The thing is that, after reading both these essays, where The Banality of Good is obviously applied to the Covid-19 healthcare expert crowd (the likes of Dr Fauci and Dr Birx in the USA, Dr Baker, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, and Siouxsie Wiles here in NZ and hundreds more like them in health leadership positions across the West) because it’s assumed that they were trying to do good but wrought much evil merely as a by-product – it seems to me that The Profundity of Evil could also be applied to them.

Since we’re in a non-news period it’s a time to try and digest some stuff about more fundamental parts of our societies, so herewith two essays as a contrast to eachother – one from this year by Douglas Murray (The Profundity of Evil) and one from 2022 by Paul du Quenoy (The Banality of Good).

The Banality of Good

The latter was written as the world was slowly emerging from the Chinese Lung Rot insanity and starts by looking at a book published in Belgium in 2022, The Psychology of Totalitarianism by a clinical psychologist, Mattias Desmet. Quenoy notes that the book was not picked up any notable American or British publisher, which he thinks is a tell in itself. But it was grabbed by a small publisher, in Vermont of all places, who struck gold as it went up the US and British best-seller lists, given how relevant it was to current events:

Desmet seeks to improve upon Arendt’s thesis with the argument that the “soft” totalitarianism she predicted would evolve after the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism is now a nightmare come true. 

Our current tyranny is not the menacing dictatorships of old, which were built on fear and operated by compliant functionaries practicing banalized evil, but by a subtler regime enforced by “dull bureaucrats and technocrats” convinced that they are advancing a greater good for humanity. The new agents of persecution are not jackbooted secret police thugs instilling fear, but almond milk latte-swigging university officials imposing unpleasant consensus. George Orwell’s vicious O’Brien has yielded to Ken Kesey’s passive-aggressive Nurse Ratched.

I’ve only seen One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest once and that was as a teenager, but Nurse Ratched was a truly unforgettable character and the days of C-19 did seem to produce a lot like her.

Desmet’s book traces the evolution of human societies since the beginnings of the scientific revolution (not just science) in the 16-17th centuries. He thinks we now have a “mechanistic ideology” being used in pursuit of “the utopian vision of an artificial paradise”, with people’s attitudes toward science and technology tipping “from open-mindedness to belief”: science as ideology not a process, aided by us being stripped of community into rather desperate individuals seeking a replacement.

As you can imagine he saw a lot of this in the Covid-19 era, enabling evil things to be done in the name of societal good.

The reviewer, Quenoy, takes issue with Desmet not including the various Woke movements of recent years (#MeToo, Critical Race Theory, BLM, Trans, etc) which employed very similar broad social controls based on emotion, anxiety, and shaky data, pushed across the MSM and social media. He also thinks that Desmet’s solution, “that dissidents should speak out, but only in polite, sincere ways that avoid antagonizing the dominant ideology”, is a waste of time and that Desmet places too much faith in his own academic world getting the changes made:

“The real task facing us is to construct a new view of man and the world, to found a new foundation for our identity, to formulate new principles for living together with others, and to reappraise a timely human capacity—speaking the truth.”

Quenoy agrees but instead points to the brutal art of politics as the only way to change all this:

He may be comforted to know that more and more people across the Atlantic are now doing precisely that, over the furious opposition of our would-be totalitarian rulers, who believe truth is a monopoly that belongs to them.
…
Like him or not, it took the abrasive Donald Trump and his army of “deplorables” to challenge this dismal outcome with considerable success, through aggressive media activism, the majesty of the law, and perhaps most significantly, ridicule that no tyranny can withstand.

The Profundity of Evil

Murray’s article also alludes to Hanah Arendt’s famous thesis but in his case he’s annoyed by its overuse, especially by ordinary people who then went on to do things that are quite evil (Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, whom I’ve written about before, gets a special shoutout).

But Murray is more annoyed by how wrong Arendt was and he goes into considerable detail about her object of study in the Israeli court in 1961, Adolf Eichmann.

First of all she didn’t actually spend a lot of time studying him in the court room!

Second, she basically took him at his word; his “rather bad memory” and use of “the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés”, which showed “that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think”. Nothing worse could be said about a human by a “German high philosopher”, and she didn’t bother going much further in her analysis of Eichmann because of that:

[W]hen 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 at 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….He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.

Murray basically calls bullshit on that, and uses as his first club, an article in Commentary magazine written not long after the publication of Arendt’s article, by a friend of hers, the writer Norman Podhoretz. Murray regards the following comment of Podhoretz as a key point in dealing with evil today:

[I]n diminishing Eichmann’s personal responsibility for the Final Solution, she enlarges the area of European responsibility in general.

Murray picks up this point made over sixty years ago to look at the world of 2024:

[S]uch responsibility has been spread not just across Germany, but also across Britain, Europe, and indeed the West as a whole. The Holocaust is now seen as the central crime of the civilized West—an attitude that educational materials and institutions meant to memorialize the Holocaust now often unwittingly slip into. The work of Dara Horn and others has shown beyond any doubt that the Holocaust is understood in America as something that is supposed to tell us about the twenty-first-century West, a subject mainly meant to provide us today with moral edification and improvement.

And here’s the kicker: there has been a lot of academic research done on Eichmann since 1961 that basically blows up Arendt’s thesis, even as we have to live with her banal phrase today, and all that it implies.

Eichmann tried to play the court in his efforts to escape being found guilty and while he failed with the judges and others, he unwittingly succeeded with Arendt (and perhaps others).

It turns out that by the time he went to trial he was on top of the most recent research on the Holocaust, having read the books and scholarship as they emerged after the war, from his comfortable little home library in Argentina. Moreover, scholars like the German historian and philosopher Bettina Stangneth, have now pieced together the transcripts and audio recordings known as the “Sassen conversations”, recorded by the journalist and Nazi Willem Sassen in 1950s Argentina. These were known at the time of the 1961 trial but Eichmann threw doubt on their authenticity and there were all sorts of fights over distribution and ownership, such that they were never presented as evidence. But it turns out that they weren’t just interviews but semi-public events where everybody present knew who the interviewee, “Ricardo Klement,” really was.

The irony here is that Nazis and neo-Nazis, buried by revelations that pretty much screwed their efforts at Holocaust denial, enlisted Eichmann to help them discredit it, but…

To Eichmann, these efforts to minimize the Holocaust were offensive—something like spitting on his life’s work. Eichmann knew that the six-million figure was accurate, and he seems to have only realized gradually that his audience was hoping for something quite different from him. The final tape includes Eichmann’s boast about the success of his life’s work, after which the room goes silent for a very long time. It is one of the most supreme, though not pitiable, examples of someone misreading the room.

Eichmann was not the man he portrayed in the Israeli courtroom, the man Arendt dismissed as a cog in the machine. In fact he was proud of his work, as the Sasen crowd discovered. In other words, Eichmann was evil and he chose to do evil, although he rationalised it as achieving a good thing for his German society.

But the Arendt observation wipes out such concepts of evil, one major contribution to the moral hopelessness of today in the West as the “banality of evil” concept is spread thinly and widely, as Murray shows with several examples, starting with this famous one:

In 2013, a young British soldier home on leave was run over, hacked at with knives, and then partially decapitated on the streets of London. Fusilier Lee Rigby was slaughtered by two Islamic fundamentalists, who after carrying out their act of depravity stood on the South London streets, their hands dripping with blood, and, as is often the case after such attacks, boasted of their crime. They were not just proud of it. They were glorying in it.

Here is what a writer in The Telegraph said about the attack in Woolwich that day. It was, he said, a “case study in”—guess what—“the banality of evil.” As the headline writer added, “We shouldn’t bother looking for any logic in attacks like these. There is none to be found.”

A writer in The Guardian that same week responded in a similar way. Sir Simon Jenkins, a former editor of The Times and an architectural historian of distinction, wrote of the decapitation of a soldier that it was no different than the other “mundane acts of violence” seen on the streets of London…

It could actually be worse. In the days after the Bataclan massacre in Paris I heard none other than a Catholic priest describe the Islamic Jihadists as being “insane”: the ultimate in psychological, theraputic analysis, and very far from what I thought priests were supposed to be experts in, the nature of good and evil and the struggle between them. It adds an irony to Murray’s point about another of his examples, the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023 (incidentally there’s a good section on Eichmann’s praise of Israel’s enemies, “you 360 million Mohammedans”):

Hearing recordings like that, or seeing the atrocity videos from the day—largely recorded by Hamas themselves—what other word is available to us other than “evil”? Pure evil. Terrible evil. Unfathomable evil—all of these things for sure. But “banal”? No—nothing could be further from the truth. And yet today, the idea of pure evil seems unavailable to many cultured minds. Perhaps it is too theological. Or perhaps we think such terms come from a metaphysics that we have abandoned as insufficiently subtle for our more enlightened times. Today, it is as though everything must be understood in some psychological or sociological terms—and may well be understandable if we can only study it enough…Perhaps our age does not like the idea of evil or does not know what to make of it. And yet if there is one thing that we ought to be able to do, it is to identify true evil—the profundity of evil—when we see it.

When even theologists reach for the therapy book rather than call out evil then you know your culture is in trouble, especially when compared to the analysis of evil by a non-religious person, another historian and philosopher called Gitta Sereny, who studied the idea of evil and conducted long interviews with Franz Stangl, the camp commandant at Treblinka (Into That Darkness). Of Sereny, Murray writes respectfully:

[S]he said in a late interview that it was her belief that evil exists in the world—that it was the only explanation for the things that certain people do; that it is a force that seems almost to descend upon humanity at times.

By contrast he writes of Arendt dismissively, and with regret for what she has partially enabled in producing our moral confusion:

How strange it is that as we try—and largely fail—to recognize and stand up to the enemies of civilization in our time, one of the people who seems to have stripped us of our ability to do so should have been a German Jewish philosopher, who sat for a few days in a room with evil in its most concentrated form and decided to define it by everything it was not.

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The thing is that, after reading both these essays, where The Banality of Good is obviously applied to the Covid-19 healthcare expert crowd (the likes of Dr Fauci and Dr Birx in the USA, Dr Baker, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, and Siouxsie Wiles here in NZ and hundreds more like them in health leadership positions across the West) because it’s assumed that they were trying to do good but wrought much evil merely as a by-product – it seems to me that The Profundity of Evil could also be applied to them.