The Banality of the Elite

Meagan Day watched the Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford testimony as so many of us did. What struck her about Kavanaugh was not his anger, not his privilege, and not his masculinity. Instead, Day saw in Kavanaugh the banality of the elite. "The masters of the universe, it turns out, are losers. The Brett Kavanaugh hearing was a kaleidoscope of family and God and prestigious clerkships spliced with boofing and ralphing and brewskis. It was a thorough dressing-down. In the end, one was left with the impression of an unremarkable guy who was born on a conveyor belt to power, without much obligation to distinguish himself from his peers. On the contrary, his success was relatively guaranteed on the condition that he didn't distinguish himself from them, that he simply play nice with the fellas - and not necessarily so nice with women - from prep school to the Ivy League to the White House and beyond. What struck me most about yesterday's hearing, cutting through Kavanaugh's tone-deaf retorts and indignant whinging and his frequent professions of love for beer, is how utterly ordinary he is. This guy is juvenile, arrogant, sexist - and very familiar. It pointed to a larger truth: the people running the show are callous and dangerous, but they're also astonishingly average. They have no irreplaceable qualities or insights that would oblige us to put up with their bullshit. They would hate for us to realize this.... Kavanaugh is probably guilty of sexual assault. That's my read, after reviewing the available testimonies and also thirty years of experience with people. But what's really sticking for me isn't the exceptional brutality of powerful men - the cruelty of Kavanaugh or his prep-school friends or of the fulminating Republicans who protested his mistreatment yesterday, referring to the investigation of sexual abuse allegations against a Supreme Court nominee as "unfair" and "innuendo." No, it's not their monstrosity that stands out. It's their ordinary pettiness, their desperate desire to impress each other and, when the shit hits the fan, to save face together." Day is right. Kavanaugh is not a diabolical monster. As an adult, he is likely not someone who hates or demeans women. There is plenty of evidence that he has been a staunch supporter of professional women. It is important to move past the easy demonization of Kavanaugh and see him as he is. Assuming that Kavanaugh did sexually assault Ford when he was 17 and she was 15, and assuming that he may not fully remember having done so, his most meaningful sin is not hearing her out and then not owning up to what he may very well have done. First, Kavanaugh denied the real possibility that he might have assaulted Blasey Ford during one of his drunken benders. Second, he ignored for weeks the undeniable fact that he had profoundly scarred a young woman. While the assault was clearly awful for Ford, we cannot simply condemn Kavanaugh for awful behavior committed three decades ago when he was in high school. From the present, however,  it was the dishonest cover-up by the adult Kavanaugh that is worse than the crime of the juvenile. The refusal to confront what he very well may have done reveals a fundamental cowardice. Kavanaugh's shallow and superficial effort to preserve his good name at the expense of honesty, empathy, and integrity is what marks his banality. The point is that Kavanaugh's past is similar to his present. He appears to have had a highly problematic relationship to alcohol and to women. He was a political hack distinguished above all for his loyalty and ideological clarity. His political jobs were highly partisan, depending on cunning and ruthlessness rather than nuance and thoughtfulness. He rose to the top of the Federalist Society's lists not because he sought to understand legal complexity but because he excelled at marshaling arguments to support ideological dogmas. In his banality, Kavanaugh sadly reflects the governing elites of our time. In the end, Day rightly sees that Kavanaugh is distinguished by his utter ordinariness. That ordinariness is no excuse for what he has done. It is, rather, a factual observation about someone who having been nominated to the highest legal court in the land reacted to a credible and heartfelt accusation with self-pity and venom. In reflecting on what she called the banality of evil, Hannah Arendt saw that such banality flows not from a monstrous evil but from a shallow attachment to an ideology that prevents one from thinking clearly. Arendt posited that what allowed Adolf Eichmann to do and to justify horrific deeds was his unthinking belief in an ideology. I want to be clear: Kavanaugh is not at all a Nazi or a racist and he should not be compared to Eichmann, except in one regard. Across the corridors the power we see people in both parties like Kavanaugh, those who justify what they know is wrong by their ideological commitments. Arendt saw in Eichmann during his trial very much what Day sees in Kavanaugh during the hearings: a normal person. Arendt reported on the disturbing fact that struck her-and many others, including the Israeli judges-that Eichmann was decidedly average. "The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were terribly and terrifyingly normal." The evil of Eichmann's deeds was indisputable, and Arendt is fully convinced he should be hanged for his crimes. Yet, notwithstanding what he had done, Eichmann's motivations seemed to her to be grounded in typical bourgeois drives. He was ambitious. He sought the recognition that came from success and the affirmation that flowed from belonging to a movement. He was, she concluded, not a monster, not stupid, but thoughtless. And it was this "absence of thinking-which is so ordinary an experience in our everyday life, where we have hardly the time, let alone the inclination, to stop and think"-that Arendt came to see as the dangerous wellspring of evil in modern times. When Arendt calls Eichmann thoughtless and banal, she means that the decisive "flaw in Eichmann's character was his almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow's point of view." Eichmann was not stupid. He in fact was quite skilled at working within the Nazi administrative hierarchy to enlist resources, develop creative solutions, and convince superiors to aid him in his assigned tasks. His banality was not stupidity. But it does have an element of what Arendt calls "Dumbness." Here is how she explains Eichmann's banality and thoughtlessness to the journalist Joachim Fest: During the war Ernst Jünger comes across some German peasants and the peasant had just seen Russian prisoners coming out of the camps, of course completely starved, and the peasant says to Jünger: "Ja, one can see clearly that these are sub-humans-like cattle: They eat the pigs' food." You see, this story has an outrageous dumbness. The man does not see that that is what people do who have been starved, isn't that true, and everyone does it. This dumbness has something really revolting. Eichmann was very intelligent, but he had this dumbness. And that is what I actually meant by banality. There is no depth-this is not demonic! This is simply an unwillingness to even imagine what is actually up with another-is not it. Eichmann's failure to think was a failure of imagination, a failure to see humanity in others, and a failure to see outside his own blinkered worldview. His thoughtlessness made Eichmann blind to the basic human fact of plurality. That is why Arendt's final judgment of Eichmann is that he must be hanged and expelled from the earth. Such a failure to think from the perspective of others, such dumbness, is what allowed Eichmann to confide in and seek understanding from his Israeli interrogator, Avner Less. It is also what allowed Eichmann to justify the extermination camps to himself with the cliché that it was war between the races and the self-serving justification that the Jews would have done the same thing to Nazis. It was his incapacity to see from the perspective of others the insanity of his ideological convictions that Arendt called his inability to think. It is this thoughtlessness, Arendt argues, that allowed Eichmann and people like him to carry out one of the greatest crimes in history. I want to repeat that what Kavanaugh is accused of is not anything like what Eichmann did. Kavanaugh is not an Eichmann. But to watch the hearings is to be struck by Kavanaugh's utter lack of imagination of the world from the perspective of Blasey Ford and others. True, his daughter did pray for Blasey Ford, and Kavanaugh did say that he wishes her well. But his overriding posture was one of complete self-justification. In spite of testimony to the opposite, he repeated he had never blacked out and never drank to excess. He denied the obvious meanings of words he had used in his yearbook. While at times he was human and vulnerable, most of the time he was wooden and menacingly inhabiting the character of someone who seemed unwilling to admit that his mistakes. When the New York Timesfact-checked his testimony, it found "the image of a skilled lawyer who, when pressed on difficult subjects, sometimes crafted responses that were misleading, disputed or off point." The question hanging over the hearings is, what would have happened had Kavanaugh, from the beginning, admitted that while he may not remember assaulting Blasey Ford, he realizes he might have given his juvenile behavior and sought to apologize and make amends. Such an attitude would have shown the kind of thoughtful man of integrity that Kavanaugh wants himself to be but shows himself to be not. The Kavanaugh hearings seem to be a turning point in our world. Women and men who were victims of sexual assaults are once again expressing their traumas. We are demanding accountability for boorish and illegal crimes. This is a step forward. But what is not yet happening is that we are not yet demanding that we embrace depth over ordinariness. In a world governed by professional elites who claim the authority to govern based on facility with statistics and doctrine, it is time to realize that those whom Arendt called the "problem solvers" are distinguished, above all, in their preference for calculation over thinking. Might it finally be time to turn away from the elites who continue to assert their right to rule in spite of the overwhelming proof of their superficiality and banality. -Roger Berkowitz

The New York Review of Books published three essays on gender politics in its recent issue. One was by Ghomeshi, who had been accused of a truly disturbing variety of sexual harassments by 23 different women. Six years later, he has written about his experiences. There was a time when essays by criminals were in vogue for what they revealed about the criminal mind as well as what lessons of remorse. Ghomeshi was actually acquitted, but he admitted in his essay serious shortcomings and owned awful behavior. At the same time, he insisted that much of what he was accused of in the world of social media was wrong or unfair or both. He offered an account of his experiences, at times painfully self-justificatory, and at times illuminating.

For the act of publishing his essay and then defending that judgment in public, the editor of the New York Review of Books Ian Buruma was forced to resign. According to Buruma, Rea S. Hederman,  the publisher of the distinguished journal, was worried about the potential loss of advertising by academic presses. Such is the cowardice of our times.

People are scared, not because they have done things that are criminal, but that if they utter the wrong opinion or tweet the wrong tweet, they will be ostracized, fired, and ruined. We are, Sullivan argues, living through a moment of social terror in which the punishment is not the guillotine, but branding via hashtags.

-Roger Berkowitz