Evil of Banality

How is it possible to murder a million people one by one? Hatred, fear, madness of one or many people cannot explain it. No one can be so possessed for the months, even years, required for genocides, slavery, deadly economic exploitation, sexual trafficking of children. In The Evil of Banality, Elizabeth Minnich argues for a tragic yet hopeful explanation. “Extensive evil,” her term for systematic horrific harm-doing, is actually carried out, not by psychopaths, but by people like your quiet next door neighbor, your ambitious colleagues. There simply are not enough moral monsters for extensive evil, nor enough saints for extensive good. In periods of extensive evil, people little different from you and me do its work for no more than a better job, a raise, the house of the family “disappeared” last week. So how can there be hope? The seeds of such evils are right there in our ordinary lives. They are neither mysterious nor demonic. If we avoid romanticizing and so protecting ourselves from responsibility for the worst and the best of which humans are capable, we can prepare to say no to extensive evil – to act accurately, together, and above all in time, before great harm-doing has become the daily work of ‘normal’ people.

This marvelous book deserves a wide readership. Hannah Arendt, Minnich’s mentor, wrote the famous book The Banality of Evil. But what Minnich sees in Arendt’s book, and in her own case studies, is the great evil resulting from thoughtlessness, which is anything but banal. Minnich shows that 'not seeing,' a certain obtuseness that hides the full reality of what one is doing, is too often cultivated. One of Minnich’s key distinctions is between intensive and extensive evil. The former involves a few people who do monstrous things (the Charles Manson cult). This kind of evil, she argues, can be contained. Extensive evil involves many people going about their lives in ordinary ways, however thoughtlessly, however obtusely, for example, the countless 'ordinary Germans' needed to make the Holocaust possible. Because the network is so wide, it is much more difficult to contain. Minick does point out that one also finds intensive goodness (e.g., Oskar Schindler comes to mind) and that extensive goodness remains a possibility. The difference, of course, is that the latter cannot be thoughtless: it must be created with attention and care, no easy task. Written in a personal, lively style, this book a delight to read, even if the cases of extensive evil depress. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers., The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking is important, timely, and needed – truly a tour de force…. Minnich’s mature, humane, and wise style suggests that these powerful insights will be read very widely, both by academics and by those who would be turned off by jargon and technical language, and thus, meet the author’s deepest goals. I am absolutely convinced that this book is going to be read broadly and loved dearly as a way to help us make sense of our world, ourselves and our actions. And even, dare I say, to make us better people., “The Evil of Banality is a subtle, original contribution to a literature that attempts to make sense of people’s evil-doings. The book approaches its main question, which it sets as guiding a years-long personal quest for an answer, from an Arendtian observation of Eichmann, which is that a necessary condition of evildoing is thoughtlessness. It refines this observation with Camus’ existentialist observations of choice. And it narrates an answer to its question using many and different examples, reflecting on them, and drawing conceptual distinctions that illuminate what banality is and how it is related to evil.”, [A]n important new book.... You will come away from reading this book understanding and appreciating the differences and their implications for how we frame evaluation inquiries.... If we, as a profession, support evaluation as a compliance activity, just going through the motions, thoughtlessly, routinely, mindlessly, we risk the banality of evaluation contributing to and becoming complicit in the banality of evil. Think about it. That is the message I take away from this important book on the life and death importance of thinking., “The Evil of Banality is a subtle, original contribution to a literature that attempts to make sense of people’s evil-doings. The book approaches its main question, which it sets as guiding a years-long personal quest for an answer, from an Arendtian observation of Eichmann, which is that a necessary condition of evildoing is thoughtlessness. It refines this observation with Camus’ existentialist observations of choice. And it narrates an answer to its question using many and different examples, reflecting on them, and drawing conceptual distinctions that illuminate what banality is and how it is related to evil.”

Elizabeth Minnich received her doctorate from the New School under the direction of Hannah Arendt. Following twenty-five years as a Core Professor in the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the Union Institute, she now divides her time between Charlotte, NC, where she is professor of moral philosophy at Queens University, and Washington, DC, where she is a Senior Scholar at the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She is the author of Transforming Knowledge (Temple University Press, 1990, 2005) and co-author of The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy (Berrett-Koehler, 2005).