The Banality of Butter

Darin Strauss has a thoughtful essay bringing Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil thinking to bear on the Paula Deen scandal, something we at the Arendt Center had thought very little about.

She writes:

Here’s a relevant fact. We know that Deen said “n-----r,” owned permissive restaurants, about the lady’s crude humor. But we know something else, too. Deen wanted to emulate a party where African Americans — and only African Americans — were made, in a manner reminiscent of the antebellum South, to serve white guests. What’s relevant, what’s Arendtian, is: none of the Stand-With-Paula people dispute any of these facts.

Which is where Eichmann comes in. In Arendt’s most famous book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, she argued that sometimes what we call evil — and what can bring about the most horrible outcomes — can often more accurately and simply be thoughtlessness of a sort. That is to say, people, and communities, are often no good at the kind of abstract thought that helps us understand the experience of others. (Which is a shame, because abstract thought is what separates us from iPhones and hamsters.)

The enlarged thinking by which we can think from the perspective of others is not, for Arendt, abstract thought. It is concrete and engaged thinking. But Strauss’ larger point is a good one. Eichmann’s banality was his unthinking commitment to the truth of the Nazi movement. It is evidence that people depend so strongly on their identity as members of movements or peoples that they will unthinkingly defend and prosecute the goals of that movement, even when those goals contradict their basic moral convictions.

You can read the rest of Strauss’ essay here.

-RB