Arendt’s Human Condition

Arendt thinks that political philosophy from Plato to Marx has neglected the plurality of humanity and the open-endedness of action (beginning/natality). It has tried to understand political agency on the model of making (or labour and making for Marx) instead – in which humanity is in control of a process and the end product. If we take plurality and natality seriously then we need forgiveness and promise to deal with the inability to control history. Though we cannot fully control events or history by definition, so these are only partial measures, but they are all we have (and some evils are beyond forgiveness).

It is a curious book because it does not offer a straightforward argument in favour of a thesis. Instead it offers a philosophical exposition of ancient Greek history in order to bring to light the dimension of action that has been occluded in western political philosophy. Margaret Canovan suggests (in her Introduction) that it is a phenomenology of labor, work and action, yet there are never any examples of what would count as action. Action ‘appears in the guise of a miracle’, because it bucks statistical trends (178). And although for the Greeks, normal behaviour must be judged by moral standards, taking account of aims, consequences, motives and intentions, but ‘action can be judged only by the criterion of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis.’ All of which suggests that actions in the technical sense are outside the norm, challenge how things have been done up till now. But how often does this happen? And how useful is this as an interpretation of politics if it doesn’t happen often? If the coalition government is trying to re-structure the state at national and local levels and society too, does that count as an action? It is certainly not without precedent, and people make moral and political arguments for an against, so it wouldn’t seem to count as action, even though it is potentially a major change in Britain’s political culture. So what would count as an action? A revolution? But again, people make arguments for and against revolutions. If one tries to think of what the Greek citizens of the polis might have done – build some infrastructure, donate money for a war, pay for a festival – none of it seems unusual in the life of the polis, which is the context from which she derives her idea of action. Arendt points out that the Greeks saw performance as the highest type of human activity (whereas modernity denigrates them as unproductive) and that performance was taken as a model for political action. So she hints at seeing political action as a performative affair, but in contrast to what? Following procedures? But not all of politics consists in following procedures.

Whilst very suggestive about political philosophy as a tradition, and in the suggestion of forgiveness and promise as a response to plurality, The Human Condition would have been more perspiscacious with some examples.

Refugees: Bretherton and Arendt

My local church has helped various asylum seekers over the last several years: acquiring furniture, buying supermarket cards from them so they can shop where they choose, driving them to hospital, writing to the local MP on their behalf, witnessing for them in court. We now work in conjunction with the Boaz Trust and several other local churches to provide a meal and a place to sleep for destitute asylum seekers during the cold months. According to Bretherton’s guidelines, the church should act locally first but also try to act structurally rather than just respond pastorally. Bretherton also suggests that churches should decide who is the particular neighbour to be loved in their context, and I think he gets it exactly right when he chooses refugees as the neighbour to be loved in the national context. From first hand experience I know that the government regularly violates the human rights of refugees. I’ve known single mothers of young children treated like violent criminals; young children and parents forcibly separated for long periods of time; children’s health jeopardized by ignoring the advice of doctors; not to mention uninterested state-provided lawyers failing to change cut-and-paste forms to reflect information accurately. Many of the asylum seekers I know have been kept in limbo for years waiting to hear if they are successful or if they will be sent back to danger; imagine the stress of that situation; nor can they work in the meantime. And this mistreatment is compounded by the government’s frequent scapegoating of refugees, and the way it arbitrarily fixes numbers of how many to accept (surely such numbers should partly be a response to events which drive people from their homes over which we have no control). Its approach to students from abroad is equally about pandering to votes and extremely unhelpful to universities.

All of this suggests a group of people that our politics and society fails and positively mistreats. That may be reason enough to regard them as the neighbour requiring our help. But reading Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism I was struck by her comments on the mob. ‘The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented.’ It is a caricature of the people but it is not the people and should not be mistaken as such, and yet sometimes it is and its demands given some due. I would submit that groups such as the English Defence League are Britain’s contemporary mob and their target is, of course, above all the refugee. ‘While it is a mistake to assume that the mob preys only on Jews, the Jews must be accorded first place among its favorite victims.’ And yet the ‘fickleness of the mob is proverbial.’ Arendt first uses the term ‘mob’ in her discussion of the Dreyfus affair, and it is this line that is really chilling: ‘Not only the mob but a considerable section of the French people declared itself, at best, quite uninterested in whether one group of the population was or was not to be excluded from the law.’ The plight of refugees is strangely absent from our media and public debate, from public consciousness, but this silence is in some sense a complicity with the mob. Bretherton points us to the Citizens for Sanctuary movement as a beginning for action.