The Failure to Think

Riverside Drive, New York. Late summer 1973. Hannah Arendt is sixty-six years old, has just returned from Aberdeen where she became the first woman to deliver the Gifford Lectures, and is in her apartment with the curtains drawn against the afternoon sun, chain-smoking Chesterfields. She is writing The Life of the Mind -- a three-volume meditation on what it means to think, will, and judge -- and she has reasons to suspect she will not live to finish it. She does not say so. She is working anyway.\n\nTwelve years earlier she sat in a Jerusalem courtroom and watched a man in a bullet-proof glass booth describe the murder of six million people as a logistical problem. He was not raving. He was not ideological. He was not even, in any recognisable sense, evil. He was ordinary. He spoke in clichés. He followed orders. He processed paperwork. He never once stopped to ask himself what the paperwork meant. She published her report in The New Yorker, then as a book, in 1963. She called what she saw the banality of evil. Half her friendships did not survive the publication. Gershom Scholem wrote that she lacked love of the Jewish people. She replied that she had never loved a people; she loved only persons. She did not retract. She did not soften. Ten years later, when Paula visits, the wound has not closed.\n\nLast week Paula visited Tati and Arup, who showed how modern design fails the body that has to live inside it. This week Paula asks Arendt whether the rules of moral judgement were ever real -- whether anything can be built that does not eventually fail the human that has to live inside it. Arendt answers: yes, but only when somebody thinks. Eichmann's crime was not hatred. It was thoughtlessness. He could not produce a single original sentence; he spoke entirely in stock phrases provided by the regime; and he had participated in the murder of millions. These two facts are not contradictory. They are the point.\n\nThe conversation widens. Arendt explains the two-in-one, the inner dialogue Socrates practised when nobody else was watching. Conscience, for Arendt, is the conversation a person has with herself. Thoughtlessness is what happens when that conversation falls silent. When you stop talking to yourself, you stop hearing the voice that would have said: this is wrong, this is murder, you do not do this. The voice is fragile. It requires habit. It does not survive in environments where everybody else has also stopped having it. Eichmann was not a monster. He was a man who had stopped talking to himself, in a country where most people had stopped talking to themselves, in a war where the silence had become law.\n\nPaula brings the question forward. In 2127, the regime is not totalitarian -- it is computational. Decisions are made by systems that have no inner dialogue because they have no inner. The systems are not evil. They are merely functional. They process. They optimise. They do not stop. Arendt nods. She says: that is not new. That is the same problem in different clothes. The mass society of the twentieth century was already an apparatus that made it easy not to think. The danger of the apparatus is not what it computes. The danger is that, while it computes, the persons inside it stop computing. Stop thinking. Stop conversing with themselves. The apparatus is the same. The names change.\n\nThe episode closes on judgement. Arendt tells Paula that the third volume of her book is about judgement and she does not yet know what to write. Kant said judgement is the faculty by which we know what is right in particular cases -- not by applying a rule, but by recognising. To judge well is to be able to think from the standpoint of others while remaining yourself. Arendt is going to argue that this is the irreducibly human faculty, the one the apparatus cannot replicate, the one that gets lost when thoughtlessness sets in. She lights another Chesterfield. She tells Paula: I do not know whether you can judge in the sense I mean. But you can ask. That is already further than Eichmann ever went.