Adolph Eichmann, Funny Man

Laughter is the change up that makes the fastball more effective.

QED

Just to add, possibly without relevance to much, Scot Atran has written about what encourages Jihadists to violence (and more specifically self sacrifice), where he argues that rather than being nihilists (which seems obvious) they should be seen as extreme moralists, who dont kill (others and themselves) for material gain, religious brainwashing, humiliation etc, but to right what they perceive as wrongs and for others within their (small, specific, terror) social network.(they die for eachother)
I dont think he generalised this phenomenon (in fact he argued it was quite specific to these groups IIRC) , but could historys mass killers be seen as ‘extreme moralists’ ? (theyre certainly not ‘nihilists’ from my – admittedly limited – understanding of the term?)

As for Gray, he flags a pernicious abstraction, but then turns the abstraction up to 11. The metaphysics of evil aren’t relevant to ISIS; they’re a band of assholes who ideally could be stopped from their campaign of misery and murder. Doesn’t mean new assholes won’t pop up, any more than doing the laundry means your clothes are now clean for all time. Gray is ending up in quietism.

“Laughter, Arendt observed in a 1944 essay on Kafka, “permits man to prove his essential freedom through a kind of serene superiority to his own failures.””

and

“Laughter does not minimize evil; it denies evil the final word.”

Wonderfully insightful.

Gray’s article is quite interesting. I think his point taken from Freud is a good one.
Though I tend to think in Jung’s terms, without the mysticism. One of my major problems with religion is the externalization of “evil”. We don’t want to admit it, but we are all capable of what we call evil. We are also capable of what we call good. Any one of us could be or become Eichmann or Mother Teresa. As humans we have to come to terms with what we are capable of. The question we have to deal with is how to minimize the evil.

JW Mason – Well yes. When someone asks a series of questions (prefaced by ‘I hope this isnt off topic’) they’re implicitly acknowledging they might be missing the point. They are questions, not statements of certainty, asked in the context of the linked article in my comment which (appeared, from my reading) to be implying that it can also be seen ‘as a personal quality, on some level (I dont know)
What I wondering, from someone who might know, was whether there *is* a pyschological categorisation (for want of a better wording) for people who rise to these positions, or help implement these schemes. What would a psycologist think about Arendt’s argument ?
I can understand if you thought the questions were stupid or trivial, but missing the point I don’t (unless you mean to imply Arendt’s position gospel?)

lynne – Im probably not expressing what Im trying to say properly. Ill think more about it and get back to you (or not, as the case may be)

From article Ronan linked:

The view that evil is essentially banal, presented by Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), is another version of the modern evasion of evil.

You know how ‘evil’ is evaded? By nattering on about it. (As if it were ‘out there.’)

“Laughter does not minimize evil; it denies evil the final word.”

This reminds me of the famous story about Sigmund Freud being required to declare he had not been mistreated before being allowed to leave Vienna for London.

He wrote “Ich kann die Gestapo jedermann auf das beste empfehlen”, which is usually translated as “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone”.

It is good manners, and good morals, never to ridicule, never to laugh at, but only laugh with. The one exception is to ridicule small-mindedness and quintessential stupidity *when and where it threatens to be taken at its own estimate*. I say this because the perpetrators of the Final Solution thought themselves to be doing something ‘holy’, a word much used in their rhetoric. So to treat them at their own estimate, as being trans-historical and equally holy, though wholly/holy negative rather than positive, as has been done by so many in both Israel and Germany, still gives away far too much to those noxious bird-brained bigots. Dr Seuss would be the man to take their measure.

And while I’m slagging on Gray, this is just stupid:

Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil tends to support the defence of his actions that Eichmann presented at his trial: he had no choice in doing what he did.

Oh please. Arendt opens up the whoop-ass on the notion that any of the Nazi murderers “didn’t have a choice,” let alone Eichmann. He stuck with the job, on her account, because he saw advancement in that direction. (His own hatred of Jews, which he underplayed at trial, may’ve sweetened the path or may’ve been something he acquired/affected in the course thereof.) But there was no reason to think he couldn’t have gotten into another division, or even quit the Gestapo.

Most evil is banal because most people are banal.

Here’s a more sophisticated and less polemical version of Gray’s argument (more or less)

http://www.sagepub.com/isw6/articles/ch3haslam.pdf

‘Evil’ as an interaction of personal and enviornmental factors (evil might not be the best term, but still .. )

#9 Lynne

Ronan rf, it seems very strange to me to treat evil as a psychiatric diagnosis rather than as a moral choice/action.

OK, let’s try it in terms of moral choice.

We shouldn’t judge morality by outcomes, because nobody really knows for sure what the outcomes are even after considerable study after the fact. You certainly can’t guess what all the outcomes will be because it isn’t over yet.

So we judge morality by intentions. In that context the drunk who kills a car full of strangers on the road is innocent — he had no idea it would happen and if he thought it was likely he wouldn’t do it. His judgement suffers, and we can’t blame him for accidents he did not expect.

We can blame him for making choices while his judgement is poor, but who among us is good at avoiding that? Suppose that you make a thoughtful, well-considered CT post which enrages some conservative to the point that he goes out and kills an abortion doctor. Shouldn’t you have had sufficient judgement that you would be careful not to do that? Ah, but your intentions were good. You only wanted to enrage him, you didn’t want him to do anything about it.

So if a collaborator believes that he is caught up in giant historical forces that will proceed about the same with or without him, he personally does better if he is allowed to join them. Like the song goes, “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail”. He doesn’t have to believe that his own contribution is decisive or even important. (Eichmann said he thought he was important, but many underlings will not think so.) If you do a good enough job that they don’t get rid of you and replace you with somebody better, then you can get by.

And so I think maybe the basic evil is the idea that you should look out for yourself and your friends more than you do for every single other human. If we try to do the best we can for everybody in the world, that’s good. Whenever we get away from “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” we are evil at heart.

It is a banal evil because almost everybody does it almost all the time.

ZM:

Thx for helping me to understand why we are unable to communicate. I cannot imagine anyone not laughing at, say “Investigations of a Dog”, or “A Report to an Academy”.

To the OP: Perhaps what we think of as “ludicrousness” is key to understanding how Eichmann can be viewed as funny (viz., the example of the passengers’ luggage in the OP). Ludicrousness is apt to evoke sardonic or mocking laughter in almost any context.

Also, too: ZM and I agree on something! Just guessing (under-grad major in psych decades ago, which I don’t credit much), but it seems unlikely that modern (PM?!) psychology would consider “evil” to represent a coherent category of behaviors with real-world implications (not that there are that many coherent categories in psych to begin with, but that’s another subject*).

*Not a criticism, per se, just a recognition of how difficult it is to be “scientific” in the social sciences.

I think that what provoked paroxysms of laughter in Arendt, when reading through reams of horrific transcripts and documents, was an accumulating sense of the sheer stupidity of it all. In part, that might have been a defensive reaction, but it might also have been a sense of helpless futility, in the face of the demand that “we” take it all “seriously”, as if intelligible sense could always be made out and the whole matter rationalized. The whole process of asking for Eichmann’s rationalizations, which could only be pitifully inadequate, made non-sense of the solemnity of the proceedings.

That’s where Kafka comes in, as the past master of perfectly calibrated absurdity, with his equally child-like and solemn tone, inimitable, and his ruthless legalistic logic. Absurdity, depending on how one is situated, can elicit two contrary reactions: horror and/or ironic amusement. Those who don’t grasp why Kafka is “funny” also don’t grasp his acuity, which is often mistaken for “prophecy”.

“[A] very grim telling of what you have to look forwards to if you are going to be a grown up in modern times.”

Yes; “The Judgment”, et al.

From TJ to the ones I mentioned above is a vast distance on the spectrum of un-funny to funny. That’s a kind of “range”, I suppose.

Never mind Mel Brooks and The Producers, what about Hogan’s Heroes? Made just 20 years after the war, every actor who played a German, including the Gestapo officers, was a Jew.

Indeed, Colonel Klink was played by the son of the famous conductor Otto Klemperer.

He was also the nephew of Victor Klemperer, whose diaries about life as a Jew in Dresden under the Nazi regime are must reading. Victor also wrote an excellent book about the Nazis perversion of language – “The Language of the Third Reich”.

Here’s my favorite Kafka story (I hope this don’t violate too many IP laws). It’s wickedly funny, pun intended; the combination of child-like sincerity and ruthless legalistic logic, as jch said. Matthew Yglesias used to write a bit like that; maybe he still does, I don’t read him anymore.

Passers-by

When at night we go for a walk, and a man, from afar already visible – as the street before us climbs uphill and there is a full moon – comes running towards us, we are not going to catch him, even if he is weak and rugged, even if someone is shouting and running after him; rather we will let him go and run off.

For it is night, and we can’t help it if the street before us is uphill in the full moon, moreover those two may perhaps have started that chase for their amusement; perhaps they are both chasing a third one; perhaps the first is innocent and the second wants to kill, and we would become accomplices of a murder; perhaps they do not even know each other and are running on their own way to bed; perhaps they are sleepwalkers, or perhaps the first one is armed.

In the end, have we not the right to be tired, and have we not drunk so much wine? How glad we are when also the second one has disappeared from our sight.

[Freud] wrote “Ich kann die Gestapo jedermann auf das beste empfehlen”, which is usually translated as “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone”.

Quite possibly the joke of the century.

Regarding Mengele, surely the point is that without people like Eichmann, he would never have had the opportunities he did. Any fool can be a psycho but it takes a striver to get you dozens of train paths a day through the rearward areas of the biggest land invasion in the history of war.

“the sort of brain scanning done by neuroscientists that can identify a lack of empathy in individuals ”

This is a deviation, not very common. What is common, however, is our ability to rationalize. We all are capable of it, that’s why these bad things happen.

@18. This reminds me of the famous story about Sigmund Freud being required to declare he had not been mistreated before being allowed to leave Vienna for London.

Unfortunately, like most great stories, that one appears to be apocryphal.

http://diepresse.com/home/spectrum/zeichenderzeit/1413372/Die-Schrift-des-Dr-Indra

47: Brings to mind, from the Wikipedia article on Eichmann:

Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal said: “The world now understands the concept of ‘desk murderer’. We know that one doesn’t need to be fanatical, sadistic, or mentally ill to murder millions; that it is enough to be a loyal follower eager to do one’s duty.”

Was Wiesenthal just plain wrong, too?

49: I took it as rather grim laughter, since the Jews were not going to be needing their baggage where they were going.

… An aside: anyone interested in the post-publication mess, or just having a fondness for the polemical Arendt, should check out “The Formidable Dr. Robinson.

Haven’t read her book, but at least one review was inadvertently funny:

Yet as Bettina Stangneth demonstrates in “Eichmann Before Jerusalem,” her critical — albeit respectful — dialogue with Arendt, these insights most certainly do not apply to Eichmann himself. Throughout his post-1945 exile he remained a passionate, ideologically convinced National Socialist. He proudly signed photos with the title ­“Adolf Eichmann — SS-­Obersturmbannführer (retired)” and, quite unlike a plodding functionary, boasted of his “creative” work. At one point he described the mass deportation of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews as his innovative masterpiece: “It was actually an achievement that was never matched before or since.”

Those sound like anecdotes Arendt would have had no trouble whatsoever fitting into her book. “Retired,” indeed.

This is a boiler-point illustration of how fascism works. From Quantrill’s Raiders to the Klu Klux Klan, to the Freikorps, to the Japanese military in China, to Ferguson, Mo. Underlings were supposed to take the initiative in carrying out the supposed unspoken general wishes of their leaders — the crazier the better.

Well there are a lot of people in this review

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/misreading-hannah-arendts-eichmann-in-jerusalem/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1

“In the German weekly Der Spiegel, Elke Schmitter argued that new evidence shows Eichmann’s “performance in Jerusalem was a successful deception” — that Arendt apparently missed the true Eichmann, a fanatical anti-Semite. In a review in The New Republic, Saul Austerlitz wrote that Arendt’s “book makes for good philosophy, but shoddy history.” David Owen, a professor of social and political philosophy at the University of Southampton, recently faulted the movie for not grasping that “while Arendt’s thesis concerning the banality of evil is a fundamental insight for moral philosophy, she is almost certainly wrong about Eichmann.” In an essay in The New York Times in May, Fred Kaplan wrote that “Arendt misread Eichmann, but she did hit on something broader about how ordinary people become brutal killers.” ”

Someway supporting novakant. I guess it’s splitting hairs, though.

Just to add, (then Ill leave it as three posts is too much), but there’s obviously going to be a difference with what Arendt wrote (in all its depth and complication) at the time, and what her argument becomes down the years (a strawman and caricature) .. so Id assume it’s unlikely her argument *as laid out in the book* was ‘just plain wrong’ , more the simplification that developed.

I read the Gray essay linked to by Ronan(rf) in comment uno, and it formed a tension in my mind with the OP — it was totally derailing for my mind if not the thread, but in a good way, I think.

Identifying some person or group as evil, in common usuage, does seem to have the function of absolving the accuser. That certainly was not what Arendt was doing, but the “simplification” as Ronan(rf) called it makes way for that usage.

I have little difficulty imagining Eichmann or Mengele living “normal” lives in a less disrupted society. One a petty bureaucrat the other, say, an academic medical doctor — the types are not unfamiliar. I’m not saying that Eichmann “was just following orders” or that Mengele was not a psychopath; what I’m saying is that high-functioning psychopaths are not all that rare.

In “normal” society, we put up with them, treat them as “serious people”. And, if we make jokes, as the OP suggests, we fail to notice that a very large fraction of the population do not get the joke, literally do not understand the irony, do not hear the sarcasm, do not recognize the satire.

P.S. I thought the Evans review was outstanding — his characterization of Arendt’s classic essay was elegant in accurately summarizing her attitude as expressing a rare independence of mind. It is precisely because she so strongly resisted tribal modes that it is difficult for some to understand and respect that remarkable work.

Just for fun, Kafka’s story “A Message from the Emperor”, dramatizing, perhaps, the futility of God’s attempts to communicate with humans, ending gently with “You, however, sit at your window and dream of the message when evening comes”, reminds me of the lengthy path a photon takes to escape from the thermonuclear chaos of the sun’s interior.

The messenger set out at once; a strong, an indefatigable man; thrusting forward now this arm, now the other, he cleared a path though the crowd; every time he meets resistance he points to his breast, which bears the sign of the sun; and he moves forward easily, like no other.

It’s only eight and a half minutes from the sun to the earth, but forty thousand years to get from the sun’s interior to the surface.