麻豆约拍

Good morning.聽

For those of us brought up believing in the importance of duty, it is disconcerting to think that misplaced duty might be at the root of the most hellish evil.聽

This was the conclusion reached by Hannah Arendt, the political theorist who witnessed the trial of the Nazi architect, Adolf Eichmann. Arendt coined the phrase, 'the banality of evil' to describe what she saw in Eichmann 鈥� not a horned monster, but a dull bureaucrat, whose evil lay in his unflinching loyalty to the Nazi project.聽

His tools were not pitchfork and flames, but duty and efficiency.聽

Eichmann may be an extreme example, but many periods in history seem brutal with hindsight. How, we wonder, did the great and the good of past centuries condone witch-burning, slavery, or torture?聽

Arendt died 40 years ago today: but her disconcerting insight remains true. People who are capable of terrible deeds are not inhuman devils 鈥� they are ordinary people making choices which seem expedient to them at the time. Despite our best intentions, evil can lurk in the collective mind, in institutional structures, and in the unexamined world of the so-called obvious. Religious radicalisation thrives in such soil.聽

The apostle Paul calls for ongoing vigilance as an antidote to institutional evil. 'Do not be conformed to this world,鈥� he writes in his letter to the Romans, 'but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.'

Question your commitments, your loyalty, your duties 鈥� yes, even your faith 鈥� if you wish to avoid the evils of your age.聽

So I pray: Lord, help us to heed the quiet voices from the margins: the poets, the prophets, the seers. Give us courage in our questioning, resolve in our realising, and wisdom in our acting. Amen