THINKING IN PUBLIC

MASHA GESSEN IN CONVERSATION WITH ROGER BERKOWITZ

Distinguished Writer in Residence Masha Gessen said on a podcast last year, “The central object of [Hannah Arendt’s] study is what happens to society when there’s too much distance, or not enough distance. . . . It is so important in her thinking that people think with one another. In order to think with one another, they have to feel their separateness from one another. You have to be an individual capable of forming an opinion, and expressing it, and exchanging it, and seeing the reflection of your ideas in the eyes of others.” This became the jumping off point for a wideranging Zoom conversation between Gessen and Roger Berkowitz, professor of political studies and human rights and academic director of Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Roger Berkowitz: Your account of Arendt’s thinking is really insightful and profound. Could you talk a little about what you mean when you say, “We worry about what happens when there’s too much distance or not enough distance”?

Masha Gessen: I feel funny talking to you about Arendt, because you have spent more time thinking and talking about her than I have, but as I read the Origins of Totalitarianism, and especially the last chapter, where she talks about loneliness and solitude, and also the atomized, she originally talks about how totalitarianism is really only possible to build in an atomized society, and that’s why I was talking about too much distance. But then she has this incredible image of the elimination of distance, of people being melded together into one man of gigantic proportions, which has stayed with me since my first reading of the Origins of Totalitarianism. Because I literally imagine the Soviet communal apartment, in which there is no space to be. It is extremely difficult for a person to feel their physical limits; where their immediate quotidian life ends and somebody else’s begins. And she talks about how that disappearance of distance makes thinking impossible. I was thinking a lot about what she wrote about loneliness and solitude when the pandemic struck. And we all—the lucky ones among us—ended up in isolation, which is not, as far as I remember, a term that she uses. But isolation is not solitude. It is loneliness and she thinks of loneliness as the defining condition of totalitarianism.

RB: I love the way you frame this. I think of Arendt as a deeply spatial thinker. So much of her work is about spaces, and that’s where she also gets into trouble: the public space, the private space, the social space, and are they distinct? And also the space of freedom and the space of appearances, which is for her the public world: how we appear to each other. As she describes it, politics is about a concern not for individuals but for the world. And she actually makes a distinction between loneliness versus isolation versus solitude. Solitude is being alone with oneself. She says solitude is absolutely necessary for all thinking—for artists, writers, musicians— because that’s where we get into that conversation with ourselves, where we think about the world. Isolation she thinks of as the space of tyranny, as opposed to totalitarianism. Here we are in our Zoom rooms, we can have dinner parties and we can meet for a chess club or a poetry club, but what we can’t do is go out on the street and protest, and we can’t write publicly about what we think, and so it’s a political isolation. You’re isolated in your private life. And then loneliness, which I think is something we really do have to think about. The person who I think has gotten this more right than anyone is Claudia Rankine. In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely she says loneliness is “what we can’t do for each other.” I love that formulation.

MG: I want to pick up on this idea of thinking about spaces. I’ve done an unintentional experiment over the last couple weeks. I’m teaching a class on great political essays, and I decided to add lectures and political speeches to the syllabus because they are also political essays. It’s an odd syllabus, where students choose one thing to read every week from a menu and then they bring their discussion to class. I think a lot of people, including a lot of students, are having trouble concentrating on reading. So I thought, okay, I’ll add a video to every week’s selection to give people the option of watching a video instead of reading an essay. The great lectures and speeches are actually not that easy to find on the internet. We’ve only had cheap cameras for 15 years or so, and before that you had to have professional equipment to record the speeches. I found some selection in the 2000s and the 2010s, and then, of course, there’s this huge wealth of recorded talks from the last year, when politics moved onto Zoom. My great discovery is that they’re completely unusable. They are flat. It is more rewarding to watch a very bad recording taken in 2000 from a high video camera from the back of a large auditorium than it is to watch a high-quality, two dimensional Zoom recording of somebody. This was completely unexpected to me, and I’m still trying to wrap my mind around why watching somebody minimally move through space is such an important thing. I can’t quite explain it. Again, I’m talking about a bad recording done from the back of a room so you can barely see the speaker and you can’t see any of the audience. But you can see that the person is among people. They hit a technical snag, they laugh with the audience, they stumble and get feedback. To the extent that every lecture, every speech is an act of thinking in public, I could see very clearly, over the last two weeks of going through this endless number of recordings, the difference between the act of speaking in public and the act of speaking in private; of thinking in private for public consumption. The difference is unmistakable. I think this also relates to loneliness and what Arendt was talking about in the distinction between loneliness and solitude, where solitude is necessary for thinking and loneliness makes thinking hard.

RB: For Arendt, the space of this world is really about sharing a commonwealth— being in the world with others and coming to understand that the world is filled with people who disagree with you, who are unlike you. That’s what she calls “plurality.” In a piece you wrote recently you quote one of my favorite passages of Arendt, from her essay “Introduction into Politics” (which I just finished teaching on the virtual reading group). “If someone wants to see and experience the world as it ‘really’ is he can do so only by understanding it as something that is shared by many people, lies between them, separates and links them, showing itself differently to each and comprehensible only to the extent that many people can talk about it and exchange their opinions and perspectives with one another, over against one another.” There are a lot of different ways to take that quote, but you framed it in a discussion of the rise of subjectivism in the modern world, and this is something that, in The Human Condition, Arendt was deeply engaged with. A large part of The Human Condition is about what she calls world alienation. The way in which we are increasingly alienated from a common world that we share with others, and she traces it to a number of places. One, to the rise of science, which turns us away from the world we see of objects to theories and explanations. Also to the Cartesian idea of doubting reality and the idea that all I know is what’s in me: this subjectivism. You said something recently that struck me as so right and important, which is that even with the rise of this internalization, this subjectivism, there was still a commitment to be part of the common world, to share something. What we see, fitfully over the last 100 years, whether it’s in Nazi Germany or Bolshevik Russia or now in many places around the world, is a loss of a commitment to that common world. And this is something Arendt was deeply concerned with. Where do you start noticing this loss of a commitment to this common world? Where did that first come to you?

MG: Roger, I have no idea. I’ve been thinking about it, certainly, since the Trump election. In all of my work I— perhaps disproportionally—write about language as an instrument of politics. And disproportionately not because I don’t think it’s important but because there are many other things in politics that are probably as important that I’m not quite as fascinated with. I think I come to this from that direction. How do we understand the ways in which totalitarian dictators, would-be autocrats, other kinds of autocrats, abuse language. We have an instinctive sense that they’re doing something with language that ought not be done with it. And I think that Arendt helps diagnose what it is that they’re doing with it, which is that they’re using it in antipolitical ways. They’re using it against the conversation, against the very possibility of conversation. RB: I think that’s right. The way someone like President—ex-President—Trump uses repeated claims that are simply not factually true is to appeal to a certain group of people, to have a conversation with them. You said before that you can’t have a political conversation without people. He loves to have people there! He thrives on that. So, he’s in a conversation, it’s just a conversation with 40 percent of the people.

MG: I think there’s an important distinction, though. In a way I’m much more interested in what Trump says about the weather than what he says about the election. He has, on at least two occasions, lied about the weather. That to me is really indicative of what is going on. When he talked about his inauguration, he sent Sean Spicer to say that it was the largest inauguration ever. But also to say that it was sunny. Trump himself claimed that it had been drizzling, but that when he started speaking the sun came out and not a single drop of rain fell, and then after he finished speaking it started raining again. Weather is, in most contexts, an unambiguous shared reality. To Arendt, the most important thing about totalitarian ideology was that it subjected all perceptions of the world to a preposterous idea, and it was entirely impervious to any fact-based intervention because it could explain all of those interventions away using its own preposterous idea.

RB: And that’s the connection to loneliness. For her, loneliness is the background condition for that kind of totalitarian lying. She says this modern lie, where you say it’s raining when it’s sunny out, she says can only succeed when you lie to people who are lonely, not in the sense of being alone, but in the sense of being without purpose. They need to believe in something, and they would rather believe in something that makes them feel good—a coherent fiction that makes them feel alive, that makes them feel important—than be confronted with a reality in which they’re not that important. What Arendt thinks is new in the modern world about loneliness is that people who were desperately abandoned and feeling completely astray in the world were generally people on the margins of society—the very old, the sick, etc.—and now she thinks this is a mass phenomenon that affects all people of all political sides who all need to believe in some truth. She does say, in Origins of Totalitarianism, that as soon as the strong man or the demagogue loses power and exits the scene, the lie crumbles. It’s that famous line right at the beginning of chapter 10 where she says, as soon as Hitler and Stalin died, the lies around them crumbled. It’s not that lies are truth, it’s that truth is a consensus. That truth emerges over time is a very Arendtian idea. But Trump is no longer president, and I’m wondering, are you confident that a kind of new consensus, a kind of new truth will reassert itself once Trump is off the scene? Do you think Arendt is right that this will crumble?

MG: I think that the question is not so much will it crumble as what takes its place? She wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism before Stalin died, and what we have seen since—and it’s been a long time and an instructive time—is that if there’s nothing to fill the void that’s left over from the lie, from the sense of belonging that the lie not so much gave but maybe dangled, this promise of belonging, then people will reach for it again. So you either need another lie that’s as grand and as preposterous, or you need a true story that is as intentional and as compelling. Otherwise people will reach back toward that lie.

RB: What do you mean “need a true story”?

MG: I’ve thought a lot about what happened to Soviet countries after that empire collapsed, and I think that one way to understand it is by making a distinction between countries that had a story to tell, and told that story, and countries that ended up without a story. An example to me of a country without a story was Hungary. Hungary had a real problem with how to think of itself after the Soviet occupation ended, because it had been an ally of Nazi Germany during World War II. There were a couple of attempts to position Hungary as a victim of both totalitarian regimes, which is true, or truer, of most other post-Soviet countries, but wasn’t true of Hungary. That story fell apart very quickly, and I think it has a lot to do with the need for a big liar, like Viktor Orbán.

RB: If I hear what you’re saying, and I think I agree, the lies, the predilection to conspiracies and coherent fictions, will continue until some sort of new American story is able to be told. Is that what you’re saying?

MG: That is what I’m saying, and I think we actually have an inkling of what that story can be and should be. The question is, is there the political leadership to sweep the country up in that story? I think that story is the story of an unfulfilled American promise, and that’s the story of Langston Hughes’s Let America Be America Again and the inaugural poem by Amanda Gorman, which is its clear descendant. In Hughes’s words, “America never was America to me.” And then he says that “America will be!” That brings together that grand promise of America—that idea of radical equality and inclusion that made this country the first country to be founded on a set of abstract ideas—and the failure to deliver on that promise, systematically, for a large part of the population. I think that story can be told, and is in fact being told, but what we need, and I’m afraid that this goes against the Democrats’ political instincts, is as profound a commitment to telling a story as I think the right has instinctively. I raise that question because I think storytelling runs counter to the dominant American understanding of what constitutes politics. In the Arendtian understanding, politics is a conversation. Politics is how we figure out how to live together in the city, in the state, in the nation, in the world. In the American media, mainstream, Democratic party understanding of politics, politics is management.

RB: This brings us to a point I know you and I both care a lot about, which is hypocrisy. In a way, Hannah Arendt is a fan of hypocrisy. She says you can’t have public life without hypocrisy. If we all constantly told people what was in our hearts and what we were thinking, it would be a very uncomfortable world. You’ve said we need hypocrisy—I think it’s a very Arendtian point. Where do you see the danger of getting rid of hypocrisy, or what would a good hypocrite look like today?

MG: You’re exactly right to make that connection, because I think that appeal, to the worst selves, is the throwing off the masks of hypocrisy that Arendt writes about. Let me use a strange example, but it’s one that I’m familiar with and maybe it will make this odd part of our conversation, where we suddenly are speaking in favor of hypocrisy—maybe it will make it more clear. The White House press briefings. The White House press briefings are a spectacle of accountability and transparency. They have very little to do with actual accountability and transparency. That’s not where accountability and transparency happen. It is not by any stretch of the imagination part of an important political conversation. It is certainly not where a great reveal happens. But it is a daily reminder that this is a government of the people, accountable to the people. I think that’s what Arendt means by hypocrisy, and that’s an example of good hypocrisy. What do you think?

RB: Yeah. I think it’s a great example of a compliment that vice pays to virtue, which is what hypocrisy is. That whatever the president is doing, you have to present yourself as someone who is accountable to the people, and in doing so you tell a story—to come back to stories—which is that we’re a self-government, that we’re a republic, and that story matters. I think the unity thing is a story that President Biden has to tell. But a lot of my friends on the left say we’ve entered a war. Politics is war. Stop with the unity stuff. Are we willing to keep being hypocrites and try and govern from a unified stance, or are we just going to say, Look, politics has become warfare, let’s just fight the war?

MG: Well, Arendt would say that’s not politics.

RB: She would say that’s not politics, but she also would say that’s what politics has increasingly become.

MG: I think there’s a difference between a story of unity and the knee-jerk bipartisanship. And I actually think it’s possible to tell a story of unity that is new and radical, and radical in its inclusion. That’s the challenge. The challenge is to not tell a story of a return to normalcy; to not pretend that politics has devolved to an absence of politics—which is when both sides see each other as mortal enemies— and suppose that something else is possible.