Hannah Arendt and The Dream of the 1990s: Part II
In the first part of this essay, I introduced Hannah Arendt’s notion of “miracles” as interruptions in moments of historical inertia. In this second part, I reflect on the role of human initiative in these miracles.
As we just discussed, it can be easy to fail to see the miracles around us, much less remember them. The end of the Soviet Union is a good example of how the memory of positive events can also suffer under excessively high standards of measurement. It is true that former Soviet states did not stroll off into paradise in 1990 and 1991. Putin has not brought about a triumph of political virtue in Russia, and ethnic violence did occur in Eastern Europe after the Iron Curtain. But that does not diminish the significance of the end of the Soviet Union and the meaning behind events like the first independent Polish election. It is strangely the case that in popular consciousness, a negative event does not have to be perfectly and completely negative to be legitimately seen as negative, but sometimes an imperfect positive event is dismissed. A positive event connected with imperfect people can even be something we almost wish had not happened.
George Frederic Watts, Hope (1886)
A less hopeful outlook on the future can also be a byproduct of aging. If you remember the 1990s, you are no longer young. As our personal horizons begin to shrink, we expect less and less for ourselves. We begin to think that perhaps our country or the world is falling apart a bit and that we will not achieve much more and should probably get serious about taking a multivitamin. Positive change begins to feel unlikely or even impossible. Perhaps it is even in the realm of “infinite improbability.” As we expect less good in the future, we sadly forget much of the good we have experienced in the past.
By 1960, Hannah Arendt had accumulated a good deal of firsthand experience about the ways in which the world can be disappointing and dangerous. Yet she counseled not only belief in miracles, but expectation of them. She writes that “it is not in the least superstitious, it is even in the counsel of realism, to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable, to be prepared for and expect ‘miracles’ in the political realm.” That is for all times, for “the more heavily the scales are weighted in favor of disaster, the more miraculous will the deed done in freedom appear; for it is disaster, not salvation, which always happens automatically and therefore always must appear to be irresistible.”
Appearances can be deceptive. Disaster is not inherently irresistible. If you were alive in the 1990s, you remember how worried the world was about the ozone layer. Hairspray was the plastic straw of the 1990s. Well, the world got its act together on the issue of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and the situation has improved. Action was taken on an environmental issue, which nowadays we are always being told is impossible. Yet it has happened in our lifetimes. Every era should expect its miracles.
This should not spell complacency; to the contrary. Arendt emphasizes that human initiative is a key part of her historical miracles. If we step back a bit further in time, consider that it was once socially acceptable to drive after drinking too much. If we go far enough back, drunkenness could even be used to excuse bad driving behavior. What happened? A major catalyst was the 1980 founding of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, now Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). MADD did not accept inertia. It expected and pursued a miracle. Its members initiated a cultural shift. Today, drunk driving is both legally and socially unacceptable. People became actively involved in a cause and change was the result. “The way things are” is not always a guide to the way things will be.
Failing to expect miracles is not yielding to realism; it is abdication of responsibility. This is the case because “in the realm of human affairs, we know the author of the ‘miracles.’ It is men who perform them—men who because they have received the twofold gift of freedom and action can establish a reality of their own.” We are often encouraged to see the problems around us as intractable. It sells books, movies, and television, and it facilitates the kind of politics that run on cynicism and despair. If we are unhappy with our current reality, we must establish a new one. And miracles are what will bring it about. We should expect them and we should expect them from ourselves. If we want memories of miracles to draw on, we can do worse than to remember the 1990s.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history at Palm Beach Atlantic University. She has a book about World War I, Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War, and she has written for various publications, including Front Porch Republic, Comment, and Inside Higher Ed. She is editor-in-chief of Orange Blossom Ordinary.