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On a sunny March morning in 1962, a taxi bearing Hannah Arendt collided with a truck as it sped across Central Park. Awakening in the ambulance, Arendt moved her limbs, rolled her eyes, and tested her memory by recalling decades, stanzas of poetry, and telephone numbers. As she later described the episode to her close friend Mary McCarthy, "for a fleeting moment I had the feeling that it was up to me whether I wanted to live or die." While she "did not think that death was terrible," she also thought that "life was quite beautiful and that I rather like it."
Today, Arendt's brush with the Reaper might become another saccharine epiphany, denatured and packaged for the burgeoning market in "uplift" and "inspiration." Arendt herself would surely recoil from much of our "life-affirming" drivel. If it isn't advertising—"smell the roses" in our flower shop, "appreciate the little things" with help from our investment firm—it's an unwitting invitation to forget the larger concerns of politics, philosophy, and religion. Having spent her life pondering the carnage and futility of the 20th, most murderous of centuries, and having escaped calamities far worse than an auto wreck, Arendt might well admonish us that beauty is always bound up with the broader forces of history, whose evasion and neglect will inevitably rob the world of its deepest charms.
This rich and intelligent "love of the world," as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl characterizes Arendt's intellectual career, could hardly be more urgently needed or imperiled than it is in this very year, her centenary. It's a perverse and benighted time when worldliness is the stock-in-trade of bilious bon vivants like Christopher Hitchens. The last exponent of Arendt's kind of worldliness was Edward W. Said, who embodied, for many of us, that civilized and cosmopolitan humanism so often caricatured as haughtiness or sophistry. Both Said and Arendt enunciated stubborn and inconvenient truths, and detested the culture of euphemism that neutralized thought and camouflaged cruelty. Though grateful for the shelter and good fortune afforded by the United States, they saw much in the bustle of their adopted homeland that mocked a true love of life. And they scorned the sort of specious and imperialist universalism that corrupts our punditocracy, all those nostrums about "freedom" (for the market) and "human rights" (to be invaded) that comprise a beguiling form of parochialism.
Over the last decade or so, Arendt has inspired a growing legion of scholars and admirers. Most of them are responding, I suspect, to the contraction of moral and political imagination among the Western intelligentsia, or to the bloodbaths that flooded out the parade for the vaunted "end of history." Of course, not all evil would appear to be banal—does this word adequately convey the horrors of Rwanda, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, or Sudan? But as the premier investigator of modern evil's bureaucratic demeanor, Arendt would seem to be an unassailable scourge of today's well-mannered iniquity, whereby torture receives the imprimatur of our own attorney general. Who better to diagnose the sado-militarism in the corridors of Abu Ghraib, or the lack of concern or even interest in the scandal in the fabled Christian heartland?
But can Arendt's work fully reward this renewal of interest? If Arendt, like Said, remained adamant that worldliness required the rejection of supernatural hope, is her love of the world sustainable without an otherworldly desire? Do her insights into "the banality of evil" themselves hang over a void? She offers a great deal that's corrective or seminal to the political culture of our time, incapable as it is of envisioning much beyond a global shopping mall or a theater for American righteousness. Her Augustinian reflections on the nature of evil will outlast all moralistic prattle about "evildoers" and wickedness. And her affirmation of "action" can embolden us to replenish our stale and dwindling inventory of political possibility.
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