Hannah Arendt Explains the Rise of Totalitarian Regimes–and the Strategies Needed to Combat Them
“Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity,” wrote the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, describing the scene leading up to the prominent Holocaust-organizer’s execution. After drinking half a bottle of wine, turning down the offer of religious assistance, and even refusing the black hood offered him at the gallows, he gave a brief, strangely high-spirited speech before the hanging. “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”
These lines come from Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, originally published in 1963 as a five-part series in the New Yorker. Eichmann “was popularly described as an evil mastermind who orchestrated atrocities from a cushy German office, and many were eager to see the so-called ‘desk murderer’ tried for his crimes,” explains the narrator of the animated TED-Ed lesson above, written by University College Dublin political theory professor Joseph Lacey. “But the squeamish man who took the stand seemed more like a dull bureaucrat than a sadistic killer,” and this “disparity between Eichmann’s nature and his actions” inspired Arendt’s famous summation.
A German Jew who fled her homeland in 1933, as Hitler rose to power, Arendt “dedicated herself to understanding how the Nazi regime came to power.” Against the common notion that “the Third Reich was a historical oddity, a perfect storm of uniquely evil leaders, supported by German citizens, looking for revenge after their defeat in World War I,” she argued that “the true conditions behind this unprecedented rise of totalitarianism weren’t specific to Germany.” Rather, in modernity, “individuals mainly appear in the social world to produce and consume goods and services,” which fosters ideologies “in which individuals were seen only for their economic value, rather than their moral and political capacities.”
In such isolating conditions, she thought, “participating in the regime becomes the only way to recover a sense of identity and community. While condemning Eichmann’s “monstrous actions, Arendt saw no evidence that Eichmann himself was uniquely evil. She saw him as a distinctly ordinary man who considered obedience the highest form of civic duty — and for Arendt, it was exactly this ordinariness that was most terrifying.” According to her theory, there was nothing particularly German about all of this: any sufficiently modernized culture could produce an Eichmann, a citizen who defines himself by participation in his society regardless of that society’s larger aims. This led her to the conclusion that “thinking is our greatest weapon against the threats of modernity,” some of which have become only more threatening over the past six decades.
Related content:
Take Hannah Arendt’s Final Exam for Her 1961 Course “On Revolution”
Watch Hannah Arendt’s Final Interview (1973)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...George Orwell’s Political Views, Explained in His Own Words
Among modern-day liberals and conservatives alike, George Orwell enjoys practically sainted status. And indeed, throughout his body of work, including but certainly not limited to his oft-assigned novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, one can find numerous implicitly or explicitly expressed political views that please either side of that divide — or, by definition, views that anger each side. The readers who approve of Orwell’s open advocacy for socialism, for example, are probably not the same ones who approve of his indictment of language policing. To understand what he actually believed, we can’t trust current interpreters who employ his words for their own ends; we must return to the words themselves.
Hence the structure of the video above from Youtuber Ryan Chapman, which offers “an overview of George Orwell’s political views, guided by his reflections on his own career.” Chapman begins with Orwell’s essay “Why I Write,” in which the latter declares that “in a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.”
His awakening occurred in 1936, when he went to cover the Spanish Civil War as a journalist but ended up joining the fight against Franco, a cause that aligned neatly with his existing pro-working class and anti-authoritarian emotional tendencies.
After a bullet in the throat took Orwell out of the war, his attention shifted to the grand-scale hypocrisies he’d detected in the Soviet Union. It became “of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was,” he writes in the preface to the Ukrainian edition of the allegorical satire Animal Farm. “His concerns with the Soviet Union were part of a broader concern on the nature of truth and the way truth is manipulated in politics,” Chapman explains. An important part of his larger project as a writer was to shed light on the widespread “tendency to distort reality according to their political convictions,” especially among the intellectual classes.
“This kind of thing is frightening to me,” Orwell writes in “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” “because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world”: a condition for the rise of ideology “not only forbids you to express — even to think — certain thoughts, but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct.” Such is the reality he envisions in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a reaction to the totalitarianism he saw manifesting in the USSR, Germany, and Italy. “But he also thought it was spreading in more subtle forms back home, in England, through socially enforced, unofficial political orthodoxy.” No matter how supposedly enlightened the society we live in, there are things we’re formally or informally not allowed to acknowledge; Orwell reminds us to think about why.
Related content:
An Animated Introduction to George Orwell
George Orwell Reveals the Role & Responsibility of the Writer “In an Age of State Control”
George Orwell Explains in a Revealing 1944 Letter Why He’d Write 1984
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...A New Analysis of Beethoven’s DNA Reveals That Lead Poisoning Could Have Caused His Deafness
Despite the intense scrutiny paid to the life and work of Ludwig van Beethoven for a couple of centuries now, the revered composer still has certain mysteries about him. Some of them he surely never intended to clarify, like the identity of “Immortal Beloved”; others he explicitly requested be made public, like the cause of his death. The trouble is that, for generation after generation, nobody could quite figure out what that cause was. But recent genetic analysis of his hair, which we first featured last year here on Open Culture, has shed new light on the matter of what killed Beethoven — or rather, what increasingly ailed him up until he died at the age of 56.
This effort “began a few years ago, when researchers realized that DNA analysis had advanced enough to justify an examination of hair said to have been clipped from Beethoven’s head by anguished fans as he lay dying,” writes the New York Times’ Gina Kolata.
With the genuine samples separated from the frauds, a test for heavy metals revealed that “one of Beethoven’s locks had 258 micrograms of lead per gram of hair and the other had 380 micrograms”: 64 times and 95 times the normal amount, respectively. Chronic lead poisoning, possibly caused by Beethoven’s habit of drinking cheap wine sweetened with “lead sugar,” could have caused the “unrelenting abdominal cramps, flatulence and diarrhea” that plagued him in his lifetime.
It could also have hastened the deafness that had become nearly complete by age thirty. “Over the years, Beethoven consulted many doctors, trying treatment after treatment for his ailments and his deafness, but found no relief,” Kolata writes. “At one point, he was using ointments and taking 75 medicines, many of which most likely contained lead.” Alas, the true danger of lead poisoning, a condition that had been acknowledged since antiquity, wouldn’t be taken seriously until the late nineteenth century. According to the research so far, even this degree of lead exposure wouldn’t have been fatal by itself. But with a bit less of it, would Beethoven have completed his tenth symphony, or even continued on to an eleventh? Add that to the still-growing list of unanswerable questions about him.
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The Secrets of Beethoven’s Fifth, the World’s Most Famous Symphony
The Math Behind Beethoven’s Music
Read Beethoven’s Lengthy Love Letter to His Mysterious “Immortal Beloved” (1812)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Jerry Seinfeld Delivers Commencement Address at Duke University: You Will Need Humor to Get Through the Human Experience
This weekend, Jerry Seinfeld gave the commencement speech at Duke University and offered the graduates his three keys to life: 1. bust your ass, 2. pay attention, and 3. fall in love. Then, 10 minutes later, he added essentially a fourth key to life: “Do not lose your sense of humor. You can have no idea at this point in your life how much you’re going to need it to get through. Not enough of life makes sense for you to be able to survive it without humor.” “It is worth the sacrifice of an occasional discomfort to have some laughs. Don’t lose that.” “Humor is the most powerful, most survival-essential quality you will ever have or need to navigate through the human experience.” Amen.
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Read More...Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)
Just a couple of days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted out a video promoting, “the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created.” The response has been overwhelming, and overwhelmingly negative: for many viewers, the ad’s imagery of a hydraulic press crushing a heap of musical instruments, art supplies, and vintage entertainment into a single tablet inadvertently articulated a discomfort they’ve long felt with technology’s direction in the past couple of decades. As the novelist Hari Kunzru put it, “Crushing the symbols of human creativity to produce a homogenized branded slab is pretty much where the tech industry is at in 2024.”
One wonders whether this would have surprised Aldous Huxley. He understood, as he explains in the 1961 BBC interview above, that “if you plant the seed of applied science or technology, it proceeds to grow, and it grows according to the laws of its own being. And the laws of its being are not necessarily the same as the laws of our being.”
Even six decades ago, he and certain others had the sense, which has since become fairly common, that “man is being subjected to his own inventions, that he is now the victim of his own technology”; that “the development of recent social and scientific history has created a world in which man seems to be made for technology rather than the other way around.”
Having written his acclaimed dystopian novel Brave New World thirty years earlier, Huxley was established as a seer of possible technology-driven totalitarian futures. He understood that “we are a little reluctant to embark upon technology, to allow technology to take over,” but that, “in the long run, we generally succumb,” allowing ourselves to be mastered by our own creations. In this, he resembles the Julia of Byron’s Don Juan, who, “whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’ – consented.” Huxley also knew that “it is possible to make people content with their servitude,” even more effectively in modernity than antiquity: “you can provide them with bread and circuses, and you can provide them with endless amounts of distraction and propaganda” — delivered, here in the twenty-first-century, straight to the device in our hand.
Related content:
Aldous Huxley Predicts in 1950 What the World Will Look Like in the Year 2000
An Animated Aldous Huxley Identifies the Dystopian Threats to Our Freedom (1958)
Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)
Hear Aldous Huxley Narrate His Dystopian Masterpiece Brave New World
Aldous Huxley, Dying of Cancer, Left This World Tripping on LSD (1963)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading “Howl” (1956)
Image by Michiel Hendryckx, via Wikimedia Commons
Occasionally I slip into an ivory tower mentality in which the idea of a banned book seems quaint—associated with silly scandals over the tame sex scenes in James Joyce or D.H. Lawrence. After all, I think, we live in an age when bestseller lists are topped (no pun) by tawdry fan fiction like Fifty Shades of Grey. Nothing’s sacred. But this notion is a massive blind spot on my part; the whole awareness-raising mission of the annual Banned Books Week seeks to dispel such complacency. Books are challenged, suppressed, and banned all the time in public schools and libraries, even if we’ve moved past outright government censorship of the publishing industry.
It’s also easy to forget that Allen Ginsberg’s generation-defining poem “Howl” was once almost a casualty of censorship. The most likely successor to Walt Whitman’s vision, Ginsberg’s oracular utterances did not sit well with U.S. Customs, who in 1957 tried to seize every copy of the British second printing. When that failed, police arrested the poem’s publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and he and Ginsberg’s “Howl” were put on trial for obscenity. Apparently, phrases like “cock and endless balls” did not sit well with the authorities. But the court vindicated them all.
The story of Howl’s publication begins in 1955, when 29-year-old Ginsberg read part of the poem at the Six Gallery, where Ferlinghetti—owner of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore—sat in attendance. Deciding that Ginsberg’s epic lament “knocked the sides out of things,” Ferlinghetti offered to publish “Howl” and brought out the first edition in 1956. Prior to this reading, “Howl” existed in the form of an earlier poem called “Dream Record, 1955,” which poet Kenneth Rexroth told Ginsberg sounded “too formal… like you’re wearing Columbia University Brooks Brothers ties.” Ginsberg’s rewrite jettisoned the ivy league decorum.
Unfortunately, no audio exists of that first reading, but above you can hear the first recorded reading of “Howl,” from February, 1956 at Portland’s Reed College. The recording sat dormant in Reed’s archives for over fifty years until scholar John Suiter rediscovered it in 2008. In it, Ginsberg reads his great prophetic work, not with the cadences of a street preacher or jazzman—both of which he had in his repertoire—but in an almost robotic monotone with an undertone of manic urgency. Ginsberg’s reading, before an intimate group of students in a dormitory lounge, took place only just before the first printing of the poem in the City Lights edition.
Note: This post originally appeared on our site in 2013. Over the years, the audio originally featured in the post, along with many of the links, went dead. So we gave everything a refresh and brought it back.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch an Enthusiast Drive the First Car Ever Made, the 1885 Mercedes Benz
In 1885, Karl Benz built what’s now considered the first modern automobile. According to the Mercedes Benz website, the car featured a “compact high-speed single-cylinder four-stroke engine installed horizontally at the rear, a tubular steel frame … and three wire-spoked wheels. The engine output was 0.75 hp (0.55 kW).” Two years after its invention, Karl Benz’s wife Bertha proved that the car was ready for prime time, driving her early Benz from Mannheim to Pforzheim. After that groundbreaking drive, the Benz went into production, becoming the first commercially available automobile in history.
Above, you can watch a car enthusiast known as “Mr. Benz” take the nineteenth-century car for a spin. Below, watch a re-enactment of Bertha’s historic drive.
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Read More...
Read the Uncompromising Letter That Steve Albini (RIP) Wrote to Nirvana Before Producing In Utero (1993)
Today, Steve Albini, the musician and producer of important albums by Nirvana, PJ Harvey, the Pixies and many others, passed away in Chicago, at the all-too-early age of 61. In tribute, we’re bringing you this classic 2013 post from our archive.
Journeyman record producer Steve Albini (he prefers to be called a “recording engineer”) is perhaps the crankiest man in rock. This is not an effect of age. He’s always been that way, since the emergence of his scary, no-frills post-punk band Big Black and later projects Rapeman and Shellac. In his current role as elder statesman of indie rock and more, Chicago’s Albini has developed a reputation as kind of a hardass. He’s also a consummate professional who musicians want to know and work with. From the sound of the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa to Joanna Newsom’s Ys, Albini has had a hand in some of the defining albums of the last thirty plus years, and there is good reason for that: nothing sounds like an Albini record. His method is all his own, and his results—minimalist, dynamic, and raw—are impossible to argue with.
So when Nirvana embarked on recording their final, painful (in hindsight) album In Utero, they asked Albini to steer them away from the more major-label sound of the breakout Nevermind, produced by Butch Vig. True to form, the typically verbose Albini sent a four-page typed letter in response. The letter (first page above—see the rest here) is a testament to perhaps the most thoughtful producer since Quincy Jones and lays out Albini’s philosophy in very fine detail. Two sample paragraphs serve as a thesis:
I’m only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band’s own perception of their music and existence. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you. I’ll work circles around you. I’ll rap your head with a ratchet…
I have worked on hundreds of records (some great, some good, some horrible, a lot in the courtyard), and I have seen a direct correlation between the quality of the end result and the mood of the band throughout the process. If the record takes a long time, and everyone gets bummed and scrutinizes every step, then the recordings bear little resemblance to the live band, and the end result is seldom flattering. Making punk records is definitely a case where more “work” does not imply a better end result. Clearly you have learned this yourselves and appreciate the logic.
Albini decries any interference from the “front office bulletheads,” or record company execs (his feuds with such people are legendary), and makes it quite clear that he’s there to serve the interests of the band and their sound, not the product of a marketing campaign. While Albini has issued many a surly manifesto over the years, this statement of his craft is maybe the most comprehensive. He is driven by what he calls a “kinship” with the bands he works with. And his passionate commitment to musicians and to quality sound makes him one of the most artistically virtuous people working in popular music today. For more on In Utero, read Dave Grohl’s Rolling Stone interview here. Below, see Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Steve Albini discuss the now-famous letter to Nirvana.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch Animations Showing How Humans Migrated Across the World Over the Past 60,000 Years
Ex Africa semper aliquid novi. Attributed to various luminaries of antiquity, that saying (the probable inspiration for Isak Dinesen’s poem “Ex Africa,” itself the probable inspiration for her memoir Out of Africa, which in turn was loosely adapted into Sydney Pollack’s Oscar-lavished film) translates to “Out of Africa, always something new.” But it’s perhaps more notable that out of Africa came something quite old indeed: humankind itself, which over the past 60,000 years has been spreading ever farther across the world. You can see how it happened in the Insider Science video above, which animates those 60 millennia of global migration in less than two and a half minutes.
For more detail, consider supplementing that video with this one from GeoNomad, which tracks the outward expansion of humanity through DNA research. “Scientific research has shown that the 7.5 billion people who occupy the earth today are the descendants of a woman who lived 200,000 years ago,” explains its narration.
“Scientists call her Mitochondrial Eve,” in reference to the DNA located in mitochondria, a type of energy-producing organelle known as “the powerhouse of the cell.” Both male and female humans possess mitochondrial DNA, of course, but only female mitochondrial DNA passes down to offspring; hence our not talking about a Mitochondrial Adam.
DNA mapping has allowed us to trace the genetic and geographical history of the Mitochondrial Eve’s descendants. Some left for other parts of Africa, and others for what we now know as the Middle East and India. Whether by wanderlust or necessity — and given the harrowing conditions implied by their low survival rate, the latter probably had more to do with it — certain groups continued on to modern-day southeast Asia and Australia. It was through western Asia that the first humans entered neanderthal-populated Europe as early as 56,800 years ago. There, some 546 centuries later, Terence would write, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”: a declaration perhaps made in the suspicion that, when you go back far enough, we’re all one big family.
Related content:
New Study Finds That Humans Are 33,000 Years Older Than We Thought
How Humans Migrated Across The Globe Over 200,000 Years: An Animated Look
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Cats Migrated to Europe 7,000 Years Earlier Than Once Thought
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...A Bicycle Trip: Watch an Animation of The World’s First LSD Trip in 1943
On August 16, 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann was synthesizing a new compound called lysergic acid diethylamide-25 when he got a couple of drops on his finger. The chemical, later known worldwide as LSD, absorbed into his system, and, soon after, he experienced an intense state of altered consciousness. In other words, he tripped.
Intrigued by the experience, Hofmann dosed himself with 250 micrograms of LSD and then biked his way home through the streets of Basel, making him the first person ever to intentionally drop acid. The event was later commemorated by psychonauts and LSD enthusiasts as “Bicycle Day.”
Italian animators Lorenzo Veracini, Nandini Nambiar and Marco Avoletta imagine what Hofmann might have seen during his historic journey in their 2008 short A Bicycle Trip.
The film shows Hofmann riding through the Swiss medieval town as he sees visions like a trail of flowers coming off a woman in red, cobblestones coming alive and scurrying away, and a whole forest becoming transparent before the marveling scientist’s eyes. The film also shows Hofmann slamming into a fence, illustrating why it’s never a good idea to drive under the influence of hallucinogens.
After his early experiments, Albert Hofmann became convinced that LSD is not only a powerful potential treatment for the mentally ill but also a valuable bridge between the spiritual and the scientific. He called the substance “medicine for the soul.”
If you’re interested in learning more about the turbulent history of the drug, check out below the 2002 documentary Hofmann’s Potion, by Canadian filmmaker Connie Littlefield, which traces Hofmann’s invention from being a promising psychological treatment, to counterculture symbol, to banned substance. The 56-minute doc features footage and interviews with such psychedelic luminaries as Aldous Huxley, Stanislav Grof, Richard Alpert (AKA Ram Dass) along with Hofmann himself.
Hofmann was always uncomfortable with the casual way the ‘60s counterculture used his invention. “[LSD] is not just fun,” he says in Littlefield’s movie. “It is a very serious experiment.”
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow her at @jonccrow.
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