Episode 181: Hannah Arendt on the Banality of Evil (Part Two)

0:00 Wes: That's one of the ways in which conscience is defeated. She actually gives a lot of different examples of the way one might defeat conscience. The grandiosity. Himmler's method is one of them. And that's in chapter six. In chapter seven, we see her say, it's not that Eichmann didn't have a conscience, it's that his conscience was basically the voice of society around him. So the way she puts it, Eichmann, in contrast to other elements in Nazi society, 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 and up to the end was success. The chief standard of good society as he knew it was. 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. And she says one of the most potent factors in soothing his conscience was basically he couldn't see anyone around him who was against the final solution. And this is the chapter by the way, in which she goes into extensively into the compliance of Jewish leaders with the Nazis and sort of rounding up Jews and giving them, you know, lists of people and there were even Jewish commandos to round people up.

And she implies that basically that's one of the things that actually assuaged his conscience. It wasn't just. It wasn't just the Nazis who thought this was normal. It was Germans in general. And it was even the victims who in some sense whose lack of resistance made it seem normal. By the way, she's not judging them for the lack of resistance. This is one of the things got her in trouble. She doesn't think any group of people would have acted any differently or could have under the circumstances. But she does take note of it

1:57 Mark: and tells about some rebels in some Dutch Jews that actually did kill some Nazis and they were tortured horribly, you know, such that she says they would envy the folks in Auschwitz and that this kind of reprisal is something that the Nazis used, wanted ready in people's minds.

2:16 Dylan: But she does have some harsh words for the Jewish leadership in Germany and even in the postscript thinks that that is a open question and it's a very, very divisive. She acknowledges it's an incredibly divisive question.

2:31 Wes: She says that, like Eichmann, they enjoyed their status and power. They enjoyed the fact that it put them in a leadership role.

2:38 Mark: Yeah. For both the Jewish leaders and just the leaders of the countries that were being invaded, annexed. In going through how things worked in the different countries. I think Sweden is one that just didn't cooperate, you know, would promise things and would not deliver them.

2:50 Wes: Was that Denmark? It's not Sweden. Denmark is the famous example where they just said no.

2:56 Mark: Okay?

2:56 Wes: They said no, and no one got killed. And to some extent, Italy, more complicated example, but Italians, even under Mussolini, didn't comply.

3:06 Mark: I think she says eventually they did comply.

3:09 Wes: And also Bulgaria is another standout example. They want to leave the Bulgarians out. Bulgarians totally, totally resisted a lot of

3:17 Mark: moving parts in making something like this happen. Unless there's cooperation from a lot of people, then you do not get this kind of horror going on.

3:25 Wes: And she said, and it wasn't even like, they didn't even suffer any reprisals for it. Like, the Germans on the ground didn't have the heart to continue if there was any resistance. So when they met resistance in Bulgaria and Denmark, they basically just gave up.

3:42 Seth: Yeah. This goes back to what I was saying about having to institute the system where you can divorce yourself from agency. Right. Cooperation makes it possible. Lack of friction in the process, through cooperation, through participation. So faced with resistance, right, the individual agent who was responsible wasn't able to overcome their conscience. Right. In other words, that fidelity to the idea, that first phase of overcoming, where you have to have fidelity to the idea, is not strong enough to overcome the individual moral conscious when it comes to if you actually have to lift a finger, so to speak, or persuade somebody or overcome resistance.

And I think, again, this is part of Arendt's point. She's saying it's really about almost like momentum. It was inertia combined with belief that brought about this. It was not that there were moral monsters or there was mass hypnosis or something like that. It's the fact that this all was made possible simply by the fact that people didn't say no, and they didn't say no for a variety of complicated reasons. But she feels strongly, I think, that we need to understand this because she says it in the. I don't remember if it's the latter half of the book or the postscript or that anytime something's unprecedented, right, you don't understand it.

You don't know how to deal with it. So in the case of genocide, genocide was unprecedented. There had been mass exterminations of ethnic groups and things like that previously, but it all took place within the borders of sovereign state. And what differentiated this was the attempt to wipe one individual group off the face of the earth, regardless of national borders.

5:37 Wes: Also for no utilitarian purpose.

5:39 Mark: Well, obviously they thought they had a purpose, but it was not an immediate for the war, not to winning the

5:45 Seth: war, not connected to a military aim

5:48 Wes: or colonialism or to, you know, that specific purpose is only to wipe that group out because they are bad. It's not a byproduct of some larger goal. She calls them administrative massacres, she thinks is a superior term to genocide.

6:04 Dylan: And even though there was a lot of taking of money and property and stuff like that involved, it wasn't for the sake of that that this annihilation was going on.

6:16 Seth: Right.

6:16 Dylan: That there was just sort of an efficiency of making sure that, well, you didn't leave anything on the table as part of that.

6:23 Seth: Right. The point of me bringing this up was that she's trying to. She says, okay, this was unprecedented. And here's the ways in which it was unprecedented. It's different than what has come before. Now the temptation is to say, because it's unprecedented, because it's exceptional. There was something exceptional in the cause, and it can't happen again. And what she says is no, unprecedented means that now it is precedented and that we should not only worry, but we should expect the same thing to happen again. And so the question becomes we must understand how it was possible that this happened.

And what she comes up with in this analysis is understanding that the narrative where we have monsters, evil and unique circumstances that give birth to the situation where something like this can happen, if we read exceptionalism into it, we will miss the opportunity to understand and be able to safeguard against the recurrence of this in the future.

7:20 Wes: So ultimately, it's about again a failure of judgment, right? And it's a compromised faculty of judgment in the face of the sort of insane belief that has taken over the rest of society.

7:32 Seth: Sorry, Wes, I want to ask, is it a compromise of the faculty of judgment or is it a compromise of conviction?

7:38 Wes: Her whole theme here is judgment. So the way she puts it in the postscript, for instance, is those few who were still able to tell right from wrong went really only by their own judgments, and they did so freely. There were no rules to be abided by under which the particular cases with which they were confronted could be subsumed. That's typical Kantian faculty of judgment. Subsume the particulars under the universals. They had to decide in each instance as it arose because no rules existed for the unprecedented. That's reflective judgment, where you simply pay attention to the particular and draw conclusions from the particular.

The idea is that most of the time the way our judgment works is we are just subsumers. We have a set of pre established rules in our mind and we subsume the particulars under them. And we operate machine like that in some sense, which is to say unthinkingly, not stupidly. She distinguishes being stupid. Eichmann is not stupid, but he's unthinking in that sense. And to really think, and this is a very Heideggerian point as well, by the way, to really think and not just be an automaton once again means that one is capable of a certain type of judgment which pays attention in particular and specifically in this case can look at things from the standpoint of someone else.

To come back to that basic assessment of Eichmann that she makes, which is that he was unable to think, which is I think, related to this inability to judge specifically from the standpoint of someone else. So I wanted to bring all those things together. The way in which we're affected by society and what's become normal within the society, the way that filters down into our everyday, the way we judge things and the way we resist that which is to engage, I think, for Arendt in real thinking, in a kind of judgment which can rebel against simple

9:27 Mark: rule following having a prescription. I don't know that I noticed this so specifically, but I guess in the discussion of Kant, she says part of Kant's morality is that you become a legislator for morality yourself. You are making your own decisions, thinking. So in that place, at least, she explicitly, at least strongly implies that if you're going to be moral, then you have to think individually. And certainly in all this discussion of cliches, she's talking about not thinking authentically. But there's no, in this text, at least explicit, like in Simone de Beauvoir's the Ethics of Ambiguity or something prescription.

I don't think it would work, is what I'm working toward here, to have a mass prescription that everybody must think individually or else we're likely to fall into this trouble. There needs to be something about the culture itself. There need to be things that are built in to keep this sort of madness from getting a hold. But it seems like that would not have to be so radical as everybody must be a philosopher of some sort.

10:26 Wes: I don't think it's everyone must be a philosopher. And yes, I'm drawing on background knowledge of Arendt here. Yes, this focus on people's ability to truly think and make real judgments is all important. The references in the text are indirect. I think you're right. But it is telling that those few who were still were able to tell right from wrong went really only by their own judgments, and they did so freely. There were no rules to be abided by. At some point, if you're living in a Nazi regime and everyone else is running around contributing to mass murder as if it's just, hey, this is everyday normal experience.

You will be pulled by that. You will be, I think naturally, any of us could be. There'll be a gravitational pull towards the idea that, okay, these are the norms. And my conscience is a function of what other people and what society in general thinks is respectable and right and good. And the only way one might resist that is if one's conscience unmoors itself from the idea of what's respectable to other people. If judgments become free and independent of that societal rule following and internalization of what everyone else says is good and right.

11:37 Mark: Which is just interesting to think about whether that is really possible.

11:41 Seth: Right?

11:41 Mark: If you're thinking about Adam Smith's Impartial Spectator, the way that Russ Roberts described it was, this is the way that people's conscience works, is that they imagine other people, their peers, and how they would judge things. And there is stuff in there as you abstract, well, what if my actual peers are wrong? Well, you kind of imagine better and better peers. But where are you getting that notion of better and better? It still has to be something that is culturally available to you. So I do think that the way that Arendt tells the story here is that there's plenty of disparate background moral thinking that people could draw on no matter what society you're in.

But certainly in a society and well educated people like some of these people she's talking about who are actively involved in the atrocities. So you're right, there's a magnetism, but it's not a complete blockade. It's not the sort of society that we read about in 1984 where there's just no cognitive matter available to you to think contrary to the mass.

12:42 Dylan: And in fact, there's great violence in the case of 1984 to make sure that you stay in line. If you're not doing that, then there is a process of rehabilitating or exterminating.

12:54 Wes: She did think of the Nazi regime as totalitarian and not simply fascist. So Arendt was very careful about making distinctions between mere authoritarian regimes and mere fascist regimes and truly totalitarian regimes. And she thought of the Third Reich as truly totalitarian in the sense of trying to formulate total control over the mind of every individual and succeeding to a great degree.

13:17 Dylan: So maybe it's worth reading her book on totalitarianism at some point. I guess I was thinking about this idea that you get pulled along by your culture. And while that seems certainly true, it does seem like there would be enough context in the broad range of human experience to know that rounding up people and killing them is outside the lines.

13:39 Wes: Right.

13:39 Dylan: That would not have been unheard of as being a bad idea.

13:45 Wes: That's great.

13:46 Seth: Right?

13:46 Mark: It's quite different than the treatment of slaves or something like that.

13:49 Seth: So here's what I would say to this, Dylan. You're right. And part of the challenge with this is you get a hint of it in Eichmann in Jerusalem, but the situation was so complex in terms of this didn't happen overnight. Right. It was a decade long process, or longer that started back in the early 1930s. And to get to the point where this was accepted by people, where they actively participated in it without the kind of resistance you're talking about, it was a process that required A lot of activity.

14:25 Wes: They boiled the frog, basically.

14:27 Seth: They boiled the frog. And I have some recommended reading at the end of the episode. Remind me and I'll give some recommendations to the listeners about where they can learn more about how this process took place.

14:37 Dylan: I think actually this book gave to me a pretty good idea of it that the incremental process of pressure, then forced emigration to concentration to final solution. A kind of incremental approach to it.

14:52 Seth: Sorry, just to clarify, there's that aspect of it, but then there's also the aspect of how Germany became essentially a one party system and how the Nazis took control, but the elimination of Social Democrats and communists and understanding, like how the voice of the other in German society was eliminated by the Nazis over time and how people were essentially convinced or forced to become part of the machine. That's another aspect of the story that needs to be told.

15:21 Dylan: Well, that's sort of the aspect of the totalitarianism and both how totalitarianism is executed and also the end effect of it. We've been talking about Eichmann's conscience and the way in which he was able to say, separate himself from the deeds. There was a time where he goes to the concentration camp and he testifies that he finds it so overwhelming to see all these horrible things happening and he just feels like he can't do it. But he's able to separate himself in the sense of I'm doing my duty and not pulling the trigger on anything. It did make me think about there were people pulling triggers, right? And there were people driving these mobile gas vans and loading up people into the vans and then driving around. Somebody turned a lever to open up gas. They all died. And then they dump them in a ditch. And there are people who are doing

16:16 Mark: that medi themselves, Jews, as she points out, because they were forced to. You'll be spared if you participate.

16:23 Dylan: Maybe that's part of the answer. I guess it's kind of a recognition that it's only by essentially holding a gun to somebody's head that you're going to get them to do those things.

16:32 Wes: Eichmann's reaction, though is kind of telling. So this gas vans thing is at Chelmno and he witnesses people being put into the vans and shrieking and then the corpse is being thrown out into the ditch. And then he talks about after that just being silent and not talking to his driver for hours, like not being able to talk. And then he says, so his account of it is there. I got enough. I was finished. I only remember that a physician in white Overalls told me to look through a hole into the truck while they were still in it. I refused to do that.

I could not. I had to disappear. And the way he tells the other stories where he's seeing people being shot. And by the way, he has a few grazes with the monstrous stuff. According to Arendt, when he visited Auschwitz, for instance, he probably didn't see anything. And at Chelmno he saw these gas vans. And at Lublin he saw some preparations. And then at Minsk, he sees people shot. And then a. Another place he sees this fountain. There's a story about a fountain of blood. But he always talks about this in terms of feeling weak. And he talks about it in terms of how it affects him and how terrible it was for him to have to see these things.

Not in terms of the standpoint of the victims or any moral language. Just I felt sick to my stomach. My knees were weak. This was too much for me. Why did I have to see this? And. And it's really fascinating.

17:57 Seth: There's an interesting part of that quote. I cannot tell how many Jews entered. I hardly looked. I could not. I could not. I had had enough the shrieking, and I was much too upset, and so on. As I later told Mueller, when I reported to him, he did not get much profit out of my report.

18:13 Dylan: He was prevented from doing a good job.

18:15 Seth: Yes, exactly. I was so disturbed, I could not do a good job.

18:18 Wes: So one thing Arendt does say, just speaking to her question about where conscience goes, the way she ends, chapter eight, before she gets into all the deportation stuff. And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, thou shalt not kill, even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody, thou shall kill. Although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people, evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it, the quality of temptation.

Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom, and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But God knows they had learned how to resist temptation. So what's really fascinating here.

19:12 Seth: Great quote. Yeah.

19:13 Wes: Is the quality of almost moralistic quality. It's like, from our perspective, this is evil. And this gets at the whole banality thing. But from their perspective, it would have been evil. Not to follow this newly developed voice of conscience which says you should kill or you should witness the gruesome things that Eichmann witnessed. Even though you don't want to. You're doing your duty, you're fulfilling your obligation. And the fact that you're repelled by and don't want to do it, well, that's basically the way we are with our obligations. We don't want to do them, we have to do them. What's so terrifying about it all is it's not that one becomes a monster and says to oneself, yes, I am now going to do evil things. It's that the voice of what tells you to do these things seems to be the voice of conscience, seems to be the voice of what is good and moral.

20:03 Dylan: Using the language of doing something that's difficult or unpalatable in that kind of bureaucratic way, that language just makes it sound like it's the equivalent of having a rif at your office. And you're a manager and you have to go and fire five people on your team because your boss told you that you need to cut your budget by $700,000. And you feel terrible about it because you're having to make choices about who goes and you know that they're not going to have jobs after this, and you feel terrible about it. That's the way in which the activity is being normalized, right?

Is that is equating all those kinds of ways of doing things that are difficult with all other kinds of things of doing things that are difficult ways that we would normally respond to our consciousness, even with, like raising children. Right? You know, you deprive your children of something they really, really want to do because no, it's better for them than not. But you still feel bad about making them feel pain because they didn't get to go to the event with their friends.

21:07 Mark: So in trying to modernize the lesson here, I'm trying to figure out how much it matters that we understand the motivations of the original, the thing that led to the slippery slope here. So this slippery slope idea, we talked about a little about how it was a step by step process by which the Jews were treated worse and worse, and that Germany became totalitarianism. And Arendt is actually critical of the slippery slope thinking in that she characterizes Israel's treatment of genocide as just the biggest, worst, most terrible pogrom in Jewish history. But that this is not something fundamentally new. This is the oldest kind of slight that we remember. That's kind of part of what our historical understanding of ourselves is based on.

21:53 Seth: There's a Jewish joke that all of our holidays follow the same script. They tried to kill us. We survived. Now let's eat.

22:02 Mark: So in trying to think about how could it happen here, it's interesting to think about the connections between the rhetoric or how close does the rhetoric have to be in terms of even just talking about the Jewish question in the first place as a problem. And I recall as recently as the 1960s or maybe even the 80s, they still talk about as the Negro problem, which might even be a way of characterizing like, okay, there are these people that have been historically wrong that are in our midst. How do we make nice with them? It might not have necessarily putting it that way, the implication of how do we ship all the Negroes back to Liberia or whatever, the stupid solution that would be comparable to the what some of the Germans were thinking at this time.

But you know, just the fact that you can't use that term anymore, you can't call race relations problem the Negro problem. Like not only because we don't want to use the word Negro, but just because it's not their problem, but yet now we have the problem of illegal immigration and how that, how easily that becomes of. It's a problem that we have all these people here that, you know, some percentage of the populace, including our current leadership, doesn't want to be here. And so how scared should we be about just the existence of that rhetoric?

How slippery is the slope, I guess. And do we have to understand why these ordinary Germans would feel that the Jews were such a problem that getting rid of them would, you know, even though it's horrible and I hate to do it, and I realize that there are people even, but geez, it really just has to be done and we're part of some great long term thing if we can just solve this problem and kind of, if we had only headed this off in the first place and we wouldn't have this problem now. Right. The modern thing would be if only we'd have better enforcement, we wouldn't have all these illegals here now.

But the fact that we have all these illegals here now, like there are no good solutions. Like something we're going to be tearing people away from their families or whatever to solve this problem. But it just, it has to be done.

24:00 Seth: That's where the element of race and racial purity and blood and there's a lot tied up in the mythology of national socialism that people think of as, you know, this goes back to this idea about perpetrating the crime for the pursuance of a political aim, for example. And okay, well, these people are living in land that we want to take, so we need to move them or exterminate them. That's a motivation that's externally understandable and politically, or I guess you could say according to the framework of general political. The Geneva Convention or whatever makes sense.

But the Nazi ideology of the eternal Reich, right. The Thousand Year Reich required a notion of racial purity and other elements that made exterminating the Jews a critical part of their plan. And so Arendt points out a number of times that even when the war was winding down and they were desperately short on supplies, they never said, you know, we need to redirect these resources to do something else. It was a critical part of their, or at least of Hitler's overall plan that this happen. And she makes the point that initially, euthanasia, the euthanasia strategy was to be employed upon the mentally ill, socially unfit, not necessarily Jews and gypsies, but on members of society who would be drains on the resources of society and not genetically appropriate, appropriate for furthering the race.

And so, you know, there's so many complex elements to this that add up that are required to explain why the Jews, why then all that sort of thing. But I think your general point that the motivation is irrelevant, right. We can look at the structure and try to understand why it was the Jews this time and why Germany and so forth. But Arendt's point is you don't need to understand what. What motivates them. What you need to understand is the mechanics of human psychology and social transformation and political will that bring about the conditions that make it possible for this to happen.

And then turn that around and looking at the individual Eichmann and going to a broader statement about society, once you understand those dynamics, to turn back around and bring that back down to your own individual judgment, as Wes pointed out, and understand be able to intervene and recognize when or if you are yourself participating.

26:33 Wes: And she thinks the reaction to her book is actually an indication of how averse people are to making judgments and to confronting what she calls the question of judgment. So this is at the end of the postscript. She thinks people, what ultimately people are upset by is her being a stickler on the question of judgment in the sense of judging Eichmann as an individual as opposed to generalizing and making it about evil or the Holocaust as a whole or anything like that. In the beginning, she wants to keep laser focused on Eichmann himself. She thinks the trial ought to focus on his deeds and him as an individual, rather than, say, the suffering of the Jews.

And we relate that this whole question of the judgment that's being directed at Eichmann is not unrelated to the. What I've called the defect in judgment of the people living under the Nazi regime who don't resist or who lose their conscience.

27:34 Dylan: And part of that was her insistence on focusing on his specific deeds and his specific person, as opposed to talking about either the fate of the Jews in general or Germany in general, or abstracting it historically, making it very, very big. So in the book, she's queuing very, very close to specific facts and specific people. She's going through names who reported to whom, what was the organization of things in that report way.

28:06 Wes: Yeah, I think we ought to distinguish what she thinks the trial should do, which is to hew closely to the individual doer, and then what her book does, which in a sense, she does that. But also her book can be. Because the trial was about more than Eichmann. The book is about more than Eichmann as well, and thankfully so. And she is examining these deeper questions about Eichmann's motivations and about how this could happen and all that stuff and what happened in the Holocaust in general. All that stuff that I think she thinks the trial should not have been in its pursuit of justice.

28:41 Dylan: She also wanted to make sure that in talking about his specific activities, that he is not responsible for everything. Right. She criticizes the trial, particularly the prosecutors, as essentially making him a bigger deal than he was as being. At some point, they hang the whole idea and organization of the Final Solution on Eichmann. And she considers that factual error really bad and dangerous, not because it somehow slanders Eichmann, but because it misunderstands deeply what was going on. And so you lose the lesson that you might be able to get out of understanding Eichmann, because that portrayal of him as being sort of the grand master of this also plays into the idea that the way this kind of thing happens is because of some kind of deep statistic evil on the.

The part of individual people. Both those things have a kind of exceptionalism of their own that undermines the. I mean, for her, I think the lesson, and I think also the true horribleness of it.

29:50 Wes: Yeah, can I read a really good quote? So it sums all that up. So this is in the epilogue, and this is one of. It's actually one of the three things she addresses about the trial is whether it comprehended Eichmann There are three different objections, and just one of them is that it didn't comprehend Eichmann and that it was important to. So she says they knew, of course, that it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster, even though if he had been, Israel's case against him would have collapsed or at the very least lost all interest.

Surely one can hardly call upon the whole world and gather correspondence from the four corners of the earth in order to display Bluebeard in the dock. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together. For it implied, as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels, that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

So ultimately, she's going to argue in the end, in this epilogue, that our common legal notions really aren't suitable, aren't adequate to dealing with a crime of this proportions. So she says larger issues at stake in the Eichmann trial was the assumption current in all modern legal systems that intent to do wrong is necessary for the commission of a crime. And that she's going to say, in this case, we have to put that aside. She advocates this point by Yosal Rogat, that a great crime offends nature so that the earth cries out for vengeance, that evil violates a natural harmony which only retribution can restore, that a wrong collectivity owes a duty to the moral order to punish the criminal.

And ultimately, in her end speech, so she's giving this hypothetical judgment, the judgment she sort of wishes the judges had given to Eichmann. And she's going to say something to the effect that, well, in a sense, vengeance is cried out for. Which is interesting because in the beginning of the book she rejects the idea that justice is about vengeance, at least the vengeance of the victims. Here she's embracing a certain kind of vengeance, but it's the vengeance of the collectivity. It's the vengeance that restores the moral order. And that's the important distinction.

32:15 Mark: The problem here comes because it's an international issue, so international law, that she thinks that the correct view of justice is not, as you say, revenge. It's that the society has been wronged. So there needs to be reparations to repair the rip in society.

32:33 Seth: Criminal proceedings, since they are mandatory and thus initiated, even if the victim would prefer to forgive and forget, rest on a law whose essence, to quote Taylor writing in the New York Times Magazine, is that a crime is not committed only against the victim, but primarily against the community whose law is violated.

32:48 Mark: Yes, just as a murderer is prosecuted because he has violated the law of the community and not because he has deprived the Smith family of its husband, father and breadwinner. So these modern state employed mass murderers must be prosecuted because they violated the order of mankind and not because they killed millions of people. The whole point in moving from the earth cries out to vengeance to society needs to be put back together is to sort of make it more concrete, more modern, less superstitious. You know, we know how bad a direction once you take a fundamentally superstitious ideology as the thing that motivates your justice, that things can go terribly wrong.

But yet just referring to actual states, I think Arendt is saying, does not do justice to our intuitions about how some crimes can be committed. And in particular these crimes against a whole people really have to be seen as not just something that offended the Jews, but crimes against humanity itself. How do we make philosophically respectable, non mystical the notion that there can be a crime against humanity? We need to philosophically clarify that so we're not just referring to some, the balance of nature or something, some superstitious sounding abstraction.

34:01 Dylan: Well, it's particularly true that the crimes against humanity are a way of getting at holding states or state like entities accountable for their actions. It's short of a super state. Right. But it's putting those state activities in the context of, in some kind of context at all as a way of holding them accountable. Otherwise you don't have a mechanism for justice because justice is defined by the activities of the state. In fact, that was part of the attempt at defending Eichmann by his defense attorney. Was that because as an act of state there's no one to judge that. Right. States do what states do and there's no super legal framework in which to hold them accountable for a law that was broken. You have to make laws that can be broken in order to hold them accountable.

34:49 Mark: Yeah. She said the UN had at that point rejected the establishment of a permanent international criminal court twice. And I had to look up that it was only 2002 that we got the Hague that actually can do that now and its jurisdiction is pretty limited. Such that you can even have Saddam Hussein saying, I don't recognize the legitimacy of this body that is coming forth to judge me. A lot of state leaders are still. I think that's essentially what the idea of America first and rejecting the UN is a matter of saying there really is nothing higher than the individual state's sovereignty.

So this is still a live issue. Even though we have some international mechanism now that's built out of treaties. As she says that that's how that comes together. It's not like we have come up with something like the social contract. Nations should agree to these abstract ways of mediating between them. No, it's actual votes and actual precedents in terms of things like this. So she points at this trial as not having established what she would prefer to be a precedent in dealing with international issues like this. It's one of her political anti Israel beefs here.

35:55 Wes: Yeah, it's a crime against humanity. It's not just a crime against the Jewish people, it's a crime against humanity and therefore should be tried in an international court. I wanted to backtrack a little bit because I have a different interpretation of the end, the very end of the epilogue, where she says, we refuse and consider as barbaric the proposition that a great crime offends nature so that the very earth cries out for vengeance, that evil violates a natural harmony which only retribution can restore, and so on. I actually think she is trying to lead us back to that.

So when she says we refuse, that's our natural inclination. And then she says, and yet I think it is undeniable that it was precisely on the ground of these long forgotten propositions that Eichmann was brought to justice to begin with and that they were in fact the supreme justification for the death penalty. It sounds like she might be criticizing the court for basing it on that. But in fact, I think that's the thing. One thing that she thinks the. Or one of the few things that she thinks the court got right. Because what she's wrestling with here is the fact that we have a criminal who didn't know that they were doing something wrong.

And that's so critical to our normal legal and moral intuitions. Like if they don't know they're doing wrong, how can we hold them accountable? And she's searching for a definition of responsibility and accountability that rises above that is independent of whether one knows one is doing wrong. So when she gives that long imaginary judgment and to Eichmann in the end, I think she's. That judgment is in the spirit of the great crime that offends nature. You admitted that you committed a crime against the Jewish people, even though you didn't hate the Jews and you couldn't have done otherwise, and therefore you don't feel guilty for it.

Your role was an accident and almost anybody could have done that in your place. In other words, he had bad moral luck to return us to. I forget which episode we discussed this in, but bad moral luck being something like if I'm drunk driving and I don't hit anyone, then if I get caught, then it's a low level criminal offense. If I hit someone and kill them, then suddenly I'm a notorious criminal. The difference between me, the notorious criminal and me, the person with a DWI, is just moral luck. And that's sort of the essence of Eichmann's claim is that he was morally unlucky.

And she's saying no, despite all that. And it's not a matter of collective guilt that he's guilty collectively. But she says, you yourself claim not the actuality but only the potentiality of equal guilt on the part of all who lived in the state whose main political purpose had become the commission of unheard of crimes. She's referencing the idea that anyone would have done this or could have done this in his place. And no matter through what accidents of exterior or interior and circumstances, you were pushed onto the road of becoming a criminal.

There is an abyss between the actuality of what you did and the potentiality of what others might have done. Moving on down, let us assume for the sake of argument that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder. There still remains the fact that you have carried out and therefore actively supported the policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery. In politics, obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations, as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world, we find that no one that is no member of the human race can be expected to want to share the earth with you.

This is the reason and the only reason you must hang. So this is a pretty radical conclusion. She's saying despite intentions and despite bad moral luck, you nevertheless have to be held accountable. And that the Holocaust in particular forces us to this position, or what she calls administrative massacres force us into this position where you have a lot of People who are, in a sense, yes, just obeying orders or, yes, just cogs in the machine. And no, Eichmann wouldn't have ended up a murderer if it weren't for the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich.

He would have just been a traveling salesman all his life. That doesn't matter. If you did it, then the restoration, the reparation of the community, demands your punishment. You guys may disagree. I wanted to get out my thought on the ending because I thought it was quite radical.

40:06 Mark: Well, it's rhetorically great. I mean, I was just. The way the epilogue ends. This is the reason and the only reason you must hang. And it's, you know, you want to cheer along with her that, like, you really burned him. But what do you think of that that ultimately comes? It's the only reason you must hang. No one can be expected to want to share the earth with you because, you know, you played God yourself. You decided who. Who lives and who dies. You know, you and your people. So she's kind of re. Personalizing that it is not quite revenge based, because revenge even might refer to some sort of balance, but it is personal that ultimately it is a matter of what people want.

You know, maybe there's constraints on that. So it's not that we can want any old thing, but what we can reasonably expect people to want. We don't want to share the earth with you anymore. Therefore, that is sufficient grounds for capital punishment. Like I thought, the whole point in getting outside this doesn't meet Nussbaum's criterion. You know, she points out in the ancient Greek play that she refers to

41:06 Dylan: which one is that the Eumenides in particular.

41:08 Mark: Exactly that. We have to make the jump from justice being a matter of personal revenge to being something that is externalized. And this is the way that, you know. So I would like to keep it depersonalized. I don't think this bit of rhetoric helps her overall argument for that we should have an international court and this should be made more into a rule of law that responds to genocide than individual states taking it upon themselves to engage in revenge. I'm getting a mixed message here, is

41:38 Wes: what I'm saying, but just to clarify my position, because I think it is a weird ending and it is hard to say exactly what she's saying. But what I took this to say is that despite the fact that she rejects vengeance at the beginning of the book, vengeance for the sake of specific victims, she's saying that there can be this more abstract concept of the earth crying out for vengeance Which I think actually she doesn't end up rejecting that idea, even though she says we do tend to reject it as barbaric. It actually, strangely enough, has a place in figuring out some sense of justice which can be applicable to someone who is a cog in a larger bureaucratic machine, who, who didn't know they were doing something wrong, who was following orders and all that stuff.

We need something. Maybe vengeance is the wrong word for that. Ultimately, I think I like your talk of moving to something. Well, it's personal in some sense, but it's sort of. Maybe some sort of elaboration of the idea of vengeance. Or maybe it does get us away from the idea of vengeance. But I still think she's grappling with something that does go beyond our usual intuitions about justice. Because she says herself those intuitions are simply inadequate for dealing with this sort of crime.

42:50 Seth: I thought that final point that you read, Wes, and it's probably. It would be worth reading the whole thing, but was her saying, if the judges had been honest about what the whole trial was about, this is what they would have said. And essentially that the real motivation for the trial was vengeance, was exculpation, which was to alleviate some conscious and to have a sense of vengeance. Like, I think that's what she was trying to say was, was that if they were honest, that's what they would have said. As opposed to her saying that the motivation for prosecuting against this type of a crime should be that type of motivation.

Because she spent some time leading up to that talking about how this new crime of a crime against humanity is legally novel. And it was confusing from a legal perspective about how it should be treated and who, you know, this goes to, who has the right to judge these people and where should that judgment take place, you know, in what jurisdiction. She's connecting it to that as well as to the notion that if there's this notion of motivation, can you judge the motivation of an individual as part of their guilt or innocence in a circumstance where there is no guilty conscience?

There can be no guilty conscience.

44:09 Dylan: Just before that final ending, I think it muddies the water a little bit on exactly what she thinks is correct. Because I think you're right, Seth, to say that she's formulating what the judges should have said if they were essentially honest. Just before those final paragraphs, she says, I think it is undeniable that it's precisely on the ground of these long forgotten propositions, I.e. that the Earth can crime out for vengeance. These long forgotten propositions. That Eichmann was brought to justice to begin with, and that they were, in fact, the supreme justification for the death penalty because he had been implicated and had played a central role in an enterprise whose open purpose was to eliminate forever certain races from the surface of the earth.

He had to be eliminated. And if it is true that justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done, then the justice of what was done in Jerusalem would have emerged to be seen by all if the judges had dared to address their defenders in something like the following terms. And then comes her what she wishes they had said or what she says they should have said if they were more honest.

45:13 Wes: So the question is whether she agrees with the more honest assessment, whether that's like, the kernel of justice in what they did, despite all the things she criticizes, or if she's also criticizing this and rejecting it.

45:26 Mark: I thought this was her preferred. Like, I wish they had said this.

45:29 Wes: Exactly. I think she's saying, look, there is an integrity to what the trial did. There is a real sense of justice. Here is what it is. And if the judges had been honest about that, they covered it up and all the other stuff, if they had been honest about it, here's what they would have said. And she's endorsing that. But I understand the other reading of that. It's puzzling. It's unclear.

45:51 Seth: There is a section where she talks about people who are critical of the kidnapping and the bringing him to trial in Jerusalem that they ironically said that the Mossad agents should have just killed him on the streets in Buenos Aires, and that would have been better. And she doesn't agree with that. So that I think in. It's somewhat support for your reading, Mark and Wes, your reading, although my initial reading of it was that she was just saying, if we're honest with what we were trying to accomplish, this is what we would have said without necessarily saying that that was okay.

Because I think she feels like the whole trial itself was complicated. And this book is partially philosophical, but also in large part a discussion about the legalities and, you know, establishing precedent and doing things for the right reasons, juridically, so that we're prepared to deal with this in the future. And at the time, it was very much a live issue in the sense of, you know, this was 1960, 60 something, that the book was published. The war was still very real and alive. There were still many, many perpetrators who were being pursued.

There were still the entire nation. You know, most of Germany had been alive during the war. And where Germany itself was reconciling itself to its own past. So there's a lot tied up in this. And of course, the establishment of the state of Israel on the back of the Second World War and the essentially justification that it was only because of the Holocaust that the state of Israel actually came into being. And so there was the fact that this was almost like a referendum or a defiant articulation of Israel's right to exist. There's just so much stuff going on.

47:36 Mark: Seth, I hope you're right, that this is not necessarily something she's endorsing. Just because of this part with Sodom and Gomorrah, what you meant to say is that we're all or most or almost all are guilty. Nobody is. This is an indeed quite common conclusion, but one we are not willing to grant you. And if you don't understand our objection, we would recommend to your attention the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, two neighboring cities in the Bible which were destroyed by fire from heaven because all the people in them had become equally guilty.

48:02 Wes: She rejects collective guilt, though, so it sounds like she's endorsing collective guilt, but she's not. She's just saying the fact that it was an accident for him, that he was taking part in this doesn't mean that he's not responsible.

48:13 Mark: I just, I wouldn't want to bring in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as an unproblematic, you know, even apart from its possible misinterpretation as collective guilt.

48:22 Wes: So in other words, if I live in a city where everyone has gone nuts and has succumbed to vice and I become vice ridden because of that, I'm not excused for my vice riddenness. That's really the point of all that. The cultural, you know, appealing, and she says this directly, other parts of this, appealing to the deterministic social and psychological causes of my venality, of my viciousness, is not an excuse, does not get me off the hook.

48:49 Seth: In my mind, part of the net takeaway is that if the world goes crazy around you, you still have an obligation to exercise your judgment against that. Exercise judgment for the purpose of moral rectitude. And I'm trying to remember, is it not the case that for the sake of one righteous person that the cities would be saved?

49:10 Mark: That that's part of the story?

49:12 Seth: Yeah, I can't remember if that's the story or if it's a different one.

49:15 Mark: Let's just say it is. I don't know.

49:17 Seth: Yeah. Okay. So the Lord informs Abraham that he's going to destroy the cities. And Abraham says, you know, would you spare it if we found 50 righteous people? And the Lord says, yes. And then Abraham says, well, what about 40 people? And then what about finally 10? Right? And then it finally comes down to the idea that if there's any righteousness in the city, the Lord will spare it, it'll be redeemed for the sake of that, for that righteous person. And instead, because there's no righteousness there except for Lot, then Lot is commanded to leave, and then the Lord destroys the city. So the lesson isn't so much about collective guilt. She's trying to point out that for the sake of a lack of even 10 righteous people, we experienced the horrors of the war and the final solution.

50:06 Wes: Eichmann's excuse is that everyone was doing it. I couldn't have known that it was wrong. It was the norms and the legalities of the society were such that within that context, I was doing the right thing. And I think the analogy to Sodom and Gomorrah is that one might think, if everyone is a sinner in the city, you wouldn't know any better, so how can I destroy the whole city? And Arendt says, what implicitly endorses that? Not because of some notion of collective guilt, but just because one's existence in a Sodom and Gomorrah and being subjected to those influences and just being, you know, one of the many who all do the same thing does not relieve one of one's moral responsibility.

So it's the same sort of argument that she makes earlier in the chapter, where she says, true, we have become very much accustomed by modern psychology and sociology, not to speak of modern bureaucracy, to explaining away the responsibility of the doer for his deed in terms of this or that kind of determinism. Whether such seemingly deeper explanations of human actions are right or wrong is debatable. But what is not debatable is that no judicial procedure would be possible on the basis of them, and that the administration of justice measured by such theories is an extremely unmodern, not to say outmoded, institution.

So this reminds me a little bit of James. But whatever we think of determinism, psychological and social determinism for our actions, if we really want to maintain the concept of justice, we have to at the very least, put that aside.

51:33 Seth: Yeah, I think we agree on the conclusion. I just sort of disagree about the reference to it.

51:38 Mark: We're then left with the question of could we possibly even now be in a situation where there's swirling injustice. And because it's so ubiquitous, we don't know about it. And there are lots of people that claim that. They claim, like our treatment of animals or when we had very complete white supremacy not too long ago was a situation comparable to that. Or the whole talk about like, well, the US Is based on an economy of exploitation and military imperialism. Like that sounds more like the collective guilt. So that's not quite what she's talking about here.

It's not just that we benefit from child labor or something, that we would then be unjust, but that maybe there is just things that we actively do, things that we actively support that we don't realize are unjust and that we have no external standpoint by which we could see that. I'm not sure what to do with that other than the sort of normal philosophical examine yourself question. Everything. Are we being cruel to plants? I'll at least consider that I don't find that motivating enough to change my behavior. But the other examples I gave are definitely things that have and should influence one's thinking about potential things they could be inadvertently doing wrong.

52:56 Dylan: The way you formulate it just has me thinking about the terms in which Eichmann is guilty. I mean, we were talking about the end, the way in which she does frame it in the epilogue of him being guilty without knowing he's committing a crime. And I guess a lot of the book sort of calls that into question that his psychology is such that he is able to think his way out of it. But it's not clear to me that he doesn't know that he's part of something that was wrong. In fact, I thought that it showed pretty well that. And that this idea that there's certainly the aspect that you're.

You could be part of a culture or a society, whether it be totalitarian or whatever, that you're going along with the norms and that there's something out of whack about those norms. But like I said earlier, this idea that rounding up people and exterminating them en masse is somehow within some set of norms, is outside of norms, seems pretty accessible. That's not like drinking a lot of sugar, a lot of soda pop, right? Everybody's drinking a lot of soda pop. I guess I'll drink a lot of soda pop and everybody gets fat. It's not what it's like every time

54:06 Mark: a bell rings, an angel is shot through the head. But we don't know that. So we just go around ringing bells all the time. No, it's not epistemically divorced from our actual experience in that way.

54:15 Wes: Yes.

54:16 Dylan: So the way you formulated the question, the debate you threw out in front of us was are there things that we're ignoring in that respect? I think as you pointed out, the animal rights one is one that people that are strongly on that side of farming is animal cruelty would say exactly that, that it's a change of consciousness that needs to happen and that they themselves won't participate as much as they possibly can. To me the lesson is thinking about the incremental nature of that totalitarian government. If I'm thinking about contemporary things, how does the frog get boiled in that respect? Slowly, such that cultural norms are changed so that you see an activity that happens and say, oh well, you know, it's not that much different than what happened before. And we let that go.

55:04 Wes: One prevalent frame of mind that we are all in, I think on a daily basis that's dangerous, is our embrace of the meritocracy and our embrace of the hierarchy we actually live. If one were to reflect in a brutal sort of hierarchy where there's lots of people at the bottom who, who don't get to live as well as us economically and also don't get the status and the prestige that others of us do. And of course then there are people on the top who get way even more of that than someone in the middle class. And we take that hierarchy for granted. So we go into work and we assume that there's a boss and then me, and maybe I might have someone under me and that's the way things are.

And we live in a society and I think most of us probably personally, we adulate success. We love the winners and the great athletes and the great actors and actresses and the philanthropists and engineers, whoever you're focusing on, we admire and adulate their excellence. And that's a certain kind of non moral in the Nietzsche sense value that admiration for non moral virtues or even for moral virtues, if they. The case of the philanthropist, that seemingly it's their morality we admire, but really it's the status, you know, there's a certain kind of status that one gains through that which is the object of admiration.

So what I'm saying is there are psychology and our societies pervaded with status consciousness. And this is something Orwell speaks to as sort of the seeds of totalitarianism. And we see that directly in Arendt's account of Eichmann where what made him so vulnerable to serving that role, which was, you know, even though he wasn't at the very top he was an important role in the deportation and murder of Jews was the fact that he was from a lower middle class family and he was status conscious. And this was the one thing that gave him success and a sense of success and abandoning it was, to use Eichmann's word, unthinkable.

It was unthinkable to abandon that status rather than keep on going with it and say, well, you know, all the terrible stuff that's going on, it's not me, you know, I'm not the one making it all happen and I'm just following orders and all those sorts of rationalizations. Ultimately, on a collective level, that concern for status and prestige for Orwell manifests itself in various types of nationalisms which, if they're taken to their logical limit, become the basis for totalitarianism. The most interesting way to look at this is that the seeds of totalitarianism, the psychological seeds, the social seeds, they are part of the fabric of our society.

It's a far more subtle thing than saying, oh, there's a Donald Trump in the White House or something like that. No matter how well we're doing as a society, unfortunately, at a very fundamental level, as long as we embrace the hierarchy, as long as we embrace that structure, we're embracing something that is the sort of, again, the seeds of potential totalitarianism.

58:04 Mark: Right? So a philosophical task would be if we acknowledge that the seeds could grow into something to evaluate the seeds. So if you're a daoist, you might say, well, the hell with all hierarchical thinking. I will just, in fact, if somebody puts a hierarchy in front of me, I will take the lowest rung because I have so much contempt for that. Whereas the Confucian response, no, no, you can't really think about virtue again, to bring in the Adam Smith thing without pulling on social norms. And you can try to transcend those social norms by thinking like, well, what would the ideal society, what would their norms be?

But it still has to be kind of rooted in actual societies, lest you just be a loon and like acting according to some directives that just have nothing to do. You know, nobody else would even be able to duplicate your thinking on these norms. Like, there has to be something that is potentially objective, potentially confirmable by other people, something that you can be sure that it's not merely your private fantasy, your private language, that you can even be sure that you're adhering to the same thing over time. So there is something to be said for hierarchical thinking in general or meritocracy in general, read your Aristotle.

But what are ways that we can get the social benefits out of these things without those seeds growing in that deformed way? And I think there are other things this in group out group thinking is another related issue. Is there any sense in which we should have a narrowed circle of concern? Is it morally proper for us to say my country first, my region first, my race, my whatever, my ethnic group first, or is that just anything like that could lead to horrible Nazi like behavior? So no, screw all identity politics, anything related to that. I think these are good questions for philosophy to consider.

And as I think I said that unless there were some benefits out of these kind of large scale ways of thinking, we would not have adopted them. So probably there is some good part to save. Even if we want to say that in general, historically, as a historical inevitability, something bad will probably come out of it if left unthought about.

1:00:14 Wes: Yeah, and Orwell is explicit about this. So if we think of identity politics as just what he calls a version of patriotism, just the desire and fealty to our particular group, however it's defined, and the desire to preserve it, preserve a certain way of life, preserve a certain kind of identity, that's all well and good, but the dark side of patriotism is nationalism in the sense of a chauvinistic attachment to the group and the group's status and superiority and power at the expense of that of other groups. That's where one thing gets turned into the other.

And so it's not just our status consciousness and the meritocracy and all those things which are the seeds in order to grow, they actually have to have a weird interaction with our desire for the good. That's what's so tragic about it. The weird interaction between our interest in power and status and then our interest in the good, including the well being of our, our own group and the well being of society generally can lead to tragic consequences. Where the fundamental political confusion is to think that you are out for the good of your group, but really you're out for status and power and one upmanship and the degradation of some other group, which is your relative standard or something like that.

There are lots of fascinating crossovers between the, you know, this and the other political stuff we've read. Not just Orwell, but say someone like Burke, because and Arendt knew this if you look at her other writing, there are also virtues to the hierarchy and there are virtues to the meritocracy. Even I'm a socialist in orwell's sense in the sense that I think at some fundamental moral level, one must reject the hierarchy. To be in a fast food restaurant and to look at a busboy and say, yes, I deserve to make more and have a better life than them because I went to school and I worked hard.

That's people's usual rationale. I worked hard, which is just code, by the way, for I sacrifice part of my psyche in devotion to my pursuit of status. But anyway, if you're a socialist, you look at that busboy and you think, they should make as much as me. They should have just as good life as me. That's the egalitarian instinct which I embrace. On the other hand, for a philosopher like Burke, hierarchy is an important connection, holds society together. It actually. It relates people in important ways. And if you get rid of it, you know, as in the French Revolution, suddenly the results can be catastrophic.

And this is something in her other writing that Arendt recognizes as well. So ultimately, it's a tricky question. I'm not. I'm not sure how we could prescribe a prevention system to keep us away from totalitarianism because it's such an insidious thing.

1:02:50 Mark: So without disagreeing with anything that you said there, I guess I still do want to stress that I feel like the meritocracy, the hierarchy thing is just one of probably several that we could come up with ubiquitous patterns that we can find within our behavior, within our society, that are potentially corruptible in this way. So another one that is really relevant to this reading is the simplicity of political communication that I think that she was criticizing the trial as being political speech by Israel. And for a political message to resonate, it has to be simple.

You can't actually get specific. You can't get into the specific ways in which Eichmann was and was not guilty. Like, no, he has to just be evil. He has to be so. Which is unfortunate that, you know, this trial was hours and hours and hours. Like, there was room for as much subtlety as the various questioners as the various witnesses wanted to put in. But they wanted the conversation to be about how horrible the Holocaust is, how we have to fight back against that. And that's. That's it. And I was very much brought to mind of just. I heard on the news Kirsten Gillibrand talking about Al Franken leaving and her wanting to say, like, look, the conversation is such now that we don't want the conversation to be about the subtleties of where sexual harassment ends and assault begins, and where is it okay.

To touch somebody. We just don't want the conversation to be about that. Fuck subtlety. It's better that he was just out of the picture so that the conversation would not be distracted by the troubles of a particular man and his particular circumstances and the details of what he did or did not do. And so we're seeing that throughout, people dismissing actual individuals and their circumstances because we want to have an overall political agenda go forward in an understandable way. We don't want to muddy the water. Seth or Dylan, do you have any more, like, modern things that you were thinking of as you were reading this that you were like, oh, that's kind of like.

We haven't actually talked about Trump here.

1:04:56 Seth: So I'll take the bait on this one thing. When Trump was elected, I was, you know, as expected, somewhat traumatized, and particularly when we started to see some of the anti Semitic stuff that surged up after his election. It's easy to use the Nazi example, right? You guys know how I feel about the Nazi example as a test case, right? Or a limit case in moral examples or ethics. So I had to say to myself, all right, is America on the same path? Are all the comparisons to Nazi Germany fair or unfair? Or, you know, Trump to Hitler and all those kinds of things?

And so I read a book which was recommended to me by my friend, former Reed College graduate John, and it's called the Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans. And this is the book that I was going to recommend to you earlier, Dylan, is that he wrote a series of books, and this is about sort of from the late 20s into the late 30s, how the Nazis came to power and what that meant for Germany and how they organized and so on. And when you read that book, you realize how radically different the circumstances were. And at a very concrete political level, what's happening in the United States is radically different from what happened in Weimar Germany prior to the advent of National Socialism.

And politically and legally, America is a very different place. But that being said, right, there are clearly threads of antisemitism, racism, exceptionalism, American exceptionalism that are quite common. And the challenge with reading Eichmann in Jerusalem and reading Arendt is that even though there's quite a bit of concrete information in the book, facts, as I think somebody said earlier, her general questioning of human psychology and her indictment of Western civilization, I mean, really of European civilization, makes me question, you know, how secure things are here.

And it makes me feel guilty about being more of a, you know, sort of lefty intellectual and not so much of an organizer and activist. And I continue to struggle with my sense that I need to be politically active in order to be that conscience, be that voice of conscience, regardless of what's going on around me. The difference is, of course, that we're reinforced in our non behavior by the fact that, you know, ironically, the external conscience for our liberal social media bubble versus the conservative social media bubble. If I follow the trend of all the people who are like me, that I'm connected to through my educational past and my political or my work status and my social media, then I might very well be indictable for my lack of action as opposed to or my inaction in a similar kind of way.

And by the way, one other last point for listeners. When the Nuremberg trials took place, the details and the understanding of the how the Final Solution was executed were not clear. And at the time of Eichmann's trial there had been quite a bit more research. And the key work of scholarship that people should refer to is a book called the Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg. And Arendt had read that, even though it was published in the same year. She had access to it and had read that. And it does rely heavily on it. And it's an immense work of scholarship to be able to differentiate the different divisions inside of the Nazi regime and National Socialism and the Foreign Office versus the army versus the SS and all these sorts of things.

1:08:49 Mark: As a closing sort of recommendation of the book, this is probably the only thing I've ever read having to do with the Holocaust that doesn't contain any what some might term suffering porn. In other words, yeah, you know that there's horrible stuff that went on. You should have been exposed to something else that would tell you that before this. But this is really getting into the logistics, parts of that story that are neglected maybe for the same reason that I was just talking about in terms of we want to make this straightforward. Like we want to keep.

When people remember the Holocaust, we want to make them remember the suffering of this massive group of people, of the atrocities. Whereas this work assumes that you already know what the atrocities were and is not just restricted to reinforcing that. Until like, I didn't think I ever wanted to read another thing about the Holocaust because everything I see or read about the Holocaust is just more emphasizing that same horrible thing. Like, yes, I know that that happened. Telling me that again and giving more of the horrible stories of individuals is not going to make cause any advance in my philosophical understanding of this at all.

But Actually getting into some of the historical details that are not directly related to the suffering of the victims. Informative. I could see myself reading another several books on this history period now, knowing that it's not all just about trying to manipulate me into making sure this never happens again. That's not its only point.

1:10:17 Wes: Yeah, it's funny. Despite all of that, I found the book really depressing. It was very hard for me to read it and I spent all of Christmas vacation reading it and feeling like I said I couldn't put it down. But. But it was also depressing and I've had a lot of exposure. My grandfather, actually my grandparents after the war stayed in Germany for decades before they came back to the States and they fluent in German. And when I went to my grandfather's house, it's just walls and walls of German history and lots of stuff about the Holocaust. And I was strongly interested in the Holocaust from a very young age and read a lot about it.

And it's something that remains difficult. And even this, you know, despite the fact that this book isn't. What is it, Mark? Suffering? Porn? Just the fact of just Eichmann's character and the whole. It's hard for me to describe. So I don't know that every reader will have the same response. But I guess to finish up my closing, I just wanted to get at what she means by the banality of evil because she got in trouble for

1:11:20 Mark: that and later said she wished she did not use that term.

1:11:23 Wes: And I think she got in trouble because it made it sound like. I think people do want to emphasize the monstrousness of someone like Eichmann. They don't believe that deeds can be evil unless we can metaphysicalize the evil of the person doing them. And so it seems to minimize the crime. When I think for Arendt. It doesn't minimize the crime at all to say that. So here's the way she puts it in her postscript when she's defending herself, she says. 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 of the trial. Eichmann was not Iago 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 his 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 colloquial, never realized what he was doing.

It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation, pouring out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that he reached only the rank of Lieutenant colonel in the SS and that it had not been his fault that he was not promoted in principle. He knew quite well what it was all about. And in his final statement to the court he spoke of the revaluation of values prescribed by the Nazi government, the reference to Nietzsche there.

He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness, something by no means identical with stupidity, that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is banal and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace, it surely cannot be so common that a man facing death and moreover standing behind the gallows should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard at funerals in his life, and that these lofty words should be completely becloud the reality of his own death.

By the way, one of the things she's thinking of there is when he's about to hang, he says, long live Germany and Austria and Argentina. I will never forget them. Because it's the type of thing you heard said at funerals. But not by the person who's dead or about to be killed. Right, because it makes no sense. He's not going to remember anything anyway. 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.

So she stands by her banality of evil point. And it doesn't minimize the horror of what happened, but it doesn't also misrepresent the causes and give us that comfortable feeling of yes, there are monsters in the world and then there's me, and I could never do such things. It's those other people, and we just have to find those other people and imprison them or eliminate them and engage in that sort of thinking, that sort of splitting type thinking, which of course is the very type of thinking that the Nazis and those like them at a political level engage in when they're calling for the extermination of a people

1:14:33 Mark: I did find it chilling when she referred to him as looking at his behavior, could call him a clown, but that would be, you know, to completely undermine the atmosphere that Israel was trying to put over. So just the banality is not just I'll let people draw their connections to the modern day political landscape themselves from that. That it can still be fucking scary to be a clown in that sense. Next time we'll be talking about John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Our closing song is called Hiding from the Face of God by Jeff Heiskel from his now out of print JudyBats 2000 album.

You can hear me interview him both on my episode five of Nakedly Examined Music and on the most recent episode, episode 93's end of year celebration. Check him out at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com we want to hear from you. What else you want us to cover what you thought of this discussion? Go to our Facebook group. Go comment on our blog partiallyexaminedlife.com you could become a Partially Examined Life citizen and propose a reading group on this book or other things by Arendt. If you wanted to get other people to help you explore this further, follow us on Twitter LinkedIn, et cetera, et cetera.

Good night everybody.

1:15:39 Wes: Good night.

1:15:40 Seth: Good night.

1:15:40 Dylan: Good night.

1:15:47 Mark: Here comes the shame. We're too much the same Is love itself not enough? We run from the light our kind

1:16:10 Wes: Hiding from the face of God.

1:16:14 Mark: You're hiding from the face of God you're hiding from the face of God. No saving grace with each embrace One hand goes to all the blind

1:16:39 Dylan: Are

1:16:40 Mark: we cursed in the flesh.

1:16:46 Wes: Down Hiding from the face of God

1:16:51 Mark: Hiding from the face of God.

1:17:12 Wes: Sam.

1:17:38 Mark: Hiding from the face of God. You're hiding from the face of God. We are hiding from

1:17:54 Wes: the face of

1:17:56 Seth: God

1:17:59 Mark: Hiding

1:18:02 Wes: from Sam.