Abstract
This article explores problems of thoughtlessness through a critical engagement with Hannah Arendt. Thoughtlessness was more complicated for Arendt than her interpreters have acknowledged. She described it as the failure of conscience; as ideology; and as an everyday condition that sustains ideology. While the first has been widely acknowledged, the latter two have been virtually ignored. Arendt identifies the cultivation of everyday thoughtfulness as a remedy for failures of conscience, but this provides no defence against ideological and everyday thoughtlessness, which can actually reinforce failures of conscience. To address them Arendt turns to storytelling. But narratives can combat and reinforce thoughtlessness. To confront thoughtlessness we need to attend to narrative production and reception. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur I call for deeper engagement between political theorists, literary critics and philosophers of literature on the roles of narrative in promoting or undermining thinking in contemporary politics.
The varieties of human suffering are staggering: From spectacular eruptions of genocide to the traumatic violence of 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’, to the exploitation of sweatshop labour and the all-too-human consequences of the global economic crisis, suffering is a persistent feature of our global political landscape. Responding productively to suffering demands that we think about how we, as citizens and members of a world community, are implicated in it. That is a prerequisite for apprehending and assuming responsibility for our world. If our responses to global suffering require thought, then thoughtlessness poses a serious problem. It has thus far received insufficient attention, 1 and my purpose here is to give thoughtlessness some thought. Accordingly, in this article I ask three questions. What is thoughtlessness, and how does it implicate us in others’ suffering? What forms does it take? How might we begin respond to it? I address these questions through a critical engagement with Hannah Arendt, who is perhaps the theorist of thoughtlessness. Arendt herself did not associate the problem of thoughtlessness with suffering as such. Indeed, she worried about politicizing suffering because she was suspicious of the introduction of pity into politics. 2 But suffering need not evoke pity. In what follows, I turn to Arendt to show how suffering might provide opportunities for responsive thought, and how thoughtlessness can undermine those opportunities.
The problem of thoughtlessness is more complicated – and was more complicated for Arendt – than her readers have allowed. Attending to this complexity helps us not only to understand Arendt better, but also to offer an Arendtian diagnosis of a constellation of pathologies that persistently afflict contemporary political life. 3 Arendt describes thoughtlessness in three importantly different ways: as a failure of conscience; as a product of ideology; and as an everyday condition that sustains ideology. The first section of this article takes up the first of these. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt famously identified Eichmann’s thoughtlessness as a failure of conscience that enmeshed him in the Holocaust. As genocides and other acts of violence continue to stain the globe, this account of thoughtlessness remains relevant today. Arendt suggests that the best remedy for a lack of conscience in the face of extraordinary evil is to cultivate thoughtfulness in everyday life. This remedy, however, provides no defence against a second sort of thoughtlessness, which I take up in the second section. In The Human Condition Arendt criticized what I call ‘ideological thoughtlessness’, the unthinking promulgation and acceptance of political mantras that obscure our implication in others’ suffering. From the perspective of ideological thoughtlessness, the discourse surrounding the war on terror threatened to lull citizens into complacency about the infringement of civil liberties at home and the official sanctioning of brutality both at home and abroad. Some reactions to the global economic and financial crisis posed a similar threat. Ideological thoughtlessness, finally, is enabled and sustained by everyday thoughtlessness, such as that which attends our implication in the suffering of sweatshop workers. I take up this sort of thoughtless in the third section. In ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, Arendt identified everyday thoughtlessness as a symptom of being confronted daily with so much to think about. Such thoughtlessness supports ideological thoughtlessness by short-circuiting the thinking that might otherwise undermine it. The persistence of ideological thoughtlessness further complicates Arendt’s remedy for thoughtlessness as a failure of conscience by suggesting that our consciences can become distorted not just in extraordinary circumstances, but in everyday life.
Arendt gestures towards storytelling as a response to everyday thoughtlessness, and scholars who have focused on her account have justly emphasized the critical, transformative potential of stories. However, in the final section I argue that they – and Arendt – downplay the fact that stories can be sources of thoughtlessness. Mitigating thoughtlessness is thus a matter of paying careful attention to how we tell, and how we listen to, stories of suffering in politics. Political theorists ought to attend more closely to work in literary criticism and the philosophy of literature that might account for narratives’ capacity to facilitate or impede thinking. To that end, and in conversation with Paul Ricoeur, I suggest that narrative’s mimetic character – its ability to offer conceptual vocabularies, organize plots and provide opportunities for abstraction – accounts for the ability of particular narratives either to combat and facilitate thoughtlessness.
Thoughtlessness as a failure of conscience
Failures of conscience abound in recent history. During genocides mass slaughter becomes for many of their architects and perpetrators not a terrible wrong, but a necessary process of purification. Different failures of conscience characterized atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Prisoners were so dehumanized that their mistreatment was permitted, celebrated and even memorialized. 4 Thus can ordinary people become implicated in horrific acts through a failure of conscience – a failure to distinguish between right and wrong, an inability to appreciate the significance of that distinction or a tendency to invert it perversely. Such a failure of conscience is one form of thoughtlessness.
Arendt provides an example of such thoughtlessness in the person of Adolph Eichmann. He personified ‘the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil’. 5 Arendt was most struck by Eichmann’s ordinariness. He was less a monster than a ‘ludicrous’ clown, 6 a career-driven family man whose desires for status and success drove him into the arms of the Nazis. 7 On the one hand this ordinariness was reassuring: Arendt’s Eichmann ‘lent order to the catastrophe and rendered the perpetrator more comprehensible because he was “like us”’. 8 But on the other hand, the apparent absence of any clear motives for Eichmann’s participation in the Holocaust was very hard to understand. ‘[H]is was obviously also no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind.’ 9 This made it difficult for anyone to ‘admit that an average, “normal” person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong’. 10 Eichmann’s thoughtlessness was not innate; it was fostered by particular institutional arrangements. Describing his attempt to save some Jews from extermination, Arendt answered the question of ‘whether the accused had a conscience: Yes, he had a conscience, and his conscience functioned in the expected way for about four weeks [albeit “within rather odd limits”], whereupon it began to function the other way around.’ 11 Several features of Nazi officialdom encouraged such thoughtlessness. One was its bureaucratic language. Unable to rephrase an answer at his trial, Eichmann replied that ‘Officialese (Amtssprache) is my only language.’ 12 He ‘repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him’. 13 Another such feature was the ‘“objective” attitude’ that ‘was typical of the S.S. mentality and something Eichmann, at the trial, was still very proud of’. It produced talk of ‘concentration camps in terms of “administration” and about extermination camps in terms of “economy”’. 14 This attitude was the basis of strict ‘language rules’ employed by the Nazis, under which ‘such bald words as “extermination”, “liquidation”, or “killing”’ were replaced by more opaque terms like ‘final solution’ and ‘evacuation’. 15 Such verbal niceties ‘surrounded’ Eichmann with ‘the most reliable of all safe guards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such’. 16 The language rules deployed by the Bush Administration in its treatment of suspected terrorists recall such verbal niceties. These rules gave rise to locutions like ‘rendition’ and, infamously, ‘enhanced interrogation’. In both cases such language rules served a dual function – they sought both to inoculate perpetrators against the evils they were perpetrating, and to sanitize them for public consumption. Moreover, while both the scale and nature of the evil certainly differed between the Holocaust and 9/11, these terms likewise obscured the horrors to which they refer – essentially, torture and the transport of human beings to secret sites in countries that allow torture – and thus shielded many from the realities of human suffering.
In some later reflections on Eichmann, Arendt clarified the meaning of ‘the banality of evil’. She wrote that she ‘meant … the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction’ in the perpetrator, and especially Eichmann, ‘whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness’. He displayed ‘not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think’.
17
If the banality of evil reflected thoughtlessness, Arendt wondered, might … the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever comes to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results … be of such a nature that it ‘conditions’ men against evildoing?
18
Elsewhere she put it differently: ‘Could the activity of thinking … be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?’ 19 In the way she first posed the question, Arendt suggested that thinking alone might prevent evil; in the second, she suggested that more might be necessary. But she clearly linked thoughtlessness with evil-doing, and thinking with its prevention. More specifically, she asked: ‘Do the inability to think and a disastrous failure of what we commonly call conscience coincide?’ And further, ‘is our ability to judge, to tell right from wrong … dependent upon our faculty of thought?’ 20
Two dimensions of thinking associate it with conscience. First, their relationship is nascent in the idea of ‘con-science … insofar as it means “to know with and by myself”, a kind of knowledge that is actualized in every thinking process’. 21 To be with oneself is to enjoy solitude. Arendt distinguished this from loneliness and isolation, both of which can contribute to thoughtlessness. Loneliness occurs ‘when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company’. 22 Isolation breeds impotence and is a precondition of terror. 23 Genocidal regimes have promoted both. The constant bombardment of propaganda, whether of the Nazi or Hutu varieties, as well as the ruthless surveillance enacted and encouraged by the state, threatens the possibility of keeping oneself company by making it difficult to stop and think. Think also of the ever-present warnings, the terror alerts and constant flow of information that clarified – or, rather, amplified – the threat of terrorism in the wake of 9/11. Rather than this constant thrum of activity, thinking requires its temporary cessation. Its ‘chief characteristic is that it interrupts all doing’. 24 That cessation requires solitude, a partial and temporary withdrawal from the common world (with its bombardment of the senses) in order to be with oneself.
Second, thinking is associated with conscience because it enables us to disrupt and criticize the terms of everyday life that might prevent us from acknowledging our participation in evil. Alluding to the language games and ‘officialese’ that structured Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, Arendt argues that thinking disturbs the blanket of complacency with which individuals may cover themselves in ‘clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct that have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality’. 25 We have seen this more recently in the war on terror: In debates over detainee interrogation, the Bush Administration preferred the term ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ to ‘torture’. This substitution has the same kind of effect as substituting ‘final solution’ or ‘evacuation’ for ‘genocide.’ It encourages participants not to recognize the evil in what they are doing (or endorsing) by redescribing their actions in terms of ‘standardized codes of expression’ that render them more ambiguous. Thinking, with its disruptive potential and its ‘critical capacity’, 26 refuses such consolations. Thinking lets us see something for what it is, to cut through euphemism and resist evasion. This awakens the conscience and, with it, the faculty of judgment – the ability to say ‘this is wrong’. 27 For Arendt, that awakening is a prerequisite for preventing evil.
How exactly might thinking rear up in the face of thoughtlessness? When Arendt asks about the relationship between thoughtlessness and evil, and between thinking and its prevention, she proposes a link between everyday thoughtfulness and the resilience of conscience. If we practise thinking in ordinary times, Arendt suggests, we stand a better chance of resisting the deformity of conscience in dark ones, like times of genocide and terror. Our capacity to think – that is, to use our conscience – is manifest in the act of judgment: ‘The manifestation of the wind of thought is … the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this indeed may prevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments when the chips are down.’ 28
Ideological thoughtlessness
Probably because of Eichmann’s notoriety, and the spectacular horrors in which he was implicated, Arendt’s account of his thoughtlessness – and of the banality of evil – has received the lion’s share of critical and public attention. This has obscured two other forms of thoughtlessness that may be even more troubling because they are more pervasive and harder to diagnose. I call them ‘ideological thoughtlessness,’ and ‘everyday thoughtlessness,’ and they, too, are critical aspects of Arendt’s work that continue to resonate today. The awakening of conscience that Arendt proposes cannot address these other forms of thoughtlessness because they are manifest in everyday life, which is the very scene of cultivating conscience.
Arendt identified what I am calling ideological thoughtlessness several years before the Eichmann trial. In The Human Condition, she observed that ‘thoughtlessness – the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of “truths” which have become trivial and empty – seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time’. 29 She wrote this in the face of two intersecting crises. The first was occasioned by the 1957 Sputnik launch which, Arendt says, was accompanied by ‘relief about the first “step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth”’, a rebellion against human existence. 30 This scientific ‘triumph’ reflected a crisis within natural science, whose ‘“truths” … will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought’. And if ‘knowledge and thought have parted company for good’, two consequences follow. First, ‘we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is’. 31 Second, ‘if we were to adjust our cultural attitudes to the present status of scientific achievement, we would … adopt a way of life in which speech [and thought] is no longer meaningful’. And ‘Men … can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.’ 32 The second crisis was ‘the advent of automation’ that promised to liberate human beings from labor. Because modernity had entailed ‘a theoretical glorification of labor and … resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society’, automation promised ‘a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor’, and which ‘does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won’. ‘Surely’, Arendt concludes, ‘nothing could be worse’. 33
In this fraught context Arendt proposes her ‘reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears’. That enterprise is ‘obviously is a matter of thought’, and so must confront the thoughtlessness that she diagnosed: the reckless, confused and complacent repetition of empty ‘truths’. Arendt says nothing further here about this sort of thoughtlessness, but her description echoes parts of her earlier analysis of ideology. As ‘the logic of an idea’,
34
an ideology converts ideas into premises and then inexorably deduces conclusions from them: The purely negative coercion of logic, the prohibition of contradictions, became ‘productive’ so that a whole line of thought could be initiated, and forced upon the mind, by drawing conclusions in the manner of mere argumentation. This argumentative process could be interrupted neither by a new idea … nor by a new experience.
35
Arendt saw great peril in this movement of logic: The danger in exchanging the necessary insecurity of philosophical thought for the total explanation of an ideology … is not even so much the risk of falling for some usually vulgar, always uncritical assumption as of exchanging the freedom inherent in man's capacity to think for the straightjacket of logic with which man can force himself almost as violently as he is forced by some outside power.
36
Arendt’s description of ideology and its dangers was not restricted to totalitarianism, so its resonance with her claim about thoughtlessness in The Human Condition is not surprising. 37 What does the ‘complacent repetition of truths that have become trivial and empty’ reflect but the exchange of our thinking capacity for the ‘straightjacket’ of prepackaged slogans? In the case of the scientific advancement that Arendt describes, we might imagine hollow claims that science has at last ‘set us free!’ from the irritating limitations of earthly existence, or the celebration of technology without regard for its use or consequences. In the case of automation, we celebrate our freedom from toil only to find our lives bereft of meaning. For Arendt these are impoverished conceptions of freedom. In the first case our ‘freedom’ entails enslavement to technology. In the second, it is bought at the price of a fully human existence. Such claims to freedom are thus indeed heedless, reckless, hopelessly confused, and complacently repeated. Misrecognized as facts about the world, rather than the vain and dangerous hopes that they are, they take on the status of ideology. 38 Elsewhere, Arendt warned against ‘nonthinking’ in similar terms. ‘By shielding people against the dangers of examination, it teaches them to hold fast to whatever the prescribed rules of conduct may be at a given time in a given society’, so ‘they get used to never making up their minds’. 39
Ideological thoughtlessness differs from the failure of conscience in important ways, although they share some features in common. Both blind us to our implication in suffering, partly through the manipulation of language and ideas, but the nature of our implication and the quality of the blindness is different. In the failure of conscience, our implication in others’ suffering is often relatively direct. Eichmann, for instance, ordered the transportation of Jews and other ‘undesirables’ to Nazi concentration camps. Even more direct is the implication of those who actually carry out the killings – or, in the case of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, those who dehumanize and torture terror suspects. Thoughtlessness blinds such people to their implication in the suffering of others by dulling their ability, or willingness, to distinguish right from wrong. Ideological thoughtlessness works differently. Through it we are implicated in our own suffering and that of others, not by contributing to it directly, but by tacitly or overtly supporting and reproducing the systems of thought and practice that facilitate it. The quality of blindness also differs: when our conscience fails, we cannot distinguish right from wrong. With ideological thoughtlessness, we fail to appreciate that there is anything to which we ought to respond at all. The problem is not the anaesthetization of conscience as such, but rather the naturalization of a contingent world; and, with it, the disappearance of suffering as a problem to confront.
Arendt’s worry about ideological thoughtlessness remains compelling today. Some of the most familiar discourse of the post-9/11 world, at least in the United States, was a kind of script from which deviation was certainly not encouraged by many in powerful positions. Think of ‘Axis of Evil’, ‘war on terror’ and, in happier moments, ‘freedom is on the march’. These slogans threatened to sink so deeply – and in some cases did sink so deeply – into our consciousness that to think about and reconsider them seemed to require some special effort, or at least the willingness to resist authoritative pronouncements and with them the logic of a set of ideas, an ideology. Such thinking was not forbidden, of course, and the slogans were actively resisted – especially by the political, academic and cultural left 40 – but the monotony of repetition still had, and continues to have, the potential to dull our senses and to lull citizens into the complacency that Arendt so feared. And in the meantime, the trumpeting of these slogans became indistinguishable from the endorsement of the constellation of policies that they underwrote: invasion, ‘enhanced interrogation’, ‘rendition’ and so on. Importantly, while ‘enhanced interrogation’ and ‘rendition’ were also language rules that may have facilitated the dulling of consciences, they perform a slightly different function here – as part of the rigid ‘logic of an idea’ – the idea of a war on terror – that made so much suffering seem (to some) less like a problem, and more like a necessary condition of contemporary politics. From this perspective, tacitly or explicitly endorsing such locutions implicates those who do so in the suffering of the victims of the ‘war on terror’. More recently, the insistence by some in the face of the global financial and economic crisis that unfettered market capitalism is the best way to organize an economy might be understood as an instance of ideological thoughtlessness underwritten by adherence to the tenets of contemporary neoliberalism – specifically, free markets, the evils of regulation and a tight link between individual freedom, economic profit and social and economic progress. Yet the crisis, we well know, has contributed to the suffering of many in the US and elsewhere. Thoughtless devotion to neoliberalism would implicate its devotees in the suffering of those whose livelihoods have been threatened by the global economic meltdown.
In response to such ideological thoughtlessness, Arendt asks us – with deceptive simplicity – to ‘think what we are doing’. 41 How might thinking mitigate ideological thoughtlessness? If such thoughtlessness entails avoiding critical reflection and clinging to unreflective habit, thinking must insistently refuse such consolations. In an address she gave upon accepting the Lessing prize, Arendt cautiously praised the ‘new kind of thinking’ Lessing promoted, which ‘needs no pillars and props, no standards and traditions to move freely without crutches over unfamiliar terrain’. 42 Thus Arendt distinguishes thinking from common sense or the sensus communis, that sixth sense that organizes the others and makes the sensible world both coherent and common. 43 For Arendt, thought is not just not foundational; it is militantly anti-foundational. 44 When we think we seek not to answer a question or to hold things together, but to question ourselves about ourselves and our condition – for example, about its contingency or necessity, about what can and cannot be otherwise. Surprisingly, given her emphasis on the anti-foundational character of thinking, Arendt claims that ‘the chief weakness of common sense … has always been that it lacks the safeguards inherent in sheer thinking, namely, thinking’s critical capacity’; and yet that capacity ‘harbors within itself a highly self-destructive tendency’ because it ruthlessly calls into question the axioms by which we live. 45 Such axioms are the products of and the fuel for ideological thoughtlessness. With its disruptive, destructive movement, Arendtian thinking appears in contrast as a powerful form of critique.
Everyday thoughtlessness
But ideological thoughtlessness is stubborn in a way that thoughtlessness as a failure of conscience is not. Recall that the failure of conscience in the face of evil could be addressed by cultivating thought fulness in everyday life. Ideological thoughtlessness is more resilient because it is actually buttressed by the conditions of everyday life. Everyday thoughtlessness is an unavoidable feature of human existence because it shields us ‘against reality, that is against the claim on our thinking attention which all events and facts arouse by virtue of their existence’. 46 Whereas in the first two cases Arendt condemned thoughtlessness, here she acknowledges its necessity: ‘If we were responsive to this claim [on our “thinking attention”] all the time’, Arendt observes, ‘we would soon be exhausted’. Eichmann was special only in that ‘he clearly knew of no such claim at all’. 47 Whether we know of such a claim or not, Arendt cautions, there is a limit to our capacity to respond to it.
Sometimes, however, some relatively specific everyday activities implicate us in the suffering of others in ways to which we might respond productively. The many large and small economic decisions that brought on the financial crisis provide one example. Another powerful example is provided by the problem of sweatshop labour, which is characterized by individuals producing garments cheaply under exploitative and often violent conditions. Iris Young points to this phenomenon as an instance of structural injustice, which … exists when social processes put large categories of persons under a systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time as these processes enable others to dominate or have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising their capacities.
48
Structural injustice is a ‘moral wrong’, but not like a wrongful individual action or a wilful action like state repression. It ‘occurs as a consequence of many individuals and institutions’ pursuing their interests ‘within given institutional rules and accepted norms’. Under this conception, ‘all the persons who participate … in the ongoing schemes of cooperation that constitute these structures are responsible for them’; not in the sense of having directly caused or intended injustice, but ‘in the sense that they are part of the process that causes them’. 49 The ideology of neoliberal capitalism is a part of such a ‘scheme of cooperation’. Young shows here how the persistence of sweatshop labour is connected to our everyday activities, and this suggests that collectively changing those activities might mitigate the suffering of sweatshop workers. The problem, however, is that the nature of our participation in these processes – through buying merchandise, for instance – is so quotidian that it may escape our thinking attention altogether, and this makes it difficult to properly assume responsibility for structural injustice in the way that Young would like us to do. 50 Thus everyday thoughtlessness can implicate us in others’ suffering in a way that is difficult to overcome.
There is, however, something in thinking that responds to the problem of everyday thoughtlessness, and it comes to light in Arendt’s distinction between thinking and philosophy. While philosophy is for professional thinkers, ‘thinking in its non-cognitive, nonspecialized sense as a natural need of human life, the actualization of the difference given in consciousness’ – the difference between me and myself that enables the dialogue of thinking – ‘is not a prerogative of the few but an ever-present faculty of everybody’. 51 That is a good thing indeed, because Arendt finds in the histories of Greek and Roman philosophy a persistent inability to deal adequately with problems like suffering and evil. 52 For the Greeks, ‘admiring wonder conceived as the starting-point of philosophy leaves no place for the factual existence of disharmony, of ugliness, and finally of evil’. 53 For the Romans, the turn to philosophy as a solution to human unhappiness reflected a desire – similar to the one expressed in the launch of Sputnik – to ‘escape a world that has become unbearable’. 54 Thus ‘philosophy is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself’. 55 On these terms, philosophy cannot come to terms with worldly evil and suffering. In contrast Arendtian thinking, as ‘the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever comes to pass’, suffers no such restriction. 56
Arendt’s conception of everyday thoughtlessness raises two problems for my conceptual efforts to untangle her notions of thoughtlessness, and for our practical efforts to confront their force in contemporary politics. The first concerns the relationship between everyday and ideological thoughtlessness: how do we know that the quality of ‘everydayness’ is not (at least sometimes) itself a product of ideological thoughtlessness that renders certain forms of suffering invisible by relegating them to the background of everyday life? For example, from a certain perspective, sweatshop labour is not an exploitative evil that commands attention, but a source of employment for those who might otherwise not have jobs. From this perspective capitalism promotes profit, progress and freedom and conceals from view this sort of suffering. On the other hand, from the perspective that sweatshop labour is exploitative, such suffering is obvious and the claims of capitalism patently ideological. Second, those who benefit from exploiting sweatshop labour may manifest a failure of conscience – an inability to distinguish between the legitimate pursuit of profit, and the exploitation and oppression of human beings – that is itself a product of a particular set of ideological investments. These problems productively highlight that all three conceptions of thoughtlessness (while conceptually distinct) may frequently be intertwined. It also suggests that how we understand our condition, and the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about it, has a lot to do with efforts to combat thoughtlessness.
Narrative, thinking and thoughtlessness
This might explain, then, why Arendt’s response to everyday thoughtlessness is a turn to stories. Arendt says that thinking arises when ‘I, having watched an incident in the street or having become implicated in some occurrence, now start considering what has happened, telling it to myself as a kind of story, preparing it in this way for its subsequent communication to others.’ 57 Arendt says nothing more here about why stories might enable thinking, but we can take a hint from what she says elsewhere. In The Human Condition Arendt turns to stories to illuminate and make intelligible the meaning of action – especially great deeds – which is always opaque to the doer and can only be revealed retrospectively to others through the reconstructive act of narration. 58 In relation to thinking, Arendt may be suggesting that, if thoughtlessness renders our connections to others opaque to us, we can tell stories that illuminate those connections and promote a more thoughtful, responsive engagement with the world. Moreover, if the problem of everyday thoughtlessness is that it threatens us with exhaustion, narratives suggest a remedy for that as well: because narratives isolate concrete slices of our world – it is this event, or sequence of events, that is the subject of this narrative – they can direct our attention to particular features of it, while leaving us relatively free from being overwhelmed by the others. I can tell myself (or another) a story, for example, about the relationship between my (their) purchasing habits and the suffering of workers that makes patent my (their) implication in their exploitation. Indeed, Arendt’s turn to narrative might also address thoughtlessness as a failure of conscience: Telling the story of the ‘war on terror’ as one of individual rights denied and torture endured (as opposed to a righteous war against enemies of freedom, for example) highlights – and might counteract – the grotesque failures of conscience that mark this era in American domestic and international security policy.
Arendt’s view of narrative thus inspires faith in its critical potential, and many of her interlocutors have seized upon it. Seyla Benhabib has written of ‘the redemptive power’ of Arendtian narrative. 59 Lisa Disch has identified Arendt’s narrative turn as a methodological and epistemological choice aimed at the critical understanding of public phenomena by providing opportunities for what Disch calls ‘situated impartiality’. 60 More recently, Maria Pia Lara has drawn heavily on Arendt in pointing to narrative as a useful medium for collective reckoning with evils like the Holocaust. Lara claims that societies can become conscious of their past through narrative: by publicly exchanging, criticizing and revising our accounts of the past in order to ‘construct a moral conscience’ – itself embedded in a ‘moral image of the world’ – we can ‘produce institutions’ that we can use to exercise judgment about the past and prevent evil in the future. 61
Narrative can indeed do all these things. But Arendt and her interpreters downplay the fact that stories can thwart progressive politics just as they can facilitate them. 62 Stories can thwart our redemptive aspirations, undermine critical understanding and impede collective reckoning. Most importantly, for our present purposes, stories can promote thoughtlessness as well as mitigate its effects. For example, in her report on Eichmann Arendt reveals (without acknowledging it as such) the failure of conscience as a consequence of telling ourselves the wrong kind of story about our relationship to the suffering of others. She notes that Eichmann ‘remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered … to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death[s] with great zeal and meticulous care’. 63 Here is a story of a ‘job well done’, and of the importance of fealty to bureaucratic goals. We might add to this Eichmann’s imperative to provide for his family, and so on. 64 Such stories provide important background to his failure of conscience. And they illuminate how we, today, might narrate our own everyday practices that contribute to the suffering of others. We, too, must provide for ourselves and our families, we must meet certain social, political and economic imperatives. And when we tell ourselves that that is what we are doing it makes it easier not to see – it may even require that we not see – the connection between our everyday activities and the ongoing suffering of others.
There is another, equally important dimension of narrative’s place in political life that has been likewise neglected by Arendt and her interlocutors: A narrative’s power comes not just from how it is told, but from how it is received. To take seriously the manifold ways in which narratives shape our political experiences, political theorists need to explore more systematically both the production and reception of narratives. Perhaps, for instance, we hear a story of sweatshop labour and understand it as bearing a lesson only for someone else. Or perhaps our conscience is so distorted that we acknowledge our implication in sweatshop labour and simply do not care. Or perhaps we acknowledge our implication, and it awakens our conscience, but we believe there is nothing we can do. All of these, and more, are plausible responses to narratives that seek to expose and combat thoughtlessness in its several varieties. These possibilities attest to both the promises and the risks of narrative engagement for confronting thoughtlessness in contemporary politics.
Political theory as such may not contain adequate resources to explore these promises and risks more systematically, so we might profitably turn to fields that put narrative engagement front and centre: literary criticism and the philosophy of literature. Before concluding, I want briefly to illustrate one form that this engagement might take. Three distinct aspects of narratives (and our engagement with them) shape how they might cultivate thoughtlessness or promote thinking, and may do each differently for different readers. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur, 65 I interpret these aspects as dimensions of narrative’s mimetic character – of narrative’s capacity to reflect our world back to us, and to offer different worlds for our consideration. 66 First, narratives offer conceptual structures that may reproduce, complement or challenge our own. This aspect of narrative corresponds to Ricoeur’s depiction of mimesis as the realm of our ‘pre-understanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character’. 67 Pre-understanding involves mimesis because it is how we represent the world to ourselves, how we represent our experience in the conceptual resources that we bring to bear upon it. Conceptual structures are critical factors in promoting or undermining thoughtlessness, because how we understand – indeed, whether we can apprehend – our relationship to others’ suffering depends upon whether we see that suffering at all. Particular structures tend to illuminate certain features of our condition and obscure others. For example, one conceptual structure associated with neoliberal capitalism includes constellations like ‘profit, progress and freedom’. Another includes constellations like ‘suffering, exploitation, and injustice’. From within the horizons of one, the other can be difficult to fathom. Second, narratives organize and elaborate those conceptual structures in plots. This aspect of narrative corresponds to Ricoeur’s depiction of mimesis2 as the realm of emplotment. It is the realm of fiction, of the ‘configuration of a narrative’, or the ‘organization of events’. 68 These plots, or stories, may be ones of the accumulation of profit, the march of progress and the enjoyment and expansion of freedom; or they may be stories of daily, grinding suffering, exploitation and domination. Third – and this is perhaps the most critical aspect – narratives offer opportunities for those who engage with them to abstract from particular narratives and carry whatever they will from the world of a narrative to their own world of private and shared experiences. This aspect of narrative corresponds to Ricoeur’s depiction of mimesis as the ‘intersection of the world of the text [the narrative] and the world of the hearer or reader; the intersection … of the world configured by the poem and the world wherein real action occurs and unfolds’. 69 But Ricoeur seems to have a specific sort of world and a specific sort of action in mind, ones that bear directly upon the problems that have animated my exploration of thoughtlessness. For Ricoeur, ‘narrative has its full meaning when it is restored to the time of action and of suffering’. 70 This aspect of narrative is the site of its instability as a source of ethical and political insight. For it is at the point of our engagements with narratives that they can shape our apprehension of our world, making certain things visible and obscuring others, enabling us to learn from them one lesson or another. Such apprehension is crucial, both for the persistence of thoughtlessness in its many varieties, and for our efforts to overcome it.
Conclusion
In this article I have explored several problems of thoughtlessness through a critical engagement with Hannah Arendt. Those problems were more complicated for her, and are more complicated for us, than many of her readers suggest and than we may ordinarily recognize. While each species of thoughtlessness – as a failure of conscience, as ideology, and as immersion in everyday life – is conceptually and practically distinct, two things unite them. First, all of them blind us to our implication in others’ suffering, though in different ways. And second, each sort of thoughtlessness can be sustained or undermined by how we tell and listen to – or fail to tell and to listen to – stories of suffering. The general problem of thoughtlessness, and Arendt’s responses to it, thus highlights the significance of narratives in shaping our experiences of politics. This significance points to the need for political theorists to study much more critically, and systematically, the place(s) of narrative in political life.