The banality of evil

Catholic Education ^ | December 7, 2013 | Fr. George W. Rutler

[NYer]

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."

A young businessman told me that on a recent trip to California he was struck by how insipid the art of conversation had become among those he met there, and that the stock reply to almost every observation or critical comment on any subject was:  "It's all good." 

Although New Yorkers might breezily pass this off as typical of the insipidity of what they call "La-La Land," this insouciance has infected all parts of our society, and anyone walking among pre-Christmas shoppers here on 34th Street can marvel at the epidemic of vacuousness all around.  To say of everything, "It's all good," is to imply that nothing is bad, and that, in turn, means that nothing is either really good or really bad.

The theme of the Second Sunday of Advent is judgment, and judgment is the act of distinguishing bad from good and, consequently in application, wrong from right.  The inability to make a right moral judgment is the definition of insanity.  The philosopher Hannah Arendt said, "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."  She spoke of the "banality of evil" with reference to the cruelest Nazis, who did not look or speak like the Devil and seemed even mild and harmless as they engineered horrors. 

If you want a current example of the consequences of bad judgment, consider the teenager just a few blocks from our church who was arrested for shoplifting a pair of jeans and some lingerie while calmly carrying a dead baby in her shopping bag.  At her arraignment, the prosecuting attorney said, ". . . shoplifting with the baby in her bag the entire time certainly suggests a little bit of difficulty following society's rules."  If "It's all good," then murder is an awkward "difficulty" and "society's rules" are the invention of a transient society and not commands from the Creator.

True worship defies the mediocrity that softens moral defense against evil, but in the last generation our narcissistic culture has chosen self-worship over divine worship.  It is mostly the graying people now who want what alert younger people wryly call "Happy-Clappy Masses" with bland folk music and blander preaching. 

Some are even so immersed in banality that they feel threatened when the Catholic Church chants the Catholic words of the Liturgy in a language higher than the idioms of the fading day.  While they invoke a fabricated "Spirit of Vatican II" to support their lack of judgment, this is the opposite of what that Council intended.  Our Lord said, "I judge no man" (John 8:15) and then said, "For judgment I came into this world."  He who is the Truth cannot contradict himself.  He proposed no standard to measure what is good or bad in us other than how we measure up in the reflection of his holy eyes.

[NYer]

Ping!

[Irenic]

“It’s all good,” is to imply that nothing is bad, and that, in turn, means that nothing is either really good or really bad.”

I don’t agree with that.

[BCW]

Moslems use the the phase, “It’s not my problem.” or “It’s the will of Allah.” or “Inshallah” meaning the same...

It’s always put off instead of standing as a unified mass and demanding such violence and corruption are ended...but it continues - those little excuses allow evil to form and grow...and it’s that direct mindset that allowed Obama to get in - allowed the Congress to pass laws or implement policies that will have tremendous impacts on the working class that will benefit the lazy and ignorant temporarily while dismantling the Republic as a whole...

Why wouldn’t the dark one not target the US? It was a nation created on the foundations of Christianity and serves as a beacon of what Jesus taught!

[ansel12]

"It's all good."

"Whatever."

[Salvation]

**”It’s all good.”**

NOT!

[circlecity]

"If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committting evil deeds and were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

"During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name does not change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil."

"Socrates taught us: Know thyself!" Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't"

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago