Background: This article started out as a lecture for a celebration of Hannah Arendt’s centenary in Berlin, April, 2005. Later, it was issued, revised, in a journal called The Good Society, volume 16/2 in 2007.
THE ART OF ALARM
In the ancient Greek world, Cassandra was metonymic for prophecy. Apollo gave Priam’s daughter her capacity for prophecy as a love gift, but when she refused his suit, so the story goes, he condemned her to be lucid but rejected. The key feature of Cassandra’s story characterizes Greek prophecy: it is a truth about the future that no one benefits from.
The Greek suspicion of prophecy went even further than the skepticism and incessant questioning or refusal of final Truth so characteristic of their philosophia –or at least of the domains of it not descended from Parmenides. In their stories about Apollo himself, bestower of prophetic gifts, they were also aware of how prophecy can be manipulated. Apollo had tricked the goat-legged god Pan into teaching him the prophetic art and then he had seized the Delphic Oracle to make the priestess there his own. People listening to Apollo’s representatives would have had every reason to wonder whether the prophecy played a role in some quarrel among the gods.
In the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic monotheistic traditions, there is no god whose special province is prophecy, although there are, of course, prophets, and Mohammed is the Prophet in Islam. False prophets may appear, but no believer should ever question whether the ultimate, divine source of truth about the future is reliable or manipulative. A prophet’s message is a statement of God’s will, of the future as God’s finished production toward which human beings, sojourning on the earth, are ultimately traveling. In these traditions, people march into the future and the prophets are guides.
Since the Enlightenment the status of prophecy has become problematic again, although not in the Greek manner. When “the prophets of Paris” –Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Comte and their followers– imagined a science of society that was going to bring about mankind’s future perfection, their visions were explicitly non-religious –although they, very importantly, retained the idea that the future is out there, to be marched toward. Each claimed to have a special human insight into the deeper workings of History, what we would now call a theory, and each portrayed the destination of Progress in systematic detail. They did not agree, however, on the systematic details. In the century after the French Revolution, self-appointed prophets of every conceivable sort hitched their visions of Progress to programs for nation-states.
Certainly the vast majority of modern self-appointed prophets in the public realm have been prophets of Progress, invoking perfectability, most frequently in Marxist terms, but after the First World War, which was such a shock to optimism and idealism, prophetic visions of decline and fall of civilizations in the Spenglerian manner became more common. By the mid-20th century, modernist self-consciousness about the unpredictability of human affairs had tempered non-religious prophetic enthusiasm generally, even in America, the land of the victorious non-Marxist ideology of Progress, the emergent superpower. But that does not mean that the modernists or even their current heirs, were not in love with theory or not given to making claims for their knowledge of either the deeper causes of history or the shape of things to come.
No one trying at the mid-20th century to imagine the future was more circumspect and suspicious of prophecy, whether of Progress or of Doom, than Hannah Arendt, who included in the Preface to her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism these somber sentences:
This book has been written against a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith.
She might have written the same sentences were she living today, in our so-called post-modernist era. And in the last years of her life, in the early 1970’s, she often did write specific complaints both against those who pretended to knowledge of the future and offered “deeper causes” theories about the past. As she did in “Home to Roost,” her reflection in 1975 on the American bicentennial, Arendt cautioned (R&J, p. 262) that those rare people who insist on “telling it like it is,” forgoing speculation in order to stay close to “the stark, naked brutality of facts, of things as they are “have never “been welcomed and often not been tolerated at all.” A Cassandra of the present tense would find it hard to get a hearing now.
Hannah Arendt’s entire writing life, from her journalistic work in the 1940’s until the last essays and the last unfinished book, The Life of the Mind, could be described as an effort to see things as they are and to reflect on how and why people fail or refuse to see things as they are and make their judgments accordingly. She had in common with prophets of many sorts that she wanted to raise an alarm, but her alarm was not about the future, which she did not think knowable, and which she did not even think of as something out there in front of us, toward which we are marching. She thought of the future as coming toward us, and as visible only –and uncertainly–in the things as they are, as an experience of things pressing upon us.
Hannah Arendt had had this conception of the future when she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism and put an aphorism from the pen of her teacher, Karl Jaspers, as an epigram to it: “Weder dem Vergangenen anheimfallen noch dem Zukunftigen. Es kommt daruf an, ganz gegenwartig zu sein.” But she had only made her conception iconic for herself as she explored a parable of Franz Kafka’s, which she quoted in the 1961 Preface to her Between Past and Future essays and then cited again and again after that. In his parable, the artist Kafka gave her an image of one of his anonymous human beings having the mental experience –the thinking experience–of standing in the “gap between the past and the future”:
He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both.
Arendt announced in Between Past and Future (p. 14) her own intention to be an experimenter in writing “exercises in political thought”; in thought that moves between past and future and does not try to leap out of their antagonisms, their pulls and pushes, to find a view from above the fray, a metaphysical or prophetic view; in thought that “arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings.” “The essay,” she noted, with the French word essai obviously in her mind, “as a literary form has a natural affinity to the exercises I have in mind.”
In this talk, I want to reflect on how Hannah Arendt’s mode of essai –at work even when she wrote to book length–raised the alarm about what she saw happening in America in the last years of her life, and I want to view her method against the background of The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition. My focus will be on Arendt’s rhetoric, but I have a further more political intention as well. In 1975, witnessing the “cascade of events” that stunned everyone as the Vietnam War ended in an ignominious defeat for America, she wondered whether America might be at a historical juncture. The same question ought to be raised about the current moment in American and world affairs, and I think that if we do that, raise that question, following her example, we can see that the juncture she was identifying then is making its fully identifiable appearance now.
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Methodologically, and in terms of her rhetoric, Hannah Arendt’s rejection of prophecies of Progress or of Doom was key to her work. To her understanding of what she was doing. Experientially, it kept her open to the present, succumbing neither to the idea –so hackneyed in the post-War period—that the past will repeat itself unless people prevent it from doing so–“those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it”—and the idea that the future can be known by extrapolating from the past. These ideas led most historians and commentators to become obsessed with analogical thinking and “lessons from the past” as guides to the future. We have become so accustomed to this shared obsession that it –for example– hardly struck anyone as strange to have the World Trade Center attack instantly analogized to Pearl Harbor so that it instantly became logical for America to respond to the attack by entering into a “war” on terrorism as America had responded to Pearl Harbor by entering into the Second World War.
Forgoing the prophetic stance with its corollary search for historical precedents, Arendt focused in The Origins of Totalitarianism on phenomena she judged unprecedented. “Unprecedented” was one of her most important and carefully used words; it meant for her both not understandable by reference to precedents and not predictable. In The Origins of Totalitarianism’s Preface, where she announced her stance as neither a prophet of Progress nor a prophet of Doom but someone hoping to exercise “balanced judgment and measured insight,” she went on to say:
[The book] was written out of the conviction that it should be possible to discover the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved into a conglomeration where everything seems to have lost specific value, and has become unrecognizable for human comprehension, unusable for human purposes…
Arendt stood against this seeming incomprehensibility and unusability for human purposes of everything in the “conglomeration,” by insisting on a particular kind of comprehension:
Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the precedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed upon us –neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality –whatever it may be.
The underlying unprecedented situation that Arendt identified in The Origins of Totalitarianism –the fundamental “burden which our century has placed upon us”—was the reason for her alarm, her resistance. Politics –in the sense of citizens speaking and acting in a “world,” a public space, variously allowed by different forms of government and secured by their laws– only appears under certain historical conditions, she claimed, and can disappear . Further, a form of government can come about –so she knew as a “stateless person” and survivor of the Twelve Year Reich –with the unprecedented and hideously contradictory consequence of making politics disappear –and disappear, she thought at the time, completely. Unlike tyranny, which produces an atrophy of politics, totalitarianism, a novelty among forms of government, is a the radical elimination of politics brought about by methodically eliminating the very humanity of, first, a selected group and eventually any group, by making humans superfluous as human beings. Such is totalitarianism’s “radical evil.”
Arendt’s aim in her book was to identify the elements which, by hidden mechanics, can combine into totalitarianism. Let me recap briefly the elements she identified. First, totalitarianism, she had argued, requires an ideology that explains all of history and justifies the regime and its policies; it designates a superior people and an internal enemy (usually operating as a conspiracy) that must be eliminated. Arendt described an ideology of Nature in Nazism and an ideology of History in Stalinism.
A second key element of totalitarianism is total terror, which she saw essentially institutionalized in the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet labor camps. Total terror, which ultimately spares no part of the population, was preceded in these regimes by dissolution of traditional class structures and political allegiances in a fervent political “movement” that eventually made uprooting and moving of huge populations seem necessary. She also noted that the introduction in 1945 of atomic and then nuclear weapons put the world under threat of a new form of total terror.
Thirdly, Arendt identified as an element of totalitarianism the destruction of natural human bonds –chiefly of the family –accomplished by laws regulating marriage (and forbidding marriage between peoples designated superior and those designated inferior) and then by police practices forcing people to spy on and inform on their family members. Along with the destruction of pubic spaces –the destruction of politics—in a totalitarian regime goes the destruction of private spaces for intimacy and family life.
Government by bureaucracy was a fourth element of totalitarianism that Arendt identified, tracking its history from the 19th century imperial regimes and examining its assault upon individual judgment and responsibility as it became in Germany and the Soviet Union “government by nobody.” She also identified as elements the domination of the totalitarian regimes by their secret police (not their national armies), and the corruption of their legal institutions, particularly those designed to protect, on the one hand, privacy, and, on the other hand, the political space (free speech, free press, right of assembly, etc.). The totalitarian governments also asserted their absolute sovereignty and justified “continental imperialism” into lands with peoples claimed as Volk (in the biological or historical terms claimed in the ideology).
Even while she was completing The Origins of Totalitarianism and then observing how her book was taken up into the international struggle that came to be known as The Cold War , Arendt began to revise her understanding of several of these elements. She was provoked by new realities of two sorts: reports emerging from Germany and especially from survivors of the Soviet camps; and, on the other hand, McCarthyism in America, a phenomenon that she at first viewed as proto-totalitarian.
The survivors’ memoirs taught her that even in the essential institution of totalitarianism, politics does not disappear completely; the “holes of oblivion’ are not holes of complete oblivion. This fact fitted with the claim she had made in her book’s “Concluding Remarks” that the totalitarian “contempt for utilitarian motives,” the vast denial of reality and common sense characteristic of totalitarians fixated on their ideologically defined goals, had a built-in limit as long as it fell short of total, global control. The totalitarians, overreaching themselves, generated resistance and opposition among people not infected with their “supersense,” particularly in the lands they set out to conquer as quickly –impractically—as possible. “[One] should bear in mind the necessary limitations to an experiment which requires global control in order to show conclusive results. Until now the totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have proved only that everything can be destroyed” (p.623).
In conceptual terms, what Hannah Arendt was able to realize is that as long as human plurality is not completely destroyed, as long as people’s identities and actions are not completely suppressed, new beginnings are possible. Seeing plurality as what essentially must be preserved against totalitarian threats , she could frame a task for preserving plurality in the future with extraordinary clarity. First, she could experience the totalitarian regimes as teachers (and she rhetorically presented them as agents of instruction), demonstrating possibilities that could not have been imagined without their unprecedented institutions, the concentration camps (p.624):
Yet in their effort to prove that everything is possible, totalitarian regimes have discovered without knowing it that there are crimes which men can neither punish nor forgive. When the impossible was made possible it became the unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice; and which therefore anger could not revenge, love could not endure, friendship could not forgive. Just as the victims in the death factories or the holes of oblivion are no longer “human” in the eyes of their executioners, so this newest species of criminals is beyond the pale even of solidarity in human sinfulness.
And then she could see that the novel crimes –called at the Nuremberg Trials “crimes against humanity” –involved denying human beings not any specific right, but the right to have rights, the right to belong to a human community and be remembered in human history. Or, as she sometimes put it, not to be superfluous. The totalitarian denial of the right to have rights coincided with the collapse of any source of rights or of actual laws outside of human nature itself –that is, the collapse of appeals to God as the source of laws in the monotheistic traditions or to “natural law” in the tradition of the French revolutionaries and their modern heirs or even to the idea that Man himself is the measure of all things human. Without specifying its form, Hannah Arendt was appealing in the “Concluding Remarks” to a “consciously devised new polity’ –a “consciously planned beginning of history” (p. 631).
But it was not until she set out to write the essay “Ideology and Terror,” which eventually replaced the “Concluding Remarks” in the 1958 revised edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, that Arendt’s sense for the limits of totalitarianism brought her to the insight that allowed her to look on the post-War world, the world after “The Thaw” in the Soviet Union and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, not as a scene where totalitarianism might arise again in a reprise of its mid-century forms but as a scene where the still existing elements of totalitarianism would be more likely to crystallize, if they did, in new forms. “It may even be that the true predicaments of our time will assume their authentic form –though not necessarily the cruelest—only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past” (p. 593).
Certainly, Stalin’s death loomed behind this statement, but I think even more crucial to it was Arendt’s experience with McCarthyism in America. She had initially looked upon the events of McCarthy’s rise to political influence as proto-totalitarian, on the model of Nazi Germany, and had expressed this fear in her correspondence with Karl Jaspers. But then she acknowledged her mistake: McCarthyism lacked the element of mass movement that she had so rightly identified as crucial to Nazism in its ascendancy, and it lacked an ideology of either the Nazi sort –based on racism or a view of Nature—or the Soviet sort –based on a view of History.
In the years of the Vietnam War, after she had made her study of American political history, On Revolution, Arendt extended the train of thought her experience with McCarthyism had launched and realized that an ideology of the Nazi or the Soviet sort is not necessary to prevent people from viewing the realities of the world, the facts of the world. You do not have to subscribe to ideological supersense or freedom from the constraints of ordinary logical thinking in order to make the realities of the world disappear. Something much less sweepingly historical will do, and that is what she came to call “an image.”
Arendt’s own experience during the controversy in the 1960’s over her Eichmann in Jerusalem gave her political insight a personal dimension. She realized that those who conducted a campaign against her and her book first created an image of her book —an image divorced from the reality of what she had written—and then attacked that image, diverting discussion to the image and away from what she had written. They created an image of her book in which she had absolved Eichmann –he was merely a petty bureaucrat obeying orders, a cog in the machine—and in which she had accused the Jews of Europe of going “to the slaughter like sheep” or even contributing to their own destruction by cooperating through the Jewish Councils with the Nazis. For Arendt, the question of how to combat this image, this distortion, became key, and her answer was not engagement in the public controversy, but the series of essays on thinking, willing, and especially on judging that eventually became the foundations for her last work, The Life of the Mind.
Her reflections on image-creation in the Eichmann Controversy ran parallel to her reflections on America’s conduct in the Vietnam War, about which she did speak out publicly. The American political leaders who launched the American military escalation in Vietnam –after lying about the events which supposedly justified the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and the declaration of war—and then continued the war to the bitter end, were defending an image of invincible American military might. Their image was of “the mightiest nation on the earth” and nothing –no lost troops, no wasted resources, no civilian casualties—was more important than that image and what came to be called “credibility,” which meant capacity to live up to that image. A totalitarian ideology, she argued, required totalitarian terror for its reinforcement and its extension into every nook and cranny of the private and public lives of friends and foes, but maintaining an image required something else: public relations, the “hidden persuasion” techniques of Madison Avenue, the carefully orchestrated lying that the Pentagon Papers revealed in such detail. Both terror and image-selling have in common that they entail lying on principle and that they involve the intrusion of criminality into politics. Although image-selling may not be “the cruelest” form that the demolition of political life can take, and we tend to judge it as not so serious because we are analogizing it to the cruelties of totalitarian total terror, image-selling can corrupt the whole surface of political life. It is truly a “banality of evil” phenomenon. In hr 1975 alarm, “Home to Roost,” Arendt wrote:
The ultimate aim of this terribly destructive war, which [President] Johnson let loose in 1965, was neither power nor profit, not even anything so real as influence in Asia to serve particular tangible interests for the sake of which prestige, an appropriate image, was needed and purposefully used. This was not an imperialist politics with its urge to expand and annex. The terrible truth to be gleaned from the story told in [the Pentagon Papers] was that the only permanent goal had become the image itself…Image-making as a global policy is indeed something new in the huge arsenal of human follies recorded in history…(pp.264-5)
In the political analyses that Hannah Arendt wrote in the last five years of her life, she stressed again and again the image-creation phenomenon –what we now call spin—and the remoteness from reality of people on all parts of the political spectrum, right to left. Making good political judgments had become a rare capacity. For example, in “Lying in Politics,” her 1971 reflection on The Pentagon Papers, she followed her standard essai procedure of pulling out of a familiar theme its novel aspect, and, in this case, the novel aspect was that the American government bureaucrats were receiving from their own intelligence services all the information they needed to make an accurate assessment of the situation in Vietnam before the war and during the steady escalation of the war, and they were ignoring it. She observed that the “non-relation between facts and decision, between the intelligence community and the civilian and military services, is perhaps the most momentous, and certainly the best guarded, secret that The Pentagon Papers revealed.” Summarily, she concluded: “…one sometimes has the impression that a computer rather than ‘decision makers’ had been let loose in southeast Asia. The problem solvers did not judge; they calculated.”
I think that what we have learned in recent years about images and ideologies is that an image, given several twists, can function with the sweep of an ideology. In the course of the “war on terror” now being conducted by America in every area of the world where a threat to that “mightiest nation on earth” image is perceived , the present Administration is adding not new goals, but new facets to the “mightiest nation on earth” image. The image now involves sanction from God, who is said to have designated America the exemplary land of freedom and democracy, a beacon to all nations, and it now involves invocation of absolute sovereignty, which defines the mightiest nation on earth as immune to any external check on its exercise of might. As Arendt was well aware, these kinds of ingredients actually signal loss of power. No powerful nation –no nation truly grounded in its people’s concerted action–needs divine sanction or isolation from other nations, which are the political equivalents (or, rather, the anti-political equivalents) of paranoid fantasies.
By the early1970’s, Arendt was able to describe how the creation of the wartime military machine that had lifted America out of Depression and created the conditions for a post-War economic boom had directly continued into escalating investment in the military and reliance on the use or the threat of force or violence. She recognized a slow erosion of American power in this increasing dependence on force and threat of force to preserve an image. And I think she would recognize now a further radical loss of power as America has grown more and more internally divided and more and more isolated from its allies among other nations. We live now in a world in which America is said, over and over, to be the sole superpower while it is less powerful than it has ever been.
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In her comparison of an ideology and an image, and of terror and “hidden persuasion,” Arendt was acknowledging that the elements of totalitarianism can change, or that in a post-totalitarian form the elements will have post-totalitarian forms. What does not change, in her way of thinking and writing, are the basic conditions of human life which are enhanced by the existence of republics and threatened when politics is threatened. In all of her work after The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt raised alarm by considering the elements of totalitarianism in a given situation, but, on another level, by considering how the stark realities of any moment threatened or did not threaten the basic conditions for human being, or for being human.
As I indicated before, she came to think of the totalitarian mass movements and institutions of terror as the ultimate threats to the human condition of plurality. Human individuality is systematically rendered meaningless. Continuation of human life, including at the fundamental level of biological reproduction, is cut off; and no human being dies except by one form or another of murder. “The world,” which was Arendt’s term for all of the things and modes of relationships that connect people to one another and to the earth which they share –all of the objects and bonds of sustenance and of culture that are between beings, in a generation and between generations– is destroyed or turned to lethal purpose in a totalitarian regime. The human condition of worldliness is assaulted as connection is replaced with violence.
In all of her essays after The Human Condition, Arendt considered being human in relation to the six conditions (explored there) without which being human is not possible and which political institutions and laws must protect: plurality, natality, mortality, life, earth, and worldliness. Her artistic or essayistic strategy was to delve into the terriotroy of totalitarian elements in order to come to the territory of human conditions. This was not a strategy of looking for deeper causes, but one of looking for deeper effects. In the last years of her life, as she was exploring the conditions of human mental life –thinking, willing, judging—Hannah Arendt’s political essays focused more and more on the effects of events and elements upon these mental conditions.
Arendt questioned, as I said before, whether the capacity for judgment was becoming rarer as image-making became more pervasive. Twenty-five years later, we have every reason to see that she was facing up upon a fact becoming visible; she was struggling against a future that is here now. We are left with a method and her example for asking what this fact means.
