The year of coronavirus has not, to put it mildly, been a great year for creativity. Human experience has collapsed into a very narrow circle, bounded by the walls of the home and the Zoom window. Instead, we have generally been consuming the outputs of vintage years. Among the piles that qualify as my own bookshelf are some of the works of Hannah Arendt, the German political philosopher best known for her analyses of the development of totalitarianism and its relationship to the human condition. Her writing is terrific, clearly and powerfully explaining complex historical processes in a way accessible even to a political novice like myself. However, there was one quote in particular that struck me as underdeveloped, made almost offhandedly on the way to some more salient point:
I took the Socratic proposition ‘It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong’ as an example of a philosophical statement that concerns human conduct, and hence has political implications. My reason was partly that this sentence has become the beginning of Western ethical thought, and partly that, as far as I know, it has remained the only ethical proposition that can be derived directly from the specifically philosophical experience… Its underlying principle is the axiom of non-contradiction… and this axiom owes its validity to the conditions of thought that Socrates was the first to discover.
– Hannah Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics’, The Portable Hannah Arendt, p 558
(Full disclosure – this final part of the quote is referring to Kant’s categorical imperative, strictly speaking. But the reliance of the Socratic formula on the principal of non-contradiction is also apparent).
On the surface, this seems nothing more than a rehash of the familiar golden rule, albeit in slightly unequal terms – not ‘do unto others as you would have done unto yourself’, but ‘do better’. However, it actually summarises a more interesting argument regarding the reasoning behind the rule, namely that in order to harm others (in cold blood), we would first need to perform a profound act of self-harm: we would need to strip ourselves of the capacity to think. It is this necessary act of self-directed violence that should give even the purely self-interested reason to pause before bringing about deliberate harm.
To understand this view, we must first understand the meaning of the world ‘thought’ in this context. The method of debate and argument expounded by Socrates was essentially an oppositional structure, in which one person proposed arguments and lines of reasoning, and another pointed out flaws in understanding and holes in logic. In Arendt’s view, the process we call thought is an internalised version of this debate, in which we split ourselves into two parts. The first part proposes ideas and developments upon them, and the internal interlocutor points out their failings. The existence of this critical voice helps us to avoid making errors of action or public speech by pointing out likely issues before thoughts are made manifest.
This basic process is called many different things depending on the context: when employing strategic thought, the chess player makes themselves two-in-one to anticipate the moves of their opponent, while the general consults their inner opponent to determine the likely response to a particular plan of action. In contemporary psychology, this two-in-one process of thought can be viewed as an important component of critical thinking and meta-cognition, both associated with sapience and higher intelligence. In the realm of social interactions, it is an important component of empathy, as it helps us to orient more accurately into the mental space of another person. In the moral sphere, it may be considered the voice that we call the conscience.
In the view of Arendt, and presumably in her opinion the view of Socrates, the second of these voices, the one that points out flaws in reasoning and contradictory opinions, naturally objects to immoral acts. To harm someone is a contradiction – assuming we recognize that we are doing harm – because it requires us to place ourselves above them in terms of rights while simultaneously recognising the essential equality of the experience of pain. This contradiction is felt most keenly with strangers, where the assumption of caused pain is likely the only inference we can draw about them. The two-in-one therefore provides moral constraint even in the absence of former or future social interactions with the other person.
How, then, can we break this constraint, and deliberately bring about harm? If we go ahead and ignore the contradiction (or, at the least, temporarily drown out the objections of the second voice), we risk becoming like Raskolnikov, tormented by the two-in-one. Any attempt to use the critical faculty in the future will lead the second voice back, eventually, to that deepest contradiction of the actor’s history. How can you reject this contradiction, it will ask the perpetrator, when you have accepted that awful contradiction of the past? To do so would be inconsistent, itself a contradiction of principles.
Responses to this conundrum fall, broadly speaking, into one of three categories: firstly, responsibility and punishment can be accepted for their wrongdoing. This doesn’t solve the original contradiction, but allows a barrier to be placed between the past and present selves, the former of which accepted the contradiction and the second of which rejects it. Secondly, a general policy of accepting all contradictions can be adopted. As this is incompatible with life in a generally self-consistent world, this is effectively a submission to madness. The third and final option is to kill off the critical faculty itself, and so eliminate its tiresome nagging.
It is this third option, the murder of the very process that makes us rational beings, that lies at the heart of the mechanism of self-harm implied by both Arendt and Socrates. Socrates said that to harm another led to the harming of your own soul, Arendt, in less spiritual terms, described it as causing the destruction of the integrity of thought. The resulting thoughtless being, thoughtless in a very direct sense of the word – ‘without thought’ – can be an instrument of great harm. Arendt’s archetype is Eichmann, who could only communicate through recited stock phrases of propaganda, and who was apparently incapable of recognizing the inherent contradictions in the various positions he professed to take. A tool then, one that could not interrogate the commands he was given. A willing tool, but a tool nonetheless.
At this point, it should be noted that there is no inherent requirement for a person to mature into thoughtfulness and then destroy that capacity by their own hand; some may simply fail to develop the two-in-one in the first place. But regardless of how thoughtlessness is achieved, it implies a level of dullness that gives hope that ingenious goodness will triumph over uncritical evil. Because it is only through sticking to that basic principal of symmetry in interactions with others that we can eventually harness our thought for other ends – planning, decision making, the full advantages of being the rational animal. This may explain why criminality, at least in its petty form, has the faint patina of incompetent grottiness – not only has a burglar probably made a series of poor life choices that lead them to an act which puts them at risk of punishment, they are likely to leave clues that a more critical analysis of their plans could have avoided.
None of this, of course, can explain the truly monumental evils of some societies, which are typically brought about at the political level and involve careful planning and coordination. It is hard to see how Eichmann’s political masters could have been so effective in achieving their monstrous goals had they been unable to properly think, nor can we understand the combination of complex economic development and unfeeling infliction of human misery that typified the European exploitation of Africa with this framework. These grander evils, possible only through the use of rationality, seem to circumvent the murder of the two-in-one through a couple of mechanisms.
Firstly, most of the examples of political evil known to history involved an extensive degree of othering, with the victims of the regime being placed in a category outside of the community of human beings. This substantially weakens, if not outright breaks, the principal of symmetry that underpins the two-in-one trap. In fact, some of the empathetic processes that create the trap may be subverted to such an extent that they are made to work against the victim. There are accounts of persons under the sway of totalitarian regimes who are persuaded that the murder of the their victims is in fact an act of euthanasia, an ending of the suffering of a naturally miserable and downtrodden people.
The second means by which an entire society can be numbed to the evil it commits is through the distribution of blame. Murder in a totalitarian regime is not the act of a single individual. To achieve murder at the scale of peoples, such a craftsman-like, bespoke approach would be far too inefficient. Instead, the techniques of the industrial revolution, of mass production and the division of labour, must be employed. And so, just as neither the engineer or the assembly line worker can take full credit for the product of a factory, so the operators of the factories of death do not accept full blame for any particular killings. The statesman can claim to have never even visited the camps, the camp governors can claim never to have pulled the trigger, the guards can claim just to have been following orders.
It is perhaps for these reasons that the morality of groups can sometimes to seem wholly at odds with the morality of their constituents. Any particular group of humans does not have an overarching, unified mind that can become two-in-one, and there is no guarantee that its decision making is constrained by the rational process in the same way as any individual’s would be. Discussion and criticism between members of the group can replicate the self-correction mechanisms of individual thought, but very often these processes are suppressed to increase the speed of collective choice. Somewhat paradoxically, the group can then become more unified in action than any individual could be in thought, and it is at this point that the group becomes both its most powerful and its most dangerous, unconstrained by the rationality of a divided whole because it is instead a unified collection of fragments. Each fragment falls back on the belief that another has done the hard work of critical thought for the collective, with the consequence that none does so.
The last nine months of COVID have been an unmatched time of isolation for many of us. We have been forced by circumstances into monkish lives, with only our thoughts for company for long stretches of time. While this has undoubtedly been incredibly painful for many, I wonder if it has also led to a worldwide training and development of that critical twin within each of us, on whom we depend for so much. Perhaps, then, we should be optimistic for the 2020s, having unintentionally focussed those powers that are the source of so much good.
A final thought: Many of the technologies that we have relied on to get us through these months, the Skinner boxes of social media and the like, may well be warping the two-in-one in unprecedented ways. The consequences of this process remain to be seen – that, though, may be a story for another time.