I have this sneaking suspicion that most people, given the right historical circumstances, are capable of extraordinary evil. That comes of the belief that evil itself is usually systemic; though individual evil exists, it’s got nothing on the kind of atrocity that can come of organization and cooperation.

As such, one of my benchmark books on the subject is Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It’s my favorite book about evil.

And also my favorite book about cliché.

Adolf Eichmann was, of course, one of the organizers of the European Holocaust. He was also, at least according to Arendt, a man nearly incapable of thought. This is from the Wikipedia entry for the book:

Arendt’s book introduced the expression and concept “the banality of evil”. Her thesis is that Eichmann was not a fanatic or sociopath, but an extremely average person who relied on cliché rather than thinking for himself and was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology. Banality, in this sense, is not that Eichmann’s actions were ordinary, or that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of stupidity which was wholly unexceptional. She never denied that Eichmann was an anti-semite, nor that he was fully responsible for his actions, but argued that these characteristics were secondary to his stupidity.

This concept has been frequently misunderstood. In his 2010 history of the Second World War, Moral Combat, British historian Michael Burleigh calls the expression a “cliché” and gives many documented examples of gratuitous acts of cruelty by those involved in the Holocaust, including Eichmann. Arendt certainly did not disagree about the fact of gratuitous cruelty, but “banality of evil” is unrelated to this question. Similarly, the first attempted rebuttal of Arendt’s thesis relied on a misreading of this phrase, claiming Arendt meant that there was nothing exceptional about the Holocaust.

And this is Hannah Arendt, in her own words:

[Eichmann] was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.[…] Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him.[…] The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

The point being, at least to me, that there’s a danger to cliché, beyond bad writing. Particularly to unexamined cliché. It’s like what Ron Sukenick wrote in Down and in: Life in the Underground, “’Use your imagination,’ I tell my students these days, ‘or someone else is going to use it for you.’”

Clichés do your thinking for you, and the worst of them are invisible. I liken it to when people tell you something’s common sense. What they really mean is, hush, you can rest easy now, all the thinking’s been done on this topic. It’s a way of asking you politely to turn your brain off.

As a writer, I’m not trying to suggest that cliché is entirely avoidable. Hell, I’m not even sure avoidance of cliché is always desirable. There are character specific clichés that are necessary, and every genre — including literary fiction — has its own set of clichés you work within. (In fact, I’m pretty sure that a tendency towards unexamined cliché is probably good for sales, in that they’re comforting.)

But I think Arendt’s right that we need to push on them whenever possible. And whenever I get one handed one — either in a book or across a cup of coffee — I always wonder what it is that it’s working to obscure.

And whether the person giving it to me even knows they’re doing it.