When Joe Biden Wrote to Hannah Arendt

08-16-2020

by Roger Berkowitz

On May 28, 1975, then Senator Joe Biden wrote a letter to Hannah Arendt. 

The article then Senator Biden had read was “The Lie and the Image,” by Tom Wicker, which appeared in the New York Times on May 25, 1975. 

The paper to which Senator Biden refers is “Home to Roost,” a lecture Arendt read on May 20, 1975 at Boston's Fanueil Hall, which also was broadcast by National Public Radio. The lecture was then published in the New York Review of Books. Arendt died suddenly a few months later in December of 1975, making "Home to Roost" one of her last published essays. “Home to Roost” was posthumously republished in a remarkable collection of essays Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn. 

“Home to Roost” is a complicated essay that embraces Arendt’s lifelong concerns with totalitarian lying and theoretical obfuscation, alongside her deep fear about the corruption and failure of the American republican tradition of free government. In the article Senator Biden read about Arendt’s speech, Tom Wicker writes, “No short article could possibly do justice to the extraordinary range and richness of Miss Arendt’s paper.” Wicker himself focused on Arendt’s highlighting of the “American tendency to substitute an image or a phrase for an unwanted reality,” which, she argued, “had grown to ‘gigantic proportions’ because the techniques of public relations had been borrowed from their usual function—‘to help distribute merchandise’—and had been ‘permitted to invade our political life.’” 

The core of Arendt's talk in Boston is that the rise of public relations has made us more concerned with images than with reality. We fight the Vietnam war not because it will bring us real benefits but because it will burnish our image  as a global superpower. We need to stimulate the economy and foster economic growth not because it will make the economy better and produce needed goods, but because people need jobs. We care more about the image of being a superpower and the image of being an economic power than ‘the stark, naked brutality of facts, of things as they are’”—namely, that American power and American wealth are eroding, propped up by insane policies justified by unreal theories. Images stand opposed to reality just as theories cover up reality. Arendt opposes the search for “deeper causes” that allows us to ignore the facts that stare us in the face. 

Much of the analysis in “Home To Roost” is based upon her prior account of the deception around the Vietnam war in her essay “Lying in Politics.” When she read the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Arendt saw that "the basic issue raised by the papers [was] deception." All sorts of lies made the American war in Vietnam possible, including phony body counts, doctored damage reports, and fake progress reports. The war in Vietnam had showed Arendt that the United States could fight a decade-long war including pacification and relocation programs, defoliation, napalm, and antipersonnel bullets all in the name of making Vietnam and the world safe for democracy while preventing communist aggression. 

One lesson Arendt took is how easy it is for problem-solvers and technocrats to conjure geo-political theories justifying military intervention. All too easily, Arendt shows, one can move seamlessly from a hypothesis such as the domino theory to a fact, that we must fight a war to save Vietnam.

Writing of those “intellectuals” who justified the war, Arendt concludes: “They needed no facts, no information; they had a ‘theory,’ and all data that did not fit were denied or ignored.... Defactualization and problem-solving were welcomed because disregard of reality was inherent in the policies and goals themselves.”

In “Home to Roost,” Arendt argues that our collective aversion to facts and embrace of theories and images  has come home to roost. Theories aim to discover the roots and “deeper causes” of what is happening. “There exists a plethora of theories about the ‘deeper’ cause for the outbreak of the First or Second World War based not on the melancholy wisdom of hindsight but on the speculations, grown into convictions, about the nature and fate of capitalism or socialism, of the industrial or postindustrial age, the role of science and technology, and so on.” Such theories, she continues, “must be plausible, that is, they must contain statements that most reasonable men at the particular time can accept; they cannot require an acceptance of the unbelievable.” 

The problem with theories is that they provide a plausible explanation for what happens, one that makes sense. And yet, what history and the world show over and again, is that the world follows no clear and plausible explanations. History is comprised of unbelievable events and extraordinary happenings. What happened in Vietnam, Arendt writes, was unbelievable, just as was what happened in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The demand and the desire for “deeper causes” and theories that explain "what is" is a flight from the “shock of reality.” It is a refusal to simply tell what is, which in its stark inexplicability has “never been welcomed and often not been tolerated at all.”

But the crises of our times, Arendt argues, are precisely not plausible; they are “unbelievable.” Here Arendt returns to a theme of her work from her book Origins of Totalitarianism, that the effort to explain extraordinary events with analogies to history or plausible explanations insulates us from the “shock of reality.” There are times, she writes, when we have to resist the urge to explain the crises of our time and, instead, face “the stark, naked brutality of facts, of things as they are.” 

The essay Joe Biden requested to read is about, therefore, the crisis of intellectuals and pundits who seek to explain the world clearly according to deeper causes and theories, and in doing so take flight from reality. This rise of self-deception through image making, Arendt worried, was corrupting the American tradition of dealing directly with reality absent high theory and ideology. 

It is unclear if Arendt ever sent Senator Biden her paper or whether the Senator ever read it. But “Home To Roost” is, as one of Arendt’s last public lectures and publications, something of her final testament, a warning that the grand experiment in freedom that is the American Republic was in danger of coming to an end. What threatened the American Republic was a refusal to look at the facts themselves—the fact that "among the many unprecedented events of this century the swift decline in power of the United States should be given due consideration." It is this fact that Arendt says is being hidden by the craving for simplistic theories and deep causal analysis that actually obfuscate the fundamental fact of American decline.

Lying as a Way of Life
A refusal to see and "say what is" becomes a mode of lying as a way of life. Lying is nothing new in politics. Politicians have always lied. And lies “have always been regarded as justifiable in emergencies.” But what Arendt finds alarming is the cancerous growth of the Madison Avenue public relations machine to encompass all areas of political and economic life such that lying and the evasion of reality is made into a matter of principle, so that living with theories and images overlays “what is,’ and thus lying becomes a way of life. 

“Lying as a way of life,” Arendt observes, was “quite successful in countries under totalitarian rule.” In totalitarian regimes, lying was guided by ideologies and enforced by terror. Only a totalitarian regime can make bold and obvious lies believable. They do so, first, by choosing plausible but simple ideological fictions—that a conspiracy of Jews controls world politics—and organizing a logical coherent narrative around that fiction. These “facts” are not objective, but they are believed as part of ideological fantasy, they become as “real and untouchable an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic.” And since the “fact” of a Jewish conspiracy is not a fact but the linchpin of a logically coherent world, it is foolproof against reality-based arguments. 

In totalitarian states, lying was guided by an ideology and thus had a logical consistency that fully divorced the lies from reality, which is always complicated and never logical. Totalitarianism promises to lonely masses what they want: a logically coherent fantasy that replaces a messy and uncomfortable reality. But the totalitarian states could only cement their lies through terror--by normalizing a “sheer criminality” by which lies would be certified by mass murder. For one sure way to “prove” the fact of Jewish world conspiracy is to exterminate the Jews and make them into the enemy you claim that they are. By bringing criminality into the political process on a gigantic scale, Nazi Germany secured belief in the fictional ideological reality.

Arendt did not believe that totalitarianism as it existed in Nazi Germany or Bolshevist Russia was a threat in the United States. Aware of the dangers of totalitarianism, public opinion in the United States, she saw, was not prepared to condone mass murder, camps, and terror. And yet, writing in the wake of the blatant lying in Vietnam, the burglaries, and the cover-ups of Watergate, rampant inflation, and the refusal to own up to the economic crises in the country, she does believe that public opinion appeared ready to condone “all political transgressions short of murder.” In other words, if "lying as a way of life" might not support the kinds of criminality evidence in totalitarian states, it might serve to obfuscate and justify a lower level of criminality in a declining American Republic. 

Arendt writes that American politicians consistently get away with lying and even blatant criminality. Her primary example is Richard Nixon and Watergate. While Nixon’s crimes “were a far cry from the sort of criminality with which we once were inclined to compare it,” the facts are clear that Nixon’s administration included many persons who—if not criminals—were so attracted to the “aura of power, its glamorous trappings,” that they came to see themselves as above the law. Nixon, and those around him, assumed that they could and would get away with their crimes because the believed that “all people are actually like them.” They thought that all people are, in the end, corruptible. Thus they assumed that judges, the press, and politicians could be bought or cowed. They sought to deny the reality of their crimes by spreading the image of human corruptibility—all men would have done the same. 

Against the logical ideological coherence backed by terror that supports the big lie in totalitarian states, Arendt sees that the lying in the American Republic of the 1970s  was based upon the hidden persuasive power of images. What Nixon sought was to replace rule by terror with rule by “persuasion enforced by pressure and the manipulation of public opinion.” And to Nixon’s shock, the public was not amenable to such pressure and manipulation by the Executive. Luckily, Arendt argues, Nixon was was wrong. The press and the American republican institutions did fight back.  “Nixon’s greatest mistake--aside from not burning the tapes in time--ws to have misjudged the incorruptibility of the courts and the press.”

And yet, Arendt's analysis of why those civil servants and appointees who worked for Nixon stayed is eerily familiar: “In retrospect, it looks as though there existed no such grand schemes but ‘only’ the firm resolve to do away with any law, constitutional or not, that stood in the way of shifting designs inspired by greed and vindictiveness rather than by the drive for total power or any coherent political program.” Nixon’s regime was not ideological, but obsessed with power. “In other words, it is as though a bunch of con men, rather untalented mafiosi, had succeeded in appropriating to themselves the government ‘of the mightiest power on earth.’” 

While the public in the case of Watergate rejected Nixon’s efforts to turn the government into a a cabal of con men and rather untalented mafioisi, there is still the fact that those indicted and convicted for their roles in the coverup were “overwhelmed with very high offers from publishers, the press and television, and the campuses to tell their story.” This demand for “self-serving” stories by the criminals is, Arendt says, part of a continuing “quest for more lies and fabrications.” It was and is a sign that the public is addicted to lies and craves comforting stories. 

In the end, what Arendt saw is how the self-justifying rationalizations of the con men could be persuasive to masses of people. That they were not—that Nixon was unsuccessful in the end in persuading public opinion to excuse his minor infractions—does not mean that a future President would not succeed in just such a persuasive effort. 

The point of Arendt's essay is that the addiction to images and theories and “deeper causes” have habituated the intellectuals as well as the masses to simplistic and exculpatory fictions. What no one wanted to see was the corruption and rot at the core of the Republic. And when the rot is so visible that it cannot be denied, it is easier to justify it and explain it than it is to rebel against it as the abomination that it is. This is what Arendt means by when she says that our aversion to reality has come home to roost: