One may be excused for a low level of Christmas spirit this year.
I am with my kids. We are all healthy. I am safely inside my private holiday.
But, oh my, the world seems to be on fire.
“‘Twas ever thus,” you might say. And that’s true. But the fire waxes and wanes. And at the moment, it rages.
And our poor country is riven. We aren’t listening to each other. We don’t seem to like each other very much.
We must keep applying the tools we have – reason, evidence, tolerance.
We must use the structures and customs that sustain us – representation, local government, voluntary associations, to name three.
And apply our values – respect for law and elections, for example.
From democratic forms may yet come a renewal of the democratic spirit.
That spirit is the spirit of plurality: Many kinds of people welcomed and appreciated. And a recognition that there is more than one pathway to truth.
Sociological pluralism has driven prosperity in the United States.
Philosophical pluralism is the summary of the American idea: e pluribus unum.
Hannah Arendt said that for totalitarianism to succeed, plurality and action must be destroyed.
When we cease to believe in pluralistic association, we cease to believe in our own power to civilize ourselves. We give up. We give in. The ideologies and the tyrants win.
Freedom is hard. Hard to achieve. But also very hard to nurture and sustain.
In her seminal work on totalitarianism, Arendt also said that the ground for anti-freedom is fertilized by the obliteration of factual truth.
Isn’t that sort of where we are?
But what does Arendt mean by “action”?
She calls action the power to begin, to initiate. And she roots it in the fact of natality.
Every human being is born a distinct and absolute person. She quotes St. Augustine that identical twins are still individually distinct.
And each human life is aware that it has a beginning and an end. And thus, she says, there is the possibility of spontaneity, of the new, of breaking with what has been.
She calls natality the source of all political action and thought.
The American Founders began a new political order.
Lincoln, in effect, re-founded us with a singular and unprecedented speech.
Speech, she says, is the way we begin to act.
Martin Luther King, Jr. replicated Lincoln’s act.
For Hannah Arendt, a humanist who not only saw the worst of humanity as a German Jew, but analyzed it as a historian and philosopher, the words “a child is born,” were among the most beautiful words in the English language.
In natality is our source of action and therefore hope.
A wife does not have to accept an abusive husband.
A slave does not have to accept his master,
or bow before idols.
New societies, new orders of being and association, may be founded.
Change is possible.
It can even be achieved with charity, as King showed.
Americans can restore the power of facts and we can renew our faith in plurality.
But, if action requires courage, plurality requires humility.
I may not fully understand the Trump supporter. He may not be “deplorable.”
He may be smarter than I.
The Trump backer may, in turn, not understand some of the threats now facing our constitutional system.
New life gives hope, as anyone who has ever held an infant knows.
But humility gives pause, and maybe makes it more possible to see and hear.
In the Brahms German Requiem, which the composer called a “human requiem,” Brahms mines Christian scripture for what he really wants to say about the true nature of humanity: A baritone sings, “Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days … that I may know how frail I am. Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreadth; and mine age is as nothing before thee …” (Psalm 39.)
And elsewhere the chorus thunders: “For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass …” (1st Letter of Peter.)
Natality gives us the capacity to begin. It should also chasten us.
No one person or group has the answers. None of us knows where history or our own existence is going. None of us fully understands either our enemies or our friends. We scarcely know ourselves.
All of this means not that we should despair, but that we should try. Speak. Found. Act.
A friend of mine says he is not optimistic, but he hopes. Optimism is a game plan. Hope is a light.
So, follow the light, as you perceive it. Because “a child is born,” there is always hope.
Arendt writes: “ .. men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.”
Because of natality, we have the obligations of hope.