Arendt, pt. 3

Perhaps Origins is just so huge, so comprehensive, that no matter what travesty might occur nowadays, it will have been foreshadowed in that book’s pages.

(I suspect that this very nearly is the case regarding some other interminable writings, e.g. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.)

Today’s historical parallel is with France’s notorious Dreyfus Affair, discussed in Origins, ch. 4. A mostly ordinary man – a member of an ethnic minority group – is shipped away and imprisoned. Probably, he is innocent; certainly, he is deprived of his basic procedural rights. His imprisoners, caught out, refuse to rectify their mistake. The incident divides society. One faction supports the prisoner. (If his rights are so egregiously disregarded, why trust the state to uphold others’ rights?) The other faction supports his captors. (Who’ll protect the nation if the captors lose face?)

The current travesty is less awful than the Dreyfus Affair in two ways: many politicians and ordinary people already support Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, and judges already have insisted on due process. Whether the righteous prevail remains to be seen. (And if you don’t know which side is behaving righteously, see this.) If the righteous do prevail, this item by Judge Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, ought to become a classic. It was written for posterity. It will be anthologized. If highschoolers can still read, they will be made to read it. (A PDF is here.)

See, also:

France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Brief Documentary History

Prisoner of Honor (1991; dir. Ken Russell; feat. Richard Dreyfuss)

An Officer and a Spy (2019; orig. J’accuse; dir. Roman Polanski; feat. Jean Dujardin)

More Arendt

… which I’m sure you were itching to read this morning.

But first, an item of local interest: a graduate of nearby Goshen College is the author of the Library of America’s latest “story of the week.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

From Origins, chapter 7:

It took the Boers several decades to understand that [British] imperialism was nothing to be afraid of, since it would neither develop the country as Australia and Canada had been developed, nor draw profits from the country at large, being quite content with a high turnover of investments in one specific field [gold mining]. Imperialism therefore was willing to abandon the so-called laws of capitalist production and their egalitarian tendencies, so long as profits from specific investments were safe. This led eventually to the abolition of the law of mere profitableness and South Africa became the first example of a phenomenon that occurs whenever the mob becomes the dominant factor in the alliance between mob and capital.

In one respect, the most important one, the Boers remained the undisputed masters of the country: whenever rational labor and production policies came into conflict with race considerations, the latter won. Profit motives were sacrificed time and again to the demands of a race society, frequently at a terrible price. The rentability of the railroads was destroyed overnight when the government dismissed 17,000 Bantu employees and paid white wages that amounted to 200 per cent more; expenses for municipal government became prohibitive when native municipal employees were replaced with whites; the Color Bar Bill finally excluded all black workers from mechanical jobs and forced industrial enterprise to a tremendous increase of production costs. The race world of the Boers had nobody to fear any more, least of all white labor, whose trade unions complained bitterly that the Color Bar Bill did not go far enough.

The racism described here is race-rule. Boer clans subsisted by forcing native tribes to farm for them. They didn’t want this arrangement upset by the development of industry or bureaucracy. (They got their wish.)

“Mob” in Arendt refers to the agglomeration of misfits: people excluded from the workings of a polity: people fulfilling no communal organizational or economic function. Mere hoarders of wealth; speculators; subsistence farmers; unemployed workers (the individualistic ones, not those moved by solidarity).

As separatist farmers, Boer clans belonged to the mob. So did people involved in the gold rush: investors as well as individual miners. Rich and poor.

Mob-rule occurs when such people use politics to prevent the development of “normal” governance and commerce. For example: Jews

settled down permanently into a unique position for a white group. [Footnote: “Jews constituted roughly one-third of the total immigration to South Africa in the twenties, and … in sharp contrast to all other categories of uitlanders, settled there permanently; their share in the annual emigration is less than a per cent.”] They neither belonged to the “lifeblood” of Africa nor to the “poor white trash.” Instead they started almost immediately to build up those industries and professions which according to South African opinion are “secondary” because they are not connected with gold. Jews became manufacturers of furniture and clothes, shopkeepers and members of the professions, physicians, lawyers, and journalists. In other words, no matter how well they thought they were adjusted to the mob conditions of the country and its race attitude, Jews had broken its most important pattern by introducing into South African economy a factor of normalcy and productivity, with the result that when Mr. Malan introduced into Parliament a bill to expel all Jews from the Union he had the enthusiastic support of all poor whites and of the whole Afrikander population.

The timeless lesson is that it behooves the most speculative and exploitative businessmen – captains of mostly useless industries (extraction of ornamental minerals, space exploration, gambling, luxurious transportation and housing) – to maintain a dysfunctional society: to lord it over desperate, disconnected, disaffected workers and voters. Plodding but sound officials and workers who bring order to chaos are best eliminated. Energetic immigrants who do so are best kept out. You can see how this describes our own moment.

As I read, I’m tempted to draw analogies between past and present, almost to treat Arendt as an oracle. Of course I don’t know enough to judge whether she gets the past right. And the analogies that suggest themselves in certain moods seem farfetched in others. How closely can Obama really be likened to Arendt’s Disraeli? I don’t know.

The origins of totalitarianism (1951)

A slog of a book, with prophetic flashes. Here’s one.

“I would annex the planets if I could” (Cecil Rhodes said this). Arendt comments in ch. 5:

The imperialist-minded businessman, whom the stars annoyed because he could not annex them, realized that power organized for its own sake would beget more power. When the accumulation of capital had reached its natural, national limits, the bourgeoisie understood that only with an “expansion is everything” ideology, and only with a corresponding power-accumulating process, would it be possible to set the old motor into motion again. At the same moment, however, when it seemed as though the true principle of perpetual motion had been discovered, the specifically optimistic mood of the progress ideology was shaken. Not that anybody began to doubt the irresistibility of the process itself, but many people began to see what had frightened Cecil Rhodes: that the human condition and the limitations of the globe were a serious obstacle to a process that was unable to stop and to stabilize, and could therefore only begin a series of destructive catastrophes once it had reached its limits. …

By “Victory or Death,” the Leviathan can indeed overcome all political limitations that go with the existence of other peoples and can envelop the whole earth in its tyranny. But when the last war has come and every man has been provided for, no ultimate peace is established on earth: the power-accumulating machine, without which continual expansion would not have been achieved, needs more material to devour in its never-ending process. If the last victorious Commonwealth cannot proceed to “annex the planets,” it can only proceed to destroy itself in order to begin anew the never-ending process of power generation.

There it is: why Elon Musk wants to colonize space and destroy the U.S. government.

I’d say “there in brief,” only it could be briefer.

I have a friend, a Trump/​Musk fanboy, who says he needs the “CliffsNotes” version whenever he’s directed to an explanation of why Trump/​Musk’s actions are illegal, repugnant, not in the country’s best interest, and so on. Usually I want to say: Just read the article (the legal document, etc.).

But I admit we need CliffsNotes for Arendt.

Here’s my own summary and application – not so brief, alas, but with plainer language.

It used to be that businessmen driven to make wealth from wealth didn’t involve themselves in national politics. (Arendt goes on about this at length.) If the government kept things stable enough for business, businessmen didn’t care who ruled the country. But countries are too small. Eventually, businessmen would use up their countries’ resources and saturate their countries’ markets. So they couldn’t indefintely keep growing their businesses at home. They’d have to go elsewhere.

Businessmen tried speculating abroad as private agents, but conditions proved too risky – too unstable. So they brought in their countries’ armies to guarantee stability. (And a leg up – although I don’t recall Arendt saying this; anyway, she doesn’t emphasize it.) Deploying armies required businessmen to involve themselves in governing their own countries as well as the new lands where they did business. So, eventually, businessmen came to dominate the business of governing (in no small part, by promoting the myth that businessmen are the best rulers). But, eventually, they’d run into trouble with other countries (ruled by their businessmen). Besides, the planet was too small. Country-scale problems of exhaustion and saturation were bound to recur on a global scale; as it’s shrewdly noted on James Bond’s familial coat-of-arms, “the world is not enough.” So, one “Bond villain,” Musk – possibly with Rhodes’s words in mind, Rhodes having been a big cheese in Musk’s home of southern Africa – tried colonizing other planets. But that was stupid. So, instead, he just took over the world’s most powerful government and destroyed as much of it and the rest of the globe as he could so that he could get more wealth for himself doing what governments used to do. This was less stupid, insofar as it profited him (tabulation is ongoing), but it sure was petulant, and the casualties were enormous.

I want to stress that I’m not endorsing ideas, just formulating them.