Thinking in and through “Emergency”

By Jeffrey Jurgens

“None of the various ‘language rules,’ carefully contrived to deceive and to camouflage, had a more decisive effect on the mentality of the killers than this first war decree of Hitler, in which the word for 'murder' was replaced by the phrase ‘to grant a mercy death.’”

-- Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

Among its many accomplishments, Eichmann in Jerusalem reflects insightfully on the close relation between language and thinking, especially in moments when previously established structures of ethical and political life have been disrupted. Arendt dwells at some length on the idioms the Nazis employed to insulate the regime’s functionaries, and German society at large, from the tangible realities and moral implications of mass killing. In her estimation, high-level officials like Hitler and Himmler possessed a particular gift for slogans—"winged words," in Eichmann’s phrasing--that soothed the conscience of those who carried out the program of extermination.

Significantly, these slogans did not typically justify killing in ideological terms: in other words, they did not explicitly explain the need to murder Jews (and other targeted groups) in terms of a seemingly comprehensive but ultimately reductive account of the world. Instead, they often appealed more diffusely to functionaries’ vanity and sense of grandeur by casting their work as part of an epic historical undertaking. As Hitler’s September 1939 decree on euthanasia illustrates, such language rendered the exercise of lethal violence on another person not as a criminal or evil act but rather as a gesture of compassion. It concealed and disguised the fact of killing in a manner that disabled the human impulse for pity at the sight of another’s suffering.

[caption id="attachment_17532" align="aligncenter" width="530"] The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution (Source: The Folio Society)[/caption]

Arendt suggests that the Nazis’ authoritative language, invoked and employed with consistency, inscribed itself on the sensibilities of state and party functionaries. The impact of such habitual language on individual moral and intellectual capacities was particularly evident in the figure of Adolf Eichmann. During the Wannsee Conference, he heard “the Popes of the Third Reich” speak so repeatedly and powerfully in favor of the Final Solution that, by his own admission, “I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.” By the time Eichmann stood before the court in Jerusalem, he had absorbed and retained the slogans of the Third Reich so completely that, in Arendt’s words, “he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché…. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.”

Elaine Scarry picks up many of these same themes, if from a somewhat different vantage point, in her book Thinking in an Emergency (2011). In her reading, the declaration of an emergency--whether it is related to a natural disaster, political unrest, or war--is typically accompanied by the claim that “all thinking must cease because [the situation] requires that 1) an action must be taken, and 2) the action must be taken relatively quickly.” The presumption here is that thinking and acting are mutually exclusive and that the urgency of the moment requires that we stop thinking and set aside our usual habits of thought.

[caption id="attachment_17533" align="alignright" width="300"] Elaine Scarry's Thinking in an Emergency (Source: Amazon)[/caption]

If we suspend our everyday thinking in this way, however, we threaten to abandon the long-cultivated laws, norms, and modes of speech that lie at the foundations of democratic governance and self-governance. According to Scarry, we risk a kind of “immobilization” that leaves us incapable of initiating our own actions and vulnerable to following orders imposed by someone else. It is no coincidence that one of her examples of such immobilization is Adolf Eichmann.

To be sure, the suspension of thinking may not leave us completely bereft of frameworks for subsequent action. As Scarry notes, a repertoire of new habits may come to the fore in an emergency that supersedes those habits that had previously prevailed. But there is no guarantee that those new habits--those new structures of law, morality, and language--will help us to manage, much less see our way out of, the emergency. Indeed, they may actually prolong and effectively normalize the state of exception.

Arendt’s account of Eichmann suggests that the Nazis did not abandon language and thinking wholesale when they seized control of the German state and gutted the edifice of democratic governance. Instead, they carefully created and institutionalized new habits of speaking, writing, and listening--new “language rules”--that did not merely inhibit thinking from another person’s perspective but undermined the very ability to carry out a searching two-in-one dialogue within oneself. Ironically, these new language rules were themselves the product of a perverse, destructive form of deliberation.

If this is the case, then we should be vigilant about the language that defines our own political life. What are the slogans that inhibit our individual and collective ability to think through current predicaments? Perhaps our scrutiny should fall on the very notion of “emergency” implicit in recent calls to crack down--or declare war--on drugs, on undocumented migrants, on terrorism, on Islamic extremism. When we accept the premises of emergency and begin to speak in its terms, we are more likely to dispense with the provisions and safeguards that we had previously trusted and that ultimately make democratic politics possible. We are also more likely to suspend our ability to think conscientiously through the consequences of our actions, to recognize--and properly name--the violence we might foreseeably inflict.

Featured image: "What Really Caused the Reichstag Fire" on History News Network