The necessity of fallacies and distastefulness in the public debate

For anyone who lives in a liberal society it is obvious that we defend the freedom of the expression of opinion and the freedom of discussion. However, if someone asks us to give rational arguments to underpin these important values of liberal democracies, it could be difficult to give a clear answer. Certainly, freedom of speech is an individual’s right; everyone should be able to say whatever he or she wants, even if the message is unpleasant, controversial or even shocking. In this article I do not want to discuss the limitation of freedom of speech and expression, but to adduce arguments in favor of the widest possible performance of these freedoms.  

One might wonder why it is necessary to bring these arguments forward. Almost all of the readers of this blog would utterly agree with me when I state that the freedom of expression of opinion is something worth fighting for.

However, I would argue that the necessity for examining the importance of the freedom of speech become more clear if we look cases where the political and intellectual establishment almost unanimously agrees on the distastefulness of the expressed opinions. In the Netherlands the politician Geert Wilders was accused of hate speech and the insulting of religious groups; he was  acquitted of all charges after a careless trail in June 2011. Another example are the activities of the fundamentalist preacher Terry Jones, who planned a “International Burn a Koran Day”. What I noticed was that one aspect of the freedom of expression received little attention: that also opinions and expressions which are distasteful, untrue, or even stupid contribute to truth and freedom.     

John Stuart Mill (1806-1973) summarizes in his essay On Liberty, first published in 1859, the most important arguments why freedom of discussion and freedom of expression are so important. The first ‘ground’ for always allowing the freedom of opinion and the freedom of expression of opinion is because the silenced opinion of the dissident is possibly true. According to Mill nobody is infallible, and therefore we should always be open for discussion.

Secondly, and more common, is a situation where the silenced opinion is untrue ‘contains a portion of truth’ but is not the whole truth. By opposing opinions the truth might come to light.

Thirdly, the expressed opinion could be the ‘whole truth’. But even if the opinion is the whole truth it needs to be ‘vigorously and earnestly contested’. By extensively discussing a true opinion we understand its ‘rational grounds’, Stuart Mill argues.

And fourthly, Mill warns against the transformation of truth into dogma. Without ‘real and heartfelt conviction’ we might lose the meaning of the doctrine itself, only through personal examination truth can remain vital and effective. If people express untrue opinions are, Mill argues,  it will result in ‘clearer perception and livelier impression of truth’. ‘Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field.’ Truth needs the collision with error in order to present itself. Without this collision the ‘living truth’ becomes a ‘death dogma’.

In John Stuart Mill’s work the discussion and debate should lead to truth, and the discussion is not a goal in itself. Free discussion is functional and necessary because leads to truth. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), another important political philosopher who extensively wrote about freedom, has a different understanding of this issue. For Arendt the free discussion among citizens is itself a manifestation of freedom, in other words, a public debate is itself the performance of freedom. Freedom is like music: as long as the musicians play their instrument there is music; as long as we speak, debate, and act in public there is freedom. In the essay On Freedom (1960) she states that the raison d’être of these ongoing discussions and public debates –Arendt calls this politics – is to ‘establish and keep in existence a space where freedom as virtuosity can appear. This is the realm where freedom is a worldly reality, tangible in words which can be heard, in deeds which can be seen.’ 

Following Arendt’s argumentation it is not so much the outcome of the free discussion (truth), but in the first place the performance of freedom which is important. The silencing  of debate does not only deprive a society of the truth that might emerge from it, but more crucial, it results in the extinguishing of freedom. The collision between opinions, collision between truth and error is itself a manifestation of freedom. The fact that we as free citizens can speak in public about all sorts of things happing in our society determines our freedom.

Terry Jones and Geert Wilders are not thus essential players: in the antagonism of the public realm truth and freedom can manifest itself.

Arendt, H. (1960) What Is Freedom? In: P. Baehr, ed. (2000) The Portable Hannah Arendt. New York: Penguin Books, pp. 438-461.

Stuart Mill, J. (1859) [2010] On Liberty. New York: Penguin Books. pp. 25-80. 

Hannah Arendt about the Polis

Hannah Arendt explains her concept of the polis departing from an ancient Greek (Heraclitus, Aristotle) understanding of this term. In The Human Condition (1958) she argues:

"The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. "Wherever you go, you will be a polis": these famous words became not merely the watchword of Greek colonization, they expressed the conviction that action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.

This space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them—like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity, like the laborer or craftsman prior to the modern age, the jobholder or businessman in our world—do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; "for what appears to all, this we call Being," and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality." [1]

And about the public realm and the space of appearance:

"Power preserves the public realm and the space of appearance,and as such it is also the lifeblood of the human artifice, which, unless it is the scene of action and speech, of the web of human affairs and relationships and the stories engendered by them, lacks its ultimate raison d'etre. Without being talked about by men andwithout housing them, the world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated things to which each isolated individual was at liberty to add one more object; without the human artifice to house them, human affairs would be as floating, as futile and vain, as the wanderings of nomad tribes." [2]

[1 ]Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, (1958) 1998, p. 198, 199.

[2] Ibid, p. 204.

Kenneth Frampton: Tectonic Form and Public Appearance

What follows is a summary of a lecture by Kenneth Frampton that he held 28 May 2009 at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. This lecture was titled Tectonic Form and Public Appearance.
Frampton begins his lecture by critizing contemporary architects like Herzog de Meuron. According to Frampton these architects put to much emphasize on the skin, and not so much on the tectonic form and the spatial aspects of the building. What is missing is the ‘space of appearance’, a term derived from Hannah Arendt’s influential work The Human Condition (1958). An example of the space of appearance is the acropolis in ancient Athens. However, we have to realize that architecture is not a preexistence for this space of appearance to come into being. This doesn’t mean that architecture is a powerless instrument in society. Frampton formulates it like this:

‘Architecture can still intervene (…) in the urban fabric in a limited way, as an intervention. And this intervention should guarantee this of public appearance.’

The question is now what the characteristics are of this spaces of appearance and Frampton tries to find examples of them in the architectural history. The first one is intercolumniation as in the we see in the temple at Thebes. The hypostyle is announcing the sacral space. This concept of intercolumniation is omnipresent in historical architecture, Frampton also gives the examples of Schinkel’s Altes Museum where the columns announce the central public space. 
The freestanding column can also be seen as a analogue for the human body in the public space.
The second example is the Greek theater where the body politic could gather and transcendent there everyday life. (The life of necessity or labour as Arendt would call it.) Not only provides the Greek theater a place to make this possible, it also expresses it in its tectonic form, this form is an representation of the absent collective body.

The third example is the stair – in its tectonic form it already represents the motion of the human body. I would say that the stair, and the theater are counter-moulds of the public.
Later Frampton comes to speak about the role of architecture. He thinks that it role is twofold: Presentation and Representation. Presentation is about what is provided, the programmatic elements for the realization of the project. Representation is the constructional elements itself that represent the public, think about the examples of the stair, column. In the absence of public you see the representation of the public.
Frampton pays in this lecture a lot of attention to the architecture of Paulo Mendes da Rocha and shows several of his buildings. This because there is – according to Frampton – a relation between the human body and the constructional elements. (He also shows the faculty building of architecture in São Paulo by Vilanova Artigas.)

The limits of Architecture
Answering the questions of the audience Frampton comes to speak about the MUBE, the museum of Brazilian sculpture in São Paulo by Paulo Mendes da Rocha. (See images bottom of the post.) This building defines a beautiful public space, however, after the construction the site is completely fenced. This ruins the building and especially the public character of the project. Frampton reacts on this particular situation in São Paulo:

‘ (…) at some point architecture has its limits. There is a certain dimension where architecture cannot really come into being. I think because society is so stressed by poverty and by the accompanying violence that come along with the poverty [that] architecture come beside to point in a way. The heroic gesture can still be made but they may not be consummated because society is under to much stress. (…) When we get to such a level of paranoia [this] paranoia makes architecture in a society impossible. I mean, if you think about designing embassies today, you need to have two embassies: you need one that is the kind of representational thing where you don’t mind that somebody puts a bomb in it, and you need another embassy which is a bunker. (…) That kind of paranoia is a killer. It is the opposite of a society of risk.’

Fragmenten uit: HET BELANG VAN HANNAH ARENDT - Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (under construction)

In het boek Het belang van Hannah Arendt [1], geschreven door Elisabeth Young-Bruehl – bekend van haar uitgebreide Arendt biografie - vond ik een aantal interessante toelichtingen op citaten uit het werk van Arendt. Zo schrijft zij onder andere over het boek Man in Dark Times (1968) het volgende:

‘Er is sprake van duisternis als de openbaarheid, de lichte ruimte tussen mensen, de publieke ruimte waar mensen zich kunnen uitspreken, wordt geschuwd of gemeden; duisternis staat vijandig tegenover het publieke domein, tegenover de politiek. “De geschiedenis kent vele donkere tijden waarin het publieke domein verduisterd werd en de wereld zo onbetrouwbaar was geworden dat de mensen niet meer van de politiek verwachtten dan dat er rekening gehouden werd met hun primaire levensbehoeften en persoonlijke vrijheid.” Mensen die de wereld hebben afgeschreven, die denken dat ze zichzelf erbuiten kunnen plaatsen zonder zich openbaar te maken in het publieke domein, maar alleen onder vrienden blijven of zich beperken tot activiteiten in afzondering, begrijpen niet dat “primaire levensbehoeften en persoonlijke vrijheid” [2] betekenisloos worden als ze nagestreefd worden zonder de bekommernis voor de rest van het mensdom.’

Dit citaat laat nog eens het belang zien dat Arendt schonk aan het publieke domein, iets dat op zeer vergelijkbare wijze naar voren komt in ‘The Human Condition’ (1958).

Hoofdstuk 2: The Human Condition en het belang van handelen
Young-Bruehl noemt in haar commentaar op de ‘The Human Condition’ een ‘inleiding over hoe we de res publica, de publieke zaak, moeten herkennen, evalueren en beschermen (…)’
Om het werk van Arendt goed te kunnen plaatsen is het van belang om term ‘politiek’ toe te lichten. Cruciaal is dat er twee soorten van denken bestaan over politiek. ‘Aan de ene kant kun je politiek zien als regeren, als een vorm van overheersing (een, een paar of veel), wat dreiging met of gebruik van geweld mogelijk maakt. Maar aan de andere kant kun je, net als Arendt, over politiek denken als de organisatie of de constitutie van de macht de mensen hebben wanneer ze samenkomen als sprekende en handelende mensen. Hier ligt haar nadruk op het beschermen van de macht van mensen door een regering die het volk vertegenwoordigt: potestas in populo.’
Interessant is het onderscheid tussen macht en geweld dat door Arendt gemaakt wordt. Om dit te kunnen begrijpen moet eerst het principe van het ‘handelen’ (action) uitgelegd worden. Handelen hangt niet af ‘van georganiseerde of wettelijke gecreëerde ruimten, maar gewoon van mensen die samenkomen om woorden en daden met elkaar te delen: “de onbetrouwbare en slechts tijdelijke overeenkomst van vele wensen en bedoelingen”. Dit samenkomen van handelende personen noemde Arendt macht, een macht die zij nadrukkelijk onderscheidde van individuele kracht (onafhankelijkheid) en van instrumenteel geweld of dwang.’ (p.91) Arendt ‘meende dat mensen hun toevlucht tot geweld nemen wanneer ze geen macht hebben of die kwijt zijn’.

Het boek geeft een goede uitleg over Arendts afkeer van de term ‘maatschappij’ in het Engels vertaald met ‘society’. Ik heb hiervoor een lang citaat nodig uit het boek:

‘Arendt had in The Human Condition gesteld dat er in de posttotalitaire wereld een ‘consumptiemaatschappij’ of een ‘technologische maatschappij’ of een ‘arbeidende maatschappij’ – ze gebruikte die drie termen in verschillende contexten – aan het ontstaan was, wat uniek was in de geschiedenis. Het woord maatschappij verwees voor haar naar een modern domein van de Industriele Revolutie, privé nog publiek, maar in een ongekende overvloed aan goederen en technieken om meer goederen te maken, inclusief destructieve goederen. Deze maatschappij (…) ontwikkelde zich op een paradoxale manier: door technologische vooruitgang, met name de automatisering, werden veel arbeiders verlost van de slopende, geestdodende vormen van arbeid die karakterestiek waren voor de Industriele Revolutie, maar daarbij waren ze nog niet verlost van het arbeidsethos. Ze kregen door die bevrijding evenmin de mogelijkheid zich bezig te houden met hogere vormen van denken en oordelen, waardoor ze opnieuw opgeleid zouden moeten worden, opgetild zouden moeten worden uit de massamaatschappij van degene die geen mogelijkheid hadden zich te onderscheiden, te openbaren wie ze waren. In tegendeel, de meeste mensen in een consumptiemaatschappij beschouwen zichzelf als arbeiders, die gewoon een baan hebben, zelfs vakmensen en degene die zich bezighouden met handelen of denkactiviteiten. Ze ‘verdienen de kost’ en voorzien naar eigen idee in hun noodzakelijke behoeften (ook al zijn de ‘noodzakelijkheden’ op geen enkele manier noodzakelijk om te leven). Mensen die ‘de kost verdienen’ kunnen zich, in de woorden van Arendt, niet in vrijheid onderscheiden of echt nadenken over wat ze aan het doen zijn; ze doen slechts hun werk. Een bureaucratie is een goede omgeving om een gedachteloos iemand te worden, maar iedere baan is daarvoor geschikt zolang degene die die baan heeft alleen maar gewoon zijn werk doet.’ p.151, 152.

[Ik moest bij dit citaat denken aan American Beauty, prachtig geregisseerd door Sam Mendes. Onderschat wordt zeker Alan Ball, de schrijver van memorabele dialogen en monologen zoals deze:

Lester Burnham: Both my wife and my daughter think I am this gigantic loser. And they are right. I have lost something. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but I know I didn’t always feel this… sedated. But you know what? It’s never too late to get it back. [3]]

[1] Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Het belang van Hannah Arendt, Amsterdam, Uitgeverij Atlas, 2007. oorspronkelijk: Why Arendt Matters, Yale University Press, 2006.
[2] Hannah Arendt, Man in Dark Times, 1968.
[3] Sam Mendes, Alan Ball, American Beauty, 2000.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 2. CRISIS, CRIMINALS, AND THE SPREAD OF EVIL

The Paulistanos interviewed by Caldeira, think that the spaces of crime are marginal, often related to favelas and cortiços. The solution to solve these problems are strong institutions and strong authorities.
Plano Collor was a plan that was developed to make the inflation decrease. However, it didn’t help, it even make the inequality bigger. Especially the middle-class was hit by the increasing inflation, their savings where frozen by the government and after a couple of months the value had decreased enormously. This caused among many people the distrust of the government. For other people it was a reason to stick to a hope for a strong government that could change all this, or even to look back with nostalgia towards Getúlio Vargas or the military dictatorship.
The interviews Caldeira took with three poor working-class men reveal the pessimism of these people. To the question about what kind of rights people have one of them answers:

‘What rights? None. Only the right to go to work, to come back home and sleep in order to go to work the next morning. The poor man spends four hours in the traffic to get to work, two hours to go two to come back’.

They are very negative about the politics of Collor.
A very telling expression related to public space is the next one:

‘My salary is only enough for eating. It’s not even enough to go the amusement park to take Maria [his wife, JvB] to play on the Ferris wheel. If I spend in transportation to the park, then I won’t have money to go to work the day after. So I stay home, it’s better, I stay home…’

[This quote really shows the depressing consequences of poverty, these people are really excluded from the economically determined spaces. ‘You have to pay for the public life’ the architect Charles W. Moore in an article with the same name. JvB]

Another very good point Caldeira makes is about aestatics and appearance. The middle-classes often refer to the poor as being more lucky than they are because they are only in the realm of necessity and therefore they don’t have to care for their appearance. Caldeira sees this as one of the many prejudices the middle-class has about the poor. (I think she is totally right in that.) She refers to the dialogues at 2.9 about the fashion. [I think we can also stress this argument to the realm of architecture. To create a real city the public buildings should be more than just products of necessity; they need to become human artifices to speak in Arendtian terminology. Arendt writes: ‘Nowhere else does the sheer durability of the world of things appear in such purity and clarity, nowhere else therefore does this thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly as the non-mortal home for mortal beings.’]
When it comes to social distance there are several ways of creating borders: The most obvious one is to create a physical border, by making a fence. Another way is ‘derogatory conceptions’ [Dutch: geringschattende opvattingen, JvB] about the poor, for example to emphasize that they are not part of the consumer society.
The fact that the poor have television is often seen as wrong but the richer part of the society. They say they can better spent it on a refrigerator, something that is more neccecary but also a lot more expensive. However, in many cases the television is the only form of leisure the poor have, and it is their connection with the outside world.
[The following interview shows the vulnerability of democracy in Brazil:]

‘We used to think that the lack of freedom and the censorship [during the military regime, JvB] were bad. Today I think that the military regime should come back. For example the case of kidnapping. It’s absurd the lack of security that one feels. I’m nobody, I don’t have many assets [Dutch: heeft iets met geld te maken, JvB], but Iám afraid that suddenly some guy gets my son in order to ask a ransom of five million. I’m scared to death… Anyone may be kidnapped, because now kidnapping has become the fashion. Why? Because of impunity [Dutch: straffeloosheid, JvB]. We were talking about the military regime: when the Al-5 was introduced do you remember? [Al-5 whas the most repressive period of the military regime.] Bank robbery ended… It is impunity which makes us feel insecure.’

Kidnapping is the biggest fear people have in higher social classes.

Very interessting conception about the walls comes forward in an interview Caldeira did with three women from Morumbi. A fragment:

‘[Interviewer:] Why do you prefer to live in a house instead of in one of the condominiums?
O: Freedom. To me, freedom first of all, and then the contact of too many children that I would be unable to prevent [in order to] control the friendships of my children. (…) The famous fear of drugs. My sister-in-law lives in a condominium: all day long you have children from here, there, everywhere. You don’t know who the children belong to…
M: Because the houses are not enclosed, the house doesn’t have walls… Only the condominium’s wall, but the house has only the grass, and in a while it is already another house. American-style.
O: All open, and you don’t know the contact your child has. How are you going to keep them separate? You don’t have a wall, how are you going to say , “No, my son, you receive the friends at home that I think are better, I am going to select these friends”? (…) There are cases of a child robbing another child’s house in order to steal dollar to buy marijuana. I won’t name names, but there are cases… in a condominium.’

[What this interview makes clear is the walling of the houses do not only function as barriers to prevent people from the outside to enter your domain, but also to lock the children in. The wall makes it possible to control the friendships of your children. It is the housekeeper who decides what the best company is for the children. The most ironic thing about this is that person ‘O’ her argument to live in a house is because of freedom it offers. The expression ‘How are you going to keep them separate?’ also gives the impression that children need this kind of wall in order to protect them from the temptations in the outside world. The house has become a space of preventative rehab. JvB]

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p53-101.