Friday 27 December 2019

Hannah Arendt on Lies and Propaganda

When I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to power in the early 1930s. Paramilitary gangs terrorizing the opposition, the incompetence and opportunism of German conservatives, the Reichstag Fire. And we learned about the critical importance of propaganda, the deliberate misinforming of the public in order to sway opinions en masse and achieve popular support (or at least the appearance of it). While Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels purged Jewish and leftist artists and writers, he built a massive media infrastructure that played, writes PBS, “probably the most important role in creating an atmosphere in Germany that made it possible for the Nazis to commit terrible atrocities against Jews, homosexuals, and other minorities.”
How did the minority party of Hitler and Goebbels take over and break the will of the German people so thoroughly that they would allow and participate in mass murder? Post-war scholars of totalitarianism like Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt asked that question over and over, for several decades afterwards. Their earliest studies on the subject looked at two sides of the equation. Adorno contributed to a massive volume of social psychology called The Authoritarian Personality, which studied individuals predisposed to the appeals of totalitarianism. He invented what he called the F-Scale (“F” for “fascism”), one of several measures he used to theorize the Authoritarian Personality Type

Arendt, on the other hand, looked closely at the regimes of Hitler and Stalin and their functionaries, at the ideology of scientific racism, and at the mechanism of propaganda in fostering “a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member... is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders.” So she wrote in her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism, going on to elaborate that this “mixture of gullibility and cynicism... is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements":
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true... The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
Why the constant, often blatant lying? For one thing, it functioned as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity. “The great analysts of truth and language in politics”---writes McGill University political philosophy professor Jacob T. Levy---including “George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is.... Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism.”
Arendt and others recognized, writes Levy, that “being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless.” She also recognized the function of an avalanche of lies to render a populace powerless to resist, the phenomenon we now refer to as “gaslighting”:
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end---is being destroyed. 
The epistemological ground thus pulled out from under them, most would depend on whatever the leader said, no matter its relation to truth. “The essential conviction shared by all ranks,” Arendt concluded, “from fellow traveller to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the ‘first commandment’ of the movement: ‘The Fuehrer is always right,’ is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war.”
“We too,” writes Jeffrey Isaacs at The Washington Post, “live in dark times"---an allusion to another of Arendt’s sobering analyses—“even if they are different and perhaps less dark.” Arendt wrote Origins of Totalitarianism from research and observations gathered during the 1940s, a very specific historical period. Nonetheless the book, Isaacs remarks, “raises a set of fundamental questions about how tyranny can arise and the dangerous forms of inhumanity to which it can lead.” Arendt's analysis of propaganda and the function of lies seems particularly relevant at this moment. The kinds of blatant lies she wrote of might become so commonplace as to become banal. We might begin to think they are an irrelevant sideshow. This, she suggests, would be a mistake.

Monday 16 December 2019

King James' Bible and the Book of Common Player

The King James' Bible at Litchfield
Having attended a meditation on the life of William Tyndale at Bossington Church recently, I have become even more aware of the place of the King James' Bible in our culture. And when last week I attended an otherwise lovely carol service at St Katherine Cree Church in the City, I was saddened to hear the beautiful and time-honoured phrases in the lessons replaced with modern English.

I realise of course that I have been conditioned to hear the King James' version of the Bible over the past 70 years. Like many of my friends, I have attended school services since the age of five of six and since going regularly to my church at Litchfield for the last thirty years I am steeped both in King James and the Book of Common Prayer and have never heard any other. I love their cadences and phrasing. Any variation, however well-meaning, is a small psychic shock, akin to changing the words of a Beatles song.

The words used at church services make up the major party of the liturgy of worship and as such are imbued with deep significance and energy. It's not fanciful to imagine the words imprinted into the fabric of churches where they have been intoned without change for the past 400 years.  I am afraid that I agree with those who ascribe a fall-off in attendance at traditional church services to the lessening of the use of such glorious language.

See also - Litchfield Church - St Cecilia's Prayer 

See also - William Tyndale - the Translator of the Bible




Monday 2 December 2019

William Tyndale - the Translator of the Bible




The Authorised Version of King James' Bible, published in 1611, was translated from the Latin and Hebrew by six committees of scholars, and remains, with some later amendments, the most authoritative text of the Bible as far as the Anglican Church is concerned.

However, the original translation of the Bible into English from Latin and Hebrew was undertaken by William Tyndale, who produced the first printed translation of the New Testament in 1526 while being sought and harassed by both the Church and Henry VIII in the form of Sir Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell. Any translation into the vernacular was regarded as heresy, and in particular, Tyndale's translation further aggravated the Church by choosing to translate the Greek 'ekklesia' as 'congregation' rather than 'Church' and 'presbyteros' as 'elder' instead of 'priest'. Working in secrecy in Antwerp, he made over 5000 revisions to the New Testament in the 1534 edition, which became 'the glory of his life's work'. The King James' translators left most of his work (said to be 93%) untouched - though, of course, not the two examples above. He also translated the first five books of the Old Testament (the Pentateuch) including Genesis and Deuteronomy, but while working on the rest in 1536 he was betrayed and executed.

Melvyn Bragg has written a useful short biography of Tyndale, and he concludes:

Genius Discarded

Yet in this country, the King James Bible has been allowed to fade away over the past few decades. While Shakespeare and all his Elizabethan and Jacobean pageant of language is played, filmed, televised and read more and more and in the original without dissent, it was decided that Tyndale was too complicated! This has proved to be a dreadful mistake, We have discarded a genius and are every day poorer for it. I see it as no accident that Anglican congregations have fallen away since the King James Bible was abandoned.

The Anglican Church has more or less outlawed then King James Version. It pops up now and again but with far less regularity and authority that it deserves. Why not have Tyndale / King James services in every church and every school on the first week of every month. For non-Christians, it would be a feast of language, adventure and argument,. For all who listened it would be to hear and understand the deepest spring of our cultural history through the mind of a unique genius; William Tyndale.

Melvyn Bragg - William Tyndale Postscript

There is also a film of Tyndale's life made in 1986 called 'God's Outlaw'

See also: The King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer