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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
History in Memory5/21/2006 10:19:55Yesterday I picked up a copy of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (A Report on the Banality of Evil) to read in light of the strange evil that we find ourselves in because of actions and events that have come as a reaction to the terrorist attacks in 2001. I have been spending the last few weeks trying to construct a story of what has happened and what is happening, a sequence of causes and effects, and a cascade of meanings. I have only read a few chapters so far. But it strikes me already the way she fixates on Eichmann's memory as it is exposed during cross-examination. He appears to remember well only the events that are closely related to his own narrative of career and advancement, which "did not necessarily coincide with the turning points in the story of the Jewish extermination or, as a matter of fact, with the turning points in history." [Penguin 1994 Ed., 53] What I have been discovering (with a bit of fear) is the extent to which, like Eichmann, I have naturally experienced these events of recent years as history (which of course will be the narrative they become) but as something more like happenings, to borrow a term from the transient performances of avant garde theater. Their essence is their transience and also their plainness. I remember, for instance, not the bombing of Baghdad in March 2003, but the room I was in, the field I walked in that night near where I lived. But: who wants to live in history? I recall Popper's fierce final chapter to The Open Society where he reminds us that all history is the history of robbers and is extraneous to any proper story of human beings. Kierkegaard lamented that we construct these great Palaces of World History while only actually living in the doghouse beside it. I reply (in agreement) that we truly live in a palace to which our histories are a mere doghouse. Yet to these, so often, we map the contours of our lives. Creating histories is a conscious task, at once part of history and for the moment outside of it. Doing it is a test of the memory and a map of it, as well as a map of allegiances, utopias, and the laws against which we imagine ourselves to be judged. The question of what we remember and what we are and what role we have in these events is important because its answer is the verdict on our complicity in evil. To this Arendt has her powerful answer, which here she describes in a letter to Gershom Scholem: “It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth and can be radical.” [quoted from the weblog Form of Life] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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