On Love, Politics, and Violence (Channeling Hannah Arendt)
Our wisdom season continues with two special notes
Dear friends,
Today we bring you the third episode in our Wisdom Season. Krista is in conversation with Lyndsey Stonebridge, author and Hannah Arendt scholar, and Lucas Johnson, who leads our social healing initiatives at The On Being Project. And they've both offered some reflections, for Pause readers, below.
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With gratitude,
The On Being team
Dear On Being Community,
Twelve years ago, I took my first trip to Israel and Palestine. I was on a delegation led by veterans of the U.S. civil rights movement, Dorothy Cotton and Vincent Harding. That trip changed my life. The elders who led the delegation had risked their lives in the expansion of American democracy. Coming from a people who felt deeply the longing for security that centuries of brutality at the hands of racist institutions can create, these movement veterans understood the promise of Israel for their Jewish friends, and they held close the grief that some of those same friends had for what Israel’s occupation of Palestine was doing to Israel's soul. They wrestled faithfully with positions that they had once held, positions their beloved Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC once held. They modeled for me what it was like to hold moral outrage and love.
The experience changed me, and in the years after that trip, I spent a considerable amount of time supporting nonviolent activists in Israel and Palestine who were working against the occupation. I supported Israeli conscientious objectors to military service and former Palestinian combatants who sought a different path. I organized events with congregations, and I helped lead delegations of my own. My most recent trip to the region ended on October 5, 2023. I was in Jerusalem with a delegation led by On Being guests Rami Nashashibi and Otis Moss III. I left Jerusalem two days before our trip was scheduled to end, and Rami and others from my delegation found themselves sheltering beneath the Tel Aviv airport as missiles flew on October 7.
My heart has broken over and over again in response to the unfolding tragedy. Since we began over 20 years ago, the On Being Project community has long included people with close proximity to the pain, whose loved ones have been killed, wounded, kidnapped, whose houses have been destroyed, whose families have been displaced in the long, painful, and tragic story. On Being first did a series of interviews in 2012 with parents in a bereavement circle, these parents and family members grieving as no one should have to, speaking poignantly to the truth of the unyielding violence that creates only victims – no one wins.
As I write, millions are gripped by a disorienting, crippling, and existential fear, the bombing continues, killing innocent men, women, and children. The hostages, those who are alive, are still not free. Hundreds of thousands more face starvation and are living in conditions unimaginably adverse. I want all of this to end. Everyone I know does. Our collective failure to stop this compounds the grief. Some of you have turned to us, hoping for us to be a resource in the past seven months. I know some of you have been left wanting much more. We have offered the insights into the human condition that some of our wisest teachers have provided. We’ve been attending to the grief and anguish, and we’ve been carefully discerning what our role might be at a time like this. What does the intimate regard with which people hold us require?
The daily onslaught of our senses these past months has demanded a moral reckoning. No matter how clear the conflict may seem for some of us, the work to get ourselves out of it is not simple.
Palestinians and Israelis have been among my teachers on the path to healing and reconciliation. The tradition of nonviolence that I bring to our work is one that does not seek to make a false equivalence between moral positions, but it does require me to work for a future that includes those who hold beliefs I find morally objectionable. It demands that I never stop considering the humanity of even those who would do me harm. I concede that this requires a kind of spiritual discipline that I do not always possess. The daily onslaught of our senses these past months has demanded a moral reckoning. No matter how clear the conflict may seem for some of us, the work to get ourselves out of it is not simple.
The questions of displacement and return, of home, of belonging are present in more regions than the “Middle East,” and they are political, psychological, emotional, and spiritual. What does it mean to guarantee safety for a people? The questions of fear, anger, revenge and what violence they justify is all too human. We are, in many places, confronting the questions of human rights and freedoms that the 20th century left unresolved and that many of us, the most comfortable of us, have felt free to ignore.
This week, we are bringing you once again the wisdom of Hannah Arendt through the prescient voice of Dr. Lyndsey Stonebridge. Krista and I sat down with Lyndsey this January to seek her wisdom for this time (and we have an exclusive essay from her, below). We are also bringing you a special season of Poetry Unbound.
has brought his wisdom and experience in peace-building into conversation with brilliant poetry that expresses the grief, complexity, and heartbreak of conflict. These are humble offerings to accompany you at this moment. It is not enough. When confronting something like this, I don’t think anything can be.As I see it, the work before us all is going to require a tremendous amount of inner searching and moral imagination. For those of us with ancestral or spiritual ties to this land, this war invokes a deep spiritual crisis. For me, all war has its origins in spiritual crisis. For those of us with family and loved ones enduring the bombardment of Gaza, the shelling of Israeli cities, or settler violence in the West Bank, I know that the fear is menacing, that there is at times a pernicious anger and often just unbearable grief. We will try to be a resource for the difficult inner work that must be done in order to end the cycles of violence that are epitomized by this war. We will invariably fail, but I’ve had a lot of teachers show me how to persist in hope for a future that seems unimaginable but necessary.
Lucas Johnson is Executive Vice President of Public Life & Social Healing at The On Being Project. He was previously a leader of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, the world’s oldest interfaith peace organization. Read his full bio here.
“On Being with Violence”
“The practice of violence changes the world,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “but the most probable change is to a more violent world.” In the numb hours and days after the Hamas attack on October 7, only one thing was certain: the world was about to get more violent. Violence is an attack on the bodies and lives of people with whom we share the planet. Violence on the scale we have witnessed over the past seven months is also an attack on the mind. “The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward,” Simone Weil, the philosopher, mystic, and contemporary of Arendt’s, wrote from war-torn Europe in 1939. Violence is bewildering: it makes it difficult to see what lies before us, to imagine the future, to judge, to respond — to be in the world.
Arendt’s answer to violence was the “drawn-out wearisome process of politics.” It was an error to conflate political power with violence, she argued. True power comes only with the assent, and sometimes dissent, of the people. Towards the end of her life, she worried deeply that violence had become equated with political action; and that force and terror had become accepted and normalized, as though there were no alternative to the baton and the drone. That equation, she concluded, “may well prove fatal,” and so it has.
Right now, meaningful politics, at least in Arendt’s sense, seems a very long time coming, and in the meantime, we have to find a way to live and breathe amidst violence. Recoil is one response. Alienation is another: Is this world of ideology and terror really ours? Can we be at home here?
Our habitual tendency is to want to put an end to alienation and discomfort ... But when that is not possible, what if instead we work with the skin that we need to survive them?
Recently reading Arendt’s letters to her former professor and dear friend, the philosopher Karl Jaspers, I unexpectedly found an alternative — and surprising — suggestion. What if alienation and rootlessness make it easier to live in dark times? she asks. Wait a minute, Hannah, I thought when I first read this — easier? Perhaps, she continues, our feelings of not being at home have a use? “They’re like a skin that grows onto us from the outside,” she explains. “And because of that skin, we can afford to remain sensitive and vulnerable.”
I was so struck by this passage and its metaphors. Our habitual tendency is to want to put an end to alienation and discomfort — to vanquish rootlessness (this tendency itself is often a source of violence). But when that is not possible, what if instead we work with the skin that we need to survive them? A protective skin that allows us to remain responsive, vulnerable, human? And skin is not armour: skin is to be touched, caressed, bruised, and stretched into new shapes.
Growing a skin will not entirely protect us from either violence or violent ideologies. There is always the risk of becoming either too thick- or too thin-skinned. Too thick and we turn indifferent, protecting our own softness at the expense of what is happening about us. Too thin and the risk is, at best, a permanent prickliness; at worst, a dissolution of all our protective membranes. It is often those who are most overwhelmed by violence, who end up making it their cause.
Although she has a reputation for being tough — this was the woman who laughed at the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann — Arendt, in fact, often wrote about vulnerability, frailty, intimacy, and sensitivity in her work. Touch, and the capacity to be touched, mattered to her. As I wrote my book on her life and writing against the backdrop of the climate catastrophe, the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and Russia’s war on Ukraine, I realized that this is the Arendt we most need now: the woman who was fierce precisely because she wanted to protect sensitivity and human responsiveness in the face of totalitarian destruction and violence.
Recently, as the police entered university campuses in the US and as ceasefire negotiations failed yet again, the writer and scholar Samantha Rose Hill reminded me of this beautiful passage from The Human Condition: “Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence.” In other words, we have no choice but to be “touched” by what happens in the world: it is the human condition. How we are touched, on the other hand, is on us.
Lyndsey Stonebridge is a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. Her 2024 book is We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Her other books include Placeless People: Writings, Rights, and Refugees. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
What’s tragic to me in this essay is the following sentence: “Our collective failure to stop this compounds the grief. “ Why is it “our” responsibility to stop this and how could we stop it when there is an entire group of people who will not stop until they have ensured no Jews live in the region. It’s a long held delusional goal which should be the focus of our attention and if it were, could be the only thing to resolve this “conflict”. If we are guilty of one thing in the west, it is of continuing to delude Palestinians that this is a reasonable goal. Both groups of people hold claim to the land and both of them should be honored. Only one side has ever been willing to entertain that. Period.
Hannah Arendt could not be more appropriate to read and rediscover at this time of evolving chaos. Thank you for this poignant essay on her continuing relevance today.