Doubters and Skeptics

Roger Berkowitz
Sebastian Veg, who writes about China, has published his introduction to the Thai translation of Hannah Arendt’s “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.” Veg seeks to understand what makes some people—people like Xu Zhangrun—risk their lives amidst social totalitarianism in order to speak their truth. Why, Veg asks, are some people “doubters and skeptics,” when others are not. 

What does Hannah Arendt’s “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” written in 1964, shortly after the Eichmann trial, have to tell us more than half a century later? Arendt uses this short text to argue that it is possible and meaningful to make moral judgments on past events. Whether in dictatorships, where crimes are still to some degree exceptions, or in totalitarian states, where crimes become the rule and non-criminal acts are exceptional, individuals are reduced to being cogs in the machine of the state. However, in both situations, they are still called upon to answer for their decision to become or to remain a cog, as a matter of personal responsibility. In what way were those who did not serve the criminal Nazi state different?, Arendt asks. She argues that the “non-participants” were those who dared to make judgments by themselves. What set them apart was not so much the fact that they embraced an older or different set of moral values, but rather that they were willing to question what others took for granted. “Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics…because they are used to examine things and make up their own minds.”...
When studying present-day Chinese society, for example, outsiders are often reminded that our gaze can be overly judgmental. On the other hand, some of the judgments we make, whether positive or negative, also reflect the views of our colleagues or interviewees in China. When considering a society in which political conformism can be rewarded very generously, Arendt’s reflections can help us better to understand certain types of behavior that otherwise seem incomprehensible. Why would a middle-aged law professor at one of China’s top universities suddenly decide to publish an essay, elegantly composed in classical Chinese, enumerating “eight fears and eight hopes” and calling to stave off a return to totalitarianism and relaunch political reforms?[1] Two years later, under university investigation and suspended from teaching, why should the same professor compose yet another essay calling on the National People’s Congress to conduct an open investigation into the Coronavirus epidemic and to uphold constitutional guarantees for free speech?[2] It is difficult to explain this type of intervention relying only on strategic cost-benefit calculations. Writings like these have brought professor Xu no advantage, rather they have made his daily life miserable and kept him away from his cherished pursuit of teaching. They can therefore only be explained as the expression of a deep-felt responsibility and accountability.