Please go see this movie.  It will be good for you.  You will want to talk about it with your friends.

Critics have not been very kind to the movie, Hannah Arendt, because it is a talky movie.  I don’t see what else it could be.  Hannah Arendt, played in the movie by Barbara Sukowa, was a prominent political philosopher before the New Yorker asked her to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.  On the left, here, is Arendt as herself.  On the right, Sukowa as Arendt.

I know Arendt from her Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition.  This movie is about Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.  Most particularly, it is about Arendt’s insistence that the most horrible thing about Eichmann was his mediocrity.  Eichmann was not a monster, according to Arendt.  He was only a paper shuffler.  He was not even an anti-Semite.  He was a nothing.  That is what made the Holocaust so horrible.

Have you ever had the experience of trying to point out the “real cause” on an event and being defeated because your explanation didn’t have any villains in it?  Or not villains who were quite evil enough?  I have had that experience many times.

Here’s what happens.  Imagine that villainy can be calibrated on a scale of ten.  The prevailing sentiment among your audience is that the Villain at Issue—it is Eichmann in this case—should be an 8.  Your own view is that, given the circumstances, he is no more villainous than 5.  What will you be charged with, do you suppose?  Defending the villain!  The case you make that he is a 5 is an affront to decent people everywhere and especially to the victims of villainy.  You are “defending” the villain by arguing that 5 is a better measure of his villainy than 8!

This response is what the movie, Hannah Arendt, is about.[1]  We see Arendt in Jerusalem listening to the testimony.  Eichmann is in a class case.  They say it is to protect him, and maybe it really was, but he looks in that case, like an exception to the human race.  There is everyone else and then there is Eichmann.  Arendt is struck by how horrible the death machine is.  Nothing can be said about the Nazi intentions and actions that is too awful to say.  On the other hand, once the machine is built, it doesn’t take any particular malice to run it.  It just takes bureaucrats who have their orders and who comply with them to the very best of their ability.

It is evil, surely.  But it is also banal.  The OED gives these meanings to banal: commonplace, common, trite, trivial, petty.[2]  The operation Eichmann ran was so thoroughly evil it was hard to comprehend.  Eichmann’s part in it, Arendt argued, was trivial.  It was petty.  It was trite.

It has always seemed to me that it is more valuable for all of us to understand that social systems can be built that do not require evil men to operate them.  Trivial bureaucrats will be enough.  This is scarcely saying more than Edmund Burke said: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Arendt, however, pointed to the system.  That is what we need to understand.  Her opponents wanted to revile Eichmann, himself.  In doing this, said Arendt, we cheat ourselves and deny to ourselves a knowledge of what is now possible that we will urgently need in the future.

Arendt’s major professor, Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi party in the hopes of reforming the university system.  He was tried, in the denazification hearings following World War II.  The French military finally classified him in 1949 as a “Mitläufer or Nazi follower (Mitläufer : person who gives into peer pressure without participation nor resistance nor inner conviction, unlike a fellow traveler, literally “with-runner” similar to “lemming-like”).”[3]  I think Arendt’s position was that Eichmann was a Mitläuffer.

I’m in no position to say whether Arendt or her critics is nearer to the truth.  The better question, it seems to me, is whether we need to understand Arendt’s view of Evil—that’s a capital E—or her critic’s view.  Which is more crucially important for us?  I’m with Arendt on this one.