The trial of Adolf Eichmann began fifty years ago this week, on 11 April 1961. There is a huge secondary literature on the trial, of which Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem is certainly the most famous contribution.[1] Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil first appeared in a five part series published in the New Yorker magazine in February and March 1963. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1963 by Viking Press which contained several technical corrections, some additional material concerning the German anti-Hitler conspiracy of July 20, 1944, and a Postscript dealing with the controversy that followed the original publication. I believe that this work should be a “core text”, particularly for courses and curricula dealing with the Holocaust and genocide studies. It’s value lies not only in the historical information it provides. Arendt’s book is important because of the controversy her analysis of Eichmann’s motivation provoked, and the intellectual courage she demonstrated in writing her book and responding to its critics.
SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolph Otto Eichmann (1906-1962) played an important role within the Third Reich in the implementation of the Final Solution for the “Jewish Problem”. As the head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration he organized and managed the deportation and transport of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Germany and Austria to Eastern European ghettos where many became victims of the Einsatzgruppen. Following the Wansee Conference of 20 January 1942 (which Eichmann attended as recording secretary) he was given the job of Transportation Administrator of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, a position in which he arranged shipments of Jews to concentration camps where they were murdered on an industrial scale. At the end of the war he was captured by the U.S. army but escaped under a false identity. He fled to Argentina in 1950 using a fraudulent International Red Cross passport and worked at various jobs under the name Ricardo Klement. He was living in Buenos Aires with his wife and their four sons in 1960 when he was captured by Mossad agents and taken to stand trial in an Israeli court on fifteen criminal charges including war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was found guilty and executed by hanging.
As Arendt attended much of his 1961 trial, read transcripts, and listened to the testimony unfold, she came to be focused on the question of the character of Eichmann’s conscience (or apparent lack thereof). How could a “good German” who was raised on the Ten Commandment (Thou shalt not murder) send thousands of innocent people to their deaths? If Eichmann was indeed “evil” in what did his evil consist?
Arendt’s answer to this question was shocking: she argued that Eichmann was an “ordinary man” whose head was swimming with empty clichés that he called “winged words”. He was a family man and a careerist who wished only to conform himself to the requirements of “respectable society” as it was understood in Nazi Germany at the time:
Eichmann, in contrast to other elements in the Nazi movement, had always been overawed by “good society,” and the politeness he often showed to German-speaking Jewish functionaries was to a large extent the result of his recognition that he was dealing with people who were socially his superiors....What he fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of “good society” as he knew it. Typical was his last word on the subject of Hitler;...Hitler, he said “may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Fuhrer of a people of almost eighty million....His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man.” His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which “good society” everywhere reacted as he did. He did not need to “close his ears to the voice of conscience,” as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a “respectable voice,” with the voice of respectable society around him. (Peter Baehr Ed, The Portable Hannah Arendt. 355)
In Arendt’s portrayal, Adolph Eichmann was far from being a “moral monster” that many thought he must have been -- his brand of evil was boring and ordinary -- it was banal.
Arendt’s description of Eichmann’s moral character, as well as her comments on the role of the Jewish Councils (the Judenrate) which had cooperated with the Nazi’s in sending their fellow Jews to their deaths, provoked a series of vicious attacks on her, mainly by American Jews. She was denounced by the Anti-Defamation League of the B.nai B’rith and labeled as “self-hating Jewess”:
For their part, critics claimed that the expression “banality of evil” seemed to exonerate Eichmann and blame the victims. Others accused her of bad taste, triviality, an insultingly harsh and ironical tone, a perverse unwillingness to understand the depth of the dilemmas facing the Jewish Councils, and of failing to show love for her own kind. A “lapse into uncomprehending arrogance” was how one scholar described the report eight years after Arendt’s death (in 1974?), and compared with some of the comments she had to endure during her lifetime this was putting it mildly. (Baehr, xxvi)
According to Peter Baehr, Arendt was “shocked and dismayed by the maelstrom her report had provoked.” Yet in the Postscript she wrote for the Viking edition she blandly observed:
Even before its publication, this book became both the center of a controversy and the object of an organized campaign. It is only natural that the campaign, conducted with all the well-known means of image-making and opinion-manipulation, got much more attention than the controversy, so that the latter was somehow swallowed up by and drowned in the artificial noise of the former. This became especially clear when a strange mixture of the two, in almost identical phraseology - as though the pieces written against the book (and more frequently against its author) came "out of a mimeographing machine" (Mary McCarthy) - was carried from America to England and then to Europe, where the book was not yet even available. And this was possible because the clamor centered on the "image" of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had never occurred to me before.
Arendt goes on to argue that the report does not attempt to address in any systematic manner the “larger questions” about the Holocaust, the German people, Jewish complicity, original sin, or other general matters, but was only about “the person of the defendant, a man of flesh and blood with an individual history, with an always unique set of qualities, peculiarities, behavior patterns, and circumstances.” She does admit that:
I also can well imagine that an authentic controversy might have arisen over the subtitle of the book; for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not lago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than 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. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.
But then she says,
That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man – that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.
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What are we to make of this lesson today? Do we have any theory about it that can help us understand how men can behave so thoughtlessly? Recent research in moral psychology suggests a theory about the kind of “banal evil” that Eichmann represents. The work of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt proposes that morality both “binds” and “blinds” us.[2] Haidt has described the pull of group cohesion on individual as a kind of force field, comparing it to the lines of a magnetic field. This force is what makes human social life possible -- it is the basis of group cohesion. Human beings, unlike other social animals, have the ability to build cohesive groups around beliefs and symbols, not just around kinship relations. We create group solidarity, and hence the basis for social cooperation among human individuals who are not related by kinship by anointing some object or belief as “sacred” or inviolable. The sacred object can be something like the Quaaba in Mecca, the image of the crucified Jesus, the flag, or the corporate logo. As individuals drawn into these force fields they are taught that success requires conformity to the belief system that characterizes the group. Deviation, disloyalty, or dissent is regarded as suspect and can lead to ostracism or worse. Those members of the group who dare to step across the line of what the group considered to be “acceptable thoughts” are quickly and violently rebuked for undermining group cohesion. Public disloyalty to the group’s ideology is a great sin -- blasphemers must be stoned, heretics burned at the stake, traitors much have their noses cut off, and dissident intellectuals must be shunned and discredited.
When mass societies are drawn into totalitarian ideologies such as fascism or communism, one has the potential to mobilize millions of humans to fight and die for their sacred symbols, or to kill millions of other humans in the name of their beliefs. What was shocking about Arendt’s insights into the origins of totalitarianism was that she realized that monstrous evil could come about simply through the normal functioning of the human moral sense. It was not an aberration that ordinary men like Eichmann could become mass murders; rather it was something to be expected because of the way the force field of social cohesion characteristically functions in human societies.
Arendt herself fell victim to this kind of attack because she asserted that the “really horrific discovery of totalitarian regimes has been that mass conformists ---”job holders and good family men” -- were much more pliant, dedicated, loyal, and abundant agents of extermination than the criminals, ‘fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots’ and social failures of the mob” (xliii). The greatest irony is that she herself was punished for disloyalty, for violating the taboos of the tribal group morality of Jewish intellectuals, for saying this.
Arendt is not the only intellectual whose ideas have been denounced because they deny some tenet of a tribal moral code. Haidt provides several examples of intellectuals who have met similar responses to their ideas.[3] Daniel Patrick Moynihan was vilified for having suggested that African-American culture might be one reason for the impoverishment of the black community. Lawrence Summer’s was hounded from the presidency of Harvard University after commenting in a speech that the reason there are no more women in science and mathematics might be due to a statistical observation that males are more likely than females to be on both the lower and the higher ends of the bell curves of intellectual achievement. Noam Chomsky, has met a similar fate after he signed a petition for the Holocaust denier Robert Fourissan. Chomsky denied that he was defending Holocaust denial; he saw himself as a defender of the principles of freedom of thought and opinion and argued that even ideas that he hates should be heard. Chomsky later wrote a short essay on the principle of freedom of speech that was included without his knowledge in a book by Faurisson. When he learned of this, Chomsky asked that it be removed. But he was nevertheless viciously attacked in a book by Werner Cohn, Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers (1995). In his usual matter of fact manner Chomsky has responded by saying, “It seems to me something of a scandal that it is even necessary to debate these issues two centuries after Voltaire defended the right of free expression for views he detested. It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers.”
In her book, Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics (Temple University Press, 2010) Susan Herbst argues that political discourse in America has become intensely partisan, uncivil, debased, and deceitful.[4] This is not a new phenomenon – American politics have always been nasty – but the cable news channels, the 24-hour news cycle, and the Internet have made the mass dissemination of toxic nonsense much easier. The Information Revolution has enabled a culture of mendacity to supplant reasoned and deliberative political discourse in the public arena. She notes that the early media theorists Robert Merton and Paul Lazarfeld predicted that radio and television would send us into a state of “narcotizing dysfunction” in which citizens would become cynically disengaged from strong political engagement But they could not imagine the extent to which we are now drowning in a sea “information” that is false, misleading, distorted, and deceptive.
So much of what passes for political discourse in the present media-saturated culture is really nothing more than the partisans of different tribal moral codes insisting on beliefs that members of their moral tribes believe in which members of other moral tribes deny. The discussion is not about truth; it is about loyalty to the tribal belief system. In order to be a member in good standing of the Republican party one must now believe that Obama is not an American citizen, that global warming is a hoax, and that the way to create jobs is to lower taxes for the rich and cut government spending. People invent elaborate rationalizations for continuing to be loyal to their tribal belief systems even though there abundant evidence that their beliefs are false. Like Eichmann they convince themselves that since all those important and successful people believe these things that they should too. Such is the power of the force fields that align people like mindless iron filings into conformity with the pattern of a group ideology.
Is there anything that can effectively counterbalance and thwart these tendencies towards enforcing mass intellectual conformity? Like many liberal college philosophy professors, I tend to believe that one can do so by teaching young people the arts of critical thinking and logical reasoning. Knowing about the rules of evidence, logical fallacies and rhetorical tricks, and taking part on reasoned debates about social, political, and ethical issues can allow young people to learn how to defend themselves against the daily tsunami of intellectual rubbish. But recent empirical research on learning outcomes among college graduates suggests most students show little if any improvement in their critical reasoning skills.[5]
Herbst argues that, “We cannot rely on standard, even if excellent, civics courses or Introduction to Political Science. We need to teach young people how to argue with vigor, intelligence, and panache.” This is what Arendt did in Eichmann in Jerusalem: she argued with vigor, intelligence, and panache that what happened in Nazi Germany can happen in any human society when the mass media are deployed in order to induce mass ideological conformity to a false tribal morality. That is why Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem ought to be required reading. But there is also the example of her own intellectual courage. Herbst writes that, “being a citizen of a democracy always demanded a sort of courage....the bravery it takes to express opinions and do so civilly.” The example of intellectual courage that Arendt provided in writing her report it is what today’s students should come to know and emulate. But they should also heed her warning about the potential for ordinary men to commit crimes against humanity by not thinking for themselves and simply going along with their tribal moral code. This timeless lesson is particularly timely right now.
[1] A new study of the trial by Deborah Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, has just been published. Some 400 hours of the entire trial are available in the English language on Youtube . For the trial transcripts, click here. There is also a film by Eyal Sivan, The Specialist. The two judgments, of the District Court of Jerusalemand the Supreme Court, are also available.
[2] Jonathan Haidt. “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology”. Delivered to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, January 27, 2011. Available online: http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/postpartisan.html. Visited 9 April 2011.
[3] Haidt himself commented that he went out on a limb in this talk, and declined to give any further examples from his own field of social psychology, saying it was “too risky” for him to do so. But he did go on to demonstrate that the ratio between social psychologists who describe themselves as politically liberal is 266 times greater than those who describe themselves as politically conservative, even though poll results consistently show that within the general population the ratio of liberals to conservatives is 1 to 2.
[4] Susan Herbst. “Rude Democracy in America: Can We Overcome it?” Phi Beta Kappa, Key Reporter, Spring 2011, pp. 8-9.
[5]Richard Arum, et. al., Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. (University of Chicago, 2011) studied 2322 college students at 24 colleges and universities over four years. They found that, “large numbers didn't learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education”. After four years 36% showed no significant improvement in higher order thinking skills. They did find, however, that, “Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.” See Sara Rimer, The Hechinger Report. “Study: Many college students not Learning to think critically,” January 17, 2011.
