The First Catastrophe
Hannah Arendt on the risks entailed in choosing to take action, and the tyranny of absolutes evoked to circumvent prudence
“The uncertainty of human action, in the sense that we never quite know what we are doing when we begin to act into the web of interrelationships and mutual dependencies that constitute the field of action, was considered by ancient philosophy to be the one supreme argument against the seriousness of human affairs. Later, this uncertainty gave rise to the well-known proverbial statements that acting men move in a network of errors and unavoidable guilt.” - Hannah Arendt
Political action is the attempt to alter the course of events through mutually negotiated plans. It entails such enormous and inescapable perils that it is a wonder that we ever choose this path! Yet we freely and willingly hurl ourselves into such action again and again, in strict denial of the uncertain dangers. What’s more, this treacherous ambiguity provides no brake whatsoever upon contemporary governance, which has long since abandoned any notion of prudence or restraint. We are told we must respond to ever-escalating calls to action by always appearing to do something, no matter how ill-considered it might be in practice.
Of all the twentieth century philosophers, Hannah Arendt had the most sustained engagement with the concept of action. There is great wisdom in her warning that commencing action unavoidably means taking a risk. Furthermore, the impression of necessary action should always serve as a warning. We simply cannot foresee with sufficient accuracy the consequences of our actions, and as such we cannot approach any problem with certainty without courting disaster. Action represents the beginning of something new, and it is an inherent property of taking action that it sets off a sequence of consequences that are inherently unpredictable, binding those who commit to it.
Those who act are also victims of the chain of events that they unleash - which Arendt stresses is what the ancients named ‘fate’, what Christians called ‘providence’, and what people today arrogantly dismiss as ‘chance’. In our commitment to denial, we never once accept what in centuries past was self-evident: that we can be personally responsible for our own doom. Just as misguided medieval misfits would blame their failure upon a lack of God’s favour, today we outsource responsibility for our health to doctors, our finances to governments, and our politics to imbeciles. Anything at all as long as we don’t have to take responsibility for our own actions.
To force extreme action requires an illusion of unity achievable only through tyranny, and Arendt declared this the “first catastrophe” of European philosophy. Her concerns here were stirred by opposition to the logic of Karl Marx, in which a ‘classless society’ is elevated to an absolute in order to justify its pursuit. Yet she is keen to stress that this is a far more flexible crisis, since “all things are equally expedient” when it comes to trying to force action to occur - literally “anything goes”. Any insane plan can be compelled into lurching motion by the evocation of absolute criteria, and reality will then offer “as little resistance as it would the craziest theory that some charlatan might come up with.”
Yet the uncertainty of action still has its revenge in the unleashing of unavoidable errors and the associated guilt which, thanks to our displacement of responsibility, we can transform into evadable blame. Hubris still calls for nemesis, but we can always seek a scapegoat to dodge our own culpability. Thus we find ourselves caught between the Scylla of despotically-contrived ‘necessary action’ and the Charybdis of despair in the face of our alleged individual impotence. We have simultaneously destroyed the conditions for authentic politics while empowering every convenient source of absolutes to bankroll whatsoever tyrannical actions are dogmatically undertaken in precisely the manner of Arendt’s dreadful ‘first catastrophe’.
Against the first catastrophe, against all action forced through the evocation of absolute necessity, the only defence we have is the space of authentic political discourse, the freedom granted to us by this very capacity for initiating new sequences of events. For as Arendt recognised, there is something miraculous in our capacity for action. As long as we can act together, we have the potential to achieve the unpredictable, the improbable, the miraculous. Even the mirages summoned by the tyranny of absolutes might somehow be dispelled by actions we cannot expect to predict, yet can still hope one day to attain.