G. W. Bush and the Banality of Evil

George W. Bush has made much of “evil” including it as a cause justifying war. Having been assigned such an important role, it merits examination.

Hannah Arendt, whose main concern after World War II was to understand totalitarianism, was sent by the New York Times to report on the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. She discovered in Eichmann a well-educated person demonstrating no hatred for the Jews, in fact working with Zionists to find a place for them to migrate to. However, when the Nazis decided that the final solution was to be extermination Eichmann found no trouble in carrying out his assignment to round up and send to concentration camps some 400,000 Jews. Puzzled by Eichmann’s ordinariness in light of the horrors he had committed, Arendt reflected on evil as she had totalitarianism in her earlier books. She offered her thoughts in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, an account of the Eichmann trial. In this study she coined her now famous phrase the “banality of evil.” That which is banal lacks originality, it is ordinary, routine and, I suggest, intellectually dull. As one commentator put it, there is no interior dialogue, no asking and answering questions, just the focus on doing the routine well. This notion of evil contrasts with that of many people, including G. W. Bush, that evil is focused on creating as much pain, suffering and death as it can.

But if evil can flow from the banality of Eichmann’s sense of duty might it not flow from other states of mind focused on the banal for different reasons?

One of the things that has puzzled me about G. W. Bush is how an individual can look at all the death and destruction he has caused and is causing and yet persist in the effort and all this in the face of no threat. What level of callousness does this take? Bush gives no evidence of creative thinking. No evidence of any significant educational impact. No appreciation for the complexity of human existence. In brief there is every evidence that Bush’s interior life is awash in banality. Some have seen in him the Dry Drunk phenomenon in which the reformed alcoholic must so continually focus on avoiding a relapse that no questioning or entertaining doubt can be permitted lest he loose his grip. This too is a form of the banal.

The point of the banality of evil is that otherwise ordinary people can create the most horrible of crimes because of the intensity of their focus on a single justifying principle. Perhaps the terrorist and religious fanatic can be understood as extreme cases of banality. If so, the importance of thinking takes on a new dimension.

Bob Newhard