Sometimes We Have to Choose Humanity Over Justice
Roger Berkowitz on Hannah Arendt, world alienation, and why we need friendships in which we can tell inappropriate jokes
Welcome to the new year!
For the first Beauty Shot of 2026, we’re delighted to feature Roger Berkowitz. Roger is the founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College; a professor of politics, philosophy, and human rights; a political theorist; and the author of several books, including the forthcoming A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World. He also publishes and frequently writes essays for Amor Mundi, the Arendt Center’s weekly newsletter.
The talk Roger gave last April at our PolyOpportunity Retreat in the Hudson Valley feels even more timely now than it did then. Hannah Arendt—perhaps the most profound humanist thinker on the personal in the political and vice versa—has reemerged as a vital voice for our era, and Roger’s reflections on what it means to be human in a more-than-human world offer a compelling prelude to our 10-year anniversary celebration in Athens this May: the World Beautiful Business Forum. We’re thrilled that Roger will join us once again, as one of more than 75 featured speakers.
- Tim Leberecht, House of Beautiful Business
Roger Berkowitz’s keynote at The PolyOpportunity Retreat, Garrison Institute, Hudson Valley, NY, April 13, 2025
It’s a real pleasure to be here. Bard College is only about 45 minutes away, but I’ve never actually been down here at the Garrison Institute—so thank you for inviting me.
When I think about the humanities, I’m reminded of how Hannah Arendt defined thinking: we think in solitude, which is not the same as being alone. When you’re alone, you feel abandoned. But in solitude, we can experience what she called “the two-in-one”—a conversation with ourselves. In this two-in-one, we challenge our prejudices and “stop and think,” freeing ourselves from conformity and clichés, learning to think for ourselves by testing our thoughts in conversation with others.
And that’s very much what I mean by the humanities—thinking with a public community about the books, actions, and artworks that manifest the greatness, dignity, pain, and joy of human life.
Funny story: I once applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I didn’t get it the first time, so I called up the grant officer and asked what I could do better. He said, “Well, you described your center as being about thinking.”
And I said, “Yes.”
He replied, “We didn’t really understand—what does that have to do with the humanities?”
I was stunned. He conceded that humanists do have to think, but was confused that I would imagine thinking itself to be core to being human.
On his advice, I changed the name from the Hannah Arendt Center for Political and Ethical Thinking to the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. The following year we got the grant.
That small absurdity captures one threat to the humanities. When thinking is reduced to ruminating and calculating—a means to an end—we lose the activity of thinking as the quest for meaning. When we seek answers rather than questions, certainty in place of the complexity of being human, we risk trading the depth of our humanity for goals defined by efficiency, prediction, and control—what we call progress.
Much of Western philosophy is organized against humanity
I was struck by what Maggie Jackson said in her talk—particularly the idea of uncertainty. That’s central to my work. My first book was called The Gift of Science, where the word “gift” was a play on the German “Gift,” meaning poison. It explored how science’s determined effort to find certain answers to uncertain questions—especially around justice and law—has poisoned our concept of justice in society.
I also loved the baseball metaphor from the earlier conversation—the idea of a stance. I’m drawn to the need for a strong, stable place in the world—a kind of home base from which we enter our conversations and our lives. If you watch baseball, as I do, you’ll notice how many different stances players have. No two are the same. Juan Soto has two different stances: one for early in the count, another for when he’s got two strikes.
That plurality—the sheer variety of stances and approaches—is, to me, the essence of the humanities. The humanities begin with humans, and humans are different.
And yet, the entire history of Western philosophy is organized against plurality. Once you see that, you realize it’s also organized against humanity.
What do I mean by that?
Well, it always matters where you begin the story. One place to start Western philosophy is with Plato. Who was Plato? A student of Socrates. And who was Socrates? Someone who walked the marketplace—the agora—engaging others in dialectical conversation. He never wrote anything down. He just talked. He listened to different opinions and tried to make sense of things.
But what happened to Socrates? He was executed—killed by the many. And Plato, horrified by that, concluded that the many—the plurality of opinions—were dangerous. What we need, he argued, is truth.
So Plato rebelled against his teacher. Instead of dialogic openness, he proposed philosophical certainty. He redefined the Greek word for truth from aletheia—unconcealment or disclosure—to orthotes—from the Greek word meaning “straight” or “correct.” Plato thus redefined the nature of truth from something made visible to something rigidly correct, what we now call orthodoxy. Plato called for philosopher-kings who knew the right truth, not democrats who argued over the truth. He sought rule by guardians of the truth, not deliberation among the many.
And that’s the beginning of philosophy’s rebellion against plurality—against humanity.
That rebellion has many stages: Christianity, with its push from many gods to one; science, with its failed objectivity after the breakdown of the church’s authority; and later, as science’s neutrality was questioned, a turn to expertise. The 19th and 20th centuries became the era of the expert. And now, as trust in experts erodes, we turn to a new source of certainty: artificial intelligence.
AI holds extraordinary promise. I don’t know how many of you are using it, but I’ve been using it more and more. There’s a kind of wish-fulfillment here—this fantasy that what philosophy, science, and expertise couldn’t give us, AI will: the solution to housing, to inequality, to medicine. One day, perhaps, we’ll live forever—digitally uploaded, merged into the machine.
Ray Kurzweil calls this the singularity—a kind of secular divinity, a new religion. We’ll become perfect, transhuman. It’s a dream that’s thousands of years old. Or is it an unraveling?
Again, I loved what Maggie said earlier about resisting the binary. It’s not a simple utopia or dystopia. It could be either. We might very well merge with the machine. I imagine many people in this room—especially the younger ones—will have AI implants by the time they reach my age.
That may be frightening. It may be exciting. How thrilling to imagine thinking with more power than Plato or Newton, with knowledge wired into your brain. And yet—it’s terrifying, too.
So we must resist binaries.
“Enthusiasm is the core of being human.”
To begin to understand what’s happening, I turn to a tradition that critiques the modern age—particularly critics of the scientific revolution. Science, for all its power, begins by telling us that our human experience is wrong. The sun doesn’t rise and set—the earth moves, even if we never feel that motion. Our senses deceive us. Common sense is flawed.
Thinkers like Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Arendt argue that this leads to world alienation. We become estranged from the human world, the sensible world, a world which now seems false, untrustworthy, obsolete.
Take the Hudson River—it’s right there outside the window. But how hard it is to see it simply as a river. We see it as scenery, a waterway for commerce, part of our economic infrastructure, an example of pollution, a site for cleanup. It becomes an object of use, a resource, a point of view. Rarely do we just see the river.
And rarely do we just see people. Instead we see “human resources”—how many of you work in organizations with HR departments? We’ve become resources to be optimized, analyzed, and made efficient. That dehumanization is something we feel every day.
I was at a bat mitzvah yesterday. The rabbi spoke about the enthusiasm of the young girl and said, “Enthusiasm is the core of being human.” That struck me. The word “enthusiasm” is from the Greek, “en theos”—to be swept up in a God within.
Winston Churchill once said, “To be human is to move from failure to failure with enthusiasm.” It’s about risk, uncertainty, and hope. To be human is to live with a God inside of us. While religion can offer such transcendental meaning, so too can living together with others. Transcendence does not require religion; it can happen when we are together with friends, are caught up in a poem, or engage with others in civil disobedience.
To be human is to be at one with something bigger, more meaningful, and more awesome than ourselves, to be part of something that matters. Whether we aim at a unified theory of the universe or seek simply to build the best shoe or write the most moving speech, to be human is to exult in our capacity to exceed usefulness, optimization, and correctness.
World alienation has been with us for a long time. We’re so alienated from the Earth that we don’t even want to be on Earth. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 marked a desire to leave it. And now terraforming societies are imagining new planets: one for people who like yoga, one for chess lovers—a sorting of utopias.
William Blake’s 1795 painting of Newton captures this beautifully. Newton sits naked on a rock, using a compass to measure the world, oblivious to the waves crashing around him. That image of control, mastery, and detachment is the heart of alienation.
And what’s astonishing is how adaptable we are to alienated worlds. We embrace bureaucracy. We normalize dehumanization. Look at what’s happening in universities and law firms. The attacks are mounting, and yet we adjust. We forget why we’re here.
AI isn’t fundamentally new. It’s the latest—and most extraordinary—manifestation of world alienation. We’ve created machines that mimic human intelligence without understanding it. And what’s remarkable is how well that works.
It raises the question: What does it mean to be human?
Is the body important? For centuries, we’ve dreamed of escaping it. The body is messy. It decays. It excretes. We hide it. But is that part of our humanity—or something to transcend?
Pain, too. Science promises a life without pain. It’s easy for me—a relatively healthy person—to say that’s a problem. But I once attended an AI lecture with a friend who has a terminal illness. When I said, “This is terrifying,” he replied, “It sounds pretty good to me.”
We’re not giving up our humanity because we’re forced to. We’re giving it up because we want to.
We can’t dismiss the allure of AI. The danger is not that it oppresses us—it’s that it makes humanity irrelevant. My daughter’s best friends are people she’s never met. They’ve only interacted online. I find that incomprehensible. She’s never touched them, smelled them, looked them in the eye.
And yet, this is real.
MIT studies have shown that when older people are given robots that mimic emotional attention, they grow deeply attached. Some begin preferring the robot to their own grandchildren—because the robot never ignores them, never says the wrong thing. It performs affection perfectly.
We’re not giving up our humanity because we’re forced to. We’re giving it up because we want to.
Because we’re tired. Because we’re flawed. Because being human is hard. We long for something better, cleaner, more efficient.
So, here at a conference on the new humanities and humanity—what is the humanities’ response to all this?
We need relationships in which we can try out inappropriate jokes
It can’t just be “Don’t use technology.” That’s naïve. I’m not here to stop progress. But we do have to ask: What are we doing?
Hannah Arendt, who I spend a lot of time reading, asked this constantly. What are we doing when we give away our private lives, our data, our locations, for free? When we erase all boundaries between public and private?
People say, “I have nothing to hide.” Maybe. But many of the most creative people do. Great artists, thinkers, risk-takers—they have inner lives, private realms. Secrets.
Depth requires secrecy.
We need relationships in which we can try out inappropriate jokes. That may be controversial—but if you can’t fail in private, you can’t grow. You become flat. You become safe. You become predictable.
Any great artist or author or thinker or politician has to be someone who thinks outside the box. But to think outside the box, you need to separate yourself from the conventional wisdom, and that means you need to have a private sphere where you can be different.
And in the public realm, what’s lost when experts and algorithms decide policy? We may gain efficiency. New medicines may keep us alive and new technologies may solve the climate crisis. But we also risk something more subtle and more dangerous: A world in which justice is treated as knowable and calculable.
Justice is not a thing we possess. It is an idea—an aspiration that orients judgment but is never fully realizable. The trouble begins when one particular vision of justice hardens into certainty, when disagreement is treated as error and judgment is replaced by expertise or code. It is then that justice ceases to guide us and begins to rule us.
When we are sure we know the truth of what justice is, we may very well lose humanity in the name of justice.
Sometimes we have to choose humanity over justice.
That’s hard. Many of my students prefer justice. But I think if we’re serious about uncertainty, we have to acknowledge that justice—like truth—is not absolute.
So how do we build a human world?
For me, the practice is simple: I read. I read closely. I read with others.
For the past 13 years, I’ve hosted a Friday reading group on Hannah Arendt with hundreds of people around the world. Why Arendt? Because her motto was: Think what we are doing. She helps us think through the world without providing formulas. Her texts are exercises in thinking.
Thinking, for her, is both a two-in-one conversation with oneself and a wandering dialogue with others—real and imagined. It’s about challenging certainties, not replacing them with new ones.
That’s how I try to be human. By reading with others. Not to find answers, but to expand our shared world.
And my hope—my aspiration—is not to arrive at some grand truth. But I do believe that through open, plural conversations about truth, justice, and meaning, we can find fragments we agree on. And from those fragments, we begin to build something together—a world we can inhabit.
A stance, if you will.
So: that’s my practice. I hope you find yours.
Thank you very much.
***
The House of Beautiful Business turns ten this year. We’re marking this milestone by renewing our mission: to shape a humanist future in and through business, in partnership with AI, and for the benefit of all life on earth. Taking place in Athens, Greece, from May 7–10, 2026, the World Beautiful Business Forum is a gathering for those who dream bigger, aim higher, and long for more: four days, five acts, 750 attendees, more than 75 speakers and performers, immersive pavilions, a 42-hour, 42-kilometer AI Democracy Marathon, and a program designed to stretch how you think, feel, and act in business—and beyond. We are offering special rates for nonprofits and students, as well as solopreneurs, founders, small businesses, and Greek residents. It will be EPIC!
The Beautiful Business School is a one-of-a-kind online learning journey that offers orientation and hope in a time of uncertainty and confusion, and provides you with a comprehensive, decidedly humanist playbook for the age of AI. Over the course of seven weeks—February 5–March 19, 2026—you’ll embark on a deep, dynamic journey into the art and practice of beautiful business. Through live sessions every Thursday, expert guidance, improv, a curated library, and interaction with AI agents and a vibrant global community of peers, you’ll develop the creative insight and human leadership needed to shape a more beautiful future.
Plus, we’ll be joined by special guests: writer Pico Iyer; humanist leadership thinker and INSEAD professor of organizational behavior, Gianpiero Petriglieri; supercoach and bestselling author Michael Bungay Stanier; somatics and improv artist Gabriella White; and more.
The first cohort, limited to 150 participants, is nearly full. Enroll now to secure your spot at 50% off before prices double. We have extended this special offer to Monday, January 5!
The House will bring a first flavor of the World Beautiful Business Forum, our upcoming ten-year anniversary flagship gathering in Athens in May, to the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. On Monday, January 19, 2026, from 8:30 to 11:00 am we will join forces with our partners Hotwire, ROI·DNA, and Page Society and return to the homey Heimatmuseum—the “home of belonging”—for a breakfast reception and the presentation and discussion of our new joint report on Agentic Organizations, to be released that very day. Expect cool AI, warm humans, live music, and the best bretzels in town!
Available to gauge appropriateness/inappropriateness of jokes confidentially and sensibly.
many points i disagreed with, but it was a great read!