On Hannah Arendt on Judgment

 

Most of what matters in the philosophical writings of Hannah Arendt was written in the shadow of the Holocaust, and thus echoes in the vastest moral vacuum the world has ever known. What might have happened to the German people, the most advanced, most educated, most sophisticated people in the history of the world, that could have led them to man the gates and sidings and ramps and wires of Auschwitz? That was her great subject, most notably in her famous Eichmann in Jerusalem. Two decades after the war, but around the same time as her Eichmann book, in a 1964 essay entitled “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” Arendt commented on the continuing moral vacuousness of modern man, implying that what was lacking in the Germans of the Third Reich was still lacking in the post-war, post-Holocaust West:

There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging that has nothing whatever to do with the biblical ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged,’ and if this fear speaks in terms of ‘casting the first stone,’ it takes this word in vain. For behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done. The moment moral issues are raised, even in passing, he who raises them will be confronted with this frightful lack of self-confidence and hence of pride, and also with a kind of mock-modesty that in saying, Who am I to judge? actually means We’re all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone.

What was true then is truer now. How many times have any of us heard “Who are you to judge?” whenever someone has the audacity to describe behavior as bad or perverse or immoral? It is the mantra of the Left, certainly, but it is truly the mantra of all of society, all of culture. “Who are you to judge”… about homosexuality or trans-sexuality or drag queens or rap music or graffiti or drug culture or vulgarity in movies or on television or divorce or hook-up culture or slovenly dress in airports or tattoos or obesity or any of the other various decadences of modern life in so-called Western “civilization”?

“Who are you to judge?” I have had this question thrown back at me many times as a college and high school teacher – it is as if young people learn it by rote in grade school! They don’t know anything about anything, but they know that it’s “racist” or “sexist” or “homophobic” or “transphobic” or “fat-phobic” or “puritanical” to make any judgments at all about anything.

Well, this is what I say to them: who I am to judge is a grown man who has never cheated on my wife, never cheated on my taxes, never stolen anything from anyone, never hurt anyone, never committed a crime, never had to take a dime of government assistance, who raised three successful, happy, church-going children, who gives of my time and treasure to my church and other charities, who writes dozens of college recommendations a year for college-bound minority students, and who has never been seriously ill or hospitalized for anything, in large part because I eat sensibly, maintain a reasonable weight, and exercise. Who I am is a freaking role model! 

If everyone in society lived like I do there would be no abandoned or abused children, no abandoned or abused women, no crime, no need for high taxes, no need for police or prisons. If everyone in America lived like I do everything we buy would cost less because every business’ casualty losses from shoplifting and embezzlement would be zero. If everyone in American lived like me our insurance rates would be lower, because we’d be healthier. That’s who I am to judge. And what’s sad is… I’m just an ordinary man, nothing special. There are still lots of people living decent lives all across America. But somehow we’ve been cowed into not being “judgmental.” And we are all the poorer and more at risk of slipping into that vast darkness because of it.

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ADDENDUM (12/16): continuing reading Arendt, I read, re Nazi Germany, "these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society," which, of course, included jurists, lawyers, doctors, scientists, businessmen, engineers, etc. It occurs to me that we have utterly failed to learn the lessons of the Twentieth Century, and are suffering the consequences. With respect to Nazi totalitarianism, we utterly failed to learn that sometimes the supposed "elites" are not the least likely, but the most likely people to commit human rights abuses, precisely because they feel themselves to be above consequences.  With respect to Soviet and Chinese communism, we utterly failed to learn that left-wing, socialistic governments inevitably become kleptocracies. The leftist Deep State in America ca. 2022 is the result. Arendt would have understood at a glance.