I'll just go ahead and echo the general sentiment of these posts in saying that Rosenbaum has put together a reckless, frivolous, unlettered train of insinuations unworthy of serious rebuttal. His lack of engagement with Arendt's and Heidegger's actual ideas is only surpassed by his smug indifference to his own ignorance. Of the several pages of irritated notes I jotted down while reading this, I'll limit myself to two points. Consider this more a contribution to the (often quite good) discussion of Arendt's thought contained in previous posts, and less a response to Rosenbaum (who I suspect is beyond saving). 1) "Radical evil," as Arendt uses it in _The Origins of Totalitarianism_, designates totalitarianism's assault on human nature as such. Plurality, for Arendt, is the hallmark of that nature: men, not "man" in the singular, walk this earth. Totalitarianism treats humanity as a uniform goo that can be molded into whatever a race-based (Nazism) or class-based (Stalinism) philosophy of history deems appropriate. It views society without limits, as though anything were possible. Full-blown totalitarianism, in Arendt's view, was only finally realized in the camps, where human beings were robbed of their unique particularity and reduced to mere flesh. This kind of evil is "radical" in that it goes all the way down (from the Latin "radix" = root). It is an attack on humanity itself. Arendt saw more clearly than anyone that totalitarianism wasn't just dictatorship or authoritarianism -- that it wasn't just an oppressive police state, as Rosenbaum would have it -- but rather a new type of political order more sinister and threatening than anything that came before. 2) "The banality of evil," as Arendt often stressed, was what actually confronted her in the courtroom in Jerusalem in the person of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann didn't vomit green slime or exude malevolence. His real fault was "thoughtlessness," an inability to think about what he was doing that was closely connected with an inability to speak. Eichmann's language was that of advertising slogans, popular cliches, and party phraseology. For Arendt, the great horror of the Holocaust for someone concerned with the foundations of morality was that "Thou Shall Not Kill," which had stood for millennia as the bedrock principle of human ethics, could be transformed into its very opposite in a few short years. Arendt's book on Eichmann was actually something of a turning point in her work, beginning a period of intense concern with problems of judgment and personal responsibility. Eichmann represented for Arendt a sort of case study in the way that our moral judgments are grounded in the "common sense" of the larger community. Change that "common sense" -- from "don't kill" to "kill" -- and those incapable of thinking independently beyond their concern for conformity and outside approval will adjust their moral compasses accordingly. Eichmann committed evil, and Arendt showed no interest in letting him off the hook. He was guilty, plain and simple. But Eichmann also represented an unsettling problem in moral philosophy. That a man who, in another time and place, would have been a rather harmless boob was capable of such monstrosities -- Eichmann knew he was assisting in the murder of Jews and that this could be thought wicked, but he was easily capable of rationalizing his actions in light of a pervasive ideology and the promise of personal advancement-- suggested to Arendt how tenuous our traditional moral precepts really were. This isn't the same as "collective guilt," a notion that Arendt generally despised, since if all are guilty, then no one really is. Rather, the "banality of evil" suggests that "radical evil" can be committed by shabby little company men like Eichmann. Even more importantly, it seeks to elucidate the conditions of moral judgment that make this possible. If great evil can be committed by nonentities like Eichmann, then the problem presented by the Holocaust is much more frightening than it would otherwise seem. "Radical evil" and "the banality of evil" may or may not be contradictory in some respects, but they certainly aren't fundamentally incompatible. Arendt should be approached critically, but no more so than any other thinker. She was, in my judgment, one of the most important political philosophers of the last century, and her ideas are certainly worth engaging. Of the wealth of excellent secondary literature on Arendt, I would recommend especially Dana Villa's collection of essays, _Politics, Philosophy, Terror_ (Princeton, 1999).

This was broken into four paragraphs when I posted it. Not sure what happened.

Too bad.

I'll have to come back to it when I have more time to concentrate. I will.

And people think computers are rational.

As to Rosenbaum, he is doing what he usually does, not just give an opinion, but make the reader acutely aware that the important thing happening is him giving his opinion. This he accomplishes in various ways: overuse of one and two letter words like 'I' and 'me', framing the discourse in a narrow way (as he sees it), hyperbole about what he finds objectionable, and in some cases referring readers to other works of his own to explain what he's saying now.

In other words, if he told me he could prove the sky was blue, I'd still look out the window.

Arendt was essentially enlarging on the theory of mass society, which to Ortega was a consequence of European overpopulation and was demonstrated sociologically not just by mass movements but by mass interest in spectator sports. In some senses, politics became a sort of spectator sport, mass entertainment by political ideals couched in the terms of emotional rivalry. Hitler used the techniques of the evangelist pulpit coupled with audience fatigue, physical and spiritual, to dope the masses into intoxication with the dual drugs of anger and righteous indignation. As Aldous Huxley has noted in his little book After Brave New World (title correct?), animals conditioned after being put in a state of nervous exhaustion are extremely difficult to de-condition.

Therefore you have nonentities believing that the most important thing in their lives is to keep killing people for no good reason. And they keep doing it knowing that there's no time left for it. Anybody can be conditioned this way. And those that can't are simply put in the victim herd.

This is one of the lessons of Cuba, probably the only society in history that suffered mass sleep deprivation. Those that were conditioned by Castro's days-long speeches broadcast over loudspeakers country-wide were conditioned en masse, by definition. Those on whom the conditioning failed to take were tagged as counter-revolutionary and subjected to various types of punishment if they were not able to escape.