Loneliness and Authoritarianism
Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and journalist at The Atlantic. Ezra Klein is an American journalist, political analyst, New York Times columnist, and the host of “The Ezra Klein Show” podcast. I offer you excerpts from Klein’s May 17 interview with Applebaum as she and he discussed Hannah Arendt’s 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Why? Both the book and the discussion are chilling in their revelations of our world – and even our Church – today. I am inserting a brief overview of the discussion and the link itself because I have excerpted here only the parts I saw as relevant to us in our struggle to reform and renew the Church. I chose some as ideas for us and some as warnings to us. First, however, is the larger perspective Ezra Klein summarized for us:
The experience of reading Hannah Arendt’s 1951 classic “The Origins of Totalitarianism” in the year 2022 is a disorienting one. Although Arendt is writing primarily about Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, her descriptions often capture aspects of our present moment more clearly than those of us living through it can ever hope to.
Arendt writes of entire populations who “had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” She describes the masses’ escape from reality as ‘a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist.’ She points out that in societies riddled with elite hypocrisy, ‘it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.’
You can access the podcast or transcript here.
Toward the end of her book, Hannah Arendt maintained that what makes a society vulnerable to takeover by authoritarians and totalitarians is loneliness. She defined loneliness as “the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man (sic).” This kind of loneliness emanates from a much deeper place than the isolation we may experience as a result of not congregating with others, being part of groups, or having personal or institutional connections. It’s the kind of loneliness that, as Klein describes it, permeates our lives “in an almost metaphysical way”, when we actually lose our sense “of belonging to a shared sense of meaning, belonging to a story, feeling a place for yourself, whether that place is literal as in a church, or just conceptual, as in part of the narrative of your own country and the time in which you live.”
I thought about this observation captured why so many of us stay in the Church that maddens us: we all, as human beings, need to be in a narrative – with others, with shared values and experiences, with a history – or -even a mythology. And here is where Anne Applebaum opened new perspectives for me.
The thing I think that we’ve learned in the last few years is that that experience and that narrative don’t even have to be real (Bolding mine). So I think people are genuinely nostalgic for past institutions, or what they imagine past institutions to have been. So they’re nostalgic for small communities that they think they remember from when they grew up, when life was simpler and everyone believed more or less the same thing. They’re nostalgic for, I think, an experience of religion that doesn’t always exist anymore, you know, where everybody in a single community went to the same church and thus believed the same thing.
We do need the narratives, but the real danger is we need them even if they are not real. Applebaum gives the example of people who fall for QAnon conspiracies and their prophet Q because of their desperate need to be part of an ongoing story. They can now belong to a community in which their views are accepted and reinforced, but, even more importantly, they “have access to special and secret information that most Americans don’t have. So you’re a community that has special knowledge. You’ve been gifted with this special access to a different reality.”
Wasn’t that, and isn’t that, just what our Church still wants us to think is the kind of community we’re in? Even more, as Applebaum warns us:
And once you’re inside it, it’s extremely powerful. And it turns out that it’s more powerful than the real reality. And, actually, Arendt anticipates this. She writes why propaganda is effective, because many people do not believe in anything visible in the reality of their own experience. They do not trust their eyes and ears, but only their imaginations.
All of this leads us to one of Arendt’s most famous quotes: With this mindset we can actually come to think “everything is possible and nothing is true”. Applebaum clarifies: “I’ve seen in a lot of studies of anti-liberal thinkers this sense that people need myths and spirit and stories and communion and narrative to thrive, not just for politics to work, but for them to thrive.”
And so, it’s complicated. Embracing a myth, a narrative, as your own, can be invigorating, inspiring and, therefore, valuable: Applebaum again:
The importance of myth, the importance of feeling of unity, the importance of history and giving people a version of history that is reinforcing as well as just merely educating, all those things “are really important…It’s the appeal of that liberalism, but liberalism with this kind of muscular bravado attached to it that people miss and that they admire in Ukraine right now.
Reinforcing, yes, but also dangerous:
But in the modern world, it’s a feeling that can be evoked not by churches and priests, or by civic institutions and congregations and real-life organizations, it can be evoked online. And that means it’s much easier to create these kinds of communities, and to give them that reinforcing power, because when people are surrounded all the time by the same images, the same messages, when they see them on their phones and their laptops and so on, it has the effect of seeming more real than what they can see out the window.
What then do we do? If we need to be part of a story, to belong in a narrative, to experience the thrill of myth and its drama in order to thrive, do we need the Church if only to help prevent ourselves and our children looking for dangerous “elsewheres”? And, if so, what kind of Church?
As Ezra Klein pointed out, we do need some alternative versions because eventually these old narratives lose their hold (Take a look at empty pews or our scattered selves), and reality sets in. He argues, “You can tell people an alternative story for some time, and they’ll believe it for some time, but the more they actually have to live under it, which is different than when you’re simply an opposition movement or a conspiracy theory, the more they actually have to live under the consequences of your story, the more something else actually takes hold.”
The ”something else that takes hold” can be positive. I argue it can be us and those like us. Our podcasters returned to Anna Arendt, this time to note what she missed, especially in her predictions for post-1950 generations. Condensed into one sentence: “She underestimated the creativity of Western societies, of Western democracies, and American democracy”.
What does that mean for us as we grapple with breaking, breaking free from, or – more challengingly – reforming and renewing, our Church? Out from under its patriarchal, hierarchal, authoritarianism, and even at times totalitarianism, we still have the ability to wax creative, to use our liberty to generate and fortify our own shared sense of meaning, to reinvigorate old narratives by integrating new stories to which all relate and in which all gain a sense of belonging. And here’s another gift Klein and Applebaum say Hannah Arendt, in her pessimism, failed to notice:
She missed the way in which democratic societies would be so much more innovative economically, but also kind of sociologically, that problems would be solved in ways that they couldn’t be solved in autocracies … And the way in which Western economies and societies simply became so much more sophisticated than totalitarian dictatorships, and they became able to solve problems that the dictatorships themselves barely could even know existed — all of that, I think, she just underestimated.
Oh, yes. We are champion problem-solvers in our own reform movements, too. We’ve had a long, long time to hone our skills. And so, Powers-That-Be: Don’t ever underestimate us!