Banality of Evil

Banality of Evil (or in some cases Malevolent Stupidity)

THIS GUEST POST (Oh, how formal!) COMES TO ALL OF US BY WAY OF FEARLESS READER DON “Tribe of Dan” “Prophet of Dan” “Dan the River Pirate” HILL.  And may I offer the same opp to others of y'all.  Certainly many of your great comments could be posted up front.  Feel free to expand on what you've sent or write more.

Here's Don, or Dan...

Sometimes a bulb comes on in the head of Dan. While it is sometimes hard to see though the bong residue and Budweiser stains of a misspent youth, it often starts the wheels rolling. Although, I can never be certain where the cart is going, I figure that I should ride anyway.

While I am neck-deep in Eduland (a former teacher, graduate student and in-transition educational administrator), I consider myself, in the academic sense, as a reader of history. I say a reader because no other title seems to fit. In short, I think that I understand a bit of the past and reflect upon it to consider current events.

I believe now that I understand a bit about the condition of Eduland. Not how to fix it, but how it came to be the blinded Cyclopes that it is today. “Nobody has blinded me!!”

This is not an attempt to add anything to the reasons already laid down by the distinguished Plum. He has the concrete evidence. I offer nothing more than an extended analogy that is probably a bit extreme and probably helpful only to myself.

In the Spring of 1946, several of the leading Nazi figures awaited trial at Nurembergfor war crimes.  Amassed in Bad Mondorf Prison were some of the most notorious human beings that the twentieth century had spawned. While villains such as Hitler, Grobbels, Himmler, Bormann and Heydrich had escaped earthly justice by way of cyanide or good old German steel, the roster included several figures that will surely have a wing in Hell named after them. Goering, Raeder, Hess, Frank, Rosenberg, Ribbentrop, Kaltenburnner, Seyss-Inquart et al were murderers on a grand scale. By 1945, they had killed six million European Jews along with millions of others, especially Slavic Europeans. While that alone would be enough, the methodology of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was sinister beyond scope. The conspiracy ran so deep. There were schedules, 24 hour killing facilities, a whole national bureaucracy dedicated to the extermination of human beings. They had an agenda.

I am sure you have all heard the stories.

Nonetheless, Bad Mondorf was under the jurisdiction of the US Army. The US top brass decided that this was a good opportunity to allow a few psychologists and psychiatrists to explore the minds of these suspected war criminals. The real reason was to overt suicide. Himmler had recently pulled a capsule from his rectum and gone the way of the dodo while in British custody. The only comfort is thinking of him dying with the taste of his own feces on his lips.

Anyway, these headshrinkers interviewed these criminals almost to the hour of their rendezvous with the hangman. Gilbert, an army psychologist, wanted to explain how these people could be capable of such horrific acts. How does one send millions of people to their death? How does one allow children to be starved to death or gassed? All of these men could have stopped it or, at the very least, limited it. Each of these men had the ability to not follow orders. Why did they do it? Emotionally, how did they do it?

Gilbert said that he saw evil, in this respect, as two-fold; the complete lack of empathy for other human beings and the disassociation with the task. To his surprise, Gilbert found that all of these men (with a couple of exceptions) were not psychotic axe murderers. Most had a loving family relationship, happily married, and remembered as good fathers. Yet, these men would leave the happy confines of home each day and do the paperwork (or in the case of Kaltenburnner et al, “hands on” work) that led to the systematic murder of more than SIX MILLION PEOPLE.

“Bye, Honey! I am off to work.”

“Bye, Dear. Are you going to be working late again?”

“Yes, Hon. The damn crematoriums are working at full throttle and we still can’t keep up.”

“You take it easy, dear. Maybe next year you can get transfer to a nicer place like Treblinka.”

Not to trivialize the event, but a monster such as Hoess (who personally came up with the idea of using Zyklon B and, as the commandant of Auschwitz, killed 1.5 million by his own estimates) said that he was merely doing his job to the best of his ability. In the same breath, he would talk about the joys of raising his children.

The one thing that all of these men had in common was that they were “yes” men. They followed popular opinion and general orders without conscience.

Georing, a man of high birth and aristocratic background, would never lower himself to actually murder a person with his hands. Yet, he sat at desks and slaughtered millions with the stroke of his pen. Nonetheless, he was a “yes” man. Hitler wanted it; he did it and never lost a moment of sleep to question morality.

Another example of “desk murderers” can be seen with the CEOs of American tobacco companies. In the late eighties, the seven CEOs of top tobacco stood before Congress under oath and stated that they did not believe that tobacco was addictive. The companies had known that nicotine was highly addictive since the 1930’s and had been working on ways since the 1950’s to make cigarettes more addictive. As one whistleblower said, “We are in the nicotine delivery business.”

I am sure all of these CEOs were good people in ways. They were probably kind and generous. They gave lots to charity and had all kinds of programs and plaques to prove it. Yet, they were “yes” men to the core. The stockholders said they wanted a heap of money and they wanted their interests protected. I use these folks as an example because of their conspiratorial nature. It is a planned operation…schedules, facilities and agendas. The CEOs said “yes.”

Okay, what the hell does Nazi war criminals and big tobaccos have to do the Eduland? I am getting to that…

A wise man once said that there is basically one crime and that is theft. In short, all other crimes are variations of theft. Murder, being one of the most heinous crimes, can be defined as a theft of opportunity. In sum, the victim is denied the opportunity of existence and the rest of society is denied the opportunity to benefit from their existence.

In being a cult of “yes” men, the Nazi regime denied opportunity to millions. They denied opportunities of existence, opportunities of safety and opportunities of freedom. For greed and acceptance by superiors, they carried out these orders without remorse. In other words, their pursuit of approval superceded natural human inclinations concerning right and wrong. The result was the holocaust and a war that ultimately killed 70 million people world wide.

The tobacco CEOs continue to be a party to the death of millions each year. They are denying or stealing freedom and existence through the continued sale of addictive and potentially fatal products. Do you smoke? Is some of your day spent smoking? If so, some of your freedom and opportunity has been stolen. Do they sleep well at night? I wonder…

In Eduland, there is and has been a theft of opportunity. Just as with the Nazis and big tobacco; the organization, methodology and the bureaucracy makes it more sinister.

Maybe I am over the top with this, but hear me out. If a group of people get together and do harmful things, there can only be two assumptions; they know better and are therefore evil and harmful or they do not know better and are therefore stupid and harmful. I refuse to believe that an Eduland school does not know better. Most of the heads are very educated. They read reports and know that 50% or more of minority kids can not read. Yet, they continue to purposely promote a fraudulent method that they know doesn’t work. Greed and lack of empathy….a disconnection with the task…denial of freedoms and opportunities to others. It is systematic. They are “yes” men (and women). They seek profit and approval of peers. They know what they do and that makes it sinister.

One of my favorite quotes from the Nuremberg trials concerns the cross examination of Walter Funk, former head of the Reichesbank. An American prosecutor had asked him about SS deposits from 1942 to 1945. Funk denied that he knew the source where the gold was coming from and said that nothing appeared strange about the transactions as the SS had been making regular deposits since 1933. The American prosecutor looked him square in the face and asked him, “Prior to 1942, how many of your customers deposited their teeth in your bank?” Funk got a life sentence.

Banality means dullness. I guess most of us think of evil as exciting…. Who knew?

==============================================

Don/Dan is definitely the Man. When he becomes a principal it won’t take long for his teachers and their kids to realize their good fortune. 

 

Comments

[Tara]

Don/Dan makes an excellent point. I enjoyed the phrase "desk murderer" - and will probably steal it for myself sometime. His position that eduland perpetuates something that does hardly anybody, hardly any good can be proven. Moreover, his thoughts that there were Nazis who truly cared about their families, children, and warm, fuzzy puppies must be true, too. Why more people don't see that, yes, the professors may be very nice folks (though perhaps a bit batty) and proclaim to care about kids...yet refuse to see the facts AS THEY ARE and work to bring about change, is beyond me. I appreciate Don/Dan's desire to bring this into the limelight, like our good friend, the inimitable Professor Plum. It's always nice to see kindred spirits out in cyberspace. ;) Thank you.

[Garbo]

"I guess most of us think of evil as exciting..."

That is precisely what makes the banal variety of evil the most dangerous--we are much less likely to recognize it until it has inflicted massive damage, if then.

Evil lurks in the dullest places; for example, Colorado's Mathematics Content Standards. Here's an excerpt:

"Second grade students will, using objects and pictures, represent whole numbers including odds and evens from 0 to 1,000."

"Third grade students will, using objects and pictures, represent whole numbers including odds and evens from 0 to 10,000."

"Fourth grade students will, using objects and pictures, represent whole numbers including odds and evens from 0 to 1,000,000."

Reread it, carefully.

This is typical of what schools and teachers in most states are REQUIRED to do to kids. (Fortunately for the kids, most of us refuse to carry it out.)

The potentially enormous quantity of wasted time and lost opportunity for learning real math is a legitimate but secondary concern, as is the practical impossibility of these tasks. The most dangerous problem: This activity is the EXACT OPPOSITE of the math-learning process, in which students progress through increasing levels of GENERALIZATION AND ABSTRACTION. Our children are not simply being led through idiotic activities, they are being taught anti-math instead of math.

(For excellent analysis of and commentary on math standards, see the Fordham Foundation's "The State of State Math Standards 2005" by David Klein et al, from which I lifted the above excerpt:

http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/publication/publication.cfm?id=338)

Don/Dan, I share your concern about going to extremes, or being perceived as going to extremes, in naming the ills of education. If I went to a math curriculum meeting and called the standards evil, I would be thrown out and lose one possible venue for bringing about change.

But you are not "over the top," you are right--it IS evil. There is no other word for damage to children intentionally inflicted by adults in power. Thanks for recognizing it, naming it and posting it.

Rock on, Don!

[plum]

Please elaborate, Garbo. Tell us what's wrong with those objectives and how they (and others) are anti-math.

[JennyD]

Dan, I am a teaching assistant for a group of undergrads who are a few years away from being in a classroom alone. The professor who does the main lecture started his talk the other day by asking us to consider the guards at Abu-Ghraib prision. "They are all probably decent people who wanted to do the right thing," the prof says. But over time, the demands of the system of being a prison guard, the skewed sense of right and wrong and acceptable, make it possible for these people to engage in behavior that the rest of the world found shocking and horrible.

The prof used that in order to get the students to consider that the "education" system, the groupthink and ideals and all that, might do the same thing to them.

Interesting.

[David Foster]

It may be going a bit far to compare the Educrats with the Nazis. I compare them with the generals of World War I (on all sides)...who simply found it too painful to *think* and consider that there might be better ways of doing things than to have men walk s-l-o-w-ly into machine gun fire. Although the failing involves a lack of empathy, it is primarily about extreme mental rigidity.

[reelman in La.]

THE BOTTOM LINE:

Teachers are the not lone "success key" in the four part educational equation (students, parents,teachers,admins).

When are those "professional" (now there is an abused term) administrators going to face the fact that its poor parenting plus cultural influences (lawsuits, lack of shame/respect and material distractions) that have trashed achievement the past 30 years or so?

Education was once about career success and character building. Now its about the "daily happiness" of students and inflating grades to keep parents (and often admins) happy.

How about extending the "freedom to fail" from the real world (or sports world) to the high school? Why not give them the grades they earned and send those home who sleep or otherwise disrupt the teaching-learning process? Some even say that the time to end compulsory attendance is now (send them home to the sorry parents who are a huge part of education's problem).

The clueless keep having meetings as they "pretend" to have found a new path to student success (again). District admins also travel the country monthly to bring more fads home to their district. Unless you hold (lazy spoiled) students and (weak) parents accountable, its all just expensive fad after expensive fad. All you can do is all you can do. Like football, the fundamentals never change and we all should know what they are by now.

If sports had been as dumbed down as most school academics the past few decades, it would be 5 strikes for an "out" and 7 yards for a "1st down". On second thought, why not have that? Then players and parents would be so much happier...and that (plus $) is what education today mostly is about.

Why not "re-norm" sports (because more kids play) like they did to the A.C.T. in 1991 so 17 became a 20 and 28 became a 30 (because more kids took it). Now the S.A.T will have an subjective section. The key word is "subjective". More educational "smoke and mirrors" to avoid reality and inflate success.

I only had 33 years in the classroom so forgive me if I just "don't get it".
========