Friday wrote:The banality of evil.
Interestingly, this view, that groupthink and normalization can accustom otherwise people to committing evil acts - is increasingly being challenged as something which in fact absolves too many people who actively and creatively decide to be evil. The banality of evil is compelling in how chilling an idea it is, but the reality actually goes deeper such that presenting evil as banal ends up partially
absolving people from responsibility for their actions. The chance of any of us falling to evil is real, as Hannah Arendt proposed, but we'll do it far more gladly than she understood.
It's certainly true that you can get a society at large to accept just about any circumstance given enough time, but Arendt's philosophy was actually based on a falsehood - she only saw the beginning of Adolf Eichmann's trial where he presented his being a "banal pencil-pusher" as a defence, but left before later examinations where he basically flipped over to revelling in being a megalomanial villain.
Stuff like the Milgram experiment (electric shocks) and the Stanford Prison experiment, actually went much too far in assuming Arendt's philosophy as scientifically proven - you may have read about how they're being retroactively discredited over time as well. Mostly in the fact that they tended to lump all the participants' actions together when in fact responses were quite varied and included dissenting individuals and those who simply "played fair". Also there's the classic "Everybody in the study was a collegiate male" problem, though there's no evidence that women would be any less (or more) tilted towards an embrace of evil. Different ages haven't been studied as much, but unsurprisingly personal background and circumstances do matter heavily.
That comes back to the classic "Superior Orders" defence so many Nazis used. The banality of evil ties into that, since we generally accept that people have a duty to disobey immoral orders, to be active rather than passive. But where the banality explanation falls even further is that historical research shows that most Nazi orders were vague, perhaps deliberately so, and that those "following" them actually did so with a great deal of creativity and zeal.
Sure, some foot soldiers may have followed orders because they knew they would be shot if not and were conditioned to discipline and army brotherhood, but that only applies to the lowest possible ranks and only in some situations - there's few if any accounts of ordinary soldiers being treated as traitors or deserters for not committing executions. Officers and functionaries of the Third Reich usually had a great deal of autonomy, which they exercised. To do great evil. Often quite enthusiastically.
tl;dr, This is a mong-winded way of saying, no, evil
isn't banal, at least not very often, and is in fact usually eager. Yes, dehumanization is still an important part of the picture - if anything tribalism and dehumanization is even more important in fostering evil than we think (and it's not like we
don't know that's a problem!). But making something routine does not typically blind people to what they're doing, rather they do great evil because they very much think it is the
right thing to do. Many become
eager to show how "good" they can be, whether to impress others or simply out of sheer zeal.
There was a very good recent monograph by a pair of British social scientists that covers the same ground in more detail
here.
Personally I always find myself coming back to "To test a man's character, give him power." an axiom I've found to be far more disturbingly accurate.