From her Introduction to 2004 edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism (Hannah Arendt) pp xxi-xxiv
Militant Islam is not well understood by those who feel most threatened by it. It has attracted legions of followers. Some have been drawn by the exclusionary and radical conservatism of the vision; others have been attracted by a sense of belonging, a desire for power, or a hunger for revenge. Those who have flocked to terrorist organizations have faith – in religion, or in an ideology that can double as a religion. If one could pierce the cloak of mystery that shrouds al-Qaeda, HAMAS, or Islamic Jihad, one might well find some of the qualities Arendt associated with totalitarian movements: “Supreme disregard for immediate consequences rather than ruthlessness; rootlessness and neglect of national interests rather than nationalism; contempt for utilitarian motives rather than unconsidered pursuit of self-interest; ‘idealism,’ i.e., their unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world, rather than lust for power.” Arendt wrote of German and Soviet selfless devotion to the idealized collective, but what greater testament to such selflessness can there be but martyrdom of the kind that thousands of young Muslim men and women are queuing up to undertake today?
In the United States since September 11, 2001, Americans have begun asking “Why do they hate us?” The response tends to fall between two extremes. Bush administration officials say, in essence, they hate us for who we are. As President Bush has put it, “They hate progress, and freedom, and choice, and culture, and music, and laughter, and women, and Christians, and Jews, and all Muslims who reject their distorted doctrines.” Adherents of this view ignore the devastating impact of specific U.S. policies on those who have learned to hate. At the opposite extreme stand those who insist young men and women are flocking to martyr themselves exclusively because of what the United States has done. They cite uncritical U.S. support for Israel, its backing of corrupt and repressive Middle Eastern states, and its exploitation of the world’s natural resources. But adherents of this position often ignore the role played by a variety of other social, political, and economic factors in contributing to local misery.
Arendt would likely avoid both rigid camps and summon us to do three things simultaneously: meet the threat abroad, preserve essential freedoms at home, and be unafraid to explore the motives and aims of the enemy. In meeting the threat, she would argue that hateful, exclusionary, and ultimately lethal collective movements cannot be met with words alone, but must also be met with force. As one disgusted by the convenient patience and wishful thinking of European statesmen before and during the Holocaust, Arendt would undoubtedly urge us to eschew our “common-sense disinclination to believe the monstrous” and make all necessary sacrifices to guard against chemical attacks, dirty bombs, and other atrocities that our imaginations can hardly dare to breach.” But while Arendt valued what today is termed “hard power,” she also knew first-hand that a state could overreach dangerously in the name of self-defence, developing its own merciless “counter-ideology.” Today, in the name of fighting an absolutist war of infinite duration, it has again proven far too tempting for our liberal democracy to privilege security over liberty, slighting or scrapping the values so central to American constitutionalism, and surrendering before a new ideology of counterterrorism.
Origins shows that Arendt would not be satisfied with a policy that aimed to violently quash today’s threat without seeking to understand it. In the preface to Origins, she set out “to discover the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved” leading to a situation “unrecognizable for human comprehension.” We have landed in a similarly unimaginable place today. Yet thus far, in their desire to avoid legitimating a murderous cause, our leaders have refused to grapple with the hidden mechanics of how we got to where we are. Arendt used the phrase “radical evil” to describe totalitarianism, and this is an idea that has been brought back into circulation. Yet while Arendt did not allow such branding to deter her from exploring the sources of that evil, the less subtle minds who invoke the concept today do so to neutralize criticisms of their responses (who, after all, can be against combating evil?). Sheltering behind such black-and-white characterizations is a problem not so much for moral or epistemological reasons; it is a problem for practical reasons – it blinds us from understanding and thus undermines our long-term ability to prevent and surmount what we don’t know and most fear. “Evil,” whether radical or banal, is met most often with unimaginativeness. Terrorism is a threat that demands an elaborate effort to distinguish the sympathizers from the militants and to keep the converts to a minimum. Terrorism also requires understanding how our past policies – whether explicitly or implicitly imperial in nature – helped give rise to such venomous grievances. Origins is a chilling read today because it reveals that even the most radical evils, Nazism and Stalinism, were driven by an internal logic and a self-perceived morality. It simply has to be true, given the nuclear stakes of the contemporary showdown, that we can never know too much about terrorist movements, and that we can never try too hard to alleviate the indignities and inequalities that might help fuel the threat.
Hannah Arendt had what W. B. Yeats described as the uncommon ability “to hold in a single thought reality and justice.” In Arendt’s preface to Origins, she noted: “This book has been written against a background both of reckless optimism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal, that both are articles of superstition, not of faith.” In order to move beyond superstition, which is what we cling to today, it is politics that has to be brought to bear. We are afraid, and fear is dangerous. It can justify excesses and can lead to escapism. The gravest temptation is an overwhelmed, apolitical retreat into private life. But it is not enough to lament the burden of our time; we citizens must shape the response. It is only in the public sphere, through voting, voicing, and mobilizing, that our fates become our own. While fear is dangerous, fear can also concentrate the mind and lead citizens to reengage. The coming years – where we find ourselves again suspended “between a no-longer and a not-yet” – are years of danger and promise, and we can only hope, as Arendt did, that the tug toward apathy will be overcome by the lure of human improvement and self-preservation.
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