Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)
The only real argument I ever had with my friend Chris Straford was about the philosopher Hannah Arendt. We squabbled about countless trivialities, such as punctuation, sometimes for the sheer pleasure of banter, but Hannah Arendt was a real bone of contention. This isn’t just because she was a smoker: photos of Hannah Arendt (1906–75) show a thin and drawn face with baggy eyes and a cigarette perched between her forefinger and middle finger as if it were an elusive idea she is trying to hold on to before it vanishes like, well, smoke. Chris, on the other hand, was as fit as a fiddle. When he was discovered out of the blue in 2016 to be riddled with cancer, he was preparing to go to Helsinki to represent his country at tennis, a sport at which he held court, so to speak. He rode his rickety old pushbike everywhere. Sometimes I would be in the car with my kids on the way to school and we would see Chris, heading in the same direction, weaving through the traffic like death couldn’t touch him. My kids loved waving. I dreaded that, the way he rode, he’d be hit by a vehicle. He is the only person I’ve known who rode his pushbike to palliative care.
Chris and I shared an office for eight years and sometimes you could hear our laughter out in the schoolyard. Before that we had been in the Jesuit order for seven years together. We shared the same wonderful work, trying to enlarge the vision of young people who might otherwise be said to have the world at their feet. For Chris and me, a big part of this was a commitment to justice, not charity. Charity is a choice; justice is a demand. On Sunday nights, Chris would gather bread from a bakery franchise that had to be persuaded to depart from protocol and give away the bread they couldn’t sell. Chris pestered them until they relented. Then, every week, he got some of our students together and took the bread around various homeless centres in the city. The bread run was the stuff of legend. Chris insisted the students talk to people, not just drop the loaves and move on. It was the talking, not the bread, that changed lives. Sometimes he brought his own children with him.
When Chris rang me to tell me how sick he was, I happened to be taking advantage of the lavish afternoon tea that was served after the funeral of a dear gentleman who had died at a ripe old age. Something in my world crumbled during that phone call.
‘There will be grace in this,’ said Chris. He was right, and the next six months were a hard and beautiful journey. I took over Chris’s classes, including a senior ethics group that had been studying the arguments about euthanasia. These were seventeen-year-old students and, of course, rather pragmatic in their views. Every one of them thought euthanasia was a good idea. Chris visited the class, struggling to breathe to get there, and told them about what his life was like and where it was headed. The kids did not know how to respond. Chris had muddied their waters, turned their shallow certainties into profound confusion. This is the sign of a great teacher. A black-and-white world will always be small. Chris lived in colour and wanted his students to do the same. Chris suffered fools. In fact, he loved them, which is just as well because there is no greater fool than a person who can’t suffer fools. But he knew they were fools. We went to the same church and Chris always told his children, sitting in the front row, to make sure they had a decent book to read during the sermon. For him, the vital thing was the community. The self-important and insipid mush that came from the pulpit was neither here nor there.
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Nobody could accuse Hannah Arendt of creating insipid mush. In 1954, she published ‘The Crisis in Education’, an essay that remains one of the most cogent reflections on the process of learning and formation I have come across. Arendt speaks powerfully to the increasingly driven and businesslike nature of schooling. She identifies the problems that arise when education focusses exclusively on training individuals so they can succeed on their own terms. She distinguishes between education and teaching, and speaks up in favour of the latter. Teaching creates a relationship and a relationship creates a moral context: this is true learning. It is about formation of character, not calibrated results: ‘one cannot educate without at the same time teaching; an education without learning is empty and therefore degenerates with great ease into moral emotional rhetoric.’
Arendt knew enough about emotional rhetoric. She wanted to re-establish trust in authority and tradition, not pander to educational fads. Arendt was a German and a Jew who, in 1940, was interned in a Nazi concentration camp in the southwest of France. She managed to escape as a refugee to the United States, where she arrived in 1941 and eventually became the first female professor of politics at Princeton. Soon after arriving, she published an article, ‘We Refugees’ (1943), which is more significant now than ever. She describes what happens to humans, who are inherently social, when they lose their society. It reminds us that the welfare of refugees is the welfare of us all.
‘The Crisis in Education’ concludes with one of the great definitions of education. Every school should have these words put up on the wall somewhere:
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable.
Chris Straford had no difficulty with this. On the contrary, he relished this kind of thinking, which came to flower in Arendt’s classic work The Human Condition (1958). That book presents the defence for the human family in the face of the case against, for which the previous fifty years of bloody history had provided ample evidence. It insists that humans aren’t programmed.
Chris was by no means alone in his problems with Hannah Arendt. She was not keen on the idea of a Jewish homeland. She asked where the Jewish leadership had been in the face of the Nazis. She had an affair with Martin Heidegger, the philosopher who supported National Socialism. Chris was a strong and exceedingly well-informed enthusiast for Judaism. He did not like what he saw as Arendt’s flirtations with something hostile to it. Most of all, he struggled with Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book I admire. In The Human Condition, Arendt says that it is in our nature for us to do surprising things. Eichmann in Jerusalem is surprising. It gave the world a catchphrase that resonates through every contemporary terrorist attack and gun massacre, especially when those atrocities start to follow a familiar pattern: ‘the banality of evil’.
Adolf Eichmann had been a lieutenant-colonel in the SS and was one of the major organisers of the extermination of Jews as part of the Final Solution. He probably did not kill any Jews himself. He simply (if that’s the right word) arranged trains and other practicalities to make sure it all happened efficiently. He drove a desk but it was a pretty nasty desk. After the war, he fled under the name of Ricardo Klement to Argentina. If he hadn’t boasted of his sick exploits to a girlfriend, he may have eluded capture. But he was nabbed by Mossad in a nondescript industrial suburb of Buenos Aires in May 1960. Dr Mengele narrowly escaped his hunters in Buenos Aires around the same time.
Eichmann was put on trial in Jerusalem and Hannah Arendt sat through the whole thing, writing a series of controversial articles for the New Yorker that eventually became Eichmann in Jerusalem. She observes, ‘To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.’ This enabled Eichmann’s behaviour. ‘The most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see no one, no one at all, who was actually against the Final Solution.’ Chris Straford loathed this blaming of victims and he was right to do so.
But Arendt asks hard questions that are worth considering. In teaching philosophy to teenagers, I ask them to understand the story of Alan Turing, the inventor of the computer and pioneer of artificial intelligence. Turing composed a famous test that poses the question of whether or not a machine could imitate human thinking to such an extent that it would be impossible to tell one from the other. His question has a partner in Arendt’s question about Eichmann. Turing asks if a machine could effectively become human. ‘At one point does destroying a machine become the same as murder?’ Arendt asks if a human could become a machine and hence forfeit moral responsibility. Only a person can commit moral acts. If a person is dehumanised, are they no longer a moral being?
Taken together, Turing’s question and Arendt’s form the philosophical core of the modern age. They are asking about human identity. What makes a human different?
The key to this, for Arendt, is language. She notes that Eichmann could only speak in clichés. This suggested to her that he was mouthing words like a tape recorder rather than thinking in any way for himself.
Officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché…The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think.
She closely observes his execution, noting that Eichmann had no belief in any kind of God or afterlife. But on the gallows, he had nowhere to turn but to clichés. He stood erect and proclaimed, ‘We shall all meet again…Such is the fate of all men.’ He said of Germany and his adopted Argentina, ‘I shall not forget them.’ Arendt comments, ‘In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory.’
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
Chris Straford and I spoke about this during his last few weeks. In some ways it was a distraction. He had been reading Jonathan Sacks’ Not in God’s Name (2015) and was fully alive to the mystery of life, even as he was dying. We laughed about funeral clichés and the way people pad themselves with easy sentiment in difficult situations. How could two of the trickiest ideas, thought and time, come together in an empty phrase such as ‘thinking of you at this time’? If anything, the cliché ‘hoping for love and peace’ is also made out of three big philosophical ideas. We thought this was hysterical. It hurt Chris to laugh but he couldn’t stop. Perhaps it was gallows humour.
Chris ran everywhere, which was ironic because he was always running late. He never wore a watch and seldom carried a phone. All of this stemmed from the fact that Chris was able to occupy the present moment, to be fully in the company of people without thinking about what needed to be done next. Even as he neared the end, struggling to walk as far as the bathroom beside his bed, he was fully present to you.
Two days before Chris died, Jenny and I visited him with our three children and he embraced them all. I don’t think they will ever forget this moment. There were no words for it, no worn-out and familiar expressions. Chris believed in the freshness of good rather than the banality of evil. The last thing I ever heard him say was: ‘The spirit is in this room.’ The room in Cabrini Hospital, with its packaged food and remote-controlled TV, was certainly banal. The good that was in it was certainly not. Hannah Arendt believed that our task was to renew the world we share. Even in his death, Chris was part of that renewal.