What explains the farce that has been politics wedded toviolence – from dozens of recent conflicts/wars to Muslim revivalist politicsand its brutal suppression by secularist/neo-colonialist forces of which thelatest illustration is shocking treatment met to Muhammad Mursi? Lack ofthinking or uncritical mindset that believes in violence as power or force toeffect one’s desired outcome. Belief in violence as a means springs basicallyfrom weakness, argued Hannah Arendt who also summed up what we need to keep inmind to help ourselves in a world thatconstrues politics in terms of powercalculus: “…every human being is a thinking being and can reflect as well as Ido and can therefore judge for himself, if he wants to.” “And to think alwaysmeans to think critically. And to think critically is always to be hostile.Every thought actually undermines whatever there is of rigid rules, generalconvictions, et cetera.” “There are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reasonthat thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.”
Japsers has argued that philosophy and politics concerneveryone. It is no chance that the most influential philosophers from Plato toArendt have been concerned with politics or thinking about politics. What wasespecially noteworthy for Arendt about his philosopher friend Jaspers was that”he exposed himself to the currents of public life, speaking out withconsistent reasonableness on public issues.” If politics concerns few, orconcerns paid party workers primarily, it is because it has failed. Today Inote some insights of her on the forgotten
Power and Violence are opposites
The stronger people are masters of themselves and as sucharen’t violent in approach. This point has been reiterated by prophets andphilosophers though readily forgotten by some believers. It goes to the creditof Hannah Arendt in modern times to argue for this in a world where few contestthe dogma of “might is right.” As the author of Why Arendt Matters notes: “Shewas really arguing that power and violence are opposites. Hers was not anargument like Gandhi’s for nonviolence, but an argument for power, which ismost powerful when it is nonviolent. Particularly for people like us, who livein a world where it is routinely assumed that those with the biggest armies orarsenals, or the ultimate weapon, are the ones with power—or even”superpower”—and where it is assumed that power means the capacity to rule overothers, her distinction is hard to understand and its implications hard toimagine in wars, which under contemporary technological conditions will be”won” by those with superior means of violence. Such a “victory” furtherpersuades people that violence is power. But under contemporary conditions sucha victory really means that the victor resorted to violence from lack of power,that it was unwilling or unable to find a nonviolent way to deal with itsenemies.” She also held that “modern battlefields permit no revelations of whoan actor is, no deeds to be judged great; rather, they are like meetings of speechlessrobots, some of whom kill and some of whom are killed.”
When the question of reconciliation is raised andimmediately one is told how come one can forget history or erase memory ofpain, Arendt’s reply would involve the recognition of the point that “one does not forgive a deed at all, butthe doer of a deed, a person.” Indeed this is real power, power to forgive. Onemust be healed inside first and that involves forgiving the culprits in themanner Joseph and the Prophet of Islam (S.A.W) forgave their opponents. Onecan’t, however, condone oppression or occupation or evil. For Arendt, fightingevil and forgiving evil aren’t incompatible. This is argued in her analysis ofEichmann trial.
One may do evil without being evil
Adolph Eichmann was the Nazi operative at the frontorganising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to variousconcentration camps for executing the Nazi’s Final Solution. Arendt concludedin her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil(1963)that he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his”thoughtlessness” and “never realized what he was doing” due to an “inability…to think from the standpoint of somebody else.” Committed primarily to hiscareer and lacking any deeper convictions, he “commit[ted] crimes undercircumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel thathe [was] doing wrong.” Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics ofEichmann ‘the banality of evil.’ Arendtconcluded that Eichmann (as well as other Germans) did evil without being eviland noted that “he was a superficial person, thoroughly conformist to histhoroughly banal society, with no independent sense of responsibility,motivated only by a wish to move up in the Nazi hierarchy.”
The sin of most careerist politicians and bureaucrats isthat they fail to think and take responsibility for their complicity in evilthey help perpetuate and cite rules of the game in their defense. Isn’t oneguilty if one’s job is linked to killing/maiming/imprisoning someone for thesake of nameless other/ideology?
Party Politics
Arendt’s 1971 essay on the Pentagon Papers, “Lying inPolitics,” noted the presence of lying throughout political history. One ishere tempted to extrapolate the idea to analyze the essence of party politicsas complicit in the art of lying. How many politicians of note or spokespersonsof any party one can name who didn’t lie? The idea of representing commonpeople or voters is a white lie. What Arendt wrote in “Civil Disobedience” isnow felt with greater intensity now: “Representative government itself,” shewrites, “is in a crisis today, partly because it has lost . . . allinstitutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly becauseit is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers:bureaucratization and the … parties’ tendency to represent nobody but the partymachines.” It is probably belated recognition of this that has fuelled suchinitiatives as Back to Village or emphasis on the Gandhian ideal of PanchayatRaj that makes each village a republic not vulnerable to any outside force orother systems that decentralize tax collection and spending and administrationis the task that party politics thwarts. Stronger the parties, more vulnerableare the people. The State, the parties, the bureaucratic apparatus all have,generally speaking, so far strengthened at the cost of people.
From Arendt’s viewpoint one may assert that almost all keyslogans and concepts and ready made analyses we are used to – sovereignty, selfdeterminism, self rule, autonomy, terrorism, azadi, strikes and youth’s driftto violence – are rather “hackneyed, not sensitive enough to what is new andnot understandable in old concepts.” Her judgment on much of what goes in thename of politics of violence that results in nothing but destruction of lifeand what sustains life would have been Kant’s “There is no cure for stupidity.”
Democracy as recognition of there is another side
Noting the end result of disempowerment of common people andmost of stake holders following elections as complained by so many after everyend term examination of party rule, one may assert that currently we aresuffering from want of ideas, reluctance to think anew in every sphereincluding politics. Arendt advocated what Kant referred to as the “enlargedmentality” of opinion sharing, consulting, paying calls on other points ofview: “But look sharp!” Here is the other side, another perspective.” Party politicsis not the best way for what Habermas called communicative dialogue and itmilitates against the soul of shoora (consultation) that constitutes the soulof the idea of democracy.
“No arguing with religious warriors”
Max Weber had noted succinctly, “There is no arguing withreligious warriors.” Arendt explains why. “For those who subscribe to them,religious ideologies have an irrefutable logic, one that makes no sense tononbelievers because the premises are not of the common world and not relatedto common sense.” As Young-Bruhel notes:”The so-called fundamentalisms that have emerged, with their very differenthistories, are perversions of Christianity and Islam: they are, in Arendt’sterms, no longer authentic religions but adaptations of religions forsupranational political purposes and as such they perform many of the functionsthat the mid-twentieth-century ideologies of Nature and History did.”
Kashmir Issue and the right to belong to a human community
From Arendt’s point of view, “a crime against humanity isone that assaults the right to belong to a human community: the right not to bereduced to a mass, not to be made superfluous, not to be stateless andrightless. It is the right to be remembered truthfully in stories told aboutplural human beings by plural human beings, not to be erased from history.” Thecrux of Kashmir issue, as of religious minorities in ideological states, iscall for right to belong to human community. However, not even their own advocates/representatives clearly recognizethis as they often come up with political propositions that come in conflictwith other such rights claims.
The final court of appeal is life and when there is contemptagainst it, what can one say? Let us hope that reason would prevail to let lifenurture and everyone becomes himself. One may conclude with an observation inCamus’ The Plague: “On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however,isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this thatwe call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorancethat fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right tokill.”