2025 Readings 12

 "It has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about."

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Yesterday I noted that I was in the middle of a couple massive tomes, and this morning I finished one of them: Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. This is one of those books which, like others on this list so far, that has been circling around me for years. I'd see references to a specific passage in The Origins of Totalitarianism and I'd track it down in my copy but I never tackled a complete readings until this year.  Not surprisingly, I was drawn to reading it now in response to our seeming effortless slide into authoritarianism. Firstly, I felt I needed more intellectual tools to use in making sense of this age. Secondly, and related to the first point, obviously, I was trying to determine whether or not I could construct a course around it at Champlain. While the latter quest was probably a failure, I would argue that the former was a success. I could definitely use concepts of it in class, but I think it would be too much of a challenge for my students to tackle. That's a lot for me to admit since I routinely have them read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment or Anthony Yu's abridgement of Journey to the West, The Monkey and the Monk. Still, you have to pick your battles (or, to paraphrase The Art of War, you don't fight a battle until you've already won it; I'm afraid that battle would be lost on day one). Hannah Arendt possessed an extraordinary genius, and I have used her Eichmann in Jerusalem in class successfully, but she definitely has an idiosyncratic writing style and doesn't bother with setting up her points as if she were constructing an argument that college undergraduates, or at least my college undergraduates, could follow. It can be at times an oddly almost conversational style, which actually makes listening it it easier than reading it; it's like she's sitting with you and chatting while on the drive in to campus. Plus, she assumes a ton of knowledge, which is fine because she's speaking to an educated audience, and lord knows we need more of that and not less. She will throw out lines that force you to put the book down and recalibrate your way of thinking, such as the passage cited above. It's like predicting the dark side of the Internet before anyone had ever dreamt of the Internet.

I don't normally include an extended quoted passage, but this one is both brilliant and tells you so much about how she approaches the topic and also how she wrote (for good and bad, I suppose). It's featured in her final chapter, "Ideology and Terror."

"The truth is, rather, that the real nature of all ideologies was revealed only in the role that the ideology plays in the apparatus of totalitarian domination. Seen from this aspect, there appear three specifically totalitarian elements that are peculiar to all ideological thinking.

"First, in their claim in total explanation, ideologies have the tendency to explain not what is, but what becomes, what is born and passes away. They are in all cases concerned solely with the element of motion, that is, with history in the customary sense of the word. Ideologies are always oriented toward history, even when, as in the case of racism, they seemingly proceed from the premise of nature; here, nature serves merely to explain historical matters and reduce them to matters of nature. The claim to total explanation promises to explain all historical happenings, the total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the future. Secondly, in this capacity ideological thinking becomes independent of all experience from which it cannot learn anything new even if it is a question of something that has just come to pass. Hence ideological thinking become emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five sense, and insists on a 'truer' reality concealed behind all perceptible things, dominating them from this place of concealment and requiring a sixth sense that enable us to become aware of it. The sixth sense is provided by precisely the ideology, that particular ideological indoctrination which is taught by the educational institutions, established exclusively for this purpose, to train the 'political soldiers' in the Ordensburgen of the Nazis of the schools of the Comintern and the Cominform.  The propaganda of the totalitarian movement also serves to emancipate thought from experience and reality; it always strives to inject a secret meaning into every public, tangible event and to suspect a secret intent behind every public political act. Once the movements have come to power, they proceed to change reality in accordance with their ideological claims. The concept of enmity is replaced by that of conspiracy, and this produces a mentality in which reality - real enmity or real friendship - it no longer experienced and understood in its own terms but is automatically assumed to signify something else.

"Thirdly, since the ideologies have no power to transform reality, they achieve this emancipation of thought from experience through certain methods of demonstration. Ideological thinking orders facts into an absolutely logical procedure which starts from an axiomatically accepted premise, deducing everything else from it; that is, it proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality. The deducing may proceed logically or dialectically; in either case it involves a consistent process of argumentation which, because it thinks in terms of a process, is supposed to be able to comprehend the movement of the suprahuman, natural or historical processes. Comprehension is achieve by the mind's imitating, either logically or dialectically, the laws of 'scientifically' established movement with which through the process of imitation it becomes integrated. Ideological argumentation, always a kind of logical deduction, corresponds to the two aforementioned element of the ideologies - the element of movement and of emancipation from reality and experience - first, because its thought movement does not spring from experience but is self-generated, and secondly, because it transforms the one and only point that is taken and accepted from experienced reality into an axiomatic premise, leaving from then on the subsequent argumentation process completely untouched from any further experience. Once it has established its premise, its point of departure, experiences no longer interfere with ideological thinking, nor can it be taught by reality."

And, yes, I think this is where we are with Trump's takeover of America, and I feel empowered to process this seemingly unimaginable (although, sadly, to a historian totally imaginable) period of time when we're throwing away democracy and the rule of law with both hands. That said, you can definitely see that challenge of turning this loose on students. I will have to find ways to bring this into class, because I feel it does serve the needs of our educational goal, less political (I'm always amused by people who think we're actually indoctrinating our students with socialist ideals; I'd be happily surprised if they read the syllabus) than pedagogical. I'm supposed to be presenting a Blue Stool talk at Champlain next week and a talk for Vermont Philosophy Week in April, which might be good places to tackle the concepts raised by Arendt in regards to our modern American hellscape, but there's not nearly enough time to do justice to them. That said, maybe I'll unofficially shoot for the 2026 Vermont Philosophy Week.