We are living in an unnatural state. We are living like this for good reason, of course, but it is still an unnatural way to live. It seems that it has taken the experience of a pandemic to remind us of things that we already knew. We are creatures made for touch, embrace, proximity, interdependence and mutual care. Although, yes, we also need our spaces of retreat, safety, privacy and sanctuary. We want to be both with others and able to retreat from them and protect ourselves from others; sociability and privacy are both part of what keeps us well. This isn’t really news, but, goodness, haven’t we had it rammed home?
But there is another dimension to our creaturely nature we have re-discovered through this crisis, which is perhaps less obvious: we are creatures who need not just a social life, and a private life to keep us well, but a public one too.
The notion that we discover in a crisis that we are social, private and public persons are sentiments that would have made a lot of sense to the twentieth century political theorist Hannah Arendt. Arendt was a committed thinker of what it means to be social, public and private persons. To live in a moment when we have lost the usual markers of our public lives — spaces of free association, sport, leisure, work, worship, education and political action and disputation beyond the home — but when we have seen the global focus on the public ethics surrounding health, social care, food production and distribution, financial markets and incarceration rise, would have fascinated and disturbed Arendt.
Arendt wrote sharply of the Roman world’s contempt for a life that is lived in search of complete privacy. A life spent in the privacy of one’s own company (idios), outside of the world of the common, is “idiotic,” Arendt notes in The Human Condition. To live only a private life was not fully to be human. The etymology of the word idiot/idiotic takes its meaning from the privacy of being locked into one’s own world alone. This is not a life lived well, not the human being fully alive.
Arendt makes use of this sharp thinking to drive home her double definition of what it means to live a public life — a life that has rounded value. The public realm, for Arendt, has two meanings.
First, the public realm is that realm in which we come to appear to each other, when we emerge out of our own concerns to found a shared world. It is the space between people that opens up in the presence of others who “hear what we hear” and “see what we see.” We need these experiences of common knowing and judging. Second, the public realm is “the world itself,” what is common to us all and distinguished from our private space. It is all that relates us, and separates us — so, not just the things we agree on and share, but also the common realities that divide or separate. The public realm is not a flat world of mere chatter; it is the world of common projects, as well as of structural inequalities. This common world is something pre-existing that we are born into and pass on, and it is something we can make anew between us, as we create a space of reasoning, judging and acting. The public realm therefore is an expansive and fluid place, a happening as much as a location.
Taking these definitions of public life, it is clear that limited to our households and keywork, we have not become wholly private persons. We remain ourselves, even under domestic lockdown, public persons. What we have done in accepting lockdown is sacrificed the physical realm of public appearance as a matter of commitment to all we hold of value in that common world. We stay at home, to protect a common world; we accept the shrinking of our world and extreme limit as a public act. Lockdown is not a form of self-selecting privacy. Indeed, arguably, to accept lockdown and social distancing is to allow our commitment to the public good to shape our private living, for it to enter into our households, domestic and work arrangements in ways unprecedented in our lifetimes. We are allowing the state to dictate rules that encroach far into the terrain of what we have thought to be most private: our freedom of movement and association; our intimate relations; our care and generative relations. Our private lives are now matters for social comment and mutual, and even state, policing.
Arguably, what this illness, and our governance decisions in the light of it, has done is to intensify the publicness of everything and everyone, yet while shrinking our physical public world. Lockdown and the months of social distancing to come are experiences of the privation of particular goods, but they are not the privatisation of our lives. This is not what is happening to us. Nor should it.
What Arendt does for us is to remind us that our “publicness” is as important to our flourishing as our sociability and our privacy. She draws a distinction between what it means to act “socially” and what it means to act “politically.” The social realm for Arendt is both the context where all our basic survival needs “are permitted to appear in public” and also the realm of “behaviour.” One of the things she fears about modern societies is that society — focused on how we behave and what we will permit for ourselves and others — becomes the realm of conformism. This is worrying not just because we don’t really get vibrant societies out of conformism and sameness, but also, Arendt says, because there is a risk that we think this is all there is to our living together. We lose ourselves in the tasks of managing behaviour and forget that our true public task is to act, and to distinguish ourselves in doing so. The risk, says Arendt, is therefore that we confuse behaviour with action; that in modern liberal societies “behaviour replaces action as the foremost mode of human relationship.” This confusion can happen in any area of our modern lives and institutions, secular or faith-based. None is immune.
Arendt wants to drive home the point that healthy public life requires that we do not just see ourselves as social actors but also as fully public persons, committed to judging and acting as members of a common world we want to inhabit and pass on. Arendt tells us that public action is action in which we stand out, are individuated, become in some way excellent in a manner that is of service to others and a greater good. This is the space where we take risks, subject our common life to scrutiny, seek justice (that sometimes requires us to transgress what seem like accepted laws) in order to be increasingly open to the claims and needs of other humans — ones who are not our household and our kin.
This public life is the opposite of conformism; it is a life of skill, struggle, negotiation, endurance, contestation. It is the space where we stand and act in the name of what we believe, with and for others. This kind of public space cannot be placed under lockdown, suspended or suppressed. In fact, in the last two months we have been utterly dependent on it; we have intensified its importance — it has become, quite literally, our life support system. This is the space where healthcare workers, innovators and key workers have individuated themselves and been excellent for us, through both skill and public commitment. While one side of our public lives has disappeared, we have intensified our public services in every dimension of their “publicness.”
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Nonetheless, there is a side to our publicness that we are less sure footed about right now. It is the space where we contest what is happened and what is revealed to us about our common world. It is the space where we ask hard questions about the demographics of this virus, the values we ascribe to life and market, and where we interrogate the hierarchy of who it is we have believed to have had value and who not, and to be disposable or not. It is the space where we work together to survive this rupture and, when we can clear our heads, wonder about what life we wish to build together during and in its aftermath.
It is also the space in which we pay close attention to the kinds of words we use in public life. Arendt is clear that the public realm is constituted by both speech and action. In combination what we say and what we do form our public sense of the world. How we use language to define this virus, to frame our moral choices, to create hierarchies of value — this is all part of how we form a public life, and must be part of our public scrutiny. Words matter. They open and close moral worlds. Is it better to say that this is a proxy-war, a battle — evoking the conflictual world of friends and enemies, us and it-them? Or to use humanitarian language — a challenge to our ways of being human, a time to rise to a challenge of care, compassion and sacrifice? The adoption of political metaphor by global political leaders has been fascinatingly gendered so far.
I wrote in the first article in this series that the commentator Matthew D’Ancona is right when he says that we are suffering from a sense of collective “asphasia”: an inability to be articulate about what is happening right now. For reasons Arendt would understand, it is hard to think about it in isolation and hard to write about it. And I argued in turn that those thinkers who can help us pay close attention to what is emerging, but do not demand instant articulacy, are especially helpful and honest guides to thinking during a pandemic.
When I have spoken with keyworkers managing complex areas of social care, they have talked not only about this pandemic thinking fog, but also that what is happening to our public and social services is a rapid change driven by very short-term planning and outcomes. We are reduced to the interval of the moment. The emergency COVID-19 housing of the homeless and changes for those seeking asylum are cases in point. Our attitudes to those we have often labelled “low-skilled” or “un-skilled” has shifted — at least at the level of mere sentiment, if not policy and wider mindset.
We are creating suspended spaces of action, short term and reactive, but thinking through where we go from here, beyond the short term, on the one hand, and the sentimental, on the other, into a place that is better than where we came from, will requires sustained attention in the longer run. It will require a commitment to both paying deep, unflinching attention now, and fresh thinking, social innovation and change that helps us not retreat into hostility, animosity and austerity of public imagination, as we find the headspace. This is a fragile moment in which the latter world of increased social division is just as possible as the former world of real social change.
In a short review essay entitled “No Longer and Not Yet,” Arendt writes about events that represent an “absolute interruption of continuity” and the ways that these events open up an “empty time.” It is worth quoting at length her remarks:
Hume once remarked that the whole of human civilisation depends upon the fact that “one generation does not go off the stage at once and another succeed, as is the case with silkworms and butterflies.” At some turning points in history, however, at some heights of crisis, a fate similar to silkworms and butterflies may befall a generation of men. For the decline of the old, and the birth of the new, is not necessarily an affair of continuity, between the generations, between those who for some reason or other still belong to the old and those who either feel the catastrophe in their very bones or have already grown up with it, the chain is broken and an “empty space,” a kind of historical no man’s land, comes to the surface which can be described only in terms of “no longer and not yet.”
In this “no longer” and “not yet” of pandemic times, we are being opened to the moral claims of others in raw and demanding ways. These are immediate claims, with longer term trajectories we cannot yet contemplate, but in time must. In the interval we are living in, we are being asked to push against the anxiety that closes us from the claims of others. And to remember who we are: social, private, public beings with a vocation to protect life. In time this will need to become a different kind of public task — one of the renewal of our common worlds.
[Note: This is the second of three articles exploring the COVID-19 pandemic through the work of Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt and Gillian Rose.]
Anna Rowlands is the St. Hilda Associate Professor of Catholic Social Thought and Practice in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Durham.