How Democracy Dies

08-06-2017

How Democracy Dies

Ian Buruma, who will be speaking at the Hannah Arendt Center Conference Crises of Democracy, explains why the coarseness of President Trump's Tweets is important.

"What is astonishing, however, and deeply disturbing, is how quickly extreme violence can erupt among people who have lived peacefully together for a long time. German Jews went unmolested by their Gentile neighbors until Nazi leaders stirred up the mobs after 1933. Christians and Muslims coexisted for centuries in Sarajevo, until Serb agitators, backed by armed forces, called for violent expulsions and murder. Hindus and Muslims who had left one another alone, or even had friendly relations, suddenly went for one another’s throats when the largely Muslim north broke away from predominantly Hindu India in 1947. Muslims lived peacefully in Burma until Buddhists, egged on recently by fanatical monks, started burning down their houses and beating them to death. Over and over again, in societies all over the world, the civilized norms that protect us from anarchy and violence turn out to be perilously thin. Some people may be more disposed to brutality than others, but aggressive impulses can be activated with surprising ease. Petty jealousies or simple greed can swiftly turn unexceptional citizens into agents of barbarism.... So far, one important difference between today’s right-wing populists, in Europe and the US, and the fascists and Nazis of the 1930s, has been the absence of storm troopers. There is no equivalent of the brown-shirted or black-shirted thugs who were given license by political leaders to beat up their opponents, or worse. But this, too, may be changing. James Buchal, a Republican politician in Oregon, suggested in May that Republicans should hire right-wing militia groups as security guards during Republican rallies. These gun-toting extremists, whose idea of patriotism is to regard the federal government as the enemy, are different from 1930s Brownshirts only in name. All that is needed for a politics of institutionalized violence is for such people to be given official license to unleash their most brutal impulses. This is why Trump’s tweets are not just coarse playacting. Once the highest representatives of a democracy start stirring up violence, the mob takes over. The US is no exception: at that point, democracy will die."

Form more information visit: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-flirtation-with-violence-by-ian-buruma-2017-07

Critique Of Opinion

Maximillian Alvarez makes the case for judgement:

"What do we really mean when we say we’re “entitled to our opinions”? So many questions have been asked over the past year with the hope that the answers to them may help us better understand how our dangerously absurd political moment came to be. But this question is way more revealing than most. I’ve been fortunate enough to design and teach my own college courses exploring, from literary, historical, and philosophical angles, the many complex processes that led to a Donald Trump presidency. But, as a teacher of argumentative writing, I’ve also been given a window through which to observe some of those processes in action, to see how their effects manifest in the peculiar ways people—namely, my students—think and act. In classes where argumentation is the center of gravity for everything else we do, my students and I begin every term by discussing whether or not, in our classroom and in the world at large, we are, in fact, entitled to our opinions. On a purely literal level, the first implication of this common refrain is that, no matter how out of wack (sic) your opinion may be, you’re entitled to have it—no one can physically stop you. Sure. That’s reasonable, if kind of banal. (You can physically punish or silence people who have certain opinions, but can you actually stop them from having the opinions in the first place?) But, as it’s generally understood, the second implication of the phrase is more troublesome. As Patrick Stokes, Senior Lecturer at Deakin University, explains it, the phrase suggests that you’re “entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth.” As if there’s a social law that says all opinions are equal and all deserve, by right, to be treated equally. This is where lines start to blur—when opinions themselves are seemingly given their own protective rights—and the common refrain that people are “entitled to their opinions” absorbs into itself the pseudo-noble cliché that we must always “respect other people’s opinions.” For Stokes, the obvious problem is that this kind of customary treatment devalues the ways that opinions are supposed to earn serious consideration through logical argumentation, persuasion, rigorous research, and expertise. When these are thrown out the window, people start to expect that their views deserve to not only be taken seriously, but to also be protected from serious challenges, because, well, it’s their opinion."

Form more information visit: https://thebaffler.com/the-poverty-of-theory/cogito-zero-sum-alvarez

Who deserves our well wishes?

[caption id="attachment_19082" align="alignleft" width="300"] By ??? - ?????????????????????John McCain??????, CC BY 2.0[/caption] This week Jonathan Graubart, a professor at San Diego State University, invoked Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem in a Facebook post to express his ire at the outpouring of sympathy for John McCain’s cancer diagnosis, and was quickly met with backlash from the right. The post has been taken down, but he wrote:

"I find myself annoyed at the groundswell of good wishes for John McCain after his diagnosis of glioblastoma and have been thinking through why. A great line from Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem comes to mind regarding the valuing of elite lives over ordinary lives:

“There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural elite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.”

This analogy should not be interpreted too strictly. McCain is certainly no Einstein and I don’t mean just on brains. Einstein had very appealing humanist instincts, as a socialist, antiwar, anti-imperialist, and anti-statist Zionist. McCain is a war criminal and, more to the point. someone who as a politician has championed horrifying actions and been lousy on state commitment to public health. So dying or not, he’s a risible public figure (I have no idea what he is like on the personal level and don’t care). But ultimately what troubles me is the urge to send such well wishes to an utter stranger as it reinforces the notion that some lives are more important than others. There are lots of people with glioblastoma and who have died from it (including my mother twenty years ago). I would much rather read random good wishes to contemporary little Hans Cohns than to politicians."

The passage that he cites from Eichmann comes at the end of Chapter VII: The Wannsee Conference, or Pontious Pilot, where Arendt uses the metaphor of little Hans as a counter argument to the prosecution’s line of questioning that implied the murder of human beings is more egregious when a culture is also destroyed. Arendt is discussing the Kastner Report and how certain Jewish elites were accorded special privileges because of their social status, and offers an example of Professor Philippsohn of Bonn who was promptly removed from his “undignified conditions at Theresienstadt” at the behest of Sven Hedin, one of Hitler’s admirers. This kind of social privilege, that determined whether one lived or died, came with a heavy price. And Arendt was confounded by Kastner’s unthinking self-appraisal. She writes,

“Even after the end of the war, Kastner was proud of his success in saving ‘prominent Jews,’ a category officially introduced by the Nazis in 1942, as though in his view, too, it went without saying that a famous Jew had more right to stay alive than an ordinary one; to take upon himself such ‘responsibilities’ – to help the Nazis in their efforts to pick out ‘famous’ people from the anonymous mass, for this is what it amounted to – ‘require more courage than to face death.’”

Arendt is raising a question of moral responsibility and complicity in the systematic murder of millions of people. Why was it accepted that “less ‘prominent’ Jews were constantly sacrificed to those whose disappearance in the East would create unpleasant inquiries”? In context, the quote Graubart used reads:

“In Germany today, this notion of "prominent" Jews has not yet been forgotten. While the veterans and other privileged groups are no longer mentioned, the fate of "famous" Jews is still deplored at the expense of all others. There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural e?lite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.”

The idea that the contributions of some people, like Einstein, to a culture are more valuable is morally questionable in Arendt’s reasoning, yes. This is consistent with Arendt’s understanding of plurality, which sees each person as a unique individual who possesses the ability to begin anew. As she writes in The Human Condition, “human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings.” But there is something more at stake in this passage. For Arendt it is a fundamental question of worldliness and moral responsibility. How do we value human life in a system where systematic murder has become a matter of bureaucracy? In this sense, Graubart simplifies Arendt’s argument, abstracting the framework into the question: Why do we care more for elites than average Americans? Or, why are so many people eager to send their well-wishes and sympathy to John McCain, whom they don’t know, and oblivious to the other roughly 26,000 people that will be diagnosed with malignant brain cancer this year?[1] The implication in Graubart’s post is that not only do we care more for elites than average Americans, but that John McCain is undeserving of our goodwill, because he is morally compromised—a “war criminal”. Graubart’s uneasiness with the outpouring of sympathy for John McCain is not politically commensurate with Arendt trying to understand moral responsibility and the Holocaust. His question is about civility; Arendt’s question is about life, death, and the survival of the world. The question of whether or not we care more for elites than average people is a good one, and one that Arendt thought critically about in the aftermath of the Second World War. The argument that we shouldn’t offer well wishes to someone who is ill because he or she is a stranger seems to be in poor spirit. We can be critical of someone’s politics while still acknowledging his or her humanity. This kind of pettiness is pernicious to collective democracy. Sending well wishes to a stranger who is also a public figure doesn’t necessarily reinforce the notion that some lives are more important than others. It does reveal a form of civility, and there is something to be said for that today. This feels even more poignant during this political moment when we are so conscious of the foreclosure of free speech, plurality, and truthfulness in public discourse. [1] http://www.abta.org/about-us/news/brain-tumor-statistics/ –Samantha Hill

Form more information visit: http://hac.bard.edu/news/post/?item=19087#who-deserves-our-well-wishes