“Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.” – Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism According to Ron Rosenbaum, damning new critiques of the work of political philosopher Hannah Arendt have officially exposed her, alongside her philosophical mentor and longtime lover Martin Heidegger, as a Nazi sympathizer and self-hating Jew. Accusing Arendt of relying on anti-Semitic and Nazi references in her book citations, Rosenbaum frames Arendt as a bourgeois German cultural elitist who, ashamed of the “parochialism†of her Jewishness, ultimately “internalized the values of the anti-Semitic literature she read in her study of anti-Semitism, at least to a certain extent.†So, in effect, the two studies featured in his review conclusively discredit Arendt once and for all. Well, not quite, it turns out, as the arguments posited here are wholly unoriginal. Her citations have been a subject of criticism for decades, as is the (specious) accusation of Jewish anti-Semitism: after publishing Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, Arendt was chastised by Gustav Scholem for lacking “ahavath Yisrael” (solidarity with the Jewish people.) Moreover, one would be hard pressed to find any serious student of Arendt's philosophy who's unaware of her love affair with Martin Heidegger. All of this stuff has been a matter of public record for nearly half a century, and scholars far better qualified than yours truly have properly defended Arendt against her overzealous detractors, so no need to reinvent the wheel here. Our reviewer adds little of his own to the debate. Except his eager anticipation that his self-described “revelations†of the latest anti-Arendt appraisals “will encourage a further discrediting of the most overused, misused, abused pseudo-intellectual phrase in our language: the banality of evil.” Well, for the insights of the review to qualify as “revelations” they'd have to be original — and they're not. Further, in intimating that the banality phrase solidified Arendt’s career – suggesting that Arendt was a vulgar opportunist as well as a self-hating Jew – Rosenbaum exposes the sophomoric sloppiness of his analysis. Witness: It was the banality phrase—and the purported profundity of it in the popular mind—that elevated Arendt above the ranks of her fellow exile intellectuals in America and made her a proto-Sontag figure, a cerebral star of sorts and a revered icon in cultural-studies departments throughout America. It was the phrase that launched a thousand theses. Clearly Rosenbaum was out to lunch when he fact-checked this piece, as Arendt’s career was already firmly established before coining the banality phrase in 1963 (the year Eichmann in Jerusalem was first published); her philosophical magnum opus, The Human Condition, elevated her to prominence in 1958. But such trivialities are of little concern for our reviewer, who seems perfectly willing to sacrifice accuracy in order to steamroll through his caustic critique. Without skipping a beat, he presses on: To my mind, the use of the phrase banality of evil is an almost infallible sign of shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated. Come on, people: It's a bankrupt phrase, a subprime phrase, a Dr. Phil-level phrase masquerading as a profound contrarianism. Oooh, so daring! Evil comes not only in the form of mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash types, but in the form of paper pushers who followed evil orders. And when applied—as she originally did to Adolf Eichmann, Hitler's eager executioner, responsible for the logistics of the Final Solution—the phrase was utterly fraudulent. Again Rosenbaum utterly misses the point, as Arendt's use of the expression is anything but shallow. It specifically referred to the fact that Eichmann, though guilty as sin for his role in the Final Solution, led an otherwise innocuous life — as a vacuum-cleaner salesperson, more specifically — but nonetheless succumbed to Nazi propaganda, ultimately perpetrating one of the most diabolic crimes against humanity in recorded history. The phrase is a warning that stereotypical dictators and xenophobic reactionaries don’t maintain a monopoly on malevolence, but otherwise benign and upright members of society can just as easily be co-opted to espouse the same nefarious tendencies. The expression is perfectly valid, and, even decades after Arendt’s death, remains surprisingly prescient. Insofar as we’ve been conditioned to think that global atrocities are merely the work of an institutionalized elite, it’s a sobering reminder that the masses are quite often equally involved in the process — once they’ve been sufficiently propagandized into complacency. Take the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: in pursuit of the noble goal of serving their nation, a group of soldiers sufficiently bombarded by anti-Iraqi agitprop succumbed to the most debased of wartime excesses. These hapless kids didn’t enter Iraq with a predilection for sadism, but were co-opted by the war apparatus under which they were serving, to the point that they sacrificed their souls in the process. Arendt’s point is as instructive today as it was in 1963: unmitigated evil is a mass phenomenon, and only by incorporating the banal into the analysis of atrocity can we develop a truly informed understanding of moral culpability. Finally, it’s worth pointing out that Rosenbaum seems to have a hidden agenda in his excoriation of Arendt’s work. Though he is careful throughout the bulk of his analysis to obscure any ulterior motives, at the end of the piece he can’t resist extending his critique of Arendt, whose Jewish self-loathing allegedly emanates from the “parochialism†of Germanic high culture, to other Jews who share her parochial worldview. As evidenced by, perish the thought, their insufficient support for Israel: One can still hear this Arendtian shame about ethnicity these days. So parochial! One can hear the echo of Arendt's fear of being judged as “merely Jewish” in some, not all, of those Jews so eager to dissociate themselves from the parochial concerns of other Jews for Israel. The desire for universalist approval makes them so disdainful of any “ethnic” fellow feeling. After all, to such unfettered spirits, it's so banal. To argue against the suggestion that Jewish ambivalence (or insufficient loyalty) toward Israel is tantamount to anti-Semitism is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this essay, as there’s no dearth of commentators who’ve properly dealt with such a glaringly vulgar proposition. To add my voice to a debate against a position that has no moral leg to stand on in the first place strikes me as, well, banal. Daanish Faruqi is an occasional contributor to Bikya Masr. BM
