What [Arendt] called “the banality of evil” was the inability to hear another voice, the inability to have a dialogue either with oneself or the world, the moral world.Recently, it seems as if everything I read or hear has to do with the the need for an overarching belief or consensus for a culture or government to be able to sustain itself. And I have spent much of the past weekend talking about how impossible it appears to be for disparate parts of our culture to have any real discussion--how determined people seem to be not to hear one another. Coming home from church Sunday I heard an interview on On Being with Lyndsey Stonebridge about her essay, Thinking and Friendship in Dark Times, which touches on the difficulties and the necessity of the conversations that we aren't having. I think it is well worth listening to if you can find an hour to do it, or you could just scan through the text interview.
I see from looking around the internet that there is a renewed interest in Arendt at the moment, and that some people think other people are misusing her. Well, I don't know enough about that to comment one way or another, but I do think that some of the points made in the interview are worth thinking about.
AMDG
P.S. I cannot find that essay anywhere.
If you want a culture that’s going to take on fake news, and the political lie, I say as someone who teaches literature and history, what you need is a culture of the arts and humanity. What you need is more storytelling. What you need is more discourse. What you need is more imagination. What you need is more creation in that way, and more of a sense of what it is that ties us to those words and ties us to those stories.
ReplyDeleteNah, I think we need more of the Augustine that Arendt wrote her dissertation on!
we were just talking about this last night - the inability of people in this land to talk to those that they disagree with. It is a profound lack.
ReplyDelete