Dialogue with Arendt, Popper and Orwell suggests ethical eco-socialism

PB July-August 2023 July-August 2023 63

otal State: Totalitarianism and How We

Can Resist It’ maps a series of cultural

and ideological mineﬁelds to better

understand the structures that have

informed, and continue to inform,

political thought and action. Dr Paul O’Brien deftly

translates dense, sometimes obscure, political

theory. He is anxious to stress that the increasing

polarisation of the Left and the Right – intensiﬁed

and exacerbated through online culture wars - is

deeply concerning given the grave threats facing

the planet.

This is sensitive territory and O’Brien is

painstakingly fair to all sides. He is overridingly

concerned with the unprecedented challenges to

individual liberty and peaceful co-existence

posed by increased surveillance, and the

associated corporatisation and bureaucratisation

of society.

The book is, in essence, a dialogue with

thinkers as various as Hannah Arendt, George

Orwell, and Karl Popper, with a view to excavating

their relevance for contemporary societies.

O’Brien’s previous work as an academic

focused on the intersection of ecological criticism

and the humanities and this background adds

depth to his analysis of the aesthetic and ethical

dimensions of political power.

A noteworthy example of how O’Brien links the

usefulness of theory, in respect of thinking

through political conundrums, is his linking of

Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion that the

totalitarian nature of fascism “seeks to make the

rebellion of suppressed nature against

domination directly useful to domination”, with

Trump’s rise to power.

The author previously wrote ‘Universal Basic

Income: Pennies from Heaven’, which

contextualised the various arguments for and

against such a measure, but favoured the

possibilities oers of a radical transformation of

society into a more sustainable eco-social model.

Notably, O’Brien makes a connection between

the mainstreaming of postmodernist ideas and

the increasing sense of alienation felt by the wider

public, speciﬁcally in the United States. He links

this to the shift away from a politics focused on

economic marginalisation towards a politics

focused on identity: “The focus of the cultural left

on postmodernist-inﬂuenced identity politics

risks not only strengthening reactionary forces on

the right but also alienating a new generation

whose main concern is, and should be, to save the

world from burning up under the pressures of

industrial capitalism”.

The book addresses the rise of Fascism and

Totalitarianism in the twentieth century. It draws

attention to the role of ideational, and

psychological, factors in the structures of thought

— ethnological, philological, and other — that

brought the Nazi party to power, and draws

lessons for our world.

O’Brien’s outlook is reminiscent of Tzvetan

Todorov in ‘Memory as Remedy for Evil’. Todorov

questioned the impulse of attributing ‘evil’ to ‘the

other’ emphasising the alterity of evil, rather than

radically addressing the potential for both good

and evil within human nature. While O’Brien shies

away from essentialist conclusions to present

discontents, the moral tone of his writing is not

unlike Isaiah Berlin’s in ‘The Crooked Timber of

Humanity’.

O’Brien’s states his primary intellectual

dilemma as, “How can freedom and order be

balanced while avoiding the opposite tendencies

to tyranny or anarchy?”. His reply is a summons to

citizen empowerment. He concludes that “the

answer lies in a combination of education,

enhanced political debate, an end to corporate

control of politics and the mass media, and a

cessation of media censorship”.

He is sensitive to the dramatic potential for

collapse of political structures and mindful of how

circumstances drive political developments (the

book encompasses the challenges posed by

Covid, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine).

A motif that runs throughout the book is the

distinction between truth and value, a distinction

he parallels to the Is/Ought problem in moral

philosophy.

There is an associated call for a renewed

emphasis on secularism at the level of the State

and in educational settings, to thwart religious

threats to intellectual freedom.

In O’Brien’s view, these issues are too important

to be relegated to the realm of specialisation and

deserve a public audience, an agora, if you will.

The only intransigence in the book is his total

unwillingness to conform to anything that limits

his ability to think for himself. The book serves to

remind the reader of the structural ironies, and

faulty premises, that beset argumentation when

economic torment is met by a tsunami of

misinformation, typically online.

In his dialogues he reaches out from the

academy to the streets. In the end, this is the key

contribution of this book, which can be viewed as

a generous plea for reasoned debate.

Dialogue with Arendt, Popper and

Orwell suggests ethical eco-socialism.

Perhaps the greatest danger of ‘cancel

culture’ is that it gives ammunition

to the political right, which poses

counterfactually as a defender of

freedom

Marion Kelly reviews ‘Total State: Totalitarianism and how we can resist it’

by Paul O’Brien, Eastwood Books, Dublin, 2023.

CULTURE

O’Brien makes a connection between the mainstreaming

of postmodernist ideas and the increasing sense of

alienation felt by the wider public, speciﬁcally in the United

States. He links this to the shift away from a politics

focused on economic marginalisation towards a politics

focused on identity