No Middle Ground

07-10-2013

David Simon, writer of “The Wire,” has a great post responding to my recent essay on the “Misreading of ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem.’” Simon writes:

Reading this essay, I began to understand that it suits no one of an ideological bent to land anywhere in the middle on the question of who the Eichmanns are and how they come to be.

This simple sentence speaks volumes of about the way ideological thinking leads away from common sense and towards artificial polarization. As one reader commented in a private email to me:

On one side there are the mostly more or less violent critics, always looking for arguments against Arendt; on the other side we have the Arendt-lovers, hating and mistrusting everyone who is naughty enough to write about her subjects. Both sides are more believers than thinkers, so one has the choice between getting simply killed or hugged to death.

Simon sums up the opposing positions quite brilliantly. On the one side, for those who “see us all as ripe for totalitarian brutality given mere circumstance, there is little to be contemplated in the human soul.” We are all controlled by our situations and cogs in larger systems. On the other side, we are free actors without constraints. “There is no narrative beyond the individual for those that see nothing systemic in the world that cannot be overtaken by the life-force of the great and vile men and women of history.”

What Simon rightly sees is that Arendt fits in neither extreme:

Ms. Arendt had blind spots, to be sure; she at points wrote of Holocaust victims with less patience and sensitivity than their standing requires. But in finding a more truthful place between fixed, ideological points when it came to Eichmann himself, Ms. Arendt offered real, but complicated insight.

The most interesting part of Simon’s post is what follows, where he draws the lesson from the ideological response to Arendt’s book about the dangers of ideological conformism.

There is a small irony here, given that “Eichmann In Jerusalem” is itself a study in the cost of ideological purity to the human spirit.  That those on either side of a philosophical divide would go so far as to mangle and mischaracterize Ms. Arendt’s work to assert against a middle ground is a shorter journey on that same, worn road. Perhaps, this is why her report from that Jerusalem courtroom still matters.

Look around at the hyperbolic and uncivil discourse between Democrats and Republicans, socialists and capitalists, Zionists and anti-Zionists, libertarians and liberals, the religious and the secular, pro-choice and anti-abortion: If you believe in anything completely — to the point of a rigorous purity — then you will at moments behave as an intellectual cripple.

I could not agree more. In fact, I had a paragraph in my essay about the way that political movements today insist on ideological purity even at the expense of common sense and of facts, so much so that belonging to and defending the movement is more important than being right. My graph landed on the cutting room floor, but Simon draws the very same conclusion from the essay anyway.

This does not mean we should not belong to movements or to groups. Committing ourselves to causes and believing in collective enterprises is part of being human. There are some opinions and some collectives for which I would sacrifice myself. Any political leader must be ready to lead obedient soldiers into war in the defense of freedom. Politics, as Max Weber wrote, is not a nursery. There is a time for the noble commitment to nation or ideals.

But there are limits past which obedience and conviction turn from noble to execrable.  It matters both what ideals one defends and what means one uses to defend them. It thus matters that when we join a group we not abandon ourselves fully to thoughtless obedience and thoughtless and unlimited pursuit of group ideals. Politics today, on the left and the right, resembles too much a game and a battle rather than a collective pursuit of self-governance.

Read the rest of Simon’s post here. And check out the comments and his responses as well.

-RB