Child-Killer Lucy Letby and the Banality of Evil – The American Spectator

It was Hannah Arendt, writing on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, who coined the term “the banality of evil.” Her phrase came under fire later from Jewish leaders worldwide, although they had missed the essence of her meaning. She was not relaying the “ordinariness” of the crimes, and she was certainly not exonerating Eichmann, she herself being Jewish and a leading philosopher of her generation. What Arendt took aim at, in critiquing the prosecution attempt at proving “intention,” was that here we had an entirely new modern subject. The new modern man was unthinking. And this makes it difficult to correlate intention.

Arendt asked if this was a particular trait of Nazi Germany. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It is endemic to an epoch: our age of non-thinking. The horror is that we are all on trial.

This ties in with the catatonic attempts by liberal media to construct a narrative of victimhood for the British child-killing nurse Lucy Letby. Along the lines of “she also was a victim,” the BBC sat down, after a court recipe of meaningless murder, with Letby’s best “loyal” friend. Her friend denied it was possible that Letby was a baby killer, unless of course she admitted it to her, personally. Of course, she would never be associated with a child killer. So, we have also not only non-thinking but dishonest thought, the kind of thought that, in accord with accepted mores, a man can have babies, that “some” people can be exonerated for their crimes according to their background. The “narrative” of the trial, as Kafka had noted, is more important than the truth. It is a plague that seeped not just into that Algerian town of Oran, for Camus had meant the plague to be universal.

Czech philosopher Jan Patočka had touched on a similar theme in denying the “thinking” of communist apparatchiks, who commit crimes for a distant utopia out of loyalty to a “scientific” philosophy. This was along the lines of Eichmann’s crimes, a disciple of National Socialism, a bureaucrat of death behind that anonymous veil, a monster through. The liberal world, however, wants only the exception: Hitler, Eichmann, Stalin, Manson, Letby — exceptions to the general rule, outside of which good, reasonable people would not falter. What Letby and Charles Manson share, however, is not degrees of insanity but degrees of normalcy. The question is not one of “moral philosophy,” for that shifts like the desert sands of the Karakoram, all values being relative. The key is a historicism of place, of the modern epoch, and here lies the real exegesis of the narrative.

The upper echelons of the Einsatzgruppen, those death squads of the SS, were not drafted from psychotic, Teutonic working-class ruffians. They were “ordinary” men drawn from a Brueghelian landscape of toil and respect to authority. They were not particularly anti-Semitic in general, and neither were they ideologues. In the basement of Linsly Chittenden Hall at Yale University, the same year as the Eichmann trial, Stanley Milgram began his shock-treatment experiments on obedience, whereby ordinary members of the public administered electric voltage to (supposed) victims in an adjacent room. The majority were prepared to administer lethal levels under due direction. (RELATED: Into Eternity: Reb Nokhem Yanishker and the Holocaust in Kaunas)

The findings were published later in Obedience to Authority; An Experimental View, and this experiment, repeated in various countries and situations, gave credence to the “following orders” syndrome so typical of modernity. It was the explanation given by the men at Nuremburg and for Leslie Van Houten of the Manson cult. Van Houten was denied parole for the 20th time at a hearing in 2013 for the brutal murder of Rosemary LaBianca, who was stabbed at least 14 times. The commissioner of the hearing board based his rejection on the fact that Van Houten could not explain how she, being of good background, could commit such an atrocity. Earlier she had told a psychiatrist how she had beaten her adopted sister and, as a teenager, had carried out her own abortion, burying the baby in the back garden. She said her mother had coerced her into doing this — the authority figure of Milgram’s experiments. Van Houten, like Letby, never showed any remorse for the killings. This is a peculiarity of the modern mode of existence, and its roots are in a dislocation from reality. This dislocation is based on a fundamental misreading of moral philosophy as we have inherited it. 

This separation, this inability to think has its origins in two seminal events. The first was the rise of reason as an intellectual fashion post-Enlightenment, which was sanctified by Kant in his “categorical imperative.” This “deontological” view states that you should “[a]ct only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Kant, therefore, set up an a priori system of laws. In Kant’s view, an individual cannot decide whether conduct is right, or moral, through empirical means or the results of action. Judgments must be reached a priori, with “pure practical reason.” The effects of this logic, that the action is not judged by empirical result, has become the foundation of modernity, especially in human rights and equality law. Our legal and political concepts, therefore, are based on practical reason rather than, say, instinct or community or particular communities. Eichmann defended his actions by appealing to this kind of universal categorical imperative.

In modernity, we have become subsumed in a legal/moral framework, of which we have forgotten its meaning. This leads to unthinking acceptance. 

The second event was the unframing of technology. Heidegger used the term “framing” to denote the purpose and meaning of technology, that it has to be enframed — that is, technology must be kept within the realm of the human and community. Now the bombing of Dresden, or Cambodia, through technology delineates the actor from the horror. One minute you press a button, and the next a child is running ablaze in napalm through the fields of Vietnam. The real visceral horror of Manson and Letby and Milgram’s dungeon experiments is their immediacy, in that the action is contemplated and produced directly by a human hand.

Technology divides us from reality. We are no longer engaged in the items we produce, no longer knowledgeable about our food, our environment. Modern technology has this Kantian horror — the results don’t matter so much if the reason, the law that controls them, is obeyed. (RELATED: Ken Burns Is Not Worthy of His Own Best Vision)

So, we live in a historicity of thresholds — thresholds controlled by reason and technology that are constantly rejigged and lowered. Liberal democracy works by atomizing the individual; it desensitizes one from instinct and custom and community. It alienates people from sensible, commonsense natural law and replaces it with a metallic screaming edifice of barbed law, which becomes Sartre’s “prison without walls.” Yet one can hide in this modern labyrinth of law and anonymity, passing threshold after threshold as we step into Patočka’s “polemos” of night. Things that ancient or indigenous societies would find anti-civilizational, such as war, abortion, or a transgender surgery, become, in rational society, legally entombed.

Rather than being liberated by the movement out of Plato’s cave, we are in a hecatomb of our own design, a kind of Panopticon of surveillance and rationality, whereby the cult of violence becomes a norm. The overall world now is one of Keynesian war, a permanent feature of liberal capitalism, and the ability to “think” is outsourced to representative forms of government, to think tanks, to artificial intelligence. We are all on trial.

Brian Patrick Bolger studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science and has taught political philosophy and applied linguistics in universities across Europe. His articles have appeared in the U.S., the U.K., Italy, Canada, and Germany. His new book Nowhere Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century will be published soon by Ethics International Press.