Background: The exchange below is a revised version of a conversation that took place at a conference “On Truth, Lies, Politics, and Media in Dialogue with Hannah Arendt,” Goethe-Institut, Washington, D.C., November 28-29, 2006. It was published in the journal Social Research in 2007.
TRUTH, LIES, AND POLITICS: A CONVERSATION
A conversation between Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Jerome Kohn
E Y-B:
When we first met her –and each other—in a Spring, 1968 seminar a the New School, Hannah Arendt was sixty-two, four years older than she was in the TV film, but still smoking away nervously and talking with that astonishing intensity and energy of thought. During the “cascade of events” (to use one of her phrases) of that spring –Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, student riots in Paris, the occupation of Columbia University (and a less dramatic sit-in at the New School itself)—soon to be followed by Robert Kennedy’s assassination, the violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia –there was certainly a great deal for her to talk about in our seminar, which had the title “Political Experience in the 20th century.” The part of the 20th century cascading by was never far from our minds as we focused in the course on the period through the Second World War and the mid-century totalitarianisms, about which she had, of course, written the discussion-setting work, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
We thought we would begin our contribution to this conference by talking about that course, “Political Experience in the 20th Century,” as an introduction to Hannah Arendt’s way of thinking, as it is crucial to have some feeling for her way of thinking in order to grasp what she had to say about our conference theme, truth and lying and the media. This was certainly not a class like any other in the Philosophy Department; it was worldly –about and for the world. The texts for the seminar reflected her remarkably wide reading and were quite a mix– everything from novels to drama to history, all arranged to explore the experience of an imaginary person, born in 1890, who might have come into public life, into politics, at the beginning of the 20th century, in the First World War. She was making, as it were, a biography of an imaginary person, although we always thought that there was a very specific referent in her husband Heinrich Bluecher, who had had political experiences close to the ones she was recreating n her imagination. Bluecher, born in 1899, was a crucial decade younger than her imaginary subject –so he had missed serving in a war that left over 7 million of his countrymen dead, wounded or missing, 65% of the German forces, along with 9 million Russians, 6 million French, more than 3 million from Great Britain and its Empire. Altogether, from all over the world, 37 million soldiers dead, wounded or missing. Her husband was not the “unknown soldier” Arendt conjured: a man who had slogged through years of horrendous –and quite senseless–trench warfare, experiencing for the first time in history aerial bombardments, chemical warfare. But Bluecher was familiar with the older brothers’ common experience of complete disorientation, confusion, lostness, and he shared the common determination to change the world with a revolution, from the left (like all those inspired by the Bolsheviks) or from the right (like all those who would gather around he Nazi banner). His entry into politics came in the wake of the war, during the brief German Revolution of 1919, when the twenty year old Bluecher associated himself with Rosa Luxemburg’s faction of the German Social Democratic Party and the nascent network of councils or Rate that sprang up in the Revolution, and he stayed active until Rosa Luxemburg was brutally assassinated and Germany headed off decisively toward the destruction of what little political life existed, a descent into violence and a culture of lying.
J K:
Hannah Arendt’s first words in the seminar were: “No theories! Forget all theories! We want to be confronted with direct experience, to relive this period vicariously.” She then distinguished thinking, which she said would certainly be required of us, from encompassing our thoughts in theories, which she said would be difficult for us to resist. In other words, she was reviving the ancient Greek distinction between theôria and theôrêmata, between the activity of thinking and its outcome in “true” theorems. That distinction has long since collapsed; it runs against the grain of both philosophy and the natural and human sciences as they have been understood and taught for centuries. But for Arendt the activity of thinking issues not in truths of any kind but in a plurality of meanings, and that distinction was essential for her in comprehending experience, and all-important in her teaching. In the seminar she assigned no philosophic or theoretical texts, but some historical writings, and an array of novels by Faulkner, Hemingway, Malraux, Orwell, Sartre, and Solzhenitsyn, among others. When Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 was discussed the author was present–he was a relative of one of the students–but he said scarcely a word and seemed intimidated by Arendt, which frustrated and disappointed her. We read a lot of poetry by Bertolt Brecht and W. B. Yeats; numerous biographies of Hitler and Stalin; and firsthand accounts of wartime experiences in René Char’s Hypnos Waking (the richly paradoxical title of the journal he kept while fighting with the French Resistance), Glenn Gray’s The Warriors, and T. E. Lawrence’s The Mint. We read Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, a collection of stories fashioned out of his experiences in Auschwitz, at least four narratives of the development of, and decision to use, the atomic bomb that incinerated the city and people of Hiroshima, and so forth and so on.
Arendt wanted us to experience for ourselves experiences that were not our own, to experience them not immediately but “vicariously,” as she put it, mediated through the works we would be reading. She spoke of a way of reading fiction as well as nonfiction, which she distinguished from the more common one of being “swept away,” of being “taken out of oneself” for as long as–but no longer than–one reads or daydreams of experiences different from one’s own. She said she might have called the seminar “Exercises in Imagination,” indicating that our success in this uncommon enterprise would depend on the most mysterious of our mental faculties. But by that she did not mean remembering what we have seen with our eyes or heard with our ears, nor recognizing what we have touched, tasted, or smelled–in all of which, to be sure, the imagination also plays a role. She meant, first, the ability of human beings to form images of things never given to their senses and, second, their submission of those images to the processes of thought. She made it very clear that she was not referring to the productive imagination (“Let no one become creative here!”), but to the capacity of the reproductive imagination to re-present, to make present what is absent via mediated images that then become the actual matter of thinking. Thinking your own thoughts, she said, is the condition of the possibility of vicarious experience. In the concept of experience this deep connection between the imagination and the activity of thinking is Kantian, and Arendt went on to speak directly of Kant. What he called an “enlarged mentality” is the capacity, in her words, “to make present in your own person” others than yourself. There is a lot of talk today about empathy, but that notion was utterly alien to Arendt. She did not believe that we could or should feel or think what another person feels or thinks, but that we can and must, if we are to experience events at which we were not present, imagine what those who were present, through the medium of their words, felt and thought. Only then can we think for ourselves in circumstances and from points of view that are not our own. Only then can we begin to comprehend the meaning of a common world, and insofar as the common world of 1968 was already becoming less limited by national boundaries, the need for an increasingly “enlarged mentality” was reflected in the diversity of Arendt’s curriculum.
We have been asked by our hosts at Goethe-Institut to consider Hannah Arendt as a public figure. There are different ways that can be done and we may get into some of them later; but right now I want to state that for me it was in her seminar room, which somehow she managed to turn into a miniature polis, a polity of equals, that this very private person appeared–and it was never easy for her to do so–in a sort of public light. Perhaps you who were not there can imagine what I am trying to get at by reflecting for a moment on the political nature of the historical past that characterized her approach wherever she led our discussions. It was never a question of understanding the matter at hand from the perspective of the history of ideas, nor of finding a place for it, as if it were a piece in a puzzle, in an overall historical pattern. On the contrary–and this is directly relevant to “Truth, Lies, and Politics,” our topic this evening–Arendt focused on facts and events, the original building blocks from which philosophical historians and historically minded philosophers construct their grand and grandiose edifices. And then, once again revisiting an ancient Greek practice, she would fit those facts and events into stories that disclosed their intrinsic political meanings, rather than any extrinsic meanings that almost by definition transcend them as facts and events. But here I’m getting way ahead of myself. This is something we definitely will return to later.
Let me just say one final thing about the seminar on “Political Experience in the Twentieth Century.” Arendt had offered this seminar in 1955 and 1965, but the spring semester of 1968, when Elisabeth and I were present, was the last time she did so. I emphasize that because in 1972, when I was her teaching assistant and she was working intensively on her last magnum opus The Life of the Mind, she asked what course I thought she should give the following year. I suggested she repeat the wonderful seminar of 1968, and I distinctly remember her reply: “No, no, it was already too late then.” I was nonplused because Elisabeth and I, along with other students, had been profoundly affected by that seminar–after all, we’re still talking about it almost forty years later! On the train to Washington earlier today we were thinking about Arendt’s remark and what she might have meant by it. This led us to consider the future in the sense that Arendt always understood it, as coming toward us–the image of the future she found embedded in the German and French words Zukunft and avenir–rather than as lying ahead of us, the temporal dimension into which we supposedly progress. At least that is what our politicians and pundits tell us every day, but Arendt did not believe in the concept of historical or any other kind of progress, except perhaps scientific and technological, and even that she questioned. We thought that what she said in 1972 most likely meant that already in 1968 certain critical and perhaps unprecedented factors were encroaching upon the res publica, the public space of the American Republic; and that these factors, when placed in a scale with the horrific events that had preceded them in the twentieth century, outweighed even those events in their need to be confronted.
E Y-B:.
I agree with you completely about Arendt’s sense of things to come in 1968, or sense that the cascade of events in 1968 was bringing into appearance something crucial in America’s –in the unifying world’s—political life. Speaking biographically, it is so interesting to note that in 1968, when Arendt took up her teaching position at the New School, leaving Chicago, she was beginning a kind of double intellectual period: she was beginning to write the philosophical essays and lectures that eventually became The Life of the Mind, and she was writing more and more political commentary, particularly for the New York Review of Books. She was being, at once, a philosopher and a journalist. She was developing in a philosophical way the characterization she had made of Adolf Eichmann as a banal, a thoughtless man, which she had first articulated when she attended his trial in Jerusalem in 1961 as a journalist. And she was developing in a journalistic mode the key philosophical distinctions she had offered in The Human Condition and On Revolution. As she wrote the political commentaries that make up the last book published during her lifetime, Crises of the Republic –including “Lying in Politics,” which is at the heart of our conference today –she was always asking the question that suffuses On Revolution: will Americans be able to remember their grand revolutionary tradition –their foundational moment, their Constitution-making moment—and preserve it from being lost in the Cold War and now in the Vietnam War, the latest front of the Cold War? Will the republic endure? Or will it succumb to one or more of the totalitarian temptations that abound in the basic elements of modern life, always waiting to be developed and crystallized anew, even amongst freedom-loving people. The question flows from her answer to the question: what is a republic, what is the nature of a republic?
Those late political commentaries –“Lying in Politics,” “Civil Disobedience,” “On Violence,” “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution” (which was actually an interview)—show very clearly, I think, what Hannah Arendt expected of journalists. Of both daily news reporters and journalist commentators, she expected, first and foremost, a capacity to be struck by “things as they are.” A particularly important subspecies of this capacity to be amazed or surprised is a capacity to say “this is new, I have not seen this before,” and to evaluate the novelty. She had herself been struck at Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem by the man’s banality, his reliance on clichés and bureaucratic locutions, his careerism, his social conformity, and she suspected that she was looking at and listening to a new type of criminal –the state sponsored, bureaucratic mass murderer, successor to the colonial overseer, who has rid himself of all impeding feelings of moral revulsion at seeing people suffer. She took Eichmann at his words, she attended to the fact of him. In the last years of her life, while she was again writing political commentary, she was, at the same time, reflecting on the capacity for judgment –reflections that were to be the third volume of The Life of the Mind—where one of the key questions is what are we doing when we judge without a rule and without precedents? How do we assess the novel, the new?
Starting with The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt had continuously stressed how crucial it is to see the novelty (or the unprecedented) in phenomena, for the novel leads to the essence of something, the nature of it, what distinguishes it fundamentally from other phenomena. For example, she had noted the ingredient or element of totalitarianism that bears most directly on our theme: contempt for the factuality of the world. In their drive to change the world, the Nazi totalitarians came to worship logicality, reasoning deductively from a premise to a logical conclusion, with complete disregard for how things are, with concern only for how they were inevitably going to be when Nature had worked its way to the triumph of the Aryan race. In her understanding, totalitarians were liars not in the usual or mundane sense that they set out intentionally to mislead or deceive with untruths, perhaps even with some conviction about the necessity of secrecy for what we call “national security,” but in the sense that they set out to override reality, to lead people to detach themselves from reality and join them in creating an alternative reality by sheer “ice cold reasoning” (to use one of Hitler’s favorite phrases of praise) or by sheer force of dialectical reasoning (as it was called in the Stalinist camp). She pointed out that contempt for the factuality of the world was characteristic of all totalitarians, but it was a specialty of their “philosopher-kings,” Hilter and Stalin, both of whom wrote in praise of logicality or ideological consistency, and it was a completely defining characteristic of the secret police, the model totalitarian followers, far more important to the regime than the army.
Totalitarian logicality or theorizing or “supersense” led right to the concentration camps and labor camps, which Arendt judged to be the essential, defining, institutions of those regimes. In the classical, Aristotlean manner, she held that things –or people, or institutions–have natures, and each nature has an essence: total terror is the essence of totalitarianism, which is a form of government, and a novel form, a new addition to the classical list drawn up by Aristotle and handed down through the centuries. A theoretician, bound by the inherited list of forms of government, would never have identified totalitarianism as a new one; Hitler and Stalin would have looked, to a theoretician, like modern tyrants. Arendt’s claim arose from observation and induction, from intent study of the phenomena, from attention to things as they are, from ability to be taken aback by novelties, as she and Bluecher were when news of the concentration camps in Nazi-dominated Europe reached them in 1942 and they could not believe it.
Does this novel form of government, she wondered, have a type of rulership and a principle of action as aristocracy does, or democracy, or oligarchy, or tyranny? Totalitarianism, she would answer in her characteristically provocative , ironical way, is rule by Nobody; it is a system of inter-related bureaucracies. And its principle of action is not like the virtue that moves people in a republic, or the honor that moves people in an aristocracy or a monarchy, or even the fear that marks all those who live in a tyranny and that makes tyranny the one form of government that inevitably collapses from within. In a totalitarian regime, people do not act; they are merely the slavish embodiments of the laws of history or the laws of nature, which are considered to be unfolding inevitably, laws more powerful and of a different kind than any positive laws. Where people accept the idea that History or Nature controls everything, that classes are dying in History’s march or that one race is superior to another in Nature’s unfolding order, they are themselves controlled by an ideology. Ideology itself is the only thing comparable to what a principle of action is in other forms of government. And ideology is, in Arendt’s terms, the basic, the fundamental, untruth of such a regime –expressing its contempt for the factuality of the world. Or, more accurately, the distinction between true and false –the standards of thought—no longer exists in a regime where people have lost the capacity for experiencing the world and for thinking.
Returning to the questions that preoccupied Arendt in her last journalistic pieces –what is a republic? can the American republic endure?—let me note that when Arendt considered the checks and balances system set forth in our Constitution and constituting the essence of our republic, she stressed that, not only in the Constitution, but in the Federalist Papers, the American founders were not afraid of the executive, which they thought of as simply the branch charged with carrying out what the legislature ruled into law. Rather, they were afraid of a kind of tyranny of the majority insofar as the majority might elect representatives—in the beginning just the House of Representatives of course—who might overrun the rights of the minority. By 1968 it was certainly obvious to her that the problem was not with the legislature but with the assumption of power by the executive. She identified the “arrogance of power” (the phrase was Senator Fulbright’s) and the arrogance of the imperial ambition of the executive as the central “crisis of the republic.” And this crisis certainly connects to the crisis that this conference is specifically convened to consider, because the check upon the executive power comes not just from the legislature and from the judiciary, but from the media. There is a kind of rule of thumb that she recognizes in the essay “Lying in Politics,” that the more power the executive has, the more it has to be investigated by the media. So that the media’s task becomes inquiring into the executive more than into the other branches of government, which still have their checks among themselves. That is the situation in which we find ourselves today, a continuation of the direction taken during the Vietnam War, which was an executive war.
J K:
I’d like to pick up on what you’ve said about “the imperial ambition of the executive as the central problem, the central crisis of the Republic.” I basically agree with that, and also agree that the various news media need to take a hard look at that political phenomenon and at the same time withstand any temptation to play a role in it. At the start it should be noted that Arendt, unlike many thinkers, holds the public press in high esteem. She placed reporters and journalists together with world-building poets and historians, insofar as all three seek–in Herodotus’ words that she never tired of quoting–legein ta eonta, “to say what is.” To do that, “to say what is,” the single most important condition is impartiality, which cannot but depend on considering perspectives other than one’s own, which in turn depends, as I indicated earlier, on the mental distance provided by the reproductive imagination. That distance belongs naturally to the histories, and essentially to the epic and dramatic poems, Arendt most admired–those of Herodotus himself and Thucydides, of Machiavelli and Montesquieu, of Homer and Sophocles, of Virgil and Dante, of Shakespeare, Goethe, Hölderlin, and Brecht, to name a few of her favorite authors. But can we expect anything like the same distance and impartial judgment from journalists who report the news, that is, from those whose daily task is to discern and evaluate what is new in the technologically driven melee of facts and events coming–or racing–toward them? To put it another way, has not the old joke about the public press being the fourth estate of government become more plausible? Does not the press, as the register of what it itself evokes as public opinion, operate as if it were a powerful branch of government, and does it less than other governmental institutions, perhaps excluding the judiciary, represent ideological points of view that, far from being impartial, shape facts and events to fit political agendas? In short, can we, as Arendt did, look to the press to stand with historians and poets outside of the realm of politics, and with them, in its own fashion, “to say what is”?
In trying to answer those questions I’d like to suggest, first, that a tumult of events is one thing and the impartiality of a journalist something entirely different; and second, that there is no reason to believe that impartiality in the American press is not possible and that it has never been more needed nor more wanting than it is right now. Two examples, one from Arendt and one from a prominent contemporary journalist, may shed some light on this matter. In 1944 Arendt recounted reports of the war correspondent Ernie Pyle from aboard a small ship during the invasion of Sicily in September of the previous year:
When the invasion ship…came within shooting distance of Sicily, five bright, terrifying bands of searchlight, one after the other, closed down on the little ship, exposing a helpless target to the coastal batteries. For some frightful moments sailors and soldiers waited for…the end. But then, the first seachlight slowly slid away, followed in close succession by the next three. Only the last remained for an extra minute, as though reluctant to part… The men almost believed in a miracle, but searchlights are handled by men, and so are coastal batteries. Italian soldiers…had given their first greetings to those whom they…no longer considered their enemies. The searchlights had turned out to be signals of welcome, an enornmous, grotesque, and powerful twinkling of the eyes. Through the night of war, the light of a secret understanding had flashed a message of unexpected friendship… If white flags mean surrender, this maneuver of searchlights meant invitation. Yet it was an admonition, too, which, translated into words…said: “See what we could do to you if we wanted. Don’t forget that we did not want to.”[1]
Sixty-three years later Seymour Hersch has reported on what at first sight seems an uncannily similar maneuver of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards upon, again, a US Navy ship. “According to a former State Department adviser on Iran,” Hersch writes, “‘The Guards are claiming that they can infiltrate American security…bragging that they have spray-painted an American warship–to signal the Americans that they can get close to them’.” In parentheses Hersch adds “I was told by [a] former senior intelligence official that there was an unexplained incident, this spring, in which an American warship was spray-painted with a bull’s-eye while docked in Qatar, which may have been the source of the boasts.”[2]
Pyle’s reportage, as retold by Arendt, tells of a single episode in the invasion of Sicily, which occurred not so long ago as to forget that it initiated the Italian campaign, a crucial component of the Allies’ strategy to defeat the German-Italian Axis in World War II. As it turned out, the campaign was bitterly fought against Nazi but not Italian armies. Pyle was aboard an American ship caught by searchlights stationed on the Italian coast. He was present with the American troops amidst the always tumultuous events of an invasion, but, when the searchlights slid away from their “helpless target,” he made “present in [his] own person” (in Arendt words) the enemy. What the reporter saw happening with his eyes but from the enemy’s point of view was not a “miracle,” as it may have seemed to the American sailors and soldiers, but a staggering surprise: the Italians were sending signals of welcome to their invaders. The image Pyle formed of this episode was not of momentary reprieve from imminent battle, but of a new configuration of the powers opposing the Allies. When submitted to thought the image reveals layers of meaning, the first of which is that the Italians would no longer be fighting for the Germans; beyond that and related to it, the image intimates the changing tide of World War II; and beyond that, the what is of the episode is disclosed as “a secret understanding…of unexpected friendship.” This deepest layer of meaning is essentially impartial, an almost perfect metaphorical definition of the realm of politics as Arendt conceived it. That definition is articulated, as according to her it only can be articulated, at a mental distance from the immediate goings-on of warfare, analogous to the spatial distance from which alone a forest can be distinguished from a jumble of trees. Hersch’s 2007 report, on the other hand, is told from a partisan political position from which he seeks to expose the hidden intentions of the Bush-Cheney Administration to attack Iran. This position presupposes that “Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq,” and that the Administration has “redefined the war in Iraq…as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran.”[3] No matter how much we may agree with Hersch, his image of Iranian know-how and boasting is of an incident, a falling-into a concatenation of events whose meaning, far from arising from thinking his image, has been speculatively predetermined. The incident as he explains it could hardly be more partial, a mere link in a chain, or more different from the episode of Pyle’s report, a coming-toward that cleaved the no longer of the German-Italian coalition from the not yet of Germany’s defeat and unconditional surrender. From Herodotus to Arendt, neither speculation, predetermined meaning, presupposition, or intention, let alone mind reading, ever constitute the reality–the what is–of any event.
Perhaps this has been an unduly roundabout way of arriving at “the imperial ambition of the executive” branch of our current Administration, which today appears all too real. Along with what Elisabeth has said about lies that “fabricate reality,” I wanted to suggest the difficulties inherent in articulating the what is of this “central crisis of the Republic,” not to doubt it. If only to orient oneself in this matter, it is worth noting that Arendt views imperialism as one of the fundamental “elements” that crystallized in full-blown totalitarianism. A good part of the reason for this is that imperialistic practices tend to boomerang, as they did in the nineteenth century, when their avowed purpose was to make manifest the superiority of Europeans and their “values” throughout the world. What eventuated was that European military expeditions to far-flung corners of the world, the bearers of those “values,” came back to Europe in the twentieth century as the two bloodiest wars in human history. Both of those wars were initiated by Germany as wars of imperialistic conquest within Europe. The first one made a mockery of European “values,” and the second one relinquished any presumption of European superiority in favor of the supremacy of the so-called Aryan race.[4] The second war was ideological and racist, in which the Nazis sought to destroy non-Aryan peoples everywhere, not accidentally starting with European Jews. The relation of Jews to their host peoples in Europe is long and complicated, and cannot and need not be gone into here. Arendt’s is probably the most multi-perspectived, impartial account of modern German-Jewish history,[5] and from it I want to extract only a late phenomenon dealing with the “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the forged document that purported to lay out the secrets, especially “the power of organization,” of Jewish global mastery–itself a lie.
Nazi propaganda…discovered [in the Protocols] the forerunner of the German master of the world and assured the masses that “the nations that have been the first to see through the Jew and have been the first to fight him are going to take his place in the domination of the world” [Goebbles]. The delusion of an already existing Jewish world domination formed the basis for the illusion of future German world domination. This was what Himmler had in mind when he stated that “we owe the art of government to the Jews,” namely, to the Protocols… Thus the Protocols presented world conquest as a practical possibility, implied that the whole affair was only a question of inspired or shrewd know-how, and that nobody stood in the way of a German victory over the entire world but a patently small people, the Jews, who ruled it without possessing instruments of violence–an easy opponent, therefore, once their secret was discovered and their method emulated on a larger scale.[6]
As used by Nazi propaganda, the forgery also was successful in hoodwinking antisemites throughout Europe, and others who previously had not been antisemites, to support Hitler’s cause. They were deceived, as were the German masses, into believing that annihilating Jews, or approving of their annihilation, qualified them as Aryan world conquerors; whereas to Hitler it was obvious, and an example of his “ice cold reasoning,” that if the German masses and others who fought for him could not win his wars then ipso facto they were not Aryans and deserved to perish. It was thus that the solidarity (regardless of any question of superiority) of European peoples, often including Jews,[7] which stood behind 19th century imperialism’s carving up of vast areas of the world into colonies of Europe’s nation-states, was torn to shreds by deception–a situation the European Union has recognized and is attempting to rectify. And that’s the problem I’ll leave Elisabeth with for now, namely, the role of lies, not in totalitarian societies but in the technologically shrunken world of current American imperialistic ventures, a world in which instantaneous communications are peculiarly vulnerable to factually unsubstantiated suspicions.[8] Or to put it in the form of a general question, how is it possible “to say what is” of events constructed of lies?
E Y-B:
No small question! But you bring me back to a distinction that I was suggesting at the beginning of our conversation. The distinction is between a political situation in which people can lie (they, so to speak, have the freedom of mind to lie) and one in which they cannot not lie, having lost all sense for the difference between truth and falsehood, thinking’s standard. Or the distinction could be put another way: there is a difference between telling a lie and living a lie
Political life has always been full of the kind of lying that can be defined as setting out to deceive with an untruth, which presumes a liar who knows the truth and willfully withholds it or warps it into a lie (prevaricates or equivocates) for strategic purposes. The lie is a means to an end. Such a liar can be doing something relatively insignificant, about relatively insignificant things –so he’s just a fibber or a white liar—or he can be, as the idiom goes, lying through his teeth or lying in his throat, which implies a good deal of forethought and planning and disguising about something significant. Machiavelli could cheerfully accept such lying as part of the Prince’s ruthlessness –although he did not offer philosophical justifications. But philosophers have come forth to justify lies for the sake of political expediency or for the sake of maintaining a regime in power or a people in ignorance. Plato is thought to have suggested that philosophers-kings should tell their people the noble lie that all people are born with souls of gold, silver or bronze –that is, that there is a natural superiority and inferiority of peoples—in order to secure their own naturally superior rule and educate the masses into subservience.
The step from this kind of philosophical reasoning into the kind of ideological world that Arendt described in The Origins of Totalitarianism is not great. And I think it is not at all surprising that Plato’s authority has been appealed to by the students of Leo Strauss who have supplied the current Administration with their versions of Strauss’s appreciation of “the noble lie.” Plato, thus mediated by Strauss, allows them to say: Look! the greatest philosopher in the West has justified the noble lie and a theory of Nature that involves a theory of group superiority. There follows logically the idea that the superior group is justified in conducting wars against all inferior peoples inside its state (like immigrants) or in foreign states, assuring world domination. Ideologies of Nature and History are combined among the Bush Administation theorists to buttress the idea that liberal democracy is the natural and inevitable result of history –the end of history—and the inevitable form of liberal democracy is rule by a superior intellectual elite.[9]
What I am trying to describe here in quick strokes is a slide from a lot of lying for political expediency into domination by an ideology and the kind of worship of logical consistency that brings that ideology to the public. I think that such a slide began during the Vietnam War, and Arendt was noting it in the justly famous essay “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers” as she pointed to the domination of the Johnson Administration not by a full-blown ideology, but by what she calls images –and specifically the image of America as the mightiest nation on the earth, an image which that Administration was determined to preserve at the price of the world’s factuality. When the New York Times put the Pentagon Papers before its readers, it very successfully interrupted that very slide from lying into domination by ideology.
But, of course, the underlying temptation to domination by ideology did not disappear, and it is no accident that it is being played out now in the context of a war –the one in Iraq, with its related fronts in the “war on terrorism”– meant to restore America’s image as the mightiest nation on earth, which so many of our political leaders have described as continually assaulted after the Vietnam War and then shattered on September 11, 2001. Our government has been devolving during the years since 2001 and the clearest sign of that is its disrespect of the Constitution, which was signaled clearly right after September 11th with the Patriot Act, which is what the Germans of the Nazi period called an “emergency law” Faced with the Patriot Act, the media were almost silent; the novelty of it struck almost no one during the stunned period after September 11th. (Thankfully, there are indications all around us that many journalists have recovered –seven years later—and are finally persuaded that the “war on terror” needs investigation, not applause.)
J K:
It is true, as Elisabeth has suggested earlier, that Arendt told the what is of totalitarianism, and that she confronted “the fact” or phenomenal reality of Adolf Eichmann. But I’m uncertain how well these examples serve us in a discussion of truth, lies, and the media.[10] The what is of totalitarianism required a long–and even more complex than long–political-philosophic-historical book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which appeared six years after the end of World War II. It is replete with new categories for understanding the entire realm of politics after totalitarianism, and, as is the case with many masterworks, its overall meaning remains subject to debate.[11] The what is of Eichmann also brought forth a book that, while stemming from her experience as a reporter at his trial in Jerusalem, became one of the, if not the, most controversial political works of the 20th century, among Jews and non-Jews alike. Her image of Eichmann as an ordinary man and the incarnation of the most extreme evil the world has ever known–which emerged from her thinking as “the banality of evil”–was bitterly attacked, challenged on both factual and interpretative grounds. “EST-ELLE NAZI?” ran the headline of an article written by a bunch of professors in France. Today the facts of Arendt’s report have been verified and are evident to anyone whose interest is not to deny them; but the implications of her representation of those facts in the persons of Eichmann and others, including some Jews, still raise doubts that have by no means been allayed by scholars or jurists. Although the phrase “the banality of evil” has become a byword in newspaper reports of “unimaginable,” senseless crimes, it is employed in a way that has little if anything to do with what Arendt meant by it. Due to the public controversy and grave misunderstandings engendered by Eichmann In Jerusalem, Arendt spent the rest of her “philosophical” life justifying the concept of “the banality of evil” as the inability or refusal to think, and hence to judge, the reality of what we ourselves are doing and allowing to appear in the world. She did this in her last uncompleted masterwork and various essays, of which the significance, if we are lucky, will be realized in years to come.[12] But neither hugely complex nor subtly eristic books, whose meaning is elusive or requires years of philosophic exegesis, are what we expect, or have any right to expect, from reporters and journalists.
Arendt wrote another essay, “Truth and Politics,” also inspired by the Eichmann controversy, and this essay is directly relevant to our concern this evening with the extraordinary harm done by political lies. In a note on its first page, speaking directly of Eichmann In Jerusalem, she says “[t]he following reflections try to come to grips with [two] issues,” the first being the legitimacy of telling the truth under any and all circumstances, and the second being “the amazing amount of lies…about what I had written, on one hand, and about the facts I had reported, on the other.” Her reflections on these issues, she says, “may also serve as an example of what happens to a highly topical subject when it is drawn into that gap between past and future which is perhaps the proper habitat of all reflections.”[13]
I want to talk about this essay. You know, when I first read “Truth and Politics” in The New Yorker –this was in 1967—it became the sole reason I went to the New School for Social Research in 1968, the year Arendt joined its faculty. After frequent rereadings, however, I find it among the most difficult of her essays to grasp as a whole. In it she compresses in less than forty pages what would take a “professional thinker” (in Kant’s ironic phrase) four hundred pages to expound, assuming he were up to it at all. So, without attempting to provide a full account of “Truth and Politics,” I will pick and choose from its many meanings and multiple perspectives, beginning with the seemingly shocking statement that to Arendt the human ability to lie is joined at the hip, so to speak, with the human ability to act. As you probably know, a recurrent theme throughout Arendt’s work is that traditional political theories have never taken action–action in itself, and not as a means to an end outside itself–seriously, and this may be partly why. But from another point of view, if action is the reason for the formation of political communities in the first place, to generate the power that can safeguard our journey in the world, Arendt quite consistently asks: Why then should telling the truth be considered a political virtue? “Fiat veritas, et pereat mundus“ indeed![14] Moreover, as she says, political lies “are often used as substitutes for more violent means,” and thus “are apt to be considered relatively harmless tools in the arsenal of political action” (229).
Political lies and political actions are closely connected because they both articulate dissatisfaction with the world as it appears and demonstrate that its appearance can be changed within limits. In her own words, “the undeniable affinity of lying with action, with changing the world–in short, with politics–is limited by the very nature of the things that are open to man’s faculty for action” (258). Which is to say that the abilities to lie and to act are similar instantiations of a strictly human freedom, since no animate creatures other than ourselves possess those abilities. That is the reason we can tame, exploit, or protect animals far stronger than ourselves, which, though they unmistakably display joy, cunning, rage, and fear, cannot express discontent with a world they cannot change–they are not free in that sense. In addition, the vexed relation of truth, and especially of telling the truth, to politics is an old story going back to Plato, whose notion of a philosopher-king ruling over citizens most improbably and ironically resolves the problem in favor of truth. The real problem, not so easily solved, is the political conflict between truth and opinion. The truth that Plato’s philosopher beholds with his mind’s eye when he sojourns alone in the heaven of everlasting ideas becomes no more than an opinion among opinions when he returns to the marketplace; there, when he tells his truth to others, expecting them to leap at the chance to apply an infallible standard in judging human affairs, he finds, on the contrary, that none of them is willing to relinquish his own particular opinion, that is, his own point of view and standpoint in the world. Not even Socrates, the most persuasive of philosophers, could convince the citizens of Athens to find for themselves, by examining their lives and interests, the partiality of their opinions. Since human plurality and the plurality of human opinions are the conditions of action and politics, “it will therefore,” Arendt says, “come as something of a surprise that the sacrifice of truth for the survival of the world would be more futile than the sacrifice of any other principle or virtue” (229).
As one reads on, it is clear that Arendt is less concerned with philosophic than with factual truths–”truths seen and witnessed with the eyes of the body”–not only because “the reporter” of such truths is “worse off” than the philosopher, but also because opinions in their diversity are only “legitimate as long as they respect factual truth” (237-38). That the reporter of truths of fact is the opposite of the liar is obvious; the reason he is “worse off” than the philosopher is that the truths he tells lack necessity. We’ve seen that necessary or rational truths can be opposed by opinion, but they cannot be destroyed by lies; whereas factual truths, because they reflect the radical contingency of the human world–”everything that has actually happened in the realm of human affairs could just as well have been otherwise” (257)–can be lied or manipulated out of existence altogether. Arendt offers a number of examples, including de Gaulle’s and Adenaurer’s ability, in the aftermath of World War II, “to build their basic policies on such evident non-facts as that France belongs among the victors of the last war and hence is one of the great powers, and [quoting Adenauer] ‘that the barbarism of National Socialism had affected only a relatively small percentage of [the German people]‘.” Even more to the point is the slightly earlier example of Trotsky who, when he “learned that he had never played a role in the Russian Revolution…must have known that his death warrant had been signed.” Stalin’s order for Trotsky’s murder makes clear that the purport of the lie about his non-role in the revolution, as opposed to the attempt to erase his name from Soviet history books, was not to hide or alter reality but to abolish it. Arendt concludes that political lies as such “harbor an element of violence,” and, when sufficiently “organized,” tend “to destroy” what they “negate”(252).
This seems to me the crux of the matter. In his State of the Union address in 2003, George W. Bush cited a forged document stating that Saddam Hussein was obtaining yellowcake from Niger to make nuclear weapons. This falsehood, among others, succeeded in convincing enough legislators to support the invasion of Iraq two months later, one of whose principal purposes, again according to Bush, was “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction”–weapons that did not in fact exist. On October 17, 2004, when these deceptions had been exposed, Ron Suskind reported in The New York Times Magazine a conversation with an unnamed “senior advisor” to Bush. The following quotation from Suskind may be familiar to you, but it is worth repeating because of its striking relevance to the aspect of Arendt’s thought we are considering:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality…. That’s not the way the world really works anymore….We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality…we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too….We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
In an unintended sense historians and poets, who come later, may be so left, but what about reporters and journalists? In Arendt’s terms, is it possible in the present to discern the limits of “the very nature of the things that are open to man’s faculty for action”? If the Bush Administration has negated Montesquieu’s principle that power divided is power increased, which is both established in the Constitution and woven into the fabric of our Republic, and if it has also negated Montesquieu’s conception of power as “completely separated from all connotations of violence”[15]–if, in short, the current regime in Washington has deceived itself into believing that violence is the means to victory in its fancied “war against terror” and that that victory is the enactment of history–what limits are there to its actions, and by what signs can they be recognized? Today there is sufficient reason to agree with Arendt “that the modern art of self-deception” in international affairs “boomerangs onto the scene of domestic politics,” but is there less reason to agree with her that “[o]nly self-deception” can “create a semblance of truthfulness” (253-56)?
Arendt reflects on these questions not from within the political realm but on the contrary by withdrawing into the “gap between past and future which is perhaps the proper habitat of all reflections.” Perhaps if we join her there, and think with her, we can come to terms, pace Bush’s “senior advisor,” with our “highly topical subject” just as she did with hers. We saw before that for Arendt the “important political function” of impartially telling factual truths can only be “exercised” by overlooking the hurly-burly of politics, not by neglecting it but as a spectator looks over a spectacle. Now we may also see that, since “[r]eality is different from, and more than, the totality of facts and events, which, anyhow, is unascertainable,” the teller of factual truths has always to fit his facts into “a story, and in this story the particular facts lose their contingency and acquire some humanly comprehensible meaning” (261-62). On the other hand, the limitlessness of lying is all too apparent: the first lie requires a second one, and then a third, and endless lies if the ongoing accumulation of falsehoods is to “form a web of deceptions” that has the “semblance of truthfulness.” But with or without that semblance, the nature of falsehood is to treat “the past and present…as parts of the future,” as if they had no reality of their own. Because factual truths are always of what has passed, and the present “is the outcome of the past,” by negating those facts the liar deprives them of the meaning they have in the truth teller’s narrative. By reducing the past and present to states of potentiality, lies likewise deprive “the political realm…not only of its main stabilizing force but of the starting point from which to change, to begin something new.” Thus lying is the form of action that negates the very possibility of acting into the future, that is, of the freedom, and the courage of freedom, to metamorphose what is coming toward us into an unforeseeable and incalculable embarkation. To distinguish truth from falsehood first reveals the always limited dynamic of action to change what can be changed, which is the primary meaning of political power. Apart from the willingness of reporters and journalists to insist on distinguishing between factual truths and falsehoods from a position above the political fray, politics itself, according to Hannah Arendt, tends toward “sterility,” squandering its ownmost meaning in a “constant shifting and shuffling” from one impotent alternative to another (255-58). These are signs we may recognize today.
[1] H. Arendt, Essays In Understanding 1930-1954, ed. J. Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005) 85-86.
[2] Seymour M. Hersch, “Shifting Targets: The Administration’s plans for Iran” (The New Yorker, October 8, 2007) 47.
[3] Ibid., 40.
[4] Never clearly defined, the term Aryan meant something like “Nordic” to the Nazis;
Italians were somehow included as reincarnations of the spirit of ancient Rome, in which “the thousand year Reich” saw itself reflected. But the term proved an almost comical embarrassment when the Japan joined the Axis, just as the term antisemitism proved an impediment to Nazi propaganda directed at Arabs when the war moved to North Africa. Then Jews suddenly became a racial “hybrid,” alien to genuinely semitic peoples! Arendt sums up this nonsense when she writes that “race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples, but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death” (Origins 157).
[5] For the 18th and 19th centuries see “The Enlightenment and the Jewish Question” and “Antisemitism” in H. Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. J. Kohn and R. H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007) 3-18, 46-121.
[6] H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968) 360.
[7] For example Disraeli, perhaps the most eminent and imitated architect of classic imperialism, and also international Jewish financiers, such as the Rothschilds, who through their philanthropies became heads of sizeable Jewish communities throughout Europe.
[8] The recent publication of Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism makes one wonder if the unlikely appearance of another forgery, this time called The Protocols of the Mullahs of Islam, would not be superfluous.
[9] In her “Truth and Politics” essay in Between Past and Future (1968), Arendt wrote in a long footnote (number 5, p. 298) that she hoped “ no one will tell me any more that Plato was the inventor of the ‘noble lie.’ This belief rested on a misreading of a crucial passage (414C) in The Republic…” She obviously would not have accepted Strauss’ interpretation of Plato, much less Strauss’ use of his interpretation.
[10] Arendt also wrote polemical articles for a German language Jewish newspaper during the war (now collected in The Jewish Writings, 134-240) addressed to Jews worldwide, calling for an international Jewish army, Jewish solidarity, and the founding of a Jewish homeland in a secular binational Palestinian state, none of which met with success.
[11] For diverse meanings see “Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism Fifty Years Later” (Social Research (69:2, Summer 2002).
[12] H. Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978) two volumes, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” and “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” both in H. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. J. Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003) 49-146, 159-89, are explicitly such justifications, among other implicit ones.
[13] H. Arendt, “Truth and Politics” in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1968) 227-64.
[14] “Let truth be told, though the world perish,” ibid., 228. Subsequent quotations from “Truth and Politics” will be identified by page numbers in the text.
[15] H. Arendt, “The Great Tradition: I. Law and Power” in Social Research (74:3, Fall 2007), 722.
