Divided American: Insights from Hannah Arendt
Mass media, even before the Internet, has been changing who we are.
Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, is the seminal work on totalitarianism. As in the seminal work. Later historians and political theorist might quibble with some of her assertions, but they always quote her work. They write in her shadow.
The Origins of Totalitarianism draws on history, but it is not traditional history. As Samantha Rose Hill wrote in her critical biography of Arendt: “Arendt felt free to look to the past not for analogies, but for those gems, rich and strange, that might help us understand our most recent experiences through a new lens.”
In a letter to Karl Jaspers, on July 15, 1926, Arendt wrote: “I can understand history only from the perspective which I myself occupy.” Her perspective, by the time she began The Origins of Totalitarianism, will include being a Jew in Germany as Hitler rose to power. She narrowly escaped the Holocaust—on three separate occasions.
Her experience led to a change of identity. Before Hitler’s rise to power, she saw herself as a philosopher. She began to study with Martin Heidegger when she was only eighteen. She then saw how ineffective philosophy was in opposition to fascism. Even Heidegger briefly became a member of the Nazi party and, when Rector of the University of Freiburg, signed an order to dismiss Jewish faculty, including Edmund Husserl. After World War II, she saw herself as a political theorist. From history, she wanted to develop a theory that could influence the course of history.
Yet, despite her complicated relationship with Heidegger, her disappointment in his complicity with fascism, his ideas continued to influence her work for the rest of her life. To explain how Arendt views the history of totalitarianism, I will begin with a section of Heidegger’s Being and Time, a discussion about the effects of media on das Man, a term that denotes a kind of generic identity, an identity that could only emerge in the era when mass media began to dominate culture.
Heidegger says that “information services such as the newspaper” level down how we exist in our daily lives (in other words, it weakens individuality) and “the real dictatorship of the ‘they’ is unfolded.” We become like the mass identity of das Man. In Heidegger’s words: “We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge.” This insight into how the homogenized values of mass media change who we are, even how we think, should have prepared Heidegger to critique the rise of fascism. It didn’t.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt says that totalitarianism, as it arose in the early twentieth century, was something new. Part of what made the total control of a society possible was the rise of new media: daily newspapers, radio, and film. These media have a profound effect on how people act in their daily lives, even how they think when they are alone.
It is impossible to summarize Arendt’s history of anti-Semitism and the rise of totalitarianism. I will say more about Arendt in this series as it emerges. I also recommend following Samantha Rose Hill on Substack. She is currently publishing a series titled 20 Tuesdays, in which she is presenting 20 lessons from Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Here, I am going to jump to the conclusion, where we see Arendt do what Heidegger did not, where we see her tie mass media—its inevitable mutation into propaganda and its influence on how individuals function within a society—to the rise of totalitarianism. Arendt wrote: “A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an every-changing, incomprehensible world, the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything was possible and that nothing was true. . . . Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.” She wrote this long before the Internet and social networking.
Not surprisingly, individuals in this kind of environment become lonely, even more so in a crowd. And this makes them more susceptible to the mob of a strong leader.
In the early days of social networking, we were told that the Internet, New Media, and social networking would bring us together. It has in some superficial ways, but it has also compromised what most of us would consider deeper and more genuine connections to others. It is not unusual to see a group of college students sitting together at a table in the student union, each of them on their phones. These students are not learning social skills; they are not even learning how to be alone without being lonely.
I think Arendt would say, when she was writing The Origins of Totalitarianism around 1950, that she was describing Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. If she were still alive, she would probably say that her comments about the effects of mass media describe America in 2024. She would be commenting on more than Trump’s transformation of a political party into a mob; she would also be commenting on how new forms of media have disrupted our development as persons.
The effect of a long history, which includes Modernism, the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of mass media and propaganda, is that individuals become less able to act independent of the “they.” Arend wrote: “Total domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual, is possible only if each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random for any other.” This is what Antonio Gramsci called “Fordism.” The entire society becomes an efficient factory, and even individuals become more like machines. Human nature is homogenized. As diversity disappears, individuals cease to matter.
To counter this leveling down of our lives, to move toward a more democratic society, Arendt says that we need a social space, where a plurality of ideas can be openly discussed, and private space, where humans can develop into persons. We need to be grounded in our unique time and space. And, at the same time, we need to understand how history and mass media have shaped us and learn how to see a self apart from that tradition.
For Arendt, the word person conveys more than a single human being. A person is someone who is connected to a community but also capable of thinking and acting apart from that community, certainly apart from a mob of fascists. As Samantha Rose Hill points out, Arendt’s view of the person is connected to the German notion of Bildung, “a form of socialization and self-cultivation” that promotes “individual freedom, autonomy and self-harmony.” On this point, she agrees with Erik Erikson, Adorno and the other authors of The Authoritarian Personality, and Eric Hoffer. The future of democracy depends on the development—the parenting and mentoring—of persons who can fully participate in democracy discourse.
This seems like a difficult—maybe impossible—task. How can we develop an entire country of persons? On November 18, 1945, in the aftermath of the horrors of World War II, Arendt wrote to Karl Jaspers: “Everything does depend on a few, but the few mustn’t become too few. . . . The only people who will count are those who refuse to identify themselves with either an ideology or a power.” In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, we witnessed how a small number of persons in key positions thwarted Trump’s attempt to overturn the will of the American people. As we approach the final days of the 2024 election, I think Arendt would say: “Be one of the few.”