Musil's most celebrated work is the monumental The Man Without Qualities—still unfinished at the time of his death. It is often linked with James Joyce's Ulysees and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and together these three books are said to represent the apogee of twentieth-century modernist fiction.
As you might expect, The Man Without Qualities is not an easy read; however, The Confusions of Young Torless is very accessible. It is fewer than two hundred pages long, is set in a military academy (just like the one Musil attended), and catalogues the psychological development of a young man as he struggles to make sense of a world in which bullying and ritual humiliation are commonplace. Musil's novel is much more ambitious than it first appears. It is a chilling exploration of the origins of fascism.
At one point, a bully provides a justification for violence that owes a debt to Friedrich Nietszche (1844-1900), the philosopher who suggested that the Übermensch or superman, does not respect moral constraints. The idea of making a new morality—beyond conventional notions of good and evil—was one endorsed by the Nazi party for obvious reasons. The conceptual leap required to construe genocide as a reasonable goal is a very considerable one and required new intellectual tools that Nietszche unwittingly provided.
In Fatal Lies, I named the headmaster of the military academy Eichmann, in order to raise the spectre of Adolf Eichmann—the Nazi who proposed “the final solution to the Jewish question.” It was Eichmann who inspired Hannah Arendt to coin a phrase that has since found its way into numerous works of history and social commentary: “the banality of evil.”
Arendt attended the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 and was amazed by his ordinariness. He was more like a petty functionary than a monster. He had become totally preoccupied by the organizational problems and technical details of genocide, at the expense of any moral concerns. He was a simple man who was just obeying orders. Arendt responded poetically, asserting that Eichmann demonstrated the “fearsome, word-and-thought defying banality of evil.”
During WWII, “normal” German citizens—when in uniform— were able to commit appalling acts of violence. This phenomenon was so perplexing to postwar social psychologists that they conducted numerous experiments in order to elucidate the factors and processes that might transform teachers, accountants, and doctors into mass murderers. This tradition began with Solomon Asch s studies of conformity, continued through Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience—and culminated with Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment. Collectively, this body of work yielded results that were entirely consistent with Arendt's notion of “the banality of evil.” It seemed that ordinary experimental subjects could be persuaded to inflict pain on others with remarkable ease. Under the right circumstances, almost anyone can become a monster.
This conclusion became received wisdom in the social psychology literature, and was seen as such for more than thirty years; however, in a recent article that appeared in The Psychologist (published by the British Psychological Society), Professor S. Alexander Haslam and Professor Stephen D. Reicher have raised significant questions concerning the legitimacy of this long-held view.
It is a surprising fact that Hannah Arendt never saw the end of Eichmann's trial. If she had, her conclusions would have been very different. Early on, Eichmann made efforts to present himself as an innocent “pen-pusher”—only doing his job. But in due course, the mask began to slip, revealing a Nazi ideologue and committed anti-Semite. He appeared, to later observers, as an individual who'd set about his work with visionary zeal and who was proud of his “achievements.”
Eichmann and his fellow Nazis were capable of atrocities not because they were ordinary decent folk in uniforms but because they believed passionately in their cause.
Recently, a number of revisionist books have been published highlighting this point. In addition, the validity of the classic experimental studies of conformity and obedience—which supported the banality-of-evil hypothesis—have since been challenged on several counts (including methodological weaknesses). Professors Haslam and Reicher assert:
…from Stanford, as from the obedience studies, it is not valid to conclude that people mindlessly and helplessly succumb to brutality. Rather both studies (and also the historical evidence) suggest that brutality occurs when people identify strongly with, brutal group that have a brutal ideology.
According to this new view, people commit atrocities because they believe what they are doing is right. Ordinary people are not closet monsters after all; however, they can become monsters if they subscribe to certain beliefs. Today, social psychologists should no longer be asking the question: How is it that ordinary people can be persuaded to do terrible things? A better question would be: What are the factors that cause ordinary people to identify with brutal belief systems? In the modern world, the answer to this question is needed with some urgency.
The wide appeal of fundamentalist ideologies—of which national socialism is an example—reveals a flaw in our intellectual and emotional apparatus. The world is a complex place, and we yearn for the comforting solidity of absolute truths. Freud posited that human beings have an infantile wish to experience again the certainty of parental declarations, the tidy polarities of good and bad, wrong and right. Such answers keep the chaos at bay—the complexities of reality, our insignificance, and our likely appointment with oblivion.
The first of our existential crises probably coincides with the onset of adolescence—a fact that provides us with a further reason to admire Robert Musil. He sets The Confusions of Young Torless in a military academy—not only to exploit the obvious resonances relating to nationalism and war, but also because such institutions are full of adolescents. Brutality is one of the things that human beings employ to make the world a simpler place—and the generation of Austrians depicted in Musil s masterpiece chose to simplify the world with devastating consequences.
Frank Tallis
London, 2008
“Questioning the Banality of Evil.” S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher. In The Psychologist, vol. 21, no. 1, January 2008. Published by the British Psychological Society.
“Introduction.” J. M. Coetzee. In The Confusions of Young Torless (2001) by Robert Musil. London: Penguin Harmondsworth.
The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism (2007). Mark Edmundson. London: Bloomsbury
FRANK TALLIS is a practicing clinical psychologist and an expert in obsessional states. He is the author of
A Death in Vienna, Vienna Blood,
and
Fatal Lies,
as well as seven nonfiction books on psychology and two previous novels,
Killing Time
and
Sensing Others.
He is the recipient of a Writers’ Award from the Arts Council England and the New London Writers Award from the London Arts Board.