Nathan Harter
Hannah Arendt wrote in the mid-twentieth century, mostly about politics. In her acclaimed Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures, she made some perfectly reasonable observations that led to striking conclusions – the most disturbing of which is the evaporation of politics. Here is what she was saying.
Social action is irreversible. Once you do something, you cannot undo it. Not easily. The primary reason you cannot undo it is that you cannot control what other people do as a result of what you did. You might have intended X, but somebody else reacted with Y and not X. Human behavior has lots of unintended consequences.
Over time, a little thing can have enormous consequences. Social scientists were to adopt this principle and call it the Butterfly Effect, due to the statistical significance of a butterfly’s wing that can alter the weather thousands of miles away. What you do reverberates down through the ages. At least, that could happen. You never know.
Not only is social action irreversible and unpredictable, but it can also become boundless, stretching on and on. Who knows? Maybe something you say or do catches on. Maybe only one person hears it and passes it on later to his child. Maybe one act of kindness will lift the spirits of an artist who goes on to create a masterpiece. As a teacher, I live for the possibility that something I’ve done outlasts me.
This assumes that your action has positive consequences. Given the unpredictable nature of social action, your good intentions can backfire, and the negative effects could grow all out of proportion, sort of like a comedy skit for Lucille Ball. One tiny indiscretion, or one thoughtless gesture, can leave an enduring stench.
Politics is comprised of social action. That is the primary function of political space: to welcome social action. Given the uncertainty of what might occur as a result, however, politics is inherently risky. Everybody can watch. And through no fault of your own, things can go wrong quickly. You can’t take it back, pretending it never happened.
A few national politicians have tried this tactic, but it rarely works.
Add to all this the fact that events having nothing to do with you and your decisions can still affect the mood of the voters, who will blame you. In a bad economy, the mood sours. During times of war, however, voters tend to rally around their leaders. To a great extent, politicians are just lucky or unlucky.
The sooner we recognize the uncertainty of social action, wrote Arendt, the sooner we can exercise two of the best strategies to keep moving forward. First, we can overcome the irreversibility of social action when we forgive and start again. We did this, if you recall, for Bill Clinton, but not for Richard Nixon. Forgiveness allows us all to put the past behind us and learn from it without becoming stuck.
The second strategy helps us overcome the unpredictable nature of social action, and that is promise-keeping. We can say in advance what we intend. We can issue vows or assurances or guarantees or pledges or whatever you want to call them. And of course if you renege, the voters will be entitled to remember. Remember the first George Bush telling us to read his lips: no new taxes?
Today, voters are unlikely to forgive, and partisans for the other side will never let them forget. We have lost faith in political promises – thrilled to hear them and cynical to discover later nobody ever expected to deliver. Without forgiveness and a meaningful commitment to promise-keeping, social action simply tumbles on ahead, in its own crazy way, unbounded, till circumstances look nothing like what anybody ever could have guessed.
Most of us eventually turn away from the spectacle, disgusted, pressured more and more to keep body and soul together, so we labor for our daily bread and then eat our daily bread so we have the strength to turn around the next day in order to labor again, round and round, responding to necessity, too busy to step forward ourselves and initiate social action.
And that is precisely what disappointed Arendt. With the birth of every child comes the chance to do something new, to start over, to begin a chain of events that will enrich or ennoble us all someday. But it takes that first big step, suspending your career to stand before the people and offer yourself. If more of us don’t try, politics will quit being politics. It will become a game, a crime, a drama, a job, a joke, or a horror the likes of which Arendt knew quite well having fled the Gestapo because she was a Jew.
