Muninn

“Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.”

Samantha Power, a professor at the Kennedy school who writes a lot on human rights issues, wrote an interesting article on the philosopher Hannah Arendt for the April 29th issue of the New York Review of Books. Arendt’s famous work The Origins of Totalitarianism has been resting unread on my shelf for a couple of years and the only other time I have really seen much on her was in reading about Heidegger or in a couple movies on the wartime Jewish escape from Europe. I hope to get around to looking at her work more closely.

The Power article is timely and proceeds from an overview and critique of Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, the use of her work by others, and finally (as one might predict) a consideration of how her work is relevant today.

“The reality is that ‘the Nazis are men like ourselves.’…the nightmare is that they have shown, have proven beyond doubt what man is capable of.”

While totalitarianism, and the specter of Nazi and Stalinist rule that is associated with it, lends itself to harsh denunciation, one of the main claims of the article is that Arendt was careful, realistic, and self-critical in her analysis. Quoting Yeats, Arendt is said to be able to, “to hold in a single thought reality and justice.” Power’s article is very moderate, and uses Arendt’s own words of caution against any radical claims about the present or future based on an analysis of the past. She “warns readers against any attempt at ‘deducing the unprecedented from precedents'” in history and adds that, “To view a subsequent happening as predictable bordered on seeing it as inevitable, which a believer in human agency and political action could never do.”

Arendt was also apparently cautious in addressing the claims of optimistic idealists who want to further human rights, “No paradox of contemporary politics is filled with more poignant irony than the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning idealists who stubbornly insist on regarding as ‘inaliable’ those human rights which are enjoyed only by the citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries, and the situation of the rightless themselves.” However, Power doesn’t lose the opportunity in this article to take a critical stance towards the current war on terrorism, “While Arendt valued what today is termed, ‘hard power,’ she also knew firsthand the danger of state overreaching in the name of self-defense, and the prospect that a merciless ‘counter-ideology’ could emerge. Today, in the name of fighting a war of infinite duration, it has again proven far too tempting for our liberal democracy to give security absolute priority over liberty.”
Continue reading Samantha Power on Hannah Arendt

Ok, I’m stupid. I thought that the classic Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison was a science fiction book. I’m hanging out with Lars at his apartment late on a Saturday night when he says, “Here, read these two paragraphs.” They are the opening from the Prologue to the Invisible Man, a book about black lives in 1940s America. I can’t believe I haven’t read this book. The opening is fantastic:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus side-shows, it is as though I am surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorted glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me.

Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful.

I’m close to finishing up Baudolino by Umberto Eco. The book is fantastic and the fourth I have enjoyed by him. Some people find it hard to get through anything he writes but I savor every page, often forgetting that I am reading him in translation. He plays with words, he plays with our minds, and he conjures up such amazing images, characters, and historical gems that not only are all his works re-readable but almost beg a second round to reassemble the pieces he throws at you. When I read Eco, I feel like he is giving the reader equal doses of revelation and deception. It is like he is playing a game, but unlike most authors who play the game with their book’s story and characters, Eco seems to love playing directly with the reader’s sanity.

Anyways, more on that some other time. Two quotes from Baudolino which I added to the quote database for this site. In isolation they may seem puzzling, but each one reminds me of one of the long moments of introspection his book instigated,

“I am not asking you to bear witness to what you believe false, which would be a sin, but to testify falsely to what you believe true – which is a virtuous act because it compensates for the lack of proof of something that certainly exists or happened.” p56

“I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds…There is nothing better than imagining other worlds, to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I had not yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.” p99