By talking to them about truth and politics, which is the title of a 1967 essay we are reading by Hannah Arendt. I started class by reminding students of something we encountered in Plato and in Hannah Arendt which is the counter-intuitive idea (heretical for a poli-sci major!) that politics isn’t actually everything.
Remembering that politics isn’t everything helps us to keep things in perspective and we really need that right now, not only for our own mental health but for the health of our country as a whole. When politics become framed in existential terms of life or death, that’s when political violence can erupt.
Remembering that politics isn’t everything helps us remember that there is a world outside of the political realm and even more importantly, that is actually where truth resides, two kinds of truth specifically: rational truths (such as 2+ 2 = 4 as Plato shows us through the Socratic dialogues) and FACTUAL truths (as Hannah Arendt shows us in her 1967 article Truth and Politics).
Let me walk you through Arendt’s argument if you haven’t read it. It’s true, she says that facts are the most vulnerable kind of truths because they are contingent (they always could have been otherwise). What she means is that there is nothing self-evident about a factual truth. Either Germany did or did not invade Belgium in August 1914 or maybe it was Belgium that invaded Germany. We can’t know which of these statements is true without seeking external validation in the form of witnesses or other documentation of the events. It’s their contingent nature that makes such factual truths vulnerable to manipulation by the political powers-that-be.
We also know that unwelcome facts can be very threatening to the political status quo, more threatening even than disagreeing with official state ideology or the official state religion. It was more dangerous in Nazi Germany, she says, to talk about the existence of the concentration camps (which everyone knew existed) than it was to disbelieve Nazi ideology or antisemitism. Political power is threatened most by factual truths because factual truths form the basis of political life, the “life of the city” as Plato puts it.
But here is where Arendt’s essay turns to make a really important point about the role of truth in politics. Arendt says that facts are also somehow, despite all the above, incredibly resilient. Even a totalitarian regime like Stalin’s could not erase the fact that a man by the name of Leon Trotsky existed even though he was wiped out of all the history books. (Leon Trotsky was part of the Bolshevik leadership after the Russian Revolution and had a falling out with Stalin and subsequently went into exile. His existence was written out of official history books and denied by the totalitarian state under Stalin and yet we still know who Trotsky was today and we didn’t even have to wait until the USSR collapsed in 1991 to find out! We know because factual truths always involve other people. There were people who saw Trotsky, met him, knew him. His existence was a factual truth that the state tried to suppress. Arendt’s point is that no political regime is powerful enough to suppress factual truths forever, not even a totalitarian regime of one of the world’s most powerful countries.
So ultimately Arendt’s message is a hopeful one that we should remember as we go through these next few years of official state-sanctioned lying (propaganda). People who have lived under totalitarian regimes can describe how odd it feels when the official state-sanctioned truth is a known lie. It can be very disorientating. We’re going to experience a lot of that over the next few years given Trump’s track record with telling falsehoods. We will feel sick at being gaslighted with all the lies and we may even start to feel like there is no truth at all, no ground beneath our feet and then we will be falling like Alice slowly down through the rabbit-hole. But if you remember Arendt’s point in this article you can keep your head: factual truths, she says, are real. They do exist and political power cannot erase them. They are the sky that stretches above us and the ground beneath our feet.