Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. Volume 1: Antisemitism. Chapter 4: The Dreyfus Affair

Much has been written about the Dreyfus Affair which happened in France in 1894. The topic has also attracted a number of film makers. For Hannah Arendt, this case, to which she devotes an entire chapter in Part 1 of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, provides an early example of the manifestation of extreme antisemitism, and a dress rehearsal for the antisemitism of the Nazis. But despite the fact that, at the time, antisemitism was worse in France than in Germany, it didn’t turn into totalitarianism. French antisemites remained nationalists. Nevertheless, this was one of the significant political events in French history in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

In this chapter, Arendt unpicks and seeks to understand the events that led to the Dreyfus Affair. As mentioned above these are well documented, but Arendt spends the first part of this chapter outlining the facts of the case.

Part 1: The Facts of the Case

My understanding of these (in brief) from Arendt’s writing and elsewhere is as follows.

Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish officer of the French General Staff. He was the only Jew in the French military. When it was discovered that secret French documents were being sent by a French Officer to the German Embassy in Paris, the military determined that the spy must be a foreigner. The only person who could be classed a ‘foreigner’ in their terms was Alfred Dreyfus because he was a Jew. Spurious evidence was concocted, on the basis of dubious handwriting analysis to support the accusation of treason against Dreyfus who was charged and court-martialled in October 1894 and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Not only this but he was publicly humiliated and stripped of his military uniform and sword in front of a baying mob whose antisemitic prejudices against Dreyfus and Jews in general had been incited by Edouard Drumont writing in La Libre Parole.

Dreyfus had no hope of a fair trial. The ministry of war placed a file of secret and in some cases forged documents before the tribunal that Dreyfus’ attorney was not allowed to see. Further, unverified and false testimonies against Dreyfus were presented at the secret trial. The court quickly found Dreyfus guilty of treason. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. (Holocaust Encyclopaedia)

Alfred Dreyfus was innocent and was eventually exonerated in 1906 and reinstated in the military, but not before spending four years on Devil’s Island, then having to endure a retrial at which the military ensured he was found guilty again despite having proof that another officer, a French major, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, was the guilty party. Dreyfus also had to agree to a pardon (seen as an admission of guilt) in order to save his family from further humiliation and distress.

The significance of this case for Arendt’s argument is that the case divided France into supporters of Dreyfus and those against him. The anti-Dreyfusards were powerful – the military, the Catholic Church, the right wing, and antisemites in general. The military in particular were anxious about potentially losing their power by being proved wrong about Dreyfus’ guilt, and ultimately the Dreyfus Affair resulted in the Catholic Church losing its power over the state and in 1905 the formal separation of Church and State in France.  Significant amongst the Dreyfusards were his family, Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, who never believed Dreyfus was guilty, and Emile Zola, as well as the moderate Republicans, Radicals, and Socialists.

….. on January 13, 1898, the Socialist newspaper L’Aurore published an open letter from the novelist Emile Zola to the president of the republic, Felix Faure. Titled “J’accuse!” (“I  Accuse”), the letter accused the government of antisemitism, lack of evidence against Dreyfus, judicial errors, and illegal jailing of Dreyfus. (Holocaust Encyclopaedia)

In seeking to defend Dreyfus, Zola ultimately had to flee France for England, for fear of imprisonment himself. The political implications of the Dreyfus case lasted for years. Arendt writes (p.120):

‘Down to our times the term Anti-Dreyfusard can still serve as a recognized name for all that is anti-republican, antidemocratic, and antisemitic.’

‘Jews in France and around the world were shocked that a thoroughly acculturated French Jew like Alfred Dreyfus, who had demonstrated his loyalty to the state and served in the military, could not receive a fair trial and instead became the victim of such vehement anti-Jewish hatred. For Theodor Herzl, this seemed to prove that assimilation was no defence against antisemitism, leading him to believe that Zionism and the creation of a Jewish State would be the only solution to the problem of antisemitism.’ (Holocaust Encyclopaedia)

In the 20^th century hatred of the Jews and suspicion of the State continued to grow. Arendt started to research the Dreyfus Affair in 1933. She wanted to understand the relation between antisemitism in France in the late 19^th century and antisemitism as it emerged in Germany. Although she thought that the Dreyfus Affair was a dress rehearsal for Nazism, she noted that French antisemitism stayed within the framework of typical 19^th century ideology. It didn’t become supernational or internationalist.  

Part 2: The Third Republic and French Jewry

The Panama Scandal

In the second part of this chapter, Arendt argues that the Dreyfus Affair, and the development of antisemitism in France, had its roots and origins in the Panama Affair. This related to the failed attempt in the French Third Republic in 1892 of a French company to build the Panama Canal. 800,000 French citizens had invested in this venture and ultimately lost their money. The scandal related to the corruption associated with this failure. The French government took bribes to cover up the failure, and whilst French citizens lost their money, financiers and politicians pocketed large amounts of money.

As in the later Dreyfus Affair, the French government looked about for who to blame and alighted on two Jews of German origin, Baron Jacques Reinach and Cornelius Hertz, who were not among the bribed government members or on the company’s board, but were middlemen. They were responsible for distributing the bribe money. Their actions were significant in ensuring that an obscure antisemitic daily newspaper ‘La Libre Parole’, founded by French antisemitic journalist, Edouard Drumont, was transformed into one of the most influential papers in France and thus paved the way for the Dreyfus Affair.

Part 3: Army and Clergy Against the Republic

In Part 3 of this chapter Arendt discusses the role of the army and the clergy in the Dreyfus affair and how

‘The refusal of the state to democratize the army and to subject it to the civil authorities entailed remarkable consequences’ (p.130)

Throughout the time of the Dreyfus Affair, the republic never dared to dominate the army and the clergy. Both the army and the Church were instrumental in promulgating the antisemitism surrounding the Dreyfus Affair, but ultimately both lost their political influence over the state as a result of the Dreyfus case.

Part 4: The People and the Mob

In this part Arendt develops ideas which she will come back to later in the book. She starts this section of the chapter by writing that it is a fundamental error to regard ‘the mob as identical with rather than as a caricature of the people’ (p.138). She goes on to define the mob as:

‘…. primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented. This makes it so easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also comprises all strata of society. While people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob will always shout for the ‘strong man’, the ‘great leader’. For the mob hates society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament where it is not represented.’ (p.138)

It was high society and politicians of the French Third Republic, with their scandals and frauds that produced the mob.

‘There can be no doubt that in the eyes of the mob the Jews came to serve as an object lesson for all the things they detested. If they hated society they could point to the way in which the Jews were tolerated within it; and if they hated the government they could point to the way in which the Jews had been protected by or were identifiable with the state. Whilst it is a mistake to assume that the mob preys only on Jews, the Jews must be accorded first place among its favorite victims.

Excluded as it is from society and political representation, the mob turns of necessity to extraparliamentary action.’ (p.139/140)

The army, the Church and the police were all complicit in organizing and inciting the mob, such that the cry ‘Death to the Jews’ swept the country (p.144). And the Catholic Church used the Catholic Press to spread antisemitism across France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, being the first to link antisemitism to imperialism.

The intellectual elite came to be nihilists, thinking the world was so corrupt that society had to be destroyed. Out of moral repugnance they came to support the mob in their desire to tear society down. A few people tried to protect France from the mob, for example Picquart (the French army counter-intelligence chief who eventually proved that Dreyfus had been wrongly accused) did not feel that the end justified the means and tried to do what was right for his country and for Dreyfus. But according to Roger Berkowitz and Hannah Arendt, the hero of the story is not Picquart, nor Dreyfus, but Clemenceau, French statesman and Prime Minister of France from 1906-1909, who fought for Dreyfus’ acquittal, not because there had been a miscarriage of justice, but on the basis of ‘abstract’ ideas such as justice, liberty, and civic virtue. Clemenceau believed that ‘an infringement of the rights of one man was an infringement of the rights of all’ (p.147).

There are two more parts in this chapter in which Arendt briefly discusses The Jews and the Dreyfusards (Part 4) and The Pardon and Its Significance (Part 5). In her final paragraph to this final chapter of Book 1. Antisemitism, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt writes:

‘Thus closes the only episode [The Dreyfus Affair] in which the subterranean forces of the nineteenth century enter the full light of recorded history. The only visible result was that it gave birth to the Zionist movement – the only political answer Jews have ever found to antisemitism and the only ideology in which they have ever taken seriously a hostility that would place them in the center of world events.’ (p.156)

The only answer for the Jews was to leave and form their own country.

Final Note

This is the fifth and final post about Hannah Arendt’s Book 1 in The Origins of Totalitarianism in which she focuses on unpicking and trying to understand the rise of antisemitism, which ultimately led to totalitarianism in Europe. Here are the links to my previous posts.

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. Prefaces

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. Chapter 1: Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. Volume 1: Antisemitism. Chapter 2: The Jews, the Nation-State, and the birth of Antisemitism

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. Volume 1: Antisemitism. Chapter 3: The Jews and Society

I think it is worth noting, before moving on to the next book in The Origins of Totalitarianism in which Arendt tries to understand the role of imperialism as an origin of totalitarianism, that Arendt’s work on antisemitism was not without its critics.

See for example this paper  Hannah Arendt’s Analysis Of Antisemitism In The Origins Of Totalitarianism: A Critical Appraisal. by Peter Staudenmaier, Marquette University

The Abstract of this paper reads as follows:

Hannah Arendt’s seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with an extended study of the history of antisemitism. Many of Arendt’s arguments in this groundbreaking text have been challenged by other scholars. Examining the chief contours of Arendt’s account of the rise of modern antisemitism, Staudenmaier offers detailed reasons for approaching her conclusions sceptically while appreciating the book’s other virtues. Arendt’s repeated reliance on antisemitic sources, her inconsistent analysis of assimilation, her overstated distinction between social and political dimensions of anti-Jewish sentiment, and her emphasis on partial Jewish responsibility for antisemitism indicate fundamental problems with her interpretation of the historical record. A thorough critical appraisal of Arendt’s argument offers an opportunity for both her admirers and her detractors to come to terms concretely with the contradictory aspects of her historical legacy.

Despite this, I admire Arendt’s courage and willingness to put her head above the parapet in her attempt to understand antisemitism, its origins, and how this could ultimately lead to totalitarianism. Even more so because she herself was subject to antisemitism. Furthermore, it seems to me that some of her text speaks so directly to what we are witnessing in the world today. For example:

While people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob will always shout for the ‘strong man’, the ‘great leader’. For the mob hates society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament where it is not represented.’ (p.138)

References

Hannah Arendt (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Random House, UK

Hannah Arendt Center: Origins of Totalitarianism (#5, 2023) The Dreyfus Affair

Holocaust Encyclopedia. Antisemitism

Wikipedia. Dreyfus Affair

Acknowledgement

I would not be able to read Hannah Arendt with much understanding, or write these posts, without the support of The Hannah Arendt Center’s Director, Roger Berkowitz’s talks and explanations.

Season’s Greetings at the end of 2023

Today in my inbox, I have received this year-end message from Roger Berkowitz, Founder of the Hannah Arendt Center

In a world of intense polarization, amidst the perils of ideological fantasies, and the failure of politics, we need Hannah Arendt’s imagination of a politics based on talking and thinking with others whom we disagree with and yet can respect. Arendt is the political thinker of the moment because she offers a path forward to the re-constitution of a pluralist and federated democracy, one not committed to centralized power or one national, ethnic, or racial identity.

In recent months I have been trying to follow the Hannah Arendt Center’s reading of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is wonderfully supported by Roger Berkowitz. Due to personal circumstances, I have not been successful in keeping up with the group, but I completely agree that Arendt is a political thinker of the moment and I wonder how many of our global leaders are familiar with her work. I intend to continue reading her book and following the group, although this will have to be in my own time, which will mean that I will not keep up with the reading group.

I also agree with Berkowitz when he writes that ‘we need Hannah Arendt’s imagination of a politics based on talking and thinking with others whom we disagree with and yet can respect’.

This sentiment closely aligns with that of Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, whose podcast – The Rest is Politics – I have been following this year. Their mantra is to disagree agreeably, and it is amazing to see how, despite their different political beliefs and differences, they are able to find common ground and indeed disagree agreeably. A lesson for us all. And I can recommend Rory Stewart’s book Politics on the Edge, which is shocking, eye-opening and enjoyable in equal measure. It has made me want to spend a day in the House of Commons and get a sense of it all for myself.

In a personally challenging year, it has been enlightening and sustaining to follow the Hannah Arendt Center’s work and The Rest is Politics podcast. Equally good from Stewart and Campbell is their Leading podcast, where they interview past and present leaders about their political beliefs, policies, experience and decisions. One episode it’s worth listening to is how Alastair Campbell and Theresa May manage to disagree agreeably.

Also this year, I have been reminded once again about the sustaining power of art. My garden is a constant source of joy and aesthetic stimulation. For me the importance of a garden, any garden, when life feels constrained, cannot be overestimated. My favourite garden (apart from my own) is Gresgarth Hall Garden, which has the advantage of being nearby.

I had intended at the beginning of this year to visit it every month and take photos which would capture the changing seasons, but again, personal circumstances would not allow for this. But it is a particularly beautiful and uplifting garden. This photo was taken in September.

I have also been so fortunate to see the exhibitions of three wonderful female artists this year – Julie Brook, Marina Abramović and Paula Rego. Such strong women, who have overcome the odds to produce amazing work. Here are three of my photos taken in their exhibitions which maybe will prompt you to explore their work further.

Julie Brook

Marina Abramović

Paula Rego

Every year is another year of learning and this year I have learned a lot about our local health services. Health issues (not my own) have dominated my life this year. In the UK we are so fortunate to have the National Health Service. It is not perfect, but I do not think we would have survived this year without it and all the wonderful people who work in it. I can’t imagine what it must be like living in a country which does not provide this service.

I am hoping that 2024 will be a better year, in the sense of being less challenging, demanding and worrying, both on a personal and global level.  

To anyone who reads this blog – thank you. I wish you all the very best for 2024, with hope for a more peaceful and stable world.

Jenny

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. Volume 1: Antisemitism. Chapter 3: The Jews and Society

Political and social antisemitism

In Chapter 2 Hannah Arendt puts forward her view that there is a distinction between political antisemitism and social antisemitism and that political antisemitism is dangerous (the Jews are associated with the state and blamed for the failings of the state, which a certain class finds opposed to their interests) whereas social antisemitism is not in itself so dangerous as it is about discrimination (as well as attraction) and does no great harm, in the sense that it does not result in the killing or imprisoning of Jews.

But Arendt says political antisemitism would not have been as dangerous had it not been preceded by social antisemitism, which raises the question of why Arendt chose to discuss political antisemitism first. She explains this as follows:

Antisemitism, having lost its ground in the special conditions that had influenced its development during the nineteenth century, could be freely elaborated by charlatans and crackpots into that weird mixture of half-truths and wild superstitions which emerged in Europe after 1914, the ideology of all frustrated elements.

Since the Jewish question in its social aspect turned into a catalyst of social unrest, until finally a disintegrated society recrystallized ideologically around a possible massacre of Jews, it is necessary to outline some of the main traits of the social history of emancipated Jewry in the bourgeois society of the last century. (p.68)

In Chapter 3 Arendt discusses the rise of the mob in the 1920s and 30s, who saw Jews as the essential cause of all evils. This made political antisemitism possible and more dangerous.

To reiterate the distinction between political and social antisemitism:

Political antisemitism is antisemitism that views Jews as a group separate in society and associated with the state – a group that is both separate and privileged from society and other classes. (This was discussed in Chapter 2).

Social antisemitism emerges from Jews’ separateness but also from rising equality in society – ‘the growing equality of Jews with all other groups’ (p.69)

The rise of equality as a cause of social antisemitism

The notion that rising equality, which could be regarded as a basic requirement of a just society, can result in social discrimination is a key point in this chapter.  Arendt suggests that the more equal conditions are the more difficult it is to find explanations for differences between people, ‘and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become’ (p.69). Once we say all the world is equal, then poverty is not simply the way the world is, but is your own fault. This echoes the thoughts of Nietzsche who thought democracy and equality two of the cruellest ideas ever imported into the world, since they make any failure your own fault. This breeds resentment in those of lower status.

For Arendt a challenge of the modern era is that we confront each other without the protection of differing circumstances. We are not equal, so we have to come up with reasons for inequality which is dangerous.

‘Whenever equality becomes a mundane fact in itself, without any gauge by which it may be measured or explained, then there is one chance in a hundred that it will be recognized simply as a working principle of a political organization in which otherwise unequal people have equal rights; there are ninety-nine chances that it will be mistaken for an innate quality of every individual, who is ‘normal’ if he is like everybody else and ‘abnormal’ if he happens to be different. This perversion of equality from a political into a social concept is all the more dangerous when a society leaves but little space for special groups and individuals, for then their differences become all the more conspicuous.’ (p.69)

This led to social resentment of Jews and attraction to them. Arendt writes how painful this is for Jews, to assimilate but not assimilate (‘acceptance by non-Jewish society was granted them only as long as they were clearly distinguished exceptions from the Jewish masses’ p. 71) and to be a Jew but not a Jew (exceptional Jews knew that to be accepted in society they had to be Jews but not like Jews, p.71). Arendt understood the pain of social discrimination but nevertheless she did not believe it to be as harmful as political discrimination.

The remainder of the chapter, which starts with the ideas discussed in the previous paragraph, is written in three parts.

1. Between Pariah and Parvenu
2. The Potent Wizard
3. Between Vice and Crime

I am not going to attempt to cover the challenging content of these three parts, but instead make brief reference to what I see as some key points.

Between Pariah and Parvenu

A Pariah = a social outcast

A Parvenu = a person of humble origin who has recently gained wealth, fame, and power, e.g., the nouveau riche

For Jews, education became their ticket for acceptance; they not only had to separate themselves, but also be exceptional people. The pain of assimilation for the Jews is that you can only assimilate into an antisemitic society by assimilating into antisemitism.

‘Emancipation would liberate the educated Jews, together with the ‘backward’ Jewish people, and their equality would wipe out that precious distinction, upon which, as they were very well aware, their social status was based’ (p.76)

In this part of Chapter 3, Arendt raises the notion of the phantom of ‘the Jew’ (p.78). To be accepted in society the Jews had to be assimilated yet separate, to be exceptional educated people, to be Jews but not Jews – ‘a man in the street and a Jew at home’ (p.86) The phantom Jew embraced the idea of a Jew, ignoring the differences between them. The Jews lost their religion, and Jewishness moved towards being thought of as an internal psychological trait. Four psychological types were recognised. The assimilated pariah, the parvenu, the conformist and the conscious pariah. Some think that Arendt herself ‘consciously sought the status of pariah’ and that her ‘way of life was that of the pariah’ (Pinkoski, 2019, Hannah Arendt: Thinking Pariah)

The Potent Wizard

In this part Arendt presents a case study of Benjamin Disraeli as the great man of the ‘exception Jews’. Disraeli was able to assimilate and yet remain separate, taking pride in his Jewish privilege, embracing Jewishness, and believing that Jews were the chosen people.

‘He played the game of politics like an actor in a theatrical performance, except that he played his part so well that he was convinced by his own make-believe.’ (p.88)

Disraeli was the perfect example of a parvenu, who exploited his Jewishness to advance his political career.

Yet Arendt strongly condemns the parvenu. By allowing other political and social traditions to define him, the parvenu separates himself from the Jewish people and conforms to a society that discriminates against actual Jews. The parvenu helped turned Jews from a national or a religious group into a social or psychological character, “Jewishness.” The parvenu thus made twentieth-century antisemitism possible. Nineteenth-century antisemitism aimed either to convert Jews or to assimilate them. Since Jews seldom did either, they were generally left alone. But “Jewishness” cannot be assimilated or dissolved through conversion. It must be either accepted or eliminated. (Pinkoski, 2019, Hannah Arendt: Thinking Pariah)

Between Vice and Crime

The allowance of Jews into society was not because Jews were thought of positively, but rather because of a fascination with vice. Arendt points out that crime can be punished but a vice is part of your identity. People with vices are not necessarily criminals. The rise of vice and emergence of love for vice was part of the decadence of the 19^th century. The Jews could be seen as people with vices, people to be looked down upon, but nevertheless people who could be assimilated into society. They were fascinating but not criminals and therefore were not subject to punishment. But this understanding of Jews as people with vices led to them being thought of as being predisposed to be criminal, for which they could, and were ultimately, punished. Thus, Jews lived/live on the edge between vice and crime.

References

Hannah Arendt (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Random House, UK

Hannah Arendt Center: Origins of Totalitarianism (#4, 2023) The Jews and the Society

Acknowledgement

I would not be able to read Hannah Arendt with much understanding, or write these posts, without the support of The Hannah Arendt Center’s Director, Roger Berkowitz’s talks and explanations.

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. Volume 1: Antisemitism. Chapter 2: The Jews, the Nation-State, and the birth of Antisemitism

This is a long and difficult chapter, with lots of footnotes, facts, and names to try and remember, so much so that it’s easy to get lost.

The emergence of the hatred of the Jews has to be understood through forms of government in the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries. It wasn’t just eternal or cultural antisemitism (see my last blog post); something else was at play.

Arendt distinguishes between political and social antisemitism which she believed to be importantly different. Social antisemitism leads to discrimination, but political antisemitism seeks to take away a citizen’s rights. This distinction is not made today. Political antisemitism is dangerous and Arendt in her writing wanted to understand when and why the shift from social to political antisemitism occurred.

‘Modern antisemitism must be seen in the more general framework of the development of the nation-state, and at the same time its source must be found in certain aspects of Jewish history and specifically Jewish functions during the last centuries.’ (p.12)

Chapter 2 is about political antisemitism. Chapter 3 is about social antisemitism. Arendt sees the rise of antisemitism as a political factor related to the rise of the nation-state in the 17^th century and the beginning of the breakdown of the nation-state by the late 19^th century.

Chapter 2 is divided into 5 parts:

1. The Equivocalities of Emancipation and the Jewish State Banker
2. Early Antisemitism
3. The First Antisemitic Parties
4. Leftist Antisemitism
5. The Golden Age of Security

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries Jews (largely wealthy banker Jews) were court Jews. They were connected across Europe but not as citizens. They were not national, but international. They did not want to assimilate but rather to maintain their difference as Jews and keep their privileges. This suited the nation states which needed the Jews’ financial capital and expertise. These banker Jews were equal but equal differently; they were equal by being granted privileges. Interestingly, whilst the wealthy banker Jews became court Jews and benefited from equal rights as citizens, poorer Jews were not considered equal. So, there was not equality across the Jewish population.

This situation suited the wealthy banker Jews. It allowed them to still be Jews. They did not have to assimilate. And it allowed them to keep poor brethren in Eastern Europe separate from them.

However, all this meant that the wealthy banker Jews had no political history or experience. They never had their own state, so they never pursued Jewish politics. They had economic importance but no political power.

After the French Revolution with the rise of the nation state and the equalisation of citizenship, privileges were no longer the preserve of the court Jews but also for larger wealthy classes of Jews. These new nation states needed capital and needed the whole Inter-European Jewish system of moneylending.

But with the rise of imperialism, the Jews lost their competitive and exclusive position and strong connection with the state. Jewish wealth became insignificant.

‘… the non-national, inter-European Jewish element became an object of universal hatred because of its useless wealth, and of contempt because of its lack of power.’ (p.19)

With the rise of equality, the nobility began to lose their privileges and with this came the beginnings of political antisemitism.

‘It is an obvious, if frequently forgotten, rule that anti-Jewish feeling acquires political relevance only when it can combine with a major political issue, or when Jewish group interests come into open conflict with those of a major class in society.’ (p.36)

By the end of the 19^th century Western Jewry had disintegrated together with the nation-state. ‘The beginnings of the modern antisemitic movement date back everywhere to the last third of the nineteenth century.’ (p.44). The first antisemitic parties began to appear in the last 20 years of the 19^th century when the lower middle classes were seriously hurt by financial scandal and fraudulent affairs, leading to social resentment and bitter hatred of the Jews. (p.47)

Although the first antisemitic parties were small, they claimed to be a party ‘above all parties’ and ‘announced clearly their aspiration to become the representative of the whole nation, to get exclusive power, to take possession of the state machinery, to substitute themselves for the state.’ (p.49). They also claimed to be supranational, uniting antisemites across national borders.

Nineteenth century antisemitism as a political movement dominated France for almost a decade but as an ideological force ‘it reached its most articulate form in Austria’ (p.53). In Austria antisemitism emerged as whole classes of people sought to destroy the state so that they could reunite with their brethren in Germany and Switzerland. They saw the state as the obstacle to their goals. It was at this time that antisemitism began to transition into totalitarianism.

There is very much more in this chapter than I can cover here, but the key argument that Arendt is putting forward is that it is political antisemitism that is dangerous and that it is political antisemitism that leads to totalitarianism. Political antisemitism begins with the fundamental function of Jewish bankers who acquired equality not through assimilation into the nation state but through privileges. As the nation state began to fall apart in the late 19^th century, Jews became the enemy, resented for their wealth, and perceived power, and political antisemitism emerged.

References

Hannah Arendt (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Random House, UK

Hannah Arendt Center: Origins of Totalitarianism (#3, 2023) The Jews, the Nation-State, and the Birth of Antisemitism

Acknowledgement

I would not be able to read Hannah Arendt with much understanding, or write these posts, without the support of The Hannah Arendt Center’s Director, Roger Berkowitz’s talks and explanations.

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. Chapter 1: Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense

In this first volume of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt attempts to articulate how antisemitism (a particular form of racism, a particular secular ideology) came to play a role in the rise of totalitarianism in Germany and the Soviet Union. In this first chapter of Volume 1, she asks how was it that such a small and seemingly unimportant group of people as the Jews, came to play such an outsized and important role in the war, totalitarianism, and the death factories. In this chapter Arendt seeks to understand what seems outrageous and tells us that common sense doesn’t help us.

Totalitarianism is completely anti common sense. Why would you want to forgo a comfortable, peaceful life to go to war, expending enormous amounts of energy, money, and human capital to kill six million people, a small group of seemingly unimportant people? It doesn’t make sense. It’s insanity. Arendt thought that the forces of insanity that oppose common sense can be summed up in the idea of scientific hope in human omnipotence versus despair at powerlessness. Two sides of the same coin, progress and doom, science, and determinism. These two forces go back and forth.

‘Such discrepancies between cause [the unimportance of the Jewish question] and effect [the fact that it set ‘the whole infernal machine in motion’] outrage our common sense, to say nothing of the historian’s sense of balance and harmony’ (p.3)

Arendt begins this chapter by asking, Is antisemitism important? It shouldn’t be. Of course, it is important to the Jews, but as Arendt points out the Jews were a small group of people. Most people can’t believe that antisemitism is important to the rise of Nazism, seeing it as either an accident that it was chosen by the Nazis as an ideology, or propaganda used to sway the masses, but not central to Nazi ideology.

Arendt believed that our outrage at what happened and our belief that it’s just not common sense for antisemitism to be so important leads us to minimise it. But we need to take antisemitism seriously. It was the driving force of Nazi ideology.

How do you take antisemitism seriously? Firstly, by understanding what antisemitism is not. Arendt believed that we have not understood antisemitism because we have made four mistakes, hasty explanations all of which are wrong. In this Chapter Arendt focuses on clearing the ground of these four mistakes.

Nationalism: Antisemitism is related to rising nationalism that sees Jews as foreigners and a threat to the nation.

Arendt believed that it is historically and factually wrong to think of antisemitism as a product of nationalism.

‘Unfortunately, the fact is that modern antisemitism grew in proportion as traditional nationalism declined, and reached its climax at the exact moment when the European system of nation-states and it precarious balance of power crashed.’ (p.3).

This is a period of imperialism and internationalism, not of nationalism.

Power: Antisemitism emerged because the Jews had power and people were jealous.

Arendt points out that this too is factually wrong:

• Most Jews were poor and powerless.
• Some Jews, in the 17^th, 18^th and early 19^th centuries, became wealthy, but in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries wealthy Jews were losing their power. Antisemitism emerged as the Jews were losing their power. Power for Arendt is valuable, has a function and is important. The aristocracy could have power and the Jews could have power and be respected for this power. They only came to be hated when they were losing their power and wealth, which came to be seen as without visible function and therefore not to be tolerated. Arendt points out that we don’t hate power, we hate unjust power. Only when it is being lost does it suddenly seem unjustified.

Scapegoating: Antisemitism emerged because the Jews were seen as scapegoats. The Nazis needed someone to blame. The Jews were an arbitrary choice.

‘The best illustration – and the best refutation – of this explanation, dear to the hearts of many liberals, is in a joke which was told after the first World War. An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? asks the one. Why the Jews? asks the other.’ (p.6)

Arendt didn’t believe that the Jews were an arbitrary choice. She thought there must be a reason why the Jews were picked. The Jews were not to blame in any way, but they must have been part of the reason. Arendt returns to her belief that in order to understand why the Jews were picked by the Nazis we have to ask hard and uncomfortable questions.

Eternal antisemitism: The fallacy of eternal antisemitism, i.e., the idea that people throughout history have always hated and persecuted the Jews so it was not a problem for the Nazis to embrace this (it took away their responsibility) or for the Jews to embrace it, as it was a desperate and excellent means for keeping the Jews together.

Arendt believed that the danger of the eternal antisemitism thesis is that it absolves the Nazis of responsibility and normalises and justifies antisemitism.

For Arendt, points 3 and 4 deny specific Jewish responsibility.

‘Antisemitism, far from being a mysterious guarantee of the survival of the Jewish people, has been clearly revealed as a threat of its extermination. Yet this explanation of antisemitism, like the scapegoat theory and for similar reasons, has outlived its refutation by reality.’ (p.10)

‘It is quite remarkable that the only two doctrines which at least attempt to explain the political significance of the antisemitic movement deny all specific Jewish responsibility and refuse to discuss matters in specific historical terms.’ (p.10)

This controversial argument of Arendt’s upset some members of the reading group who felt that Arendt was wrong to question the responsibility of the Jews. Arendt believed that we have to think about Jewish responsibility to resist antisemitism. We have to understand it, even when it is uncomfortable to do so. We have to risk uncomfortable inquiries and question prejudices and opinions. She was not blaming the Jews. She did not see seeking to understand Jewish responsibility as equivalent to blaming the victim. She did not attach moral blame to the Jews’ willingness to embrace their Jewish separateness, but she did believe that this put them in the position where they could be attacked by those who were blameworthy. For some people in the group, it was not possible to read Arendt with this understanding.

In the final two pages of this chapter Arendt turns to Plato and the Sophists. Plato wanted to create a society based on truth, but the Sophists denied truth and elevated opinion. They understood that everything in politics is about opinion and were masters at manipulating facts to tell a story. Arendt also thought that all politics is about opinion. Arendt writes on p.11,

‘The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the modern wants a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. In other words, one destroyed the dignity of human thought whereas the others destroy the dignity of human action.’

Modern sophists (the antisemites) attack the dignity of human beings and their ability to comprehend. This resisting of reality requires comprehending it even when it is outrageous and uncomfortable. If we accept false explanations for antisemitism because they make us feel better and don’t make us ask the hard question about Jewish responsibility, we fail to comprehend antisemitism and we fail in our own humanity. The only way to resist the evils of antisemitism is to comprehend it. Comprehension means:

‘… the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality – whatever it may be or might have been’. (p.xviii)

In the next three chapters Arendt explores the source of antisemitism.

References

Hannah Arendt (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Random House, UK

Hannah Arendt Center: The Origins of Totalitarianism (#2, 2023: Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense)

Acknowledgement

I would not be able to read Hannah Arendt with much understanding, or write these posts, without the support of The Hannah Arendt Center’s Director, Roger Berkowitz’s talks and explanations.

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. Prefaces

For a change from reading Iain McGilchrist’s book The Matter With Things, which I am only doing very slowly, I have joined the Hannah Arendt Center’s Virtual Reading group, which is based in New York and led by Roger Berkowitz, to read The Origins of Totalitarianism. Both these books explore the challenges our modern world faces, but from very different perspectives. I have written a lot about McGilchrist’s work in the past (see The Matter With Things and The Divided Brain), but much less about Arendt’s work, although I did write a series of posts about her book Between Past and Future. Those posts were also informed by Berkowitz’s videos, which I find invaluable and are openly accessible on YouTube.

The first session of The Origins of Totalitarianism reading group was devoted to an introduction to Hannah Arendt and the three Prefaces at the start of the book. 102 participants attended the online session, some of whom were clearly very well informed about the work of Hannah Arendt. I am not going to make any such assumptions about people who might possibly stumble across this post, and, if only for myself, am going to try and clarify my understanding through this writing and make my posts as clear and succinct as possible. At least, that is my intention, which I may not be able to realise. The Origins of Totalitarianism is a long (over 600 pages) and difficult text. I find Arendt a real challenge to read.

A little about Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

As a Jew, Arendt fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and moved to Paris where she started her work on The Origins of Totalitarianism. When Germany invaded France, she fled again, ultimately moving to New York in 1941, where she settled, becoming an American citizen in 1950. In 1951, she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, originally in London, under the title, The Burden of Our Time.  The thrust of the book is that the burden of our time is to comprehend the rise of totalitarianism – not identify causes, there are too many and it is too complicated for this, but to comprehend and face up to totalitarianism.

The book

The Origins of Totalitarianism is divided into three smaller books, and preceded by four prefaces.

Preface to the First Edition

Preface to Part One: Antisemitism

Preface to Part Two: Imperialism

Preface to Part Three: Totalitarianism

Part 1: Antisemitism

Part 2: Imperialism

Part 3: Totalitarianism  

Although the Prefaces are short, there is a lot more in them than I have referenced here. In this post I am simply noting some of the key points in each Preface.

Preface to the First Edition (written in 1950)

This is only 3 pages long, but is powerful writing. Arendt’s tutor in Germany was Karl Jaspers and she starts this Preface by quoting him.

Weder dem Vergangen aheimfallen noch dem Zukünftigen. Es kommt darauf an, ganz gegenwärtig zu sein. 

Which translates roughly as:

Neither to fall prey to the past nor the future all depends on our being fully present.

A core question of the book is what does it mean to be fully present. Arendt believed that we should not get too caught up in the past. We’ve had tyranny, dictatorship, monarchies, authoritarianism, and democracies, but totalitarianism is none of these. We shouldn’t ignore the past, but totalitarianism is not a new version of tyranny.  It didn’t exist until the 20^th century.

The problems of our time which have led to the rise of totalitarianism.

Arendt identifies these problems as homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness on an unprecedented scale and isolation/loneliness (p.ix), saying:

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest – forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. (p.ix)

It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives’ (p.ix)

In the past human beings lived in communities, families, religious groups, which had a sense of tradition and were largely connected. This gave them a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. In the 20^th century, the old world fell apart and the majority of the world began to live a homeless, rootless, lonely, purposeless, meaningless existence. Arendt thought that this loss of identity led people to seek meaning in a movement. Homelessness and rootlessness are thus the foundational elements of what makes totalitarianism possible. The deep modern need to belong is a problem of our time and totalitarianism is an ever present possibility in our age.

Hannah Arendt lived through totalitarianism and was deeply aware of its evils believing it to be destructive of the essence of man, of human freedom and dignity.

Human dignity is another key idea in the book. The Romans found dignity in nobility, the Christians found dignity in man’s being in the image of God, the rationalists, e.g., Kant, found dignity in man being a rational being, not a means to an end but an end in itself. We have entered an age in which it is perfectly plausible and has happened that governments have made the decision to kill off whole segments of the human race because they find it valuable to do so. Today we have to give up the idea that human dignity means something. Arendt believed that we need a new political principle that will replace the loss of human dignity. We need a new law on earth that can resist totalitarianism, e.g., the right to have rights, the right to be meaningful, to be able to act and speak in ways that matter.

Preface to Part One: Antisemitism (written in 1967 from the perspective of 1967)

Part One looks at the importance of anti-Jewish racism for the rise of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Arendt makes the point that antisemitism and religious Jew-hatred are not the same. She tells us that antisemitism was unknown before the 1870s. Antisemitism as it emerged in the 19^th century is a secular racist ideology.

‘The history of antisemitism, like the history of Jew-hatred, is part and parcel of the long and intricate story of Jewish-Gentile relations under the conditions of Jewish dispersion.’ (p.xiv)

In order to understand antisemitism, we have to understand three facts:

1. The Jews didn’t have a state. They were living always amidst other people.
2. Because they were living amongst other people they depended on Gentiles for protection and safety.
3. Living in non-Jewish lands amidst other people, in order to remain Jewish, the Jews had to separate and dissociate themselves.

The result of this is that once the ideal of equality emerged in the Enlightenment, and once nation states emerged with Jews in them and once Jews begin to think of themselves as having equal citizenship, assimilation becomes an option. The Jews could decide to assimilate and lose their Jewishness. Antisemitism then became in the self-interest of the Jews because it allowed them to justify remaining apart. Antisemitism became an argument for the Jews to remain separate. This is not to blame the Jews in any way for antisemitism, but to understand that racist ideology emerged in the 19^th century to resist assimilation.

For Arendt, understanding, or comprehension, does not mean denying the outrageous. Rather it means ’the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality – whatever it may be or might have been’. (p.xviii)

Preface to Part Two: Imperialism (written in 1967 from the perspective of 1967)

Imperialism is about expansion for expansion’s sake; it is about power politics with no limits, power for power’s sake, which seeks to extend itself across the globe. Imperialism was not a nationalist project; it was an internationalist project. Both Nazism and Bolshevism were internationalist ideologies. In 1967, Arendt asks if we are returning to an imperialist age. The imperialist powers that she examines are the United States and Russia, and potentially China.

Arendt says that the imperialism of the 1960s is not the same as the imperialism of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but not completely different either. The United States and Russia seek expansion for power reasons. Arendt worries that the United States is becoming an imperialist power. She says the US does this through the giving of foreign aid, billions of dollars, in order to increase its power. She also worries about the rise of the security state, an invisible government led by secret services. Arendt was a huge critic of the deep state.

Arendt sees imperialism as one of the key elements in the rise of totalitarianism. ‘Before the imperialist era, there was no such thing as world politics, and without it, the totalitarian claim to global rule would not have made sense’. (p. xxvii)

Preface to Part Three: Totalitarianism (written in 1966 from the perspective of 1966)

The ambition of totalitarianism is enormous. It is to transform diversity into unity. It aims for total domination of the population of the earth and the evisceration of human freedom.

In Part 3, Arendt explores how totalitarianism works in practice, philosophically and sociologically. She looks at the sources of totalitarianism in Germany and the Soviet Union, and how the implementation of mass terror isolated people and made them fully dependent on government.

She asks the questions:

• What happened?

• Why did it happen?

• How could it have happened?

She also asks, ‘whether a study of totalitarianism can afford to ignore what has happened, and is still happening, in China’. (p.xxxi)

Arendt tells us that the word ‘totalitarian’ should be used sparingly and prudently (p.xxxiv) and should not be confused with dictatorships and tyrannies. She warns us that we should avoid any kind of expansionist global ideology because this can lead to totalitarianism.

She lists some of the core elements of totalitarianism.

• the elimination of group solidarity, because when people are members of a group, they are not part of a total government.
• facts that oppose the official fiction have to become non-facts. Totalitarianism creates a fictional world.
• totalitarian governments create multiple layers of bureaucracy that overlap and create parallel functions, because one layer of bureaucracy can become a group solidarity that needs to be opposed. Totalitarianism doesn’t have a stable goal.
• The rise of the police to replace the executive branch – the creation of objective enemies that have committed no crime, e.g., Jews in Nazi Germany or bourgeoise in Soviet Russia. They become enemies of the people simply because of who they are.
• Terror

In this book Arendt looks at two versions of totalitarianism, Nazism in Germany, and Bolshevism in the Soviet Union. She tells us/warns us, that totalitarianism did not end with Nazism and Bolshevism. Totalitarianism is rooted in the true problems of our time.

References

Hannah Arendt (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Random House, UK

Hannah Arendt Center: The Origins of Totalitarianism (#1, 2023: The Prefaces)

Hannah Arendt Center VRG: The Origins of Totalitarianism, Ep. #1, “Introduction” & “Preface to the First Edition”

I found this PDF useful in recognising that there is a long history of antisemitism: Anti-Defamation League (2013). A Brief History of Anti-Semitism

Acknowledgement

I would not be able to read Hannah Arendt with much understanding, or write these posts, without the support of The Hannah Arendt Center’s Director, Roger Berkowitz’s talks and explanations.

The Matter With Things. Chapter 14. Reason’s claims on truth

It is equally excessive to shut reason out and to let nothing else in (Blaise Pascal, 1976)

This is one of three quotes at the start of Chapter 14 in Iain’ McGilchrist’s book The Matter With Things. Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, in which he discusses the question of reason’s claims on truth.

McGilchrist argues that: ‘Reason is extraordinarily important, but going beyond it is also important’ (2022). There are an infinite number of things beyond the power of reason to comprehend, for example, music, which can be life enhancing but not expressed in reason. We tend to see reason in terms of language, i.e., writing down propositions, but there is much that lies beyond language that is very important.

What does it mean to go beyond reason? McGilchrist discusses this question with Alex Gomez-Marin in this video.

In Chapter 14 of his book, McGilchrist explores the relationship between reason’s claims on truth and the hemispheres. In this respect it is not really surprising to find him explaining that reason has two distinct meanings, which are opposed to one another, just as the two hemispheres attend to the world in two distinct ways. One meaning of reason only makes sense in a limited local environment. This one focusses on linear, algorithmic, serial processes, like a machine, and tends to be inflexible (which equates to the left hemisphere’s explicit approach to reason); this contrasts with the second meaning, which sees a number of points of view and focusses on the global and holistic (the right hemisphere’s implicit approach to reason).

McGilchrist tells us that in a number of languages, Greek, Latin, German, there are distinct words for these two kinds of reason: for example, in German, Verstand and Vernunft. But in English we use the same word, ‘reason,’ for two very different phenomena. This can lead to miscommunication as people can be talking about two different things. Thus, McGilchrist chooses to use different words for these two different phenomena. The first is better thought of as rationality (a linear process, abstract, context-independent thrashing out of an algorithm – close to what a computer can be trained to do), the second as reason (understanding in the round; the ability to balance a form of logic with wisdom that comes from experience, everything about the context). A computer cannot be trained to reason.

Reason encompasses rationality, but rationality does not encompass reason. ‘Rationality is exclusive: reason is inclusive, balancing rationality with intuition, emotion and imagination.’ Reason is a more elevated form of knowing (p.549). Imagination is needed for true knowledge and understanding of the world and for wisdom.

To be reasonable is to see things in perspective, in context, to have a sense of proportion, perhaps with a sense of humour, being able to balance things, not being certain, non-mechanistic – not easily found in schizophrenia and autism, and increasingly absent in our modern life.

In this chapter McGilchrist also makes the distinction between compelling minds with reason and awakening minds with reason. Rather than forcing each other through objective reasoning and debate, we can converse and share different points of view. Nietzsche is thought to have said that reason doesn’t solve problems, and Waismann (1968) that reason can never compel, it can only illuminate. Great advances of science and even mathematics are not typically made by reasoning (p.555). ‘… the paths used by scientists, mathematicians and philosophers to reach conclusions are often implicit and are only subsequently and incidentally coupled to an explicit justification.’ (p.565). Philosophy depends on a vision and a vision never results from following abstract procedures. Philosophy is not about arguments. It is about insights, but in modern academic life it has become sterile and too narrowly specialised. In our time, philosophy has become more analytical, and abstract, than it used to be. In the past philosophers such as Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, took broad views and were polymaths; like McGilchrist himself.

The important point is that we can never put something into someone, but (and good educators know this) instead evoke an understanding that is already latent there and comes to us as an insight.

There is always this polarity between what is subjective and what is objective, but reality is an encounter between us and something outside of us – a reciprocal connection. There is such a thing as the objective, we do need to get beyond our own prejudices, but it doesn’t equate to the peculiar disposition of mind where everything that is personal and human has been taken out of the encounter. Objectivity doesn’t make it more real. The way to validate something is to repeatedly examine it with other people, such that we can see what is generally more reliable (this is intersubjective validation). From this perspective objectivity is finding as many points of view as one can before arriving at a conclusion. (This reminds me of a post I wrote in 2017, about objectivity and subjectivity in social research quoting Malcolm Williams as saying that objectivity is socially constructed).

Subjectivity and objectivity are a false dichotomy. Instead, there is a betweenness to reality – both parties contribute. ‘… what I know is real enough, but it is only what I am able to see from where I am: a tiny portion of the whole’. (p.550). From this, ideally philosophy takes place in the second person – not from the objective third person standpoint, nor from the subjective first-person standpoint, but from the intersubjective second person standpoint, the standpoint of betweenness – a modest, honest process that is not grandiose.

‘To find the ‘richest’ view, the one that seems truest to the world as a whole, in the sense that it resonates with our experience in the richest way, the imaginative exercise of inhabiting a number of points of view is required. Seeing things from as many points of view as possible, so that we don’t see them ’meagrely’, is not mere subjectivity. Nor is it falsely claimed objectivity: in different ways it is the opposite of each.’ (p.551)

The importance of reason is that it is a form of shrewdness. It brings questions and other ideas and caution – but reason needs also to scrutinise itself and its own intermediate processes. Reason can never be enough on its own. It’s an intermediate processor, supported by and completed by intuition. ‘Rationality starts and finishes in intuition, which supports it like a pair of massive bookends’ (p.554).

Exactly the sort of things that the reasoning process is not good at is the sort of things that poetry is there to transcend – poetry is there to use language to get beyond language. McGilchrist hopes that in his book he uses reason and language to go beyond both of them to allow his ideas about ‘the matter with things’ to come forward. Reason is a very valuable tool, but it can’t go everywhere. Ratiocentrism is the belief that everything can be encompassed by reason, but reason on its own is powerless, because we need to respond with the whole person, in the context of history and experience. (p.557).

McGilchrist believes in the importance of clarity, but there are certain subject matters that are not well encompassed by language – the spiritual, the religious, the arts. We can talk about them, rationalise them, but in doing so we won’t be able to express the most central thing about them, which is the relationship they induce in us and the awakening they cause.

The process of analysis for clarifying understanding is an illogical assumption because analysis depends on you explaining something in terms of something else, and that something else must introduce another element that is not already in the picture, which itself now needs to be defined and explained – so leading to a never-ending series of defintions and complicating and confusing rather than clarifying.

‘Some things can only be experienced or understood when they are not put to analysis. This is not because analysis defeats them, but because they defeat analysis.’ (p.565)

There is no one way of attending to understand something. Attention is a moral act. We are true to something if we attend it to it carefully. Certain attempts to clarify things will obfuscate them. Some things cannot be clarified in language. Parts of whatever it is are going to be hidden. We can be clear about things but not any further than the subject matter permits.

Whitehead wrote: As we think we live. Adopting a certain way of thinking about the world makes us live our lives in a certain way. McGilchrist believes that in our modern society our way of thinking about the world has become barren and destructive.

In conclusion and to reinforce his main point, McGilchrist says –

Just because reason or rationality can’t solve many problems – it’s not a reason to abandon it. ‘To insist on reason alone is deeply irrational, not to say a sign of mental illness…’ …. ‘But to abandon reason altogether is also deeply irrational.’ (p. 569). Reason is an incredibly important tool in our ways of dealing with experience. In modern life reason is too often neglected. If people use reason in the broader right hemisphere way it would be possible to finesse positions, such that we can see the strengths and the limits in different situations. We seem to be losing the capacity to bring together things that seem to be contradictory – rationality and reason. This is leading to aggression and unfruitful, unedifying public discourse.

References

McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter With Things. Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press.

Wonder and Enchantment in Education

This is a wandering and wondering post.

I often wondered through my career in education, whether it is possible to teach ‘wonder’ in schools. I always thought not.

In his book, The Master and His Emissary (p. 178), Iain McGilchrist quotes Arne Naess as saying, ‘Philosophy begins and ends with wondering – profound wondering.’  And Aristotle wrote ‘For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin, and at first began, to philosophize.’ Also, in ‘The Master and His Emissary’ McGilchrist quotes other philosophers as making similar statements, e.g. Descartes, Wittgenstein, Goethe, Plato, Heidegger.

This suggests that it must be important that children have some experience of a sense of wonder, as it would seem linked to curiosity, a questioning approach to life, and a search for meaning. In other words, children need to be taught to philosophise. But philosophy, if taught at all in our UK schools, seems to be a very low priority subject.

I have a friend who has told me that she has never felt a sense of wonder or awe and that she doesn’t know what it is. From this, can we assume that there are children in our schools who never have an experience of wonder? Can this be true or is it that the language we use is confusing? Is wondering (profound or not) the same as a sense or experience of wonder, and is wonder the same experience as awe? Can children/adults experience awe, wonder and enchantment without knowing it, or is it more that we don’t have the language to express this?

Patrick Curry uses the word enchantment to encompass the experience of awe and wonder, saying that there are degrees of intensity of enchantment from charm to delight to deep enchantment (which we sometimes refer to as joy, or awe). Enchantment is not the same as happiness or pleasure.

In a recent conversation with Iain McGilchrist on YouTube, Patrick Curry draws on his recently published book, Art and Enchantment: How Wonder Works, to explain what he means by this.

I haven’t read his book, but there are points in this video which I think could usefully be noted by teachers when thinking about ensuring that children have experiences of enchantment in their classrooms.

One of the key points that came out of this video for me, is that enchantment (wonder) cannot be willed.  A teacher cannot write a lesson plan to teach wonder! Enchantment is not biddable. It cannot be managed or organised or put to work. Nobody is in charge, but it does require a participatory relationship, in the sense that we have to be open to it. It is personal and relational and takes the form of a meeting or encounter across a gap of differences.

Enchantment is a way of being in the world, of presencing. It is not about knowing but is ontological. As Wittgenstein thought, we’re better to wonder at things than believe that we know them. You can’t possess enchantment or be possessed by it. If you try and put it to work, it cannot bring its gift.

So, what attitude should we (teachers) adopt?

We must create the conditions which favour enchantment – fearless receptivity. We must help/encourage children (and adults) to stay open to it and pay attention to it if it does happen. We know that young children have it but then tend to lose it. Enchantment cannot be micromanaged or controlled. This is to lose it. You can’t make it happen, but you can stop it happening. It requires humility and wildness (which I equate to uncertainty). Ultimately enchantment is love, a non-possessive love, as necessary for the health of humans as sunlight is for life.

My interpretation of the discussion between Patrick Curry and Iain McGilchrist, when related to education and teaching, is that wonder cannot be taught, but the conditions for experiencing it can be created.  These conditions will require the teacher to forego micromanagement and control, to realise that it will not be possible to have planned a learning objective for the lesson, or to assess the outcome of the lesson, to allow for a degree of ‘wildness’ and openness that might be unfamiliar to the teacher and children alike, and to ‘go with the flow’.

I’m not sure whether this is possible in today’s education system where everything is measured, and humanities subjects (philosophy in particular), seem to be awarded so little time in schools where the emphasis is on the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Whilst the STEM subjects can also offer experiences of wonder and enchantment, perhaps we should reflect on Wittgenstein’s comment that ‘Man has to awaken to wonder – and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.’ (quoted by McGilchrist on p.157, The Master and His Emissary).

‘Remember that life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but the moments that take our breath away’. (anonymous)

In this post I have not attempted to cover the conversation between Patrick Curry and Iain McGilchrist in any depth. For that please view the video and read their books:

References

Curry, P. (2023). Art and Enchantment: How Wonder Works (Contemporary Liminality). Routledge.

McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

The Matter With Things. Chapter 13. Institutional science and truth.

McGilchrist opens this chapter with these two aptly chosen quotes which pinpoint the key arguments he is making in this chapter.

‘Most human institutions, by the purely technical and professional manner in which they come to be administered, end by becoming obstacles to the very purposes which their founders had in view.’ (William James, 1909, A Pluralistic Universe)

‘Specialization is for insects.’ (Robert Heinlein, 1973, Time Enough for Love)

This chapter is a bit different to others In The Matter With Things as it focusses less on hemisphere correlates and is not heavily reliant on the hemisphere hypothesis. Instead McGilchrist explores the question of whether we can trust science’s claims on truth and examines the limitations of the institution of science.

I recognised most of the key points McGilchrist makes in this chapter as I think would anyone who has a background in research and publication, especially but not solely if these are related to science. Many of the same issues arise in humanities disciplines. McGilchrist discusses the limitations of the institutions of science under four headings; Specialisation and its impact on original thinking; How reliable is scientific evidence? The problems of publication; and Peer review.

Specialisation and its impact on original thinking.

‘Science is a victim of its own extraordinary success’. (p.502) The explosion of scientific knowledge has led to increasing specialisation, such that scientists can only be an expert in a small area. When even a very good scientist talks about science, unless he is talking about his own area, he is taking it on trust/authority. We need to think about the worthiness of this trust/authority.

Specialisation drives scientific disciplines apart, leads to ‘narrowness, technicalisation and fragmentation, at the expense of breadth, humanity, and synthesis’ (p.508). McGilchrist argues that whilst of course we need specialists, we also need generalists. We need both the flies eye view and the birds eye view. He describes this as follows:

‘If perceiving shapes is how maths and science progress, as I believe it is, you will see those shapes only by rising above the hole where you are digging. The view in the valley floor is good, but if you never climb, you will not know that there are many other valleys, and mountain ranges nearby, which are not only beautiful in themselves, but help you see why good work needs to be done down in the valley floor at all.’ (p.504)

Specialisation also leads to specialised jargon.

‘Increasingly, the heavily acronymic jargon of research papers seems to me to present an almost impenetrable barrier to anyone other than the most highly specialised reader, and even then, if they are to get anything out of the exercise, they must have a huge capacity to tolerate boredom’. (p.507)

(McGilchrist’s writing often makes me smile 😊)

How reliable is scientific evidence?

In this section McGilchrist discusses the problems involved in interpreting data, taking mirror imaging (a way of knowing what is going on in the minds and brains of people) as an example. Brain activity scans are difficult to read accurately. The data require interpretation and therefore cannot be assumed to be objective or truthful. Every way of looking at the brain has its limitations. Whenever you are looking at a complex system, you can’t assume that the bit you are looking at is the crucial one. We should use as many ways as possible to look at the brain, and not rely solely on scanning.

In scientific research, for a result to count as important it must be replicable, reliable, and reproducible, but ‘A survey of 1,576 researchers across scientific disciplines published in Nature revealed that more than 70% of researchers had tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half had failed to reproduce their own experiment.’ (513)

A widely cited paper by John Ioannidis (2005) – ‘Why most published research findings are false’, concludes that most research is not adequately designed to prove what it claims to show, that ‘The hotter the scientific claim, the less likely the research findings are to be true’, and that ‘the greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field the less likely the research findings are to be true’.

There are now huge temptations (in terms of financial and reputational rewards) to commit anything from a minor misdemeanour to recognisable fraud (fabrication of results), and McGilchrist provides examples of these in this chapter.

McGilchrist also includes an Appendix (3) on the reliability of public health policy which makes for interesting reading. If you have cut salt out of your diet, you might want to think again, or read the Appendix!

The problems of publication

Most academics will recognise the exhortation to Publish or Perish!

Institutions put enormous pressure on their staff to publish, whether or not they have anything to say; quantity is more important than quality, as is publishing in high impact journals. This leads to corner cutting and inflation of claims. It also leads to a focus on writing short papers rather than books, which take a long time to write and require fallow periods. McGilchrist’s view is that this is ‘inimical to free thinking.

‘Scientific thinking gets crystallised too early, before it has had a chance to broaden and deepen; there is no longer a chance for ideas to evolve, to enter the necessary fallow period of unconscious gestation, without being prematurely forced into explicit form, and worse still in sliced form, so that what might have come to be a dawning new Gestalt is forever lost. And in the end, science is not about producing data so much as thinking, to which the acquisition of data can be only a prelude or addendum.’ (p. 516/517)

This pressure to publish can also lead to deliberate gaming of the system, where authors chase citations by working in ‘highly populated’ areas of science (even though ‘it is estimated that only 20% of cited papers have actually been read’, p.158), or even pay to have their work published in predatory open journals (See Beall’s list ) As soon as there is payment for publication, the whole system is corrupted.

And then, there are the fake papers. McGilchrist devotes Appendix 2 to some of these – papers such as those that are created by computer programs but nevertheless succeed in getting published, despite being, literally, gibberish.

So, we may ask, what happened to peer review?

Peer review

How effective is peer review? Richard Smith (Editor of the BMJ) wrote that far from being an objective, reliable and consistent process, peer review is ‘a subjective and, therefore, inconsistent process ….. something of a lottery’. (Smith, 2006, ‘Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals). As McGilchrist states:

‘Bias is intrinsic to human life. We just waste a lot of time and money pretending we’re avoiding it, and then kid ourselves that the outcome was ‘objective’ – a more dangerous position, because it introduces complacency and is a much more difficult thing to fight, precisely because of its appearance of objectivity’. (p.529)

Peer review is a laborious progress which takes up researchers’ time, which is given for free, and so takes them away from their own work. Interestingly, McGilchrist tells us that until the 1930s/40s peer review was never part of the publication process. Papers were reviewed by the editorial committee. Einstein, for example, refused to subject his work to peer review – only one of his 310 publications underwent peer review. Presumably once was enough to convince him of the flaws in the process.

There is also evidence that peer review can be prone to bias against innovation and radical new ideas, such that no-one wants to publish a paper that will rock the boat. Those who step out of line pay a huge price. In addition, reviewers have been shown to regularly fail to spot major errors in research, such that the process is obviously open to fraud.

The bottom line is that science is not exempt from human fallibility.

McGilchrist ends this chapter by discussing the need for a new paradigm, one that recognises that the essence of good science is originality and original thinking takes time. Science cannot avoid operating under the existing paradigm, ‘because, without such a paradigm, its findings could not cohere’ (p.536) but working within the prevailing paradigm also ‘militates against those great insights that change the direction of scientific history, despite this being widely believed to be precisely what science is about.’ (p.536)

McGilchrist believes that contemporary science is not scientific enough in that it is not willing to be aware of its limitations. On the concluding page of this chapter, McGilchrist defends science in the following terms:

‘Science is, or should be, a source of wonder that opens out our understanding of the world and gives us one of the touchstones on the path towards truth. Just because science cannot answer all our questions does not mean that it is not the very best way to answer some of them, and a helpful contributor to answering many more. And that there is corrupt practice in science does not make it different from any other human enterprise.’ (p.544)

For discussion of this chapter between Iain McGilchrist and Alex Gomez-Marin, see

References

McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter With Things. Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press.

A HYMN OF LOVE TO THE WORLD – Braiding Sweetgrass

We are almost at the end of 2022, and I do not want to let the year end without mention of this book – Braiding Sweetgrass – by Robin Wall Kimmerer. For me this has been the best book I have read this year. I had better qualify what I mean by ‘best’. It is a beautifully written book – beautiful prose with the feel of poetry. It is easy to read, but by no means superficial; in fact, it is the exact opposite – a deeply meaningful book. It is the book that has had the most impact on me this year. I will never think about Nature, and plants, in the same way again. It is a book full of wisdom and love. It is indeed ‘A hymn of love to the world’ as is quoted by Elizabeth Gilbert on the front cover. Sweetgrass symbolises healing, peace, and spirituality. The three cords of the sweetgrass represent mind, body, and spirit.

Source of Image: https://www.chq.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/CLSC_BraidingSweetgrass.jpg

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a decorated botany professor, a scientist with a non-orthodox approach to science. She currently works as a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology in New York, but most significantly she is the Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. She comes from a Native American background, Potawatomi heritage, and this informs her life and work as a botanist and her approach to science and to our planet.

In her book Kimmerer takes a story telling approach, and through these stories we learn to think of plants not as separate from ourselves, not as ‘things’ we dominate or a resource that we plunder, but as living beings like ourselves with whom we should live in harmony, in the spirit of love, gratitude and reciprocity. Most plants already live with each other in this way, and they can be our teachers. Most importantly, she passes on the teachings of her forefathers in the idea of ‘The Honourable Harvest’; that is, we only take from the ‘Earth’ what we need and use natural resources responsibly. And not only do we not ‘take more than we need’, but we give back, and exist with plants in a relation of reciprocity and gratitude. Robin Wall Kimmerer recounts many stories in the book to illustrate this point.

Source of image: https://www.robinwallkimmerer.com/

The book is so rich with wonderful ‘teachings’ that I could not possibly do justice to it here. If you are a scientist, there are lessons for how to include ideas of beauty and reciprocity into the analytical world of science. If you are a botany teacher there are lessons for how to step back and allow plants to teach your students. If you are a mother, there are lessons you can draw on from how Nature acts as a mother. If you are a gardener, there are lessons you can learn about which plants thrive when planted next to each other and why. If you are a conservationist, there are lessons you can learn about collaboration, cooperation and listening. If you are a medic, there are lessons you can learn about the gift of plants. If you are an artist, there are lessons to be learned from the beauty of Nature.  If you are spiritual, there are lessons you can learn from the legend of Skywoman Falling.

Source of image: https://convergenceus.org/2020/09/15/my-skywoman-fall-again/https://convergenceus.org/2020/09/15/my-skywoman-fall-again/

I would not have come across this book had it not been for the Philosophy of Education Reading Network – the last book of the year to be read and discussed by the group. In our online meeting (zoom) at the beginning of this month, the book was introduced by Louise Hawxwell, who posed these thought-provoking questions for us to discuss, beautifully presented in a lovely set of slides:

You can see from these slides and the questions that Louise asked, that there is far more in this book than I have discussed here. I have barely scratched the surface. Braiding Sweetgrass is a book that deserves to be read many times and it is certainly a book that I will be thinking about when working in my garden next year or caring for my house plants, not to mention reflecting on my personal relationships with humans and non-humans in my life.

References

Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass. Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Penguin Random House, UK.

Postscript

The first book to be read by the Philosophy of Education Reading Network in 2023 (Tuesday 17^th January, 7.00 pm, zoom details posted on Twitter, @PhilofEd) will be Miseducation. Inequality, Education and the Working Classes (21^st Century Standpoints) by Diane Reay