Over recent years, few writers have been quoted as incessantly as Hannah Arendt. Or rather misquoted — for though Donald Trump’s first presidential win catapulted Arendt’s 1951 book on totalitarianism back into the bestseller list, her fans have largely wallowed in anachronism. Avoiding her most arresting insights, they have instead reimagined Arendt as a kind of Resistance liberal, offering warnings of what happens when “politics as usual” is shamefully disrupted.

“Once again,” wrote Anne Applebaum in her new introduction to the re-publication of Origins of Totalitarianism in 2024, “we are living in a world that Arendt would recognize.” Which makes Arendt’s own response to America’s 200th anniversary so useful now, as Trump’s cage-filled 250th celebrations reach their climax. For the truth is that the philosopher’s own example actually proves she was far more thoughtful about her present than her contemporary followers are of theirs — even if her own hunt for usable versions of American patriotism ended up fomenting its own mistakes.

The most critical Arendt ever got of the United States was in a public lecture in Boston, 50 years ago, to mark the 200th birthday of her adopted land the year before it was celebrated. It wasn’t, she reflected, an anniversary that inspired much confidence in the future. Nor was the problem one disastrous politician, even one as nefarious as Richard Nixon. It was, rather, where capitalism and empire were taking the country, as Arendt looked out at “an increasing disarray in the very foundations of our political life”.

In Southeast Asia, America had gone down to ignominious defeat. The attempt to prop up South Vietnam after the “peace” in 1973 had only led to more war, and the emergency airlift of anyone who could make it out from the roof of the United States embassy in 1975. (Arendt gave special attention to the now almost forgotten “Operation Babylift”, which spirited thousands of orphans out of Saigon before the city fell.)

At home, Nixon’s resignation in 1974 came with soul-searching about how executive mendacity and secrecy undermined trust in government. Indeed, the Pentagon Papers publication had revealed — Arendt suggested — that the agonizing loss in Vietnam wasn’t half as bad as the fact that it took so long for Americans to register the truth about the war, since modern “public relations”, and not just age-old concealment and lying, had obscured their failures.

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Instead of celebrating anniversaries simplemindedly, Arendt concluded, it was time to confront how badly the American experiment had gone awry. The crimes, mistakes, and sins of the immediate past were like chickens coming home to roost, in the phrase made famous by Malcolm X and which Arendt chose as the title of her speech when it was published in the New York Review of Books.

Arendt claimed that returning to their beginnings could inspire Americans in crisis to overcome their blunders in the mid-20th century. The deeper past of the American founding, she suggested, offered a chance of transcending them. Let us, she admonished, not “forget these years of aberration lest we become wholly unworthy of the glorious beginnings 200 years ago”. In this, she channeled the spirit of her earlier classic On Revolution, which had presented the American Founding as a modern reprise of austere Roman republicanism. She disdained what many people, then and now, take to the beating heart of the American project: whether law, liberalism, or rights. Rather, Arendt thought, America had once exemplified political action for the sake of collective freedom, a value she worried was dying in the modern world.

Amid the celebrants of her day, Arendt certainly refused to look away from the anxiety and depression that the following two centuries had produced. Yet she, too, was stumbling — not so much because of her misunderstandings of the 1770s, as because she confused the stakes of the Seventies. Five decades on from Arendt’s speech, America ended up in the age of Trump — as a direct consequence of the forces unleashed in her day. But she didn’t see them coming.

In her piece, for instance, Arendt mourned “the erosion of American power” following the Vietnam fiasco. But when she mounted the Boston lectern to celebrate the Founding, she didn’t imagine that the Democrats and Republicans alike would move to renew America’s global power over subsequent decades: including its military muscle. For the Democrats especially, the catastrophic defeat of peace candidate George McGovern in 1972 cast the die. From Mogadishu to Kabul, other failed wars, and countless casualties, invariably followed.

The militarism of an American hegemon rehabilitated in the 50 years since Vietnam, alongside the greater damage it wrought around the world, left too many disaffected voters, displeased by the ignominy of their country’s record. It also left an opening for Trump to run twice as a peace candidate — even if he finally and unceremoniously betrayed that promise. All this is a reminder that, as great a theorist of the imperial origins of totalitarianism as she was, Arendt never did glimpse the possibility that America itself had been, or could indeed become, an empire.

Arendt had other ideological blind spots too. Her political theory had always resonated with the ideal of participatory democracy in things like the Port Huron Statement, the 1962 manifesto propounded by student activists. Yet she always preferred to recognize the political action stemming from the deep past of the American Revolution, or Greece and Rome before it, and perhaps in some evanescent modern situations like the French resistance or the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

In her lecture, Arendt raised doubts about her American modernity and its consumerist economy, its mendacious ad-men and image-managers. They were, she said, exactly what made the American Founding indispensable, because it demonstrated public-mindedness beyond private gain or pleasure.

Unfortunately, though, Arendt’s failure to anticipate a renaissance for war was matched by a misrecognition of economic transformation. She did not anticipate that the economic instabilities of the Seventies were giving rise to the neoliberalism of the era since. She acknowledged the economic events, inflation most notably, that defined her decade when the 250th ceremonies were held across the country. Yet in her flawed belief that failed wars are fueled by inflation — a consequence, perhaps, of her German background — she missed the deeper geopolitical reasons for her age’s economic malaise. Both the first oil shock and Nixon’s decision to float the dollar transformed America’s long-term fortunes, even as the neoliberal response to Seventies-era inflation soon redefined the national economy.

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Even more than the return of American militarism, meanwhile, the economic choices beginning in the Seventies produced the most damaging aspects of our own time. It was the American carnage of neoliberalism, after all, that permitted Trump to run against his own party and then the Democrats for betraying the people in the name of “elites”. (Never mind that practically Trump’s only legislative accomplishment is a gargantuan tax cut he gifted to the rich in his first term and renewed in his second.) Talk about chickens coming home to roost!

“We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other,” Arendt wrote, in one striking moment of clarity. “The dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people have stumbled over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably shut up the past.” When she asserted that people can confusingly stumble into a future so starkly different from the past that it makes their own confusion unintelligible, she was right not least about herself.

Indeed, beyond prompting skepticism of the restoration of American “normalcy” that Resistance liberals today so confidently counsel, Arendt’s greatest value is less about the dangers of prophecy — even if it’s striking that she was hardly the Cassandra of her own age. Rather, she reminds us how easy it is to miss what’s happening under our noses, and pretending that our past, even when we celebrate it, is where the cure for the rot can be found.

Strangio, who is elf-like and buff, wore a hip button-down, tailored slacks and a very nice pair of what appeared to be Prada loafers ($1,200 for similar, online). He took the stage to robust applause and proceeded for the next hour to evade and shift away from the crowd’s questions. He was received by appreciative nods, thoughtful “mmmms” and occasional applause from the Boomer audience. The crowd was mostly older and well-heeled, wearing pastel beach-tees and sporting deep, early-season tans. Neither the queer anarchist radicals nor the Ptown party vibe was in effect, and there was no visible representation from the trans kids.

It was a strangely oppressive experience, not exactly boring but more soul-crushing. I am the kind of persuadable centrist voter whom the trans movement has lost, but I’d gone to the event hoping for a clash of ideas and the occasional spark of recognition that the other side had a point. Instead, the audience was presented with a leader who didn’t offer direct answers to the queries posed by his most ardent supporters. And beneath the tans and the bonhomie, some of them, I believe, recognized his avoidance tactics.

The event’s host, Celeste Lecesne, founder of the Trevor Project LGBTQ+ youth hotline service, started with a tribute to Strangio’s heroism in defending the rights of trans youth. This wasn’t a surprising choice for a group of super-fans in America’s preeminent gay beach destination, but it makes the independent observer’s brain hurt given that the ACLU’s miscalculation and overreach had just curtailed the potential to fight similar bans in other states. Lecesne asked Strangio about this: Would the Tennessee decision “pave the way for the other 24 states banning trans youth care to do what they’re going to do?” Strangio explained that those states, for the most part, were already banning the healthcare, and the decision wouldn’t change that.

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The statement is true but also blame-shifting and deliberately misses the point. In his opening remarks he’d implied that the ACLU had known all along that the case was unlikely to succeed, saying, “I know exactly what to expect from [the Supreme Court]” and “I’m very used to reading distorted, disingenuous decisions from this court.” But he showed zero accountability for why the ACLU was willing to gamble something they have continuously claimed to be “necessary” and “lifesaving.” Why take the risk?

What did Strangio think the “core of the objection” to this kind of healthcare is? Lecesne asked, in a tone of deep puzzlement. The answer: A mysterious “retrenchment around gender” that often coincides with the rise of authoritarian governments. (A retrenchment that has nothing to do, of course, with sterilized adolescents or aggressive activism.) The objection is also, Strangio speculated, “a manufactured set of concerns” created by the right-wing media. For the latter argument, he pulled out the shifting and contested numbers often used by the Left to suggest that the trans population is minuscule and should be of no concern to anyone. This too is disingenuous and brain-hurting. The percentage of trans kids undergoing medical care is much higher than minuscule in my observable reality (admittedly, Brooklyn). And trans activism has focused precisely on making it affect everyone by framing themselves as a utopian liberation movement.

There was more. Strangio denounced The New York Times for having “contributed more to the anti-trans laws than almost any other thing in this country.” He elided the Cass Report’s findings that the case for pediatric gender medicine is unusually weak even for pediatrics. He mocked the idea that kids are being rushed into care.

Lecesne criticized the social-contagion theory of trans identities and then explained that “I thought I was a gay man for my whole life” until the pandemic, when whilst leading online workshops for LGBTQ+ youth who were discovering their transness, he’d discovered his own and changed his name and pronouns. “They changed me,” he said. Seems kind of contagious, no? Lecesne described watching kids in those workshops as “watching butterflies coming out of their cocoon,” and said the only contagion was “of happiness.” This is a common trope among trans-activist adults. And it’s unfair to place the burden of proof on the trans kids — but still, if unchecked and glorious happiness was really what most adults were observing as trans kids hit their school systems, the debate today might be very different.

The whole event reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism, which both the Left and Right having been turning to lately to explain today’s politics. Even if a comparison between the actual totalitarian leaders of the book and our situation today is too strong, Arendt’s description of the political mechanism is revelatory. She describes the conditions that led to totalitarian rule in Germany and the Soviet Union as those in which the “masses” (meaning the bourgeoisie) lost their class identities because of a new focus on individualism, and because of destabilizing social and economic change after the First World War.

People became atomized, isolated, and “superfluous,” meaning, without social purpose or stable employment. Under these conditions (which sound very familiar), they were ripe for totalitarian leadership. One of the central features of this kind of leadership, Arendt says, is that it doesn’t stand for anything coherent. It’s not a movement of people towards a shared goal, but instead confers membership in a safely correct group, whose goals are by necessity always shifting and “expanding.” Totalitarian propaganda, Arendt says, is under no obligation to be consistent, and in fact it’s better if it isn’t. The important thing is loyalty, which can be demonstrated even better when positions are shifting or incoherent.

Totalitarian movements, Arendt says, do not originate with the masses themselves, but with an alliance between “the elite,” and what she describes as “the mob,” which is a collection of criminals and grifters who make up the lowest elements of society. (Columbia student, meet Albanian looting gang.) In times of social instability, elites — and particularly the best and most idealistic elites, perhaps like Strangio — come to believe that the anything-goes tactics of the mob are refreshingly practical, lacking in bourgeois hypocrisy, and so on. These elites feel intense “nausea” when looking at their messed-up social institutions and are ready to destroy them for change. Or at least, this is what happened in the Thirties, when artists and intellectuals were misled by Stalinism and Nazism in numbers we don’t like to think about.

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Part of the beauty of The Origins of Totalitarianism is how well it applies to both sides of the current culture wars. Trump’s resemblance to a totalitarian leader requires no explanation; and in Leftist circles I’d say the totalitarian trend is led not by a person, but by the social-media zeitgeist, with the correct position being whichever is angriest and most extreme, or the most “expansionist” in Arendt’s terms. It strikes me as an awfully good explanation of how we got to the current incoherence of both theory and strategy on transgenderism, despite the sincere passion and actual best efforts of many people involved. The trans movement is riddled with internal contradictions. It has long been a loyalty test. And as the ACLU strategy shows, it has always been about endlessly expanding activism, rather than the best results for trans people. If they hadn’t brought this case to the Supreme Court, which they knew they’d likely lose, trans people would be better off.

An odd bit of hope for Americans today comes in what is almost a side observation of Arendt’s. She notes that Britain never succumbed to fascist or totalitarian rule, despite experiencing many of the same cultural and economic conditions as the European countries, because, she thinks, its robust two-party political system prevented the total atomization that occurred in countries ruled by more fragmentary coalitions. It would be funny if America’s dueling totalitarianisms were in fact its secret strength. Perhaps our vicious polarization is only thing holding back the deluge. But it’s not so funny that we should rely on it.

Strangio offered hope to the faithful through more of the same — the possibility of unexplored legal strategies, new gender clinics popping up on the borders of friendly states, and the historic ability of the LGBT (and now Q+) community to band together and get along through oppression. I found myself wanting a fair and non-totalitarian resolution to the issue, one notably not forthcoming from the Trump administration. If youth gender medicine isn’t settled, let’s settle it, without evasions and twisting the evidence. Instead of destroying our institutions, let’s use them: democracy, the law, the “both sides” media. The good Ptown bourgeoisie in the Hawthorne Barn seemed at least a little bit on the same page as me. They were warm and friendly to Strangio, but they were asking questions.

One woman suggested that no one should be “assigned” a sex at birth, and that we should always give it a couple of years to see what kind of identity develops. In my view this is a denial of human reality and would be terrible for children, but at least she was honest about her objectives, and somewhat consistent. (Strangio said this would be “doing a service to the child,” but also added “I didn’t do that. I took my child’s sex assignment and went with it.”) Another woman, very politely, raised an article critical of the youth gender medicine orthodoxy, written on the Skrmetti decision by Nicholas Confessore and published last week in The New York Times. She asked about Strangio’s response to “a kind of pulling back in the medical opinions not only here but in England and elsewhere in the world.” Strangio ground-shifted away, but the question was brave, and it went over with the crowd just fine. May this too be contagious.

In his book The Inevitability of Tragedy (2020), Barry Gewen shows how Kissinger’s doubts about democracy ultimately accounted for his world-weary view of geopolitics. Likewise, the great philosophers of ancient Greece and the Italian Renaissance well understood that without the minimum virtue on the part of its practitioners, democracy, like any system, was vulnerable. That is why Arendt and Strauss were particularly unnerved by the ideological witch-hunts of the McCarthy era in the late Forties and Fifties in the United States. But at least back then there was the rectitude of presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to ultimately protect the system. Now, it is the occupant of the Oval Office himself who constitutes the mortal danger.

Donald Trump is no Adolf Hitler, the killer of Weimar. But he is a destroyer of institutions, of constitutional safeguards, and of the very demeanor of political life in America. He is the impresario of American political decline for a reason that is so obvious it goes virtually unnoticed: the loss of the center in American politics, leaving the system at the mercy of both Right- and Left-wing ideologies. The late Polish philosopher Czesław Miłosz, in surveying the pathologies of Cold War-era communism, noted that the great attraction of ideologies was a “fear of thinking” for oneself, so that the masses had extreme ideas prepared for them by others. We have reached a similar moment in today’s America, where the advancement of communications technology has produced social media mobs driven by simplistic messages and passion. And passion is the enemy of analysis. It is impossible to imagine Trump outside of the digital-video age.

It turns out that what protected America for so long was the more primitive technology of the print-and-typewriter age, which led to a deeper exploration of issues and generally avoided simplistic thinking, and was thus a barrier against mass ideologies. The print-and-typewriter age upheld America’s vibrant and stable democracy for most of its history. It is unclear whether American democracy can succeed as well in our new media era.

Another reason the center has vanished is the fact of globalization itself. Rather than unite the world, globalization has split countries down the middle. In the United States that has meant the creation of a cosmopolitan, wine-sipping, European vacation-oriented upper-middle-class intimately connected with the outside world, and a working-class stuck in the old nation-state. There is even a geographical basis to this divide, with the globalized half inhabiting the two coasts, as well as the urban areas and college towns in-between, and the non-globalized half living in that vast rural obscurity defined as flyover country.

Finally, there is a flaw in democracy itself that the Founders well understood. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison preferred a republic to a democracy: that is, he favored a limited democracy with elite safety measures. One could argue that America remained crucially a republic for as long as the party bosses chose presidential candidates. But that ended some decades ago, when the primary system was gradually established, allowing voters to choose their own candidates for the presidency. Because of low-voter turnouts in primaries, the new system favored the extremes who were more motivated to vote. In fact, the party bosses never would have chosen Trump in 2016; they would have preferred the boring but supremely competent Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who would have governed like his father and not like his brother. America is now a fully fledged democracy and the result is Trump.

Since mass democracies function best in the political center, it is worth exploring what the center and the loss of it has meant to American politics. For that loss is the real fruit of globalization and the digital-video era, justifying the fears of Kissinger, Arendt, and Strauss.

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The center made Congress work, both as a balancer against the executive branch and as a producer of good laws, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986. When the Republicans were a center-right party and the Democrats a center-left one, there was always a large philosophical overlap of senators and congressmen from both parties that got things done. That is no longer the case, as the Republicans have become a radical populist Right-wing party and the Democrats a radical progressive one.

The center also produced a vital unity in foreign policy, so that the party out of power in the White House generally supported the foreign policy of the party in power. Politics, it was said, stopped at the water’s edge, so that America spoke with one voice when it came to matters on the other side of the two oceans. That is long gone, too. Now America’s foreign policy oscillates by 180 degrees between one administration and the next, so that foreign governments no longer wholly trust the United States.

The center produced a dedicated and competent federal bureaucracy, including a Foreign Service elite that staffed the many dozens of embassies and consulates abroad: so that problems in a myriad of countries, especially in complex and troubled ones like Pakistan, Nigeria, and Colombia, were well handled before they reached the level of the secretary of state and the White House. The Trump administration is in the process of gutting this bureaucratic cadre which for decades kept American foreign policy far removed from both Left- and Right-wing ideologies. The so-called deep state, as I have written elsewhere, based on my own experience as a foreign correspondent for decades, is vastly superior in knowledge and common sense to the Right-wing ideologues who are now suspicious of it.

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Finally, and most profoundly, the loss of the political center has meant that elections have been invested with dangerous existential significance. Whether it’s the Democrats or the Republicans who are in power, there is now the phenomenon of the tyranny of the majority, with the 52% who voted for the winner tyrannising the losing 48%. In normal democracies, elections don’t — and shouldn’t — matter so much.

The United States has experienced the same phenomenon and worse in its nearly 250-year history. There was the presidency of Andrew Jackson from 1829 to 1837, and the Civil War itself from 1861 to 1865. Jackson was a rather rough-hewn military commander from Tennessee, with much Native American blood on his hands, who scandalized the genteel Virginia and Massachusetts elites who had run the country up until then. It was a geographical factor — the country’s westward expansion — that brought him to the fore as a man from the frontier; just as it was a geographical issue — the question of whether new western states entering the union would be slave states or not — that instigated the Civil War. And it is, in part, a geographical issue — the encroachment of the outside world upon American shores through globalization — that is key to the country’s present dysfunction.

In each case, the country’s physical horizons have expanded, discomforting the elites. But the American West was ultimately absorbed into the body-politic of the nation in the late 19th century and a new political consensus arrived at, with all of its variations. Similarly, globalization, which despite the new tariff regime is inexorable in so many subtle ways, could absorb all of America and help lead eventually to a new consensus. But that very process could itself require new battles and upheavals. In any case, the German-Jewish intellectuals who had personally experienced the end of Weimar were right to worry about their newly adopted land.

Yet he had played an active role in an industrial-sized enterprise of human cruelty and malevolence. There was something deeply unnerving about this: the disproportion between the smallness of this man and the Himalayan magnitude of the Holocaust. It didn’t seem to add up.

As a criminologist, I have been trained to think that evil is a social category or label that dominant groups impose on less powerful “Others” – the marginalised. If there’s a “criminology of evil”, it’s a criminology of how modern states and their elaborate network of enforcers succeed in demonising people who can’t or won’t follow the rules of the system. According to this account, evil people aren’t really evil; they’re just the convenient victims of the “problematic” use of state power. They’re the symbolic scapegoats we invent to signal our virtue so that we can feel good and exorcise our demons.

Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann, while recognising his quotidian evil, readily fits in with this. Far from being a monster, Eichmann, in Arendt’s eyes, is a “thoughtless” Everyman. Even his motives, according to Arendt, were bland and boring, more to do with needy imperatives like pleasing superiors, career advancement and wanting to be liked.

But there’s another part of the story of human evil that Arendt and today’s criminologists cannot or do not want to confront. This is the part that has to do with the monstrousness of monstrous people. It’s the part that’s so squalid and viscerally disgusting that we can’t help but stare at it, shocked and dumbfounded by the scale of human wickedness grimly staring us in the face. It’s the stories that, as the renowned scholar William Ian Miller puts it, “sicken us in the telling, things for which there could be no plausible claim of right: rape, child abuse, torture, genocide, predatory murder and maiming”.

If there’s a genre to which these stories belong, it’s horror. And yet there’s no criminology of horror. Indeed, all of those sharp insights about “the banality of evil” quickly lose their edge the closer we venture toward that region of, to quote Miller again, “dark unbelievability”.

If, as I have, you’ve watched a lot of ISIS atrocity propaganda, or listened to the testimony of those who narrowly missed appearing in it, you’ll know all about dark unbelievability. It’s the sheer insanity of filming a toddler shoot a defenceless man, of filming a group of hostages being decapitated, of filming a man burned alive in a cage. It’s the sheer depravity of inventing ever more creative ways to torture and kill people because you think your fan-base will love it and your enemies hate it.

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Granted, there was a method to ISIS’s madness. The group murdered people on camera — 2,375 in all, between January 2015 and June 2020 — because it wanted to terrify its enemies and inflame its supporters. And, like any terrorist group, it also wanted maximum exposure and publicity. But there was also an undeniably expressive quality to ISIS’s violence which can’t simply be reduced to cold means-ends logic. ISIS murdered not just with savage efficiency, but with hot exuberance and glee.

For a recent lecture on Trinidadian ISIS militants, I pulled out a particularly gruesome video that I planned to show. Uploaded to the internet in the summer of 2014, by which point ISIS had captured Mosul in Iraq and declared the formation of the caliphate, it shows a jihadi in military fatigues holding up a severed head.

“Hello, my name is John,” he says in a mock English accent, performing the role of ventriloquist. This is followed by howls of laughter, from both the militant and the person filming. “See, he doesn’t smile today,” the militant adds. “Right now John look like he died of natural causes,” a voice with a Trinidadian accent says off-camera. More riotous laughter.

These men are clearly enjoying themselves, which surely raises the spectre of a kind of evil that is anything but banal. Or does it?

A sanitised, sociological reading of the video would conclude that the laughter is an expression not of sadistic delight but of nervous energy; the men are laughing because they’re secretly horrified. They’re desensitised to killing and have been brutalised by war. It’s a way for these men to bond, and if they’re violent and thuggish it’s because they’re following the script of toxic masculinity. Indeed, the whole spectacle before us is determined by the situation, and not the predispositions, choices, desires or quirks of the men themselves. As the social psychologist Albert Bandura puts it: “Conducive social conditions rather than monstrous people… produce heinous deeds. Given appropriate social conditions, decent, ordinary people can be led to do extraordinarily cruel things.”

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Let’s leave aside the question of whether the men in the video are “decent, ordinary people”; though I suspect that cutting a man’s head off and then laughing about it on camera is reason to doubt such a proposition. Instead, let’s probe the sly determinism inscribed in that  causal reference — “led” — in the above quotation from Bandura. Who or what led ISIS western militants to Syria? And who or what led them to cut off heads and laugh about it?

The typical sociological account of western ISIS militants would have it that everything but the agency of the militants themselves led them to go to Syria. Western imperialism led them. Slick ISIS videos led them. Their bruising experiences with the British security state led them. The Iraq war led them. Islamophobia led them. The caliphate-fantasy led them. Shadowy recruiters led them. Insecurity, identity-confusion, trauma, boredom — all of that somehow led them. And, then, once they got to Syria and Iraq, peer pressure, PTSD, fear, the need to belong — all of that led them to enslave people and commit terrible atrocities.

But none of this explains anything. It doesn’t explain why the so-called “Beatles” — the British ISIS beheading outfit — spent a lot of time taunting and degrading their victims prior to killing them. It doesn’t explain the insanity of the ISIS videos. It doesn’t explain the laughter of those Trinidadian ISIS militants. It doesn’t explain all the “useless violence”— as Primo Levi called it — that ISIS committed both on and off camera; the sort of violence that, as Levi explained, has no purpose other than creating pain.

More than twenty years ago, the political theorist C. Fred Alford brilliantly dissected the famous Stanley Milgram experiments that were carried out at Yale University in the 1960s. The subjects in the experiments, called “teachers”, think that they’re delivering shocks to a “learner”, who is actually in on the experiment with Milgram. The learner is a middle-aged man with a heart condition — or so Milgram informs the teacher. The teacher’s task is clear: he must flick a switch on the generator and deliver an electric shock to the learner when he fails to memorise word pairs. The shocks begin at 15 volts and go up to 450.

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Alford concedes that the teachers do not appear to like their job: “They ask the experimenter not to go on, they talk about how worried they are about the learner. They smoke too much and sweat furiously…they complain, they hesitate…” Yet most deliver the electric shocks. “All they have to do… is just say no, and mean it. Less than half do,” Alford writes.

Milgram interpreted this finding as evidence of “the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority”. But Alford doesn’t buy it, and is struck by a little discussed detail that recurred throughout the experiments: namely, the grotesque laughter, “the giggling fits at the shock generator”.

“What if these men are giggling in embarrassed pleasure at being given permission to inflict great pain and suffering on an innocent and vulnerable man?” Alford asks. “What if what the teachers really want, what they long for, is permission to hurt someone?” Milgram rejected this conclusion outright: the teachers in the experiment are slavish, not sadistic. But he presented no evidence for this view.

Whether Alford is right about the teachers’s laughter remains to be seen, but his broader psychoanalytic perspective, which recognises the agency of people who do evil and the pleasures they take from controlling others through violence, captures something Arendt missed in her account of evil as “banal”.

Extensive footage from the Milgram experiments can be viewed on YouTube and you can judge for yourself whether or not Alford was onto something. Or there are those dark recesses of the internet, stuffed with videos of horrors inflicted by people who, pace Arendt, are terrifyingly terrible: ISIS butchers, chainsaw-wielding Mexican cartel murderers, serial killers armed with screwdrivers and many more grotesque figures.

And therein lies the problem with Arendt’s account of Eichmann: she was so bewitched by the smallness of the man that, to this day, it dulls us to all the thoughtful malevolence that surrounds us, should we dare to look at it and see it for what it really is.

For speed and scale the deportations went unmatched: 424,000 people were despatched by train in just 52 days, from 14 May to 9 July. In this fleeting window Hungarian Jews became the single largest group gassed at Auschwitz. The crematoria couldn’t cope with such “over-supply”, and Commandant Rudolf Höß ordered special fire pits dug — filling the camp with noxious smoke. According to Primo Levi, “there were weeks when only Hungarian was heard in Auschwitz”.

Physical annihilation was undergirded by Eichmann’s elaborate psychological strategy. Sophisticated Budapest Jews who might escape or resist were pacified by newspaper reports that only “ost Juden” from Hungary’s nether regions were being removed as “undesirables”. Many only saw through the lie, if at all, when deportations reached Budapest’s outer suburbs in early July — just before Admiral Miklós Horthy, Hungary’s Head of State, halted them under diplomatic pressure from the Western Allies and neutrals.

Throughout the deportations, and across Hungary’s length, Eichmann deluged Jews with ever more complex regulations covering the minutiae of daily life. These instilled a false sense of permanence which inhibited hiding or escape: “why would the authorities go to all this trouble if they were just going to get rid of us?”

Even as deportations rolled on, Eichmann conducted elaborate negotiations for fanciful “rescue schemes” including, but not limited to, the infamous “Blood for Trucks” project involving Rudolf Kastner — the proposed barter of one million Jewish lives for 10,000 Western motor vehicles for use on the Eastern front against the USSR. The aim, Eichmann later acknowledged, was not just to split Western powers from the Soviets, but also to distract Hungary’s Jewish leaders from counter-organising: keeping minds busy and hopes alive.

All the while Eichmann treated Jewish leaders in Budapest to flashes of menace.  One day he promised them a return to normality “after the war”, the next he would snarl “Do you know who I am? I am a bloodhound!” With studied cruelty Eichmann arranged the ghettoisation of Hungary’s Jews to begin on Sunday, 16 April: the first day of Passover, 1944.

Eichmann did many things in Hungary; the one thing he did not do was simply “obey orders” — indeed over time he defied them with gathering frequency. That autumn as inevitable defeat became ever more apparent Eichmann, helped by local enthusiasts, intensified his efforts, instigating newly inventive means of eliminating Jews in Hungary and the Balkans through “death marches” and localised killing sprees. In doing so, Eichmann subverted instructions from Himmler who ordered cessation as part of a delusional plan to negotiate with the allies.

This “Eichmann in Budapest” should be recalled while contemplating the later Eichmann in Jerusalem.

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What did the Habsburgs do for us?

By Alexander Faludy

By 11 May 1960 a fugitive Eichmann had lived for a decade in Buenos Aries as “Ricardo Klement”, a rabbit farmer and, later, Mercedes-Benz factory worker, an immigrant hailing from the German minority in Italy’s South Tyrol. That evening Mossad agents, following a tip-off, kidnapped “Klement” from the street outside his house as he walked home from the bus stop after work.

Ten days later a drugged-up Eichmann left Argentina on false papers aboard an El Al flight supporting a diplomatic protocol visit timed to cover his extraction. Fearing a rescue bid by any Nazi sympathiser network while refuelling, the plane exceeded its permitted milage. By touchdown in Tel Aviv it was flying on vapours.

Preparing the prosecution case took almost a year. Eichmann’s trial commenced in Jerusalem’s brand-new Bet Ha’Am theatre on 11 April 1961 before three Israeli judges. Eichmann was accused of fifteen counts of crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity. The unusual venue arose from unprecedented international interest: over 400 journalists sought accreditation, and the country had no courtroom large enough.

Controversy raged around the trial. Eichmann’s removal, a triumph of spycraft, was a flagrant breach of Argentina’s sovereignty. Israel’s authority to try crimes occurring outside its borders, enacted by (and against) non-citizens prior to its foundation seemed, at best, dubious. Sixty years on, however, discord persists less in regards to the trial’s legal foundations and more because of how courtroom events were theorised by one writer: Hannah Arendt.

Arendt, a pre-war Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, travelled to Jerusalem to observe the trial for The New Yorker and confront the government that caused her own life’s profound dislocation. Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) consolidated her reflective articles for the New Yorker published that year. Its subtitle, “A Report on the Banality of Evil”, became synonymous with the trial: it’s how most people “know” about Eichmann.

Unfortunately, Arendt was utterly, appallingly, wrong about the man she saw, or thought she saw, in Jerusalem.

“Banality” appears just once in Arendt’s main text: in the very last sentence. Reflecting on Eichmann’s clunky, formulaic, farewell prior to execution Arendt opined: “It was as though in those last minutes he was summoning up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome, world and thought defying banality of evil.”

The “banal” designation comes at the narrative’s end but condenses observations made in memorable passages throughout including “Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect he was a clown”. 

Observing 55-year-old Eichmann’s bureaucratic bearing, ponderous speech, and petty jealousies Arendt deemed his key role in genocide motivated not by fanatical anti-Semitism (his denial of which she accepted), but “thoughtlessness” in its most literal sense. Arendt used the word to connote not “forgetfulness” but absence of autonomous cognition. She took Eichmann’s seeming “inability to speak” as evidencing incapacity to think. Such a person, Arendt reasoned, greets the “Führer principle” joyfully – relieved from the agony of forming opinions.

Arendt’s verdict bled through her book’s cover into mainstream pop psychology. The “banality of evil” became a banality itself thanks to excessive invocation at dinner parties and in newspaper columns. It escaped Arendt that Eichmann, who she dismissed as uneducated, was playing a clever game.

Understanding Eichmann requires less focus on transcripts of the 1961 trial and more on a collection of late 1950’s recordings from informal seminars in Argentina. These were attended by numerous former and aspirant Nazis, and taped by Dutch sympathiser-journalist Willem Sassen, who hoped to write a book rehabilitating the Third Reich by proving the “Jewish propaganda” about the “slaughter of six million” to be a hoax.

Following lengthy conversations with Eichmann, Sassen abandoned the project, having been told precisely what he didn’t want to hear, and from the horse’s mouth — the “propaganda” was true.

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Regrettably these recordings, though known of in 1961, were available to the court only in fragmentary transcripts: the full cache didn’t re-emerge until 1999. If they had been played at trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem would read very differently. (Fortunately, an analytical summary is now available in Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem, published in 2011.)

On the penultimate recording in a long series (68 tapes) Eichmann, articulating his role in the Holocaust reflects on his divided nature, says: “I the cautious bureaucrat, that was me, yes indeed. But I would like to expand on the issue of the ‘cautious bureaucrat’ somewhat… This cautious bureaucrat was attended by a fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood which is my birth right.”

A terrifying crescendo is reached with these words “No, I have to tell you quite honestly that if out of the 10.3 million [worldwide] Jews… identified we had killed 10.3 million, I would be satisfied… We would have fulfilled our duty to our blood… if we had eliminated the most cunning intellect of all the human intellects”. Contemplating repentance, Eichmann exclaims “I could do it cheaply for the sake of current opinion… [but] for me to deeply regret it, for me to pretend that a Saul has become a Paul… I cannot do that”.

Sassen’s Holocaust denial project ended abruptly soon afterwards.

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By Giles Fraser

Before Adolf Eichmann was Ricardo Klement, he was Otto Henninger and before that Adolf-Karl Barth. At war’s end, under yet another name, he was captured by the allies but escaped. We shouldn’t be surprised if one so used to disguising his identity might also conceal his complex nature. Genocidal bent and aptitude for dissimulation was not temporarily sequential: they were interlaced aspects of personality. Long before adopting false names Eichmann mastered self-concealment.

In the 1930s and 40s Eichmann wove elaborate biographic myths to create confusion. He convinced Jewish interlocutors of linguistic gifts he didn’t possess in Yiddish and Hebrew, and forged a story of upbringing amid a notorious “Templar’ German community in Palestine known for anti-Semitic violence. These motifs, fused with deep knowledge of Zionist literature in translation, allowed him to disorientate Jewish interlocutors: simultaneously opening up an unexpected connection and a register of menacing threat.

Yet despite her analytical faults, we shouldn’t condemn Arendt harshly — as some have. Critics like Deborah Lipstadt allege Arendt arrived in Jerusalem with a commission from The New Yorker and a suitcase bursting with ideas she wanted to demonstrate. They attribute to her a drive to render Eichmann a worked example of her thesis in her 1951 masterpiece the Origins of Totalitarianism about the moral disabling of individuals which a supercharged ideology possessed of state-power can achieve.

This is unfair. Arendt didn’t see in Eichmann what she wanted but what he projected. Arendt’s evaluation is consonant with that of many journalists reporting on the trial with no ideological axe to grind. It’s just that her intellectual subtlety was outflanked by Eichmann’s psychological one. As Stangeth points out, Eichmann lead “a highly intelligent person to defeat herself with her own weapon”, the assumption philosopher Arendt carried that “someone speaks and writes only when they want to be understood”.

Conversely Israeli Police Captain Avner Less, who interrogated Eichmann pre-trial, was sharper. “After the end of the first hearing [interview], I was convinced that Eichmann wasn’t telling this story for the first time,” he said afterwards: “I had the feeling this man had been rehearsing it somewhere.”

Eichmann in Jerusalem wore a mask, yet pulling that mask off doesn’t pull the rug from under Arendt’s Totalitarianism. Historical sociologists take the deep conditioning of the Third Reich seriously; contemporary behavioural psychology confirms our susceptibility to manipulation by authority figures. Paradoxically Eichmann’s performance supports Totalitarianism’s thesis: he could ably present himself as one deformed by totalitarianism because he helped to fashion it and deform others.

And so, under questioning, Eichmann presented himself both as one for whom obedience was the supreme virtue and as a mere “messenger” operating an intermediate administrative ‘clearing house’ for orders. Though he couldn’t evade conviction he hoped to slip the noose by passing himself off as a cog in the machine.

Curiously his counsel, Cologne lawyer Robert Servatius, took a contrary approach. Servatius asserted not that superior orders absolved Eichmann from subjective moral responsibility. Rather, he argued, the order’s receipt and discharge objectively subsumed Eichmann’s personal actions into “Acts of the German State” raising the shield of “sovereign immunity” — a more plausible legal argument then than now. The defence concluded on 15 August.

Judgment came on 11 December. Rejecting Servatius’s “Act of State” defence, Eichmann was found guilty on all counts. The defendant’s interpretation of events was likewise dismissed: Hungary proved Eichmann’s distinct moral agency: he was not just “obeying orders”.

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A sentence of execution by hanging followed on 15 December, and was carried out on 31 May 1962. Eichmann’s body, like his victims’, was cremated: the ashes scattered at sea to prevent a grave attracting Neo-Nazi pilgrims.

It has become fashionable, since the Sassen tapes emerged, to despatch Arendt’s thesis, or at least a representation of it, to the winds of oblivion too. Her “banality of evil” thesis should, it is argued — because of its contextual inapplicability to Eichmann — be banished from the moral Lexicon per se. This however risks an empirical misreading of both Eichmann and his trial.

Eichmann was both a calmly meticulous administrator and a murderous anti-Semite. The punctilious observer of office routine and arranger of index cards is far better placed to achieve genocidal aims than the volatile smasher of windows.

The infectiousness of the genuine “banality of evil” was demonstrated, inadvertently, at trial by the defence counsel. Robert Servatius, himself entirely innocent of complicity in genocide witnessed to its precondition by unthinking, and at the time scandalous, reference of the gassing at Auschwitz as “medical matters”. The lawyer meant no offence — he had, as a former inhabitant of Nazi Germany, simply internalised the euphemistic language by which such things were referred to under the Third Reich.

If we discard Arendt completely, we risk something worse than misreading Eichmann. We chance missing the mask calculated evil wears before us now.

The Roy family occupies the most rarefied level of globe-trotting oligarchs. Dropping down a rung or two on the pyramid of power, consider the moral ecology inhabited by the broader gentility: the salaried decision-makers and ideas-managers who service the global arrangement from various departments of the ideological apparatus. They may work in NGOs, the governing bodies of the EU, corporate journalism, HR departments, the celebrity-industrial complex, the universities, Big Tech, etc. They, too, enjoy a kind of freedom, but it is decidedly not that of the high-spirited criminals depicted in Succession. So far from living “beyond good and evil”, this broader class of cosmopolitans asserts its freedom through its moralism, precisely. In particular, they have broken free of the claims of allegiance made upon them by the particular communities they emerge from.

How does this work, psychologically? The idea of a common good has given way to a partition of citizens along the lines of a moral hierarchy – one that just happens to mirror their material fortunes (as in Calvinism). Instead of feeling bound up in a shared fate with one’s countrymen, one develops an alternate solidarity that is placeless. The relatability across national borders that the gentlefolk feel in one another’s company — the gracious ease and trust, the shared points of reference in high-prestige opinion — has something to do with their uniformly high standing in the moral hierarchy that divides citizen from citizen within their own nations. The decision-making class has discovered that it enjoys the mandate of heaven, and with this comes certain permissions; certain exemptions from democratic scruple.

The permission structure is built around grievance politics. Very simply: if the nation is fundamentally racist, sexist and homophobic, I owe it nothing. More than that, conscience demands that I repudiate it. Hannah Arendt spelled out this logic of high-minded withdrawal from the claims of community in the essays she wrote in response to the protest movements of the 1960s. Conscience “trembles for the individual self and its integrity,” appealing over the head of the community to a higher morality. The latter is discerned in a highly subjective, personal way. The heroic pose struck by Thoreau in Civil Disobedience is the model for this kind of moralistic anti-politics of conscience, in which the good man may be quite opposed to the one called a good citizen.

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In The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch spelled out in greater detail the role that claims of racial and sexual oppression play in securing release from allegiance to the nation — not just for those who identify as its victims, but for those with the moral sensitivity to see victimisation where it may not be apparent, and who make this capacity a touchstone of their identity. It becomes a token of moral elevation by which we recognise one another, and distinguish ourselves from the broader run of citizens. Both Lasch and Arendt argue that black Americans serve a crucial function for the white bourgeoisie. As the emblem and proof of America’s illegitimacy, they anchor a politics of repudiation in which the idea of a common good has little purchase.

This illegitimacy transcends any particular historical facts about slavery and segregation. Indeed it transcends America, as one can surmise by the ease with which American grievance politics has been exported throughout the Western world. In this we sometimes see the use of American historical references that have been weirdly transposed, as when a house once lived in by Rosa Parks was relocated from Detroit to Berlin, the financial seat of the European Union. (Under the empire of Christendom, the market for material relics from the Passion of Christ was similarly global; they left the holy land and ended up in various seats of earthly power.) Most recently, the transatlantic festival of George Floyd attests to the fact that it isn’t simply America that stands accused.

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Britain’s race pain is not the same as America’s

By Ralph Leonard

The social order is corrupt, then. The labour movement once had an alternative order to offer in its stead, drawing on the socialist tradition. It was one that included African-Americans – not as African-Americans but as workers. And this movement was fairly successful. The pressures that organised labour brought to bear on business and the state helped to secure America’s brief period of shared prosperity, lasting roughly from the end of WWII to the 1970s.

What happened then? The new prominence of the term “repressed” in the 1960s is significant, and marks a shift into a new terrain of psychologised politics. The object of attack for the “new Left” was no longer laissez-faire capitalism but “society”, the Freudian superego more or less, with its insistence on standards of behaviour that are binding on all. Arendt and Lasch both identify this attack on shared standards as the decisive inflection point in our turn away from a politics of the common good. Society is taken to be inherently oppressive, and discredited in the name of liberation.

One can find such an idea in a selective reading of Freud, for whom there is an inherent conflict between self and society. But for Freud, reconciling oneself to this conflict and entering into the world of shared meaning and exchange, indeed identifying with it, is how one becomes an adult. The world does not love you simply for being you, as your mommy does. One holds oneself accountable to prevailing norms, or else remains trapped in infantile narcissism.

The Left’s posture of liberationism provided an interpretive frame in which the deadly riots and wider explosion of urban crime in the 1960s was to be understood as political rather than criminal. This interpretation played a key role in the wider inversion: it is “society” that is revealed to be criminal. The utility of urban rioting for the new Left lay in the fact that it was thought to carry an insight into the illegitimacy of even our most minimum standards of behaviour. The moral authority of the black person, as victim, gave the bourgeoisie permission to withdraw its allegiance from the social order, just as black people were gaining fuller admittance to it.

Consider the images that had so impressed the nation in the 1950s and lead to the passage of civil rights legislation: marchers demanding equal treatment, and being willing to go to jail as a demonstration of this allegiance to the rule of law, impartially applied. The civil rights movement began as an attack on the injustice of double standards; it was a patriotic appeal to the common birthright of citizenship, as against the local sham democracy of the South. Notably, the civil rights activists of this time wore suits and ties, the costume of adult obligations and standards of comportment. But in a stunning reversal achieved by the new Left working in concert with the Black Power movement, Lasch points out, “the idea of a single standard was itself attacked as the crowning example of ‘institutional racism’.” Such standards were said to have no other purpose than keeping black people in their place. This shift was fundamental, for shared standards are what make for a democratic social order, as against the ancien régime of special privileges and exemptions.

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For the new Left, then, it was not capitalism but the democratic social order altogether that was the source of oppression — not just of black people, or of workers, but of us, the college bourgeoisie. The civil rights movement of black Americans became the template for subsequent claims by women, gays and transgender persons, each based on a further discovery of moral failing buried deep in the heart of America. Hence a further license, indeed mandate, granted to individual conscience, as against the claims of the nation.

But the black experience retains a special role as the template that must be preserved. The black man is specially tuned by history to pick up the force field of oppression, which may be hard to discern in the more derivative cases that are built by analogy with his. Therefore, his condition serves a wider diagnostic and justificatory function. If it were to improve, denunciation of “society” would be awkward to maintain and, crucially, my own conscience would lose its self-certifying independence from the community. My wish to be free of the demands of society would look like mere selfishness.

The white bourgeoisie became invested in a political drama in which their own moral standing depends on black people remaining permanently aggrieved. Unless their special status as ur-victim is maintained, African-Americans cannot serve as patrons for the wider project of liberation. If you question this victimisation, you are questioning the rottenness of America. And if you do that, you are threatening the social order, strangely enough. For it is now an order governed by the freelance moralists of the cosmopolitan consensus. Somehow these free agents, ostensibly guided by individual conscience, have coalesced into something resembling a tribe, one that is greatly angered by rejection of its moral expertise.

The notion of expertise is important. There appears to be a circle of mutual support between political correctness, technocratic administration, and the bloated educational machinery. Because smartness (as indicated by educational credentials) confers title to rule in a technocratic regime, the ruling class adopts a distinctly cognitivist view: virtue does not consist of anything you do or don’t do, it consists of having the correct opinions. This is attractive, as one may then exempt oneself from the high-minded policies one inflicts upon everyone else. For example, the state schools are turned into laboratories of grievance-based social engineering, with generally disastrous effects, but you send your own children to expensive private schools. You can de-legitimise the police out of a professed concern for black people, and the explosion of murder will be confined to black parts of the city you never see, and journalists are not interested in. In this way, you can be magnanimous while avoiding the moral pollution and that comes from noticing reality.

With this clerisy’s systemic lack of “skin in the game”, the idea of a common good becomes a weak abstraction. Maintaining one’s own purity of opinion, on the other hand, has real psychic consequence, as it is the basis for one’s feeling of belonging — not to the community one happens to reside in, but to the tribe of the elect.

If the ideal of a de-moralised public sphere was a signature aspiration of liberal secularism, it seems we have entered a post-secular age. Populism happened because it became widely noticed that we have transitioned from a liberal society to something that more closely resembles a corrupt theocracy.

It is, of course, impossible to avoid risk completely. You could stay indoors and reduce your risk of death from lightning, transport accidents or being attacked by strangers. But that would only increase your long-term risk of chronic health problems and early death, thanks to physical inactivity and social isolation.

So let me rephrase that: why do we take the risks we do?

I suppose we could make our life decisions based on mathematics. And before doing anything we could calculate the odds of success. Or, assess by how much a favourite vice would increase the chances of getting a horrible disease.

But we don’t do the maths. Not because we’re stupid – but because we’re human, and we live in a messy human world, most of which can’t be reduced to numbers.

A great illustration of this is The Norm Chronicles, by Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter. It’s the story of Norm (or Average Man) but also of Prudence (who tries to avoid all risks) and an expanding family of characters called Kevin or Kelvin, who take every risk going. Spiegelhalter is a statistician, so the book does a fine job of using numbers to get some perspective on risk and danger. But The Norm Chronicles is much more than a maths book.

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It is also a highly entertaining read, as the characters’ varying attitudes to risk get them into comical or hair-raising scenarios. Whether through embracing risk, or excessive desperation to avoid it, Kelvin, Prudence and Norm allow us to laugh at exaggerated versions of ourselves, and then reflect on how we make decisions in the real world.

“Although we recognise the patterns in numbers as much as anyone,” the authors write, (modestly), “we can’t bring ourselves to say that any of our characters are irrational in choosing to ignore them and going their own way.”

After all, rational calculation, based on data from the past and present, only gets us so far with making decisions that commit us to one or other branch of our infinite possible futures. At some point you have to go with your feelings – and make a choice about which future self you want to become, while accepting that you don’t know, and can’t fully control, the consequences of your decision.

Which brings us neatly to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition – my second recommendation. Her subject is the inherent unpredictability of human action.

“This is not simply a question of inability to foretell all the logical consequences of a particular act, in which case an electronic computer would be able to foretell the future,” she writes, “but arises directly out of the story which, as the result of action, begins and establishes itself as soon as the fleeting moment of the deed is past.”

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For Arendt, action begins a story in the human world, and so gains meaning when looked back at from the future. It’s not only the material consequences that can’t be certain before the event, but what the story, and hence the meaning, will ultimately be. And that’s inherently unpredictable because it’s a story involving other human beings, each of whom is also free to act.

Risk today is most often used in a negative sense; it is deemed to be something we should control, minimise or avoid altogether. Being ‘At-Risk’ is now an adjective, a condition that may infect you if you’re unlucky enough to live in the wrong postcode, have the wrong family, or fall into the wrong socio-economic bracket. Most of us are encouraged to see ourselves as At-Risk to some degree – of crime, or diabetes, or mental illness.

Deliberately putting oneself at risk, or taking risks, is seen as irresponsible, or immoral. Even in a financial context, where risk is acknowledged as an inevitable part of investment, regulation is designed to quarantine and contain it.

As Arendt reminds us, however, risk is intrinsic to action. Statistics can help us assess our options, but we can never know all the consequences before we decide what to do.

Many of the things that make us safer today than our ancestors started out as highly risky projects. Commercial flight is one of the safest ways to travel, mile for mile, but we owe it to the pioneers who threw themselves into thin air, in mechanisms whose performance was an unknown quantity. Nuclear power is seen as uniquely dangerous; but the move from coal has saved over a million lives, which would mainly have been lost to mining accidents or air pollution.

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Beyond these pragmatic reasons, though, we need to value risk-taking as fundamentally human. Look, by way of illustration, at what I’ve spent the past month doing. Why did I choose to bring a new show to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe? I’m no longer making my living as a professional comedian, so I’m not trying to be ‘discovered’ or to land a comedy agent. I could have spent August in the garden, reading and working on my next book, instead of accosting strangers with leaflets, and then offering myself for their judgement daily on a tiny stage in a dark basement.

I’m here because I feared that my life was getting too safe. I felt that I had fallen into the habit of only doing things that I know I can do, and foresaw my envelope of comfort shrinking to become a straitjacket. And I wanted to find out what I was capable of, onstage with a live audience and limited control over what will happen in each show.

Only through this willingness to start something new in ignorance of how the tale will end, can we discover, and reveal to others, who we are. Not what we are – an inventory of our qualities or social categories – but who– our character that emerges only in action. “Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure,” says Arendt.

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Which brings us to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Wind, Sand and Stars. My final recommendation for your summer reading is a collection of non-fiction writing about Saint-Exupéry’s life as a pilot in the early, and terribly risky, years of aviation. He writes with a deep humanism about the freedom of flight, but also about the connection he felt with other people. Some of them crossed his path only once in a distant land, or were nothing more to him than the sparks of their firelight, glimpsed far below his wings at night. But to him, each person was an irreplaceable subject, the centre of a unique universe that would vanish at the moment of their death.

Saint-Exupéry chose a life which made the risk of death tangible every day, in the companions who took off but did not land, and were not seen again. He himself describes crash landing in the desert, defying the odds by not dying on impact, only to realise that the most likely outcome was dying of thirst before rescuers could find him. “I have no regrets, I’ve gambled and I’ve lost,” he says at the point of resignation to death. “It was all in a day’s work. But at least I have breathed the wind of the sea.”

That story ends with rescue, of course, or we wouldn’t be reading it. Years later, though, Saint-Exupéry did take flight over the Mediterranean but never landed. His story found its ending, leaving us to draw meaning from his choice to live life to the full by embracing the risk of death.

It’s a reminder that the meaning of our lives is unlikely to be found in a vain attempt to eliminate uncertainty and risk.