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Thinking Big in Dark Times d r u c i l l a c o r n e l l In dark times we need to resist the temptation to miniaturize the human spirit, to paraphrase Amartya Sen’s telling phrase.1 We have to think big, even if we often feel overwhelmed and powerless before a world that acts from thoughtless myths and the reputed commands of ruthless gods. Indeed, we need to risk affirmative, moral, and ethical speech, knowing all the while that great ethical and moral ideals have indeed been soiled and profaned and debased , to echo a poem of Auden’s that Arendt so loved.2 At the heart of Arendt’s work is her conviction that the European tradition of moral thought has crumbled, not because of the failure of human beings to live up to their standards, or even because of philosophical inadequacy. Rather, the tradition of human dignity has succumbed to the brutal reality of the twentieth century, a reality that has undone the tradition by confronting us with acts and behavior that simply fall outside or beyond the reach of these measures or ideals. To quote Arendt: Antisemitism (not merely the hatred of Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest ), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship)—one after the other, one more brutally than the other, have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities.3 Before the horror show of the twentieth century, Arendt argues that “morality has become shabby and meaningless, and no effort to rebuild it will effectively revitalize the great moral and ethical ideas.”4 To the degree that ideals remain in the discourse of revolution, they are distorted into ideologies that threaten to prop up totalitarianism. To judge and question Arendt’s conclusions about the fate of ethical and moral ideas, we need, of course, to read the decline of Europe and European traditions somewhat differently from how she does. After all, Franz Fanon, Facing: Envelope from Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt, dated December 17, 1952. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Collection, Stevenson Library, Bard College. 222 Thinking Big in Dark Times who reminded us that the reconstruction of the great ideals of humanism could truly begin only with the demise of colonialism, remained committed to the possibility of a new humanity through the very struggle for liberation. As he so aptly put it: We must leave our dreams and abandon our old beliefs and friendships from the time before life began. Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration.5 While Arendt saw this demise and the crisis of ideals it manifested, she did not—indeed thought she could not—offer new ideals in their place. In the spirit of questioning Arendt’s judgment of modern European ideals , I want to offer two examples of the role of moral and ethical ideals from the new South Africa. The first is the connection between the moral ideal of dignity, as it has been established as the Grundnorm of the entire South African Constitution,6 and then deployed to justify the horizontal application of the Constitution.7 Horizontal application, in short shift, means the legally radical claim that all social actions are open to constitutional review.8 For example , the question whether or not discriminatory social gatherings violate any person’s dignity is, in South Africa, a constitutional issue. I will say more about this. The second example is the South African Constitution’s commitment of the current South African Constitutional Court to the ideal of humanity as this both demands and promotes a notion of cosmopolitan right.9 Furthermore, the African National Congress (ANC) has strived to develop an ethical and not simply an instrumental foreign policy.10 Arendt often argues that foreign policy should not be a political matter. In the new dispensation of South Africa, foreign policy is not just...

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