"Evil Comes From A Failure To Think"

Let’s start with a question: which book saw a 1000% increase in sales in the 12 months following Donald Trump’s election as US president in 2016? 

First (small) clue: it was published in 1951.

Second (larger) clue: a woman author. 

Born in Hamburg in 1906, brought up in Berlin. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 for doing historical research in the archives (on programmatic state antisemitism in Germany) after eight days she was released and immediately fled the country, with her mother, crossing the border to Czechoslovakia and from there eventually to exile in Paris. 

Let me put you out of your misery: I am talking about the political philosopher, historian, essayist, Hannah Arendt. And the book - the one that topped the  Amazon lists for months - was the book that made her name in the United States: The Origins of Totalitarianism, her long, detailed exploration of 19^th century antisemitism, imperialism and racism and how these strands of 19^th and 20^th century life had emerged into – woven themselves into – totalitarian systems like Nazism and Stalinism. 

It’s probably not a book one would read for pleasure – not least because  Arendt’s prose style has that clotted density characteristic of the academic tradition in which she grew up and was trained. She was a precocious youngster, the doted-on only child of assimilated, educated, secular-but- Jewishly-aware left-leaning parents. At 14 she was devouring the volumes of Immanuel Kant she found in her father’s library; later she was expelled from school for challenging a teacher; and at 18 she enrolled to study philosophy at the University of Marburg with Europe’s leading philosopher Martin Heidegger. 

She later studied under the tutelage of both Edmund Husserl and Karl Jaspers – these names may not mean anything to you, but those three male teachers  were the central figures of 20^th century European humanist and existential philosophy. All of them (and Arendt followed in that tradition) wrote with that heavy, convoluted, abstract lyricism that was rooted in the German Romantic tradition. Anyone who has read Martin Buber’s work might have had a taste of that. They aren’t beach reading. 

So if it wasn’t her fluid prose style that made The Origins of Totalitarianism such an unlikely must-read after sixty-odd years, what was it? Well, I’d suggest it was possibly the way in which readers discovered that Arendt had developed insights into political processes and human nature – and how politics moulds and manipulates human nature – that suddenly had a startling new relevance to what is going on in these early decades of the 21^st century.   

Readers discovered that within that demanding prose style there were some luminous  jewels to be found, thoughts that helped one think about, for example,  what was going on in the White House. And not only there. Sentences like : 

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” [OT, 1976, p.416] 

That’s a sentence to keep close to hand when thinking about the recent American past – and what is yet to come; as well as when we get our next UK Cabinet reshuffle. A totalitarian mindset can exist separately from a totalitarian system. 

But  why am I focusing on Hannah Arendt now? It’s partly because I’ve become interested in her recently, and I’d like to share that enthusiasm with you. It’s partly because I’ve just been reviewing a new biography of her life and work – We Are Free To Change The World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience by Lyndsey Stonebridge - and it’s made me realise how little I have  paid attention over the years to her work and the deep originality of her thinking. It’s never too late to discover a major thinker who has been hidden in plain sight all one’s life. 

I’d always known about the mystique that surrounds Arendt – made up of all sorts of things about her life, her biography: she was not only Heidegger’s star student at Marburg but his lover for four years (he was twice her age, and married), and although their affair had ended well before the advent of Hitler, Heidegger later became – to Arendt’s horror - an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis and was a member of the Party until 1945. Despite this, Arendt renewed contact with him in 1949 and they remained close for twenty more years. 

Arendt managed to escape Europe in 1941 in spite of having been incarcerated as an ‘enemy alien’ in Vichy France in the concentration camp at Gurs near the Spanish border: she walked out of the camp with forged papers provided by a group of Austrian communists operating within the camp –  soon after this the camp became a transit point for Auschwitz. Survival was (is) so often a matter of luck or fortuitous timing or the sheer randomness of life. 

When she boarded the boat to America she carried with her a suitcase of papers and writings – not her own but those of the great philosopher Walter Benjamin, who had entrusted them to Arendt when they met by chance days before he committed suicide on the French/Spanish border. You see what I mean by the mystique around her – but that’s around her life. What about her writing?   

The text which really made her name - and promoted her to the status of leading public intellectual -  came in the 1960s after she attended the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She wrote up her experience for The New Yorker and it was in that context that the phrase with which Arendt is most often associated entered public consciousness – The New Yorker lifted one phrase out of her text to publicise the piece: that much misunderstood phrase ‘the banality of evil’.   

When she wrote about the ‘banality of evil’ many Jewish readers felt she was minimizing the horrors and evil of the Holocaust – but, on the contrary, what she was emphasising was that in the flat, detached, bureaucratic verbiage that Eichmann spouted in the dock, with all its circumlocutions which avoided naming the crimes he was committing, a new form of banality was being laid bare, the banality of thoughtlessness, a moral and imaginative blindness that had invaded the human condition, Arendt thought, like a virus. He presented himself as a mediocre functionary with no awareness at all of the monstrous nature of what he had been involved with. That was the ‘banality of evil’. 

Her essays reporting her observations over the many weeks of the trial generated a huge furore. She wrote with deeply etched irony and a kind of intellectual detachment that did not endear her to many survivors. It may be that irony was part of her emotional defence against the pain of what was being spoken about. At any rate, she lost friends over it – people like Saul Bellow. 

But what also alienated her readers was how she reported Eichmann’s attempts to exonerate himself – he spoke in his defence about how he’d worked  with Jewish leaders, in ghettoes and camps, and with a rabbi like Leo Baeck in Theresienstadt (who did to some extent attempt to protect his congregation within the camp by not spelling out everything he knew of their ultimate fate). This could be construed as collaboration with the enemy – and it was painful for Jews to hear her speaking about Jewish leadership in such fraught situations in those kind of terms.  So she was shunned by those who felt that she was guilty of a lack of imaginative awareness of the impossible choices that had had to be made within such extreme situations. 

So Arendt was a complex personality. She never toed the party line on any subject – she was dedicated to thinking for herself, and kept emphasising in her writing that thinking is a moral activity, it is about values, it needs to be done all the time and about every subject. She demands that you do the work for yourself and not rely on second-hand thinking. 

But sometimes she just seems to put her finger on the pulse of something and her angle of vision just illuminates an issue or theme.   

Let’s just take one example that speaks to where we are now in the midst of this horror show in Israel/Gaza – one of the other reasons I’m sharing thoughts about Arendt here is that she can help us think about what is going on in that painful and tragic land. 

Take this thought:

Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before [this idea] is used to destroy the humanity of man. (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1968, p.227) 

And if that doesn’t speak to what is going on in the minds of Netanyahu, his Knesset henchmen, and the fundamentalists on the West Bank, I don’t know what does. 

So we need Arendt – and she is everywhere. Her image is on coffee mugs and postage stamps and T-Shirts: there are dozens of T-shirts for sale with photos of her, quotes from her – my favourite is the one that says in large bold letters:

  WHAT WOULD

HANNAH ARENDT

          DO?

I wouldn’t wear it myself (except perhaps on Purim) but I have been going round saying to myself ‘What would Hannah Arendt think?’ 

She was an early Zionist, she worked for Youth Aliyah in Paris in the second half of the 1930s, but she was a committed bi-nationalist like Martin Buber, Henrietta Szold, Judah Magnus who ran the Hebrew University, so when the Zionist Congress meeting in the Biltmore Hotel in New York broke with tradition in 1942  and demanded that “Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth” she was appalled, predicting – accurately, of course – that such a  state would exist in endless tension with the other inhabitants of the land. 

And she realised that it wouldn’t solve the underlying problem of human statelessness – she had been stateless from 1938 when she was stripped of her German citizenship until she became a US citizen in 1950. “On the contrary”, she wrote in The Origins Of Totalitarianism, “like virtually all other events of the 20^th century, the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees…thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000-800,000people.” [OT, Schocken, 2004, p368

And what would Hannah Arendt think about this week’s turning of the wheel of history, and the opening of the case brought by South Africa (a rich historical irony there) at the International Court of Justice, the case against Israel’s so-called ‘genocidal intent’ in Gaza? The language is of course emotive, and Israel will plead its cause, but it is hard to hear some of the statements made by Israeli politicians and military leaders – I’m not talking about actions but language – it’s hard not to hear some of the vengeful and annihilatory language that has been used without feeling a moral revulsion at the dehumanised and dehumanising rhetoric that has been used.  

So what would Hannah Arendt think?  About the way, after various wrong turns, it has come to this, less than three generations after that? Would she remind us about one of her acidic but penetrating observations, that “evil comes from a failure to think”? 

[[“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”  from Eichmann in Jerusalem]]

Well, we will not see her like again, but we still need thinkers of the calibre of Arendt to help us think in these fraught times. Not just to feel – Jews are very good at that – but to think, to gain a clarity, a moral clarity about how to act when all around are losing their heads. But thinking is hard work. To do it we need all the help we can get, from Hannah Arendt or anyone else. 

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, January 13^th, 2024]