Jaw Dropper Dept.

Most of my reading time as of late has been taken up with research for Tokyo Inferno, and as such things go I tend to bounce from one link to another. I found myself reading about the fierce reactions to Hanna Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, the book that coined the phrase "banality of evil" (although at the cost of a good deal of violence to the truth).

The whole thing is worth reading, but one paragraph in particular absolutely stopped me cold.

[Mary] McCarthy felt that Eichmann in Jerusalem had been misinterpreted. Abel was wrong to interpret the conduct of Jewish leaders in terms of duress ('a man [who] holds a gun at the head of another and forces him to kill a friend'). McCarthy was indignant: 'Forces him to kill a friend? Nobody by possession of a weapon can force a man to kill anybody; that is his own decision..... he is tempting you to kill your friend that is all.' [31] This objection was, of course, uninformed by analysis of the criminal defence of duress in any legal jurisdiction.

Leave even the legal definitions aside and what you have is a stupefying example of the misinterpretation of the concept of free will. What McCarthy was attempting to say, I guess, is that in the end you always choose what to do regardless of what pressure is put on you in a given circumstance. Up to a point this is true; I can choose to spend or hoard my money as I see fit, and maybe even starve if I don't buy enough food for myself.

The problem with this argument, especially with the way she formulates it, is that it makes the vast swath of humanity — whatever else they might do with the rest of their existences — into total cowards not capable of meeting her high and mighty moral code. The victims of Cambodia's killing fields, the prisoners at Bergen-Belsen and Chelmno, the countless forgotten ones in North Korea's "re-education" camps, all dismissed at a stroke. Surely nothing stopped them from rising up against their captors except the fear of a bullet — exactly the kind of logic you'd get from someone who's never faced the prospect of death for both themselves and a generation of their families in both directions.

One of my college writing professors (not the one I admired more, I admit) provided us with something of the same botched formulation in one of his dissembling critiques of a student's story. The story was pretty bad, to be sure, but the attack on it was in wretched faith, and in the end people were more resentful of the professor's mean spirit than how not to write a story about moral issues.

Most of us have never been coerced — I'm sorry, tempted — into doing evil with a gun pointed at us, and I hope we never have to, me included. Those that have, they scarcely need to have further insult done to them in this way.