As one who made so many decisions out of fear for so long in my life, I am curious to go to New York City Wednesday with Maria, meet up with my daughter Emma, and all go and see the new movie “Hannah Arendt,” showing almost nowhere but New York. I am lucky to have a wife and a daughter who want to see this movie with me, I was expecting to go alone.
You will not see this movie in the megaplex near you, Hannah Arendt is not somebody corporate entertainment conglomerates are about to put up on marquees. A brilliant moral philosopher and journalist and professor and author, I have a dog-eared copy of “Responsibility And Judgement,” a book on how to make good and ethical decisions that I have used many times. It is becoming more, not less, important to me. If you are not sane, you will not make good decisions no matter what you read, if you get sane or saner, it seems to work out better.
Arendt argues that good decisions come from self-respect, not the advice of other people, and they require some practice in thought. In the world I peer out at from my farm, I do not see people being encouraged to think, they are encouraged to be afraid, and make decisions accordingly. Get tests, you might get cancer. Stay out of the woods, there are ticks. Build huge IRA’s or you will starve. Don’t find work you love, you need health care. Keep your cholesterol down, mess up your kidneys. Don’t ever talk to strangers or tell anybody how much your dog cost, it is dangerous out there. Aging is a terror bounded by tests, pills, long-term insurance and health care. You don’t think about how you wish to age or die, you just keep adding options, procedures, and policies.
Those are not choices or decisions to me, they are a way the outside world has of telling me to do these things or else. To live their idea of life, not mine. For me, that does not seem like free will.
Frightened people cannot make good decisions – I can testify to this – precisely because their decisions are based on reacting to what frightens them, not to what it is they want or need in their lives. You can eat up a life in a flash that way, the fast-track to what T. S. Eliot called the “hollow life.” If living in fear led to a good life, I would have it knocked, but I do not believe it does. To make good decisions, I have to think, and to re-think, I have to set aside what the world tells me I must have to live, and consider what I tell myself I must have to live a meaningful life.
If I am not being scared to death, I am drowning in unwanted advice and every day each of us must struggle through this swamp and figure out who we really. To make good decisions, I must know myself well. If this shortens my life or brings a plague down on my head, I will accept responsibility and as of now, I will consider it a fair trade.
I was on the phone with Fedex tech support today – their software didn’t like my telephone number, refused to believe it was mine. After escaping the phone tree, I made it to India where a lovely man set to work on the problem while humming some music. After a few minutes, he remembered that I was there and apologized. Did I mind the music, the humming?, he asked. Not at all, I said, it was lovely and it was better than listening to static. Soon he fixed my problem and he said he enjoyed talking to me. Americans usually got annoyed with his humming, he said. Of course, I thought, they didn’t have time for it. I will make time for it.
Everywhere I go I am being told what to think, what to do, what I need. I can’t recall when anyone last asked me what I think, I want to do, what I need. This is what I need to keep on learning to do, this is my work, this is Arendt’s vision.
Every time I read Arendt – this gutsy old-world intellectual, think of her throaty, chain-smoking voice, her gutteral German accent, her challenge to people to avoid labels and think for themselves – I learn something about decisions. You will not find moral philosophers on cable tv news, even though that might be the best possible thing for all of us. You find ideologues and dogmatics using ideas as entertainment to feed their own tribes. I’m excited to see this movie and get a breath of the other world and I hope, as always with Hannah Arendt, I learn a thing or two more about making decisions for myself. About learning how to think. I have a farm, but I live a life of the mind, and it is the mind that needs its own grain, as the donkeys need theirs.
Wednesday, I’m going to New York for a vitamin boost for the mind, an affirmation of the fading are of learning to think for myself.