A Lying World Order

Peg Birmingham: A Lying World Order: Political deception and the threat of totalitarianism

(Arendt) argues that while the ancient sophists were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, modern sophists want a great deal more, namely, modern sophists want “a lasting victory at the expense of reality itself.”

From Roger Berkowitz, et al, (eds); Thinking in dark times: Hannah Arendt on ethics and politics; (2010)

I want to address the question whether totalitarianism is a threat today. I think a caveat is in order as I make some remarks about this question; and that is that for Hannah Arendt totalitarianism was the crystallization of several elements that together constituted this event. I say this because I think, first of all, that for Hannah Arendt there is no form of totalitarianism in the way that Montesquieu, for instance, might outline a form of government such as the republic or the monarchy. Second, we should keep in mind that these elements of totalitarianism might themselves change. There may be unpredicted and unprecedented elements of totalitarianism facing us today that would constitute or reconstitute the event of totalitarianism again, but in ways that might look very different from the analysis that Arendt gives in the Origins of Totalitarianism.

That said, I do think that there is one element of totalitarianism that Hannah Arendt was herself very concerned about, and one that we are facing today. And that is what Arendt calls a “lying world order.” 1
It is not often enough noted that the problem of political deception occupies a central, indeed inaugural place, in Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism. At the outset of Origins of Totalitarianism, prior to her analysis of antisemitism, imperialism, and radical evil, Arendt raises the issue of political deception, considering the difference between the ancient and modern sophists and their relation to truth and reality. She argues that while the ancient sophists were satisfied with “a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth,” modern sophists want a great deal more, namely, and again citing Arendt, modern sophists want “a lasting victory at the expense of reality itself.” 2 In these early pages of Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt claims that the characteristic that sets totalitarianism apart from tyrannical and dictatorial regimes is precisely the modern sophistic victory at the expense of reality, a victory that, she argues, institutes a lying world order. Indeed, her discussion of radical evil in the Origins of Totalitarianism cannot be understood apart from her continuing preoccupation with the problem of this particular kind of political deception.

When she writes, in 1945, that the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe, Arendt is indicating that the problem of radical evil is not by any means eradicated with the defeat of totalitarianism. To my mind, this is in large part because of totalitarianism’s inseparable link with the political lie. The political lie, for Arendt, has nothing to do with what we understand by falsehood, error, or even the deliberate lie, which are the ways in which deception, in all its guises, is traditionally distinguished from truth. Falsehood and error are the opposites of truth, while a deliberate lie is the intentional dissimulation of the truth. The political lie is something else altogether, insofar as it introduces, and these are Hannah Arendt’s words, “a mutation into the history of the lie.” 3 The mutation, for Arendt, is the deliberate attempt to transform a lie into reality.

In her 1945 essay “The Seeds of a Fascist International,” Arendt writes,

It was always a too little noted hallmark of fascist propaganda that it was not satisfied with lying, but deliberately proposed to transform its lies into reality. For such a fabrication of lying reality, no one was prepared. The essential characteristic of fascist propaganda was never its lies, for this is something more or less common to propaganda everywhere, and of every time. The essential thing was that they exploited the age-old occidental prejudice which confuses reality with truth, and made that true, which until then, could only be stated as a lie. 4

Arendt gives the example of this mutation by pointing to the statement, “my wealthy aunt is dead.” If someone should say, “But I saw your aunt just a moment ago at the market,” all I have to do to make my statement true is to go home and murder my aunt. For Arendt the transformation of a lie into a truth introduces a mutation into the history of the lie: “One can say that to some extent fascism has added a new variation to the old art of lying – the most devilish version – that of lying the truth.”

For Arendt, our only defense against a lying world order is our establishing of factual truth, and nothing could be more difficult. For unlike rational truths such as 2 + 2 = 4, factual truths are characterized by their contingency. They are the result of action, and there is no necessity to action; this is what makes factual truths unexpected and unpredictable. Arendt’s example, for instance, was that there was no necessity to France’s not being a victorious superpower at the end of World War II, nor was there any necessity for Germany to invade Belgium in 1914. The problem we run into with factual truths is that we usually view action from the point of view of its completion, rather than its inaugural moment. So the paradox of factual truth is that it possesses both, for Arendt, a stubborn thereness and an absolute contingency, and it is the contingency of factual truth that makes it the kind of truth most like doxa. Yet, for all of Arendt’s insistence on the public space as a space of doxa, she is not one who celebrates doxa over factual truth. Indeed, she insists on the distinction between the two. Doxa is always open to persuasion, and there is always a plurality of doxa that together make up the public space as a space of opinion. Factual truths, on the other hand, while “political in nature,” are not strictly speaking part of the public space, if by that is meant a space of persuasion, contest, and debate. In other words, while factual truth and opinions occupy the same realm, namely, the public space, they are in different locations. Factual truths, Arendt argues, provide the limits of the public space as a space of action and of contested and debatable opinions. In this way, they function more like laws that provide the walls of the public space. Unlike the law, she argues, which provides the boundary and border of the public space, factual truth provides the ground of the public space itself. Without this factual ground, there simply is no public space whatsoever.

Moreover, factual truths are not open to persuasion. I can try to persuade you for the next many months that Belgium invaded Germany, or that France was a great superpower after the war, but even if I succeed in changing your mind, I have not thereby altered the reality of what occurred. The best way to destroy factual truths, however, is to reduce them to so many opinions that can then be easily dismissed as “just another opinion,” open to dispute, contest, and interpretation. Arendt argues, “facts and opinions, though they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other, they belong to the same realm. Facts inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truths. Indeed, the best way to destroy factual truth is simply to reduce them to so many opinions which can thus be easily dismissed as, just simply, your opinion.” 5

To establish the validity of factual truths requires witnesses and testimony: factual truth “is always related to other people; it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony.”6 Arendt suggests that without the testimony of the witness, there is no public space whatsoever; the witness establishes the very ground of reality, factual truths, the very condition of the public space, without which the perseverance of this reality is threatened. Asking the Kantian question of whether truth should be sacrificed for the survival of the world, Arendt answers, and I quote, “What is at stake is survival, the perseverance of existence (in suo esse persevare), and no human world, destined to outlive the short life span of mortals within it, will ever be able survive without being willing to do what Herodotus was the first to undertake consciously, namely legein ta eonta, to say what is. No permanence, no perseverance and existence can even be conceived without those willing to testify to what is, and appears to them because it is.” 7 If totalitarianism is characterized as the complete eradication of the public space, then the loss of factual truth, and those who are willing to say it, is one of totalitarian’s necessary conditions.

Certainly Arendt’s insights, to my mind, on the pervasiveness and threat of political deception have lost none of their urgency. Indeed, it is my claim that the issue of political deception has today become an even greater political and philosophical problem.

Politically, there is no lack of examples for the decline and fall of factual truth in the public space, as suggested by the subtitle of Frank Rich’s book The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina. Rich quotes a White House aide in his introduction as saying, “A judicious study of discernable reality is not the way the world works anymore; we create our own reality.” 8 Rich gives an account of the deceptions of the George W. Bush administration, an account that reveals the accuracy of Arendt’s claim that political deception would be one of the most difficult problems of the contemporary world.

The decline of factual truth and creation of lying realities is unfortunately not an anomaly. For Arendt, philosophy itself opens the door to the possibility of what she calls “a lying world order.” In her essay “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” she claims, “If Western mentality has maintained that reality is truth, for this is of course the ontological basis of the adaequatio rei et intellectus, then totalitarianism has concluded from this, that we can fabricate truth in so far as we can fabricate reality, that we do not have to wait until reality unveils itself and shows us its true face, but we can bring into being a reality whose structure will be known to us from the beginning, because the whole thing is our product.” 9 And I think, for those of us here, in a conference titled “Thinking in Dark Times,” this implication of philosophy in the problem of deception may be the most difficult for us. Philosophically, I submit, deception is an even greater problem today, precisely because postmodern philosophy has rejected the notion of adaequatio rei et intellectus in favor of a notion of reality as performative and truth as a performative fiction. I say “postmodern” in a very broad and general sense, by the way, and I agree with many of postmodern philosophy’s claims regarding the performative nature of reality.

The question, for us, is how we grasp the phenomenon of the lie, if reality is constituted through a performativity that seemingly renders the very notion of factual truth invalid. If there is no objective reality or objective truth—and I think Arendt herself subscribes to that view—and further, if facts are dependent upon their modes of representation, then what happens to the very notion of factual truth, which, Arendt argues, seems to be one of the most imposing bulwarks against totalitarianism and radical evil? If we think of this in terms of narration and interpretation, then it would seem, out of this framework, that for any particular narrative or representation, there could always be a counter narrative, even contradictory facts. If reality is performative, given only its reality in its various representations, then what would prevent us from performing or representing reality in a way that better corresponds to how we wish it to be? In other words, taking the postmodern critique of objectivity seriously, is there any philosophical basis by which to make a distinction between on the one hand a true performance or a true representation, and on the other hand lying the truth?

I will conclude by suggesting that perhaps the answers to at least some of these questions can be found by paying close attention to the final chapter of Origins of Totalitarianism, “Ideology and Terror.” It may be that this ending returns Origins of Totalitarianism to its beginnings, for the problem of ideology is, for Hannah Arendt, the problem of political deception. Ideology, for Arendt, is the mutation that establishes the lying world order, by replacing reality with an ironclad fiction. In other words, ideology is the “most devilish version of the lie”; these are Hannah Arendt’s words, and we should hear her claim that the “banality of evil” is, at its very heart, ideology. With both its hellish fantasies and its clichés, the “banality of evil” is characterized by a strident logicality—a logic through which the whole of reality is thoroughly and systematically organized, according to a fiction with a view to total domination.

Footnotes

1. Hannah Arendt, “The Seeds of a Fascist International,” in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 145.

2. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), 8–9.

3. Arendt, “The Seeds of a Fascist International,” 146–147.

4. Ibid.

5. Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1977), 238.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 229.

8. Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 3.

9. Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” in Essays in Understanding, 354.

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Alexandre Koyré: The Political Function of the Modern Lie (1943)