I’m slowly making my way through books by and about Hannah
Arendt, since that fascinating biopic on her came out recently. Possibly it’s because the film was focused
on the Eichmann trial, but I am quite taken by her insight into the nature of
good and evil. She made a lot of enemies
when people misunderstood her to say Eichmann wasn’t a monster, but just an
ordinary Joe. They were looking for a way
to keep an awareness of the Holocaust alive and thought having a monster like
Eichmann would do the job. She didn’t
really argue he wasn’t a monster; she merely suggested we were looking for evil
in all the wrong places. Evil, she said,
stems not from violence so much as it does from thoughtlessness. And by that she meant not careless thinking, but
lack of thinking.
Eichmann was able to do evil things because he didn’t think
for himself. He was the ideal Nazi
follower. His strength and his pride were in his own ability to follow orders.
Once he had found the perfect authority figure in the Führer, his work was done. From then on, all that was required of him
was to do what he was told.
Arendt had formed her notions of good and evil from a
lifetime dealing with the problem of totalitarianism, first directly, in the flesh, then the rest of her life
philosophically. She was a Jew who left Germany when the Nazis
took over in 1933, and she devoted much of her life thereafter to the contemplation
of evil. Before her coverage of the Eichmann trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem, which made her
famous, she had already decided that real evil is perpetrated by enablers,
those who go along with the crowd, become part of mass opinion, seek out
authority figures to follow uncritically.
Her embrace of critical thinking began long before her study
of twentieth-century authoritarianism, but the advent of Hitler and Stalin
and the vision of the mindless crowds surrounding them in adulation could only
confirm the importance of open-ended thinking.
A study of semantics will reveal just how arbitrary is
meaning. Postmodern philosophy goes
further. It suggests that not only is
meaning negotiated constantly anew, but so is truth itself. Or at least our understanding of it. What this means in ordinary language is that
what matters is not the so-called eternal truths, but how we live in society,
matching our own personal experience against the experience of others to establish
what is good and what is meaningful.
To authoritarians, this is anathema. To religious authoritarians, it is
heresy. Truth must be eternal and
unchanging. This struggle, between
conservatives who would foreground the constants and background the trivial
(for what else would we call something that is not eternal?), and those who would
see the essence of life in the flow of life, is one of the great philosophical
issues of all time. What can we count
on? Is life to be lived moving from whim
to whim?
To non-authoritarians, change is the very nature of
life. One never steps into the same
stream twice, say the Buddhists. One
lives not in the night; one lives in the time “becoming day.” One
lives in the hope things will get better.
And one knows from experience that with new knowledge, new perspectives, new insight, it actually often
does.
Arendt once had this to say about how to view the world and
the people in it: “The world and the
people who inhabit it,” she said, “are not the same.” “The world lies in between people.” Although Arendt was referring to feeling at
home in the world again after years of alienation, I take her declaration that
the world lies between people to mean that it moves forward in everyday human
interactions. What matters is not so much the status of
birth, or wealth, or accidents of nature, or any of the other externals that we
credit or blame for the human condition, but what we do with these givens and
events. Life is what we make it, and
reality changes as human interactions make new experiences. With each new experience we have more to go
on in making wiser choices than before.
Another way to say the world lies “in between people” is to
say that meaning is constantly negotiated anew, and this implies there is no
meaning without constant movement, constant questioning of assumed truths, and
revisiting of the values we live by.
Without such openness, we would never have gone from being a
slave-holding society to where we are now. We are still trying to remove the scars of
slavery and segregation, but slavery to virtually all Americans today is unthinkable. We would not
have decided it is inappropriate to tie seven-year-olds to machines in
factories rather than give them a basic education. Or that our understanding of race was
arbitrary and unscientific and there was no justification to forbidding people
of different races to marry. We
routinely look back at our history and wonder at the folly we once took for
truth and common sense. Without this
openness, past wrongs can never be put right.
These thoughts flooded in the other day when I read the
stunning news that the pope had made a move that I suspect will change the
world. Or at least a good segment of
the human population which still looks to the Roman Catholic Church for answers
and those affected by their decisions.
Ever since attempts to open the church under Pope John XXIII in Vatican
II, succeeding popes have been trying to move the church back to where it was
when the pope lost control of the Papal States and compensated by claiming sole
infallible authority over the minds of the faithful. The Roman Catholic Church in recent years
has been notorious for its embrace of tradition, the old ways such as a return to the Latin Mass, the idea that
the pope speaks through the bishops and priests for God and the prime duty of a catholic is
obedience.
While the clerical arteries were hardening within, those in
the Church in touch with the world outside have recognized the damage done to
the institution by its authoritarian patriarchy. These “folks in the pews” have gone along,
as most people have, with the progress of human rights outside its walls, where
women are increasingly finding a voice and substituting sexual equality for
patriarchal domination, where lesbians and gays are finding dignity and social
approval, where Catholic priests working with the poor in Latin America are
demonstrating that followers of Jesus can be primarily about compassion and not
power, authority, and self-interest. For
the majority of Roman Catholics, both those leaving the institution in droves
and those working with extraordinary patience within, having to watch the hierarchy
attending banquets with the power structure, joining forces with dictators – and
more recently with right-wing Republicans known for taking away food stamps to
enable tax benefits for the rich – has been a heavy burden.
Now, in one fell swoop, Pope Francis seems to have lifted
the burden from their shoulders by declaring the moral teachings of the church
are not all equivalent. “We have to find
a new balance,” he said, and by that he meant it is time to give up the
preoccupation with abortion, homosexuality and birth control, and look at the
more essential Christian doctrines stressing love and compassion. “This church…” Francis declared, making a
sharp contrast with his predecessor who once suggested he’d be perfectly happy
with the church shrinking down to a smaller group of true believers, “is the home of all, not a
small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people.”
It’s
important to note in passing that the pope has not made any sudden
changes in doctrine. He has not come to
embrace abortion, homosexuality or birth control. He has only criticized the church’s
preoccupation – not with adultery, or greed, or deception or gluttony or any the
many other sins out there worthy of condemnation, but – with issues of sex, including
birth control and abortion. His
criticism has been leveled at what one person has aptly called a “pelvic
zone orthodoxy.” The sins in question still
stand.
In
so doing, he is inviting all within the church, gays, women, priests sanctioned
for their work as Liberation Theologists, to the table. Just as orthodox rabbis can say to their gay
members (or anybody else they consider a sinner), “You’re always welcome at
shul,” Catholics, Francis is suggesting,
can keep coming to mass and should expect to be embraced.
This
will be possible, of course, only when the focus is not on the rules, not on
the status quo, but on the dialogue.
What has to matter is the on-going nature of human relationships, the exchange
of views. The church, like any other
network of human relationships, must live in the spaces in between. In the language of progressive Christians,
one has to stop putting a period where God has put a comma, and God has to be
experienced not as a noun (truth, authority, censure), but as a verb.
When
you embrace this option of remaining open, you are faced with a constant need
to revise as you go along. You are
required to think. Hannah Arendt saw
evil in thoughtlessness. Having to think
doesn’t mean you always reach the right conclusions. But not thinking takes away your power to
stand up to what is wrong.
“Who
am I to judge?” Francis said, when asked recently about his stand on
homosexuality.
I
take that to mean, “I’m keeping an open mind.”
(I don’t imagine he would give the same answer to “What do you think of
rape and murder?”)
He
has opened the doors of the church and let in some fresh air. He has not shed the concept of infallibility,
but he has taken the notion from himself and placed it where he thinks it
belongs, on the body of believers as a whole.
They will have to work out their differences, in other words. Don’t wait for me to give you the answers,
he is telling them. Think for yourselves.
There
are a lot worse things than a pope who encourages thinking.
If
you are interested in the pope’s interview, it’s available here.
And
if you are interested in some of the discussion about the impact of the pope’s
views, Bill Lindsey’s blog is a
good summary and place to start.
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