Video Archives - "Lying and Politics: Democracy and Lying" (2011)

11-21-2014

Friday, March 4, 2011: “Lying and Politics: Democracy and Lying”

Participants:

-- George Kateb, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Emeritus at Princeton University.

-- Jerome Kohn, Director Hannah Arendt Center The New School for Social Research

George Kateb is a prominent political theorist who has written on Arendt before, including in his book Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil. In his 2011 talk at Bard’s Graduate Center in New York City, Kateb speaks at length on the effect of an imperialistic foreign policy on the state of a democracy. He frames his lecture around the ideal of governmental transparency. Most fundamentally, Kateb argues against reliance on what he calls “untruth” in politics: secrets, propaganda, exaggeration, denial, and outright lying.

The practical value of a democratic government, according to Kateb, lies in the fact that its procedures compel officials to realize their accountability. To make democracy work, citizens must want to hold their officials accountable, and those seeking office must promise to be accountable to the public. At the center of the accountability of government is the transparency of officials’ actions and intentions. In a state of accountability, honest, sincere, and intelligible statements must describe what officials do and why. If this is not possible in public discourse, then accountability is lacking. “When policies are difficult to identify or discuss, responsibility becomes diffuse” says Kateb. Compounding the matter, citizens tend to gravitate towards untruth.

[caption id="attachment_14847" align="alignleft" width="300"] George Kateb (Source: Youtube)[/caption]

This effect is seen most acutely in foreign policy, which Kateb says “wreaks havoc on modern constitutional democracy” by its very nature but especially so when it becomes imperialistic. By this he means a policy that is inherently global in scale, subjecting any and all peoples to its decisions. Imperialism not only reduces other peoples to factors in calculations of power but removes domestic political subjects from power by turning them into a mere resource for the state. Imperialist foreign policy begets immense discretionary power to the elite political stratum of society, erasing accountability. “Democratic imperialism is built on systematic inconsistency with itself and leads the political stratum into systematic untruth,” says Kateb. Their foreign policy is characterized triply by its affinity to criminality. (violence for selfish ends, its “corruption by responsibility”, and its unreality, with the latter two being linked) Fanatics of power, granted the discretion of tyrants while maintaining the veneer of democratically elected representatives, conflate their will with reality. They gain the sense of being the authors or novelists of geopolitics, knowing events from the inside out. “The vicissitudes of inner life mingle with rules and conventions to produce a complexity of unpredictable conduct in politics,” says Kateb, as the psychological factor of the political elite comes to determine the course of foreign policy and in turn distresses the democratic character of the political body.

To counter his grim diagnosis, Kateb suggests that the role of the political analyst must be to rise above both the political elite and even the people itself. By craving transparency for its own sake—even above the value of democracy—the political thinker might engage with the political events of the day in such a way that accountability is resuscitated rather than simply mourned.

This talk offers an opportunity to hear a leading contemporary theorist and prominent Arendt scholar speak about the role of truth in democracy.

Analysis by Dan Perlman

(Featured Image: Transparency in Government; Source: Boiling Springs North Carolina)

You can watch Kateb's talk in full below:

Lying and Politics: Democracy and Lying from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.