Will God forgive us for what we've done? The Banality of Evil in contemporary history.

Arendt, Scorsese, and Donald Trump.

I love writing. I love writing about film. But like much of my life, these things are often impeded by the shadowy figure of my reflection. In this issue of the newsletter, I try to overcome that by tying some contemporary ruminations in with philosophy and film in more relaxed terms. Hope you enjoy.

Philosophy is mired in a sense of antiquity. Though contemporary political philosophy forges new ground in concepts previously unexplored, the conception of philosophy as a whole tends to get bogged down by a sense of agedness. No one imagines contemporary practice as a modern happening. It always exists before, belonging to a time we can’t fully understand. 

Obviously, this couldn’t be further from the truth. In a sense, philosophy is always happening- we just aren’t always aware of it. And like anything that derives itself from a period in time, the product says more about said place than any one person or idea ever could. Today’s efforts to either justify or critique the machinations of life under late capitalism are evidence of its distinct presence and understanding in our lives in the same way prior contemporary philosophers responded to the problems of their age. 

With that said, there’s perhaps no period that struggled more directly with issues of morality than that of a relatively recent tradition. The horrors of the holocaust, while seemingly increasingly misunderstood given today’s gestating nationalistic fascism, was the philosophical project of, amongst others, The Frankfurt School. Thinkers like Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, and Jurgen Habermas, to name a few, wondered how such an uninterpretable act of violence could come to be. Explaining the chain of events, much less the event in and of itself, of something like the Holocaust was important and impossible. Coming to figure how modern humanity, with little day-to-day barbarism to account for, could allow -even invite- the genocide of millions of people in front of our very eyes was something that needed explaining. 

The work produced by these thinkers varied and often critiqued a mass, systematized organization of society and its varying social structures, allowing for the manufactured amelioration of such an event, but few would strike more directly at the core of the issue than Hannah Arendt. 

In her piece on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a nazi middle man standing trial in Nuremberg, she isolates the problem succinctly:

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

In both isolated excerpts and throughout her entire ontology, Arendt pulls back the veil of linguistic ideology that could be said to have contributed to the horrors of her day and probably many others. Evil is and has never been the product of a fire-breathing, horned devil creature, moving about the earth like a nightmarish amalgamation from biblical texts. If only it were so easy. No, evil is amongst us every day. Hiding in the details and seemingly insignificant actions of an unexamined life.

Arendt’s conception of ‘personal politics’ goes beyond the idea of politics as a choice of governance. It asks for each and every person to take an active understanding in the totality of their actions so that they may at least have some conception of what it is they are directly or indirectly contributing towards. Society should ease itself off the crutches of a system that allows for the inactive participation of many so that an event like the Holocaust never happens again.

See, for Arendt, Eichmann was caught in a system that simply encouraged his bureaucratic actions- the consequences of which we separated from their actuation. Removed from the process of violence with which he enacted at the end of a pencil. He was never particularly hateful towards the subjects of his horrors. He was even deterred by the mere presence of violence. And yet, because of a sort of languid systematization of behavior, a man whose attributes amounted to nothing more consequential than your average person was responsible for hundreds, if not thousands of deaths.

Arendt’s understanding of Eichmann and the conclusions that followed drew criticism from some within the Jewish community, likening them to something of a rationalization for those who had committed heinous crimes against humanity. For this, it’s not my place to say that those concerns are invalid, but Arendt’s refusal to pinpoint the individual as the sole cause for such horrors does bring forth an uncomfortable point of contention. It’s a truth that I believe remains an issue in our world today.

If the hard work of confronting our own hypocrisies, the ease with which we can be subdued into assuming a ‘violent’ position, reaches a point that sits beyond reproach, how can we ever expect to change things for the better? For all the ills that exist in something like the Trump era, imagining that their presence, much less their removal from power, solves the issues most associate with their time at the helm is to live in a fantasy akin to those described in any text- biblical or otherwise. The posturing of Trump as the ‘Orange man bad’-devil that many assume him to be may fit some of the transgressions he’s directly responsible for, but it’s far too easy an escape for those systems and groups truly responsible for the evils of today.

Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island looks to present such a problem with shocking accuracy. In a tale where Teddy Daniels, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, constructs a reality-bending narrative to better deal with the murder of his kids by his wife, many mistook the point of the film to be inherent to the ups and downs of the immediate plot points. Scorsese’s focus on the late twist is but a parlour trick, one that ambulates the message toward a more complete representation of the complex issue at hand. Famously, Daniels, or rather, Andrew Laeddis, seemingly slips back into the character that allows him to fashion distance between himself and reality. After having a minor breakthrough via elaborate play-acting, Dr. Cawley is signaled. Laeddis is to be lobotomized, as his regression into Daniels simply won’t stick. But it’s in a final look and a question that we come to understand Laeddis’ predicament.

As he cannot stand the reality of his wife having gone insane, killing their three children and then having to kill her himself, Laeddis’ tendency to fashion distance is understandable. But before willingly succumbing to surgical catatonia, it’s Laeddis/ Daniels who asks, ‘which would be worse? To live as a monster, or die as a good man?’

While the question in and of itself is an interesting issue for those taking Philosophy 101, the context with which it is received begs a much more intriguing quandary. The entire film revolves around the perspective of an unreliable narrator; one that constructs a reality of their own from amalgamated happenings and experiences so to ameliorate the pain of what they’d done and seen. To say that each and every one of us suffers from the same illness would perhaps go a bit far, but one point that often appears overlooked in our perception of the everyday is the manner in which the biases of our individual understanding color any event. Laeddis’s conspiracy theories took real events, people, places, and things and ordered them in a way that agreed with the manner in which he sought to view the world. Yet, even in this twisted organization of The Real, breadcrumbs of ‘truth’ remained in track marks of its presentation.

Seeing his daughter’s faces in the snow during a flashback, his actions as a soldier signaled towards feelings of responsibility. That perhaps he might’ve done more to avoid the mass killings at Dachau and in his own family. The constructed narrative of Laeddis being a pyromaniacal tenant responsible for killing his wife, only to disappear in a government experiment on the island, signaled toward a sense of escape. A fiery dispersion contrasting the watery grave of reality. The glaring existence of that which is inarguably occurring is always there; it’s just not always seen. Moreover, how things are conceived is much more a result of the ever-coalescing interpretations of our lives.

The brilliance of Arendt’s counter-philosophical work within the context of the material and phenomenological Marxists of her day was that it neither supports nor directly opposes the false-dichotomy often presented to us about the nature of being within a society. In one fell swoop, Arendt insists on both a personal responsibility in which we should ease ourselves off the narratives that try and align themselves within our minds while simultaneously asking society at large to acknowledge the systems that incorporate and manufacture a sense of consent from its participants. Arendt offers us the possibility of a third option, one that does not allow for an escape in the nether of total individual or systemic blame. Rather one that acknowledges the truth of our modern reality- that our society is made up of collective individual actions. 

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Much like this here newsletter, my attempt to synthesize philosophical, cinematographic, and common prose with one another to string together cogent throughlines is a result of my perception. It is the ideology of conceptual objects that justify themselves through the reality of language that creates a self-referentially logical beginning and end. It is the projected reality of my reality that I choose, both consciously and not, to organize how I see fit. And it’s in my attempt to push forward a cohesive idea about the nature of evil and how we might avoid it that we may be reminded of Arendt in the manner Andrew Laeddis never allowed himself to. The stories we tell ourselves and to one another are what guides the understanding of what came before. The narratives we establish about history influence the future because all we have to move forward from is the past.

Where the linguistic affectations of yesteryear did well to push across a message concerning the pitfalls of sloth, greed, hubris, wrath, and the sort, perhaps the imagery of today need be adjusted so that we understand where evil truly lies. For those living in pre-modern societies, perhaps the nightmarish impossibility of familiars and winged things was enough to push forth an immediate avoidance of a deeper truth. But it’s the arrogance of modernity that must now be overcome if we’re to conquer our modern banality of evil.