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Amor Mundi 12/14/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Adam Gopnick sees a nationalistic error in the way that some are defending the crimes revealed by the CIA torture report: "The North Vietnamese were under far more direct threat from American bombers than Americans have ever been from mostly remote Arab terrorists, yet no one would ever suggest that the Vietnamese were justified in torturing American pilots, even if they could have found out about, say, the targeting and timing of bombing raids, which might conceivably have saved Vietnamese lives. That was, we said, and would say again, no excuse. We have none, either. This is a good place to make it clear that, in this case, comparisons to Nazi and Communist tortures, far from being some kind of wild violation of decorum, are exactly what's essential--essential because without the belief that, even in wartime, there are acceptable and unacceptable forms of violence, the post-Second World War war-crimes trials, in which we place great pride, would indeed be no more than what the ex-Nazis always said they were: pure victor's justice. If we believe, as we do, that those trials were truly just, then that is because the acts that they sanctioned, including the torture of prisoners, were evil inherently, not just evil when done by other folks." The idea that we must be making those kinds of comparisons is compelling, but we must also remember that the fact that torture on the scale described in the report was committed in the name of a nominally liberal democracy. The comparisons are important so that we keep our heads in the right place, but we must not forget that these crimes were committed and also repudiated in our name and for our benefit.
On the day the Senate's torture report was released, Andrew Sullivan and his team at The Dish read through the document and responded to both it and reactions in real time. The transcript is fascinating because it follows Sullivan's commentary as the report unfolds right there in his hands. The magnitude of unredacted things that were revealed, the nature and kind of the torture perpetrated by the US under the auspices of national interest, seems even larger when consumed in this way. Here's one of Sullivan's comments on the text: "Here's a real bombshell: Bush was first briefed on waterboarding in 2006! And he didn't like it: '[D]espite agency efforts to keep the Bush administration informed about the program, top White House officials repeatedly resisted having the CIA brief cabinet-level figures about the details, and CIA officials were not permitted to brief Bush directly until mid-2006, more than four years after the president signed a broad executive order authorizing the program, according to Senate Democratic aides who briefed reporters ahead of Tuesday's release. When Bush finally heard the details of the harsh interrogation techniques that were used against CIA detainees, he was "uncomfortable" with some of them and expressed dismay that some detainees were required to remain in stress positions for long amounts of time, to the point that they had no choice but to soil themselves, the aides said.' What does it say about our democracy in the last decade that the one person ultimately designated to run the war was utterly oblivious to what was actually going on in such an extraordinarily vital area such as torture? That others were really running the country? That he was a disastrously disengaged and incompetent figure-head? Well, I guess what we suspected is now out there. But who was ultimately responsible for torturing suspects in a manner far far worse than stress positions if the president wasn't?"
In an interview, poet and National Book Award Finalist Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric, discusses the way that seeing oneself as a progressive liberal, defining oneself as not-racist, can be a kind of trap for those who want to see a better world: "That's one of the fallacies that are out there, that we're above it, that these kinds of things belong to a supremacist world and not the world that the ordinary citizen lives in, that the ordinary educated middle-class person would never do these things, would never say these things. Not many people in writing about Citizen note that the book really lives in that space, in a kind of liberal American space. I'm sure the prosecutor in Wilson's case felt he was a liberal-minded person and his own liberal subjectivity was going to allow him to then move forward in a fair way."
Remember, But Please Don't Tell
Ian Johnson takes a peek at a Chinese history newsletter that, at least officially, doesn't exist: "E-mailed to subscribers as a seventy- to ninety-page PDF every other week, Remembrance's articles and first-person accounts are helping to recover memories that the Communist Party would prefer remained lost. Remembrance has no listed address, let alone bustling editorial offices. But if it has a home, it is here, in one of Tiantongyuan's concrete apartments, a dark, ground-floor unit lined with bookcases and stacked with boxes of banned books--a fittingly anonymous home for a publication that officially doesn't exist. Remembrance is part of the rise of unofficial memory in China, a trend that resembles the appearance in the Soviet Union during the 1980s of groups like Memorial, a historical research society that helped undermine the regime by uncovering its troubled past. Today's China is more robust than the Gorbachev-era Soviet Union, but memory is still escaping the censor's grasp, posing challenges to a regime for which history represents legitimacy. The government still controls official history through textbooks, museums, movies, and the media. But memory is more private, and setting it down on paper can be presented as a personal enterprise, even when the outcome is highly political."
Foucault In Praise Of Neoliberalism
The Jacobin republishes an interview with Daniel Zamara on his controversial new book about the philosopher Michel Foucault. Zamara has ruffled feathers by arguing that Michel Foucault was, in point of fact, sympathetic to the neoliberal order he explored and described. Ballast asks: "By making Foucault compatible with neoliberalism, your book could ruffle a lot of feathers." And Zamara answers: "I hope so. That's sort of the point of the book. I wanted to clearly break with the far too consensual image of Foucault as being in total opposition to neoliberalism at the end of his life. From that point of view, I think the traditional interpretations of his late works are erroneous, or at least evade part of the issue. He's become sort of an untouchable figure within part of the radical left. Critiques of him are timid, to say the least. This blindness is surprising because even I was astonished by the indulgence Foucault showed toward neoliberalism when I delved into the texts. It's not only his Collège de France lectures, but also numerous articles and interviews, all of which are accessible. Foucault was highly attracted to economic liberalism: he saw in it the possibility of a form of governmentality that was much less normative and authoritarian than the socialist and communist left, which he saw as totally obsolete. He especially saw in neoliberalism a 'much less bureaucratic' and 'much less disciplinarian' form of politics than that offered by the postwar welfare state. He seemed to imagine a neoliberalism that wouldn't project its anthropological models on the individual, that would offer individuals greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state."
The Spirit Of The Cuban And American Revolutions
A story in The Princetonian revisits a 1959 speech by Fidel Castro at the Wilson School specifically to a seminar titled "The United States and the Revolutionary Spirit." One participant at this seminar was Hannah Arendt who later credited her time at Princeton as the inspiration for her book On Revolution. Arendt's book argues that the American Revolution succeeded where the French Revolution failed because it focused on the foundation of freedom over the satisfaction of needs. No evidence exists that Arendt heard Castro's speech, and she doesn't mention Cuba in her book. But Castro's words do mirror Arendt's own view of the American Revolution that, free from misery, set its sights on the public happiness of acting together with others. According the Princetonian archives, "Castro told the Princeton students and faculty members that one of the particularities of his revolution was that it had triumphed in a Latin American nation with a relative degree of social welfare. The Cuban revolution, according to this young Castro, had been more a political and moral revolution against a corrupt dictatorship than a class-based uprising of poor against rich. For this reason, the revolution had been supported by '95 percent of the people,' generating 'unanimity of opinion,' a phenomenon unheard of in Cuban history."
Lunchtime Talk with Angela Maione, our Klemens Von Klemperer Post-Doctoral Fellow
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 6:00 - 7:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen, a Hannah Arendt Center Doctoral Fellow
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 1:00 pm
Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?
A conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and The University of The Western Cape
Monday, April 6, 2015 - Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Location and Time TBA
The Life of Roman Republicanism with Joy Connolly
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Aspinwall Room 302, Bard College, 6:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Claudia Hilb reflects on how Adolf Eichmann's crimes awakened in Arendt an archaic sense of justice that is at the same time restrained by the limitations of modern judicial systems in the Quote of the Week. French essayist and moralist Joseph Joubert provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In this week's Video Archives, we remember a 2012 presentation by Peter Beinart on his book "The Crisis of Zionism." We acknowledge how Aristotle helped shape Arendt's philosophy in our Library feature. And we reveal the winners of our 2014 Thinking Challenge!
As the holiday season is now upon us, please consider donating to the Hannah Arendt Center. A tax-deductible gift says that you agree that an institutional space for thinking about the world from an Arendtian perspective is vital at a moment of thoughtless and predictable debates.
Please donate by clicking the button below.
Amor Mundi 12/7/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Dara Lind on Vox looks into the controversial number of police killings every year. A minimum of about 400 people are killed annually by what the FBI calls "justified police homicides"--but the actual number is likely much higher (see FiveThirtyEight). Within these statistics, those killed are predominantly male. About 50% are white, the rest largely black or Hispanic. But one important difference concerns the age of the victims: "The SHR lists 118 victims of 'justifiable homicide' who were killed while fleeing, committing a felony, or resisting arrest--not because they were attacking anyone. And 102 of those weren't killed with a rifle or a shotgun but with a handgun. In these 102 cases, the necessity of the officers' use of force is the most ambiguous. And in these 102 cases, the victims are more likely than in any other justifiable homicide categories to be black.... John Roman of the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute says these numbers indicate that many white justifiable-homicide victims are killed by police who are intervening in a domestic-violence dispute. Broader research on all types of homicide, he says, shows that victim and offender ages fall into a few distinct groups: 'You see one peak with little kids with infanticide, one peak with teenagers shooting each other, and then you see another big blip where the age of the victim and the offender are the same and they could be in their 30s, 40s or 50s. And that's mainly domestic violence. So when you see whites being shot by police officers, who are older than their early 20s, that's almost certainly domestic violence.' The concentration of death among young black and Hispanic men, meanwhile, is in part a demonstration that those are the people most likely to encounter police officers. They're the ones most likely to be arrested, and most likely to be living in the neighborhoods where police most frequently patrol."
The Daughter Against The Archivist
Marc Parry profiles Saskia Sassen, author of Global Cities, and daughter of Willem Sassen, the Nazi who is now famous for his interviews with Adolf Eichmann. Amidst an account of Sassen's innovative work on globalization, Parry gives Sassen's reaction to the stories being told about her father, most recently in Bettina Stangneth's book Eichmann Before Jerusalem. "But, to my surprise, Sassen hasn't seen that movie. Nor has she read Stangneth's book. And the longer I speak with Sassen about her father, the clearer it becomes that her account clashes with Stangneth's. Willem Sassen, in his daughter's description, is a more palatable figure. A bit of a fanatic, yes. A journalist aligned with the Nazis, yes. But a man whose great passions were theater and journalism. In Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Stangneth describes how Willem Sassen grew infatuated with Hitler in his youth. She tells me how, after Eichmann's capture, Sassen protected the murderer by manipulating the transcripts of their discussions and never going public with the original recordings. (Stangneth found no evidence that Sassen had betrayed Eichmann to the Israelis.) Stangneth's book also describes how, in a 1991 interview on Argentine TV, Sassen continued to justify Josef Mengele's 'experiments' on Auschwitz victims. By contrast, Saskia Sassen tells me that her father 'did not like the Nazis.' She emphasizes how he clashed with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister. 'My father detested Hitler,' she says. 'He detested him.' And the Argentina circle? The dreaming of Nazi restoration? Willem Sassen's attempt to discredit 'propaganda' about the Holocaust? 'That's not what I remember,' she says. In her telling, Willem Sassen comes across as a mouthpiece for local Nazis. He wrote for them but ranted about them at home. The 'ridiculous texts' he produced were 'to have an income,' she says. At another point in our conversation, Sassen says, 'My father was more a journalist--a journalist wants to discover stuff--than he was pro-Nazi, actually.' It's not that Stangneth is lying in her portrayal, she tells me. 'But she was dealing with archives.... She doesn't understand, in my home, what I experienced.'"
Seeing The World Through Others' Eyes
To think, Hannah Arendt writes, is to think from the perspective of others, what she calls enlarged thinking. But thinking from the perspective of others means many others, and not just from the perspective of one group. That is Jim Sleeper's point. He tells of Claudia Horwitz, "a spiritual/social activist and interim director of Houston's Rothko Chapel," who writes that the answer to the question, "What Are White People to Do?" is for whites to "put ourselves through some honest reflection and let that process lead us on to thoughtful action ... to dismantle a system of white supremacy that permeates every corner of our legal, economic, political, relational and cultural lives." Sleeper, author of the classic "The Closest of Strangers, Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York," has a different take: "But Horowitz doesn't address those millions of white guys (and gals) who run the gamut from a Zimmerman to a Signorelli. To do that, whites who think and write about race would have to 'peer into' the lives of whites who are perhaps even more deeply angry than we are--so angry they haven't enough words or even scapegoats to lift the sadness that accompanies their rage. We'd also have to discover that some of them are as angry at moralizing, liberal whites as they are at blacks--just as angry as they'd be if America were white from coast to coast, like the England of Charles Dickens, where grinding, gnawing differences in class weren't racial at all, as they also aren't in most majority-black societies. We'd have to understand why the white anger I've just mentioned is taking increasingly murderous and perverse turns that won't be deflected by our moralizing. Start with two contrasting images of generic American 'white guys,' taken from two historic moments less than a decade apart. When death-embracing fundamentalists attacked the World Trade Center on 9/11, perhaps the most telling response came from New York City firefighters and police officers who ran toward death in order to rescue others, not slaughter them." For Sleeper, white elites must indeed learn to think and feel from the perspective of blacks, but they must also attend to the ressentiment of the white working class.
Speaking at a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Education, Chris Lebron says that America, "while no longer white supremacist in the way it was before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, daily exhibits the visages of a country where public lynching was practiced and Jim Crow segregation was the norm." What is needed, Lebron argues, is a new idea of racial education: "When I speak of racial democratic education I mean something deeply humanistic. When we are presented with facts, numbers, and dates, we tend to think we have acquired knowledge. But more essentially we consider ourselves to be educated when knowledge opens a window letting in a new way of seeing the world--this is the moment when knowledge becomes erudition. I think a significant problem with regard to race in America today is that we have focused a great deal on, admittedly, a narrow range of knowledge regarding American history. These arebasic pedagogical tropes: Lincoln freed the slaves, Martin Luther King, Jr. made a momentous speech on the steps of the Washington Monument, the Civil Rights Act made racial equality law of the land. But these tropes do not allow us to see the world anew--they are the tropes that now allow us to be comfortable with the status quo, for surely if Martin had a dream and racial equality is law of the land, we can wake up today and go about our business. But it goes without saying that no conversation about the Civil Rights Movement can be complete without paying serious attention to Malcolm X or the Black Panthers. It goes without saying that no one can responsibly remark on the triumph of formal racial equality as law without also noting the concurrent and aggressive build-up of the carceral state and the penal system which disproportionately incarcerates young black men, resulting in what Michelle Alexander aptly calls the New Jim Crow. It would certainly help the cause of racial equality if more knowledge were brought before the minds of students and Americans more generally. But I want to explore another avenue. This avenue is not mutually exclusive to the knowledge-based approach I just mentioned. The kind of thing I've been thinking about lately has to do with something very essential: more than know what has happened in American history to blacks as a category of people (and here I note and bracket the obvious problems with a notion like racial categories). I think we need a better understanding of what it is like to be, to exist as a black person in America. In what follows I can only offer a philosophical account of the conceptual framework I have in mind--my expertise is far from advising educational policy in its particulars. It is my hope that some of what I say resonates here today with those of you who are surely better positioned than I am to think in terms of policy."
This week saw a mass resignation of editors and writers at The New Republic, one of the oldest and most venerable magazines in US history. No other resignation will be felt as strongly as that of Leon Wieseltier who ran the Books & The Arts section of the magazine for decades. R.R. Reno writes that Wieseltier's departure speaks volumes about both American liberalism and America's colleges: Wieseltier could leave, Reno writes, first because "American liberalism is shifting in the direction of a long tradition in American conservatism, one that is supremely confident in the wisdom of markets. For liberal idealists, the new technological utopianism married to the dynamism of capitalism has replaced the old utopian socialism of the bygone era." The second reason Wieseltier is going "reflects changes in the university. A liberal arts education educates young people into a particular way of life, a particular culture. Some of them become virtuosos in this way of life, which means they absorb its animating ideas and sentiments, but can improvise. All cultures need these virtuosos, because all cultures face external and internal challenges that require adaptation, revision, and renewal. The prophets of Israel were virtuosos. Socrates, Luther, Burke, and Emerson were virtuosos.... As an editor, Wieseltier sought liberal virtuosos. (Conservatives were not part of his mix. He was interested only in a conversation about a progressive future.) And when he found them he gave them an extraordinary amount of space to speak to us about things that matter. But today's universities don't train virtuosos. A shallow scientism and materialism has found its way to the classroom. Political correctness shuts down conversation, insisting on sterile platitudes. Conservative ideas are largely excluded, and many of the most important questions facing us today simply aren't posed in ways relevant to our public life (which unlike the university culture isn't monochromatic). And anyway, if starting a company and cashing out as a billionaire is the way to change the world, who needs Shakespeare?"
In an interview, publisher Gary Groth situates underground comix in terms of other art movements from the 60s and 70s: "Zap was obviously part of the '60s-counter-cultural zeitgeist--it couldn't have happened without the larger cultural shift that it epitomized--but I tend to think the whole underground comix revolution was too singular to compare tidily with the stylistic and attitudinal shifts in the other arts in the '60s (and '70s). You can observe parallels in other media: artists like Stan Brackage, Jonas Mekas, Frank Jacobs, and Kenneth Anger were pushing the formal elements of film; Vonnegut, Pynchon, Brautigan, Kesey, and others were emerging in prose fiction. But they didn't represent a decisive split from the past. By contrast, in terms of visual art, I don't see much connection to other artists emerging in the '60s. Surely the Zap artists had little in common with (and I bet most were even fundamentally opposed to) Warhol (who showed his first comic strip painting in 1960) or Litchenstein (who did his first comic strip painting in 1961) or Claus Oldenberg or Gerhard Richter or Ed Ruscha, whose ascendancy parallels the underground artists. Their respective values seem quite different to me. The only art movement that I can see that Zap or the underground artists generally shares any affinity with is the Chicago Imagists (or the Hairy Who) (who had their first show in '66)--artists like Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Karl Wirsum. They had a cartoony, occasionally psychedelic cast to their work, but used to different ends, the results of which were pretty remote from those of underground comix. You could make a case that Kesey and his Merry Pranksters had the same aesthetically anarchic spirit as much of the undergrounds, but that too seems a bit of a stretch. And maybe rock was as huge a break from previous pop music as Zap was from previous industrial comics production, but the explosion of rock seems more like a continuation or culmination of musical trends, whereas underground comix was a decisive break from the past--a deliberate, incendiary reaction to the censored blandness of comics over the previous 15 years. So it seems to me that the Zap crew was somehow part of but apart from their countercultural brethren in the other arts."
Freddie de Boer admits to being suspicious of crowdfunding: "After all, crowdfunding is a type of crowdsourcing; what's being crowdsourced is the gatekeeping functions that investors and organizations used to perform. The essential work isn't just sorting through various projects and determining which are cool or desirable but determining if they're responsible and plausible--capable of being successfully pulled off by the people proposing them within the time frames and budgets stipulated. It turns out that most people are not good at that. But then, why would they be? Why would the average person be good at fulfilling that function? Where does that faith come from? There are so many places where we've turned over functions once performed by experts to amateurs, and we're consistently surprised that it doesn't work out. 401(k)s aren't crowdsourced, exactly, but they exist thanks to a choice to turn over control of retirement funds to individuals away from managers, in the pursuit of fees, of course. The results have been brutal. But why wouldn't they be brutal? Why would you expect every random person on the street to have a head for investment in that sense? It's worth pointing out that crowdsourcing was first introduced for simplistic tasks that a human can do better than a machine, often through rote repetition--bilingual speakers checking machine translation, for example, a task still far better performed by humans than machines. (Yes, folks.) But now, we seem to expect to hand tons of essential tasks off to computers and crowds, and in many cases, we don't bother to check and see how well they're actually doing because the hype about both is so loud."
Roundtable on Academic Freedom
A panel discussion with guests Andrew Ross, Steven Salaita, and Katherine M. Franke.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Bard College Campus Center, Multipurpose Room, 7:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen discusses how the absence of experience leads philosophy and ideology into useless abstractions that ignore the reality of human interactions in the Quote of the Week. Russian mathematician and esotericist P. D. Ouspensky provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In this week's Video Archives, we look back on a lecture Roger Berkowitz gave on the relationship between revenge and justice. And we appreciate two passages on Nietzsche that Arendt found worthy of annotation in our Library feature.
As the holiday season is now upon us, please consider donating to the Hannah Arendt Center. A tax-deductible gift says that you agree that an institutional space for thinking about the world from an Arendtian perspective is vital at a moment of thoughtless and predictable debates.
Please donate by clicking the button below.
Amor Mundi 11/30/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Writing in The Diplomat, Ben Reynolds invokes Hannah Arendt to illustrate the paradoxical ineffectiveness of protecting refugees under international law. "The stateless may be technically protected under international law, but they lack enforceable rights without the corresponding protection of a state. International law recognizes the right of states to determine who they recognize as citizens. This is a fundamental component of state sovereignty. States are thus permitted to deny citizenship and its corresponding rights to persons fleeing war, disaster, and tyranny who seek shelter within their borders. Lacking the normal rights of citizens, refugees are subject to the caprice of the host nation. Paradoxically, the very ideas of nationality and citizenship deprive human beings of their rights the moment they leave their own polity. The resulting 'natural' response of states has been to contain the stateless within refugee camps, isolating them from the normal civic and social life of the host nation. International agreements, like the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, seem to offer some level of protection for the rightless. They are, however, essentially unenforceable. No one should believe that international law will convince the government of Myanmar, for example, to provide an acceptable level of rights to all of the Rohingya people, much less citizenship. Even if someone were to naturalize every currently stateless person, an almost impossible task, the very next large scale political crisis would create a new wave of refugees which states would seek to exclude from their political communities."
"Without the existence of a right to belong to a political community, the 'right to have rights,' there can be no lasting solution to the problem of statelessness." Pointing to Arendt's idea of the "Right to have rights," he suggests that there is such a right to belong to a political community that has little to do with states as they are understood in the international legal system. It's worth revisiting what Roger Berkowitz writes about Arendt and human rights: "Human rights, in other words, are only those rights to speak and act amidst a people such that one's words and deeds are seen and heard in such a way that they matter. At bottom, the only truly human right - the right to have rights - is the right to speak and act as a member of a people. Confusion over this point - and thus the efforts of human rights advocates to extend human rights to life and liberty (and also to second and third generation rights like economic prosperity) - cleaves human rights from its foundation in the human condition and risks, therefore, exposing the entire edifice of human rights as nonsense upon stilts. Arendt names the human condition of acting and speaking that underlies the right to have rights natality. Natality, the capacity to be born, is, as Peg Birmingham has seen, a double principle. On the one hand, natality reflects the fact that man can, by acting and speaking, start something new. In this sense, natality refers to man's freedom in the sense of his spontaneity, the ability to begin and initiate something new. On the other hand, natality says also that a human being is born and, having been born, is given the gift of existence. This givenness - this 'mere existence' that is 'mysteriously given us at birth' - is an 'anarchic' principle that is '[c]ut off and adrift from any sovereign constituting power or foundation....' Since human existence, as physis, is cut off from any prior reason or ground, man is unjustifiable and thus vulnerable. Man stands alone as alien and strange. And this radical singularity that attaches to man's natality both underlies Arendt's defense of plurality and her insistence that the right to have rights includes the right to be as you are. It is the obligation in the face of the alien that must be respected as part of the human that, pace Birmingham, underlies Arendt's guarantee of the right to have rights to every human being."
Walter Russell Mead makes the case that if we are to resurrect our foreign policy, we need to move beyond the President and his appointees: "not many of our executive appointees are either as wise or as all-seeing as they may think they are: witness the Libya mess. From the side of the Congress, what's needed is a serious personal commitment from a critical mass of members to master the knowledge required to play a role in American foreign policy commensurate with the needs of the hour and the importance of Congress's constitutional role - combined with efforts to upgrade the processes and institutions through which the Congress carries out its mission. What we need to do at this point is begin to rethink the role of the Congress in American foreign policy.... The United States Congress has to be part of the solution. The Congress has, for example, the power to review and reform the agencies in the executive branch, and this power may need to be invoked. Is it, for example, a good thing that the National Security Council in the White House has accreted so much power? If the President's closest adviser on foreign policy is no longer the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense, what degree of Congressional oversight is required in the NSC? Should its officials be subject to senatorial confirmation? If not, should the President accept limits on the NSC staff and the role of its chief? But to really live up to its potential and to carry out its constitutional role in foreign policy, the Congress is going to have to raise its sights. It's time to rethink what oversight means and how it should work. In particular, the Congress is the place where the country's most serious public conversations and deliberations about foreign policy should be held. As it is, this country's most important foreign policy debates are held on cable television and other news programs. That isn't good either for American foreign policy or for the long term health of American democracy."
Hannah Arendt insisted that a trial, even a Grand Jury Trial, requires that we pay attention to the individual accused. That is not what most people wanted following the trial of Darren Wilson. Yet to abide by Arendt's words, we must recognize that the case against Wilson as a singular individual was incredibly weak. Thus it is important, as Ta-Nehisi Coates demands, that we understand Michael Brown's death as a manifestation of institutional, rather than individual, racism: "Black people know what cannot be said. What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is the idea of superhuman black men who 'bulk up' to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson but a staple of American racism."
Anger. Frustrated. Fearful. Embarrassed. Sympathetic. Confused.
Perhaps the best analysis of the Darren Wilson shooting of Michael Brown has come from Benjamin Watson, a football player for the New Orleans Saints. "At some point while I was playing or preparing to play Monday Night Football, the news broke about the Ferguson Decision. After trying to figure out how I felt, I decided to write it down. Here are my thoughts: I'M ANGRY because the stories of injustice that have been passed down for generations seem to be continuing before our very eyes.... I'M SAD because another young life was lost from his family; the racial divide has widened; a community is in shambles; accusations, insensitivity, hurt and hatred are boiling over; and we may never know the truth about what happened that day. I'M SYMPATHETIC because I wasn't there so I don't know exactly what happened. Maybe Darren Wilson acted within his rights and duty as an officer of the law and killed Michael Brown in self-defense like any of us would in the circumstance. Now he has to fear the backlash against himself and his loved ones when he was only doing his job. What a horrible thing to endure. OR maybe he provoked Michael and ignited the series of events that led to him eventually murdering the young man to prove a point. And I'M OFFENDED because of the insulting comments I've seen that are not only insensitive but dismissive to the painful experiences of others."
In an interview, writer on religion and former nun Karen Armstrong sees organized religion as attempting to stop violence rather than cause it: "I've tried to show how the various traditions devised ways to help people get over violence. How Jewish rabbis actually completely revised their interpretation of the Jewish scriptures to take the violence out. How the ideal of ahimsa took root strongly in India. And how Jesus, who was an excitable man, says that extraordinary thing: Love your enemies. We're living in a globalized world, and the great theme that religion can give us, and perhaps national mythologies cannot, is that we are profoundly interconnected. Our histories are intertwined; economically we're absolutely bound up with one another; what happens in Syria has a blowback in Canada. So what the religions have insisted is that you cannot confine your benevolence to your own group. You must love your enemies and reach out and practice what the Indian sages called equanimity: You cannot prefer one being to another. You cannot put yourself on a privileged pedestal because that is no longer a rational response to our globalized world."
Despite the tendency among critics and fans to separate Marilynne Robinson's first book, Housekeeping, from her later Gilead novels, Alex Egrebretson argues that her work is actually a coherent corpus: "The notion that there is indeed profound continuity between the early and late work would require much more space to prove. But let me at least sketch a different perspective on Robinson's career, one that sees the difference between Housekeeping and the Gilead novels as greatly exaggerated. In this view, Robinson moves from being an author with an odd, two-stage career to an author with deep imaginative habits, one who has worked and re-worked, emphasized and de-emphasized, a single literary vision. Housekeeping is that vision, serving as Robinson's spiritus mundi, a storage house of symbols, allusions, images, themes, and dramatic situations. From those basic materials, she has built each of her successive novels. Instead of an author who recreated herself late in her career, Robinson is one who has returned and renewed imaginative possibilities already latent within her first book."
Finally, as a way to mark the late holiday, meet Horace Vose, turkey farmer to the President of these United States.
Film Screening & Director's Discussion: Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt with Nazis
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium, 5:00 - 8:00 pm
Roundtable on Academic Freedom
A panel discussion with guests Andrew Ross, Steven Salaita, and Katherine M. Franke.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Bard College Campus Center, Multipurpose Room, 7:00 pm
This holiday week on the Blog, Michiel Bot explores Arendt's understanding of the "national idea" as one of the origins of totalitarianism in the Quote of the Week. And George Bernard Shaw provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking.
This coming Friday, December 5th, the Hannah Arendt Center will host the second session of its new Virtual Reading Group. We will be discussing Chapter One of The Human Condition.
The reading group is available to all members and is always welcoming new participants! Please click here to learn more!
Amor Mundi 11/2/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Meline Toumani has a great essay about the ways hatred between the Armenians and the Turks renders impossible the necessary objectivity of art. Toumani, an Armenian, can recount her version, but even telling her story she realizes that she tells one side and hates that: "I am doomed to be what is known as an unreliable narrator. I hate the way it feels." Her essay brings the power and force of hating to view in multiple perspectives. She acknowledges the fact of hatred, that "there are two things I know to be true. One: I know that if your grandmother told you she watched as her mother was raped and beheaded, you would feel something was yours to defend. What is that thing? Is it your grandmother you are defending? Is it the facts of what happened to her that you are defending, a page in an encyclopedia? Something as intangible as honor? Is it yourself that you are defending? If the story of the brutality that your grandmother encountered were denied or diminished in any way, you would feel certain basic facts of your selfhood extinguished. Your grandmother, who loved you and soothed you, your grandmother whose existence roots you in the world, fixes you somewhere in geography and history. Your grandmother feeds your imagination in a way that your mother and father do not. Imagination is farsighted; it needs distance to discern and define things. If somebody says no, what your grandmother suffered was not really quite as heinous as you're saying it is, they have said that your existence is not really so important. They have said nothing less than that you don't exist. This is a charge no human being can tolerate." But also, that hating corrupts her writing, her art. "Artistic objectivity: the ability to see a problem or an experience from multiple points of view; to tell a story for the sake of a deeper understanding, not to further an agenda; to inhabit the mind of the villain as fully as that of the victim. The villain, for me, had always been the Turk. It was time to try to understand him."
Diane Ravitch in the NY Review of Books looks at the myth of the exceptional Chinese schools and how it is fueling a testing craze in the United States. "At this juncture comes the book that Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, members of Congress, and the nation's governors and legislators need to read: Yong Zhao's Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World. Zhao, born and educated in China, now holds a presidential chair and a professorship at the University of Oregon. He tells us that China has the best education system because it can produce the highest test scores. But, he says, it has the worst education system in the world because those test scores are purchased by sacrificing creativity, divergent thinking, originality, and individualism. The imposition of standardized tests by central authorities, he argues, is a victory for authoritarianism. His book is a timely warning that we should not seek to emulate Shanghai, whose scores reflect a Confucian tradition of rote learning that is thousands of years old. Indeed, the highest-scoring nations on the PISA examinations of fifteen-year-olds are all Asian nations or cities: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Korea, Macao (China), and Japan."
Frank Bruni writes about "Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools," Joel Klein's forthcoming book on education. Bruni hones in on Klein's conclusion that the key to improving education is better teachers. Klein wants to make it easier to remove poor teachers. But he also argues that we need to rethink how we educate our teachers. "He said the curriculum at education schools should be revisited as well. There's a growing chorus for this; it's addressed in the recent best seller 'Building a Better Teacher,' by Elizabeth Green. But while Green hones in on the teaching of teaching, Klein stressed to me that teachers must acquire mastery of the actual subject matter they're dealing with. Too frequently they don't." Here Klein sounds like Hannah Arendt, who argues that teachers must teach young people about the world as it is; the first qualification for teaching, she writes, is "knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it." Which is why the Bard College Masters of Arts in Teaching "requires an equal amount of advanced study in the elected academic discipline and in education courses challenging preservice teachers to apply the results of research and pedagogical analysis to their teaching."
Should international law apply to the Global War On Terror? Marty Lederman and Naz Modirzadeh are debating this question on their respective blogs. Lederman has argued that the Obama administration should be praised for trying to bring the War on Terror within international law. Modirzadeh worries that in doing so, the administration is making International Humanitarian Law into a "toolkit for targeting" civilians and combatants. In other words, International Law is being turned into a guidebook for how and when to target civilians in the war on terror. Modirzadeh writes: "The lawyers, professors, and others, such as Lederman, who have been instrumental in shaping the Obama administration's legal framework have a vested interest in defending the administration's interpretations of international law and policy. I understand that. But I would urge us to consider the long-term implications for the legitimacy and coherence of how international law regulates war of both the legal arguments and the way they have been presented. The arguments for a seemingly boundary-less conception of non-international armed conflict against a terrorist organization or network (one that is quickly splintering and disaggregating), while crafted in response to pressing national security threats, have tremendous implications for international law in the future. In the hands of Syria, Russia, China, and other nations, such legal arguments-especially when seen as legitimized by the world's superpower-may unleash a wave of other boundary-less NIACs. Surely it isn't only the Obama administration lawyers who would like to argue that international law allows for the determination that traveling terrorist fighters can be targeted outside of situations of 'hot' battlefields. These arguments also matter, not only for the immediate debate in the U.S. but also for the decades of state action to come. Poking holes in the divide between the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello, blurring law and policy, drawing from IHL targeting rules for situations that do not rise to the level of armed conflict: we should, at a minimum, pause to reflect on the implications of these legal and strategic arguments in the hands of decision-makers other than those in the current administration."
In an essay in The National Post, Bettina Stangneth, author of the recent book Eichmann Before Jerusalem, writes of the many and conflicting versions of Adolf Eichmann. Stangneth's book deepens our understanding of Eichmann and helps show the complexity of any attempt to understand him according to simple reductions. She writes: "Depending on whose account you read, Eichmann comes across variously as an ordinary man who was turned into a thoughtless murderer by a totalitarian regime; a radical anti-Semite whose aim was the extinction of the Jewish people, or a mentally ill man whose innate sadism was legitimated by the regime. We have a multitude of irreconcilable images of Eichmann, made even more so by the controversy around Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The public view, however, largely remains an empty shell. We are still missing a view of the 'Eichmann phenomenon' before Jerusalem: the way Eichmann was perceived during the different periods of his life."
Sarah Burnside despairs over the fact that we can buy ourselves new hobbies, and therefore new identities, seeing it as a symptom of a larger cultural fracture: "'Identity politics' is commonly criticized for focusing on the narrowly personal at the expense of the structural, but such criticisms must be viewed with a skeptical eye. It would be ludicrous to argue that a person's race, gender, or sexuality has no impact on his or her lived experiences; you might as well claim that social class doesn't exist. Identities that are based on likes and dislikes, unmoored from the material world, are another matter entirely, however. It's jarring to read a journalist using the language of civic participation to refer to, say, enthusiastic adult fans of My Little Pony as 'the brony community.' The growth of bespoke selves may also be part of something broader: a kind of fracturing and splintering of the ways we conceptualize ourselves. If we're purchasing and inhabiting new identities, it's merely a continuation of our packaging and repackaging of curated versions of ourselves, such as in that minor absurdity of modern life: the Twitter bio."
Kelly Osgood sought out the music of the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Anne Sexton and couldn't quite put it away: "Anne Sexton the performer stands in some contrast to Anne Sexton the poet. Though both Linda Sexton and Bob Clawson claim she had no sense of rhythm and often fell into a kind predetermined modulation better suited for readings than musical performances, her voice on the recordings is lilting and measured, rising and softening in accordance with the band. Listening to a performance of 'Protestant Easter,' a hilarious poem that digs at New England Calvinism from the point of view of a child ('After that they pounded nails into his hands / After that, well, after that / everyone wore hats'), I begin to envision her covered in sweat, down on her knees in front of a congregation, shouting 'Praise Jesus!' as the organ trills away behind her. It becomes clear to me that I cannot separate the less comfortable aspects of Sexton and her work from the parts that are more easily accessible and more widely lauded. It was her unusual daring--can you imagine Plath doing a doo-wop version of 'Ariel?'--that fueled Sexton's work. I couldn't take only the fine formal verse and discard the later, sloppier, more desperate writings. I couldn't discard her failed experiments with prose and cling to only what was deemed Pulitzer-worthy."
Michael Powell spent the days before and the hours after Madison Bumgarner's heroic World Series performance with the pitcher's father back home in Hudson, North Carolina. His essay makes vivid the small town and homespun world from which Bumgarner hails and to which he still returns every year. Powell also introduces us to Kevin Bumgarner, Madison's father, who reminds us all that pride, while a sin in general, is a thing of beauty when expressed by a father to his son: "Then Kevin pulled out his phone. He had texted Madison after the eighth inning, and he tried to read it to me. He began to choke up and just handed me the phone. 'OMG. You're so much more than awesome,' Kevin had written to his son. 'To see you work on the mound reminds me of watching you in high school. You are willing yourself to perfection and dragging the team along with you. I couldn't be more proud of your baseball accomplishments.' Kevin looked at me. 'I knew he wouldn't read that text before the game was over,' he said, 'but I wanted him to know this was what his daddy thought of him.'"
The Fall Experimental Humanities Mellon Lecture
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Alexei Gloukhov
Arendt and the Question of Positive Freedom
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
The Hannah Arendt Center, 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Jurgens discusses Arendt's analysis of the Western tradition of revolution and how revolutionary episodes for her failed to enshrine the people's freedom in lasting institutions in the Quote of the Week. Marcel Proust provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In our Video Archives, we look back on a 2011 roundtable discussion on Occupy Wall Street. And we appreciate a particular passage that Arendt felt worthy of being underlined and marked with other annotations in our Library feature.
This coming Friday, November 7th, the Hannah Arendt Center will host the first session of its new Virtual Reading Group. We will be discussing the Prologue and the Introduction to The Human Condition.
The reading group is available to all members and is always welcoming new participants! Please click here to learn more!
Amor Mundi 10/12/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded this week to French novelist Patrick Modiano, whose work is more or less unavailable in English. Alexandra Schwartz offers an introduction: "[Modiano's first novel] La Place de l'Étoile appeared at a moment when the core tenet of French postwar identity-'the myth of France as a nation of resisters,' as the French writer Clémence Boulouque put it to me when I called her to discuss Modiano's win-was beginning to crumble. (The book was published in May, 1968, the same month that the famous student protests in Paris began; General de Gaulle, the President of the Republic and the living symbol of French heroism during the war, fled to a military base in Germany to wait it all out.) Modiano knew the soiled truth firsthand. His father had refused to wear the star and did not turn himself in when Paris's Jews were rounded up for deportation to concentration camps; he spent the war doing business on the black market and hanging around with the Gestapo stationed on the Rue Lauriston. Boulouque, who is currently a post-doctoral fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that in his three dozen or so novels Modiano has returned again and again to the same themes: the pull of the past, the threat of disappearance, the blurring of moral boundaries, 'the dark side of the soul.' Modiano, she told me, believes that 'the novelist has an ethical duty to record the traces of the people who have vanished, the people who were made to disappear.' It will not have escaped the attention of the Nobel committee that Modiano's win comes at a time when anti-Semitism in France is on the rise, as is the rate of French Jews' emigration to Israel. The fear that French Jews are not safe in their own land, that French Jewish culture may vanish, is once again palpable, and real."
Brian Castner asks why with so much fiction and poetry coming from veterans of the war in Iraq, almost no fiction has emerged from the war in Afghanistan. His best answer: "Afghanistan was always a Task Force war. It began with CIA officers and special forces soldiers on horseback, 'Just a couple guys dressed up like Afghans giving the middle finger to the camera,' according to Maurer. Eventually larger units arrived, but still Rangers and paratroopers and the air assets to support them. That culture survived as the war grew: every aspect of the mission was executed by a Task Force with a name like Odin and Paladin or, for the more secret elite units, a numerical designation alone. Regional commands were given greater autonomy, special forces teams blanketed the country and had freedom to operate, and small outposts were left to survive on their own. Contrast this experience with Iraq, a centrally controlled war where every armor division and artillery regiment took a turn; in military-speak, Big Army was in charge. 'Iraq was televised,' Maurer says. 'It was a big invasion, it was a lot of guys, and it was a combined arms wet dream. They got a chance to use all the stuff.' The long occupation of Iraq then required many average soldiers, many cogs of the war machine, to patrol streets, sweep highways, and simply be in the neighborhoods, on the forward operating bases (FOBs), in country. To use a term from military doctrine, Iraq became a war of mass. 'I think special operations is the overarching narrative of the Afghan War,' says Maurer, 'and those guys love their jobs. To get to that level, it isn't a part-time job, it is your life, it's how you define yourself. So it makes sense they want to do memoirs to recount their stories. I don't see a lot of those guys sitting quietly at the firebase with an existential crisis, some sort of deep journaling. Meanwhile, you go to any platoon in the major conventional units, and you have a cross section of the country.' 'Who's even drawn to write novels?' Molin asks me, not entirely rhetorically. Not only did the average soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan have vastly different experiences, they had different backgrounds, skill sets, and relationship with their chosen occupation. 'If you think of a young guy in an unconventional unit, a SEAL team or special forces, out at a fire base, they have a vote,' says Maurer. 'Even the newest guy on the team, they are going to look at him for his specialty, they will ask his input on certain parts of a mission. An 18-year-old assistant machine gunner in the infantry, you're not being asked to do anything other than pick up your machine gun and walk.'"
Nathan Jurgenson suggests that Big Data is the new positivism, but with a perverse twist: "The positivist fiction has always relied on unequal access: science could sell itself as morally and politically disinterested for so long because the requisite skills were so unevenly distributed. As scientific practice is increasingly conducted from different cultural standpoints, the inherited political biases of previous science become more obvious. As access to education and advanced research methodologies became more widespread, they could no longer support the positivist myth. The cultural ideology of Big Data attempts to reverse this by shifting authority away from (slightly more) democratized research expertise toward unequal access to proprietary, gated data. (Molly Osberg points out in her review of Dataclysm for the Verge how Rudder explains in the notes how he gathered most of his information through personal interactions with other tech company executives.) When data is said to be so good that it tells its own truths and researchers downplay their own methodological skills, that should be understood as an effort to make access to that data more valuable, more rarefied. And the same people positioning this data as so valuable and authoritative are typically the ones who own it and routinely sell access to it."
In an interview about the creation and teaching of a class on Landscape Artists at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Karen Russell talks revisiting the much-read: "In class, we take a sort of field trip of the mind together, and it's fun to see some of the places we've all been to before with fresh eyes-Nathaniel Hawthorne territory, Faulkner's county, Shirley Jackson's terrifying 'Lottery' village. The spots on the literary tram tour. I assumed Hemingway was on that itinerary, so I handed out the story without his name, but half the class wasn't familiar with it. It reads totally differently if you remove it from the context of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories and the war, so it became an accidental experiment to learn how much context informs your experience of a place in story. The students still loved it, but what they loved about it seemed more experiential-the animal happiness of being safe in a tent, for instance."
Eula Biss compares the crisis in education to the crisis in health care. At the root of it all, she says, is a consumer mentality: "Yes, we may be consumers, of health care as well as many other things, but that doesn't mean that it always serves us best to think like consumers. Health care is one of those areas, like art-making or community-building or education, where the consumerist approach of trying to get as much as you can for as little as possible can be counterproductive. As a teacher, I've had ample opportunity to observe what consumerism does to education. Students who approach their education as consumers may be passive, may want a product not a process, and may expect learning to feel like entertainment. Learning tends to hurt more than entertainment, and the inevitable disappointment felt by the consumerist learner is often interpreted as a defect in the product. The loss there is twofold-the learner loses the opportunity to learn, but also loses the awareness that she is responsible for that loss. This is not to say that we shouldn't be looking hard at the high cost of education, and the low returns some students get for that cost. We should absolutely interrogate the economy of education and its corruptions, just as we should interrogate the economy of health care and its corruptions. But we aren't served any better, within these troubled systems, by failing to understand our personal role and responsibilities."
Suddenly comics are everywhere. Best sellers are reissued in graphic editions and graphic books are best sellers. For the under 15 set, graphic novels are now a mainstay. Asked whether "Words Limit Art?" Art Spiegelman offers a theory about why comics have had trouble gaining cultural footing: "I would say that as words rose in our cultural firmament, pictures got smashed down to make room for them. And ever since, pictures have been more suspect. We're living in this Protestant country that doesn't respect imagery the same way it respects the word. And all of a sudden something like comics comes along that mixes the two together, and it's viewed as contraband. We're getting into a place where we're barraged with words and images all the time, and we have to get rid of our prejudices against one or the other, and this (tour) is like a controlled science experiment where you've got the pictures without the language."
Reading: Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler
Two of Germany's most distinguished contemporary playwrights read from Discovery of America and other works.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Olin Room 102, 7:30 pm
One Day University Film School Presents: "Robot and Frank" and a Discussion with Roger Berkowitz
Robot and Frank explores the depths of friendship and even love between a robot and a man. Though the film is a comedy, the underlying questions it raises are both timely and serious. What is friendship? Can a machine love? More importantly, what happens when humans fall in love with machines?
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Manhattan Movement and Arts Center, 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Ian Storey invokes two pieces by E. B. White to speculate about the United States' fear for the world it must confront today in the Quote of the Week. And Plato provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking.
On Thursday and Friday, we held our seventh annual fall conference "The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Ideals Worth Fighting For?" It was a busy two days full of talks and discussions, made all the more stimulating by audience members' insightful comments and questions. We hope you were able to make it, and if not, hopefully you were able to watch the conference using our live webcast.
We at the Hannah Arendt Center pride ourselves on our ability to host engaging, thought-provoking events for the Bard community and the greater public at large. We look forward to continuing this tradition well into the future.
Thank you for supporting the Hannah Arendt Center and for helping to make this past week's conference our best conference yet!
Amor Mundi 10/5/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
In a brilliant profile of Marilynne Robinson, whose new book Lila will be out this month, Wyatt Mason (a Senior Fellow at the Arendt Center) notes that Robinson thinks that fear dominates our contemporary condition; fear, she says, is the root of a cultural cynicism: "I hate to say it, but I think a default posture of human beings is fear." Robinson comes to speak about fear in answer to Mason's question: "What do you think people should be talking about more?" Her answer: "'One of the things that bothers me,' she began, with feeling, 'is that there are prohibitions of an unarticulated kind that are culturally felt that prevent people from actually saying what they think.' From there, she raised her well-documented relationship to faith; said that students at Iowa from faith-based backgrounds seek her out; sketched the inhibition these students nonetheless feel in describing the sacred ('If you're Jewish or Catholic, you can make all the jokes about your mother or the nun, but in terms of saying on one's deathbed, "What will it mean to me that this is how I would have described myself, how does the cosmos feel as it nestles in my particular breast?" they are completely inarticulate about that'); addressed that inhibition and suggested its root ('It's as if when you describe something good, you are being deceived or are being deceptive'); offered Flannery O'Connor as an example of a religious writer who fails to describe goodness ('Her prose is beautiful, her imagination appalls me'); evoked the nature of O'Connor's failure ('There's a lot of writing about religion with a cold eye, but virtually none with a loving heart'); complained about the widespread ignorance of religion in American life; told the story of Oseola McCarty, a laundress who bequeathed most of her life savings to the University of Southern Mississippi ('[An] interviewer was talking about how McCarty took down this Bible and First Corinthians fell out of it, it had been so read. And you think, Here is this woman that, by many standards, might have been considered marginally literate, that by another standard would have been considered to be a major expert on the meaning of First Corinthians!'); suggested that McCarty's understanding of First Corinthians - in which Paul lays out the kind of communitarian behaviors upon which Christian decency might depend - reveals what it means to read a text well ('It makes you think that comprehension has an ethical content'); jumped to some reading she has been doing that has an explicit ethical content - essays by John Wycliffe, who played a crucial role in the first English translations of the Bible ('Wycliffe says that if you do not object strenuously to a superior's bad behavior, you are as bad, as guilty as he is of what happens'); and rehearsed the radical activist tradition of translating the Bible, how rendering it into English was a courageous act, a risky resistance of royal authority. ... And it was here that Robinson brought up fear: How it has come to keep us at bay from our best selves, the selves that could and should 'do something.' In her case, that 'something' has been writing. For Robinson, writing is not a craft; it is 'testimony,' a bearing witness: an act that demands much of its maker, not least of which is the courage to reveal what one loves."
Steven Heller considers cartoonist Richard McGuire's newly updated project Here, a comic set in one room over the course of many centuries: "Here is, furthermore, a meditation on 'impermanence,' which is what makes it emotionally compelling yet unsettling-as though every moment in time is preserved in some random playback mode. Structurally, everything and everyone has what McGuire calls a 'walk-on part' as the mysterious scenes go flowing by. 'If you stop to think about this, the "now" becomes heightened,' he says. 'We are so rarely "in the moment," we spend most of our time thinking of the past or worrying about the future. The "now" is the only thing that really exists. The book starts with the question, "Why did I come in here again?" Which is what I was asking myself when I started this project. It took me a long time to figure out how exactly to make this book. The book ends with a moment of recognition of the "now." The person finds the book they are looking for. Which is also my answer, I came back to this idea to make it into a book.'"
Steven Pinker suggests that, although there are lots of reasons why academics write so poorly, most it is because they are not encouraged to write well: "Fog comes easily to writers; it's the clarity that requires practice. The naïve realism and breezy conversation in classic style are deceptive, an artifice constructed through effort and skill. Exorcising the curse of knowledge is no easier. It requires more than just honing one's empathy for the generic reader. Since our powers of telepathy are limited, it also requires showing a draft to a sample of real readers and seeing if they can follow it, together with showing it to yourself after enough time has passed that it's no longer familiar and putting it through another draft (or two or three or four). And there is the toolbox of writerly tricks that have to be acquired one by one: a repertoire of handy idioms and tropes, the deft use of coherence connectors such as nonetheless and moreover, an ability to fix convoluted syntax and confusing garden paths, and much else. You don't have to swallow the rational-actor model of human behavior to see that professionals may not bother with this costly self-improvement if their profession doesn't reward it. And by and large, academe does not. Few graduate programs teach writing. Few academic journals stipulate clarity among their criteria for acceptance, and few reviewers and editors enforce it. While no academic would confess to shoddy methodology or slapdash reading, many are blasé about their incompetence at writing. Enough already. Our indifference to how we share the fruits of our intellectual labors is a betrayal of our calling to enhance the spread of knowledge. In writing badly, we are wasting each other's time, sowing confusion and error, and turning our profession into a laughingstock."
Writing about former nun Karen Armstrong's new book Fields of Blood: Religion of History and Violence, Ferdinand Mound troubles the commonly understood relationship between the two: "Armstrong argues persuasively that it is under the cumulative pressure of invasion by outsiders and internal oppression that secular grievance morphs into jihad. To use an apt but unlovely term, invented I think by Dr. Henry Kissinger, religion is 'weaponised' - how Dr. Strangelove would adore the word. After years of Israeli blockade and creeping land grabs, Yasser Arafat's entirely secular Palestine Liberation Organisation has segued into the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. Israel herself, founded as a secular haven in the teeth of the rabbis, has become a holy land after half a century of Arab encirclement. Now young men all over the Middle East, many of them originally secular and ignorant of Islam, as were the majority of the 9/11 bombers, are being hyped up by selective quotation of holy writ to commit crimes as unspeakable as, well, Samson's. Religion makes its comeback into politics in this hideous perverted form for much the same reason as it emerged in the first place - as an anguished reaction against a heartless world. Westerners lament that Islam never had a Reformation. Muslims may retort that if we had not trampled all over them, they wouldn't have needed one."
Seyla Benhabib has an excellent account of the poverty of those American critics who take to the media to denounce Hannah Arendt every time a new opportunity emerges. In doing so, she provides an excellent account of Arendt's use of Kant in her understanding of Adolf Eichmann: "Commenting on Eichmann's claim that he was 'neither a murderer nor a mass murderer,' Stangneth writes that his 'inner morality is not an idea of justice, a universal moral category, or even a kind of introspection.... Eichmann was not demanding a common human law, which could also apply to him, because he, too, was human. He was actually demanding recognition for a National Socialist dogma, according to which each people (Volk) has a right to defend itself by any means necessary, the German people most of all.' Stangneth explains that for Eichmann 'Conscience was simply the "morality of the Fatherland that dwells within" a person, which Eichmann also termed "the voice of the blood."' This recalls the famous exchange during Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem between Judge Yitzhak Raveh and the defendant about Kant's moral philosophy, which Arendt cites in 'Eichmann in Jerusalem.' She quotes Eichmann saying, 'I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws.' But Arendt notes that Eichmann's meaning perverts Kant's Categorical Imperative: Whereas 'In Kant's philosophy the source, that source was practical reason, in Eichmann's household use of him, it was the will of the Führer.' So when Arendt uses the phrase 'the inability to think' to characterize Eichmann's reduction of conscience to a 'voice of blood' and of the categorical imperative to the command of the Führer, she is taking as given the Kantian terminology, in which 'to think' means to think for oneself and to think consistently, but also from the standpoint of everyone else. The Categorical Imperative in one of its formulations says, 'Act in such a way that the principle of your actions can be a universal law for all.' Eichmann neither thought for himself nor from a universal standpoint in any Kantian sense, and Arendt returned to the relationship between thinking and moral action in several of her essays after 'Eichmann in Jerusalem.'"
In an interview at the end of the regular season, baseball fan George Will takes on the idea that baseball is somehow religious: "Part of the beauty of baseball, and sport generally, is that it doesn't mean a damn thing. It's valued for itself. Now, it can be the pursuit of excellence. It is competition tamed and made civil by rules. It is aggression channeled in a wholesome direction. These are all virtues. They tiptoe up to the point and stop well short of giving baseball meaning. It's a game. It's a very pretty, demanding, and dangerous game. I do think that baseball satisfies a longing in people, particularly urban people. There is a vestigial tribal impulse in all of us. For instance, when you get on the L and the cars begin to fill up with people wearing their Cub blue and you're all going to the same place for the same reason, for about three hours a little community exists. It disperses after three hours, but it will come back tomorrow. Daniel Patrick Moynihan talked about what he called the 'liberal expectancy.' He said that with the coming of modernity the two drivers of history, religion and ethnicity, would lose their saliency. Sport caters to this and entertains this desire for group identification. But there's nothing transcendent about baseball."
As a Fellow at Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry, in Munich, Mr. Mantell replicated the Milgram experiment.
Monday, October 6, 2014
The Hannah Arendt Center, 3:00 pm
Resolved: "Individualism is an American value worth fighting for."
Tuesday, October 7th, 2014
Campus Center Multipurpose Room, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
October 9-10
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?, will be held this week on Thursday and Friday, October 9-10!
Registration closes Monday, 10/6! You can register here before it's too late!
Reading: Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler
Two of Germany's most distinguished contemporary playwrights read from Discovery of America and other works.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Olin Room 102, 7:30 pm
One Day University Film School Presents: "Robot and Frank" and a Discussion with Roger Berkowitz
Robot and Frank explores the depths of friendship and even love between a robot and a man. Though the film is a comedy, the underlying questions it raises are both timely and serious. What is friendship? Can a machine love? More importantly, what happens when humans fall in love with machines?
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Manhattan Movement and Arts Center, 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Kazue Koishikawa discusses Arendt's conception of the self and how our thoughts, our bodies, our speech, and our love shape our existence as communal beings in the Quote of the Week. Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We look back to a 2012 lecture delivered by Michael McCarthy analyzing Arendt's critique of "the world alienation of modernity" in our Video Archives. In our Library feature, we appreciate Arendt's collection of Lichtenberg's works. And Roger Berkowitz reflects on the decline of and how we might reinvigorate America's exceptionalism in the Weekend Read.
Amor Mundi 9/28/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
If you want an example of why distrust of American institutions is at epidemic proportions, listen to the investigative report of the New York Federal Reserve based on secret tapes made by one of their Senior Bank Examiners, Carmen Segarra. Segarra, a lawyer with impeccable credentials, was hired by the Federal Reserve after the financial crisis as part of an effort to bring in new personnel who were more willing to stand up to the banks they were charged with regulating. Segarra's story is told jointly in a hour-long radio show by Ira Glass on "This American Life" and in an investigative article by ProPublica's Jake Bernstein. Here is one exchange between Bernstein, Segarra, and David Beim, author of a once secret report commissioned by the Federal Reserve to study why the Fed had failed to adequately regulate banks in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis.
David Beim: So I could just read the fear of speaking up list of quotations. And it goes like this: "Don't want to be too far outside from where management is thinking. The organization does not encourage thinking outside the box. After you get shot down a couple of times, you tend not to go there anymore. Until I know what my boss thinks, I don't want to tell you."
Jake Bernstein: According to Beim's report, this culture of fear paralyzed the Fed in the years leading up to the financial crisis and prevented it from taking action. It's not that the Fed regulators didn't notice the problems accumulating in the financial system that eventually brought it down.
David Beim: They were aware of those problems coming. There were lengthy presentations on subjects like that within the organization. It's just that none of those meetings ever ended with anyone saying, "and therefore let's take the following steps right now."
Carmen Segarra: I mean they're meetings without a clear agenda, they're meetings without clear objectives.
Jake Bernstein: Carmen was used to the private sector, where she says meetings ended with specific action items. People knew what they were supposed to do.
Carmen Segarra: None of that happens at the Fed. It's like the information is discussed, and then it just ends up in like a vacuum floating on air, not acted upon. And the mere act of having this meeting, for them, is almost like akin to having done something about it.
You can read more about Segarra and also about George Packer in this week's Weekend Read.
Jeremy Waldron in the NY Review of Books raises important questions about the "libertarian paternalism" of nudging as social policy. Nudging is the idea that government encourages healthy or rational behavior not by commanding it but by changing default choices. Instead of banning large sugary drinks, for example, the government could require that restaurants serve diet soda in medium cups unless the customer expressly asks for a large sugary drink. Customers remain free to fill themselves with sugar, but, nudged by the default choice, more customers will consume less. Waldron admits such nudging helps many live healthier. But he worries: "I am afraid there is very little awareness in these books about the problem of trust. Every day we are bombarded with offers whose choice architecture is manipulated, not necessarily in our favor. The latest deal from the phone company is designed to bamboozle us, and we may well want such blandishments regulated. But it is not clear whether the regulators themselves are trustworthy. Governments don't just make mistakes; they sometimes set out deliberately to mislead us. The mendacity of elected officials is legendary, and claims on our trust and credulity have often been squandered. It is against this background that we have to consider how nudging might be abused. There are deeper questions, too, than these issues of trust and competence. As befits someone who was 'regulation czar' in the Obama White House, Sunstein's point of view is a rather lofty one and at times it has an uncomfortable affinity with what Bernard Williams once called 'Government House utilitarianism.' Government House utilitarianism was a moral philosophy that envisaged an elite who knew the moral truth and could put out simple rules for the natives (or ordinary people) to use, even though in the commissioner's bungalow it was known that the use of these rules would not always be justified. We (the governors) know that lying, for example, is sometimes justified, but we don't want to let on to the natives, who may not have the wit to figure out when this is so; we don't trust them to make the calculations that we make about when the ordinary rules should not be followed. Williams saw the element of insult in this sort of approach to morality, and I think it is discernable in Sunstein's nudging as well."
In an interview, Hillary Mantel compares Thomas Cromwell, the subject of her books Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, and Margaret Thatcher, the subject of the only new story in a collection that's about to be released: "Creativity in politics is rare but I think she had it... Cromwell did too. But there are big differences. He was a negotiator and she detested consensus-she saw herself as an Old Testament prophet delivering the truth from on high. Cromwell used history to pretend the new things he was doing were old and thus to soothe the English temperament. Mrs. Thatcher despised history as a constraint."
In a survey of the state of the essay about research into the relationship between madness and creativity, Tom Bartlett suggests that maybe we want our artists to suffer a little bit: "The depressed writer is a stock character, like the ditzy cheerleader or the slick salesman. It's something we believe almost without thinking about it, in part because that pathetic figure so frequently appears in books and movies, and because we can point to historical examples of artists plagued by mental illness. John Berryman leapt from a bridge. Virginia Woolf walked into a river. David Foster Wallace, a fairly new addition to this sad list, hung himself. We mull the meaning of their deaths, divine clues from the works they left behind. We do the same with other artists. After Robin Williams's recent suicide came the predictable musings about whether his comedic brilliance was fueled by his apparent depression. Was his manic humor a tool to keep the darkness at bay? Our readiness to accept the connection between mental illness and creativity makes Andreasen's research all the more palatable: It is approval from on high of what we already feel in our guts. Perhaps it's perversely comforting to us nongeniuses that artists, in a sense, pay dearly for their cultural accomplishments. Maybe you'll never produce a great American anything but at least you're not nuts. At the same time, it's nice to think that the mentally ill harbor some special skill, and to argue otherwise seems unkind."
Hannah Arendt's call to think without banisters has captured the imagination of political thinkers. Within a symposium on Tracy Strong's important book Politics Without Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century, Patchen Markell offers a definition of thinking without a banister: "I'll begin with a terminological question: What are 'visions' and 'banisters,' exactly? Often, Strong's uses of these terms, and especially the latter, seem to refer to what we used to call 'epistemological foundations.' He begins his book by saying that the phrase 'thinking without a banister,' for Arendt, 'meant for her that humans no longer could rely on any transcendental grounding to finalize their thinking' (1, emphasis added). What this amounts to is the idea that action cannot be underwritten by 'complete' knowledge of the world, not because there are things we should know but cannot, but because 'human understanding [is] not exhausted in the act of knowing.' Absent the banister of knowledge, we are compelled to relate to the world aesthetically, which means we acknowledge the 'presence of the incomprehensible' and, consequently, we recognize that 'what one says about it is necessarily in and only in one's own voice,' a recognition that 'necessarily opens and relates one to others making a judgment of their own' (13). What sets Strong's authors off from the tradition that precedes them, it seems, is that all take up the challenge of thinking without banisters in this sense, radicalizing Kant's critique of knowledge under the weight of their anticipation or experience of the horrors of the twentieth century." The Symposium has essays by Markell, Linda Zerelli, Mary Dietz, and a response by Tracy Strong. The entire symposium can be found in the journal Political Theory.
In a profile of Bard College president Leon Botstein, Alice Gregory reveals the sound and fury that he finds necessary to running a small liberal arts college with relatively few resources (the Arendt Center is housed at Bard). In Botstein's case, it often means taking risks and fostering innovation with the faith that the funding will follow. Gregory suggests that the key to Bard's recent success is a series of attempts at revising the traditions of secondary education, specifically mentioning the college's revolutionary programs in prisons, it's acclaimed high school early college programs, and its innovative ways of admitting new students. People ask how Botstein does so much with so little. Gregory writes that Botstein turns the question around: "Botstein, who has accused other college presidents of doing nothing more than 'running something that is somewhere between a faltering corporation and a hotel,' seems genuinely baffled by what he sees as the financial conservatism of most well-endowed liberal-arts schools. 'I'm a little mystified about what they do with their money,' he said." For Gregory, Botstein has created Bard in his "polymath image": "Classes are small and seminar style. Freshmen arrive on campus three weeks before the fall semester starts, not to river-raft or play getting-to-know-you games but to study philosophy, literature, and religious texts for five hours a day. In January, they are required to stay on campus and work in science labs. Unlike many colleges today, Bard still has distribution requirements. Before declaring a major, sophomores must present and defend papers before a board of professors. All seniors must write theses.The school remains small-there are fewer than two thousand students-and resources are scarce. But Botstein has built Bard, which saw a thirty-per-cent increase in applications this year, into an academic center that punches far above its weight."
As a Fellow at Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry, in Munich, Mr. Mantell replicated the Milgram experiment.
Monday, October 6, 2014
The Hannah Arendt Center, 3:00 pm
Resolved: "Individualism is an American value worth fighting for."
Tuesday, October 7th, 2014
Campus Center Multipurpose Room, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
October 9-10
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?, will be held this year on October 9-10!
Registration is now OPEN! You can register here!
Want to know more about the schedule of the conference? Please click for details here!
Learn more about the conference here.
This week on the Blog, Anne O'Byrne discusses Arendt's reaction to a Matisse exhibition and what "stripping away the face" means for our humanness in the Quote of the Week. Athenian historian Thucydides provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We look back on a 2010 Lunchtime Talk with Bill Dixon on a new critique of globalization in our Video Archives. In our Library feature, we discover a Bible in Hannah Arendt's library and wonder whether she herself owned it. And Roger Berkowitz discusses Carmen Segarra and the "unwinding" of America in the Weekend Read.
Amor Mundi 8/31/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
The Guardian is asking writers and critics to choose the book that changed them. Rafael Behr answers Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler. It is a good choice. Behr writes: "When I went to university I was only tangentially interested in politics. Then, during the summer holiday at the end of the first year, driving across France, I borrowed Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon from a friend. He was studying philosophy and had been ordered to read it. I was studying languages and was avoiding some untranslated set text. I had never been gripped by anything so theoretical before. The story is sparse. Rubashov, an ageing first-generation revolutionary, is imprisoned and interrogated by an ambitious thug from the steelier, younger generation. Execution is certain. Pacing his cell, Rubashov recalls his past work for the party abroad, manipulating and ultimately destroying idealistic but dispensable foreign communist agents. He composes a tract on 'the relative maturity of the masses' which submerges his personal dilemma - to die in silence or serve the party one last time by submitting to a show trial - in a sweeping quasi-Marxist rumination on history and destiny. The drama is not contained in the action. What excited 19-year-old me was the guided tour of a totalitarian mind." Rightly, Behr sets Darkness at Noon next to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, as "companion volumes in my imagination." Both Koestler and Arendt are spurs against the seductions of totalitarian rationalism. For more on Darkness at Noon, take a look at Roger Berkowitz's essay Approaching Infinity: Dignity in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon.
Lost in Translation From the Classroom to the Dining Room
David Bornstein asks, "How can we repair our public discourse?" And in a recent essay he answers that we need to re-learn how to listen and have meaningful conversations, which is the goal of the initiative "Ask Big Questions." Bornstein writes: "Imagine that you're among a group of college students who want to discuss the big issues of the day. What can be done to bring peace to the Middle East? How can we reduce sexual assaults on campuses? What should be done about immigration? These questions have the potential to produce rich explorations. But they're equally likely to devolve into shouting matches that increase anger and mistrust. Is there a way to frame conversations so that people actually listen to one another?... Ask Big Questions helps students discover how to establish a foundation of trust and confidentiality in a group, invite contributions from everyone, and guide others into deeper learning by interpreting the meaning of poems, texts or images, reflecting on their lives and the implications for action. The interpretive part of the discussion is essential, says Feigelson: 'If you don't have some sort of a text or interpretive object, the conversation can easily veer off into bad group therapy.'" The initiative teaches students how to think and speak about hard questions by seeking to understand opposing views and imagining that the truth might have various shades. This is, of course, one premise of a liberal arts education, which makes one wonder why the lessons from the classroom are not being translated to the dining room.
Adam Gopnick takes on the old adage about those who don't learn from history, suggesting that repetition is even more likely when the history being read is a self serving one: "Studying history doesn't argue for nothing-ism, but it makes a very good case for minimalism: for doing the least violent thing possible that might help prevent more violence from happening... The real sin that the absence of a historical sense encourages is presentism, in the sense of exaggerating our present problems out of all proportion to those that have previously existed. It lies in believing that things are much worse than they have ever been-and, thus, than they really are-or are uniquely threatening rather than familiarly difficult. Every episode becomes an epidemic, every image is turned into a permanent injury, and each crisis is a historical crisis in need of urgent aggressive handling-even if all experience shows that aggressive handling of such situations has in the past, quite often made things worse...Those of us who obsess, for instance, particularly in this centennial year, on the tragedy of August, 1914-on how an optimistic and largely prosperous civilization could commit suicide-don't believe that the trouble then was that nobody read history. The trouble was that they were reading the wrong history, a make-believe history of grand designs and chess-master-like wisdom. History, well read, is simply humility well told, in many manners. And a few sessions of humility can often prevent a series of humiliations."
Molly Crabapple tries to think of an ethical response to the horror and violence of the last few months. One response, to affirm her complicity as a white woman for the police violence in Ferguson, evidences a basic fallacy of collective guilt. Crabapple is not guilty of killing Michael Brown. And if someone is guilty, her musings about her own guilt minimizes his guilt. But Crabapple's second response is infinitely more moving: to affirm the beauty of the world: "Power seeks to enclose beauty-to make it scarce, controlled. There is scant beauty in militarized zones or prisons. But beauty keeps breaking out anyway, like the roses on that Ferguson street. The world is connected now. Where it breaks, we all break. But it is our world, to love as it burns around us. Jack Gilbert is right. 'We must risk delight' in the summer of monsters. Beauty is survival, not distraction. Beauty is a way of fighting. Beauty is a reason to fight." Crabapple's musings on beauty in dark times call to mind Berthold Brecht's poem"To Posterity":
Truly, I live in dark times!
An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead
Points to insensitivity. He who laughs
Has not yet received
The terrible news.
What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!
And he who walks quietly across the street,
Passes out of the reach of his friends
Who are in danger?
Joseph Luzzi suggests a reason why some books remain important long after their original place and time, attempting to rehabilitate the idea of the universality of literature in the process: "This contrast, between a celebrated and largely unread classic and an enduringly popular classic, shows that a key to a work's ongoing celebrity is that dangerous term: universality. We hold the word with suspicion because it tends to elevate one group at the expense of another; what's supposedly applicable to all is often only applicable to a certain group that presumes to speak for everybody else. And yet certain elements and experiences do play a major role in most of our lives: falling in love, chasing a dream, and, yes, transitioning as Pinocchio does from childhood to adolescence. The classic that keeps on being read is the book whose situations and themes remain relevant over time-that miracle of interpretive openness that makes us feel as though certain stories, poems, and plays are written with us in mind."
A Discussion with Zephyr Teachout
Zephyr Teachout, author of Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United and a Democratic Primary Candidate in the upcoming Gubernatorial Election, will be visiting Bard College to address students, staff and community members.
Friday, September 5th, 2014
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium, 3:00-4:00 pm
For more information about this event, please click here.
Lunchtime Talk with Kenan Malik
Details soon to follow.
Wednesday, September 17h, 2014
The Hannah Arendt Center, 12:30 pm
Resolved: "The fate of the world depends upon the success or failure of America's model of democratic self-government."
Tuesday, October 7th, 2014
Campus Center Multipurpose Room, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
October 9-10
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?, will be held this year on October 9-10!
Registration is now OPEN! You can register here!
Want to know more about the schedule of the conference? Please click for details here!
Learn more about the conference here.
This week on the Blog, Roger Berkowitz emphasizes the need to restore spaces where freedom can be enjoyed in the Quote of the Week. American poet and writer Sylvia Plath provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We look back on a lecture by Philippe Nonet on the history of metaphysical freedom in our Video Archives. And Roger Berkowitz remarks on the needlessly specialized nature of modern humanities scholarship in the Weekend Read.
Amor Mundi 8/10/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Fantasy novelist Lev Grossman discusses why he loves the work of C.S. Lewis, who as opposed to most contemporary fantasy fiction wasn't particularly interested in the way that his world worked: "People talk a lot about the ecology of [George R. R. Martin's] Westeros, for instance-how do the seasons work? What are the climate patterns? How does it function as an ecosphere? You have to think about the economy, too-have I got a working feudal model? It's gotten so extreme that when characters do magic, it's very common to see fantasy writers talk about thermodynamics-okay, he's lighting a candle with magic, can he draw the heat from somewhere else in the room so that equilibrium gets preserved? This is the school of thought that extends from Tolkien and his scrupulously-crafted Middle Earth. Lewis was of a different school from that. Magic, to him, was a much wilder, stranger thing. It was much less domesticated. And when I re-read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I feel as though we've wandered too far from the true magic, the kind Lewis wrote. Maybe we want to worry less about thermodynamics and work harder to get that sense of wonder he achieves with such apparent effortlessness. And then, there are things that he does that are simply not replicable. The lamppost in the woods: there's something indescribably strange and romantic about that image, which recurs at the end of the book. In some ways, you read Lewis and think: I can learn from this guy. But sometimes you have to sit back and think, I'll never know how he did that. You know, I've seen the lamppost in Oxford which is alleged to be the Narnia lamppost. To me, it looked like an ordinary lamppost. I would not have seen that lamppost and gone home to write The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. You had to be Lewis to see it for what it was."
The statistical and technological mania has reached the soul. Casey N. Cep reports that a pastor, John Ortberg, has teamed up with a sociologist to market "a simpler way of measuring a soul: SoulPulse, a technology project that captures real-time data on the spirituality of Americans. SoulPulse attempts to quantify the soul, an unbodied version of what FitBit, the exercise-tracking device, has done for the body. After filling in a brief intake survey on your age, race, ethnicity, education, income, and religious affiliation, SoulPulse contacts you twice a day with questions about your physical health, spiritual disciplines, and religious experiences. Each of the surveys takes less than five minutes to complete.... Ortberg, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology, listened to my concerns, and said, 'On the one hand, not everything can be put in a test tube or seen with a microscope. The most important dimensions of life have to do with the spirit, and those aren't always quantifiable. But using the best tools and methods available seems like a worthwhile thing.' He also stressed that, while SoulPulse is using new tools, it is answering old questions. Describing Brother Lawrence's 'The Practice of the Presence of God,' a seventeenth-century text that linked God's presence to daily tasks like doing the dishes and cooking meals, Ortberg said that believers across the centuries have tried to cultivate a mindfulness of the holy."
There are so many opinions about Gaza, so it is worthwhile to read a diary of the everyday there, from bombs and scares to the search for falafel. Atef Abu Saif published his diary of eight days during the war in the New York Times: "When I wake up I don't want to listen to the radio or phone a friend to ask about the latest developments. I want the morning to be like a normal morning, before the war. To start my day with a cup of coffee, to sip it in private for an hour. To look down from my window and watch the people in the street, to feel the pulse of the city around me. I suggest to Hanna that we have a proper breakfast: hummus, foul, falafel. But after an hour of visiting all the restaurants in the neighborhood, my son Mostafa returns with the news that falafel can no longer be bought in Jabaliya camp. My father-in-law explains that this might be because falafel requires a lot of boiled oil, which in turn requires lots of gas. As there is still no clue when the war might end, everyone is saving every gas cylinder they have. Hanna suggests that the lack of parsley in the market might be another cause; parsley is essential for making good falafel. My mother-in-law is watering her plants despite the shortage of water in the tanks. She keeps her plants in the living room in different pots arranged around the room. They make the house calmer, greener. There are 13 kinds of plants in this garden. Every morning she waters them and checks each leaf, remembers each one, and notices whenever a new leaf buds into life. She knows their length and their sheen. She always finds water for them. A minute later she is complaining that our oldest child, Talal, is taking too much time in the shower."
Gabriel Winslow-Yost considers the World War I comics of French cartoonist Jacques Tardi: "For his WWI books he restricts himself almost exclusively to three horizontal panels per page. These unusually wide, large panels fit the trenches and barren battlefields, and give him room to balance his careful renditions of tanks, guns, soiled uniforms, and exhausted faces against the emptiness of washed-out sky or devastated ground. The three-panel page also gives the action a slow, stuttering rhythm-a series of frozen moments, rather than any sort of continuous movement. This suits the mournful anecdotes of It Was the War perfectly. A pointless French infantry charge early in the book is agonizing, monumental. The soldiers are running, stumbling, bleeding, but with an eerie, almost sadistic slowness; Tardi draws them just at the moment they fall, in one case right as the bullet hits. The fundamental trick of comics is to convince us that a series of still images, all visible at once, are in fact depicting the passage of time. At its best, It Was the War manages to do the reverse: we see furious action stilled, the final horrible moments of these men prolonged indefinitely. The captions offer us a taste of contemporary jingoism: 'Joyful, despite their grief, are those families whose blood flows for their country.'"
Noting that the essay is conspicuously anti-modern, Joshua Rothman answers William Deresiewicz's "Don't Send Your Kids To The Ivy League": "Deresiewicz believes that colleges can push the modern world out, that the proper role of a college is to be anti-modern. On today's élite campuses, Deresiewicz writes, 'everything is technocratic,' centered on 'the development of expertise'; wouldn't it be better, he wonders, if colleges replaced expertise with soulfulness? 'The job of college,' he proposes, is 'to help you become an individual, a unique being-a soul.' By this measure, religious colleges 'deliver a better education, in the highest sense of the word,' than do Ivy League schools. The implication is that, by rearranging their priorities, colleges could recapture the purity of purpose they once had. They could bring the past into the present. But this both underestimates the power of modernity and overestimates the power of colleges.... Colleges aren't monasteries. They can't give their students spiritual sustenance; they can't provide an escape from modernity. And they shouldn't be faulted, or punished, for that. There are good ways of responding to the modern world, but they don't have much to do with college. In 'Ulysses,' we admire Bloom's attitude of curious acceptance, which seems to be rooted in his disposition. In Proust, we learn to take solace in memory (Proust is hard to teach, in part, because twenty-one-year-olds have barely had time to forget anything). In 'Anna Karenina,' the answer seems to be patience and the passage of time. Levin flirts with the Deresiewiczian idea of escaping from modernity; maybe, he thinks, he should marry into a farming family, forget about writing his book, and cultivate a mode of life that allows him to live cheaply, simply, and away from the striving, citified world. In the end, he recognizes that he cannot pry himself loose from his own era. He marries the woman he loves-an upper-crust girl from Moscow-and admits to himself that, when it comes to the purpose of life, 'nowhere in the whole arsenal of his convictions was he able to find, not only any answers, but anything resembling an answer.... He was in the position of a man looking for food in a toymaker's or a gunsmith's shop.' In the end, Levin does the best he can; he nurtures a tentative faith, muddles through, tries to live a good life, and only occasionally despairs. Could a better college education have helped him avoid that? Not really." Let's hope Bard students would answer differently.
Eichmann, Von Mildenstein, and Arnon Goldfinger
At the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the accused was asked who the initiators were of the program of forced Jewish emigration from 1933-1939. He was asked if Heydrich was involved. Yes, he replied, but he did not initiate it. Pressed, Eichmann admitted that he himself was one of the initiators. Pressed further, he answers that the intellectual father of the German policy of Jewish emigration was Baron Leopold von Mildenstein. Mildenstein is the person who recruited Eichmann into the SS office on Jewish Affairs. Imagine the surprise of Arnon Goldfinger, living in Tel Aviv, when he learns that his Zionist grandparents were best friends with von Mildenstein and his wife. "I found much more about [von Mildenstein] than what is in the film. It was important to say that he did not l[ea]ve the Nazi party. He was involved in anti-Semitic propaganda. But he wanted to stay in contact with Jews. I found all kinds of other things about him, nothing that would change your mind, no smoking gun, but you could ask yourself, 'Did he have an alternative?' The way to describe what happened was this. Nobody knew what Hitler wanted, but everybody knew if they did something Hitler did not want, it's the end. It was a classic regime of terror. There's a book called Alone in Berlin that described life in the war. It's horrible. I am a Jew; I don't so much identify with them, but still I can understand and ask the question, 'Could he do something?' If you look at his career, you won't find him in the concentration camps. He is in the headquarters, spying, thinking. For me, it's enough. One of the most shocking moments for me was when Edda told me that she knew my family had lost someone in the concentration camps. She did not have the details right. She thought it was my grandfather's mother, not my grandmother's mother. She's a little mistaken with the details but it shows that she and therefore her parents knew some of what happened. That means my grandparents were sitting over there in the garden where we were, discussing the death of someone from their family with a man who was a Nazi. Did they ask him if he received their letter asking for help? Did he tell them he could not help them? There were a lot of lies over there." "The Flat," the movie he made about the discovery, is absolutely worth viewing.
October 9-10
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?, will be held this year on October 9-10!
Registration is now OPEN! You can register here!
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From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Jurgens discusses Arendt's insistence that judges to be able to deal with the unprecedented in the Quote of the Week. French wrier and moralist Luc de Clapiers provides this week's Thought on Thinking. We look back on a lecture Roger Berkowitz delivered in 2010 on the importance of humanity in our Video Archives. And Roger Berkowitz observes how the American crisis of freedom can be attributed to the loss of the national government's sense of constitutional purpose in the Weekend Read.
Amor Mundi 6/29/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
"It seemed to me to be half-sadness and half-fury, and I wondered what in her life could have put that expression in her eyes." This is how Reverend John Ames, the voice of Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead, describes his younger wife Lila, whose former life is largely a mystery even to Ames himself. Now, Robinson's much-anticipated fourth novel will tell Lila's story and how, after being rescued as a child by a drifter named Doll, the two craft a life together on the run and on the fringes of society. Though the novel does not come out until October, its description recalls another remarkable female pair in Robinson's work--the young Ruth and her aunt Sylvie from Robinson's first novel Housekeeping, which came out thirty-five years ago--and Housekeeping's theme of Christian homelessness. For now, FSG offers a sneak peek of Lila: "The child was four or five, long-legged, and Doll couldn't keep her covered up, but she chafed at her calves with her big, rough hand and brushed the damp from her cheek and her hair. She whispered, 'Don't know what I think I'm doing. Never figured on it. Well, maybe I did. I don't know. I guess I probly did. This sure ain't the night for it.' She hitched up her apron to cover the child's legs and carried her out past the clearing. The door might have opened, and a woman might have called after them, Where you going with that child? and then, after a minute, closed the door again, as if she had done all decency required. 'Well,' Doll whispered, 'we'll just have to see.'"
Simon Critchley seeks the bleeding obvious philosophical lessons from soccer-the priority of the coach over individual players: "Allow me to state the bleeding obvious: this is a tactical game. It is not about passion and individual genius, notwithstanding the relentless commodification of stars like Messi, Ronaldo, and Neymar. No, soccer is about the use of reason and intelligence in order to construct a collective team formation that will contain and defeat the opposition. It requires discipline and relentless training, particularly in order to maintain the shape of the team and the way it occupies and controls space. This is the job of the coach, who tends to get reduced to some kind of either bizarrely animated comic character or casually disaffected bystander when games are televised. But he is the one who sets the team up to play a certain, clearly determined way, the prime mover although sometimes moved rather than unmoved. Otherwise said, soccer is not about individual players." Soccer may then be the perfect game in our world of quantitative analysis and big data, one in which what matters less are exceptionally talented individuals and what wins in the end is well-managed, data-driven, carefully-crafted strategic analysis. Which would maybe explain why the Oakland A's are presently the best team in baseball.
When the People are the Fourth Estate
In an article for the most recent Nieman Report, Engin Ondin, the founder of the Turkish citizen journalism aggregator 140journos, describes the founding of the project, and its growth following last year's protests in Istanbul. Although he and his partners have increasingly relied on citizen-editors as informants, he finds that oversight remains important, and that he can use Twitter apps to help: "Turkey has about 12 million active Twitter users, roughly a third of the online population. We have more than 300 volunteer content producers all across the country, including a survivor of the Uludere attack. As the number of Turkish citizens feeding information to 140journos grew, we shifted gears. Instead of doing all the reporting ourselves, we focused on collecting, categorizing, validating and Storifying the news content sent to us. To verify news reports, we use free tools like Yandex Panorama (Russia's version of Google StreetView) and TinEye, a search service to help determine if images are new or pulled from websites. To monitor the flow of news tips, 140journos uses TweetDeck. We keep lists of 140journos contributors who tweet news from more than 50 cities, universities and other political hotspots in Turkey. We also keep lists organized by individual events, such as protests against executions in Egypt, and lists organized by factions, such as ultra-nationalists and conservatives." Although he doesn't quite come out and say it, this kind of work is important in any place where freedom of the press is limited, or perhaps merely focused on other things.
The Literature of the New Wealth
Pivoting off of Thomas Picketty's attention to classic literary fiction in Capital in the Twenty First Century, Stephen Marche points out that we have already seen the literary proof of the second gilded age, and that it is by and large Franzenite: "Future economic historians won't have to look very far to find fictional descriptions of our current financial realities. The social realist novel of the moment can be identified by the preeminent, almost exclusive, emphasis it places on social expressions of the changing economic reality. Currently, the large-scale realism of Jonathan Franzen, articulated in his famous article for Harper's in 1996 and achieved most fully in The Corrections and Freedom, stands utterly triumphant. The narrative forms that thrived in the mid-nineties - minimalism, with its descriptions of poor and rural men; magical realism which incorporated non-Western elements into the traditional English novel; the exotic lyricism of John Berger or Michael Ondaatje - have been pushed to the side."
Reporting from the trial set to determine whether or not the NCAA can continue to exclusively profit from the likenesses of its players, Charlie Pierce frames the debate in the language of personhood, and whether or not a digital representation of a person is the same thing as the person himself: "As near as I can tell, the video games in question were created by taking game films from various NCAA football and basketball games and then transferring them technologically until actual players found themselves with NCAA-licensed avatars that live forever. It was seeing his avatar that prompted Ed O'Bannon to launch his lawsuit in the first place and, having done so, he opened up a number of interesting questions about who he is, both in real life and in virtual reality. Is Ed O'Bannon's avatar really Ed O'Bannon, or is it an Ed O'Bannon made by someone else so that a lot of someone elses could make a whole lot of money? Isn't that a fundamental looting of one's fundamental identity? Doesn't the real Ed O'Bannon have a say in the use of his name, his image, and his likeness? After all, that's him in that game. The avatar runs the court like he did. It shoots the way he did. It passes the ball the way he did. There doesn't seem to be any moral basis for an argument that Ed O'Bannon doesn't have the right to control - let alone profit from - all the Ed O'Bannons that have been created out of the work that the real Ed O'Bannon did as an athlete. How can an actual person find himself an indentured servant in virtual reality?"
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Faisal Baluch explores Arendt's distinction between politics and violence as a way to understand her support of a Jewish army in the Quote of the Week. American philosopher Eric Hoffer provides this week's Thought on Thinking. And Roger Berkowitz distinguishes Arendt's banality of evil from Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" in the Weekend Read.
Amor Mundi 6/22/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Black in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Hilton Als, in reviewing a new book co-edited by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. entitled The Image of the Black In Western Art, The Twentieth Century: The Impact of Africa, is struck by a particular painting, Portrait of Tonia Stieltjes by the Dutch artist Jan Sluyters. The book focuses broadly on "image of the black during the age of mechanical reproduction and how it changed, was modernized, denigrated, and, often, fetishized." Als, however, fixes on the singular humanity of one portrait: "Tonia's grave face is powdered white, as was the fashion of the time, but then there is her 'real' skin and her style, which is something 'other.' My imagination reacts to those levels of density and nonverbal expression more readily than to portraits of black people by artists ranging from Goldie White to Brent Malone. I find their work predictable: it elevates blackness to a kind of folkloric purity and strength that doesn't allow for labyrinthine humanness, or for the fact that most blacks come from some place they don't know but, like Tonia, make themselves up out of the whole cloth of Europe, or Africa, or whatever temporary home will have them.... It's Tonia's isolation in public, the theatricalization of her different self through paint and dress, that encompasses so much of what makes the black in Western art incalculably lonely, unknowable, troubling, and, sometimes, beautiful, just like other people."
In the New Republic, Christopher Ketcham makes the case that journalist idol Chris Hedges has a plagiarism problem. Ketcham's account, though bordering on the tedious, overly personal, and the monomaniacal, seems to make its case. It has recently been given further support by a long post by Adam Weinstein at Gawker, which both uncovers further instances of plagiarism and argues that Hedges habitually recycles 1000s of words of his own writing and even whole articles in longer articles and books that he claims to be original work. Hedges forcefully denies Ketcham's charges and has written a response here that also includes responses from Ketcham and The New Republic. Ketcham's thesis is that Hedges's plagiarism must be outed to protect the integrity of journalism, an argument he puts in the words of a journalism expert: "Trust is a journalist's and journalism's most precious commodity…if there is even a hint of the possibility that misconduct was covered up, it's even worse. Journalism will take another hit." That is true. But equally central to this story is the nature of power. Hedges has said, "You have a choice between which two sets of principles you serve. Justice and truth or privilege and power…. The more you make concessions to those whose fealty is to privilege and power, the more you diminish the capacity for justice and truth." He is so right. Admirably, Hedges has stood up for his principles, angering the right and the left, and always speaking his mind. We need more publicly courageous intellectuals like Hedges. But in his belief in his own importance to the cause for which he fights, Hedges has not only made mistakes (which can be forgiven) but also has refused to own up to his mistakes and instead has sought to drown out his critics with bluster. His response suggests that privilege and power may mean more to Hedges than he lets on.
In an interview with Granta, cartoonist Adrian Tomine discusses the value of a very informal education: "I've learned a lot of tangible, practical things from studying all kinds of things: comics, illustration, movies, prose, etc. But I think I've learned more from just hanging around creative people and talking to them and learning from their example. I suppose I'm talking about the kind of osmotic learning that comes from getting to know other artists (or writers or musicians or whatever). If you go over to the house of someone whose work you admire, and you look at their bookshelves and ask about things that jump out at you, that right there can be kind of an education. I've even learned a lot from just going to an art store with other cartoonists. Invariably they'll know about some drafting tool I'd never heard of, or have some preference for some brand of ink that they've arrived at after years of trial and error. And on a broader scale, it's really useful to watch how someone - especially someone who's been at it for longer - deals with issues that arise in their art and just in life in general."
The Beautiful Game as an Expression of National Character
In the midst of the international frenzy of the World Cup, Matthew Futterman describes USA's German-born coach Jürgen Klinsmann as soccer's "Alexis de Tocqueville," endeavoring to create an American style of the game, saying that "he wanted to create a squad that represented what he sees as the defining American characteristic-a visceral hatred of being dictated to." Since, paradoxically, this change came from the top down, it, of course, turned out to be more difficult than easy.
I Come to Praise the CPA, Not to Bury Him
Jacob Soll yearns for the heroic accountant of the early modern Dutch, for whom keeping one's books in order took on a spiritual meaning: "Double-entry accounting made it possible to calculate profit and capital and for managers, investors, and authorities to verify books. But at the time, it also had a moral implication. Keeping one's books balanced wasn't simply a matter of law, but an imitation of God, who kept moral accounts of humanity and tallied them in the Books of Life and Death. It was a financial technique whose power lay beyond the accountants, and beyond even the wealthy people who employed them. Accounting was closely tied to the notion of human audits and spiritual reckonings. Dutch artists began to paint what could be called a warning genre of accounting paintings. In Jan Provoost's 'Death and Merchant,' a businessman sits behind his sacks of gold doing his books, but he cannot balance them, for there is a missing entry. He reaches out for payment, not from the man who owes him the money, but from the grim reaper, death himself, the only one who can pay the final debts and balance the books. The message is clear: Humans cannot truly balance their books in the end, for they are accountable to the final auditor."
Alexandra Schwartz, riffing off the recent release of a book documenting Marcel Proust's letters to his upstairs neighbor, considers the loneliness and alienation of the city's crowd and remembers that, far from the mere writer of In Search of Lost Time, Proust was a real person who lived under neighbors whose loud banging sometimes annoyed him, too. Here is one such missive sent upstairs by Proust: "Madame, I hope you won't find me too indiscreet. There's been a lot of noise these past few days and as I'm not well, I'm more sensitive to it.... If the hammering must be done in the morning, might it be done in the part of your apartment that is above my kitchen, not my bedroom.... If there's too much noise on Sunday morning I won't be able to get out of bed until the afternoon." Schwartz adds, "We who toss and turn, fantasizing about the exquisitely cutting emails we'll never have the guts to send to the invisible others keeping us awake, are happy to have him on our team."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Christopher C. Robinson discusses intergenerational justice and the ecological crisis in the Quote of the Week. Lord Byron provides this week's Thought on Thinking. And Roger Berkowitz discusses the conscience of Edward Snowden in the Weekend Read.
Amor Mundi 6/8/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Jonathan Galassi offers an excellent account of the Futurist Movement, the best exemplars of which are currently on view at Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe, a show at the Guggenheim Museum. Futurism celebrated speed, vigor, and creative destruction, as expressed in the 1909 Manifesto of Futurism written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Here is how Galassi describes Marinetti's founding moment? "'My friends and I had stayed up all night, sitting beneath the lamps of a mosque, whose star-studded, filigreed brass domes resembled our souls,...listening to the tedious mumbled prayers of an ancient canal and the creaking bones of dilapidated palaces.' Their Orientalist idyll is disturbed by 'the sudden roar of ravening motorcars,' and Marinetti and friends leave the mosque in hot pursuit ('all the myths and mystical ideals are behind us. We're about to witness the birth of a Centaur'). 'Like young lions,' they go chasing 'after Death' and end up in a ditch. Marinetti apostrophized: 'O mother of a ditch, brimful with muddy water!... How I relished your strength-giving sludge that reminded me so much of the saintly black breast of my Sudanese nurse.... When I got myself up-soaked, filthy, foul-smelling rag that I was-from beneath my overturned car, I had a wonderful sense of my heart being pierced by the red-hot sword of joy!' Marinetti had found his way out of the cul-de-sac of too much civilization. The Futurist manifesto that follows on his dream, the first of many, glorifies 'aggressive action' and asserts that 'a roaring motorcar...is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace' (never mind that Boccioni's sculpture will uncannily resemble it). 'There is no longer any beauty except the struggle,' Marinetti declared. War is 'the sole cleanser of the world.'"
A Double-Edged Presidential Power
Underlying President Obama's decision this week to secure the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl by releasing five detainees allegedly affiliated with the Taliban from Guantanamo is the question of why Guantanamo remains open in the first place. Several commentators, including Glenn Greenwald on The Intercept, have declared that Obama's releasing of the detainees was in fact illegal, as he failed to provide Congress with the 30-day notice that is required by the 2014 defense authorization statute. As Greenwald argues, the only possible legal argument to justify the release is if the Obama White House maintains, as it has in the past, that such congressional restrictions do not bind them, and that the release of detainees is a decision solely allocated to the commander-in-chief. But if the President does in fact have the power to override these restrictions, what accounts for his ongoing failure to close Guantanamo as he pledged to do, or at least release those detainees who are already cleared? After the events of this week, writes Greenwald, the Obama administration now finds itself in a legal quandary: "The sole excuse now offered by Democratic loyalists for this failure (to close GITMO) has been that Congress prevented him from closing the camp. But here, the Obama White House appears to be arguing that Congress lacks the authority to constrain the President's power to release detainees when he wants...Obama defenders seem to have two choices here: either the president broke the law in releasing these five detainees, or Congress cannot bind the commander-in-chief's power to transfer detainees when he wants, thus leaving Obama free to make those decisions himself. Which is it?"
In reviewing Social Physics, a new book by Alex Pentland on what big data can teach us about human behavior, Joshua Rothman tells of a Bank of America call center: "Life at the call center was almost fanatically regimented: Pentland writes that call center managers 'often try to minimize the amount of talking among employees because operations are so routine and standardized.' At this call center, even the coffee breaks were scheduled individually, so as to maximize the number of workers on the phone at any given time. The mystery to be solved, in this environment of extreme solitude, was why different teams of operators handled their calls at different speeds. Pentland found that, of the four twenty-person teams he tracked, the ones with the fastest 'average call handling time,' or A.H.T., were also the most social. In fact, the most successful teams spent more time doing exactly what their managers didn't want them to be doing: talking. Pentland suggested the introduction of team-wide coffee breaks, designed to encourage mingling. The increase in speed was so dramatic that Bank of America did the same at all of its call centers, generating a fifteen-million-dollar increase in annual productivity (and, presumably, some newly quantifiable amount of good cheer)." Rothman sees the double edged quality of big data. In revealing the truth that human sociability can be productive, big data explodes myths that make our workplaces ever less human. At the same time, the statistical study of the most intimate details of our lives is both invasive and reductive, lending credibility to the managerial dream to optimize human resources.
Heidegger Caught in the Trap of His Own Ideas
Judith Wolfe, writing in Standpoint, has a strong account of the Black Notebooks and Heidegger's philosophical engagement with Nazism and the Jews. Here is her explanation of Heidegger's poetic use of Jewishness: "The conclusions that Heidegger drew from this last point were not as radical as we might hope: he questioned not the stereotype of the calculating Jews but only their uniqueness. He himself speculated that the Jews might have a role to play in the technological crisis of the modern world, though he never specified what. What Heidegger thoroughly rejected, however, was any description of the Jews as a 'race': 'The question of the role of World Jewry', he insisted, 'is not a racial one, but the metaphysical question of a form of humanity' characterized by deracination and instrumental reasoning. It would be absurd to assume that this 'form of humanity' could be eradicated by eliminating a particular group of people. On the contrary: such calculated extermination would only perpetuate the technological logic that Heidegger was calling his compatriots to abandon. That logic could only be overcome, as Heidegger wrote, by 'suffering and danger and knowledge.'" As Wolfe rightly sees, "The real danger of his comments about the Jews is not merely that they are racist but that they seem to hold out an abstract, poetic typology as a replacement for political awareness: by reducing the Jews to a poetic type, he becomes deaf to their practical plight. This sometimes takes grotesque forms: though he would never advocate or condone Hitler's and Himmler's 'final solution', for example, Heidegger seems to find a measure of poetic justice in the Nazis' calculating reduction of the Jews to a 'race' as matching the Jews' own reductive tendency towards racial thinking. He is, as Hannah Arendt later put it to Günter Gaus, 'caught in the trap of his own ideas.'"
Discussing the meaning of internet "nerd" celebrities John and Hank Green, Clare Malone suggests that habits are one of the things that allows humans to reach beyond themselves: "We haven't spent a whole lot of time talking about the audience that the Brothers Green are sending their video missives out to. But they're the people whose clicks make this world go 'round. This Vlogbrothers movement is a sort of 'revenge of the nerds' type of thing-except the movie based on it would probably be called 'the civil disobedience of the nerds,' because John and Hank are about encouraging people to channel outsiderness into something productive, like living well through small acts of kindness. I can imagine a person getting into the habit of watching these daily and thinking about their meaning (maybe not actively, more by osmosis), almost in the way a monk goes to vespers or a devout Muslim prays five times a day. I'm not even being theological; I'm just thinking about the importance of habit. Prayers involve repetition to get a person into a meditative state. To a certain extent it's Pavlovian, but we need that push into a different headspace to think about things outside necessities of the flesh."
Neil Richards suggests that privacy isn't dead, just changing, although not for the better: "Fifteen years ago, the Internet was heralded as a great forum for intellectual liberation-a place to think for ourselves and meet like- (and different) minded people unmediated by censors or surveillance. Yet, incrementally, the Internet has been transformed from a place of anarchic freedom to something much closer to an environment of total tracking and total control. All too often, it may seem like the digital future is unfolding before our eyes in some kind of natural and unstoppable evolution. But the final state of Internet architecture is not inevitable, nor is it unchangeable. It is up for grabs. In the end, the choices we make now about surveillance and privacy, about freedom and control in the digital environment will define the society of the very near future. I fear that the 'privacy is dead' rhetoric is masking a sinister shift, from a world in which individuals have privacy but exercise transparency over the powerful institutions in their lives, to a world in which our lives are transparent but the powerful institutions are opaque. That's a pretty scary future, and one which we've told ourselves for decades that we don't want. The availability of cheap smartphones and free apps shouldn't change that. We should choose both control of our digital information and the benefits of our digital tools. We can make that choice, but the 'privacy is dead' rhetoric is obscuring the existence of the choice."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Manu Samnotra discusses how the language of fate and destiny shaped Arendt's philosophy and political theory in the Quote of the Week. British philosopher Jeremy Bentham provides this week's Thought on Thinking. And Roger Berkowitz discusses nihilism and futurism in the Weekend Read.
Amor Mundi 1/5/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
The Missing NSA Debate About Capitalism
Hero or traitor? That is the debate The New York Times wants about Edward Snowden. But the deeper question is what, if anything, will change? Evgeny Morozov has a strong essay in The Financial Times: "Mr. Snowden created an opening for a much-needed global debate that could have highlighted many of these issues. Alas, it has never arrived. The revelations of the US's surveillance addiction were met with a rather lacklustre, one-dimensional response. Much of this overheated rhetoric - tinged with anti-Americanism and channelled into unproductive forms of reform - has been useless." The basic truth is that "No laws and tools will protect citizens who, inspired by the empowerment fairy tales of Silicon Valley, are rushing to become data entrepreneurs, always on the lookout for new, quicker, more profitable ways to monetise their own data - be it information about their shopping or copies of their genome. These citizens want tools for disclosing their data, not guarding it.... What eludes Mr. Snowden - along with most of his detractors and supporters - is that we might be living through a transformation in how capitalism works, with personal data emerging as an alternative payment regime. The benefits to consumers are already obvious; the potential costs to citizens are not. As markets in personal information proliferate, so do the externalities - with democracy the main victim. This ongoing transition from money to data is unlikely to weaken the clout of the NSA; on the contrary, it might create more and stronger intermediaries that can indulge its data obsession. So to remain relevant and have some political teeth, the surveillance debate must be linked to debates about capitalism - or risk obscurity in the highly legalistic ghetto of the privacy debate."
Considering the Fourth Amendment implications of the recent Federal injunction on the NSA's domestic spying program, David Cole notes something important about the world we're living in: "The reality of life in the digital age is that virtually everything you do leaves a trace that is shared with a third party-your Internet service provider, phone company, credit card company, or bank. Short of living off the grid, you don't have a choice in the matter. If you use a smartphone, you are signaling your whereabouts at all times, and sharing with your phone provider a track record of your thoughts, interests, and desires. Technological innovations have made it possible for all of this information to be collected, stored, and analyzed by computers in ways that were impossible even a decade ago. Should the mere existence of this information make it freely searchable by the NSA, without any basis for suspicion?"
Jason Kottke thinks that the blog is no longer the most important new media form: "The primary mode for the distribution of links has moved from the loosely connected network of blogs to tightly integrated services like Facebook and Twitter. If you look at the incoming referers to a site like BuzzFeed, you'll see tons of traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Pinterest but not a whole lot from blogs, even in the aggregate. For the past month at kottke.org, 14 percent of the traffic came from referrals compared to 30 percent from social, and I don't even work that hard on optimizing for social media. Sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy aren't seeking traffic from blogs anymore. Even the publicists clogging my inbox with promotional material urge me to 'share this on my social media channels' rather than post it to my blog." Of course, it may be the case that the blog form remains deeply important, but only for those blogs that people visit regularly and then distribute through social media. The major blogs are more powerful and popular than ever. What we are learning is that not everyone is a blogger.
Ta-Nehisi Coates explains why he's frustrated about the way we're having the conversation about paternity leave: "So rather than hear about the stigma men feel in terms of taking care of kids, I'd like for men to think more about the stigma that women feel when they're trying to build a career and a family. And then measure whatever angst they're feeling against the real systemic forces that devalue the labor of women. I think that's what's at the root of much of this: When some people do certain work we cheer. When others do it we yawn. I appreciated the hosannas when I was strolling down Flatbush, but I doubt the female electrician walking down the same street got the same treatment."
The Professional Palate Unmasked
Breaking a tradition of his profession, New York magazine restaurant critic Adam Platt has decided to reveal his face. During his explanation, he stakes a claim for the continued importance of the critic in the digital age: "So is there still room for the steady (and, yes, sometimes weary) voice of the professional in a world where everyone's a critic? Of course there is. This is especially true in the theatrical realm of restaurants, where the quality and enjoyment of your dinner can vary dramatically depending on where you sit, what time of day you eat, how long the restaurant has been open, and what you happened to order. Anonymity would be nice, but it's always been less important than a sturdy gut and a settled palate. Most important of all, however, is a healthy expense account, because if a critic's employer allows for enough paid visits to a particular restaurant, even the most elaborately simpering treatment won't change his or her point of view."
Amor Mundi 12/22/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
The Boycott and Intellectual Freedom
The American Studies Association, a group of about 5,000 scholars, voted overwhelmingly this week to support the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. The vote has almost no practical import. According to the NY Times, It "bars official collaboration with Israeli institutions but not with Israeli scholars themselves; it has no binding power over members, and no American colleges have signed on." But symbolically, the vote is a sign of the increasing disillusionment of the American left with Israel. My colleague Walter Russell Mead has a long and passionate rebuttal, one that is noteworthy for what Arendt calls "enlarged thinking," namely, the effort to understand those with whom he nevertheless still strongly disagrees. Amidst his account, which many will disagree with but no one will be able to say is irrational, he writes: "Speaking personally, I don't boycott. I've met with representatives from both Hamas and Fatah over the years in Gaza, on the West Bank and in Beirut. I've also met with Israelis on all points of the political spectrum there, including radical settlers in and around Hebron. Globally, as a journalist and a scholar, I've met with all kinds of people whose viewpoints I find objectionable. I've had dinner with Fidel Castro, I've interviewed neo-Nazi skinhead thugs in the former GDR, I've visited North Korea and met with officials of that regime. (I've never broken US law on these trips, by the way.) I did stay out of South Africa until the first majority elections had been held, but would have met with officials or scholars representing the old regime had there been some reason to do so, as I have met with scholars from Iran and with officials of Hezbollah. I am on the board of the New America Foundation, an organization that has come under criticism when one of its senior fellows invited the controversial author of a book very critical of Israel to speak. I neither resigned from that board nor criticized the event. When Brandeis University recently canceled its cooperation agreement with Al-Quds, a Palestinian university where students held a demonstration in support of the terrorist organization Islamic Jihad, I supported the decision of Bard College, where I teach, to continue our relationship based on the facts as we understood them. I may not always succeed, but it is my intention and my goal as a scholar and a writer to provide a consistent defense of intellectual freedom and to promote the ideal of free exchange of ideas."
Scribblings, Notes, Poetry Jotted Down on Envelopes
Hillary Kelly zeroes in on what makes a new edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry, one that reproduces the original scraps of paper she wrote her poems on, so interesting: "The result is a collection of scrap paper that says more about the Belle of Amherst than most biographies could. The madcap pencil strokes, torn edges, and higgledy-piggledy line breaks are the work of a quick-thinking, passionate woman. But the carefully crossed through and reworked prose are the mark of a poet bent on perfection. The harmony between the content and use of space, most of all, reveals Dickinson's self-awareness and inherent knack for poetic construction."
Rebecca Schuman argues for the end of the essay exam in most college humanities and social science courses. On the heels of the news that the current average grade at Harvard is A- and that the most often given grade at Harvard is a straight up A, it is time to revisit our means of evaluating college students. I personally make increasing use of written exams in my courses. It is not that students cannot write, for many can. It is that if the aim is to get them to engage deeply and thoughtfully with the material, studying that material is an essential first step. Exams are much better incentives than papers. Here is Schuman's rationale for replacing essays with exams: "With more exams and no papers, they'll at least have a shot at retaining, just for a short while, the basic facts of some of the greatest stories ever recorded. In that short while, they may even develop the tiniest inkling of what Martha Nussbaum calls 'sympathetic imagination'—the cultivation of our own humanity, and something that unfolds when we're touched by stories of people who are very much unlike us. And that, frankly, is more than any essay will ever do for them."
It is dinner party season and last week I met the artist and scientist Catherine Chalmers. This led me to her website where I found fascinating photographic images as well as interviews from her book "American Cockroach." Here is one excerpt:"With American Cockroach, I am interested not so much in troublesome behavior as in an animal humans find problematic. The roach, and the disgust we feel for it, make for a rich conduit to the psychological landscape that inculcates our complex and often violent relationship with the animal world. I can think of few species that are as thoroughly loathed as the cockroach. But interestingly enough, although they carry this heavy burden of our hostility, they don't do very much in terms of behavior. They don't eat in a dramatic way, and they certainly don't have the wild sex life of, say, the praying mantis. They don't sting, bite, or carry the dangerous pathogens that flies, mice, and mosquitoes regularly do. Having a cockroach in your kitchen is not like having a venomous snake living in the house. There's nothing about the animal that is life-threatening. The dichotomy of the roach being a loaded subject, yet in habit, a fairly blank canvas, allowed me to bring more to this work."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Lance Strate details the concept of the laboratory as an anti-environment. The weekend read revisits a post detailing Michael Ignatieff's acceptance speech upon winning the Hannah Arendt prize in Bremen.
Amor Mundi – 7/7/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Roger Berkowitz on Arendt's Unconventional Wisdom
In the New York Times, Roger Berkowitz takes on what he calls the new consensus emerging in responses to the new "Hannah Arendt" movie, that seems to be resolving the vitriolic debates over Arendt's characterization of Adolf Eichmann over the last 50 years. This new consensus holds that Arendt was right in her general claim that many evildoers are normal people, but was wrong about Eichmann in particular. As Christopher Browning summed it up recently in the New York Review of Books, "Arendt grasped an important concept but not the right example." As Berkowitz writes, this new consensus is founded upon "new scholarship on Eichmann's writings and reflections from the 1950's, when he was living amongst a fraternity of former Nazis in Argentina, before Israeli agents captured him and spirited him out of the country and to Israel. Eichmann's writings include an unpublished memoir, "The Others Spoke, Now Will I Speak," and an interview conducted over many months with a Nazi journalist and war criminal, Willem Sassen, which were not released until long after the trial. Eichmann's justification of his actions to Sassen is considered more genuine than his testimony before judges in Jerusalem. In recent decades, scholars have argued that the Sassen interviews show that Arendt was simply wrong in her judgment of Eichmann because she did not have all the facts." As tempting as this new consensus is, it is wrong, Berkowitz argues. Read his full argument here.
Geoff Dyer, flipping through the catalogue of a recent Gary Winograd retrospective at SFMoMA, considers the way that the street photographer presented what he saw: "the pictures didn't look right, they were all skewed and lurchy, random-seeming and wrong. They were, it was felt, an unprovoked assault on the eye... We were accustomed to viewing the world through a set of conventional lenses that Winograd wrenched from our face, making us conscious of how short-sighted we had been." Winograd's still pictures, in other words, act on their viewers, betraying our sense of the world, shifting it out of focus, and therefore revealing it for what it is.
Tony Horwitz uses the upcoming 150th anniversary of Gettysburg to zoom out and consider the changing historical narrative about the American Civil War, in the process offering up an important reminder that history is a living, changing thing: "the 150th anniversary of the Civil War is too narrow a lens through which to view the conflict. We are commemorating the four years of combat that began in 1861 and ended with Union victory in 1865. But Iraq and Afghanistan remind us, yet again, that the aftermath of war matters as much as its initial outcome. Though Confederate armies surrendered in 1865, white Southerners fought on by other means, wearing down a war-weary North that was ambivalent about if not hostile to black equality. Looking backwards, and hitting the pause button at the Gettysburg Address or the passage of the 13th amendment, we see a "good" and successful war for freedom. If we focus instead on the run-up to war, when Lincoln pledged to not interfere with slavery in the South, or pan out to include the 1870s, when the nation abandoned Reconstruction, the story of the Civil War isn't quite so uplifting. "
Computer scientist and writer Jaron Lanier critiques the present digital economy with a close look at the evolving relationship between technology and power. To make his argument for change, he insightfully reinterprets what many consider to be a paradox - that the pairing of technology and power at once enriches and erodes the agency of individual actors. Companies like Google are so valuable, he argues, because they control enormously powerful and expensive servers-he calls them Siren Servers to emphasize their irresistible allure-that allow it to manipulate aggregate activity over time. "While people are rarely forced to accept the influence of Siren Servers in any particular case, on a broad statistical basis it becomes impossible for a population to do anything but acquiesce over time....While no particular Google ad is guaranteed to work, the overall Google ad scheme by definition must work, because of the laws of statistics. Superior computation lets a Siren Server enjoy the magical benefits of reliably manipulating others even though no hand is forced ... We need to experiment; to learn how to nurture a middle class that can thrive even in a highly automated society."
Reconciling Experience with History
Discussing her recent essay in Harper's, writer Rebecca Makkai talks about her experience of her grandfather, whom she knew as a yoga instructor who lived in Hawaii, who was also the principal author of Hungary's Second Jewish Law, which passed in 1939. At one point, she strikes a particularly Arendtian note: "There's also the fact that it's just very difficult, psychologically, to reconcile the face of a real person with one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century. It's not the same as looking at someone who's personally violent, likely to reach out and hit you. This guy is chopping up papaya on his balcony, telling jokes, and I think we have an instinct to forgive, to see just the best in that person, to see him at just that moment. (The irony being that this is what he and his colleagues failed to do - to see humans in front of them.)"
Roger Berkowitz will be in attendance at the Moviehouse in Millerton for a discussion after the 4:00 pm screening of "Hannah Arendt" and before the 7:00 pm screening.
July 16, 2013
Following the 7:40 pm showing of "Hannah Arendt" at the Quad Cinema on 13th St. in N.Y.C., there will be a Q&A with Roger Berkowitz about the film.
July 21, 2013
Following the 6:00 pm showing of "Hannah Arendt" at Symphony Space on Broadway and 95th St. in N.Y.C., there will be a Q&A with Roger Berkowitz about the film.
The sixth annual fall conference, "Failing Fast" The Educated Citizen in Crisis"
Olin Hall, Bard College
Learn more here.
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Ian Storey in the Quote of the Week looks at the implications of the recent Supreme Court same sex marriage rulings. Jeff Champlin considers Arendt's reading of Kant, offering a new way to think about judgment. Hannah Arendt's thinking is brought to bear on the Paula Deen scandal. And, for your weekend read, Roger Berkowitz looks at the moral implications of financial inequality.