How Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism remains painfully relevant.
Recently, following a discussion of totalitarianism, a student shared a conversation she’d had in her dormitory with a brilliant peer from China. My student was asked, “What is so great about democracy?” To explain why she was asking such a provocative question, the Chinese student showed her a headline from CNN that quoted a recent tweet by President Trump: “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.” A bright, ironic smile spread on the Chinese student’s face, as if to say, “If this chaotic adolescent narcissism is an expression of democracy, I prefer rational tyranny.” “There was little I could say,” said my student with noticeable sadness. “At the moment, I myself am not sure how I should answer.”
The challenge posed by authoritarian regimes such as China’s to political liberalism and democracy is everywhere today. The daily headlines from Hong Kong and elsewhere remind us that around the world tyranny of multiple sorts is on the rise. Values, such as free speech and an independent press, that we used to take for granted are in doubt, as we question their ability to endure, while some are dismissed altogether. Indeed, seventy years after the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the enduring threat to freedom seems as pertinent as ever. From Manila and Mumbai to Brasilia and Moscow, from Budapest and Warsaw to Istanbul, Damascus, and beyond, freedom of thought, expression, and political action are in ever greater danger. As I show in my book, Poetic Thinking Today, what makes Arendt’s insights into despotic politics in the modern era so pressing and relevant is not only the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ explosion of the will to power or the seemingly interminable machinations of capitalism. It is also what Arendt brilliantly describes as the enduring affinity between certain philosophical assumptions and tyranny. Ever since Plato, Arendt noted in a diary entry from 1950, Western logic has been “by definition” tyrannical — fixed on principles, which are considered the outcome of “pure thought and reason.” It is not only tyrants, in their desire to repress all forms of opposition, but also the despotic idea that understanding and sound judgment depend solely on logic, method, rigor, and systemization that pose a constant threat to human freedom. If, under a tyrannical regime, the sovereign alone decides between right and wrong in all realms of life, the Western notion of “thinking” itself is constantly threatened by a despot of its own: the consecrated Western concept of “logic.” Arendt thus asks, “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?”[i]
Art alone is hardly sufficient to combat tyranny; a piece of art, in and of itself, cannot change the world. Yet art itself and the way we engage with it can indeed effect change—both within ourselves and eventually within the public worlds we inhabit.
My answer to this question is a clear yes. In Poetic Thinking Today, I point to the post-Romantic philosophical tradition in its open-ended notion of thinking as a clear alternative to the authoritarianism of logic-bound thought. Yet, I also view the arts and our engagement with them in schools and universities as crucial for enhancing and cultivating freedom. Drawing on a variety of thinkers who all explored art’s capacity to present and to engender insight or to offer orientation—including Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Michael Oakeshott, and Richard Rorty—I suggest how we can protect and promote intellectual and political freedom when those values are under duress. With tyrannical tendencies increasing around the world, we must adopt poetic thinking in our educational systems, in our scholarship, and in the public sphere as a vital measure to protect our freedoms.
I write this knowing very well that as much as we might like to believe otherwise, a poem is just words and a painting is just paint. Art alone is hardly sufficient to combat tyranny; a piece of art, in and of itself, cannot change the world. Yet art itself and the way we engage with it can indeed effect change—both within ourselves and eventually within the public worlds we inhabit. The answer to the question, “What is so great about democracy?” runs through any sort of thinking that defies tyranny of various sorts: democracy and political liberalism are the political manifestation of a way of thinking that does not adhere to the despotism of a single “truth”—to the belief in the supremacy of logic, rigor, system, and method. These are surely valuable for scientific thinking, but they hardly help us appreciate and cultivate the diversity and multiplicity of human cognition. If we only hold onto thinking as valuable when it follows logic, rigor, system, and method, we stand to lose the eternal insights of Ecclesiastes and Sappho, Laozi and Akka Mahadevi, Virginia Wolf, Kenzaburō Ōe, and Arundhati Roy.
As I told my student shortly before saying goodbye, democracy protects the plurality of thinking that we discover in the work of these and other poet-and artist-thinkers and at the same time, it is their capacity to think poetically that enhances our own political freedom. When my student asked for an example I reminded her of Laura Poitras’ documentary CITIZENFOUR as a case in point(one I also discuss in my book): Following the stormy reactions to Edward Snowden’s revelations, and the enthusiastic reception of Poitras’s film about them, in June 2015 the US Senate voted into law and President Obama signed the USA Freedom Act—a piece of legislation that, for the first time since 9/11, imposed limits on the extensive collection of data on US citizens by American intelligence agencies. Granted, poems and documentary films cannot simply “change the world,” but they can make a difference. At times even a very noticeable difference. The answer to Arendt’s question, “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?” points to the various areas of human life where thinking may be found. By shedding light on the poetic modes of our thinking, we defend our very ability to utter any of our thoughts at all.
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Notes
[i] Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch: 1950 bis 1973, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann, 2 vols. (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2002), 1:45.
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