Crimes of the modern era: sorting them out
And other things I've seen this week
The big beautiful death toll
One million deaths from USAID cuts
From Tim Harford, the Undercover Economist. He isn’t up to Hitler, Stalin and Mao’s record of deaths, but he’s getting into the league of Pol Pot whose reign produced over 1.5 million dead.
One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic. If Stalin ever said such a thing, he wasn't the first — but the ghoulish claim has stuck to him because he is one of very few politicians with more than a million deaths on his conscience.
The list of government actions that deliberately or negligently led to the deaths of more than a million people is short and ugly. There are civil wars, famines and a cluster of atrocities surrounding the second world war, but not many governments have been so evil or so reckless as to pass that horrendous target.
Incredibly, there is now a case for adding the Trump administration to the list. Elon Musk boasted in early February that, "We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper." The White House budget request for next year pencils in a cut of two-thirds to global health and humanitarian funding... that cut would plausibly cause a million deaths in the next 12 months alone...
Despite the caveats, a million deaths is a staggering number. It comes from Charles Kenny and Justin Sandefur, two respected researchers at the think-tank the Center for Global Development. They reckon that if the cuts to humanitarian assistance happen — from $8.8bn to $2.5bn — then 675,000 people are likely to die from HIV within a year, and 285,000 from malaria or tuberculosis...
Pepfar (the President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, established by George W Bush) supplies antiretroviral drugs that keep 20 million people alive. The effectiveness of these drugs is well understood. They suppress the virus and prevent transmission, including from mother to baby...
The US secretary of state Marco Rubio has maintained that life-saving aid is continuing, but clinics have closed, and people are finding it impossible to get the medication they need to keep them alive...
Few people in the foreign aid industry would argue every cent saves lives... In some cases it might be desirable for national governments to find their own funding... Yet this is no way to reform anything. The cuts are so abrupt that life-saving services are falling apart before our eyes.
A few former USAID staffers have been working to salvage something from the wreckage... "We originally called ourselves the Lifeboat Project," says Robert Rosenbaum of PRO. "And I think that metaphor holds better than any other."
The darkness is justified. When a huge ship sinks, lifeboats can save lives, but you need enough lifeboats, and you need enough time. We have neither...
A million deaths may be a statistic, but it is also a million tragedies. Most of these tragedies could still be prevented.
War as entertainment (from 2008)
Deep fakes
Turns out it’s harder to stop deep fakers who pay your bills
Move fast and don’t fix things - if they’re making you money that is. A creepy business.
And just before the main article, don’t forget Facebook’s move fast and don’t fix things approach to atrocities against the Rohingya. As Amnesty found:
Facebook … was made aware of its role in contributing to the atrocities against the Rohingya ethnic group years before 2017, and it both failed to heed such warnings at the time and took “wholly inadequate” measures to address issues after the fact.
And here’s Martin Wolf.
I have an alter ego or, as it is now known on the internet, an avatar. My avatar looks like me and sounds at least a bit like me. He pops up constantly on Facebook and Instagram. Colleagues who understand social media far better than I do have tried to kill this avatar. But so far at least they have failed.
Why are we so determined to terminate this plausible-seeming version of myself? Because he is a fraud — a "deepfake". Worse, he is also literally a fraud: he tries to get people to join an investment group that I am allegedly leading. Somebody has designed him to cheat people, by exploiting new technology, my name and reputation and that of the FT. He must die. But can we get him killed?
I was first introduced to my avatar on March 11 2025. A former colleague brought his existence to my attention and I brought him at once to that of experts at the FT...
My expert colleague contacted Meta and after a little "to-ing and fro-ing", managed to get the offending adverts taken down. Alas, that was far from the end of the affair. In subsequent weeks a number of other people, some whom I knew personally and others who knew who I am, brought further posts to my attention. On each occasion, after being notified, Meta told us that it had been taken down. Furthermore, I have also recently been enrolled in a new Meta system that uses facial recognition technology to identify and remove such scams.
In all, we felt that we were getting on top of this evil. Yes, it had been a bit like "whack-a-mole", but the number of molehills we were seeing seemed to be low and falling. This has since turned out to be wrong. After examining the relevant data, another expert colleague recently told me there were at least three different deepfake videos and multiple Photoshopped images running over 1,700 advertisements with slight variations across Facebook, and Instagram. The data, from Meta's Ad Library, shows the ads reached over 970,000 users in the EU alone — where regulations require tech platforms to report such figures...
These ads were purchased by ten fake accounts, with new ones appearing after some were banned. This is like fighting the Hydra!
That is not all. There is a painful difference, I find, between knowing that social media platforms are being used to defraud people and being made an unwitting part of such a scam myself. This has been quite a shock. So how, I wonder, is it possible that a company like Meta with its huge resources, including artificial intelligence tools, cannot identify and take down such frauds automatically, particularly when informed of their existence?...
A spokesperson for Meta itself said: "It's against our policies to impersonate public figures and we have removed and disabled the ads, accounts, and pages that were shared with us."
Meta said in self-exculpation that "scammers are relentless and continuously evolve their tactics to try to evade detection, which is why we're constantly developing new ways to make it harder for scammers to deceive others — including using facial recognition technology." Yet I find it hard to believe that Meta, with its vast resources, could not do better. It should simply not be disseminating such frauds.
In the meantime, beware. I never offer investment advice. If you see such an advertisement, it is a scam...
Above all, this sort of fraud has to stop. If Meta cannot do it, who will?
Eric Hoel on Walmart
Inveterate Substacker Eric Hoel explains his latest project thus:
When you become a new parent, you must re-explain the world, and therefore see it afresh yourself.
A child starts with only ancestral memories of archetypes: mother, air, warmth, danger. But none of the specifics. For them, life is like beginning to read some grand fantasy trilogy, one filled with lore and histories and intricate maps.
Yet the lore of our world is far grander, because everything here is real. Stars are real. Money is real. Brazil is real. And it is a parent’s job to tell the lore of this world, and help the child fill up their codex of reality one entry at a time.
Below are a few of the thousands of entries they must make.
Other entries can be found in Part 1. This is Part 2 of a serialized book I’m publishing here on Substack. It can be read in any order. Further parts will crop up semi-regularly.
Here’s a sample entry. His other two on this post are cicadas and stubbornness.
Walmart
Walmart was, growing up, where I didn’t want to be. Whatever life had in store for me, I wanted it to be the opposite of Walmart. Let’s not dissemble: Walmart is, canonically, “lower class.” And so I saw, in Walmart, one possible future for myself. I wanted desperately to not be lower class, to not have to attend boring public school, to get out of my small town. My nightmare was ending up working at a place like Walmart (my father ended up at a similar big-box store). It seemed to me, at least back then, that all of human misery was compressed in that store; not just in the crassness of its capitalistic machinations, but in the very people who shop there. Inevitably, among the aisles some figure would be hunched over in horrific ailment, and I, playing the role of a young Siddhartha seeing the sick and dying for the first time, would recoil and flee to the parking lot in a wave of overwhelming pity. But it was a self-righteous pity, in the end. A pity almost cruel. I would leave Walmart wondering: Why is everyone living their lives half-awake? Why am I the only one who wants something more? Who sees suffering clearly?
Teenagers are funny.
Now, as a new parent, Walmart is a cathedral. It has high ceilings, lots to look at, is always open, and is cheap. Lightsabers (or “laser swords,” for copyright purposes) are stuffed in boxes for the taking. Pick out a blue one, a green one, a red one. We’ll turn off the lights at home and battle in the dark. And the overall shopping experience of Walmart is undeniably kid-friendly. You can run down the aisles. You can sway in the cart. Stakes are low at Walmart. Everyone says hi to you and your sister. They smile at you. They interact. While sometimes patrons and even employees may appear, well, somewhat strange, even bearing the cross of visible ailments, they are scary and friendly. If I visit Walmart now, I leave wondering why this is. Because in comparison, I’ve noticed that at stores more canonically “upper class,” you kids turn invisible. No one laughs at your antics. No one shouts hello. No one talks to you, or asks you questions. At Whole Foods, people don’t notice you. At Stop & Shop, they do. Your visibility, it appears, is inversely proportional to the price tags on the clothes worn around you. Which, by the logical force of modus ponens, means you are most visible at, your very existence most registered at, of all places, Walmart.
Eric Ravilious
Is life a simulation?
Hint: no. And why this kind of talk is built on a category error
From Indy Johar
The dominant metaphysical conceit of our time is not the belief that we inhabit a simulation. It is the conviction that we could construct one.
That with sufficient data, compute, and synthetic cognition, we might simulate a universe indistinguishable from our own. That we might birth a General Artificial Intelligence capable not just of matching, but of exceeding the intelligence embedded in this reality.
This is not science fiction — it is the guiding mythos of much of our contemporary technological ambition.
But this ambition is founded on a profound category error.
The Delusion of Extracted Intelligence
At the core of the simulation hypothesis — and the broader AGI dream — is the implicit belief that intelligence is extractable.
That cognition is a substrate-independent phenomenon. That mind can be decontextualized from matter. Encoded, digitized, and run on silicon.
This is the Cartesian inheritance, repackaged in machine form:
That thought exists apart from the world, and that the world can be reconstructed from its informational residues.
But what if this is backwards?
What if intelligence is not a modular function that can be abstracted from context?
What if it is relational, emergent, situated — not within a substrate, but within a process?
The Universe Is Not a Dataset
To presume the possibility of simulation is to treat the universe as a knowable object — a bounded system that can be compressed into a model and reconstructed through formalism.
But the universe is not a dataset.
It is not a finite body of information waiting to be mined, parsed, and rendered.
It is a recursive, entangled, multi-agent unfurling — a process of ontogeny, not ontology.
And if the universe is itself a kind of computation, it is not one we can simulate — because we are already inside it.
To simulate it from within is tautological.
To simulate it from outside is impossible.
This is not a technical limitation.
It is an ontological boundary condition.
No system can fully contain a simulation of itself — not because of processing constraints, but because simulation presupposes separability, and the universe does not grant us that luxury.
Ambition as self-sabotage
I learned this lesson a long time ago when I realised that dividing the work for an essay into ‘reading and research’ and ‘writing’ was dumb, that they need to guide each other. But still find it hard to live by.
There is a moment, just before creation begins, when the work exists in its most perfect form in your imagination. It lives in a crystalline space between intention and execution, where every word is precisely chosen, every brushstroke deliberate, every note inevitable, but only in your mind. In this prelapsarian state, the work is flawless because it is nothing: a ghost of pure potential that haunts the creator with its impossible beauty.
This is the moment we learn to love too much.
We become curators of imaginary museums, we craft elaborate shrines to our unrealized projects... But the moment you begin to make something real, you kill the perfect version that lives in your mind.
Creation is not birth; it is murder. The murder of the impossible in service of the possible.
the curse of vision
We are perhaps the only species that suffers from our own imagination. A bird building a nest does not first conceive of the perfect nest and then suffer from the inadequacy of twigs and mud. A spider spinning a web does not pause, paralyzed by visions of geometric perfection beyond her current capabilities. But humans? We possess the strange gift of being haunted by visions of what could be, tormented by the gap between our aspirations and our abilities.
This torment has a name in cognitive science: the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers...
my favorite anecdote… "the best is the enemy of the good"
In a photography classroom at the University of Florida, Jerry Uelsmann unknowingly designed the perfect experiment for understanding excellence. He divided his students into two groups.
The quantity group would be graded on volume: one hundred photos for an A, ninety photos for a B, eighty photos for a C, and so on.
The quality group only need to present one perfect photo.
At semester's end, all the best photos came from the quantity group...
The quantity group learned something that cannot be taught: that excellence emerges from intimacy with imperfection, that mastery is built through befriending failure, that the path to creating one perfect thing runs directly through creating many imperfect things.
your brain, it turns out, is an exquisite liar
When you imagine achieving something, the same neural reward circuits fire as when you actually achieve it. This creates what neuroscientists call "goal substitution"—your brain begins to treat planning as accomplishing. The planning feels so satisfying because, neurologically, it is satisfying. You're getting a real high from an imaginary achievement...
The aspiring novelist who spends months crafting the perfect outline gets the same neurological reward as the novelist who spends months actually writing. The brain can't tell the difference between productive preparation and elaborate procrastination.
the quitting point
Here's what happens to those brave enough to actually begin: you discover that starting is only the first challenge. The real test comes later, at "the quitting point" —that inevitable moment when the initial excitement fades and the work reveals its true nature...
This is the moment that separates the quantity group from the quality group: not at the beginning, but in the middle, when the work stops being fun and starts being work.
The quitting point is the moment you discover whether you want to be someone who had a great idea or someone who made something real.
lower the stakes!
Counterintuitively, the path to creating your best work often begins with permission to create your worst.
When you lower the stakes, you enter into a conversation with reality. Reality has opinions about your work that are often more interesting than your own... Reality is the collaborator you didn't know you needed.
Your masterpiece won't emerge from your mind fully formed like Athena from Zeus's head. It will emerge from your willingness to start badly and improve steadily. It will emerge from your commitment to showing up consistently rather than brilliantly. It will emerge from your ability to see failure as information rather than indictment...
We are still the only species cursed with visions of what could be. But perhaps that's humanity's most beautiful accident. To be haunted by possibilities we cannot yet reach, to be driven by dreams that exceed our current grasp. The curse and the gift are the same thing: we see further than we can walk, dream bigger than we can build, imagine more than we can create.
And so we make imperfect things in service of perfect visions. We close the gap between imagination and reality one flawed attempt at a time.
Tucker and Jordan
Academia: another scandal
Academia is beset by problems. They are problems that could be worked on. They’re talked about, but not seriously worked on because, as I suggested in this piece, they relate to the public goods of academia - p-hacking, publication bias, the gaming of metrics and the inherent risk aversion engendered by peer review. And public goods require collective action. But to a really remarkable extent, universities are so busy competing that they don’t attend to these problems seriously. It doesn’t surprise me that most universities do this. But it does surprise me that there’s not a vibrant minority trying to do better. Some might be minor universities in lovely places to live. They might attract some really good academics. And mightn’t one of those approximately 20 American universities with over $5 billion in endowments use them to buck the system? But I can’t say I’m holding by breath. Anyway, here’s another obvious problem that has been around for decades.
When you write about higher education, there's always a rock to turn over and there's always a scandal under the rock. Here's one: standard textbooks (including digital editions) for introductory science courses are anywhere from 8-20 years out of date. Here's another: this fact is widely known and accepted by science educators.
In the humanities, outdated textbooks provoke outrage, op-eds, tumultuous school board meetings, strong positions, legislation. So I wondered why nobody protests old science books at the high school or college level. Meanwhile, the U.S. is falling behind globally in science innovation. Just 40% of U.S. students who intend to major in STEM actually complete the degree, a startling attrition rate that begins in first-year science classes...
The reason you will not find a definitive link between outdated textbooks and poor STEM outcomes is that the public conversation is focused almost entirely on cost, not content. Major studies compare high-cost commercial textbooks to free Open Educational Resources (OER), without noticing that both have a "strikingly similar design," and contain identical content...
The textbook industry vs. science news
The science textbook industry is a broken oligopoly, or perhaps cartel. Its (profitable, messy, inefficient) business model relies on high prices and superficial revisions designed to kill the used book market. Free open textbooks are all versions of their expensive commercial counterparts...
Meanwhile even when cost is solved, introductory courses are failing to excite students and attrition rates in STEM remain high. The pedagogical focus shifts to "active learning" or "belonging" rather than to the excitement of new scientific discoveries...
In short, science textbook stagnation is everyone's fault and nobody's.
AI is poised to jump-start science education by bypassing the entire chain of intermediaries. It can analyze the latest scientific papers directly, delivering the excitement of discovery to students without the filter of textbook publishers...
What is missing from college introductory science courses?
Physics course materials often lag the furthest behind, following a century-old progression from mechanics through electromagnetism. Textbooks still teach semiclassical models, like the Bohr model, that faculty who have the time spend "unteaching" to their students...
Standard chemistry materials, even in top universities, still follow the general-organic-physical pathway. While advocates have succeeded in integrating "green chemistry" into introductory courses, transformative fields like nanotechnology are almost entirely absent.
Biology shows a similar decades-long lag in integrating major discoveries. Recombinant DNA techniques developed in the 1970s didn't appear in undergraduate textbooks until the 1990s...
Outdated science as business model
The acceptance of outdated science is rooted in the 20th-century scaling of higher education. After WWII, the GI Bill and a push for "general education" created a massive market for standardized textbooks...
This legacy of tolerance for the outdated persists, which we should all find very odd. Today, a science textbook can be seven years old and still be acceptable for transfer credit in the University of California system...
AI will make this scandal impossible to ignore
Universities can no longer defend a business model where students pay tuition for a human to deliver information that an AI can personalize for each learner instantaneously. Once AI can deliver the entire general education curriculum, the university's value proposition must shift from introducing students to knowledge to guiding students at the frontier of knowledge...
Teaching at the frontier is expensive. It is the opposite of the scalable, one-size-fits-all model that defines general education. Faculty are already too burdened by state-mandated learning outcomes and assessments that measure absorption of old knowledge...
An undergraduate education should be organized around three questions: What do we know? How do we know it? And what remains unknown? This pedagogy cannot be done at scale...
If U.S. universities are to remain competitive, students must work at the frontier. It is the only part of education that cannot be automated, and the only thing worth the price of tuition.
Climate change disinformation from the left: shock!
Joseph Heath’s complains about left wing disinformation on climate change are worth reading. But as I read them, I couldn’t help thinking about something more fundamental. Blaming the 100 ‘major emitting’ firms for 70% of emissions isn’t just misleading when it’s used to suggest that those firms are privately owned. It completely papers over the real problem which is that people’s enthusiasm for reducing emissions has a very nasty tendency to slide precipitately when they get asked to pay the costs of doing so.
As costs are imposed on private emitters, it’s true they’ll try even harder to improve their carbon efficiency. However most of the action will be in passing increased costs onto their customers or reducing production - which will also impose costs further downstream. As that happens, the left wing messaging of ‘corporations bad, people good’ breaks down. The people are not particularly good, but they like the game in which they are. (Just as they like playing the ‘politicians bad, people good’ game of democracy even though those politicians who didn’t tend to spin to their electorates got weeded out - got voted out of the game by us voters - generations ago.
Anyway, over to Joseph and his technicolour complaints.
I have a professional interest in the philosophical issues raised by the problem of global climate change. I wrote a book on the subject, I give lectures, attend conferences, speak on panels, etc. Yet I often find these events quite frustrating, for reasons that some may find surprising. On many of these occasions, instead of being able to focus on the genuinely difficult philosophical questions raised by climate change (involving primarily the way that we think about our obligations to future generations) I find myself dedicating a large fraction of my time to correcting misinformation. To be clear, these are mistaken beliefs held, not by members of the general public, but often by other university professors.
Everyone knows that misinformation is a serious problem when it comes to debate over the climate change issue. The UN just released a major report on the subject. The report, unfortunately, follows the general trend of focusing exclusively on right-wing disinformation, while ignoring completely the possibility of left-wing disinformation. More specifically, it focuses on climate denialism and skepticism (i.e. views that downplay the severity of the problem) while ignoring the opposite tendency toward catastrophism (i.e. views that radically overstate the seriousness of the problem)...
There is a temptation to give the latter a free pass, on the grounds that we are not currently doing enough to mitigate climate change, and so erring on the side of overstatement, when it comes to presenting the anticipated consequences, seems harmless. Where this attitude becomes a serious problem, however, is when people start to call for regulation, or criminalization, of climate misinformation...
To get a sense of what I mean when I say "left-wing climate misinformation," consider the role that The Guardian has played in propagating the (false) claim the over 70% of emissions are produced by only a small number of corporations. This claim has its origins in the Carbon Majors Database, which tracks the emissions produced by "the world's largest oil, gas, coal and cement producers." The word producers is key here, because the report includes both public sector and private sector emitters. Yet The Guardian reported these figures under the following headline: "Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says." If one reads the article carefully, one will discover that investor-owned corporations are responsible for less than half of these emissions, and that of the top 10 emitters, only two of them are private corporations...
I call this sort of thing "highbrow" misinformation not just because of the social class and self-regard of those who believe it, but also because of the relatively sophisticated way that it is propagated. Often one will find the accurate claim buried deep in the text, but framed in a way that leads most readers to misinterpret it...
[This leads to ineffective policy recommendations, like activists calling for nationalization of fossil fuel companies without realizing state-owned enterprises are already the largest emitters.]
Anyhow, all of this is just a warmup for the issue that I want to discuss, which involves what I think must be the most common piece of highbrow climate misinformation. A very large number of people believe that climate change, under the high-probability "loss and damage" scenarios, within the next few decades, stands poised to lower the standard of living of future generations below what it is today.
Of course this may happen, but it is absolutely not what any of the studies say, or what the IPCC loss and damage reports say. The misrepresentation stems from the way that these studies present their results and how those presentations subsequently get reported.
Consider, for example, the following opinion piece, which I came across in the Globe and Mail last year: "Climate change will knock one-third off world economy, study shows."... Saying that the economy will "contract" clearly implies that we are talking about a net decrease in GDP, like during a recession. Similarly, the idea that one might "knock one-third off" of the world economy suggests that people in the future will be poorer than they are today. But this is not what the study claims.
In order to figure this out, however, one must read the study quite carefully... What the authors are saying is that, rather than just the expected increase of 100% between now and 2050, the world economy could be increasing by 119% if there were no climate change. In this respect, climate change will "decrease" output by 19%.
Of course, many people will choose not to believe these projections about GDP growth... The observation that I am making here is the much narrower one – that the results of this study are being misreported and misunderstood, which is causing the average educated person to have false beliefs about the assumptions that structure environmental policy debates...
All of the confusion and misinformation on this issue interferes with my work, because one of the major normative challenges posed by climate change involves thinking about the tradeoffs between the short-term benefits of economic growth and the long-term harms of climate change. Furthermore, because future generations are still expected to be better off in the aggregate, by the end of the century, under the most probable scenarios, simple deontological approaches (like plain-vanilla Rawlsianism) are inadequate to address the issue...
As far as the misinformation is concerned, the important lesson to be drawn is that our epistemic environment has been severely degraded over the past decade, with the result that many traditionally trustworthy media sources have become a great deal less so. People who believe that only the right-wing epistemic ecosystem is impaired are deluding themselves. The populist right may be particularly bad, but the rot is everywhere.
Good piece
Heaviosity Hannah
This week’s heaviosity half-hour is perhaps rather more than a half hour - consisting of three related pieces.
What is Arend’s Amour Mundi?
This Samantha Rose Hill on Hannah Arendt’s hostility to sentimentalism, though I’ve edited out Hill’s leaning into her own ideological sentiments.
Readers looking to Arendt’s Amor Mundi [love of the world] for a form of political love might at first be disappointed. Amor Mundi—love of the world—is not love in any sense we’re commonly used to. There is, however, a challenge to think about what it means to be committed to the world, to care for the world despite its horrors. There is a provocation to embrace one another in our difference and to meet one another as fellow human beings. There is also a radical critique to be found of more common forms of love, which are destructive of difference and plurality.
Arendt’s conception of Amor Mundi has more to do with understanding and critical thinking than with sentiment or affect. For her, love cannot be political. It is dangerous and destructive to the realm of political affairs. Throughout her work, Arendt discusses numerous forms of love: eros, philia, agape, cupiditus, caritas, fraternitas. But love and politics is dangerous terrain.
In her treatise on The Human Condition, which she intended to title Amor Mundi, she writes:
“Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.”
Love of the world is also not the same as equality or care, or extending oneself to another from a place of need. In a letter to Auden Arendt chastises his characterization of charity and forgiveness as a form of love, writing that:
“You talk about charity as though it were love, and it is true that love will forgive everything because of its utter commitment to the beloved person. But even love violates the integrity of the wrongdoer if it forgives without having been asked to.”
Love in this sense is not the same as forgiveness, because love is not capable of critical thinking and judgment—it 'violates the integrity of the wrongdoer,' flattening all wrongs to a plane where each can be forgiven. In another letter to James Baldwin Arendt also criticizes his understanding of political love:
What frightened me in your essay was the gospel of love which you begin to preach at the end. In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.
The love that belongs to the oppressed makes the injustices they suffer bearable. And when this love, with its empathy and commitments to justice and equality, enters the public realm it becomes destructive of plurality, which is the foundation of democracy. For Arendt there is a distinction between solidarity, which is the acceptance of difference and welcoming of plurality, and empathy and equality, which seek to flatten and condense. Baldwin’s idea of love can only ever threaten the political by leading us away from democracy.
Love of the world is about understanding and reconciling one’s self with the world as it is. Or, to use Arendt’s own language, it is the idea that we must “face and come to terms with what really happened”, and what is happening today. How can we live in a world where something like the Holocaust is possible? In her letter to Karl Jaspers written on August 6, 1955, Arendt says:
“Yes, I would like to bring the wide world to you this time. I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world that I shall be able to do that now. Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theory ‘Amor Mundi.’”
This passage comes in the middle of the letter, where Arendt is describing the “melancholy task” she’s been working on—writing introductions for books by two deceased friends, Hermann Broch and Waldemar Gurian. It is only because of her love of the world that she is able to perform this one last act of friendship. Within this statement there is a recognition and reckoning with the events of the past. What does it mean to love the world in face of such great loss?
For Arendt, Amor Mundi is bound up with her axiom at the beginning of The Human Condition that we must stop and think what we are doing, along with the idea of reconciliation that is threaded throughout her thinking journal and her essays on responsibility and judgment. There is a form of self-reflective critical thinking contained within these ideas, since in order to see the world as it is we must stand on the sidelines, find perspective, and a place of solitude for thinking. In other words, there has to be a turning in before we can turn out. Loving the world requires reckoning with the world, which means we must find some critical distance from what is happening around us. When we witness injustices, sometimes there is an impulse to act, but Arendt cautions us to slow down and think what we are doing—to be thinkers not just joiners.
This form of reckoning and reconciliation might also be understood as making peace with one’s self; finding a way to have fidelity to one’s thoughts even in our darkest moments of loss, grief, and crisis. Amor Mundi can give us a metaphysical sense of certainty in a world that is always being destroyed. It is a relational form of love.
In earlier letters to Jaspers Arendt talks about the joy she finds in the American people—a young fishmonger who has read all of Jaspers’ work, a young girl from a poor family whose living room is filled with books of Plato, Hegel, and Kant. Loving the world involves reconciling ourselves with the events of the past so that we can move about the everydayness of life, to go on living, to create, to find joy, to find perspective, to build new friendships, and to remind ourselves of where the possible remains—in language, in poems, in the young fishmonger who has a fondness for philosophy. It’s a promise of continued existence, a way of not resigning from the world when the world seems too unbearable to live in.
What kind of world are we facing today? Why is public funding being allocated to walls instead of arts? Why are so many Americans unable to afford health insurance? Why do we value some lives more than others? And why are middle-aged Americans committing suicide at unprecedented rates?
More broadly, how is there genocide in the 21st century? Why are we experiencing the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War? Why do we keep insisting on the rhetoric of social equality instead of learning to appreciate and celebrate our differences? And why do we demand answers to any of these questions when the logic of question-answer is the same logic of tyrannical thinking?
Arendt’s conception of Amor Mundi is not comforting, it is challenging. It refuses the idea that we can ‘find meaning in’ or ‘make sense of’ and instead pushes us to work hard to understand and accept that there are no answers to these questions in the way we might wish.
In teaching us to love the world Arendt is teaching us to be thinking, engaged citizens. She cautions us against the impulses of sentiment or affect, and guides us toward political thinking. Loving the world offers us a way of being in the world that plants our feet firmly in reality, so that we can see what is before us.
How to Think—and How Not to Think—About Race
I’ve really enjoyed listening to this book which I recommend. This excerpt is from Chapter 5. It’s followed by the contemporary source on which much of the latter part of the extract is commenting.
Race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.
—Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt wrote to James Baldwin out of a strong political identification. [See the quote in the previous extract above.] Love is the privilege of pariah peoples as long as they are not free, she told him. She knew this herself from Berlin, from Paris, from Gurs, and from Montauban. Three years earlier, in 1959, she had published an essay called “Reflections on Little Rock.” There she criticized the campaign against the segregation of schools in the Jim Crow South. It was wrong and cruel, she argued, to put children in the front line of the struggle against racism. She did not say so explicitly, but she also assumed she knew this herself from her own childhood, and from her work with Jewish children in Paris. But Hannah Arendt did not know the children of Little Rock, Arkansas, nor did she comprehend the history of their fight. Written in a lofty and chiding tone, her essay caused a scandal because in it she had forgotten one of her own lessons: you can’t co-create rights and freedom with people who you cannot see.
To think about race alongside Hannah Arendt often also means thinking against her. On the one hand, she is an original and powerful historian of modern racism. By the time she arrived in New York in 1941, her pariah perspective was pretty much fully formed. Over the next thirty years she would find new ways of putting this perspective into writing. The Origins of Totalitarianism came first in 1951, followed by The Human Condition, her love song to the world, seven years later. She picked up the historical threads of terror and freedom in On Revolution, published in 1963, the same year that her most audacious reckoning with totalitarian thinking, Eichmann in Jerusalem, catapulted her into public consciousness. In each of these books she pitched plurality against terror and tyranny and the human condition against racist and inhuman ideologies. But her “Little Rock” essay would not be the only occasion on which she would fail to comprehend American racism and Black resistance to it. Commentators have noted that her enthusiasm for America’s democracy blinded her to its white mythologies. This is certainly true, but that blindness means that something else sometimes bubbles up when she writes about race. Hannah Arendt was a principled anti-racist thinker, but this did not mean that she always thought well about race. …
Famous as one of the first and certainly most original studies of a new political phenomenon, The Origins of Totalitarianism is also a survivor narrative told by a refugee determined to document the historical conditions of her uprooting. No wonder it was passionate and unwieldy. How do you tell the history of your own near disappearance? This huge and sprawling text was Hannah Arendt’s most ambitious affirmation yet of her own life. I sometimes think of it as an act of love disguised as scholarship.
Upon publication, she was both praised and criticized for her passion. The Times Literary Supplement condemned her “tortured and self-torturing sincerity.”[1] Others accused her of sentimentality and of lacking sufficient academic disinterestedness. She retorted that her subject called for a stylistic approach that was as quietly outraged as totalitarianism was itself outrageous. Anything else would be a denial of what had really happened.
The book’s status as a classic of Cold War thought has also obscured the extent to which it is, among other things, a study of modern racism. In fact, the bulk of the book is concerned with this history. She had started the research for the first section, “Antisemitism,” in Berlin and Paris. Religious discrimination against Jewish people had evolved into an ideology of race hatred over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (I was there to see the end of this, she might have added). In the second section, “Imperialism,” she traced how French and British imperialism had ransacked Africa and India using ideologies of racial supremacy as both a pretext and a justification. When Germany, Austria, and Russia then turned imperial racism on Europe itself, the elements that would eventually crystallize into totalitarianism moved into place. The elementary structure of totalitarianism is the hidden structure of the book, while its more apparent unity is provided by certain fundamental concepts which run like red threads through the whole, she explained.[3]
One of those red threads, perhaps the red thread, was racism and race-thinking. That thread also ran through the politics of the country in which she now wrote. Adolf Hitler had approvingly referenced the oppression of Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. Many whites in America had just as approvingly referenced him back in the 1930s and early 1940s. Just because they had now gone quiet did not necessarily mean they had changed their minds.
In its early stages, the now hidden structure of the book, along with Arendt’s fevered outrage, was much more explicit. She planned to call it The Elements of Shame: Anti-Semitism-Imperialism-Racism. I like “shame” because it captures her belief that such a profound moral line had been crossed that people could barely bring themselves to speak of it. The ashamed are usually silent, as well they might be in this case: Arendt’s elements of shame were anti-semitism, imperialism, and racism, none of which had vanished from the face of the earth with the defeat of Nazism. Another, more Dante-esque early title was The Three Pillars of Hell: Anti-Semitism-Imperialism-Racism. Right up until the proof stages the working title was The Burden of Our Time: Anti-Semitism-Imperialism-Totalitarianism (this was also the title of the first UK edition). Arendt had now grasped how anti-semitism and imperialism were the elementary structures from which totalitarianism would eventually emerge. The Burden of Our Time, taken from her poem about walking alongside the Hudson with Blücher, is a reminder of how deeply personal this book about inhuman and profoundly impersonal political structures was.
The word “totalitarianism” didn’t find its way into the main title until just before the book went to press in the autumn of 1950. It was her US publisher that suggested The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is a great title and it was a shrewd move to keep an explicit mention of racism and anti-semitism off the front cover. In 1951, many Americans would have been reluctant to think about either as one of the key elements of a political system that was supposedly the antithesis of their own democracy. Far better to get those readers into the book first.
But the muting of racism, imperialism, and anti-semitism had consequences for how the book was, and is, read. The final, and now most read, section of the book, “Totalitarianism,” is a terrifying and exhilarating account of a political system in which human spontaneity has all but been eliminated. Death and horror stalk these pages as Arendt brilliantly adumbrates how ideology ripped apart people’s experience of the world, bearing down on minds and smashing through laws and institutions with a relentless dark energy, culminating in the death camps and gulags. This was the nightmare of “total domination” that had now arrived in the world and which she feared was here to stay, although possibly not in such a dramatic and extreme form. Tired horror, she would go on to say, can be just as, if not more, morally corrupting than the vivid violence of pure terror.
Yet it was implicit in Arendt’s argument that the elements that eventually produced totalitarianism are endemic to most modern political systems. It’s not just massively outsize propaganda, unspeakable terror, constant surveillance, fear, censorship, black flags, concentration camps, and public executions you need to watch out for. Racism, political and economic greed were all there at the beginning too. They were the roots.
The first modern superfluous people, Arendt argued, were created by the desire for superfluous wealth. If you want to understand the origins of totalitarianism, look to the origins of Empire. “I would annex the planets if I could,” the English vicar’s son, mining magnate and whiteness ideologue Cecil Rhodes declared at the height of his mission to turn Africa’s resources into pure wealth and its people into the pure labor necessary to produce it. He was totally serious. Arendt opened the middle section of her book, “Imperialism,” with Rhodes’s mad quote. Much of what followed aimed to take him and everything his deranged ambition stood for down. (I think of Rhodes’s words whenever I hear the business mogul Elon Musk detail his plans for annexing the planets as a “solution” to the climate catastrophe.)[4]
Another Englishman, George Orwell, so often in lockstep with Arendt, had earlier made the point, well known throughout Asia and Africa, that human rights were not first demolished in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century but at least a hundred years earlier. What was the freedom the West was fighting for? he asked in 1939. Just whose lives were being counted in the name of white democracy? Lying under anybody’s nose were many of the elements which gathered together could create a totalitarian government on the basis of racism, Arendt wrote of British imperialism. “Administrative massacres” were proposed by Indian bureaucrats while African officials declared that “no ethical considerations such as the rights of man will be allowed to stand in the way” of white rule (OT 286).
The vivid novelty of the third section of her book, “Totalitarianism,” eventually overshadowed much of the historical material that preceded it and left the impression that the horrors of imperialism in Africa and India were simply building blocks for a greater horror—the “greater” horror being that its murderousness now extended to white people too. The reason why Europeans were so appalled by Hitler, wrote the Martinique poet and politician Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism, first published in Paris a full year before The Origins of Totalitarianism, was because he “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively” for people in Algeria, Africa, and India. …
Thirty-six years after Hannah Arendt ran through the streets of Königsberg, another smart fifteen-year-old girl, books clasped close to her heart, was trying to find her way home. She, too, was thoughtful and serious. She also sometimes seized the time walking from school to home or from home to the shops or back from church to lose herself in thought and disappear. But because she lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, the moments when Elizabeth Eckford could slip inside herself were few and precious. She was rarely allowed to forget that she was appearing for others; that she was a Black girl walking alone in the Jim Crow South.
On the morning of September 3, 1957, Elizabeth Eckford was not only fighting for her mind, she was fighting for her life. In case she was in any doubt about this, the mob of white youths surrounding her told her so; specifically, they screamed, they would like to lynch her. She knew that the State of Arkansas would not protect her because when she had walked up the steps of Central High School just a few minutes before, it was against her body that the National Guard had raised their bayonets. In the five more minutes it took her to walk back down the steps, through the grounds, and out into the street, she also discovered that if you appeal for help with your eyes, as children do, to the nearest adult woman with a kind face, if that woman is white what you might get in reply is her spittle on your cheek. Understanding all of this, she knew she must keep walking at all costs, which she did, eyes behind her sunglasses, the layers of tulle petticoat under the special dress she had stayed up late making the night before camouflaging the knees trembling beneath them.
The photographs taken of Elizabeth Eckford’s long walk from the school steps to the bus stop were reproduced across the world. Nobody could fail to see what happened when a young Black woman claimed her rights and walked alone in the South. As the Eckford family had no telephone, she did not get the message saying that the police would escort the children to school on that first day, so she had gone by herself. The cab firm she was led to by the activist Grace Lorch refused to take her home. The journalists who encircled her, tall, suited, grown white men, kept the mob from getting to her but still flashed their cameras in her face, demanding to know her name, what she thought she was doing, and how afraid she really was. One of them, Benjamin Fine, sat next to her on the bench by the bus stop, put his arm around her, and whispered firmly: “Don’t let them see you cry!” “This little girl, this tender little thing, walking with this whole mob baying at her like a pack of wolves,” he later wrote.[10] Elizabeth Eckford did not let them see her cry. She shut herself up tight and waited for the bus to take her to the school for the deaf where her mother worked.
Everyone was interested in Elizabeth Eckford, but in another sense, hardly anybody was interested in her. For all the demands made on her that day and since, few white observers at least troubled themselves to ask the one question, according to Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, that must be asked of every newcomer—and every changemaker—in a truly plural world: Who are you? What do your actions and speech—your agency—tell us, who share the world with you, about you?
Certainly not Hannah Arendt herself, aged fifty-one, now an established public intellectual in her new home, who watched the events unfolding in the South from New York with unease. I think no one will find it easy to forget the photograph reproduced by newspapers showing a Negro girl…persecuted and followed into bodily proximity by a menacing mob of youngsters, she wrote in her essay “Little Rock,” which was originally intended for the Jewish magazine Commentary. Arendt looked at Eckford and saw a little girl, an achingly vulnerable little Negro girl. Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change the world? And do we intend to have our political battles fought out in the school yards? she despaired.[11] The answer to both those questions, as the Little Rock Nine and countless other civil rights activists would go on to demonstrate in the months and years that followed, was yes.
But that was not the answer Arendt wanted. In prose Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, would describe as “Olympian” (which he did not mean as a compliment), she argued that education was the wrong battle to fight segregation with. The photographs of Eckford and the mob of white teens, she admonished, were like the worst caricature of progressive education, where the adults had divested themselves of all responsibility and left Black children to the mercy of the pack and those in the pack to their worst instincts. Elizabeth Eckford had been failed, by her community, by the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), and, she suggested, in a truly scandalous piece of insensitivity, by her parents.
In the days leading up to September 3, Elizabeth Eckford’s mother, Birdie Eckford, had talked over the risks of sending her daughter to school with the editor and journalist Daisy Bates, the president of the Arkansas NAACP. Mrs. Eckford recalled walking as a child with her own mother and witnessing a lynch mob dragging their victim through the streets of Little Rock: “We were told to get off the streets. We ran. And by cutting through the side streets and alleys, we managed to make it to the home of a friend. But we were close enough to hear the screams of the mob […] to smell the sickening odor of burning flesh. And, Mrs. Bates, they took the pews from Bethel Church.”[12] Both women knew that what they had to fear for their children went far beyond the supposed anarchy of progressive education. Hannah Arendt was not seeing this—or Elizabeth Eckford—right.
Commentary spiked her article. On September 23, President Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock and on the 24th the Nine finally walked through the doors of Central High. For the rest of the school year, they battled regular physical and psychological abuse. In the summer of 1958, Governor Faubus made one more effort to delay desegregation and succeeded in shutting down the entire school system for a year. The Nine, their advocates, and the local school board dug in for a long fight.
Surprisingly, so too did Hannah Arendt and published her article in another magazine, the left-leaning Dissent, a full year after she had first written it. The predictable outrage was immediate. Not only had she gone too far, but many also found it hard to see where she had gone at all. For most people, at least in the North, the case for desegregation was self-evidently just. If anybody was irresponsible it was a nation that permitted some of its children to believe they were less worthy of educating than others. The harm done to the self-esteem of Black children by segregation had been demonstrated in recent and much-publicized studies that had helped to galvanize liberal opinion and steel the resolve of activists. To argue against the desegregation of schools was monstrous.
Arendt based her case on two arguments. The first was a concern about equality, visibility, and social rights. Anticipating worries in the early twenty-first century about how successful progressivism provokes conservative backlashes, Arendt fretted that compulsory school desegregation risked providing white rage with a phony justification. White resistance to Black people becoming visible agents of political power was probably inevitable, she thought, although it didn’t have to be that way. The rise of Trumpism in America would not have surprised her. What scared her in 1957, as it scared many between 2016 and 2020, was the anti-political senselessness of that rage. Why risk triggering a mob mentality that threatened the wider project of political equality? she asked. And why do that while leaving fundamental human rights violations—specifically southern state laws that prohibited interracial sex and marriage—intact? If social prejudices are to be prevented from becoming tyrannical, maybe we should allow people to have their differences and discriminations, even if we find them repellent?
Arendt’s experience of Nazism made her hyper-alert to the dangers of one-size-fits-all social solutions. Her migrant experience of American mass society made her warier still. Social conformity was one of the first things she noticed about her new home. The fundamental contradiction of the country is political freedom coupled with social slavery, she wrote to Karl Jaspers in January 1946 (AKJ 30). When she’d first arrived in the United States, Arendt had been taken in as part of a refugee hosting scheme by a couple in Massachusetts. The deal was that she would help with the housekeeping in exchange for English lessons. Hannah Arendt, unsurprisingly, was the worst au pair and the most interesting of houseguests. She did next to no housework or cooking (although she would maintain throughout her life that she was an expert cook, privately her friends differed on this matter). She preferred to stay up late talking politics with her hosts, particularly with the husband; she couldn’t work out whether they were Jewish or not, but suspected there was a story. She was deeply impressed by how naturally the couple took responsibility for local and national issues; attending meetings and writing to legislators exactly as though what they did should, and indeed would, make a difference. People did not behave like this in Europe. Was this perhaps political freedom in action?
But what then puzzled her was that such a politically engaged people could also be so socially conservative. The right to have rights was there, in theory, waiting to be grasped, but the mood was low-key and socially stifling. Arendt wasn’t simply being an Old World snob. She had the nineteenth-century French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous observation about the paradox of American democracy in the back of her mind. Democracy gives people a singular and precious power, but the tyranny of the majority always threatens. In a democratic republic committed to equality, such as the United States, it does not take much for the demand for social equality, even equality in misery and oppression—social slavery—to exert its pressure. In other words, democracy is no guarantee of political or personal freedom. As the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie succinctly paraphrased this paradox in 2022: “We fear the mob, but the mob is us.”[13]
The tyranny of the mob does not just belong to fascist and totalitarian societies. It is there too in social democracies. Arendt believed deeply that once people become their own secret police, politics really starts going to the bad. Social media, she might have said, is merely the latest example of how what might look like social liberty can also breed a dangerously oppressive conformity. Few nowadays need lessons in how the internet can raise a mob. We can name and shame, follow and unfollow, but we need to remember that as we do, real political and economic power remains in the shadows. One of Arendt’s key historical lessons for today is each to their social own—their own clubs, Tinder accounts, parties, and dress codes—and all to fighting very hard for the political right to be different.
This lesson is at the heart of her distinction between the private, social, and political worlds. Her worry was always that both personal and political life might collapse into an over-socialized existence. In this now perhaps familiar dystopia, social conformists would dictate what you might say or not say, how you might say it, what you should have known better about, your looks, your friends, who you should be having sex with and probably how you should be having it. Morality—thinking—would never get the chance to be the topic of a two-in-one conversation enjoyed in solitude, because it would already be decided by courts of public opinion, which is to say it would be no morality at all. (“I would fear the mob less,” Adichie said, “if my neighbor would not stay silent were I to be pilloried.”) And political power would remain where it always had, with elites who are happy to let people believe they have social agency when what they actually have is merely the right to feel right, righteous, outraged, or at least not to feel despised and lonely. By contrast, freedom for Hannah Arendt meant being clear about the spaces between people, as well as acting together for a common good when it mattered.
But the Little Rock Nine were not demanding entry into a specialist holiday camp, one of Arendt’s more niche examples of the kinds of acceptable social segregation we practice all the time, any more than I would demand to be followed by the Conservative Women’s Organization on social media. They were demanding that the law be upheld and the right to the same educational privileges as their peers. They did not wish for everybody to be or to think the same as them; they wished to be young political citizens.
Ironically, the gap in Arendt’s argument was the very thing she wanted to protect: the political and personal rights of all Americans, including, most urgently, Black Americans. Her second argument in the article, about political power, was also strange in this respect. The American Republic contained the grain of anti-totalitarianism in its federated structure—this is what made it so attractive to her. Enduring political power, as the Founding Fathers recognized, was achieved by neither force nor violence but rested in the power that is created between people and associations. Where other political systems called on higher powers—God, the sovereign, History, Nature, Terror, the state—the republican tradition begins with the recognition that only the common action of people makes power durable. This doesn’t mean that people power is necessarily a good thing. Citizens can just as easily authorize their rulers to do awful things—including depriving them of their own freedoms and turning them into social slaves. But the virtue of a federated and constitutional system was that it put a system of checks and balances in place to hold power to account. It made politics human, both frail and strong—alive.
In the case of Brown v. Board of Education, she feared that the Supreme Court was putting the Republic at risk through overreach. This was a peculiar interpretation of the constitutional right to check individual states’ power to act in unaccountable ways, not to say of the Fourteenth Amendment. Even if you wanted to defend state autonomy, it’s difficult to see how you might possibly do this when, as she also pointed out, those same states were suppressing (and continue to suppress) Black votes, often using a lack of educational attainment as a bar to registration. Hannah Arendt knew all this but chose not to see it when she looked at the photographs of Elizabeth Eckford.
My first question was, what would I do if I were a Negro mother? she replied to her critics in Dissent, in a last word on the matter which even the most passionate Arendt fan must wish she had left unsaid:
The point of departure of my reflections was a picture in the newspapers showing a Negro girl on her way home from a newly integrated school: she was persecuted by a mob of white children, protected by a white friend of her father, and her face bore eloquent witness to the obvious fact that she was not precisely happy,…The answer: under no circumstances would I expose my child to conditions which made it appear as though it [sic] wanted to push its [sic] way into a group where it [sic] was not wanted.[14]
Hannah Arendt was not Elizabeth Eckford’s mother. She didn’t have to be to imagine what Birdie Eckford may or may not have done. Elsewhere, it is Arendt herself who urges the cultivation, and education, of an enlarged mentality so that we can visit other people’s experiences and look at the world from perspectives that are not our own. It is also Arendt who teaches us again and again that judgment is a matter of testing reality: of establishing the facts and dealing with them, no matter how difficult; of laying out the world as it really is, as a prelude to resisting it and making it different.
But she did not check the facts. Elizabeth Eckford was not on her way home from a newly integrated school: she was being hounded back home because the school was precisely not being integrated. Black parents, activists, and townspeople had been advised to stay away from Central High that day for fear that their presence would incite more violence, so nor was it the case, as Arendt assumed, that neither white nor black citizens felt it their duty to see the Negro children safely to school.[15] Elizabeth Eckford was not protected by a white friend of her father in the photograph; she was being shielded by white journalists. Benjamin Fine, the education editor for The New York Times who sat by Elizabeth Eckford on the bench, was a friend of Daisy Bates (although not of Mr. Eckford). “Daisy, they spat in my face. They called me a ‘dirty Jew,’ ” he later told her: “A dirty New York Jew! Get him!”[16] The National Guard responded by threatening to arrest Fine for incitement to riot; apparently being a Jewish man sitting next to a young Black woman on a public bench and telling her not to cry was reason enough to drive the white citizens of Little Rock to rip up the sidewalk.
Although she would not have been surprised to learn that the social prejudices of Little Rock’s racist mob included violent anti-semitism, Arendt did not discuss this connection in her essay. Nor did she scrutinize the personal identification that so obviously drew her to the defense, so she thought, of the children of Little Rock. Asking herself what she would have done were she Elizabeth Eckford’s mother was a way of both remembering and not remembering what it was like to be a Jewish girl walking alone in 1920s Königsberg, trying, and sometimes failing, to disappear into her own thoughts—of being denied the right to be invisible in her own unique quest to understand her world.
I should like to make it clear that as a Jew I take my sympathy for the cause of the Negroes as for all oppressed or under-privileged people for granted, she wrote in some preliminary remarks to her article.[17] But some forms of sympathy can be barriers to good political judgment. The one thing, perhaps the most important thing, Hannah Arendt’s life and writing teaches us is to take nothing for granted. Don’t assume, don’t accept, test your thoughts against reality, question—do the work. Think. But she didn’t. Hannah Arendt secretly saw herself in Elizabeth Eckford, that much is true, but it remains the case that she did not see Elizabeth Eckford. “Neither the ‘Negro girl’ nor her actions appear to Arendt,” the philosopher and poet Fred Moten has written: “Eckford is unseen because she is neither seen nor heard to see.” …
“There are no abstract rules,” the novelist Ralph Ellison once explained, describing how although all anti-racism struggles serve the same purpose, they are always unique in context. “And although the human goal of a higher humanity is the same for all, each group must play the cards a history deals them.” This, he added, “requires understanding.” He was talking with fellow southern writer and literary critic Robert Penn Warren, a regular co-contributor alongside Arendt in the pages of Partisan Review. Penn Warren had traveled across the United States in 1964, the same year that the Civil Rights Act was passed into American law, collecting interviews from leading figures, including Ellison, and local activists, which were collected in the anthology Who Speaks for the Negro?[19]
Ellison had little patience for whitesplaining northern intellectuals. “Why is it so often true that when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis?” he asked in the same essay in which he had described Arendt’s prose as “Olympian”: “why is it that so many of those who would tell us the meaning of Negro life never bother to learn how varied it really is?”[20] It was exactly this brash, careless lack of attention, he explained to Penn Warren in their 1964 interview, that caused Arendt “to fly way off into left field” in her “Reflections on Little Rock” essay.
Hannah Arendt had forgotten that nobody knows more about the tyranny of social life than those who have no say in it but are compelled to exist on its terms. The people who she had once described as living without umbrellas in the rain understand more precisely because they are soaking wet. Black Americans, Ellison said, lived the truth of racism, and they were drenched.
For Ellison, understanding is “required” of minorities not out of some sense of enlightened liberal generosity toward the people who make their lives miserable, but because if you do not think all the time, if you do not constantly reflect on your place within the madness, you risk becoming the nobody, the superfluous person that racism imagines and wants you to be. Hyper-understanding is a means of survival. “This puts a big strain—yes, it puts a big strain on the individual,” Ellison told Penn Warren. “Nevertheless, isn’t this what civilization is about? Isn’t this what tragedy has always taught us?”
Tragedy teaches us that the sacrifices we make are never just individual but are meaningful precisely because we exist alongside others. When we act we make ourselves real in the world, visible, courageous even (Arendt, after Aristotle, thought that courage was the most important political virtue). When people leave their homes, take the bus, walk up to the gates, when they challenge society, they lose their privacy, expose themselves, risk everything, and they do not do this simply for themselves, because they want to be heroes (although this, too, can be the case), but out of a tacit, sometimes even unconscious, understanding of their position in relation to others. Such, at least, was Hannah Arendt’s argument in The Human Condition, the book she wrote after The Origins of Totalitarianism. If her first major book told the story of how hell was made on earth, her second was a description of the kind of political humanism that might remove it—or at least diminish its scope.
Arendt’s political heroes in The Human Condition are us: actors in the world whether we like it or not. Sometimes we are unaware of what our actions might trigger; often we’re lost in events, not knowing where the story ends. Sometimes, all we know is that we are in the story and that we must act. Although we show the world who we are through our actions, it is more than likely that the “who” which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself. Action is the kind of self-expression that matters because it is understood by others (HC 181).
And this, Ellison explained in his interview with Penn Warren, was more or less exactly what Elizabeth Eckford was doing when she walked up to the gates of Central High on September 3, 1957: making a sacrifice in the tragedy that is America; being a “who” appearing for others. In this matter, neither was she as alone as she looked. “This is the thing,” Ellison explained: “my mother always said I don’t know what is going to happen to us if you young Negroes don’t do so-and-so-and-so. The command went out and it still goes out. You’re supposed to be somebody, and it’s in relation to the group. This is part of the American Negro experience, and this also means that the idea of sacrifice is always right there.”
In other words, because she could not see Elizabeth Eckford acting as a Black American living and acting among other Black Americans, Hannah Arendt did not see that Elizabeth Eckford was taking precisely the kind of walk which she herself understood as enacting the promise of politics. Back in New York, in the summer of 1965, Arendt read Ellison’s interview with Penn Warren in Who Speaks for the Negro? and for the second time in nearly as many years, stubbed out her cigarette, drew her typewriter toward her, and wrote a letter to a major Black American writer that would go unanswered:
Dear Mr. Ellison,
While reading Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro I came across the very interesting interview with you and also read your remarks on my old reflections on Little Rock. You are entirely right: it is precisely the “ideal of sacrifice” which I didn’t understand and since my starting point was a consideration of Negro kids in forcibly integrated schools, this failure to understand caused me indeed to go into an entirely wrong direction. I received, of course, many criticisms about this article from the side of my “liberal” friends or rather non-friends which, I must confess, didn’t bother me. But I knew that I was somehow wrong and thought that I hadn’t grasped the element of stark violence, of elementary bodily fear in the situation. But your remarks seem to me so entirely right, that I simply didn’t understand the complexities in the situation.
With kind regards,
Sincerely yours,
Hannah Arendt
Ralph Ellison
Here is the interview to which Arendt was reacting above.
In 1952, Invisible Man was published. It is now a classic of our time. It has been translated into seven languages. The title has become a key phrase: the Negro is the invisible man.
Ralph Ellison is not invisible and had done some thirty-eight years of living before the novel appeared, and the complex and rich experience of those years underlies the novel, or is absorbed into the novel, as it undergirds, or is absorbed into, his casual conversation.
Ralph Ellison was born in 1914, in Oklahoma City, of Southern parents. His father, who had been a soldier in China, the Philippines, and in the Spanish American War, was a man of energy and ambition, and an avid reader; he named his son for Emerson. He died when Ralph was three years old, but Ralph’s mother managed to support the children and encouraged them in their ambitions.
As a boy, Ralph sold newspapers, shined shoes, collected bottles for bootleggers, was a lab assistant to a dentist, waited on tables, hunted, hiked, played varsity football, conducted the school band, held first chair in the trumpet section of the school orchestra. “Was constantly fighting,” he says, “until I reached the age when I realized that I was strong enough and violent enough to kill someone in a fit of anger.”
With some help from his mother, whom he describes as an “idealist and a Christian,” he worked his way through Tuskegee, as a music major. But there he read Eliot, and that fact, though for some years he was to keep his ambition as a composer, was the beginning of his literary career. In 1937, during a winter in Dayton, Ohio, where he had gone for the funeral of his mother (who had died, he says, “at the hands of an ignorant and negligent Negro physician”), and where he was living in poverty and making what money he could by hunting birds to sell to General Motors officials, he took up writing seriously: “This occurring at a time when I was agitating for intervention in the Spanish Civil War, my personal loss was tied to events taking place far from these shores. Thus the complexity of events forced itself to my attention even before I had developed the primary skill for dealing with it. I was forced to see that both as observer and as writer, and as my mother’s son, I would always have to do my homework.”
Ralph Ellison has traveled widely and lived in many parts of the United States; he has known a great variety of people, including “jazzmen, veterans, ex-slaves, dope fiends, prostitutes, pimps, preachers, folk singers, farmers, teamsters, railroad men, slaughterhouse and roundhouse workers, bell boys, headwaiters, punch-drunk fighters, barbers, gamblers, bootleggers, and the tramps and down-and-outers who often knocked on our back door for handouts.” He might have added that he has known the academic world and the world of the arts, has lived for two years in Italy as a Fellow of the American Academy, and has traveled in Mexico and the Orient.
* * *
Ralph Ellison is something above medium height, of a strong, well-fleshed figure not yet showing any slackness of middle age. He is light brown. His brow slopes back, but not decidedly, and is finely vaulted, an effect accentuated by the receding hair line. The skin of his face is unlined, and the whole effect of his smoothly modeled face is one of calmness and control; his gestures have the same control, the same balance and calmness. The calmness has a history, I should imagine, a history based on self-conquest and hard lessons of sympathy learned through a burgeoning and forgiving imagination. Lurking in the calmness is, too, the impression of the possibility of a sudden nervous striking-out, not entirely mastered; and too, an impression of withdrawal—a withdrawal tempered by humor, and flashes of sympathy. It is a wry humor, sometimes self-directed. And a characteristic mannerism is the utterance of a little sound—“ee-ee-”—breathed out through the teeth, a humorous, ironical recognition of the little traps and blind alleys of the world, and of the self.
His voice is not deep, but is well-modulated, pleasing. He speaks slowly, not quite in a drawl, and when he speaks on a matter of some weight, he tends to move his head almost imperceptibly from side to side, or even his shoulders.
He does this as he sits on a couch in his study high above the Hudson River, where the afternoon sun strikes and a string of barges moves leadenly against the current. I have just quoted the passage to him from Du Bois on the split in the Negro psyche.
ELLISON: It’s a little bit more complicated than Dr. Du Bois thought it. That is, there’s no way for me not to be influenced by American values, and they’re coming at me through the newspapers, through the books, through the products I buy, through all the various media—through the language. What becomes a problem, of course, is when you turn from the implicit cultural pluralism of the country to politics, social customs. But it seems to me that the real goal of the pressure now being asserted by Negroes is to achieve on the sociopolitical level something of the same pluralism which exists on the level of culture. The idea that the Negro psyche is split is not as viable as it seems—although it might have been true of Dr. Du Bois personally. My problem is not whether I will accept or reject American values. It is, rather, how can I get into a position where I can have the maximum influence upon those values. There is also the matter, as you have pointed out, of those American ideals which were so fatefully put down on paper which I want to see made manifest.
WARREN: One sometimes encounters the Negro who says he regrets the possible long-range absorption of the Negro blood, the possibility of the loss of Negro identity.
ELLISON: That’s like wishing your father’s father wasn’t your grandfather. I don’t fear Negro blood being absorbed, but I am afraid that the Negro American cultural expression might be absorbed and obliterated through lack of appreciation and through commercialization and banalization. But as for the question of diffusing of blood—it isn’t blood which makes a Negro American: Adam Clayton Powell’s reply to a white TV interviewer’s query, “I hear that you have quite a lot of white blood,” was “Yes, probably more than you, Mike.*” If it should suddenly become true that being a Negro rested on the possession of African blood alone, without reference to culture, social experience, and political circumstance, quite a number of people who are white and who enjoy the privileges of white status would find themselves beyond the pale.Anyway, I don’t think the problem of blood absorption works so simply. There are principles of selection which have little to do with the status accorded to whiteness, and these assert themselves despite the absence of outside pressure. On the aesthetic level alone there are certain types you like, certain sensibilities, certain voices—a number of other qualities. Another factor is that Negroes, despite what some of our spokesmen say, do not dislike being Negro—no matter how inconvenient it frequently is. I like being a Negro. WARREN: Then it’s not merely suffering and deprivation, it’s a challenge and enrichment?
ELLISON: Yes, indeed—these complete the circle and make it human. And as I was telling the kids this morning at Rutgers, I have no desire to escape the struggle, because I’m just too interested in how it’s going to work out, and I want to impose my will upon the outcome to the extent that I can. I want to help shape events and our general culture, not merely as a semi-outsider but as one who is in a position to have a responsible impact upon the American value system. WARREN: Some Negroes—some leaders—say that there is no challenge or enrichment in the situation of Negroes. Of course, it may be a matter of strategy to insist on the total agony.
ELLISON: Perhaps I can talk this way because I’m not a leader. But I understand that this has become part of the strategy of exerting pressure. There is a danger in this, nevertheless. The danger lies in overemphasizing the extent to which Negroes are alienated, and in overstressing the extent to which the racial predicament imposes an agony upon the individual. For the Negro youth this emphasis can become an excuse and a blinder, leading to an avoidance of the individual assertion. It can encourage him to ignore his personal talent in favor of reducing himself to a generalized definition of alienation and agony. Thus is accomplished what the entire history of repression and brutalization has failed to do: the individual reduces himself to a cipher. Ironically, some of those who yell loudest about alienation are doing it in some of the most conservative journals and newspapers and are very well paid for so yelling. Yet, obviously, the agony which they display has other than racial sources.Actually, I doubt the existence of a “total” agony, for where personality is involved two-plus-two seldom equals four. But I agree that agony and alienation do form a valid source of appeal.
However, there’s another aspect of reality which applies: The American Negro has a dual identity, just as most Americans have, and it seems to me ironic that the discipline out of which this present action is being exerted comes from no simple agony—nor simple despair—but out of long years of learning how to live under pressure, of learning to deal with provocation and with violence. It issues out of the Negro’s necessity of establishing his own value system and his own conception of Negro experience and Negro personality, conceptions which seldom get into the sociology and psychology textbooks.
WARREN: The power of character, of self-control—the qualities that are making this Movement now effective—did not come out of blind suffering?
ELLISON: Nor did they come out of self-pity or self-hate—which is a belief shared by many black and white sociologists, journalists, by the Black Muslims, and by many white liberals. But even though some of these elements—the Negro being human—are present within the Movement—the power of character, of self-control—these qualities are no expression of blind suffering or self-hate. For when the world was not looking, when the country was not looking at Negroes, and when we were restrained in certain of our activities by the interpretation of the law of the land, something was present in our lives to sustain us. This is evident when we go back and look at our cultural expression, when we look at the folklore in a truly questioning way, when we scrutinize and listen before passing judgment. Listen to those tales which are told by Negroes among themselves. I’m so annoyed whenever I come across a perfectly well-meaning person saying of the present struggle, “Well, the Negro has suddenly discovered courage.”* * *
In all of Ellison’s conversation and writing there is the impulse re-inspect, to break through, some of the standard formulations of the Revolution, which are in constant danger of becoming mere stereotypes. One is that the Negro has been deprived of a sense of identity and is a “self-hater.” When James Baldwin says that “for the first time in American Negro history, the American black man is not at the mercy of the American white man’s image of him,” he is referring to the question of identity; as he is when he goes on to say that, though it is “very romantic,” the American Negro finds it “a necessary step” to think of “himself as an African.” Martin Luther King says that he recognizes “the psychic split” as a “real issue,” and Wyatt Tee Walker says that only now the “Negro really accepts his identity.” Izell Blair says that the young Negro, in facing the dominant values of white society, says: “Well, what am I?” And then: “You feel rubbed out, as if you never existed.” The question arises in a number of case histories; for instance, in one of the persons studied by Kardiner and Ovesey: “I know I don’t want to be identified with Negroes, but I am identified regardless of how I feel.” And, as we have seen, the Black Muslims, including the defector Malcolm X, take the recognition of the problem of identity and self-hate as the beginning of redemption.
In the past, in the essay “Harlem Is Nowhere,” written in 1948, Ellison accepted the notion of self-hate among Negroes in connection with what Dr. Frederick Wertham calls the “free-floating hostility” which the Negro senses, and sometimes takes “as a punishment for some racial or personal guilt.” Ellison is quite specific: “Negro Americans are in a desperate search for identity . . . their whole lives have become a search for answers to the questions: Who am I?, What am I?, Why am I?, and, Where?” But later (as in the present interview), Ellison insists, over and over again, on the Negro’s will, even under slavery, to develop discipline and achieve individuality. For instance, in a review of Blues People (1964), by Le Roi Jones, he writes:
“A slave,” writes Le Roi Jones, “cannot be a man.” But what, might one ask, of those moments when he feels his metabolism aroused by the rising of the sap in the spring? What of his identity among other slaves? With his wife? And isn’t it closer to the truth that far from considering themselves only in terms of that abstraction, “a slave,” the enslaved really thought of themselves as men who had been unjustly enslaved?
What are we to make of these apparent contradictions? In the first place, we have to grant that a man is the final authority about his own feelings. If Izell Blair says that, at a certain time, he felt “rubbed out,” he ought to know. By the same token, Ralph Ellison ought to know what he felt, or how he feels. The trouble only starts when one generalizes, and attributes a certain feeling to that abstraction “the Negro”—that is, to all Negroes—and creates a stereotype. But, of course, we would be nearer the truth if we thought not of “the Negro” but of pressures and tendencies implicit in the situation of oppression and of an enormous variety of persons upon whom they act.
Ellison, in thinking of those Negroes who set models for resistance, puts his emphasis on the individual, on the achieving of personal identity. On this point, some psychologists, in discussing the situation of the Negro under slavery, will distinguish between the personal ego and the social ego. For instance, Kardiner and Ovesey say that there were “among the slaves powerful and resourceful leaders,” that slavery was not accepted with docility, and that “individual protests were many.” But they distinguish such protests from group action, organized action. The fact that rebellions were so few and so promptly failed they attribute to the destruction by slavery of “the fabric out of which social cohesion is made.” Under slavery the individual might have “enormous self-confidence,” but such confidence would not be available for common use; its reference would remain almost strictly individual.
The explanation for this they would take to be complex. There would be, of course, the breakup of cultural bonds, the inability to form permanent and dignified family ties, the spy system, the use of Negro “drivers” and pace-setters, the system of special privilege for house-servants and “pets.” Furthermore, Kardiner and Ovesey emphasize the nature of work under slavery: “No slave can take pride in his work, except perhaps in that it may serve another form of self-interest through ingratiation”—and this would be a bid for discrimination in favor of oneself, to the implied disadvantage of everyone else. The slave—except among favored craftsmen—did not plan work and had no opportunity to cooperate in work, and this fact would also have had a deep psychological effect. And, always, there would have been the pressure to accept the master’s values. Under such pressures individuals might, and clearly did, achieve “identity,” but with a special struggle—and a struggle that might have emphasized the special personal nature of that identity, an identity that might be expressed in individual acts of resistance or by flight.
As we have said earlier in discussing Samboism, we must think in terms not of absolutes, but of pressures inherent in the situation. And in this instance, common sense would dictate that the distinction between the personal self and the social self cannot be taken as absolute. Certainly, the example of resistance or flight would fire something in those who to that moment had not resisted or fled; and such examples, entering the local folklore, might have continuing effect. And on this point Ellison was continuing, telling of a man who, long after slavery, had entered folklore as the intransigent, individual discoverer of the self:
ELLISON: I remember that when I was riding freight trains through Alabama to get to Tuskegee Institute there was a well-known figure of Birmingham, called Ice Cream Charlie, whose story was also told over and over again whenever we evoked the unwritten history of the group. Ice Cream Charlie was an ice cream maker and his product must have been very good (Negro folklore has it, by the way, and erroneously, I’m afraid, that a Negro slave woman invented ice cream) because the demand for it led to his death. His white competitors ordered him to stop selling his product to white people, but the white people wanted it and, believing in free enterprise, he ignored the warning. This led to his competitors’ sending the police after Charlie, and it ended with his killing twelve policemen before they burned him out and killed him. Now there are many, many such stories which Negroes keep alive among themselves, and they form part of our image of Negro experience—nonviolence notwithstanding.
Many people don’t even bother to know or care about this part of Negro history. They project their own notions—or prefabricated stereotypes—upon Negroes—they make a slow and arduous development seem a dramatic event.*
The freedom movement, such a person assumes, exists simply because he is looking at it. Thus it becomes an accident or an artistic contrivance, or a conspiracy, instead of the slow development in time, in history, and in group discipline and organizational technique which it actually is.
I shouldn’t be annoyed, of course, since Americans know very little of their history and we tend to act as though we believed that by refusing to look at history there’ll be no necessity to confront its consequences. And we have so many facile ways of disguising the issues, of rendering them banal.
Sometime back I saw a revival of an old Al Jolson movie on television. This was about the time of the summer riots in Harlem, and in one of the big scenes Jolson appears in blackface singing a refrain which goes, “I don’t want to make your laws, I just want to sing my songs and be happy!” Well, whatever the reality of the Negro attitudes or whatever the stage of the Negro freedom struggle at the time the picture was originally released—yes, and no matter how many white people were lulled into believing that Jolson’s “passing for black” granted him the authority to express authentic Negro attitudes—this piece of popular culture tells us more about Jolson, about Hollywood, and about American techniques for converting serious moral issues into sentimental and banal entertainment than about Negroes. Anyone who bothers to consult history would know that not only were Negroes anxious to change the laws but were trying even then to do so. By 1954 they had helped to discover how—with Charles S. Houston’s mock supreme court cases held at Howard University Law School.
Viewed from this perspective of Al Jolson, America has been terribly damaged by bad art. Perhaps those Negro writers who wish to be praised for shoddy work, and who regard serious literary criticism as a form of racial prejudice, should remember that bad art which toys with serious issues is ultimately destructive and the entertainment which it provides is poisonous, regardless of the racial background of the artist.
WARREN: What do you think of the suggestion that part of the Southern resistance is not based on the question of race as such but on the impulse to maintain identity? A white Southerner feeling that his identity is involved may defend a lot of things in one package as being Southern, and one of those things is segregation. He feels he has to have the whole package to define his culture and his identity. Does that make any sense to you?
ELLISON: It makes a lot of sense to me, because one of the areas that I feel, and which I think I see when I look at the Southerner who has these feelings, is that he has been imprisoned by them, and that he has been prevented from achieving his individuality, perhaps more than Negroes have. And very often this is a tough one for Northerners to understand—that is, Northern whites, and sometimes even for Northern Negroes.
WARREN: I think it is too—some of the people I know.
ELLISON: Yes, it is very difficult to get that across and I wish it could be spelled out. I wish that we could break this thing down so that it could be seen that desegregation isn’t going to stop people from being Southern, that freedom for Negroes isn’t going to destroy the main current of that way of life, which becomes, like most ways of life when we talk about them, more real on the level of myth, memory and dream than on the level of actuality anyway. The climate will remain the same, and that has a lot to do with it, the heroes of Southern history will remain, and so on. The economy will probably expand, and a hell of a lot of energy which has gone into keeping the Negro “in his place” will be released for more creative pursuits. And the dictionary will become more accurate, the language a bit purified, and the singing in the schools will sound better. I suspect that what is valuable and worth preserving in the white Southern way of life is no more exclusively dependent upon the existence of segregation than what is valuable in Southern Negro life depends upon its being recognized by white people—or for that matter, by Northern Negroes. Besides, from what I’ve seen of the South, as a musician and as a waiter and so on, some of the people who are most afraid of Negroes’ invading them will never be bothered, because their way of life is structured in a manner which isn’t particularly attractive to Negroes.
WARREN: There’s an interlocking structure, I sometimes think, supported by just one thing—segregation.
ELLISON: Yes, and their fear is so unreal, actually, when you can see the whole political structure being changed anyway. And when the political structure changes and desegregation is achieved, it will be easily seen where Negroes were stopped by the law and where they would have been stopped anyway, because of income and by their own preference—a matter of taste. There is, after all, a tiny bit of Negro truth in the story which Southern whites love to tell, to the effect that if a white man could be a Negro on Saturday night he’d never wish to be white again.That bit of consolation aside, however, I don’t think it sufficiently appreciated that over and over again Negroes of certain backgrounds take on aristocratic values. They are rural and Southern and not drawn to business because business was not part of the general pattern. This is one reason—over and beyond the realities of discrimination by banks, suppliers, poor training opportunities, and even individual lack of initiative—that we’ve developed no powerful middle class. Here again a cultural factor cuts across the racial and political appearance of things. Southern whites were also slow to take to business.
WARREN: That’s been one of the things that have been commented on by observers from the eighteenth century on.
ELLISON: But over and over again, my intellectual friends—they have no conception of this. They can’t understand—I mean, it appears ludicrous to them when I say that so-and-so is aristocratic in his image of himself and in the values which he has taken over from the white South. Nevertheless it’s true, and some of the biggest snobs that you could run into are some of these poor Negroes—well, they might not be poor actually, they might be living very well—but there are just certain things, certain codes, certain values which they express and they will die by them. And there’s quite a lot of that.
WARREN: In Washington I was talking to a Miss Lucy Thornton, in the Howard University Law School, and she’s been through the demonstrations, she’s been in jail and so forth. She said, “I’m optimistic about the way things are probably going to go here—or may go here—about getting a human settlement after the troubles are over.” I asked, “Why?” She said, “Well, because we have been on the land together. We have a common history which is some basis for communication for living together afterwards.”
ELLISON: Well, it is true that when you share a common background, you don’t have to spell out so many things, even though you might be fighting over recognizing the common identity, and I think that that’s part of the South’s struggle. For instance, it’s just very hard for Governor Wallace to recognize that he has got to share not only the background but the power of looking after the State of Alabama with Negroes who probably know as much about it as he does. Now, here in New York I know many, many people with many, many backgrounds—and I have very often found people who think that they know me as an individual reveal that they have no sense of the experience behind me, the extent of it and the complexity of it. What they have instead is good will and a passion for abstraction.
WARREN: That’s a human problem, of course, all the way. It can be special in a case like this, I presume.
ELLISON: It can be special because suddenly something comes up and I realize, “Well, my gosh, all the pieces aren’t here.” That is, I’ve won my individuality in relation to those friends at the cost of that great part of me which is really representative of a group experience. I’m sometimes viewed as “different” or a “special instance”—when in fact I’m special only to the extent that I’m a fairly conscious example, and in some ways a lucky instance, of the general run of American Negroes.
WARREN: I encounter the same thing, I suppose, in a way. I’ve been congratulated by well-meaning friends who say, “It’s so nice to met a reconstructed Southerner.” I don’t feel reconstructed, you see. And I don’t feel liberal. I feel logical, and I resent the word—I resent the word reconstructed.
ELLISON: It’s like this notion of the culturally deprived child—one of those phrases which I don’t like—as I have taught white middle-class young people who are what I would call “culturally deprived.” They are culturally deprived because they are not oriented within the society in such a way that they are prepared to deal with its problems.
WARREN: It’s a different kind of cultural deprivation, isn’t it? And actually a more radical one.
ELLISON: That’s right, but they don’t even realize it. These people can be much more troubled than the child who lives in the slum and knows how to exist in the slum.
WARREN: It’s more mysterious, what’s happening to him—the middle-class child?
ELLISON: Yes, it’s quite mysterious, because he has everything, all of the opportunities, but he can make nothing of the society or of his obligations. And often he has no clear idea of his own goals.
WARREN: It’s twice as difficult to remedy because you can’t see how to remedy it.
ELLISON: He can’t see how to remedy it, and he doesn’t know to what extent he has given up his past. He thinks he has a history, but every time you really talk to him seriously you discover that, well, it’s kind of floating out there, and the distance between the parent and the child—the parents might have had it, they might have had it in the old country, they might have had it from the farm, and so on, but something happens with the young ones.
WARREN: Do you think there’s a real crisis of values in the American middle class, then?
ELLISON: I think so. Perhaps that is what I am trying to say.
WARREN: I think there is, too.
ELLISON: I think there’s a terrific crisis, and one of the events by which the middle class is being tested, and one of the forms in which the crisis expresses itself is the necessity of dealing with the Negro freedom movement.
WARREN: Is this why there are some young white people who move into it—because it is their personal salvation to find a cause to identify with, something outside themselves, outside the flatness of their middle-class American spiritual ghetto? Several people, including Robert Moses in Mississippi, have remarked on the resistance of Negroes there to white well-wishers or even courageous fellow workers. One thing, some whites try to absorb arbitrarily the Negro culture, Negro speech, Negro musical terms, Negro musical tastes—move in and grab, as it were, the other man’s soul.
ELLISON: Yes, and the resentment has existed for a long time now. But what is new today is that it is being stated, articulated. It is important to recognize, however, that the resentment arises not from simple jealously over others’ admiring certain aspects of our life style and expression and seeking to share them, but because all too often that idiom, that style, that expressiveness for which we’ve suffered and struggled and which is a product of our effort to make meaning of our experience—is taken over by those who would distort it and reduce it to banality. This happened with jazz, resulting in great reputations and millions of dollars for certain white musicians while their artistic superiors barely got along. Worse, the standards of the art were corrupted. But another aspect of Negro resentment arises because all too often whites approach us with an unconscious assumption of racial superiority. And this leads to the naïve, and implicitly arrogant, assumption that a characteristic cultural expression can, because it is Negro (it’s American too, but that’s a very complex matter), simply be picked up, appropriated, without bothering to learn its subtleties, its inner complexity, or its human cost, its source in tradition, its idiomatic allusiveness, its rooting in the density of lived life.
WARREN: Grab an apple off the cart and run—
ELLISON: It’s like Christopher Newman, in James’s The American, going over and trying to move into French society and finding a dense complexity of values and attitudes. But to get back to the other point, I’m sure that there must have been quite a lot of resentment even among the Negroes who encountered certain Abolitionists, because they displayed a tendency to use other people for their own convenience.
WARREN: It’s awful human, isn’t it?
ELLISON: It is, it’s awful human.
WARREN: Let’s turn to something else. Here in the midst of what has been an expanding economy you have a contracting economy for the unprepared, for the Negro.
ELLISON: That’s the paradox. And this particularly explains something new which has come into the picture; that is, a determination by the Negro no longer to be the scapegoat, no longer to pay, to be sacrificed to—the inadequacies of other Americans. We want to socialize the cost. A cost has been exacted in terms of character, in terms of courage, and determination, and in terms of self-knowledge and self-discovery. Worse, it has led to social, economic, political, and intellectual disadvantages and to a contempt even for our lives. And one motive for our rejection of the old traditional role of national scapegoat is an intensified awareness that not only are we being destroyed by the sacrifice, but that the nation has been rotting at its moral core. Thus we are determined to bring America’s conduct into line with its professed ideals. The obligation is dual, in fact mixed, to ourselves and to the nation. Negroes are forcing the confrontation between the nation’s conduct and its ideal, and they are most American in that they are doing so. Other Americans are going to have to do the same thing. Well, I say “have to”—I don’t mean that we’re in a position to force anything, except the exertion of—
WARREN: Well, let’s say force.
ELLISON: Yes—a matter of pressuring—keeping this country stirred up. Because we have desperately to keep it stirred up.
WARREN: What has been historically proved—not just in America but elsewhere—social change doesn’t happen automatically—something has to happen.
ELLISON: One can only hope about these things. We’ve had the luxury of evading moral necessities from the Reconstruction on. Much of the moral looseness from which we suffer can be dated back to that period. It just seems to follow that you have to learn how to be morally correct and when you have so much mobility, as Americans have, and so much natural wealth, then you come to believe that you can eternally postpone the moment of historical truth. But I think that as a result of becoming the major power in the world, we are being disciplined in the experience of frustration, and the experience of being found inadequate. We’re slowly learning that the wealth does us little good, that something more is needed. We’re in trouble simply because we’ve compromised so damned much with events and with ourselves. Something is wrong and it isn’t the presence of Negroes. It isn’t even the presence of the civil rights problem, although this is an aspect of it.
WARREN: I agree with you immediately that that is not the central fact. But it flows into an American national situation and aggravates it.
ELLISON: The national values have become so confused that you can’t even depend upon your writers for some sense of the realism of character. There is a basic strength in this country, but so much of it is being sapped away and no one seems to be too much interested in it.
WARREN: Let me switch the topic, if you will. You know Dr. Kenneth Clark’s view of Martin Luther King’s philosophy—this will lead us back to the whole question of the nature of violence and nonviolence.
ELLISON: Well, Dr. Clark misses the heroic side of this thing—perhaps because he has an investment in negative propaganda as a means of raising funds with which to correct some of the injustices common to Negro slums. But he seems so intent upon describing the negative that he forgets that there is another side, and in doing so he reveals how much he doesn’t know about Southern Negroes. Where Negroes are concerned, the open sesame to many of the money vaults in this country seems to be a description, replete with graphs, statistics, and footnotes, of Negro life as so depraved, hopeless, and semi-human that the best service that money could perform would be to stuff the mouths of the describers so that the details of horror could stop. I’m reminded of the Black Guinea disguise in which Melville’s Confidence Man blackened his face and twisted his limbs and then crawled about the ship deck whimpering like a dog begging and catching coins in his mouth.Getting back to King and Clark, I think this—and it might sound mystical, but I don’t think so because it is being acted out every day: there is a great power in humility. Dostoevski has made us aware—in fact, Jesus Christ has made us aware. It can be terribly ambiguous and it can contain many, many contradictory forces, and most of all, it can be a form of courage. Martin Luther King isn’t working out of yesterday nor the day before yesterday. He is working out of a long history of Negro tradition and wisdom, and he certainly knows more about the psychology of his followers than Dr. Clark. He knows that these people have been conditioned to contain not only the physical pressures involved in their struggle, but that they are capable, through this same tradition, of mastering the psychological pressures of which Clark speaks.
WARREN: Do you mean conditioned by their training or by their history?
ELLISON: I’m talking about the old necessity of having to stay alive during periods when violence was loose in the land and when many were being casually killed. Violence has been so ever-present and so often unleashed through incidents of such pettiness and capriciousness, that for us personal courage had either to take another form or be negated, become meaningless.Often the individual’s personal courage had to be held in check, since not only could his exaction of personal satisfaction from a white man lead to the destruction of other innocent Negroes, his self-evaluation could be called into question by the smallest things and the most inconsequential gesture could become imbued with power over life or death. Thus in situations in which courage appeared the normal response, he had to determine with whom he was involved and whether the issue was as important as his white opponent wished to make it. In other words, he has always to determine at what point and over which specific issue he will pay the ultimate price of his life.
This has certainly been part of my own experience. There have been situations where in facing hostile whites I had to determine not what they thought was at issue, because in any case they were bent upon violence, but what I wanted it to be. “This guy wants me to fight, most likely he wants an excuse to kill me—what do I have to gain? And am I going to let him impose his values upon my life?” WARREN: To let him determine your worth to you, is that it? ELLISON: Yes. So, Dr. Clark notwithstanding, if I couldn’t love my would-be provocateur as Dr. King advises, I could dismiss him as childish and, perhaps, even forgive him. This, even though at the time I ached to meet him on neutral ground and on equal terms.
One thing that Dr. Clark overlooks is that Southern Negroes learned about violence in a very tough school. They have known for a long time that they can take a lot of head-whipping and survive and go on working toward their own goals. We learned about forbearance and forgiveness in that same school, and about hope too. So today we sacrifice, as we sacrificed yesterday, the pleasure of personal retaliation in the interest of the common good. And where violence was once a casual matter, it has now become a matter of national political significance. Clark regards the necessary psychological complexity of Southern Negroes as intolerable, but I’m afraid that he would impose a psychological norm upon Negro life which is not only inadequate to deal with its complexity, but implicitly negative.
WARREN: Let’s go back to what you said a moment ago—you said he lacked a conception of the basic heroism involved in the Negro struggle.
ELLISON: Yes, I’m referring to the basic, implicit heroism of people who must live within a society without recognition, real status, but who are involved in the ideals of that society and who are trying to make their way, trying to determine their true position and their rightful position within it. Such people learn more about the real nature of that society, more about the true character of its values than those who can afford to take their own place in society for granted. They might not be able to spell it out philosophically but they act it out. And as against the white man’s indictments of the conduct, folkways, and values which express their sense of social reality, their actions say, “But you are being dishonest. You know that our view of things is true. We live and act out the truth of American reality, while to the extent that you refuse to take these aspects of reality, these inconsistencies, into consideration—you do not live the truth.” Such a position raises a people above a simple position of social and political inferiority and it imposes upon them the necessity of understanding the other man and, while still pressing for their freedom, they have the obligation to themselves of giving up some of their need for revenge. Clark would probably reply that this is too much to ask of any people, and my answer would be: “There are no abstract rules. And although the human goal of a higher humanity is the same for all, each group must play the cards as history deals them.” This requires understanding.
WARREN: Understanding themselves, too?
ELLISON: Understanding themselves, too—yes—in terms of their own live definition of value, and of understanding themselves in relationship to other Americans. This places a big moral strain upon the individual, and it requires self-confidence, self-consciousness, self-mastery, insight, and compassion. In the broader sense it requires an alertness to human complexity. Men in our situation simply cannot afford to ignore the nuances of human relationships. And although action is necessary, forthright action, it must be guided—tempered by insight and compassion. Nevertheless, isn’t this what civilization is all about? And isn’t this what tragedy has always sought to teach us?At any rate, this too has been part of the American Negro experience, and I believe that one of the important clues to the meaning of that experience lies in the idea, the ideal of sacrifice. Hannah Arendt’s failure to grasp the importance of this ideal among Southern Negroes caused her to fly way off into left field in her “Reflections on Little Rock,” in which she charged Negro parents with exploiting their children during the struggle to integrate the schools. But she has absolutely no conception of what goes on in the minds of Negro parents when they send their kids through those lines of hostile people. Yet they are aware of the overtones of a rite of initiation which such events actually constitute for the child, a confrontation of the terrors of social life with all the mysteries stripped away. And in the outlook of many of these parents (who wish that the problem didn’t exist), the child is expected to face the terror and contain his fear and anger precisely because he is a Negro American. Thus he’s required to master the inner tensions created by his racial situation, and if he gets hurt—then his is one more sacrifice. It is a harsh requirement, but if he fails this basic test, his life will be even harsher.
WARREN: White Southerners have been imprisoned by a loyalty to being Southern. Now, there’s a remark often made about Negroes, that they are frequently imprisoned, or the genius of the Negro is imprisoned, in the race problem. I am concerned with a kind of parallelism here between these two things.
ELLISON: Well, I think that the parallel is very real. We’re often so imprisoned in the problem that we don’t stop to analyze our assets, and our leaders are often so preoccupied with an effort to interpret Negro life in terms which sociology has laid down that they not only fail to question the validity of such limited and limiting terms, they seem unaware that there are any others. One reason seems to be that they exclude themselves from the limitations of the definitions.Now, we know that there is an area in Southern experience wherein Negroes and whites achieve a sort of human communication, and even social intercourse, which is not always possible in the North. I mean, that there is an implacably human side to race relationships. But at certain moments a reality which is political and social and ideological asserts itself, and the human relationship breaks up and both groups of people fall into their abstract roles. Thus a great loss of human energy goes into maintaining our stylized identities. In fact, much of the energy of the imagination—much of the psychic energy of the South, among both whites and blacks, has gone, I think, into this particular negative art form. If I may speak of it in such terms.
WARREN: Just from the strain of maintaining this stance?
ELLISON: I think so. Because in the end, when the barriers are down, there are human assertions to be made, whatever one’s race, in terms of one’s own taste and one’s own affirmations of one’s own self, one’s own way and one’s own group’s sense of life. But this makes a big problem for Negroes because there’s always the dominance of white standards—which we influence and partially share—imposed upon us. Nevertheless, there is much about Negro life which Negroes like, just as we like certain kinds of food. One of our problems is going to be that of affirming those things which we love about Negro life when there is no longer pressure upon us from outside. Then the time will come when our old ways of life will say, “Well, all right, you’re no longer kept within a Jim Crow community, what are you going to do about your life now? Do you think there is going to be a way of enjoying yourself which is absolutely better, more human than what you’ve known?” You see, it’s a question of recognizing the human core, the universality of our experience. It’s a matter of defining value as one has actually lived reality. And I think that this will hold true for white people. It certainly shows up in the white Southerners who turn up in the North, as with the hill people who are now clinging to their own folkways in the city of Chicago.
WARREN: You are thinking simply of a pluralistic society, without—
ELLISON: Yes, without any racial judgments, negative or positive, being placed upon it. I watch other people enjoying themselves, I watch their customs, and I think it one of my greatest privileges as an American, as a human being living in this particular time in the world’s history, to be able to project myself into various backgrounds, into various cultural patterns, not because I want to cease being a Negro or because I think that these are automatically better ways of realizing oneself, but because it is one of the great glories of being an American. You can be somebody else while still being yourself, and you don’t have to take an ocean voyage to do it. In fact, one of the advantages of being a Negro is that we have always had the freedom to choose or to select and to affirm those traits, those values, those cultural forms, which we have taken from any and everybody. And with our own cultural expressions we have been quite generous. It’s like the story they tell about Louis Armstrong teaching Bix Beider-becke certain things about jazz. It was a joyful exchange and that was the way in which Negro jazzmen acted when I was a kid. They were delighted when anyone liked their music—especially white Americans—and their response was, “You like this? Well, this is a celebration of something we feel about life and art. You feel it too? Well, all right, we’re all here together; let the good times roll!”I think their attitude reveals much about Negro life generally which isn’t recognized by sociologists and journalists who consider Negroes powerless to make choices. We probably have more freedom than anyone; we only need to become more conscious of it and use it to protect ourselves from some of the more tawdry American values. Besides, it’s always a good thing to remember why it was that Br’er Rabbit loved his brier patch, and it wasn’t simply for protection.
WARREN: I know some people, Ralph, white people and Negroes, who would say that what you are saying is an apology for a segregated society. I know it’s not. How would you answer such a charge?
ELLISON: There’s no real answer to such a charge, but I left the South in 1936. My writing speaks for itself. I’ve never pretended for one minute that the injustices and limitations of Negro life do not exist. On the other hand I think it important to recognize that Negroes have achieved a very rich humanity despite these restrictive conditions. I wish to be free not to be less Negro American but so that I can make the term mean something even richer. Now, if I can’t recognize this, or if recognizing this makes me an Uncle Tom, then heaven help us all.
WARREN: How do you relate this, either positively or negatively, to the notion that the Negro Movement of our time invokes a discovery of identity?
ELLISON: I don’t think it’s a discovery of identity. I think rather that it is an affirmation and assertion of identification. And it’s an assertion of a pluralistic identity. The assertion, in political terms, is that of the old American tradition. In terms of group identity and the current agitation it’s revealing the real identity of a people who have been here for a hell of a long time. Negroes were Americans even before there was a United States, and if we’re going to talk at all about what we are, this historical and cultural fact has to be recognized. And if we’re going to accept this as true, then the identity of Negroes is bound up intricately, irrevocably, with the identities of white Americans, and especially is this true in the South.
WARREN: It is, indeed.
ELLISON: There’s no Southerner who hasn’t been touched by the presence of Negroes. There’s no Negro who hasn’t been touched by the presence of white Southerners. And of course this extends beyond the region. It gets—the moment you start touching culture you touch music, you touch dance attitudes, you touch movies,—touch the structure anywhere—and the Negro is right in there helping to shape it.* * *
In the Introduction to his collection of essays Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison says of his struggle to become a writer:
... I found the greatest difficulty for a Negro writer was the problem of revealing what he truly felt, rather than serving up what Negroes were supposed to feel, and were encouraged to feel. And linked to this was the difficulty, based upon our long habit of deception and evasion, of depicting what really happened within our areas of American life, and putting down with honesty and without bowing to ideological expediences the attitudes and values which give Negro American life its sense of wholeness and which renders it bearable and human and, when measured by our own terms, desirable.
In other words, the moral effort to see and recognize the truth of the self and of the world, and the artistic effort to say the truth are seen as aspects of the same process. This interfusion of the moral and the artistic is, for Ralph Ellison, a central fact and a fact that involves far more than his literary views: for if “truth” moves into “art,” so “art” can move backward (and forward) into “truth.” Art can, in other words, move into life. Not merely, Ellison would have it, by opening our eyes to life, not merely by giving us models of action and response, but by, quite literally, creating us. For him, the high function of technique is “the task of creating value,” and in this task we create the self. For style is the very “instrument of freedom,” and in technique lies the “greatest freedom.”
This process is a life process—a way of knowing and experiencing in which is growth: a growth in integrity, literally, a unifying of the self, of the random or discrepant possibilities and temptations of experience.
The very paragraph quoted above on the difficulty of being a Negro writer is pregnantly infused with that honesty which it celebrates. We all know, alas, the difficulty of being humanly honest about our feelings. But Ellison clearly means more than that. He means the special dishonesty engendered by what “Negroes are supposed to feel,” “encouraged to feel.”
“Encouraged” by whom?
By the white world, of course—but also, as he has added, “by Negro ’spokesmen’ and by sociologists, black and white.” But in so far as the Negro writer does have this particular problem of truly knowing his feelings, it means that he has accepted the white man’s expectations as his own. It is, then, his own expectation, however derived and even wickedly subsidized, that he must penetrate to the truth. Worse, it is “our” long habit—the Negro’s own long habit, however derived and subsidized—of deception and evasion that must be broken before the Negro writer can report “what really happened.”
Now, “ideological expediency” would have Ralph Ellison say things somewhat differently. It would prompt him to so slant things that the special problems of the Negro writer would be read as one aspect of the Negro’s victimization by the white man. A very good case—in one perspective, a perfect case—can be made out for that interpretation. But Ellison refuses that gambit of the alibi. In various ways, Ellison rejects the “Negro alibi” for the Negro writer. For instance, in the essay, “The World and the Jug,” he says, “. . . when the work of Negro writers has been rejected they have all too often protected their egos by blaming racial discrimination, while turning away from the fairly obvious fact that good art—and Negro musicians are present to demonstrate this—commands attention of itself. . . . And they forget that publishers will publish almost anything which is written with even a minimum of competency. . . .”
In regard to the alibi, Ellison is more concerned with the way man confronts his individual doom than with the derivation of that doom; not pathos, but power, in its deepest inner sense, is what concerns him. He is willing, pridefully, to head into responsibility. But in the last half of the same sentence, he flouts even more violently “ideological expediencies” which dictate that the Negro advertise the blankness, bleakness, and misery of his life. Instead, Ellison refers to its “wholeness,” its desirability, and elsewhere in the same Introduction he refers to “the areas of life and personality which claimed my mind beyond any limitations apparently imposed by my racial identity.”
This attitude, which permeates Ellison’s work, comes to focus in two essays, which are probably destined to become classic statements,* written as a reply to Irving Howe’s essay “Black Boys and Native Sons.” Howe’s essay takes Richard Wright’s work to be the fundamental expression of the Negro genius. The day Native Son appeared, he says, “American culture was changed forever. . . . A blow at the white man, the novel forced him to recognize himself as an oppressor. A blow at the black man, the novel forced him to recognize the cost of his submission.” Though Howe admires the performance of both Baldwin and Ellison, he sees them as having rejected the naturalism and straight protest of Wright, as traitors to the cause of “clenched militancy”; and then, as Ellison puts it, Howe, “appearing suddenly in black face,” demands: “What, then, was the experience of a man with a black skin, what could it be here in this country? How could a Negro put pen to paper, how could he so much as think or breathe, without some impulsion to protest . . . ?” And he goes on to say that the Negro’s very existence “forms a constant pressure on his literary work . . . with a pain and ferocity that nothing could remove.”*
This, to Ellison, is the “ideological proposition that what whites think of the Negro’s reality is more important than what Negroes themselves know it to be”; and this, to Ellison, is Howe’s “white liberal version of the white Southern myth of absolute separation of the races.” That is, the critic picks out the Negro’s place (i.e., his feelings and his appropriate function) and then puts him in it; with the result that Ellison says: “I fear the implications of Howe’s ideas concerning the Negro writer’s role as actionist more than I do the State of Mississippi.” Howe’s view is another example of a situation that “is not unusual for a Negro to experience,” as Ellison says in a review of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, “a sensation that he does not exist in the real world at all—only in the nightmarish fantasy of the white American mind.” Howe’s attitude represents, Ellison says in “The World and the Jug,” a violation of “the basic unity of human experience,” undertaken in the “interest of specious political and philosophical conceits.” And he continues:
Prefabricated Negroes are sketched on sheets of paper and superimposed upon the Negro community; that when someone thrusts his head through the page and yells, “Watch out there, Jack, there’s people living under here,” they are shocked and indignant.
We must not fall into the same error and take his attack on the white liberals’ picture of the Negro to be Ellison’s concealed version of the common notion that no white man can know a Negro. By his theory of the “basic unity of experience” and by his theory of the moral force of imagination, such a view—except in the provisional, limited way that common sense prescribes—would be untenable. What Ellison would reject is the violation of the density of life by an easy abstract formulation. Even militancy, if taken merely as a formula, can violate the density of life. For instance, in “The World and the Jug” he says: “. . . what an easy con game for ambitious, publicity-hungry Negroes this stance of ‘militancy’ has become.” He is as ready to attack a Negro on this point as a white man. In a review of Le Roi Jones’ study of Negro music, Blues People, he says that Jones “attempts to impose an ideology upon this cultural complexity” and that even when a Negro treats this subject “the critical intelligence must perform the difficult task which only it can perform.”
The basic unity of human experience—that is what Ellison has found; and he sets the richness of his own experience and that of many Negroes he has known, and his own early capacity to absorb the general values of Western culture, against what Wright called “the essential bleakness of black life in America.” What he is saying here is not that “bleakness” does not exist, and exist for many, but that it has not been the key fact of his own experience, and that his own experience is part of the story. It must be reckoned with, too:
For even as his life toughens the Negro, even as it brutalizes him, sensitizes him, dulls him, goads him to anger, moves him to irony, sometimes fracturing and sometimes affirming his hopes ... it conditions him to deal with his life, and no mere abstraction in somebody’s head.
Not only the basic unity, but the rich variety, of life is what concerns him; and this fact is connected with his personal vision of the opportunity in being an American: “The diversity of American life is often painful, frequently burdensome and always a source of conflict, but in it lies our fate and our hope.”* The appreciation of this variety is, in itself, a school for the imagination and the moral sympathy. And for Ellison, being a “Negro American” has to do with this appreciation, not only of the Negro past in America, but with the complex fluidity of the present:
It has to do with a special perspective on the national ideals and the national conduct, and with a tragicomic attitude toward the universe. It has to do with special emotions evoked by the details of cities and countrysides, with forms of labor and with forms of pleasure; with sex and with love, with food and with drink, with machines and with animals; with climates and with dwellings, with places of worship and places of entertainment; with garments and dreams and idioms of speech; with manners and customs, with religion and art, with life styles and hoping, and with that special sense of predicament and fate which gives direction and resonance to the Freedom Movement. It involves a rugged initiation into the mysteries and rites of color which makes it possible for Negro Americans to suffer the injustice which race and color are used to excuse without losing sight of either the humanity of those who inflict that injustice or the motives, rational or irrational, out of which they act. It imposes the uneasy burden and occasional joy of a complex double vision, a fluid, ambivalent response to men and events, which represents, at its finest, a profoundly civilized adjustment to the cost of being human in this modern world.
Out of this view of the life of the Negro American—which is a view of life—it is no wonder that Ellison does not accept a distinction between the novel as “protest” and the novel as “art”—or rather, sees this distinction as a merely superficial one, not to be trusted. His own approach is twofold. On one hand, he says that “protest is an element of all art,” but he would not limit protest to the social or political objection. In one sense, it might be a “technical assault” on earlier styles—but we know that Ellison regards “techniques” as moral vision, and a way of creating the self. In another sense, the protest may be, as in Oedipus Rex or The Trial, “against the limitation of human life itself.” In another sense, it may be—and I take it that Ellison assumes that it always is—a protest against some aspect of a personal fate:
. . . that intensity of personal anguish which compels the artist to seek relief by projecting it into the world in conjunction with other things; that anguish might take the form of an acute sense of inferiority for one [person], homosexuality for another, an overwhelming sense of the absurdity of human life for still another . . . the experience that might be caused by humiliation, by a hair lip, by a stutter, by epilepsy—indeed, by any and everything in life which plunges the talented individual into solitude while leaving him the will to transcend his condition through art.
And the last words of this preceding quotation bring us to the second idea in his twofold approach to the distinction between the novel as protest and the novel as art: the ideal of the novel is a transmutation of protest into art. In speaking, in “The World and the Jug,” of Howe’s evaluation of his own novel, Ellison says:
If Invisible Man is even “apparently” free from “the ideological and emotional penalties suffered by Negroes in this country,” it is because I tried to the best of my ability to transform these elements into art. My goal was not to escape, or hold back, but to work through; to transcend, as the blues transcend the painful conditions with which they deal.
And he then relates this impulse toward transcendence into art to a stoical American Negro tradition which teaches one to master and contain pain; “which abhors as obscene any trading on one’s own anguish for gain or sympathy”; which deals with the harshness of existence “as men at their best have always done.” And he summarizes the relevance of this tradition: “It takes fortitude to be a man and no less to be an artist.”
In other words, to be an artist partakes, in its special way, of the moral force of being a man. And with this we come again, in a new perspective, to Ellison’s view of the “basic unity of experience.” If there is anguish, there is also the possibility of the transmutation of anguish, “the occasional joy of a complex double vision.”
For in this “double vision” the “basic unity” can be received, and life can be celebrated. “I believe,” he says to Howe, “that true novels, even when most pessimistic and bitter, arise out of an impulse to celebrate human life, and therefore are ritualistic and ceremonial at their core.” The celebration of life—that is what Ellison sees as the final function of his fiction—or of any art. And in this “double vision” and the celebration which it permits—no, entails—we find, even, the reconciliation possible in recognizing “the humanity of those who inflict injustice.” And with this Ellison has arrived, I take it, at his own secular version of Martin Luther King’s agape.
* * *
If, in pursuing this line of thought about Ralph Ellison, I have made him seem unaware of the plight of the Negro American in the past or the present, I have done him a grave wrong. He is fully aware of the blankness of the fate of many Negroes, and the last thing to be found in him is any trace of that cruel complacency of some who have, they think, mastered fate. If he emphasizes the values of challenge in the plight of the Negro, he would not use this, any more than would James Farmer, to justify that plight; and if he applauds the discipline induced by that plight, he does so in no spirit of self-congratulation, but in a spirit of pride in being numbered with those other people who have suffered it.
No one has made more unrelenting statements of the dehumanizing pressures that have been put upon the Negro. And Invisible Man is, I should say, the most powerful artistic representation we have of the Negro under these dehumanizing conditions; and, at the same time, it is a statement of the human triumph over those conditions.