The Origins of Totalitarianism 3
Dec. 1st, 2017 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamer_easyI guess everyone has feet of clay, or a blind spot - pick your metaphor. In the case of Hannah Arendt, it seems to have been Africa. I read her chapter on "Race and Bureaucracy" and her account of the colonisation of Africa with mounting unease, realising that she was not just describing the attitudes of colonists like the Boers, but her own. (I got so cranky that I pulled the very readable African History: a Very Short Introduction by John Parker and Richard Rathbone off my infinite "to read" shelf.)
"What made them different from other human beings," Arendt writes (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p 192), "was not at all the colour of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality - compared to which they appeared to be phantoms, ghostlike. They were, as it were, 'natural' human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder."*
I'll give you another example: "Lazy and unproductive, they [the Boers] agreed to vegetate on essentially the same level as the black tribes had vegetated for thousands of years... The Boers lived on their slaves exactly the way natives had lived on an unprepared and unchanged nature." (p 194) And again: "They [the Boers] behaved exactly like the black tribes who had also roamed the Dark Continent for centuries - feeling at home wherever the horde happened to be, and fleeing like death every attempt at definite settlement." (p 196)
Similarly, the peoples of Australia and the Americas had no "human reality": "Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans." (p 186) By contrast, "there could be no excuse and no humanly comprehensibly reason for treating Indians and Chinese as though they were not human beings. In a certain sense, it is only here that the real crime began, because everyone ought to have known what he was doing." (p 206)
Even alongside Arendt's severe criticism of the Boers, it all sounds disturbingly like justification. It also brings into question the whole definition of civilisation - of "humanity" itself. No accomplishment is enough to qualify you: not writing (the Meroitic script of Nubia, the Ge'ez script of Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Berber scipt Tifinagh) nor monumental architecture (Nubia's pyramids, the walled city of Great Zimbabwe, Axum's obelisks); not settled communities, agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy; and certainly not other kinds of technology or expertise, nor a rich culture which includes law, history, religion, sophisticated art, and the kind of spoken storytelling on which Homer's work is based**. I think, for Arendt, possibly only a long literary tradition would allow any civilisation into the "humanity" club - which knocks out the overwhelming majority of human cultures, in all times and places.
It's not that the facts weren't available to Arendt; the Meroitic script, from ancient Nubia, had been deciphered, the Bantu origins of Great Zimbabwe were known. It's just that her immense expertise was focussed on Europe, and she shared the received wisdom of her time, which, as Parker and Rathbone put it, was that "Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, had no history to speak of. Not only were its societies regarded as primitive and unchanging, they were believed, due in large part to the widespread absence of literacy, to possess no collective historical consciousness." (p 3)
Where the chapter is most effective, I think, is where it talks about the people who colonised not as representatives of "civilisation", but because they themselves were outsiders:
"The superfluous men... who came rushing down to the Cape, still had much in common with the old adventurers.... The difference was not their morality or immorality, but rather than the decision to join this crowd... was no longer up to them; that they had not stepped out of society but had been spat out by it; that they were not enterprising beyond the permitted limits of civilization but simply victims without use or function." (p 189)
There's a parallel here with both those Trump voters who have been effectively excluded from American society through poverty and social breakdown, with - as Susan McWilliams wrote in The Nation - the Hell's Angels (I've just read Hunter S. Thompson's book, of which more soon); and also with Dale Beran's analysis of 4chan, when Arendt writes: "They were irresistably attracted by a world where everything was a joke", "a world of infinite possibilities for crimes committed in the spirit of play, for the combination of horror and laughter".
McWilliams writes that the Trump supporters' racism is partly a fuck-you to the political elites. Maybe, but as Arendt writes: "South Africa's race society taught the mob the great lesson of which it had always had a confused premonition, that through sheer violence an underprivileged group could create a class lower than itself, that for this purpose it did not even need a revolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes, and that foreign or backward peoples offered the best opportunities for such tactics." If necessary, of course, you can always declare some of the people next door to be foreigners.
* I had a nasty moment reading this and remembering another nasty moment: watching some dreadful "white jungle goddess" movie or other, in which a pith helmeted dolt panics and randomly shoots dead one of the locals, and begs the White Goddess to get him out of being punished. And, until I caught myself, I sympathised. Partly, of course, it was just because this was a speaking character vs an extra seen on screen for a few seconds. Partly, of course... it wasn't. [ETA: this was indeed "Jungle Goddess" (1943), which was MSTed. "Meanwhile, in an equally racist Tarzan movie across the way..."]
** Here I'm putting aside the complicated question of the African-ness of Ancient Egypt; I don't even need it to make my point. (Actually, I've seen a few Black people on Tumblr worry that Egypt gets too much attention, to the detriment of the other great civilisations of Africa.)
*** I remember reading - this must have been when I was writing Hummer, so forever ago - a chapter about some women of native heritage, perhaps in rural Mexico, ooh-ing and ah-ing over how much darker than them a Black woman on TV was. You might think they'd be natural allies, said the chapter, subject to the same colourism. But the women were able to console themselves that at least they weren't that black. :(
"What made them different from other human beings," Arendt writes (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p 192), "was not at all the colour of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality - compared to which they appeared to be phantoms, ghostlike. They were, as it were, 'natural' human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder."*
I'll give you another example: "Lazy and unproductive, they [the Boers] agreed to vegetate on essentially the same level as the black tribes had vegetated for thousands of years... The Boers lived on their slaves exactly the way natives had lived on an unprepared and unchanged nature." (p 194) And again: "They [the Boers] behaved exactly like the black tribes who had also roamed the Dark Continent for centuries - feeling at home wherever the horde happened to be, and fleeing like death every attempt at definite settlement." (p 196)
Similarly, the peoples of Australia and the Americas had no "human reality": "Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans." (p 186) By contrast, "there could be no excuse and no humanly comprehensibly reason for treating Indians and Chinese as though they were not human beings. In a certain sense, it is only here that the real crime began, because everyone ought to have known what he was doing." (p 206)
Even alongside Arendt's severe criticism of the Boers, it all sounds disturbingly like justification. It also brings into question the whole definition of civilisation - of "humanity" itself. No accomplishment is enough to qualify you: not writing (the Meroitic script of Nubia, the Ge'ez script of Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Berber scipt Tifinagh) nor monumental architecture (Nubia's pyramids, the walled city of Great Zimbabwe, Axum's obelisks); not settled communities, agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy; and certainly not other kinds of technology or expertise, nor a rich culture which includes law, history, religion, sophisticated art, and the kind of spoken storytelling on which Homer's work is based**. I think, for Arendt, possibly only a long literary tradition would allow any civilisation into the "humanity" club - which knocks out the overwhelming majority of human cultures, in all times and places.
It's not that the facts weren't available to Arendt; the Meroitic script, from ancient Nubia, had been deciphered, the Bantu origins of Great Zimbabwe were known. It's just that her immense expertise was focussed on Europe, and she shared the received wisdom of her time, which, as Parker and Rathbone put it, was that "Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, had no history to speak of. Not only were its societies regarded as primitive and unchanging, they were believed, due in large part to the widespread absence of literacy, to possess no collective historical consciousness." (p 3)
Where the chapter is most effective, I think, is where it talks about the people who colonised not as representatives of "civilisation", but because they themselves were outsiders:
"The superfluous men... who came rushing down to the Cape, still had much in common with the old adventurers.... The difference was not their morality or immorality, but rather than the decision to join this crowd... was no longer up to them; that they had not stepped out of society but had been spat out by it; that they were not enterprising beyond the permitted limits of civilization but simply victims without use or function." (p 189)
There's a parallel here with both those Trump voters who have been effectively excluded from American society through poverty and social breakdown, with - as Susan McWilliams wrote in The Nation - the Hell's Angels (I've just read Hunter S. Thompson's book, of which more soon); and also with Dale Beran's analysis of 4chan, when Arendt writes: "They were irresistably attracted by a world where everything was a joke", "a world of infinite possibilities for crimes committed in the spirit of play, for the combination of horror and laughter".
McWilliams writes that the Trump supporters' racism is partly a fuck-you to the political elites. Maybe, but as Arendt writes: "South Africa's race society taught the mob the great lesson of which it had always had a confused premonition, that through sheer violence an underprivileged group could create a class lower than itself, that for this purpose it did not even need a revolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes, and that foreign or backward peoples offered the best opportunities for such tactics." If necessary, of course, you can always declare some of the people next door to be foreigners.
* I had a nasty moment reading this and remembering another nasty moment: watching some dreadful "white jungle goddess" movie or other, in which a pith helmeted dolt panics and randomly shoots dead one of the locals, and begs the White Goddess to get him out of being punished. And, until I caught myself, I sympathised. Partly, of course, it was just because this was a speaking character vs an extra seen on screen for a few seconds. Partly, of course... it wasn't. [ETA: this was indeed "Jungle Goddess" (1943), which was MSTed. "Meanwhile, in an equally racist Tarzan movie across the way..."]
** Here I'm putting aside the complicated question of the African-ness of Ancient Egypt; I don't even need it to make my point. (Actually, I've seen a few Black people on Tumblr worry that Egypt gets too much attention, to the detriment of the other great civilisations of Africa.)
*** I remember reading - this must have been when I was writing Hummer, so forever ago - a chapter about some women of native heritage, perhaps in rural Mexico, ooh-ing and ah-ing over how much darker than them a Black woman on TV was. You might think they'd be natural allies, said the chapter, subject to the same colourism. But the women were able to console themselves that at least they weren't that black. :(
no subject
Date: 2017-12-07 09:05 am (UTC)Actually one of the things that I am really enjoying is the description of the trade routes to Timbuktu - and the diverse kingdoms they passed through. I kind of want more detail on that part!
I find the feet-of-clay part of our hero figures interesting, and our reactions to them more so. Aunt San Suu Kyi being the most recent of course in the face of the Rohingya ethnic cleansing. I am not sure why we (the Western 'we') assume that she would mean all ethnic groups in Burma rather than just the Burmese - she is as human and undoubtedly as filled with prejudice as anyone else, and her "us" may always have meant only Burmese. I hope not - I would rather think that she is walking a precarious tightrope between Western demands and Burmese realpolitik, and that there is more going on privately than we know of. *sigh* In some ways the Ancient Greeks had it right - their pantheon was as flawed as any human community, with all the injustice that follows. Lowered expectations nicely.