Disgust with bourgeois respectability drives men into imperial secret service

Evidence

Lawrence was seduced into becoming a secret agent in Arabia because of his strong desire to leave the world of dull respectability whose continuity had become simply meaningless, because of his disgust with the world as well as with himself. What attracted him most in Arab civilization was its “gospel of bareness…[which] involves apparently a sort of moral bareness too,” which “has refined itself clear of household gods.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 563

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the toolkit’s theme of alienation from the ‘imagined community of the nation’ — Lawrence’s flight from respectability parallels how the stateless/rootless figure is produced.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing later: why Arendt frames attraction to Arab civilization through ‘moral bareness’ — is this a resource for the field’s argument about Orientalist projection onto the colonized Other?