The Evil of Banality: On The Life and Death Importance of Thinking
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.
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The Evil of Banality: On The Life and Death Importance of Thinking
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.
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The Evil of Banality: On The Life and Death Importance of Thinking
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.
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).
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction:What Were They Thinking? PART I: EVIL—THINKING THE UNTHINKABLEChapter 1: Truth and Fiction: Camus’ The PlagueChapter 2: Thinking about Not-ThinkinghChapter 3: Changing MindsChapter 4: Escaping Explanations, ExcusesChapter 5: Meaning, Truth, Rationality, Knowledge, and ThinkingChapter 6: Romanticizing EvilChapter 7: Intensive Evil, Extensive EvilChapter 8: The Ordinary for Good and IllPART II: GOODNESS: WHAT IS TO BE DONE?Chapter 9: Phillip Hallie: It Takes a VillageChapter 10: Preparing for Extensive Goodness?Chapter 11: Looking for Good Beyond the VillageChapter 12: The Banality of Goodness?PART III: FERTILE GROUNDS FOR EXTENSIVE EVILChapter 13: Seeding Prepared GroundChapter 14: Large-Scale Enclosures: Meaning SystemsChapter 15: Physical Enclosures of Bodies, MindsChapter 16: Laying out the StrandsAfterword: Teaching ThinkingNotesBibliography: Sources and ResourcesIndexAuthor Biography