As someone holding a Master’s degree in Sociology, reading Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil[i] gave me a space to learn and unlearn. Let me begin with a short account of the central question that Arendt raises.
Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution. Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.[ii]
I have learnt that you cannot generalize something as grave as a “crime against humanity”. One must know the measures and the grounds for the claims that one is making. Making assumptions is easy, but when you seek to make sense of what constitutes the assumptions, you learn what went into your earlier, taken-for-granted learning. have to unlearn the process of learning. There are different takes, locations and experiences in every single incident, every single story. Yes, once or twice commonalities could be drawn, but quick generalizations can be hazardous.
We have to understand that everything is not explicit in society. If we did not consider the aspect of the Jewish leaders and councils, or not read the Story of a Coin by Primo Levi[iii], probably the complexity of morals wouldn’t have been so clear to us. To realize that morality is not always altruistic, always not black and white, was my lesson learnt in how to think. You see, when we read the text by Arendt at first, we can only see the harping over on the importance of thinking, yet if we look and read carefully, between the lines, we can see that she teaches us also how to think! It is a valid and necessary criterion that she highlights in her writings.
Another integral factor is the factor of her way of explaining evil, the way she talks about the totalitarian regime, the matter of alienation and loneliness, the loss of character, the generalization of individuality, and the faceless masses. It was very difficult to speak my mind out previously, but sociology has indeed helped me understand and dissect several complex issues. To have a mind of one’s own, to understand what goes on in another person’s mind and being is important. For it is so easy to think like others wish you to think. There is a dangerous level of manipulation which hardly people could think of, as it happens silently, and pretty effectively. Learning about the works of Arendt helped me realize that, which is why I hardly take things at a face value from now on! The idea that Hitler creates about him in the minds of many is not a very easy task. Reading history makes it look easy, but is it so? Not exactly! And this is what Hannah Arendt makes us learn once again, the complexities of turning society just the way you want to be, where we as sociologists remember the example of charismatic authority that Weber speaks of. The charismatic leader amid uncertainty is that anchor of certainty. [iv]
I am even interested in the way the herd mentality works in society. Can relate it to Durkheim’s idea of mechanical solidarity? The intention behind an act of crime has different layers and dimensions, and I think it is important for us to understand that, which is seen in the case of Eichmann.
Labelling everything to be known and generalizing everything is a wrong approach which Arendt wanted us to learn. Arendt taught the sociologists to look at things more in the frightening shade of grey, rather than just categorizing things under good and bad. A change of perspective has arrived with the advent of Arendt in my life. My love for philosophy has sharpened, and the importance to avoid essentialism in sociology is a lesson learnt.
Another important aspect is that power comes in different packages, but it is important to unwrap a gift before guessing its true colors. What may appear to be a box of cookies, might turn out to be an atomic bomb. What merely looks like an incident in the past, could come back to you once again, hence, I feel that as a sociologist, it is also important to reread history, understand it, analyze it and dissect it. The relevance of history never ends, because even if people are made aware of the incidents that made things wrong, they still tend to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors. Everything has changed, the faces of evil have altered. Mediatized knowledge travels instantly and across a society marked by unequal knowledge and a culture of echo chambers. That is why a good knowledge of history and a better understanding of thinking, might help society progress in a better fashion. It will allow the moral conscience to prevail among humans.
To think is to question, and to question is to be deviant, and being deviant is to have the courage to revolt, and revolting could cause an upsurge of a new mankind. The idea of progress comes with dissent and imagining a better society.
[i] Arendt, Hannah. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press
[ii] https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-the-banality-of-evil, accessed on 15th October 2022.
[iii] Levi, Primo. (1986). Moments of Reprieve. United Kingdom: Einaudi.
[iv]https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Sociology/Introduction_to_Sociology/Book%3A_Sociology_(Boundless)/15%3A_Government/15.01%3A_Politics_Power_and_Authority/15.1G%3A_Charismatic_Authority, accessed on 16th October 2022
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Srestha Chatterjee is a Master’s graduate in Sociology and she loves to explore the creative, more applied side of social sciences.