“A human being is worth more than his opinions.” — Hannah Arendt, quoted by Roger Berkowitz
“A human being is worth more than his opinions”, Hannah Arendt wrote to her Zionist friend Gershom Scholem in 1946, after he read her critical essay on Zionism and accused her of betraying the Jewish people. So how to value a human being? What, according to Arendt, are we worth? According to the Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz, our value lies in the power of friendship. That’s what he calls, in his new book, A World We Share. It’s what makes us human.
Berkowitz, who runs the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, reminds us that Arendt wasn’t a postmodern relativist who believed everyone’s opinions were equally credible. Facts mattered to her enormously — but a thousand facts about immigration will not verify migration policy, and two people with Harvard doctorates, especially if they are friends, can still disagree about how many people to let into America.
Nor is Berkowitz presenting Hannah Arendt as an anodyne centrist. For Arendt, he argues, people are plural and always will be so. We can, and should, have strong opinions that sometimes cause us to raise our voices in anger. But an argument, she believed, should end in disagreement rather than discord. So, when she and Scholem fell out all over again seventeen years later, this time over her argument about the banality of Nazi evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem, she hoped it wouldn’t affect their friendship. It’s our ability to disagree and reconcile (which isn’t the same as forgiveness) that makes us human, Arendt says. That’s what we should — indeed, must — share if we are to rebuild our broken world.
FIVE TAKEAWAYS
1. Better facts will not fix politics, Arendt argued. Twenty facts about immigration still won’t settle immigration, and two Harvard graduates can still disagree about Trump. The fix-it-with-education assumption goes back to Plato.
2. Reconciliation is not forgiveness. Forgiveness says I might have done the same. Reconciliation says what you did was wrong and I do not forgive you — but I can love a world with you in it. Heidegger got it. Eichmann did not.
3. There are people you cannot have in your world, and that is a judgment, not a rule. Berkowitz’s corollary: the uncle whose opinions you cannot bear is generally not Eichmann.
4. Totalitarianism is organised loneliness, Arendt wrote — so it is hardly a thing of the past. Religion, family and tradition have gone as banisters, leaving the atomised individual and whoever offers him meaning.
5. There is no such thing as a two-week-old friendship. She knew Auden twelve years and said they’d met too late. Friendship takes the time nobody has, which is why it may matter most once machines take the labour.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, where he is Professor of Politics, Philosophy and Human Rights. A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World is published by Yale University Press. He lives in New York.
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Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States, hosted by Andrew Keen, author of The Internet Is Not the Answer and How to Fix the Future. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
00:31 — Another inconvenient woman
04:27 — Is Arendt a postmodernist?
05:15 — Post-metaphysical, not post-truth
07:24 — A refugee all her life
09:04 — Impartiality versus objectivity
13:24 — Totalitarianism as organised loneliness
18:38 — Earthly transcendence
24:05 — Friendship as homeland
31:57 — Heinrich Blücher, her four walls
36:08 — Not a book about civility
37:50 — Why Eichmann had to die
39:10 — Heidegger on his knees
42:00 — Reconciliation is not forgiveness
42:40 — The letter to Scholem
44:34 — Mary McCarthy
49:16 — Why better facts will not fix politics
54:33 — Friendship as judgment, not ideology
59:57 — There is no two-week-old friendship
01:03:26 — Friendship in the age of AI