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The evil of banality:
Arendt revisited
Arts & Humanities in Higher Education
0(0) 1–22
! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1474022213513543
ahh.sagepub.com
Elizabeth Minnich
Association of American Colleges and Universities,
Queens University, NC, USA
Abstract
The banality of evil (Arendt) remains controversial and useful. Ironically, the concept is
now itself a banality. To revisit and extend it, we consider the evil of banality, the profound dangers of clichéd thoughtlessness. A distinction is proposed: intensive versus
extensive evils. The former takes few people and is readily romanticized as demonic.
The latter takes many people over time and is badly misunderstood if romanticized: it
requires many reliable workers. The paper introduces the continuum of attentiveness in
relation to the doing of evil or good (from Eichmann and Saddam Hussein’s obtuse
thoughtlessness, to the poet Wislawa Szymborska’s astonishment at the ordinary).
Education, especially in the Humanities, may be our last best hope to teach people to
think, to see, and resist the evils enabled by banality.
Keywords
Arendt, banality, evil, humanities, moral education, teaching thinking
Is our ability to judge, to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly, dependent upon
our faculty of thought? Do the inability to think and a disastrous failure of what we
commonly call conscience coincide?. . .. An answer, if at all, can come only from the
thinking experience, the performance itself, which means that we have to trace experiences rather than doctrines. (Arendt, 2003: 159, 167)
Introduction
In an interview, a man who worked as a killer-of-Tutsis thinks back to a particular
day during the three months of the Rwandan genocide. He remembers one of his
Corresponding author:
Elizabeth Minnich, Association of American Colleges and Universities, Queens University, NC, USA.
Email: [email protected]
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many victims: ‘‘Me, I knew this old man by name, but I had heard nothing unpleasant about him. That evening I told my wife everything, we did not discuss it, and I
went to sleep’’ (Hatzfeld, 2005: 22).
The killing was a job, not a vendetta; it was nothing personal; working hours
pretty well contained it. The killers could sleep well and, next day, continue their
work.
For many years, I have been asking myself, how could they do it? What was
going on in the minds of those whose job it was to kill, to colonize, in the Third
Reich, Armenia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo—too many times and places? What
were they thinking when they faced their victims, among them acquaintances,
friends, unthreatening strangers, and workers they saw every day? How can
people enslave, exploit unto death, rape as an act of war and genocide, and traffic
in children? It is a very old and always searingly new question to which there are
many responses.
Two of the most basic conclusions to which I have come are these: No great
harm to many people could ever be perpetrated if distorted systems had to rely on
sadists to do it, nor would great good affecting many people happen if we had to
depend on saints. And: People who are not thinking are capable of anything.
I have learned that when systems go bad, when the extraordinary becomes
ordinary, it does not take a Hitler, an Idi Amin, a Jeffrey Dahmer, a Charles
Manson. It just takes a practiced conventionality, a clichéd conscience, emotional
conformity, susceptibility to small-scale bribery by salary, goods, and/or status, a
sense of isolation, and distrust of the reliability of others that works against taking
a differing public stand. It just takes, that is, much of what in better times keeps a
society provided with reliable and ambitious workers, status-anxious consumers,
polite neighbors, agreeable team players, and citizens who make no waves: an
ability to go along thoughtlessly, to play the game.
These are challenging things to say or ought to be.
I have worked as an educator on the college and university level for more than a
few decades and have come to believe that education may be our last, best, and
perhaps—given the record of other social, economic, and political institutions,
most assuredly including religious—our only hope of making Never again anything
other than a tragically failed cry of the heart.
Hannah Arendt’s ‘‘banality of evil’’ and the evil of banality
In the late-1960s, I returned from a Fulbright fellowship to teach and to study
classic Indian dance (Bharat Natyam) in Gujarat, India, to graduate work in political science and theory at the University of California, Berkeley, and then philosophy at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where the
first course I took was Hannah Arendt’s ‘‘Political Experiences of the 20th
Century.’’ Those were stormy, fascinating, and irregular times. I wrote my first
paper for Arendt asking, how could so many deeply idealistic Communists in the
early days have failed to see, and to stop, what was happening as Stalin took
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power? I read journals, memoirs, novels, and studies that took readers inside the
consciousness of people, even some sent to the gulags who were starved
and worked like slaves who went on believing in Stalin. If he only knew what is
happening, he would stop it immediately, people said. It was extraordinarily
difficult, I had to realize, to think outside of the ways they had for so long thought,
and to question what they had believed so fully that it had given meaning to
virtually all moments of their daily lives. They were not blinded ideologues, they
were people who needed to make sense of things, as we all do, who found it
exceedingly difficult to do so if everything they had believed in, figured out, lived
by was implicated, now, in violently negating its own premises and promises. In
short, they were in extraordinary circumstances, horrifying ones, but I no longer
found them unusual.
Arendt asked me to be her teaching assistant after that first paper, at a time
when she was dealing with the impassioned criticism of her book, Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil and participating in debates on the
Vietnam war and other hot issues. Arendt’s thoughts about Eichmann, a significant
perpetrator of the Holocaust, had taken her to conclusions for which many
people evidently were not ready: the disagreement was often vitriolic and highly
personalized. 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 a highly specific instance. Those who could not listen to
Arendt’s thinking were realms away from Eichmann, of course, as 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. Still, I needed to
ask if there might be a thread to be traced through them all.
Reflecting on Arendt’s work and its early reception by good people who were
deeply pained, I thought that perhaps it would have helped had she spoken first of
‘‘the evil of banality,’’ a phrase she never used, rather than ‘‘the banality of evil.’’
The evil of banality has haunted my thinking ever since, as has Arendt’s use of
‘‘thoughtlessness’’ to describe what was most extreme, most striking, about the
man on trial in Jerusalem. So, whatever else I have been doing, studying, teaching
and writing, I have continued to try to get in close to what people caught up in
extraordinary events as perpetrators, as resisters, as immediate observers were
thinking. I have worked in Academe, where the emphasis is more on knowing,
interpreting, testing, theorizing than it is on just trying to understand. But I have
increasingly felt that understanding what perpetrators and those who resisted them
thought they were doing, how they made sense of it all, was the single most morally
pressing question I could ask about human beings, creatures and creators of meaning that we are.
But, while the individual is finally where moral responsibility lies, it is also
important to emphasize that all the many systems within which we live our lives
matter a great deal.
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Systems gone wrong
Many have studied the systems that are turned rotten by a few people while many
others enable that turn and keep it going; Arendt herself wrote The Origins of
Totalitarianism very soon after World War II and well before Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. I am neither a sociologist nor a political analyst; I am a philosopher, and what I want to know is What were they
thinking? How could they make sense of what they were doing? Because, if we can
understand that better, I actually do believe we might learn something crucial
about how, in a complex sense, to educate our young so that more of them will
find themselves unable, when the time comes, to do the extensive work that systems
going bad require.
While it does not work to focus only on individuals as if we live, love, and have
our being all on our own, it also does not work to give all agency over to systems,
whether conceptual, moral, political, and/or economic. We need to think through
experiences as we find them in reality.
Consider these observations by a visitor to Baghdad that come together to raise
very large questions:
To receive this briefing [re: what the U.S. Embassy had, or—as it turned, out, had
not—done for its highly vulnerable Iraqi employees], I had passed through three security doors into the Embassy’s classified section, where there were no Iraqis and no natural light; it seemed as if every molecule of Baghdad air had been sealed off behind the
last security door. The Embassy officials struck me as decent, overworked people,
yet I left the interview with a feeling of shame. The problem lay. . .with the politics of
the American project in Iraq, which from the beginning had been conducted under
the illusion that controlling the message mattered more than the reality. A former
official at the Embassy told me, ‘‘When we say that the corridors of power are insulated,
is it that the officials aren’t receiving the information, or is it because the construct under
which they’re operating doesn’t even allow them to absorb it?’’ (Packer, 2007: 64).
This is astute thinking by an individual who recognizes both individual responsibility and the system-defined contexts within which we do or do not accept it,
and still there are questions to be raised. ‘‘The construct under which they are
operating’’ includes systems of differing but complementary sorts, from actual
buildings to professionalized meanings, language, hierarchies, protocols, career
paths, and onto individual ways of making sense of what is going on. So, I want
to ask something additional: how, day by day by day, do they choose to think
within that construct when, as the thinking creatures that we humans are, at any
moment any one of them could, as this visitor did, be startled back into thinking—really could stop and think (one of the common sayings Arendt rescued by
hearing what it actually suggests).
In truth, much as we might rather not admit it, we usually do know what is
going on. We just find ways not to think about it, and you cannot care about, and
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need not take action concerning, something or someone you simply do not
take into or hold in your mind. Don’t take it home with you, friends advise.
Be a team player; it’s not our business; I was just doing my job; everyone else
seemed okay with it: conventional banalities ready to hand that work very well
when we choose to avoid thinking about what we are doing within and in service
of larger systems.
Education matters
Education has rarely centered on practicing individual and collaborative thinking
in, about, for our shareable worlds and their systems. We desperately need it to do
so and to include as many differing people as we possibly can.
Having studied how monstrous evils actually become possible, normalized
enough to involve a great many perpetrators, I have also explored the doing of
good by a few people even in the face of the worst that it seems everyone else is
doing. Having dwelt among the good for a while now, I observe that above all, we
need to practice being attentive to the obvious as well as the elaborate, the familiar,
and daily as well as the professional and technical. We need to practice such attentiveness, such presence to immediate realities, to develop it as a way of being in the
world that will not fail us when, morally, we need most of all to be thinking what
we are doing.
Finally, I want to make a case for an overlap of thoughtfulness and mindfulness
as arts and ways of being for which we can purposefully educate, not as in some
traditions to win release from the world but, entirely on the contrary, to accept our
responsibilities as conscious beings affected by and affecting the worlds around us
with every breath, action, and word. If we do not thus re-cognize—daily recognize
and re-think—even the obvious that usually we can ignore to get on with our lives
(how we rouse our children in the morning, greet our coworkers, joke with a waiter,
choose and do our jobs, think of our neighbor, relate to the police, deal with a
beggar), our care for others and the world can go badly wrong. Failure to be
informed and renewed through the interactions with our real surroundings that
are as common as our breathing in and out can make us and our lives dull, banal,
deadening, and even, in bad times, deadly. Our minds, hearts, spirits, and effective
consciences as well as our bodies require interactions to stay alive. This is not
irrelevant to education. It is worth remembering that slaveholders, Nazis, and
proponents of eugenics were not typically uneducated. Quite, quite the contrary.
Return to the evil of banality, the dangers of thoughtlessness
In 1946, in an exchange of letters between Arendt and her former teacher, Karl
Jaspers, we find these two philosophers reflecting on their direct experiences and
still unfolding understanding of the Nazis. Jaspers wrote, ‘‘‘I’m not altogether
comfortable with your view [of] a guilt that goes beyond all criminal guilt [because
such guilt] inevitably takes on a streak . . .of satanic greatness. . . we have to see
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these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality’’ (October 19, 1946).
Arendt replied, ‘‘We have to combat all impulses to mythologize the horrible
and to the extent that I can’t avoid such formulations, I haven’t understood
what actually went on’’ (December 17, 1946: Arendt, 1992). Arendt was
struggling to think about the ordinary rather than the extraordinary conditions
of evil, and to do so directly, attentively remaining as open as possible to the most
prosaic aspects of realities that include mass murder as well as a kind word.
She speaks, in an essay titled, ‘‘On Thinking and Moral Considerations’’ (2003:
160), of ‘‘the claim on our attention which all events and facts arouse by virtue
of their existence.’’
Arendt (1992) was a philosopher and remained always a thinker whose attention
was turned by the violations of her times toward the world of action rather than
‘‘the life of the mind’’ that she had previously desired and prepared for as a student
of philosophy in Germany. She was clear earlier than too many others that what
was happening as Hitler came to power could neither be ignored nor conventionally comprehended. Categories of explanation shattered along with all other sustainers of daily life under the Nazis: they were not, she insisted, just thugs: they were
thugs who were taking power and early on doing terrible things.
After the war, when Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped from Argentina and taken
to Jerusalem to stand trial, Arendt went to Jerusalem as a writer for The New Yorker
to look, to listen, and to try to tell us what she found. An amateur reporter, but one
who had by then been thinking against the grain for some time—later she spoke of
needing to ‘‘think without a banister’’—she found herself, she wrote, ‘‘with a concept,’’ an understanding that then still eluded her as she tried to follow the story, the
many stories, of Eichmann told in that court. This is different from applying a
scholarly or professional method, empirical or theoretical: more in the classical
role of a spectator, Arendt opened herself to re-experiencing very painful things,
daring to think with a profoundly guilty man in the dock in order to figure out how
that mind worked. In the course of taking in, thinking, and writing, up came the
concept with which she said she found herself: the banality of evil.
It was a phrase that created a furor: the contrast between the staggering horror
of the Holocaust and ‘‘banality’’ sufficed to evoke outrage. But she had worked to
evaluate, not just apply, the most emotionally sustaining beliefs and concepts and
that had led her as well as Jaspers to rid themselves of notions of radical evil so as
not to see the Nazis as larger than life—which is, of course, how they saw themselves and worked hard to be seen by others, masters of pageantry, costume, and
propaganda as they were.
Others had not done such preparatory conceptual work: what Arendt was
saying almost literally could not be heard as she meant it. This is entirely understandable: in the face of horrors, most of us need whatever help we can find not to
be utterly shattered by them. Almost everyone uses the most familiar of phrases to
help them speak of what they cannot take into their minds lest their broken hearts
finally shatter. As Arendt herself said during the first course I took with her, it
takes at least 10 years for writing to begin to deal with disasters with any art and
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clarity. Even writers, I thought then; so much more the rest of us. Arendt was
misheard by virtually everyone.
For all its emotional difficulties, the banality of evil is an illuminating concept
and, over time, it has ceased being as infuriating to as many people as it was. So, in
the middle of the thundering oratory by political and religious leaders about evil to
which, I am sorry to say, we were returned in the last years of the 20th century and
the first years of the 21st century—e.g. Reagan’s ‘‘Evil Empire’’ and George W.
Bush’s ‘‘axis of evil’’—there remains available that quieter call to think close-in, to
refuse romanticism from any side that gives us devils and saints and world-scale
events to divert our attention from the world we encounter, remake, and could be
destroying or improving every day.
What I hear, when I tune in to talk and writing about evil these days, is a view of
evil as Janus-faced. One face, vividly painted and waved before us by people who
want us terrorized, is effectively a Medusa, snakes coiling in place of hair, paralyzing
any who gaze on her. The actual face that is used thus to terrorize us varies, of course:
it depends on whom we are supposed to demonize as The Enemy. The other face of
evil resembles what is taken to be Arendt’s portrait of the petty, pale, bureaucratic
Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was called the ‘‘Engineer of the Final Solution’’: his
deeds were monstrous but there he was, a pale white man in a suit needing protection
by a glass booth from the passionate hatred of others. Arendt’s phrase, coined to
capture her realization that what was startlingly unusual about him was ‘‘a quite
extraordinary thoughtlessness,’’ which led him to have trouble thinking for himself
rather than in clichés and platitudinous ‘‘edifying phrases’’—i.e. banalities—rather
than anything extraordinarily demonic, has lost its original meaning.
The ‘‘petty bureaucrat’’ face of evil is now generalized and variously infused
with images of ordinary people doing terrible things. These have also emerged from
widely read social science studies, most notably Stanley Milgram’s ‘‘Eichmann
Study’’ and Philip Zimbardo’s ‘‘Stanford prison experiment’’ (to use their popular
names). Both experiments have entered mainstream consciousness as demonstrating that many perfectly ordinary people become willing and able to do thoroughly
nasty things to other people when in an authoritarian situation (as when an eminent university professor tells you to administer what is staged to appear as a very
painful shock to another person as part of an experiment; as when you are enacting
the role of a prison guard, or supervisor—in Milgram and Zimbardo’s studies,
respectively). Of course, these researchers’ works are more complex than that: I
am here working with popular understandings, with the take-away phrases that
have clustered with ‘‘the banality of evil,’’ and, being reduced to ‘‘obedience to
authority’’ and variants are taken to account for our propensity to take on and
fully play out whatever social role we are given, including harming other people
when authority tells, or a system encourages, us to.
I fear that the banality of evil is itself becoming a banality, a cliché, in ways that
gut its force. In general, now, ‘‘the banality of evil’’ means that ‘‘ordinary people,’’
and not just Grand Villains, are capable of doing excessive harm. That is not
wrong, but it is utterly inadequate, sliding as it does toward a notion that goes
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even further than collective responsibility toward once again swamping individual
responsibility. If everyone is guilty, then no one bears actual responsibility.
But collective responsibility and guilt together create an appealing position. The
combination gives us company, lots of it, and that is a fine way to avoid those dark
nights of the soul in which we take account of our lives. But moving in close, we
cannot sustain that step outside, the already-clichéd ‘‘we’re all capable . . . ’’ in order
to think afresh. Try this—find out that your loving uncle spent 30 years killing
squirrels in the basement to rid the world of these vermin, and you will not just say,
Ah, yes: we are all capable of that. We are all alike is not what Hannah Arendt
meant; an avoidance of demonizing Nazis can go too far, just as imagining them as
radically different from the rest of humanity in their unmatched monstrousness
does. It is not an either/or judgment, monster, or every person. We need to think
more carefully than that.
Adolf Eichmann and Saddam Hussein
The headline of the veteran reporter John F. Burns’ report on Saddam
Hussein’s trial in Baghdad was ‘‘Judgment Days: From Banality to Audacity.’’ I
will quote from the piece at length; it has several strands of interest for us here. Burns
wrote:
During Saddam Hussein’s remorseless harangues from the dock last week, one spectator sitting in the glassed-off viewing galleries found his mind moving back more than
40 years, to a court in another Middle Eastern country where a man accused of mass
murder stood on trial for his life.
The man was Adolf Eichmann, and the venue of the court was Jerusalem. His was a
trial memorialized by Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, in The New Yorker, about the
banality of evil—Eichmann was an almost pitiable figure, a man so ordinary when
stripped of the trappings of fear and power, who in fact saw himself as so ordinary,
that he seemed quite out of proportion to the slaughter of millions in which he had
been among the most lethal practitioners.
In Baghdad, Mr. Hussein has been monstrous in his lack of pity for sobbing witnesses
and their tales of torture, rape and execution in the gulag fashioned to sustain his
power. Day after day, until he refused to attend at all, he commanded the court to
attend to the outrages committed against himself—as a captive of the American
‘‘occupiers’’ and as a man who for 30 years had been ‘‘your leader,’’ as he admonished
the chief prosecutor, and synonymous with Iraq.
But pitiable he has not been. Tragic, perhaps, in the sense of a man incapable of the
repentance that might lend him at least a glimmer of humanity in this, the extreme
passage of his life; wildly deluded, too, in his insistence that he is Iraq’s legitimate
ruler . . ..
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But of a reduction like Eichmann’s, to a figure so commonplace, so insignificant, that
he seemed inadequate to his grotesque place in history, there has been no sign. (Burns,
2005)
Even John Burns has misunderstood: that oddly, theatrical reading of character
suggests the old romanticized notion, the idea—perhaps actually the hope—that
those people are so radically other than you and me that it must show, no matter
how cleverly they try to hide it.
Pity
Eichmann was not remotely, let alone ‘‘almost,’’ pitiable. Would you pity a dry,
tight, and self-absorbed man whose bureaucratic skills and ambitions were part of
what made the extremely difficult work of murdering millions of people possible? If
he seemed humanly inadequate, that is not grounds for pity; Eichmann was good at
what he did.
An impulse to pity can express a need to understand something that we are
still trying to comprehend, something that sends us in quest of concepts and
familiar emotions ready to hand. When we find one, it can protect us
from really dealing with the person before us. But pity could be a call to
stop and think, and think again, if it moves us to try, as the philosopher
Immanuel Kant put it, to think in someone else’s place. Yes, think, not only
unreflectively feel. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant calls this ability an enlarged
mentality.
Out of touch
What seems more useful as a thought-line in comparing Eichmann and Saddam
Hussein is that Eichmann, like Saddam Hussein, was startlingly, radically out of
touch with the realities of his victims as well as his prosecutors. While Saddam went
on claiming to be the Iraqis’ leader and demanding a kind of respect a defeated
tyrant in chains cannot realistically expect, Eichmann went on worrying that he
had not been promoted within the Nazi hierarchy as he felt that he should have
been even as he, too, was on trial for his life. It is that bizarre out-of-touch quality
so startling in both these doers of terrible deeds that should help us see what they
share.
A temptation is to equate ‘‘out of touch’’ with ‘‘insane,’’ increasingly often used
when we cannot fathom how someone could otherwise have done something. But
insane people cannot be as effective as Saddam Hussein and Adolf Eichmann were.
Their being out of touch with the meaning of their actions did not hinder, it helped
them do what they did. This does not feel like banality, but a main function and
effect of banalities is just that: to protect us from being in touch with realities, as
sometimes instead of seeing the magnificence of a mountain sunset, we see a picture
postcard.
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Those who are not thinking about what they are doing usually are thinking about
themselves.
They can also get their feelings hurt when the world fails to see them as they see
themselves and, because they remain out of touch, keep trying to tell their side of
the story. They are not then able to imagine how they might sound to other people
since that requires thinking, Kant’s practice of thinking with others. Such ‘‘selfcenteredness’’ as it is readily called can also seem startlingly petty. But Saddam
Hussein could and did listen to wrenching stories from devastated, sobbing witnesses without taking in their realities. By his lights, he already knew who they
were, what they were, what they meant to him, and that is what he persisted in
trying to tell the Court: his view, his reality, and his position. If anyone was not
being listened to, or misunderstood, it was, to Saddam’s mind, evidently he himself,
thence his anger, his sulks, and his tirades. Eichmann apparently was not at all
dissimilar, either during the trial or in doing his evil work before it, despite the fact
that he, an underling unlike Saddam, tried to go along with superiors, rather than
ordering everyone around.
Both, bizarre as it may seem, showed us during their trials that what caught,
held, and dominated their attention was almost exclusively their own efforts to be
treated right by the world, to get what was theirs, and to be respected for the hard
workers they actually were.
A continuum of attentiveness
Eichmann and Saddam could be said together to mark one end of a continuum at
the opposite end of which is acute, open attentiveness to the realities we can experience. At their end: obtuse, closed refusal to recognize as significant anything but
what one has already categorized, encapsulated, and settled with regard to oneself
and the demands it might make on one.
On the attentive end, we take in—we sense, perceive, and apprehend something,
someone—with full consciousness and reflect respectfully, remaining open to new
encounters, to the uniqueness even of the familiar. The other, obtuse end of the
attentiveness continuum is too easy to imagine: we all have prejudices and prejudgments that keep us from meeting the actual person who looks like a ‘‘kind’’ of
person that, say, we believe to be more prone to violence, or stupider, than we are.
But daily, most of us move back and forth. What was unusual about Eichmann was
not that he could be out of touch with the realities of what he did but that he
appeared before, during, and after his trial to be unable to relate to the world,
except as filtered through conventions and clichés. Same for Saddam Hussein: he
continued to see himself and everyone else as he had when he thought of himself as
‘‘synonymous with Iraq.’’ This is banality that, like the kudzu plant that covers
over all other vegetation like a quilt, isolates, suffocates, and can finally kill.
Arendt reported that, standing under the gallows on the day of his own execution, Eichmann delivered himself of edifying words appropriate for a funeral. He
needed conventions and clichés to know what to think and what to say; lacking any
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such things for a gallows speech, let alone his own, his mind produced eloquent words suited for death. Close enough for him: he gave his speech without
being startled back into attentiveness and thought. Arendt writes: ‘‘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’’ (Arendt, 1992: 288, italics
added).
We are not, then, done with the banality of evil. We need to think further about
how daily clichés, conventions, and other ways of going on autopilot disable our
consciences. Insider jargon, technical terms, field-specific logics, and scientific, political, military, economic, psychological, religious, and other domain-defining categories can function as entrance requirements to our attention. There is no one sort
of banality; almost anything can become banal if we use it so often that it prefigures
the world for us without our even noticing anymore. Thus, first-grader Saleh
becomes an ADHD kid; a Christian named Maria becomes an infidel; a whole
generation becomes millennials, all difficult to teach in the same ways; throwing
people out of work and destroying communities in pursuit of more profit becomes
creative destruction.
In extreme instances, we know – from the sheet numbers of people involved in
carrying out genocides, slavery colonialism, radically exploitative labor practices,
and other horrific harms – that we humans can shift our minds into making sense
of and accepting what, before we became insiders of utterly distorted systems, we
would have found impossible to imagine ourselves doing. We were just part of
something. We never meant to do such harm. That is neither an excuse nor an
explanation. It is, rather, the moral issue: how was it possible to avoid thinking
and reflecting about what you were doing when you actually were murdering,
inflicting harm, using people up and tossing them away to profit a few, demeaning
people on whose service your good life depended?
Lead-time
A survivor of the Rwandan genocide tells us that being so radically out of touch
with what you are doing starts, at least in some cases, beforehand. ‘‘Innocent,’’ a
survivor of the Rwandan genocide, says of the killer of his family (and many
others):
I’ve known him since our school days, and we later became colleagues and friends
since we were both teachers. [Even when] we were in opposing camps . . . that did not
prevent us from sharing a Primus [beer] and some laughs.
Still . . . his character changed completely after January . . . We hadn’t quarreled
about anything . . . . He preferred putting in hours at closed meetings with influential
people.
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What I think now is that he didn’t know the tiny details of the genocide, such as the
day and the exact agenda. But he certainly knew three months in advance that he was
going to kill me, and my wife and my child, with whom he had shared pleasant times.
(Hatzfeld, 2005: 178)
There are many observations from Germany, too, about changes in social relations
as a system is going so very wrong. It does take time to go from thinking of a man as
a good drinking buddy to seeing him as a lower life form, or perhaps just as someone
you are going to kill without flinching, which may well be far more common. We can
usefully see changes being made in speech, through propaganda, as the social psychologist Waller (2002) suggests (e.g. blaming the to-be-victim and denigrating his/her
‘‘kind’’). Still, when you are faced with that old friend, no matter what you have
learned to call him (‘‘cockroach’’ was common in Rwanda), what does it take to
murder him, close in, while actually looking at him? Slave drivers knew the individuals who were enslaved; they worked, whipped, and killed people whose names they
knew. Bosses who worked, and work, children for long hours can also hand out toys
for Christmas, recognize, and call the children by name. What does it take to kill
strangers, too, close-in? They used machetes, for the most part, in Rwanda; in Nazi
Germany, the einsatzgruppen or mobile-killing squads started out using pistols,
close-up, and even face-to-face, one by one.
Still, there was a lead-in, a transitional time. The man who was getting ready to
murder his old friend ‘‘Innocent,’’ among many others, ‘‘preferred’’ in the time
leading up to the genocide, ‘‘putting in hours at closed meetings with influential
people.’’ In a quite literal sense, he chose to resocialize himself in order to be, as he
saw it, ready to be on the ‘‘winning side.’’ He was not thinking about what he was
doing in a direct, attentive way.
Crucial distinction: Intensive evil and extensive evil
It is time to make a distinction the lack of which has seriously skewed our efforts to
understand the evils that humans do.
Intensive evils, as I define them, are great harms done by one or a few people.
In that sense, they are contained: they stand in shuddering contrast with the lives
others are leading around them in their times. When they burst into our lives, we
are genuinely spectators, not participants, not enablers, and not perpetrators. If the
evils I call extensive, like the use of child soldiers, spread like plagues, intensive evils
in the body politic are more like poison: they do their great harm to a few, leaving
lasting effects among others when they cease, but they do cease and they do leave
clear lines between the poisoned and the unpoisoned. Which is why they tempt us
to romanticize them so much: there are antiheroes, terrifying individuals and
groups involved that actually did and do identifiable things in direct, obvious
defiance of still-prevalent norms. When intensive evil erupts, systems have not
gone bad: people within them have, so the people who did terrible things do
stand out in stark contrast. They are precisely not ordinary.
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These evils are intensive: exaggeratedly distinct from our usual more scattered
and mixed lives.
But there is another kind too, and it is importantly different.
They were asked what they had seen when they returned from the war, what they
had seen at those camps, and they would look down, look away, look lost, and say,
very quietly, ‘‘It was unspeakable: we saw the evil of which humans are capable.’’
These are extensive evils, the massive and monstrous harms carried out by
many, many people for significant periods of times—months, years, decades, and
more (slavery and sexualized violence: when has humanity been without these and
others?). They are the evils of which we would not speak, of which we so often say,
‘‘unthinkable.’’ Extensive evil is not contained; it does not stand out in stark contrast to persistent ordinary lives, normally decent people; it is enabled by the turning of whole systems until it is ordinary to do, to enable, terrible things, and to go
on living as if ‘‘we didn’t know.’’ Extensive evil requires that it be conventional to
do its work as one’s job, daily, day after day after day after day, with supper at
home and picnics on the weekends.
He signed and shook his head when he received the orders. They were not entirely a
surprise, not really, but still he had hoped . . .. He sat down, took up his pen, and
started drawing yet again a map he knew very well, a map of the train routes from
the city to the quieter, more private, semi-rural areas surrounding it where already
Jews were being held in concentration camps. Now he needed to figure out how to
make the transport of millions, not just hundreds or even thousands, of people to the
camps not only possible—lord knows, a huge challenge already—but efficient, effective. The logistical dimensions of The Final Solution, announced now as state policy,
were obviously huge. He focused on the first obvious problem. Interesting, he found
himself thinking. He worked late, kept going by a new exhilaration.
Extensive harms—some of which continue for hundreds of years, some of which
are still with us—can become so woven into the fabric of lives that individuals enact
them with a sense that they are simply serving or protecting a good and necessary
way of life.
It is a problem with extensive evil: as it spreads, the unique, independent, and
original become ever more risky, and ever more minds pull back into themselves.
As Albert Camus wrote in The Plague, ‘‘by reason of their very great duration great
misfortunes are monotonous.’’ ‘‘The truth is that nothing is less sensational than
pestilence’’ (1991: 179). But it kills or damages many, many more than sensational
intensive evil.
Where our minds want to stop is all too often precisely where and when we need
them most of all. People who are not thinking can do anything.
My need to make the distinction between extensive and intensive evil has a
special urgency because I fear that its lack keeps us from understanding the extensive evil that is by far the greater threat of the two. On a complementary and
parallel track, I want to think through what it might do for us to distinguish
between an intensive goodness ‘‘that passeth all understanding,’’ goodness that is
‘‘not of this world,’’ ‘‘saintly,’’ and an extensive goodness that arises when doing
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good is, for the doers, simply the thing to do and so can be and is something that
can be done by many over time: ‘‘I’m not a hero. No. What else could I have
done?’’
It is this kind of evil—that, for instance, of serial killers, cult murders, group
suicides, hate crimes, outbreaks of violence that go over the top into rapes, and
child-killing—that can and I believe much too often does, dominate our thinking,
thence our comprehension, our explanations, our defensive acts and plans, and
provisions pertaining to all evils, and this, I am now convinced, badly skews our
thinking about large-scale, extensive evils such as genocides, slavery, endemic sexualized violence against women and children, and deadly exploitation of workers.
Thinking of all evils as if they were intensive—taboo, smacking of possession, and
shocking to still-functioning conventional society, hence readily felt to be antirational—blinds us to the on-the-ground realities of extensive evils that are enabled
by such familiar motivators as careerism and greed and desire not to rock the boat.
The poet Charles Simic (2008) has written:
There are one or two murderers in any crowd.
They do not suspect their destinies yet.
Wars are started to make it easy for them.
To kill a woman pushing a baby carriage.
Actually, murderers make poor soldiers. Blood lust can get in the way of trained
obedience and skill. The poem, then, may express truths about intensive evil, but is
quite wrong about extensive evils, for which, as for wars, reliable workers are
needed.
Intensive evils are horrific, episodic rather than sustained acts, performed by
individuals or small groups. The acts may stretch through time, but they do not
infect many people: typically, they are carried out in secret, in isolation, because
they are precisely not normalized for a whole society or polity. On the contrary,
they are bounded, sharply defined, and identifiable by striking deviations from
conventionalized behavior even though, within their bounds, they do have their
own cultures of explanation and legitimization. They are intensified by their very
boundedness, their isolation from, defiance of, all that surrounds them as normalcy, as ordinary. When discovered, they cut through the protective wrapping
of the ordinary like a laser: central to their power to appall and paralyze us is
precisely their revelation of the utter uselessness of normalcy to protect or to inure
us to them.
Most people remain outside of, unimplicated in, acts of intensive evil. When
they come to light—a telling phrase—we become in our numbers their appalled (for
some, also titillated) voyeurs.
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This distance between ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them,’’ the perpetrators, is a recognition and a
felt experience of the shared understandings by which social orders, cultures, legal
and political systems, and religions draw lines to demarcate the acceptable, the
punishable or actionable, the taboo. In encountering radical violations of those
shared understandings of limits, we reaffirm rather than violate them in our gut
reactions of moral horror perhaps even more than our expressions of shock and
outrage.
‘‘Evil’’? or ‘‘bad,’’ or ‘‘sick’’ or ‘‘abnormal’’?
We may actually know that we could ourselves under some extreme circumstances
commit, say, murder (to stop someone from stabbing our child; to end years
of sexualized abuse our world colludes in refusing to see; in time of war or insurrection), but we do not usually call such murders evil. We might do so if a culturally
needed norm were violated—if a mother murdered her child, if a general killed
his own troops—because then the supposedly normal, conflated with the normative, has been radically exposed as vulnerable: that is beyond ‘‘bad.’’
Understandable and, we believe, explicable bad acts, including killings, done by
rational-enough people we nonetheless hold morally responsible, are quite, quite
different. We provide for so-called insanity defenses, thereby recognizing that there
are wrong actions, including killing, which we may not understand as congruent
with normal, but for which we do have categories. Doers of categorized, nonnormal acts may not then be held morally and/or legally responsible—e.g., because
they were judged incapable of knowing right from wrong. Again, these acts are not
called ‘‘evil’’ because they are not anti-normal, even if they are aberrant.
With the rise and spread of pop psychology and a plethora of professional
experts at the ready, along with many crime and violence TV shows and movies,
with their increasingly common and even sometimes sophisticated uses of psychology, we are hard to shock into utter speechlessness, and we are quick with
explanations. Many of those explanations are actually just labels that feel
like explanations (like obedience to authority, and banality of evil when used
unthinkingly) in that they allow us to wrap the subject up in something familiar,
to contain it and file it: ‘‘Well, he’s psychotic,’’ or ‘‘a racist,’’ or a ‘‘pervert.’’ Each
of those is actually very complex, of course, as is the effort to explain.
Both rational and irrational acts (so judged) can then be categorized and dealt
with, however more or less well, justly, or fairly, but dealt with; our systems, conceptual, moral, and legal are not paralyzed by them. Even a planned, murderous,
and suicidal (hence, of course, singular) binge of killing does not cause many of us
to invoke evil anymore as long as it is contained, entirely over with when the killer
kills himself (far more rarely, herself). We are now more likely, as a society, to call
in the social scientists, the psychologists and social psychologists to explain to us
how that particular individual became ‘‘sick,’’ when and how that could and should
have been known, and how to be more effectively protective next time. That is, we
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are not rendered helpless by such acts: we think we ought to know what to do,
ought to have done it, can do better.
In our psychologized age, what we call evil with the characteristics of intensive
evil in mind may be a shrinking category even if not a shrinking phenomenon
(would that it were). Still, and this is indeed a problem, intensive evil disproportionately haunts our imaginations, our popular arts, and dominates meanings
beyond its rather narrow useful scope.
Extensive evils require reliable workers
Extensive evil is precisely not horrific harm done by one or a few people that is
shockingly incomprehensible to, and therefore conceptually, morally, as well as
existentially cut off from, the ordinarily normal lives of most of us. The evils I
am suggesting we call extensive are distinctively different: they are massively violative harms kept up over time that—simply, factually—could not be done by one
or a few monstrous people.
These are not crimes of passion any more than they are the acts of insane or
‘‘sick’’ people. Many ordinary people must get up, day after day after day after
day; go out in daylight among others; and once again directly themselves do and/or
participate knowledgeably in enabling others to do horrific things on purpose.
There are still differing kinds and levels of complicity and guilt among the many
doers and enablers of extensive evil, of course, but from enabling by-stander to
front-line agent of horrific harm, there is a web of mutual implication. Extensive
evils require them all to continue to show up and keep doing their work.
As Hannah Arendt put it, Eichmann’s judges dealt with a case that ‘‘rested on
the assumption that the defendant, like all ‘normal persons’, must have been aware
of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he
was ‘no exception within the Nazi regime’. However, under the conditions of the
Third Reich, only ‘exceptions’ could be expected to react ‘normally’. This simple
truth of the matter created a dilemma for the judges which they could neither
resolve nor escape’’ (Arendt, 1994: 26–27).
‘‘Sane and civilized people don’t allow torture,’’ I have heard it said in the
United States, even as the US government is indeed having people tortured.
Records are emerging indicating that the practice was forwarded under the
George W. Bush administration but hardly his alone. There are deeply ingrained
prejudices at work in such ‘‘explanations.’’ This is not surprising—and itself a part
of conventionality that can be turned from aberration into normalcy during periods of extensive evils. It is intensive evil that seems mad, utterly abnormal, to most
others in its own time.
Deep at the heart of the horrific shock of the Holocaust remains the thought, so
dear to the dominant Western tradition, that ‘‘we’’ don’t do such ‘‘primitive’’
things as mass slaughter, domestic enslavement and/or sexual violations of females,
or literally working people to death. We have criminals; we have ‘‘sick’’ people; we
have the occasional monstrous eruption of intensive evil—but these are all
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exceptions. Tragically, there is also extensive evil, and it cannot be understood if we
keep using the categories we use for intensive evil, much as we clearly want to.
Most simply, and challengingly, extensive evils specifically require us to think
about how massive harms actually can and do get done by the many, many reliable
workers and enablers they require. There are not enough monsters to do the work
of extensive evil.
An ongoing effort to comprehend how many of us can go so very, very wrong
reclaims the very faculties that, turned off, made those actions possible. We return,
together, to thinking things through, to being open to realities however searingly
difficult—to a base-level responsibility of conscious creatures to remain attuned to
the world, to others. As an educator, I have now to ask why, whether, how we can
teach thinking, practicing the arts of attentiveness, reflection, and reflexivity—the
restless arts, the very opposite of being out of touch, thoughtless.
Teaching thinking1
I believe it to be intellectually, morally, and politically important to teach thinking.
If all the usual sorts of moral, intellectual, and political strictures, from religious to
secular, can effectively be turned so that those who rely on them without reflection,
thoughtlessly, superficially, can participate all too fully in conventionalized mass
harms, then whatever else we also do, we must work to strengthen the arts of
independent, fresh, and reflective thinking in as many people as possible, practicing
them to sustain it as long as possible so that they can be on time when those
framing and in-forming systems start going wrong. If, as I now hold, people
who are not thinking can do anything, then the only remedy is to practice thinking,
as Arendt put it, ‘‘without a banister,’’ until it is second nature, something we do
simply to be who and as we are.
It may seem just obvious, and already agreed, that independent thinking—in
education, too quickly and, I think, reductively called ‘‘critical thinking’’—should
be enhanced in as many people as possible. I wish I thought that we really do teach
critical, independent thinking, but I am afraid I do not.
So, what is thinking?
Thinking differs from uses of cognitive capacities that follow prescribed rules and
conventions, which, if used well with others who have assented (or been submitted)
to the same rules and/or conventions, can prove a conclusion, a position, an evaluation to be correct, and do so coercively. Within such systems (a prime instance
being formal logic, of course), people can draw conclusions that are valid or
invalid; make statements that are provably correct or incorrect, sound or unsound,
when there is no virtue in the latter term of any of those pairs. I am not then at
liberty to say, ‘‘Two plus two is five’’ or even ‘‘twenty-two.’’ Where there is truth,
validity, and established fact, the goal is to be correct such that disagreement
becomes error.
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Thinking, by contrast, is neither coerced nor coercive. It is exploratory or suggestive; it does not prove anything, nor does it finally arrive anywhere. Should we
be thinking and happen upon an observation that we can then validate as sound,
well and good; it surely does happen. But as a sound conclusion, a bit of knowledge, it is no longer something we are thinking: it has become something we and
others can know, teach, learn, and use.
This is why, when we say people are ‘‘thoughtful’’ or ‘‘thought-provoking,’’ we
are not saying that they are knowledgeable, or rational; rather that they are openminded, reflective, attuned, and challenging. They are more likely to question than
to assert, inclined to listen to many sides, capable of making sensitive distinctions
that hold differences in play rather than dividing in order to exclude, and desirous
of persuading others rather than reducing them to silence by refuting them.
Someone who is thoughtful takes others into account; someone who is thoughtprovoking startles us back into thought, invites, or shakes us out of conceptual
autopilot.
I take thinking not to be a source of any moral code or set of ethical principles
but a propaedeutic, a ground-clearing, and ongoing preparation (with experience,
with life itself, it is ongoing) for discernment and indeterminate judgment. We want
students to emerge as more thoughtful people who will continue to seek meaningful
lives. However, educators shy away from it when pressed, we do believe, and often
say, that yes, a good liberal arts education—meaning, precisely, not a training
school for any particular skill—does help us become better people. Not just
more knowledgeable. Not just more reasonable. Better, morally and civically
because more thoughtful, more attentive, and more in touch. And I am profoundly
convinced that such thoughtfulness needs to be practiced in all of education: a
practice of a prime art of morality as of political judgment is equally important
in a dentistry class as in a literature one.
Attentive relations
Greene (1993) writes eloquently of teaching that engages students in thinking
together. She sees the classroom as a preparation for a thoughtful life among
differing equals.
She emphasizes the telling of stories, but she speaks of students telling ‘‘stories of
what they are seeking,’’ a particular, prospective way of showing who, and how, we
already—but not necessarily, not always—are. It is inquiry and both its personal
and its creative wellsprings that she links with enabling moral, political responsibility, ‘‘the need to take responsibility for each other’’ (Greene, 1993: 211–221). We
do not reason each other into caring, nor—reliably anyway—do we argue people
into taking responsibility.
Knowledge and reason are the ground beneath our feet and the maps we hold in
our hands and share, but thinking is the why and the how and with whom of the
questing itself. In classes, thinking together, discussing, and reflecting practice us in
the openness and ability to discern many differing sorts of connections,
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distinctions, disjunctions, relations, perspectives, and values of an engagement with
others in quests for knowledge that ask more of us than mere submission to what
already is there, settled, and the same. Simultaneously, and for the same reasons,
such thinking together prepares for and practices moral ways of being in our
complexly plural, relational public world that also asks more of us than submission
to a prevailing order, settled, and the same.
Thinking, that is, is prospective in that it is open-ended; free, in that it follows no
one set of rules, must end nowhere in particular; is always yet again possible
because it is out and about with regard even to its own insights; and has effects,
not products. When it leads to knowledge, it may pause, but it does not stop: the
questioning always begins again. Unless it is forbidden, scorned, and ignored, as so
often it is. This is why thinking with our students is our primary (though of course
not exclusive) purpose and why it is in our self-interest as well as theirs. We want
them, and ourselves, to comprehend the knowledge for which they come to us, not
to move inside it and shut the door, emerging only to apply what we have taught
them as if that were entirely adequate to the changing, plural, complex, and contradictory worlds we inhabit.
A focus on practicing thinking rather recasts things: texts, for example, of whatever sort, are not, then, only purveyors of material to be mastered but examples of
someone else’s thinking with which to converse. We do not teach Platonic Doctrine
(which Plato, whose Socrates is the very exemplar of thinking, knew enough to say
he never wrote anyway); we practice thinking with him and his characters. We do
not learn Freud’s Theory; we are puzzled and reflect with him as he tries to figure
out what he is hearing (or not) and what that suggests simultaneously about a
unique individual and the human psyche. We join Patricia Williams in putting the
law back into its political, historical, and personal contexts, consulting outrage and
hope as well as reason to comprehend, and imagination to communicate its
realities.
We are looking for ways to stay in touch, so we can be attentive and reflective,
rather than moving on conventional autopilot—whether of expertise or of cliché—
right on past what we or others may actually, truly, be doing.
The final line in Dewey’s (1916) Democracy and Education is, ‘‘Interest in learning from all the contacts of life is the essential moral interest.’’ Learning, inquiring,
and reflecting—not knowing about. Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish poet, said in her
Nobel Prize acceptance speech: ‘‘Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions
quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In
the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even
poses a lethal threat to society’’ (1998: xvi).
Unfortunately, those who are established as knowers do not always equally value
thinking in the Diotimic/Socratic sense of questing out of a love for wisdom we do
not possess, an art quite different from calculating, making a case, proving a point,
strategizing, analyzing, and reasoning deductively. We do still need to remember
that there is knowledge that has informed extensive evils, justifying them—eugenics;
the ‘‘knowledge’’ that there are ‘‘heretics’’ who must be burned at the stake, or
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blown up; that females are incurably inferior to males; that some peoples are
‘‘primitive’’; that a cost/benefit calculation overrides individuals’ worth and
rights—but it is not the knowledge that does the killing. It is our failure to think
perceptively soon enough to realize we must act to stop those who would use it in good
as well as bad faith to legitimate the doing of consequential harm on a grand scale.
Szymborska, who knows something of mass horrors, has thought it important
also to say this to us: ‘‘Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider
every word, we all use phrases such as ‘the ordinary world’, ‘ordinary life’, ‘the
ordinary course of events’. But, she wants us not to forget, ‘whatever else we might
think of this world—it is astonishing.’ And that astonishment—which I believe is a
wellspring of the attentiveness to, the interest in, that which is here and now before
us as we act, and thereby enables any morality at all—is, Szymborska rightly says,
‘an epithet containing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that
deviate from some well-known . . . norm, from an obviousness to which we’ve
grown accustomed. But the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment . . . isn’t based on a comparison with something else.’ For those who, like
poets, weigh their words’ calibration with experience very carefully, ‘nothing is
usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single
day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not
anyone’s existence in this world’’’ (1998: xviii).
What we need is education that opens the space for astonishment at least as often
as it closes in on answers and certainties. Such education liberates minds through
inquiry into, through, and around knowledge that is world-defining for cultures and
surely to be conserved and renewed but always as a living treasure. I believe that any
subject can be taught in ways that achieve learning by practicing thinking with
others—writing code, literature, physics, carpentry, psychology: anything.
The humanities
It is nonetheless also the case that, at least for a long historical moment in which
our subjects remain so very distinct from each other with regard to their uses of
minds, we particularly need to tend and share the humanities. These are the fields in
which a fine use of languages, a rich interplaying of perspectives, aesthetic and
formal qualities, a quest for meanings that can challenge as well as illuminate truth
claims, attentiveness to the eloquence of phenomena not yet categorized are more
than instrumental: they are ends in themselves.
The humanities take us always back to the unique, the end in itself, and
invite the free play of the mind’s faculties rather than submitting them to a rule,
as Kant put it in the Critique of Judgment. Beauty comes under no rule; neither
does meaning, as distinct from truth. This is no doubt part of why the humanities
can seem useless in a bad sense, as a kind of indulgent, effete luxury of and for the
few, for which other people have no time or even inclination. But that is another
Orwellian Big Lie. Tyrants have always known to get rid of artists and thinkers and
those who love and share in such works, and the most oppressed have always
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struggled to learn to read and to seek meaning and beauty: Give us bread, but give
us roses, too.
Without the arts of freedom, wellsprings for the unruly arts and humanities,
I fear that we remain all too vulnerable to thoughtlessness. But if we are educated
in practices of freedom and quests for meaning that interweave our private,
working, and public lives, we are less likely to think that it is practical to go
along with those who need us thoughtlessly to do the work of extensive evils
they really cannot do without us.
With such efforts to renew thinking, to teach it, we open the possibility not only
of living more attentively and so morally in the present and future, but also of
reconciling with the past. In the realm of freedom opened by thinking, we also find
the possibility of a mercy that, unlike forgiveness, knows itself to be unjustifiable,
and so a gift. Mercy may well up from comprehension so that we can continue,
together, our experiments not only in truth but in compassion, becoming every step
of the way more practiced in the very thinking that may enable us to have less for
which to judge ourselves.
Note
1. I am in part drawing here on Minnich (2003).
References
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Arendt A (2003) Thinking and Moral Considerations. In: Kohn J (ed.) Responsibility and
Judgment. New York: Schocken/Random House, pp.159–189.
Burns J (2005) From banality to audacity. The New York Times, 11 December. Available at:
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Camus A (1975) The Plague. New York: Vintage International/Random House.
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Minnich E (2003) Teaching thinking: Moral and political considerations. Change Magazine,
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Packer G (2007) Betrayal. The New Yorker, 26 March.
Simic C (2008) poem in Pollitt K. What little sense. New York Times Sunday Book Review,
18 May, 21.
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Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 0(0)
Author biography
Elizabeth Minnich is a Senior Scholar, Association of American Colleges and
Universities, and teaches moral philosophy and applied ethics at Queens
University, USA. She keynoted the Third International Conference on Genocide
at Sacramento State University, ‘‘Genocide and Other Extensive Evils: Enablers,
Perpetrators, Resisters’’ and is presently completing the work on the book from
which this paper was excerpted.