Meanwhile, we should all of us perhaps take care when we speak of the problem of evil. For there is more than one sort of banality. There is the notorious banality of which Arendt spoke —the unsettling, normal, neighborly, everyday evil in humans. But there is another banality: the banality of overuse—the flattening, desensitizing effect of seeing or saying or thinking the same thing too many times until we have numbed our audience and rendered them immune to the evil we are describing. And that is the banality— or “banalization”—that we face today.
This is Tony Judt (a very controversial scholar, if you don’t already know) on “The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe” in The New York Review of Books.” Provocative and worthwhile reading.
educating alice 