BishopAccountability.org
	On the Uses and Abuses of History By Eric Bugyis dotCommonweal September 9, 2011 http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=15035 For all of the common wisdom ascribed to the hackneyed expression that “history repeats itself,” attempts to draw analogies between events in history are riddled with problems. At best, such analogies may be said to “limp” and shed little light on the very particular and complex set of circumstances they are being called upon to illuminate. At worst, the very act of analogizing might be said to replicate the violence done to and by the actors and events of the past by using them to emotionally manipulate one’s audience. Such is often the case when trying to draw analogies between present injustices and the horrors of the Holocaust. My recent attempt to call up the specific instance of the Eichmann trial and Hannah Arendt’s penetrating commentary on it, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, is not exempt from either of these criticisms. And, in order ensure that I am not trying to further some personal ideological agenda by lazily exploiting the grief of the past, I should be held accountable for using such a loaded rhetorical weapon. To that end, I would like to thank Grant Gallicho, Jim Pauwels, and others for their interventions, and I would like to apologize to those who felt emotionally manipulated by my admittedly under-determined and unadorned allusion. Yet, I stand by the contemporary relevance of the specific example of Arendt’s Eichmann, which I defended in the understandably heated conversation that followed my post. I should have been clearer, however, as to what I was and was not saying in that original post. [After the jump: what I should have written.] I was not trying to draw a comparison between the Holocaust as a whole, including both the suffering of the victims and the actions of the perpetrators, and the cases of sexual abuse that were committed and systematically covered-up by leaders within the Catholic Church. Any such comparison would not only limp, but also would be an injustice to the individuals involved in both tragedies. This is not, however, because the former is of such greater magnitude than the latter, but because any attempt to compare acts of violence, which are always infinitely singular eruptions of evil in the lives of both the guilty and the innocent, always already trivializes suffering by attempting to translate it into a discrete quantifiable value. Any attempt to give an answer to whether it is worse to have been tortured for months and executed in a Nazi death camp or serially raped at the age of 10 by three trusted leaders of the community is to already dehumanize the victims in question by taking them to be easily interchangeable, faceless individuals rather than infinitely valued images of the Creator with their own, absolutely singular histories. What is legitimate, however, and what I intended, is to raise awareness to the fact that historical violence dehumanizes both the victims and the perpetrators. If our cries to “never forget” are going to be more than sentimental memorializations of reified villains and pitiable casualties, we must come to terms with the fact it is “we,” which is to say human beings, who both suffered inhumanity and committed monstrosity. This is what Arendt intended to highlight when she said that the Eichmann trial put the “banality of evil” on display. Of course, it is hard to think ourselves capable of being lulled into collusion with a violence that is always unspeakable. It is an affront to that spontaneous empathy by which we immediately place ourselves in solidarity with the victims, rather than the villains, of history. Yet, this is the scandal of evil: It is we who commit it, and it is we against whom it is perpetrated. Controversial though such a claim may be, Arendt defended it by arguing that she was only describing what she saw: “I also can well imagine that an authentic controversy might have arisen over the subtitle of the book; for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. [...] It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of the period. And if this is “banal” and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace. [...] That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.” I felt that a similar “lesson” came through reading Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s treatment of Msgr. Lynn in Rolling Stone. The two salient features of Arendt’s claim regarding the “banality of evil” are: (1) Eichmann was no monster, and beyond that, he was not even wicked in the sense that he sought to commit some kind of premeditated act of treachery. Rather, Eichmann simply wasn’t thinking whether his actions might be morally questionable. (2) Such thoughtlessness is not “commonplace,” which is to say that it does not belong to the way we normally approach our actions. Rather, as I mentioned above, we spontaneously are inclined to empathize with those whom are actions might affect, and what was so horrifying about Eichmann, Arendt claims, was precisely that he lacked the kind of “imagination” that would enable one to inhabit the perspective of another. Whence such a “lack of imagination”? Within the logic of the Nazi ideology, Eichmann had simply given himself over to being turned into a “cog” in the machine, and, indeed, his defense claimed that he was a “tiny cog.” Of course, Arendt says, “The whole cog theory is legally pointless and therefore it does not matter at all what order of magnitude is assigned to the ‘cog’ named Eichmann. In its judgment the court naturally conceded that such a crime could be committed only by a giant bureaucracy using the resources of government. But in so far as it remains a crime–and that, of course, is the premise for a trial–all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant, are in court forthwith transformed back into perpetrators, that is to say, into human beings.” Thus, even if Eichmann’s imagination has been suffocated by the complete identification of his own person with his role in the institution, “we” must (re)imagine for him both the suffering of his victims and his own responsibility qua human. In reading Erdley’s presentation of the Lynn case, I felt that she was (re)presenting Lynn as a human being who, far from being a monstrous or treacherous individual, was “a kind and jocular pastor, [who] had swiftly become beloved in the parish, always happy to pitch in at events held by the Home & School or to host dinner parties at his rectory.” At the same time, though, she chronicled the slow strangulation of his imagination as he was steadily rewarded for subordinating his own self to the role he had been assigned in the institution. She writes, “Seminary is a form of military-style indoctrination, molding men to think institutionally, not individually. ‘It’s like brainwashing, almost,’ says Michael Lynch, who attended St. Charles [Borromeo Seminary] for nine years but was rejected from the priesthood after repeatedly butting heads with his superiors. Lynch recalls a priest barking at his class, ‘We own you! We own your body, we own your soul!’” Of course, one shouldn’t be quick to generalize such a picture of seminary life, and I am not saying, nor do I think that Erdley intends to suggest, that all priests go through this kind of formation or find themselves this over-determined by the institution. However, in the case of Lynn, it seems to have “worked,” and its “working” seemed to serve him well as he moved through the ranks of the Church. So, when he became “secretary of the clergy” and began fielding accusations of abuse, Erdley writes, “Bill Lynn understood that his mission, above all, was to preserve the reputation of the church. The unspoken rule was clear: Never call the police.” And, I would add, in light of Arendt: Don’t invite any external intervention that might disrupt the internal coherence, sovereign authority, and autonomous governance of the “body.” What drove home the connection to Arendt’s Eichmann, for me, was the scene that ends the piece. The point at which Lynn, standing in court and being re-imaged as a responsible and spontaneously acting individual, “insists cheerfully” that he understands the conflict potentially facing his archdiocese-paid attorneys but sees no need to step outside the Church to seek independent council. Such an unwillingness, or inability, to imagine himself apart from the institution, as Erdley concludes, “is what makes him such a loyal and devoted servant, all the way to the bitter end.” After reading Erdley, through the lens of Arendt, the question that haunts me, as a Catholic, is whether I suffer from a similar inability. When I attend mass in the Catholic Church and say, “Amen,” to the prayers offered by the priest on behalf of the faithful, am I not affirming the entire ecclesial structure and sacramental economy that we, as Catholics, are asked to believe gives that man the power to so speak for the community, in persona Christi? And am I not, then, in that moment, allowing myself to be yet another “cog,” however tiny, in an institution that asks individuals to subordinate their own imaginations to a vision of what it is to be Christian, even human, that has always already been imagined for them? Have I become just another unwitting accomplice in maintaining the conditions that have turned what any other would see as tragedy into farce? I have no answers to these questions—not for myself and certainly not for my fellow Catholics. But, I don’t think I am alone in asking them. So, they persist, and the silence that follows them is deafening.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.