Eva Cox spoke at length with Philip Adams on the ABC RN Late Night Live program. Eva mentioned Hannah Arendt and spoke of her with awe and admiration. Arendt had also come into my orbit again through the Prologue to Pankaj Mishra’s compelling 2017 book Age of Anger. Arendt is of course known for her seminal work on Totalitarianism, and unsurprisingly seems to be getting a bit of publicity of late. This interview clip of her from 1964 although only 6 minutes or so is worth watching.
On being asked given its age was it wise Ira Maine has provided this short commentary:
Hannah Arendt was getting old and was always wise in 1964.
Society had, in Ms Arendt’s lifetime, been stood on its head, slowly at first and then with ever increasing rapidity by that new and exciting phenomenon; consumerism We the citizenry were no longer backbones of villages and towns, of extended families and of a way of life that had helped us survive for many thousands of years. Instead, regular wages, money in the bank and a citizenry largely concentrated nowadays in our cities, provided golden opportunities to shopkeepers, business people and advertisers to bury us in a fantasy world of consumerism for which we were ripe and from which we show little signs of recovering. If we could then be encouraged to buy houses, to become ‘nuclear families’, we might be persuaded to sit at home, divorced from extended families, divorced from friends and divorced from responsibility and allow ourselves to to be bombarded night and day with a new and grotesque parody of philosophical belief called Consumerism.
Consumerism is all you need! Consumerism will see you through! All you’ve got to do is rip your kitchen out and buy a new one! Rip the lav out and buy a new one! Get a new car or a bigger house. Take your holidays in Peru! Have plastic surgery or a hair transplant! Lipo-suction and tattoos! Tooth implants and your arse lifted! Holy Toledo! The possibilities are endless!
Grotesques, we sit in the nest, gross, oversized cuckoo children, our mouths drooling, open, screeching to be fed.
And the best thing of all is?. You don’t have to lift a finger. No digging, no delving, no spanning…
Simple emasculation is all that’s required, and of course, the absolute absence of self-respect..
God help us all but is this not the ‘loneliness’ that Arendt describes? Is this her ‘modernity’?
We seemed then, in the sixties, despite the fact that people were infinitely better off, to have exchanged our birthright for a mess of pottage.
Perhaps we continue to do so.
If so perhaps it’s time we stopped.