Where Do We Learn Our Love For the World?
Far too little people are truly in love with the world, in awe of the way it unfolds to them. Anxieties, insecurities, doubts of truly belonging, have reached the center of public discourse because of their urgency amongst young generations.
Hannah Arendt, famous writer and thinker, noticed that this was something we might have to deal with in the past century, and developed a thought that I believe has gained new relevance today. Connectivity, to her, was the key to happiness- to loving the world. Modernity was its threat. In our terms, connectivity and modernity are often seen as inseparable. After all, it is through modern forms of technology that we communicate, and without social media and channels in the abyss of the internet, many might not encounter the voice of another at all.
Hannah Arendt’s approach is both powerful and valuable, as she links together two concepts that do not often occupy the same intellectual space: happiness and politics (more specifically, totalitarianism). I dare say that her work can be received as advice on approaching the everlasting questions: how to escape totalitarianism as a nation? How to find out who we are? How to be happier?
In this article, I quote Marilyn LaFay’s Hannah Arendt and the Specter of Totalitarianism and sometimes include quotes directly from Arendt that LaFay publishes in her work. I recommend her book for quick overviews of Arendt’s theories on totalitarianism.
Arendt asserts that the site of our love for the world –a simple, common adoration– is the public sphere. Yes! The public… The abstract space in which you are visible, seen and observing, where someone will hear you when you raise your voice. The concrete space where you encounter other members of your community to debate, agree, disagree, and propose changes.
We might view the public sphere as similar to the places we call third spaces, as termed by critical theorist Homi K. Bhabha today. Any shared space that is not predetermined for one specific thing, like grocery shopping or medical procedures, can become the host of the public sphere, and in doing so, make the most natural, and powerful shifts in community and politics.
At the time when Hannah Arendt is writing, the world is reorganizing after the Second World War; it's a period of global chaos and transformation, and she, as a German and Jewish immigrant in the US, is right in the middle of it. Yet, despite all that is happening, all the action, reaction, and emotionality, she highlights the phenomenon of loneliness she observes. This withdrawal from the world at a time when everything seems to be happening is strikingly similar to what we experience today. How do we come to terms with a lively world, yet retracted individuals?
Modernity and totalitarianism both play key roles here. Post World War II, as well as contemporary modernity, arguably, “makes it too easy to turn inward”. Totalitarianism, then, threatens to be the product of just that: “totalitarianism comes about due to a sense of loneliness, of feeling superfluous in the world”. Further, LaFay contextualises “as soon as we lose that sense of responsibility toward the maintaining and continuous re-creation of the world, we absent ourselves from establishing “care for the world.”
Care for the world, a phrase like this could be read esoterically, or, as it should, as a catalyst for being active politically, environmentally, socially.
To Arendt, the danger is modernity because it casts the shadow of individualism. The threat is totalitarianism, and the remedy is community– activity in the public sphere.
She writes, “the public sphere is a type of therapeia for the modern age.”
Arendt also argues that a pleasant side-effect arises from meaningful engagement with common members of society: she calls it public happiness: the antidote to the loneliness we observe as a global phenomenon.
“Another experience new for our time entered the game of politics: It turned out that acting is fun. This generation discovered what the eighteenth century had called “public happiness,” which means that when man takes part in public life he opens up for himself a dimension of human experience that otherwise remains closed to him and that in some way constitutes a part of complete “happiness.”
Hannah Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution: A Commentary,” in Crises of the Republic, New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, 1972, p. 203
When Hannah Arendt recorded these insights, she was surrounded by exiled intellectuals, in a foreign land, with a language that wasn’t her own, traumatized by what her home country had done to her people, probably puzzled by the violence that had occurred in her lifetime. Yet, she had the courage to face the puzzles of her society, her generation, her world, with intelligence and unconventionality. I believe through that, she is an inspiration to us all.
What she came up with, this link between happiness and love for the world, political activity, and community, may reshape the way we approach the troubles of our time– with collective energy rather than avoidance.
In establishing the importance of the public sphere, she also criticizes the role of the ‘private’ in our lives. Nowadays, we think about privacy as an entitlement, a right that can -and constantly is- violated. It is a territory in which our existence is undisputed, and any invasion constitutes a direct assault against our personhood. However, that is not what Hannah Arendt meant when she talked about the private.
The private sphere, concretely, could look something like this:
A daily life in which you wake up, consume media on your phone in your own closed off room, feeding into your own personal algorithm. You intake the necessary food as fuel for the day, drive to work in your car, work in a cubicle, take a walk to the coffee shop for lunch, work late to get done what you need to do, head home exhausted, perhaps spending time with your partner, if at all, and going to bed. Caught in the rat race, the matrix, some might call it. The dangers this poses are plenty, and Arendt is not the only one to observe them. A retrieval into the private threatens a distorted view of the world with one’s own circumstances in the center, like a stencil framing all observances. It removes the individual from existing in relation to another.
Despite this factor of magnifying the individual and creating solitude, it is the private sphere that we nowadays employ to grapple with the question “Who Am I?”. There seems to be an understanding of the collective as distracting, and a quality of loneliness to concentrate on oneself. What we witness today are strategies like costly self-discovery journeys, coaching, meditation trends, solo-travelling to “really discover who we were”. Arendt proposes an alternative theory: “ it is only by moving into and acting within the public sphere that each individual can struggle with the question of what he or she is as a person”.
Perhaps, as Arendt suggests, we should also look towards collective energy, community, and shared experiences. Much of who we are as individuals crystallizes itself not in solitude but in exchange. Naturally, the skills to self-reflect, introspect, and care for yourself are traits that matter, and that are practiced internally. However, whether you are loyal, fierce, kind, vulnerable, distant, careful are all traits that you discover strongest when you engage with someone else, not with yourself. The things you care about show themselves through challenging debates, exposure to experiences, stories, and conversations.
Existing in a shared space with others can have the power to create belonging, intellectual stimuli, and curiosity, and ultimately, make you love our world at least a little more.
