, I was filled with grief and sympathy, but then was aware of the fact that my mind naturally drifted, quite quickly, to thinking about the song that was in my head. The fact that, a second after hearing of such tragedy, I was cheerfully humming along to whatever annoying pop song was plaguing me was more jarring to me than the shooting, itself. This upset me.

After a brief moment of self-judgment, I began to mourn the fact that things like safety in schools can no longer be taken for granted and that mass-murderers choosing schoolchildren as their targets has become so commonplace that a relatively sensitive and genuinely caring person, such as I like to think of myself, is able to go on, relatively unaffected by such news. I checked and, in the year and some odd months since the tragedy in Newtown, CT, there have been 44 school shootings in the U.S., 13 of them within the first six weeks of 2014, alone.

So, I looked up the phrase and rediscovered Hannah Arendt’s book. I even watched the lackluster 2012 movie, Hannah Arendt, about her life before, during, and after the book’s publication. I’m not sure that I buy her argument that Nazi Adolf Eichmann, the man who was in charge of arranging the transportation of several million Jews to their death in packed train cars, was simply a puny, boring bureaucrat, unable to think for himself; that he was just following orders. She was surprised to find that, as she puts it, “Everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown,” that his, “lack of imagination” and “sheer thoughtlessness” allowed him to “never realize what he was doing.”

No, I’m not sure that I buy any of that. It seems a weak defense. But of course, I wasn’t there. Still, what’s difficult to wrap one’s brain around is that anyone could ever so abandon their conscience or divorce themselves from empathy so entirely as to compartmentalize in that way. Eichmann’s greatest aspiration, it seems, was to rise in the Nazi ranks and to be somebody, having been a disappointment to his father, his community, and been looked down upon by the middle class of his upbringing. He wanted to please the big man in charge, at all costs, even swearing that he had never held any anti-Semitic beliefs, himself.

In truth, there could never be an adequate motive offered by a mass-murderer. We hope, in many contemporary cases, such as mass public shootings, for a mental illness diagnosis to surface. In our efforts to understand horrendous acts of evil, we prefer to remove as much personal agency and responsibility from the perpetrator as possible. We would rather believe that a glitch in the wiring of the brain would provoke such atrocities, rather than believe that someone could, willingly and without remorse, choose to hurt or kill another. If there is an explanation of mental illness, we think, then we may have hope of preventing future tragedies, of curing the sickness.

In an article in The Guardian, entitled, “From, Adam Lanza: The Medicalication of Evil,” Lindsey Fitzharris, a British medical student, warns us that to over-pathologize examples of evil will remove personal accountability from the equation, “While I do believe it is important to determine what factors may have led Lanza to open fire on Sandy Hook Elementary School- and whether this tragic event could have been prevented- I want to remind the U.S. and the world of one thing: evil is about choice. Sickness is about the absence of choice.”

Not only should be careful about pathologizing mass murderers so as to avoid further stigmatization of mental illness, but in doing so, we not only let the perpetrator off the hook, we also avoid confronting the possibility of seeing ourselves in those who are able to choose evil over good. Sure, some who commit evil acts truly may be beyond rehabilitation, unable to feel a shred of empathy for another. Psychosis is real. But, although we may view ourselves as genuinely compassionate, good-natured people, I would reckon that empathy most often lies somewhere on a spectrum between saintly and intrinsically evil. We can’t all be Mother Theresa just as we (thank goodness) aren’t all Hitler. I am sure that we’d rather think of ourselves as closer to the Mother Theresa end of that spectrum, as I believe we tend to be, but the fact still remains that empathic concern is a fluid characteristic.

Our 1st Principle, as Unitarian Universalists, states that, “we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” The drafters of that principle, delegates gathered from UU congregations throughout out movement, were careful not to state a belief in the inherent goodness of every person. Rather, we are concerned with the possibility of goodness in people and strive to treat them accordingly.

Last year, professor Steve Taylor wrote in Psychology Today, “empathy or lack of empathy aren’t fixed. Although people with a psychopathic personality appear to be unable to develop empathy, for most of us, empathy- or goodness- is a quality that can be cultivated. This is recognized by Buddhism, and most other spiritual traditions… As we become more open and more connected, [we become] more selfless and altruistic.” This is evident in Tibetan Buddhism’s idea of recognizing that every human was, at some point in time, your mother, and treating them as such. We are aware of the Golden Rule. The Platinum Rule goes one step further, “Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.”

It is within human nature to desire to think of ourselves as “the good guys.” As liberals, progressive folk, we like to think of ourselves as standing “on the right side of history.” Hopefully, with dedication, our legacies may prove this to be the case. But, because we believe ourselves to be good, does this prevent us from perpetrating or being complicit in evil? If we can so easily dismiss horrors of the nightly news as ordinary, commonplace occurrences, how far removed are we from the ability to set aside conscience, altogether? What makes otherwise “normal” people commit acts of evil?

This was a major question in the recent television series, Breaking Bad. The lead character could have been a modern day Eichmann- a boring, dweeby high school chemistry teacher who, upon being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, begins to manufacture “crystal meth.” For several seasons, the audience bears witness to Walter White’s moral degradation, as he, little-by-little, goes from dull family man to ruthless, amoral drug lord, by looking past one scruple after another.

It’s amazing how people can transform. We don’t often think about the fact that Hitler was once a giggling baby that someone cherished. I saw a photograph of a young, teenage Osama Bin Laden this week. He and over a dozen siblings and cousins were posing in front of a pink Cadillac while on vacation in Europe in the ’70’s. They were all dressed in the styles of the day, both women and men. No hint of radical Islam. And there he stood, laughing and young, big hair and sideburns, dressed like J.J. from “Good Times.” I couldn’t look away.

These days, most accept that evil is not a metaphysical force. “The Devil made me do it” doesn’t hold much weight anymore. But, I wonder if we have not adopted a seeping, dangerous cultural denial of evil’s existence as a systemic reality. We take cultural ills and reduce them to interpersonal incidents before we then reduce them to background noise on the nightly news. It’s someone else’s loss, someone else’s kid, someone else’s town.

Instead of stepping back to recognize the living system at play, we zoom in so closely that we no longer have to focus at all. Epidemic gun violence becomes to us unrelated cases of mental illness, or neglectful parents, or the product of violent video games. Racism becomes individual prejudice, mere name-calling, men in white sheets, rather than the very foundation that our society was built upon that was never fully reconciled and still affords great privilege to those born with white skin. Genocide becomes an egregious terror that lesser civilized nations carry out, rather than our nation’s own shameful history. Misogyny becomes cat-calls and ditsy blond stereotypes, rather than the worldwide actuality of the continued mistreatment of women and girls. And, anti-Semitism becomes the painful memories of far-away Europe, rather than the continued presence of Neo-Nazi hate groups within our own communities. And so on…

Ignoring our own nation’s atrocities, choosing the privilege of being able to not have to think about evil in terms of systems in which we live our lives, creates of us a chilling similarity to the many nameless, ordinary accomplices to historical events such as the Holocaust. Before the world wars, Germany was widely respected, thought of the world over as a center of culture, science, intellect, and art. Flunkies “following orders,” bystanders, and other banal people helped the evil cause in their action and inaction.

It would be maddening to fully empathize with each and every story of evil, day in, day out. The anger and grief would eventually deaden our ability to experience joy. We can, however, choose not to outright ignore. Together, we can choose not to accept hopelessness, not to choose personal insignificance, but to be part of the collective response. We can choose to work toward repairing the evil present in our world with good. And, we can begin within ourselves. Systems are not always easy to notice, especially because we are busy playing our parts within them.

So, how not to feel like any problem, any evil is too big to care about? How do we battle the urge toward indifference? Where do we find the middle ground between a depressing, bleak outlook and total moral blindness and lack of concern? Longtime Buddhist scholar and activist, Joanna Macy, tells us that we find it in community. She says that, “[this work] needs to be done in groups so we can hear it from each other. Then you realize that it gives a lie to the isolation we have been conditioned to experience in recent centuries… And because the truth is speaking in the work, it unlocks the heart… there comes a time when the little band of heroes feels totally outnumbered and bleak, like Frodo in Lord of the Rings or Pilgrim in Pilgrim’s Progress. You learn to say, “It looks bleak. Big deal, it looks bleak.”

Archbishop Desmond Tutu speaks to this in his book, “No Future Without Forgiveness.” After apartheid, South Africa sought to find a middle ground of moving forward. Somewhere between the Nuremburg Trials after WWII and the national amnesia that continues to take place in the United States’ attitude toward our own history of genocide and slavery. Post-apartheid South Africa was too complex for either option. Both sides were still living side by side, both had committed atrocities, and all wounds were still fresh. The middle way, the extremely difficult path toward forgiveness was chosen and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established.

Tutu said, “It was pointed out that we none of us posses a kind of fiat by which we can say, “Let bygones be bygones” and hey presto, they become bygones. Our common experience is in fact the opposite- that the past, far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet, has an embarrassing and persistent way of returning and haunting us unless it has in fact been dealt with adequately.”

On my fridge is a magnetic quote by Gloria Steinem, “The truth shall set you free, but first it will piss you off.” I’ll add that it will also make you cry and fill you with grief, but we shall be free.

Never forget. And, never let it happen again.

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