The Academia website periodically alerts me to various academic materials relating to the political theorist, Hannah Arendt, who is pictured above. Not so long ago, I got a notice informing me about a paper authored by Roger Berkowitz, who is the Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.
Berkowitz' paper is titled, "Hannah Arendt: Power, Action and the Foundation of Freedom." Here is how Berkowitz begins his paper, with a quotation from Arendt:
In distinction to strength, which is the gift and the possession of every man in his isolation against all other men, power comes into being only if and when men join themselves together for the purpose of action, and it will disappear when, for whatever reason, they disperse and desert one another. Hence, binding and promising, combining and covenanting are the means by which power is kept in existence; where and when men succeed in keeping intact the power which sprang up between them during the course of any particular act or deed, they are already in the process of foundation, of constituting a stable worldly structure to house, as it were, their combined power of action. There is an element of the world-building capacity of man in the human faculty of making and keeping promises. Just as promises and agreements deal with the future and provide stability in the ocean of future uncertainty where the unpredictable may break in from all sides, so the constituting, founding, and world-building capacities of man concern always not so much ourselves and our own time on earth as our ‘successors’, and ‘posterities’. The grammar of action: that action is the only human faculty that demands a plurality of men; and the syntax of power: that power is the only human attribute which applies solely to the worldly in-between space by which men are mutually related, combine in the act of foundation by virtue of the making and keeping of promises, which, in the realm of politics, may well be the highest human faculty (emphasis added).
My blog postings have been claiming, for some time, that the "political world," the world that we most immediately inhabit, is going to be running into some very significant challenges. In fact, and this is no surprise to any reader who is paying attention, such challenges are already here. Global Warming, or "Climate Change," as many call it, the threat of nuclear war, wealth inequality and the housing crisis, and the possibility that our democratic system of self-government might collapse into some sort of "dictatorship," are all good examples of the kind of challenges that we all can admit are real, and pressing, but that are really not "front and center" for most of us. There are certainly a lot more challenges, too!
The crises we are facing, in other words, are serious, and we should be preparing ourselves to confront them. By "confront," of course, I mean to take "action" in response to what is happening. The other option is to be a "spectator," and simply watch what is happening, instead of trying to do something about it ourselves.
One piece of advice that I have been giving is to "Find Some Friends."
The Arendt quote, above, reminded me why "finding some friends" is so important. "Power" is our ability to "do something," to "take action," as Arendt puts it, and she further tell us that if we want to be able to take action, when challenges arise, we need to be able to "join [ourselves] together." We need, in other words, to "organize." The other alternative to "organizing," as already noted, is just to be spectators, and to watch what is happening to us.
Most of us (me, too; I am not really that different from anyone else) are spending most of our time just "observing" what is happening. Sometimes we like what we see. Sometimes we don't. But there is another way to live our lives. That other way, however, will require a significant reallocation of our time. We need to become "actors," not just "observers," and in order to be able, successfully, to reallocate our time to the "action" side of life we need to "join ourselves together for the purpose of action." That's what we need to do, in other words, to become more "powerful."
There are lots of different ways we can do it (and I do think that "finding some friends" is a key), but however we wish to approach the task, though, let's all understand that it's time for us - for all of us - to "Power Up."
Hannah Arendt: Power, Action and the
Foundation of Freedom
ORGANIZE!
ReplyDelete