For fifty years, since Arendt’s report on Eichmann, we’ve been assured that what characterises evil is its banality. A cliché deployed against a cliché. The avatar of evil’s enormity, goes the claim, is no operatic Satan, but a dull quotidi…For fifty years, since Arendt’s report on Eichmann, we’ve been assured that what characterises evil is its banality. A cliché deployed against a cliché. The avatar of evil’s enormity, goes the claim, is no operatic Satan, but a dull quotidi…
Kevin McGowan
other · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
McGowan appears here only as a passing reference in a passage critiquing Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" thesis—the reading invokes him to question whether this framework has become a cliché used to deflect from thinking rigorously about systemic harm. The excerpt suggests McGowan is being positioned as someone who challenges the adequacy of Arendt's formulation for understanding how bureaucratic rationality and technological systems enable large-scale violence, which matters for a course examining AI and cybernetics' entanglement with power structures and ethics.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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