Critics of effective altruist billionaires need to reckon with the hard political realities around inequality.
Earlier this month I published a looooong piece explaining the current status of effective altruism (EA), the social movement that among other things inspired Future Perfect.
EA started as an effort to get financially comfortable people in the UK and US to donate more money to charities that could do the most good, but it has rapidly evolved into much more: a source of career advice, a political movement, and the preferred cause of at least two mega-billionaire households, Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz (net worth $14.2 billion) and Sam Bankman-Fried (net worth $13.3 billion).
The piece got a lot of feedback, most of it helpful, some of it less helpful. But most of the critical feedback to the story, and similarly themed ones from Gideon Lewis-Kraus in the New Yorker and Naina Bajekal in Time, boiled down to a simple argument: these rich donors need to pay more in taxes.
It’s a fair point. The EA of 2013, which was mostly a few philosophy professors and students donating 10 percent of their money to buy anti-malaria bednets, was not particularly entangled with the American billionaire class. Nearly a decade later, it very much is. Some people hate the billionaire class for very understandable reasons, and that enmity is inevitably going to rebound on EA.
The enmity is particularly pronounced for Bankman-Fried, given the fact that crypto is, let’s be blunt, a completely useless asset class that has serious environmental costs.
(Disclosure: Bankman-Fried’s family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, is funding some of the Future Perfect section at Vox, so let me bite the hand that feeds me and say that I think him buying up Super Bowl ads and Vogue spreads with Gisele Bündchen to encourage ordinary people to put their money into this pile of mathematically complex garbage is … actually morally questionable. Bankman-Fried can do a lot of good with the money FTX produces, but parts of the production process make me increasingly uncomfortable.)
The EA push for higher taxes on the rich
But the critique of EA philanthropy is also made in ways that are frankly just inaccurate. “A huge number of effective altruists support unconditional cash transfers,” the writer/podcaster Michael Hobbes tweeted, “but if you propose taxing them and funding the welfare state (i.e. the same thing) they lose their minds.”
I have obviously not been present for all of Hobbes’s conversations with every person who identified as an effective altruist, but in my experience this statement is bizarrely false.
A 2020 survey of more than 2,000 EAs showed they tend to be college-educated (often grad school-educated) 20 and 30-something atheists or agnostics. In a 2019 survey of the community, about 72 percent reported being left or center-left politically; only about 12 percent reported being libertarian, center-right, or right-wing. These are not people who lose their minds at the idea of a welfare state.
More to the point, both the Tuna/Moskovitz and Bankman-Fried households are extremely generous backers of Democratic campaigns. “I’m for raising taxes and help elect Dems to do it,” Moskovitz tweeted the other day.
This is, if anything, an understatement. Moskovitz’s wife Cari Tuna, as I note in my piece, was ranked by the watchdog group OpenSecrets as the seventhth biggest donor to outside spending groups in 2020, above figures like George Soros. Bankman-Fried, for his part, gave more than Hollywood mega-donor Steven Spielberg or billionaire Illinois governor JB Pritzker.
In other words, the two main financial backers of EA are also among the dominant financial backers of the US political party that’s actively trying to raise taxes on rich people. The Inflation Reduction Act just passed a marked increase in tax enforcement and corporate taxes into law.
Tuna/Moskovitz and Bankman-Fried’s support for Democrats is not primarily because of tax policy; they have their own reasons for wanting Democratic control and specifically for wanting Donald Trump out of elected office, as my piece details. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the EA movement, or at least its financial centers, are through their donations making higher taxes on rich people more, not less, likely.
So you want higher taxes. What do you do right now?
There’s something a little dissatisfying about this defense, though. Can you really get out of the guilt of being a plutocrat by using your money to swing elections to politicians who will tax you more?
The more hardcore critics of billionaire philanthropy would say, not really.
Emma Saunders-Hastings, a political theorist at Ohio State University, has advanced the most complete and uncompromising of these views in her recent book, Private Virtues, Public Vices. Saunders-Hastings argues that many if not most acts of philanthropy are “usurpations of public authority,” which “impose hierarchies of judgment and status” and “subvert valuable relations of social and political equality.”
In this view, billionaire philanthropy represents an act whereby the rich shape the society around them without deference to the wishes of the mass of that society. This critique clearly applies to EA, just as it applies to David Koch and David Geffen’s $100 million gifts to Lincoln Center to get their names on venues, or to Nike founder Phil Knight’s $400 million gift to Stanford to get a Rhodes Scholarship-type program named after himself. All these are mass reallocations of resources done without democratic input.
So, they’re undemocratic. Now what? There are billionaires committing their fortunes, right now, to philanthropic causes. If that’s politically unjust, we should identify what they should be doing instead.
One option would be for billionaire donors, from Geffen and Knight to Tuna/Moskovitz and Bankman-Fried, to simply donate their money to the US treasury. As philosopher Richard Y. Chappell notes, this is a perfectly allowed option that enables the wealthy to put their spending decisions in the hands of Congress. (Such donations could only be used to pay off the public debt, but hey — it’s tax deductible.)
But one almost never hears people proposing this. When push comes to shove, critics of big philanthropy usually don’t want to commit themselves to the view that slightly reducing the federal budget deficit is morally or politically preferable to letting billionaires donate to other causes.
Another option would be for billionaires to shift to consumption: go on even more vacations, stay at even nicer hotels, buy even more art for themselves, etc.
At times Saunders-Hastings seems to tilt toward this view. She notes that, “Some philanthropy is quite easily conceived as consumption,” such as opera patronage (billionaires paying for art they enjoy consuming) or yacht clubs (billionaires … okay, yeah, you get this one).
But she adds “even donations that primarily serve others can bring the donor indirect or intangible benefits,” she continues, meaning that “attempting to single out a subset of philanthropy as nonconsumption looks unpromising.”
If it’s really not possible as a matter of political theory to distinguish between buying bednets to save children’s lives from malaria and buying Yale an international airport — and if Saunders-Hastings is right that philanthropy has particular antidemocratic properties that billionaire consumption doesn’t — it seems to follow that we’d be better off with billionaires buying more yachts rather than giving their money away.
That view is coherent, but I find it impossible to swallow. At other points, Saunders-Hastings does too; she praises Julius Rosenwald, the multimillionaire from Sears who funded schools for black children in the Jim Crow south, because he provided a “stopgap” in a situation “where government is unable or unwilling to meet the requirements of justice.”
That opens up a crack in the critique that honestly begins to look more like a gaping chasm.
You go to tax war with the legislative body you have
It strikes me as plausible that the persistence of factory farming, the failure of governments to invest in preventing pandemics, and the failure of rich nations to protect residents of poor ones from preventable diseases — that all these things violate principles of justice.
If that’s true, how are the spending priorities of EA donors unacceptable while Rosenwald’s are noble?
This is knotty, complicated stuff. But the upshot for me is that we will live in a world of extreme wealth inequality for the foreseeable future, and the best we can likely hope is for the winners in that rigged game to donate their winnings justly.
The past year in US politics is illustrative. The 2020 election was, in one important sense, the best for the Democratic Party in 12 years: It marked the first time since the 2008 election that the party controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress. Given that these kinds of “trifectas” tend to only last for two years before midterms wipe out the governing party’s congressional majority, this victory meant that the 2021-22 legislative session was likely the high-water mark of the party’s power for the next decade or more. For supporters of higher taxes on the wealthy, this was about as good as it was going to get for a long time.
But the victory did not lead to a legislative majority willing to raise individual income tax rates on either wages or investment income, or willing to raise the corporate tax rate, or willing to expand the estate tax. Instead, the most ambitious tax policy capable of earning 50 votes in the Senate was a new 15 percent “minimum tax” on high-profit corporations, meant to force companies claiming large tax deductions to pay more. The Inflation Reduction Act, which included that minimum tax, also included an excise tax meant to discourage companies from buying back their own stock, as well as more funding for the IRS to catch tax cheats.
That’s not nothing, but from the perspective of wealth inequality, it’s close to nothing. The US would need a truly massive change to the way it taxes accumulated wealth or investment income, akin to the Billionaires Income Tax proposed by Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden (D-OR), to cut into major fortunes like Tuna/Moskovitz’s or Bankman-Fried’s. The experience of 2021-22 suggests very strongly that there is not a governing majority capable of making those changes in the United States anytime in the near future. Americans simply are not electing enough people to the Senate with those views for it to happen.
That likely means that the conversation about taxing America’s wealthy more will be highly academic until Democrats gain a more progressive governing majority; if history is any guide, that will probably take another 10 years or more after Democrats likely lose the House this fall. (And given the Senate’s rural skew, which penalizes Democrats, a decade might be optimistic.) As long as that discussion is academic, the discussion of how billionaires should spend their fortunes, given that they will not be taxed more heavily, remains very practical and real, and very high-stakes.
It’s well and good to point out that the game is rigged. It is. But that’s just the start of the conversation.
A Russian politics expert explains how much is still unknown about the murder of Darya Dugina.
Over the weekend, a car exploded along a Moscow highway. Inside was Darya Dugina, the daughter of an ultranationalist ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Dugina, though lower profile than her father Aleksandr Dugin, espoused many similar nationalist and pro-war beliefs and had been sanctioned by the United States for running a disinformation website. Russia is blaming Ukraine for Dugina’s death, and it’s already prompting recriminations between the two countries — and fears of escalation.
“Our hearts yearn for more than just revenge or retribution,” Dugin said in a statement Monday that added to those fears. “It’s too small, not the Russian style. We only need our Victory.”
Russia’s security agency, the FSB, says its two-day investigation found that “Ukrainian intelligence agencies” planned the attack, and a Ukrainian woman who entered and then fled through Estonia carried it out. Ukraine denies involvement and points the finger back at Moscow; a Ukrainian official on Monday called the attack part of an “intraspecies” fight among Russian elites. Meanwhile, a new supposed anti-Putin underground group tried to claim responsibility Monday.
It’s far too early to know who’s behind the attack, said Brian Taylor, a political science professor at Syracuse University and an expert in Russian politics. In fact, we may never know. With other recent assassinations in Russia with high political stakes, including opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in 2015, “the investigation usually ends up only going so far.”
Right now, “a lot of the speculation is simply that: It’s speculation trying to figure out, ‘Well, who might have had a motive to do that, and what that motive might have been,’” Taylor said.
Vox spoke to Taylor to dig into what we know about Dugina’s murder, the plausible explanations, and why the fallout might be felt most in Russian society rather than in the war in Ukraine.
This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Caroline Houck
So before we get into the actual attack and what we do or don’t know about it, I wondered if you could explain who Darya Dugina was. Obviously, any car bombing would make headlines, but why has her death in particular been so shocking, both domestically and internationally?
Brian Taylor
I think Dugina’s death has caused so much tension more because of who her father was than who she was. She was relatively new as a media personality and did not have the level of visibility that her father did.
And the thing about her dad is that there’s a lot of different opinions out there about Dugin and how important he was in Russian internal politics. My sense of Dugin himself was that a lot of times in the West, his influence in Russian domestic politics was vastly overinflated, and that it’s not accurate to refer to him as someone being close to Putin, or “Putin’s brain,” or “Putin’s Rasputin,” or whatever label that you want to put on it. He at a couple of times was useful to the regime, especially in 2013-2014, but he was always a bit too out there to be incorporated into the media mainstream. He is appealing to a certain segment of right-wing Christian Russian nationalists, with very authoritarian, very militaristic kind of viewpoints.
And his daughter was in a similar vein, occasionally appearing on some of the television talk shows and talking a similar line about the need to wipe out Ukraine and that kind of thing. But she was not one of the big media personalities that was a leading voice with close ties to the Kremlin. So, in that sense, it’s sort of hard to explain why this is such a big deal, other than because of who her father was. And because Russia is at war right now, and because this happened in Moscow, in a place close to where members of the Russian elite live. So in that sense, the reverberation from it is almost incidental to who she herself was, and I don’t mean that in a disparaging way.
I think we have to say that the impact isn’t so much about her but about the timing, the location, and who her father was.
Caroline Houck
That for me raises the question of, well, who would want to kill her? I mean, there’s obviously a lot of theories out there right now: Russia is saying Ukraine did it; Ukraine is saying Russia did it. And there’s this supposed anti-Putin group that is coming out of the woodwork trying to claim credit. Do any of these theories seem credible to you?
Brian Taylor
Honestly, I think it’s super hard to know this early what the correct explanation is. We don’t even know if they were trying to kill her or if they were trying to kill her father. So that’s probably the first starting point: Who were they trying to kill (whoever “they” is)?
Caroline Houck
Right. Just to interject, because Dugina and her father were at an event together earlier that evening.
Brian Taylor
Yeah, they were at an event together. And at least some of the initial reports suggested he was supposed to be traveling in that car, and then at the last minute went in a different car. So, yeah, it’s not obvious who the target was.
In terms of the theories, the thing I would emphasize is: We probably aren’t going to know any time soon definitively who was behind it. And so a lot of the speculation is simply that. It’s speculation trying to figure out, well, who might have had a motive to do that, and what that motive might have been.
Having said that, I think we can divide the types of explanations up a bit. So the one that the Russian government, in terms of the FSB, is promoting is that Ukraine is behind this attack. And if we think about why would this be in Ukraine’s interest, I’m having a hard time seeing that story. If the Ukrainian secret services are capable of carrying out assassinations near Moscow, it’s not obvious to me why either Dugina or Dugin would be who they would go after. And the evidence that’s been put forward — such as it is — by the FSB doesn’t look particularly convincing at this point.
So I think it’s more likely there’s some kind of internal Russian explanation for the murder. But even then, there are a whole range of possible candidates with a whole range of possible motives. Sometimes these things in Russian politics are political; sometimes they’re economic; sometimes it’s a combination of the two. The explanations in terms of politics go from false flag effort by the government to opponent of the government. So you’ve got a whole constellation of different possible explanations and motives. And as far as I can tell, so far this early, we just don’t have enough evidence to say which of those seems most credible.
Caroline Houck
So it’s going to take some time to get to know what happened, if we ever do. Historically, with other assassinations in Russia, what have we been able to learn, and what should we expect in terms of getting to the bottom of this?
Brian Taylor
I think we could look at both, you know, political murders in Russia — in and around Moscow — and also perhaps ones in the Donbas.
There have been various warlords and political figures killed [in the Donbas] since Russia started the war there in 2014. And always very murky kind of what was behind it, who the actual perpetrator was, with some people blaming it on Ukraine in those circumstances and other people saying it’s some kind of either legal or political or economic thing going on, like turf struggles for control of economic flows and that kind of thing.
In the Moscow cases, it’s often opponents of the regime. And, you know, the most famous ones are the attempt to kill Navalny, the murder of Boris Nemtsov, [and] the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist.
The Nemtsov one is sort of a good illustration of how these things often happen, where there are different theories put out there about who’s behind it. There’s clearly high political stakes involved in it. And the investigation usually ends up only going so far, right? So, someone gets put in jail for being the trigger person. But you never find out who was actually the person who ordered the thing to take place.
And in the case of Nemtsov, the threads went to Chechnya. And then the question was, how close did they go to [Ramzan] Kadyrov, the warlord/governor of Chechnya? And if they go to Kadyrov, do they go beyond that? Do they go higher in the Russian state? So the thread always runs cold, once you get past the functionaries. So it seems surprising that the FSB would have cracked the case in less than 48 hours in this case.
Caroline Houck
So how should we think through what people continue to say, what different sources continue to say — what the FSB says, what Putin says — going forward?
One of the things that people are worried about is that this could be used as a pretext for an escalation in the war on Ukraine. Whether you think it was a false flag by the government itself or not, it could always be used as a pretext anyway. So what should we look for in Russian domestic politics in the next 48 hours, next week or so, on how this murder is talked about?
Brian Taylor
Yeah, I think a lot of the conversation has already moved to what are the implications of this, regardless of who did it. How will it be used by various actors and by the Russian state?
So clearly, we see a lot of this sort of strident regime propagandist types arguing for hitting harder at Ukraine because of this, without any real hesitation about thinking through whether it even makes sense that there’s a Ukrainian trace to this. So it could be used for that reason.
But then, the question is what does it even mean to talk about escalation in a Ukrainian context. Russia has been bombing the crap out of Ukraine for the last six months and has displaced literally millions of people and killed tens of thousands of people. [It] has hit civilian targets again and again and again, whether it’s hospitals or schools or apartment buildings or malls or whatever. So what does it mean to say they’re going to “escalate,” especially at a time when, as far as the military analysts can tell, they’re having trouble putting forces in the field, they’re having trouble finding soldiers, they’re having trouble with equipment losses, and that sort of thing.
The other question then is: How is it used in terms of Russian internal politics? I think what a lot of people are worried about is that this will be used — even if this was not the origins of it — as an excuse to go even harder against any internal opponents of the war. The question is, if they’re going to tighten the screws further internally, where do they go next? Because they’ve already, you know, banned all opposition media, chased many opposition politicians out of the country, there are people awaiting trial. So there are other people that could arrest but it would have nothing to do with this bombing. So would it just be the atmosphere? You know, a “make the public more alarmed” kind of thing. But I guess I don’t really see [that]. Unless they want to use it as an excuse to go after a certain group that isn’t clear yet. So I think we’re going to have to watch and see whether there is more done internally to try and go after opponents of the war.
The other thing I would say that we should be paying attention to, maybe not in the coming days but in the coming weeks, is if this is an indication of some kind of inter-regime power struggle or fight, and the murder was just some sort of side-shoot of that.
So then we’d be in the murky world of the various courts of agencies inside the state that sometimes clash with each other, and quasi-state organizations like the Wagner group. We’d be getting into what Russian politics people often refer to as “clan battles” that are going to be escalating because of this. So that would be another possible angle, not the false flag angle so much but the angle that this is evidence of the state and sort of state-affiliated actors starting to split and fall apart over the course of the war. And there’s some kind of power struggle going on inside those circles that we simply don’t know what they are. But maybe in the coming weeks, it’ll become more clear if that’s the reason behind the murder.
Caroline Houck
When it comes to those kinds of struggles, those internecine struggles, would they be ideological, about pursuing each faction’s own interests, trying to grapple for power? Are there specific impetuses for it, or is it a general thing of, now we’re six months into the war and any unity is going to start getting taxed?
Brian Taylor
There’s potential ideological [divides], potential struggles for power and influence and infighting about, you know, who screwed things up or who’s going to be taking the lead going forward. I would not rule out overlapping political and economic motives because a lot of times these structures are not only, you know, part of the executive branch or quasi-attached to the executive branch, but they’re also entangled informally with various economic schemes to try and profit either off some subset of the agency or some actors within any particular agency or grouping.
This, I should say, is something that we’ve seen over the decades. So it’s just more dramatic now because it’s in the context of this massive war. And in the context of a real potential crisis moment for the Russian state and the Russian regime, where they launched this massive war, they thought it was going to be easy, it’s turned out to be very, very hard and costly. And so there could be recriminations.
Caroline Houck
So we might be being teed up for a more unstable period in Russian domestic politics.
Brian Taylor
I think that’s certainly one possibility. I think it’s possible that this is just going to be an episode that comes and goes, and then in a few weeks, everything has moved on and nothing much has changed. The more dramatic possibility is this is the start of a much bigger story and a bigger period of instability and infighting inside the Russian elite and inside the Russian state. I don’t have any strong priors at this point which of those it might be. But I think that’s what we would want to look for in the coming weeks. Is there some kind of evidence of this leading to subsequent events, that all have a common thread that we can’t see at this point?
Caroline Houck
Is there anything people should think about as they seek and follow news developments in this?
Brian Taylor
The only thing I would add is: Lots of things happen in Russian politics where we want to understand what was going on there. And I’ll remind us of Churchill’s quote about [Kremlin political intrigues resembling] bulldogs fighting under a carpet: “An outsider only hears the growling, and when he sees the bones fly out from beneath it is obvious who won.”
The idea is there’s this fight going on, and we shouldn’t necessarily expect that we’re going to know what was behind it until quite a bit later. And maybe that’s not satisfying. But I would counsel patience and skepticism about what comes out.
It can help us push back against tyranny. Philosopher Hannah Arendt’s legendary cocktail parties were proof.
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Part of the Friendship Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
Imagine it: New York City. The 1950s. An apartment building on Riverside Drive. Even before you reach the door, you can hear the buzzing, a clamoring hum punctuated by laughter. Inside, a dozen people sit in the living room, palming tumblers and martini glasses, alternating sips with a drag off their cigarettes. As the sun sets over the Hudson, there’s no cocktail party small talk; they are shouting with passion — though, you notice, no aggression or malice. The topic becomes briefly unintelligible as some slip into German and then, after glancing around the room at those who’ve fallen silent, back into English.
Books shoved into cases ring the room around the tweed-clad group, mostly men, mostly bespectacled, mostly recognizable from the lecture halls and barrooms and magazine offices around town, and in the middle of them all sits one woman with short, unmanageable hair and a wise smile: Hannah Arendt. This is her home, and this is the only place in the city you’d want to be.
The setting changed frequently, but from the 1940s to the 1960s, most weeks you could find a similar scene somewhere in New York. It was a recurring reincarnation of a tradition stretching back a century or more, to the European salons run by women, often Jewish women, with a keen interest in ideas, art, and people. This moveable feast went on for decades, with new faces, new concerns, but always the same goals: to find oneself among friends or frenemies, lovers and former lovers, colleagues and cordial nemeses, and hash out what was going on in the world while nourishing the soul (and the stomach, too).
This salon was made up of a group that historians would one day call the New York Intellectuals. Many were American Jews or Jewish émigrés from Europe. All of them wanted to understand the most fundamental things about life in a world that felt as if it had gone mad.
Only recently had the full horrors of Hitler’s Holocaust become known to the public. For a lot of the New York Intellectuals, the discovery felt like it split history in two.
A brilliant German Jewish woman, a philosopher by training, who had fled her homeland in 1941 and a few years later was publishing (in her third language, English) in journals like Partisan Review and Commentary, Arendt knew what was at stake. In 1951, she published a hefty book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which traced the roots of what was happening in Europe, from Nazism to Stalinism. In it, she wrote about what led to the rise of totalizing power, which erases people’s humanity by erasing their individuality. Totalitarianism tries to deny both individual citizens’ uniqueness and their ability to act collectively against systems of oppression. And most of all, it makes impossible what Arendt says makes us human. What was happening in that apartment over cocktails — the all-important act of thinking — is something that can only be done in conversation with the self, and with friends.
You can see why this group of intellectuals mattered to her. They helped her think, but they also modeled a crucial concept: Revolutions may be happening all over the world, but right here, in this little group, in this little apartment, among friends and frenemies, the subversive potential of friendship was constantly unfolding.
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They came to gossip. They came to be seen, to engage in intrigue, to quarrel, to flirt, to test out new members of the group so they could laugh about them later. They drank, and sometimes they’d eat, too, but the main thing they took in was talk. And it wasn’t empty or small talk. Their cocktail parties became legendary not because of their extravagance or their spectacle, but because they were where the group thought together, as friends.
Arguing was a way in which to build a world and test out ideas on one another. These gatherings were a boozy still point in a world spinning off its axis. If an idea appeared in Partisan Review or Commentary or the New Yorker, or in a book that set the intellectual world ablaze, or ricocheted around a classroom at Bard or Columbia or Berkeley, it might have first been hashed out and honed over some very stiff martinis on Riverside Drive.
Even when there were fights, intrigue, and bad behavior, there was something fundamentally solid and generative about the gatherings. When you look at Arendt’s writing, you can clearly see that these cocktail parties were a key part to her understanding of how the forces that wanted to eradicate the humanness of humanity — forces she understood all too well — could be defeated at their own game.
By the time Arendt was famous, she’d come to believe that the project of life wasn’t to think about the world’s problems in order to solve them, since no single fix could be found. Instead, the goal was to keep thinking. Like most great writers, Hannah Arendt wrote about the same few topics over and over, refashioned and reconfigured to fit new circumstances. Maybe her most important recurring idea is amor mundi — the love of the world.
For Arendt, amor mundi means you can’t fool yourself about the world, closing your eyes to the realities of history and injustice. Instead, loving the world means working on two specific tasks. The first is doggedly insisting on seeing the world just as it is, with its disappointments and horrors — and committing to it all the same. The second is encountering people in the world and embracing their alterity, or difference.
That last piece — loving people for their difference — is essential to Arendt’s thinking and her friendships, as well as her social gatherings.
“Arendt sees friendship as allied to politics: not as a substitute for politics, nor as a way of doing politics, but as a condition necessary for the survival of politics as she understood it,” writes Jon Nixon in his book Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship. “Friendship is what lies between the private world of the familial, tribal, and religious affiliation, and the political world of institutional and association affiliation based not on family, tribe, or religion but on equality.”
The idea of friendship being necessary for politics is strange to ponder. But for Arendt, politics was not a totalizing identity marker.
Yet, just as importantly, she wasn’t saying that friendship with people “across the aisle” is somehow going to save us, or that all politics have the same impact on humans. Instead Arendt means something slightly different: that friendship with other people (including those you generally agree with) subverts power. Friendship — in which people see and recognize one another’s differences, affirm and challenge those differences, and ultimately grow — pushes back against tyrannical forces that try to deny our individuality and dignity.
As Nixon puts it, “Through our friendships we learn to relate to one another as free and equal agents and, crucially, to carry what we have learned from those friendships — by way of the exercise of freedom and the recognition of equal worth — back into the world.”
True amor mundi recognizes that our problems will never be fixed, that there is no perfect theory or principle that will unlock the puzzle of existence and solve our problems. And, Arendt writes, that’s why politics exists. In politics, we come together, committed to the world, willing to raise our eyes and look at one another, to debate and critically discuss the world, continually working our way toward what we would like it to become, knowing the work will never be “finished.” Doing so requires us to see one another as individuals with equal dignity but very different ways of being. Our idiosyncrasies make us who we are, and those unique traits and eccentricities empower us to care for one another. We see how someone is different from us, and we choose to love that difference, thus expanding our love beyond ourselves.
So, politics is where we focus on everything that happens between all the individuals who make up a society. It’s where we repair the threads that bind us together. Yet, it’s balanced with the knowledge that while people see the world differently for different reasons, we can’t make up stories that paper over our reality. Racial history, class oppression, gender discrimination, prejudices of all kinds — we have to own up to them all. That’s how we start to generate freedom.
That requires us to think and talk with others — and sometimes drink and eat with them, too. How can one person, in their specificity, grasp the enormity of history and existence?
We are dropped down into a broken world, where humans hurt one another. To love the world, Arendt says, we need “oases” where we can retreat and be renewed. Those oases include art and music and poetry and dinner tables and cocktail parties and, perhaps most importantly, friendship.
That’s why friendship was everything to Arendt. It is the strongest of oases, the one that keeps us from turning inward on ourselves and away from the horrors of the world. It is where we learn to appreciate others not for the ways they are the same as us, but for how they’re different from us. It is where we overcome the horror of isolation, but also avoid becoming just another face in the crowd, lost in the collective. Friendship is the connective tissue that builds us into a true society and saves us from being overtaken by totalitarianism.
Arendt famously poured herself into making and maintaining friendships — even with people whom she might reasonably have been expected to abandon over her life. Her most strange, uncomfortable, even problematic friendship was with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, her former professor and, some believe, the great love of her life. They conducted a passionate, clandestine affair for a couple of years, beginning when he was 35 and she was 18 (and still his student). The relationship waned after Arendt left town to study with Karl Jaspers (who would ultimately become an even more valuable mentor for her). Heidegger then joined the Nazi Party, apparently enthusiastically. In spite of this fact, in the years following the war, Arendt — now married and living in New York — tried to reestablish contact, and for her whole life would doggedly pursue a friendship with Heidegger, seeing him for better or worse as a profitable intellectual partner, if not a romantic one. By all accounts he was, it seems, a rather exasperating man to befriend.
A much more satisfying friendship came in the form of Mary McCarthy, the writer and critic, though the friendship was almost ruined from the start. They first met in 1944, on one hazy Manhattan night in a bar. They’d both been brought there by friends — McCarthy by the art critic Clement Greenberg, with whom she was having an anemic affair, and Arendt by Greenberg’s brother Martin, her coworker at Schocken Books, where she was working as a secretary. McCarthy (married at the time to the critic Edmund Wilson) already had made her reputation. Arendt was still new to New York and was just beginning to publish in some of the most incisive, radical journals headquartered there: Partisan Review, The Nation, Commentary.
That night, Arendt talked animatedly about the United States, how it was still malleable and unfinished compared to her native Germany, a young country finding its footing. That kind of force would appeal to McCarthy, a woman who had built her life on having an opinion and stating it boldly, but with charm.
The pair didn’t become friends that night. In fact, the next recorded interaction between them, in 1945, was an outright disaster. They were at — what else? — a cocktail party, and McCarthy made a crack about Hitler calculated to scandalize her more sanctimonious friends. She expressed that she felt sorry for Hitler, an absurd man who wanted his victims to love him. Arendt was incensed. “How can you say such a thing in front of me — a victim of Hitler, a person who has been in a concentration camp!” she exclaimed, and then stormed out. Any chance of a relationship between the two seemed impossible.
But in the airtight, insular world of their intellectual circle, with mutual friends and mutual interests, they inevitably kept crossing paths. One night, after they both attended a gathering, they ended up standing on the same subway platform, no doubt waiting for one of those interminably delayed late-night trains that make you feel suspended in time, especially when you’ve had a bit of gin. Each had found in debates that they were frequently on the same side against the rest of the room. “Let’s end this nonsense,” Arendt finally said to McCarthy, breaking a three-year silence. “We think so much alike.” They made amends. And thus a friendship was born that would last the rest of their lives.
Their relationship, assiduously maintained by the pair until Arendt passed away in 1975 — after which McCarthy put aside her own work to prepare Arendt’s unfinished book, The Life of the Mind, for publication — is an ideal model for what Arendt thought friendship could do. Friendship is a place for public happiness, a give-and-take that is receptive to the world and to others. So friendship is revolutionary. It confronts and rebukes totalitarianism. Thinking and sharpening one another helps stave off evil; in friendship, we encourage one another to think. “It is within that place — the place of friendship — that friends are able to explore the truth of their opinions by ‘talking things over’ and through the ‘give and take’ of conviviality,” Nixon writes. Friendship in Arendt’s thinking, he later notes, is a “microcosm of the polity — not seeking to replace or juxtapose itself against the polity, but sustaining and modeling it.”
I learn from Hannah Arendt that a feast is only possible among friends, or people whose hearts are open to becoming friends. Or you could put it another way: any meal can become a feast when shared with friends engaged in the activity of thinking their way through the world and loving it together. A mere meal is a necessity for life, a fact of being human. But it is transformed into something much more important, something vital to the life of the world, when the people who share the table are engaging in the practices of love and of thinking.
Alissa Wilkinson is a senior culture reporter at Vox. This essay is adapted from her new book Salty: Lessons in Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women (Broadleaf Books, 2022).