seeker wrote:My thinking on this, until now, has been influenced by Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, in which he asserts that a fanatic is always a fanatic (by disposition), and that if you discredit one cause or ideology, the True Believer will adopt another one.
But part of Arendt's point is that the majority of people accused as war criminals were not, in any appreciable sense, fanatics. Most of them were actually quite mild mannered, like Eichmann, and were acting in full accordance with the laws and aims of the societies in which they lived. In coining the phrase "banality of evil" she was resisting the urge to see Nazi war criminals in just that light -- as exceptional cases of zealotry or depravity. An Eichmann living in Denmark probably never would have involved himself in anything so extraordinary as genocide -- that a German Eichmann did so is due only to an extraordinary set of circumstances that he himself was unlikely to ever encounter again.
Is a person who kills thousands of people, not for personal gain, but for an ideology or religion, or a person who kills and martyrs themselves (e.g. a suicide bomber), driven by a disposition to "True Belief" and extreme demonstrations of it, or by a specific situation that only happens once in a lifetime, if ever?
Well, first off, I don't think the question is entirely germaine to what Arendt is talking about. The sort of war criminals she has in mind didn't kill for ideological or religious reasons. They killed because the law enjoined them to, and they considered it a rather routine form of good citizenship to follow the law.
Recognizing as much, however, does nothing to invalidate your question, and I think it's worth answering for its own merit, regardless of whether or not it bears on Arendt's points.
What I would say is that an disposition towards "True Belief" (if we're going to stick to Hoffer's terminology -- I find Hoffer a little problematic, but I recognize his influence and import) is developed biographically. People aren't born true believers; events and experiences in their lives create that need, so there is an element of contingency that is erratic and unpredictable because it depends on events that are by no means inevitable. I wouldn't say that's the same thing as their being situational, though. It depends, I would think, on responses that are the result of a person's individual character, so you can't subject two different people to the same set of experiences and expect reliable results in terms of making "True Believers" of them.
The distinction between situational and biographical development is mostly that the latter is an issue of character. Having developed that inclination towards True Belief does a lot to determine how you'll react in a given situation, whereas in a more schematic sense of the term situational we'd be talking about fairly predictable responses that occur in humans across the board.
But getting back to Arendt, one of the remarkable things about mid-20th century war criminals -- particular when you compare them to today's bogeymen: terrorists -- is that, for the most part, they didn't have the character you would expect of a killer. A lot of the SS officers directly involved in the torture and killing of the "inferior races" probably were sadists, but they make up only a small proportion of the people who were knowing accomplices in the act of genocide, and most of those people could hardly be considered zealots. On the contrart, a lot of them seemed to exhibit the same sort of detached indifference characteristic of the rising middle classes in 19th and 20th century Europe. So in their case, I would say that the willingness to engage in or at least condone behavior that, from a broader perspective would have struck them as patently immoral, probably was at least partly a situational response, rather than a matter character. And it seems to me that part of Arendt's point is that they never would have made war criminals of themselves had they been more conscientious in making their own personal characters an element of their assessment of the situation.