Mary Lee Settle on the Banality of Evil

American writer Mary Lee Settle had served the British war effort in London, 1944, doing journalism, at a time when England was subject to countless bomb raids by Germany.

When Nazi Germany fell and the Japanese empire was defeated, Settle had hopes that the Second World War had eliminated an evil from this world. She returned to America.

One night, she was having dinner in a New York restaurant with some artists, where one artist casually made a remark that was pro-Hitler, this only months after the defeat of the Third Reich. She was polite during the conversation but found the earliest opportunity to leave.

Afterward, she felt sick to her stomach, and felt guilty that she had not spoken up. Her first thought following the meal was that the war effort had done nothing to erase an undeniable evil.

Then she arrived at the following considered judgment. In a Virginia Quarterly Review essay, "London—1944," she wrote,

It has taken me a long time since that night to realize that the war years were not wasted. I have had to face the fact that social change does not change evil people. There is only this difference. Their seduction is no longer officially tolerated in democracies. Evil men and evil prejudices are with us still; "nice" people belong to anti-Semitic country clubs, and their imitators drive pick-up trucks with gun racks and hate (expletive removed). The only thing that saves us is that such beliefs have been unacceptable to decent people since 1945. I know that "unacceptable" is a small word for this enormity, but the world runs on shallowness for the most part. We are left, at least, with a residue of social shame as a weapon.

Settle published this essay in 1985. Now, this 40 years hence, racial and ethnic hatred remain unacceptable to decent people. As for the effectiveness of social shame against such hatred, however, the evidence is inconclusive.