Judge Dennis Davis and Professor David Peimer
Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil
Summary
Exploring Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil.” The debate aims to explore the profound implications of this idea, emphasizing the normalizing effect of immoral principles within a society and the importance of challenging dominant ideologies.
Judge Dennis Davis
Dennis Davis is a judge of the High Court of South Africa and judge president of the Competition Appeals Court of South Africa. He has held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand, as well as numerous visiting appointments at Cambridge, Harvard, New York University, and others. He has authored eleven books, including Lawfare: Judging Politics in South Africa.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Hannah Arendt said that there isn’t an Eichmann in all of us, there isn’t an Iago, a Richard III, a Macbeth, et cetera. She disagreed with that later in interviews, but not in the book. I think there is an element, not necessarily of Eichmann and that extreme, but I think there’s a capacity for self-destruction and destruction of others in all of us and I go more along the lines Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn, and Freud.
I would say no. She’s saying that evil is founded on a failure to think out of the received so-called normal belief systems with which the majority agree to live by in a society. And if that can be in a dictatorship, that is a one dimensional way of thinking. The performance of it may be mechanistic and bureaucratic and corporatist and managerialist, but that’s the performance of it, that’s not the value system or the belief system itself.