Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguiling of Evil
Guest post by Fred Emil Katz
My 1993 book Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguiling of Evil came about from an unexpected collision between my profession—I am a sociologist who studies ordinary people’s ordinary behavior—and my personal story as a child survivor of the Holocaust. From that collision I learned that ordinary people, engaging in ordinary behavior, have contributed to extraordinary evil; that moral sickness and degeneracy will give us fewer clues about evil-doing than will an unemotional look at some quite mundane attributes of our personal and societal makeup—these attributes can be used for doing evil just as readily as for doing good. What is more, these attributes can be known and understood. We need not remain ignorant and impotent against evil.
Confronting evil began, for me, in the private matter of coping with the murder of my parents and my brother in a concentration camp. It turns out that confronting evil is more than a private matter. Not only are there many persons who become innocent victims of evil. There are also many persons who, beginning innocently, take part in actually producing and sustaining evil. My book describes in detail that this applied even to the Commandant of Auschwitz. His father wanted him to become a priest. And, as seen in the recent movie The Zone of Interest—nominated for Best Picture at this Sunday's Academy Awards—he attempted, and largely succeeded, to maintain a peaceful, loving family life for his wife and children in the grounds outside the Auschwitz camp. He personally lived the beguiling of evil from early in his career being aghast about concentration camp horrors to eventually becoming its most extreme practitioner. Despite our information about this man, Rudolf Höss, there is still much ignorance about the beguiling of evil. That ignorance need not continue. We can become more realistic about how evil is actually produced by ordinary people adapting their mundane ways to the world of horrors we know as Auschwitz. My book supplies considerable detail and explanation of how this actually happened as, for example, individual guards created their own torture specialty that is respected and honored by their Auschwitz colleagues, forming an evil-doing community with a distinctive social structure. In short, my book is an in-depth look at the beguiling of evil in action as ordinary people produced extraordinary evil. But also giving us a glimmer of hope that, by understanding the paths to evil, we are given tools for avoiding evil. This is the remaining challenge.
During a distinguished academic career, Fred Emil Katz taught at the University of Missouri, the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and Tel Aviv University. His books include Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguiling of Evil; Confronting Evil: Two Journeys; Contemporary Sociological Theory; Autonomy and Organization: The Limits of Social Control; Structuralism in Sociology: An Approach to Knowledge; and Immediacy: Our ways of Coping in Everyday Life.
