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<\/p>\nThose of noble and aristocratic birth did not appreciate the rising influence of this low-born peasant. Early in the first novel in the trilogy, Wolf Hall<\/em>, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk and one of the most powerful and influential men in England, expresses his annoyance at Cromwell\u2019s ubiquitous presence at court:<\/p>\n Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a . . . person? It isn\u2019t as if you could afford to be. He [Cromwell] waits, smiling. He knows what the duke means. He is a person, he is a presence.<\/strong><\/p>\n Later in the same chapter, Howard accuses Cromwell once again of being a \u201cperson,\u201d something that those who know their place should not aspire to. It\u2019s an interesting idea, both aspiring to be a person and considering what happens when one chooses not to pursue personhood.<\/p>\n A couple of weeks ago, I was greeted on Facebook by a picture of my dachshund Frieda who died more than five years ago at the age of thirteen. As Facebook regulars know, your feed will remind you of pictures you have taken in the past\u2014this one was just a few months before her passing, shortly after she had some teeth removed, basking in the sun as she lounged on a favorite chair by our dining room window. My caption for the picture was \u201cFrieda without her teeth in.\u201d She died of heart problems a few months later\u2014I still think about and miss Frieda frequently.<\/p>\n I shared the picture on my feed, saying \u201cI hate it when Facebook does this. Just when I spend a few days without missing Frieda, I\u2019m reminded. This picture, taken several weeks after a few of her teeth were removed (hence giving her this perpetual smile), was taken five months or so before she died.\u201d A few people expressed their sympathy with a word and an emoticon or two, but Jeanne, who misses Frieda as much as I do, hit the nail on the head.<\/p>\n Friedalina, so full of personality. Such a person\u2014truly. Made her wishes known. Knew when you weren\u2019t feeling well and wouldn\u2019t leave your side. You would never interfere with her sunbathing, though, or else you would get the look.<\/strong><\/p>\n For a decade of her years with us, Frieda was the alpha dog in a three-dog pack at our place. Although all three canines were loved and spoiled, we always said that \u201cBean and Winnie are dogs, but Frieda is a person.\u201d So how does someone rise above their biological wiring and natural limitations in order to become a person?<\/p>\n I occasionally have the opportunity to lecture, on Hannah Arendt\u2019s Eichmann in Jerusalem.<\/em> This is frequently a centerpiece of the considerations of World War II in the interdisciplinary course I teach in; it is not only a profound meditation on evil in human form, but also is uncomfortably relevant to our contemporary world. And it reveals much about the dangers of failing to be a person.<\/p>\n Arendt\u2019s text emerged from her weekly submissions, as a reporter for The New Yorker Magazine<\/em>, on the Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the last Nazi war criminals to be brought to justice, in Jerusalem in the early 1960s. Eichmann, who had eluded justice for years, was captured by the Israeli Secret Service in 1960 and brought to Jerusalem for trial; he was executed in 1962. In her observations of and reports on the months of trial, Arendt coined the phrase \u201cthe banality of evil,\u201d expressing the idea that the most insidious feature of evil is that it is banal, that it embeds itself in an individual and a culture in ways so unremarkable that fail to recognize it for what it is\u2014until it is too late.<\/p>\n Arendt describes Eichmann, one of the fashioners and facilitators of the \u201cFinal Solution\u201d that sent millions of Jews and other \u201cundesirables\u201d to their deaths, as anything but the embodiment of evil that one might expect from literature and cinema. There was nothing \u201cdevilish\u201d or even remarkable about Eichmann. Rather, he was a bureaucrat, a paper pusher who made the trains run on time\u2014in full knowledge that those trains were filled with people being transported to the death camps. Furthermore, Arendt reported, Eichmann\u2019s testimony at his trial revealed serious shortcomings in his nature.<\/p>\n What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not just because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.<\/strong><\/p>\n Eichmann was a man unable to think from the perspective of someone other than himself. He also had a markedly limited vocabulary, consistently using set phrases and words even in inappropriate contexts. This sounds familiar.<\/p>\n At this point, this could turn into a post about the President, about the fact that many of Arendt\u2019s observations about Eichmann fit Donald Trump to a tee. I\u2019m tempted. But shortly after spending a week on Arendt, I had the opportunity to give a lecture on the work of Iris Murdoch; rather than picking the low-hanging Trumpian fruit, here are some of Murdoch\u2019s ideas about how to cultivate the ability to think and to see from the perspective of someone other than yourself. I\u2019m not convinced that Trump is capable of learning to do this, but each of us can. And it might make a big difference.<\/p>\n Iris Murdoch was one of the most celebrated novelists of the twentieth century, as well as an influential philosopher whose work has come back into vogue over the past couple of decades. She was an atheist (or so she professed at least), but only in the sense that she did not believe that traditional models of God, along with their religious trappings, were any longer viable in the aftermath of two devastating world wars.<\/p>\n Despite her atheism, she believed that in order to live a life of value and goodness, human beings need to focus their attention on something other than themselves. In the absence of God, Murdoch often wrote of the close connection between moral and aesthetic values, as when describing a poet\u2019s evaluation of an artist.<\/p>\n Rilke said of Cezanne that he did not paint \u201cI like it,\u201d he painted \u201cThere it is.\u201d One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals, or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals. We cease to be in order to attend to the existence of something else, a natural object, a person in need.<\/strong><\/p>\n How to engage things as they are rather than as I wish them to be. Remembering that I am not, after all, the center of the universe. Not to stifle the beauty and promise of a day by wrapping it in what Murdoch calls \u201cthe avaricious tentacles of the self.\u201d And finding a way, on a daily basis, to rise above or step aside from the ordinary, the routine, and the expected.<\/p>\n In the movie \u201cHannah Arendt,\u201d Arendt tells a classroom filled with students and faculty that Eichmann\u2019s greatest moral failure was that \u201che was a human being who refused to be a person.\u201d One way of reading the gospels is as an invitation to be a person, something that is not established by simply being born as a human being. When Jesus invites us to consider the natural world around us\u2014lilies, sparrows, growing crops, the wind\u2014he is asking us to turn our attention toward things other than ourselves. When Jesus consistently challenges us to pay attention to the \u201cleast of these,\u201d people falling through the cracks whose plight may seem distant from and unrelated to our own lives, he is calling us to personhood. Be a person\u2014it is both a task and a choice.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Be a Person Masterpiece Theater recently began a several week production of\u00a0 The Mirror and the Light, the final entry in a trilogy of novels by Hilary Mantel about Thomas Cromwell, the consigliere and fixer for Henry VIII. Cromwell is the son of a blacksmith, a violent and abusive father whom Cromwell flees as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2938,"featured_media":20812,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,14,26,36,40,48,61,66],"tags":[823,242,251,802,289,1205],"class_list":["post-34210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bible","category-books","category-dogs","category-family","category-god","category-human-nature","category-literature","category-movies","tag-adolf-eichmann","tag-god","tag-hannah-arendt","tag-hilary-mantel","tag-jesus","tag-person"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2020\/05\/Frieda-no-teeth-225x300.jpg\")
Such a Person<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Banality of Evil<\/h3>\n
Live a Life of Value and Goodness<\/h3>\n
Both a Task and a Choice<\/h3>\n