Niall001 wrote:Now, if Jack finds himself in a minority of one, then surely he is powerless since he cannot accomplish anything? And if he is powerless, he is in the position of a child, where he can be forced to obey, no?
Powerlessness to accomplish a thing and powerlessness to resist are two very different things. The Mary McCarthy quotation is explicit on this point. What can any person force you to do something if even pointing a gun at you and demanding obedience is only tempting you? The answer is, even if you're obeying a command under mortal duress, the action is still yours. Others around you may find it more sympathetic if you held out until threatened with execution, but the deed itself is still accomplished by your participation.
I don't see any indication in the essay that Arendt considers the human power to decline participation as mutable. Quite often we do take the political temptations that are offered to us, but there are plenty of examples that demonstrate that states (like Denmark) and individuals (like those German citizens who refused to participate) can resist even that temptation even when powerless, even when the it's presented as a choice between obedience and punishment.
Temptation doesn't really seem to be the right word to describe that situation. In fact, Arendt states that:
Impotence or complete powerlessness is, I think, a valid excuse.
But in that context, she's talking about an excuse for not fighting the immorality around you. She does not take impotence or powerlessness as an excuse for participating in that morality yourself.
I also find it a little odd that Arendt figures that the doubters and the skeptics are the most reliable, but at the same time, she seems to suggest that our only reliable sense of morality is intuitive.
Well, despite what Mr. P spoke of above, I don't think she's championing Freethought here. The doubters and the skeptics are valuable in these situations not because they apply a standard of reason that is independent of the given values and rationalizations of society, but simply because, by impulse, they tend to be wary of enthusiasms. They, like anyone else, must depend on their own internal faculties for judging a situation, but they're more likely to fall back on those faculties than a person who feels secure in championing anything that resembles a previously affirmed moral standard.
It's a bit wishy washy. We're supposed to think, but not too much. We're supposed to go with our intuition, but not too much. Which is fine advice if you have an end-goal in mind, but deciding upon that end-goal, Arendt doesn't really seem to have a solution.
Wishy washy? Really? I think Arendt is suggesting the more difficult road here, and she seems very much aware of that fact.
It would be far simpler to suppose that there is an external moral standard, and that we can all just whip out our Little Orphan Annie Decoder Rings any time there's a moral quandary. The idea that we can use reason to arrive at a reliable moral solution to any problem presupposes that there is a reliable set of premises that we can reason from. But there's no particular reason to suppose that there is, and even if there were, how do we substantiate those premises? The Germans that leapt on board with the Nazis could easily square their prior moral convictions with their new political action, and by degrees that led to their involvement, as a nation, in something that, from our remove, seems patently evil.
So it isn't that we're not supposed to think too much. We can think all we want once we've established a basis for moral judgment, but rational thought itself provides no such basis. Things would be much simpler if it did. For one thing, there would be almost no grounds for disagreement over what is and what is not moral.
It almost looks to me as though the entire essay is meant to deal with the problem of the apparent failure of moral judgment in instances like the Nazi rise to power -- a problem seems to have really troubled Arendt only after the Eichmann trial. She proposes a solution to that problem by considering the examples of those who consciously refused to participate in that power. If it isn't a terribly comforting answer, that's probably because Arendt's experience and study finally led her to the conclusion that only the most tenuous threads connect humanity and morality.