What in the human psyche makes hate ideology a home?
I am rereading Hannah Arendt, who wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Origins of Totalitarianism. The first book was based on her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a major Nazi operative responsible for the extermination of thousands and thousands of Jews in Nazi Germany. What makes a man like that tick, she asked. Her answer was: Nothing. There was nothing real in his head. Eichmann was incapable of free and independent thought. His mind with filled with cliches which he interpreted in an utterly simplistic way. Hence Arendt’s highly controversial, often misunderstood, and not universally applicable concept of “the banality of evil.”
When we see evil, such as we saw in Charlottesville, and in Orlando, and Charleston, and in San Bernardino, and at the Boston Marathon bombing, we want to think of it as powerful, and clever, and mythically Satanic. But that’s not always how evil is.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt developed a concept of the human psychology that makes totalitarianism possible. It is a personality that lives for the crowd and by the slogan. Many writers of the last century wrote about “mass man,” as opposed to individuated man. But Arendt wrote about the man who literally could not think. He can only respond to the stimulus of the mass, and the symbols that move it.
The essence of thinking is making distinctions. The essence of citizenship — real citizenship — is thinking.
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Americans must begin thinking more deeply about race, and the other things that divide us. But we must do so with brutal honesty, without blinders, and we must do it together. “Come, let us reason together,” said Lyndon Johnson at another time when racial tension seemed to threaten the civil fabric.
To do that, we need free speech. And that means the ability to hear what we do not want to hear.
We need to stop demonizing each other. And we need to set aside the factions, the -isms, the slogans. We cannot fail to condemn white nationalists. Or black nationalists. And we will never be able to reason together if we begin by calling each other racists.
Yes, President Trump should have denounced white nationalism by name, initially. Now he has done so and his sincerity is questioned. But no matter what you assume about what is in the President’s heart, we need to make distinctions: Not every Trump voter is a white nationalist. Not every Brietbart reader is a racist. Not every aspect of Confederate history should be obliterated, first because it is history and second because not every Confederate soldier was a racist, nor are most of his descendants.
My first job in journalism was in Winston-Salem, N.C. When I went there, I knew nothing of the South. I made two great friends who were Southerners and helped me to see much more than I would have on my own — John Syme and my publisher, Joseph Doster. Mr. Doster was a born and bred Tar Heel. He grew up dirt poor and earned a Phi Beta Kappa key at Chapel Hill. He’d been an ace reporter and bureau chief. And he could discuss the history of the presidency and the structure of the federal reserve with dexterity. He also signed a petition to rename his street “Billy Bob Lane.” His attitude could be summed up in the words of another hero of mine: “I am the great unwashed.”
Joe loved the South, he could not otherwise. I am sure he would be astonished at the idea that a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville should come down. Lee was a heroic figure in the eyes of U.S. Grant.
John was the grandson of Mississippi’s longtime, senior senator, John C. Stennis. Senator Stennis would, I am sure, be thought of by northern liberals today, as he was by many in his time, as a throwback. But he was a courtly man who served his state and country nobly. He was wrong about the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s. But Barry Goldwater, Sam Ervin, William F. Buckley, and William Fulbright were all wrong, too. Should these names and all the good they did be obliterated from history because they were on the wrong side of one vital issue?
Americans are losing the capacity to talk to one another, which is un-American. Politics is now off limits for me and someone very dear to me because I said Mike Pence is not evil. “How can you say that,” this person asked. Well, I met the man and spent time with him. He’s a good man. I don’t need to agree with him to see that.
But for many Americans on the left, such a statement is unpardonable heresy.
We have to establish some common ground to be able to reason together. I suggest goodwill and free speech.
And we have to be able to think — to make distinctions. Otherwise, we deny the complexity of history.
Reinhold Niebuhr — another great thinker of the last century — wrote an entire book on the irony of American history. Our history is sometimes heroic, as in the imagination of Ronald Reagan. And it is sometimes tragic, as in the imagination of Lincoln (a man formed in Kentucky who understood the South). But it is almost always ironic. Think about great progressives like LBJ or Woodrow Wilson, who were very far from enlightened on race, even for their own times. Should their contributions to history be negated? Wilson is already on his way to the ash heap. Forty years from now, will we remove the statues of Martin Luther King, Jr., because he was an unfaithful husband and he objectified women?
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I am fascinated by Thomas Jefferson. I love his writing and I love his renaissance mind. He is the ultimate thinking individualist. He is the author of the American creed. His home at Monticello is a citadel of learning and humanism. I once attended a ceremony naturalizing new citizens there — men and women of many nations and colors. It was deeply moving. And yet, in the basement of that great house, where the great man lived, are the slave quarters. Jefferson never freed his own slaves, though he knew full well what slavery was. He knew it was the American stain. And, though he knew, he exploited at least one slave in a way we today find appalling.
There is nothing simple about history, about race, or about America, and there is not a single American who has not been at some time “so blind he could not see.”
The only way to stumble forward is freedom of thought and expression and curiosity about each other.
Keith C. Burris is a columnist for The Blade.
Contact him at kburris@theblade.com or 419-724-6266.
First Published August 14, 2017, 8:56 p.m.
