The evil of banality: Arendt revisited

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 to resist the evils enabled by banality.