Plurality and Charlottesville

Roger Berkowitz and Samantha Hill spoke this week to incoming First Year students in Bard’s Language and Thinking program about Chapters 24-27 of Hannah Arendt’sArendt’s chapters are about the centrality of plurality to politics, so Berkowitz and Hill took the opportunity to bring Arendt into the conversation around the rise of neo-Nazi and white supremacist violence. The Arendt Center has published a transcript of their conversation

“Samantha Hill: How’s everyone doing? Has everyone been following what’s been going on politically? It’s kind of hard to miss, but not everyone reads the newspaper. It’s been occupying a lot of our thoughts for the past couple of days, and I know yesterday-to me, at least-felt like Inauguration Day. And so I found myself last night going through some of Arendt’s older essays, and I came across one I remember she wrote for a symposium in The New York Times in 1968 responding to the question, Is America By Nature a Violent Society?

Arendt’s contribution was titled “Lawlessness Is Inherent in the Uprooted.” In that essay she takes on questions of race, the Civil Rights Movements, and the use of violence in political movements. She repeats one of her central thoughts about American politics, that “Freedom of Assembly is among the most crucial and cherished and, perhaps, most dangerous rights of American citizens.” We should all take this seriously and think about how freedom of assembly is both central to American democracy and dangerous. Democracy, according to Arendt, is not safe. It is a contest and an engagement. And she celebrated the fact that in the 1960s students others were engaged and became active in politics. She says in this essay, they became “de-alienated” from politics.

But after celebrating the power and success of the peaceful and non-violent Civil Rights Movement, Arendt adds a caution. The power of freedom of assembly and the success of the Civil Rights Movement should not, she writes,

“make us forget that the Ku Klux Klan and the [John] Birch society are also voluntary associations, and no one will deny that the outbreak of violence can be greatly helped by such groups. It is difficult to see how this danger could be eliminated without eliminating freedom of assembly; it is not too high a price to pay for political freedom.”

What Arendt is saying in this quote is that we have to remember that the KKK and other organizations we often associate with words like racism, or bigotry, or hatred, that these are volunteer associations that people join because they have political opinions. And we might really disagree with their political opinions, but they choose to join these organizations. And Arendt is saying that with these organizations, with the freedom of assembly, comes the threat of violence. Further, that the only way we can insure that this violence does not exist is by getting rid of the freedom of assembly; and that’s too high a price to pay. It’s very provocative to think that allowing these organizations to exist and thrive is the price of freedom and democracy.

So, why is Arendt making this argument? For Arendt plurality and politics necessitate one another; they go together. Plurality is a condition of politics, it’s a condition of small ‘d’ democracy, of a democratic society. She defines plurality in The Human Condition and it’s a key part of the first three chapters on action that you’re reading for Language & Thinking. In these passages, she talks about how we appear before one another in as distinct individuals in a public realm, who have the ability to engage one another, and the world around us, with speech and action. And it is this condition of plurality, our distinctness and difference, that is essential to the public, political realm. We cannot foreclose the appearance of individuals, because they might have contentious political views, we must find a way to engage with difference as a democratic practice.

At the beginning of the book Arendt writes:

“Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”

–The Human Condition, 8

And at the opening of Chapter 24, which you’ve read for today, she adds:

“Human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction.”

–The Human Condition, 175

RB:

I think the quote that we started with that Sam read must be understood within the context of Arendt’s thinking on plurality and politics. Voluntary associations are essential for both plurality and politics. So when she says that the KKK and the John Birch Society are voluntary associations, what does she mean?

Arendt has a very important belief about the centrality of voluntary associations to democratic politics. These voluntary associations and the right to public assembly-the right to act and speak in public in ways that matter-are for her the essence of democratic freedom. For people to come together and act together in politics to pursue their ends is what it means to be free. And this is to her the essence of democracy. It’s participation, it’s engagement, it’s acting in concert.

And so when she says that even though the KKK – and we could add now the neo-Nazis – are racist, and clearly violent in the sense that they envision a society built on oppression, exclusion, and violence, they are also expressions of voluntary associations and thus democratic. These fringe groups are at the root of what it means for a group of people who share a common opinion to get together and express that opinion. We need to understand and even appreciate the pluralistic spirit of these protests even as we have the right, and I think, responsibility, to oppose that opinion if we don’t agree with it and to argue strenuously against it; but that doesn’t mean eliminate it.

Arendt’s argument in her essay reminds me of the quote she knew well from Federalist Paper 10 by James Madison, perhaps the most famous quote from our founding era: “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire.” You can’t have fire without air, right? And you can’t have liberty without faction, without disagreement. To seek to abolish faction by taking away liberty is always a seduction, especially when those factions are dangerous and offensive. But the faction that comes from liberty is, in Arendt’s words, “not too high a price to pay for political freedom.”

It is important for us today that we remind ourselves that you can’t have action and speech, you can’t have politics, without plurality. And that means that in all plurality, in all faction, in all disagreement, in all action and speech, there’s going to be both equality and distinction. That means that we are distinguished from the KKK and the neo-Nazis, but we’re also equal to them in a certain way, and we have to hold onto both those ideas. We are, as Arendt says in the quote from the Human Condition, “all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”

This is not to say at all that the KKK and the anti-fascist groups are the same. Plurality does not affirm sameness or equivalency, which is the mistake President Trump made in his initial remarks and then again on Tuesday. Plurality does, however, affirm both our sameness and our difference. And affirming both is important.

I think a good comparison here is that Hannah Arendt later, in 1963, published a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem. One of the things she said in that book is that the Jews who worked in the concentration camps for the Nazis, and the Jews who worked in the ghettoes for the Nazis, were wrong to do so. And people went nuts and said to her, “How can you blame the Jews for the Holocaust?” And she said, I’m paraphrasing here: “I never blamed the Jews for the Holocaust. I said they were wrong. That doesn’t mean they were at fault for the Holocaust. The Nazis are at fault for the Holocaust.” It’s not an equivalence. And yet she also wanted to say the Jews were wrong. And I think there is a parallel to what’s going on today. We can and should say that those on the left who are engaging in violence are wrong without in any way saying they’re responsible for what’s going on or that there’s an equivalence.

And why are those on the left engaging in violence wrong? That’s an important question. The Arendtian answer, is that to engage in violence in order to try and eliminate faction, or eliminate disagreement, or eliminate plurality is anti-pluralistic. It is to suggest that politics is not about dissent and opinion, but about one truth that has to be violently imposed. And the core of Arendt’s thinking throughout her entire life emerges from this idea of plurality, that if we really want difference, uniqueness, distinction in the world, we have to be willing to let plurality exist, even amidst those people we find offensive.”