The Trap of Punditry
MORGAN, RICHARD E.
The Trap of Punditry Crises of the Republic By Hannah Arendt Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 233 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Richard E. Morgan Associate Professor of Government, Bowdoin College Most...
...Arendt treats this as a question of "facts...
...This distinction is usually invoked to argue that persons in the first category, the civil disobedients, gain moral stature solely by their willingness to accept the prescribed penalty for their violation, while those in the second may reasonably ask to be relieved of punishment (even if their legal challenge does not succeed) because they were playing by the rules of the game...
...But a theory of government by consent cannot coherently require specific consent to specific acts...
...Even more arresting is Arendt's suggestion concerning the role of hypocrisy as a provocation of violence: "If we inquire historically into the causes likely to transform engages into enrages, it is not injustice that ranks first, but hypocrisy...
...Yet as the essay develops the difficulties increase...
...Such violence, again illegal, is not necessarily irrational...
...the third, "On Violence," analyzes certain recent manifestations of turbulence in America and wrestles again with the ancient distinctions between violence, power and authority...
...Reality" and "facts" as Arendt conceives of them here are surely the province of professors on campuses, not professors turned policy-makers...
...From the remorse of early 1972, it is difficult to accord to either of these phenomena the importance Arendt was able to see in them in 1969 when she was writing...
...Insofar as they have the appetite for action and are also in love with theories, [the policy-makers] will hardly have the natural scientist's patience to wait until theories and hypothetical explanations are verified or denied by facts...
...It is precisely the selective refusal of the civil disobedient to say this that has made his moral position so perilous, and has caused tank cars of ink to be spilt over the past few years...
...It opens with a familiar distinction—between disobeying a constitutionally proper law that one believes to be unconscionable, and disobeying a law that one believes to be unconstitutional or otherwise illegitimate within the prevailing legal scheme in order to test it...
...The core idea of consensual government is that citizens agree in advance despite their ignorance of what the actual acts of government will be...
...The central thesis of the essay is that in modern republics "power" means the capacity of the regime to muster something like continuing consent to be ruled within the electorate as well as among interest groups...
...Arendt speaks of a tacit consent that is not specific or really voluntary...
...In 1972 it seems clear that the argument for an "industrial North Vietnam" susceptible to punishment by strategic bombing was a flawed argument...
...just as to use a gun in self-defense is not 'irrational...
...the banality of evil" was impressed on our consciousness...
...We ask our most subtle minds for instant analysis of the problems (now we are taught to say "crises") of the moment...
...Against this background I found the four pieces that make up the present volume somewhat disappointing...
...We can debate and reorganize the set of interlocking procedures by which legislation is passed...
...As Arendt points out, the tension between law and justice preoccupied Melville in Billy Budd but has received short shrift in the literature of political philosophy...
...This self-delusion of the decision-makers (in their attempts to delude others) was the underlying reason for our disastrous adventure —not that Vietnam was inherently a quagmire, not that we stumbled into it as a result of a series of honestly mistaken partial commitments, not that it was part of an imperialistic design, but that we slid in on the ice of our own contrived image of ourselves as an omnipotent world policeman...
...Rage and the violence that sometimes—not always—goes with it belong among the 'natural' human emotions, and to cure man of them would mean nothing less than to dehumanize or emasculate him...
...is the only way to set the scales of justice right...
...Why does Arendt, of all people, end up with such a simplistic, almost fundamentalist argument—the sort of "it's-all-very-easy" stand that has marred so much of the antiwar movement...
...Besides, the Supreme Court refuses to consider certain kinds of constitutional questions (the so-called "political questions doctrine" and thus disobedience (as opposed to testing) is often the only course open...
...Arendt builds to the suggestion that civil disobedience groups be accorded the same legitimate place among American "institutions" as ordinary interest groups—those that lobby, litigate and propagandize...
...Now one may argue whether it is enough that consent to the political order be tacit or implied, and a case can definitely be made that consent to the procedures of lawmaking must be explicit and voluntary if citizens are to be considered as morally bound...
...Her work on The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) was, in the proper sense of a much-misused word, seminal...
...Unlike the others its argument is easily rendered: Officers of the American government charged with managing our involvement in Southeast Asia lied, and came to believe their own lies, about Vietnam...
...The answer, I think, is that American intellectuals, as a class, create a trap for those who teach them best—the trap of pundi-try...
...This, Arendt implies, has begun to happen in America, and it is here that the first twinge of disappointment is felt...
...Arendt's occasion for considering the origins of the war was, of course, the publication of the "Pentagon Papers," and the following sentences are representative of her tone: "The divergence between facts?established by the intelligence services . . .—and the premises, theories, and hypotheses according to which decisions were finally made is total...
...Her writings on history and on revolution have been delicate and highly intelligent...
...Arendt has not succeeded in leading the disobedients out of this moral wilderness...
...we can provide the most expansive sorts of constitutional protections for minorities...
...It is concerned, largely, with questions about the essay "On Violence" and is best treated as an extension of that work...
...Axendt, however, sees the moral implications differently...
...the second explores the legal and moral intricacies of "Civil Disobedience...
...It was followed by a decade of debate and a series of fascinating attempts to sharpen and perfect the concept of totalitarianism as an instrument of political analysis...
...The last point rests on a remarkable argument concerning the nature of consent in a democratic polity...
...it is mostly implied by citizens accepting the benefits of a particular order and covers only the nature of that political order...
...Why should the one class be expected to require the consummation of punishment, and the other class not...
...the fourth piece, "Thoughts on Politics and Revolution," is actually the transcript of an interview granted by Miss Arendt to the German writer Adelbert Reif in the summer of 1970...
...Contained in both of these expressions is an assumption that there is a knowable reality available to policy-makers—if only they will have patience and eschew theorizing...
...but at some point there has got to be a readiness to be bound by the output of the system—to say, "well, that's government...
...The legal order, of course, cannot countenance acts of violence based on intuitive, individual perceptions of justice, but their emotional character does not render them contemptible...
...Is North Vietnam an "industrialized" society...
...On Violence" is by far the most rewarding part of the bundle...
...The essay on "Lying in Politics" is the most problematical of the collection...
...Similarly, for today's Third World ideologue, the common experience of colonial rule is assumed to supervene all the cultural and political antagonisms between the new nations of Asia and Africa (and the older but endemically unstable nations of Latin America...
...Certainly, she observes, it is a function of the legal system to insure the stability of the ordinary political atmosphere, but the legal system itself is usefully jarred from time to time—and, after all, in disobeying a particular law a group does something that is clearly illegal but not necessarily culpable...
...On the question of whether interpersonal violence is inherently evil, one is rewarded with this distinction (and dissent from conventional wisdom): "Under certain circumstances violence . . . acting without argument or speech and without counting the consequences...
...Though the organization of the essay is almost as disjointed as the interview, bits and pieces of vintage Arendt are scattered about...
...Any discreet act or regulation promulgated by the order must be specifically consented to for a citizen to be morally bound to his fellow citizens to obey it...
...We should not really be surprised at getting a mixed bag of nice distinctions and strong feelings...
...Ten years later her commentary on the Echmann trial supplied a new dimension to our thinking about bureaucracy and criminal behavior...
...Her case that it is happening now depends on the significance of (a) urban riots and (b) campus disorders...
...As with so much of the debate over the Vietnam war, the "reality" was not then, and is not even now, self-evident...
...Civil Disobedience" defies facile summary...
...She remarks, for instance, that "The Third World is not a reality but an ideology or an illusion...
...Groups of civil disobedients, she contends, sometimes alter the law after only a slightly longer period of time than those who succeed in challenging legality and constitutional propriety...
...The world of political action is notoriously a world of shadows, quick glimpses and contradictory road signs...
...When such consent begins to be withdrawn a regime will attempt to substitute violence for power...
...To use reason when reason is a trap is not 'rational...
...A worrisome example of irrational rage is that produced by the white canard about blacks?we are all guilty...
...Rage and violence turn irrational only when they are directed against substitutes...
...What is crucial to policy-making, however, is the psychological posture of the North Vietnamese elite to these factories...
...Wogs were wogs?and their supposed common inferiority was far more important for the imperialist powers than their real differences one from another...
...she does this because the CIA had a count of factories and by Western standards there weren't many...
...Reviewed by Richard E. Morgan Associate Professor of Government, Bowdoin College Most political intellectuals of this generation have gone to school to Hannah Arendt...
...This is a commanding argument, unspoiled by what seems a misunderstanding of the political questions doctrine (whose meaning, surely, is not that there are certain constitutional questions the Court will refuse to adjudicate because they are politically charged, but that certain questions simply are not constitutional...
...In the true world, reality is inchoate and intensely political—the actors struggle to impress their particular constructions on it ahead of the next chap (hence the abiding hostility of governmental actors to "media" actors...
...The first essay, "Lying in Politics," deals with the reasons for the Vietnam debacle...
...Arendt argues that "the real rift between black and white is not healed by being translated into an even less reconcilable conflict between collective innocence and collective guilt," which "serves effectively to give the very real grievances and rational emotions of the Negro population an outlet into irrationality, an escape from reality...
...But the nature of the flaws (or the "reality") of the situation will take years of debate and exhaustive scholarship to establish...
...But this is not so...
...Not only is it an illusion, but it is the mirror image of the old colonialist idea of inferior races...
Vol. 55 • September 1972 • No. 18
