'The most urgent political task is to redemocratize conversation': Lyndsey Stonebridge

Hannah Arendt's thought has become a beacon for understanding current political reality. This is the thesis defended in the essay "We Are Free to Change the World. Thinking Like Hannah Arendt" (Ariel, 2024), by Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham.

We spoke with her about the importance of pluralism, the banality of evil , totalitarian thinking, and other topics.

I think Arendt wanted to make a distinction here between plurality and liberalism: it's true that liberal democracies are better suited to pluralism, but not always. What happens—and we've seen this in the last ten years or so—when liberal democracies fail to deliver results or when liberal values ​​are seen as the exclusive prerogative of the powerful? Then you really see a threat to plurality.

Arendt might say that we expose ourselves to this threat because we have yet to accept—or truly explore —what a politics of plurality might actually mean.

For Arendt, living in a plural world means that it is truly necessary to work to establish the political, cultural, and social institutions that can create the conditions for spontaneity, action, dissent, and consent, on the one hand, but also privacy, discomfort, and love…

That is, for a politics of the human condition and also—although unfortunately she does not explore this in depth—on the natural plurality that exists on Earth.

I'm not sure she would necessarily see this as ironic. Arendt was suspicious of all ideologies of freedom because she thought that, once ideological thinking had taken hold, those who didn't fit into its framework would always pay the price. So ideological thinking in itself is bad for freedom. And there's no doubt that the anti-abortion and anti-immigration movements are particularly ideological, again, in Arendt's terms, because they grossly ignore the realities of a world in which people are going to move around and in which there will be women who—no matter what you do, no matter how omnipotent you think you are—will seek to terminate their pregnancies. I would add that neoliberal economics is also ideology in its magical thinking about the market, as we could see in the UK in 2022 when a radicalized ideologue (Liz Truss) became prime minister (almost, it seems, by accident) for 43 days and the country's economy collapsed. The freedom Arendt believed in—along with Rosa Luxemburg—was the kind of freedom we experience when we act, individually or collectively, in response (a key word for her) to events and injustices. That freedom comes not from abstractions, and certainly not from flags, but from the streets, from experience.

There's a passage in Nadezhda Mandelstam's brilliant two-volume autobiography of life in the Soviet Union in the 20th century where she comments that everyone talked all the time, but that conversation had run out. Arendt thought Mandelstam's book Hope Against Hope was one of the "real documents of our time," and one can clearly see why. First of all: we need to stop talking—and here we are, thankfully and finally, beginning to analyze the role of large social media companies and their culpability in this matter—and prioritize the creation and vigorously protect those places where conversation (and not chatter) can happen. Be it city councils, parliaments, artistic organizations, NGOs, collectives, media outlets, universities, schools, etc. But not only that. Because she also wrote against the backdrop of fascism and totalitarianism: Arendt was deeply suspicious of attempts to change social and economic life by force. At the same time, she was, and rightly so, horrified by the effects of growth-for-growth economics and consumerism. She saw corporate governance coming and was, again rightly, dismayed by what it implied for both politics and ethics. Unlike Arendt—or perhaps pushing her into the 21st century—I believe that to fight the populist right, we must directly address economic and social inequalities. Look at work, for example. Work is part of the human condition; it follows, then, that everyone should have the right to meaningful work and to thrive on terms that are not crudely individualistic and competitive.

You'd think we'd have more tools, right? And to a large extent we do, we just have to pick them up. The great emancipatory stories of the 20th century revolved around growing plurality: feminism, civil rights, anti-fascism, decolonization… In other words, more people have learned to use political tools and are doing new things with them. It's been said before that today's totalitarian thinking is the last bitter gasp of the old Western hegemonies (hegemonies that gave us totalitarianism in the first place). Hence, perhaps, the desperate and cynical impunity of the current crop of lying politicians and their twisted conspiracies. There's something very hysterical about all this. To combat this, Arendt would say, we really must pay attention. Especially, we must actively resist the politicization and monetization of our attention, and actively refuse to be taken in. And I think that's happening, in small and large ways. The urgent political task is to re-democratize conversation, attention, and concentration. This means electing governments brave enough to confront the dominance of technology and investing in education as a democratic project.

Arendt was quite clear in 1943 when she wrote that brilliant and furious essay: if you relegate large numbers of people to the “dark background of difference,” you haven’t solved anything—you’ve created another problem. Arendt was also right to be cautious about the new structures of humanitarianism that were established after the Second World War. As I argued in Placeless People (2018), when it comes to refugees and migrants, the opportunity to implement genuine rights is squandered as new humanitarian regimes take shape: people are there to receive help, which is fine, but what’s important is actually hidden from view. This is what she meant when she claimed that the last thing people left homeless after the war demanded was human rights, as they had known since then how fragile such protection was. They wanted a homeland, a place where they could be seen, a place where the “right to have rights” was possible. That's why he supported the idea of ​​a Jewish homeland in Palestine and why he opposed the forced displacement of Palestinians as the price to pay for that security.

It's not eternal; there has been a historical conflict—77 years now—between the State of Israel, Palestine, and many of their neighbors. Arendt, who advocated a binational Palestinian state, predicted it. Hamas is not Palestine, and Arendt would have condemned Hamas as a terrorist organization just as she would have condemned today's right-wing Zionism as genocidal. Nothing that's happening now would have surprised her, but she would have been deeply saddened, as we all should be.

Arendt wrote about the banality of evil in relation to the Holocaust: the most extreme crime carried out with the most extreme thoughtlessness, not by its designers, who thought a great deal about what they were doing, but by its willing executioners. But to see the banality of evil at work now, we also need to look more closely to realize what happens when inhumane systems are created in which people are valued only to the extent that they are useful or profitable. Yes, bad ideologies enable evil, but we also need to be very attentive to policies and institutions that are 'evil' in less obvious ways. And, of course, to the agents and groups that, like (Adolf) Eichmann, like to cover up their complicity with claims of ignorance and good intentions. Like those corporations that support human rights violations in resource-rich countries.

Yes! Arendt also said that the thing about the holes of forgetting—the concentration camps, the corpse factories, the gulags, but also think of the migrant camps, the slums, the disconnected places where we lock up the marginalized today—is that they had a crucial flaw: “Nothing human is so perfect. There will always be one man left to tell the story.” So yes, we can open them as long as there are survivors and as long as we continue to have the conversation. As she herself said: “We humanize what happens in the world and in ourselves simply by talking about it, and by talking about it we learn to be human.”

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