I am compelled by my very nature to seek out new things to read, despite the ever-growing piles of old things to read that surround me. That’s as good an explanation as any for why I came across Samantha Rose Hill’s Substack. Hill is a political science scholar, the author of a couple of books about Hannah Arendt, and for the past couple of months, every Tuesday, she takes a passage from Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and parses it. She’s planning on 20 episodes, of which she’s done 8 so far. I happened across her 7th entry about a week ago, and kind of thought, why not? Arendt is one of those writers whose work is part of that growing pile, and this felt like a nice way to ease into it. The passage Hill cites is a bit longer, but I focused mostly on the first paragraph:
The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us—neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.
Hill explains that Arendt is intent on drawing “a distinction between making sense and the work of comprehension,” which (tbh) felt a little counter-intuitive to me. I’ve spent enough of my life reading philosophy to be comfortable with fine-grained distinctions, but it also convinced me that I didn’t want to live my life among them. So I went into this a little skeptical. Comprehending something and making sense of it have always felt to me more synonymous than not.
The first thing that I thought about, though, as I read this passage was the contemporary turn towards conspiracy theories. I think that they might provide us with some idea of the distinction that Arendt is after. Conspiracism is one way that we make sense of disparate or inexplicable phenomena, often at the cost of genuine comprehension. In her book Cultish, Amanda Montell talks about how susceptibility to conspiracy theories is driven in part by “the needs for certainty, control, and closure that feel especially urgent during crisis-ridden times.” That feels like it matches it up with what Arendt describes as “the conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible” to us. What Montell adds, perhaps, is the idea that the more chaotic (crisis-ridden) the circumstances, the more likely we are to retreat into an attempt to have things make sense.
Hill notes that “Making things make sense minimizes how significant they are and dampens the ‘shock of reality.’ When we make the unknown familiar, the unknown is no longer ‘new.’” And this in turn allows us to simply explain it away, to rationalize it and treat it as unworthy of our sustained attention. One word for this that you’ll hear is “normalization1.” If someone behaves badly often enough, their fiftieth (or thousandth) indiscretion or falsehood simply isn’t as notable or newsworthy as their first. The people we rely upon to call out that behavior become inured to it, numb to the point that they’ll wave it off, because “that’s just what he does.” It’s not unlike the cynicism of saying “boys will be boys.”
Arendt’s point is that we insulate ourselves from the shock of experience this way, but I’d add that there’s an inertia to this process that makes that insulation progressively more difficult to puncture. We often think about this from the perspective of the “boys” that we enable this way, wondering why they grow increasingly worse, when the enabling is just as much to blame. It’s the force that insists on the “sense” that this behavior makes, rather than confronting it (and comprehending it) in its present state.
And yes, I know that everyone and their next door neighbor has a podcast or a YouTube explainer about the unprecedented impact of describing the Republican Presidential ticket as “weird,” but let’s return to it one last time, because I think this passage from Arendt gets at precisely why it’s been a successful tactic. Hill explains that “Comprehension means, instead, examining what is in front of us with fresh eyes,” and sometimes all it takes is one moment of defamiliarization to trigger that examination. It’s low-key shocking to realize that we’ve all been part of a game that’s been going on for nearly a decade, and a little demoralizing to realize that we’ve (all) been responsible for keeping it going as long as it has.
But as Ryan Broderick notes,
The big lie was immediately undone once a candidate fully shaped by it stepped on stage and opened his idiot cringe mouth. Because the Trump distortion field only works if you can play the part. And playing the part only works if the person you’re running against is playing one too (sorry Hillary). But when all of this is pulled out of the internet and forced to exist in the real world, it quickly becomes apparent that the central tenet of the incel has never been true.
What Broderick calls the “distortion field” is what I’m calling (citing Kirsten Powers in the link above) a “game.” One of the things about games, as Johann Huizinga wrote, is the extent to which they rely on a “magic circle,” or “the space in which the normal rules and reality of the world are suspended and replaced by the artificial reality of a game world.” Within the magic circle of the game, plenty of things “make sense.” You have to accept (at least, provisionally) the reality of the game world to understand, for example, why a soccer goalie wears a different kit from the rest of her team and is allowed to use her hands while they aren’t. Or why corporate spokesdrones and Fox commentators decry laws against price-gouging as Communism. It’s when we allow those artificial realities to be dictated to us and for us that we run into problems.
The relief so many people feel at finally being able to step away from the distortion fields, and to see some of this for what it is, speaks to me to the vitality of Arendt’s passage2. It’s not that reality doesn’t have its own problems, to be sure, but facing up to them feels like a pretty good first step.
I should also mention that this is partly the way that the so-called Overton Window functions, which I’ve written about before.
I feel like I should be clear here that, without reading far more of Arendt’s work, I wouldn’t lay claim to explaining “what Arendt means.” As my subtitle suggests, this is more of a riff than an explication.
Thanks for the discussion on "Origins of Totalitarianism" here, and the lead to Samantha Rose Hill. Related, I think (and with clear acknowledgement that I've got Lord Huron's "Lonesome Pine" on the turntable), I just plugged the DVD of "The Post" into the player night before last, and was struck that while Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee were both, superficially, playing the roles of owner and editor of a paper just trying to stay in business - the undercurrent, brought literally out of 'Nam by Daniel Ellsberg, who'd seen first-hand what was "going on", was that an entirely corrupted process of governance was completely contaminating the discussion of what "This war is all about". Seeing the portrayal of a comfortable establishment scene in DC of how 'things get done' suddenly come in conflict with the lying and implicit threats to "the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be", and then doing something about it was more jarring to me now than it was then- and then I was just 13 draft numbers from being called up. Thanks for this.