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Amor Mundi 3/29/15
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.
Christopher Jencks explores the common-sense conviction that poverty rates are not declining. The poverty rate has stayed largely static since 1969, but Jencks shows how that statistic is unreliable. Today, there are many more cohabiting couples who both work and can each be counted as poor. There are also many more "non-cash" benefits like food stamps, which do not count towards income measured by the poverty line. Larger tax credits for the working poor also are invisible in poverty statistics because poverty is measured on a pre-tax basis. The result, Jencks writes, is that poverty has actually fallen much more precipitously than is usually thought. "Both liberals and conservatives tend to resist the idea that poverty has fallen dramatically since 1964, although for different reasons. Conservatives' resistance is easy to understand. They have argued since the 1960s that the federal government's antipoverty programs were ineffective, counterproductive, or both. Since the 1970s they have cited the stability of the post-1969 poverty rate to support those judgments. To them, the suggestion that poverty has fallen sounds like a suggestion that the War on Poverty succeeded. Liberals hear the claim that poverty has fallen quite differently, although they do not like it any better than conservatives do. Anyone, liberal or conservative, who wants the government to solve a problem soon discovers that it is easier to rally support for such an agenda by saying that the problem in question is getting worse than by saying that although the problem is diminishing, more still needs to be done. The equation of 'bad' with 'worse' is so tight in American political discourse that when I tell my friends or my students that 'there is still a lot of poverty, but less than there used to be,' they have trouble remembering both halves of the sentence. Some remember that there is still a lot of poverty. Others remember that there is less than there used to be. Few remember both."
Randall Kennedy in The Boston Review writes about the contested history of protest politics in the Civil Rights Movement, focusing on the ambiguous legacies of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Huey Newton. "In assessing Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Huey Newton it is important to keep in mind that they tried to act against the racial injustice that has befouled America. That alone entitles them to some respect. It is important to acknowledge, too, the profound obstacles they encountered within and outside black communities. At this moment when civil liberties are threatened by new, disturbingly powerful surveillance technologies, we must remember that the self-destructive paranoia and divisiveness that menaced black power leaders stemmed in large part from the devious and illicit machinations of Hoover and other enforcers of law and order. It is also important to acknowledge that Carmichael was only twenty-five when he shouted 'black power!' and that Newton was only twenty-four when, with Seale, he founded the Panthers. It should come as no surprise that young people sometimes display bad judgment in confronting daunting conditions. Without a sympathetic appreciation of peoples' problems, internal and external, there is no realistic way to take stock of their accomplishments and defeats. But this does not lessen the responsibility of scholars to be exacting, especially when they self-consciously pursue their studies in order to advance social change, as the progressive revisionists of black power do. The art of social transformation is demanding. Those who portray the past for instruction and inspiration must not shrink before its imperatives, lest today's activists learn the wrong lessons."
Carmen Maria Machado wonders what college students would do if they knew how many of their professors were adjuncts and just what that means: "We like to rhapsodize about the influential teacher who changes lives and hearts, and makes students stand on their desks in academic ecstasy. But this doesn't translate in the contemporary world of higher education. There is a complicated culture of silence that surrounds adjuncting. Schools have no incentive to draw attention to how many adjuncts most institutions now rely on, and as for the adjuncts themselves, addressing the subject raises awkward questions, and might even put their jobs at risk: in her essay 'The Teaching Class,' Rachel Riederer recounts how merely explaining how adjuncting worked to a group of students outside of class threw one adjunct's job into jeopardy. There also can be an element of shame, or reservations about discussing financial matters, or a reluctance to complain. Harvey tells me he didn't think of it as a secret; it just never occurred to him to bring it up. 'I would've told anyone who'd asked' he said. But then the students often don't know to ask. If more of them learned how many of their classes are taught by poorly paid, unsupported teachers, even as their tuition rises, how would they react? Would they question the value of their education? Call for reform? Or would they do what I suspect I would have done if I'd known Harvey, the most valuable teacher in my undergraduate career, was an adjunct: burned with embarrassment, and never reached out to him after the semester closed, because I'd already received too much?"
Jon Nixon considers Hannah Arendt's thinking and how it connects to the political role of education. "It is the task of education--and therefore of the university--to ensure that a space for such thinking remains open and accessible. But the university can fulfil [sic] that task only if the space it provides remains uncluttered by what Arendt saw as barriers to thought. There were--and are--two such barriers. The first is the assumption that the outcomes of thinking can be pre-specified--that we can think things through to a predetermined end or goal. Against this assumption, Arendt insisted--in her 1967 essay on 'Truth and Politics'--that 'our thinking is truly discursive, running, as it were, from place to place, from one part of the world to another, through all kinds of conflicting views'. Thinking is heuristic and explorative, unpredictable in its outcomes, uncertain and indeterminate. It falls outside the frame of any pedagogical approach or assessment regime premised on the notion of pre-specifiable goals, targets and outcomes. The second barrier relates to notions of academic categorisation. Arendt understood the importance of disciplinary and methodological boundaries, but was aware that these could all too easily become barriers. In her own life and work she insisted on the need to think outside--and between--the traditional academic categories: 'thinking without bannisters', as she called it. During an interview televised in 1964, she rounded on her interviewer who referred to her as a philosopher: 'I have said goodbye to philosophy once and for all. As you know, I studied philosophy, but that does not mean that I stayed with it.' Having distanced herself from that subject, she never settled into an established discipline but constantly crossed and re-crossed the boundaries between historical analysis, philosophical reflection and political theory. As she put it in her lectures on Kant's political philosophy, what matters is '[t]o think with the enlarged mentality--that means you train your mind to go visiting'. The public sphere was, for Arendt, the outward expression of that 'enlarged mentality'--so, to 'go visiting' was to journey out into that sphere. She saw education as providing a necessary transitional zone between the private and the public: a semi-public space within which we can test our opinions, interpretations and judgments and be held to provisional account for them. As Jerome Kohn--a distinguished scholar and editor of Arendt's work and one of her former students--recalls: 'In her seminar, every participant was a "citizen" called upon to give his or her opinion, to insert him or herself into that miniature polis in order to make it, as she said, "a little better."' This 'insertion' of the self into the polis constitutes a radically new beginning--a 'natality' in Arendt's terms--by which we realise our potential as persons and as citizens."
The Ivory Tower Descends to Power
Alexander Clapp sketches how Syriza, the leftist party recently elected to power in Greece, has reached into the academy for its ministers and its guiding principles and how it's attempting to put theory into practice, if a little haphazardly: "Syriza hasn't tried to hide its academic inclinations. Down the street from the party's crumbling headquarters in Psiri, a leftist redoubt in Athens, is the Nicos Poulantzas Institute. This is Syriza's think tank, where about two hundred party intellectuals, mostly economists, have been polishing their theories since 1997. Leftists from more than twenty similar organisations throughout Europe--the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Germany, Espaces Marx in France--show up every week to give talks. An office press, Nissos, publishes several volumes of party scholarship every year. Analyses produced by the institute's members--'The Political Economy of Public Debt' by Nikos Theocharakis; 'Development, Productive Reconstruction, Memoranda and Debt in Greece, a Country of 1.5 Million Unemployed People' by Nadia Valavani, the current alternative finance minister--appear in Avgi, on Kokkino, the party radio station, and Left.gr, its blog. 'Syriza politicians let us operate the institute autonomously,' Georgios Daremas, one of its trustees, told me. 'We push out ideas; they grab onto things here and there.'" The list includes friends of the Hannah Arendt Center, including Rania Antonopoulos, Associate Professor of Economics at Bard and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, who was elected to the Greek Parliament as a Syriza Party member in January.
Dane Erickson compares the recent street movements in Sub-Saharan Africa to the Arab Spring but notes that its the maintenance of democracy, rather than the end of an unpopular autocratic regime, that's at stake: "Looking over the horizon, attempts by African leaders to stay beyond constitutionally mandated limits may serve as flashpoints for increasingly disillusioned young and middle-class people. Many African nations created two-term limits in the early 1990s, but Angola, Chad, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Togo, and Zimbabwe have since done away with those limits. Some observers believe that Burundi, Rwanda, Benin, and the Republic of Congo may also attempt to amend their constitutions during the next two years. Almost 30 years ago, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said 'the problem of Africa...is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power.' Many have encouraged the practice of peaceful succession of power, most notably Mo Ibrahim. In the next couple years, a number of African leaders will have important decisions to make along these lines. In some cases, the African Street may help make those decisions for them."
Jim Sleeper in the Washington Monthly waxes pessimistic and tragic about the recent re-election of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In doing so, he refers to Arendt Center Director Roger Berkowitz's account of Hannah Arendt's thinking on the decreasing potency of war in modern politics. "Berkowitz's must-read essay argues that the nature of war itself has changed enough that massive militaries are useless and that war itself is unwinnable by any 'side.' His essay opens with Hannah Arendt's prescient observation that since sovereign states have no 'last resort' except war, then 'if war no longer serves that purpose, that fact alone proves that we must have a new concept of the state.' What Netanyahu's victory probably does prove is that many Israelis, for compelling, understandable, but tragic reasons--and their American cheerleaders, for reasons that are far less compelling or excusable--aren't ready to internalize this new truth about war and make new history by supporting a viable federation with Palestinians along the lines Nusseibeh sketches. Paroxysms can't be reasoned with. And Berkowitz explains why, when they're militarized, paroxysms can't win. We have to hope that they'll burn themselves out before they draw everything else down with them and that some new combination of circumstance and persuasion will deter them."
Jessica Benko takes a peek inside Norway's maximum security Halden Prison: "To anyone familiar with the American correctional system, Halden seems alien. Its modern, cheerful and well-appointed facilities, the relative freedom of movement it offers, its quiet and peaceful atmosphere--these qualities are so out of sync with the forms of imprisonment found in the United States that you could be forgiven for doubting whether Halden is a prison at all. It is, of course, but it is also something more: the physical expression of an entire national philosophy about the relative merits of punishment and forgiveness."
The website Muckrock has posted an FBI memorandum obtained through Freedom of Information Request on Hannah Arendt. In it, Arendt is described as "a small, rotund, stoop shouldered woman with a crew-like haircut, masculine voice and a marvelous mind." And she is considered dangerous. "Mr. [redacted] advised he felt HANNAH ARENDT was very dangerous to the best interests of this country in view of the fact she is a professor who travels around the United States instructing at numerous colleges as a visiting professor. He stated his daughter changed her thinking completely after taking courses from HANNAH ARENDT at the University of California at Berkeley, California, in 1955, and feels that it was her influence which had influenced his daughter to go to Europe to study under Professor PAUL RICOERUR. Mr. [redacted] advised that from the information he had been able to gather, he could not say that HANNAH ARENDT was a Communist, but stated she was advocating a totalitarian philosophy in her political courses."
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #6
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at email@example.com.
Friday, April 3, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Property and Freedom: Is Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty and Promoting Freedom in South Africa?
A one-day 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 Rift Valley Institute.
Free and open to the public!
Monday, April 6, 2015
Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
This week on the Blog, Laurie Naranch discusses how the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero uses Arendt to argue for a narratable self in defense of individual uniqueness in the Quote of the Week. American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Shmuel Lederman, a visiting scholar with the Hannah Arendt Center, discusses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's victory in the recent Israeli elections. HAC student fellow Marisol Dothard recounts Eyal Press's keynote speech, which was the first installment in our "Courage to Be" dinner/lecture series. And we appreciate Arendt's collection of Adolf von Harnack's multi-volume work, "History of Dogma," in our Library feature.
Amor Mundi 2/1/15
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 Age of Political Correctness?
Jonathan Chait explains the rules of the new political correctness movement: "Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing. This has led to elaborate norms and terminology within certain communities on the left. For instance, 'mansplaining,' a concept popularized in 2008 by Rebecca Solnit, who described the tendency of men to patronizingly hold forth to women on subjects the woman knows better--in Solnit's case, the man in question mansplained her own book to her. The fast popularization of the term speaks to how exasperating the phenomenon can be, and mansplaining has, at times, proved useful in identifying discrimination embedded in everyday rudeness. But it has now grown into an all-purpose term of abuse that can be used to discredit any argument by any man. (MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry once disdainfully called White House press secretary Jay Carney's defense of the relative pay of men and women in the administration 'mansplaining,' even though the question he responded to was posed by a male.) Mansplaining has since given rise to 'whitesplaining' and 'straightsplaining.' The phrase 'solidarity is for white women,' used in a popular hashtag, broadly signifies any criticism of white feminists by nonwhite ones. If a person who is accused of bias attempts to defend his intentions, he merely compounds his own guilt. (Here one might find oneself accused of man/white/straightsplaining.) It is likewise taboo to request that the accusation be rendered in a less hostile manner. This is called 'tone policing.' If you are accused of bias, or 'called out,' reflection and apology are the only acceptable response--to dispute a call-out only makes it worse. There is no allowance in p.c. culture for the possibility that the accusation may be erroneous. A white person or a man can achieve the status of 'ally,' however, if he follows the rules of p.c. dialogue. A community, virtual or real, that adheres to the rules is deemed 'safe.' The extensive terminology plays a crucial role, locking in shared ideological assumptions that make meaningful disagreement impossible." Chait goes too far when he suggests that the only discrimination worth fighting is the overt kind, that their aren't systematic race, gender, and class biases that need to be addressed. The problem is not the invention of a word like "mansplained," which can bring to light invisible harms in an original way. The problem is when such words become a weaponized jargon whose use not only brings new insights to light but also offers an ad hominem attack on a person as a clichéd member of a group. Instead of a conversation about ideas, p.c. accusations like "mansplaining" or "Islamophobia" address people as cardboard representations of ideological oppressors and seek to dismiss them through a jargon that has a multi-valenced meaning only accessible to those initiated into a particular worldview. This is a phenomenon that Peter Baehr has rightly called unmasking (an idea he discusses at length in "One to Avoid, One to Embrace: Unmasking and Conflict Pluralism as European Heritages," forthcoming in the soon to be published third volume of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center). Chait is right to call out such unmaskings that separate the world into cliques of initiates and barbarians. We live in a plural world full of people with whom we disagree; learning how to talk with them, rather than over them, is an essential aspect of finding our way in our world.
Zoë Heller has an important essay in the NYRB on the legal and political movement to shift rape trials from law courts to campus and other administrative tribunals. It is, Heller argues, "a moral and strategic error for feminism--or any movement that purports to care about social justice--to argue for undermining or suspending legitimate rights, even in the interests of combating egregious crime." And yet, as Heller writes, "most anti-rape campus activists remain strongly in favor of keeping rape allegations an internal college matter. Students, they point out, are usually reluctant to go to the police (whose willingness to take sexual assault claims seriously they have good reason to mistrust), and because of this any attempt to institutionalize partnerships between campus security and law enforcement will only result in even fewer assaults being reported. Danielle Dirks, a sociology professor at Occidental College, and one of a group of women who have filed Title IX complaints against the university, recently told The Nation: 'I say this as a criminologist. I've given up on the criminal justice system. College campuses, which are supposed to be the bastions of cutting-edge knowledge and a chance to shape the rest of the country, actually can do right.' There is no doubt that the police and the courts are guilty of all manner of negligence, insensitivity, and rank stupidity in handling cases of sexual assault, but the wisdom of 'giving up' on criminal justice--of retreating from the fight for fair treatment under the law--and taking refuge in a system of ersatz college justice remains highly questionable. In addition to the fear of not being believed, the chief reason that students cite for not reporting their assaults to law enforcement is their uncertainty about whether the incidents constitute sufficiently grave crimes. Asking those students to take their allegations to campus tribunals--to have their claims adjudicated in essentially the same manner as plagiarism charges--does nothing to clear up their confusion about the seriousness of sexual assault. On the contrary, it actively encourages the trivialization of sexual violence."
David Leonhardt writes in a letter to subscribers of "The Upshot" that there is a basic confusion in the country around the term "middle class." "My favorite phrase in Josh Barro's much-discussed piece this week about who's rich and who's not was this one: '$400,000 isn't a lot of money--after you spend it.' Josh's argument was that while many people with household income of $400,000--or $200,000--may consider themselves middle class, they're actually affluent. Nationwide, fewer than 5 percent of households make at least $200,000. In New York, the share is only modestly higher. A common response--and you can read many in the comments section--is that a couple of hundred thousand dollars of annual income doesn't make people feel rich. They still have to worry about their spending, unlike the truly rich. After they've paid for a nice house in a good school district, a couple of vehicles, a vacation or two and the normal expenses of life, not to mention putting away money for retirement and college, they don't have much left over. All of which is often true. But here's the thing: Being able to afford those things is pretty good definition of affluence in modern American society."
Reihan Salam over in Slate also takes aim at what he calls the upper middle class in distinction from the rich. For Salam, it is the upper middle class and not the rich who are, in his words, ruining America. But Salam's argument is not the usual one. As a conservative, he finds common cause with the upper middle class whom, he writes, fends off tax hikes that could actually fund generous social democracies, such as those found in Europe. Instead, what bothers Salam is the way the upper middle class protects its privilege with zoning laws, professional registration fees, and immigration laws that make life more expensive and difficult for the merely middle class: "You might be wondering why I'm so down on the upper middle class when they're getting in the way of the tax hikes that will make big government even bigger. Doesn't that mean that while liberals should be bothered by the power of the upper middle class, conservatives should cheer them on? Well, part of my objection is that upper-middle-income voters only oppose tax hikes on themselves. They are generally fine with raising taxes on people richer than themselves, including taxes on the investments that rich people make in new products, services, and businesses. I find that both annoyingly self-serving and destructive. The bigger reason, however, is that upper-middle-class people don't just use their political muscle to keep their taxes low. They also use it to make life more expensive for everyone else. Take a seemingly small example--occupational licensing. In North Carolina, teeth-whiteners without expensive dental degrees would like to be allowed to sell their services but are opposed by the state's dentists, as Eduardo Porter noted in a recent New York Times column. Are the good dentists of North Carolina fighting the teeth-whiteners because they fear for the dental health of North Carolinians? It doesn't look like it. A more plausible story is that dentists don't want to compete with cut-rate practitioners, because restricting entry into the field allows them to charge higher prices. We often hear about how awesome it is that Uber is making taxi service cheaper and more accessible for ordinary consumers but how sad it is that they are making life harder for working-class drivers who drive traditional cabs.... You'd almost get the impression that while working- and lower-middle-class people are expected to compete, whether with the Ubers of the world or with Chinese manufacturing workers or with immigrants with modest skills, members of the upper middle class ought to be immune. The result is that all Americans have to pay more to get their teeth whitened, to get a formal education, or to do any of the other million things that we can only get through licensed providers."
Over at the Pew Research Center, a new set of surveys offers some surprising insights into the way Americans view their government. You may not be surprised to learn that the IRS is largely seen negatively, even more so by Republicans than by Democrats. But one surprising result is that the NSA has remained popular, even after the revelations by Edward Snowden and especially amongst young people. "Favorability ratings for the National Security Agency (NSA) have changed little since the fall of 2013, shortly after former NSA analyst Edward Snowden's revelations of the agency's data-mining activities. About half (51%) view the NSA favorably, compared with 37% who have an unfavorable view. Young people are more likely than older Americans to view the intelligence agency positively. About six-in-ten (61%) of those under 30 view the NSA favorably, compared with 40% of those 65 and older." This fits with the widely held belief that younger Americans are less protective of their privacy than their elders. Privacy, and why it matters, will be the theme of the Hannah Arendt Center's 8th annual conference this October 15-16th. Save the Date.
In an article about groups who are attempting to archive the internet, Jill Lepore bemoans the way the web has made the footnote unreliable: "The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is--elementally--ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: 'Page Not Found.' This is known as 'link rot,' and it's a drag, but it's better than the alternative. More often, you see an updated Web page; most likely the original has been overwritten. (To overwrite, in computing, means to destroy old data by storing new data in their place; overwriting is an artifact of an era when computer storage was very expensive.) Or maybe the page has been moved and something else is where it used to be. This is known as 'content drift,' and it's more pernicious than an error message, because it's impossible to tell that what you're seeing isn't what you went to look for: the overwriting, erasure, or moving of the original is invisible. For the law and for the courts, link rot and content drift, which are collectively known as 'reference rot,' have been disastrous. In providing evidence, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges often cite Web pages in their footnotes; they expect that evidence to remain where they found it as their proof, the way that evidence on paper--in court records and books and law journals--remains where they found it, in libraries and courthouses. But a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, 'more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.' The overwriting, drifting, and rotting of the Web is no less catastrophic for engineers, scientists, and doctors. Last month, a team of digital library researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory reported the results of an exacting study of three and a half million scholarly articles published in science, technology, and medical journals between 1997 and 2012: one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot. It's like trying to stand on quicksand. The footnote, a landmark in the history of civilization, took centuries to invent and to spread. It has taken mere years nearly to destroy."
Harris Nye has a fascinating essay about the way different baseball fans react to advanced statistics. There are two kinds of fan. "Proponents of sabermetrics in baseball tend to speak very strongly when preaching the gospel of Bill James, mostly because the individual nature of baseball and the precision of baseball stats has created a sense of absolute certainty among saber-minded fans." On the other side, "baseball fans who dislike advanced stats are inevitably turned off by the firebrand nature of sabermetrics proponents. To the traditional minded baseball fan, a large part of what makes sports appealing is their uncertain nature." What to make of this opposition? For Nye, the difference is defense: namely, that statistically minded fans seek to take defense into account while common sense fans do not. Nye uses the example of a truly surprising statistical conclusion--that the Braves' Jason Heyward was 25% more valuable last year than Freddie Freeman--to argue that the source of the radical difference between common sense and statistical analysis is that most common sense baseball fans ignore defense. "The fact that by fWAR the gap between the two players can so dramatically reverse the value of the two players is the kind of thing that is so offensive to traditional minded fans about sabermetrics and wins above replacement. A Braves fan who just watched the team last year without using advanced stats would find the notion of Heyward being better than Freeman obviously false. Nobody likes their preconceived notions being challenged and it is always these issues of defense that cause wins above replacement to tell fans something vastly different from what they already believe about the value of individual players." Data analysis is so complicated and depends on such immense processing of information that it is impossible without computers. Which means that we no longer can have an informed discussion about baseball--or anything for that matter--without relying on mechanical brains. For those who think baseball is a game viewed with human eyes and the human brain as opposed to through a screen and a computer, statistical insight challenges the common sense world.
Hans Rollman looks at Julio Cortozar's Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampire: An Attainable Utopia, a hybrid, comics-novel recently translated into English that Cortozar conceived after participating in the Second Russell Tribunal, which was convened to investigate crimes committed by South American dictatorships, and then reading his own cameo appearance in the Mexican comic book Fantomas: "The genius of the book lies in the fact that it both has no prescriptive point, and at the same time conveys a remarkable multiplicity of points. It's a reflection of Cortazar's own frame of mind following the Second Russell Tribunal--his alternating waves of doubt and confidence; anger and despair and hope. In a world where injustice and genocide continue their march without blinking an eye, what was the point of the tribunal at all? It takes a plot within a plot within a plot to convey the inextricable complexity of injustice and violence in today's world, and a surreal fusion of the real with the fantastic to arrive at the hope that solutions are possible. Not to arrive at solutions, mind you--that eludes everyone, from Fantomas to the Russell Tribunal. But to arrive at the hope, that solutions are still possible, that utopia is attainable."
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #4
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at email@example.com.
Friday, February 6, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Now Accepting Applications for Post-Doctoral Fellowships!
The Hannah Arendt Center announces three post-doctoral fellowships for the 2015-2016 academic year.
To learn more about the fellowships, including how to apply, click here.
Application Deadline: Thursday, March 5, 2015
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Eyal Press
The Courage To Refuse
Monday, February 9, 2015
Kline Faculty Dining Room, 6:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism, Jeanne van Heeswijk
Monday, February 16, 2015
Kline Faculty Dining Room, 6:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Angela Maione, our Klemens Von Klemperer Post-Doctoral Fellow
"Wollstonecraft and the Right to Political Community
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 6:00 - 7:00 pm
Screening of The Decent One and Q&A with Director Vanessa Lapa and Sound Designer Tomer Eliav
The film is based on the newly discovered diaries of Heinrich Himmler. Watch a trailer here.
Monday, February 23, 2015
Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Charles Snyder, a Hannah Arendt Center Post-Doctoral Fellow
"Natality and its Vicissitudes"
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 12:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Uday Mehta
Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge
Monday, March 30, 2015
Manor House Cafe, 6:00 pm
Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?
A one-day 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
Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
This week on the Blog, Hans Teerds draws upon the writings of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin to discuss the importance of the interior in people's lives in the Quote of the Week. John Dewey provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We appreciate two volumes of Churchill's history of the Second World War and how they may have influenced Arendt's understanding of the human condition in our Library feature. And we are pleased to acknowledge a Special Donation.
This coming Friday, February 6th, the Hannah Arendt Center will host the fourth session of its Virtual Reading Group. We will be discussing Chapter Two, Sections 7, 8, and 9 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 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!
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Amor Mundi 11/9/14
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 Creep In Our Kitchen, In Our Car, And Everywhere
Sue Halpern writes that the internet is getting creepy. Beyond smart phones and smart watches, we now also are confronted with smart cars and smart refrigerators. Cars remember where we like to go and can direct us there; they will soon even drive for us. Refrigerators know our favorite milk and our guilty pleasures and can order them to be delivered before we realize we need them. All these smart appliances are wired, connecting us and the immense and revelatory data of our lives to the world of commerce and security. Companies can, of course, pay for that data and subtly or not suggest new products. And the government, or others, can hack into the streams of data we trail behind us to know where we've been, what we're doing, and even what we want. Halpern cites Jeremy Rifkin, an evangelist of the coming internet of things, who is clear that in this new age, there will be no privacy: "Connecting everyone and everything in a neural network brings the human race out of the age of privacy, a defining characteristic of modernity, and into the era of transparency." For Rifkin, we should have no qualms about trading privacy for a coming age of unparalleled convenience and security. The more information about ourselves we offer up to the internet of things, the more benefits we will receive. As Halpern argues this week in the NY Review of Books, "These trade-offs will only increase as the quotidian becomes digitized, leaving fewer and fewer opportunities to opt out. It's one thing to edit the self that is broadcast on Facebook and Twitter, but the Internet of Things, which knows our viewing habits, grooming rituals, medical histories, and more, allows no such interventions-unless it is our behaviors and curiosities and idiosyncracies themselves that end up on the cutting room floor." We are entering a world in which we need to rethink what it means to be private in a world when we are so connected to the internet of things that the internet-and those who can mine it-knows more about ourselves than we do.
Linda Holmes talks up the pleasure of being alone and asks how, if at all, we can truly be by and with ourselves: "We have a certain cultural mistrust of solitude, I think. It is for weirdos and lost souls, spinsters and misfits. But in truth, I can't tell you what a luxury I think it is to be entitled to it. Most of the time, I want good company, like most people do. But the experience of earned, voluntary aloneness is, among other things, instructive. I don't think you can really understand how accustomed you are to being scheduled and operating off an internal to-do list at almost all times until you think to yourself, 'My goal will be to get to Providence by 4,' and then you think, 'Why is there a goal?' And then it begins to make you internally rebellious: What if I drove with no goal? What if I had nowhere to be all day until it was time to sleep and I discussed with no one where to stop and take a picture, where to have lunch, what shop to go in, or which way to turn on the trail? What would I do if I could do anything - in this micro-environment, in this moment, at the point of this particular pause, what is my wish?"
Attorney General Eric Holder is about to resign. His legacy: after six years as the nation's top law enforcement officer, no one has gone to jail either for breaking American laws against torture or for breaking U.S. laws regarding financial fraud relating to the financial crisis. In a recent speech at NYU, Holder explained why it is that corporate executives are not criminally prosecutable: "Responsibility remains so diffuse, and top executives so insulated, that any misconduct could again be considered more a symptom of the institution's culture than a result of the willful actions of any single individual." As Matt Taibi glosses such doublespeak in Rolling Stone, "In other words, people don't commit crimes, corporate culture commits crimes!" Taibi's moral clarity comes in an article on Alayne Fleischmann: "the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported - more on that later) to keep the public from hearing. Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as 'massive criminal securities fraud' in the bank's mortgage operations. Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she's kept her mouth shut since then. 'My closest family and friends don't know what I've been living with,' she says. 'Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview.'" Fleischmann saw crimes committed, blew the whistle on them, and is angry that these crimes are still not being prosecuted. Her choice to speak now appears to be a brave one: "And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. 'I could be sued into bankruptcy,' she says. 'I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don't start speaking up, then this really is all we're going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.'"
Oligarchy, From Left And Right
In a short essay seeking to revive the 20th century American conservative James Burnham, Daniel McCarthy argues that we need to learn from Burnham's combination of unblinkered realism regarding power and insight into the non-ideological managerial elite. He suggests that, as a political culture, there's just one way forward: "What has happened in America since the end of the Cold War, however, is that competition for popular favor has been reduced to a propaganda exercise-employing myths, symbols, and other 'derivatives'-disconnected from policies of material interest to the ruling class. Thus monetary policy, foreign policy, and positions on trade and immigration vary little between Republican and Democratic presidents. This is a terrible situation-if you're not part of the elite. If you are, all the gridlock and venom of our politics is simply irrelevant to the bottom line. For the non-elite, however, insecurity of all kinds continues to rise, as does a sense that the country is being sold out from under you. America's ruling class has bought itself time-for continuing capitalism in an age of worldwide managerial revolution-at the expense of America's middle and working classes. Reform, alas, will not come from 'throw the bums out' populism of either the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street varieties. It can only come from two directions: the best of the people must grow conscious of how oligarchy operates and why populist leadership is a paradox, and new factions among the elite must be willing to open competition on more serious fronts-campaigning not only on myths and formulas but on the very substance of the managerial revolution."
Charles P. Pierce takes on the myth of American sportsmanship: "Sports today are conducted in a context that makes true sportsmanship - which is nothing more and nothing less than recognizing that your opponent is basically the same common clay deserving of the same respect as you are, not because of talent, but simply because he or she is another human being - almost impossible. Sports today, at almost every level, have arranged themselves in such a way that the athlete is made a commodity. The games are a clash of walking narratives, of competing sales campaigns, of a design competition between marketing techniques and strategies. This has exacerbated the emotional conflict that always has been present when we talk about our athletes - we want ferocious, brain-scrambling passion from them when the ball is in play, and conspicuous public politesse when it is not. If the latter gets tangled up in the former, then we get what seem to be endless arguments about how America is being wussified, and how we have become a soft and passive people, and a lot of rancid talk about people playing in skirts and so on. It's a wonder more athletes don't simply go mad." But if sportsmanship is a no go, what's left? Ultimately, Pierce wonders if it is anything more or less than kindness.
What's the Matter With Goodness?
In a conversation with Angela Davis, Toni Morrison gives a short history of the end of goodness: "It wasn't true in literature in the early days. There was always a hero who prevailed. As awful as things could happen in a Dickens novel, it ended up with the survival and triumph of high morality, of people who deserved to triumph. But something happened. Now, I'm not entirely sure about this, but I think it is after World War I with novelists at any rate, and certainly some of the war poets. Perhaps they understood themselves as attacking evil but they ended up theatricalizing it and the good people were fairly stupid or unlucky or what have you. There are references in literature to the silencing of goodness ... I am interested in pulling from the modern canon what I know and what I believe about this adoration and fascination, this compulsion to display evil. Even if there is a mild attempt to say that it is evil, nevertheless, it's hogging the stage in many novels. I think goodness is weak in literature almost like it is in the culture. This is just a general observation."
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 Champlin reflects on Arendt's understanding of violence and the origins of power in the Quote of the Week. John Stuart Mill provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In our Video Archives, we look back on a 2010 Lunchtime Talk with Ursula Ludz, a former visiting scholar of the Hannah Arendt Center. And we appreciate a copy of Publii Virgilii Maronis Opera in our Library feature.
Equality and Singularity
Thomas Piketty is not the only Frenchman making waves with a new book about inequality. The Society of Equals by Pierre Rosanvallon was just published in a translation by Arthur Goldhammer with Harvard University Press (the same press that published Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century). As does Piketty, Rosanvallon employs philosophy and history to characterize the return of inequality in the late 20th and now 21st centuries. But Rosanvallon, unlike Piketty, argues that we need to understand how inequality and equality now are different than they used to be. As a result, Rosanvallon is much more sanguine about economic inequality and optimistic about the possibilities for meaningful equality in the future.
Paul Star of Princeton and The American Prospect reviews The Society of Equals in the New York Review of Books. Rosanvallon begins, Star writes, by noting that the return of massive inequality in European and American societies has not been met with real anger or revolutionary unrest. There is, instead, "passive consent to inequality," and, as Rosanvallon writes, "'a generalized sense that inequalities have grown 'too large' or even become 'scandalous.'" And yet, that sense "'coexists with tacit acceptance of many specific forms of inequality and with silent resistance to any practical steps to correct them.'" Economic inequality for Rosanvallon is rampant and important, but the widening income gap in and of itself is no longer seen as unjust. As Star writes:
The crisis of equality therefore involves more than widening economic disparities: "It reflects the collapse of a whole set of old ideas of justice and injustice" and "must be grasped as a total social fact."
In other words, Rosanvallon wants to enlarge and transform what we mean when we speak about inequality. He seeks to "provide a comprehensive understanding that would help overcome the general sense of resignation and revive equality as a moral ideal and political project."
Specifically, Rosanvallon wants to move the discussion of inequality away from an exclusive focus on income and towards an equality of individual self-flourishing, what he will call an "equality for a new 'age of singularity' when 'everyone wants to 'be someone.'" Here is how Star summarizes Rosanvallon's approach to equality:
The story that Rosanvallon tells here is that as new forms of knowledge and economic relations have emerged, people have come to think of their situation in less collective ways. Since the 1980s, he writes, capitalism has put "a new emphasis on the creative abilities of individuals," and jobs increasingly demand that workers invest their personalities in their work. No longer assured of being able to stay at one company, employees have to develop their distinctive qualities—their "brand"—so as to be able to move nimbly from one position to another.
As a result of both cognitive and social change, "everyone implicitly claims the right to be considered a star, an expert, or an artist, that is, to see his or her ideas and judgments taken into account and recognized as valuable." The demand to be treated as singular does not come just from celebrities. On Facebook and many other online sites millions are saying: here are my opinions, my music, my photos. The yearning for distinction has become democratized. Yet amid this explosion of individuality, equality loses none of its importance: "The most intolerable form of inequality," Rosanvallon writes, "is still not to be treated as a human being, to be rejected as worthless."
The kind of inequality that Rosanvallon is concerned with—the kind that makes one feel rejected and worthless—is neither economic nor political, but a matter of social status.
There is good reason for such a focus, but one that has little to do with the purported Marxist revival that Piketty's book is supposed to herald. The strange thing about the incessant talk about inequality today is that rarely does one encounter genuine concern regarding the plight of the poor. The inequality debate has little to do with poverty or the impoverished and everything to do with the increasing gap separating the super-rich from the merely rich and the middle class. For Rosanvallon, we need to simply accept that economic inequality is part of our reality; what is more, he suggests that most of us have accepted that reality. But that doesn't mean we should abandon the ideal of equality. Instead, we must re-imagine equality for the modern age.
Rosanvallon wants to renew the egalitarian tradition in line with the changed circumstances of our time. "We live today in an individualist age and must reformulate things accordingly," he writes in his new book. Does he solve the contemporary puzzles about inequality? I don't think so. But he analyzes them in so illuminating a way that anyone interested in understanding and reversing the surge in inequality should read his work.
Reading Star's account of Rosanvallon recalls John Adams' claim that the true evils of poverty are less economic than invisibility:
The poor man's conscience is clear; yet he is ashamed…. He feels himself out of the sight of others, groping in the dark. Mankind takes no notice of him. He rambles and wanders unheeded. In the midst of a crowd, at church, in the market… he is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar. He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is only not seen… To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable. If Crusoe on his island had the library of Alexandria, and a certainty that he should never again see the face of man, would he ever open a volume?
For Hannah Arendt, from whom I take this quotation of Adams, these words express "the feeling of injustice" and "the conviction that darkness rather than want is the curse of poverty." For Arendt, as for Adams, the "political predicament of the poor" could only be seen because of the relative "absence of misery" prevailing in revolutionary America.
Of course there was misery and poverty in revolutionary America, some amongst whites but clearly amongst black slaves. But as Arendt writes, even as the founding fathers "were aware of the primordial crime upon which the fabric of American society rested, if they 'trembled when [they] thought that God is just' (Jefferson), they did so because they were convinced of the incompatibility of the institution of slavery with the foundation of freedom, not because they were moved by pity or by a feeling of solidarity with their fellow men." She concludes from this that "the institution of slavery carries an obscurity even blacker than the obscurity of poverty; the slave, not the poor man, was 'wholly overlooked.'" It was this blindness to misery that allowed the founders of America to imagine the true evils of inequality to rest not in deprivation but in invisibility. And it was upon this blindness that the American Revolution imagined a kind of political equality in which the freedom to appear in public could flourish.
What Rosanvallon sees is that the fact of extreme inequality today carries the threat not of misery but of irrelevancy. But such an analysis of inequality has very nearly obscured the question of poverty; it focuses, instead, on the feelings of disempowerment and resentment of the upper and lower middle classes. It is for these classes that Rosenvallon's new ideal of equality will appeal—the right to equally appear as a singular individual. Here is how Star understands the new ideal of equality as singularity:
The idea of framing equality around the principle of singularity is provocative and appealing. Of course, even in the age of YouTube and Twitter, no society could possibly satisfy the desire of everyone to be a star, but in Rosanvallon's conception singularity is a basis of human connection: "The difference that defines singularity binds a person to others; it does not set him apart. It arouses in others curiosity, interest, and a desire to understand." Singularity demands recognition and acceptance:
'Each individual seeks to stand out by virtue of the unique qualities that he or she alone possesses. The existence of diversity then becomes the standard of equality.'
Star raises serious questions about the way Rosanvallon depoliticizes economic inequality as he refocuses the idea of equality around the equal right to stand out and exist in public. But Star also recognizes that there is something true in Rosanvallon's account, something that all the attention given to his countryman Piketty continues to overlook: That inequality absent misery may not be the real problem of political justice. The reason so much inequality is greeted with resentment but acceptance, is that our current imagination of justice concerns visibility and singularity more than it does equality of income. Of course, both these points depend upon our leaving the truly miserable and poor outside of the debate on inequality. So far, that has proven a fairly reliable assumption.
Star's review is well worth being your weekend read.
Race, Democracy, and the Constitution
Looking for scandal, the press is focusing on the apparent conflict between Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The controversy began seven years ago before Sotomayor was on the Court, when Roberts wrote, in a decision invalidating a race-based busing program in Seattle, "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." This week, in a dissent Sotomayor chose to read aloud from the Supreme Court bench, she scolded Roberts:
"In my colleagues' view, examining the racial impact of legislation only perpetuates racial discrimination. This refusal to accept the stark reality that race matters is regrettable. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination. As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. It is this view that works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter."
Sotomayor's point is that race matters in ways that her colleagues, including Roberts, apparently do not understand. She is right; race does matter, and it matters in ways that are difficult to perceive and comprehend. Among the pages of historical, legal, and everyday examples she offers, there are these reflections on the small but persistent present reality of race in America:
"And race matters for reasons that really are only skin deep, that cannot be discussed any other way, and that cannot be wished away. Race matters to a young man's view of society when he spends his teenage years watching others tense up as he passes, no matter the neighborhood where he grew up. Race matters to a young woman's sense of self when she states her hometown, and then is pressed, 'No, where are you really from?', regardless of how many generations her family has been in the country. Race matters to a young person addressed by a stranger in a foreign language, which he does not understand because only English was spoken at home. Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: 'I do not belong here.'"
Roberts responded in a separate concurring opinion, defending himself against the charge of racial insensitivity. It is not and he is not out of touch with reality, he argues, to disagree about the use of racial preferences in responding to the reality of race in 21st century America. He too is right.
"The dissent states that '[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race.' And it urges that '[r]ace matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: "I do not belong here.'" But it is not 'out of touch with reality' to conclude that racial preferences may themselves have the debilitating effect of reinforcing precisely that doubt, and—if so—that the preferences do more harm than good. To disagree with the dissent's views on the costs and benefits of racial preferences is not to 'wish away, rather than confront' racial inequality. People can disagree in good faith on this issue, but it similarly does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate."
The background of these supremely intemperate contretemps is a decision in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action in which the Court, in an opinion written by Justice Kennedy, upheld a Michigan Constitutional provision (recently amended through a ballot initiative) prohibiting race-based affirmative action in public universities.
As both Justice Kennedy's controlling opinion and Justice Breyer's concurring opinion make clear, the decision does not at all address the constitutionality of race-based affirmative action programs themselves. While in recent years the Supreme Court has shown skepticism about race-based affirmative action, it has consistently allowed such programs as long as they are tailored to achieve a legitimate state purpose understood as diversity in educational institutions. Nothing in Schuette changes that.
At the same time, Schuette does give constitutional blessing to states that democratically choose not to use race-based affirmative action. Already a number of states (including Blue states like California and swing states like Florida) have passed voter initiatives banning such race-based preferences. Racial preferences are not popular. In Michigan, a state that has voted democratic in the last five presidential elections, the anti-affirmative action ballot proposal passed by a margin of 58 percent to 42 percent. For this reason, Schuette is rightly seen as another nail in the coffin of race-based affirmative action programs.
Support for race-based affirmative action is dwindling, hence the impassioned and at times angry dissent by Justice Sotomayor. Even if the Court does not further limit the ability of states to practice race-based affirmative action, more and more states—which means the people of the United States—are choosing not to.
This, by the way, does not mean a return to segregated education although it will likely mean, at least in the short term, fewer African Americans at public universities in Michigan. To choose not to allow race-based preferences opens the door to other experiments with promoting diversity in education. For example, universities in Michigan and California can seek to give preference to students from poor and socio-economically disadvantaged zip codes. Depending on the connection between race and poverty in a given state, such an approach to diversity may or may not lead to racial diversity on campus, but it will very likely lead to increased and meaningful diversity insofar as students from meaningfully different pasts and with uniquely divergent life experiences would be in school together. It is at least arguable that such an approach would lead to greater diversity than many race-based preference programs that end up recruiting a small group of upper class minorities.
As a legal matter, Schuette concerned two different understandings of freedom. On the one hand, as Justice Kennedy writes, "The freedom secured by the Constitution consists, in one of its essential dimensions, of the right of the individual not to be injured by the unlawful exercise of governmental power." Understood as individual rights, freedom means the right to attend desegregated schools, the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the right to meaningful dissent.
But freedom, Kennedy continues, "does not stop with individual rights." There is another understanding of freedom, which may be called the freedom to participate in self-government:
"Our constitutional system embraces, too, the right of citizens to debate so they can learn and decide and then, through the political process, act in concert to try to shape the course of their own times and the course of a nation that must strive always to make freedom ever greater and more secure. Here Michigan voters acted in concert and statewide to seek consensus and adopt a policy on a difficult subject against a historical background of race in America that has been a source of tragedy and persisting injustice. That history demands that we continue to learn, to listen, and to remain open to new approaches if we are to aspire always to a constitutional order in which all persons are treated with fairness and equal dignity. Were the Court to rule that the question addressed by Michigan voters is too sensitive or complex to be within the grasp of the electorate; or that the policies at issue remain too delicate to be resolved save by university officials or faculties, acting at some remove from immediate public scrutiny and control; or that these matters are so arcane that the electorate's power must be limited because the people cannot prudently exercise that power even after a full debate, that holding would be an unprecedented restriction on the exercise of a fundamental right held not just by one person but by all in common. It is the right to speak and debate and learn and then, as a matter of political will, to act through a lawful electoral process."
Both individual freedom and political freedom are important. Both are at the core of American understandings of free, democratic, constitutional government. The point is that these freedoms must be balanced. In this case, the balance swung in favor of political freedom. Here is Justice Breyer's argument from his concurring opinion:
"The Constitution allows local, state, and national communities to adopt narrowly tailored race-conscious programs designed to bring about greater inclusion and diversity. But the Constitution foresees the ballot box, not the courts, as the normal instrument for resolving differences and debates about the merits of these programs. In short, the 'Constitution creates a democratic political system through which the people themselves must together find answers' to disagreements of this kind."
For Sotomayor and those who agree with her, the claim is that the reality of racism historically and presently threatens the integrity of the political process. The problem with Sotomayor's argument is that it is not at all clear that racial inequality today is the primary factor threatening the integrity of our political system. On the contrary, while it is incontrovertible that race matters, other facts, like class or income, may matter more.
To think seriously about race in American is hard. Very hard. As Walter Russell Mead writes, in discussing these questions,
"There's a basic point that should not be forgotten in dealing with anything touching on race: The place of African Americans in the United States is a uniquely difficult and charged question. The history of slavery, segregation and entrenched racism in the United States cannot be denied and should not be minimized. The effects of this history are still very much with us today, and while the overwhelming majority of Americans repudiate racist ideologies and beliefs, the continuing presence of racist ideas, prejudices and emotions in this country is a reality that policy makers and people of good will cannot and should not ignore. It is naive to think otherwise, and any look at how our system works and any thoughts about whether it works fairly have to include a serious and honest reflection on the fading but real potency of race."
Mead raises a difficult question, which is whether race is really the best way to think about inequality in 21st century America. He argues for status based public policy programs to replace race-based programs:
"Ultimately, this is why status-based forms of affirmative action seem better than race based ones. President Obama's kids don't need any special help in getting into college, but there are many kids of all races and ethnic groups who have demonstrated unusual talent and grit by achieving in difficult circumstances. Kids who go to terrible schools, who overcome economic disadvantages, who are the first in their family to complete high school, or who grow up in neighborhoods that are socially distressed can and should be treated with the respect their achievements warrant."
Should President Obama's children benefit from race-based preference programs? Clearly the answer is no. But note, this does not mean that his children will not suffer from racism. Mead knows this and says so. Indeed, it is likely they will, over the course of their lives, find themselves in situations where they are looked at askance, avoided, singled out, discriminated against, and also privileged on account of their races. Race matters, undoubtedly, in complicated but overwhelmingly in damaging and at times degrading ways. Responding to the reality of race in our society is absolutely necessary.
It is not at all clear that race-based preferences in college admission are the best way to respond to the reality of race in the 21st century. Some states believe such race-based preferences are necessary. Other states, including Michigan, California, and Florida, have concluded they are not. Deciding that preferential admissions to universities on the basis of race is impermissible is not unconstitutional. That is the correct decision the Court made this week.
That does not mean, of course, that we shouldn't try to address both racial and class discrimination in higher education. There are many ways to address the damaging impact of racial as well as economic inequality in our society—some maybe better than race-based preferences. For one, schools could institute truly need-blind admissions and decide to give preference to applicants who come from poor or disadvantaged backgrounds. While many of the poorest and most disadvantaged children in our society are white and from rural backgrounds, many others are racial minorities. Both would benefit from such an approach, which would be infinitely more just than a simple preference based on skin color.
Even better would be a serious commitment to affirmatively act to improve our shamefully underfunded and under-achieving high schools. Especially in poorer areas where rural and urban poverty crush the hopes and dreams of young people, our public schools are too-often disastrous. These schools, however, are free and the four years students spend in them are frequently wasted. If we could somehow figure out how to make high school a meaningful experience for millions of low-income children, that would be the single best way to help disadvantaged children around the country, both minority and white. That would be a truly meaningful form of affirmative action.
Over the last 50 years race has replaced class as the primary way that people on the left have perceived the injustices of the world. During that time poverty did not disappear as a problem, but it was hidden behind concerns of race and at times of gender. A whole generation of activists and politicians have grown up and worked in an era in which the problems of the nation were seen through a racial lens. There were good reasons for this shift and the results have been important and phenomenal. Yes, race still matters today, but nowhere to the extent it did 50 years ago.
Poverty, on the other end, matters ever more. With rising inequality and with the welldocumented problems of the middle classes (let alone the overlooked lower classes), we are slowly seeing a shift away from race and towards class as the dominant lens for thinking about equality and inequality in the country. This is as it should be. It is time to begin thinking more about advocating for real class diversity in colleges and public institutions; that doesn't mean race as a problem has gone away, but it does mean that in the early 21st century, poverty trumps race as the true scourge of our public life.
The opinions in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action are well worth reading in full, especially those by Justices Breyer and Sotomayor. They are your weekend read. You can download a PDF of the opinion here.
National Security and the End of American Exceptionalism
Back in September, Russian President Vladimir Putin called out President Barack Obama for carrying out a foreign policy based in American exceptionalism. Around the same time conservatives in the GOP argued that President Obama was abandoning American exceptionalism, pushing a secular and even socialist agenda that leads him to apologize for American greatness. According to Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru, "The survival of American exceptionalism as we have known it is at the heart of the debate over Obama's program. It is why that debate is so charged." Mitt Romney repeated this same line during his failed bid to unseat the President, arguing that President Obama "doesn't have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do." American exceptionalism—long a sociological concept used to describe qualities that distinguished American cultural and political institutions—has become a political truncheon.
Now comes Peter Beinart who writes in the National Journal that the conservatives are half correct. It is true that American exceptionalism is threatened and in decline. But the cause is not President Obama. Beinart argues that the real cause of the decline of exceptionalist feeling in the United States is conservatism itself.
The core of the first part of Beinart's argument concerns a generational shift regarding the place of religion in American society. That younger Americans are fundamentally changing their attitudes toward religious life is a theme Beinart has written about often. In short, one pillar of American exceptionalism has been its religiosity. America has long been the most religious of the western democracies. But the current younger generation is an exception.
For centuries, observers have seen America as an exception to the European assumption that modernity brings secularism. "There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America," de Tocqueville wrote. In his 1996 book, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, Seymour Martin Lipset quoted Karl Marx as calling America "preeminently the country of religiosity," and then argued that Marx was still correct. America, wrote Lipset, remained "the most religious country in Christendom." But in important ways, the exceptional American religiosity that Gingrich wants to defend is an artifact of the past. The share of Americans who refuse any religious affiliation has risen from one in 20 in 1972 to one in five today. Among Americans under 30, it's one in three. According to the Pew Research Center, millennials—Americans born after 1980—are more than 30 percentage points less likely than seniors to say that "religious faith and values are very important to America's success." And young Americans don't merely attend church far less frequently than their elders. They also attend far less than young people did in the past. "Americans," Pew notes, "do not generally become more [religiously] affiliated as they move through the life cycle"—which means it's unlikely that America's decline in religious affiliation will reverse itself simply as millennials age. In 1970, according to the World Religion Database, Europeans were over 16 percentage points more likely than Americans to eschew any religious identification. By 2010, the gap was less than half of 1 percentage point. According to Pew, while Americans are today more likely to affirm a religious affiliation than people in Germany or France, they are actually less likely to do so than Italians and Danes.
Beinart's point is that the younger generation is less religious and thus less tied to one of the core components of American exceptionalism than previous generations of Americans. That he is right is apparently beyond dispute. And it is not unimportant.
The deflation of religion removes one of the pillars that has long-distinguished American life. For Tocqueville, religiosity was necessary in a democratic country, as it gave the people a moral language to restrict the unimpeded longings of individualism. Religion also feeds the confidence and sense of purpose lends to the American project its jeremiad-like quality. And this is nowhere better illustrated than in Philip Freneau's 1795 poem "On Mr. Paine's Rights of Man:"
So shall our nation, formed on Virtue's plan,
Remain the guardian of the Rights of Man,
A vast republic, famed through every clime,
Without a kind, to see the end of time.
The religious roots of American exceptionalism are well established and form the central argument of Deborah Madsen's book American Exceptionalism. Madsen traces the doctrine to 17th century Puritan sermons and poetry, including Peter Buckley's famous "Gospel-Covenant sermon" that proclaims,
We are as a city set upon an hill, in the open view of all the earth; the eyes of the world are upon us because we profess ourselves to be a people in covenant with God, and therefore not only the Lord our God, with whom we have made covenant, but heaven and earth, angels and men, that are witnesses of our profession, will cry shame upon us, if we walk contrary to the covenant which we have professed and promised to walk in.
According to Madsen, this religious sense of distinction and purpose translated easily to a rationalist project as well. Benjamin Franklin embraced the exceptionalist rhetoric but covered it in a rationalist patina, arguing the "providence" is a "rational principle that controls the operation of the world." For Franklin, American newness meant that it was "unhampered by the complexities of European history and unburdened by a sophisticated class system and structure of inheritance." Thus, Madsen writes, America "offered an unrivalled opportunity for the establishment of a democratic society based on rational principles…. Franklin represents the American errand as the creation of a secular state that is purified of the corruption of European politics and a social structure based on inherited title."
By the time Abraham Lincoln addressed the nation on the battlefield at Gettysburg, the vision of the United States as a unique and exemplary democracy marked by a distinct approach to freedom and equality had established itself in the nation's psyche.
The United States of America was understood not simply to be one country amongst many, but it was "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." The survival and success of the United States was hardly a local matter, but was a grand experiment testing whether "any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." Americans understood that America mattered as an example for the world.
Seymour Lipset summed up the idea of American exceptionalism in his 1996 book American Excptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword.
The United States is exceptional in starting from a revolutionary event, in being "the first new nation," the first colony, other than Iceland, to become independent. It has defined its raison d'être ideologically. As historian Richard Hofstadter has noted, "It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one." In saying this, Hofstadter reiterated Ralph Waldo Emerson and Abraham Lincoln's emphases on the country's "political religion."
For Lipset, the "American Creed can be described in five terms: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire." Exceptionalism, he argues, doesn't mean American is better than other countries. It means that America "is qualitatively different, that it is an outlier. Exceptionalism is a double-edged concept."
There have always been opponents of what Godfrey Hodgson calls The Myth of American Exceptionalism. And there is the question of how fully different races and classes have embraced the idea of American exceptionalism. But overall, the myth has had some basis in sociological reality. Americans were more religious than other democratic and liberal states. Americans believed they had more economic mobility, and saw their country as the first truly multi-ethnic and multi-racial democracy; one that developed in fits and starts towards an ideal of equality over 200 years.
So what does it mean when this idea of American exceptionalism is in retreat? Beinart traces the increasingly suspicious attitudes of the young to traditional tenets of American exceptionalism in foreign affairs and also in economics.
When conservatives worry that America is not as economically exceptional anymore, they're right. A raft of studies suggests that upward mobility is now rarer in the United States than in much of Europe. But if America's exceptional economic mobility is largely a myth, it's a myth in which many older Americans still believe. Among the young, by contrast, attitudes are catching up to reality. According to a 2011 Pew poll, young Americans were 14 points more likely than older Americans to say that the wealthy in America got there mainly because "they know the right people or were born into wealthy families" rather than because of their "hard work, ambition, and education." And as young Americans internalize America's lack of economic mobility, they are developing the very class consciousness the United States is supposed to lack. In 2011, when Pew asked Americans to define themselves as either a "have" or a "have-not," older Americans chose "have" by 27 points. In contrast, young Americans, by a 4-point margin, chose "have-not." According to the exceptionalist story line, Americans are all supposed to consider themselves "middle class," regardless of their actual economic fortunes. For seniors, that's largely true. According to a 2012 Pew study, they were 43 points more likely to call themselves "middle" than "lower" class. Among young Americans, by contrast, the percentage calling themselves "middle" and "lower" class was virtually the same.
Perhaps the most interesting generational change Beinart identifies is what he calls the loss of American civilizational self-confidence, which he ties to our loss of religious feeling.
[A]s conservatives suspect, Americans' declining belief in our special virtue as a world power really is connected to our declining belief in our special virtue as a people. And the young are leading the way. A 2013 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that while almost two in three Americans over 65 call themselves "extremely proud to be American," among Americans under 30 it is fewer than two in five. According to a Pew study in 2011, millennials were a whopping 40 points less likely than people 75 and older to call America "the greatest country in the world."
Young Americans, in fact, are no more "civilizationally self-confident" than their European counterparts. When Pew asked respondents in 2011 whether "our culture is superior" to others, it found that Americans over the age of 50 were, on average, 15 points more likely to answer yes than their counterparts in Britain, France, Germany, and Spain. Americans under 30, by contrast, were actually less likely to agree than their peers in Britain, Germany, and Spain.
It is easy to worry about the effects of the loss of exceptionalism in America, but hard to deny the truth that America is, today, increasingly less exceptional than in the past. Beinart is worried and rightly so. For what would a country be that had no common ideals? It would be a geographic entity held together by fear and bureaucratic inertia.
So Beinart holds out the hope that, in the end, Americans will reinvigorate their mythic exceptionalism. His prescription is a war on inequality that will return our faith to America as the land of economic mobility. If we can break down the Republican coalition with the plutocratic one percent and between Republicans and religionists, we could re-inspire both religious and economic exceptionalism that have undergirded so much of the progress toward social and racial justice in American history.
What Beinart's hoped for return of American exceptionalism forgets is that historically what most distinguished America from other nation-states in Europe and elsewhere was its uniquely federalist and decentralized and constitutional structure—something that has long been abandoned and is a distant memory in today's national security state. Not only Tocqueville in the 19th century but also Hannah Arendt in the 20th century saw in the United States a unique and exceptional country, one that for Arendt was fundamentally different from all European countries. The difference, for Tocqueville, was in America's incredible multiplication of distinct power centers at all levels of government and society. Arendt agrees, arguing,
The great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politics of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny and the same.
Arendt understood that what truly made America exceptional was its decentralized system of power, that the states did not surrender their powers to the Federal government, but that that Federal government should check the powers of the states and the considerable powers that still remained with them. By multiplying power sources, the American constitutional republic created a system that both prevented one sovereign power from acquiring tyrannical power and, equally importantly, insured that local power structures would persist that would give individual citizens reason and incentive to engage in the American practice of democratic self-government.
Arendt's love for America, as she expressed it in her last interview, was for a country that refused to be a nation-state. "America is not a nation-state and Europeans have a hell of a time understanding this simple fact." As a country and not a nation, America was comprised of a plurality of persons and groups that each could found and support their own institutional bases of power. Politics in America had no center, but proceeded according to the contest of local and dispersed groups. And what unites all Americans is one thing: "citizens are united only by one thing, and that's a lot: that is, you become a citizen of the United States by simple consent to the Constitution." The Constitution in the United States is not just a scrap of paper. I it "a sacred document, it is the constant remembrance of one sacred act, and that is the act of foundation. And the foundation is to make a union out of wholly disparate ethnic minorities and regions, and still (a) have a union and (b) not assimilate or level down these differences." It was this view of the United States as a country that did not require the assimilation or leveling down of meaningful differences that so impressed Arendt. It was American pluralism free from a nation-state that Arendt found so exceptional.
In the same interview, however, Arendt expressed her fear that the exceptional American pluralism that she found in the country was coming to an end. And the culprit, she identified, was the rise of the national security state.
National security is a new word in the American vocabulary, and this, I think, you should know. National security is really, if I may already interpret a bit, a translation of "raison d'etat." And "raison d'etat," this whole notion of reason of state, never played a role in this country. This is a new import. National security now covers everything, and it covers, as you may know form the interrogation of Mr. Ehrlichman, all kinds of crimes. For instance, the president has a perfect right… the king can do no wrong; that is, he is like a monarch in a republic. He's above the law, and his justification is always that whatever he does, he does for the sake of national security.
Arendt expressed a similar worry about the rise of a national security state in American in 1967, when she wrote:
There is no reason to doubt Mr. Allan W. Dulles' statement that Intelligence in this country has enjoyed since 1947 "a more influential position in our government than Intelligence enjoys in any other government of the world,' nor is there any reason to believe that this influence has decreased since he made this statement in 1958. The deadly danger of "invisible government" to the institutions of "visible government" has often been pointed out; what is perhaps less well known is the intimate traditional connection between imperialist policies and rule by "invisible government" and secret agents.
If American exceptionalism is about religious freedom and religious passion, if it is about equal rights to participate in government, if it is about populism, and if it is about a moral vision of a "government of the people, by the people, for the people," then American exceptionalism is incompatible with the increasingly large, centralized, and bureaucratic security state that has emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Whether the security sought is national or economic security, the demand that a central government secure our freedoms lives in tension with the basic desire for freedom understood as self-government. It is the loss of that American tradition more than any other that underlies the waning belief of Americans in their exceptionalism. And for that loss, both parties are at fault.
While Beinart misses the connection between national security and the decline of American exceptionalism, his presentation of that decline is convincing, important, and troubling. His essay is well worth your time.
Loneliness and Expansive Writing
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt asks after the "elements" of totalitarianism, those fundamental building blocks that made possible an altogether new and horrific form of government. The two structural elements she locates are the emergence of a new ideological form of Antisemitism and the rise of transnational imperialist movements, which gives the structure to her book: Part One (Antisemitism) and Part Two (Imperialism) lead into Part Three (Totalitarianism). Underlying both Antisemitism and Imperialism is what Arendt calls metaphysical rootlessness and metaphysical loneliness.
Totalitarian government, Arendt writes, "bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man." The loneliness of modern humanity is multifaceted. It is "closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the breakdown of political institutions and social traditions in our own time." The image of the factory worker laboring repetitively on a conveyor belt is forever associated with Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. In his 1950 classic The Lonely Crowd, David Reisman describes how middle class Americans had lost their meaningful connections to religion, to class, and to family. They take their values increasingly from a mass culture and they become malleable and subject to the influence of propaganda and advertising.
"Metaphysical rootlessness," Arendt argues, is both the "basic experience" of modern society and also the generative impulse behind ideological racisms (which Arendt distinguishes from older non-scientific versions of racism). Without a core of personal and collective identity, the lonely mass man is "the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims." Racism is based in hatred of a world in which lonely and rootless people are confronted with their meaninglessness, their belonging to no place, and their superfluousness. It is these masses that seek to build an imaginary and coherent togetherness based on race. Thus is rootlessness characteristic of all racism and all totalitarianism.
In her most pregnant attempt at a definition of totalitarianism, Arendt writes: "Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated, individuals." Totalitarianism depends upon "the masses [who] grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class." Shorn of family and national and class connection, the modern atomized individual becomes a mass man. "The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships."
The question underlying so much of Arendt's work is how to respond to what she calls "the break in tradition," the fact that the political, social, and intellectual traditions that bound people together in publically meaningful institutions and networks have frayed beyond repair. The customs and traditions that for millennia were the unspoken common sense of peoples can no longer be presumed. Stripped of these meaningful institutions of transcendence, mass men turn to racism or consumerism to give their lives meaning. Both are dangerous in different ways. Arendt ask repeatedly, how are we to make life meaningful, how are we to inure individuals from the seduction of ideological movements that lend weight to their meaningless lives?
If metaphysical loneliness is the basic experiences of modern life, then it is not surprising that great modern literature would struggle with the agony of such disconnection and seek to articulate paths of reconnection. That, indeed, is the thesis of Wyatt Mason's essay "Make This Not True," in this week's New York Review of Books. Modern fiction, Mason argues, struggles to answer the question: How can we live and die and not be alone?
In the guise of a review of George Saunders Tenth of September (a 2012 finalist for the National Book Award), Mason suggests at least three paradigmatic answers to this question "How do I die?" The answers are represented alternatively by three of the greatest contemporary writers, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Saunders. In brief, Wallace combats the loneliness and inattention of the distracted masses by writing prose that is so seductively difficult that it demands attentiveness and thus membership in a community of readers. Franzen seeks the antidote to loneliness in palpable scenes of connection amidst the wreckages of modern relationships. For both Wallace and Franzen, connection is to be found in the cultivation of quintessentially modern relationships.
Saunders is notable for pursing a different path through the wilderness of contemporary isolation. Instead of external connections, Saunders is a master of the inward journey we must make alone. For Mason, there is an important link between Saunder's Buddhism and his writing:
In Buddhist practice, through sitting meditation, the mind may be schooled in the way of softness, openness, expansiveness. This imaginative feat—of being able to live these ideas—is one of enormous subtlety. What makes Saunders's work unique is not its satirical verve or its fierce humor but its unfathomable capacity to dramatize, in story form, the life-altering teachings of such a practice. … [I]f fiction is to continue to exert an influence over a culture that finds it ever easier to connect, however frailly, to the world around them through technology, Saunders's stories suggest that the ambition to connect outwardly isn't the only path we can choose. Rather, his fiction shows us that the path to reconciliation with our condition is inward, a journey we must make alone.
Mason's essay is subtle and profound. It is your weekend read. And if you have the time, read Saunders' masterful short story, "The Falls", which Mason discusses at length in his essay. Best of all, order Tenth of December. I spent a few rapturous days reading Saunders' stories this summer. They can warm your January as well.
Amor Mundi – 8/18/13
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.
In May 2013, the Hannah Arendt Center and ECLA of Bard sponsored a conference in Berlin: Judgment in Extremis, a conference Inspired by the Fiftieth Anniversary of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The video from the conference is now online and you can watch lectures by Roger Berkowitz, Jay Bernstein, Seyla Benhabib, Kerry Bystrom, Andreas Nachama, Gerd Hankel, and Christoph Menke. The conference focuses on the fact that Arendt's book on Eichmann's trial is actually a book less about Eichmann and the banality of evil than an inquiry into the problems of doing justice in extreme cases of evil of the kind Eichmann represented. This is especially apparent in the keynote talks by Roger Berkowitz and Christoph Menke. As Berkowitz frames the question, Arendt "didn't go to the trial to develop a thesis on the banality of evil; she went to the trial in order to answer this question on the adequacy and inadequacy of law to deal with extreme crimes like genocide. She had already developed this in the 1940s in correspondence with Karl Jaspers, and she writes, "We have no tools at hand except legal ones, with which we have to judge and pass sentence on something which cannot be adequately represented, either in legal terms, or in political terms." So she is dealing with a problem that she has already identified, and that problem is that law is just a way we deal with a trial and deal with crimes, and is inadequate for these kinds of experiences. In the Eichmann in Jerusalem book, proper, she repeats this same point. This is but one example among many to convey the inadequacy of the prevailing legal system, and the current judicial concepts, to deal with the fact of administrative massacres, organized by the state apparatus. I want to suggest here that this is really the question she goes to Israel to answer." For both Berkowitz and Menke, Eichmann in Jerusalem is a book about the inadequacy of law to deal with extreme cases of wrong and Arendt's response to that inadequacy. You can watch all the videos here.
James Surowiecki over at the New Yorker writes about the recent walkouts by fast food workers and attempts at local and federal levels to pass living wage bills. The real problem, he argues, is that fast-food workers are now family breadwinners: "[T]he reason this has become a big political issue is not that the jobs have changed; it's that the people doing the jobs have. Historically, low-wage work tended to be done either by the young or by women looking for part-time jobs to supplement family income. As the historian Bethany Moreton has shown, Walmart in its early days sought explicitly to hire underemployed married women. Fast-food workforces, meanwhile, were dominated by teen-agers. Now, though, plenty of family breadwinners are stuck in these jobs. That's because, over the past three decades, the U.S. economy has done a poor job of creating good middle-class jobs; five of the six fastest-growing job categories today pay less than the median wage. ... More of them are relying on their paychecks not for pin money or to pay for Friday-night dates but, rather, to support families." Surowiecki argues we need legislation to require higher wages and also increased governmental safety nets to guarantee a middle class life. But maybe also we need to face the reality that across the country, the standard of living we associate with a middle class lifestyle is simply beyond the means of most middle class jobs.
Rebecca Bates talks to editor Jesse Pearson about the second issue of his magazine Apology, which he calls his "apologia against... the state of magazines today." When he elaborates, he talks about a way of publishing that is outside of time, noting that "many magazines seems to be overly obsessed with the new and are often lifestyle/culture catalogs for new, new, new, new, new. I like the idea of doing a magazine that owes nothing to the current moment."
Ryan Bloom recently translated a wordless play of Albert Camus's. In the mimeodrama, an artist becomes distracted from his life by his art; as he paints, he removes himself from the world and the world passes him by.
In a review of Anna Segher's recently republished book Transit, Adam Levy considers the German-Jewish-born Segher's experience of trying to find a way out of Marseilles in the first few years of World War II. Instead of writing her attempts to leave into her novel, she invents a protagonist who is desperate to stay; in doing so, Levy says, she turns the tragedy of the refugee on its head: "You could say that permanence is the goal of the displaced, and not always to return home. For the narrator of Transit this is certainly the case. What home is left for him to return to? And if home resides somewhere else... what would be the point in continuing to run? The logistics of staying put, however, set the narrator paradoxically on the road to departure: to stay in Marseille he must prove that he is preparing to leave."
In the wake of Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos's purchase of the Washington Post, Todd Gitlin writes about just what happened to the American newspaper: "The business model built on advertising and circulation to sustain a professional staff lasted roughly a century, and is now skidding and smoldering when it is not crashing and burning. Suburbanization killed afternoon papers, and along with television, drained department stores of their taste for full-page display ads. The Internet ate up the classifieds. At both high and low-end papers, circulation, stagnant for years at best, plunged, as did profits, especially the sort of superprofits that became de rigueur as newspaper chains and other publicly traded media companies squeezed the newsrooms for more (and less news) for their bucks."
The sixth annual fall conference, "Failing Fast:The Crisis of the Educated Citizen"
Olin Hall, Bard College
Learn more here.
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Lance Strate wonders whether or not we can survive the entertainment age. Jeffrey Jurgens considers recent events in Germany's refugee politics.
Ideological Blindness
It would be too much to hope that my plea to end the ideological warfare over Hannah Arendt would win over either those who insist she is a Nazi-lover or those who thinks she walks on water. That said, I have been pleasantly surprised that most people saw my essay for what it was: a call for an end to the ideological warfare that leads both Arendt's supporters and critics to interpret every fact and every statement as evidence for their side. Similarly, I ended my essay with a claim about the relevance of Arendt's work in today's overly heated ideological environment.
I expressed the hope that thinking deeply about Arendt's characterization of Adolf Eichmann as a joiner might help defuse the petrified ideological positions of contemporary politics. I wrote:
At a time when confidence in American institutions is at an all-time low, Arendt's insistence that we see Eichmann as a terrifyingly normal "déclassé son of a solid middle-class family" who was radicalized by an idealistic anti-state movement should resonate even more urgently today. That is ever more reason to free Arendt's book, once again, from the tyranny of the conventional wisdom.
Good luck. In a post responding to my essay in the Magazine Commentary, Jonathan Tobin has this to say:
While he doesn't say so bluntly, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Berkowitz is making a not terribly subtle reference to those middle-class Americans who want smaller government and a less intrusive federal oversight of their lives as being somehow the moral equivalent of Eichmann. I've read more than my share of attempts to justify Arendt's banality of evil thesis, but this is the first that attempts to enlist her in the fight against the Tea Party.
The sheer chutzpah as well as the colossal inappropriateness of Berkowitz's insinuation is, by itself, enough to disqualify him as a rational voice about the subject.
Let's note a few facts. First, as Tobin admits, I nowhere mention the Tea Party. Second, he somehow insists that my worry about middle-class, anti-state, movements is a "not terribly subtle" left-wing swipe at the Tea Party. Third, Tobin decides to ignore what I write, inserts his own interpretation, and concludes that I am disqualified as a rational voice on the subject. Talk about chutzpah!
If Mr. Tobin had simply bothered to do a modicum of homework, he could have found past articles in which I ascribed anti-state tendencies to both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. Here is one example from 2011: "Occupy Wall Street is, like the Tea Party, driven by an apparent disdain of government, elites, and traditional institutions." My argument is clearly a critique of tendencies on both the left and the right.
What is more, in the version of the essay that I originally wrote and handed in to the Times, I mentioned four groups in the final paragraph as examples of what I meant as "idealistic anti-state movements." Yes, I included the Tea Party. But I also mentioned Occupy Wall Street, the radical environmental movement, and the anti-tax crusade. Hardly a one-sided and partisan group.
What unites these diverse movements is that they are all anti-state in important ways. The Tea Party and the anti-Tax movement seek to limit or immobilize government. At the same time, Occupy Wall Street and radical environmental movements are decidedly internationalist movements that either reject national politics in the favor of international solidarity or seek to subordinate national democratic will to international bureaucratic regulations. What all of them share, as movements, is a drive to create adherents and victories rather than a desire to actually govern.
Granted these examples are not in the final version run by the Times, but with or without my examples, there is absolutely nothing in my essay to suggest a liberal or a conservative agenda. This does not stop Tobin from branding me a "liberal ideologue" who seeks to tar "contemporary conservatives as somehow would-be Eichmanns." Honestly, how he gets from my essay to such a ridiculous conclusion beggars belief. Tobin's perverted fantasy of what he thinks I may have written is simply a prime example of the rabid ideological fervor that grips so many in this country, on both sides of the ideological divide.
Tobin displays an extraordinary ignorance beyond his ideological blindness. He writes:
Contrary to [Berkowitz's] assertion, Nazism was not an "anti-state movement" whether one wishes to call it "idealistic" or monstrous. It was, in fact, a classic example of a movement that worshiped the state and sought to sacrifice individual rights on the altar of the collective. In the case of Germany, it was the glorification of the German state and its leader while in Russia it was the socialist ideal and a different evil monster. Anyone who doesn't understand that doesn't understand the Nazis, Eichmann or the Holocaust he helped perpetrate.
Excuse me, but Nazism was not a movement that worshipped the state, and to say that it was is simply false. Nazism was an imperialist and internationalist movement. Like Bolshevism, it sought a world-wide community based on a tribal identity (Aryanism or Bolshevism). What Hitler desired was an international "Third Reich" that stretched beyond the German state. In Mein Kampf, he wrote, that in Vienna he "laid the foundations for a world concept in general and a way of political thinking in particular." Hitler spoke of a German people (Volk) that stretched beyond state borders, saying, "Wherever we may have been born, we are all the sons of the German people." Ernst Hasse, founder of the anti-Semitic Pan-German League, wrote that the German people (and not the German state) "had the same right to expand as other great peoples and that if [they were] not granted this possibility overseas, [they would] be forced to do it in Europe." As Arendt concludes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, "Hostility to the state as an institution runs through the theories of all pan-movements…. The Pan-Germans, who were more articulate politically, always insisted on the priority of national over state interest, and usually argued (citing the founder of modern anti-Semitism Georg Ritter von Schoenerer) 'world politics transcends the framework of the state,' that the only permanent factor in the course of history was the people and not states; and that therefore (citing Ernst Hasse again) national needs, changing with circumstances, should determine, at all times, the political acts of the state."
In the pursuit of world domination, Nazism elevated party membership and blood purity above state identity. It set the party and national Volk above the institutions of the state. It was an imperialist and global movement, one that saw traditional state boundaries and institutions as bourgeois limitations that interfered with its global ambitions. That Tobin condemns me for saying so and simply asserting that Nazism "worshipped the state" is simply to parade his ignorance.
Tobin's screed is filled with similar unsupported assertions, as when he writes "most serious thinkers understood [Arendt's] misleading characterization of Adolf Eichmann was bad history." The most esteemed historical biographer of Adolf Eichmann, Bettina Stangneth, largely embraces Arendt's account, but not as a fawning admirer, just as someone who looks objectively at the facts. She takes issue with a few particular conclusions Arendt arrives at, but largely confirms Arendt's understanding of Eichmann. And even the much more partisan and anti-Arendt-book by David Cesarani concedes that Arendt was generally right, and that Eichmann was no monster. But admitting these clear facts is something Mr. Tobin is clearly incapable or unwilling to do.
Shouting the same tired slogans over and over plays to the converted. But I ask you to judge whose arguments should be disqualified from rational discourse. You can read Tobin's rant here, if you want. Compare it to my essay in the New York Times.
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
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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.
The Moral Roots of Income Inequality
Inequality is not simply a matter of numbers and economics. Thomas Edsall explores at the moral and cultural roots of income inequality last week in the New York Times. His essay takes as its basis a recent speech by Alan B. Krueger, President Obama's Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, entitled "Fairness as an Economic Force." Here is one excerpt from Krueger's speech:
In considering reasons for the growing wage gap between the top and everyone else, economists have tended to shy away from considerations of fairness and instead focus on market forces, mainly technological change and globalization. But given the compelling evidence that considerations of fairness matter for wage setting, I would argue that we need to devote more attention to the erosion of the norms, institutions and practices that maintain fairness in the job market. We also need to focus on the policies that can lead to more widely shared – and stronger – economic growth. It is natural to expect that market forces such as globalization would weaken norms and institutions that support fairness in wage setting. Yet I would argue that the erosion of the institutions and practices that support fairness has gone beyond market forces.
While globalization, outsourcing, and the rise of robots certainly are part of the reduction of wages and the hollowing out of the middle class, they do not tell the whole story.
At a time when real wages are stagnant, CEO pay is skyrocketing, income at the highest levels of society is increasing disproportionately, and corporate profits as a share of Gross Domestic Product have reached record levels.
Importantly, Edsall notes that conservatives and liberals both have focused a light on this disintegration of the moral fabric of our society, though they often do so in very different ways. He begins his essay with a discussion of Charles Murray and David Brooks, each of whom argue that the economic and political problems we face have their roots in "disintegrating moral norms."
While Krueger's analysis is very different from Charles Murray's or from David Brooks', all three share an interest in what they see as disintegrating moral norms. And there is something else that binds them: the trends that Murray, Brooks and Krueger deplore continue with unrelenting force. From Murray's perspective, social decay and irresponsible behavior have spread into the broad working and lower middle class.
Liberals and conservatives often reject alliances on moral questions, and their analyses of the moral decay are meaningfully different. And yet, Edsall does well to bring them together and to remind us that radical inequality and political paralysis may have cultural and moral valences that transcend political affiliation. His essay on "Our Broken Social Contract" is your weekend read.
You might also look at Alan Krueger's speech, "Fairness as an Economic Force." originally given at Oberlin College. I have written about Murray's book Coming Apart, here and here.
Labor and Summer Vacation
"There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance – poverty and misery where exhaustion is followed by wretchedness instead of regeneration, or great riches and an entirely effortless life where boredom takes the place of exhaustion and where the mills of necessity, of consumption and digestion, grind an impotent human body mercilessly and barrenly to death – ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive."
-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
A great deal has been written about Hannah Arendt's philosophical and political thinking, but as the academic year draws to a close, it is important to remember that she urges her readers to think about and appreciate all aspects of human existence, including the life of the body. The passage quoted above comes from the Labor chapter of The Human Condition, in which Arendt traces the worrisome trend in the modern world where human activity is more and more dominated by a concern for the cyclical process of production and consumption. It is safe to say that ours is the kind of "waste economy" she speaks of, in which all objects become consumed and used up rather than used and re-used over time. Even highly technologically advanced devices such as our mobile phones are manufactured and treated as more or less disposable, made to last for a few years before they become obsolete and need to be replaced. The threat that a laboring and consuming society poses to a stable and durable human world has potentially disastrous consequences not only for political life, but also more generally for our ability to feel at home in our condition as earthly beings. In light of Arendt's critique of labor as a human activity, it is remarkable that she pauses to acknowledge that this essentially worldless cycle of production and consumption with the aim of merely preserving our biological existence is the only activity that holds the key to "lasting" and "elemental" happiness in our lives.
The need to labor is "prescribed" by our condition as living beings most obviously in the case of needing to eat. In one way or another, all of us must continually expend energy in order to have food on the table. Happiness is found in this cycle of exhaustion and regeneration when each side balances the other, when pain and pleasure each contribute to feeling fully alive.
For most Americans this cycle is somewhat indirect since the number of people working on farms or growing food remains a minority. As the expenditure of energy through labor is abstracted (usually through the medium of money) from the regenerative act of consumption, it becomes more difficult to find happiness in the endless cycle of necessity. Furthermore, Arendt points out that the balance of exhaustion and regeneration can only be found in a middle-class life that is harder to come by today given the ever widening gap in income distribution. As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, life itself becomes a burden for both extremes – a source of misery on one hand and a sign of impotence on the other – rather than a source of sustaining fulfillment.
How might we seek to reclaim this balance?
While many students and teachers (myself included) may be feeling the need for a pleasurable regeneration in the form of a vacation after a long season of schoolwork, Arendt is clear that "intellectual labor" shares few characteristics of manual labor related to maintaining our biological existence. However, there is also a pervasive notion that summer vacation from school was not designed to give students a break from thinking, but rather out of the necessity for young people to work on their families' farms. Summer vacation is often thought of as a remnant of America's agrarian past. Despite the fact that this interpretation of summer vacation is in fact historically erroneous, its persistence in the American mind suggests a collective nostalgia for a time when there was a balance of work, labor, and leisure in our lives.
Many educators and politicians today are questioning the wisdom of taking two or more consecutive months off from school, citing the educational demands that the 21st century economy places on individuals trying to earn a living. Summer vacation has been shown to negatively impact those students who are most in need of academic support since they are the least likely to have the privilege of enriching summer experiences at home or in summer programs. Many charter schools have turned to extended school days and extended school years to improve test scores of historically failing (usually urban) populations. It would be wrong to oppose eliminating summer vacation on the grounds that it takes away regenerative time for students, because summer is only regenerative for a privileged segment of the population. But perhaps a case can be made for the present relevance of the historical misconception that summer vacation is a time for young people to learn by laboring for food.
Although the local food movement has largely been the preoccupation of the upper-middle class, it has the potential to change how people in communities across the country participate in cycles of production and consumption. Community based agricultural opportunities are popping up in urban and rural areas, many of which seek to involve as many young people as possible through schools and other community organizations. These farming programs have the potential to teach young people that happiness comes through painful laboring while reaping the direct benefits for oneself and one's own community. These kinds of work opportunities could begin to shift the imbalance of human activity in our society and reclaim a more direct and fulfilling form of laborer than the mere "jobholder."
Insofar as education aspires to be more than training in how to make a living in the modern economy – a task made nearly impossible given the rapid technological and societal changes that make it very difficult for teachers to predict what the world may be like when their students are adults – it can open opportunities for young people to reflect on and make meaning of the various aspects of human living on earth. Schools must stand apart from the economic life process long enough to foster a free appreciation for, rather than enslavement to, the cycles of being alive. Participating in the growing of one's own food during the summer months – whether at home, in a community garden, or on an urban farm – is a good way to learn gratitude for the bodily pain and pleasure that define the life that we have been given.
-Steven Tatum
MOOCs: The Debate Continues
After months in which university after university signed on to the bandwagon for Massive Open Online Courses called MOOCs, the battle over the future of education has finally begun. This week Duke University pulled out of EdX, the Harvard/MIT led consortium of Massive Open Online Courses called MOOC's.
The reason: Its faculty rebelled. According to The New York Times,
While [Duke provost Peter] Lange saw the consortium as expanding the courses available to Duke students, some faculty members worried that the long-term effect might be for the university to offer fewer courses — and hire fewer professors. Others said there had been inadequate consultation with the faculty.
The Times also reports that faculty at Amherst College, my alma mater and former employer, voted against joining EdX. Again, the faculty saw danger. My former colleagues worried that the introduction of online courses would detrimentally impact the quality and spirit of education and the small liberal arts college. They also, as our friends over at ViaMeadia report, worried that MOOCs would "take student tuition dollars away from so-called middle-tier and lower-tier" schools, pushing their colleagues at these institutions out of their jobs.
And that brings us to ground zero of the battle between the faculty and the MOOCs: San Jose State University. San Jose State has jumped out as a leader in the use of blended online and offline courses. Mohammad H. Qayoumi, the university's president, has defended his embrace of online curricula on both educational and financial grounds. He points to one course, "Circuits & Electronics," offered by EdX. In a pilot program, students in that course did better than students in similar real-world courses taught by San Jose State professors. Where nearly 40% of San Jose students taking their traditional course received a C or lower, only 9% of students taking the EdX course did. For Qayoumi and others, such studies offer compelling grounds for integrating MOOCs into the curriculum. The buzzword is "blended courses," in which the MOOCs are used in conjunction with faculty tutors. In this "flipped classroom," the old model in which students listen to lectures in lecture halls and then do assignments at home, is replaced by online lectures supplemented by discussions and exercises done in class with professors. As I have written, such a model can be pedagogically powerful, if done right.
But as attractive as MOOCs may be, they carry with them real dangers. And these dangers emerge front and center in the hard-hitting Open Letter that the philosophy department at San Jose State University has published addressed to Michael Sandel. Sandel is the Harvard Professor famous for his popular and excellent course "Justice," that has been wowing and provoking Harvard undergraduates for decades. Sandel not only teaches his course, he has branded it. He sells videos of the course; he published a book called Justice based on the course, and, most recently, created an online video version of the course for EdX. San Jose State recently became one of the first public universities in the country to sign a contract paying for the use of EdX courses. This is what led to the letter from the philosophers.
The letter begins by laying out the clear issue. The San Jose Philosophy department has professors who can teach courses in justice and ethics of the kind Sandel teaches. From their point of view, "There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX solves, nor do we have a shortage of faculty capable of teaching our equivalent course." In short, while some students may prefer a course with a famous Harvard professor, the faculty at San Jose State believe that they are qualified to teach about Justice.
Given their qualifications, the philosophy professors conclude that the real reason for the contract with EdX is not increased educational value, but simply cost. As they write: "We believe that long-term financial considerations motivate the call for massively open online courses (MOOCs) at public universities such as ours.
In short, the faculty sees the writing on the wall. Whatever boilerplate rhetoric about blended courses and educational benefit may be fashionable and necessary, the real issue is simple. Public universities (and many private ones as well) will not keep paying the salaries of professors when those professors are not needed.
While for now professors are kept on to teach courses in a blended classroom, there will soon be need for many fewer professors. As students take Professor Sandel's class at universities around the country, they will eventually work with teaching assistants—just as students do at Harvard, where Professor Sandel has pitifully little interaction with his hundreds of students in every class. These teaching assistants make little money, significantly less than a tenured or even a non-tenured professor. It is only a matter of time before many university classes are taught virtually by superstar professors assisted by armies of low-paid onsite assistants. State universities will then be able to educate significantly more students at a fraction of the current cost. For many students this will be a great boon—a certified and possibly quality education at a cheap price. For most California voters, this is a good deal. But it is precisely what the faculty at San Jose State fear. As they write:
We believe the purchasing of online and blended courses is not driven by concerns about pedagogy, but by an effort to restructure the U.S. university system in general, and our own California State University system in particular. If the concern were pedagogically motivated, we would expect faculty to be consulted and to monitor quality control. On the other hand, when change is financially driven and involves a compromise of quality it is done quickly, without consulting faculty or curriculum committees, and behind closed doors. This is essentially what happened with SJSU's contract with edX. At a press conference (April 10, 2013 at SJSU) announcing the signing of the contract with edX, California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom acknowledged as much: "The old education financing model, frankly, is no longer sustainable." This is the crux of the problem. It is time to stop masking the real issue of MOOCs and blended courses behind empty rhetoric about a new generation and a new world. The purchasing of MOOCs and blended courses from outside vendors is the first step toward restructuring the CSU.
The San Jose State philosophy professors are undoubtedly correct. We are facing a systematic transformation in higher education in this country and also in secondary education as well. Just as the Internet has revolutionized journalism and just as it is now shaking the foundations of medicine and law, the Internet will not leave education alone. Change seems nigh. Part of this change is being driven by cost. Some of it is also being driven by the failures and perceived failures of our current system. The question for those of us in the world of higher education is whether we can respond intelligently to save the good and change out the bad. It is time that faculties around the country focus on this question and for that we should all be thankful to the philosophy professors at San Jose State.
The Open Letter offers three main points to argue that it is bad pedagogy to replace them with the blended course model of MOOCs and teaching assistants.
First, they argue that good teaching requires professors engaged in research. When professors are engaged in active research programs, they are interested in and motivated by their fields. Students can perceive if a professor is bored with a class and students will always learn more and be driven to study and excel by professors who feel that their work matters. Some may wonder what the use of research is that is read by only a few colleagues around the world, but one answer is that such research is necessary to keep professors fresh and sharp. We all know the sad fate of professors who have disengaged from research.
Second, the philosophy professors accept the argument of many including myself that large lectures are not the best way to teach. They teach by the Socratic method, interacting with students. Such classes, they write, are much better than having students watch Professor Sandel engage Socratically with faculty at Harvard. Of course, the MOOC model would still allow for Socratic and personal engagement, just by much lower paid purveyors of the craft. The unanswered question is whether low-paid assistants can be trained to teach well. The answer may well be yes.
Third, the philosophy faculty worry about the exact same moral justice course being taught across the country. We can already see the disciplinary barricades being drawn. It may be one thing to teach Math to the whole country from one or two MOOCs, but philosophy needs multiple perspectives. But how many? The philosophy professors suggest that their highly diverse and often lower-middle-class students have different experiences and references than do Professor Sandel's Harvard students. They can, in the classroom, better connect with these students than Professor Sandel via online lectures.
The points the San Jose State philosophy professors raise are important. In many ways, however, their letter misses the point. Our educational system is now structured on a few questionable premises. First, that everyone who attends college wants a liberal arts education. That is simply not true. Many students simply want a credential to get a job. If these students can be taught well and more cheaply, we should help them. There is a question of whether we need to offer everyone the same kind of highly personalized and expensive education. While such arguments will be lambasted as elitist, it is nevertheless true that not everyone wants or needs to read Kant closely. We should seek to protect the ability of those who do—no matter their economic class—and also allow those who don't a more efficient path through school.
A second questionable premise is that specialization is necessary to be a good teacher. This also is false. Too much specialization removes one from the world of common sense. As I have argued before, we need professors who are educated more generally. It is important to learn about Shakespeare and Aristotle, but you don't need to be a specialist in Shakespeare or Aristotle to teach them well and thoughtfully to undergraduates. This is not an argument against the Ph.D. It is important to study and learn an intellectual tradition if you are going to teach. But it is an argument against the professionalization of the Ph.D. and of graduate education in general. It is also an argument against the dominance of undergraduate curriculum by professionalized scholars.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, is the premise that everyone needs to go to college. If we put a fraction of the resources we currently spend on remedial education for college students back into public high schools in this country, we could begin the process of transforming high school into a serious and meaningful activity. For one thing, we could begin employing Ph.D.s as high school teachers as are many of the emerging early colleges opening around the country.
I am sympathetic to the philosophy professors at San Jose State. I too teach a course on Justice called "The Foundation of Law: The Quest for Justice." It is a course quite similar and yet meaningfully different from Michael Sandel's course on Justice. I believe it is better, no offense meant. And I would be upset if I were told next year that instead of teaching my course I would be in effect a glorified TA for Professor Sandel. I hope it doesn't come to that, but I know it might.
The only response for those whose jobs are being replaced by computers or the Internet is to go out and figure out how to do it better. That is what happened to journalists who were fired in droves. Many quit voluntarily and began developing new models of journalism, including blogs that have enriched our public discourse and largely rejuvenated public journalism in this country. Blogs, of course, are not perfect, and there is the question of how to make a living writing one. But enterprising bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Walter Russell Mead are figuring that out. So too are professors like Michael Sandel and Andrew Ng.
We need educators to become experimental these days, to create small schools and intensive curricula within larger institutions that make the most of the personal interaction that is the core of true pedagogy. If that happens, and if teachers offer meaningful education for which students or our taxpayers will pay, then our jobs will be safe. And our students will be better for it. For this reason, we should welcome the technology as a push to make ourselves better teachers.
The Open Letter to Michael Sandel deserves a response. I hope Professor Sandel offers one. Until then, I recommend that this beautiful Spring weekend you read the letter from the San Jose State Philosophy Department. It is your weekend read.
Avoiding the Catch-22
The NY Times Editorial page takes aim at online education on Monday. It turns out that studies show that more students in online classes drop out of classes, more fail, and fewer graduate. This is not surprising. But one might ask so what? Online courses are proliferating and will continue to do so because they are less expensive. For some students, they may even be better. But for high-risk students, the track record is poor. Here is the Times editorial board's conclusion:
A five-year study, issued in 2011, tracked 51,000 students enrolled in Washington State community and technical colleges. It found that those who took higher proportions of online courses were less likely to earn degrees or transfer to four-year colleges. The reasons for such failures are well known. Many students, for example, show up at college (or junior college) unprepared to learn, unable to manage time and having failed to master basics like math and English.
Lacking confidence as well as competence, these students need engagement with their teachers to feel comfortable and to succeed. What they often get online is estrangement from the instructor who rarely can get to know them directly. Colleges need to improve online courses before they deploy them widely. Moreover, schools with high numbers of students needing remedial education should consider requiring at least some students to demonstrate success in traditional classes before allowing them to take online courses.
The Times' solution is based on a common lament, that young people are caught in a double bind, what Joseph Stiglitz recently described as a Catch-22:
Without a college education, they are condemned to a life of poor prospects; with a college education, they may be condemned to a lifetime of living at the brink. And increasingly even a college degree isn't enough; one needs either a graduate degree or a series of (often unpaid) internships. Those at the top have the connections and social capital to get those opportunities. Those in the middle and bottom don't. The point is that no one makes it on his or her own. And those at the top get more help from their families than do those lower down on the ladder. Government should help to level the playing field.
Stiglitz, like the NY Times editorial board, worries that the current higher educational system is poorly suited to addressing questions of class. Both are right. College education is too expensive for most poor and even many middle class Americans. This is especially true since many people spend much of their time (and money) in college taking remedial courses where they learn little of extra value. And when these at-risk students do attend college, they too often emerge with life-altering debt rather than a transformative education.
What both the Times and Stiglitz want is to change the system of college and how we subsidize it. I leave aside the argument over whether government subsidies for higher education are the right answer. That becomes a question of how much money we want to pay as a percentage of our GDP.
But what does seem strange is that we continue to see our colleges as the problem here. As the Times rightly sees, the problem is that students arrive at college unprepared.
Our overburdened public colleges must spend a fortune on remedial education for students. And then we charge students for this remedial education, which frequently fails, leaving them with debt and nothing else.
Whereas colleges cost students money, high school education is typically free. The first line of attack on inequality through education should be reforming and improving high schools. Yet no one speaks about that. President Obama's education initiatives focus on early pre-school education and community college. High Schools are left out. But if we could divert the huge resources currently spent on remedial college education to high schools, maybe college wouldn't be so necessary. And maybe those who attended college might then be ready to work at a college level.
To read more on the idea of shifting funds from college to high school education, click here. To read more from the Hannah Arendt Center blog about online education, click here and here.