Arendt and Complicity

Date: 11 Nov 2020

Apropos of absolutely nothing going on in the world today, I recently indecided to read Hannah Arendt's 1964 essay, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship".[1] The question is simple: can we judge those who did terrible things in terrible times? A difficult question, because an obvious response is that those of us who did not live through such times could not know what it was like. An uncomfortable question as well, since Arendt points out that there is often an unwillingness to judge, a sort of lack of self-confidence, or a belief that no one is a truly free agent.

Of course, such questions are entirely abstract to us, living as we do in a world where absolutely no one approves or is complicit in any kind of slide towards fascism, along with its attendant hounds of racism, sexism, and xenophobia.

Nonetheless the essay was worth reading: it avoids platitudes and asks interesting questions. Some of it is oddly familiar, such as when she discusses the widespread moral collapse that happened early on: we are not as surprised by the brutality of the brownshirts as we are by the widespread acquiescence of the public to such casual brutality and criminality. There were many who did not completely agree with the crimes of the Third Reich, and yet committed them. These are the ones we are concerned with most of all. Many might have thought it more responsible to stay on, perhaps out of duty, or out of a hope that they would "prevent worse things from happening", or from a claimed belief that by doing so they were choosing a "lesser evil".

And yet Arendt points out that these excuses fall flat, one after the other. Those who stayed on were often civil servants, without whom the regime would not have survived. There was no attempt at an overthrow of the regime early on, and by the time one was attempted it was far too late. The justification that they had chosen a lesser evil is one we can reject both on the basis that the "lesser evil" is soon forgotten to be evil at all as things get worse (and they always get worse), and perhaps also on the basis that one should not even choose a lesser evil, since it is still evil.

The most pertinent bit, to my mind, was the point that questions of moral responsibility, like legal responsibility, remain fundamentally individual. It is often argued, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that when many other people make the same mistake there is less culpability for doing so, since this shows the mistake was an easy one to make. And yet Arendt argues this is irrelevant for the question of personal responsibility. We cannot simply dodge responsibility for our own actions, and it is not a defence to say that others did the same or to say that others would have done so if we did not.

With all this in mind, it makes sense to me that Arendt argues the few who chose to avoid complicity altogether were not those who firmly held to their convictions, since it turned out that convictions could be replaced; but rather those who were in the habit of asking themselves if they could, as an individual, live with what they were asked to do.

> "...the total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler regime may teach us that under such circumstances those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable: we now know that moral norms and standards can be changed overnight, and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something. Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds. Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves."

That they withdrew from politics might seem irresponsible, but Arendt suggests that responsibility requires at least some ability to act, and this was denied them in practice by the dictatorship they lived in; by withdrawing from where obedience was demanded, they at least refused to lend their support to the regime, and it does not take a great deal of effort to imagine how powerful such civil disobedience could be if done *en masse*.

And as for those who did what was demanded of them? They perhaps thought themselves duty-bound to obey, but really they were asked to support the regime, to *consent* to the regime -- this makes all the difference, for those of us who are not either children or slaves -- and they did so.

Coda

Arendt states early on in the essay that most of her remarks would be most germane to totalitarian societies. I agree, but I think what she has to say has much more general application. The heart of it is not her rejection of the excuses people offer for their complicity or for their refusal to judge, but her arguments that:

We are individuals who may choose to give or withhold our consent and support;

Our decisions to participate and to give or withhold support, and our responsibility for doing so, are also individual and cannot be mitigated by an appeal to the crowd; and

A flexible scepticism grounded in an ongoing dialogue with the self and concerned with what one can live with having done is the best inoculation against moral collapse.

These seem to me to be just as applicable to citizens exercising their political rights (of speech, of association and assembly, and to vote) in a democratic state, as they are to those they were addressed to, viz. those who form part of the professional and administrative machinery in a fascist or totalitarian state.

In times like these, where one can easily feel that half the world has gone mad while the other half can only struggle with moral collapse, it can be daunting to ask ourselves what we are complicit in. Questions of our personal responsibility can be difficult enough, without going into whether we also share collective responsibility for acts we may have had no part in, but which we inherit by virtue of our membership in a political community.[3] The only consolation I can find is that, like the Stoics, we at least retain both the right and the responsibility to make our own choices going forward, against all the world if need be.

Footnotes

[1] In Jerome Kohn (ed.), *Responsibility and Judgment*.

[2] A position that reminds me of a passage from a favourite writer of mine. Kierkegaard wrote that it was a common tendency of people to go along with the crowd, on the assumption that the crowd can't be wrong, and that if they were in any case wrong there would be some exculpation because everyone else had also been fooled. Common, but wrong: God cares not about the general mass but the individual, and there are no breaks for having made the same errors as everyone else.

[3] See Hannah Arendt, "Collective Responsibility", in *Responsibility and Judgment*.

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