It's not so much to ask

You will agree with me that the political philosopher Hannah Arendt can be anything but naive.

We could hardly consider the thinker who developed the concept of the banality of evil a "good person" and who, in addition to her keen intelligence and a character that her peers called arrogant, was brave enough to defend some unsatisfactory reflections after attending the trial of one of the greatest criminals in history.

This despite the pain she knew she could inflict.

magazine

, which he turned into a book in 1963 (

), earned him an avalanche of

.

His peers questioned his criteria, more than one classmate at the University took the opportunity to trip him up and a close friend withdrew his friendship.

However, she did not change her conclusions one iota.

In his work he raised the causes that could lead to the Shoah.

The relationship between responsibility, legality and justice.

Who and how did they collaborate?

Who and how offered resistance.

The way in which, no longer an individual in isolation, a

with ambitions, but an entire State with all its bureaucratic and judicial machinery renouncing a moral legacy to follow a racial and racist instinct.

Time has proved Arendt right, which is why she is read more than ever, because she is one of the great thinkers of one of the most powerful engines of humanity: evil.

The Jewish origin of whom she found the new variant of this constantly changing phenomenon is not surprising.

Millennia later, Genesis or Job from the Old Testament seem to inspire series like

and

.

Also the sense of shipwreck, tear and desolation that accompanies human fallibility.

The Bible is a narrative monument about good and evil that for centuries has given us food for thought.

That is why Hitlerism did the impossible to annihilate it.

To the Bible and to a whole people (the People of the Book).

Any imaginary that allowed distilling concepts to think about the world from an ethical order instead of a racial jungle, he had plenty of.

Imagination is the enemy of fascism and racism.

Also ethics.

And doubt, as the philosopher Carolin Emcke defends against hatred.

Human beings do not have moral

as standard, like modern cars have GPS.

What happened in Germany showed that the maxim "thou shalt not kill" can no longer guide even the most respectable society.

The refusal to think, the most definitive human quality, is what, in Arendt's opinion, created the possibility of the Shoah.

When asked if it could occur again, he was not complacent either: yes, because every step that humanity takes, for better or for worse, is condemned to be the threshold of the next milestone on its path towards its salvation or its destruction.

For this reason, she speaks of thought not as a sum of knowledge, but as the ability to differentiate good from evil, to create an ethic, to participate with word and action in the public space shared in a plural way, that is, among equals, where each one is also unique and irreplaceable.

Witness to the Shoah, Arendt's political reflection vindicates the sense of possibility against that of fatality.

Now that we are entering Christmas time (from the Latin

, birth) I propose to think about active and political life based on its birth category.

As much as democracy is exercised in the desperate narrowness of ideologies;

Even though the strategies of ultras and populists sow the public discourse of nihilism and conspiracies so that hatred, immobility and paralysis flourish, our human condition is also capable of the best, and we can expect from it a regenerative will for change.

There are events that can break out and change the course of events.

Epiphanies of freedom capable of giving new beginnings.

The revolution of an

, to express it in the words of the philosopher Adriana Cavarero, is always possible.

We are seeing it.

It is happening now in Iran, where thousands of young people take to the streets and hundreds of women put their lives at risk in a movement to protest, liberate and fight against authoritarianism.

Today's youth are the first generation to receive the legacy of the Shoah with no survivors and in an increasingly complex world.

They will have to solve extremely complicated challenges of moral significance derived from the climate, nuclear or migration crises.

It's time to help them

the world, help them translate its complexity so that the new adults they are about to be can take their place in common life, with a positive impulse and the confidence of a regenerative perspective of change for the better.

Without fatalism or demagogy.

In view of what is coming, it is not so much to ask.

Berta Ares

is a journalist and cultural researcher with a PhD in Humanities.

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