The ladder of evil
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post. Unfortunately, it seems as though it’s always a timely subject, and right now even more timely. So I thought it could use another go-round, very slightly edited.]
Commenter “Ymarsakar” once made an interesting observation:
When the world declares Jews, Republicans, and whites to be non humans that need to be exterminated to get rid of a threat to humanity, most people will Obey.
Most will. They have nothing in their spine that can resist the Power of the World and its numbers. Nothing.
I have a slightly different take on it. I’ve long conceptualized the whole thing as a hierarchy of evil and the resistance to it, a sort of ladder with many rungs. Here they are, in order from most evil to most dedicated to fighting evil:
–Some people will conceptualize, plan, and implement it as leaders.
–Some people will actively cooperate with vigor.
–Some people will support it but not actively participate.
–Some people will be indifferent (or even unaware) unless it directly reaches them or their family.
–Some people will be somewhat disturbed by it, but manage to put it out of their minds most of the time and go on with their lives.
–Some people will be disturbed by it and contemplate various forms of resistance, but will be too frightened to act.
–Some people will be disturbed by it and will decide to act in small ways to resist it, ways they consider lower risk.
–Some people will be disturbed by it and will decide to take great risks in order to resist it, but could be stopped by threats (not necessarily threats to themselves, but threats to friends and family).
–Some people will risk all to actively resist it in every way they can.
An example of the latter would be those Poles who continued their rescue efforts and resistance despite this type of retribution from the Nazis:
Poland was the only place where German law rendered any assistance to Jews punishable by death. That punishment was severe and collective: It was meted out not only to the rescuer but also to his entire family and to anyone else who knew about such activities and did not report them. Almost 1,000 Poles were killed this way, including entire families whose children were not spared.
When we talk about the prevalence of evil in humanity, and whether people are “good at heart,” this is what I think we’re actually discussing. What percentage of the population belongs to each group? I don’t know, but if I had to guess at the shape of a graph, it probably would be a normal distribution—that is, the biggest bump would be in the middle groups, with much smaller numbers for the beginning and ending rungs of the ladder of evil.
So what causes the difference among the groups? Why is a person in one rather than another? Darned if I know, but I have ideas. Some of it probably has to do with devotion to something beyond oneself, which could be religion (in certain circumstances it could even be Communism—in Poland, for example, many of the resisters to the Nazis were Communists). This can lead to good or to evil (such as the 9/11 terrorists, for the latter).
Many of the differences among groups almost certainly involve personal traits that are some combination of nature and nurture, such as the extent of the devotion to liberty. And although psychopaths/sociopaths (the ladder’s first couple of rungs) are often born, certain societies in certain times can be especially effective at fostering and encouraging and promoting them, and using them most fully to further goals of the group rather than just goals of the individual psychopath/sociopath.
In the end, though, there is something mysterious about it all: the problem of evil, with which humankind has been wrestling for aeons.
This is a subject which, while it is clear in my head, I have difficulty to express myself clearly.
This is because, in sociology, the sum of a group of people is, or can be, very different than the sum of it’s parts. The stronger the emotions of such a group run, the more this is true.
I’ve just read a small pamphlet, “Pretending To Sleep,” by Mona Lisa Foster. It’s a 20 minute read, but I can’t get my head around the vignettes described. It recounts what it was like being a child in Romania in the 1970s. The level of evil carried out by people just doing their jobs as everyday functionaries is hard to accept. Though there were a few who still displayed some scraps of humanity, it chills you to the bone to understand the need for such repression and loss of humanity to create a “peoples’ utopia.” In such a place, the ladder of evil becomes difficult to discern as people are required to do things most people would reject in a free and just society. It should be required reading for all politicians – especially those like AOC.
The link in the phrase “this type of retribution from the Nazis” no longer works, but here’s the updated link, thanks to the Wayback Machine:
https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/history/nuns-who-saved-polish-jews.html
Ideologically and ideally, of course I want to be in the “some people will risk all to actively resist it in every way they can” group. Functionally, I know I’m inclined to be in the “disturbed by it and resisting in small ways” group, and so any larger shows of resistance will require the strength to go against my own nature. I do pray for that strength.
Shoa II
coming soon
Tara:
Thank you for the link.
JJ – “The level of evil carried out by people just doing their jobs as everyday functionaries is hard to accept.”
I urge you to read “The Police and Us”. Bureaucrats tend to follow orders. Their temperament is to “belong”. That is what Hannah Arendt termed “The Banality of Evil” in her book “The Origins of Totalitarianism” was driving towards. They don’t want to become “the other”. Particularly in times of social upheaval.
People can change as life experiences happen. They can be passive order takers and then change to active resistors if something profound happens. The cinematic version would be “Schindler’s List” where at the end he recriminates for not doing more.
Read the Essay and ponder. Bookmark it for fast reference. If the police or FBI knock on my door I intend to hand it to them and ask them to read the first part below. Then ask them how they fit into that scenario.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/23/the-police-and-us/
Turkeys cheering the arrival of Thanksgiving would be only marginally more pathetic than the conservative luminaries on Fox News who cheer for the police as civilization’s saviors. The police. You know—the heroes who stood aside as mobs looted and burned Minneapolis, Portland, Kenosha, Chicago, Macy’s in New York, downtown Chicago and so on while organized mask-wearing Antifa thugs beat whoever got in the way? Yes, the police we watched tase a woman for not wearing a mask in a stadium and arresting people for singing Christian hymns in a park. The police, who don’t answer calls from people who are being threatened in their homes. Those police.
Ah! the conservative luminaries tell us: the cops really would rather protect us. They don’t want to hurt us. Yes, the police fine us and jail us on behalf of politicians who hate us. Yes, effectively, they are protecting the mobs. But that’s only because they are duty bound to obey the duly constituted authorities who also pay them. They’re just doing their jobs even if they don’t like what they are doing. What should they do, disobey orders and get fired? So, let’s give them more money and more power.
The more we think about that, the more we realize that this attitude corrupts citizens as well as police. Let us reflect.
On November 10, 1938 my late friend Lewis Gann (1924-1997) answered the doorbell at his home in Mainz, Germany. The kindly policeman had come pursuant to the Reich Chancellor’s order to collect the medals that Jews, like his father, had been awarded for their service in World War I. That day, Gann’s father was on a business trip to London. The previous night, since remembered as Kristallnacht, when regime-inspired mobs had first ransacked Jewish businesses, was the beginning of the end of safety for Germany’s Jews. Lewis recalled how his mother and the policeman vied to show respect for one another, and to reassure the other that they were both doing their civic duty by obeying duly constituted authority.
After the policeman left, a telegram arrived from his father: “Leave everything. Come here now.” They did.
What happened beginning around three years later in Maniz and throughout the Reich? That policeman and others like him did their duty as they helped people like Mrs. Gann and Lewis’ friends do their duty by climbing into the cattle cars taking them to the camps. No hard feelings among good Germans.
Only the first two groups and the last two groups count. It has always been thus.
“–Some people will conceptualize, plan, and implement it as leaders.
–Some people will actively cooperate with vigor.
–Some people will be disturbed by it and will decide to take great risks in order to resist it, but could be stopped by threats (not necessarily threats to themselves, but threats to friends and family).
–Some people will risk all to actively resist it in every way they can.”
The greater the evil, the greater the sacrifice required of good to defeat it.
Some of us, possibly many of us, have thought about being suicidally brave in the face of evil.
Repercussions visited on the family do have a calming effect.
Solzhenitsyn’s ponderings led him to conclude that even table legs would be sufficient if used en masse.
The story from Mainz about duly constituted authority is likely a German issue. Most Americans don’t think authority is duly constituted if they disagree with it. It’s one thing to admit somebody won an election fairly. But if he’s screwing around, it’s not duly constituted, since duly constituted means doing things the right way–about which there is much argument.
IOW, authority’s duly constituted status can be taken away by its actions, not by the chain of events which duly put them in place.
But when Authority can direct a BLM mob to your kids’ home…..
I tend to think of attitudes being in a circle. The hard line “true believers” both persecutors and resisters can switch back and forth on many issues. It is so easy for the resistors if they gain the upper hand to make the evil ones “the others”. The diameter opposite would be the disinterested. So, if you start out with your top it would go through the supporters to the disinterested to the rising resistance to the hard-core resistors.
An example is Fascism and Communism both Totalitarianism. Both follow Mussolini’s maxim ““All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Mussolini was a rising star in the Socialist Movement pre WWI. Then he flipped to an ardent nationalist at the beginning of the war. He was HATED by the Socialists and Communist because he was a rising star in that movement.
Another example of circular belief system is belief in God. You can believe in a monotheistic God be very fervent, then committed, to observant, to sporadic but still believe, to doubtful, to agnostic to ardent pagan and finally Atheist. I know three people who were seminary students who had a crisis of faith and became atheists. I also know two former atheists who are on fire for God now. They switched almost immediately and didn’t go around the full circle. Edward Feser was an Atheist and now blogs about philosophy, religion and moral thought. He posts once a week on average and I drop in to see what he is thinking about.
https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/
For people to do great evil they have to believe that they are immune to the consequences. They don’t have an external ultimate authority of what is good and evil to check them. Though in WWII, the Nazi’s felt impelled to use euphemisms and tried to destroy the evidence. They knew it was wrong to the majority of people and didn’t want to have them move from dis-interested to resisters. In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge just piled up the skulls. They didn’t care.
People are internally driven or externally driven. Ie. People who have internal motivations believe they are in control of their lives by and large vs. those who believe they are subject to the whims of fate. The greater the sense of powerlessness it will have more people with external locus. If you have an external locus the easier you can be persuaded to hate “the other”. It is much harder for someone who is more internally motivated and believes in a definition of good and evil set by a monotheistic God.
Finally there is the psychological disordered. An interesting essay about that is below. The most compelling paragraph is copied. Shades of Orwell and today’s elites bending language to their fanciful reality. Cowards? Rationalizers? Sounds like our elites today.
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/12/psychopathy-origins-totalitarianism/
“Pseudo-realities are always social fictions, which, in light of the above, means political fictions. That is, they are maintained not because they are true, in the sense that they correspond to reality, either material or human, but because a sufficient quantity of people in the society they attack either believe them or refuse to challenge them. This implies that pseudo-realities are LINGUISTIC PHENOMENA above all else, and where power-granting linguistic distortions are present, it is likely that they are there to create and prop up some pseudo-reality. This also means that they require power, coercion, manipulation, and eventually force to keep them in place. Thus, they are the natural playground of psychopaths, and they are enabled by cowards and rationalizers. Most importantly, pseudo-realities do not attempt to describe reality as it is but rather as it “should be,” as determined by the relatively small fraction of the population who cannot bear living in reality unless it is bent to enable their own psychopathologies, which will be projected upon their enemies, which means all normal people.”
Interesting article that bears on this subject: https://www.newsweek.com/importance-commission-unalienable-rights-opinion-1582556
I am Spartacus:
Thanks for quoting the excerpt about Lewis Gann from Codevilla’s excellent essay. Interesting to see that Gann lived in Rhodesia in the late 1950s-early 1960s. I wonder whether the multivolume Cambridge University Press history of colonialism in Africa that he contributed to will be canceled. In that connection, consider the current case of Bruce Gilley at Portland State University:
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/the_case_for_colonialism
Gilley approvingly cites Gann and Gann’s Hoover Institution colleague Peter Guignan. So yes, Gann’s work will probably be canceled, eventually.
On the police, bureaucratic culture, “Schreibtischtäter” (literally, “writing desk criminals”–that is, bureaucrats who order crimes against humanity but don’t get their hands dirty doing the wet work), and “just following orders, Sir/Ma’am”: perhaps we should ask TexasDude, our resident veteran policeman, for his perspective on these questions. It is worth remembering that everything that was done in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was done in accordance with the law. Nazi and Soviet law.
Evil is Evil, with a capital E. I disagree with the ladder concept; human folly and error are human failings, not small or intermediate doses of Evil. And we are all imperfect.
Thus the Catholic Church’s insistence on regular confession to cleanse the soul, which requires the self-recognition of folly aka sin in order to confess such folly/sin to God and to another human being, the priest. All Popes regularly confess, even!
Some attention might be paid to God, who is cited above only by I Am Spartacus; and particularly to Christian theology. The writings of Joseph Ratzinger (who became Pope Benedict XVI) and Saint Pope John Paul II) I have found helpful in their remarkable philosophical discourses. That has lead me into the realm of Natural Law (see the opening of the Declaration of Independence: “The Law of Nature and Nature’s God”).
There is a reason why the great modern day butchers of humanity, the doers of Evil, were/are atheists, whether Nazis or communists. There is no banality to Evil; those butchers were anything but banal. Were the Red Guards banal? Hannah Arendt is wrong. Orderliness, as with Eichmann, is an inborn German trait, to be used or misused.
Cicero:
I am under the impression that the Catholic Church recognizes degrees of evildoing in that it categories sins into different categories such as venial and mortal. Whether or not humans are innately evil – something on which Catholicism and Judaism differ, for example – is another question. But this post is speaking of people’s degrees of cooperation with evil, furtherance of evil, and/or actions in doing evil or in fighting evil, rather than whether evil is intrinsic to humanity.
I agree that the great evils of the 20th Century were done by atheists. But certainly some evil is done in the name of religion, both long ago and in the present day (Islamicist terrorists).
And I also disagree – as you do – with Arendt’s essay on the banality of evil. I discuss her concept here. I think that she would have done well to describe it instead as “the facade of banality that evildoers sometimes don”.
They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer is a good book.
Excellent book on the topic.
And I also disagree – as you do – with Arendt’s essay on the banality of evil. I discuss her concept here. I think that she would have done well to describe it instead as “the facade of banality that evildoers sometimes don”.
Perhaps apply it to more fitting objects. The US Congress, for one.
Neo:
“some evil is done in the name of religion”. Stress should be placed on the “name of”, rather than on monotheistic religion itself.
Venial and mortal are the only two categories of sin in Catholicism.
Venial are the sins relieved by confession. Mortal sins are those with no similar means of redemption, like the sin of Biden the pretend-Catholic supporting abortion. I fault the Church for not excommunicating him and those like him. Only one or two US bishops have urged that move.
Thus the Catholic ladder has only one rung, one step up, with confession of venial sin(s). Missing a Sunday mass is a venial. Mortal sins lacking total, abject repentance will send the soul to Hell, and I’m good with that!
“In the name of” does not entirely cover the issue.
It’s unlikely that the mercenary bands who devastated Europe in the Thirty Years War picked their side according to the church in which they were raised. Their princes may have fought “in the name of religion” because it sounded better than their actual motives.
Still, some of the savagery went beyond the utility of war.
Cicero – First off I agree that evil is not banal. There is evil and there is DEPRAVITY. What we see today is evil morphing into depravity. Like fraud evil acts start small and grows into depravity. You get a target audience to think of the opposition as “the other”. Then you ratchet it up.
Before 1933, the extremist organizations in the Weimar Republic, Nazi’s and Communists were conditioning their audiences to view their opponents as “the other”. Then when in 1933 when the Nazi’s took power, people were conditioned to act violently against “the other”. And the pogroms got worse and worse. The book “K2” is a great reference to this whole process of how the Concentration Camp system was created and refined.
Ditto the Communists in the Soviet Union and the Kulak campaign with the enhancement of the Czarist Siberia exile process to the Gulag Archipelago. The show trials that demanded a quota of evil doers. The Red Guard in the Chinese Cultural Revolution on to the Uighurs and Tibetans. The KKK in the South and BLM in the present United States.
Nothing new under the sun.
Make no mistake. They are coming after us. Trouble for them is that we have guns.
Both prior Popes lived through WWII. JPII actually was in Auschwitz after the war to look for relatives. A guide at Auschwitz when I was there with my mother was in his party. Both saw depravity up close and personal. Same with Solzhenitsyn and others who chronicle the depravity of pagans and atheists.
How to combat it here in the US. First, refuse to be silent. Silence is Violence. Make them say David Dorn’s name. Right away when they say “Black Lives Matter” add “including unborn ones”. It destroys their sloganeering.
And work. Work to fix this broken political system. Work to repair the rents in our society’s fabric. Do so with love in your heart because in the end we win even if in the end it is in heaven. Do it now and don’t cease.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2021/03/25/this-is-no-time-to-ride-into-the-sunset/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXGUNvIFTQw&ab_channel=LukeBolduan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6C8SX0mWP0&ab_channel=EgalmothOfGondolin01
In Catholic Theology there is the concept of a just war. Let us work to prevent that so the attached never happens. I am.
https://ncrenegade.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/leftalone.jpg
There is SOME amount of behind the scenes look at what was happening among the German people in these matters in the 1930s in the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. MeTaxes biography is a bit of a long read, but worth it. I do have some reservations about the title, but nevertheless, still a good, but not lite, reading book. https://www.amazon.com/Bonhoeffer-Pastor-Martyr-Prophet-Spy/dp/1595552464
Ditto, from Corrie ten Boon’s book, “The Hiding Place. “ Though I was only a child when I read it and remember only bits and pieces of it. https://www.christianbook.com/the-hiding-place-corrie-ten-boom/9780553256697/pd/56696?en=bing-pla&event=SHOP&kw=christian-living-0-20%7C56696&p=1179517&dv=t&msclkid=f13d3a709e3e1a167c115a033bd6daab&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Shopping%20Main&utm_term=4580702881405439&utm_content=s-all%20products
“Banality of evil” is indeed a problematic phrase.
More than problematic.
But what does it mean? (Or more importantly, what CAN it possibly mean?)
I doubt very much that Arendt realized the backlash she would receive as a result of having coined the notorious phrase. After all, SHE knew what she meant; ergo, so should everyone else….
It would seem that she, however, for all her brilliance, had some problems with empathy. And with imagination as well. The Eichmann she witnessed in the dock in 1961 was not the tall, handsome, imposing Nazi in impressive, sinister, black SS regalia with the trademark Totenkopf glaring prominently from under the even more prominent NAZI eagle splayed at the apex of his officer’s cap.
With the “divine” ability to take life or to prescribe torture and death.
And so, merely—for Arendt—a functionary of evil. A banal apparatchik. Some people, it seems, market lentils, lima beans, chickpeas. Some people market death; and they, apparently, must do what they’re told (even if some market beans with a bit more panache—and quite a bit more efficiency—than your average trader in legumes.).
And so evil become banal—though truly, evil can NEVER become banal (at least not for the person to whom evil is perpetrated).
Or, perhaps expressed another way: if or when evil DOES become banal—should society degenerate to the point where evil becomes the norm—then we’re in trouble. Deep trouble.
And perhaps this is what she meant. (Or perhaps not.) Or perhaps she meant that society must be always vigilant since every society is capable of this degradation. (Or perhaps not.)
Certainly though, as a philosopher, as a dealer in words and meaning—in analysis and explication—Arendt should have known better. But we all have our limitations. And it is easy—far too easy—to, as it were, cast stones.
Currently, the unthinkable is beginning to occur in places where it oughtn’t even be contemplated: evil, banal or otherwise, is being encouraged and embraced (though not, alas, for the first time) by whole swaths of people who ought to know better yet who seem to have been seduced by the irresistible, dimpled charms and urges of evil’s transformative, transmutative cunning (manifested by humankind’s extraordinary ability to rationalize—and all too often distort—practically anything).
So that evil (though once again not for the first time) has become MORAL. Morally necessary. Morally imperative.
It’s as if, society has become imbued with…EVIL, EVIL, THOU SHALT PURSUE… (and defend).
In this case, the “naked emperor” is not only clothed in the richest, most exquisite finery, but his ugly, vile, destructive soul is perceived as the epitome of gentleness, concern and charity. Of humanity.
The repellant has become the enabler.
The menace the savior.
The despoiler the redeemer.
The liar the messenger of Truth.
In fact the sheer unbanality of evil.
Pingback:Strange Daze: “Outside of these Democrat-run cities, America is peaceful, safe, clean, and racially tolerant.”
“the great modern day butchers of humanity, the doers of Evil, were/are atheists, whether Nazis….”
Hitler, Himmler etc. atheists? Not to my understanding, unless that word’s definition is as flexibly applied, as is the SJW “definition” of “racist”.
Until sounder arguments are deployed, I’m with Arendt.
aNanyMouse:
Here, from an “unimpeachable” source:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/04/20/hitler-hated-judaism-he-loathed-christianity-too/
And of course the atheist lobby on the web (Wicked media, et cetera) protests that Hitler certainly wasn’t an atheist. Because their rationality will prevent such faith based atrocities as the Crusades or that thing that nobody expects, while ignoring the Reign of Terror and the Vendee Genocide as nothing to see.
Funny how his hatred of 2 Religions of the Book gets spun, to imply that Hitler was an *atheist*, as if he couldn’t have leaned toward Islam, ancient Germanic etc. polytheism/ pantheism (Wotan etc., Zeus etc., or Jupiter etc.), or, indeed, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, or Deism.
Atheism is a specific philosophical position, distinct from more than just a rejection of the WaPo’s favorite theisms.
When Pravda on the Potomac claims that “he was full of contempt for *everything* else pious and divine”, they offer *no* proof at all.
The quote on “no frontier between the organic and inorganic” proves nothing more about Hitler, that it does about Himmler, who was a (Darwinian) Wagnerian pagan.