SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY: Reflections on Evil and Responsibility Prompted by Hannah Arendt and Kazuo...

SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY: Reflections on Evil and Responsibility Prompted by HannahArendt and Kazuo IshiguroAuthor(s): John McGowanSource: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 91, No. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2008), pp. 229-254Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41179224 .

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SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY: Reflections on Evil and Responsibility Prompted by Hannah Arendt and Kazuo Ishiguro

John McGowan

T^he attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 placed the question of the nature of evil

and how to respond to it center stage. Against a liberalism char- acterized as relativist, "soft," and even treasonous because it re- putedly could not squarely ascribe responsibility to the guilty parties, conservatism swung into action, declaring a "war on terror" that pitted the forces of good against the enemies of civiliza- tion, of freedom, and of "our way of life."1

A few ignored voices were raised in favor of treating the attacks as criminal actions, not acts of war. The appropriate response to crime is particular: Find those directly responsible; prove their responsibility in a court of law; exonerate any wrongly accused on the crime, while punishing, in accordance with pre-existing legal guidelines, those who committed the crime; attend to whatever compensation is possible (understanding its all too fre- quent inadequacy) to surviving victims. Contrastively, a war is indiscriminate, harming a whole people or peoples, and based on (if waged under the banner of justice, of a response to a specific harm done to us) ascriptions of collective guilt/ responsibility. World War I was the last war in which there were not massive civilian casualties. Wars since 1918 have dispensed almost entirely with any effective way of delivering war's deaths (not to mention its sufferings) only to parties plausibly described as responsible for our justified resort to violence, or only to soldiers and other

John McGowan is the Ruel W. Tyson Jr. Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Soundings 91.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2008). ISSN 0038-1861.



230 SOUNDINGS John McGowan

combatants. In fact, civilian deaths have generally outnumbered military deaths in most wars of the past ninety years.

The indiscriminate killing that comes with modern war yields, in a reactive formation that is paradoxical yet not surprising, a heightened rhetoric of guilt and innocence. Just as we are less and less able to limit the killing to combatants, the attempt to publicize the "atrocities" committed by the other guy and to ex- plain away the "collateral damage" of our own violence escalates. The need to distinguish clearly and strongly our violence from theirs means that both the messiness of actual war and the moral degradation it produces in all combatants (irrespective of the moral rectitude of their "cause") must be obscured. Our killing of non-combatants is inadvertent, a regrettable mistake for which we apologize, or a regrettable necessity justified by the end we pursue. No need to go into the details of the kinds of weapons we use (cluster bombs, land mines, carpet bombings), ones that makes our mistakes inevitable - and are belied by talk of "surgi- cal strikes" and other terms meant to suggest our violence is con- trolled. Crucial to this rhetoric is separating the unintended by- products of violence from the essence of violence, understood as a legitimate and often successful means to an end. We can get to that end, the rhetoric insists, without inflicting death indiscrimi- nately. That we have not managed to pull off this feat in recent wars is just contingent. At the same time, the atrocities of the other guy define precisely and essentially who he is - and ex- plains why we must exterminate him. We only intend to kill people who deserve it; the other deaths are accidents. But our enemy kills innocent people deliberately, on purpose. That's the particular moral outrage of terrorism: It makes no attempt or pretense of distinguishing the innocent or the civilian from the guilty or the combatant.

The logic of this attempt at differentiation brings the criminal trial back in a somewhat unexpected place. In the aftermath of World War II, the victors distinguished their regrettable killing of civilians from the killings committed by the Nazis and the Japa- nese by conducting a series of trials. "War crimes" was a new concept, one that attempted to establish that, even under the cover of war, some killings are excessive, can be understood as not necessary to the conduct of the war, and constitute crimes that can



Sufficient Unto the Day 231

be punished by way of legal procedures. Individuals can be iden- tified as guilty - and treated as criminals.

If we accept the category of "war crimes,'' or the category of "crimes against humanity," created to encompass genocide, the next step could have been foreseen, even though it was not. The trials of war criminals are going to move from the victors prosecuting the losers to our side prosecuting some of its own while the war is in progress. How else can we demonstrate the crucial difference between us and them, the fact that we do not condone the killing of innocent civilians? To effect that differentiation, we must arrest, judge, and punish those among our own ranks who commit atrocities. Of course, such prosecutions will be initiated only with extreme reluctance, and every effort will be made to cover up the horrible things that happen in combat zones and in modern bombing campaigns. But when news does leak out, when pictures of dead villagers or tortured prisoners reach the folks back home, trials must follow if the innocence and justice of our cause is to be preserved.

Messy territory indeed, full of implausible efforts to draw fine distinctions between justified and unjustified killings when the reality of modern warfare is massive firepower and wholesale death. And the whole enterprise requires singling out as particularly responsible certain individuals for participating in what is overwhelmingly a collective endeavor. The post World War II trials famously raised the question of responsibility in the context of military and political organizations in which refusing to obey orders was often tantamount to accepting one's own death. The response was to prosecute and punish only those very high in the chain of command - in many cases, people who, in a direct physical sense, have not killed anyone. Trials of Americans involved in the Vietnam and Iraq wars have gone exactly the oppo- site way. Only those very close to the actual killings or torture have been prosecuted, while higher-ups have been immune.

In this essay I explore some puzzles raised by these intertwined issues. How should we judge and respond to evil? What meanings does responsibility acquire in collective enterprises - and within democratic polities? My guides are Hannah Arendt and Kazuo Ishiguro, not so much because they provide satisfactory answers (I have none either), but because they raise extremely relevant




points for consideration. They push my thinking - and, I hope, my reader's - along.

I

Not surprisingly, in the wake of 9/11, Arendťs famous phrase "the banality of evil," was much bandied about. Arendt coined the phrase in her "report" on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jeru- salem in 1961. Arendťs account of the Eichmann trial outraged many Jewish readers because she appeared to partly blame Jewish leaders for the disaster of the Holocaust, to ridicule the notion that Eichmann was the mastermind behind the destruction of the Jews, and to castigate the state of Israel's prosecution of Eich- mann as a "show trial." As is usual in such controversies, many of these accusations were leveled by people who had never read the book - and the charges leveled were hardly consistent. Arendt was blamed for not judging Eichmann harshly enough and for daring to judge the Jews at all.

The controversy does have the benefit of raising questions of judgment and responsibility very directly. Gershom Scholem, among others, argued that those who were not there are in no position to judge the actions of those who were. Arendt vehe- mently rejected that claim. "The argument that we cannot judge if we were not present and involved ourselves seems to convince everyone everywhere, although it seems obvious that if it were true, neither the administration of justice nor the writing of history would ever be possible."2 Arendt sets herself against what she characterizes as "the reluctance evident everywhere to make judgments in terms of individual moral responsibility" (EIJ, Post- script, 297). What she likes about a court case is its clarity. The issue before a court is whether a criminal act was committed and whether this individual did that act. Motives and complicating (contributory) circumstances are not utterly irrelevant, but they are secondary, more germane to deciding the appropriate sentence than to determining innocence or guilt. The initial judgment is: This person did (or did not do) this criminal (or permissible) act. An individual person is tied to an individual deed. Arendt wants desperately to hold on to this initial clarity - and to insist that we all need to make such judgments about responsibility all the time. Only after that basic judgment do we wander into the muddy waters of the appropriate response, be it




forgiveness, punishment, efforts at social or individual reform, or some messy mixture of all these things.

Arendt, I believe, is both right and wrong in her arguments about judgment and responsibility. As so often in her work (think of her firm differentiation between "the political" and "the social"), she introduces very hard and fast distinctions that do aid our thinking clearly about an issue, but makes the mistake of believing that she can maintain those distinctions when either dealing with messy cases herself or when explaining how others act, judge, or think in particular instances. Because Eichmann, as others besides Arendt noted, was such a cipher, I propose using Stevens, the butler in Ishiguro's novel Remains of the Day, as the messy case with which to test Arendťs position.3 At first blush, Stevens' most serious fault is precisely his abdication of responsibility - and that is why he never attains the "dignity" he claims is his goal. Stevens' whole first-person narrative is a long rationalization, an attempt to offer plausible excuses for behavior he dimly recognizes as reprehensible. But his narrative also demon- strates that he (and, by extension, we as human agents) is incapa- ble of complete lucidity about his motives, complete comprehension of his self or his circumstances, and of complete control over any situation. There is always a more or less plausible story the agent can tell that displaces responsibility even as the very manifest imperfections of the story that he tells also undermine any straightforward judgment of his guilt.

"Ethical holidays" are as ready-to-hand as assuming responsibility; either course - making excuses or taking the blame - stacks the deck a certain way; each way of telling the story of an action, its origins and its consequences, is partial, and strives to blind itself to alternative ways to tell this tale.4 Ascriptions of responsibility are "essentially contestable."5 All assumptions (by the agent) and ascriptions (by the spectator) of responsibility are excessive, dependent on assigning an efficacy, clarity, autonomy, and univocality to human actions that they simply do not possess. (Spectator is a poor word here; better to say: those with whom we are in active social relation.) That Aristotle ties himself into knots in Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics when trying to establish a firm distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions suggests that the difficulties of producing an air-tight account of responsibility are not confined to our post-Freudian era.




In a superb essay on these matters, Susan Wolf distinguishes between a "strict justice" that is at pains to parcel out responsibility in the most careful, precise, and niggardly fashion and a more generous view of one's entanglement in a complex world of multiple contingencies and unknowns.6 Wolfs argument is that, while we do want our legal institutions to pursue the ideal of "strict justice," our wider relations of one person to another are dependent on selves assuming responsibility in cases where, strictly speaking, they might slide off the hook. She writes:

To form one's attitudes and judgments of oneself and others on the basis of their wills and intentions, to draw sharp lines between what one is responsible for and what is up to the rest of the world, to try in this way to extricate oneself and others from the messiness and the irrational contingencies of the world, would be to remove oneself from the only ground on which it is possible for beings like ourselves to meet. If we define ourselves in ways that aim to mini- mize the significance of contingency and luck, we do so at the cost of living less fully in the world, or at least at the cost of engaging less fully with the others who share that world. (123)

There is a crucial asymmetry here between what the spectator is justified in blaming the agent for and what we - the agent's fellows - expect and hope for in the way of self-blame. But there is symmetry between the forgiveness extended by those hurt by certain actions and the responsibility assumed by the agents of those actions, since both are excessive in relation to strict justice and yet both are absolutely necessary to sustain our ability to live together. At issue, then, is not so much individual dignity, per- sonhood, or autonomy as sociality itself. We expect - and very much need - individuals at times to take responsibility for deeds for which they are not, in the strictest sense, fully to blame, just as we expect - and very much need - those who suffer from the consequences of such acts to forgive the perpetrator - but only after he has made the gesture of assuming (excessively) responsibility. Responsibility - and our responses to responsibility - are an intersubjective process, not some definitive matching (corre- spondence) of individual with deed. Agents just don't have the kind of autonomy that would make ascriptions of responsibility straight-forward. Rather, responsibility is the product of specific acts, primarily speech acts. Those acts include accusations, im- puting blame, accepting blame, and offering evidence for con- nections between agent and act, or evidence for mitigating




circumstances that soften or dissolve the connection between agent and act. There are multiple gaps here between ascriptions and assumptions of responsibility and between blame and forgiveness. The ability to cross such gaps is never secure, even though so much depends upon it. I turn now to the social and political consequences - the effects on the selfs being with others - of these gaps.

One significant problem lies in the centralized nation-states and "rationalized" societies (now in Max Weber's, not Freud's, sense of the term "rationalization") of the post-feudal West. Within large governments, corporations, and other bureaucra- cies, much human action unfolds in ways that separate the decision to act from the physical implementation of that decision. The Kantian formula "never use another human being as a means" instantiates the very principles of autonomy, self-govern- ance, and individual responsibility that legitimate the democratic procedures and civil liberties to which modern governments claim to adhere. Yet the Kantian maxim seems more honored in the breech than the observance. The use of human instruments diminishes responsibility on both sides. Darlington (in Ishiguro's novel) commands the firing of the Jewish maids but doesn't have to get his hands dirty or witness the actual deed and the suffering it causes. He, quite literally, doesn't know what he is responsible for. And Stevens is only carrying out orders. He did not will or desire the suffering; if he had the power to be responsible, he assures himself and Miss Kenton, the suffering would never have been inflicted. A perfect arrangement for making responsibility vanish into thin air. An ethical holiday for all.

Such arrangements reverse a fundamental feature of democracy. Ideally, in a democracy the government is the instrument of the people. Decision-making and, hence, responsibility are lodged in the demos, not the government. Where Hobbes views citizens as alienating their freedom to an absolutist state in exchange for security, Mill insists that no one has the right to alien- ate his or her freedom. Somewhere in the middle ground between these two is, undoubtedly, where we live, but patterns of instrumentality push us towards the Hobbesian end of the spec- trum, where authority is lodged in the government, not the citizens.




Instrumentality is often justified by appeals to expertise, to professionalism. Ishiguro's novel is deeply conflicted, one might even claim confused, on this issue. Stevens' two by-words are "dignity" and "professional." In fact, his dignity, even as he occupies a subordinate position in a very hierarchical society, depends on his being able to tell himself that his job is a "profession." Yet the novel, which seems sympathetic to Stevens' desperate (and, I think we must conclude, failed) attempt to attain - and to as- sure himself in his narrative that he has attained - dignity, also illustrates the human cost of a rigid sense of professional require- ments. Profession stands between Stevens and his father, Stevens and Miss Kenton, preventing him from forming satisfactory rela- tionships with either one. It is hard not to read "professionalism" as a mug's game in Stevens' case, extracting much more work from him than if he had simply thought of his butlering as a job. By trying to be a professional, he makes that job so completely his identity that he loses the capacity to be a full human being. He is unable to be a son, a husband, or a citizen because all of those other roles would compromise his professionalism.

These considerations might suggest that Stevens' mistake is to fail to decouple dignity from professionalism - and, thus, that the very notion of profession is where the fault lies. But Darling- ton's errors, his naïve appeasement of the Nazis, stem from his not being professional enough. He is excoriated as an amateur, as someone meddling in affairs of which he knows little and understands less. But that denunciation is first offered by the obviously corrupt American senator, which lessens its impact. Later, however, the most reliable character in the novel, Mr. Cardinal, voices the same criticism of Darlington.

Amidst these mixed messages about professionalism, the novel fully understands that ceding judgment to experts is the death knell of democracy. In one of the most painful scenes in the novel, Stevens feigns ignorance about current events before Dar- lington and his friends precisely to allow them to draw the de- sired conclusion that democracy is impossible. "Democracy is something for a bygone era," Darlington triumphantly con- cludes. "The world's far too complicated a place now for univer- sal suffrage and such like. For endless members of parliament debating things to a standstill" (198).




A democrat, on the contrary, must insist on the competence of all to make fundamental political and moral judgments. The novel nowhere expresses a democratic faith in the existence of that competence. The closest it comes to championing democracy is the assertion by Harry Smith, whom Stevens meets when he runs out of petrol, that "it's one of the privileges of being born English that no matter who you are, no matter if you're rich or poor, you're born free, and you're born so that you can ex- press your opinion freely, and vote in your member of parliament or vote him out. That's what dignity's really about . . ." (186). But the villagers, no less than Stevens, think Smith is too vehement, too self-assertive. The formerly socialist, but now disil- lusioned, doctor tells Stevens that "people do have a political conscience of sorts here. They feel they ought to have strong feelings on this and that, just as Harry urges them to. But really, they're no different from people anywhere. They want a quiet life. Harry has lots of ideas about changes in this and that, but really, no one in the village wants upheaval, even if it might benefit them. People here want to be left alone to lead their quiet little lives. They don't want to be bothered with this issue or that issue" (209-10). Stevens is "surprised by the tone of disgust that had entered the doctor's voice," but it passes, and shortly thereaf- ter, the butler offers his own definition of dignity: "I suspect it comes down to not removing one's clothes in public" (210). The comedy of this definition does not obscure its poignancy. To ex- press one's opinion openly and plainly in public is terrifying to Stevens.

Whether Ishiguro believes democracy possible or not is not clear; he never, after all, speaks in his own voice in the novel. What is clear is that judgments and opinions about what the polity should do are, like ascriptions and assumptions of responsibility, always risky, always excessive in relation to the facts one can command. Judgments, like ascriptions of responsibility, are always contestable; such contests are, in large part, the very stuff of politics, and thus need to be staged in public. To refrain from making judgments - no matter the reasons or causes of such diffidence - is to sabotage democracy before it commences. It abdicates the responsibility to take responsibility, where taking responsibility is always risky because it is like writing a blank check; we cannot know in advance if our judgment is correct or




what the full consequences of acting upon it will be.7 To cede the decision to experts is to believe that knowledge can significantly lessen, if never quite eliminate, that risk while also letting oneself off the hook. Judgment requires a certain kind of courage, the courage to go out on a limb - and democracy requires a citi- zenry generally infused with that courage, and with a tolerance for, maybe even a taste for, the agonistic public contests that must follow from the enunciation of various different and com- peting judgments.

A democracy, in short, needs to encourage thoughtfulness in citizens, and a confidence in their own judgment that justifies their sharing of power and responsibility. It is deeply undemo- cratic to foster or to adopt a willful ignorance that acquiesces in the government not telling us what it is doing because, on the whole, we are happy not to know. What would enable us to es- chew the moral holiday of off-loading responsibility onto superiors and blindly following their orders? Taking responsibility politically, no less than taking responsibility personally, doesn't happen by itself. And if Wolf is right, there is not a very large gap between the political and the personal here since the assumption of responsibility in each case fundamentally influences the social scene in which both unfold.

Identifying the problem here goes almost none of the distance needed to find a solution. My point, put most baldly, is that democratic politics, no less than ethics in general, relies on assumptions of responsibility that, because excessive, we are always tempted to shirk. Beyond moral suasion - making claims (for example) that our dignity as persons or our standing as citizens depends on taking responsibility - I see no way to keep people from taking moral holidays. Responsibility is tied to freedom; compelled behavior is precisely the behavior for which one is not responsible. Thus, to maintain the very meaning of responsibility, it seems imperative that its assumption cannot be compul- sory. Yet with so much riding on these matters - the very terms of our being together - that conclusion seems deeply unsatisfac- tory. Still, the alternative seems even worse, since it would destroy the very thing it claims as its goal: the thoughtful and responsible action of each self toward the other selves with whom it is associated.




Politically, this less than satisfactory conclusion reminds us that a free and democratic people must choose democracy, with all its difficulties and responsibilities, for themselves - and that they must make this choice again and again. If they abdicate through willful ignorance or by ceding decisions and responsibility to experts, bureaucrats, politicians, or any other minority, then democracy will vanish. There is nothing beyond the demos itself to stop democracy from withering away. Similarly, democracy is not one simple thing. The tone and texture of a polity's mode of association is established through the daily interactions of its citizens.

There are only various possibilities here, no necessities. De- mocracy as actually instantiated in the here and now is fully contingent. There is no institutional mechanism or magical means to sustain it apart from what citizens do in their relations with one another. Moral suasion and political argument are all we have. (Yes, there is the rule of law, which is very important, but remember that ours is fundamentally an advocacy system of law, built out of and continually revised through argumentation.) Moral suasion will articulate principles and will point to the respect and approbation extended to those who take responsibility and to those who establish admirable relations. Political argument portrays the comparative advantages of democracy, praises the dignity and freedom that redound to equal participation in collective processes of making and implementing decisions, and argues in the name of articulated values of justice. Our democracy, tattered though it might be, remains alive (even if on life support) so long as those moral and political arguments find a place for enunciation and an engaged audience.

II

Up to this point, I have been considering the centrality to democracy of selves being willing to assume responsibility for, to make judgments about, actions and their consequences even though they have available to them various ways to evade that call. Now I want to think about the ways in which we ascribe responsibility to others, as contrasted to how we assume it for ourselves. Here's how I think Arendt pushes us to phrase this question: How do the ways we describe evil connect to our understanding of the humans who perpetrate it and/or resist it? Ar-




endt's speculations about Adolf Eichmann's character provide the impetus for asking rather similar questions about Stevens in Ishiguro's novel.

Arendt takes up this question of moral character in an extreme and dramatic fashion. States during the twentieth century have committed "crimes against humanity" that Arendt, like many others, deems "evil." In light of those crimes, Arendt explores issues of personal responsibility within the larger framework of considering a range of individual responses to evil done by polities. It is crucial to remember that Arendt has no illusions about the efficacy of individual action in such cases. Her interest in the negative example of Eichmann and the positive example of An- ton Schmidt is completely divorced from any harm or any good they did or might have done. Given a state that is hell-bent on murder and which will immediately kill anyone who tries to thwart its killing, the question Arendt asks, to put it starkly, is: Why do some people choose to die themselves rather than to kill?

Admittedly, it takes Arendt considerable time to get to that stark question. She must observe, as Ishiguro does, all the subter- fuges by which people evade knowledge and responsibility, the various things we can say to ourselves to deny our participation in killing or that this particular killing "counts" as murder, as evil. But I want to insist that we misunderstand Arendt's argument that Eichmann is "thoughtless" - and the corollary to that argument, namely that evil is "banal" - if we limit her to saying that humans have the capacity to make murder so ordinary, so habit- ual, that we can kill without ever quite registering that we are doing so, without being connected enough to, conscious enough of, the dead to take responsibility. Arendt is saying that, and to confirm her point we need only think of the proliferation of long-distance methods of inflicting death over the past thirty years, of the relegation of death to places remote from the places where the decisions that lead to death are made, and of the careful management of information that might connect such decisions to a full cognizance of their consequences. But she is also saying more.

I can best approach this "more" by confessing that I find the moral complacency of Ishiguro's novel repugnant.8 Everything in the novel serves to distance us, Pharisee-like, from its butler-nar-




rator. We've got Stevens' number. We know everything we need to know about him - and far more than the poor repressed fellow knows about himself. The book reads to me like a prosecu- tor's case; every word in it functions to move us toward the verdict: guilty as charged. Of repression, of willful ignorance, of ignoring plain political and historical facts, of taking the lesser light for the greater, of lacking the most basic human feelings toward father and possible spouse. Verily, the butler did it.

What could possibly motivate heaping such obloquy on a fic- tional character? What could we possibly learn from such an ex- ercise beyond a heightened respect for our own moral rectitude? Arendt was contemptuous of exactly this side of the Eichmann trial. She distrusted - and found totally irrelevant to the business of judging Eichmann for his crimes - the "show trial" as- pects of the proceedings. And I interpret her as moving from that particular wariness to her more general disavowal of any desire or claim to "know" Eichmann.

This gets very tricky because Arendt finds herself dancing in a minefield here. In many ways, her argument is pushed along more by the bombs she wants to avoid detonating than by any positive goal. But here's a stab at stating the position she wants to justify: The court is able to judge and condemn Eichmann, but that judgment is based on very circumscribed (and rightly so) knowledge. Thus, Arendt severs any causal or justificatory link between knowledge and judgment. We are always judging where we do not have complete information. Plus, we do not "know" that an act is evil; we judge it to be so. Conversely, we do not judge that JFK was killed in Dallas; we know it to be so. Knowl- edge is not irrelevant to judgment, but there are different types of and arenas for judgment, with different kinds of knowledge relevant in these different cases. Furthermore, knowledge of persons is always tainted in Arendt's view with the marks of "racial thinking." The repeated tendency of humans to think "I know all that there is to know of a person because I know that he is Jew- ish" makes Arendt suspicious of all knowledge claims that deal in such generalizations, that depend on the adequacy of general terms to characterize existential singularities. Arendt wants to judge Eichmann apart from any question of what "kind" of person he is. In particular, Arendt deplores the intrusion of questions of "character" into public matters such as elections or trials.




Eichmann's motives and character are not relevant to the trial, she insists. The court's job is to determine whether he did the deeds of which he is accused and, on that basis, judge him guilty or not. Society's job in relation to this specific judgment of the court is to determine what punishment or retribution it deems fitting for such deeds. End of story.

Except, of course, the story does not end there. Arendt herself speculates at length about Eichmann's character. In fact, it is fair to say that she thought about little else in the last twelve years of her life. That's when, pushed both by her own reactions to the Eichmann trial and by the overwhelming response to her book about it, she asks her stark question: Why, even "when the chips are down," do some people "withstand the temptation" to aban- don the Socratic conviction that "it is better to suffer than to do wrong?"9 She repeatedly tells us that these speculations are "personal" or "philosophical," not "political." The question is how and why individuals react differently in the extreme case where politics goes haywire, where the state does evil and forces its citizen to be the instruments for its evil deeds. So the question shifts from a public, political concern with judging a person's deeds to considering the personal qualities and convictions that make some people act criminally and others refuse to do so in an historical situation in which the public definition of "criminal" has itself shifted one-hundred-and-eighty degrees.

Arendt's famous conclusion is that Eichmann is "thoughtless," and her language at times suggests that means he is "stupid." At first blush, her verdict can look like the intellectuals' version of self-congratulatory Phariseeism. Thank god, I'm too smart to ever be an Eichmann. And, to some extent, Arendt does claim to have Eichmann's number, to know everything about him. In fact, she wants to rule such knowledge out of bounds in the court proceedings, in part, because she fears that, in a post-Freudian world, to know all is to pardon all. But her own way of describing racism indicates the counter-truth that Ishiguro's novel also dem- onstrates: To know all is to condemn all the more fiercely and confidently.

Stupidity accompanies knowledge like its ever-present shadow. Stupidity is the belief that you know all there is to know about something; it is the belief that you have no need to think any more about something; it is having complete, untroubled confi-




dence in your own judgments. There are undoubtedly risks involved in our constant - and probably unavoidable - practice of making judgments when we don't know enough; that's why such judgments require courage, are sometimes foolhardy, and are always fallible. What Arendt suggests is that judgments based on a presumption of adequate knowledge are even more dangerous.

If evil emanates from the stupid, what could be more banal and ordinary than that? To paraphrase Shakespeare, if stupidity is declared a crime, none will scape whipping. Stupidity is everywhere and, while voluble, speaks only in clichés. It has nothing of moment to say because it pays scant attention to the identifying peculiarities of individual cases, underestimates the world's com- plexity, and casts nary a glance toward human fallibility. Racism is the apotheosis of stupidity, dealing in stereotypes and blind to facts. Arendt turns to "thinking" in her effort to devise an anti- dote to the "thoughtlessness" of stupidity.

"Thinking" in Arendt is not "knowing." Thinking is a process that is tangential to the investigations that produce knowledge and may even be hostile to knowledge's characteristic forms. Again, this is tricky because Arendt is at pains, both in her responses to the critics of the Eichmann book and in later essays on the American government's lies during the Vietnam War, to point out that getting the facts right is a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition for thinking. So knowledge and thinking are not utterly disconnected - and both have some relation to, but are not identical with, judgment.

To simplify matters greatly, in Arendt knowledge is about facts, judgment invokes reasons, and thinking, unlike the other two, is inner-directed rather than outer-directed. Thinking is the dia- logue with one's self in which and by which the self ascertains and reflects upon the relations in which it stands to others, the world, and, most crucially, to itself. In that sense, Stevens' act of narration in Remains of the Day is an act of thinking, but one that is manifestly imperfect because marked so clearly by evasion and rationalization (now in the Freudian sense of that term). Ar- endt's basic claim for "thinking" is that it leads the thinker to ask: "Can I reconcile this deed I am being pushed by circumstances to perform with my commitment to being-in-the-world in a certain way? Can I live with myself in harmony after I have commit-




ted this act?" As various commentators have hastened to point out, that the thinker asks himself or herself such questions hardly guarantees, in some ways is barely even connected to, arriving at the "right" ethical answer. Arendtian thinking, partly because it is so subjective, is pre-ethical or a-ethical. Ethics enters with judgment - and Arendt is very clear that judgment is a much more social and public enterprise, one that is imbricated and in dia- logue with the sensus communis invoked in Kant's Critique of Judg- ment Thinking is too personal - a matter of living at peace with oneself - to be the stuff of ethics or morality. Arendt struggles in her later writings to build a bridge from thinking to more public and generally applicable judgments. That bridge was never completed - and maybe you can't get there from here. All that we certainly have in place is Arendt's contention that the "thoughtless" will shift with every change in the wind's direction. They have no ballast to withstand external pressures. They will, she writes, exchange "one set" of moral beliefs for another "with hardly more trouble than" they would take to change their "table manners."10

Arendt's failure to build the bridge to ethics stems, in part, from her having a different goal in mind. (Although this is only partly true because she did intend to get to the question of judgment; but she delayed taking up that question - and died before addressing it - because she also wanted to pursue this other goal I am about to discuss.) She wanted very much to find a way to affirm existence in this world despite the manifest fact of evil's presence within it. This recurrent Arendtian desire finds expression in Eichmann in Jerusalem in the passage about Anton Schmidt, a German sergeant who "helped the Jewish partisans [in Poland] by supplying them with forged papers and military trucks. Most important of all: 'He did not do it for money.' This had gone on for five months, from October 1941, to March 1942, when Anton Schmidt was arrested and executed" (EIJ, 230). The lesson that Arendt wants to draw from the Schmidt story is that this tale of refusing to do evil gives us all - I stress all - we need to affirm human existence, even knowing of horrors such as the Holocaust.11 "Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a fit place for human habitation" {Eichmann, 233). That sentence, no matter how many times I read it, always brings me up short. My




first response, once again, is "Whoa!" What can this sentence mean? And could it possibly be true? Surely not. Don't we need justice, equality, democracy, some semblance of an ethically rep- utable world in order to declare this planet a fit place for human habitation? Would the sheer fact that "under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not" give us enough reason to go on? Even when the actions of those who refuse to comply are completely ineffective?

Arendt was obsessed with the question of how to reconcile oneself to this world after the Holocaust from the moment she over- came her initial disbelief in the rumors of its occurrence. In her more grandiose moments, Arendt aims for something even higher than reconciliation, for that "love of the world" that Elisa- beth Young-Bruehl invokes in the title of her biography of Ar- endt. Arendťs first impulse - implemented in The Origins of Totalitarianism and explained in the 1954 essay she originally ti- tled "The Difficulties of Understanding" - is to try to understand "the unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil" that "totalitarian regimes" committed.12 The effort to understand is "an unending activity by which ... we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world."13 By the time of The Human Condition (1958), however, Arendt relegates understanding to the back seat. She never quite abandons it, but more willful and creative forces assume the larger role in recon- ciling us to life, "to what we do and what we suffer."14

"Action," the central term of The Human Condition, is precisely that which surpasses all understanding. "Behavior" names those human movements that are calculable, predictable, and can be fully explained. But action is always a surprise; it exceeds expecta- tions and brings forth something new in the world. Its "natality," its giving birth to the singular, is to be cherished and loved. And the meanings of action are infinite, are procreative. We tell stories that endlessly revise and augment in the retelling an action's significance as its consequences ramify through time and through a community. It is this inexhaustible production of nov- elty and of the unique that Arendt calls the world's "plurality." Our wonder that there should be so many somethings - and always more somethings - rather than nothing generates a love of the world besides which the reconciliation offered by understanding pales.




I will confess that Arendťs abandonment of understanding for love, along with her installation of "natality" and "plurality" as primal inexplicable givens, makes me nervous. There is both a willful optimism and a nascent mysticism here. No matter what evil humans do, Arendt asserts, there remains, to quote the Ge- rard Manly Hopkins poem "God's Grandeur, "the dearest fresh- ness deep down things." The real cannot be obliterated by the human, although men will try their damndest to put a fabrication in place of the real. (Arendt did not write her doctoral disserta- tion on Augustine - specifically his notion of love - for nothing. There is a touch of the Augustinián denial of evil's reality in her insistence that the evil of totalitarianism is an unreal fabrication that cannot sustain itself.) After the harsh winter of evil, the daffodils will always spring back. Is faith in the nonhuman real, in a primal energy that will manifest itself in the natality of human action, an adequate response to evil? At times, Arendt appears to believe that such faith is all that she has - and so she tries very hard to convince herself and us that it will suffice.

But if we return to the passage on Anton Schmidt we can see that Arendťs life-long meditations on a satisfactory response to evil also provide, at times, a more humanist, more secular alternative to faith in reality's resilience. Schmidt proves, we might say, the banality of goodness. As commentators like Richard Bernstein have noted, Arendt's Eichmann book abandons the talk of "radical" and "absolute" evil that is featured in The Origins of Totalitarianism}5 "Banality" calls us to realize - and acknowl- edge - that evil is ordinary. That recognition is both comforting and devastating. Devastating because evil becomes part and parcel of life, not some extraneous intrusion that can be banished if only we find the proper formula. But comforting because evil is nothing special; it does not have powers that are beyond our capacity to resist or to overcome. Evil may be horrible, but it is ordinary; it is human, all-too-human. It is us. To call evil banal avoids Manichean distancing of evil from ourselves; more crucially, it resolutely "divorces the concept of evil from any theological scaf- folding," and it attempts to combat the "mesmerizing fascina- tion" of evil.16

It follows from Arendt's argument that everything that can be said of evil in its ordinariness and its humanness can be said of




goodness as well. The good, too, is ordinary and human, and of this world, our world. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. We do not need to look beyond the ordinary, beyond our day, to find evil or to locate its source or to summon the resources to resist it. The banal is what we must struggle with and what, with determination and luck, we can learn to love. We cannot - and should not - displace this struggle from the human and from this world. We are the only ones to blame if evil drives goodness from this world and we have no one but our fellow humans to aid us in striving to prevent evil's triumph.

Ishiguro's novel, it seems to me, also resists ascribing evil to the nonhuman; but he places the positive and fearsome evil of the Nazis off-stage and focuses instead on the absence of good. Only Mr. Cardinal in the novel has the strength of mind and purpose to fight evil - and he dies young. The novel as a whole has an elegiac, post-apocalyptic feel. Yes, the Nazis were defeated, but the effort not only exhausted English society, but also revealed its own petty, but still significant, imperfections. Little enough remains of the day; Stevens, English society, and mankind as a whole appear doomed to drift into the sunset. The world will not be renewed. We now know all too well the great and the petty evils of which humans are capable - and we do not have the resources required to stop the downward drift. There is no myste- rious well of goodness which we can summon. So maybe the novel is not about cementing our view of our own rectitude in relation to Stevens' cowardice, self-ignorance, and refusal to take responsibility. Perhaps Ishiguro is saying that all of us would fail - perhaps not in Stevens' distinctive way, but each of us in his own personal and pathetic way - to stand up to evil.

Anton Schmidt, for Arendt, proves that goodness still exists in humans and in this world. Note that Arendt doesn't pretend to understand Anton Schmidt. The fact of him, the fact that even "under conditions of terror . . . some people" will choose and act for the good, is enough. Even within this secular vision, there remains the elements of mystery that characterize Arendt' s account of "action." She will not presume to know what leads an Anton Schmidt to resist. Certainly, there is no formula, no rulebook, for producing Anton Schmidts or for him to consult when history puts him to the test. So we come back round to our opening question of responsibility. We can, I think, best describe




Schmidt's actions as his taking responsibility for the world. He cannot live with himself unless his actions contribute to creating a world that he can affirm, that he can love. That assumption of responsibility is excessive, even foolish. He cannot, in fact, actually produce a good world in 1942 Poland. And, given the dire circumstances, no one is going to blame him, is going to hold him responsible, for the evil world in which he is caught up. He is perfectly in the clear, just a lowly sergeant. Yet he assumes that responsibility - and his doing so is perfectly ordinary. People do this all the time. But they don't do this all the time as well. Per- haps our dignity, maybe even our humanity, resides in each person taking responsibility for this world we inhabit together. But such honorific and exhortatory terms strike my ear mostly as obfuscating bravado. More germane is the threat to life and to the very existence of the world if no one assumes such responsibility.

Evil (the evil that people cause) exists because humans inflict suffering and death. The response to evil can include punishment of those who commit those acts which bring it into the world. But more germane are efforts to prevent evil or to attend to its unfolding consequences. Our responsibility for making the world a place fit for human habitation should trump (I am rec- ommending) our effort to pin responsibility on others for making it a place we find difficult to affirm.

Ill

Anton Schmidt becomes so important, not only in Arendt's Eichmann book but also for her work in the last years of her life, because she focuses on the futility of preventing the evils done by modern states. She turns to personal responsibility because she despairs of collective action. Overwhelming public disapproval of the Vietnam War only brought it to an end after long delays, a scenario being repeated today with the Iraq war. Individuals in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and countless other twentieth century dictatorships had even less hope of ending the state's infliction of suffering and death. However, some sixty pages before she tells the story of Anton Schmidt, Arendt consid- ers an instance of heroic - and successful - collective resistance to evil: the response of Danes to German attempts to deport the Jews living in Denmark. (There were both Danish




Jews and a significant number of German Jews, who had fled to Denmark prior to 1939. The Danes protected both groups equally.) Arendt presents this complex story in some detail, but I will limit myself here to considerations that I think are best char- acterized as "rhetorical."

Arendt argues that the resolute refusal of the Danes to accept any of the premises of German anti-Semitism actually served to undermine the thoughtless but strong convictions of the German officials serving the Reich in Denmark.

Politically and psychologically, the most interesting aspect of this incident is perhaps the role played by the German authorities in Denmark, their obvious sabotage of orders from Berlin. It is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had met resistance based on principle, and their toughness' melted like butter in the sun, they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage. (£7/175)

A publicly enacted set of beliefs serves to sway the opinions - and actions - of others. This act of resistance is not ineffective even though it openly challenges a superior power. All political hope is not lost. Collective action is possible, if not in every single case, still in some very dire cases. And that collective action can use the resources of the kind of public sphere idealized in con- ceptions of deliberative democracy. A challenge to the beliefs and reasons others offer for their decisions and actions accompa- nied by a public staging of a contrasting set of beliefs and reasons serves in this case to change the course of events. The agon of political contestation was conducted in the public sphere of war- time Denmark with remarkable results.

Arendťs own rhetoric in describing this success does not reach the sublime heights of her passages on Schmidt, but she is not shy in making large claims about the lesson the Denmark case has to impart.

One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence. (£7/171)




Non-violence does offer resources in the contest against the violence visited upon us by states - and by non-state actors like terrorists. Violence need not always call forth an answering violence; other responses can prove effective. As always, there are no guarantees here. We are dealing with possibilities and the strategy must be carefully attuned to the circumstances. Even more crucial, perhaps, is that a large number of citizens must assume responsibility. And they must do so together and in public. They must, like Anton Schmidt, take the way this world goes personally - and then they must go the next step of making their personal convictions political by making them public in concert with others (a move that was not available to Schmidt).

In the context of the Vietnam war, the large-scale public demonstrations along with fairly wide-spread draft resistance were the primary forms taken by the collective action that finally ended the war. (I hope the reader will agree that, even though the war dragged on for way too long, its ending was hastened by the pop- ular protest against it.) What forms or strategies are appropriate today is less clear to me. The large-scale demonstration has lost almost all impact in the contemporary US. The government has learned to take such demonstrations in stride, doing nothing to prevent their occurrence, pointing to them as proof that we live in a free country, and going on its merry way. Perhaps more fre- quent demonstrations would make a difference - but I doubt it. The tactic has simply lost its rhetorical and political force. More disruptive demonstrations, ones that aimed to shut down normal governmental or civic functioning, would not, in my opinion, be effective. Occupying the moral high ground is crucial in these matters and crossing the line over to disruption leads to a defeat in the battle for public opinion. For every person thrilled by the vehemence of the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle, there were five people who thought the demonstrators went too far.

What is needed - and, again, I have no solution to offer - is for citizens to take responsibility for what the country is doing in Iraq and Guantanamo. In the case of Vietnam, large numbers of people "owned" the war because either they personally or people they loved were liable to be drafted. Even though in practice the affluent and influential did not often serve against their will, the shadow of the draft hung over every young man between 18 and 26. By way of contrast, the public today is carefully sheltered from




the costs (in taxes, in military service) and the realities (no pictures of coffins, no published figures of Iraqi dead) of the Iraq war. The state has encouraged the demos' abdication of responsibility. Not enough people take the war personally, even as polls show that very large majorities are against its continuing.

The assumption of responsibility, while a necessary step, would not be sufficient in and of itself to end the war, to stop the killing. One reason is the fact of evil itself, which nothing said here is meant to ignore or deny. Humans commit acts of violence against other humans. Telling them to stop works sometimes, but only sometimes. That even suggesting that telling them to stop could ever work comes across as naïve speaks volumes about the loss of democratic control over the actions of our government. And, of course, terrorist acts of violence exist outside ofthat kind of political accountability. One thing that makes terrorism so in- tractable is that it is so often a personal, not a collective, action. Terrorists only very, very loosely belong to organizations, or take orders from superiors. It is far from clear that any one person (or small group of people) is in a position to get terrorists (even those supposedly affiliated with them) to cease and desist. (Apply this claim to the IRA, Al-Qaeda, the various Palestinian groups, and various militias in the Iraq "insurgency," and you'll see the point.) Evil actions are being done outside of any structures that have much power to control them, or to stop them. In that respect, I do think it is better to think of terrorism as crime, and to use the standard defenses against crime as the imperfect, but best available, strategies for preventing its occurrence and mitigating its consequences. We don't expect to end crime altogether - and there is no reason to think we will attain that success with terrorism.

Another reason that taking responsibility is not sufficient is the lack, right now, of appropriate forms for staging that responsibility in public. To some extent, we have a chicken and egg problem here, a Catch-22. Effective strategies rely on being truly collective. But you can't get large numbers if people aren't assuming responsibility. A good example would be refusal to pay the percentage of one's taxes that go to the war effort. That action appears quixotic and self-sacrificing if done in the absence of any hope of being effective. Yes, Thoreau's challenge ("the only place for a just man in an unjust society is jail") and




Schmidt's example do call us to such heroism. But those heroic actions would be as ineffective as I am saying the demonstrations have become. Actions that have a decent possibility of achieving success are much more likely to attract the numbers needed to increase the very chances of that success.

I wish that I had some public and collective action, some rhetorical form, to recommend at this point. I am distressed at my own lack of imagination - and the general lack in today's America - on this score. I do believe that the lack of an inspir- ing and effective form stands as one (although hardly the only one) explanation for the American people's failure, thus far, to assume full responsibility for ending a war that we loathe. The lives of many Iraqis and American are at stake. So is the existence of our democracy.

NOTES

1. For the conservative claim that liberals don't have the moral or intellectual resources to combat terrorism, see Patrick D. Healy, "Rove Criticizes Liber- als on 9/11," New York Times, June 23, 2005. For the oft-repeated statement that "evil" terrorism is an assault on our freedom and our way of life, see George W. Bush, "Statement by the President in His Address to the Na- tion," <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16. html>. For an argument that terrorist attacks are best considered criminal acts rather than acts of war, see Mark A. Drumbl, "Judging Terrorist Crime, Taliban Guilt, Self-Defense, and Western Innocence," <http://jurist.law. pi tt. edu/ terrorismdrumbl . h tm> .

2. Hannah Arendt, "Postscript," Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1965): 295-96. Subsequent references are abbreviated as EIJ, with page numbers given in my text.

3. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (London: Faber and Faber, 1989). Subsequent references are to this edition, with page numbers given in the text.

4. William James introduces the notion of "moral holidays" in Lecture III of Pragmatism. Interestingly, he does not condemn such holidays, but he is clear that we get one only if someone else or some other power holds all responsibility. Ultimately, only belief in an all-powerful God can underwrite moral holidays in James's view. "Remember what I said of the Absolute: it grants us moral holidays." Quoted from Pragmatism and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 2000): 51. J. Peter Euben uses the notion of "ethical holidays" specifically in connection with Stevens of Remains of the Day in his essay, "The Butler Did It," in Naming Evil, Judging Evil, ed. Ruth W. Grant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006): 103-20. My essay originated as a conference response to Professor Euben 's essay - and, although much revised, still shows some traces of my engagement with issues raised by his essay.




5. I take the term "essentially contestable" from David Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value, 3rd. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1998): 314. Wiggins takes the term from W. B. Gallie's 1955 essay, "Essentially Contested Concepts," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 56.

6. Susan Wolf, "The Moral of Moral Luck" in Setting the Moral Compass, ed. Cheshire Calhoun (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 113-127.

7. My argument is running particularly close to Euben's here. He quotes John Schaar on the temptation that someone else is "competently in charge of the large and dangerous affairs of politics and that the rest of us can go about our business without guilt, responsibility or sharing the burden of citizenship' (116).

8. In presenting this paper to several different audiences, I discovered that few readers share my reaction. I don't quite know what to make of this. Certainly it gives me pause. And it has been interesting to see how vehe- mently my interlocutors defend both Stevens and Ishiguro. I stand accused of lacking sympathy for Stevens, of making him more pathetic and guilty than he actually is. I don't, in other words, cut him enough slack, take seri- ously the excuses for his failings. Worse in most of my respondents' eyes is my indictment of Ishiguro. I impugn his sympathy for his character. My response is that the narrative is certainly "ironic" in Northrop Frye's sense of the term: the reader is placed in a position of superiority to the narra- tor/protagonist. We know that Darlington is wrong, not just because we come later in history, but also because several characters in the novel are shown as being right; either Stevens doesn't know Darlington is wrong out of willed ignorance or sycophantic conformism - or, worse, Stevens does know Darlington is wrong, but suppresses any action on that knowledge out of a misplaced sense of what his "profession" requires. We also are asked to laugh at Darlington and Stevens' inability to talk about sex to young Mr. Cardinal. And, surely, we judge that Stevens has led a failed life. So, yes, maybe we are called to pity Stevens, but I hardly think the narrative asks us to sympathize with him, or strives to lessen the ironic distance between us and him. But that judgment seems harsh and cold to many.

9. "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," in Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2003): 18. The whole passage is worth quoting here: "I had somewhere taken it for granted that we all still believe with Socrates that it is better to suffer than to do wrong. This belief turned out to be a mistake. There was a widespread conviction that it was impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, that none of us could be trusted or even to be expected to be trustworthy when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same."

10. "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy," in Responsibility and Judgment 50. 11. Here is a longer excerpt from Arendt's response to the story of Anton

Schmidt: During the few minutes it took Kovner to tell of the help that had come from a German sergeant, a hush settled over the courtroom; it was as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmidt. And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question - how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in




Germany, in Europe, and perhaps in all the countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told ....

It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian governments in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions. A good many of us might have accepted such a death. The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity. It is certain that anyone who had dared to suffer death rather than silently tolerate the crimes would have sacri- ficed his life in vain. This is not to say that such a sacrifice would have been morally meaningless. It would only have been practically useless

It is true that totalitarian domination tried to establish holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear. . . . [but all such attempts] were doomed to failure, [as were] efforts to let their opponents 'disappear in silent anonymity.' . . . The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be 'practically useless,' at least, not in the long run. It would be a great practical usefulness for Germany today, not merely for her prestige abroad but for her sadly confused inner condition, if there were more such stories to be told. For the lesson of such stories is simple and within every- body's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that 'it could happen' in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can be reasonably asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation. (£7/231-33)

12. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966 [1951]): 459.

13. Hannah Arendt, "Difficulties," in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 [Har- court & Brace, 1994): 307-8.

14. Ibid.: 309. lo. bee Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge:

MIT Press, 1996), esp. Ch. 7. Bernstein's failure to consider Eichmann in Jerusalem in his more recent "Reflections on Radical Evil: Arendt and Kant," Soundings LXXXV, 1-2: 17-30, calls forth Owen Bradley's interesting reply: "Evil? A Response to Richard J. Bernstein," Soundings LXXXV, no. 1-2: 31- 37. Bradley shares my uneasiness with transcendent accounts of evil, and thus would, I assume, endorse Arendt's movement away from the idea of "radical evil" in her work after Origins of Totalitarianism. Interestingly, however, Bradley believes that secular attempts to understand evil will lead us to historical accounts that stress collective agency and thus mitigate interest in and obsession with naming individually guilty parties - a shift in emphasis that Bradley thinks salutary. Obviously, I develop the idea of a secular view of evil in very different directions in this essay.

16. The quoted phrases are from Euben, "The Butler Did It": 104.



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