The Banality of Decency

Don't ask me why, but Utne Reader seems never to make it out of our house once it comes in, which is only a partial explanation of why I happened to be paging through an old issue (March-April, 2006, to be precise!) when I stumbled upon this most exquisite phrase--"The banality of decency."

You might guess that it had something to do with a play on words taking off from Hannah Arendt's famous evaluation of the defendents in the Nazi War Crimes tribunals, and the "banality" of their "evil." The article I stumbled upon was by one Sam Smith, writing for the on-line Progressive Review, but reprinted in the Utne from DESIGNER/Builder, which the end note indicates is "environmentally driven and socially conscious."

Pause for just a moment to respect the absolute serendipity of me quietly reading in my living room in 2010 from a periodical from 2006, quoting the September/October, 2005 reprint from an obscure architectural magazine with a social consience...and note that on the website of DESIGN/Builder is the sad note: "Due to the untimely death of beloved publisher Kingsley Hammett, further issues of DESIGNER/builder magazine are on hold until further notice." How DO ideas bounce around in this universe, anyway?!

Back to the article, by Sam Smith, reflecting on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and wondering what it is that we learn from evil. Smith ambles through his first experience of the horrors of the Nazi death machine in a 1956 Social Studies class. I resonate with his reflection: "The concentration camps were gruesome, but the movies Nazis had made to celebrate thmselves were in some ways even more horrific, depicting millions of Germans voluntarily surrendering their souls as millions of others involuntarily lost their lives."

I nodded in appreciation how Smith's journey had led him through William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free. There is an unsettling truth in observing that it does not take extraordinarily evil people to accomplish extraordinarily evil ends. Just about anyone will do, if you can so structure the odious tasks that no one really has to take responsibility.

But then, this exquisite paragraph:

"If you watch good people closely, you see that their good comes as naturally as evil came to Eichmann. It does not have to be propped up with memories of great wrongs; it is just the everyday unconscious behavior of those graced with honor: the banality of decency."

I associate William Sloan Coffin's name with the thought that in the long-term a Christian cannot help but be optimistic, which means in the short term she can be nothing but a pessimist. There's no doubt but that left to play by themselves you will see people act in thoughtless, mean, calculated, and yes, sometimes even evil ways. Want proof? Drive the speed limit in the left lane next time you are on the highway! Take away their food, their homes, any sense of hope, and it may well be that people will act in ways that offend our human sensibilities. But before you just throw up your hands in frustration over this great human experiment, notice what Smith named: that uncanny, unrehearsed goodness that seems just as present in the world you move through from day to day.

For me, this morning, it was the waitress who "promised to bring the Promise," the salesperson at Barnes and Noble who humored me with an introduction to their e-book reader knowing I already have a Kindle, the server who cleared my plate at the Rotary meeting on Tuesday, who, in a room of 150 people who probably could not have cared less how she was, had that tone in her voice when she asked if she could take the plate that made me know she really did care if I wanted or needed anything else. Yes, yes, they're all told to be nice and helpful. But if you watch people closely, you see that the goodness comes naturally.

Sure, that goodness is in the envelope right next to the one that opens with fear, suspicion, malice, self-justification, and there's just as much danger in thinking people are essentially good as there is in thinking they are essentially evil. We're mixed beasts, moral mongrels all for the most part looking for our next meals, but always, the teacher from Ecclesiates reminds me, with that "hint of eternity" planted within us. If we could only nurture it, cup it, like a communion wafer in our hands, warm it with our breath and take it into our hearts.

I want to give good Mr. Smith the last word:

"The frightening thing about Auschwitz is not that some would deny it but how real it still seems. The frightening thing about Auschwitz is that our leaders go to honor it while still denying Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and Palestine. We will know that we have finally learned the Holocoaust's lessons when we no longer hear new echoes of it."

Or maybe, better, when we hear the echoes, with all of their bitter dissonance, with ears tuned to a deep, broad, long, even eternal touch of decency that sees and acknowledges, yet neither condones nor forgives the evil that is its banal brother.