From Theodicy to Anthropodicy: The Banalities of Evil

Abstract

This article defends the idea that evil is a notion dependent on social and cultural judgment, and that in our societies, it implies the idea of free will. There is no metaphysics of evil, but rather an anthropology, a myriad of specifically human incidences linked to situations, to good or evil intentions, to specific relationships such as wars, torture, violence, rape, cruelty, abuse, and so on. Their consequences involve suffering and death, sometimes deliberately. The anthropological question of evil differs from a metaphysical conception of human nature.

1. The Ordinariness of Evil

To fight evil is to fight oneself (Octavio Paz 1996, Itinéraire).

In 1975, at a gallery in Naples, Marina Abramovic presented a performance entitled Rythme 0. She left herself entirely to the initiative of visitors, mainly gallery regulars and art directors, and invited them to do with her as they wished for six hours. Seventy-two instruments are laid out on a table, providing pleasure or pain: needles, thorns, a loaded gun, scissors, pins, a hammer, a saw, a fork, a rose, honey, a pen, a Polaroid camera, a bottle of perfume, a feather, and so on. For the first three hours, the intimidated public remained at a distance, holding out the rose, placing the shawl on their shoulders and being kissed. Little by little, prohibitions fade. Often, the women told the men what to do. Then a man cuts off her T-shirt and removes it. She is manipulated like a puppet, made in order to strike poses. One man writes “End” on her forehead with a tube of lipstick. Another photographs her and puts the Polaroids in her hand. Then two men lift her, lay her on a table and stick a knife near her crotch. Another pricks her with a pin. Another slashes her neck with a knife and sucks her blood. A spectator grabs a pistol and arms it, bringing it close to her neck. At this point, a conflict breaks out between those who want to protect her and those who want the performance to continue without restriction. The man with the gun is finally expelled from the gallery. “I was in a terrible state, half-naked, bleeding, with wet hair. And then a strange thing happened; at that moment, the spectators still present were suddenly afraid of me. When I walked towards them, they ran out of the gallery […] The next morning, I looked in the mirror and saw that I had a large lock of grey hair. In that instant, I realized that the public can kill you” (Abramovic 2017, p. 89). This was the discovery of evil by an artist who played at transgression, believing herself protected by a common morality, a trust necessary to the social bond.

Moral evil is just one possible example of the woes of the world, often associated with a more general idea of the precariousness inherent in the human condition. Empedocles gives a place to what might be called evil, seeing in love and hate, friendship and discord, the very dialectical principle of the human being. Good in principle is what unites and implies love, concord. Evil is that which separates, divides and opposes. “Evil is always defined as separation, the rupture of harmony, either within the same being, or between all beings. This is because every evil will pursue isolated ends which, sacrificing the Whole to the part, always undermine the integrity of the Whole and threaten to annihilate it” (Lavelle 1940, p. 53). Hence, the innumerable forms of evil. “Described from the outside, malevolence appears as a passion to dislocate”, adds Jankélévitch (2018, p. 355). Understood in a broad sense to include both the frailties of the human condition and the perverse actions of certain men, evil is, for every religious conscience, an objection, a reluctance in the face of the final imperfection of a creation harboring such a formidable grain of sand. Religious systems in particular have integrated human suffering into their explanation of the universe. They have sought to justify it in the eyes of God, the gods, or the cosmos, and to indicate the ways in which men should accept or combat it. For many cultures, the humanization of horror involves the religious determination of its cause and a moral code of behavior that is not respected by a population or individuals.

However, there are no metaphysics of evil, but rather an anthropology, a myriad of specifically human incidences linked to situations, to good or evil intentions, to specific relationships such as wars, torture, violence, rape, cruelty, abuse, and so on. The purpose is now less to question the justice of God than that of men, thus, implying the passage from a theodicy to an anthropodicy. Listing these situations makes little sense, as they are so numerous, and sometimes completely independent of the aims of those who cause them. However, their consequences involve suffering and death, sometimes deliberately. Evil “belongs to the problem of freedom […] This is why we can be responsible for it, take it upon ourselves, confess to it and fight against it” (Ricoeur 2004, p. 13). Evil is an objection not only to God, but also to the reason of philosophers, to whom it reminds us how irreducible human beings are to the Good, or to the reasonable. “Attempting to understand evil through freedom is in no way a decision about the origin of evil, but merely a description of the place where evil appears and from which it can be seen” (Ricoeur 2009, p. 14). As a survivor of the camps of Nazi Germany, Jorge Semprun also says in his own way that evil is everywhere and always, deeply rooted in the human condition: “Of course, this experience can be had anywhere […] You don’t need concentration camps to know evil. But here, it will have been crucial and massive, it will have invaded everything, devoured everything […]. It’s the experience of radical Evil […]. Evil is not the inhuman, of course […]. Or else it’s the inhuman in man […]. Man’s inhumanity as a vital possibility, as a personal project […]. As freedom […] It is therefore derisory to oppose evil, to distance oneself from it by a simple reference to the human, to the human species […]. Evil is one of the possible projects of the freedom constitutive of man’s humanity” (Semprun 1994, pp. 120–21).

2. From Theodicy to Anthropology

The anthropological question of evil differs from a metaphysical conception of human nature. It is not posed in theological terms. Evil has no origin, no materiality, but it never ceases to resurface with a logical ubiquity in that it is potentially born with each individual. Rousseau points this out in his Emile: Man no longer seeks the author of evil. There is no other evil than the one you do or suffer, and both come from you. No original sin gives evil a natural and irresistible evidence. Evil is no longer demonic, but a fact of the secular human condition, residing in certain men and in certain situations that lead men to acts that lead to the suffering of others. He is a choice, never a necessity. “The devil is quite optimistic if he thinks he can make human beings worse than they are,” Karl Kraus ironically said.

Evil is no longer about the frailties of the human condition, vulnerability to illness, accidents, climatic or meteorological adversities included in a paradigm of fragility (Le Breton, 2015, 2017), but which ultimately does not involve an intentionality to bruise. Evil implies an intention to harm or moral indifference to the consequences of one’s actions. Fire, rain, volcanoes and the earth do not have evil intentions towards people. “The evil of wickedness,” writes Jankélévitch, “thus serves to embitter what constitutional evil has not corrupted; in their blood thirsty wickedness, men destroy what earthquakes and scarlet fever would have adventurously spared; wickedness and destiny, they share the task, they take turns and double each other, man bringing of his own accord to the malfeasance of destiny the reinforcement of a malevolence that is his personal contribution to disorder” (Jankélévitch 2018, p. 297).

The individual who fights against the injustice he has suffered, the aggression to which he is subjected, the massacre of his loved ones in the name of God or some other principle, is not fighting against evil but against very concrete situations with men who bear a face and embody malevolence. For Jean Nabert, the first experience of ethics is that of evil, i.e., the feeling of injustice, the indignation against a particular situation that should never have existed, and that demands to be fought. “Certain actions […] seem unjustifiable to us, even though we cannot point to the normative being they deny” (Nabert 1955, 3). For Jean Nabert, evil is what is unacceptable. It is not only the result of individual acts, but is often inherent in social organization itself, through inequalities, injustices and domination. “I am irremediably caught up in an ethical relationship with myself, where I play both the role of the one who sees and the one who is seen, the judge and the justiciable.” (Devillairs 2019, p. 66).

Social morality is of course cultural, in the sense that one person’s evil is often another’s good. People slaughter those of a different ethnicity or creed to satisfy their group or their gods. No one feels that slitting a prisoner’s throat is an act of evil, because God or the Party demand it. He deserves his fate because of his opinions, ethnicity or disbelief, for example, just as his loved ones are slaughtered for the same reasons. Criteria of right and wrong have no universal foundation, and dissolve into identitarian demands that are not afraid to call for the murder of those who are not exactly of the same group, or from the same region, or who are supposed not to respect divine commandments, even if their victims have never heard of them. The concern to find universal benchmarks of right and wrong is rather a Western preoccupation, far from being one of total consensus. The bomber in a popular market, or the man who opens fire on the shoppers on a terrace or the spectators at a concert, is convinced that he is acting for God’s good by killing countless miscreants who, in his eyes, embody so many figures of evil.

3. Ordinary Man

In 1963, Hannah Arendt attended Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. Unlike the Nuremberg defendants, she saw him not as a monster, but as a bland, banal character, a high-ranking civil servant devoted to his work with no concern for its consequences. She discovers an intelligent, disciplined man, without the slightest imagination, integrated without relief into a hierarchy, and totally subordinating his thoughts to it. He is neither a doctrinaire, nor a sadist, nor a psychopath. Arendt makes Eichmann a possible paradigm of the subject in totalitarian regimes, men or women who fit into the machinery without judging it, blindly applying rules that lead entire populations to the worst. They are lived by their lives, not living their lives. “Banality of evil,” she writes, but by no means a banal evil. She then draws out one of the principles of secular thinking on evil: “Evil is most of the time the work of people who have never been able to decide whether to be good or evil, whether or not to perform evil” (Arendt 2013, p. 205). They are indifferent to the question of good and evil. They just go with the flow. They kill or torture because the authorities they submit to tell them to. They erase themselves from any moral position. They are not evil individuals, but ordinary ones; they apply instructions without hindsight, they are guiltless when forced to examine their crimes in retrospect; they had no intention of doing harm, but only the concern to apply instructions correctly.

Another example among a thousand: Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, obeyed the same principles. He writes that he never felt the slightest hatred for Jews. “I certainly considered them enemies of our people, but I wanted to treat them just like the other prisoners, making no distinction between them” (Hoess 1959, p. 174). He accepted Himmler’s request to set up a “mass extermination” facility at Auschwitz. “There was certainly something monstrous in this order […] but the arguments he presented to me made his instructions seem perfectly justified. I didn’t have to think: I had to carry out the order. My horizons were not broad enough to allow me to form a personal judgment on the need to exterminate all Jews” (Hoess 1959, p. 194).

The death camps stand out as one of the most tragic incidences of evil, with a social and political organization and a lot of executors who killed, raped or tortured with complete peace of mind, without ever having been aware that they were the cogs of hell. Eichmann did not want evil, he did not see it, he obeyed orders in the conviction that his country was right, that he was defending essential values to the Germany of his time. When Arendt speaks of Eichmann’s inability to think, she is nevertheless trying to distinguish him from the ordinary individual, but Eichmann thought his actions, he measured their consequences; he simply thought of them as legitimate, consistent with his political commitment, in no way as monstrosities. He too had desires, aspirations, and intelligence in the organization of the camps. Moreover, for many Nazi dignitaries, culture and a love of music or literature went hand in hand with evil.

Totalitarian regimes like those of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union could not have survived without the permanent support of the masses against all odds. “Totalitarian regimes involve the entire population, for they dominate individuals in every aspect of their existence in an “organized complicity” that erases all innocence, for “the dividing line between persecutor and persecuted, between murderer and victim, is blurred” (Arendt 2005, p. 192). Arendt sees in this “the murder in man of the moral person” (2005, p. 190). There is no innocence for entire populations, because doing nothing is already complicity with evil, and sometimes acting against evil turns out to be worse than evil. Primo Levi also insists on this when he speaks of the “gray zone”, that of collaborators with evil who are sometimes convinced that they are doing “good”, or others who simply want to save their own skins, even at the cost of sacrificing others. “There isn’t a prisoner who doesn’t remember it, and who remembers his astonishment: the first threats, the first insults, the first blows didn’t come from the SS but from others prisoners, from “comrades” of these mysterious figures who were also wearing the same zebra-striped uniform that they, the new arrivals, had just put on” (Levi 1989, p. 29). The boundary between good and evil is porous, circumstantial, without transparency or reassuring clarity.

In a chapter of his book Tout passe (1984), Vassili Grossman evokes men who knowingly denounced, betrayed, and falsely accused others. They behaved ignobly, but in a social context where innocence and guilt no longer had any meaning, as living in Soviet totalitarianism implied countless compromises and prevented any innocence. “These men wished no harm to anyone, but all their lives they had done evil” (Grossman 1984, p. 251). Arendt also reminds us that it’s impossible to imagine a population deceived by effective propaganda: everyone saw with their own eyes the daily atrocities, the arbitrariness, the deportations, the acts of violence, and the meticulous monitoring of all forms of behavior, yet they never ceased to support the system. Most of these people were passive, others enthusiastic. Only rarely were they men likely to say with Richard III: I am determined to be a villain. They would have disavowed such a statement. They were not doing evil, but building a better world by eliminating what they saw as parasites of various kinds. They were criminals, but they did not know it. Their only humanity was that of the Party.

Even, on the contrary, the man faced with horror who refuses to see “does not shriek when the monster begins to devour his own children, nor if he himself becomes a victim of persecution, if he is unjustly condemned, expelled from the party, if he is sent to forced labor or in a concentration camp. On the contrary, to the stupor of the civilized universe, he may even be ready to help his accusers and fabricate his own death sentence” (Arendt 2005, p. 40). No argumentation, no testimony, no horror perpetrated before the eyes of the people changes their overwhelming adherence. At least in the case of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, or other totalitarian societies that demanded the massive complicity of the people. The deterioration of the social bond is such that “as soon as a man is accused, his former friends immediately turn into his most bitter enemies; in order to save their skins, they become snitches and hasten to corroborate with their denunciations evidence that did not exist” (Arendt 2005, p. 64). Yet when the Allies tried to find a convinced Nazi, there was not one left. Beyond hypocrisy, other criteria of right and wrong that pre-dated Nazi Germany were making a come-back.

The promoters of evil belong to the human condition, not detached from it by a kind of evil magnetism that distinguishes them from the rest, a kind of chaff among the good grains. “At Buchenwald, the SS, the kapos, the snitches, the sadistic torturers, were just as much part of the human species as the best and purest among us. The frontier of evil is not the frontier of the inhuman, it’s something else entirely. Hence the need for an ethic that transcends this original fund in which the freedom of Good and Evil are equally rooted […]. An ethic, then, that forever frees itself from theodicies and theologies, since God, by definition, as the Thomists have sufficiently proclaimed, is innocent of Evil” (Semprun 1994, p. 216). As David Rousset puts it: “Normal men don’t know that everything is possible” (Rousset 1946, p. 181). In Nazi Germany, “what was so seductive was that terrorism had become a kind of philosophy expressing frustration, resentment and blind hatred, a kind of political expressionism that expressed itself through bombs, that watched with delight the publicity given to its dazzling actions, and that was entirely ready to pay with its life to force normal society to acknowledge its existence” (Arendt 2005, p. 78).

This is not a trial against humanity as a whole. Men are also caught in a system that forces them at least to the semblance, but sometimes imposes deadly actions on them. Primo Levi himself intends to introduce nuances into the degree of freedom to do evil. “It would be imprudent to immediately pronounce a moral judgment. We must clearly state the principle that the greatest fault lies with the system, with the very structure of the totalitarian system, and that it is always difficult to assess the contribution made by individual collaborators (never sympathetic, never transparent). This is a judgment we would like to entrust only to those who have had the opportunity to verify for themselves what it means to act under duress” (Levi 1989, p. 43). All these crimes were perpetrated by ordinary men plunged into an extreme situation, even if some perverts were able to satisfy their inclination in the straight line of power.

Not everyone, however, despite moral constraints, chose to lend a hand to the executioners, even if the effect of social gravity was powerful. Christophe Browning reports that a battalion of “ordinary” men was called to execute the Jews of Josefhow. After the horror of the first few days’ executions, the commander asks them who wishes to continue the mission and who prefers to give up. He promises them that they will not be punished. Only a dozen men out of five hundred withdrew, the others continuing the massacres day after day (Browning 1994, p. 93). Of course, beyond any morality, analytical data partly explain this conformism in horror and the lifting of all moral inhibitions: the virulence of some men’s antisemitism, the “esprit de corps”, the fear of losing face, an affirmation of virility, acceptance of the brutality of war, the feeling of having no choice, the fear of reprisals. The vast majority of these men who accept to be executors draw the content of their conscience from what others think alongside them. They divest themselves of their own thoughts, or rather, they deduce their thoughts from what others do. Even torturers and serial killers, dictators who massacre their populations, never imagine themselves as evil figures. Nor do school killers or followers of religious fundamentalism who are convinced they are doing God’s work. This question does not concern them. They follow their path, their desires, convinced of their legitimacy. They are beyond good and evil. They absolutize their desires and their person, seeing others only as instruments to serve them, and disregarding the feelings of those they coerce. Such temptations to exert unbridled power over others are found in many individuals driven by resentment, hatred, a thirst for vengeance or a desire to impose their ideology or even to exist in the eyes of the world through the horror they might provoke, but without actually doing so. “It may be said that such wickedness is rare, but it’s not certain that it never flashes through the most benevolent and pure consciences: so true is it that the human condition obeys common laws from which no individual in the world can consider himself delivered […] We don’t think that, in wickedness, the will to cause suffering is ever isolated. It is always associated with some external motive, as we see in the motive of revenge, where the will to impose suffering on the one by whom we have suffered is always allied either to the need to conquer after having been conquered, or even to the idea of a restored balance and satisfied justice” (Lavelle 1940, p. 5051). It is never evil for evil’s sake, but always for good reasons, at least for its author. In this sense, it sometimes takes a great deal of inner strength to repel their desire for cruelty by hurting, bruising, or killing others. What is it that keeps us from giving in to the temptation to exercise power over others?

In 1971, a study by Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University in California, showed how ordinary students caught up in an experiment embraced their role without distance, going beyond the arbitrary, forgetting fiction to zealously match the role they had been assigned. Paid students are invited to contribute to an experiment on the effects of prison life. Successful candidates are arbitrarily divided into two groups. The faculty premises are temporarily given the appearance of a prison. Once the system is in place, students who are assigned to the role of inmates are arrested at home and placed under the discretion of those who play the role of guards. From then on, the latter assume their role without any distance, accentuating their power. They add to the arbitrariness by requiring their authorization to go to the toilet. Thus, the inmates are forced to defecate or urinate in a bucket that they were sometimes forbidden to empty. Many other unnecessary cruelties were inflicted on so-called inmates.

The fact of not being the executioner but obeying orders, of using technical mediation, renders the harm done to others abstract and lifts all inhibitions. This is the lesson of Stanley Milgram’s (1974) classic study, in which he observed the obedience of a large majority of people who, in the name of science, were asked to send electric shocks to subjects supposedly taking part in a study on memory, every time they made a mistake. Naturally, they simulate a suffering that they do not feel since the object of the investigation is the degree of obedience of those hired to monitor it. In the name of authority, they send out seemingly ever-stronger discharges, more or less aware of the suffering they believe they are inflicting. Few of these people with the levers to punish withdraw from the experiment, and for those who remain “there is neither irritation, nor a spirit of vengeance, nor hatred among the subjects who have made the victim suffer” (1974, p. 232). They are a kind of civil servants of evil, filled with a good conscience. Authority and distance from the target dissolve all ethical restraint. “The man sitting in front of the button that can turn the target country into the Armageddon of the Apocalypse presses it with the same emotion as if he were calling an elevator” (1974, pp. 195–196). However, this distance is only a facilitator, as experience shows that in many cases torture is exercised with the addition of a strong personal coefficient not required by the circumstances.

4. The Ability to Turn Away from Evil

The American writer David Vann reconstructs the course of Steve Kazmierczak who kills 5 students and injures 18 before committing suicide at North Illinois University on Valentine’s Day 2008. In Last Days on Earth, he wonders why he, who did not have a happy childhood, did not become this young killer that no one recognized in his murderous gesture. Reading the information gathered about him, he wonders: “I found the story of someone who really did almost escaped all this, who almost managed to avoid becoming a mass murderer, someone trying to make something of himself after a wretched childhood, and mental health history, someone attempting the American Dream, which is not only about money, but about the remaking of self. His life had been far more terrible than mine, his successes a far greater triumph, but through him I could understand finally, the most frightening moments of my own life, and also what I find most frightening about America” (Vann 2011, p. 3).

Steve’s father is a depressive alcoholic who hardly seems to play a role in his childhood, and his mother is described as mentally unstable, spending her days in front of the television. Steve is often mocked by other students. He has few friends. He meets girls but he feels bad about himself and tries one day to kill himself. He was revived after an overdose of Tylenol and interned for a week in a hospital by his parents. He gets fat from the drugs he begins to take. He is passionate about the two Columbine killers he sees as heroes. The mass killers fascinate him and he reads a lot about them. At the same time, enrolled in the faculty of sociology, he received the highest award given to a student for his results during the undergraduate cycle of the university.

His reputation is so good that his friends joke about him: “Meet our friend Steve […] he must be a mass killer, he is such a nice guy or He’s too nice, he must be an axe murderer” (Vann 2011, p. 66). The Virginia Tech massacre, in April 2007, captivates him and he studies the course of Cho. One of his friends later said, “We had a fascination with school shootings from the point of Cho, how he got away with thirty-two victims or whatever he did. And how he missed some victims and his gun locked and all that stuff […] So Steve was very well-versed in the methodology of how to successfully pull it off” (Vann 2011, p. 112). His psychological state is deteriorating. In the series of the films Saw, he is fascinated by the perverse character of Jigsaw who does not tolerate dying of cancer and forced his victims to “appreciate their existence” by plunging them into horror. In a process of identification, Steve willingly puts on Jigsaw’s mask and asks his friend to take photos that he sends by email to his friends. He gets a “Jigsaw” tattoo on his forearm. When he breaks up with his friend, he suggests she write a book about him. As she asks him why, he replies: “I could be a case study” (Vann 2011, p. 239). Steve is already thinking about his upcoming fame that will erase the frustrated and dull existence that he has never ceased to lead. “I know people will abhor me, but my God they won’t ignore me” (Vann 2011, p. 96). Then he launches into slaughter.

Troubled by Steve’s journey, David Vann remembers his teenage watches where, armed with a magnum.300 that his father had offered him, he hid in the grass to target the streetlamps and sometimes the faces of the people he saw in the scope of the rifle. “It was enough simply to imagine. But sometimes, it was not enough. Sometimes I wanted more. On those nights, I felt the blood in my temples, a pounding my father had called buck fever when we hunted deer, my breath gone, my heart become hard as a fist” (Vann 2011, p. 2). Despite the power he feels at these moments, he resists his temptation and is content to shoot the lamps to discharge this tension. Yet he wrote, “I lived a double life. A straight-A student who would become valedictorian. In student government, hand sports, etc. No one would have guessed” (Vann 2011, p. 2). His father’s suicide plunges him into immense disarray. He is harassed by other students who mock his face, his difficulties with girls and his refusal of alcohol. He remembers that every day was constant humiliation. He feels threatened at every break when the class comes together. He is lonely. A friend takes him one day to a theatre workshop. At the hearing, for the first time, instead of saying that his father died of cancer, as he does regularly, he talks about his suicide. And he is surprised to be accepted by the group. “What it meant for the shape of my life was that instead of continuing to spiral down into a double life, things began to improve for me, and this is what never happened for Steve in high school. His life spiraled into drugs, medications, suicide attempts, sexual shame, bitter fights with his mother, threats of violence” (Vann 2011, p. 21). David Vann also evokes another chance that probably decided its existence: the move of his mother who leaves a neighborhood of bars of buildings. “Many kids in the neighborhood, many children stole, fought, did drugs and had sex as early as age ten […] I remember feeling as a kid that my life wasn’t really my own, that it could be shaped and sent out of control by others” (Vann 2011, p. 25). David Vann takes a step back from the violence he feels within himself. In a way, instead of picking up a gun to kill, he takes up the pen to write stories imbued with the coherent violence inherent in stories deeply rooted in his existence, but which he transcends through writing.

Some people are in situations that encourage a desire to destroy, humiliate or take power over others, but not everyone who could do so, and not everyone is deliberately out to do harm, “faire mal” as the French language puts it. As Albert Camus said: “A man ought to break himself in” (“Un homme ça s’empêche”) (Camus 1994, p. 66). Men with an unmeasured power over their victims refrain, while others multiply the abuses. Evil is not in nature, but in the actions of men who are sometimes revealed by circumstances, and who then absolve themselves of any responsibility towards others, or remain deliberately blind to their suffering. The paradox is that these men do not think they are doing anything wrong. The imputation of evil is always the other’s point of view. Understanding the question of evil implies going from a theodicy to an anthropodicy, in order to take into account the notion of free will.