Tag: Hannah Arendt

We need to talk

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments
The School of Athens

Socrates died for it. Charlie Kirk died doing it. They both died because some people, powerful or not, hated them for what they said and did. Socrates died from a dose of hemlock his enemies obliged him to swallow; Kirk died from a bullet in the neck.

Essentially what these two men had in common, and for which they were hated by their political enemies, was the dangerous habit of trying to dialogue and converse with those who opposed them. Nothing seems to have changed in two and a half millennia and every time in our human culture, when civilised conversation and the freedom to speak our minds and search for truth has been abandoned, we descend into barbarism. It is not only heroic people who die. With them will also die true friendship and true political life.

An essay in the Financial Times back in 2012 proclaimed that the art of conversation was on a death list. “It’s a dying art,” wrote John McDermot, “struck down by texting, email and messaging”

McDermott, at that time an FT comment editor, recalled an account by Thomas de Quincy of an evening spent in the company of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The experience was like being swept into some great river, a continuous strain of dissertation, certainly the most novel, the most finely illustrated, traversing the most spacious fields of thought…”

He did not think it probable that many of us would enjoy that level of conversation. Nevertheless, he hoped that we might at some time have felt the elation of staying up all night talking with a friend or loved one.

What is it that makes a conversation something more than idle chatter? Cicero’s formula was summarised by The Economist in 2006: “Speak clearly; speak easily but not too much, especially when others want their turn; do not interrupt; be courteous; deal seriously with serious matters and gracefully with lighter ones; never criticise people behind their backs; stick to subjects of general interest; do not talk about yourself; and, above all, never lose your temper.”

“But”, McDermott reflects,  “Cicero was lucky: he never went on a first date with someone more interested in their iPhone than his company.”

People have been preoccupied by the question of what real conversation is for a long time. The British philosopher Michael Oakshott connected it with the very idea of the pursuit of learning itself. Oakshott was one of the founders of the free University of Buckingham back in the 1960s.

This foundation embodied the principle that the pursuit of learning is not a race in which the competitors jockey for the best place. It is not, he said, “even an argument or a symposium; it is a conversation. And the peculiar virtue of a university (as a place of many studies) is to exhibit it in this character, each study appearing as a voice whose tone is neither tyrannous nor plangent, but humble and conversable. Its value lies in the relics it leaves behind in the minds of those who participate. A conversation does not need a chairman, it has no predetermined course, we do not ask what it is ‘for’ and we do not judge its excellence by its conclusion; it has no conclusion, but is always put by for another day.”

The New York Times columnist, Ezra Klein recently drew attention to another angle of the demise of conversation. He reflected that  while holidays – like Christmas time – are an unusually social time, filled with parties and family get-togethers, for most of the year, we feel isolated and unsatisfied with our social lives. Our society, he thought, wasn’t  structured to support connection year-round. He drew our attention to a book by Sheila Liming, an associate professor of professional writing at Champlain College and the author of “Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time.” In the book, Liming investigates the troubling fact that we’ve grown much less likely to simply spend time together outside our partnerships, workplaces and family units. “What would it look like,” Klein asked, ”to reconfigure our world to make social connection easier for all of us?

For Hannah Arendt, conversation was about much more than ‘hanging out’, valuable and pleasurable a human experience as that might be. ‘Gladness, not sadness,’ she wrote, “is talkative, and truly human dialogue differs from mere talk or even discussion in that it is entirely permeated by pleasure in the other person and what he says.” 

In her short biography of Arendt, Samantha Rose Hill writes, “Aside from Arendt’s husband Heinrich Blücher, no one understood this better than her mentor, the philosopher Karl Jaspers. In Jaspers, Arendt found a man who understood the art of listening and conversation, and elevated these worldly activities to the centre of his life and work”

Arendt said of Jaspers, “Within this small world he unfolded and practiced practicsed his incomparable faculty for dialogue, the splendid precision of his way of listening, the constant readiness to give a candid account of himself, the patience to linger over a matter under discussion, and above all the ability to lure what is otherwise passed over in silence into the area of discourse, to make it worth talking about. Thus in speaking and listening, he succeeds in changing, widening, sharpening – or, as he himself would beautifully put it, in illuminating.”

For Arendt, Karl Jaspers embodied what it meant to think, because they both understood the importance of conversation, lingering over topics and returning to subjects of contemplation.

The central elements of Jaspers’s philosophy, Hill writes, left a lasting impression on Hannah Arendt’s work. At the centre of her conception of thinking is conversation, or the ‘two-in-one’ dialogue one has with oneself. Studying with Jaspers meant that, for Arendt, thinking was no longer confined to a hidden realm. Her dissertation work on Saint Augustine drew together the disciplines of theology and philosophy in order to understand neighbourly love as a secular value for being with others in the world.

Hill writes that friendship was an oasis for Arendt, and in dark times – of which there were a number in her life – it offered a refuge. She said, in being with others, “one heart reaches out directly to the other. It is a meeting ground of equals, where one is free to go without a mask, without the pressures of performance and appearance. It is the intimacy of close relationships with others that teaches us how to breathe, to co-exist.

Another Arendt scholar, Kathleen B. Jones writes, “For Arendt, friendship thrived on equality, but only in the sense of a shared commitment to independent thinking and a willingness to take risks. For Arendt, conversation was the lifeblood of friendship and friendship was the lifeblood of society.

Arendt saw genuine conversation and friendship as the place where truth can be spoken without the distortions of ideology, propaganda, or power. She held that with a friend, you do not speak to persuade, command, or manipulate.
You speak to seek understanding and to “appear” authentically before one another.

In that way friendship preserves individuality. Friendship helps people remain distinct individuals rather than absorbed into mass movements and she saw conversation as the essence of human plurality. Arendt thought human beings live in a condition of plurality—we each see the world differently. Conversation for her was how we come to terms with these differences without violence. It is not aimed at agreement but at mutual understanding. Conversation is how the world becomes “real” between us.

What would our world look like if these values, these practices and dispositions prevailed within it? Conversations and friendships are surely the key to resolving the terrible polarisation which now afflicts us and kills the genuine plurality which is part of our true human inheritance. Polarisation, mindless ideology, and the hatred they induce are driving our world to a very lonely and unforgiving place. We must resist them with all our moral strength – as heroes in all ages have done.

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HANNAH ARENDT AND THE ‘CRISIS OF OUR TIME’

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Undoubtedly, one of the most important books written in, and left to us from the 20th century was and is Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Why? It is a thorough and spellbinding work on the history of the two-century unfolding of that nightmare of butchery and twisted deceit. It is also a deep and penetrating work of political philosophy which serves as a frightening and lasting reminder that humanity is permanently threatened by the destructive seeds from which that cancer grew. She reminds us that it could happen again.

Predictions are of little avail and less consolation, she writes, but goes on to say that there remains the fact that the crisis of our time and its central experience have brought forth an entirely new form of government -Totalitarianism.  In 1966 she held that this, as a potentiality and an ever-present danger, is only too likely to stay with us from now on,. Just as other forms of government which came about at different historical moments and rested on different fundamental experiences, have stayed with mankind regardless of temporary defeats – monarchies, and republics, tyrannies, dictatorships and despotism. 

Nearly sixty years later, with the evidence we have of totalitarian tendencies in our public life we are hardly in a position to dispute her assertion. 

Arendt began writing her study of the origins of totalitarianism as early as 1945. One incarnation of that catastrophic horror had just been eliminated at the cost of a terrible war. Another was still exercising the full force of its tyranny, while the third was about to begin its reign of terror in the Far East. The first to be vanquished was that which had spread across Europe from Nazi Germany; the second was Stalin’s Soviet Empire with its multiple puppet satellites in eastern Europe; the third was the People’s Republic of China with its overcooked clones, North Korea and Vietnam. That one is still with us, carefully camouflaging itself in an attempt to make us think that it is not what it really is.

We think of all these aberrations as 20th century phenomena. Arendt’s great and prophetic work shows us, however, that their origins go back through a century and a half of mankind’s confused reading of our world, human society and the many deadly turnings which political thought took over that period. 

Yuval Levin’s  book, The Great Debate, is a  study of the arguments between Edmund Burke and Tom Paine in the 1790s. In it he showed how the critical divergence in western political thought in our own time dates from then. That debate was essentially over the foundations on which the rights of man are based. In many ways it matches Arendt’s own vision of where our 20th century nightmare started. If we want a dramatic symbol for the turning point which led us to the disasters of our time we might take the enthronement of the goddess of reason on the high altar of Notre Dame de Paris. This was the symbolic and fatal moment when Man was declared to be the centre of all things.

I could not hope and would not dare to try to offer a succinct summary of Arendt’s masterpiece, all 600-plus pages of it. The best I can do is explain that In the three parts of her study – the first edition was published in 1950, later revisions in 1966 – the phenomena she holds to account for the world’s greatest catastrophes and the political impasse she saw in the Cold War in the1960s, are antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism which they spawned.

Arendt died 50 years ago (1975). The chilling thing about everything in her work is that she speaks to our world today in so many ways. One of the great evils which she saw in her time and which, in her view, contributed to the despair on which totalitarianism nurtured itself, was loneliness.  She noted that totalitarian regimes fostered the atomisation of individuals in society. Loneliness accompanied this, which along with distrust of others fostered the semi-worship of the all-powerful deadly state systems which the 20th century had to suffer. 

What is one of the tragic human maladies of which 21st century men and women have again become painfully conscious? Loneliness.

She wrote in 1966, reflecting on the deadly attraction of the so-called intelligentsia to this new state system, What’s more disturbing to our peace of mind than the unconditional loyalty of members of totalitarian movements, and the popular support of totalitarian regimes, is the unquestionable attraction these movements exert on the elite, and not only on the mob elements in society. It would be rash indeed to discount, because of artistic vagaries or scholarly naïveté, the terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count among its sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and inscribed party members.

The dominant elites of the past thirty years may not have been consciously totalitarian but the antisemitic mobs which occupied university campuses, or London’s streets over the past two years did not come out of thin air. Do her reflections on the power and influence of the elites of her own time not sound familiar to us relative to the cancellations, no-platforming, silencing and destruction of freedom of speech in our time – not to mention their insane efforts to redefine and obliterate our very understanding of human nature?

Furthermore, she explained, this attraction for the elite is as important a clue to the understanding of totalitarian movements as their more obvious connection with the mob. It indicates the specific atmosphere, the general climate in which the rise of totalitarianism takes place. It should be remembered that the leaders of totalitarian movements and their sympathizers are, so to speak, older than the masses which they organize so that chronologically speaking the masses do not have to wait helplessly for the rise of their own leaders in the midst of a decaying class society of which they are the most outstanding product.

The ultra progressive capture of our academic institutions is now providing the elders of the movement. Over a few decades this is what has generated the mobs of young people who in the past decade have torn apart whole city districts and occupied campuses today.

Reflecting on what prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world, she argues, is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever growing masses of our century. 

The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality. The ‘ice-cold reasoning’ and the ‘mighty tentacle’ of dialectics which ‘seizes you as in a vise’ appears like a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon. It is the inner coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of contradictions that seems to confirm a man’s identity outside all relationships with others. It fits him into the iron band of terror even when he is alone, and totalitarian domination tries never to leave him alone except in the extreme situation of solitary confinement. 

She explains how the process works by destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other, even the productive potentialities of isolation are annihilated; by teaching and glorifying the logical reasoning of loneliness where man knows that he will be utterly lost if ever he lets go of the first premise from which the whole process is being started, even the slim chances that loneliness may be transformed into solitude and logic into thought are obliterated.

 If this practice is compared with that of tyranny, it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth. The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms. 

But sand storms are not permanent phenomena. They are destructive but temporary. Their danger, she says,  is not that they might establish a permanent world. Totalitarian domination, like tyranny. bears the germs of its own destruction.

The first part of her study deals with the growth of  secular antisemitism. The second part deals with the nature, legacy and corrupting nature of late 19th  and early 20th  century imperialism. In the third part she shows how the combined and intertwining legacy of these two fatal realities morph into the horror of totalitarianism.

The flawed notions of the rights of man which were championed by Tom Paine et al flourished over the nineteenth century. Add to that the plague of antisemitism and imperialism which spawned what she describes as ‘race-thinking’. This in turn undermined the historic model of the nation state and the sense of community which it nourished. The replacement of the old stabilising notion of the nation state generated pan-ethnic consciousness (Germanic, Slav and Russian) which in turn created stateless populations – including Jews – which found no home in those entities. Those entities themselves were partly driven by a desire for conquest and to create new empires. Out of all this emerged classless mobs worshiping a new notion of political power. These became easy fodder to nourish the central and eastern European totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

She makes an interesting observation on how the Mediterranean nations somehow partially escaped the frenzy.

The only countries where to all appearances state idolatry and nation worship were not yet outmoded and where nationalist slogans against the ‘suprastate’ forces were still a serious concern of the people were those Latin-European countries like Italy and, to a lesser degree, Spain and Portugal, which had actually suffered a definite hindrance to their full national development through the power of the Church. It was partly due to this authentic element of belated national development and partly to the wisdom of the Church, which very sagely recognized that Fascism was neither anti-Christian nor totalitarian in principle.

The real seed-bed of totalitarianism was Central and Eastern Europe. In the 1920s and 1930s, after the first World War, the chaos among the displaced populations, the ethnic majorities and the corresponding minorities, produced all sorts of conflicts, requiring the setting of new state boundaries. Ireland’s border predicament was a side show in comparison with what mainland Europe was experiencing. But the growth of race-thinking added more poison to the mix. Europe was awash with masses of stateless people. The League of Nations tried to institute what were called ‘minority treaties’ to establish some kind of human rights for these people. They can only be seen as dismal failures.

Add to this confusion the flawed notion of human rights without any philosophical or anthropological foundation – who has them, and on what basis?  In principle the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. But in practice this abstract notion of humanity guaranteed nothing.

The crimes against human rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful for the whole in distinction to its parts. A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for – the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number – becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. 

Here, in the problems of factual reality, we are confronted with one of the oldest perplexities of political philosophy, which could remain undetected only so long as a stable Christian theology provided the framework for all political and philosophical problems, but which long ago caused Plato to say: ‘Not man, but a god, must be the measure of all things.’

She concludes that these facts and reflections offer what seems an ironical, bitter, and belated confirmation of the famous arguments with which Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. They appear to buttress his assertion that human rights were an abstraction, that it was much wiser to rely on an entailed inheritance of rights which one transmits to one’s children like life itself, and to claim one’s rights to be the ‘rights of an Englishman’ rather than the inalienable rights of man.” (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France). According to Burke, the rights which we enjoy spring from within the nation, so that neither natural law, nor divine command, nor any concept of mankind such as Robespierre’s ‘human race,’ the sovereign of the earth, are needed as a source of law.  (Robespierre, Speeches. Speech of April 24, 1793.)

She asserts that the pragmatic soundness of Burke’s concept seems to be beyond doubt in the light of our manifold experiences. Not only did loss of national rights in all instances entail the loss of human rights. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. And in view of objective political conditions, it is hard to say how the concepts of man upon which human rights are based – that he is created in the image of God (in the American formula), or that he is the representative of mankind, or that he harbors within himself the sacred demands of natural law (in the French formula) – could have helped to find a solution to the problem.

The survivors of the extermination camps, the inmates of concentration and internment camps, and even the comparatively happy stateless people could see without Burke’s arguments that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger.

But Arendt is not a pessimist. Her final judgement echoes – but in a more Judaeo-Christian way – the final frames of Stanley Kubrick’s  masterpiece imagining of the future of humanity, 2001: S Space Odyssey, where the ‘star child’ enters the edge of the screen suggesting a new beginning for mankind.
She reminds us that there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only ‘message’ which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est – that a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.

A watershed election looming in Ireland?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

 

illuminations-irish-flag-flies-above-the-gpo

As Ireland slides somewhat apathetically towards a potentially crucial general election in the centenary of the 1916 Irish rebellion against the British Empire, there are signs – and hopes among some – that this might be a watershed year in Irish politics.

The old party political structures which have persisted for nearly 100 years are tired and have gone far beyond their sell-by date. Worse, they are corrupted and for many they reek of some of the worst vices that relativism and it progeny, unprincipled pragmatism, can bring to any political culture.

In 1961the social and political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, was sent by The New Yorker magazine to Jerusalem to write about the trial of Adolf Eichmann. She was appalled by what she saw and heard. The spectacle which she saw unfold before her was of a man – indeed of many men and women – who set conscience aside to carry out the orders received from a government to which he had committed allegiance.

This appalled her at least as much as the catalogue of atrocities which the trial revisited. These she had anticipated and indeed lived through as a victim. In some senses was prepared for the repeated blows to her sensibilities which rained down on her. The former was something she was not prepared for and until her death in 1975 it haunted her. Well it might, and well it might haunt us all. The abnegation of conscience and its inevitable consequence, the abnegation of humanity, still stalks our public square today.

We may like to think that it does not manifest itself today in the horrendous proportions which it did in the case of Adolf Eichmann – and his co-criminals – but in essence it does. It does so in the same banal guise as it did in the case of that monstrous “ordinary” bureaucrat. It is at our peril that we think that it does not.

The coalition government of Enda Kenny, a politician more reviled by a sizeable proportion of the Irish electorate than any in living memory, is seeking to be returned to power along with his liberal coalition partners, the Irish Labour Party. He may well succeed. It is now widely expected, however, that there will be a strong representation in the new parliament for those who have been crying, “a plague on all your houses.” Kenny’s party may be the largest one in the Dáil after the election but its majority will be greatly reduced.

A poll at the start of the election campaign indicates that over 60 per cent of the electorate want rid of the present coalition. However, party fragmentation and independent deputies of all colours may result in them just getting more of the same. If Kenny can form a government he will have to do so with the help of all the colours of the rainbow, always a volatile and often a short-term mix.

There are multiple reasons for the disaffection of the Irish electorate. Ireland is not immune to this virus now found in many Western democracies. But in Ireland one in particular stands out. Enda Kenny is the leader of a party which in 2013 cut a number of its members adrift because they would not and could not, in conscience, support his government’s abortion legislation.

The members in question opposed the legislation on two grounds. The first was the ground of their moral conscience which told them that the termination of the lives of innocent unborn human beings in their mothers’ wombs was evil. The second, although not a matter of life and death like the first, was no less moral. They believed that promises made, undertakings given by politicians going into an election, should be honoured. Kenny’s party explicitly undertook not to legislate for abortion if it got the votes to enable it to form a government. Once in power, under pressure from their coalition partners and the media, they turned around and did just that.

But revulsion at Kenny goes even deeper than that. Not only did he unjustly punish those he could not bring with him. He corrupted the consciences of those too weak to stand their ground against him, those who in their hearts knew that what he was doing was both morally wrong and a betrayal of the trust of the electorate. These people, under pressure from him and his bullying acolytes caved in and voted for his legislation.

For many, sadly, this is just the stuff of political life. For others it is much more than that. Those who opposed Kenny did not see this as a matter involving the extermination of a race. For them it was about a law which was going to open the door to a regime of abortion through which their country would join a community of nations which have callously organised the extermination of millions of unborn babies over the past five decades. In secret meetings abortion advocates in Kenny’s coalition told their supporters that although limited in scope, the legislation he was introducing would open the door to abortion on demand in Ireland. That was no surprise to anyone.

Lucinda Creighton was a minister in Kenny’s government and was forced to resign when she was unable to support the legislation – legislation to which she was opposed in principle and which she had promised her electorate that the party would not introduce or pass into law. Media outlets in Ireland are overwhelmingly pro-abortion and Creighton is now their number one target. She is seeking re-election and is the head of a new party with a radical and comprehensive platform of policies. It is campaigning, among other things, to rid Irish party-politics of the paralysing and freedom-denying version of the parliamentary whip system it has be operating under.

lucinda

Creighton’s new party is taking a much more liberal line on the application of the party whip because everyone sees that the system as used at present is simply turning the elected representatives in moronic “yes-men” – and women.

In their hue and cry pursuit of her Irish media show themselves, no less that the majority of the politicians in the traditional parties do, totally insensitive to the ethical quagmire which Hannah Arendt discerned in heart of Adolf Eichmann at his fateful trial in Jerusalem.

One journalist typified this a few weeks ago when she attacked Creighton for her conscientious stand. “I think she was wrong. She was wrong to leave over abortion and she was wrong to leave at all,” she said. Creighton should have understood, the journalist argued, why the party whip had to be imposed. According to her the TDs – an acronym derived from the Irish term for a parliamentary representative – and senators needed the “protection” of the whip. She denied that it was a method of ensuring group think and mind control. Read another way that means they needed the “protection” of the whip to shield them from their own consciences and to absolve them of personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

Creighton’s spirited and inspiring defence of her stand in 2013 obviously meant nothing to this journalist. It did, however, to many, right around the world where it was read, listened to and admired.

I never bought into the line about matters of conscience…., the journalist went on. If you can’t stand being told what to do, how do you intend to take part in Cabinet decisions, which are constitutionally collective and confidential? So in the end, you can dress it up in principles all day, but ultimately, Lucinda is just another splitter.

She concluded, the following applies, not just to Lucinda, but the rest of them: Compromise can be framed as the means by which ideals are undone, one vote at a time. You can sacrifice your soul on the altar of loyalty, but nothing changes the fact that politics is a collective business.

So yes, there’s a game to be played. But it’s a long game.

There are chilling echoes of Eichmann’s defence in those words. In the light of what she observed in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt raised the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness, a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions and inaction.

All this is symptomatic of what many see as a cancer at the heart of not just Irish political life, but of Western democracy generally. Politicians today are fond of telling us that their thinking and their principles are “evolving”. That, in most cases, is just a euphemism which describes political thinking devoid of principles.

For the next three weeks some Irish men and women are living in the hope that, 100 years after men went in good conscience to their deaths for an ideal, they might again have representatives in their parliament for whom conscience and ideals, as opposed to power, mean something.

The most lethal fault line in the modern world

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Fault line creating a desert

In the culture wars it is not recommended to the defenders of Life that they talk about the Nazi holocaust as a parallel to the holocaust of the living unborn. This is primarily a matter of strategy or tactics. The accidental details of the horror of the holocaust which took place in the Nazi death camps are so visceral that in the public imagination it is incomparable with anything else in human history. Inviting comparisons is thought to be ridiculous – if not downright obscene.

But is it? Are there not strong parallels? Is evil not evil in whatever packaging it is presented to us?

Both of these evils have their root in one great evil – the denial of humanity. Both of these evils also share a common characteristic which mark them out in their own time, the characteristic of banality which was highlighted for the world in the case of the Nazi holocaust by Hannah Arendt.

The entire Nazi project for the extermination of the Jews – and others – was based on a view of the human race which raised the Aryan embodiment of that race to a level which placed all other Nazi-classified embodiments on an inferior level. The Semitic peoples it placed on a level where their very humanity was denied. Their very existence was a threat to humanity and for that reason they warranted extermination.

Am I exaggerating if I say that those who adhere to the ideology of choice now prevailing in many of the world’s national jurisdictions, and who are driving the practice of abortion through this ideology, share this same common denominator. In both cases, at the heart of their doctrine is a denial of the humanity of their victims. The pro-abortion movement, under the specious pretext of defending the rights and best interests of women, have built an ideology which not only denies but which has also closed off all debate on the essential humanity of the child awaiting delivery from its mother’s womb. This radical misunderstanding of humanity is one of the great fault-lines dividing the peoples of the world today.

On the foundation of this false and unexamined principle – which with each day that passes science shows to be more and more false – they have built the narrative that all those who oppose abortion are bent on denying women their fundamental rights. This ideology has now asserted itself across the world and established the right in law in countless jurisdictions to terminate the lives of millions on the basis of denying the humanity of children before birth. Sleepwalking, millions have subscribed to this ideology – just as millions of Germans were half asleep as millions of their fellow human beings went to their deaths in the camps.

What is the difference? I see none. There may be accidental differences, but for those who identify themselves as sharing their humanity with, on the one hand, the Jewish people, and on the other, with children from the moment of their conception, palpable evil is the common denominator which they share.

It is here, contemplating this evil, that we also become aware that the truth of Arendt’s description of the evil of the Nazi atrocities as banal also applies to the evil stalking our world today.

In 1961 Arendt covered the trial, in Jerusalem, of Adolf Eichmann – following his kidnapping on a street in Buenos Aires, and resulting in his death sentence and execution by hanging in Israel. Her reports appeared in The New Yorker and were later published in book form after his execution as Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963. For all sorts of reasons the book inflamed debate over the holocaust. One of those reasons was her characterization of Eichmann as an exemplar of what she described as the “banality of evil”. There is perhaps less agreement now* over whether it can be properly applied to the person and career of Adolf Eichmann himself but the idea that much of the evil in the world is perpetrated in the most banal circumstances rather in spectacular and sensational ways is hard to deny.

Arendt rejected the overblown rhetoric of the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, who portrayed Eichmann as a sadistic monster. She insisted that Eichmann was no more than a colourless bureaucrat, a shallow operative who had had “no motives at all”. Acting out of “sheer thoughtlessness”, Eichmann “never realized what he was doing”, for he worked in a system that made it “well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel” that what he was doing was wrong, she maintained

Maybe yes, maybe no. It now seems probably “no” in the particular case of Eichmann. But there is no question that the “system” for which he worked – and helped create – had many operatives, cooperating agents, sleepwalking participants in this great evil for whom their participation was banal, ordinary and mundane. It is in just the same way that acceptance and, in some cases, participation in the culture of death which is abortion, is banal, ordinary and now just a part of everyday life. Such is the routine way in which doctors – like many Kermit Gosnells – daily propose to mothers that they would be wiser to abort the child they are carrying; or so-called counselors advise and facilitate the same; or parents advise their pregnant daughters, or boyfriends their girlfriends. It is everywhere and the world has just become accustomed to it all.

Kermit Gosnell saw himself as an ordinary man, a doctor just doing his day’s work.

Thankfully the horror that was the Nazi holocaust is now universally recognised – excepting some pockets of nutty, if still abhorrent and dangerous, anti-semitism. The same is not so with the modern horror of abortion. The blinding god of Individualism has dulled the consciences of millions into accepting this human sacrifice as just one more event on the daily round. Those entrusted with the promotion and protection of the common good have just nodded their heads in agreement, buying the lie, the lie which is at the heart of both holocausts, that the victim being sacrificed is not human. In this holocaust they have swallowed the deception that the object of their violence is just a clump of cells (which we all are), a “foetus”, not worthy of the name “child”, and fit only for the incinerator – if the so-called quality of life of those on whom it depends for its life, seems to require it.

It is that very banality which makes us dull and restrains us from comparing this holocaust with the other. Let us tell the truth and call this what it is, a holocaust of the most horrendous proportions, a human sacrifice to the false gods of modernity, more terrible than Moloch, Astaroth, or others of the ancient world who demanded young lives as sacrifices. When enough people in the world eventually accept the truth that its victims are human beings, we will hang our heads in shame that it was allowed to go on for so long.

*See Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined life of a mass murderer reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, February 27, 2015.