It was an almost ordinary Sunday afternoon in West London, warm for February, enough so that some shops had their doors propped open. Two young men were crouching beside one, shovelling boxed up jars of honey from a display into a large shopping bag. As I sidled around them, I made the lazy assumption that they worked in the health shop, and that perhaps they were very casual dress-down Sunday workers. That they were wearing masks was perhaps because, well, so many just do now. Yet for all the explanations that I was making about the scene to myself, it was off-tempo, too fast for a slow-moving Sunday afternoon mood.
As I tried to work out what grated a familiar face came barrelling down the main aisle. As he ran everything seemed slowed down, and as it did, my internal alarm clanged. The mind in slow motion is a reaction either to intense relaxation or extreme danger. The man was shouting at the boys by the door. They continued to heap up honey pots. As the man got close enough to grab them they bolted, shopping bag stuffed with hundreds of pounds of honey.
Potential attackers gone the pace of events reverted to normal.
‘Seriously?’ queried a woman waiting at the counter to pay, apparently cemented to the spot.
The familiar-faced man stood in the doorway, bent forward, hands on knees.
‘They come almost every Sunday,’ he panted. ‘My colleague is on break. They wait until only one of us is on and then they come in and just take whatever they can.’
He assured us that the police would not be interested, and that health shop chain does not intend to put in CCTV.
We all muttered, exchanged muted questions about whether we were all okay, and the day moved on. It was so banal.
Hannah Arendt was unofficially ostracised by many in Israel when she wrote in her coverage of Adolf Eichmann’s trial of the ‘banality of evil’. The expression encompassed the philosopher’s theory that Eichmann, despite having organised the transportation of millions of Jews to concentration camps, seemed ‘terrifyingly normal’. As she observed during his trial In Israel in 1961, one that was being watched around the world, he seemed to her to be a highly diligent bureaucrat who had fulfilled his remit of evil actions but without evil intention.
Across time her word clash of ‘terrifyingly’ and ‘normal’ surely raises the question of whether an evil act or acts can be committed without the doer, or indeed doers, being evil. In Eichmann’s case, Arendt’s argument was his need for efficiency separated him from the outcome of his actions. It is terrifying that anyone could imagine a knowing cog in a machine of genocide could be seen as either normal or banal. Normal and banal are what petty crime seem to have become on a warm February afternoon in West London in a time when genocide is again part of the daily news round.
The line attributed to Edmund Burke that, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’, could be in danger of riding right up against Arendt’s theory of evil as petty, or even not so petty crime, is now barely even registered in so called ‘civilised societies’. It is a human adaptation that a few boxes of honey become a few more, then bigger prize, a cash hit, a brave security guard who gets in the way, a murder, a life sentence. There is a poignant and human predictability to this cascade, yet surely there can be nothing banal about the deep schism in a man who can be so loved by his family, heralded as an exemplary husband and father, whilst finding order in the train timetables that enable the correct movement of human volume. The terrifying adaptability of the mind is that it can normalise cruelty and brutality when they happen often enough—just another train load of humanity, just another statistical conundrum. The other side of the same mind’s genius and capacity is that it takes a relatively small shift of imagination and a certain amount of courage to defeat this kind of normalisation—just a neighbour warning the world of the smell of burning bodies, just a woman waiting at counter who chooses to close shop door on a warm February Sunday afternoon.
Justine Hardy © February 2024