Elizabeth Minnich, The evil of banality: On the life and death importance of thinking
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865817749904 |
| Published date | 01 September 2018 |
| Date | 01 September 2018 |
| Author | Sabah Carrim |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Review
Elizabeth Minnich, The evil of banality: On the life and death importance of thinking. Rowman &
Littlefield: Lanham, MD, 2017; 256 pp. ISBN 9781442275959, $85.00 (hbk), 9781442276307,
$29.95 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Sabah Carrim, University of Malaya, Malaysia
No, we are not all Little Eichmanns, with a propensity for evil, a dormant potential for
torture, murder, declares Minnich.
Over the years, however, misinterpretations of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book,
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, coupled with findings from
psychological experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, sug-
gested that there is an untapped potential for sadism in every average individual. Man’s
sadism is brought out mostly – if not entirely – by situational rather than dispositional
factors. This has challenged the founding premises of law and religion which focus
primarily on individual (read ‘dispositional’) traits in blaming and punishing.
Arendt’s banality of evil, in contrast with the radical evil of Immanuel Kant, implies
that evil may sometimes be perpetrated effortlessly, hence banally, by thoughtless
bureaucrats like Adolf Eichmann. But Minnich declares that the term ‘banality of
evil’ has turned into a cliche
´, so that its original meaning is widely misunderstood;
therein lies the Evil of Banality – the title of her book – the evil when words lose
their meaning, when absence of thinking is encouraged, and people stop thinking not
only about the evil they perpetrate but also the good they do. Minnich thus says, ‘There
is no one sort of banality; almost anything can become banal if we use it so often that it
prefigures the world for us without our even noticing anymore’ (p. 41). Minnich pro-
poses what Kant calls an enlarged mentality – or what Arendt elsewhere refers to as
doxa, an understanding of the personalised reality of another person, and other people,
which would encourage empathy. Had any of the perpetrators understood and practised
it, the world would have a cleaner record of cruelty and inhumanity.
The approach adopted by Minnich in writing her book shares parallels with Arendt’s
methodology; it is an attempt to engage in the thinking process and ‘trace experiences
rather than doctrines’ (p. 1). Minnich weaves through case studies, excerpts from
speeches, and newspaper reports covering accounts of the Holocaust and the war in
Rwanda among others, in an informal and easy style while exploring the evil of banality.
According to Minnich, we employ the epithet ‘evil’ to qualify that which we do not
understand. In doing so, the incomprehensible (i.e. the ‘evil’) paralyses us into thinking
that no matter what we do, the overwhelming evil will dominate us.This habit may
simplify life, withhold our dependence on things and people we know we cannot
Australian & New Zealand Journal of
Criminology
2017, Vol. 0(0) 1–3
!The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865817749904
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