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Background For A New Book

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Index to posts in this series

This series about rights began with the observation that there is a lot of talk about rights, but not a lot of clarity about their nature and origin. I think the readings so far provide a bit of clarity. Earlier series add additional background.

Several commenters recommended Jamal Greene’s How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart. I’ve read the introduction which summarizes some of Professor Greene’s ideas, and I think it will be a good next step.

This post sets out ideas that form the background of my approach to Greene’s book. In the next post I’ll examine Roe v. Wade, which is at the center of a contest about rights in the US.

The nature of us humans

The Evolution Of Agency by Michael Tomasello leads me to think that we humans invented ourselves by a slow process involving observation, learning, teaching, memory and luck. Many species can learn behaviors by trial and error coupled with varying degrees of observation and reasoning. Many of those species can teach learned behaviors to others of their species by example. Humans are especially good at that. Humans add the layer of verbal communication which speeds things up. We can also pay attention to our own words and reason with and about them in a kind of iterative learning. This gradually gave us a tremendous capacity for abstraction which is a valuable asset in problem-solving.

Early humans taught their young their knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, giving them tools for survival. Natural curiosity brought change. This view of evolution is supported by Cat Bohannon’s book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. Bohannon says  most likely females taught basic language skills to the young, on the ground that females spent most of their time tending to helpless infants.

Philosophical insights

“Of all things the measure is man: of those that are, that they are; and of those that are not, that they are not.”

That, of course, is Protagoras, quoted in §2.1 here He meant that individual observation of the world is the best anyone can do in determining facts about things in the world. The example he uses is weather. If it seems cold to me then it’s cold and if at the same time it seems hot to you then it’s hot.

But when a group of people compares notes on such observations, and generates and tests explanations, something else happens: we start to approach truth, at least truth in the sense of the Pragmatists.

This kind of truth is the goal of participants in the Epistemic Regime described by Jonathan Rauch in The Constitution Of Knowledge, which I discuss here (Side note, the earlier posts in that series took Brooks’ false definition of the term as a starting point. I wrote the linked post after I read what Rauch actually wrote.)

William James, one of the founders of Pragmatism, says that everything we think and know came from our human ancestors. Everything they taught us, including language, the meaning of words, and the rules of reasoning, all came from the actions and thoughts of our forebears.

We socialize each other. We learn how to act, think, and be human from other humans. We aren’t the individual atoms described by neoliberal economists, and we aren’t the husks created by totalitarianism. The social human is a better view than most philosophers offer. Descartes with his cogito ergo sum tries to reason his way into understanding the self, as do other philosophers, but it doesn’t work like that.

We can’t understand anything useful by starting with individuals. We only have meaningful existence in the context of our social groups. If I come up with what I think is a new idea, it only becomes useful if I share it with others who check it, and perhaps find some use for it.

Basic principles of rights

In Chapter 9 of The Origins Of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt demonstrates three relevant points. First, rights are guarantees given by citizens to each other. Here’s how Arendt puts it:

Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere existence, is not given us, but is the result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the principle of justice. We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights. P. 301.

I read this to say that equality is an element of citizenship in a well-organized state. Each of us as a citizen participates in the public life of the group on an equal footing. Equality only exists in societies guided by a principle of justice. Arendt doesn’t say which principle of justice. To my mind this is a valuable insight, as different societies can have vastly different ideas about justice based on their own cultures. I’d guess Arendt would approve of the notion of justice laid out by John Rawls in A Theory Of Justice.

Arendt rejects Jefferson’s pious formulation that the Creator endows us with certain rights. She says, correctly I think, that we endow each other with rights and by doing so we hold those rights reciprocally. We create our own rights by consent. Over time we reach for the rights we think are most conducive to our flourishing as a group. Again, this doesn’t tell us which society is best, or what “flourishing” might mean, simply that it is acceptable to the majority.

Second, Arendt says that as a practical matter rights only have meaning if they are the creation of a state or a nation capable of and willing to enforce them against all comers, foreign and domestic. The first nine chapters of the book can be read as supporting this view, if you think of them from the point of view of people acted on by the dominant class. It is especially obvious in her discussion of the vast migrations set off by World War I. Modern examples abound, including the formation of Pakistan and Bangladesh, the attack on the Rohingya people of Myanmar, and the contemporary attack on Gaza.

Third, Arendt agrees with Jefferson that the governed must participate in social decisions as a matter of the equality of all citizens. I take that to be one of the principles of justice.

Freedom and Equality

When we say that all people are created equal we mean equality in civic life. This is the way Elizabeth Anderson talks about it as I discuss here.  Here’s the index to the series, which also takes up her discussion of the dimensions of freedom in civic life. Equality is closely tied to her concept of freedom, which includes freedom from domination by others.

Supreme Court Cases

I have discussed a number of Reconstruction Era Supreme Court cases (here, here here, and here). These show the dangers of letting a group of unaccountable lawyers make decisions about rights.

Conclusion

I hope this summary helps explain how I am approaching the ideas in Greene’s book. I will use these ideas and definitions as starting points for understanding his book.

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Front page picture: By Sailko – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57477584

 

Citizenship

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In the last part of Chapter 9 of The Origins Of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explains her ideas about citizenship as a crucial part of human nature. Arendt was a scholar of the ancient Greeks, and it shows in this section.

A place in the world

In prior posts I looked at statelessness arising from the enormous European migrations during and after WWI. Millions of people were deprived of citizenship in their own nations, or worse, their nations disappeared, leaving them not even subject to deportation. Having no state to protect their rights, they were in effect deprived of all human rights.

The fundamental deprivation of human rights is manifested first and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective. Something much more fundamental than freedom and justice, which are rights of citizens, is at stake when … one is placed in a situation where, unless he commits a crime, his treatment by others does not depend on what he does or does not do. P. 296.

In Arendt’s view, this is the nub of the disaster facing stateless people. They continue to exist, but it doesn’t matter what they say or think or do. They are alive, but they are useless, superfluous. Their treatment by others, the way they are dealt with by the state, has nothing to do with their opinions or actions.

This right, the right to participate in the life of a community, was thought to inhere in people. It has roots deep in human history and far back into pre-history. In earlier times, groups of people driven out of a community might be taken in by another group, or they might be able to live on their own, as shown in the delightful story of the Kimmeri as told by Herodotus in the Histories, Vol. 1, Book IV, ¶ 11 (set out below).

Arendt says that at least since Aristotle, the ability to speak and act was defined as the nature of human beings, and it was Aristotle who called humans “political animals”. Aristotle saw that these were not characteristics of slaves, and therefore slaves were not human. Arendt notes that even slaves had a place in society, and their labor was a valuable asset that remained in their control to some extent. But that wasn’t true of the stateless people. They had no place in society other than whatever charity might hand them.

In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson says that the Colonies are entitled to “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”. In a passage based on the writings of Edmond Burke about the French Revolution, Arendt asks how we could possibly think a universe which showed no sign of either laws or rights implied anything for us humans.

A return to nationalism

Beginning at page 299, lay out Arendt offers her thought on the best way forward. The argument is multi-layered and not quite clear to me. As I read it, she thinks the solution can’t come from outside us, in history, nature, or from a common humanity. She thinks the solution lies in the laws of each nation. She thinks we are capable of creating laws that define and protect the rights we are willing to extend to each other, nation by nation.

She points to Burke’s rejection of the French Rights of Man And The Citizen. Burke calls these rights “abstractions”, and they are, just as Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are abstractions. We can’t govern ourselves with abstractions, we can’t protect abstractions, and we can’t even agree on the meaning of these abstractions because in the end, the meaning is dependent on the context.

According to Burke, the rights which we enjoy spring “from within the nation,” so that neither natural law, nor divine command, nor any concept of mankind such as Robespierre’s “human race,” “the sovereign of the earth,” are needed as a source of law. P. 299, fn. omitted.

She says:

We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights. P. 301.

She offers a pragmatic justification: the abstractions failed the stateless, but the protection of rights by the state worked.

She offers more abstract justifications, based on the notion that we as humans deeply want to be part of societies, and to contribute our ideas and our labor to the general good. She notes that the ancient Greeks,distinguished between the public and private spaces in communal life. Private space is based on individuality and difference. Public life is based on equality of participation and recognition, and this is the sphere of life in which we all want to participate.

Discussion

1. The strength of our rights is based on our ability to work together to achieve a good life. Successful nation-states work to diminish or eliminate the kinds of differences, arising from the private space, that make working together difficult or impossible. Religion is often one of those intractable problems. In the US, the idea was to keep religion our of the public sphere to the maximum extent possible. We put it in the Constitution. In the 14th Amendment we said we wouldn’t deny rights to people on acount of race. Today we see how eroding that principles divides us, and makes solutions to common problems impossible.

2. I started this series saying that we humans create the rights of Man. Our ideas about how to live together have evolved over millennia as our human ancestors worked out ways of living together. Arendt says that the universe does not seem to recognize the categories of rights and laws (p. 298) so that we, who are part of nature, can’t deduce rights and laws about ourselves.

I don’t agree with that. We can and do deduce the actual laws governing nature, even laws we don’t understand, like quantum theory and dark matter. In a similar way, we can deduce laws that will give us the best chance of flourishing. This has already happened in the past when civilizations moved away from animism and paganism.

This transformation occurred independently in four different regions during the Axial Age, a pivotal period lasting from 900 B.C. to 200 B.C., producing Taoism and Confucianism in China, Buddhism and Hinduism in India, Judaism in the Middle East and philosophic rationalism in Greece.

This quote is from a review of a book by Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation: The Beginning Of Our Religious Traditions, in the New York Times. As I recall this book, Armstrong sees a common strain in these religious traditions that can be summarized as forms of the Golden Rule.

Perhaps it was this common strain that led Enlightenment thinkers like Jefferson to the idea of natural rights, or universal rights recognized by everyone. Those universal rights were, of course, never actually universal: autocratic leaders found multiple reasons to deny them to groups of people.

Each of these great religions co-evolved with a different social structure. Those different structures have lasted several thousand years of material and intellectual changes. Are there signs that those structures are morphing towards greater commonality, at least among the wealthier citizens with access to the world-wide communications platforms? How would rights work in nations with a large number of people who have moved away from traditional structures while another large number remain committed to an older structure? Is there enough commonality among citizens to hold nations together?

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The story of the Kimmerians, as told by Herodotus:

There is however also another story, which is as follows, and to this I am most inclined myself. It is to the effect that the nomad Scythians dwelling in Asia, being hard pressed in war by the Massagetai, left their abode and crossing the river Araxes came towards the Kimmerian land (for the land which now is occupied by the Scythians is said to have been in former times the land of the Kimmerians); and the Kimmerians, when the Scythians were coming against them, took counsel together, seeing that a great host was coming to fight against them; and it proved that their opinions were divided, both opinions being vehemently maintained, but the better being that of their kings: for the opinion of the people was that it was necessary to depart and that they ought not to run the risk of fighting against so many, 14 but that of the kings was to fight for their land with those who came against them: and as neither the people were willing by means to agree to the counsel of the kings nor the kings to that of the people, the people planned to depart without fighting and to deliver up the land to the invaders, while the kings resolved to die and to be laid in their own land, and not to flee with the mass of the people, considering the many goods of fortune which they had enjoyed, and the many evils which it might be supposed would come upon them, if they fled from their native land. Having resolved upon this, they parted into two bodies, and making their numbers equal they fought with one another: and when these had all been killed by one another’s hands, then the people of the Kimmerians buried them by the bank of the river Tyras (where their burial-place is still to be seen), and having buried them, then they made their way out from the land, and the Scythians when they came upon it found the land deserted of its inhabitants

 

Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt#/media/File:Hannah_Arendt_1933.jpg

Stateless In Palestine

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The belief that all humans have certain rights, endowed by the Creator as Jefferson put it, is common. The lesson of Chapter 9 of The Origins of Totalitarianism (“Origins”) by Hannah Arendt is that such rights mean little or nothing if there is no one to enforce them. Realist diplomats after WWI knew that the successor states would not enforce the human rights of minorities and refugees unless forced to do so. They created the Minority Treaties to provide that enforcement, backed by the League of Nations.

It didn’t work. It turns out that the important part of Jefferson’s observation is the next phrase: “that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….“ Absent the protection of the state, the mystical state of having rights is useless. And even having formal rights, like citizenship, is no protection against denaturalization. Arendt provides an example:

Yet, one need only remember the extreme care of the Nazis, who insisted that all Jews of non-German nationality “should be deprived of their citizenship either prior to, or, at the latest, on the day of deportation” (for German Jews such a decree was not needed, because in the Third Reich there existed a law according to which all Jews who had left the territory—including, of course, those deported to a Polish camp—automatically lost their citizenship) citizenship) in order to realize the true implications of statelessness. P. 280, fn omitted.

The problem of statelessness, and thus rightlessness, which runs through Origins is still with us. One salient example today is the Palestinian people. Arendt wrote about the impact of establishment of The State Of Israel in 1947.

The notion that statelessness is primarily a Jewish problem was a pretext used by all governments who tried to settle the problem by ignoring it. None of the statesmen was aware that Hitler’s solution of the Jewish problem, first to reduce the German Jews to a nonrecognized minority in Germany, then to drive them as stateless people across the borders, and finally to gather them back from everywhere in order to ship them to extermination camps, was an eloquent demonstration to the rest of the world how really to “liquidate” all problems concerning minorities and stateless.

After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.

And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale involving many millions of people. Since the Peace Treaties of 1919 and 1920 thé refugees and the stateless have attached themselves like a curse to all the newly established states on earth which were created in the image of the nation-state. P. 289 — 90, fn. omitted, my paragraphing.

The problem of the stateless and rightness Arabs described by Arendt has not been solved. The Palestinian Authority has no ability, or will, to protect the human rights of Palestinians and Gazans. Hamas is a terrorist organization, not a government. No Hamas member from top to bottom cares about the lives of the people of Gaza, let alone their rights, though apparently the “leaders” care about their own safety and luxuries, living the rich life in Qatar.

The State of Israel doesn’t care about the Palestinians either. There’s the ruthless bombing. There’s the settler attacks in the West Bank, which go unpunished. Israel has sold oil leases that were thought to be the property of the Palestinians. Even as the war continues, it announced its intention to build 3,000 new housing units for settlers in the West Bank.

The failure of assimilation

In earlier chapters of Origins, Arendt discusses the history of anti-Semitism in Europe, especially France. She tells the story of Alfred Dreyfus. But probably she wasn’t aware that the French Vichy government deported Dreyfus’ granddaughter, Madeleine Levy, to Auchwitz, where she was murdered in the Holocaust. Nor does she mention the deportation and murder of other assimilated French Jews such as the family of Nissim de Camondo; there are monuments to these dead all over France. I read this part of Origins as saying that assimilation of Jews into European society was a failure, at least up to then.

Arendt was herself a Jew and stateless, and worked for Zionist organizations in the early 1930s in Germany and then in Geneva. Given her premise about human rights, it’s easy to understand why she might favor the goal of Zionism to establish a home state for Jews. If the Jewish people are to have rights they need a state that is willing and able to protect those rights. This is the founding goal of Zionism.

Revisionist Zionism

Rick Perlstein wrote an essay for The American Prospect discussing a book by Eram Kaplan, The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy. According to Perlstein, Kaplan says that there were two factions in the Zionist movement, Labor Zionism and Revisionist Zionism. Labor Zionism is the faction that seemed to prevail. It’s the faction of the Kibbutzim, people working the land to make the desert bloom. It’s the faction for which Jewish kids collected dimes to plant trees. It’s the founding story of Israel I learned growing up in the 50s.

Perlstein’s essay focuses on Revisionist Zionism. He begins with a discussion of an interview by the excellent Isaac Chotiner of a leader in the settlement movement. Chotiner talked to Daniella Weiss, a leader in the settlement movement for over 50 years. Weiss believes that the State of Israel should include all the land from the Euphrates to the Nile. She says Arabs and other non-Jews who live there now have no political rights:

Q. When you say that you want more Jews in the West Bank, is your idea that the Palestinians there and the Jews will live side by side as friends, or that—

A. If they accept our sovereignty, they can live here.

Q. So they should accept the sovereign power, but that doesn’t necessarily mean having rights. It just means accepting the sovereign power.

A. Right. No, I’m saying specifically that they are not going to have the right to vote for the Knesset. No, no, no.

Weiss may seem like an extremist, but Perlstein tells us she’s stating the ideological position of Revisionist Zionism. Perlstein writes that Kaplan says that the Revisionist faction was a fascist ideology, based on Italian Fascism.

Perlstein describes the ideas of a founder of this faction, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, showing the connection to Benito Mussolini’s fascism, including its emphasis on violence and moral purity as a means of returning to a former glory. Perlstein says the language used by Weiss in the Chotiner interview is the doctrine of Revisionist Zionism.

And make no mistake: What this settler told [Chotiner] was doctrine. “For Jabotinsky,” Kaplan writes, “human rights, civil equality, and even political equality could not create harmony among individuals. Only the common ties of blood, history, and language could bring people together.”

Perlstein tells us that Benjamin Netanyahu’s father was an associate of Jabotinsky, and argues that Netanyahu carries the entire tradition of Revisionist Zionism forward.

Discussion

1. The blithe disrespect for the human rights of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is shocking. You have to read it to believe it.

2. Perlstein’s essay is a bare introduction to Revisionist Zionism, and it’s the first I ever heard of it. It’s also shocking.

3. One of the many issues Perlstein discusses is the way his understanding of the history of the State of Israel has changed since he was a child. Perlstein is a historian, but he tells us he never heard of the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem until he was 30. Well, I never heard of the Tulsa Massacre until I was in my 60s.

Denaturalization And Asylum In Interwar Europe

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Migrations during and after WWI

In Chapter 9 of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt describes the vast migrations set off by WWI, and the further migrations driven by the  successor states. These were the new national boundaries set by the victors in WWI, primarily England, France, and the US. They’re located along the eastern side of Europe, extending past Turkey into the Levant The victors put a single national/cultural group in power, even though there were large numbers of people of other nationalities and cultures in those states. Most had significant numbers of Germans and Jews.

As the migrating minority populations in the successor states grouped together, the new states increasingly considered them a threat. This became a greater problem as Germany recovered from defeat and particularly with the rise of the Nazis. Anti-Semitism was rife across Eastern Europe, adding to the distrust of their Jewish population. Other large minority groups, such as Poles, Ukrainians, and Armenians, were also distrusted. In all cases the concern was that these populations would take the side of countries controlled by their nationality against the successor states.

Arendt says the victor nations saw themselves as having evolved legal regimes to replace arbitrary rule of kings and other despots, and that this was done so long ago that the presence of subgroups and migrants was not an existential threat. I think Arendt accepts their view that Internal rivalries in these countries were sufficiently tamped down that they would accept the legal institutions, and even the language and culture, of the dominant group. Creating new nation-states from scratch lacked the evolution that would legitimize the new governments.

So that when the precarious balance between nation and state, between national interest and legal institutions broke down, the disintegration of this form of government and of organization of peoples came about with terrifying swiftness. P. 275.

Denationalization

After WWI, there were revolutions in a number of countries. The winners then promptly denaturalized all the losers and evicted them, adding to the vast migrations. Some of these people were able to return to their home nations, but most weren’t. Many had assimilated to the extent that they no longer identified with their native nation. Others had fled from oppression in their home country. In many cases, the home countries didn’t exist, or their homelands had been under so many regimes they couldn’t claim any single home country. This was the fate of millions of Russians and Armenians, Hungarians and countless others.

Arendt seems to accept the right of a sovereign nation to denaturalize its own citizens:

Theoretically, in the sphere of international law, it had always been true that sovereignty is nowhere more absolute than in matters of “emigration, naturalization, nationality, and expulsion”…. Fn. omitted, p. 278.

Obviously large-scale denaturalization would be disruptive to other nations, and could easily lead to retaliation. For this reason it was not used on a mass basis. Arendt associates large-scale denaturalization primarily with totalitarian states, Italy, Germany and Russia. But almost all European countries adopted and used some form of this tool.

Denaturalization led to terrible problems after World War II. The term stateless people gave way to a new term, displaced persons. This term carries the implication that as soon as things calm down, these people will be returned to their home countries. In other words, it simply ignores the reality of their status.

Asylum

Arendt says that asylum has a long history.

Since ancient times it has protected both the refugee and the land of refuge from situations in which people were forced to become outlaws through circumstances beyond their control. P. 280.

The concept of asylum as a human right, or a Right of Man, dates back to Medieval times, when people were held to be subject to the laws of whichever state they might find themselves in, and were entitled to the protection of that state. In our terminology, simply being in another country entitled you to be treated as a citizens of that country, and your home nation had no duty towards you. As the nation-state developed, asylum came to be seen as a derogation of the duty of the state of citizenship to protect its own citizens when they were beyond its borders, and thus was somewhat anachronistic.

When Arendt was writing (the mid-1940s) the right of asylum was a remnant of the Rights of Man, but was not part of international law, and was not written into national laws either, That has been remedied. Here’s the Wikipedia discussion of the legal situation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_asylum

In any event, the right of asylum wasn’t much help to stateless people who didn’t get to England or the US.

Arendt’s personal experience

Arendt hereself was one of these stateless people. Wikipedia tells us that while still in Germany in the early 1930s she was arrested on account of working for a Zionist organization. She was released pending a hearing and fled the country over the mountains into Czechoslovakia, then on to Prague before settling in Geneva. She found work there, and eventually found her way to Paris. In 1937 she was stripped of German citizenship.

In 1940 she and all German ex-pat Jews were interned in the South of France. She managed to obtain papers of liberation. She was now a stateless person. Eventually with the aid of Varian Fry and others she was able to escape France and move to the US.

Discussion

1. Arendt politely doesn’t mention that her new country, the US, turned away Jews seeking asylum during and after WWII.

2. The US had no definition of citizenship until the 14th Amendment set a baseline. We’ve had a number of laws on immigration, and we have naturalization laws. We have laws governing asylum seekers. We have the Emma Lazarus inscription on the Statue of Liberty as an aspiration. And for all the shrieking from right-wing scaremongers and their fear-junky followers, immigrants built this country.

Even the flow of immigrants and asylum-seekers into the US over the last few years doesn’t compare to the tsunami of people on the move in Europe during and after WWI. Migrants continue to enter Europe today.r I took the picture associated with this post at the Vienna train station in mid-September 2015. It shows a large crowd of Syrians, I think, fleeing the war there. In 2015, about 1.3 million people migrated into Europe.  The latest wave is Ukrainians and others fleeing the Russian invasion.

And it’s going to get worse as climate breakdown continues. Side note: Lake Michigan didn’t ice over once in Chicago so far this year, despite several days of polar vortex. It’s 61 as I write this.

3. In a fortunate synchronicity, Heather Cox Richardson just wrote about the ugly history of US anti-Asian immigration laws. For a fascinating look at immigration, watch Celine Song’s directorial debut film Past Lives. People move for many reasons besides climate breakdown, war, and famine. In another book, Eve, by Cat Bohannon, there’s the suggestion that migrating played a large role in our evolution as a species.

4. Right wing provacateurs are riling up the rubes with pro-denaturalization andi-asylum rants. Corporate media respond with mindless drool like Pavlov’s dogs. For a sane look at the problem, try this.

The Mass Migrations Caused by WWI

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The text for the next posts is Chapter 9 of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins Of Totalitarianism, titled “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man”. It’s a short chapter, 37 pages, and can be read as a stand-alone essay. I didn’t discuss it in my series on the book, partly because I didn’t think about its relevance to our current situation. I did remember her discussion of the Rights of Man; and rights are the subject of the current series.

Pre-WWI context

The book focuses on Europe, and ignores much of the rest of the world. The first chapters discuss anti-Semitism and imperialism. Both cover the period from the mid-19th Century and the early 20th. During that time most of Europe coalesced into one of two types of states, nation-states and empires, with the boundaries created by the 1815 Treaty of Vienna as a starting point..

Western Europe was mostly organized into nation-states. Here’s the Wikipedia definition:

A nation-state is a political unit where the state, a centralized political organization ruling over a population within a territory, and the nation, a community based on a common identity, are congruent.

The term “common identity” means roughly cultural homogeneity, so I use the term cultural group instead of nationality. The term nation-state itself isn’t widely used today, perhaps because there aren’t many, if any, today.

The other form, empire, included Austria-Hungary; the Czarist Empire; and, thought it’s not wholly in Europe, the Ottoman Empire. Each of these included a large number of culturally dissimilar groups, including different language groups. Many of these groups had at one time lived in their own Nation-States, including, for example, Poland and Ukraine. Cultural groups in these empires did not have national sovereignty, and often were mixed in with other groups or jammed up against others without formal borders. Ancient animosities persisted for generations. We can see it in recent history, as the break-up of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Soviet Union.

WWI and its aftermath

Arendt describes the impact of World War I as an explosion. I usually think of WWI as a trench warfare stalemate between the English and French and later the Americans against the Germans, but across the European continent and into what we now call the Middle East, there were battles among all of the smaller cultural groups, and destruction aimed at revenge for ancient, if not forgotten, insults. Among the larger groups on the move were Armenians facing genocide by the flailing Ottoman Empire, Poles, Ukrainians, Balkans, the list is endless, and that’s just in Central and Southern Europe. Many Germans lived in the outskirts of the Austria-Hungary Empire, and they were forced out or ran for their lives. And, of course, Jews across the continent were assaulted and expelled.

The war ended in 1918, and the struggle to reorganize European states began. The basic idea was to create nation-states for the large populations, giving them defined borders and international recognition. This animated map gives an idea of the major changes in Europe. One group of people in each successor state was put in charge, and the other large minorities were assumed to somehow participate in the government, as, for example, the Slovaks in Czechoslovakia.

The enormous numbers of migrants were to be protected by the Minority Treaties, which all the new nations except Czechoslovakia signed. These offered some protection, enforceable by the League of Nations. That didn’t happen. The choice faced by the migrants was to assimilate, or to be treated as stateless people. Naturally, many didn’t like that choice.

There were two groups of stateless people: those whose nations had disappeared, like the people formerly in the Austria-Hungary Empire, and those who could not return to their homelands because they’d be murdered, like the Armenians. The Jews fell into both camps.

The entire approach was, in Arendt’s word, “preposterous”. The outcome was obvious. The minorities and stateless peoples were horribly mistreated by the dominant group. At best the minorities were forcibly assimilated, their own culture lost. At worst they were preyed on by an unchecked police force and their new neighbors. The demands of cultural groups, many of which had never controlled their own states, for self-determination were frustrated. This project was doomed, as was the whole idea of a viable nation-state for every aspiring national group.

Ultimately, the interests of nationality dominated the states across Europe. Law itself became subordinate to the demands of dominant nationalistic cultural groups. And the odd part is that across Europe about this time, the idea of self-determination for these cultural groups was gaining ground.

The Rights Of Man

The concept of the Rights Of Man springs from the American Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, a document of the French Revolution.  The idea is that from birth all men are equal before the state, all are entitled to certain rights, including life and liberty, and participation in self-government. This last is critical: the state exists to insure the Rights of Man to all. As Jefferson put it: “… to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”.

The Rights of Man is a lovely sentiment. But it turns out that the second part is crucial: there are no Rights of Man without a state that can and will enforce them. High-minded principles are useless in the face of a marauding police force.

Discussion

Several of the books I’ve been writing about here, and reading but not writing about, provide evidence that in-group/out-group hostility has roots in our evolution. For example, Michael Tomasello in The Evolution of Agency says that socially normative agency, the kind he attributes to human beings, is tied to the community of which our ancestors were members. Tomasello says that individual humans can’t survive on their own, that they must belong to a group for survival. He attributes this to the inter-group struggle for scarce resources.

Even if this were true for our ancient ancestors, it doesn’t explain the hatreds we see today. Conflicts over religion, national origin, racial differences, aren’t about resources or physical needs. They’re purely abstract, purely created by us humans. Of course it matters to the rich and powerful. But why would it matter to an IT professional or a goat farmer?

What difference does it make to me who you worship or whether you worship anyone or anything? Why would it matter if long ago some Armenian Hatfield got cross-ways with some Turkish McCoy? Why does some Dublin Catholic boy care who some Derry girl worships or how? Name an inter-group conflict and ask what its basis is. It’s not going to be about whether there’s a tree with ripe fruit or a river full of fish. It’s going to be some mental construct.

It seems to me there’s a deeper issue here. If you were to go to Beijing or Delhi or Harare or Buenos Aires and pick a pair of twenty-somethings, I bet you could plop them down in Pittsburg or Mexico City and except for language you wouldn’t notice them as you walked by. They’d have no problem finding food they liked, and they might even learn to love brats or pork in molé sauce.

Killing people over abstract ideas is stupid and pointless. Worse, it’s going to make it impossible to solve the worldwide problems we’ve created with climate breakdown. Right now, there’s pressure on the poor in equatorial regions to move to more temperate climates. Some of the pressure is grotesque governments, some is hunger, some is massive climate change. Think what will happen when the gulf stream stops. The pressure will be the other way, people from the north will want to move south. These problems aren’t solvable if we don’t grow up as a species. These are real problems, not the fake culture war gibberish spouted by the right wing, not abstract ideas about the proper way to worship the proper Deity.

Dealing With Trump Voters

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Ever since the election, I’ve been thinking about how to deal with Trump voters I might meet. This article in the New York Times has helped me clarify my thinking. The star of the story is Amanda Delekta, identified as a sophomore at the University of Michigan and the Political Director of the College Republicans. She is “outraged” that students held vigils mourning the election results, and a biology professor canceled classes on the theory that students would be too upset to learn anything. She is further outraged that U of M’s president sent an email she interpreted as saying that the ideas of the “liberal majority” at the school are superior to the “ideology of their peers”. She thinks her ideology is entitled to respect. The article doesn’t explain exactly what her ideology is, or why it is entitled to respect.

This stupid election campaign did not reveal any ideological stance of the winner. He is devoted to himself and beyond that, who knows. His only serious promises involve walls, deportations, keeping out Muslims, lower taxes, and no regulations. And somehow that will bring back so many jobs in manufacturing. Delekta can’t possibly think that is an “ideology” or that this hodge-podge is worthy of respect. There is no evidence that any of this crap would help workers or anyone except Trump and his rich allies. She apparently doesn’t realize we’ve been trying trickle-down economics for decades without any improvement in the wages of the bottom 50% of Americans while the rich have separated themselves from the rest of us.

Delekta doesn’t seem to grasp the difference between liberalism as a set of ideas about politics, and a liberal educatioin, which is about free and oopen inquiry and analysis. She thinks students are somehow being brainwashed by using their brains to read and understand reality, without even noticing that plenty of people are using their liberal educations without in any way losing their conservative politics. Good examples can easily be found in business and engineering schools, but the same is true in most of the schools.

By rejecting the common understanding that the best way to learn advanced skills is through free and open inquiry and not from memorizing a textbook, she has aligned herself with the base of the Republican Party. That includes the Sandy Hook Truthers, the Pizzagate fanatics, and all the other loons who believe everything from Young Earth creationism to poisonous Chemtrails to whatever lies are peddled by Fox News.

If she were an active learner, she might have read about the rise of fascism in Germany, perhaps The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. Arendt says that when the artistic and intellectual elites were run out of Germany and Austria or neutralized in place, the masses took up all sorts of crackpot ideas and conspiracy theories as truth. They became fertile ground for Nazi propaganda, and this played a significant role in the rise of totalitarianism.

The Republican Party is now entirely the party of crackpot ideas and conspiracy theories. All scientists conspire with China to create the anthropogenic climate warming hoax. Chemtrails are used to spray us with something for some purpose by unknown malignant agents. If we cut regulations and give enough money to the rich, the economy will grow and manufacturing jobs will return at higher wages than are paid in Bangladesh. It’s only the tax code that caused jobs to leave the US, not the minimal wages and minimal environment standards in poor nations. Sandy Hook was a hoax or a government plot or something else nefarious. No harm will come from getting rid of banking regulations. Liberals worship Satan in the basement of Pizza Parlors in DC. Income taxes are voluntary. No one should be upset because Trump chose a White Supremacist as his chief policy adviser. Jailing your political opponents is normal politics.

Delekta thinks all the fear and anger among her classmates over the election could be solved by some Kumbaya about “we’re all Wolverines”, meaning the things that unite us are greater than our political differences. Sorry, but no. When you leave the Enlightenment for Crazytown, you go only with those who choose the crazy. Us post-Enlightenment people will stay in the present as long as possible, at least until you and your nutcase allies turn out all the lights except fire.

It’s the young people who have identified the way forward. They don’t want to be around Delekta; they think she’s nuts. They don’t want to be identified with any of the Republican ideology, especially racism, but also science denialism and anti-factualism, and presumably the entire truth-denying thing. That’s just as true of moderate Republicans, if there are any of those still around, as it is of liberals and independents. No sane person voluntarily hangs around with people who can’t agree on facts and basic morality.

Those of us not in school have to work and live with Trump supporters, but we don’t have to be friends with them. Bare civility will suffice. We don’t have to hire them, we don’t have to listen to them, and we don’t have to let them near our children. They can all keep company with each other. I’m sure Delekta will find many new and charming friends among the Breitbart crowd of White Nationalists, the facebook readers who liked and reposted fake news created in Eastern Europe, and militia groups scaring Muslims on their way to Mosques for services. She has a lot more in common with them than with her classmates at U of M. Or me for that matter.

On edit: on Trump’s and the Republican Party’s science denialism.

The Origins of Totalitarianism: Conclusion

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The point of this series was to examine the conditions which led to the rise of Fascism in the 1930s to see if there are useful insights that might guide our understanding of conditions in the US today. In introduction to this series, I suggested several points of convergence, and over the last three months I have tried to flesh out those ideas.

The book has problems. The history focuses on Europe, so it isn’t helpful in understanding the rise of totalitarianism in Russia. There is much less focus on the economic situation in post-WWI Germany and Austria than I would expect. Arendt talks about the the large number of superfluous people, the mob and the masses, but there is little discussion of how or why that happened. Fortunately we already read The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, so we have some idea about that. The reasons for the displacement don’t seem important to Arendt’s thesis, but the absence is jarring.

It seems to me that the most significant condition that led to the rise of fascism in Germany was the large number of displaced and unsettled people, which I think is the result of economic upheaval due to the costs of WWI and the reparations imposed on Germany. That mob was egged on by politicians and media pushing propaganda about the ideology of the Nazis and setting up scapegoats, especially the Jews. Another important factor was the lack of resistance from elites. But the Nazis would have been limited to the margins if not for the large number of people with no place in society. These are the superfluous people. They have no role in the productive sector of society, and no place or position to hold them reasonably close to the bounds of society. Here’s how Arendt explains it:

The totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous reflects the experience of modern masses of their superfluity on an overcrowded earth. The world of the dying, in which men are taught they are superfluous through a way of life in which punishment is meted out without connection with crime, in which exploitation is practiced without profit, and where work is performed without product, is a place where senselessness is daily produced anew. … P. 457.

That is true in the US and elsewhere today. People aren’t stupid. They know that they are superfluous. They know they have no power, no security and no real hope of either. They hate it. When they see people fired from long-term jobs and told they only get severance if they train foreign replacements to do their jobs, it makes them sick inside. When they are told that their jobs are going to Mexico, and it’s “strictly a business decision” but 1400 people are going to be fired, they are angry and hostile. They know that they mean nothing to their employers, and nothing to politicians. And mostly they know they mean nothing to the elites who dominate the political process and the economy, and who set the system up to screw everyone else. They know the elites despise them as the the NRO’s Kevin Williamson and David French loudly say. They know the elites and specifically the tribe of economists, knew that they would be screwed by NAFTA and other trade deals, and didn’t lift a finger to stop that from happening on the grounds that it all works out for the beset on average. So what if the rich elites took all the gains? The liberal elites will come up with incremental tweaks to fix everything, and the conservatives will resist and nothing will change, and they don’t worry because it isn’t them or their families.

Other factors work into this poisonous stew. There is an ideology: the neoliberal myth of the almighty market, the supercomputer that works out all the details as long as mere humans do not interfere with its mysterious workings. This ideology permeates every aspect of our society, from claims that markets pay what you are worth to the strange idea that businesses should operate public schools.

Liberals deny that they share the ideology, but since 1992, the liberal elites have pushed “market-oriented” solutions to every problem. We can’t use a Pigovian tax system to solve problems, especially a tax on fossil fuels or securities transactions. We need a market solution: cap and trade. Schools are a problem, but we can’t throw money at them like they do in socialist hells like Finland. We need the market solution of charter schools competing with public schools, with the public schools funded primarily by local property taxes, so rich areas get good schools and screw the poor. We can’t have single payer health insurance. We put the insurance companies and big Pharma firmly in control of which working age people get health care and cost of health care for all of us. Liberal elite theory results in the creation of new government sponsored “markets” which create opportunities for rich people and corporations to screw over consumers, like Enron did for electricity.

Then there are scapegoats. The primary targets are minorities, especially African-Americans, but recently the unemployed and the working poor. The neoliberal ideology justifies scape-goating. It tells people that if you don’t succeed, it’s your own fault because this is the best of all possible systems. The losers are labeled as leeches and takers by the winners. The ideology justifies their smugness and their sociopathic demands to cut the social safety net.

Neoliberalism is also an excuse for hating immigrants and Muslims, who are coming here to take the jobs of deserving people, so it actually works to deflect the anger of the first group of scapegoats, at least for those who take the bait.

The conservative elites, such as they are, support this neoliberal ideology, and in pursuit of winning elections add the rejection of science and the imposition of ancient religious prohibitions and standards. The liberal elites are fine with the ideology, though they continue to support Enlightenment values, and occasionally offer a patch to salvage one or two lives. But when the crunch comes, they always side with the ideology and the establishment candidate.

Conclusion

As I reread the posts in this series, I realized how angry I am about the way politics operates here. I am repulsed by the elites who act as if there were no alternative. I am nauseated by liberal wonks whose views of what is possible are claustrophobic. They are the descendants of the liberals who told me and my generation that nothing could be done about the murderous war in Viet Nam. I cannot stomach the conservative elites. They are the scum who think their mission on earth is to undo the New Deal; the direct spawn of the John Birchers and the McCarthyites and the rest of the fear-mongers. They are the wreckers.

Polanyi says that when a social structure imposes too much stress on too many people it has to change. We don’t know how many disaffected people there are In the US, but it is clear that there is an enormous number, in both parties and among the unaffiliated, and that change will come. The US has always prided itself on its openness to change. We believe that everything will work out for the best, because we are the exceptional people, the City on the Hill. We assume that change will be for the best. Arendt points out the sickening reality: some changes are deadly.

Index to all posts in this series

The Origins of Totalitarianism Part 7: Superfluous People

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The last chapter of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is devoted to discussion of the totalitarian regime, which comes when the totalitarian movement has taken power. Arendt says that totalitarian movements don’t offer a specific program for government. Instead, they propose to operate under a “scientific” program. For the Nazis, this was the law of nature with its eternal progress towards perfection, which Arendt thinks arises from a skewed form of Darwinism. For the Communists it was the laws of history as supposedly discovered by Marx. Once in power, the totalitarian regime becomes an instrument for the will of the leader, who in turn is an instrument for imposing and acting out those laws. It is here that Arendt takes up the issue of concentration camps. She says that they are instruments for studying ways to reduce individuals to oblivion, to being superfluous, which is the goal of totalitarianism.

Men insofar as they are more than animal reaction and fulfillment of functions are entirely superfluous to totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous. Total power can be achieved and safeguarded only in a world of conditioned reflexes, of marionettes without the slightest trace of spontaneity. Precisely because man’s resources are so great, he can be fully dominated only when he becomes a specimen of the animal-species man.

…

The totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous reflects ihe experience of modern masses of their superfluity on an overcrowded earth. The world of the dying, in which men are taught they are superfluous through a way of life in which punishment is meted out without connection with crime, in which exploitation is practiced without profit, and where work is performed without product, is a place where senselessness is daily produced anew. Yet, within the framework of the totalitarian ideology, nothing could be more sensible and logical; if the inmates are vermin, it is logical that they should be killed by poison gas; if they are degenerate, they should not be allowed to contaminate the population; if they have “slave-like souls” (Himmler), no one should waste his time trying to re-educate them. … P. 457.

Why is it necessary that people become superfluous? The answer appears in the final chapter, Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government. Ideologies are “… isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurrence by deducing it from a single premise…”. P.468. They are the scientific programs offered by totalitarian movements as the organizing principles of societies. For Arendt, the Nazi ideology revolves around the idea of the laws of nature, of blood, while the Communist ideology revolves around the historical laws of Marxism. In both cases, human beings are in the way of the historical forces, and must be forcibly denied the ability to interfere with the primal force.

Terror is the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to make it possible for the force of nature or of history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action. As such, terror seeks to “stabilize” men in order to liberate the forces of nature or history. It is this movement which singles out the foes of mankind against whom terror is let loose, and no free action of either opposition or sympathy can be permitted to interfere with the elimination of the “objective enemy” of History or Nature, of the class or the race. Guilt and innocence become senseless notions; “guilty” is he who stands in the way of the natural or historical process which has passed judgment over “inferior races,”, over individuals “unfit to live,” over “dying classes and decadent peoples.” Terror executes these judgments, and before its court, all concerned are subjectively innocent: the murdered because they did nothing against the system, and the murderers because they do not really murder but execute a death sentence pronounced by some higher tribunal. The rulers themselves do not claim to be just or wise, but only to execute historical or natural laws; they do not apply laws, but execute a movement in accordance with its inherent law. Terror is lawfulness, if law is the law of the movement of some supra-human force, Nature or History. P. 465.

That idea, the idea of the unrestrained movement of supra-human forces, should sound familiar. That’s how Arendt described Imperialism, the early form of unrestrained capitalism. It also describes today’s world as seen by the architects of neoliberalism. They warn that everyone loses if The Market is subjected to even the slightest restraint, whether to movement of jobs and capital overseas or to prohibit dumping toxins into earth, air and water. They insist that foreign limitations on patents and copyrights are impossible restraints. They preach that the only legitimate goal of government is to enforce property rights to the utter maximum. For them, the restless movement of money in the hands of the rich and powerful operates in accordance with its own internal logic, logic which cannot be questioned by quasi-humans not gifted with the power to control vast sums of wealth. They tell us that The Market knows all and fixes everything as long as we mere humans do not interfere with its workings. Neoliberal capitalism is a form of supra-human force that Arendt warned us about.

Neoliberalism forms world view of movement conservatives. Here’s an article in the National Review on this issue by one Kevin Williamson. :

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed[mund] Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

Williamson’s NRO colleague David French agrees:

My childhood was different from Kevin’s, but I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.

For generations, conservatives have rightly railed against deterministic progressive notions that put human choices at the mercy of race, class, history, or economics. Those factors can create additional challenges, but they do not relieve any human being of the moral obligation to do their best.

Williamson and French agree that the white working-class people are superfluous, and so are their communities and their way of life. Millions of them should just hire U-Hauls and move to the blessed land of plentiful jobs. They must all lose themselves and their way of life to the inexorable laws of movement, only this time, it’s the inexorable laws of neoliberalism, of rampant unrestrained capitalism. By those rules, individuals cannot act collectively, through unions or through active government. They are permitted to act collectively in their Churches, which emphasize their helplessness in this world except through the will of the Almighty, and therefore pose no real threat to the interests of the rich and powerful.

These white working-class people and their communities aren’t economically viable, and nothing can or should be done to make things different. They should surrender to the external and ungovernable force of hyper-capitalism. They are superfluous, and if they die in misery, leaving their families in poverty, it’s just the natural law of economic freedom working itself out in the passive voice, with the invisible hand of the rich and powerful hidden in a fog of words.

Index to prior posts in this series

The Origins of Totalitarianism Part 6: Totalitarian Propaganda

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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself; the masses have to be won by propaganda. P. 341.

As we saw in Part 5, the elites were neutralized by violence against the Marxists and Communists. That removed a major obstacle to the growth of the totalitarian movement in Germany between the two World Wars. It opened the door to all kinds of crackpot theorizing and ridiculous conspiracy theories. But terror is only available when the totalitarian movement has taken over the state. Before that time, the state monopolizes the instruments of force, and presumably will not use them to assist a totalitarian movement to replace the existing power structure. Therefore, the connivance of the Social Democratic party was the chief driving force in the crushing of the Marxists and communists. Once that was done, the totalitarian movement began its propaganda assault.

Arendt says that both Nazi and Russian Communist propaganda claim to be rooted in scientific theories that explain the hidden mysteries of human society:

People are threatened by Communist propaganda with missing the train of history, with remaining hopelessly behind their time, with spending their lives uselessly, just as they were threatened by the Nazis with living against the eternal laws of nature and life, with an irreparable and mysterious deterioration of their blood. P. 345,

Propaganda was focused on the mob, the displaced and rootless people with little or no understanding of the actual state of society. The primary criterion for the subjects of propaganda was mysteriousness. The creators used all those subjects that were not part of public discourse. That included the Jews, the Jesuits, the Freemasons, and other secret societies, in general anything that was kept secret for whatever reason. The mob was disposed to believe anything that revealed the workings of secret groups exercising power in ways that made their lives miserable. And there are plenty of events that seem unlikely in life, so the propagandists were able to offer explanations for lots of seemingly random events.

The following paragraph deserves special attention:

In other words, while it is true that the masses are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects, it is also true that their longing for fiction has some connection with those capacities of the human mind whose structural consistency is superior to mere occurrence. The masses’ escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist, since coincidence has become its supreme master and human beings need the constant transformation of chaotic and accidental conditions into a man-made pattern of relative consistency. The revolt of the masses against “realism,” common sense, … was the result of their atomization, of their loss of social status along with which they lost the whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense. In their situation of spiritual and social homelessness, a measured insight into the interdependence of the arbitrary and the planned, the accidental and the necessary, could no longer operate. Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity. Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices — and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect. P. 352, emphasis added.

Our minds seek order. We need a coherent story to explain the way things are. In a functional society, people have social and economic certainties that form the structure in which common sense can operate, and that structure is closely tied to reality. When those structures break down, as in post-WWI Germany and Austria, people want and accept stories that provide them with a sense of order, and a place in which they can find dignity and self-respect, no matter that these stories are totally bizarre and disconnected from reality.

Totalitarian propagandists provided such stories premised on pseudo-scientific certainties about society, certainties that explained the random events and the damaging experiences that made their lives unbearable. They blame secret forces, mysterious groups that control everything. A modern day equivalent would be the UN’s Black Helicopters, the Army’s Jade Helm, and the claim that Obama is going to seize your guns. Older examples include the New World Order or the Trilateral Commission, or the fantastical claims of the Communist menace of fluoride. These stories are always present in the minds of a few, and they spread like cancer when the economic and social structure is in disarray. In the case of Hitler, Arendt gives us as a concrete example, his use of the silly Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This nonsense works because the totalitarian movement is able to shut the targets of propaganda off from the real world. In that setting, propagandists

… conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations. P. 353.

The elites, as we have seen, did not provide an alternative, but instead participated in these fictions, cheering them on, and through their art and music, provided even more disruption. Today we have conservative elites who deny science and bow down to the chimeras of religious fanatics.

Of course, today we don’t have anything as ham-handed as propaganda. We have endless advertising, whether in the form of paid spots on your TV, or “earned media”, as when the four former heads of the Council of Economic Advisers make up stories about a paper they haven’t read. We get bombarded with the most awful images and words, using techniques formulated to sell soap:

.…there is a certain element of violence in the imaginative exaggerations of publicity men, that behind the assertion that girls who do not use this particular brand of soap may go through life with pimples and without a husband, lies the wild dream of monopoly, the dream that one day the manufacturer of the “only soap that prevents pimples” may have the power to deprive of husbands all girls who do not use his soap. P. 345.

We see this working in the Orwellian language of Frank Luntz. We see it in the crackpot worldview of Trump, who adopted the Fox-supported fantasy that immigrants caused job losses in the US, and not the CEOs of Apple and Intel who built factories in other nations, supplying US built design and capital extracted from US citizens and giving jobs to Taiwanese instead of US citizens. This false view of the world is useful for selling the Trump brand over the Cruz or Rubio brand, and so off it goes to work on the minds of the poorly educated people that Trump loves so much.

There is a huge number of people whose lives are so disrupted that the stories pumped out by Republican presidential candidates sound good. There are millions thrown out of jobs who aren’t ever going to have the life they were promised if they worked hard and played by the rules. There are millions who lost everything in the Great Crash, and who now watch as their children shoulder mountains of education debt because they refused to pay taxes or to tax the rich. There are millions of racists, homophobes and misogynists who found a religious basis and government support for their biases, and who lost that support. There are millions of people whose parents are immigrants who somehow think that today’s immigrants are making their lives miserable. There are millions of religious people whose faith has been shaken to its roots by grasping preachers, pedophiles and a hierarchy that covered it up. The WaPo has the evidence. Barrons offers the spectacle of a deeply conservative Thomas Donlan calling the Republican base “losers”.

These so-called losers are not stupid people. In their despair, the advertising of the haters offers a bit of self-respect, and a story about the world that doesn’t require them to make radical changes.

Index to posts in this series.

The Origins of Totalitarianism: Index to All Posts

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This post will be updated with all posts on The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. Here’s a copy of this book. All page numbers correspond to that version

Posts in this series:

The Origins of Totalitarianism Part 1: Introduction.

The Origins of Totalitarianism Part 2: Antisemitism

The Origins of Totalitarianism: Interlude on the Tea Party

The Origins of Totalitarianism Part 3: Superfluous Capital and Superfluous People

The Origins of Totalitarianism: Interlude on The Commons

Capitalism Versus The Social Commons (published at Naked Capitalism; discusses privatization using Rosa Luxemburg theory)

The Origins of Totalitarianism Part 4: Humanity under Totalitarianism

The Origins of Totalitarianism: Interlude on Right-Wing Authoritarianism

The Origins of Totalitarianism Part 5: Artistic and Intellectual Elites and the Rise of Fascism

The Origins of Totalitarianism: Interlude Defining Elites

The Origins of Totalitarianism: Interlude On the Twilight of Conservative Elite Pundits

The Origins of Totalitarianism Part 6: Totalitarian Propaganda

The Problem of the Liberal Elites Part 1

The Problem of Liberal Elites Part 2 On Trade

The Problem of the Liberal Elites Part 3 on Trade

The Problem of the Liberal Elites Part 4 Conclusion

The Origins of Totalitarianism Part 7: Superfluous People

The Origins of Totalitarianism: Conclusion