Connell Fanning
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Do we live in ‘dark times’?
Arendt, writing in 1968, referred to periods in history when activities about which there was nothing mysterious were taking place in public and yet, notwithstanding such publicness, the activities were ‘by no means visible to all or easy to perceive until the very moment when catastrophe overtook everything and everybody’. Such activities were not covered up by realities, but by systematic double-talk: they were camouflaged by “the highly efficient talk and double-talk of nearly all official representatives”. These ‘official people’ explained away unpleasant facts, valid, and justified concerns “without interruption and in many ingenious variations”.[i]
The bad activities are one thing but the obfuscation by officials is another matter that brings its own kind of distress. We observe this around us every day coming from public officials and permeated the business realm from the people of what was called ‘spin’ and are now the people of what is called ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’.
While we know them most obviously today as the people, for example, coordinating themselves with the goings on of a Donald Trump or a Boris Johnson, we also see them in all spheres of public affairs, including business, churches, media, public administration, and even voluntary associations and organisations. These are the people who plunge us into ‘dark times’, as Arendt memorably labelled the situation they deliberately and systematically create. Some know well what they are about while others are just going along with their peers.
Aside from the events themselves, this aspect of a ‘dark time’ can be oppressive or rather we can succumb to some degree of despair.
They pose the challenge to us of how to destroy their effects of their doings, eliminate their impacts on us, and demolish their sources of power over us.
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In the first instance, the demand the implicit and presumptuous claims on our attention the people who bring us ‘dark times’ put to us is:
How do we think for ourselves in ‘dark times’?
How do we get and keep our bearings in such a climate of opinion?
How do we ensure our immunity to‘the highly efficient talk and double-talk of official representatives, and others of the ‘Anointed’ class,[ii] who inflict this type of corruption[iii] on our social institutions?
To get to the core: How do we not just prevent and avoid but transcend sinking into the ‘dark times’ at which we are put at risk by the behaviour of the likes of the ‘Trumps’ and ‘Johnsons’ in the realm of politics and the ‘Zuckerbergs’, ‘Paiges’, ‘Bezoss’, and ‘Musks’ in the realm of business today?
How can we use concepts, such as ‘dark times’ and related concepts[iv] to protect ourselves from the infectious and corrosive dissembling of the likes of Johnson which is widely transmitted by ‘their people’ – people who coordinate and support their ‘efficient camouflaging double-talk’[v] – given their relentless access to us and their abuse of their power over us?
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Arendt suggests that we have to take into account the ‘camouflage’, which emanates from and is spread by ‘the establishment’ or ‘the system’, called the ‘elites’ and kleptocrats today, when we are thinking about ‘people living and moving in ‘dark times’.
This demand applies first of all when we are thinking about ourselves moving and living in ‘dark times’.
This, it hardly needs saying, is easier said than done – vigilance can be exhausting – but that is the demand being a mature adult makes on us, individually and collectively.
The demand is that we develop the ‘maturity’ only available in adulthood, that we ‘grow up’.[vi]
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What does that require of us?
First, we can care.
Arendt considered indifference about the company we choose – the common position that any ‘company’ is good enough – to be the greatest danger to how we think.
Judgments – our decisions about right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, good and bad, true and untrue – depend, in Arendt’s view, “upon our choice of company, of those with whom we wish to spend our lives”. How do we choose our ‘company’?
According to Arendt, we choose our ‘company’ “…by thinking in examples, in examples of persons dead or alive, real or fictitious, and in examples of incidents past or present.”[vii]
Thus, we ask ourselves: What is the ‘company’ I am choosing to keep?
Second, we can judge.
Connected to this indifference is “the very common modern phenomenon, the widespread tendency to refuse to judge at all” which Arendt considered as “only a bit less dangerous”.
We must overcome the fear of judging lest we be judged – the intimidation of the sanction ‘who am I to judge?’.
The answer to that fear is simple: I am a mature person who accepts the responsibility that I cannot be indifferent and, therefore, must make judgments.[viii]
The combination of the refusals to care and to judge is the source of the kind of crisis we face in ‘dark times’: “Out of the unwillingness or inability to choose one’s examples and one’s company, and out of the unwillingness or inability to relate to others through judgment, arise the real skandala, the real stumbling blocks…” in our thinking.
These refusals or failures are the openings to the thoughtlessness which Arendt characterised as the ‘banality of evil’.[ix]
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Arendt considers the function of the ‘public realm’ is to throw light on the affairs of people by providing a “space of appearances in which [people] can show in word and deed, for better or worse, who they are and what they can do”.[x]
Then, the
“…darkness has come when this light is extinguished by ‘credibility gaps’ and ‘invisible government’, by speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral or otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truth, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality.”
Thus, we must care and judge ‘who they are and what they do’.
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Do we live in ‘dark times’ today?
Are Trump and Johnson and their acolytes the agents of ‘dark times’? Can it really be so?
Examples of such ‘dark times’, Arendt holds, are not new and not rare in history.
They are to be distinguished, however, she says from “the monstrosities of [the twentieth] century which indeed are of a horrible novelty” and, thankfully, not so common, although clearly they should never occur at all.
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Arendt asserts that “…even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination…” and that:
“such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some [people], in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time that was given to them on earth…”
People such as Abraham Lincoln, the Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, and Robert Kennedy, come readily to mind as people who ‘from their uncertain, flickering, and often weak light’ kindle illumination for us to see our way.
They are examples, in Arendt’s sense, of people whom we could choose, if we wish, for our ‘company’ – the ‘company’ on which the power of our judgment depends.
It may be that illumination may not come from theories and concepts as such. Nevertheless, how the people, who in their lives and their works will kindle illumination under almost all circumstances, think is crucial, as the case of Mandela here and here demonstrates. And concepts and theories have a central place in how people think.
Thus, it may also be that there are theories and concepts that kindle light when used rightly by us.
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Therefore, the questions arising for us, when we are living in ‘dark times’, are:
From whom can we expect illumination, to whom can we look for illumination?
Who are the people by their lives and works who illuminate the particular ‘dark time’ in which we are living?
Who are the ‘source thinkers or theorists’, as we might put it, whose ideas illuminate?
What about our collection of theories and concepts and how we use them?
and
Do we want illumination?
Do we want to ‘grow up’?
How can we deliberately and intentionally go about ‘growing up’?
[i] Hannah Arendt, Preface, in Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times: viii-ix (emphases added), Harcourt Brace, San Diego, 1968. Arendt took the term ‘dark times from a poem by Bertholt Brecht “which mentions the disorder and the hunger, the massacres and the slaughterers, the outrage over injustice and the despair ‘when there was only wrong and outrage’, the legitimate hatred that makes the voice grow hoarse” (Arendt, 1968: viii).
[ii] Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as the Basis for Social Policy (Basic Books, New York, 1995) is a powerful critique of what he called the ‘Anointed’in his book The Vision of the Anointed (1995). The subtitle of the book conveys the thrust of Sowell’s expose and critique of a pernicious way of opinion making. He did this as an antidote to the arrogance of the practitioners of the ‘Anointed Mindset’. The ‘self-congratulation’ characterisation captures well the attitude and stance of the self-anointed to the viewpoints and opinions other than their own. Sowell exposes the intolerant, oppressive, presumptuous, unscientific and anti-scientific attitude of the Anointed in the areas of society, politics and the economy. More generally, ‘Public Policy’ and ‘Business Strategy’ can be substituted for ‘Social Policy’, especially now that ‘spin-as-strategy’ is so common across all type of organisations and is engaged in so pervasively by CEOs and self-styled, business ‘leaders’.
[iii] Corruption: (i) the process by which something, typically a word or expression, is changed from its original state to one that is regarded as erroneous or debased (The New Oxford Dictionary of English: 413. Edited by Judy Pearsall. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998); Change for the worse of an institution, custom, etc., a departure from a state of purity (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Volume 1, A-M: 518. Edited by Lesley Brown. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993).
[iv] For example, ‘bullshit’ as explained by the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005). ‘Bullshit’ is not lying or bluffing. The essence of ‘bullshit’ is that it is phony: “The bullshitter is faking things”. The indifference to truth is at the core of the bullshitter: “He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” Since such a person pays no attention to truthfulness at all, “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” (Frankfurt, 2005: 46-47, 56, 61). That Boris Johnson, for example, was bullshitting was patently obvious during his campaign for headship of the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom in 2019.
[v] As Arendt (1977: 278) pointed out:” For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.”
[vi] Being a ‘grown-up’ adult as distinct from just growing to a certain age deemed arbitrarily to be an adult – as the way ‘adulthood’ is defined and taken generally – is explained by Susan Neiman, following Immanuel Kant on ‘enlightenment’, in Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age: Chapter 4, Penguin, London, 2016.
Donald Trump, although an ‘adult’ in the conventional sense of biological age, appears as chief executive officer of the U.S. Government not to be a ‘grown-up adult’.
For example, Donald W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a Washington Post contributor, using American Academy of Pediatrics descriptions of small child behaviour argues that Trump acts like a toddler. Through this prism, Drezner made a collection over three years of more than one thousand Tweets documenting examples of Trump’s own aides and allies describing him exhibiting infantile behaviour or behaving like a toddler (acknowledging of course that there’s nothing untoward about such behaviour in a young child; indeed, such behaviour is normal in a child, hence its labelling). The author explores these descriptions of Trump being like a small, badly-behaved pre-schooler in The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us About the Modern Presidency (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2020). In chapters on temper tantrums, short attention spans, poor impulse control, oppositional behaviour, knowledge deficits, too much screen time reflecting the typical small child dimensions of Trump’s behaviours. While good parents may be able to re-direct wayward behaviour by a small child without too much destruction, it is an entirely different matter where the toddler-like adult is the President of the United States, especially in a situation where it also appears that there are not many ‘adults in the room’. Hence the continuation of such behaviours and, indeed, even the worsening of it under pressure, just as we may observe in a small child.
Many will have experienced adults, including managers and CEOs of organisations, exhibiting similar characteristics in their behaviour and, sometimes it seems, for no other reason than they can do so. ‘Grown-up adulthood’ is not a stage of development to be presumed as having been reached in all adults whatever their wealth, position, or title.
[vii] Hannah Arendt, Some Questions of Moral Philosophy, in Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment:137, 146, Jerome Kohn, editor, Schocken Books, New York, 2003.
[viii] Arendt, 2003: 146. Making judgments is a considered matter and is a different matter from being, in a pejorative sense, ‘judgmental’, which is an urge or impulse that is essentially thoughtless.
[ix] Arendt, 2003: 146. The idea of ‘thoughtlessness’ – the inability to put oneself in the standpoint of another – as the banality of evil and something to which we are all open was made famous by her in her ‘report’ of the 1963 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, first published by Viking Press, New York, 1963, revised and enlarged edition Penguin Books, New York, 1977.
[x] The ‘public space’ for many people in today’s world is their organisational context given how much of their lives are lived within these organisations and the ensuing consequences of living in that space for themselves and for the quality of society.
