First Title value, for Searching:
The evil of banality : on the life and death importance of thinking
First Author value, for Searching:
Minnich, Elizabeth Kamarck, author.
ISBN:
9781442275959
9781442276307
Personal Author:
Display Publication Info:
Lanham, Maryland :
Rowman & Littlefield,
[2017]
Physical Description:
xii, 243 pages ; 23 cm
General Note:
Zip book
Contents:
Part 1. Thinking the unthinkable. Truth and fiction : Camus' The plague ; Thinking about not-thinking ; Changing minds ; Escaping explanations, excuses ; Meaning, truth, rationality, knowledge, thinking ; Romanticizing evil ; Intensive evil, extensive evil ; The ordinary for good and ill -- Part 2. Goodness : what is to be done? Philip Hallie : it takes a village ; Preparing for extensive goodness ; Looking for good beyond the village ; The banality of goodness? -- Part 3. Fertile grounds for extensive evil. Seeding prepared ground ; Large-scale enclosures : meaning systems ; Physical enclosures of bodies, minds ; Laying out the strands.
Abstract:
Asking, How could they do it? about the many ordinary people who have been perpetrators and those who resist extensive evils - genocide, human trafficking, endemic sexualized violations of females, economic exploitation -- the book delves into historic, contemporary, national, and international examples. The author, a moral philosopher, draws also on literature, psychology, economics, journalism, pop culture. Reversing Arendt's banality of evil, she finds that mind-deadening banality, thoughtless conventionality, ambition, greed, status-seeking enable the evil of banality.
Amador County Library.
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