Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
When the French government began ordering refugees to report to camps, there was little to provide comfort except for poetry.
–Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World
….terrible is the temptation to be good.
–Bertold Brecht
It is a sad thing not to have friends, but it is even sadder not to have enemies.
–Che Guevara
In the latest of his Peoples’ Classrooms, a series of “teach-ins” hosted at The Other Side, teacher “Luigi,” continued the series he’d called “The Modern Presidency’s War on the Working Class,” with a focus on the legacy of GW Bush. Among other aspects of GW’s legacies, we’d been looking at the horrendous brutalities inflicted during the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan. Luigi asked us to consider the question: “Should you be friends with people who have a very different moral perspective than yourself?” As everyone grappled for how to talk about this recognizable problem for left-leaning liberals, one woman suggested that many people simply cannot be aware of such horror.
Her point – expressed better than I’ve done here – was well taken. To the extent she’s right, people have to stay with the more optimistic perspective which allows them/us to continue to function reasonably decently in the reasonably livable lives that, so far, capitalism makes possible for some and not for all, by design. The very real moral problem then is the incapacity – let alone the disinclination – to take in unbearable information – “the horror!” in Colonel Kurtz’s words in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. To be of more than pornographic interest, dark knowledge has to be absorbed in such a way as not to lose – but rather to gain – moral agency. It has to be a means for judging from the “intact” heart. Thus, the problem for white middle class people like myself with, overall, reasonably acceptable lives, is to find the heart of darkness in one’s heart. Once one has gained the painful knowledge of darkness within, one may be able to behold it objectively, without rejecting it, and without going over to the Kurtzian “dark side.”
There is a “saving grace” to possessing darker knowledge, and that is, it connects oneself spiritually with the world. In neoliberal America, many people of liberal conscience don’t know of the built-in compensatory function that can render horrendous truth something that can be lived with as long as one is engaged politically, consciously in the world, in the love for it. This is the creative/thinking/imaginative function. Dark truth, experienced personally and inwardly, must have creative expression; it must have a story. Without the container of the story, be it of an abusive childhood, or of even earlier, less definable trauma which gives the lie to a Facebook-ready presentation of self – the darkness is left to drive the myriad of neuroses and addictions that keep economy and liberal society going. They preserve ego-dominance at the expense of mental health and prevent the full development of a valorous, realized, courageously alive human person. Just as a crooked president pardons the crooks, liberal reality protects good men and women from having to go deeper into their personal heart of darkness, below the ego’s radar. It keeps moral consciousness stymied.
The act of judging – central to the thinking of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt – has an ambiguous place in a society so protected against its heart of darkness. Her own judgments at the time she expressed them – most famously in the case of the controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) – earned her many enemies. This is the power judgment has, and exemplifies why judging has gone missing in the liberal world. At least since the power of monarchy was replaced by the power of capitalism, judging has lost ground; in the “free air” of neoliberalism, it seems as if no one has the authority to “dispassionately” judge based upon wisdom, i.e., the judgment that gets its assent from the soul. In the absence of wisdom, “judgments” are often made from aggrievement or the need to place blame, or from desire to be aligned with authority that has state power behind it, instead of from moral ground where love is the real power.
My effort in recent essays to explore the contemporary spiritual relevance of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s central teaching “Trust thyself” has been inspired by returning to Hannah Arendt’s ideas and her example chiefly through the excellent biography by Young-Bruehl. Emerson pointed the way to restoring the capacity for judging by pointing to the wisdom inherent in the individual who is “self-reliant.” Hannah Arendt trusted herself – her own power of judgment to a remarkable degree; her work shed great moral light in a world that has become far more horrifying than Emerson could have imagined. He needs – and deserves – the update!
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Writing later about her experience in an internment camp for women, in France, Hannah Arendt commented on the attitude of many of the women who, realizing they might well be “done in,” found in themselves a collective “violent courage of life.” However, she continued, once out of danger, back in their individual lives, their problems became once again individual, back to “the insane optimism that is next door to despair.”
Hannah Arendt looked for an attitude in people – “courage for life” – which most of us cannot find unless pushed to it by extremity. The piece of Hannah Arendt’s story most interesting to me, and most usable I think for others seeking to preserve moral moorings in an insane world, was the aspect of her personality – shared with her husband Heinrich Blucher – that allowed them to both have no illusion about what was happening under fascism, and to be able to retain in themselves the sanity of thinking – to be alive, which is to live with courage – in the midst of lost hope.
That they had no illusions about Nazism, nor about there being any effective deterrent to Nazism in the politics of Germany in the 1930’s, we, who have hindsight, should not assume was simple. I believe their precocious clear-sightedness came from their conscious alignment with identities that were socially/politically marginalized, (Arendt as a Jew, Heinrich as an autodidact who fit in nowhere, though he found a temporary home in Communism). Self-identifying as outsiders –pariahs was Arendt’s word for it – provided the mental space for freedom from “insane optimism.” It was basis for their unusual kind of faith. It served to keep their souls safe. Feeling safe in one’s soul one has no need for illusion, for souls have their own, better dream. Their pariah identity kept the Bluchers faithful above all to their alive imaginations and to thinking. Without imagination, survival was meaningless; with it, love for the world was real, and it was not naive idealism.
In my understanding of it, and inasmuch as I have experienced it, this imaginative leap of identification with the outcast is “read” by one’s soul as respect. It allows one the soul’s judgment that rings true, as the opinions of others do not, so that all other bases for thinking, in, for example, the horrific context of rising fascism, were lies. Any other identity they might have lived by would have allowed them to fall into one trap or another of delusional (conformist) thinking. Arendt’s love for the world came at the cost of choosing pariah identity over assimilationism. There was no bargaining on this point. Pariah identity comes from having swallowed and digested hard, irreconcilable, unwanted truth – the reality that darkness is as true as light, evil co-equal with good. Not an intellectual truth but a truth that can be suffered in only one place, in the ultimate unifier of “heaven and earth” – that is, in the soul.
Even though to call Hannah Arendt’s “pariahhood” a spiritual faith is presumptuous of me, I’m confident the basis for such moral clarity – that resists identifying evil monsters, instead seeing evil as a widely spread spiritual deficit she called banality – is spiritual, that is, imaginary. Her moral clarity could be seen, for example, in her denunciation of the then-new state of Israel’s growing nationalism and violence against Palestinian Arabs, years before large numbers of people around the world took up that cause – she, a Holocaust survivor and a confirmed Zionist. (In Zionism she’d found a spiritual home because of Zionism’s uncompromising anti-assimilationism.)
This kind of freedom from illusion, this capacity for moral discernment and judgment is needed now in white liberal America. How it may be obtained by those of us not consciously members of a despised minority or underclass seems important knowledge to have.
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In Hannah Arendt we see one can live with such a dark burden as knowledge of radical – but radically conventional – evil – with a sense of purpose intact. One could, using her example, live unassimilated to the conforming social world that must maintain its illusions. But the cost is high in terms of the burden carried in the soul and in the fact that one’s darker visage, its Kali-like consciousness and discernments will be misunderstood and will make enemies. Anticipating one’s judgments could, and likely will be, plausibly contradicted, one still must make them, and not half-heartedly. And, even more difficult, most of us picking up this burden of consciousness will have to experience the absolute “wrongness of existence” inwardly and personally, or we will not get it. We will not get why, as the biographer Young-Breuhl writes, “not to go wrong requires of the good man far more than…compassionate zeal,” or, more poetically expressed by Brecht, “terrible is the temptation to be good.” I would add : terrible to want so much for the world to be good just for you that you will believe without question the lies of our leaders whose souls have been sold, just as you believed innocently that your parents loved you and your childhood was a happy one.
I’m sure there are people who can grasp such paradoxical, poetic truth – and not only intellectually – without going through major PTSD recovery themselves, for this is an area of mystery that is difficult to make exclusive truth claims about. But few of us escape the temptation to be good instead of true to thyself. Thus the option to become conscious of the soul’s trauma in our modern neoliberal context in which trauma is denied, that cannot contextualize it for us, and thus adds surplus terror to the old trauma wound is a way, if not the way, to one’s true pariah identity. Trauma probably has touched all people alive on the planet in these dark times, but its true energy and power link with the underclass (in “pariahhood”).
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If J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring trilogy ( which we finished reading just recently) is read mythologically, Gollum is this unwanted dark entity lurking in the soul, stuck inside his neuroses, seemingly quintessentially evil, in the end instrumental to the successful end to Frodo’s hopeless heroic quest. Though never going so far as to befriend Gollum, Frodo also does not reject him, as Sam would have him do – which makes all the difference! I’ve told my story many times: in the modern neoliberal totality, in which no other (imagination-based) reality can exist, I have found my psychic/soul survival depends upon having discovered my identity as an other, a discovery made possible by allowing Gollum his reality.
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Most people will stick with “insane optimism” until it’s too late. Last week at a music and arts festival in the village outside Utica, at which The Other Side had a table, I found myself across the way from a booth offering native plants for sale. It was staffed by a several women, one of whom comes to the above-mentioned Peoples’ Classrooms. As we spoke, she acknowledged she’d forgotten there was one more in the summer series on “the modern presidency,” this one to focus on Obama. Maybe this was the cause of her forgetfulness; when I “reminded” her of next week’s topic, she winced. “Oh, he’s not going to bash Obama!”
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Arendt saw totalitarianism’s power lay in inducing terror, i.e., the function and purpose of the camps. 21st century neoliberal technocratic reality too gets its power from invoking terror in the souls of white middle class liberals, for who among us has a choice whether or not to assimilate to the neoliberal technocracy? That is, in the unaccustomed vulnerability I feel after the loss of our Cafe, not to mention the onset of old age, I find myself experiencing a familiar fear. It feels very much like being forced into a space outside of place and time; i.e. a virtual reality that is not game but void. And how we all got here, completely assimilated such that we can name no precise “enemy,” is partly due to the lure of convenience, of information retrieval for “fast-paced” lives, partly to advertising, but also, without denying the great convenience offered by digital technology – to intimidation, plain and simple.
It has become crucial to realize now in 21st century America during these dark times – one’s obligation to preserve one’s otherness – the soul’s truth – before acting either to resist the totality or to accommodate to the degree necessary (a degree that’s unknown!) Stable, rooted identity, below the “merely social”self, is precisely what is obliterated by terror. Without a prior, steadying experience one simply assimilates (conforms), some of us as nice people, some of us not, but, in all cases adding one’s bit to the economy of Silicon Valley, the military-industrial complex, the Hellthcare industry, etc. so that the ultra-rich can remain comfortable.
Like Hannah Arendt’s choice to write “political” philosophy rather than to be a “pure” philosopher, Ursula LeGuin’s “pariah-choice” was to be a science fiction writer, rather than a writer of serious fiction. At her speech for the National Book Award ceremony in 2014, LeGuin famously suggested that capitalism, seemingly “inescapable” like the divine right of kings, can also pass away. “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin… in the art of words.” Emerson – and I – would agree.
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