Deliver Us from Evil

On Susan Neiman, Hannah Arendt, and the Difference Between What Hurts and What Is Evil

There is a sentence in the Lord’s Prayer that I have said and heard countless times:

Deliver us from evil.

Not: Deliver us from what hurts.

The difference is small in language. Only a few words. Philosophically, however, the distance between them may be considerable.

I began thinking about this when I read Jennifer Szalai’s review in today´s The New York Times of Susan Neiman’s new book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era. Neiman argues that we have become reluctant to use the word evil. Yet the world has not necessarily become less evil. The problem may instead be that our ideas about what evil looks like make us less able to recognize it.

We look for the monster.

But perhaps that is precisely why we do not always see evil.

What Hurts

We know what it means for something to hurt.

A child falls and scrapes a knee. Someone loses a person they love. Illness, loneliness, grief, betrayal, and death can all cause pain.

But they are not necessarily evil.

This distinction is crucial. If everything that causes human suffering is called evil, the word loses its moral meaning. A surgeon may cause pain in order to save a life. Someone may tell a truth that hurts. Nature may strike us with illness, storms, and earthquakes without nature itself being evil.

What hurts concerns the suffering we experience.

Evil takes us into the realm of morality. It concerns actions, choices, failures to act, institutions, and the ways in which human beings treat one another.

But already the question becomes more difficult.

Where does evil reside?

Where Does Evil Reside?

Neiman is concerned with an idea that can easily blind us: we think of evil as a characteristic of evil people.

The sadist. The tyrant. The monster.

Szalai’s review tells of an interviewer who repeatedly wanted Neiman to discuss a grotesque case of cannibalism. Neiman tried to turn the conversation towards forms of evil that she regarded as more commonplace and more destructive to society. But the interviewer kept returning to the spectacular.

The spectacular is easy to condemn.

The problem arises when what is morally reprehensible looks entirely ordinary.

A caseworker opens a file on a screen. The rules are clear. The application must be rejected. She knows that the consequences will be serious for the person concerned, but the decision is in accordance with the regulations. She clicks “reject” and moves on to the next case.

Perhaps the decision is correct. Perhaps it is necessary. The point is not that bureaucracy is evil.

The point is the question that remains:

When does following a rule become a way of avoiding moral thought?

This is where Hannah Arendt enters the picture.

The Banality of Evil – and the Problem of Eichmann

When Arendt wrote about Adolf Eichmann after his trial in Jerusalem, she was struck by how undemonic he appeared. She did not primarily describe a monster, but a man who spoke in clichés, performed tasks, and seemed to lack the ability or willingness to think about what his actions meant for other people.

She called this the banality of evil.

Neiman returns to precisely this idea. For Arendt, Eichmann’s thoughtlessness was not an excuse but, on the contrary, part of the problem: enormous crimes could be carried out through seemingly ordinary administrative actions.

But Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann has subsequently been challenged and qualified.

Bettina Stangneth’s research into material from Eichmann’s years in Argentina, particularly the so-called Sassen interviews, reveals a man who was far more ideologically committed and far less remorseful than the image of the grey, thoughtless bureaucrat might suggest. Eichmann cannot simply be reduced to an official who merely carried out orders.

Yet this does not necessarily constitute a refutation of Arendt. The historian Richard J. Evans has cautioned against reading Stangneth in this way. In Arendt’s account, too, Eichmann was more than an obedient clerk. The problem was his inability or unwillingness to judge morally the system he had voluntarily joined.

The opposition between Arendt and Stangneth is therefore less straightforward than it may initially appear.

Perhaps it reveals something even more disturbing.

Evil need not be either ideological or banal.

It can be both.

A person may be deeply committed to a destructive ideology while carrying out its consequences through routines, forms, meetings, train schedules, and administrative decisions.

Banality, then, need not mean an absence of conviction. It may also be the everyday form that evil takes.

“I Was Only Following the Rules”

Very few of us will ever face choices like Eichmann’s.

But many of us know the smaller sentence:

I was only following the rules.

In a workplace, someone is treated unjustly. Several people see it, but no one speaks because the decision was made higher up.

A computer system produces an assessment that clearly fails to fit a particular human being. No one changes the decision because “that’s what the system says.”

Someone is publicly attacked on social media. A hundred people each leave one small comment. No individual comment seems decisive. Taken together, they can cause enormous harm.

None of those involved need think of themselves as evil.

That is precisely what makes the question uncomfortable.

Responsibility does not necessarily disappear simply because it is distributed.

But Who Is to Judge?

Here we encounter the most difficult objection to Neiman’s project.

When are we entitled to say:

This is evil?

Neiman herself knows that the word is dangerous. She describes evil as one of the most explosive words we possess. Used indiscriminately, the accusation of evil can itself contribute to bringing forth further evil.

Szalai therefore raises a crucial question: What happens when one person believes a moral boundary has been crossed while another does not? In her view, Neiman’s book does not fully resolve this problem.

This is where practical philosophy enters.

The task of philosophy cannot simply be to teach us how to judge. It must also teach us to examine our judgement.

What is it based on? What prejudgements do I bring with me? What have I failed to see? Could the situation be understood differently from the way I first understood it?

But this humility, too, has a limit.

If every moral judgement dissolves into perspectives, context, and interpretation, we eventually lose the ability to say that something is actually wrong.

Understanding is not the same as excusing.

Hermeneutics cannot mean moral silence.