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“Everyday Evil” July 22, 2007 Unitarian Church of Evanston Allison Farnum, summer minister Michael Anderson, Worship Associate
Adolf Eichmann was a normal guy in Austria. He loved his wife and kids. He worked hard at his job, always looking for the next break to get him up the ladder. From a solid middle-class family, he was not living up to the standards of his social class. He was fired from his job as a traveling salesman at the Vacuum Oil Company. He likely felt like a loser in the eyes of his family and peers. Another, better opportunity presented itself, and so he took it.
Why not join the S.S. in Germany? Being a soldier held potential for quick advancement. There he proceeded to the rank of corporal but soon became bored and listless again, itching for more opportunity. He applied to the Security Service of the Reichsfuhrer S.S, known as the S.D. He was soon disenchanted with the S.D., realizing that this next start put him again at the bottom of the food chain. His boss gave him a book to read, Der Judenstaat, a Zionist classic which Eichmann uncharacteristically took up with great passion. He soon learned a little Hebrew and Yiddish. And slowly he built himself up in the organization as an expert on Jews. This organization, of course, was the Nazi regime.
This perfectly normal man was in an abnormal world – one in which all eyes went up to the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler. In this abnormal world language was emptied of real meaning. Eichmann himself was noted many times parroting empty clichés heard over and over again in Nazi propaganda.
Eichmann was indoctrinated in a world of lies where killings were “medical procedures”, and genocide was called a “final solution” that was simply the last resort to what the Nazis called the Jewish “problem”. Words became empty of meaning, until finally, as this man sat on trial in Israel for crimes against the Jewish people, Eichmann was all together confusing in his testimony. He claimed that he liked Jews and had nothing against them. Yet as he pushed papers and climbed up the Nazi ladder of ambition, millions died because of his “administration.”
How is this possible? This man was not psychotic. He was examined for hours by professionals and deemed “normal”. But the problem was that Nazi Germany normalized what was not supposed to be normal.
Eichmann is an important reminder of what any average human being is capable of- mindless, everyday acts of evil that are extraordinary. His sinful ambition converged with a logic that encouraged his weakness and stripped him of any moral sensitivity. This is a moral sensitivity that we take for granted- it couldn’t ever really get that bad, could it? But it did. And in the wake of World War II, folks all over the globe where left with the haunting question: how could this have happened?
Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt, was a response to that haunting question: How could this happen? She discusses at length the mechanisms of the Nazi regime, how it worked to so massively and effectively to invade the lives and psyches of the German people. As a German-born Jew fleeing persecution, she moved to Paris is 1933. After war broke out she was held in a detention camp as an “enemy alien.” Afterwards she fled to New York City. In this first book, Arendt speaks of the Nazi regime at first in terms of radical evil- this great monstrosity was an anomaly of human experience that demanded public attention and increased political action. The Nazis malevolently chose to be evil.
In 1960, the newly formed but highly skilled sraeli intelligence kidnapped Eichmann, finding him in Argentina and bringing him to trial in Israel for crimes against humanity. Hannah Arendt covered the trial in her post at The New Yorker. As she witnessed the trial of Eichmann, Arendt underwent a transformation: She perceived an evil much more frightening than the radical evil she had suggested in her previous work. More frightening was how normal Eichmann was. He ended up proving what she came to articulate as “the banality of evil.” By banality she did not mean to say it was something not worth noting- She meant banal in the sense of lacking any originality. As she reported the trial for The New Yorker she came to believe that the atrocities of the Nazi regime were not carried out in the spirit of a sadistic malevolence. Instead, the evil was more insidious because it was fashioned in such a way that it was all in a day’s work.
Observing Eichmann, Arendt reports that “except for looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all….He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.” Before the trial and during the investigation into his crimes, Eichmann was extensively interviewed about his life. During these interviews he repeatedly bemoaned the fact that he was never promoted further in his rank in the SD despite all of his hard work and dedication. He painted himself a victim. The hard work he was so proud of resulted in the deaths of millions. He never once seemed to make the connection that the officer who interviewed him was a German Jew who made it out alive, in spite all of Eichmann’s “hard work” in the Department of Jewish Affairs. Eichmann was devoid of sympathy- unable to pierce through a cloud of self-absorption. He was unable to see the world from anyone else’s perspective. During the trial his ignorance baffled the judges, especially when he insisted that he worked with the Jews in the spirit of “mutuality”, insisting that he helped them. He gave the impression that he felt underappreciated in a thankless job in which he was undervalued by the people he was “helping” and by the bureaucracy he was serving. Arendt argues that Eichmann was incapable of actually thinking, actually becoming aware of the things he was doing and how they might effect other people.
The great warning to our time is this thoughtlessness- not thinking through to imagine the end result of our actions. Eichmann exhibited a lack of imagination that prevented him from stepping into another person’s shoes. Thus the banality of evil.
The holocaust, the genocide of the Jews, was mass murder meted out by ordinary people; all in a day’s work. Daily tasks of keeping books, running trains, and small administrative trifling took on epic proportions. In light of the heinous results, it is hard to imagine that any of us would now be so hoodwinked by such a morally insensitive paradigm- one in which human lives, so precious, so dear, would be simply another number on a spreadsheet. Could evil become such an everyday occurrence?
The etymology of evil goes back to the root word, UBER, meaning “over.” The context of “over” is likened to transgression or extending beyond due limits. I heard one preacher interpret this etymology as meaning “uppity.” How interesting that evil’s root is descriptive of a state of mind that indicates a way of relating to the world. Evil is the transgression of thinking that one is over another. One is more important than another.
In Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explains that the bureaucracy of the totalitarian regime is competitive. Among the Nazi ranks was cutthroat competition over who could get closest to the center of power- the Fuhrer. Each scrambled over the other in hopes of success.
Dietrich Bonheoffer was a Lutheran minister who was part of the small German resistance. He was imprisoned by the Nazis and eventually was hung for his involvement in an assassination attempt against Hitler. In his work Ethics, Bonhoeffer illustrates how quickly success can become equated with goodness. That Hitler, he was a smashing success! The regime was a self-sustaining system in which the Fuhrer was “the best,” and bureaucrats (like Eichmann) worked hard and ambitiously to get “better and better.” In this system the better you got, the more you dominated others.
Starhawk is a political activist, organizer, and self-acclaimed witch who is active in the peace movement. In her writings, she talks about different ways of using power. Her analysis of power is couched in spiritual terms. In the paradigm of domination, she calls the relationship power-over. Opposing the power-over system is a more relational ethic that draws upon what she calls “power-from-within”. “Power-from-within” will sound very familiar- it is based on our seventh principle: We are all connected and interdependent. Therefore we all deserve respect and all of our voices are needed at the table. Though we all have this power-from-within, we are accountable to the larger whole, what we call the interdependent web of Life. To acknowledge another’s power-from-within is to affirm her inherent worth and dignity. No one is over any one else.
The story from the Dalai Lama book The Art of Happiness paints a familiar picture- the dinner companion who complains the whole night about the service and transforms what could have been an amiable evening into misery. The unhappy man gets a free dessert, an apology, and a detailed explanation as to why the service was so slow. But still he grumbles that he is never coming back. He doesn’t hear it: one of the cooks had a death in the family. He gives no thought to the reality of the situation. As Dr. Cutler mentions, the grumbly dinner companion is creating his own misery and, in his self-absorption, taking any inconvenience as a personal slight. He clings to the notion that the Universe revolved around him.
Life is suffering, say the Buddhists. Life is not easy, but we live in a culture that insists that it should be easy and based on our individual desires. The Book of Matthew in the Christian scriptures warns me here: Judge not, that ye be not judged. I shall not judge the disgruntled dinner companion with the speck in his eye without pointing out the log in my own. One of my colleagues and I used to carpool down to Hyde Park together. She knew me as a kind person, until that first day we got on Lakeshore Drive in traffic. Driving in traffic is such a disempowering experience. Traffic: A sea of human bodies, encased in steel boxes, private spaces, that encourage us to forget that human beings are actually driving the cars instead of evil robots who were put on the earth to make you miss all the good parking at the University of Chicago. So, someone cuts me off and my friend hears utterances that should never pass a seminarian’s lips. Never mind that the driver needs the exit ahead, may have screaming children with small bladders in the backseat, never mind any of that. I don’t have time to think of that- instead I think only of myself. In that moment, I personalize the situation. How dare they not think of me! My friend laughs at me as I wonder all the way to the South side how I am going to be a good minister.
Sometimes it feels like our everyday lives are more like traffic. We want to control the world around us but always run into the cold, hard facts that life is sometimes hard and outside of our control. Life involves suffering- and we are not the only ones. The alternative way of thinking is to simply not think anymore. The alternative is to absorb the given maxims of society around us without question and play them out to their bitter end. Pretending that evil is something separate and monstrous is a dangerous idea to absorb. Pretending that we are not susceptible to thinking we are better than others is a naïve denial of the way our culture operates.
Pretend instead that now is the time to use imagination, to think clearly about how actions of everyday life play out into the larger web of life. The food eaten at dinner- the faster pace past the homeless beggar- the uncomfortable silence of words not spoken- the helpless shrug after the racist joke- when does thoughtlessness end and mindful transformation begin?
What if Eichmann had, just once, stepped into the shoes of one of the Jews he watch line up for the trains? Or really stopped in his tracks for one moment to think about the real meaning of the entries in his log book? What if he remembered that they, too, were people just as important and worthy of life as he was?
The Holocaust Museum in Washington DC displays thousands of shoes taken from the Nazi prison in Majdanek, Poland. I have only seen pictures and heard stories form friends about the arresting and gut-wrenching vision. Empty shoes: heeled for the women, laced oxfords, children’s dainty little shoes that once housed those little feet. How many stories, how many gifts unrealzed, how many cares and burdens would Adolf Eichmann have to imagine before his ambition shriveled in the face of his evil? Oh, had he taken the time to step into any of those shoes.
How awful…and sad. Beyond description. Our Universalist heritage, via John Murray, cries out, “Give them not Hell but hope,”
I believe that Eichmann somehow thought himself hope-less. We cannot make the same mistake.
One of the great inspirations is Viktor Frankl, a camp survivor. He writes, "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
The Universe and all the random events within it are not of human control. To think that one is “over” this fact is hubris. No human is immune. Life is not easy. In fact, sometimes life is so overwhelmingly difficult. The news is depressing, the injustice overwhelming…so what do we do? Denial will only strip away that last human freedom: to choose.
The great hope and the great danger, is that we have a choice. Danger smolders in the choice that one person is “over” another. Hope sparkles in the choice to engage in small everyday practices that indicate we have given life some thought. Imagine what others around you experience of the world. Envision the choice to infuse life with meaning instead of letting someone else decide what “normal” life is supposed to be. Choose mindfully and lovingly.
Deliver us from evil. Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt Dreaming the Dark, Webs of Power, for example Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl Co ntentUnitarian Church of Evanston
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