What stood out to me most after two viewings of Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt is how unprepared the world was to think about the moral phenomenon of Nazism. It simply lacked the conceptual resources to think about what happened.

Whenever we lack conceptual resources to think through a problem, the tendency is to think them out with the conceptual resources we do have, distorting or nullifying ill-fitting data the best we can –gently if possible, aggressively if necessary.

Hannah Arendt, being a persistent and insistent source of ill-fitting data, became an object of offense to those who remained committed to old conceptions of evil.

Aggravating the problem is the subject itself: evil. The question of evil is bound up with our most fundamental understandings of the world: the good self with the good ally and the evil enemy. Hannah Arendt showed how attitudes that many of us celebrate as everyday virtues, under certain circumstances can be complicit in evil of the grandest scale. It seems counter-intuitive, and out of scale — almost a butterfly-effect in morality.

But it might be the invisible corollary of “banality of evil” that really gets under our skin. If evil is at least partly banal, what does this imply about goodness? What is required to be good in a milieu that has gone evil?

And then there is the issue of what “going evil” is. I am convinced that we still do not grasp what that is. I accept Arendt’s view that banal evil is akin to empathic failure — a sort of willful autism — a practical solipsism that wants “the mind to be its own place” and systematically fails to grasp anything of the world that is not a factual arti-fact of their own minds. Evil and ideology are complementary, if not identical.

According to Arendt’s understanding, morality is not a matter of good ideology versus bad ideology — it is a matter of thought versus ideology.

But for many people, and perhaps the majority of people passionately committed to a Good that stands in opposition to Evil, good ideologies are goodness itself. Such people celebrate “faith” of willful and uncompromising adherence to beliefs (and the conceptual repertoire that makes these beliefs intuitive and self-evident), despite evidence and in defiance of counterarguments. Whoever refuses to take sides in these ideological battles is a relativist, an even more insidious enemy of truth than a straightforward liar. And who can tell them other than what they know, and what they know how to know? This requires an inconceivable kind of goodness, the very thing ideologues find most intolerable.