The Tocqueville Review is a French-American bilingual journal devoted to the comparative study of social change, primarily in Europe and the United States.
Isolation, Loneliness, and Solitude: Hannah Arendt’s Triumvirate
After months of collectively weathering crisis after crisis, so many of us have felt unmoored. There’s so much uncertainty surrounding our current moment. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic, and scientists don’t yet fully understand the novel coronavirus. America is mired in an ongoing economic crisis.
Mass protests over racial inequality and violence have swept the nation, drawing public attention to our broken political systems and institutions. We’re grappling with the erosion of American democracy itself.
The only certain outcome appears to be mass illness and death from Covid-19. We are indeed living in what the German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt called “dark times.”
Arendt is one of those writers, who simply reminds us to stop and “think what we are doing.” If, as she put it, “even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination,” then her ideas about solitude, loneliness, and the human condition help shed light on our common world.
Hannah Arendt knew what it felt like to be lonely.
For eighteen years, Arendt was a stateless person. In 1933, she was arrested by the Gestapo and detained for eight days for conducting illegal research for a Zionist organization.
After her release, she immediately fled Nazi Germany. Unanchored, seeking safe harbor, Arendt drifted around Europe for eight years, spending time in Prague, Geneva, and Paris.
She was held for nearly six weeks in an internment camp in Gurs before narrowly escaping to Montauban, then Lisbon, and ultimately to New York City in 1941.
Arendt finally found refuge in the United States, but it would be another ten years before she received American citizenship. Her itinerant existence was, at times, isolating and lonely.
But she maintained “a little solidarity” with others who had experienced exile from Europe, and in a letter to her mentor and friend, Karl Jaspers, she wrote that without that solidarity, “every last one of us would simply have gone under.”
Objecting to the term “refugee,” Arendt preferred the language of “statelessness,” “uprootedness,” or “homelessness.”
From her perspective, refugees were people “driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held.” But while Jews and others persecuted by the Nazis were indeed forced to seek refuge, they had “committed no acts,” as she put it, nor “dreamt of having any radical opinion”—they were persecuted, in other words, not for what they said or did but for who they were.
With a great deal of grit and good fortune, she escaped with her life, but she lost nearly everything. “We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life,”.
We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives.
Those experiences fundamentally shaped Arendt’s ideas about isolation (Isolation), loneliness (Verlassenheit), and solitude (Einsamkeit)—the triumvirate that would be at the heart of much of her subsequent thinking.
In one of her formative essays, “Ideology and Terror” (1953), Arendt distinguished isolation from loneliness. Isolation was a kind of paralysis that threatened political life by making it impossible for individuals to come together, to act in concert, to pursue a common concern.
Now think about this folks in terms of our current situation under pandemic restrictions. Arendt stated, “Destructive of power and the capacity for action,” isolation was pre-totalitarian, a state of aloneness that prepared the soil for the growth of tyrannical government. “Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it is always its result,” she wrote.
Could this be a reason we continue to see a push to keep us isolated during this pandemic?
Feeling helpless was a distinctive feature of isolation, since “power always comes from men acting together” and “isolated men are powerless by definition.” Once isolation took root, terror alienated the helpless individual from the shared world, from her fellow human beings, by using lies and propaganda to remake reality and rewrite history and by preventing collective action.
Isolation and terror transformed the public sphere into an unrecognizable, unmapped wilderness.
“Deserted by all human companionship,” deserted even by herself, the lonely individual was left feeling that she “had no place in the world.” If isolation concerned only the political sphere, loneliness concerned “human life as a whole,” and was the hallmark of totalitarian government.
The peculiar thing about totalitarianism, as Arendt understood it, was that it destroyed both public and private life, leaving the lonely individual politically and existentially homeless. As a stateless person, Arendt learned that lonely people are abandoned people who don’t belong “to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”
Arendt was immune to a blind faith in the democratic promise. She had lived through the Weimar period, she had witnessed the rot and ruination of Western institutions, and because of that experience, she understood that even democracies like America were not inoculated against totalitarian temptations.
Today, in the midst of a global pandemic, we have found ourselves physically cut off from one another, forced into varying degrees of social distancing and isolation.
Many of us have felt helpless, unable to act to alter our circumstances. Many of us have felt uprooted from our regular routines and alienated from our shared world. Many of us are lonely. And what Arendt illuminates for us in this moment ought to serve as a warning: in non-totalitarian societies, it is loneliness that prepares people for totalitarian domination.
What perpetuates such tyrannical regimes, Arendt argues, is manipulation by isolation — something most effectively accomplished by the divisiveness of “us vs. them” narratives. She writes:
Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about.
Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.
This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together…; isolated men are powerless by definition.
Although isolation is not necessarily the same as loneliness, Arendt notes that loneliness can become both the seedbed and the perilous consequence of the isolation effected by tyrannical regimes.
In isolation when the most elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one’s own to the common world, is destroyed, isolation becomes altogether unbearable… Isolation then becomes loneliness.
While isolation concerns only the political realm of life, loneliness concerns human life as a whole. Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities.
But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.
I found an article by Rod Dreher a senior editor at The American Conservative that explores this concept further.
In 1951, Hannah Arendt published The Origins Of Totalitarianism, a detailed study of why, in the twentieth century, nations had succumbed to Fascism and Communism.
Though the two totalitarian systems were at opposite ideological poles, both emerged from similar social and political conditions, Arendt found – conditions that are strikingly present in America today. Among them:
Loneliness and social atomization. Totalitarian movements, said Arendt, are “mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.”
“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world,” she continued. “is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.”
She wrote those words in the early 1950s.
This past January, before the long Covid-19 emergency, health insurer Cigna released results of a survey finding that 61 percent of Americans consider themselves to be lonely. Young Americans are far lonelier than the old: seven in ten Millennials call themselves lonely, with nearly eight in 10 (79 percent) of Gen Zers self-diagnosing as such.
Loss of faith in hierarchies and institutions. Loneliness is politically significant because it leaves the masses hungry for a sense of community. In a healthy society, an individual could find fellowship and common purpose through the institutions of civil society – political parties, churches, civic clubs, sports leagues, and the like.
But Americans have been dropping out of mediating institutions steadily since the 1960s. Meanwhile trust in basic institutions – political, media, religious, legal, medical, and so forth – is at dramatic lows.
Young adults under 40 are the most religiously unaffiliated generation in American history, and though strongly liberal and Democratic in their political preferences, are also the least likely to embrace a political party.
In Europe of the 1920s, said Arendt, the first indication of the coming totalitarianism was the failure of established parties to attract younger members, and the willingness of the passive masses to consider radical alternatives to discredited establishment parties.
Socialism is still fairly opposed among Generation X and older Americans, but those who came of age after the Cold War feel much more warmly towards the radical left.
Embracing transgressiveness. In both pre-Bolshevik Russia and pre-Nazi Germany, elites reveled in acts of rebellion that made fun of traditions and standards, moral and otherwise (Tearing down statues?). They also took pleasure in overturning institutions and established practices.
“The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it,” wrote Arendt.
Her words apply with eerie similarity to the upheaval on today’s university campuses, within the media, and elite culture in general.
Susceptibility to propaganda and ideology. Whether out of cynicism or misplaced idealism, the willingness to surrender one’s moral responsibility to be honest for the sake of a politically useful narrative opened the door to tyranny.
In pre-totalitarian nations, wrote Arendt, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.” Does this sound familiar?
One considers the New York Times’s Pulitzer-winning “1619 Project,” which declares that the United States was founded for the purpose of defending slavery. Despite heavy criticism, even from historians of the left, the 1619 Project has been adapted for thousands of classrooms, and optioned by Oprah Winfrey and Lionsgate studios for television and film projects.
Valuing loyalty over competence. “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first- rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intellect and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” wrote Arendt.
All politicians prize loyalty, but few would regard it as the most important quality in government, and even fewer would admit it. But President Donald Trump is a rule- breaker in many ways. He once said, “I value loyalty above everything else— more than brains, more than drive, and more than energy.”
This statement by Trump pushed liberals over the edge. But how can liberals complain? Loyalty to the group or the tribe is at the core of leftist identity politics. This is at the root of “cancel culture,” in which those who oppose it, however minor their infractions, find themselves cast into outer darkness.
Arendt believed that a society in which individuals are disconnected from each other is most vulnerable to totalitarian leaders.
“When people are atomized, a movement or a strongman arises and he offers a story or an ideology which claims to explain everything, why people are unhappy,” stated Robert Eaglestone in a recent article in “Our Times”. “This story becomes more and more powerful. You can’t argue with people who become Nazis or Stalinists because there’s only one way to think.”
So, based on what I have shared with you today, I think you can begin to see how the current isolationism we have experienced as a result of the pandemic has contributed to the chaos we are seeing in our cities.
Was Hannah Arendt right. Does loneliness lead to authoritarianism.
What comes next? Let me leave you with a quote by French philosopher Gustav Lebon, author of “The Crowd”.
What motivates individuals to join a crowd?
When an individual lives his life as an individual – that is, when he forced to take responsibility for his life – he is apt to feel a crushing burden and sense of impotence he can’t seem to shake.
In joining a crowd or a mass movement, the individual is temporarily relieved of this responsibility and sense of impotence, and comes to feel that he is capable of shaking the foundations of the earth:
“In crowds the foolish, ignorant, and envious persons are freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness, and are possessed instead by the notion of brutal and temporary but immense strength.”