The Illuminations of Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt observed, "The hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core." Talking about which, "The Clinton Show" was a postmodern Oz rife with constitutional deconstruction and semantic subversion, a virtual surreality polymarked by presidential alleles peccantly misplaced (or, in the case of Jefferson, posthumously misappropriated). Consider: One day, Daniel Patrick Moynihan dies. The next, the Clintons are arrogating his soul. Hardly surprising. In 1999, the Clintons were not at all shy about seizing his still-warm senate seat. One has merely to recall their Thomas Jefferson double-helix hoax to understand that posthumous misappropriation is, for the obvious reason, the Clintons' preferred method of legacy inflation. If misappropriation of Jefferson's alleles hinged on a broken line of descent, misappropriation of Moynihan's endorsement depended on a broken line of dissent. Like Sally Hemmings' progeny, Moynihan's later acquiescence is of dubious lineage. The fictional world of “alternative facts” and worse, indeed.

If you believe that he is in fact, evil, then the banality of his evil is clear. He is motivated only by personal wealth accumulation and self aggrandizement. There is nothing more banal.

As someone who has spent weeks of hours in the Literaturmuseum wien doing research and viewing all the treasures it holds there, one of the most stunning documents that they have on view is one with the most power of all. I highly suggest that all German speaking vistors to our great city go there. It says, on the telegram she sent from New York: WE ARE SAFE. WE ARE FREE! I never leave there without viewing those words of Hannah Arendt.

As profound and moving as Arendt was - and remains - she's a part of a much larger coterie of brilliant 20th century analysts who shared the despair of World Wars and the frustrations of ideological victories of limited impact. Check out Jane Jacobs' Dark Age Ahead for another, with very similar cautions. We are in dangerous times indeed, and it's wise to look both left and right while trusting only that the future is not bound by their silos.

Mr. Bernstein: thank you for bringing Hannah Arendt's work to my attention. I'm constantly reminded of areas of human experience that I've overlooked and must read and study to become better versed about life. There's a simple theme that runs throughout history, "human nature doesn't change." During my work as an asset manager I studied the psychology of investing. Knowing how people respond to economic adversity during tough times and new found wealth during a heavy bull market. The main thing about the stock market is its irrationality. It's one of the few areas that people willingly spend more money each day to buy less of the same item. They rarely realize that as stock prices increase they are paying more for lower earnings per share and a decreased dividend. What drives the populace is greed and lust for wealth. Yes, investors could sell of shares and protect their gains but they don't. sell high, buy low. Sounds simple but many investors, just like today's voters, avoid rational thought. Voters could have easily checked Trump's business background via the web. Had they done this simple step, they wouldn't have voted for him. Instead, they placed a thug in the Oval Office. A man with little or no decency, empathy or compassion. His behavior seems to feed the disenchanted masses. Trump is following in Nero's footsteps, feeding the Christians to the lions and his voters are in approval. Ms. Arendt's work explains his behavior and his voters actions.

When my tutor told me that I think like Hannah Arendt (I had apologised for being so at odds with much of the course), I had to learn more about her. Now here, in the New York Times is an article which explains that her predictions and analyses about the effects of political and social misbehaviour were and are corrrect. READ and REFLECT. Just a small taste "Her essay “Truth and Politics,” published in 1967, might have been written yesterday. Her analysis of systematic lying and the danger it presents to factual truths is urgently relevant. Because factual truths are contingent and consequently might have been otherwise, it is all too easy to destroy factual truth and substitute “alternative facts." Familiar? Thank you Professor Bernstein. I've shared this article with Oxford Ladies, with my comment.

Hannah Arendt was a far right philosopher who had contempt for the working people--the "masses" she called them--and blamed them for the rise of the dictators, not the plutocrats who bankrolled such demagogues. Her book TOTALITARIANISM simply asserted, over and over again, in the most strident terms, that the two opposite systems of Communism and Nazism were identical. It was a message most welcome in early 1950s Cold War America and apparently in Cold War Two America nowadays. Note that unlike Herbert Marcuse, who broke with him, Arendt always defended her friend, the odious Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Thanks, Dick. In memory of Anita and Max Pepper, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and for George Kateb, all friends in common. Thomas

The warnings of Arendt in regard to refugees are certainly in place. So is her understanding of the evils of Totalitarianism. Her long list of accomplishments is of course impossible to detail in an article as brief as this one. But her own moral lapses especially in her flawed analysis of the Shoah, and callous relation to its victims, and in her post- war exoneration of the most famous Nazi philosopher of all, her mentor Heidegger compromise her moral standing.

I think the professor struggled to avoid Arendt ‘s “banality of evil” term. And yet trump, sessions, pence and McConnell and their white evangelical supporters are leaving and breathing examples of same. To quite a piece in said banality: Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’. Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted into the Nazi Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief. Sound familiar?

I saw a video with Günter Gras interviewing Hannah Arendt in which she described the experience of growing up a young Jew in nazi Germany. Speaking in her raspy voice and chain smoking cigarettes she calmly described the subtle changes that ultimately became palpable terror. Asked why she wrote, she replied with the simple answer: Das Bedürfnis zu verstehen - the need to understand.

Mass migration is a constant of human history, and the word “refugee” has an almost limitless variety of meanings—from Jews expelled on racial and religious grounds to Syrian refugees fleeing the consequences of a failed uprising (caused by imprudent Obama-era foreign policy) to Central Americans seeking a perennial “better life” in America. What is supposed to be the takeaway from Hannah Arendt’s generalized talk of “refugees”? Only narrow partisans of a political cause think the answer is obvious. A flood of refugees is not always distinguishable from an invasion. And the overused and misunderstood word “totalitarian” should not be applied to any thug with an ethnic grudge, whether that means Hitler or our very own president. Read Hannah Arendt’s teacher, Martin Heidegger. Nothing is more “totalitarian” than modern Western democracy, in which a totality of possibilities is laid out for its citizens by the benign offices of a free press, global free-market economy and a system of elite universities, allied to the potent artificial-intelligence resources and targeted advertising of Facebook, Google and Amazon. All of these resources empower Europe and North America which (thanks to history) still sit on the lion’s share of the world’s wealth. They intend to remain sitting on that pile, even if it means tailoring their refugee policy to new conditions. Immigration was once an engine of economic growth, but times have changed.

Mass migration is a constant of human history, and the word “refugee” has an almost limitless variety of meanings—from Jews expelled on racial and religious grounds to Syrian refugees fleeing the consequences of a failed uprising (caused by imprudent Obama-era foreign policy) to Central Americans seeking a perennial “better life” in America. What is supposed to be the takeaway from Hannah Arendt’s generalized talk of “refugees”? Only narrow partisans of a political cause think the answer is obvious. A flood of refugees is not always distinguishable from an invasion. And the overused and misunderstood word “totalitarian” should not be applied to any thug with an ethnic grudge, whether that means Hitler or our very own president. Read Hannah Arendt’s teacher, Martin Heidegger. Nothing is more “totalitarian” than modern Western democracy, in which a totality of possibilities is laid out for its citizens by the benign offices of a free press, global free-market economy and a system of elite universities, allied to the potent artificial-intelligence resources and targeted advertising of Facebook, Google and Amazon. All of these resources empower Europe and North America which (thanks to history) still sit on the lion’s share of the world’s wealth. They intend to remain sitting on that pile, even if it means tailoring their refugee policy to new conditions. Immigration was once an engine of economic growth, but times have changed.

Too bad we don't have Hannah Arendt around to debate Jordan Peterson, especially when he claims that white privilege doesn't exist.

Thanks for illuminating this dark season with Arendt's insights. Master propagandists direct DOJ investigations and "voter integrity" commissions from Presidential lies. Mueller's lamp threatens this Presidency, so executive actions, firings and pardons may follow. Or a "wag the dog" military intervention may ensue. Arendt witnessed the arson of the Riechstag building, purportedly by a communist, to subvert scheduled elections and provide "emergency powers" to Hitler. 2016 elections were subverted via algorithms/interventions in social media. How much easier to rally our basest instincts via twitter and a synthesized "crisis"? Demand contingency plans from Congress and Twitter for disseminating information to the American public. For all the talk of "fake news", what are emergency response plans of Twitter if verifiable lies emanate from the White House during a national crisis? If lies are regularly disseminated from the Oval Office when there is no crisis, what responsibility does Twitter have should there be a manufactured calamity? Active dissemination of demonstrable lies by the executive branch must be an issue before Congress. This regime declares free press as chief enemy, airs loyalty pledges from Cabinet members, exports lies from Oval Office to DOJ's arguments, plunders for personal gain, impounds toddlers from parents as deterrence. Perversions of liberty and democracy may follow if current occupants of the people's house are threatened with eviction.

"Many liberals are perplexed that when their fact-checking clearly and definitively shows that a lie is a lie, people seem unconcerned and indifferent." Uhhh... So is everybody else—concerned that is. Liberals (whatever that means) are not the arbiters of "truth", especially when the left's own propagandists encourage others to "speak their OWN truth."

Hannah Arendt has long been a hero of mine. This is both good and bad. Good, because I can see how her writings apply to our world today. Bad, because I can see how her writinngs apply to our world today. I am frightened, but if she could survive the Nazis and so much more, then I must continue to strive for the good, no matter how hopeless it may seem at times.

Hannah Arendt wrote, "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil." The obvious evil of Trump and the 45% of this country's people needs no explanation. It is self-evident. If nearly half of our "citizens" see nothing wrong with internment camps for infants and young children stripped from their parents' arms, then there is no longer any purpose in "reaching out" to them. Arendt's quote, though, speaks to the rest of us. Some 55% of us, we are told, are horrified by the acts of this administration. Aside from sporadic marches every few months, there is no evidence that we are that disturbed about having an unhinged, dangerous madman with unfettered power. There is no evidence that we, the 55%, want to put in the effort to show our outrage for a frankly racist, xenophobic man who will not stop at interning innocent young babies. Sure, he pacified us today with his "executive order", but if anyone thinks he considers this latest episode anything more than a bump in the road on his way to assuming complete control in this country, they are mistaken. We should not be waiting for the notices from MoveOn and other organizations, about the occasional marches. They are doing very good work. But we, ourselves, must do more. Even if we have to start with small groups of our friends, we must commit to be in the streets every week until this regime has ended. Otherwise, we are no better than those who "never make up their minds."

We have the most ironic situation of a President who lives out of a completely fabricated narrative of himself, leaving him functionally disabled--clearly & totally unable to recognize fact, truth or good. Marry this dysfunction with power and we have the nightmare we have been living in. Somehow,though, there are still enough of us who recognize the immoral and inhumane as evidenced by the global reaction against the child separation Trump was engineering in our name...perhaps a place to begin the project Arendt and the Professor call us to undertake.

I can only second the comment from GreenSpirit. We need to plan for the much larger number of refugees there will be attendant to climate change and world population growth. As Hannah Arendt alludes to, mistreatment of refugee populations can cause the thread of civilization to break devolving society into a barbarism devastating to all.

"Hannah Arendt was making points that unfortunately are timeless. Situations existed before her time and they exist now and they will exist in the future." Are Arendt's statements therefore any less true? This habit among the 'intellectual' establishment of looking down on this woman's work is really tiresome. She experienced of what she spoke. She was a victim and an honest one. I,for one, take solace in what she wrote. She did not give up on humanity - which I often have.

"People who feel that they have been neglected and forgotten yearn for a narrative — even an invented fictional one — that will make sense of the anxiety they are experiencing, and promises some sort of redemption. An authoritarian leader has enormous advantages by exploiting anxieties and creating a fiction that people want to believe. A fictional story that promises to solve one’s problems is much more appealing than facts and “reasonable” arguments." The practical problem is how do you counteract the false narrative "these neglected and forgotten" people are buying. MAGA folks (and by virtue of his 80% approval rating among Republicans) rabidly support the Trump narrative. Fox News has just announced that they are the only truth. Frankly, I am tired of the "neglected and forgotten" theory of Trump's rise. The Republican party is generally well-heeled, prosperous, and have gotten their share of the America Pie (many older and enjoying Medicare) and they are buying into the narrative. This is about hate, pure and simple, not displacement by "the other." Otherwise, Bernie would have. This has always been about hate, both latent and overt.

What's most discouraging to me is that there are only 22 comments on these superb thoughts. We have certainly lost our bearings and seem to be oblivious to the need for truth in telling, but we have gotten to the point that we don't even know we are wandering aimlessly without a compass or a flashlight, and don't care enough to find either. Ah, woe!

Thank you for this timely op ed. Maybe someone will start writing a book we need now, titled --- "The Origins of Totalitarianism in the 21st Century American Democracy." Our political culture has been conned by a demogogue in love with power. What were our political system's weaknesses that allowed this? We see the media monopoly Fox News become the state - run media of the party dominating our 3 branches of government, broadcasting lies and extremism across the land. Now, the resistance seems to be growing, especially after the shocking revelations of refugees being detained, mistreated and disrespected. The border guards were following the orders of their superiors. Arendt's life and work should be discussed now in our media. Hey, Ken Burns....how about a documentary?

"What convinces the masses are not facts...but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably a part." I watched an interview this morning of a fundamentalist Christian minister from a community in Texas along the border where internment camps are located. The reporter was somewhat surprised that everything was going on so normally in this town where a few hundred feet away from the church she was sitting in, children were sequestered in tents in the Texas sun (at a cost of $750 a day each to "conservative" American taxpayers). The minister wasn't surprised: after all, the internment camps were just a manifestation of God's will on earth and shouldn't be questioned. And similarly, we should not question the actions of Mr. Trump because God destined him to be president. Trump's system of alternative facts is very consistent if nothing else, like the consistency found in fundamentalist Christian doctrine. "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." (Source: Sinclair Lewis)

This essay is exactly why we still need philosophy as a truly important element in the undergraduate education process. As a adjunct writing instructor, I have watched as the liberal arts curriculum in higher education has been whittled away to almost nothing. Well constructed thought is so important. History tells us everything, and deep critical thinking is the only way to create and then motivate change in our culture. Difficult problems do not have easy, twitter size solutions. Thank you for The Stone, and thank you for Prof. Bernstein.

I am sure that the good professor is a sound scholar of Arendt but he is bending her words to suit his beliefs - not hers. Arendt's reaction to totalitarianism was to theorize on a retreat to the private sphere - 'the loss of the world', or the restriction or elimination of the public sphere of action and speech in favor of the private world of introspection and the private pursuit of economic interests. Her major work from my perspective was The Human Condition - which addresses the public and private realms of all of us and how we engage with the modern age. While it is true that Arendt would have seen Trump coming, she would have characterized him as no different than any other politician and using the tools of any politician. Her goal - in the end [and unlike the author's] - was not an epistemological theory - but guide for a way of life DESPITE the problems of modernity.

Oh dear. Prof. Bernstein's essay makes it clear that we are there again. Alas, too few people realize that. If only Congress would take the dangers seriously.

Thank-you for this much-needed article. I think that this current round of totalitarian ideology/propaganda/theatrics is even worse because we are being kept from recognizing and preparing for the effects of climate change and the humanitarian crisis that will inevitably happen with continual mass migration, one of its horrific effects. There is so much political drama every day--real issues get lost in the noise.

Yup. But in the end, Arendt's insights, as cogent and universal as they may be, lead one to the conclusion that everything old is new again, or, conversely, the more things change, the more they stay the ever-livin' same. Still, it doesn't hurt to be reminded. Might give us a chance, however slight, of not repeating the same old.

Unfortunately, Prof. Bernstein over reaches in this short piece. He tries to embrace too many themes in a sort of collage of themes and quotes of Arendt, none of which is explored in any semblance of depth. It all comes off as a superficial collage of top hits in Arendt's work, that may ring a bell in Trump's regime. Any of these topics merits at least a short piece of its own to begin with. Start with, say, truth and falsehood. Arendt lived in modernity. Post modernity began to tear down those distinctions, not Trump. Trump represents the extreme--cartoonish-- version of post modern notions like "positioning" "construction of facts," alternative" narratives, power, etc--now hijacked by the right in true dialectical fashion. We do need serious thinkers analyzing what is going on now and the "genealogies" of these trends.

Excellent analysis of what we're facing in America: "People who feel that they have been neglected and forgotten yearn for a narrative — even an invented fictional one — that will make sense of the anxiety they are experiencing, and promises some sort of redemption. An authoritarian leader has enormous advantages by exploiting anxieties and creating a fiction that people want to believe. A fictional story that promises to solve one’s problems is much more appealing than facts and “reasonable” arguments."

I read Origins of Totalitarianism a few years ago. At least I tried. I got through about 3/4 of it and gave up out of exhaustion. It was an incredibly difficult read. But that's what one should expect when trying to peer into the thoughts of a super genius. She had it going on. I learned of her works from a movie that came out in 2012. Absolutely fascinating and illuminating. I was totally riveted to the story. It was produced in Europe. Anyway, what I want to convey is that if you want to take a journey into the mind of one of the 20th century's greatest minds, please read her works. At he very least, watch the film. You will learn a lot from it. I can't can't of anyone in public life today that comes close to her brilliance and insight into the ways of the world.

Absolutely spot on! Thank you, Mr. Bernstein, as with all your writing. Ms. Arendt has so much to teach us, in these dire times. Her witness to the Holocaust is most valued in our own deeply troubled times. We, too have a monster to deal with, and must articulate our truth, our values in the face of him; of them.

This is brilliant. We need Hannah Arendt over our shoulders to reclaim the ability to keep truth alive in the midst of the spin that substitutes for reality in this era. We all take in multiple streams of so called content all the time. Her points are essential and cogent - if we do not keep our own sense of truth active, we can easily fall prey to the spin that is happening at this very moment in relation to people who come to this country, struggling to find the fresh air of what once was called freedom.

This is magnificent, one of the finest, clearest and most powerful essays ever to appear in The Stone. Thanks and congratulations to Richard J. Bernstein.

The most fundamental right is to have rights. What nonsense. Please define a right, Professor. Let me help you. A right is a moral concept that defines and sanctions an individual's freedom of action in a social context. Yes, there is a fundamental right, the right to life. All other rights are derived from and subordinate to the right to life. But no one has the right- a claim-on the resources of others, like the right to healthcare, or food or clothing. Those needs of individuals are countless and must be provided by the individuals themselves by trading value for value.

"The deepest theme in Arendt is the need to take responsibility for our political lives." With responsibility comes anxiety. Demagogues take away the anxiety by conning people into believing that they have all the answers. A lot of people are seduced by this and abdicate their political responsibility. Unfortunately.

Thank you Professor Bernstein. Hannah Arendt was making points that unfortunately are timeless. Situations existed before her time and they exist now and they will exist in the future. In that sense she was hardly prophetic. Human beings seem to be easily fooled that something is true because it is generated by a set of things that are consistent with each other. Those “things” could be facts and correspond what we call reality or they can be lies but still correspond to a set of consistent “alternative facts” and therefore part of an alternative reality. Unfortunately to distinguish the two one needs education and critical thinking. That is lacking in present day America as it was lacking in Hitlerite Europe and the times of the Crusades or the Inquisition for that matter.

Hannah Arendt’s existential proximity to Martin Heidegger leaves a stain on her body of work, and her place in history, that is difficult to view without an immense amount of skepticism.