Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt’s Rhetoric of Warning and Hope by Ronald C. Arnett (review)

In Picasso’s famous 1937 painting Guernica, the artist depicts the brutality of the new modern age grotesquely ushered in that year when German and Italian planes, at the behest of the Spanish fascists, destroyed the town of Guernica during the Spanish civil war. The mammoth painting is set against a backdrop of pitch-blackness, with images of suffering, death, and sorrow illuminated by two sources of light. One source, localized and humane, shines from a candle held by a shocked onlooker who has come face-to-face with terror. But another source holds center stage. Pale, metallic, and lifeless, an electric bulb hangs from the ceiling, cloaking the whole scene in artificial light that acknowledges no good and sees no evil. Unlike the lamp holder, who witnesses, thinks, and judges, the electric light simply shines on, content to play its role to bring a process to its logical end, regardless of whether that end results in death or life.

Ronald Arnett does not reference Picasso’s work in his sweeping and ambitious book, Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt’s Rhetoric of Warning and Hope, but it is hard to believe it was not on his mind. Despite being structured as a survey of Arendt’s entire corpus of published works, it is more accurately an extended exploration of a single archetypal metaphor—that of darkness and light. Like Guernica, Arnett’s book complicates the simplistic binary that equates darkness with evil and lightness with good. Rather, Arnett posits that the greatest evil comes in the form of an artificial light, the light of modernity, which conceals the human condition and inhibits authentic communication. The result is a passionate and provocative book that stands as a unique accomplishment that cannot help but inspire the reader to do that rarest and most human of all things, to think.

For its scope alone, Arnett should be commended for his courage. Every chapter explores a single published work, whether a complete book or edited volume of essays, to derive at the end of the chapter a list of ethical principles for communication in dark times, which he lays out in clear bullet points. For instance, from The Origins of Totalitarianism we learn that the aim of all totalitarian movements is “a strange creation of ‘loneliness’ in which one works side-by-side with another in the mob, only to feel utterly alone with no one to trust” (46). From Men in Dark Times we gain a greater recognition of the “importance of the local and the roots of the particular and the valuing of diversity in the public domain” (131). From The Promise of Politics we learn that such a promise “rests with the protection of interspaces between persons in the public realm” (195). The overall lesson of the book is communicated in its closing lines: the “counter to modernity is a demanding rhetoric—think before, during, and after the doing” (263). For those looking for an introduction to Arendt’s work that reveals the breadth of her thought and shows its significance to communication, this book stands alone.

Achieving such a mammoth task does come at the price of making the book stylistically uneven, however. At his best, Arnett writes in a “gestalt” fashion, patiently setting forth the parts of Arendt’s thought in preparation for a sudden revelation of the whole, as when the survey of The Promise of Politics concludes in the aphoristic maxim that “the gardening of the human condition rests within protected interspaces” (195). But at other times, such as in the sequential summary of every essay included in Essays in Understanding, making one’s way through pages of declarative sentences about what Arendt believed and asserted can grow laborious.

Yet the most original contribution of the book comes less in its encyclopedic treatment of Arendt and more in the way Arnett explores the...