The Banality of Evil

 

From “Eichmann, the Banality of Evil, and Thinking in Arendt’s Thought” by Bethnia Assy

Eichmann in Jerusalem (2) was originated when Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem in order to report, for The New Yorker, on the trial of Otto Adolf Eichmann, (3) who was acused of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The trial began in April 15, 1961. The New York Times had announced Eichmann’s capture by Israeli agents in Argentina, in May 24, 1960. Israel and Argentina had discussed Eichmann’s extradition to Israel, and the United Nations finally decided the legality of Jerusalem Trial. After the confirmation that Eichamnn was to be judged in Israel, Arendt asked The New Yorker’s director, William Shamn, to do a complete report of the Eichmann case in Israel.

Arendt’s first reaction to Eichmann, “the man in the glass booth,” was — nicht einmal unheimlich — not even sinister.” (4) She argues that “The deeds were monstrous, but the doer … was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.” (5) Arendt’s perception that Eichmann seemed to be a common man, evidenced in his transparent superficiality and mediocrity left her astonished in measuring the unaccounted evil committed by him, that is, organizing the deportation of millions of Jews to the concentration camps. Actually, what Arendt had detected in Eichmann was not even stupidity, in her words, he portrayed something entirely negative, it was thoughtlessness. Eichmann’s ordinariness implied in an incapacity for independent critical thought: “… the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.” (6) (emphasis added) Eichmann became the protagonist of a kind of experience apparently so quotidian, the absence of the critical thought. Arendt says: “When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.” (7)

The full article, if you are interested, is here . 

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A Longing for the Past?

There is, at the moment, a preoccupation with time. Svetlana Boym has called nostalgia—the longing for a different time—a “symptom of our age.”” And Andreas Huyssen has called the “slow but palpable transformation of tem-porality in our lives” the defining characteristic of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.” This preoccupation with time and longing for another time is an effect of the “speeding up” of a globalizing late capitalism in which the increased pace of communication and exchange—of money, goods, images and people—has produced a fundamental shift in people’s relation to time. This shift can be characterized by an “increasing instability of time and the fracturing of lived space” that disorientates people’s perception of living their lives in a diachronic continuity between past, present, and figure.” Jerome Binde, making a similar argument about the temporality of late modernity, has argued that this shift in people’s relation to time has opened the way for the “tyranny of emergency” in which governments, politicians, and citizen-consumers forgo “forward-looking deliberation” in favor of instantaneous gratification, immediate results, and abstract certainties.” For both Huyssen and Binds, this “attack of the present on the rest of time”” has resulted in a crisis of the future that marks the present state of global economic and political relations.

Huyssen writes of the practice of “musealization” as symptomatic of a generalized fear of the loss of the past and of tradition in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. From Hollywood movies like Titanic and Forrest Gump, to cable channels like the History Channel, to the proliferation of memorials and monuments, musealization represents an attempt to resuscitate a (comforting) past in a present that has become alienating and disorientating. Biade calls this rush to musealize the past the “transformation of tradition into ideology” whereby the future is only imagined in terms of the repetition of an (idealized) past, a compensatory move that attempts to deny the passage of time itself. For Binde, this temporal crisis in which the future can only be imagined as the return of an illusionary past is a “measure” of our inability, as late modem societies, to relate to others. By refusing to think the future in relation to the present, and by reverting to a claim on the past that is at once invented and “frozen” in time, we remain locked within a wholly solipsistic enterprise: the familiar has to be maintained at the expense of reaching out to the difference of others.

-From Feminist Time Against Nation Time by Lisa Diedrich and Victoria Hesford

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The Magic Income Number

Perhaps money can buy happiness, after all:

What’s the magic income number? According to Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman, it’s about $75,000, at least when it comes to day-to-day happiness. “As people earn more money, their day-to-day happiness rises,”reports The Wall Street Journal. “Until you hit $75,000. After that, it is just more stuff, with no gain in happiness.” Income above $75,000, however, does improve people’s overall “life assessment.” 

–From the Freakonomics Blog

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The Interrobang

Is a discarded punctation mark dreamed up by an ad executive the symbol of our times?

Meet the interrobang:

On Monday I discovered the interrobang, and I have been thinking about it all week. And no, not because I am a grammar nerd, but because I think ? may just sum up something about our clever yet confused culture.

The interrobang is a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point. Many of us use this punctuation when we type ?!, but a real interrobang is a merger of these two symbols: ?

Punctuation expresses an attitude, an idea, and slant. Often we relegate punctuation to the background, deeming it a mere convention or formality. But with each colon, we make a point: one idea explains a previous one. Cause and effect. Sometimes we signal connections between ideas; punctuation can refine relationships between points. Although words can make an impact, punctuation, clauses, and syntax do a lot of work, too.

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The Most Isolated Man in the World

Slate Magazine reports about what they call the “most isolated man in the world,” a single member of a tribe in Brazil:

 

The most isolated man on the planet will spend tonight inside a leafy palm-thatch hut in the Brazilian Amazon. As always, insects will darn the air. Spider monkeys will patrol the treetops. Wild pigs will root in the undergrowth. And the man will remain a quietly anonymous fixture of the landscape, camouflaged to the point of near invisibility.
That description relies on a few unknowable assumptions, obviously, but they’re relatively safe. The man’s isolation has been so well-established—and is so mind-bendingly extreme—that portraying him silently enduring another moment of utter solitude is a practical guarantee of reportorial accuracy.
He’s an Indian, and Brazilian officials have concluded that he’s the last survivor of an uncontacted tribe. They first became aware of his existence nearly 15 years ago and for a decade launched numerous expeditions to track him, to ensure his safety, and to try to establish peaceful contact with him. In 2007, with ranching and logging closing in quickly on all sides, government officials declared a 31-square-mile area around him off-limits to trespassing and development.
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