Monday, November 23, 2009

Wolin on Arendt's Banality of Evil

Richard Wolin in his Heideggers Children, Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse, 2001, in addition to being a critic of Heidegger is a critic of Arendt. He doesnt believe that Arendt had the right focus in her Banality of Evil. On page 31 he writes, The problem was not just Hitler ofHitlerism, but the fact that a vast majority of Germans had consciously and willingly met their infamous Fuhrer halfway. Hitlers seizure of power was not some kind of unforeseeableindustrial accident or Betriebsunfall, as postwar Germans were fond of claiming, that befell the nation from outside and that left German traditions unscathed. Instead, the genocidal imperialism that the Nazis unleashed upon Europe represented the consummation of certain long-term trends of German history itself.

Beginning on page 58 he quotes Arendt to say The mob man, the end-result of thebourgeois, is an international phenomenon; and we would do well not to submit him to too many temptations in the blind faith that only the German mob-man is capable of such frightful deeds.

Wolin draws conclusions for her:Therefore, to punish the Germans collectively as a people, as some were inclined to do, would be misguided and senseless. Rather than being a specifically German crime, Nazi misdeeds were symptomatic of the ills of political modernity in general. They were of universal significance and, as such, could have happened anywhere. In fact, one of their distinguishing features was that they had been perpetrated neither by fanatics nor by sadists, but by normalbourgeois.. . The malefactors, she argued, were typical representatives of mass society. They were neither Bohemians, nor adventurers, nor heroes. Instead, they were family men in search of job security and career advancement.

Wolin then goes on to offer his objections to Arendts thesis: . . . the functionalist thesis, as articulated by Arendt and others, tells only part of the story. What it fails to explain is the specificity of this particular genocide. Why was it that the Nazis explicitly targeted European Jews for extermination? . . . It was not only the result of a brutal and impersonalmachinery of destruction; it was also the product of the proverbialpeculiarities of German history.

The main weakness of the functionalist approach is that it tends to underplay one of the most salient features of the Nazi rule: ideology specifically, the ideology of anti-Semitism. . . By emphasizing theuniversal constituents of the Final Solution at the expense of their specifically German qualities, she also managed to avoid implicating her country of origin . . . Margaret Canovan puts her finger on the problem when she observes:By understanding Nazism in terms not of its specifically German context but of modern developments likened to Stalinism as well, Arendt was putting herself in the ranks of many intellectuals of German culture who sought to connect Nazism with Western modernity, thereby deflecting blame from specifically German traditions.’”


In an earlier note I argued that it was more alarming to realize that what happened in Germany could happen in any nation than to see Germany, or parts of Germany, as being demonic. For if they are demonic then they are outside of us. We could never, or hardly ever (I take Wolin to be asserting), do what the Germans did. I also take Wolin to be placing the Nazi evil above the Stalinist evil because it was racist.

If Wolin were capable of removing his politically-correct blinders he might be able to see the similarities between Nazism and Stalinism. The danger is not in the demonic nature of the Germans but in the political form of government Arendt calls Totalitarianism.

Heidegger thought that a great spiritual leader could lead the Germans the correct technology-controlling path. Meanwhile, over in Moscow, the Russians thought that a great leader could lead them on the right path toward Communism. In both cases excesses, mass-murders, were engaged in for the good of the cause.

Wolin is wrong to want to demonize the Germans. He should instead criticize the idea that any leader is smart enough and knowledgeable enough to lead any nation in a good direction as a dictator. If he is an average dictator he will concentrate on preserving his power and the heck with the people. But if he is an idealistic dictator, subscribing to an ideology like National Socialism or Communism, then he may decide to purify the cause by putting enemies to death.

To imply that putting this enemy to death is more serious than putting that enemy to death misses one of Arendts point. And to imply that racism is intrinsically worthier of condemnation than totalitarianism misses another.

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