Suspicious to the Core (3 / three)

Undoing Equations : Solidarity beyond Pain

Several centuries ago, however, there were no media to channel agency. And yet, there were certainly means of oppressive control akin to manipulative strategies known to those who nowadays inhabit the world. The core of social ills the planet confronts at the moment includes ramifications of a distorted ideology Arendt delineates investigating the Rousseau – Robespierre nexus. Namely, Rousseau’s thought elevates passion over, to his mind, detrimental rule of reason. That it found fertile soil in creative circles thirsting to establish poetry as a privileged social vocabulary, while reconfiguring vocabulary of classicism, is not central to this study, but is worth mentioning. Of greater significance is the way such social reconfigurations entailed mixed up perception and practice of the ethical, social, political, and economic spheres. More precisely, accentuating poverty, i.e., economic factors, and advocating passion over reason engendered some mistaken equations.

Not only does such reductionist thinking cripple the perception and experience of ethical categories and morality (the rich are by default bad, and being poor is by definition either stigmatized or glorified), but it also enables crude violation of the distinction between the public and the private, a major consequence of which has been increasing intrusion of the state in the private realm and overregulation of the life of an individual. The roots of such socioscape can be tracked via Arendt’s insights into Robespierre’s politics based on (or, indeed, equated with) the social, where the question of poverty was considered not as a problem of a person struggling to sustain bare existence, but rather as the phenomenon pertinent to a particular social stratum (class? mass?).

Perversion of the so called politics that under the disguise of humaneness perpetuates sociopolitical dynamics stemming from and manifested in interest, greed, materialist wealth based mindedness, sheer utility, hostility, to name but a few characteristics that have been spelling out currency of social exchange since major historical occurrences enabled repositioning of power mainly incarnated in rulers. Paradoxically, the same politics was instrumental in propagating “selflessness” of the people for the purpose of higher (?) goals, while masterminding the climate nourishing grandeur of the ruler. Needless to say, this cleared the way for oppressive regimes ranging from tyranny, via dictatorship to totalitarianism that Arendt extensively interrogates and criticizes elsewhere. In that context, she rightly notes the centrality of the question of hypocrisy and related issues of appearance, surfaces, superficialities, difference, and sameness.

How we relate to each other has a crucial role in the sustenance of the communal generating fruitful exchange free from distraction and noise, and anchored in humbleness. It calls for revisiting Arendt’s take on the distinction between pity and solidarity. She remarks that pity is inevitably conditioned by hostile relationships, i.e., one can only feel pity if somebody is suffering. Conversely, solidarity is possible in positive circumstances, as well. It is worth noting that Richard Rorty in Irony, Contingency, and Solidarity (1989) limits the use – and, indeed, understanding – of the notion of solidarity to empathy with the suffering of others, thereby implying that it (solidarity, i.e.) is a connective in sensitizing to the common ability to feel pain. In contrast, Arendt offers an angle for thinking humanity both in a communal and individual senses through the framework that supersedes pity. One can think solidarity beyond pain.

(At Least) Twofold Undoing – Again : Masks of Dis/integration

There are two ways of approaching the conundrums Arendt delineates. Neither can expose the origins and / or the cause of the consequences mainly manifested in ruthless utilitarianism, reckless competitiveness, and mindless survivalism. Neither can explain exactly how to articulate an alternative, a counterpoint. Both, however, tackle the problem of a distorted image of social functioning. Both are critical of a deceitful belief in the prosperity and wellbeing of the community of humans solely based on fiscal logic and materialist aspects of the everyday.

Terry Eagleton, for example, illuminates expropriation of the term norm resulting from a bewildering mix of mutually conditioned mirroring between discursively engineered cultural categories and the extralinguistic. In After Theory (2003), he writes:”The norm now is money; but since money has no principles or identity of its own, it is no kind of norm at all” (16-17).

Addressing a slightly different angle of the, basically, same cluster of issues, T.S. Eliot verbalizes the polemic across the class divide, while clearly accentuating the role tradition and religion have in his social vocabulary. It is in The Idea of a Christian Society (1940) where he extensively considers the question of living within the human community. Thus, part of the social imagination can be perceived via the following excerpt:

And the tendency of unlimited industrialism is to create bodies of men and women--of all classes--detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words, a mob. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, and well disciplined. (19)

Neither rigid nor lawless, neither ossifyingly reactionary-conservative nor repudiating tradition is the basis for reconfiguring socioscape in the light of the abovementioned thinkers. Hannah Arendt is obviously in accord with the critique of reductionist understanding of humans both as individuals and participants in the life of the society. She develops a discussion tracking the phenomena to the times of Robespierre. The crux of the debate is the concept of hypocrisy and the way it was dealt with during the days of the French Revolution. Namely, there is something about hypocrisy and the mission the revolutionaries found themselves on that, elucidated through the lens of Arendt’s theory, opens up the avenue for rethinking society, politics, individuality, and language with an awareness of ambiguity and its, paradoxically, alleviating effect.

Arendt puts emphasis on the hypocrisy hunt the rebels were on while overthrowing the regime of utter corruption. The monarchy turned out to be the very incarnate of hypocrisy, but, as Arendt demonstrates, no less erratic was an attempt to presume one’s own self to be entirely hypocrisy free. It implies a total absence of the sense of humbleness. In addition, situated--as Arendt does it in those genealogical excavations--within the etymological unfolding, the questions meet some of the most significant philosophical themes such as the appearance-being nexus. Arendt indicates salient instances of diverse approaches to the issue. The ancient Greeks, Socrates in particular, held appearances to be closely related to the perception of one’s identity. By contrast, supposedly “in the tradition of Christian thought” (On Revolution 91), from Machiavelli’s point of view, appearances are precisely the opposite of who one is.

Arendt invokes the word persona that in Latin “signified the mask ancient actors used to wear in a play” (On Revolution 97).   She draws a parallel showing the significance of “roles” in social context assigned to an individual that one assumes, thereby taking part in the life of the community and reanimating an aspect of self constitutive of some distinctive features. Specifically, those might be socially constructed and designated descriptions of self, but they are also hugely important, since they don’t have to be impositions, but rather liberating channels of social dynamics that relieve one of a description and perception exclusively in biological terms. It is in tune with instincts stemming from the aspects of the human being that exceed the sheer realm of the bodily. It surely offers a possibility of religiosity free religion. As such, it is particularly informative of the understanding of sin, law, deeds, mercy, forgiveness, to name but a few critical categories many religions regard as essential.

Such a counter-babylonian, anti-mammonesque stand simultaneously provides a perspective from which discursively conditioned categories are acknowledged as versatile, yet not indiscriminately multifarious, unleashed proliferation of narratively manipulated realities. From that angle, it seems that, paradoxically, as Arendt sees it, hypocrisy is the vice of vices. Not only does “anti-hypocritical hypocrisy” imply an individual’s blindness to one’s fallacy, but it also entails a complete disregard of one’s inauthenticity, since it is an attempt at a total eradication of the awareness of falsehood, hence a person’s disavowal of integrity. Additionally, it is crude violation of critical thinking and blatant neglect of a critical distance. It is an instance of extreme, uncritical suspense of disbelief.