misterpessimistic wrote:I also think, in contrast to Mad, that these skeptics and freethinkers DO also rely heavily on reasoning to reach a decision on what actions to take and that these people are also less likely, on the whole, to fall into mass hysteria and support such pogroms.
To clarify, I don't recall having suggested that freethinkers
don't use reason to decide what actions to take. My point was that Arendt isn't talking about freethinkers at all. Modern writers like Michael Shermer have made it seem like the words skeptic and freethinker are almost synonymous, but all Arendt seems to be talking about when she says skeptic are people who are reserved about agreeing with the judgments of others. Her phrase was "skeptics and doubters", and I interpret that to involve no particular methodology. These are simply people who look at what everyone else is doing and say, "Actually, 1 million people
could all be wrong", without supposing what might be right. Doubt and skepticism open you up for some way of deciding what would be better, but I don't think any particular alternative is necessary for what Arendt is talking about. What's crucial is that moment where you say, "Maybe I won't join in." Only then is it possible to apply judgment, regardless of whether it is based on reason or intuition.
Niall wrote:If poor old Jack chooses to die for the sake of resistance, his family may starve, or they may simply be viewed as undesirable. Few of us exist in a situation where we do not have obligations to others.
To put it quite bluntly, that isn't Arendt's concern in this essay. All she's asking is whether or not it's possible to be personally responsible for the morality of one's own behavior. The defense made by Nazi conspirators after the war suggested that it wasn't, and if that's the case, then we're faced with all sorts of questions as to whether or not it's possible to behave morally at all, whether the fact of political involvement precludes morality, and whether or not it's even possible to resist immoral political paradigms.
If the Nazi party chooses to make life difficult for your family, if they choose to put a bullet in your brain, they're the one's acting immorally. And maybe they can bully you into acting immorally, but that does nothing to mitigate the immorality of your action, nor your responsibility for how you've acted. Crying out, "What else could I have done?" may make us feel badly for the circumstances you had to face, but it doesn't change the fact that your actions hurt someone else. The only question Arendt really intends to address in this essay, it seems, is that of whether or not a person can reliably judge for themselves the morality of an action.
In most situations, you are not simply deciding to sacrifice your own life, you are choosing to inflict a certain amount of suffering on those associated with you.
Not true, and as Arendt points out in the prologue, political action is hardly a mechanical phenomenon. Nazi Germany implicitly threatened every nation that might refuse to return expatriate German Jews to the Fatherland. Only Denmark refused and the consequences were practically nil. In that particular situation, it's as though Germany pointed a gun at Denmark's head, said "Obey, or else", and then simply pulled the gun away when Denmark refused. It doesn't always work out that way, but the point is that you're not deciding who to sacrifice in those situations -- the aggressor always decides, and ultimately, you can't be personally responsible for their actions. In the same situation, it's easily as possible that, even if you obey, you'll still get your brains blown out, or that your family will suffer. Caving in to coercion guarantees nothing.
More to the point, the people who were killed for refusing generally stood at the end of a very long line of people who had not refused. The people at the top of the hierarchy would have been unable to force any hands had there not been a majority of people willing to oblige them. Which is, I gather, the gist of Arendt's meaning when she says that it's impossible to achieve a political goal alone -- the injustices of the Nazi regime were made possible only by the cooperation of a majority of people who were willing to suspend their own judgment and carry out the will of those who would otherwise have been powerless.
But what I find frustrating is that Arendt takes the Nazi atrocities as the gold standard of evil, then works backward. I wonder would her theories hold up if she attempted to apply them to the Armenian holocaust or Rwanda? What about on the global scale?
I don't see why not. In every case, what seems to be operative is a failure of personal responsibility: people allowing a political agenda to dictate what is and is not moral. Arendt deals with the Nazi atrocities mostly because that's what she's studied most. Not only did she flee with her family from Nazi Germany, but she studied politics during a period when World War II was the defining influence on global politics. In the meantime, so much has happened that it's difficult to tie everything back to that one war, but Arendt died in 1975, and did most of her writing during the 50s and 60s, when World War II still cast a shadow over the whole of modern history.