Thanks for this review. I have done evil in the past due to similar reasons the author points. Not huge evils, smaller evil, but evils nonetheless. Afterwards I learned to be on guard against those small causal chains, but even so, even having began being on guard, I still did evil one more time afterwards. I hope my future rate will go down to zero and stay there. We'll see.
By the way, an additional factor not mentioned in the review, and thus, I suppose, on the book, is the matter of evil governments manipulating the few who are good so they, too, serve evil purposes. This is something major powers do regularly. Their strategists identify some injustice going on in enemy territory, and induce those there who care to seek justice in specific ways calculated to cause the most disruption to the enemy government. Power structures thus destabilized result in social chaos, which can grow, when properly nurtured, into extreme violence, blood feuds, crackdowns, oppression, and generations-long prejudice and hatred. All by manipulating the goodness and sense of justice of the gullible.
To avoid that and do true good one needs to think from the perspective of evil. To imagine the many ways in which one's good impulses could be redirected into evil deeds, and to act one or more layers above that.
How do ordinary people, who largely profess good values, and who have no particular interest in doing evil things, nonetheless become instrumental in horrible crimes?
From the story shared just above this quote, this sounds like we can mostly explain it as coordination failure, i.e. a failure to hunt stag instead of rabbit.
Definitely getting that book. I wanted something to take me past Arendt's book, which never really seemed to get to the banality of it all. Will check it out.
In Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil (1993), Fred E. Katz begins where Hannah Arendt’s examination of the banality of evil ended. Katz tries to apply the techniques of sociology to the question of how ordinary people, without deliberate evil intent, commit horrendous deeds.
Katz himself narrowly escaped the massacre of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. When he returned to his former village after the war, he heard the villagers explain their passivity or collaboration during the Nazi persecutions by using the same language they used at the time: “There is nothing we could do about it. We are just little people. It’s the government.”
But he noticed that the village had erected a plaque in honor of the boys and men who had died fighting for the Axis, and remarks that it was just this loyalty and willingness to serve that doomed the victims of the Nazi era.
How do ordinary people, who largely profess good values, and who have no particular interest in doing evil things, nonetheless become instrumental in horrible crimes? Katz set himself the task of analyzing this question from the perspective of sociology, concentrating mainly on the Holocaust but also looking at some other examples. Here are some of the conclusions he draws:
Some of the most important, far-reaching, portentous decisions that we make in our lives as ordinary people — whom we marry, what profession we adopt, etc. — we tend to make without thinking at the large scale. Instead, we make these decisions in the form of a culmination of smaller decisions that we make with a very short-term, here-and-now focus on transient priorities. Katz gives the example of someone who has spent her professional career as a nurse despite never having had any passion for nursing. She went into nursing school because a high school friend did, or in the hopes of catching the eye of a marriageable doctor, then got out of school with no better job prospects, then had no experience in anything but nursing, and finally found herself to be a life-long nurse in spite of herself.
In the same way, Katz argues, we can be beguiled into great careers of evil by taking many small steps in which our minds are only focused on the concerns of the moment. Never intending to be an evil monster, like never intending to be a nurse, one can nonetheless find oneself fulfilling that role.
Also, our roles and our enterprises tend to be a package of many elements, some of which we find engaging or are passionately invested in, and to others of which we are indifferent or even opposed. In these packages, we will emphasize to ourselves the parts that we care about, and play down the other parts. Because of this, we may find ourselves doing evil things, thinking that those things are merely incidental to our real purpose. (Am I designing a terrible new weapon of mass destruction? I hadn’t thought about it that way. I’m solving a difficult engineering challenge… I’m serving my country ably… I’m impressing senior management… I’m providing for my family… etc.)
In addition, our values tend not to be held as absolutes, but as things in flux and in competition with each other. At any time, and in any circumstance, certain values may be prioritized over other ones. Rudolph Hoess, the commandant of the concentration camp at Auschwitz, said he was repulsed by his job of mass extermination of the victims of the Nazi regime — it offended his idea of the value of human life. But he held other values, such as his loyalty to the Nazi government and its ideology, and his bureaucratic ambitions, at a higher priority, and so not only did he do his job, but he did it well, in an enterprising and inventive way.
Indeed, Hoess used the revulsion he felt at the job he was assigned as a way of justifying his acts — as a variety of personal suffering that consecrated his deeds. His twinges of conscience ironically served him as further evidence of his virtue.
Hoess also used compartmentalization to help preserve his self-image. At work, he was a ruthless and efficient mass murderer who brooked no squeamishness from his underlings. At home, he tried to have a placid, mundane, warm home life, at which concerns from “the office” were not allowed to intrude.
Katz also notes how important it is to respond to qualms of conscience quickly. When you have started doing evil deeds you will also start developing justifications for them, and these justifications will make it easier for you to continue doing more evil. Many times these justifications take the form of reprioritizations of your values, so that by justifying an evil act in one area, you open the door to committing evil in many others (after all, if I was justified in killing this Jew with impunity because Jews are subhuman, why should I have to be at all humane to any Jews ever?)
I found this slim book to be thought-provoking and its project to be an important and welcome one. I am a little concerned that the application of what he insists is the “science” of sociology to the question may run the risk of merely inventing “just-so” stories that offer the illusion of being explanatory or predictive without actually being so. Even so, I think that the process of taking this issue seriously and soberly trying to understand and defend against it can be beneficial, even if it isn’t yet literally scientific.