I finished Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition this morning.

A passage from the last chapter was especially significant, because it hit several of my own core themes from the last several years (which were, in fact, indirectly implanted by Arendt herself, via Richard J. Bernstein):

• That humanity is most fully actualized when automatic behavior is transcended in the conscious decision to think, deliberate with others, and  act intentionally.
• Seeing human life from an exterior position rather than an interior point has ethical consequences.
• That behaviorism wishes to understand humanity as that which is observed from outside (empirically observed, like science observes its objects), but that only human beings restricting themselves biological-social automatism can be understood in this manner. Fully actualized human behavior requires speech, and it has the power to change the worldview of the “observer”, so that theoretical frameworks and research methods are in question, and the observer is deprived his uninvolved, neutral, outsider perspective.
• That science is significant as a cultural phenomenon, an extremely effective method of coming to agreements, but that these agreements are not the only kind of agreements possible between human beings, nor are they the highest. (However, they are the easiest agreements to reach, and in a world starving for agreement and its attendant stability, this value can eclipse all others combined. And in fact it has, even in spheres of human activity that call for higher forms of agreement, namely in education, in government and in business. Business defines its goals strictly in terms of quantitative profits largely because this is the easiest standard to set and the hardest to argue against. It makes people feel all hard-nosed and tough to assert it against their inclinations, but in fact this is a cheap and easy move, and it is not a heroic sacrifice, but a cowardly self-betrayal.)
• That much of commercial life is dominated by behaviorist psychology, and the scientific mode of agreement, both of which eliminate the “revelatory character of action” (which, in Arendt’s definition, includes speech). (“Revelatory character” is antithetical to predictability. Whether predictability is a defense against revelation, or suppression of revelation is a means to predictability, the need to predict and the desire to not be surprised are two of the most powerful, unquestioned and universal corporate values. (This twofold force is singlehandedly responsible for that repellent quality we call “corporateness” (and constitutes the single most obstinate impediment to innovation, which is simultaneously celebrated in word and undermined in action in most groups.)))

Here’s the passage:

The last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the over-all life process of the species and the only active decision still required of the individual were to let go, so to speak, to abandon his individuality, the still individually sensed pain and trouble of living, and acquiesce in a dazed, “tranquilized,” functional type of behavior. The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism is not that they are wrong but that they could become true, that they actually are the best possible conceptualization of certain obvious trends in modern society. It is quite conceivable that the modern age — which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity — may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.

But there are other more serious danger signs that man may be willing and, indeed, is on the point of developing into that animal species from which, since Darwin, he imagines he has come. If, in concluding, we return once more to the discovery of the Archimedean point and apply it, as Kafka warned us not to do, to man himself and to what he is doing on this earth, it at once becomes manifest that all his activities, watched from a sufficiently removed vantage point in the universe, would appear not as activities of any kind but as processes, so that, as a scientist recently put it, modern motorization would appear like a process of biological mutation in which human bodies gradually begin to be covered by shells of steel. For the watcher from the universe, this mutation would be no more or less mysterious than the mutation which now goes on before our eyes in those small living organisms which we fought with antibiotics and which mysteriously have developed new strains to resist us. How deep-rooted this usage of the Archimedean point against ourselves is can be seen in the very metaphors which dominate scientific thought today. The reason why scientists can tell us about the “life” in the atom — where apparently every particle is “free” to behave as it wants and the laws ruling these movements are the same statistical laws which, according to the social scientists, rule human behavior and make the multitude behave as it must, no matter how “free” the individual particle may appear to be in its choices — the reason, in other words, why the behavior of the infinitely small particle is not only similar in pattern to the planetary system as it appears to us but resembles the life and behavior patterns in human society is, of course, that we look and live in this society as though we were as far removed from our own human existence as we are from the infinitely small and the immensely large which, even if they could be perceived by the finest instruments, are too far away from us to be experienced.

Needless to say, this does not mean that modern man has lost his capacities or is on the point of losing them. No matter what sociology, psychology, and anthropology will tell us about the “social animal,” men persist in making, fabricating, and building, although these faculties are more and more restricted to the abilities of the artist, so that the concomitant experiences of worldliness escape more and more the range of ordinary human experience.

Similarly, the capacity for action, at least in the sense of the releasing of processes, is still with us, although it has become the exclusive prerogative of the scientists, who have enlarged the realm of human affairs to the point of extinguishing the time-honored protective dividing line between nature and the human world. In view of such achievements, performed for centuries in the unseen quiet of the laboratories, it seems only proper that their deeds should eventually have turned out to have greater news value, to be of greater political significance, than the administrative and diplomatic doings of most so-called statesmen. It certainly is not without irony that those whom public opinion has persistently held to be the least practical and the least political members of society should have turned out to be the only ones left who still know how to act and how to act in concert. For their early organizations, which they founded in the seventeenth century for the conquest of nature and in which they developed their own moral standards and their own code of honor, have not only survived all vicissitudes of the modern age, but they have become one of the most potent power-generating groups in all history. But the action of the scientists, since it acts into nature from the standpoint of the universe and not into the web of human relationships, lacks the revelatory character of action as well as the ability to produce stories and become historical, which together form the very source from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates human existence. In this existentially most important aspect, action, too, has become an experience for the privileged few, and these few who still know what it means to act may well be even fewer than the artists, their experience even rarer than the genuine experience of and love for the world.