Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt's Rhetoric of Warning and Hope

4. A Community of Memory at Risk: Between Past and Future

47 4 A Community of Memory at Risk Between Past and Future In this sense their own departure from tradition [generated an] . . . ominous silence that still answers us whenever we dare to ask, not “What are we fighting against” but “What are we fighting for?” —Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought Arendt offers insight into the emergence of a vacuous moment, one in which the life of tradition no longer brings together past and future. Arendt offers Between Past and Future as a counter to modernity’s disdain for tradition. She asks: How do you explain the gap between past and future? The space between is the dwelling of tradition; it is the gap between past and future that aligns us with commonsense engagement of daily living. Arendt’s story is a lament that counters the hubris of modernity and its assumption that we can live productive lives without a mediating link between where we are going and where we have been. She gives us a way of engaging tradition that is not static but alive in the between of the not (past) and the not yet (future). The entrance into this Arendt project is “the between,” a revelatory space where there is no sense of sole ownership. This emphasis is consistent with Arendt’s escape to the United States in 1941; she became a 48 A Community of Memory at Risk naturalized citizen in 1950. The concept of the between is a call for revelation and denial of a modern fiction that one can have complete ownership of discourse. The notion of the between is not a linkage; it is a space that functions as a dwelling between past and future as a revelatory location of meaning, a dwelling place of lived tradition that reshapes and reclaims itself in the ongoing meeting of past and future. Arendt’s treatment of tradition within the framework of the between, or what she terms a “gap,” liberates us from the modern prejudice of disdain for tradition. The union of tradition and the between rejects both a demand to control the assessment of yesteryear and the stipulation for agreement upon a given futuristic vision dependent upon unreflective progress. Meaningful contemplative life offers ground that meets the past and the future in a home not owned by us; meaningfulness lives in a tradition that dwells in the between of past and future. The group of essays that make up Between Past and Future was published in 1961; the writing of these works took place during the era after World War II to the beginning of significant societal changes in the 1960s. Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959. In 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected the thirty-fifth (and first Catholic) president of the United States. The change that Arendt witnessed was profound—from the development of new technologies to emerging new governments, from the increasing rise of Marxism in the Soviet Union, Cuba, and China to new hope for leadership in the United States, represented by Kennedy. For Arendt, the glue that holds past and future together in the human evolution of change is a live tradition; she addresses in political terms what Bonhoeffer termed in religious language “a world come of age,” meeting change from the ground of a living and vibrant tradition.1 The Story: Tradition Reexamined Arendt empowers the metaphor of the gap in order to defy the negative version of the notion of the between—her understanding of tradition is ontologically necessary. She quotes René Char, a French poet and writer, who offered a cogent reading of France after its collapse to the Germans and then its liberation after resistance: “Our inheritance was left to us by no testament.” The power of this quotation rests upon two words: “no testament.” It is the between of tradition that offers a testament, emphasizing a gap that initiates Arendt’s project. Arendt discusses the irony of how the burden of resistance lasted four years before people were thrown back into the “weightless irrelevance of their personal affairs.” The survivors of the French liberation were stripped of all the importance of dangerous work that had masked that they were without a treasure. Such a discovery is not unknown to those who seek to keep busy to fill a 49 A Community of Memory at Risk void where meaning at one time resided. Arendt underscores the...