a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Hannah Arendt thought that republican political communities come into being as people gather together, talk with each other, deliberate, decide on a course of action that they will undertake together. In their talk and in their action they reveal themselves to each other; they make an appearance in the public realm that their common undertakings require them to create –a space that, once created, they cultivate as their common world. The experience is, as we say, empowering. Both the recognition of equals and the joining together are empowering. They have the power of a deliberating and acting people. The power of council, which is invoked in all kinds of “participatory democracy” visions, including Gandhi’s vision of village councils.

In their councils, people call upon each other for two human actions that accompany all
other actions, in fact or in possibility. The first reconciles them to the past: they learn to forgive each other for past actions that may stand in the way of their present unity. As we say in therapy contexts, they “work through” their differences for the sake of their commonality and common purpose. The key to this process is honest admission of what the past has been. “Truth and Reconciliation” is nothing without the Truth part. The second action is making promises or agreements for their future together, promises both about what they hope for and what institutions will make their hopes sustainable. Ultimately, they imagine basic principles, a Constitution, that preserves their possibilities for action and gives guidance –not commandments, but guidance. Any political community that does not become committed to these actions of reconciliation and promising will end up violent.

Like Gandhi, Hannah Arendt thought of violence as the last resort of people who have no power or of people who are losing their community-based power –as the British were in India. One good way to judge the condition of an existing political community is to see whether the people think they need to resort to violence; and whether they mistakenly equate power with possessing the means of violence. Failing communities are the most violent and those in them who want to dominate offer the most self-righteous rationalizations for their violence. That is, the dominators tend to argue that being able to exercise violence is proof of their “power,” not wanting in any way to admit that it is proof of their loss of coherence and common world. The exception to this generalization about how being powerful and being violent are not the same –are, in fact, opposites– has to do with situations where self-defense is at issue: self-defensive use of violence, then, may mean the difference between community survival and massacre. As Nelson Mandela knew, a particular kind of judgment is involved in such a crisis.

What Arendt had to say in her On Violence (1969) about power and violence –which is quite Gandhian– is unusual in political theory, but most psychologists and psychoanalysts follow her rule of thumb when they assess individuals. The ones who resort to violence –physical or emotional and verbal– are the ones who have no equals to ally with or the ones who are losing alliances and making desperate attempts to regain connection by exactly the means, violence, which will inevitably defeat them. “Those who live by the sword die by the sword.” Or, as I often put it to myself in my consulting room: those who are living by narcissistic delusion are dying by it. Gandhi was right: “in the end, deceivers deceive only themselves.”

When they create institutions, democratic or republican people want them to provide opportunities for the basic empowering experience to keep happening. It gives them joy, or what the 18th century American revolutionaries called “public happiness.” So their legislative assemblies need to be places where there is free debate among equals; each respectful of all the others, each grateful for the others’ willingness to reveal themselves. The idea is not to harangue or sermonize or be verbally violent, but to display a thinking process, offer it up like a gift. The Roman rhetorician and politician Cicero once made a statement about how truly political people assess the virtues: “Gratitude is not only the greatest of the virtues, but the parent of all the others.” Gratitude is the exemplary virtue, which you practice with those who have enlarged you, expanded your understanding and your power.

Similarly, when democratic people create judicial institutions for their political communities, they want them to be as much like a scene of political deliberation as possible. Judges apply the law the people have agreed to live by, determining by deductive reasoning whether this or that case falls under this or that law. But their most politically important function is in case law. That is, when they consider a case for which there is no immediately applicable law, no law that fits just this case just so. Then they have to reason inductively, going into the case to find the principle at stake. They are, then, thinking more like political actors, who say to each other in deliberation: this situation we are in has some analogues to past situations, but also some new features, there is no rule that will tell us what to do, so what do we do?

It is when people are in situations together that have new and challenging features, where they cannot fall back on a rule or a law or a commandment of any sort, that they are most intensely political, where their concern for the world they have in common and want to be able to share is most at issue. And where the well-being of their community is most at issue. They agree to deliberate, which implies thinking and re-thinking. (The etymology of “deliberate” is graphic: you weigh things up, as on a scale, a libra –like the one Justice holds in her hand as she is judging impartially, blindfolded to particular interests or ideas.)

In her late reflections on judgment, Arendt offered the idea that, particularly in situations where there is no valid rule to follow or law to apply, or when there has been a moral collapse, political communities most need examples of people who deliberated and acted in ways they respect. These exemplary people provide them with what she sometimes called “exemplary validity.” Often these people were among the founders of their communities; a founding father or founding elder –sometimes even a founding mother. They may be actually existent people or mythic ones, literary creations –or an actually existing person whose story has been told in a classic biographical or autobiographical text. For the Greeks of the Periclean Age, the exemplary figure was Achilles as Homer presented him in the Iliad. For the republican Romans, Aeneas as Virgil presented him.

Like citizens, great citizen leaders in the present take their guidance from these exemplary figures of the past: Pericles was Achillean in his courage and care for his comrades. Often, the exemplary figure also had an exemplary fault, which stands as a caution to those who look up to him. Often the fault is an excess of his virtues, as Achilles’ rage was an excess of his courage and sense of solidarity. Perfect examples –if that is not an oxymoron—tend to tempt people to the do-gooding fanaticism of perfectionists. It is important for people who share an exemplary figure to be able to debate and deliberate with each other about his character and what in it they respect and what is troubling –or produced trouble. The exemplary figure is not, as we say “an icon,” but someone to be engaged with as though he or she were in the room. (The same could be said of an exemplary Constitution—it should be an example to be engaged with, continuously debated, not strictly constructed.)

On the 9th of September, 2009, nine months into his presidency, Barack Hussein Obama was asked during a meeting with some 9th graders in Wakefield High School, Arlington, Virgina, who, among all people living and dead, he would most like to have dinner with. The Times of India (my source for this story) rejoiced to report his answer at length, for Obama invoked Gandhi. Invoked a man who, put the same question, might have invoked Harishchandra, the epic King who exemplified the virtue truthfulness. As a boy, the example of Harishchandra had haunted Gandhi: “I must have acted Harischandra to myself times without number.” When he came to write about his boyhood and his life Gandhi called his autobiography My Experiments with Truth. It would be hard to exaggerate the uniqueness of such a title in the history of autobiography.

“You know, I think that it might be Gandhi, who is a real hero of mine,” Obama told the 9th graders at Wakefield. “Now, it would probably be a really small meal because he didn’t eat a lot,” he said amidst laughter. “But Mahatma Gandhi is someone who has inspired people across the world for the past several generations.” Obama noted to the children that Gandhi had inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. Without Gandhi’s example there might not have been a civil rights movement in the United States. “What was interesting was that he ended up doing so much and changing the world just by the power of his ethics, by his ability to change how people saw each other and saw themselves — and help people who thought they had no power realize that they had power, and then help people who had a lot of power realize that if all they’re doing is oppressing people, then that’s not a really good exercise of power,” Obama said.

We have as president a man who did not reply, thank god, George Washington. Obama is not a warrior or a nationalist in his thinking, he is connected to “people across the world,” he can appeal to a world example. But Obama faces a real challenge to help those students –and his fellow citizens—understand in what way Gandhi can be “Bapu” –Papa, as he is known in India– to the Americans as well as to “people across the world.”

And Obama faces a real challenge in himself to learn a bit more from Gandhi. He forgot to mention Gandhi’s non-violence to the kids. Next time he evaluates the war in Afghanistan, he might consider that Gandhi did not think that the British occupying India were using power to oppress, only violence—that’s why “people power” could confront the regime and its guns. If the British had had power, they would not have resorted to massacres. Gandhi’s confidence in the eventual success of satyagraha [non-violent resistance] rested completely on his assumption that the power arising in its practice was stronger than any violence.

Gandhi also did not think that his own leadership rested on “the power of his ethics.” He did not set himself up as an ethical example and he did not want to be taken as such. He regarded his ethical convictions as a private matter–crucial for himself. Indeed, one of the most astonishing things about his autobiography is his expression of disinterest in holding up his “standard of the self” (in Arendt’s phrase) as an ethical standard for others. Gandhi’s “experiments in truth” were methods for keeping his internal life a well-organized economy, a working eco-system. He was making himself a microcosm of the world he wanted to see in the macrocosm of Indian society, and eventually world society Gandhi was a psychic housekeeper more than a spiritual adept in the usual sense of a cultivator of spiritual practices. Even his asceticism was about husbanding energy. One of his key experiments concerned dedicating a piece of his every day to spinning and making his own clothing. This was his personal, in-house version of the economic program he was recommending: Indians should resist the capitalist system that had destroyed local textile manufacturing. The British had set things up to import Indian cotton and hemp at minimal cost, manufacture textiles in British factories, and then export them to India at great profit, contributing nothing to India but growing impoverishment and the near-death of Indian textile manufacturing. Rescuing a key component of their economy that had been usurped and exploited by British capitalism was to be a central goal of non-violent resistance and non-cooperation. The resistance could begin in every household with agreements to spin and refusal to buy British goods. From that base. resistance could grow. Gandhi’s “experiments in truth” were of the practice what you preach sort, and what he was practicing was sustainable local anti-capitalist economics. His exemplary leadership rested not on what Obama called “the power of his ethics,” but on the power of his having learned to spin and talk with his people about spinning. (More on this next post.)

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