Why does humanity fall into despair? Or is the fall inevitable? Is the depravity that looms over our existence the creation of few deranged individuals, or is it the work of humankind en masse, carried out through the banal indifference we normalise?
When Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt writes, stood trial, he displayed a chilling indifference towards the crimes he had orchestrated. She observed something more unsettling than fanaticism—absence of thought. An obedient bureaucrat—a thoughtless “cog”—appeared as a normal functionary. He claimed no hatred or grand ideology, for he was merely doing his job, a routine he had become accustomed to. For Ardent this emptiness of thought is what made him the greatest criminal of the 20th century. The architect of the Nazi Final Solution, Eichmann lacked any intentionality or emotions while committing the crimes. This evident lack of hatred and a sense of indifference speaks of the perils of thoughtlessness. It speaks to us of the “banality of evil” that to this day continues to haunt us.
Eichmann had stated in his testimony that he always tried to abide by Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the time will that it should become a universal law.” Yet Ardent believed Eichmann had failed to recognise the principle of reciprocity and coincided a man’s actions with general law. This stirs a question that moves beyond history. If the idea that categorial imperative demands that one act only on the principles that we would will to be the universal law, what does our passivity and collective silence reveal? What does blind obedience to laws, to authority, speak of?
The modern world is consumed by thoughtlessness. And thoughtlessness does not mean a lack of knowledge. One can be knowledgeable and still be thoughtless, similarly one does not require knowledge to think and speak up against the evils that we humans perpetuate. A thoughtless human, thus, is no better than a fanatic. For Ardent the reductive tendency to equate thought to knowledge has been the root of modernity’s greatest catastrophes. It becomes the failure to reflect, to question and turn ordinary humans into cogs in the machinery of atrocity and equally complacent.
The evils perpetuated by society can be analogised to the narrative of the anime Attack on Titan. The titans—“other” than humans, monstrous creatures—were the cause of violence, of oppression and destruction of humanity, or so it seemed. But as the story unfolded, the evils that were externalised were the cause of the structures that humans had created. The titans became the reflection, a result of the evils that humans possess. However, framing evil as inherent within the human-constructed systems does not absolve individuals of responsibility. In a world that is devoid of empathy, evil can not be defined solely by the acts of violence. The indifference towards human suffering constitutes evil that is banal and ordinary. Evil thrives within our inaction, within our indifference to be moved by the sufferings that are structural and perpetuated through the mechanism of normalisation.
The constraint to our moral reflections and responsibilities, also comes from the phenomenon of Rationalisation, disenchantment, and scientism. Arendt draws on Max Weber to explain this phenomenon. According to her, rationalisation is the domination of human life by impersonal abstractions and structures. This means that rather than inaction, the reorientation of action towards abstract rules without any personal judgement thus leads to subjugation of the personal thought by impersonal and seemingly “objective” order.
Disenchantment works as the eradicator of definite values. While the modern world thrives with scientific knowledge and the accumulation of facts, it also robs the world of meaning because it essentially displays that nothing exists beyond the phenomena. The scientific world eliminates the possibility of knowing the world from an unscientific mode of understanding. This does not deprive us of freedom directly but makes our freedom devoid of any meaningful orientation. Scientism reinforces this detachment by claiming that everything is already in motion and determined and denies the will and moral agency. Scientism fosters perspectives that are detached from first person analysis and replaces them with third person, perverting the human engagement and undermining the possibility for humans to perceive themselves as agents or perceive value in the world. Collectively these forces lead to a dismissal of reflective thought, strip us of our reactive moral attitudes and create conditions through which humans participate and or tolerate evil.
Democracies today act as the institutions that rationalise the routine procedures, by appearing participatory all while enacting a system of detachment and compliance. Our engagement within our states is structured by the procedural norms, limiting our action. In this sense, the mechanism itself that is to safeguard the agency of the people becomes the site fostering a sense of indifference and passivity as civic ethics.
While people continue to face repression and atrocities, our compliance comes in forms of detachment and passivity. But our survival, the very ability to think and reflect—is not predetermined. Our voices, as we breach through these walls of passivity, challenge the indifference and the banality of evil that exists around us, in us. From Nepal to Bangladesh, to the hope that still stirs within the children in Gaza and Sudan, we as humans possess the capacity to resist indifference, to question structures that perpetuate suffering, to rage against the dehumanisation of our own, to become human again.
Reeba Khan
Image Credits: Irish Times
DU Beat Print | Volume 19 Issue 06