Evildoers

Not long after the movie “Psycho” gave us evil as the product of derangement, which other movies soon dumbed down even further to become evil as a crazed indulgence of baser instincts, the philosopher Hannah Arendt in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil”, gave us an almost diametrically opposite view of evil. A very civilized one – evil as a product of bureaucratic habit, an averting one’s attention from the meaning of what one is doing.

Those types of evil do occur as do, I’m sure, many others. But, I suspect the most commonplace form of evil and probably the one with the greatest destructive capacity (ax murderers may be scary, but their victim counts rarely reach double digits), is an evil that doesn’t involve either crazed madmen or nebbishes who avert their eyes. Rather, it is evil looked at squarely by the perpetrator and then rationalized into insignificance or, at the very least, justified on the grounds that it is done in response to a greater evil.

As examples, how about the sanctioned practice of torture as well as the terrorist incidents that supposedly justify it? There’s no avoidance going on in either of those cases, nor are those responsible dismissing conscience altogether. Instead they employ our immense powers of rationalization that, as George Orwell showed us, can turn war into peace, hatred into love, and black into white. And the beauty of rationalization is that it doesn’t require psychological mayhem or disorientation, which can be difficult to arrange and even harder to sustain. Even the factual and logical underpinnings don’t have to overwhelming. They merely have to be sufficient to create doubt . . . just enough to allow us to give the benefit of the doubt to that which we want to do anyway.

That seems to me the to be the thread that runs through four books, three of which are reviewed by David Cole in the current (January 15, 2009) “New York Review of Books” – “Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values” by Philippe Sands, “The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book” by Michael Ratner, and “Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond” by Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh. Also mentioned is Jane Mayer’s “The Dark Side”, which I recently completed.

What frightens me is that in many ways, those involved don’t seem very different from you and I and, if that’s true, how are we to stand against a power as great as that of our own reasoning? And how will we know when we fail?