We have spent sixty years repeating Hannah Arendt’s most famous phrase without noticing that she may have left it half-finished. Evil, she found at the trial of a tidy bureaucrat, was not monstrous but banal. This book takes the sentence and turns it over. What if banality is not a quality that evil sometimes wears, like a gray suit, but the thing itself— the actual machinery by which ordinary people, on ordinary mornings, let the unthinkable become routine?

Beginning at the desk of a man who insisted he was only doing his job, the argument removes, one by one, every comfortable place to stand. There is no bedrock beneath our moral certainties. There is no view from outside all frames. There is, in the human world, nothing that is simply forbidden the way a law of physics forbids. The frames we live inside are improvised on the spot from whatever our societies hand us, and the mind that improvises them is itself on loan from other people.

And yet— against this dissolving background— one thing refuses to dissolve: the body. A number of children dead at a rate a hundred times the normal. A grave under an ordinary town. A creature in a pen who was someone’s companion before breakfast. These do not become opinions because everything else does. They are the hard places where a smoothed-over frame finally catches, and where awareness, which can be switched off as easily as a light, must be switched back on.

The book ends not with consolation but with a demand. The cruelest trick the mind plays is the one that flattens the gap between the world as it runs and the world as it ought to run— the quiet harmonizing that makes horror look like the weather. To refuse that flattening, here and now, with one’s hands, before anything living is turned into bacon in the literal or the human sense: that, and not the verdict we pass on the dead, is the whole of the matter.