Hannah Arendt's Pessimistic Views

Some six million people were murdered by the Nazis considering themselves a "superior" race, and killing people merely because they were Jews, or homosexuals, gypsies, or physically handicapped. Is it any wonder then that Ms. Arendt, a German Jew who left her homeland before the Holocaust, considers that one of the greatest evils perpetrated by men against other men is "the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective" (p. 296). She explains that there seems to be a limit to the existence of rights. There seems to have been an abridgment of "a right to belong to some kind of organized community" (p. 297) And that abridgment was made manifest by the Holocaust, obviously. She is pessimistic because, as she says (p. 297) this is not due to a lack of civilization, since there is no uncivilized place left on earth. Again, it is obvious that she is referring to the Nazis (and all Germans who believed in what the Nazis were doing) in excluding individuals from the right to belong to a community. She equates this "outsider" status to Aristotle's time and the slaves of Athens, who were not considered humans. And, incidentally, we don't need to look any further than our own Constitution which equated a Negro and Negro slaves as being about three-fifths the value of a white American. What isa disturbing to her (and should be to all of us) is that one can do without the principles proclaimed in The Rights of Man as long as one can retain one's dignity. She is prominently concerned with "the dignity of man (p. 298)

She objects to Burke's opinions that the rights of man were an "abstraction" and that one should rely more on an "entailed inheritance" (p. 2999) Where she and Burke part company is in her defiant refusal to agree that the rights we enjoy "spring from within the nation". This seems to mean that unless you are a citizen of some country, you literally have no right to have "Rights". She uses the example of the state of Israel to pound home that point. "The restoration of human rights has been achieved... so far only through the restoration of national rights" (p. 299).

If there is a truly significant statement by Arendt, it is "The survivors of the extermination camps, the inmates of

concentration and internment camps, and even the comparatively happy stateless people could see without Burke's arguments that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger" (p. 300). Imagine the pain that this statement provides thinking human beings: "being nothing but human". Our world has become so dehumanized- computers have taken over, person-less telephone connections, answering machines, voice mail, et al- that it is weird to read that the greatest danger is being "nothing but human". And yet, she is so correct in this assumption, regardless of how many years ago she wrote this. She indicates that "our political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality through organization" (p 301). Of course, this is not so. One can remember the slogans on top of the entrances to the concentration camps in Germany "ARBEIT MACH FREI" (Work makes one free). We know through history books that the Nazis were perfectionists when it came to organizing. They took copious notes and files of everything. Their organization mania doomed some of them.

What her arguments come down to, then, is more than organization it is the fact that there is so much alienation, and that citizenship means nothing when one is an outsider- the Negro in America, the East Indian in Britain, the Algerian in France, and the Jew most everywhere except Israel. Alienation comes when communities attempt to somehow eliminate the differences of the people living there. She calls it "ethnic homogeneity" (p. 301). Not that she approves of it, only that she points out that it is a reality.

One has to wonder if Hannah Arendt were a WASP whether she would hold the same opinions. It takes someone who knows and has had first-hand experience with prejudice, and cruelty due to ethnic differences, to discuss the idea of alienation as a human trait. She suggests that people who are alienated are "thrown back, in the midst of civilization, on their own natural givenness, on their mere differentiation" (p. 302) She then goes on to state that these people are then forced to belong to the human race merely as a species, like animals, rather than for their impact.

So, we come to the main question within the question: Are her arguments cogent enough to be agreed with? One would have to put oneself into her shoes- a Jewish intellectual barred from her native country, ousted from her community, forced to resume an interrupted life in a new surrounding, with a new language, and a bitterness that is unimaginable. The simple reason for agreeing with her outlook is in the final paragraph of this reading: "The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages. Who among us is not guilty of capitalist smugness, a sort of imperialism of "democratic principles" which has alienated so many who felt cheated by life as it was paraded about by the American power elite. Did we create the barbarians, just as inept politicians and greedy World War I victors created Hitler? Are we responsible for apartheid as much as Martin Luther King's dream? Are we now become savages, thanks to Attorney-General Ashcroft and his trampling on American civil rights? Hannah Arendt was right. We must agree with her.

CITATION:

Arendt, H. The Origin of Totalitarianism: Chapter Nine:

"The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man"