Skip to main content.
Bard HAC
Bard HAC
  • About sub-menuAbout
    Hannah Arendt

    “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.”

    Join HAC
    • About the HAC
      • Our Staff
      • About Hannah Arendt
      • Our Location
  • Programs sub-menuPrograms
    Hannah Arendt

    We bring Arendt's fearless style of thinking to a wide audience.

    • Our Programs
    • Courage to Be
    • Campus Plurality Forum
    • Race and Revolution
    • Virtual Reading Group
    • Affiliated Programs
    • Meanings of October 27th
    • Democracy Through Sortition
    • Global Humanities Network
  • Academics sub-menuAcademics
    Hannah Arendt

    “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

    • Academics at HAC
    • Undergraduate Courses
    • Practice of Courage Courses
  • Fellows sub-menuFellows
    HAC Fellows

    “Action without a name, a 'who' attached to it, is meaningless.”

    • Fellows
    • Postdoctoral Fellows
    • Student Fellowships
  • Conferences sub-menuConferences
    Hannah Arendt
    Conference 2019

    Fall Conference 2019
    “Racism and Antisemitism”

    Thursday, Thursday, October 10 – Friday, October 11
    • Conferences
    • Past Conferences
    • Registration
    • Our Location
  • Publications sub-menuPublications
    Hannah Arendt
    Subscribe to Amor Mundi

    “I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world ... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi.”

    • Publications
    • Amor Mundi
    • HA Journal
    • Further Reading
    • Video Gallery
    • From Our Members
    • Podcasts
  • Events sub-menuEvents
    Hannah Arendt

    “It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.”

    —Hannah Arendt
    • HAC Events
    • Upcoming
    • Archive
  • Join sub-menu Join HAC
    Hannah Arendt

    “Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.”

    • Join HAC
    • Become a Member
    • Subscribe
    • Virtual Reading Group
    • Join HAC
               
  • Search

Amor Mundi

Amor Mundi Home

 

The Politics of Small Things

12-23-2020

Roger Berkowitz

Jeffrey Goldfarb writes that his 2006 book The Politics of Small Things was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s idea that “politics is about people meeting each other as equals in their differences, speaking and acting together.” In his Democracy Seminar, Goldfarb invites activists to speak about the ways they act together. One activist, Teng Biao, describes the importance of resisting the urge of self-censorship, what Arendt herself called the greatest threat to conformism and social totalitarianism. Goldfarb writes:

Teng Biao is an exiled Chinese human rights lawyer and activist, who has suffered severely for his principled commitments to democracy, human rights and the rule of law. He is being politically harassed even in the United States. His contribution to the Democracy Seminar focuses on the powerful interaction between the repressive measures of the party-state apparatus and the even more powerful repression accomplished through self-censorship. He then highlights the implications of turning off the self-censor, citing Vaclav Havel’s notion of “living in truth.”

This sentence summarizes his position: “Censorship is oppressive, and to self-censor is to give up on resistance. On the other hand, the refusal of self-censorship is the beginning of resistance.”
He reports that when he embarked on his path of resistance, it was enabled by new media and technology, but now he warns of what he calls “high tech totalitarianism.” He used the new media to meet others who shared the democratic principles to which he is committed, to speak and listen to them, and to develop a capacity to act together in pursuit of those principles. Now:

“The CCP utilizes its lead in Artificial Intelligence to tighten its total control of Chinese society. The Great Firewall, social media, big data, e-commerce, and modern telecommunications make it easier for the CCP to keep people under total surveillance. The internet has been used by the CCP as an effective tool for censorship, propaganda, and brainwashing. Facial recognition, voiceprint recognition, gait recognition, DNA collection, and biometric tags have all systematized the CCP’s growing control. What’s happening in Xinjiang, Tibet, and all over China goes far beyond the imagination of George Orwell’s 1984.”

Biao underscores that this applies not only in repressive regimes such as China, but also in regimes of aspiring repressiveness, such as Donald Trump’s America. Fear, despair, alienation and confusion, lead to cynicism to the point that as he puts it “the survivors become the perpetrators.” As the author of The Cynical Society, I was particularly interested in how he analyzed what he calls “the post-tank syndrome.”

Footer Contact
Contact HAC
Bard College
PO Box 5000
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
845-758-7878
arendt@bard.edu
Join the HAC
Become a Member
Subscribe to Amor Mundi
Join the Virtual Reading Group
Follow Us
Image for Twitter
Image for Facebook
Image for YouTube
Image for Instagram