Pope Leo XIV quoted Hannah Arendt in a speech to the world’s top news agencies. origins of totalitarianism. He emphasized her warning about “ideal subjects of totalitarian domination” and warned against a world in which “the illusion of omnipotence” makes it impossible to distinguish between fact and fiction.
The Pope spoke of the “post-truth quicksand” and pointed to conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. The White House is not happy. More headlines.
Most people, including admirers of Arendt, find this reassuring. However, those who consider her a cheerleader in the public square often misunderstand the woman herself. Famous for valuing public life over private life in the spirit of early democracies, she argued that political integrity begins subjectively, even if politics remains in our minds or is the first thing we want to forget.
She warned of a growing “desert” in social life, exacerbated by conformity, empty slogans and ridicule of the sacred. The real danger is that we have become accustomed to living in this sandstorm.
We often get attached to big ideas like systems, structure, and movement. These are important things, but we forget that society ultimately depends more on the character of people than on the efficiency of its institutions.
Treating politics with contempt will lead to the chaos we all fear. Populist narratives have made our national identity more vulgar, pushing out habits of mind such as empathy and moderation, which no policy can replace. Blaming the system for your failures is like blaming a mirror for your reflection. This kind of thinking mistakes symptoms for causes. It ignores that an empty culture cannot maintain a strong society. While we criticize our reflection, we live true to that which distorts it.
Courage lies in what Arendt called “oasis”, small, specific places where different ways of thinking exist. These manifest as friendships, conversations, and a new sense of privacy. They are not big solutions, but they are important solutions to break out of our collective drift. Social trust cannot be built by law. Survival is more important than compassion, and you cannot thrive where only the strongest have support.
An oasis is a place where slow, uncertain, and sometimes inconvenient thinking is still possible. It’s not just a “comfort zone”. Arendt would have seen the newly fashionable retreat, the “Benedict Alternative,” as a white flag, and she would have seen the New Right’s position as its own setback, one that mistakes the defense of justice for the burden of responsibility. An oasis is not about abandoning a culture, but about keeping something alive amidst its threats.
Words like “crisis” and “collapse” and even “decline” and certainly “end” are so common that they have become empty, like another kind of desert. The sky has no choice but to fall.
What really matters doesn’t make the news. It shows up in the classroom, where complexity is valued, and in friendships, where truth matters more than being right.
We see this in the Renegade Book Club, where strangers meet to discuss new ideas and openly disagree, and in the Heterodox Academy, which requires discursive courage. This also appears in a workshop hosted by the University of Moral Courage, where participants learn to engage with the “other” without simply tolerating it, without abandoning their beliefs. More than just another rehearsal for “DEI,” it thrives on bipartisan respect and consideration for businesses.
This spirit has been quietly present in the mutual aid networks that have come to prominence during the pandemic, where people have been able to care for the elderly or reach out to neighbors they have never met.
The wider world depends on what the private world cultivates: the moral imagination necessary to see clearly what actually is while holding fast to what could be.
W. H. Auden’s description of Arendt’s brilliance, characterizing her rationality as “imaginative” and her wisdom as poetic, reveals that it was exactly the kind of oasis she had envisioned for herself. He knew that without moral imagination, even the best systems lose their soul. Mark Twain said: “When your imagination is out of focus, you can’t rely on your eyes.”
When meaning is limited to our own perspective, the desert expands. Arendt wrote that true talent is to see the sacred in everyday life, to find beauty in the mundane, and to turn Descartes’ ideas on their head and say, along with Auden, “I am loved, therefore I exist.”
The real problem is not the source of the next big change. What matters is whether we can notice and cling to the places where we can still breathe, and whether we have the patience to stay there long enough to see what is created there.
You already have what you need. Just find it and take a deep breath.
notes and reading
The conflict between Trump and the Pope echoes the 1,000-year-old question of what happens when divine and secular powers collide. – conversation (April 15, 2026).
oasis-A term used by Arendt, especially in a letter to Karl Jaspers, to describe the rare sheltered space of friendship and honesty that remains humanly possible even in the “desert” of modern political life. “Oasis” itself is not a formal component of her published work, but serves as a metaphor for preserving humanity and truth within the private sphere. reference,”Thoughts and moral considerations” 1971 lecture, and thinking lifeArendt’s life of the heart (1978).
[Sabbath—“Oasis” follows that pattern. In Genesis, God rests not because creation failed but because it was “very good.” Even then, there is a pause, an interruption that refuses to let activity consume everything.]
Renegade Book Club– Small, discussion-driven communities where reading and disagreement are treated as ends in themselves, rather than tools of persuasion or strategy. heretic academy—“These professors disagree, and that’s what matters.” (December 22, 2025). Diversity of perspective as a condition of good thinking, not just a demographic exercise.
Moral Courage University—Training to bridge strong disagreements without backing down or opposing them. Beyond the instinct to simply tolerate what we disagree with. Staying true to our beliefs while remaining authentically connected. Workshops and conferences for community, business, and academic leaders.
benedict options—Rod Dreher (2017). I quote this because the “Benedict Alternative” has been widely talked about as a practical response to cultural confusion. In contrast to Hannah Arendt’s “oasis” of preserving thought within the world, Dreher calls for a form of cultural separatism, enjoying liberalism while ruthlessly deploring its domination.
Oasis – Mary McCarthy (1949). A satirical portrait of mid-century intellectual life, it reveals how easily self-proclaimed thought communities can reproduce the very habits they claim to escape. McCarthy and Arendt were intellectually close friends, and their correspondence (among friends) remains a major source of information for Arendt scholars.
When your imagination is out of focus, you can’t rely on your eyes. ”In Twain’s historical novel, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).
Auden and Arendt—“Thinking about what we are doing” Auden, encounterJune 1959. “In memory of W.H. Auden” Arendt, new yorker (June 12, 1975). online. – Note: In later years, several poets proposed marriage, but Auden was “platonic”. Arendt said she was “too old”.
What remains: Hannah Arendt’s poetry collection—Translator: Samantha Rose Hill, Jenness Grill (2024). “We expect only truth from poets, not ideas from philosophers,” Arendt wrote. Beyond her formal studies of philosophy and theology, Arendt was an avid reader of ancient Greek and modern poetry. She believed that poetry is an important link between our inner life and the outside world.
bless this land
walls and fences
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
