'The other day I was listening to a news report. They said the death toll in Iraq has finally equalled the death toll in the World Trade Center. You listen to that and you say, 'What, are you crazy? Five hundred thousand people didn't die in the World Trade Center.' But of course, they're not talking about anybody but Americans."
Last Friday afternoon, the novelist Walter Mosley was on the line from snow-struck Chicago, killing time waiting for his flight back home to New York by mulling the American body politic and what the late philosopher Hannah Arendt might have made of it all. "Identifying a nationality where one person is worth any hundred thousand people in any other group - Arendt understood that problem with nationalism," he said.
For a woman who died more than 30 years ago -- today marks the anniversary of her death in 1975 - Arendt is pretty hard to avoid these days. Any given week, it seems, smarty-pants on the left and the right invoke her notion of "the banality of evil" to describe either someone in the Bush administration or its various enemies. Penguin Classics just published a new paperback edition of her 1963 treatise On Revolution. All through 2006, the centenary of her birth, dozens of symposia and conferences around the world have reasserted her continuing relevance.
Arendt's centenary has special meaning here in New York, since she made the city her home after escaping Nazi-occupied Paris in 1941. Here, she began reporting for the local German-language newspaper Aufbau; worked as a book editor; wrote for The New Yorker, including profiles of Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, and her landmark 1963 five-part series on the trial of Adolf Eichmann that became her book Eichmann in Jerusalem; and taught at The New School from 1967 until her death. She is buried next to her second husband Heinrich Blücher about a two-hour drive north of here in Annandale-on-Hudson, on the verdant campus of Bard College, which holds her personal library.
Bard and The New School each held recent conferences on Arendt. Last weekend, New York University chimed in with its own two-day consideration of her work and her life, inviting not just the usual crew of academics but also writers and artists who brought a different perspective to Arendt.
On Saturday afternoon, the author Azar Nafisi ( Reading Lolita in Tehran) and the exiled Iranian activist Ladan Boroumand discussed Arendt. That night, the German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta and her writing partner Pamela Katz appeared via video conference from Paris to discuss the film they're developing about Arendt's coverage of Eichmann's trial. And yesterday (assuming his plane finally got out of Chicago), Mosley was due to discuss Arendt with Steve Wasserman, the former Los Angeles Times books editor.
Mosley, who is probably best known for his Easy Rawlins series of Los Angeles crime novels, has a quiet connection with Arendt: Back in the late 1970s, he worked on a graduate degree in political theory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he encountered her writing for the first time. He abandoned the degree (winding up in computer programming before selling his first novel) but held onto his admiration of Arendt.
"The way I think and how I think about the world is so lucid through the image of Arendt's work," Mosley explained. Though she hasn't influenced his novels, she was probably whispering in his ear as he wrote What Next, his 2003 memoir that sought to challenge global capitalism, and this year's Life Out of Context, which called for the creation of a major black political party.
Mosley admires Arendt's ability to unsettle readers through her refusal to adhere to expectations. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she notoriously suggested Jewish leaders may have been partly responsible for how the Final Solution had been carried out because they'd allowed themselves to enter into discussions with Eichmann and others over particulars. "She's a dangerous thinker because she's a serious thinker," said Mosley. "She represents very beautifully a way that one might be able to think about the problems that we face, and about being self-critical.
"That's something I think that, at least in her journalism, Hannah Arendt was doing, and that I find very interesting and very important, because we have some really major issues. We lie to ourselves really seriously in this country."
This being late 2006, our conversation naturally wandered back to Iraq. But while Mosley is far from a fan of President Bush, like Arendt he realizes the problems facing the West go beyond one person. "A whole country visited this war on Iraq. It wasn't just George Bush," he said.
Mosley hoped his participation in the conference might help spark a wider awareness of Arendt -- that is, among non-academics who wouldn't otherwise have been likely to spend a couple of days listening to people talk about a German-born philosopher who died in the seventies.
"Arendt is a wonderful thinker and well worth reading, but what we really need is philosophers willing to get out into the world and talk," Mosley said. "There is such a thing as philosophy, but not in American culture. We have philosophers today like Dr. Phil and Oprah. You think I'm kidding, but I am not. Really, we turn to them to help us understand our problems, our morals, our bodies in relationship to the rest of the world. It's crazy."
He added quickly: "This is nothing against Oprah, but I think we need real thinkers who are going to challenge us, not who are going to entertain us, not that are going to make us laugh and cry."