This paper aims to explore Arendt’s idea that modern
worldlessness is closely related to crimes against humanity. Arendt describes worldlessness as the condition where people do not belong to the world that
defines them as individuals. It is the condition where people are deprived of
“a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective.”
The world, a significant space for human appearance in action and speech, loses its power and thus human beings who live in it are deprived
of their rights to belong to a political community or are
alienated from the public realm. In other words, worldlessness is the condition where people have nothing in common with others,
no institution to be relied upon, and no system of meaning to act and speech.
In this condition, people are treated not as who can act and speak, but as what, as thing-like.
Meanwhile regarding the crimes against humanity, what
Arendt refers to is a specific kind of crime
called genocide. Suppose the crimes against humanity are generally related to the systematic attack, such as murder, kidnapping, or disappearance, against the civilian population. In that case, the crime of
genocide—one kind of crime against
humanity—is characterized by the intention of the agent to
destroy, wholly or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. In
Arendt’s view, totalitarian genocide is a new and unprecedented kind of crime of genocide because it is
intentionally organized to attack on plurality and diversity.
The Phenomena of Modern Worldlessness
Arendt
observes that there are two phenomena or conditions
in modernity that have generated worldlessness in which
the world loses its power, namely the escape from the world and the rise of the
social.
The Escape
from the World
Along with
her contemporaries Horkheimer and Adorno, Arendt criticizes
modern scientific disenchantment of the world. All of them are concerned with
the destructive and repressive effect of Enlightenment’s project of modernity. Horkheimer and Adorno
claim that there is a
paradox in Enlightenment’s project because, despite all its greatness, enlightenment has turned into its opposite,
barbaric. Horkheimer and Adorno claim that in enlightenment, ‘humanity, instead of entering humanity into
a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.”The barbaric aspect of modernity is central to Arendt’s discussion
of modern worldlessness.
However, unlike Horkheimer and Adorno,
who are concerned with the mastery of nature that generates the domination of the human subject,
Arendt laments the loss of the world's power, brought about by modern
instrumental rationality. If Horkheimer and Adorno focus on the
reduction of humanity because of the expansion of instrumental reason, Arendt
focuses more on the
alienation of the human world.
From
Arendt’s perspective, the world’s alienation refers to the loss of trust or faith in the power of
the world where we live. The consequence of this loss of trust is that
modern men strive to escape from the world, either to the universe or to self. In The
Human Condition, Arendt concludes her prologue by saying that the modern
world’s alienation can be traced in “its two flight from the earth into the
universe and from the world into the self.”
She refers the former to modern scientific progress that enables modern men to
travel in space and the latter to modern philosophy that turns away men from
the common world into what Simon Swift calls ‘inner exile’.In both, Arendt observes that modern men
desire to escape from their condition as being in the world.
Concerning the first, ‘flight from the world to the universe’, Arendt claims that in the modern age we live in “a world thoroughly determined by a science and
technology in which a knowledge acquired by selecting a point of reference
outside the earth is applied to earthly nature and the human artifice.”For Arendt, the modern age began in the seventeenth century with Galileo’s discovery of a telescope to search for
the secrets of the universe and bring them down into human cognition. That means the telescope puts “within the grasp of an
earth-bound creature and its body-bound sense what had seemed forever beyond
his reach.”The invention of the telescope is accompanied by the
discovery of the Archimedean point, “a
point outside the earth from which to unhinge the world.”
These discoveries were driven by the fear that our sense-organs deceive us in
the reception of reality and the doubt of the certainty of human perception.
On the
ground of the distrust of sensual perception, modern science has “turned toward
experiment, which by directly interfering with nature assured the development
whose progress has ever since appeared to be limitless.”
Arendt acknowledges that these
discoveries have generated progress in modern sciences,
but the problem is that modern sciences not only have the potential to destroy
all earthly organic life and even the earth itself but also consider nature from a point of view outside the earth. It is the handling of nature
from the perspective beyond human reach, outside the earth.
Meanwhile
regarding the second flight ‘from the world to the self’, Arendt points it to
modern philosophy, initiated by Descartes that placed the radical
doubt in a central position. Philosophy after Descartes,
Arendt’s claims consist “in the
articulations and ramifications of doubting.”
Descartes argues that what certainly exists
is the thinking part and others including the world or even our body may or may
not exist. The point is that there is doubt about the reality of the
world and of human life. Since everything else seems to be doubtful, the only way out is
introspection, which is, for Descartes, the source of certainty. In this way, the existence of the world
depends on the process in the human mind.It
is introspection because the objective reality is dissolved into a subjective
mental process. This introspection is predominant in modern philosophy and
results in a modern attitude that what is construed in the human mind is the only
thing that is certain and thus can be comprehended. Here, the human mind replaces the Archimedean point because human reason has become the
point, where men can look upon the reality of the world.
For Arendt, the
handling of nature from the outside of the earth’s perspective—whether in
modern sciences or modern philosophy—points to
the fact that cosmic process is imported into nature, which is called ‘acting
into nature’ that presupposes “the godlike powers that mankind takes on in its
delving into the fundamental nuclear processes and the ultimate unpredictability
of such powers and interventions.”What concerns Arendt is the new emphasis
placed upon the cosmic or mental process and not on things in themselves. This emphasis deprives things in themselves or the
objective world. In this context, the world lost not only its power but also its
meaningfulness.
The Rise of
the Social
Arendt also finds the loss of power of the
world in the modern
phenomenon of mass society. Here worldlessness refers to the condition where the world between people has lost its power to gather people together, to relate and separate them.There is nothing ‘in-between’ or common that
unites people and even things, the products of human works, do not bring people
together, but conversely disperse
them. This
condition is brought about by the growth of the third realm called society characterized by the elevation of labour
above all other human activities.
In this way, the limits of private households are liberated and channelled into the public realm. What is supposed to be kept private in the
household, becomes public in modern societies. In this way, society has replaced altogether the private and public realms. Arendt writes: “Society is the form in which the fact of
mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public
significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival—previously
confined to the private sphere—are permitted to appear in public.”
The rise of the social, in Arendt’s view, is
the loss of a plurality of distinct human beings, because society requires its
members to act as one huge family and to
have only one opinion and interest.
The consequence of this attempt is the destruction of the plurality of
perspectives that marks the end of the common world since the social requires
that the world “is permitted to present itself in only one perspective.”In the mass society, conformity becomes the mode of life, in the
sense that instead of
acting together and telling their life story to one another, people are
required to conform themselves to ‘a certain type of behaviour’.
Conformity eliminates the freedom of people
to act. Since people are deprived of the opportunity to
talk about their life stories and the value of the products of their works, then
their destiny is decided not by their own free action but by an elite group who happen to possess either economic or political power. In this context, as Richard Gill claims,
worldlessness means the “loss of the sense
of reality as individuals are thrown back upon their own subjective experiences
and natural drives, tending less to initiate spontaneous actions than to
conform to predictable patterns of behaviour.”
Arend finds a concrete example of the
worldlessness of society in the
blurring of the distinction between property and wealth. Property, Arendt argues, is privately located and has its own significance for the maintenance of the life process. It allows people to enter
into the public realm. In having property of his own, a person becomes free or no longer governed
by the necessities of life and thus can participate in public life.For
Arendt, property becomes the condition of
worldliness, because it is only by owning property that one can be part of the world, shared
with others. In this sense, property has a worldly dimension because it
represents “the privately owned share of a common world and therefore is the
most elementary condition for man’s worldliness.”
The problem actually emerges when property is transformed into wealth that has driven the
process of exploitation of peasants or labourers. In this way, labourers lose
their stable place in the world and are not protected—either by their own
property or family. For Arendt, wealth is worldless because it replaces the immobile, durable and worldly property and
has the tendency to create a fluid or unstable commercial society. This consumer society,
Arendt argues, “cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things
which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its
central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin
to everything it touches.”
In The
Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that capitalism and imperialism is related. In Arendt’s view, the driving force of imperialism is expansion,
or as she puts it:
“Expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics is the central political
idea of imperialism.”The imperial expansion was driven by the social
and economic interests. Economics becomes the motive of the states to
expand their political power. In so doing, the states are more concerned with
accumulating wealth than with the well-being of citizens. This phenomenon is
known as the colonialization of the political, in which the state
turns away from its responsibility to public matters and submits itself
to the forces or imperatives of the society. In this context, politics becomes a part of social life. This is clear in bourgeois society as the consequence of imperialism. Arendt writes:
Imperialism
was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against
national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to
politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want
to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic
growth, it had to impose this law upon its home government and proclaim
expansion to an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.)
Furthermore, when the regimes of the capitalist states concentrate on
maximizing profit and accumulating capital, they disregard the role of people. Worstly, the state purposely forces citizens to lose
their common interest, have no goal to obtain in their life, and become
indifferent to societal matters. They are treated as the masses, which
Arendt describes as the people who “either because of sheer numbers, or
indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any
organization based on common interest, into political parties or municipal
governments or professional organizations or trade unions.”
In the totalitarian
states, Arendt observes, there is a state-organized effort to deprive citizens
of their active participation in social and economic life. In striving
for capital accumulation, the state is turned into ‘a highly atomized
society’ because it is structured based on competitiveness. The impact of this process is that those
citizens who fulfill these criteria are allowed to participate in the states
and those who do not are automatically eliminated. The fact shows that only a few
citizens can attain it and the majority of people
are not. As a result, the majority of citizens “either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass.”What
concerns Arendt with the masses is not the brutality it may create or the progressiveness of people, but the isolation of people as a
group and the destruction of human relationships. There is nothing in common for people to
talk about and there is no space to act together. In other words, the objective
world or things-in-between that provide the space for people to appear before
one another and to act and tell their life stories, has been destroyed by the
emergence of mass society in modern capitalist society. Arendt beautifully
illustrates the situation of loneliness as follows:
The
weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of
people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the
table vanish from their midst so that two persons sitting opposite each other
were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by
anything tangible.
Here we find the connection between the
destructive effect of the mass society generated by the
rise of the social in capitalist society as discussed at length in The Human Condition and the phenomenon of superfluousness
brought about by the totalitarian regimes as discussed
in detail in Origins of
Totalitarianism. In this regard, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl argues, in favour of a single party, totalitarian regimes
abolished all other parties to establish absolute
power and in doing so all social and class formations were broken down to create a mass society. To attain
this purpose, totalitarian regimes employed total terror, including secret
police and established concentration camps. In this way, totalitarianism became a
new form of government that destroys politics because it methodically
eliminates speaking and acting human beings and attacks
the very humanity of people. It makes people superfluous as human beings.
Modern Worldlessness and Crimes
Against Humanity
Modern worldlessness as described above is the condition
out of which totalitarianism emerges. It has driven European states to become authoritarian during the first
half of the twentieth century. The totalitarian ideology has generated ‘organized loneliness’, which is the common
ground for terror and the essence of totalitarian regimes.Totalitarian
ideology serves as a
theoretical framework for totalitarian regimes in their total domination to
destroy the world and everything in it, including the other human beings. This domination is
mainly intended to make it superfluous. Arendt writes: “Totalitarianism strives
not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are
superfluous.”
By making people superfluous, totalitarian regimes believe that people are
easily turned to be violent or exposed to violence. This is exactly what Arendt
means by the inseparability between worldlessness and crimes against humanity.
Worldlessness and
Violent Action
According to Arendt, the condition of worldlessness has generated violent
attitudes of modern men or made them radically evil. This is clearly seen in Eichmann and other
Nazis in Germany. She explores this point in her report on the trial of
Eichmann, a series of articles in the New Yorker, then published in a book
called Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on
the Banality of Evil. In this book, Arendt attempts to relate the
individual moral character—good or bad—to a community in totalitarianism, through
her description of evil as banal because evil comes to exist in the condition
where people are being abandoned or superfluous.
In order to understand the banality of Eichmann’s evil,
let us look at the condition that has made him such a monstrous person.
Eichmann, in Arendt’s view, is a ‘victim’ of totalitarian ideology, called
Nazism because he is treated as the agent of totalitarianism or the instrument of
an evil political system. Hitler’s ideology changed not only how people act
or behave to one another but also human nature itself. Arendt claims the
aim of totalitarian ideology is to transform human nature by inducing them to
become ideological creatures.What Arendt stresses here is the fact that it
is only when people have been possessed by ideas or more accurately, by a
system of ideas (ideology) that they turn to be vicious people.
The transformation
of human nature was carried out through the establishment of concentration
camps. She describes concentration camps
as the fabrication of hell on earth. Arendt divides three types of death camps
that correspond to the concept of life after death; hades, purgatory, and hell. Among the three types, Arendt argues: “Hell
is in the most literal sense embodied by those types of camp perfected by
the Nazis, in which the whole of life was thoroughly and systematically
organized with a view to the greatest possible torment.”The image of hell in the form of
concentration camps is meant to construct the fantasy that human beings can be
omnipotent. Arendt writes: "The totalitarian hell proves only that the
power of man is greater than they ever dare to think, and that man can realize hellish fantasies without making the sky fall or the
earth open.”
The desire for omnipotence is called ‘the madness for the superlative,’ “a
madness that brings God down to earth in the figure of a particular omnipotent
individual.”
Through this desire, the Nazi regime wanted to totally dominate the world, achieved through eliminating plurality in
favour of ‘being one’ or the only one. Hitler as Führer desired absolute power, a godlike power on earth.
In the concentration camps, the desire
for absolute power was transferred into the mind of ordinary Germans and the Nazis. In favour of being
omnipotent, they were driven to carry out the order of transporting,
organizing, and then murdering the inmates. Because of the fantasy of
omnipotence, the Nazis were reluctant to give in to their vices and resisted
the temptation to do the good. Arendt claims: “Evil in the
Third Reich had lost the quality which most people recognize it—the quality of
temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis must have been tempted not to
murder...but God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.”This resistance occurs through the Nazi’s
imperative of obedience and self-sacrifice.
The perfect example of this is Adolf Eichmann. The imperative of the Nazi regime stimulated Eichmann’s own consciousness and thus Eichmann’s
conscience was carried away and caught up in the voice of others. Eichmann’s voice had been the voice of Himmler. In this way,
Hitler’s desires and fantasies, voiced by Himmler, became Eichmann's own desires and
fantasies.Arendt argues that the sacrifice of Eichmann’s desire through the elated voice of
conscience is accomplished by turning the basic instinct of pity back to
oneself. “The trick used by Himmler consisted in turning these instincts
around, as it were, in directing them toward the self.” That means the sacrifice of desire for duty displays
Eichmann’s fantasy of being omnipotent as well. In other words, the fantasy of
Hitler as Führer was transferred into the
mind of Eichmann.
This fantasy has driven Eichmann to be an agent of the
state’s criminal policies. Consequently, his crime represents a new form of
evil, which Arendt calls the banality of evil which means “the condition of a
humanity that has been forsaken, banished.”Evil
is banal because the person acts out of ideals which he or she had taken over
from others without understanding them. In other words, the person does not
think about what he is doing and thus fails to recognize the negative impacts of his
action to others. Or as Berel Lang puts it: “The evildoer was a ‘hollow man’,
emptied of whatever it is that distinguishes human beings as human—then the
result of this would be the banality, the sheer mechanical thoughtlessness, of
the evil-doer.”
In the case of Eichmann, he was superfluous as a human being, deprived of his
individuality as a free and thinking person. Although he appeared as a normal
person, whether during the Holocaust or the trial in Jerusalem, in fact he
lacked the capacity for freedom and thinking or understanding. Eichmann was an ordinary man, but his lack of thinking, generated by Hitler’s
ideology (Nazism) made him a monstrous person. He is the perfect example of
how worldlessness in the form of superfluousness is the driving force of violent action. In this context, Eichmann represents the terrorists and
fundamentalists in our time who have been driven to violent actions because of
ideals induced by certain ideologies or religions. They are the victims of the
politic of brainwashing where people are deprived of their own ideals or
desires and replace them with other ideals coming from the outside.
Worldlessness and the Loss
of Right to Have Rights
Besides driving people to be violent actors,
worldlessness also renders people vulnerable, in
the sense they are easily exposed to crimes as experienced by Jewish people
during the Holocaust. For Arendt,
the Holocaust is not necessarily a unique event due to the large number of
victims and suffering in history, but a unique horror that negated
modernity’s universalism, absolutism, and ideology.It is the mark of the failure of modernity
because instead of bringing about a healthy human condition, where human beings
can freely and meaningfully act and speak as equals, modernity has created a worldless or inhuman condition. It generates
worldlessness, which Arendt considers as the precondition
of crimes against humanity. In the condition of worldlessness, people lost their rights to have rights. They become the rightless people.
In The Origins of
Totalitarianism, Arendt relates the loss of
right to have rights to the failure of nation-states that
began in the late nineteenth century in
anti-Semitism and imperialism and reached its climax in the mid-twentieth
century in the form of totalitarianism. The idea of nation-states
emerged as a response to the growth of ethnic groups within the state that
demanded the recognition of their rights.
William Batkay claims that nation-states are based on the premise that the
state should be the political embodiment of a racial or ethnic nation. This is
the replacement of the state that is based on individual or citizen’s rights.The nation-state is reflected in the Westphalian system, “the nation-state survived as an
organized political community in which citizens were granted rights and a
meaningful space among equals.”
However, the problem with the nation-state is that it is
contradictory because, from the beginning, the nation-state is formed on the
principle of ‘nationality’. In other words, the principle of nationality is the
founding element of the nation-state. But, the fact shows that this principle is also the driving force of the
expulsion of citizens and minorities in some of European
nation-states, in the beginning of the twentieth century. It is on the principle of nationality that the
nation-states expel their own citizens, particularly minorities and render them superfluous. Consequently, minorities are not protected in their own
nation-state and at the same time cannot find any protection from international
authority or even from other countries.
This is what Arendt calls the decline or crisis of the
nation-state because
they were unable to
cope with the emergence of large ethnic minorities within the existing states
and the obsession with national or ethnic rights that have
generated both the domination of one ethnic over the others (discrimination
against minorities) and the war between ethnic’s nations.This is exactly what Arendt sees in
anti-Semitic and imperial politics. For Arendt,
nationalism was easily turned to racialism and anti-Semitism which provided the
impetus for the hate against the minority. The first victims of the change from an individual or citizen-based state to an ethnic-based state is the Jews. Arendt
writes: “The fact is that modern anti-Semitism grew
in proportion as traditional nationalism declined, and reached its climax at
the exact moment when the European system of nation-states and its precarious
balance of power crashed.”
What concerns Arendt in anti-Semitism is the politicization of this social discrimination, in the sense that the hate or discriminating attitude is
formalized by the political leaders in order to maintain their power and carry
out their hidden agenda. In Arendt’s view, At the driving force of the hate towards Jewish people is
political.One good example of the politicization of
such a social phenomenon was Hitler’s nationalism. When he came into power in 1933,
Hitler declared: ‘Germany for the ethnic Germans’ or ‘Germany is not an
immigrant state’. Of course, this pronouncement brought about the prejudices and the hate against minority
groups, particularly the Jews firstly in Germany
and then widespread to all other European states.
The decline of the nation-states can also be seen in
imperialism, which is driven by what Steve Buckler calls it ‘depoliticizing mentality’. Imperialism has marginalized people because
they lost their right to belong to a political community and worstly deprived of their active participation in political life.This is found in bureaucracy, where the state
is ruled by the few or the elites who have either political or economic power.
In this way, the large numbers of ordinary citizens are
disempowered and the states become “the precious cement for binding together a
centralized state and an atomized society.”Arendt
observes that national sovereignty has deprived the majority of people of
their right to have rights. In fact, she discovers that in the modern world, human rights are at stake. Or as Rensman claims: “The loss of your polity includes the
more fundamental loss of human dignity, ‘the essential quality as a man’ which is
dependent of a place in the world—a worldly context in which human life can
have meaning and in which human recognize one another as free and equals.”)
The decline of nation-states as described above has
brought about the loss of the right to have rights. There are three indications of
this phenomenon: first, it is “the
loss of their homes.”
Home is a special entity and significant space because in home we find security
and even meaning of our lives. When homes are destroyed then the human world that
defines human existence and meaning is also destroyed. However, Arendt is not
only concerned with the loss of the homes but the difficulty of
finding new homes or new places for human shelters. Describing the condition of
migrants, Arendt writes:
What is
unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new
one. Suddenly, there is no place on earth where migrants could go without the
severest restrictions, no country where they would be assimilated, no territory
where they could found a new community of their own.)
Second, it is “the loss of government protection.”Here, Arendt
points to people who are looking for political asylum. These people, she
argues, are not politically and legally protected in their own country and are
uncertain to be protected in other countries. What is unprecedented in this
context is that people do not belong to
any community. Since there is no country in the
world that claims them, they then remain superfluous. This is
exactly what the Nazis’ regime did to the Jewish people. “The Nazis started their
extermination of Jews by first depriving them of all legal status (the states
of second-class citizens) and cutting them off from the world of living by
herding them into ghettos and
concentration camps.”
Arendt shows that this phenomenon does not end
in concentration camps, but still going on in those who were treated as
refugees. Therefore, in her article ‘We Refugees’,
she claims that the loss of refugees is absolute. “We lost our home ... We lost
our occupation ... We lost our language .... We left our
relatives ... and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps.”
Third, it is the loss of humanity where human capacity of action
and speech are destroyed: “They are deprived not of the
right to freedom, but of the right to action; not of the right to think
whatever they please, but of the right to opinion.”
The complete destruction of humanity is seen in Nazi concentration camps
where people were not only deprived of their right to action and opinion but
also were treated as thing-likes that can be predicted and calculated. Their
spontaneity and conditioned being were denied. In concentration camps, Arendt
claims, Jewish people were not treated: first, as judicial beings because they
were arbitrarily arrested and put into camps; second, as moral beings because
they were completely cut off from the world; and third, as
distinct individual beings because they were permanently and institutionally
tortured.
It becomes clear that for Arendt, the loss of ‘the right to have right’ particularly the right to be
a member of the political community is the precondition for the annihilation of Jewish people in the concentration camps. Before taking action of killing, they were made superfluous, uprooted, and
stateless. They were stripped of their citizenship. For Arendt, the loss of citizenship is similar to the loss of worldliness or the
condition of human existence.In fact, Arendt’s thinking on
crimes against humanity is informed by her awareness of dehumanization brought
about by racism, imperialism, colonialism,
militarism, and bureaucratic domination in modern society and politics. That
means, as Hayden argues, crimes against humanity are closely related to modern
structure and condition of superfluousness, created
and maintained by “political, economic, and social structures, attitudes and beliefs
that normalize and legitimize extreme deprivation and exclusion.”
Arendt’s description of the inseparability of
worldlessness and crimes against humanity does not mean that she defends the
criminals. Arendt does not treat Eichmann as an innocent person. Arendt’s main
point is to consider a crime in the broader context to get a whole
picture of why cruelty could happen. In this way, I think, Arendt
challenges the judicial systems throughout the world that focus only on the
criminals in the trials and thus let the actor’s intellectuals behind the
crimes—those who have power either political or economic—go away unpunished.
Furthermore, Arendt’s idea helps governments to fight against and eradicate crimes.
That means, in understanding the inseparability between crimes and the
condition of worldlessness, governments can design a fundamental
and comprehensive strategy to prevent a crime from occurring again in the future.***
Conclusion
Arendt’s idea that crimes against humanity are related to the condition of
worldlessness is still seen in our times. In recent years, many forms of
worldlessness have generated crimes, such as the deprivation of people’s right
to act and speak in the public realm, discrimination against minority groups, and social and economic injustices. For Arendt, to
eradicate the crimes, the states must create a human
condition where people have the freedom to act and speak, to easily find the
government’s protection and the room for developing their own lives in unforced
situations.
References:
---------. The Origins of Totalitarianism.New York: A Harvest Book,
Harcourt
Inc., 1951
