Lecture on WORK AND POLITICS and GOOD AND EVIL

An Interpretation of Hannah Arendt

Dr. Ronald Schindler

In her Human Condition, Hannah Arendt broke down the concept of working to three levels that can be detailed as follows of labor, work, and action. Read a penetrating quotation from this text, below.

“But the background of actual political experience, at least from Plato to Aristotle, remained so strong that the distinction between the spheres of household and political life was never doubted. Without mastering the necessities of life in the household neither life nor the 'good life' is possible, but politics is power for the sake of life. As far as the members of the polis are concerned, household life exists for the sake of the 'good life in households'.”

1. Labor involved the creation of the means for sustaining your life and reproducing

it. Pain and suffering are entailed in the work world, along with psychological alienation. This description can be considered compatible with the Marx of the Paris Manuscripts. Activities become routine and involve the rationalization of activities; the administration of things impersonally by bureaucracy and the monetarization of the life world where World Alienation ensues in which Man is estranged from his conditions of life characterizes our present day situation. Man becomes nothing more than a biological animal at work, even when the means of production become socialized after the manner of Marx. Witness Stalin’s Soviet Union in which there was an equality in poverty as the most extreme example.  

2. Students have privileged access to knowledge and life opportunities of upward class and race mobility to think about fundamental values. This creates the freedom to form social contracts according to natural law theory. This viewpoint has been challenged by the historical materialist approach of Marx. The existentialist philosophy allows man to create himself freely by the will to will power. Thinking per se is onanistic. Only in public, in discourse with the Other, can we truly know who we are, and then that is not a guarantee. The faculty of judging entails ethical and aesthetic evaluations as to what actions are good and what are evil. Arendt distinguishes between radical evil and banal evil. That latter term makes its appearance in Eichmann in Jerusalem and has to do with the type of bureaucratization of reason in which rules replace thinking such that a person can commit crimes against humanity and think he has done his duty in good faith. Eichmann essentially arranged the transportation for Jews to the extermination centers believing that he was doing political euthanasia on a group whom the all powerful, totalitarian state had deemed not fit to live with. The consequence in the end was that there was a world war of good against evil in its simplest terms, the so-called just wars. At Nuremberg and Jerusalem the courts deemed that the ruling elite of National Socialist Germany were not fit to live with humanity because they were its enemies; hence, they were sentenced to death or to long terms of imprisonment.

3.  Hannah Arendt allowed the epic hero to emerge in history who founds a state. This entails the principle of natality where something from nothing is created de novo. This concept she innovated to counter the death oriented atheism of Heidegger in his Dasein philosophy. To gain immortality, each individual has the opportunity at birth to render great deeds in the public forum. Upon death, the hero survives as a legend. The narrative form of history allows humans to tell his or her story to spectators in the public who render judgment. The hero wills, the public judges. Our Founding Fathers acted out of such a revolutionary sentiment to negate the old order of Europe with its traditions that impaired freedom and liberty. It was a political revolution in which people are bound by mutual pledges to start anew a constitutional order that supports freedom. Her doctrine of forgiveness allows people to make errors and repent in order to continue the political process to assure its stability. This is the principle of natality to start from new beginnings something radically new in the political domain. The French Revolution augured in the modern era with terror as an end to assure the equality of condition and remake man socially to be obedient to the political system. There is a fatal flaw in this omniscient style of thinking. There is a direct line of  failed revolutions, in the image of the French model, that finally led to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Violence is the antithesis of the political. Totalitarian revolutions are the enemies of freedom because when the grand plan cannot be implemented, because of human error, the fault is not in the plan but in reasons of state that give class, race, and whole political factions blame for the contemporary ills. If men are fallible and the obstacles, the logic of social revolution leads to a war of each against all to the death of the political order in consequence. The result culminates in genocide and ecocide. Man is now destroying the planet in order to meet his elementary biological and socially conditioned needs, that are often false in their validity, to pose an unprecedented threat to the survivability of Homo sapiens itself.

4.   Arendt regrets that thinking and action separated at the time of Socrates and Plato, but reconstituted itself during our revolutionary era. Previous to that occasion, men acted such that they exhibited praxis whereby there was a unity of the two in a seamless pattern. Thought per se turns upon itself to render oneself a strictly private individual, forfeiting the right to political participation. Such solitary existing philosophers cannot be for men of virtu’ to model good conduct. Good conduct had to be premised upon being a good citizen who is willing to exhibit courage in battle to serve the interests of the city state. She took her concept of virtu’ from Machiavelli’s The Prince. Machiavelli wanted to have a charismatic leader unify Italy in the sixteenth century. Hence, force could be a means to an end, not the end itself, in forging a new order for Italy in which the barbarians would be expelled from the territory and nationhood would emerge in which the people would have a civil status in a defensible geographical area coincidental with nationhood. From this model, Arendt argued the necessity or realpolitik that made for the American and Jewish states, in different times. The creation of the Jewish state by the United Nations, but fashioned in war, was not only necessary in order to defend the survivors of the Holocaust but provided the juridical basis for a legitimate trial of Eichmann for his war crimes committed against the Jewish people from 1939 to 1945.

5.  Arendt, a German Jewess exiled in the thirties, loved and admired her adapted homeland of the United States with a passion because of the nature of its founding in a  compact in which there was given not just the consent of the people but a mutual pledging of lives and fortunes to effect freedom from the tyrannical motherland. The great leaders, like Washington, Jefferson, and Adams, worked for the public interest and not merely for private, selfish gains. Their works achieved a transcendent greatness. Arendt emphasized that the revolution was limited to political gains, and there consciously was not any effort to reconstruct man according to shibboleths of an idealized American that would have entailed a much longer, and probably unsuccessful outcome to the civil war within the colonies and the other between the emerging nation and Great Britain. Of course, Arendt points out that the original sin was slavery whose legacy lives with us to this day.

6. What Arendt particularly valued about the American republic was that in its founding days during the Colonial era Americans practiced participatory democracy at the local level, in which in effect there were invaluable face to face interactions and the secret ballot. The electorate were political actors, not spectators like today. She also advocated conciliar democracy for Eastern Europe in the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Czech Revolution of 1968. Too, she was an advocate of union power provided that its members did not have to submit to a bureaucratic machinery linked to the power structure whether capitalist democracy or European socialist. She was a strong supporter of the black civil rights movement in its nonviolent manifestations of Martin Luther King, but she avoided the Women’s Movement, believing its “extremist” positions did not properly represent the everyday, American woman with more practical concerns. She was more an advocate of freedom than a rhetorician of equality because the politics of equality leads to excesses and eventually to violence that is the antithesis of the democratic, political process as she understood it.  I will leave you with the final thought about promising. Promises are premised on forgiving others and ourselves for unavoidable transgression done in doing the commerce of political life. If we always sought revenge, a la Hobbes, then we could never start again anew and refashion ourselves as a work in progress. History would freeze into an eternal moment of hatred and its actors would be fixated on past wrongs with only the most dire and lethal emotions allowed to express themselves.

7.  Hannah Arendt does talk about the plurality of opinions in a world of diversity. In politics, opinions are rendered on a judgmental basis in an interhuman context. Truths are relative, not absolute. That allows for pluralism and freedom ultimately. She has a belief in participatory democracy in a federal system wherein an active citizenry put in their inputs directly or by representation at every level of government. In the end, she is arguing for an enlarged consciousness by dialoguing and informed citizens who have insights into the democratic process such that their decisions are not only rational and coherent but attain the status of a communicative community of common interests. The universality of common sense a la Kant and the particularity of discursive will formation a la Arendt coincide in a world, federal government at some indeterminate time in history. But history is contingent, not absolute in the Hegelian sense. So, the human project is fraught with peril at each of its moments in the process of evolving toward an unknowable future.

In conversation, an interlocutor must maintain respect for his or her partner in the speech acts. The desired actions and interactions will be a recognition of the common sense (of community solidarity) of plural interests that conflict and blend over time. There is an assumption to agree to disagree in an institutional format that generates popular power or the will of the people on an individual basis. Power comes from great deeds and noble speech acts to inspire insightful statesmanship to overcome world alienation. World alienation subsumes crimes against nature and human nature such that the world can no longer exist in its plurality of differences that form the ground for freedom’s possibilities.

8.      Arendt certainly critiqued very negatively the social sciences, whose experts put themselves into the service of the state, in their attempt to use social theory to control the behaviors of people, who by their nature live in a world of contingency. The very teleology of the social sciences contradicts how people actually behave, and that is unpredictably because they have free will which cannot be controlled by any application of social science theory within a political mechanism. People are not automatons and by nature are fractious and oppositional. To attempt to impose controls from above can only lead to a political system based on organized terror against the people. However, there is a dark side to human nature insofar as people to opt for radical evil if they perceive personal gains that are compatible with a power addicted personality type, or the so-called authoritarian personality. The social sciences had become a tool of the state in the administration of people to act passively according to the designs of the ruling class. In social theory, she saw that this instrument of control could be used for totalitarian purposes and also, because it is value neutral, would make terror, if necessary, more rationalized. This human condition she describes as the essence of unthinkingness that can lead to catastrophes in the manipulation of nature and human nature.

9.      Arendt talked about Jewishness. She described herself as a secular Jew, who did not necessarily believe in the Jewish laws of Judaism. That definition is unacceptable. Her concept of evil as ‘banal’ during the Eichmann Trial caused many people, Jewish and non-Jewish, to describe her as a self-hating Jew, which is not my point of view. She rejoined that she was a pariah/prophetess spurned for her blunt analysis of Jewish problems. Her sense of Jewishness was strictly political in that she believed Jews should be allowed to be accepted in state and society without being assimilated. That certainly describes the United States where Jews have either converted voluntarily or have exercised their civil rights to be Jewish. Arendt said that there were no essentialist qualities about Jewishness, such as intelligence, appearance, greediness, and so forth, rejecting and attacking stereotypes. She was a critic of Zionism and the State of Israel’s policies toward Arabs that led to a system of apartheid. But she said if push came to shove and the State of Israel’s existence as a homeland, rather than state, came under threat, she would throw her support with the Israelis. She criticized the imperial connection between the United Sates and Israel, saying that it only postponed indefinitely the Day of Reckoning when the Arabs and Jews would have to have face to face negotiations as equals without Great Power mediation. I find myself in agreement that love of the Jewish people best defines a good Jew; I would add that a passion for seeking the truth by studying philosophy is consonant with this definition.

10.  Amor Mundi: For  Love of the World.  Hannah Arendt loved the world in the political sense.  She knew that the emancipation for the Jew with his civil rights could only come by fighting for these rights in the public forum where there is equality of opportunity to make your case. The parvenu Jew, who retired into the concerns of the everyday in the freedom of the socioeconomic realm did so at the expense of his Jewish identity. It was to live in bad faith. Arendt had a profound realization that the socioeconomic realm harbored great inequalities of wealth and hence life opportunities that bred anti-Semitism and racism. She found racism to be the original sin of the American republic. Liberation and emancipation came with political struggle. Men and women could never be equal equal. Equality was only a moral and political possibility. There are great inherent differences between people and that bred inequality and persecution. That was to be the burden of the American republic from its inception to present times.

11.  Hannah Arendt in her Eichmann in Jerusalem takes on the problem of evil. She describes it as banal in the sense that Eichmann was only a jobholder with careerist ambitions within a corrupt system of National Socialism. Per se, he seemed devoid of anti-Semitic feelings. He was a normal man. However, Eichmann used his concept of duty, derived from Kant, to say that he was only following orders. He misunderstood, in his reading of The Critique of Practical Reason, that duty entailed critically thinking and saying no to unlawful orders, such as murdering innocent people on scale, even though he was remote in terms of the actual events. He had the power to transport Europe’s Jewry to their final solution. Arendt emphasized the importance of the quality of judgment, which Eichmann did not have. He was not willing to share the earth with the Jews. Might makes right. In the end, the surviving Jews did not want him to be in the community of men because he was an enemy of mankind to be killed at the discretion of people with a good will.  The Israelis made that decision that his crimes against humanity, in particular the Jews, showed that he went beyond simply committing war crimes to murdering people not related to reasons of state, which can be an excuse to eliminate rivals by political means, that is violence. He went over into evil in that he saw whole peoples as unfit to live and less than human who were not a threat to the state; hence, he did not understand Kant because in his second categorical imperative he told people to treat others as ends and never as means for a self-centered purpose, which actually deprived Germany of its most productive thinkers and workers. The first categorical imperative said that in exercising your will and ethical judgment the individual should legislate for mankind. In such a scenario, in legislating for mankind you would not exterminate whole peoples.

Hannah Arendt attacked the Jewish Elders for not defending the Jews under their protection. They involuntarily handed over lists that doomed all assigned to it. The Elders had no choice because death would be the instantly administered by the Nazis to their Elders and their families, held hostage. Arendt engages in a form of blaming the victims. Blaming the Elders is to condemn them to a posthumous second annihilation, leaving them to be dishonored and disgraced in history’s ultimate verdict. Arendt is a self-hating Jew. Simply view her lifetime love affair with Martin Heidegger, the leading philosopher and advocate for Hitler being “the voice of  Das Volk." The argument is ad hominem. However, students of Arendt have to know the company you keep in a profound relationship necessarily affects her moral status.

To repent is to renounce evil and make restitution. Necessarily, Eichmann could not make restitution to the millions he condemned to horrible deaths. That was a factor in judging him in Jerusalem. There could be no mitigating circumstances in his case. Too, he was part of the Wannsee Conference, in which he helped to draw up a ‘hit list’ of ten million Jews. What he did was unspeakably horrible and beyond being human. He committed crimes against humanity, a new juridical category that entailed killing on industrial scale for no reasons of state.

Twentieth Century Philosophy: The Question of Evil

A Philosophic Reflection upon Evil

There is a divide between the is and the ought, according to Kant. Reason and nature are at odds. For Kant, the world is not quite right. So metaphysical evil arises. The world is not as it should be. The Jansenists argued that God made a ‘botched’ universe. When He saw what he did, he fled the world and left it to man’s devices and free will. Hence, man cannot blame the way the universe is constructed in the ontological sense as a failing of man; it is a failing of the God who misconstructed him. That had been the case since the Lisbon earthquake of 1655. That is called natural evil, although really it is a catastrophe since human agency is not involved. Hegel reconciled the is and the ought, nature and reason through bloody conflicts in history. History became the new God. Later in the nineteenth century, Marx altogether banished theodicy from philosophy. He killed philosophy in order to kill God. Hence, for Marx, man suffered only the moral evil of capitalism with its faulty distribution of goods and services to the producers. With Freud, there was good and evil in conflict in individuals and civilizations. There is a natural evil in that man internalizes society’s and civilization’s mores. There is a war of good against evil in the instinctual makeup of man himself.

Auschwitz became the symbol of all that is wrong with reason in the twentieth century. Reason produced an industrialized system for administering mass death in a clinical way on a helpless population. There was a breakdown of moral codes at the death camps, for whoever was civilized was more apt to die. There were no rules of the game. Inmates had to resort to a natural state, in the worst sense of the term, in order to enjoy even a minimal possibility to survive. Neiman’s book showed that in modern times man has become God through a Promethean impulse. Otherwise, the person subscribing to rigid moral beliefs will succumb, literally, to the stronger who have the will to power and with it the desire to dominate. Good and evil must find new moorings, such as exemplified by Rawls, Sartre, and Arendt. Sartre believed that man must be the author of his own fate with no excuses. Arendt shows that man has to redeem himself through promises in which he takes an oath never to do evil again nor accept it. Rawls is concerned with fighting injustice (evil) through a social contract in which from an original position all agree to accept the benefits and failures of living together cooperatively in society. The so called least difference principle allows for man to enjoy power so long as those who are most dependent benefit first and consent to governing rules.

Natural evil deals with catastrophes in the environment. It is not so simple because man is responsible, for example for global warming. Metaphysical evil says that there is a world that is imperfect because either God is flawed or dead. The great systems of philosophy have tried to overcome the limitations inherent in reality by taking personal and social responsibility for the ills of mankind. The fact that God is dead renders metaphysical evil a matter of indifference. As for natural evil, catastrophic events usually cannot be foreseen and hence they are literally a given of the human condition for which we should be prepared but for which we cannot really ever fully anticipate. Hence, natural disasters are more in the way of freak accidents than divinely or humanly inspired evil. Rousseau did promise that man could learn from being in a state of nature. It is commercial society that made man bad by creating unnatural desires for meretricious things at the expense of dominating and bullying others. Hence, there arises by necessity the need for a social contract.

The last great issue is moral evil in that it relates to man’s unwillingness to think in extreme situations. Auschwitz could never have been foreseen. Marquis de Sade had his literary characters commit crimes so great that the educated and civilized reading public itself would be repelled by the intended evil deeds to be unable to reconcile them to any notion of reason. His literature was an attack on the Enlightenment with the belief that man was good. De Sade believed that there was no act of evil that could not be outdone to a new level of degradation to the perpetrators and victims. He was an amateur compared to the industrial scale killings of the death camps, spiced by a high dose of sadism in the systematic degradation of its victims from Berlin officials down to the guards themselves. The evil mentality spread like a fungal disease from the misuse of instrumental reason for purposes not serving the state. After the event, philosophers only can conclude it never should have happened. Words do not capture the essence of this human made monstrosity. It evolved from man’s hubris when there is a belief that with the killing of god there can follow the murdering with premeditation of his children in the forsaken covenant. Then, there is a war of each against each. The only hope is for civilization to have reserves of repression of its aggressive and sexual instincts to construct a collective mentality of superego that can contain the death drive in man. Evil is a category of theodicy and reason. If you man kills God, then his meager reason is pitted against nature in order to dominate not only generic Nature but Homo sapiens itself in a revolutionary attempt to create a new man who is a collective distortion of the projection of all that is repulsive and negative within man’s passions. Reason took a terrible beating in the second world war. It has never recovered its status, not so much that the is is at odds with any conception of the transcendent but because it wars with nature in the latter’s laws and inherent perfectibility. Reason is always the weaker of those two entities.

My own belief is that evil is not banal, that is you are simply ‘doing a job’ when you issue transports of whole populations to extermination centers. You cannot help but know the consequences. Evil is radical. It is a function of strategic calculation. Nazi officials first stripped Jews of their citizenship, then put them in ghettoes, at the camps they assumed numbered identities, until at last when they were gassed, they only were statistics on a hit list drawn up by design and malice at the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942. The bodies were cremated to destroy any vestige of the Jews ever having existed, or at least that was part of the grand design. Every German knew, because pictures and stories circulated in the population from soldiers at the front. To say I did not know is a lie. If a soldier, it is a lie to say that you could not help but kill innocent people when you could simply say no without any physical consequences really means that each individual civilian and soldier had choices to be made. The moral choice is simple: to acquiesce or to decline your duties to a personal oath given to Hitler. After the war, most Germans denied any responsibility, let alone knowledge of what happened. Martin Heidegger was not that kind of German. He neither repented nor gave an explanation of his wartime role as the philosopher of the Third Reich. Arendt questioned him on numerous occasions, but Heidegger begged off. Obviously, he was a committed National Socialist until the day he died. He played out his role to the day of his death, without any apologies. His evil is that he corrupted the youth of Germany during and after the war. By his silence after the war, he failed to educate youth as to the consequences of creating and then worshipping false idols.

The role of organized religion left a legacy of disgrace. The Jewish Councils, almost to the man, functioned as a cog in the wheel of the Nazi Behemoth. An Elder at least had the choice to commit suicide rather than to betray your trust to the community. In extreme situations, suicide is a viable and honorable option. More regrettably, Pope Pius XI was Hitler’s puppet. The moral conscience of the Vatican silenced itself because it had evolved into a secular and political institution. Its reason of state dictated saying nothing about the plight of their Jewish brothers. As for the various Protestant denominations, with a few exceptions, nothing was said. Silence is a form of endorsement and cooperation. Individual Christians did save eight hundred thousand Jews. They did so at great risk, for harboring Jews meant deportation to Auschwitz. A resister put his whole family then at risk. That is what is sublime about National Socialism. There were those from the first day who knew what Hitler’s policies would entail. As a member of the human race, you would have to either migrate internally or openly defy the regime. That so many did so speaks of the sublime character of human nature. To conform is a matter of habit of any national collectivity. To defy the will of all is to take on the proportions of a true hero.

We have discussed evil. An evil person chooses, for bad reasons, to objectify whole categories of populations into subhuman status The motivations vary, then, ranging from simply being a jobholder with prospects to rise in the bureaucratic hierarchy to sheer sadism, that is the joy in instinctually gratifying yourself in reducing another human being into dust, and then annihilating the memory of their even having existed. What is good, then? A good man or woman leads a virtuous life, according to a morally autonomous moral code, without the expectation of achieving happiness. This tension pervades life itself. A virtuous life is one where you achieve your potential as a human being in terms of searching for the truth without hedging and living your life in the service of others through political activities or praxis. Individuals are social and political animals. It is not acceptable to benefit from the liberties and bounties of your collectivity and not serve it. A life spent in philosophical isolation if not evil, is certainly not virtuous, but rather narcissistic and solipsistic. Philosophy done in this manner leads to embracing  the death instinct, for loving means integrating yourself into something greater than your idealized self, which can only be described as neurotic. By not being engaged with the other, an individual objectifies him or her into abstract categories, thus denying their full humanity and your own. It is an extreme form of bad faith—Sartre’s stinker, in effect. Carried to its logical extreme, there results pathology. The de Clerambault Syndrome best exemplifies what might happen.

As a victim of personal and police endorsed anti-Semitic violence for the past several years, I have benefited from intimate contact with my tormentors. My enemy is not an ideology, a foreign entity, or a physical affliction but has a human face of people who are my neighbors and local officials who have sworn to uphold the rule of law. Suffering emotional trauma and pain in extreme situations does educate, far more than the sum of all my book learning. I have learned who my friends are to date. None. I get much sympathy but no real help from those from whom I most expect direct action. Hannah Arendt said that you will never know who your true friends are until you find yourself in the situation I described in a previous lecture. Albert Camus said, paraphrasing him, in The Myth of Sisyphus, "that every day I wake up, I have to decide whether or not to commit suicide…. That is the ultimate question of philosophy.” Is life worth living under any set of circumstances? I affirm yes. Suicide is a crime against nature since the human nature that the suicide takes out of the social compact cannot be replaced and leaves a trail of a broken web of human relationships. Suicide is simply a variation of homicide—a crime against nature. It is not simply self-murder, but the murder of the social order. Just as quickly as true enemies show me their face, the day of deliverance will come when I see real men and women step forth and say—enough! If not, then I will die a slow existential death in a barbaric society where human relationships have been replaced by the cash nexus. That was Marx’s argument. I respect Marx because he said not only is there no need for a God, there is no need for philosophy. He engaged in the political realm, although he described himself as an economist. However, political economy is the secular study of how economic and societal relations of production condition how workers behave. Marx thought of man as a biological, laboring animal.

I adhere to a Critical Theory that believes in the Enlightenment ideals of further evolution of progress and its concomitant social forms, the limitlessness of knowledge, and that in the final analysis evil comes from a profound and radical lack of self-understanding, amenable to remedy through Freudian after-education. Just look at how successful de-Nazification was in post-war Germany. It is now a beacon of participatory democracy. So, philosophy is timeless in that it begins with an unanswerable question, why is there something rather than nothing? That is Leibniz. It really ends with, what can I hope for? That is Kant, and he promises no redemption. There is only hope. I can live with that ideal. I can believe that ideal will be fulfilled that my alienation from my fellow men will be overcome. Hegel ‘improved’ upon Kant by stating that the real is rational and the rational is real through History. History worked through the dialectic of the master/slave relationship. In the Absolute, all events in history take on permanence and hence take on a retroactive legitimacy and necessity where reason and nature are reconciled. That means that even Auschwitz had a historical necessity because of the cunning of reason. I do not think Hegel would have ever imagined the Holocaust, even with his understanding that History is a slaughter bank to justify progress with the culmination in the Rechtsstaat. Nietzsche had the thought experiment of eternal recurrence in that if you were to affirm life then you would repeat every aspect of history to the last detail. That would be an affirmation of the Holocaust and the suffering of its victims. I do not think that Nietzsche could have anticipated horrors of an unimaginable magnitude to be committed after his death, and vindicated in his name. His concept of the superman in particular took on significance in a racist sense not articulated by Nietzsche at all.

Refuting Hegel, Arendt described our condition as World Alienation because human kind is compelled to work the best years of their lives in jobs that generally prove to be unworthy of affirming life. Part of the appeal of totalitarian regimes is that the leaders promise transcendent goals to the individual pursuit of self-interest. The problem is that the individual becomes deindividuated as a collective being with no more sense of selfhood and personal responsibility to judge disinterestedly political concerns. I disagree with the concept that your work defines your being. Her Aristotelian concept of the political belies that emphasis. In the end, she said that it is sufficient to love the world on the promise that there will be new beginnings, and that is the justification for hope. I buy that latter thesis wholeheartedly.

Happy Holidays!

Dr. Schindler

27 November, 2008