4/29/25 Elizabeth Minnich "The Evil of Banality"

Elizabeth Minnich discusses her remarkable new book "The Evil of Banality- On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking." At the heart of Minnich's book is an examination of the phenomenon of what she calls Extensive Evil, where many people allow some sort of evil to occur. American Slavery, the Holocaust, and the Genocide in Rwanda are three examples of Extensive Evil (as opposed to Intensive Evil, in which an evil act is perpetrated by an individual or small group of people. Minnich contends that it is when we live life thoughtlessly that we so easily become participants in evil on a widespread scale. Minnich worked for many years with Hannah Arendt, who coined the phrase "the banality of evil" in the early 1960s and was harshly criticized for it.