“The Banality of Evil,” is a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt, a German Jewess and a leading post-World War II thinker. She employed the term while reporting on the Eichmann, Nazi-trial in Jerusalem to describe a deadly force that Modernity has set in motion.
This force simply reduces evil to humdrum, so much so, that evil as such is no longer evil; it is simply banal!
She claimed that the Nazi era and its attendant atrocities provide dramatic evidence of a nation suffering from a spiritual malaise, encouraged by governing elites. This malaise diminishes first, people’s desire to judge right from wrong and in quick turn, their ability to distinguish between the two so that any course of action now becomes acceptable. Evil reduced to banality clearly explains Germanic complicity throughout the Nazi era. Educational institutions, the Churches, writers and public consensus-molders failed to distinguish between right and wrong and very quickly lost their ability to do so.
Hannah Arendt went further! She claimed that the spiritual malaise which gripped the German nation during the Hitlerian regime has enveloped the entire modern world.
Regardless of one’s position in the American political spectrum, we must admit that a national consensus distinguishing right from wrong, no longer exists. All positions on vital issues which touch each human being, individually and in community are now in diametric opposition. Prominent among these are sexuality, marriage, the meaning of family, and most importantly, the intrinsic value of human life itself, which includes the issues of abortion, mercy killing, and embryonic stem-cell research.
The greatest EVIL this nation now collectively perceives is, MAKING A MORAL JUDGEMENT. Banality has been elevated to a national virtue!
We must remember the grim note of warning the French writer and historian, Hilaire Belloc, left us with when he wrote:
“We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid.
We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and fixed creeds refresh us; we laugh. But as we laugh, we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile!”
Holy Mother Church, currently in the grips of Her most formidable challenge in two thousand years, has no choice but to face the reality and ferocity of Modernity’s challenge - evil reduced to banality. Instead, it is becoming apparent that our pastoral shepherds are tending to suspend judgment on vital issues which define right and wrong, both in the public square and from the pulpit. The Universal Church, in her struggle to maintain her identity and survive as a meaningful, independent entity, must not be sidetracked by secondary issues that currently engulf Her. Modernity takes no prisoners!
--Xavier Rynne
