Jerusalem, 1961: A Bureaucrat in the Dock

In 1961, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), among the most important political philosophers of the 20th century, herself a Jewish refugee who had fled Nazi Germany, attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem as a reporter for The New Yorker. Eichmann was the SS lieutenant colonel who had been in charge of the logistics of the Holocaust: organizing the deportation of Jews from across Europe to the death camps. He had been abducted by Israeli intelligence in Argentina and brought to Jerusalem to face justice.

What Arendt expected to find, and what most people expected her to report, was a monster. A sadist. A true believer in Nazi ideology, burning with genocidal hatred. Someone whose evil was commensurate with what he had done.

What she actually found was, in some ways, much worse.

Eichmann was ordinary. Disturbingly, almost comically ordinary. He was a middle manager. He spoke in clichés. He had difficulty expressing himself without reaching for stock phrases. He was eager to please, obsequious to the court, proud of his efficiency and his ability to follow orders. He explicitly and repeatedly denied hating Jews. He claimed he had simply been doing his job, following orders, working within a system, following the law as it was then constituted. His lawyer argued (correctly, in a narrow sense) that he had never personally killed anyone.

Arendt's resulting book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), introduced among the most disturbing and controversial phrases in modern thought: the banality of evil. Her argument was not that what Eichmann did was not evil. The Holocaust was unambiguously, catastrophically evil. Her argument was that the person who organized a significant portion of it was not a monster, a demon, or a fanatic. He was a thoughtless bureaucrat, and the thoughtlessness was not incidental to his evil but central to it.

The most radical part of her claim: Eichmann did not think. Not in the sense of being stupid, he was not unintelligent. He did not think in the sense of exercising genuine moral judgment: standing back from the system he was embedded in, asking himself what he was actually doing, considering the reality of the people he was consigning to death. He had suspended the capacity for what Arendt called thinking, the inner dialogue in which a person holds themselves accountable, considers the human reality of their actions, refuses to reduce themselves to a function. Without this thinking, the ordinary machinery of bureaucracy and obedience was sufficient to produce mass murder.

The implication is what makes the idea so disturbing: if ordinary thoughtlessness, not extraordinary malice, was sufficient to produce the Holocaust, then the relevant condition is not a rare one. Bureaucratic thoughtlessness is normal. Obedience to systems is the default. The capacity for genuine moral thinking is, apparently, something that has to be actively cultivated and can be lost or suppressed without the person noticing that anything has gone wrong.