Tag Archives: totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt And the Importance of Critical Thinking

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Hannah Arendt is visiting me this morning!  Yes, she dropped by in the form of one of her books and I am fully taken by her grasp of the Hitler era and the workings of the mind. In scholarly culture, if you think of totalitarianism you inevitably think of this woman because of her book, “Origins of Totalitarianism.”  But her visit this morning is via another book of hers, “The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation of How We Think.”

We usually do not think about “thinking” because we are too busy thinking, too busy with the white noise we are accustomed to. To “think about our thinking” is to bring to bear thought upon the very process of our “thinking,” or cognition. This complicated involution of the mind is one dimension of the thinking process and is commonly called, “critical thinking.”  Arendt’s work posits the notion that if we are not willing to employ  “critical thinking” there is a sense in which we are not thinking at all but are “thought” by what are merely the machinations of our unconscious mind.  As a result of this, we are carried along life’s way by a subterranean conglomerate of unacknowledged premises and assumptions which do the “thinking” for us. Someone once said, “Our thinking is but belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”  In simple terms, “We think what we want to think.”

This is a very complicated vein of thought I am presenting here and merits further explanation; but that would take me too far from what I am trying to present.  In simple terms, Arendt teaches us that if we never get beyond “thinking what we want to think” we become easy prey to totalitarianism.  There is sense in which we are imprisoned by our very thinking and will make decisions that can be catastrophic in the long run.  This is what Socrates told us about in his famous “Cave” allegory, a delightful summary of which can be found in a cartoon—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RWOpQXTltA

Here is a brief selection from Arendt’s “Life of the Mind”:

Non-thinking, which seems so recommendable a state for moral and political affairs, also has its perils. By shielding people from the dangers of examination, it teaches them to hold fast to whatever the prescribed the rules of conduct may be at given time in a given society.  What people get used to then is less the content of the rules, a close examination of which would lead them into perplexity than the possession of rules under which to subsume particulars.

The “non-thinking” which Arendt’s work explores relies heavily on that term, “subsume particulars.”  This refers to taking in what we read or hear and “subsuming” it into “categories” which lay unexamined in the realm of perception.  Here in perception, as opposed to cognition, one can reject anything coming his way that is antithetical to this perceptual field.  Within the perceptual field lies unquestioned assumptions and biases which almost always “dictates” our thinking, ruling out anything not consistent with our view of the world.

Vaclav Havel and Epistemic Closure

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Epistemic closure and close-mindedness has been one of my “obsessions” in the six years I’ve been blogging.  There is no doubt that this is because I have spent my life in that prison and this “blathering” is my feeble effort to talk/think/write my way out of it.  But this effort is teaching me that there is no escape…or as Sartre put it in his short story, “No Exit,”…for we are confined to live in the world of appearance where we can only at best, “see through a glass darkly,” trusting that there is some, “Divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.”  And I do have faith in that Divinity but the “faith” and the “Divinity” itself is of a different stripe than the one I was presented with by the happenstance of birth.  Accepting this world of limitations is slow and tedious and one is always dragged there kicking and screaming, for the ego wants to cling to the illusion that it is completely in control.  Accepting life in this world of incomplete knowledge…”seeing darkly”…is what I think the Biblical “fall” was about, the “fall” from the Uroborous of innocence into the world of cognition.

In the following quotation from Vaclav Havel’s 1986 book of essays, “Living in Truth,” we see his description of the, “post-totalitarian state” that he lived through in Czechoslovakia in the late 1980’s, leading to the Velvet Revolution which he led in 1992.  By the term, “post-totalitarian state” Havel was referring to a subtle form of totalitarianism which purports to no longer be totalitarian but only because the system of bondage has become systematized so finely that it is not readily recognized.  It brings to mind an observation made by psychologist B.F. Skinner who, in his book, “Beyond Freedom and Dignity,” declared that the most pernicious form of slavery is one which is so subtle that it does not breed revolt.  In Havel’s description we find a description of epistemic closure on the group level which closely parallels the epistemic closure of the individuals who have been consumed by “group think,” a dark cloud with whom they have a symbiotic relationship.  (I will address the individual dimension of this problem in my next post.)

The post-industrial system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on.  This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies, government by bureaucracy is called popular government, the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class, the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his or her ultimate liberation, depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical election become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views, military occupation becomes fraternal assistance.  Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything.  It falsifies the past.  It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future.  It falsifies statistics.  It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus.  It pretends to respect human rights.  It pretends to persecute no one.  It pretends to fear nothing.  It pretends to pretend nothing. (pg. 44-45, Vaclav Havel, “Living in Truth.”)