Frisson
I guess the banality of evil exists in the sense that you can get ordinary people to do awful things, but I think Christopher Hitchens is right in saying that it is in the caprice of bad acts, the going the extra mile in brutality, is one thing that makes the difference. I think of it as the frisson of pleasure the captor or tomentor feels in inflicting his horrors which gets him extra credit, perhaps his own circle in hell.
Hitchens’s point is that even the most jaded and worldly commentators will be willing to credit the term “evil” at some standard deviation from normal behavior — they just don’t want it to be an obvious thing, accessible to GWB and his cowboy followers.
I love reading Hitchens and I just finished his Orwell book. When I read an article like his above, I am always struck that it comes from the left. It reminds me of the –best — classes of university life. Coming from the conservative side, you can just feel a tug-of-war as Hitchens drags his reluctant reader or dinner party companion into an acknowledgement of the reality of evil as his opponents’ arguments get further and further from reality. For example, at some point, the psychological explanations just don’t capture the essence of something which destroys both victim and tormentor, and in which the tormentor is taking genuine pleasure.
It’s so much less work to be a conservative, thank God.