Grievance Over Ideas?
Grievances might be shared, but unless they change minds we will continue to repeat the mistakes of the past.
If you are not familiar with the name of Hannah Arendt, then you will be very shortly.
Arendt was a philosopher whose contribution towards the field is perhaps best known for her discourse on what is now known as The Banality of Evil, where her remarks on Adolf Eichmann — one of the Nazi architects of the Final Solution — brought her critics and praise alike.
One of Arendt’s observations was that evil wasn’t something unique or special. In fact, evil was something quite mundane and ordinary. Far from being unique in their capacity to inflict human suffering, the Nazis were quite ordinary, bland, and even boring.
Having endured and lived through the rising intolerance of 1930s Germany, Arendt bristled at the idea of intellectualism as a sort of bulwark against tyranny, especially as the Nazis began determining which speech was permissible in their public square and which voices were impermissible — even dangerous — in the new Gleichschaultung:
The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies did but what our friends did. . . . I lived in an intellectual milieu, but I also knew other people. And among intellectuals Gleichschaultung was the rule, so to speak. . . . I never forgot that. I left Germany dominated by the idea. . . . [that] I shall never again get involved in any kind of intellectual business. I want nothing to do with that lot.
Conservatives are often criticized by our friends on the left for being anti-intellectual, holding in contempt those who would pretend to “know better” than the rest of us. Certainly we are seeing this in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic as conservatives took with several grains of salt the warnings of epidemiologists to lock down businesses and wear masks only to watch these same sainted few perform a volte face as thousands upon thousands of people marched in the streets of America’s cities demanding justice for George Floyd.
Like most Americans, there is a certain mixed set of feelings at play. George Floyd’s death was an all-too familiar tragedy in today’s society. Urban policing is failing our urban communities. The fact that the city of Chicago can spend $1.78 billion a year on its police department while tolerating 458 murders in 2019 (down from a high of 756 in 2016) seems the definition of insanity.
Crime statistics are perhaps the very definition of banality.
We see them, but we see numbers. We don’t see the victims per se, nor do we see the institutions behind them Of course, we don’t see the Democratic politicians and policy makers, the masters degrees who bleed a small fortune away from city governments where those resources could have been used to fix the problems they are sent in to analyze.
Most of all, we do not blame the media for turning crisis into mediocrity. Advertising must be raised, images of violence sell far better than the everyday heroism of raising families, running small businesses, mowing the lawn or an uneventful night of community policing.
There’s a deeper and more meaningful problem we need to address with this. Just as our eyes tend to wander away from tranquility and towards violence, so too do the politics of grievance bend our minds away from the politics of ideas.
An aggrieved party can (and has) triumphed over many a reasoned argument. This has been the path of most revolutions in the world; failed or won, right or wrong.
Most of these revolutions aim for the proper sort of groupthink. Certain concepts and ideas, certain words or histories, this collected ephemera of human existence and nuance is always simplified, distorted, or silenced.
Arendt was no stranger to this Gleichschaultung. Surely we are seeing much of the same impulses today, whether it is the revolt of the woke at the New York Times over the publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed in its pages, or the silencing of Andrew Sullivan — certainly no apparatchik of the conservative movement — the reaction of the aggrieved is one in the same.
These opinions are valid; yours are not.
Sullivan’s sin was to point out how the Great Awokening of intolerance within our current college campus culture — once thought to be restricted to our universities — is now infecting and dominating our institutions:
"I’m not talking about formal rules — but norms of liberal behavior. One of them is a robust public debate, free from intimidation. Liberals welcome dissent because it’s our surest way to avoid error. Cultural Marxists fear dissent because they believe it can do harm to others’ feelings and help sustain existing identity-based power structures. Yes, this is not about the First Amendment. The government is not preventing anyone from speaking. But it is about the spirit of the First Amendment."
What is learned rather quickly is that a grievance can carry over an idea.
This epidemic isn’t limited to college campus culture anymore. Express an unauthorized opinion on Twitter, and one is quickly deplatformed. Express the wrong sentiment on social media, and one loses your job in the All Lives Matter vs. Black Lives Matter debate (for the record, it should suffice to say that one can only say “all” if one is willing to say “black” — QED). Apologize and debase yourself before the mob, and one quickly discovers that Mensheviks go to the wall as well.
So what fixes this?
The good news is that one has to bear in mind that these legions of woke protesters do not represent even a fraction of a minority of the public interest. Put a thousand souls on Broad Street in Richmond, and they don’t amount to even a tiny bit of the 227,000 souls who live in the city itself.
They might be loud and disproportionately so, but they aren’t America.
So where is the American public? Probably where you are right now.
Most Americans are tired of watching black men die for the crime of being black.
Most Americans are tired of over policing and can distinguish this from their support for law enforcement personnel.
Most Americans generally support the idea of racial equality; most Americans have no idea how to even speak to one another in order to achieve it.
Most Americans think the rioting is a repudiation of justice.
Most Americans are sick and tired of being told what to think, how to think, and when to think (which is all the time) by a 24/7 news media cycle that seems to infect every aspect of consumer information.
Of course, the intellectuals of the left don’t care about this. National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.’s critique of the left — that the left claims to want to give a hearing to other views only to be shocked and offended to discover that there are indeed other views — was as true then as it is now.
Michael Hariot over at The Root perhaps had the best assessment of what could only be termed as privileged guilt from so-called “woke” allies in a piece you should truly read in its entirety:
[T]his meaningless, performative show of solidarity is not just limited to companies and brands. All of a sudden, white people are ready to take a stand against racism after saying nothing about it for years.
I’m torn about this.
Part of the reason that racism persists is that white people don’t do anything about it. They don’t challenge their friends, challenge their family members, or reprimand their coworkers when they see racism. They might hate inequality but do nothing to fight it.
. . .and that has to be frustrating to see people jump on the brand Justice! (TM) as if it were the fad of the next few weeks as if one were buying a pair of shoes or a temporary identity, then watch them dissolve back into their daily lives content that they did something. . . even if it was in truth nothing at all.
Grievances might be felt and even shared for at time, but unless the idea of anti-racism gets hammered home? Unless at core there is a basic respect for the human right to exist? Unless there is a recognition of and belief in the profound, inherent, moral and equal dignity of every human person rather than a merely notional sense of it?
We might leverage a grievance for a time, but it will never change the thoughts of others. Only ideas can do that.
Meanwhile, 35 George Floyds were shot in Chicago this weekend, 5 of whom died.
How much longer?
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard.