At its most, well, banal, Rosenbaum gives us the unedifying spectacle, so familiar from the eight years of Bush-Cheney, of a simple-minded person mocking a person of much greater discernment and feeling absolute confident about it. Imagine Ann Coulter throwing mud on, say, Jimmy Carter, or Donald Rumsfeld sliming Nelson Mandela.

I would like to say that Rosenbaum has unfairly conflated Arendt's meaning of the phrase "the banality of evil" with the way later writers may have misunderstood it, but he's much worse than that: his article makes it clear that he too does not understand her meaning, at all.

He is prevented from understanding by his own antithetical view: "Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on."

This statement has the virtue of being so clear and unequivocal it cannot be misunderstood; and it is not merely shallow, but absolutely false and quickly seen to be false by any student who merely scratches the surface of evil.

Rosenbaum was told, at the very beginning of his project on Hitler, by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper that Hitler believed in his own rectitude; and by a dedicated Israeli Nazi-hunter that of course Hitler thought he was doing good, not evil, by ridding civilization of a deadly pathogen. But Rosenbaum could not accept these truisms, and eventually signed on to the view of various intellectual hysterics that Hitler knew his own criminality and reveled in it.

This view is almost certainly untrue even of psychopaths and career criminals; but it is absurd as an explanation of national policies and mass movements.

It is in fact this view--that our enemies know that they are evil and do evil for its own sake--that unleashes all of our evil: war, assassinations, renditions, torture, the abolition of due process. And the banality of evil is that the ordinary people in Congress, in the Pentagon, in the Justice Department, at the military trials, at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib, at Bagram, write their memos and go home and kiss their wives and dote on their children and eat dinner and sleep the sleep, not of the just, but of those who are convinced that they are the just.

Rosenbaum is a dunce criticizing a thoughtful person, a tribalist lashing out at a humanist, and a gnat biting at the heels of an intellectual giant.

Absolutely agree. You write: "his article makes it clear that he too does not understand her meaning, at all." \\p\\ I think Rosenbaum most clearly displays his absolute failure to understand the meaning of the phrase 'the banality of evil' in his discussion of different 'levels' of evil, with Hitler being the worst level yet achieved, with worse perhaps yet to come. This line of thought is not necessarily incorrect, but if you understand the argument that evil is banal, then talking about 'levels of evil' starts to look ridiculous. \\p\\ Arendt's point that evil is banal implies that people are the same around the world; they are the same as they always have been. Human nature has not changed significantly in the history of mankind. Though our institutions and societies change, human nature itself is neither better nor worse across time, nor is it better or worse across continents or social classes. \\p\\ Evil itself is not some force in the universe; it has no direction and no ultimate goal. Rather, evil occurs when ordinary men carry out what they consider ordinary tasks, yet their good intentions in fact lead to violence, death, torture, and other objectively 'evil' acts. In a sense, evil is accidental. No, the Holocaust was no accident, and the banality of evil should not excuse the perpetrators from blame, BUT the nitty gritty bureaucratic management of the Holocaust was carried out by mundane men doing mundane jobs: noting down numbers, obeying orders, serving their function as a part of a larger (murderous) machine. \\p\\ In this light, the concept of 'levels' of evil makes no sense at all. There are no different categories or levels of evil; just generic people doing generic, mindless things which sometimes translate into minor or major acts of evil. The same man who is told to deny financial credit to a certain minority in a democratic capitalist system (racial discrimination in the implementation of the American GI Bill, post-WWII) could very easily be told to count up that population and orchestrate railway transportation to another site (Eichmann in Hungary) where they will be efficiently murdered (but he doesn't like to think about that part). \\p\\ This idea makes Rosenbaum angry, because to an unsophisticated mind this analysis excuses what the Nazis did. But the banality of evil is not an excuse; it is a terrifying paradox: the most hideous acts of evil come from the most ordinary of people: men and women like you or I. To talk about Heidegger or Hitler or Eichmann as 'radical evil' or the worst 'level of evil' yet achieved is to pretend that we are good people and they are evil people. In fact - and this is the troubling, controversial part which Rosenbaum either cannot understand or refuses to understand - we are all just human, and one of the banal aspects of human nature is the ability to be complicit in the most extraordinary evil acts the perverse mind can imagine. Rosenbaum is refusing to see himself in Eichmann or Eichmann in himself, and therein lies his fundamental inability to truly understand the troubling implications of the idea that evil is banal. \\p\\ How else could an entire nation become complicit in the greatest mass murder of human history? Were they all of them evil men and women? Of course not. That is what is so terrifying about the banality of evil. It does not take evil people to produce evil on a grand scale, just a lack of vigilance. \\p\\ Sorry SLATE cannot handle paragraph breaks for some reason. Very frustrating. Bad SLATE.

Bravo. For some people, world history begins and ends with the Holocaust. Currently, our nation is the enforcer of a financial empire the benefits the top 1 or 2% of the richest people on earth (who own what? half of it? three quarters?) where we are being taxed to death in order to keep the boot on the neck of any brown froggy foreigner that has the audacity to reject globalism and Friedman's "Capitalism 2.0" or whatever ridiculous framework he wants to construct. We actually hear over an over how our use of killer robot drones and the mass slaughter of all sorts of folks on a daily basis is not evil at all but actually a public service.

So, is Rosenbaum just ignorant of this, as a self declared intellectual, or is he actively evil?

I agree this article is lame, but ignorant of what exactly?

How is one "actively evil"? Is that like sexually active?

Personally, I believe “evil” is a matter of reference. Where do we get our notion of evil? Rock and roll used to be "evil" for godsake. I am not a religious person, but even the bible’s (particularly the first testament) representation is quite murky. For example, in the story of Abraham god seems quite evil in this one. Even the story of the flood and Noah seems pretty damn evil. To me the world isn’t as black and white as many here would have us think. It is clear that you think the US military to be evil, but what about those that they fight? Are they evil, they kill people too, as a matter of fact they intend to kill people. Is merely killing people evil? Is this killing ever justified?

To me the idea of good and evil is a tough one that breaks down in most scenarios. The world is not good and evil, black and white, but just opposing forces that through conflict complement each other. One thing I have noticed is that those that claim to know beyond a shadow of a doubt what is good and what is evil are usually those that cause a lot “evil” stuff.

Good points.

I remember reading, I think it was in a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh, about an interrogation of a suspected militant (or terrorist, or what have you — in this case the adjective "suspected" carries more weight than the noun) in which the American or American-sponsored interrogators were coming to the conclusion that the poor wretch did not, in fact, know anything; and that he was probably not any kind of terrorist at all. But then, having so concluded, they went back to torturing him, merely because they had not yet completed their process.

When process supplants humanity, we are lost. Plain and simple. That's what happened in Nazi Germany, and that is what happened under the Bush administration.

Ohka:

I agree this article is lame, but ignorant of what exactly?

How is one "actively evil"? Is that like sexually active?

Personally, I believe “evil” is a matter of reference. Where do we get our notion of evil? Rock and roll used to be "evil" for godsake. I am not a religious person, but even the bible’s (particularly the first testament) representation is quite murky. For example, in the story of Abraham god seems quite evil in this one. Even the story of the flood and Noah seems pretty damn evil. To me the world isn’t as black and white as many here would have us think. It is clear that you think the US military to be evil, but what about those that they fight? Are they evil, they kill people too, as a matter of fact they intend to kill people. Is merely killing people evil? Is this killing ever justified?

To me the idea of good and evil is a tough one that breaks down in most scenarios. The world is not good and evil, black and white, but just opposing forces that through conflict complement each other. One thing I have noticed is that those that claim to know beyond a shadow of a doubt what is good and what is evil are usually those that cause a lot “evil” stuff.

Woah! Look, nothing gets my goat faster than someone bitching about "moral relativism"-- usually meant as any view of life that does not follow their dogma. But there is evil shit in the world, my friend, and a person who denies a clear case of same is just being the banal shitbag of which Arendt complained.

I mean, roast and eat a baby and tell me that's not evil. Or, try a more common activity-- use a drone to drop a missile on a bunch of folks and roast babies that way. It's evil, buddy, and the fact that the people dropping the missile and the ones ordering them to do it and the ones who designed and built the missile and those of us who paid for it and those of us who sit silently back while this is done with our money and in our name don't consider themselves evil, or who think they have a really really good reason to have done something that horrific, doesn't matter. In fact, I kinda think that's where the "banal" part comes in.

Seems to me the only thing that prevents people from recognizing the evil that permeates our lives, and which is, sadly, perhaps the very foundation of how we operate and consume in this world, is the fact that full realization would be simply too psychologically destructive to bear.

Come on man. So the old guys that dropped bombs on innocent german women in children were "baby burners", but were they really evil? I don't think so.

There are unpleasant things that happen on Earth (even before humans made their debut) but I am not convinced that there is evil. Our sense of good and evil is most likely an adaption that allowed for us to form cohesive tribes that followed some sort of order... so that these same tribes could then be strong enough to "burn babys" from the nearby rival tribe. In the eyes of nature, destruction itself isn't even bad or evil. Hell, death isn't evil, it is great for bacteria, fungi, insects as well as avian, reptilian and mammalian scavengers. Massive extinctions like the one that occurred 65 million years ago killed of millions and millions of organisms but that devastation made it possible for mammals to gain a foothold, without which we wouldn't be here. Why is it any more evil for a baby to die from an atomic bomb than it is to die of cholera or from starvation? Death is death, and it is just part of living here on Earth. There is no evil just competing forces, and we all get to pick a side, naturally the side we pick is always "good" and the side we don't is always "evil", because as you have demonstrated here, the individual always sets himself up as the utmost authority of good and bad.

As I said before a baby on a bayonet is only evil from a matter of perspective based on arbitrary rules we have set for ourselves and become accustomed to. For example, the sacrifices that the Aztecs performed may seem evil to us, but was perfectly normal for them. Were, they "evil" though?? If looked at from the perspective of the universe it is neither good nor bad .

Ohka:

Come on man. So the old guys that dropped bombs on innocent german women in children were "baby burners", but were they really evil? I don't think so.

There are unpleasant things that happen on Earth (even before humans made their debut) but I am not convinced that there is evil. Our sense of good and evil is most likely an adaption that allowed for us to form cohesive tribes that followed some sort of order... so that these same tribes could then be strong enough to "burn babys" from the nearby rival tribe. In the eyes of nature, destruction itself isn't even bad or evil. Hell, death isn't evil, it is great for bacteria, fungi, insects as well as avian, reptilian and mammalian scavengers. Massive extinctions like the one that occurred 65 million years ago killed of millions and millions of organisms but that devastation made it possible for mammals to gain a foothold, without which we wouldn't be here. Why is it any more evil for a baby to die from an atomic bomb than it is to die of cholera or from starvation? Death is death, and it is just part of living here on Earth. There is no evil just competing forces, and we all get to pick a side, naturally the side we pick is always "good" and the side we don't is always "evil", because as you have demonstrated here, the individual always sets himself up as the utmost authority of good and bad.

As I said before a baby on a bayonet is only evil from a matter of perspective based on arbitrary rules we have set for ourselves and become accustomed to. For example, the sacrifices that the Aztecs performed may seem evil to us, but was perfectly normal for them. Were, they "evil" though?? If looked at from the perspective of the universe it is neither good nor bad .

I think your problem is that the scope of evil is so broad and so permeates our world that you can't bear to call a spade a spade. So, tying a child to a stone table and ripping his/her beating heart out with a jade knife or whatever is okay IF the whole gang says it's okay.

Well, you might be right that the Aztecs and their priests saw nothing wrong with that, but I think their prisoners did. I think that's the main reason why Cortez destroyed the Aztecs, because he was able to recruit large forces among the Aztec's subject peoples.

No matter what framing you put on it, there's going to be a victim there that has no problem, no nuance, in finding the people who oppress and murder them to be evil. Beyond that, there are moral constructs, some of which are called "religion" which defines good and evil and to which people ascribe, not just with words, but in the carrying out of their lives and the construction of their communities and societies. That such definitions may vary over time and from place to place does not render any definition null and void. In fact, one might find a solid core of common aspects.

Now, where it gets tricky is in the situationalism. Deciding that this clear rule of good and bad is somehow inapplicable in a particular circumstance. Happens all the time. And that, I think, is what the banality thing is about (sorry to repeat myself.)

Oh, and BTW, God told me to hunt you down and skin you alive. No hard feelings, I hope. :))

Oh, and BTW, God told me to hunt you down and skin you alive. No hard feelings, I hope. :))

LoL! Well, I'd expect no less of you!

Don't get me wrong, I never suggested that we don't fight those that are harming others, but to me it is a matter of a threat rather than an "evil". In short, I don't find it necessary to hate or demonize my enemies. I also don't think that I have to become an absolute pillar of morality to fight my adversaries. As I said, god and bad is always mixture of gray and a matter of perspective.

Thanks for these critiques. I "joined" Slate just to add my agreement. Arendt's "Eichmann" is one of the best books from the 20th century (I think), and Rosenbaum, as these readers note, simply misses (confirms?) her central argument. The "banality of evil" is hardly a banal concept. It is one of the most terrifying (and convincing) explanations of perhaps the most barbaric century in human history.