Is Failed Crisis Management Evil?

Once again I feel a need to comment on an article that just appeared on the Al Jazeera English Web site:

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-banality-evil-200505075710643.html

This article draws upon the concept of the “banality of evil,” a phrase coined by Hanna Arendt in her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. The authors of the article, Catherine Rottenberg and Nira Yuval Davis, explain Arendt’s terminology as follows:

She invoked the term to describe how Eichmann, a key bureaucratic functionary of the Nazi party, carried out his technocratic duties without questioning their purpose.

I find it somewhat ironic that this perspective can be traced as least as far back as the Crucifixion, at which one of the last “words” of Jesus was “they know not what they do,” suggesting that those killing him could still deserve forgiveness.

Rottenberg and Davis then try to make the case that the banality of evil can also take place “through the carrying out of bureaucratic tasks in an incompetent and negligent way.” For me this recalled the old joke that, if stupidity were a crime, it would be impossible to build enough prisons for the criminals. Even so, I think that Jesus was a bit too forgiving of those that “know not what they do,” particularly when they have embraced ignorance as a matter of conscious choice. In this case the conscious choice is one of viewing market value as the only relevant social value, relying only on the numerical calculations that determined market value without allowing for any other factors, many (most?) of which are not quantitative, to enter the calculus.

Max Weber saw the problem with such prioritizing. He argued that it would bring about two different kinds of loss: loss of meaning and loss of freedom. The first of these should be clear enough: The very meaning of “value” as been so distorted that we have become a world population for which no other value is realistically conceivable. One may then recognize loss of freedom at least at the level of no longer having the freedom to think for ourselves about what we value. Even deeper is the issue that only those that command significant financial resources are free to make choices about what factors impact the world in which we live, whether that world is suffering a plague or just losing its icecaps.

I prefer not to pass judgment on whether those that have brought about loss of meaning and loss of value are evil. In this sort of a mess, nothing will be gained from finger-pointing. On the other hand, we might do well to recall what was written in our Declaration of Independence after the one sentence that so many of us know by heart:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

It that context, perhaps we should view to prioritization of financial resources as an act of usurpation against those self-evident truths. By all rights, such Government could be overthrown by the electoral processes already in place; but, as we have seen over the last decade, the “meaning” of those processes is yet another manifestation of Weber’s loss-of-meaning syndrome.

That particular loss may well lie at the heart the mess in which we are stuck, and it remains to be seem if there are enough people that still respect valid meaning with the power to get the population as a whole out of that mess.