Thanks, Ruth and Elizabeth.
I’ve just read a very interesting article by Peter Michael Gratton, called The Banality of Complicity: Arendt’s Guide to Moral Resistance in the Age of Trump, in which he discusses Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) and subsequent lecture in 1964, Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.
Gratton observes that Arendt’s lecture “is uncanny in precisely identifying the psychological and moral patterns of capitulation [to] and cooperation [with authoritarian systems] we see playing out today,” and it struck me that there are parallels with the uncritical and wholesale embrace of AI. For example:
Equally troubling [to the alarming speed with which moral standards can be inverted overnight] is Arendt’s insight into how readily people surrender individual judgment to systems. … The lecture isn’t [however] some grandstanding harangue about the need for heroism. Instead, she makes clear that resistance begins not with heroic action but with the simple refusal to participate in the regime and its lies, as well as the comfortable self-deceptions that make complicity possible. … Having knocked down the last of the excuses of the complicit—what else was I to do?—Arendt can move to the central claim of the lecture: that “obedience” always amounts to support, no matter what we tell ourselves to sleep at night. … What makes Arendt’s [lecture] so profound is that she locates resistance not in grand gestures requiring extraordinary heroism, but in preserving one’s capacity to think independently and refuse complicity in evil even when everyone else has capitulated. We cannot control the circumstances we inherit—so many never asked for this—but we always retain the power to withhold our support from systems that violate human dignity. And in that vital first act of defiance lies the seeds for resisting the reality in which we find ourselves today.
Edit:
I would say that reality is what we have to deal with, and that success is dealing with reality, which is not to say that dealing with reality doesn’t alter the reality we have to deal with.
From the conclusion to my article, “the revolution, and the unfolding resistance that must now precede it, will not be televised brothers and sisters, because the revolution will be live.”
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