The Reality-Based Community
Hannah Arendt on how and why we've lost the plot
Remember this 2004 Ron Susskind quote:
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.
I was reminded of it when reading a 1958 essay by Hannah Arendt entitled, “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern” in which she says—
In my studies of totalitarianism I tried to show that the totalitarian phenomenon, with its striking anti-utilitarian traits and its strange disregard for factuality, is based in the last analysis on the conviction that everything is possible—and not just permitted, morally or otherwise, as was the case with early nihilism. The totalitarian systems tend to demonstrate that action can be based on any hypothesis and that, in the course of consistently guided action, the particular hypothesis will become true, will become actual, factual reality. The assumption which underlies consistent action can be as mad as it pleases; it will always end in producing facts which are then “objectively” true. What was originally nothing but a hypothesis, to be proved or disproved by actual facts, will in the course of consistent action always turn into a fact, never to be disproved. In other words, the axiom from which the deduction is started does not need to be, as traditional metaphysics and logic supposed, a self-evident truth; it does not have to tally at all with the facts as given in the objective world at the moment the action starts; the process of action, if it is consistent, will proceed to create a world in which the assumption becomes axiomatic and self-evident.
Between Past and Future, pp. 87-88.
Is there a better description of Trump’s m.o.? But the larger point is that Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. This has been the dark side not just of the GOP, but of American Capitalism and its advocates for decades. But it’s been inherent in Capitalism from the beginning. Marx saw it in 1848 when he said about Capitalism—
All fixed, fast-frozen relations... are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."
Marx, of course, saw this as an opportunity for creating something new, but alas. Nevertheless, the last part of this quote might yet be fulfilled. I think that what makes this last phase of Capitalism—techno-capitalism—different from earlier phases is the way it pushes things—finally—too far in all the ways it threatens the human future. We are being forced to sober up.
Arendt’s argument in this particular essay is to show how we “know” in a soft science like history is pretty much the same thing as how we know in the so-called hard natural sciences. I’m not going into the full argument here, but essentially she’s arguing that there is no such thing as purely objective facts. I’ve made a similar point frequently in the past, which is that there is no such thing as an unintepreted fact. Arendt’s point is that there is no objective world out there where there exists answers to unasked questions, and so the important issue is not about the objectivity of facts but about the quality of the questions and the quality of the judgments used to evaluate the adequacy of the answer. Reality isn’t objective; it’s relational. If you don’t have a good relationship with it, it’s not going to give you the facts you need.
So factual objectivity isn’t as important as the subjective judgments one makes about how one connects the factual dots, so to say. Good judgment is a subjective quality, and it goes hand in hand with wisdom, and the best seat-of-the-pants indicator of wisdom is the quality of the questions a person asks. Good questions elicit from Reality good answers. Less good questions elicit less good answers, even if they are supported by facts.
My problem with mainstream public intellectuals is not that their answers are unsupported by the facts but that the quality of the questions that they are asking is mediocre. The reductio ad absurdum of a transhumanist-driven capitalist project I hope will drive them to ask better questions. And the most important question we need now to ask and to come to some consensus on is ‘What does it mean to be human?’ AI is forcing us to ask that question. We’re not there yet. We’re not scared enough yet. 1
Most people who have good judgment got it by learning the hard way. We’re all born fools, but the difference between an old fool and someone who has obtained a measure of wisdom is that the latter has actually learned something when Reality has thwacked him or her upside the head. So the more we resist learning, the bigger the thwacks that must come. Why are we so resistant?
There is something about life in the world that Modernity/Capitalism has made that numbs us from the massive and repeated thwackings that Reality has administered to our collective heads. It’s as if these thwackings instead of waking us up have made us more addle-minded. And maybe that’s why Reality has delivered Trump to us. I thought his election in ‘16 would be the thwacking that would wake us up, but apparently not. So Reality thwacks us with him again. It’s as if Reality is saying: “This is who you have become. This fool represents everything that late capitalism has done to American society. Wise up. Start asking better questions. And BTW, electing mainstream Democrats is not the solution. You tried that the first time, and you didn’t learn the lesson. So will you learn it this time?”
Probably not. We’re not scared enough yet. Our denial mechanisms are still too strong.
Nevertheless, I live in hope. The potential to grow in wisdom and good judgment is there buried in all of us, and the task of a human life is to allow it to germinate and to do what’s necessary to cultivate it. And it’s a lot easier to do in a society whose norms and traditions are more aligned with Reality than alienated from it. And ours just isn’t.
Arendt explains, at least in part, why:
The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as potentially man-made. These processes, after having devoured, as it were, the solid objectivity of the given, ended by rendering meaningless the one over-all process which originally was conceived in order to give meaning to them, and to act, so to speak, as the eternal time-space into which they could all flow and thus be rid of their mutual conflicts and exclusiveness.
She’s talking about the loss of a living, humanly created Western Tradition/Civilization here as it has been supplanted by impersonal historical/evolutionary processes. The result is that we no longer believe that human beings make history'; rather, these impersonal, “objective” processes are all that matter. She calls this elsewhere in the essay “eunichic objectivity”. 2
This is what happened to our concept of history, as it happened to our concept of nature. In the situation of radical world-alienation, neither history nor nature is at all conceivable. This twofold loss of the world—the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history—has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them. (pp. 89-90)
Arendt is anticipating Baudrillard here.3 Modernity/Capitalism has produced in the human condition our living in a world that has no living history because no living tradition, so no shared meaning framework, and so our “world” is no longer capable of mediating Reality. Late Capitalism instead works overtime to starve us of Reality. In our starving for Reality, we gobble up anything that looks more or less edible. It sickens us, and the main symptom of this sickness is foolishness. But everyone we know is sick too, so we accept our sickness and our collective foolishness as normal. We adapt and make the best of it. We’ve been able to get by so far, but the proverbial chickens are gathering.
From my pov, that’s the real significance of Magnifica Humanitas—it’s asking THE question, and whether or not you agree with Leo’s answer, at least he’s asking it. Who else is doing it in a way that anybody cares about? And if you don’t agree with his answer, it forces you to confront the questions: You got a better answer? If so, what makes it better? If you’re the typical mainstream public intellectual, chances are you don’t have a better answer because (1) you never asked the question or (2) you’ve just accepted a kind of pop-Nietzschean nihilism that is utterly inadequate for meeting the challenge that confronts us now.
Whatever you want to say about Karl Rove or whoever Susskind is quoting, he was not constrained by eunichic objectivity. I’m not justifying it, but I think it explains in part why Conservatives have such contempt for Liberals whom they see as wimps, and why, for that reason, better Trump than Clinton or Harris. Whatever else Trump is, he’s no wimp. Liberals are all about these suffocating, plodding, soul-sapping, mind-numbing, exasperating, Merrick Garland-y processes. Results don’t matter as much as process, and so nothing ever seems to get done—except when we put the bull-in-the-China-Shop bad guys back in office who couldn’t care less about process. Maybe there’s a middle ground between hubristic, irresponsible adventurism and passive submission to process? Maybe if we had a living, human-centered tradition, that would provide more people who ask the right questions and have the good judgment to know when it’s time to act and when it’s time to wait. I know. Dream on.
I lay out Baudrillard’s ‘Precession of the Simulacra’ thesis in the second of The Cathedral Lectures. Scroll down.