To Be at Home in the Desert

By Hans Teerds

‘The danger lies in becoming true inhabitants of the desert and feeling at home in it.’

Hannah Arendt – ‘The History of Political Theory’ (1955)

This warning is actually taken from a conclusion of a lecture Arendt delivered in 1955 at the University of California (Berkeley), which has been added by Jerome Kohn as an ‘Epilogue’ to the collected writings of Arendt under the title The Promise of Politics. An epilogue it is, I think--to the collected thoughts on politics in this volume.

Although it’s just a short text, Arendt is very concrete about the human worldlessness in the modern age. And, as is well known, she comes up with a sharp critique upon the modern diagnosis of this worldlessness. She blames the sciences of psychology for having a blind spot with regards to this lack of worldliness of the human being and for instead focusing on the human being itself in order to make him comfortable in a worldless world, that is, in the desert. A dangerous path, she states.

[caption id="attachment_16832" align="alignleft" width="324"] The Promise of Politics (Source: Amazon)[/caption]

I won’t follow Arendt on this tricky trajectory to blame the modern sciences. To my understanding, this world-less world has become tangible even beyond imagination in the contemporary urbanized landscape. (The word "urbanized" should be taken here as the contemporary apparatus of control and governance of the landscape, a still ever-expanding and comprehensive system of organization and control developed on the basis of economic models.) As is known of Arendt, she was very concerned about the economic approach to the world, for the economical sciences bring every phenomenon back towards models of efficiency and what seems to be profitable.

The first stage of urbanization led specifically in the Northern American region to the occupation of the landscape through individual dwellings and roads. This is because these possessions are a matter of real estate profits on the short time, as well as a minimum of public investment. Although the road might be understood as ‘public’, it nevertheless is not able to be an in-between world specifically because of the endless proliferation of this scheme in the occupation of the land. It offers an image of the own property in a sea of properties, not sharing any common ground except the access road.

This worldlessness of the contemporary neighborhood even becomes more tangible in the second phase of the urbanization of the landscape once the roads and neighborhoods and roads are privatized. In this stage, we witness the erection of walls around a compound, the introduction of control, and an increasing emphasis on the personal safety and security of the property. Indeed, much of today's landscape seems to be a proliferation of enclaves in which people live their lives in the privacy of the domestic realm, behind the protecting wall around the neighborhood, shopping mall, theme park, or business district. That is the very tangibility of the worldlessness of the contemporary dweller. The danger is that we feel very comfortable in this worldless world. It is to be at home in the desert.

In an enclave world, the urban realm gets divided into “fortified cells of affluence” and “places of terror”, the Los Angeles based Urban sociologist Michael Davis writes in his book The Ecology of Fear. The 2012 Trayvon Martin case in Sanford (FL) actually shows that it is even worse than that. Threat has entered the gated community itself; the walls around the community no longer take out the strange and unknown. It shows the downward spiral of the principle of security. On this earth, a place somehow never is secure. New threats rise, or old measurements seem to fail. They urge the continuous development of new interventions and protocols to secure the dwellings and their dwellers.

What is lost in this downward spiral, in this emphasis on security, is the in-between, the space through which we can relate to others. In a world-less environment, there is no place for strangers since the unknown disturbs, threatens the domestic realm and its properties, its comfort and luxury, its calmness and quietness. For Arendt it is clear: the human being as a political being needs an in-between space, a space that both simultaneously separates us as well as unites us. "To live together in the world," she writes in The Human Condition, "means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time." Without such an intermediate space, we would fall over each other, she writes. This argument acknowledges the commonly shared world. It is these others that actually offer us different perspectives of our shared world, views which help us to broaden our understanding, widen our view, and make our experience of the world more layered, thick and intense.

In the economic totalitarian’ system--to bring it back to the suspicion Arendt sketches upon the economical sciences--the public is reduced to mere consumers and the world loses its power. The end of the commonly shared world has thus arrived when it is reduced to a single perspective and a single aspect. By contrast, the world gets its reliability, in all its diversity of aspects, Arendt argues, when it is shared with others and seen from different perspectives. "Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity," she writes in The Human Condition, "so that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear."

[caption id="attachment_16833" align="aligncenter" width="530"] (Source: The New Indian Express)[/caption]

Being at home in a desert-like landscape brings the danger to lose any real contact with the world and its (other) inhabitants. It seems to me that the new interest in living in an urban city-center--in the city--also can be understood as a discomfort about the contemporary urbanization of the land. The turn back to the city, to spaces where more people live and work on less square feet of ground, shows a new awareness of the importance of the shared world. This even more comes to the fore in new initiatives by inhabitants regarding the very public spaces of the city. It might be evoked by a limited concerned about the quality of their immediate circumstances, but this may lead to a new acknowledgement of the importance of the shared world--a table around which we gather and share the different perspectives and experiences from the very places where we are situated.

(Featured image sourced from Golden State Marketing)