Ignorance leads to moral decay

Philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote a book about how outrageous behavior, if not evil, became normal in the society preceding and during the Holocaust. This “normality,” ignoring evil that is present, was how people would carry out unspeakable acts like doing the work that enabled the death camps to function. Of course, Arendt was writing a response to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the “final solution” who declared that he was simply a railroad engineer doing his duty to his country. How is he to be blamed? Though fortunately most Americans today have not been faced with the horrors of genocide, there is reason to examine how many of us practice this ‘banality’ in our own country.

Taking press releases without critical thinking is one way. Recently, Director James Comey testified that the FBI was investigating Russian influence in the 2016 election. One media response was, “DeepStateGate: Democrats’ Russia Conspiracy Theory”, another, “Fix Is In: House Committee on ‘Russian Hacking’, or this, “Fake News, Russian Hacking” from Breitbart. Each article spinning the committee hearing to cast doubt on the actual story. 37 million readers, some 240 million page views of Breitbart may believe in lies. When the integrity of our elections — our democracy — are interfered by a hostile country and people are led to believe the problem is the Democratic party? That’s ignorance. And ignorance leads to moral decay.

To ignore that the Ku Klux Klan was ecstatic at the election of Donald Trump because they now believed they had a friend in the White House is another way to normalize evil. Even after the election when over 200 white nationalists met a few blocks from the White House and shouted, “Heil Trump! Heil Our People! Heil Victory!” To ignore the near-tripling of anti-Muslim hate groups and the emergence and activity of neo-Nazis and anti-semitic hate crimes while appointing one of their advocates, Steve Bannon, as the President’s top adviser is flirting with evil.

And finally, when American citizens ignore references to Mexicans as ‘rapists and criminals’ causing an the increase in hate crimes nationwide, stating POWs like John McCain is not a hero while criticizing Gold Star (Kahn) family, using celebrity status to grope women, banning all Muslims, ignoring provable facts as “fake news”, in addition to the mountain of lies (to numerous to name here) one after another that come from our President, that is normalizing outrageous behavior. These are examples of what Hannah Arendt would describe as the “Banality of Evil”.

—David R. James

Eureka