text:
Cassandra in Little Rock
(Federal troops escorting the Little Rock Nine into Central High for the first time. Photo credit: Bettman/CORBIS; Source: ABHM)
By Nicholas Tampio
"Liberals fail to understand that the nature of power is such that the power potential of the Union as a whole will suffer if the regional foundations on which this power rests are undermined."
– Hannah Arendt, "Reflections on Little Rock"
In a January 2015 Nation article entitled "Black Lives Matter—at School, Too," George Joseph explains how education reformers have been able to disempower urban black communities. Students in these communities take standardized tests and get low scores. Politicians use these results to justify transferring power from elected school boards to for-profit charter school chains such as KIPP that transform schools into "totalizing carceral environments." Children who do well in such environments are prepared for low-wage jobs in manufacturing and retail, but charters are quick to expel disobedient children, thus contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline. Unfortunately, parents and community members cannot protest these policies because charters are privately run and thus unresponsive to democratic school boards.
Amor Mundi 4/12/15
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.
In a long profile of Toni Morrison, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah tries to define the arc of the novelist's career: "On one level, Morrison's project is obvious: It is a history that stretches across 11 novels and just as many geographies and eras to tell a story that is hardly chronological but is thematically chained and somewhat continuous. This is the project most readily understood and accepted by even her least generous critics. But then there is the other mission, the less obvious one, the one in which Morrison often does the unthinkable as a minority, as a woman, as a former member of the working class: She democratically opens the door to all of her books only to say, 'You can come in and you can sit, and you can tell me what you think, and I'm glad you are here, but you should know that this house isn't built for you or by you.' Here, blackness isn't a commodity; it isn't inherently political; it is the race of a people who are varied and complicated. This is where her works become less of a history and more of a liturgy, still stretching across geographies and time, but now more pointedly, to capture and historicize: This is how we pray, this is how we escape, this is how we hurt, this is how we repent, this is how we move on. It is a project that, although ignored by many critics, evidences itself on the page. It has allowed Morrison to play with language, to take chances with how stories unravel and to consistently resist the demand to create an empirical understanding of black life in America. Instead, she makes black life--regular, quotidian black life, the kind that doesn't sell out concert halls or sports stadiums--complex, fantastic and heroic, despite its devaluation. It is both aphorism and beyond aphorism, and a result has been pure possibility."
Nick Laird in the New York Review of Books writes about the poetry and essays of Claudia Rankine. Rankine describes everyday slights that condition her experience of being black, what increasingly are called "microaggressions"--those daily and often unconscious and unintended slights that individuals perceive as burdensome and deadening. The dialogue around microaggressions can be helpful insofar as people of all races reach across divides and try to understand each other. But too often the discussion of microaggressions is itself an aggressive accusation. Then attention to microaggressions takes over one's life. As Laird writes: "This is how racism works: it blocks the possibility of living an undefended life. For those who know 'the urgency brought on by an overflow of compromises, deaths, and tempers specific to a profile woke to and gone to sleep to each day,' every incident is a possible example of it. In an open letter discussing 'The Change,' a poem by her erstwhile colleague the poet Tony Hoagland (Rankine maintains that 'some readers perceived [it] to be...racist' and Hoagland maintains that it is 'racially complex'), she writes that 'when offense is being taken offense is heard everywhere, even in the imagination.'"
The corollary of microaggression in feminism today is trauma, something explored by Jessa Crispin in Boston Review. "Last May, after the Isla Vista shooter's manifesto revealed a deep misogyny, women went online to talk about the violent retaliation of men they had rejected, to describe the feeling of being intimidated or harassed. These personal experiences soon took on a sense of universality. And so #yesallwomen was born--yes all women have been victims of male violence in one form or another. I was bothered by the hashtag campaign. Not by the male response, which ranged from outraged and cynical to condescending, nor the way the media dove in because the campaign was useful fodder. I recoiled from the gendering of pain, the installation of victimhood into the definition of femininity--and from the way pain became a polemic.... If you are wounded, everything you do is brave and beyond reproach. If you are wounded, you get to say that any portrayal of a woman as lying or manipulative is harmful to the culture and all of the future wounded women. If you are wounded, you get to control what is said and thought about you, and you get to try to create a criticism-free world."
Can We Have an Intelligent Debate?
Over at Commonweal, Paul Horwitz has produced perhaps the most intelligent commentary yet on Indiana's religious freedom law and its impact on gay and lesbian rights. Horwitz worries that the quality of debate is so poor as to make questionable our capacity to have public debates about difficult and important questions: "That the debate is playing out so publicly and with such fervor is understandable, even commendable. It speaks to how far our society has come in a short time on the question of the equal dignity of gays and lesbians. For those who have long yearned for such recognition, questioning the quality of this debate may seem like mere carping--like caviling over the proper placement of commas in the Declaration of Independence. But the quality of this discussion matters. Nothing, I think, will--or should--stop the basic recognition of gay rights, and the heat of the current debate in part reflects this inevitability. But the details are still in flux, especially regarding same-sex marriage, and the current debate will surely affect some of the particular details of our new social settlement. Moreover, this debate raises questions about our very capacity to engage in the kind of thoughtful, careful public discussion that serious issues like this demand. By that standard, there is good reason to be dispirited. The public furor over Indiana's religious freedom law, or 'RFRA,' was long on heat and short on light. There is a difference between attempting to persuade by careful reasoning and simply trying to play on emotions or rely on rhetorical tropes. Public arguments needn't observe the rules of the seminar room, of course. But it may be possible to offer a few tips to inoculate readers against some of the more questionable or manipulative arguments." The rest of Horwitz's essay considers three common misconceptions around the religious freedom debate. It is necessary reading for anyone who wants to think intelligently about the contest of religious freedom and full rights for gays and lesbians. As Horwitz concludes: "It is difficult for any one legal system to fully recognize both LGBT rights, broadly understood, and religious freedom--also broadly understood. No; it is impossible. It is important nevertheless that we try--and that, when the contest produces winners and losers, we are candid about it, rather than try to pretend that there was no real conflict to begin with because one side was wholly unreasonable. We should have high expectations about what our public discourse looks like, do our best to hold ourselves to those expectations, and treat with caution anyone whose arguments fall short. Contrary to the old saying, not all is fair in love or war. This is a culture war about love: the right to love one's partner, and one's God. The stakes are high. But even this war has rules."
Even though the 150th anniversary of Robert E. Lee's surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox was this week, David W. Blight thinks that the Civil War never ended: "Yet Appomattox was not the end of the war. Three more military surrenders occurred over the next month and a half. On April 26, at a farmhouse called Bennett Place between Greensboro and Raleigh, North Carolina, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman. Further west in Alabama, on May 4, Confederate General Richard Taylor surrendered the remaining troops east of the Mississippi River. And finally, on May 26, in Arkansas, General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the remainder of a Confederate trans-Mississippi army. Formally, the hostilities were over; the affair of arms and exhausted soldiers, indeed the dying, seemed at an end. But these apparently conclusive and clean surrenders masked the difficult and conflicted post-war era that would follow. The war ended with revolutionary and lasting results that echo down to the present day--especially in the two broad questions of racial equality and federalism. A great deal of American political, constitutional, and social history can be read through these two broad, likely eternal challenges."
Oliver Burkeman thinks he knows why it's so hard to find time to read well: "In fact, 'becoming more efficient' is part of the problem. Thinking of time as a resource to be maximised means you approach it instrumentally, judging any given moment as well spent only in so far as it advances progress toward some goal. Immersive reading, by contrast, depends on being willing to risk inefficiency, goallessness, even time-wasting. Try to slot it in as a to-do list item and you'll manage only goal-focused reading--useful, sometimes, but not the most fulfilling kind. 'The future comes at us like empty bottles along an unstoppable and nearly infinite conveyor belt,' writes Gary Eberle in his book Sacred Time, and 'we feel a pressure to fill these different-sized bottles (days, hours, minutes) as they pass, for if they get by without being filled, we will have wasted them.' No mind-set could be worse for losing yourself in a book."
Michael S. Roth, in a thoughtful review of Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head, asks what the world of distraction means for us as people and as educators. "The concern isn't just the technological appendages like computers or iPhones that we've come to depend on; it's that we can't control our own responses to them. 'Our distractibility indicates that we are agnostic on the question of what is worth paying attention to--that is, what to value,' Crawford writes. Everywhere we go, we are assaulted by commercial forces that make claims on our mental space, so that 'silence is now offered as a luxury good.' That isn't just inconvenient. It destroys independence of thought and feeling: 'Without the ability to direct our attention where we will, we become more receptive to those who would direct our attention where they will.' And they have gotten very good at manipulating our environment so that we are turned in the directions that can be monetized. But it's really bad for us. 'Distractibility,' Crawford tells us, 'might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity.' We have become more vulnerable to this regime of manipulated attention, he argues, because we have only individualism as a defense. The Enlightenment quest for autonomy leaves us powerless against those who mount noisy appeals to our personal preferences, in service of manipulating us. Against this tendency, Crawford argues for a situated self, one that is always linked to (not independent of) the environment, including other people. We may not be in a bike-repair shop, but we are always somewhere."
The Life of Roman Republicanism with Joy Connolly
Joy Connolly, a Professor of Classics at New York University, will discuss her book The Life of Roman Republicanism (Princeton 2014), which examines key themes in Roman republican thought: freedom, recognition, antagonism, self-knowledge, irony, and imagination.
Free and open to the public!
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Bard College, Aspinwall 302, 6:00 pm
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #7
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 24, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Translating the Holocaust: H. G. Adler as Writer and Scholar
This event, which features a keynote address, several panels, and a performance, will offer a unique opportunity to consider the intersection of both the scholarly and artistic work of H. G. Adler, a major thinker and writer who is just becoming known in English.
Sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center, The Bard Translation Initiative, Jewish Studies, German Studies, and Human Rights Project.
Free and open to the public!
Monday, May 4, 2015
Location TBA, 4:00 pm - 6:00 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, Anabella di Pego encourages us to see Arendt's support of institutionalizing civil disobedience as a chance to evaluate our democratic institutions in the Quote of the Week. American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. And we reflect on how Hannah Arendt was a "who's who" in 1974-5--just one year prior to her death at the age of 69--in this week's Library feature.
Amor Mundi 4/5/15
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.
Hannah Arendt was a bold thinker. One of the most controversial of her many provocative opinions was her support for the right of social discrimination. Arendt fiercely defended equality in public affairs and in politics, but she also saw equality as necessarily limited to the political sphere. Thus, Arendt strongly justified the right of Jews to spend their vacations at Jewish-only resorts as well as the right of others to "cater to a clientele that wishes not to see Jews while on holiday." Importantly, Arendt made a distinction between resorts on the one hand and buses, restaurants, theatres and museums on the other. The distinction is based on the criteria that some people go to resorts to congregate with others like themselves (they all are Jewish, all Muslim, all Catholic, or they all like to ski) while people who use buses and restaurants and museums are using "services which, whether privately or publicly owned, are in fact public services that everyone needs in order to pursue his business and lead his life." For Arendt, these private services are in the public domain and thus must be protected from social discrimination in order to guarantee political equality in the public sphere. And yet, Arendt affirms not only the right, but also the importance, of social discrimination as a necessary antidote against conformism. "The danger of conformism in this country--a danger almost as old as the Republic--is that, because of the extraordinary heterogeneity of its population, social conformism tends to become an absolute and a substitute for national homogeneity." In other words, the rise of the social realm "which has only one opinion and one interest"--whether in the one-interest of economic rationality or the one opinion of polite society--leads to the expectation that all citizens will behave, follow innumerable rules, and live according to normal standards that "exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement."
It is worth recalling Arendt's fear of the dangers presented by social conformity and her consequent defense of social discrimination in light of the intense anger directed at the State of Indiana and anyone who might dare to defend the state's passage of a law protecting persons and businesses from legal action if they refuse business deals that violate their religious beliefs. It is one thing to support the right to marry whomever one wants, which Hannah Arendt did. She specifically says that marriage is a private right and that the state should not in any way intrude on a person's private decision of whom to marry, be they of another race or of the same sex. She also fundamentally rejected those laws that would permit restaurants, bus lines, or museums to refuse service to gays or to Jews on religious grounds. Even when privately owned, these businesses operate in the public sphere and thus must treat all people equally. But if a business wants to only provide wedding cakes for gay weddings or another business only wants to provide wedding cakes for heterosexual weddings, the logic of Arendt's position (one should not speak for what Arendt would in fact say) also means that she would likely support that right and would most certainly oppose the societal and state efforts to force religious individuals to forgo their right to association. If the Indiana law would in fact allow restaurants to not serve homosexuals (as some of its critics but not its supporters suggest), it is unjust and would need to be rescinded or amended. But the cacophony of criticism has drowned out such nuance. The demand from critics is that Indiana affirm that the law not permit any social discrimination whatsoever. And Indiana has complied.
We don't have to agree with Arendt, god forbid. But one reason her thought is so important is because it provokes us to think deeply about the rise and danger of social conformity in the modern age. Arendt was clear that all public discrimination must be fought vigorously. But it will do all of us some good to think a bit more about her equally strong defense of social discrimination. Arendt pushes us to ask, are their meaningful limits to the drive for social equality?
Dylan Davis, a student from Bard College Berlin, penned the winning paper in the Hannah Arendt Center's essay contest on Hate and the Human Condition. The contest was open to students taking classes on "Hate and the Human Condition" at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Bard College Berlin, and Bard College in Annandale, NY. The courses were part of a Hannah Arendt Center program to explore the fact and meaning of hate, an emotion that has persisted and thrived in nearly every era of human existence. While groups and movements seek to eradicate or limit or ameliorate hatred, hate continues to evolve and thrive. We wanted to ask whether hate is an unavoidable part of human existence and whether hatred, if it is human, might also be valuable in some ways. Is there, for example, a benefit to hating those who are evil? Professors teaching the four classes nominated 10 papers for consideration in the essay contest. Davis' winning essay argues that against the common sense that increasing equality would reduce hate, experience teaches otherwise. "The different revolutions our class analyzed all conceived of equality as their proper end. Hate was symptomatic of either the revolutionary spirit or the conditions that led to revolution. Because of this, one might easily suppose that when revolutions reach their completion, with equality supposedly realized, hate would dissipate under this new order. Nonetheless, it always seems to survive and, paradoxically, become strengthened. Against common sense, I contend that the relationship between hate and revolution is such that, as equality increases in society, so does hate." Davis pursues his exploration of the constitutive relationship between hate and equality through readings of two texts by Alexis de Tocqueville. "Tocqueville confirms the phenomenon wherein hate increases in relation to equality by turning to the German peasantry where, because of social conditions inverse to those of France, he can observe the lack of hate relative to inequality. He writes, 'At first glance, it is surprising that the Revolution, whose essential object was to abolish what remained of medieval institutions everywhere, did not break out in countries where those institutions, being better preserved, made people more aware of their oppressiveness and rigor, but rather in countries where these things were felt the least. Thus their yoke seemed most unbearable where in fact its burden was lightest' (Tocqueville 31). Astonishingly, precisely because the conditions were worse outside of France, the revolutionary spirit was less palatable. The German peasantry didn't hate their lords because the system they were part of became naturalized over time. If benefits or privileges were granted, equalizing the conditions of the dominant and subjugated classes, hate would increase in relation to the extent that the lower classes were humanized. The revolutionary spirit, Tocqueville notes, spread to the areas outside of France that were in closest geographical proximity to it due to the fact that conditions in these areas were closer to France's." Davis' excellent paper is worth reading in full. In addition, you can read the rest of the winning essays here.
For National Poetry Month, The Boston Review is printing a two-part interview in which Adam Fitzgerald questions the recently deceased poet Mark Strand in what turns out to be his last interview. Part one is now available, where Strand talks about his early interest in art, his development as a poet, and what poetry can and should not do. "AF: In your famous Paris Review interview with Wallace Shawn, you say, 'We don't read a poem to find the meaning of life.' MS: Well, the meanings are embedded in the poems, but I think the poems represent a particular vision of an individual living in the mid-20th century. And into the 21st. I can't claim that they are more than that. They don't tell you how to live your life. Poems that purport to give the reader the meaning of life would tell you this should be the meaning of life, but I don't preach. I'm not a preacher. I'm always astonished when I read some of my earlier poems. They're very much like what I would have written today. They have a slightly different way, but the kind of anxiety that exists in the earlier poems, the sort of spookiness, even the humor is in some of them. I was writing prose poems all along. Because it's fun. I wrote because I enjoyed it. It was work, and it was frustrating, but all in all, when you've finished a poem, you have this thing that didn't exist and it exists independently of anything else. There's nothing else in the world exactly like it. It's not a multiple of anything. It's simply there. And you brought it into the world. It's pretty amazing. To do something that's never been done."
On the principle that what we don't see might matter more than what we do, UK-based artist James Bridle has put together a short movie of representations of British deportment centers using Computer Generated Images (CGI) rather than film or photographs. Cassie Packard considers how this changes how we understand what we're blind to: "As Bridle put it frankly in a recent interview, 'Having no pictures available of a phenomenon has become a technique of not talking about it.' Accordingly, Bridle's oeuvre has aimed to reveal the concealed. In past work he has drawn attention to covert drone strikes by regularly posting satellite imagery of strike locations to Instagram account Dronestagram and by painting life-size drone-shaped shadows onto the ground in such politicized locations as London and Washington DC. Through his work on drone strikes, Bridle became interested in issues of contested citizenships, and the manner in which UK citizenship is stripped or denied behind closed doors. On view at The Photographer's Gallery in London, his latest project Seamless Transitions sheds much-needed light on some of the UK's more out-of-sight immigration and deportation practices.... The Photographer's Gallery commissioned Seamless Transitions as a complement to the main exhibition on view, a show of black-and-white documentary photography entitled Human Rights Human Wrongs. The pairing of Seamless Transitions with Human Rights Human Wrongs is an astute one that puts two strains of human rights documentary side by side. Seamless Transitions can be a bit emotionally anesthetized as it expresses a concern for human rights without depicting any humans, instead focusing on the shifting legalities and neoliberal networks--there is no one person responsible for anti-immigration measures--that violate human rights. Human Rights Human Wrongs, on the other hand, features more traditional human rights documentary, engaging the viewer emotionally as it zooms in on the lives and narratives of oft-disenfranchised individuals in wars, racism, and political conflict. In marrying these two factions of the genre, The Photographer's Gallery wisely proposes that, to address today's numerous and nuanced human rights violations, we need both."
Extreme News for an Extreme World
Franҫois Kiper takes on the high energy HBO newsmagazine Vice, wondering aloud whether it's the news we need: "To be sure, the screaming promotion of 'real time' live action and melodramatic clashes is unremarkable in the age of 'infotainment,' where stories are fodder for the feeding frenzy of 24-hour news cycles. However, unlike CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, and their myriad online and TV epigones, VICE's mode of firsthand reporting purports to transcend the mind-numbing formula of clamoring demagogues and nonstop pulp newscasts we have all become inured to. Accordingly, VICE packages its 'real time,' 'on the ground'--but meticulously curated and slickly engineered-'exposés' as the gospel-truth of news, specifically targeting the all-important 18-40-year-old demographic that looks at everything with an overstimulated and jaundiced eye. While these jaded young and middle-aged viewers are unlikely to take what they see on cable news networks with anything more than a grain of salt, TV ratings reveal that they are susceptible to VICE's cult of Immersion... Nevertheless, it is not difficult to understand VICE's popularity: the show enthralls its audience with the frisson of alarm and impending melodrama. A more pressing question is: what's at stake? Smith contends that VICE's content--which Dan Rather felicitously termed 'more Jackass than journalism'--is just what 'young people, who are ... angry, disenfranchised, and ... don't like or trust mainstream media outlets' want. Indeed, a kind of mythomania has developed around VICE, as if Smith and his cohorts are media firebrands ruffling the hoary feathers of the fourth estate by intruding on its fusty, out-of-touch conventions. And yet, VICE's sensational approach is itself a radically conventional and historically reactionary journalistic method."
Ian Crouch worries about Amazon's new "dash button," a device designed to be placed at strategic points in your house to help speed the delivery of individual household items that you've run out of: "What if there is actual value in running out of things? The sinking feeling that comes as you yank a garbage bag out of the box and meet no resistance from further reinforcements is also an opportunity to ask yourself all kinds of questions, from 'Do I want to continue using this brand of bag?' to 'Why in the hell I am producing so much trash?' The act of shopping--of leaving the house and going to a store, or, at the very least, of one-click ordering on the Amazon Web site--is a check against the inertia of consumption, not only in personal economic terms but in ethical ones as well. It is the chance to make a decision, a choice--even if that choice is simply to continue consuming. Look, we're all going to keep using toothpaste, and the smarter consumer is the person who has a ten-pack of tubes from Costco in the closet. But shopping should make you feel bad, if only for a second. Pressing a little plastic button is too much fun."
Julia Hutton tracks the money that comes into communities, large and small, after a tragedy, and finds that many aid agencies have trouble sorting out how best to spend money: "With no template to guide their decisions, nonprofits and relief-fund panels are still being left to improvise in a charged atmosphere. Many cities today have no better option than picking up the phone and calling Columbine for advice. Small towns and suburbs may be especially hard-pressed to meet the challenges that come with dispersing victim funds, but claims of mismanagement and insensitivity also dogged New York following September 11th and Oklahoma City after the bombing there. Tucson, Arizona, is one community that found its way through the complexities of distributing aid to victims without a fight."
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
The Life of Roman Republicanism with Joy Connolly
Joy Connolly, a Professor of Classics at New York University, will discuss her book The Life of Roman Republicanism (Princeton 2014), which examines key themes in Roman republican thought: freedom, recognition, antagonism, self-knowledge, irony, and imagination.
Free and open to the public!
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Location TBA, 6:00 pm
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #7
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 firstname.lastname@example.com.
Friday, April 24, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Translating the Holocaust: H. G. Adler as Writer and Scholar
This event, which features a keynote address, several panels, and a performance, will offer a unique opportunity to consider the intersection of both the scholarly and artistic work of H. G. Adler, a major thinker and writer who is just becoming known in English.
Sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center, The Bard Translation Initiative, Jewish Studies, German Studies, and Human Rights Project.
Free and open to the public!
Monday, May 4, 2015
Location TBA, 4:00 pm - 6:00 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, Jeffrey Jurgens explains how Arendt's treatment of Socrates warns us of the ways in which abridged thinking can beget cynicism in the Quote of the Week. Edward de Bono, originator of the term "lateral thinking," provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We announce the winners of the Academic Initiative on Hate and the Human Condition Essay Contest and publish their essays on our blog. And we share a photograph of a personal Arendtian library provided by one of our Twitter followers in this week's Library feature.
Amor Mundi 3/8/15
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 Common Core of Moral Skepticism
Justin P. McBrayer has an insightful column about the confounding and dangerous way schools are required by the common core to teach in ways that undermine moral facts. "When I went to visit my son's second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read: Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven. Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes." McBrayer rips these clichés to shreds, showing how the definition of fact encompasses both accepted truths and proofs, which are hardly the same thing. What is more, in opposing facts and opinions, the common core curriculum forgets that some facts are also opinions and vice versa, thus undermining any possibility of moral facts. "How does the dichotomy between fact and opinion relate to morality? I learned the answer to this question only after I investigated my son's homework (and other examples of assignments online). Kids are asked to sort facts from opinions and, without fail, every value claim is labeled as an opinion. Here's a little test devised from questions available on fact vs. opinion worksheets online: are the following facts or opinions?
- Copying homework assignments is wrong.
- Cursing in school is inappropriate behavior.
- All men are created equal.
- It is worth sacrificing some personal liberties to protect our country from terrorism.
- It is wrong for people under the age of 21 to drink alcohol.
- Vegetarians are healthier than people who eat meat.
- Drug dealers belong in prison.
The answer? In each case, the worksheets categorize these claims as opinions. The explanation on offer is that each of these claims is a value claim and value claims are not facts. This is repeated ad nauseum: any claim with good, right, wrong, etc. is not a fact. In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths." Moral facts and moral truths are those that are at once subjective and also universal, truths that are neither subject to proof nor questionable by thinking persons. Moral truths are shown, not proven, which is why both Kant and Arendt insist that examples are the core of moral education. We all know that copying homework and dealing drugs are wrong, just as we know that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. acted courageously and ethically in breaking laws; we don't need logical proofs or empirical studies to make moral judgments with conviction. And yet, increasingly our scientific age insists that truths are only those statements subject to logical or empirical proof, thus denying the very existence of moral facts and undermining the ethical foundation of the common world in which we live. The attack on ethical reality goes beyond our schools. It is not only the common core that denies the existence of moral truths; it is a Schande when the Federal Government imposes a curriculum that teaches our children that all opinion is false and only what is provable is true.
Peter Maass has two related essays in The Intercept about the two-tiered system of justice for leakers. In a long and revealing essay about Stephen Kim--a mid-level government analyst who leaked classified information to the journalist James Rosen--Maass focuses on the selective nature of the prosecution: "Kim had the particular misfortune of being a mid-level official. Senior officials tend to have powerful allies who can push back against the Department of Justice. This doesn't always protect them--Scooter Libby, who was Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, was convicted in 2007 of obstructing an investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's name (though his sentence was later commuted by President Bush). But usually it helps. Top officials who have not been prosecuted for leaking include Leon Panetta, the former CIA director who, according to a report by the Defense Department's inspector general, leaked the name of the SEAL commando who led the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Another example is Gen. James Cartwright, who reportedly has been investigated as the source for a Times story on Stuxnet, but has not been charged. And of course there is David Petraeus, the former CIA director and four-star general who is being investigated for leaking classified information to Paula Broadwell, his former lover and authorized biographer. According to recent press reports, lawyers in the Department of Justice have recommended that Petraeus be indicted, but there's significant resistance because he is a popular figure with influential friends who have taken his side, including Sens. Dianne Feinstein and John McCain. While Kim sits in prison for talking to a reporter about a single classified document, Petraeus has not been charged for allegedly handing over multiple classified documents." In a second article written after David Petraeus was granted a plea that not only allowed him to avoid jail but permitted him to keep his lucrative job on Wall Street, Maass highlights the difference in the way Petraeus and Kim were treated: "Petraeus pleaded guilty to just one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified information, a misdemeanor that can be punishable by a year in jail, though the deal calls only for probation and a $40,000 fine. As The New York Times noted today, the deal 'allows Mr. Petraeus to focus on his lucrative post-government career as a partner in a private equity firm and a worldwide speaker on national security issues.'" The point is not that Petraeus should be fully prosecuted but that Kim's prosecution is strikingly a case of overkill, all of which calls to mind Arendt's somewhat mangled line about the public perceptions of the 1963 Frankfurter tribunals of mid-level Nazi bureaucrats: "The small fish are caught, while the big fish continue their careers."
Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a succinct and powerful summary of the U.S. Justice Department's investigation into Darren Wilson's shooting of Michael Brown. "Yesterday the Justice Department released the results of a long and thorough investigation into the killing of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. The investigation concluded that there was not enough evidence to prove a violation of federal law by Officer Wilson. The investigation concluded much more. The investigation concluded that physical evidence and witness statements corroborated Wilson's claim that Michael Brown reached into the car and struck the officer. It concluded that claims that Wilson reached out and grabbed Brown first 'were inconsistent with physical and forensic evidence.' The investigation concluded that there was no evidence to contradict Wilson's claim that Brown reached for his gun. The investigation concluded that Wilson did not shoot Brown in the back. That he did not shoot Brown as he was running away. That Brown did stop and turn toward Wilson. That in those next moments 'several witnesses stated that Brown appeared to pose a physical threat to Wilson.' That claims that Brown had his hands up 'in an unambiguous sign of surrender' are not supported by the 'physical and forensic evidence,' and are sometimes, 'materially inconsistent with that witness's own prior statements with no explanation, credible for otherwise, as to why those accounts changed over time.' Unlike the local investigators, the Justice Department did not merely toss all evidence before a grand jury and say, 'you figure it out.' The federal investigators did the work themselves and came to the conclusion that Officer Wilson had not committed 'prosecutable violations under the applicable federal criminal civil rights statute, 18 U.S.C. § 242.' Our system, ideally, neither catches every single offender, nor lightly imposes the prosecution, jailing, and fining of its citizens. A high burden of proof should attend any attempt to strip away one's liberties. The Justice Department investigation reflects a department attempting to live up to those ideals and giving Officer Wilson the due process that he, and anyone else falling under our legal system, deserves." We should all take a deep breath and respect Coates' clarity. As for whether the local prosecutor did the necessary work or not, I don't know. But clearly the prosecutor came to the same conclusion to which the Justice Department and Coates now come, and they took action to encourage the grand jury to do the same.
In the same essay as he accepts the innocence of Darren Wilson, Ta-Nehisi Coates digs into the Justice Department's second report, the one that found systematic violations of civil rights throughout not only the Ferguson police department but also the entire legal system. Above all, the City of Ferguson saw its citizens, and predominantly its black citizens, as sources of revenue to be fined and cited rather than as citizens to be respected or even to be punished: "' Ferguson's law enforcement practices are shaped by the City's focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson's police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community. Further, Ferguson's police and municipal court practices both reflect and exacerbate existing racial bias, including racial stereotypes. Ferguson's own data establish clear racial disparities that adversely impact African Americans. The evidence shows that discriminatory intent is part of the reason for these disparities...' Partly as a consequence of City and FPD priorities, many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson's predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue... The 'focus on revenue' was almost wholly a focus on black people as revenue. Black people in Ferguson were twice as likely to be searched during a stop, twice as likely to receive a citation when stopped, and twice as likely to be arrested during the stop, and yet were 26 percent less likely to be found with contraband. Black people were more likely to see a single incident turn into multiple citations. The disparity in outcomes remained 'even after regression analysis is used to control for non-race-based variables.' One should understand that the Justice Department did not simply find indirect evidence of unintentionally racist practices which harm black people, but 'discriminatory intent'--that is to say willful racism aimed to generate cash. Justice in Ferguson is not a matter of 'racism without racists,' but racism with racists so secure, so proud, so brazen that they used their government emails to flaunt it."
In an interview, Zephyr Teachout outlines what she thinks is the problem with American political culture: "There's a big dream out there about wind and solar power. I think a lot of the reason people are attracted to the Keystone pipeline is because at least we're doing something. There's a fear that society will collapse if it's not acting. To contrast those actions with other actions is important in making it feel plausible. Maybe we must have the size of the dream meet the size of the threat. This is what's so hard about our current politics: things poll well, but people don't believe that politicians are telling the truth. Politicians might mention renewable energy, and the public will think, 'That sounds good, but I don't believe they're going to do everything they can to build those towers.' Or with campaign finance reform--they don't think that we actually intend to change the way money works in politics. Then citizens don't get very engaged. They think, 'Maybe that politician is just naïve.' Or, more often, people think that the politician is just part of a system, and whether they're lying or not doesn't matter. One of the most dangerous things about Fox News isn't that it's right wing but that it's nihilistic. It takes away the capacity to believe in politics. What were they thinking in 1900? Were they thinking the American system's broken and we should just give up? Why do we feel powerless but Pussy Riot doesn't? Why do we feel powerless but the protesters in Hong Kong don't? Why do we feel powerless? There is a strange feeling of powerlessness among us, even though we do have power."
Killing Can Be Banal, But It Need Not Be
Timothy Kudo, a Marine Captain, reflects on how killing for him has become banal. He tells of a time when he was asked to give an order to kill suspected insurgents: "The voice on the other end of the radio said: 'There are two people digging by the side of the road. Can we shoot them?'" Kudo responds according to both cliché and his training: "'Take the shot,' I responded. It was dialogue from the movies that I'd grown up with, but I spoke the words without irony. I summarily ordered the killing of two men. I wanted the Marine on the other end to give me a reason to change my decision, but the only sound I heard was the radio affirmative for an understood order: 'Roger, out.' Shots rang out across the narrow river. A part of me wanted the rounds to miss their target, but they struck flesh and the men fell dead." Kudo trained to kill and trained to learn how to justify killing, how to kill in ways that made the killing morally and physically acceptable. "For a while after I ordered the Marine to take that first shot, everything we did seemed acceptable. It revealed that killing could be banal. Each day would bring a new threat that needed to be eliminated. Bombs would drop, Marines would fire and artillery would blanket hills with explosions. I had a rough estimate of how many people we killed, but I stopped counting after a while." Kudo recognizes a problem here and writes: "If this era of war ever ends, and we emerge from the slumber of automated killing to the daylight of moral questioning, we will face a reckoning. If we are honest with ourselves, the answers won't be simple." But then he ends his essay with this: "I don't blame Presidents George W. Bush or Barack Obama for these wars. Our elected leaders, after all, are just following orders, no different from the Marine who asks if he can kill a man digging by the side of the road." The retreat to the "just following orders" justification is clearly here out of place. The point about Kudo and his marines is not that they were following orders but that they came to see the orders as right, even if the rightness of orders is complicated. This is clearly also the case for the two presidents. We see how precarious and difficult it is to make moral judgments when someone like Kudo instinctively flees the groundlessness of judgment for the safety of bureaucratic irresponsibility. What he forgets, however, is that in politics obedience and support are the same. The fact is, as Arendt writes, that those who kill are not simply obeying orders; they are supporting the political legitimacy of those orders, which is why we can never escape our personal responsibility to judge.
Parent and public school teacher Michael Godsey praises the private school because it requires students and parents to "buy in" to their education. Students that have a stake in their education, he thinks, are better students: "If the parents are paying tuition at an independent school--one that advertises an alternative approach to education and promotes a 'love of learning' as its cornerstone--they are publicly claiming a stake in a specific curriculum and pedagogy. They're not simply accepting the title of 'stakeholder' at the school that's chosen for their kids because of, say, geography.... I noticed the same effect of 'buying in' when I used to teach Advanced Placement English at another public school. By law, anyone was allowed to take the class, but the school encouraged every interested student to get a signature from a former teacher to vouch for his or her qualifications. The simple act of taking the initiative to procure a signature was enough to show 'buy-in': On the first day of school, every student had made a tiny but significant act that showed that they had chosen to be in this class. This served as implicit evidence that they cared about their education, at least a little bit." One of the most passionate and insightful defenses of private over public education comes from James Tooley, author of The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into How the World's Poorest People Are Educating Themselves. Tooley spoke at the Arendt Center's Conference Failing Fast in 2013. You can watch a video of his talk here. (Click on Failing Fast and then scroll down.)
Jessica Gregg, on the other hand, has elected to take her kids out of private school in order to save money but also because she believes that public school students, who are handed much, much less, learn how to make more for themselves: "It turns out that our children didn't need to be one of a handful of precious kids in a classroom. They can handle the bigger classes, the dozens of children from different backgrounds. They can be OK and even, sometimes, great. We've learned that our kids aren't so extraordinarily fragile that they need to be bubble wrapped by us before they venture into the world. We've also learned that they aren't necessarily extraordinary at all. Or, to be more precise, that if they want to be perceived as extraordinary in the public school system, they had better be extraordinary. The school will not create extraordinary for them. We are lucky: The kids will receive a solid educational foundation in our local schools. And they can remain at that foundational level, or they can improve upon it. But it is up to them to take advantage of extra resources or to create those resources themselves. They have to be part of their own educational equation. Seth will be entering a public high school with an international baccalaureate program, classes in Chinese, and the option to take courses at the local university if he is not sufficiently challenged. But he has to seek these experiences and he has to be qualified. His ability to take advantage of these opportunities is contingent on him, not on our ability to pay for a school that will automatically provide them. Of course, down the road, we may regret this decision. We have to contend with the possibility that without the extra advantage that private school gives them, our children may no longer be considered super-special, super-educated, super-kids, zooming toward our version of their success. ('Yes, she'll be at Yale next year. It just seemed a better fit than Harvard.')"
Eli Saslow profiles Daniel Norris, also known as "Van Man," a top baseball prospect who lives off the grid. "HE HAS ALWAYS lived by his own code, no matter what anyone thinks: a three-sport star athlete in high school who spent weekends camping alone; a hippie who has never tried drugs; a major league pitcher whose first corporate relationship was with an environmental organization called 1% for the Planet. He is 21 and says he has never tasted alcohol. He has had one serious relationship, with his high school girlfriend, and it ended in part because he wanted more time to travel by himself. He was baptized in his baseball uniform. His newest surfboard is made from recycled foam. His van is equipped with a solar panel. He reads hardcover books and never a Kindle. He avoids TV and studies photography journals instead.... For almost 80 years, his father and grandfather owned and operated a small bicycle shop in car-dependent Johnson City, and their store was not only a place to sell bikes but a way to spread their family values and popularize a belief system. Play outdoors. Love the earth. Live simply. Use only what you need. Norris spent his childhood outside with his parents and his two older sisters, going for weekend bike rides and hiking trips, playing football, basketball and baseball. In school, he was a varsity star in all three, but it was baseball--and particularly pitching--that most aligned with his personality. Being alone on the mound reminded him of being out in the wild, where he was forced to solve his own problems and wrestle with self-doubt. 'I was a good pitcher because I was already good at taking care of myself,' he says. 'I love having teammates behind me, but I'm not going to rely on them. It can get quiet and lonely out there when you're pitching, which drives some people crazy. But that's my favorite part.'"
Dinner Discussion with Angela Maione, our Klemens Von Klemperer Post-Doctoral Fellow
"Figuring Rights: Wollstonecraft and the Right to Political Community
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 6:00 pm
Film Screening, A Snake Gives Birth to a Snake and Director's Discussion by Michael Lessac
Synopsis: A diverse group of South African actors tours the war-torn regions of Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia to share their country's experiment with reconciliation. As they ignite a dialogue among people with raw memories of atrocity, the actors find they must once again confront their homeland's violent past, and question their own capacity for healing and forgiveness.
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Weis Cinema, Campus Center, 6:30 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Uday Mehta
Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge
Invite Only. RSVP Required.
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 firstname.lastname@example.com.
Friday, April 3, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 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
Free and open to the public!
Monday, April 6, 2015Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Jeanne Van Heeswijk, Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism
Invite Only. RSVP Required.
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, Thomas Wild discusses how the transformation of thinking and acting into works of art permeates Arendt's understanding of the world conceived by humankind in the Quote of the Week. American author and social activist Howard Zinn provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. And we appreciate Hannah Arendt's collection of the works of German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling in our Library feature.
Amor Mundi 1/11/15
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.
In the wake of the shootings at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hedbo and the correspondent backlash against the manner of certain depictions and the choices of certain subjects, Anthony Lane considers the role of humor in civil society: "But we need to bear in mind that Charlie Hebdo, the target of the murders in Paris, is a satirical magazine. Its raison d'être was to make people laugh. You may disagree, saying that its more substantial mission was to provoke, to outrage, and to scold unreason and prejudice, bringing institutions to account or into disrepute--but many publications do that with an air of frowning solemnity. If Charlie Hebdo sought the truth, it did so by treading the path of the grotesque, littering the ground with jokes, often cheap and silly ones, as it passed along. That path led to catastrophe. Members of staff were exterminated for making fun. Were they sometimes irresponsible? Yes. Is there not something juvenile, or at least eternally adolescent, about men and women who continue to sneer at power and to snicker at the dignified proceedings of high office long after the rest of us, not without regret, have accepted the rites of dullness as the way of the world? Of course. Freedom of speech, that noblest of abstractions, can easily coarsen and shrink into freedom of snort. Nonetheless, a certain rakish splendor hangs over those who refuse to calm down, shut up, or grow up. To claim, as Tony Barber, the Europe editor of the Financial Times, did in an opinion piece yesterday, that 'some common sense would be useful at publications such as Charlie Hebdo,' is to grasp the wrong end of the stick. One of the joys--more often than not, a joyful embarrassment--of a democracy is that it allows time and room for people who find the whole lark of maturing, whether in politics or in personal conduct, to be overrated. Common nonsense has its place and purpose, too." If you read Lane's essay, you'll also get this provocative and pertinent quotation from Henri Bergson, on the nature of comedy: "We have shown that the comic character always errs through obstinacy of mind or of disposition, through absent-mindedness, in short, through automatism. At the root of the comic there is a sort of rigidity which compels its victims to keep strictly to one path, to follow it straight along, to shut their ears and refuse to listen. In Molière's plays, how many comic scenes can be reduced to this simple type: A character following up his one idea and continually recurring to it in spite of incessant interruptions! The transition seems to take place imperceptibly from the man who will listen to nothing, to the one who will see nothing, and from this latter to the one who sees only what he wants to see."
Frederik deBoer is frustrated with the nature of the response to the shootings at the French humor magazine Charlie Hedbo; we are, he says, debating dead questions: "Peter Beinart and Ross Douthat and Jon Chait and hundreds more will take the time in the week to come to beat their chests and declare themselves firmly committed to brave ideas like 'murder is bad' and 'free speech is good.' None of them, if pressed, would pretend that we are at risk of abandoning our commitment against murder or in favor of free speech. None of them think that, in response to this attack, we or France or any other industrialized nation is going to pass a bill declaring criticism of Islam illegal. In fact, all of them would, if pressed, likely admit that the result will be literally the opposite: that we will become more belligerent against Muslim extremism, not less; that we will become more aggressive in our posture against Islam, not less; that the public mood, already dark towards Islam, will grow only darker. They know all of this. They simply won't tell you about it. This is a liar's conversation we're having right now. It's built on a foundation of unreality. People debating it rail against an outcome that not one of them think is actually going to happen. And they do it for the same reason they always do it, to avoid talking about the rot underneath their feet. I have no time to debate the immorality of murder, and I see no one who disagrees with me on that immorality with whom I could debate. There are real questions that this lurching, violent country should ask itself, and won't." He is right. It is unlikely we will pass laws making the criticisms of Muslims or Jews illegal. What Charlie Hedbo responded to with satire was a cultural and social unwillingness to speak certain opinions, a kind of self-censorship that limits critiques not only of Muslims but also of other minorities and so too of powerful interests. There is a place for those who speak up to power, including for those who do so irreverently and, yes, sometimes rudely and stupidly.
A Marshall Plan for The Middle East
Seyla Benhabib responds to the Charlie Hebdo massacres: "No, I don't think that the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the ensuing violence is just a reaction to the offense to Prophet Mohammed or to Islam; neither do I think that it is about what the Koran says or does not say about blasphemy and apostasy. At its root, it is driven by Muslim rage and Arab Muslim civilizational despair. Islam's current-day reformers are few and far between, while itinerant and fiery preachers like al-Madoudi have captured global audiences. But even if there were a significant reform movement within Islam, I don't believe that this would be enough. What is needed is a regional or international effort on the scale of a Marshall plan for the Arab Muslim world that will invest in infrastructure, communications, agriculture, industry, medicine and education. Just as Europe was pulled out of its devastation after WWII, so too this region which is almost bleeding to death, needs to be resuscitated."
The Adults' Table and the Children's Table
David Brooks adds an insight to the discussion about irresponsible satire of the kind practiced by Charlie Hedbo. For Brooks, such satire is juvenile, and yet it has an important role to play. "In most societies, there's the adults' table and there's the kids' table. The people who read Le Monde or the establishment organs are at the adults' table. The jesters, the holy fools and people like Ann Coulter and Bill Maher, are at the kids' table. They're not granted complete respectability, but they are heard because in their unguided missile manner, they sometimes say necessary things that no one else is saying. Healthy societies, in other words, don't suppress speech, but they do grant different standing to different sorts of people. Wise and considerate scholars are heard with high respect. Satirists are heard with bemused semirespect. Racists and anti-Semites are heard through a filter of opprobrium and disrespect. People who want to be heard attentively have to earn it through their conduct. The massacre at Charlie Hebdo should be an occasion to end speech codes. And it should remind us to be legally tolerant toward offensive voices, even as we are socially discriminating." Even in monarchies, the importance of the fool was recognized, the one person who could say the truth that others were afraid to utter. To make the truth palatable, it had to be vulgarized and hidden in humor.
Where's the Radical Church When We Need It?
Ayana Mathis has a beautiful essay in Guernica on her struggles with faith. "For many years I was a lion. I answered to no one, really. And I was free. There were periods in which my freedom was a terror, as though I were untethered and floating off into the high thin air. And there were times my freedom made me ferocious and strong. I have lived, for the most part, as I wanted to, and I have had the liberty to attempt, always failing, to become a person I admired. I am not sure what this has cost me. I am not sure now of what I mean by freedom. I do know that I have doggedly refused to belong--to a community, to a family, to a religion. It seems to me now that this is naïve and foolhardy, the idea that I could somehow outwit the nature of being alive." For Mathis, faith has a faceted and deep history, but it is also importantly political. "In 1963, at the height of the civil rights movement, a young girl named Bettie Mae Fikes sang 'This Little Light of Mine' in a church in Selma, Alabama. Fikes was sixteen and a member of the Freedom Singers, the musical arm of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She sang with the soul of a warrior, improvising the lyrics of the second verse, 'Tell Governor Wallace [the rabidly pro-segregation governor of Alabama], I'm gonna let it shine...' The song rose out of her like trumpets sounding before battle. And indeed young Fikes was going into battle, armed with, among other things, the theology of freedom. We have diminished the spiritual aspects of, as it was called at the time, The Struggle. History has transformed Martin Luther King Jr. into an activist first and a minister second, when in reality it was the other way around. The movement he led, along with his stance against the Vietnam War and his Poor People's Campaign in the late 1960s, was a spiritual one to its very roots. He referred often to the establishment of what he called 'the beloved community,' a global fellowship based on the dignity of all humankind as creatures of God and the eradication of poverty and racism through nonviolent protest. At the heart of that community, in King's theology, was love: Christ's commandment that we love one another. Love, not as a toothless feel-good sentiment, but love in all its ferocious and transformative possibility. Paul Tillich defines it thusly: 'Love is not an emotional but an ontological force.' Buoyed by this theology, ordinary people summoned extraordinary courage in the name of liberation. They were spat on at lunch counters from Greensboro to Montgomery, beaten bloody with batons and zapped with cattle prods in jail cells. All the while they sang those old church hymns I thought so insipid when I was a teenager. They sang 'We shall overcome... The Lord will see us through...' and '...like a tree that's planted by the waters, we shall not be moved.' They fought for their freedom and, in a radical interpretation of Jesus's admonition to turn the other cheek, their struggle would also liberate the whites who had so terribly oppressed them. They aimed to cut out the rot so as to save the whole body, not just its parts. What happened to that church? Where is the movement's radical spirituality when we so desperately need it?"
Glenn Loury opens a debate on the legacy of Ferguson in The Boston Review: "Once again a high-profile but disputed encounter on the streets of an American city has become the site for a national debate over issues of race, order, and social justice. This is, in my view, an unfortunate and unproductive state of affairs. The case of Michael Brown should not frame our deliberations on racism and public order. A stark conflict of narratives in an unavoidably ambiguous factual context may set the stage for considerable drama but is unlikely to yield progress toward the reconciliation of two irrefutably legitimate claims: first, all American communities must be kept secure from the depredations of violent criminals; second, all Americans must be treated with dignity and respect by the law enforcement officers they encounter on the streets where they live. Both claims express fundamental requirements of social justice: the residents of disadvantaged and marginal communities, too often people of color, also deserve public order and individual protections. But, as a practical matter, these imperatives are in tension. Maintaining order in dangerous communities is bound to engender some conflicts between the police and the residents of these places. Achieving social justice today means both acknowledging the moral force of these claims and remaining open to the complex and troubling social realities to which they apply. We are a long way from doing either. Our current ways of thinking involve a series of binaries that, in my view, preclude a reasoned weighing of the two basic moral imperatives. A precondition for having a serious and effective deliberation about policies, laws, and practices is, on this argument, to dispel such simplistic ways of thinking." For one thing, Loury argues that the protests following Ferguson are ineffective because they don't target laws: "[Rosa] Parks's protest targeted a law. Responsibility for changing that law was clear, as was the moral conviction at stake. Brown's death under ambiguous circumstances provides no such path to change. Indeed, the reactions to it have every prospect of leading to further entrenchment of the status quo--not just because Brown seems to have been the aggressor, but also because issues about crime, policing, and poverty cannot be addressed in the ways that traditional civil rights issues could."
In the same issue of The Boston Review, Danielle Allen responds to Loury by defending Al Sharpton's focus not on policies but on highlighting inequality. "But two generations of scholarship in history and political philosophy have shown that the inclusion/exclusion paradigm is inadequate to reality. Our problem is not exclusion, to be solved by inclusion. Our problem is domination, to be solved by non-domination. Liberal institutions in America were built on documents and principles that provided liberty for some and domination for others. These differential statuses were not accidentally but intrinsically connected to each other. Those who enjoyed liberation and the benefits of domination, which we have come to call white privilege and male privilege, mistakenly understood themselves to be experiencing equality. Thus began the mis-education of our people. We have not yet learned what it means and feels like to live with one another, with the many and different others among whom we find ourselves, on the footing of equality. Sharpton's network relentlessly spotlights this fact. In order to achieve our egalitarian aspirations, we need not so much include the excluded as reconstitute our social order. In this sense our project is no longer one of racial justice, of fixing something for a part of the population, as the image of inclusion suggests. Instead we need an egalitarian order for everyone."
Katrina Forrester, in a review of Edmund Fawcett's book Liberalism: This History of an Idea, suggests that liberalism's history does not start with Locke and liberty but as a way of finding alternatives to a certain other competing idea: "The liberal dream, Fawcett writes, was 'a myth of order in a masterless world.' Crucially, for liberals, this was only a dream. What distinguished them from conservatives was their belief that progress toward such a world was possible; what distinguished them from socialists was their belief that they would never get there. Conflict was intractable; there was no utopia in which politics would cease. The aim of liberalism was to manage conflict, while still treating people with 'civic respect'--a catchall phrase for the various kinds of legal and political equality owed to citizens of liberal societies... To do so, they turned to whatever institutions worked best. In the German case, Bismarck's antisocialist strategy resulted in the national welfare schemes hailed as the origins of the welfare state. But the best institutions were not always those of the state: while philosophers tended to describe state authority as coherent and unitary, in reality its power was messy and diffuse. As a result, liberalism in the age before the fully centralized state was highly experimental. It looked to all sorts of institutional arrangements--national and local, collectivist and individualist. The mid-nineteenth century saw a proliferation of voluntary associations, self-help cooperatives, unions, mutual banks, friendly societies for insurance and other forms of collectivism, both in theory (the writings of Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill and the German theorist of 'mutualism' Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch) and in practice. Though these associations are usually thought of as more socialist than liberal, they were often first imagined as alternatives to state socialism."
Ian Storey made the case for satire in an essay published last year: "Some are suspicious of jokesters and satirists in moments of political crisis, on the one hand because they seem to rarely offer any positive way forward, and on the other because they work to make light of things that, in their graveness, ought not be made light of. Arendt herself emerged from the pale of the events that offer our best examples of horror's power to make us resist its translation into humor (though it should be remembered that one of her first pieces after the war was the darkly witty 'We, The Refugees'). In that, we risk becoming horror's willing agents, but perhaps in some cases it has already won its victories and we can only subsequently mourn. It's a difficult question, which terrible things can be made funny, and those who would play in the languages of politics should be granted a measure of leniency for those times when they traipse over the line. In their defense, that line is one that can never be drawn in advance, because it comes bearing ever-shifting whens and whoms that can always be pushed further back by an extraordinary gift that not even the most talented satirists can live up to in every moment. The line can be pushed back, and should be pushed back, because when undertaken by the most talented, satire and seriousness have never been opposites, but on the contrary are what allow each other to do the utmost that they can do. This is what made Orwell, for all his limitations, one of the great political writers of and on the English language: in the face first of empire and then of anti-semitic totalitarianism, he staked his artistic life on a faith in the power to express what is most utterly serious better through wit, to join the sustaining narrative power of sad mirth to the deepest and most inexpressible of pains. The lesson of 'Shooting an Elephant' always seemed to me to be something along the lines of an idea that horror must be swallowed just long enough to give us sustenance, if we are to go once more into the breach against it. It's a difficult and contentious thought, but worth swallowing."
Everywhere people are aghast that terrorists killed in response to cartoons. But the reason to defend satire is precisely that such speech can be radical, revolutionary, and dangerous. Thus there is something heartening in the anger at Charlie Hedbo, the discomfort that so many express with the magazine's juvenile satirical stance. To be effective, satire must discomfort. It must grate and piss off. Indeed, the great danger in a decadent society is when satire loses its ability to infuriate. This is the danger that Arendt saw in Weimar Germany, specifically in the popularity of Berthold Brecht's satirical classic, the "Threepenny Opera." Here is how Hannah Arendt describes the arrival and reception of Brecht's play: "'The play presented gangsters as respectable businessmen and respectable businessmen as gangsters. The irony was somewhat lost when respectable businessmen in the audience considered this a deep insight into the ways of the world and when the mob welcomed it as an artistic sanction of gangsterism. The theme song in the play, 'Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral' [First comes the animal-like satisfaction of one's hungers, then comes morality], was greeted with frantic applause by exactly everybody, though for different reasons. The mob applauded because it took the statement literally; the bourgeoisie applauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long that it had grown tired of the tension and found deep wisdom in the expression of the banality by which it lived; the elite applauded because the unveiling of hypocrisy was such superior, wonderful fun.' According to Arendt, Brecht hoped to shock not only with his portrayal of corruption and the breakdown of morality, but by his gleeful presentation of Weimar decadence. However, the effect of 'Threepenny Opera' was exactly the opposite since all groups in society reacted to Brecht's satire with joy instead of repulsion. Arendt has little hope for the mob or the bourgeoisie, but she is clearly cut to the quick by the ease with which the elite felt 'genuine delight' in watching the bourgeoisie and the mob 'destroy respectability.' As Arendt explained, the 'members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.' Because the elite had largely rejected their belief in the justice and meaningfulness of the moral and common values that had supported the edifice of civilization, they found more joy in the ironic skewering of those values than they felt fear at what the loss of common values might come to mean."
Satire Cuts to the Bone. But Why?
Satirical cartoonist Joe Sacco draws his response to the killings in Paris: "My first reaction was sadness. People were brutally killed, among them several cartoonists--my tribe." Sacco knows that "tweaking the noses of Muslims might be as permissible as it is now believed to be dangerous." He thinks it is also "vapid." Satire, he writes, "is meant to cut to the bone. But whose bone? What exactly is the target? And why?" He struggles to figure that out and writes: "But perhaps when we tire of holding up our middle finger we can try to think about why the world is the way it is... And what it is about Muslims in this time and place that makes them unable to laugh off a mere image. And if we answer 'Because something is deeply wrong with them'--certainly something was deeply wrong with the killers--then let us drive them from their homes and into the sea. For that is going to be far easier than sorting out how we fit in each other's world."
Ulrich Beck died on New Years Day. The German sociologist was best known for his book The Risk Society. He is eulogized here in the Financial Times: "In Risikogesellschaft, published in Germany in 1986, Beck, who died aged 70 on New Year's Day, argued that the theme of freeing humanity from its traditional constraints was being eclipsed by a new imperative; the need to manage the risks created by mankind's technological advances. Mads Sørensen, an academic at Aarhus university and author of an introduction to Beck's work said: 'Beck knew very well that we can't avoid taking risks. That risk-taking is part of life. However, some of the "new risks" that were the focus of his analysis--radioactivity is perhaps the best example--have the potential to destroy us.' The only way to avoid such risks, in Beck's view, was, for example, to shut down nuclear power plants; the social scientist praised Germany's plans for an accelerated nuclear exit after the Fukushima disaster. Other risks, such as climate change or terrorism, had to be managed rather than avoided entirely. Beck pointed out that these risks were transnational, cutting across old boundaries between nations. 'There is therefore no way around increasing transnational co-operation if we want to protect ourselves against them,' Mr Sørensen said."
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
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, Time TBA
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015!
This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Champlin investigates Arendt's claim that the racist Nazi government and Soviet communist government both followed a deeper underlying idea in the Quote of the Week. C. G. Jung provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We appreciate a testament to Arendt's interest in Jewish historiography in our Library feature. And Seyla Benhabib has written an essay explaining what the Charlie Hebdo attacks mean to the West's negotiation with Islam in the modern world.
Amor Mundi 11/30/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Writing in The Diplomat, Ben Reynolds invokes Hannah Arendt to illustrate the paradoxical ineffectiveness of protecting refugees under international law. "The stateless may be technically protected under international law, but they lack enforceable rights without the corresponding protection of a state. International law recognizes the right of states to determine who they recognize as citizens. This is a fundamental component of state sovereignty. States are thus permitted to deny citizenship and its corresponding rights to persons fleeing war, disaster, and tyranny who seek shelter within their borders. Lacking the normal rights of citizens, refugees are subject to the caprice of the host nation. Paradoxically, the very ideas of nationality and citizenship deprive human beings of their rights the moment they leave their own polity. The resulting 'natural' response of states has been to contain the stateless within refugee camps, isolating them from the normal civic and social life of the host nation. International agreements, like the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, seem to offer some level of protection for the rightless. They are, however, essentially unenforceable. No one should believe that international law will convince the government of Myanmar, for example, to provide an acceptable level of rights to all of the Rohingya people, much less citizenship. Even if someone were to naturalize every currently stateless person, an almost impossible task, the very next large scale political crisis would create a new wave of refugees which states would seek to exclude from their political communities."
"Without the existence of a right to belong to a political community, the 'right to have rights,' there can be no lasting solution to the problem of statelessness." Pointing to Arendt's idea of the "Right to have rights," he suggests that there is such a right to belong to a political community that has little to do with states as they are understood in the international legal system. It's worth revisiting what Roger Berkowitz writes about Arendt and human rights: "Human rights, in other words, are only those rights to speak and act amidst a people such that one's words and deeds are seen and heard in such a way that they matter. At bottom, the only truly human right - the right to have rights - is the right to speak and act as a member of a people. Confusion over this point - and thus the efforts of human rights advocates to extend human rights to life and liberty (and also to second and third generation rights like economic prosperity) - cleaves human rights from its foundation in the human condition and risks, therefore, exposing the entire edifice of human rights as nonsense upon stilts. Arendt names the human condition of acting and speaking that underlies the right to have rights natality. Natality, the capacity to be born, is, as Peg Birmingham has seen, a double principle. On the one hand, natality reflects the fact that man can, by acting and speaking, start something new. In this sense, natality refers to man's freedom in the sense of his spontaneity, the ability to begin and initiate something new. On the other hand, natality says also that a human being is born and, having been born, is given the gift of existence. This givenness - this 'mere existence' that is 'mysteriously given us at birth' - is an 'anarchic' principle that is '[c]ut off and adrift from any sovereign constituting power or foundation....' Since human existence, as physis, is cut off from any prior reason or ground, man is unjustifiable and thus vulnerable. Man stands alone as alien and strange. And this radical singularity that attaches to man's natality both underlies Arendt's defense of plurality and her insistence that the right to have rights includes the right to be as you are. It is the obligation in the face of the alien that must be respected as part of the human that, pace Birmingham, underlies Arendt's guarantee of the right to have rights to every human being."
Walter Russell Mead makes the case that if we are to resurrect our foreign policy, we need to move beyond the President and his appointees: "not many of our executive appointees are either as wise or as all-seeing as they may think they are: witness the Libya mess. From the side of the Congress, what's needed is a serious personal commitment from a critical mass of members to master the knowledge required to play a role in American foreign policy commensurate with the needs of the hour and the importance of Congress's constitutional role - combined with efforts to upgrade the processes and institutions through which the Congress carries out its mission. What we need to do at this point is begin to rethink the role of the Congress in American foreign policy.... The United States Congress has to be part of the solution. The Congress has, for example, the power to review and reform the agencies in the executive branch, and this power may need to be invoked. Is it, for example, a good thing that the National Security Council in the White House has accreted so much power? If the President's closest adviser on foreign policy is no longer the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense, what degree of Congressional oversight is required in the NSC? Should its officials be subject to senatorial confirmation? If not, should the President accept limits on the NSC staff and the role of its chief? But to really live up to its potential and to carry out its constitutional role in foreign policy, the Congress is going to have to raise its sights. It's time to rethink what oversight means and how it should work. In particular, the Congress is the place where the country's most serious public conversations and deliberations about foreign policy should be held. As it is, this country's most important foreign policy debates are held on cable television and other news programs. That isn't good either for American foreign policy or for the long term health of American democracy."
Hannah Arendt insisted that a trial, even a Grand Jury Trial, requires that we pay attention to the individual accused. That is not what most people wanted following the trial of Darren Wilson. Yet to abide by Arendt's words, we must recognize that the case against Wilson as a singular individual was incredibly weak. Thus it is important, as Ta-Nehisi Coates demands, that we understand Michael Brown's death as a manifestation of institutional, rather than individual, racism: "Black people know what cannot be said. What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is the idea of superhuman black men who 'bulk up' to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson but a staple of American racism."
Anger. Frustrated. Fearful. Embarrassed. Sympathetic. Confused.
Perhaps the best analysis of the Darren Wilson shooting of Michael Brown has come from Benjamin Watson, a football player for the New Orleans Saints. "At some point while I was playing or preparing to play Monday Night Football, the news broke about the Ferguson Decision. After trying to figure out how I felt, I decided to write it down. Here are my thoughts: I'M ANGRY because the stories of injustice that have been passed down for generations seem to be continuing before our very eyes.... I'M SAD because another young life was lost from his family; the racial divide has widened; a community is in shambles; accusations, insensitivity, hurt and hatred are boiling over; and we may never know the truth about what happened that day. I'M SYMPATHETIC because I wasn't there so I don't know exactly what happened. Maybe Darren Wilson acted within his rights and duty as an officer of the law and killed Michael Brown in self-defense like any of us would in the circumstance. Now he has to fear the backlash against himself and his loved ones when he was only doing his job. What a horrible thing to endure. OR maybe he provoked Michael and ignited the series of events that led to him eventually murdering the young man to prove a point. And I'M OFFENDED because of the insulting comments I've seen that are not only insensitive but dismissive to the painful experiences of others."
In an interview, writer on religion and former nun Karen Armstrong sees organized religion as attempting to stop violence rather than cause it: "I've tried to show how the various traditions devised ways to help people get over violence. How Jewish rabbis actually completely revised their interpretation of the Jewish scriptures to take the violence out. How the ideal of ahimsa took root strongly in India. And how Jesus, who was an excitable man, says that extraordinary thing: Love your enemies. We're living in a globalized world, and the great theme that religion can give us, and perhaps national mythologies cannot, is that we are profoundly interconnected. Our histories are intertwined; economically we're absolutely bound up with one another; what happens in Syria has a blowback in Canada. So what the religions have insisted is that you cannot confine your benevolence to your own group. You must love your enemies and reach out and practice what the Indian sages called equanimity: You cannot prefer one being to another. You cannot put yourself on a privileged pedestal because that is no longer a rational response to our globalized world."
Despite the tendency among critics and fans to separate Marilynne Robinson's first book, Housekeeping, from her later Gilead novels, Alex Egrebretson argues that her work is actually a coherent corpus: "The notion that there is indeed profound continuity between the early and late work would require much more space to prove. But let me at least sketch a different perspective on Robinson's career, one that sees the difference between Housekeeping and the Gilead novels as greatly exaggerated. In this view, Robinson moves from being an author with an odd, two-stage career to an author with deep imaginative habits, one who has worked and re-worked, emphasized and de-emphasized, a single literary vision. Housekeeping is that vision, serving as Robinson's spiritus mundi, a storage house of symbols, allusions, images, themes, and dramatic situations. From those basic materials, she has built each of her successive novels. Instead of an author who recreated herself late in her career, Robinson is one who has returned and renewed imaginative possibilities already latent within her first book."
Finally, as a way to mark the late holiday, meet Horace Vose, turkey farmer to the President of these United States.
Film Screening & Director's Discussion: Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt with Nazis
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium, 5:00 - 8:00 pm
Roundtable on Academic Freedom
A panel discussion with guests Andrew Ross, Steven Salaita, and Katherine M. Franke.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Bard College Campus Center, Multipurpose Room, 7:00 pm
This holiday week on the Blog, Michiel Bot explores Arendt's understanding of the "national idea" as one of the origins of totalitarianism in the Quote of the Week. And George Bernard Shaw provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking.
This coming Friday, December 5th, the Hannah Arendt Center will host the second session of its new Virtual Reading Group. We will be discussing Chapter One of The Human Condition.
The reading group is available to all members and is always welcoming new participants! Please click here to learn more!
Amor Mundi 11/23/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
In The New Republic, Judith Shulevitz writes about the deadening impact of loneliness and how it can ravage our body and our brain. She traces modern interest in loneliness to Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, a psychoanalyst whose "1959 essay, 'On Loneliness,' is considered a founding document in a fast-growing area of scientific research you might call loneliness studies. Over the past half-century, academic psychologists have largely abandoned psychoanalysis and made themselves over as biologists. And as they delve deeper into the workings of cells and nerves, they are confirming that loneliness is as monstrous as Fromm-Reichmann said it was. It has now been linked with a wide array of bodily ailments as well as the old mental ones. In a way, these discoveries are as consequential as the germ theory of disease. Just as we once knew that infectious diseases killed, but didn't know that germs spread them, we've known intuitively that loneliness hastens death, but haven't been able to explain how. Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking. A partial list of the physical diseases thought to be caused or exacerbated by loneliness would include Alzheimer's, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer - tumors can metastasize faster in lonely people." The turn toward biology situates loneliness as a mental and a physical illness, one to be combated with public health programs. Shulevitz traces the efforts to medicalize loneliness, as well as programs to treat loneliness as a problem of inequality. And yet, in the end, she suggests that humans have incredible resources to fend off loneliness: "[T]here's something awe-inspiring about our resilience, too. Put an orphan in foster care, and his brain will repair its missing connections. Teach a lonely person to respond to others without fear and paranoia, and over time, her body will make fewer stress hormones and get less sick from them. Care for a pet or start believing in a supernatural being, and your score on the UCLA Loneliness Scale will go down. Even an act as simple as joining an athletic team or a church can lead to what Cole calls 'molecular remodeling.' 'One message I take away from this is, "Hey, it's not just early life that counts,"' he says. 'We have to choose our life well.'"
Loneliness was a constant theme in Hannah Arendt's work. In her most pregnant attempt at a definition of totalitarianism, published in 1950, 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." Stripped of the political, social, and intellectual traditions that historically bound people together in publically meaningful institutions and networks, mass men turn to racism or consumerism to give their lives meaning. Both are dangerous in different ways. As Paul Morrow writes, "Loneliness can result from formal prohibitions on expression or action, as seen in totalitarian societies; but it can also result from informal standards and patterns of life which disvalue political - and overvalue social or commercial - interactions." And Bill Dixon adds: "To be lonely is to be deprived of both the public and the private realms and therefore to feel utterly abandoned by other human beings, to finally lose one's place in the world completely. The mass production of loneliness is closely linked to the experiences of 'uprootedness' and 'superfluousness' that have unevenly afflicted peoples across the earth since the industrial revolution and European imperialism. Pervasive loneliness as a modern way of life therefore amorphously anticipates the emergence of the totalitarian form, but it also serves to structure and vivify its psychic violence once underway. Loneliness perversely tends to intensify when felt in the presence of others, that is, when one is not strictly speaking alone."
David Bromwich reviews Laura Poitras' Citizenfour and argues that it shows Edward Snowden to be a modern hero, a courageous conscientious objector in the war on privacy: "An incidental strength of Citizenfour is that it will make such casual slanders harder to repeat. Nevertheless, they are likely to be repeated or anyway muttered in semiprivate by otherwise judicious persons who want to go on with their business head-down and not be bothered. It must be added that our past politics give no help in arriving at an apt description of Snowden and his action. The reason is that the world in which he worked is new. Perhaps one should think of him as a conscientious objector to the war on privacy - a respectful dissident who, having observed the repressive treatment endured by William Binney, Thomas Drake, and other recent whistle-blowers, does not recognize the constitutional right of the government to put him in prison indefinitely and bring him to trial for treason. His action constitutes a reproach to the many good citizens who have learned what is happening and done nothing about it. That, too, is surely a cause of the resentment that has a hard time finding the appropriate adjectives for Snowden." Bromwich is right that listening to Snowden in the movie is to be in the presence of someone of integrity: "The undeclared subject of Citizenfour is integrity - the insistence by an individual that his life and the principle he lives by should be all of a piece. Something resembling an aesthetic correlative of that integrity can be found in the documentary style of Laura Poitras." What Snowden, Poitras, and Bromwich show is that the core of privacy is integrity. It is thus the integrity of the person that is under attack in the age of surveillance.
In an essay about how it is for teachers, both now and in the past, Jonathan Zimmerman says he thinks he's figured out what's happened to teaching in America: "the federal Race to the Top program sponsored by the Obama administration encouraged schools to use students' test scores in evaluating individual teachers. The primary responsibility of teachers is no longer to encourage good behavior in future citizens, as Horace Mann insisted. Instead, it's to ensure that they get the right answers on a high-stakes test. The shift in goals has unfortunately done nothing to alter the tedious, anti-intellectual practices of American teaching. If anything, the strong commitment to 'academic' goals has probably made teaching less academic - so far as the quality of learning is concerned - and more routinized than it was before. When teachers were hired for their inborn ability to 'nurture' schoolchildren, many derided or disregarded their intellectual capacities. Now we've created a system that is so firmly tied to scholastic achievement - as narrowly defined by standardized tests - that no serious scholar would want to teach in it."
In the New York Times, seven writers reread some of their old work and write about how they feel about it all this time later. Marilynne Robinson, for example, tries to recall what it was like to write Housekeeping: "In writing 'Housekeeping' I was trying to recover the appearance and the atmosphere of a very particular place, northern Idaho. When I wrote it, I had not spent much time there for almost 20 years. So it was very much an exploration of memory that I was engaged in. I thought I was writing an unpublishable book, so I was undistracted by other considerations than my own interest in the workings of memory and the ability of language to evoke what I 'saw' in memory. I found that the common old question 'What was it like?' stimulated recollection and recruited words and images that made my sense of the thing remembered, a place or a smell or the glint of light on water, much more accessible to me than I could have anticipated. It became a discipline for me, always to keep a scene before my eyes and to be ready to value and explore any detail that presented itself to me with an especially pungent or plangent specificity. I wrote much of the book in a darkened room. This was not intended as part of the experiment, but it may have contributed to it. My memories were often as bright as dreams and often as highly detailed. Only the place is actually remembered in the book. None of the characters or events are real. The point was to let my imagination take on the colorations of memory and interpret the place, as music might do."
In an interview with Questlove Thompson, an interview that's as much about music as anything else, Cornel West defines courage: "But we all live in fear. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the working through and overcoming of fear. Brother Martin had fear. He just wouldn't allow fear to determine his behavior. As human beings, everyone has stuff coming at them, and a certain kind of fear. But courage is being true to yourself, true to a sense of integrity. And that's what is more and more difficult."
At the Intersection of Art and Commerce
In her National Book Awards acceptance speech, Ursula K. Lu Guin explains why she loves, and fears for, literature: "Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. I've had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don't want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn't profit. Its name is freedom."
In a piece about the resurfaced allegations of rape against Bill Cosby, Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us that he, like all writers, lives in history, with his own context and biography. Knowing that is a kindness - one, he suggests, that an ethical journalist must transcend: "The Bill Cosby piece was my first shot writing for a big national magazine. I had been writing for 12 financially insecure years. By 2007, when I finished my first draft, I had lost three jobs in seven years. I had just been laid-off by Time magazine. My kid was getting older. I was subsisting off unemployment checks and someone else's salary. A voice in my head was, indeed, pushing me to do something more expansive and broader in its implication, something that did not just question Cosby's moralizing, but weighed it against the acts which I believed he committed. But Cosby was such a big target that I thought it was only a matter of time before someone published a hard-hitting, investigative piece. And besides, I had in my hand the longest, best, and most personally challenging piece I'd ever written. It was not enough. I have often thought about how those women would have felt had they read my piece. The subject was morality - and yet one of the biggest accusations of immorality was left for a few sentences, was rendered invisible. I don't have many writing regrets. But this is one of them. I regret not saying what I thought of the accusations, and then pursuing those thoughts. I regret it because the lack of pursuit puts me in league with people who either looked away, or did not look hard enough. I take it as a personal admonition to always go there, to never flinch, to never look away."
Film Screening & Director's Discussion: Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt with Nazis
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium, 5:00 - 8:00 pm
Roundtable on Academic Freedom
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Bard College Campus Center, Multipurpose Room, 7:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Johannes Lang discusses Arendt's critique of obedience in political and moral matters in the Quote of the Week. Carl Sagan provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In our Video Archives, we remember a talk George Kateb gave at our 2011 annual fall conference on the ideal of governmental transparency. And we appreciate Arendt's impressive collection of Goethe's works in our Library feature.
Amor Mundi 7/27/14
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.
Rachel Aviv tells the heartrending and maddening story of the rise and fall of Damany Lewis, a dedicated and innovative teacher who helped teachers correct wrong answers on standardized test scores. One of the arguments for the Common Core and other data-driven educational reforms is that it has the dignity to hold students in poor districts to the same standards as students in wealthier districts. Lewis sees this demand as simply unrealistic: "He felt as if he and his colleagues were part of a nationwide 'biological experiment' in which the variables-the fact that so many children were hungry and transient, and witnessing violence-hadn't been controlled. David Berliner, the former dean of the school of education at Arizona State University, told me that, with the passage of the law, teachers were asked to compensate for factors outside their control. He said, 'The people who say poverty is no excuse for low performance are now using teacher accountability as an excuse for doing nothing about poverty.' Confronted with the need to reach impossible goals, Lewis and his fellow teachers took the easy way out: they cheated. The choice was made easy for them because 'they viewed the cheating as a door they had to pass through in order to focus on issues that seemed more relevant to their students' lives.'" In telling a compelling and devastating story, Aviv raises fundamental questions about the over-reliance on data in education: "John Ewing, who served as the executive director of the American Mathematical Society for fifteen years, told me that he is perplexed by educators' 'infatuation with data,' their faith that it is more authoritative than using their own judgment. He explains the problem in terms of Campbell's law, a principle that describes the risks of using a single indicator to measure complex social phenomena: the greater the value placed on a quantitative measure, like test scores, the more likely it is that the people using it and the process it measures will be corrupted. 'The end goal of education isn't to get students to answer the right number of questions,' he said. 'The goal is to have curious and creative students who can function in life.' In a 2011 paper in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, he warned that policymakers were using mathematics 'to intimidate-to preëmpt debate about the goals of education and measures of success.'"
Incarceration on a Scale Unexampled in Human History
In the Atlantic, Matt Ford looks at the United States' obsession with incarceration. "Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today-perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system-in prison, on probation, or on parole-than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under 'correctional supervision' in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.... The common retort is that people of color statistically commit more crimes, although criminologists and scholars like Michelle Alexander have consistently found no correlation between the incarceration rate and the crime rate. Claims about a 'black pathology' also fall short. But police scrutiny often falls most heavily on people of color nonetheless. In New York City alone, officers carried out nearly 700,000 stop-and-frisk searches in 2011. Eighty-five percent of those stops targeted black and Hispanic individuals, although they constitute only half the city's population. Overall, NYPD officers stopped and frisked more young black men in New York than actually live there. Similar patterns of discrimination can be found nationwide, especially on drug-related charges. Black and white Americans use marijuana at an almost-equal rate, but blacks are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for possession nationally. In Pennsylvania, Illinois, and other Midwestern states, that arrest disparity jumps to a factor of five."
The Transcendent and Sequential Art
Brian Cremins takes on the relationship between the mundane and the transcendental both in comics and in art more broadly: "the transcendental artist is not bound by rationalism, but, then again, doesn't work in the realm of the irrational or of the uncanny either. The transcendental artist weaves together the rational with the irrational, the real with the imagined, and the material with the spiritual. To borrow a phrase from Benjamin, the artist doesn't differentiate between the 'major and minor,' but sees all of history's actors-from the enslaved and the martyred to the kings and queens-as playing roles of equal weight and significance."
The Secularization of the Sacred, the Sacralizing of the Secular
Kaya Genç notes the way that Turkey's secular nationalists have taken on characteristics of the religious, while its competing group of Muslim nationalists have taken to certain secular aspects. The result makes the country's politics unusual: "Religion in Turkey has become secularized and the secular sphere sacralized, resulting in a struggle over the definition of what is sacred, accompanied by accusations of blasphemy (phrased as disloyalty to the nation and even treason). Individual choice - the choice to be suurlu, a 'consciously' believing Muslim, as opposed to blindly following tradition - has become highly valued as a sign of Muslim modernity. Islamic practice increasingly has come to be expressed as participation in economic networks and through a commodified lifestyle of self-consciously Muslim fashion and leisure. Meanwhile, Kemalist secularism has taken on aspects of the sacred. To discuss this reversal of cultural values and show how religion could have a Weberian association with a certain entrepreneurial mood, [writer Jenny] White paints a picture of the complexities behind Turkey's competing political discourses. The camps described above may have different approaches to nationalism, but they also have many things in common. The motif of the flag, for example, symbolizes both 'secular nationalism' and what White refers to as 'Muslim nationalism.' But beyond the flag, particularly when it comes to race and religion, Turkey's competing nationalisms have a number of not very easily reconcilable differences."
William Deresiewicz' new book Excellent Sheep takes on the academic-industrial complex. In an essay in the New Republic he argues that the Ivy League is ruining the best and the brightest: "These enviable youngsters appear to be the winners in the race we have made of childhood. But the reality is very different, as I have witnessed in many of my own students and heard from the hundreds of young people whom I have spoken with on campuses or who have written to me over the last few years. Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they're doing but with no idea why they're doing it. When I speak of elite education, I mean prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams as well as the larger universe of second-tier selective schools, but I also mean everything that leads up to and away from them-the private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants and test-prep courses; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brand-name graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the B.A.; and the parents and communities, largely upper-middle class, who push their children into the maw of this machine. In short, our entire system of elite education.... So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk."
How to Rebirth the Virtuous (Puritanical) University
Jim Sleeper responds to Deresiewicz' in an essay in Bookforum and argues that there is a lost tradition in the liberal arts university itself that Deresiewicz ignores but that needs to be reawakened. "[W]hat's most consequentially wrong with Deresiewicz's jeremiad is his selective history of the old colleges: 'We need to go back before the start, to the Gilded Age, the last decades of the nineteenth century,' a period he knows well as a scholar of its fiction. He dismisses the colleges' founding missions as too little, too early; like the sociologist Jerome Karabel in The Chosen, he doesn't quite know what to make of the fact that, as late as the 1960s, the Ivy WASPs mobilized their oldest, toughest Protestant and civic-republican virtues to prepare 'the ground for their own supersession' by retiring age-old quotas based on ethnicity and race (though, significantly, not the ones based on economic clout) and to 'put the interests of the nation as a whole above their own.' I witnessed that firsthand as an undergraduate at Yale, whose president Kingman Brewster Jr., a descendant of the minister on the Mayflower, gave an honorary doctorate to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964, when some alumni still considered King a rabble-rouser. Brewster understood that the civil rights movement was renewing the Exodus myth that had moved his Puritan ancestors (and my own Jewish ones) to make history. Yale's radically Calvinist chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr., leading resistance to the Vietnam War, defied the state in the name of a higher power that, for some of us, was the living American republic itself. So have Howard Dean, Jonathan Schell, Ned Lamont, and other Ivy graduates in our time.That mystic chord of memory seems broken now, as do the colleges that honored it. Deresiewicz tells them to stop cooperating with commercial college-ranking systems; to base affirmative action on class, not race; to discard preferences for legacies and athletes; to weight SAT scores for socioeconomic factors; to discourage résumé stuffing by curbing extracurriculars and by counting financial-aid service jobs as service. And he makes his grand, sweeping calls for change. But how to summon the will to fight for these worthy goals? Beyond his exhortations and potted invocations of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad, the preacher hasn't a clue."
From the Archives: Eichmann in Jerusalem
This past week, The New Yorker put its whole archive online for free, for a limited time (of course). Over the next few weeks, we'll be combing the archives, finding articles worth your attention. In the meantime, it seems like there are two good places to start. The first, of course, is Hannah Arendt's dispatch from the trial of Adolf Eichmann, published in the magazine in five parts and then published separately as the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, a piece of journalism and philosophy that remains important and controversial. There are a lot of rumors about what Arendt said and about what she didn't say-- this is an opportunity to read the work and then judge for yourself as it first appeared.
Help the Arendt Center meet its goal of 100 members before August 1!
Become a member here!
Learn more about the membership challenge here.
October 9-10
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?, will be held this year on October 9-10!
Registration is now OPEN! You can register here!
Learn more about the conference here.
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Arie Amaya-Akkermans explores the sources of Arendt's indebtedness to storytelling in the Quote of the Week. French biologist and philosopher Jean Rostand provides this week's Thought on Thinking. We look back on a racism lecture Robert Bernasconi delivered in 2011 in our Video Archives. As a special treat, we learn about a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar that was taught on Arendt at Bard this summer. And Roger Berkowitz celebrates the memory of author Nadine Gordimer and recognizes mankind's ability to change the world in the Weekend Read.
Video Archives – Racism Lecture Delivered by Robert Bernasconi (2011)
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011: Race, Slavery, and the Philosophers of the Enlightenment
Lecturer: Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Penn State.
Robert Bernasconi challenges the defense of enlightenment philosophers who supported or defended race based slavery in their writings and raises questions about how racism infects their philosophy. In this lecture, he aims to implicate John Locke and Immanuel Kant in the development and propagation of an idea of race as an absolutizing, essentializing concept that motivates racism and racial slavery.
Amor Mundi 6/15/14
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.
Dana Goldstein in The Atlantic partly agrees with the California superior-court judge who ruled this week that the state's teacher tenure system is a mess and discriminates against the state's poorest students. But Goldstein argues that simply abolishing tenure is not the answer. The problem is that good teachers simply don't want to teach in decrepit, disorganized, and discontented schools. "The lesson here is that California's tenure policies may be insensible, but they aren't the only, or even the primary, driver of the teacher-quality gap between the state's middle-class and low-income schools. The larger problem is that too few of the best teachers are willing to work long-term in the country's most racially isolated and poorest neighborhoods. There are lots of reasons why, ranging from plain old racism and classism to the higher principal turnover that turns poor schools into chaotic workplaces that mature teachers avoid. The schools with the most poverty are also more likely to focus on standardized test prep, which teachers dislike. Plus, teachers tend to live in middle-class neighborhoods and may not want a long commute. Educational equality is about more than teacher-seniority rules: It is about making the schools that serve poor children more attractive places for the smartest, most ambitious people to spend their careers." Read more in this week's Weekend Read.
In the Carnegie Journal of Ethics and International Affairs, Roger Berkowitz argues that the increasing reliance on drones is threatening our humanity-but not as usually thought. In "Drones and the Question of 'The Human,'" Berkowitz argues it is a mistake "to use the term 'drone' to refer only to these much publicized military devices. Drones, more precisely understood, are intelligent machines that-possessed of the capacity to perform repetitive tasks with efficiency, reliability, and mechanical rationality-increasingly displace the need for human thinking and doing.... The trend Jünger and Turkle worry about is unmistakable: we are at risk of losing the rich and mature relationships that mark us as human. The rise of social robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other one-dimensional machines that act like humans-without the perceived human weaknesses of distraction, emotion, exhaustion, quirkiness, risk, and unreliability-answers a profound human desire to replace human judgment with the more reliable, more efficient, and more rational judgment of machines. For all the superficial paeans to human instinct and intuition, human beings, in practice, repeatedly prefer drone-like reliability to the uncertain spontaneity of human intuition. In other words, we confront a future in which 'human' is a derogatory adjective signifying inefficiency, incompetence, and backwardness."
Karl Marx imagined that in a socialist utopia, everyone would work less and have more time to study or pursue hobbies. But contrary to Marx's prophecy-and also the prediction of John Maynard Keynes, who argued in the 1930s that improving productivity would result in significantly more leisure time for workers-increases in productivity have coincided with longer workdays. In an ever-wealthier society with more disposable income, the idea of leisure time is becoming culturally devalued. In an interview with Thomas Frank, David Graeber observes that this development has happened in part because of the creation of "bullshit jobs," which he describes as "the kind of jobs that even those who work them feel do not really need to exist," and work coming to be seen as a virtue in itself-and all the more virtuous if the job in question offers little intrinsic gratification: "Suddenly it became possible to see that if there's a rule, it's that the more obviously your work benefits others, the less you're paid for it. CEOs and financial consultants that are actually making other people's lives worse were paid millions, useless paper-pushers got handsomely compensated, people fulfilling obviously useful functions like taking care of the sick or teaching children or repairing broken heating systems or picking vegetables were the least rewarded. But another curious thing that happened after the crash is that people came to see these arrangements as basically justified. You started hearing people say, 'well, of course I deserve to be paid more, because I do miserable and alienating work,' by which they meant not that they were forced to go into the sewers or package fish, but exactly the opposite-that they didn't get to do work that had some obvious social benefit. I saw a very interesting blog by someone named Geoff Shullenberger recently that pointed out that in many companies, there's now an assumption that if there's work that anyone might want to do for any reason other than the money, any work that is seen as having intrinsic merit in itself, they assume they shouldn't have to pay for it. He gave the example of translation work. But it extends to the logic of internships and the like so thoroughly exposed by authors like Sarah Kendzior and Astra Taylor. At the same time, these companies are willing to shell out huge amounts of money to paper-pushers coming up with strategic vision statements who they know perfectly well are doing absolutely nothing."
Evan Hughes considers Karl Ove Knausgaard's suggestive titling of his six book autobiographical opus My Struggle, rendered in its original Norwegian as Min Kamp. Noting that the title was proposed by a friend, and suggesting that it is in some way a response to Knausgaard's childhood spent near the home of famous Norwegian author and Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun, Hughes also considers the way that Knausgaard's distinguishes himself, "sometimes speak[ing] in interviews and public appearances of an irony inherent in the name of the book; where Hitler is all ideology and rigid perfection in Mein Kampf, Knausgaard's struggle as a middle-class dad is quotidian, messy, faintly ridiculous. But his book is not all that ironic or clever. In fact, its directness and sincerity-to the point of frequent, unembarrassed cliché-contributes to the almost shocking immediacy of the voice. My Struggle makes no apologies. Knausgaard does not protect himself from the charge of narcissism by turning to self-deprecation or rationalization or literary tricks. Go ahead and say it's nothing much, he seems to say, but this is my struggle. For me, it counts."
Evgenia Peretz considers the recent blowup in literary criticism over the quality of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch deserves its popularity. Noting that these questions are malleable, she provides an example: "The questions are as old as fiction itself. The history of literature is filled with books now considered masterpieces that were thought hackwork in their time. Take Dickens, the greatest novelist of the Victorian period, whose mantle writers from John Irving to Tom Wolfe to Tartt have sought to inherit. Henry James called Dickens the greatest of superficial novelists ... 'We are aware that this definition confines him to an inferior rank in the department of letters which he adorns; but we accept this consequence of our proposition. It were, in our opinion, an offence against humanity to place Mr. Dickens among the greatest novelists.... He has added nothing to our understanding of human character.'"
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Champlin discusses the dual nature of thinking as a human activity in the Quote of the Week. Swiss philosopher and poet Henri-Frédéric Amiel provides this week's Thought on Thinking. And Roger Berkowitz discusses the value of tenure as both a luxury and evil in the Weekend Read.
Who Does Tenure Help?
A judge in California has ruled that the state's method of granting tenure to teachers is unconstitutional under California's guarantee of equal protection. At the heart of the ruling is a finding that between one and three percent of teachers in California are "grossly ineffective." That amounts to between 3,000 and 9,000 thousand teachers, most of whom are gathered together in many of the poorest and worst school districts in the state. Evidence shows that one year of instruction by a "grossly ineffective" teacher can significantly retard a child's progress. Multiple years of such teaching is dangerous and patently unfair. Because these teachers cannot be fired and because they end up teaching the poorest Californians, the judge found that tenure "impose[s] a disproportionate burden on poor and minority students."
Amor Mundi 5/18/14
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.
Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk argue in a long essay in The Nation that the democratic moment is passing if it has not yet passed. Meaney and Mounk build their argument on a simple critical insight, a kind of "unmasking" of what might be called the hypocrisy of modern democracy. Democracy is supposed to be the will of the people. It is a long time since the small group of Athenian citizens governed themselves. Modern democrats have defended representative democracy as a pragmatic alternative because gathering all the citizens of modern states together for democratic debate is simply impossible. But technology has changed that. "As long as direct democracy was impracticable within the confines of the modern territorial state, the claim that representative institutions constituted the truest form of self-government was just about plausible. But now, in the early twenty-first century, the claim about direct democracy being impossible at the national level and beyond is no longer credible. As the constraints of time and space have eroded, the ubiquitous assumption that we live in a democracy seems very far from reality. The American people may not all fit into Madison Square Garden, but they can assemble on virtual platforms and legislate remotely, if that is what they want. Yet almost no one desires to be that actively political, or to replace representation with more direct political responsibility. Asked to inform themselves about the important political issues of the day, most citizens politely decline. If forced to hold an informed opinion on every law and regulation, many would gladly mount the barricades to defend their right not to rule themselves in such a burdensome manner. The challenge posed by information technology lies not in the possibility that we might adopt more direct forms of democracy but in the disquieting recognition that we no longer dream of ruling ourselves." In short, democracy understood as self-government is now once again possible in the technical age. Such techno-democratic possibility is not, however, leading to more democracy. Thus, Meaney and Mounk conclude, technology allows us to see through the illusions of democracy as hypocritical and hollow. While it is true that people are not flocking to technical versions of mass democracies, they are taking to the streets and organizing protests, and involving themselves in the activities of citizenship. Meaney and Mounk are right, democracy is not assured, and we should never simply assume its continued vitality. But neither should we write it off entirely. Read more in the Weekend Read by Roger Berkowitz.
Narenda Modi is a corruption-fighting son of a tea merchant who has risen from one of India's lowest castes to be its new Prime Minister. He is also a member of an ultra-nationalist organization who is alleged to have enabled anti-Muslim pogroms and has until now been banned from traveling to the United States. An unsigned editorial in the Wall Street Journal gushes: "Mr. Modi's record offers reason for optimism. As governor for 13 years of Gujarat state, he was the archetypal energetic executive, forcing through approvals of new projects and welcoming foreign investment. Gujarat now accounts for 25% of India's exports, and the poverty rate has plunged. As the son of a tea-seller, Mr. Modi also has a gut sense of the economic aspirations of ordinary Indians." In a longer essay in the same paper, Geeta Anand and Gordon Fairclough speak of India's "post-ideological moment": "Voters from different castes and regions, rural and urban areas, the middle class and those who want to be middle class-all turned out to vote for Mr. Modi. 'This is a big shift. It is the beginning of a post-ideological generation, not left-centered,' says Shekhar Gupta, editor in chief of the Indian Express newspaper. 'This is the rise of Indians more interested in themselves. They are aspirational, and they are united in their impatience.'" And yet, in the Guardian, Pankaj Mishra warns: "Back then, it would have been inconceivable that a figure such as Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist chief minister of Gujarat accused, along with his closest aides, of complicity in crimes ranging from an anti-Muslim pogrom in his state in 2002 to extrajudicial killings, and barred from entering the US, may occupy India's highest political office. Modi is a lifelong member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary Hindu nationalist organization inspired by the fascist movements of Europe, whose founder's belief that Nazi Germany had manifested 'race pride at its highest' by purging the Jews is by no means unexceptional among the votaries of Hindutva, or ''Hinduness'. In 1948, a former member of the RSS murdered Gandhi for being too soft on Muslims. The outfit, traditionally dominated by upper-caste Hindus, has led many vicious assaults on minorities. A notorious executioner of dozens of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 crowed that he had slashed open with his sword the womb of a heavily pregnant woman and extracted her foetus. Modi himself described the relief camps housing tens of thousands of displaced Muslims as 'child-breeding centres'. Such rhetoric has helped Modi sweep one election after another in Gujarat."
Subscriptions to academic journals can run into the $1,000s. What is more, after a publication and review process that takes years, the articles are frequently barricaded behind firewalls for years more. Robert Darnton, despairing over inaccessibility of academic journals and what that means both for both research and the public good, notes that there is, in fact, some hope in any number of organizations looking to align the interests of authors and readers both: "the desire to reach readers may be one of the most underestimated forces in the world of knowledge. Aside from journal articles, academics produce a large numbers of books, yet they rarely make much money from them. Authors in general derive little income from a book a year or two after its publication. Once its commercial life has ended, it dies a slow death, lying unread, except for rare occasions, on the shelves of libraries, inaccessible to the vast majority of readers. At that stage, authors generally have one dominant desire-for their work to circulate freely through the public; and their interest coincides with the goals of the open-access movement." The new model of open-source academic publishing seeks to subsidize peer review by charging a fee for submission. Good idea.
Hardly any idea is more in vogue these days than 'critical thinking.' There is even a National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking that defines critical thinking as the intellectually disciplined process of skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, and evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. Isn't that what we are supposed to be teaching our children and our students? Not according to Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University. In "The Stone" in the New York Times, Roth argues that students-and not only students-are too critical in their approach to texts and ideas. "Our best college students are very good at being critical. In fact being smart, for many, means being critical. Having strong critical skills shows that you will not be easily fooled. It is a sign of sophistication, especially when coupled with an acknowledgment of one's own 'privilege.'The combination of resistance to influence and deflection of responsibility by confessing to one's advantages is a sure sign of one's ability to negotiate the politics of learning on campus. But this ability will not take you very far beyond the university. Taking things apart, or taking people down, can provide the satisfactions of cynicism. But this is thin gruel." Critical thinking is important. First, however, learning requires submission to the text, the facts, or the thinker. Too often, students and even professors skip the hard work of learning and proceed directly to criticism. As I am constantly telling my students, first try to understand Nietzsche before you decide if he is right or wrong.
In an essay on the racial-bias in the death penalty, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes: "When [Ramesh] Ponnuru suggests that the way to correct for the death penalty's disproportionate use is to execute more white people, he is presenting a world in which the death penalty has neither history nor context. One merely flips the 'Hey Guys, Let's Not Be Racist' switch and then the magic happens. Those of us who cite the disproportionate application of the death penalty as a reason for outlawing it do so because we believe that a criminal-justice system is not an abstraction but a real thing, existing in a real context, with a real history. In America, the history of the criminal justice-and the death penalty-is utterly inseparable from white supremacy. During the Civil War, black soldiers were significantly more likely to be court-martialed and executed than their white counterparts. This practice continued into World War II. 'African-Americans comprised 10 percent of the armed forces but accounted for almost 80 percent of the soldiers executed during the war,' writes law professor Elizabeth Lutes Hillman."
Omar Encarnación argues in Foreign Affairs that we should pay attention to Pope Francis not only because of his well-remarked attention to economic inequality. "More surprising than Francis' endorsement of economic populism and even liberalization theology are his views on social issues, homosexuality in particular, which suggest an even deeper Latin American influence on Francis' papacy. On a flight back from Brazil last July, he told reporters: 'If someone is gay and seeks the Lord with good will, who am I to judge?' Then, in an interview in September, he called on Catholics to 'get over their obsession with abortion, contraceptives, and homosexuality.' Most recently, in an interview in March, Francis insinuated that he supported same-sex civil unions and that the church would tolerate them -- for economic reasons. 'Matrimony is between a man and a woman,' he said. But moves to 'regulate diverse situations of cohabitation [are] driven by the need to regulate economic aspects among persons, as for instance to assure medical care.'"
Dahlia Schweitzer praises the work of photographer Cindy Sherman for daring to reveal what's beneath: "After all, Sherman's photographs are an encyclopedia of body language, identities performed with carefully arranged figures. The body is a collection of limbs used to convey roles, personalities, and situations. Each gesture, each object, is loaded with meaning. Her photographs are never casual snapshots or self-portraits. Rather, they are explorations of arrangement and archetype. She questions stereotype and learned behavior through her compositions and subjects, and through the diorama-like environments she creates for each scenario. She exposes the ruptures under the surface by taking everyday life and shifting it off-kilter, examining society's expectations for appearance and behavior. Her photographs work for the attention they bring to that which does not fit, to the exact point of the tear."
Heidegger, Arendt, and the Political
Babette Babich speaks with Roger Berkowitz and Tracy Strong in a long conversation touching upon Hannah Arendt, the Margarethe von Trotta film, managerial governance, totalitarianism, the Eichmann case, Stanley Milgram, evil, democracy, Martin Heidegger, and politics in the 21st century.
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Jennifer M. Hudson in the Quote of the Week compares Thomas Piketty to Arendt's approach to populism and technocratic rule. And in the Weekend Read, Roger Berkowitz argues that claims portending the end of democracy are overstated.
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.
The Danger of Intellectuals
[T]here are, indeed, few things that are more frightening than the steadily increasing prestige of scientifically minded brain trusters in the councils of government during the last decades. The trouble is not that they are cold-blooded enough to "think the unthinkable," but that they do not think.
-Hannah Arendt, "On Violence"
Hannah Arendt's warning about the power of educated elites in government is one of the most counter-intuitive claims made by an irreverently paradoxical thinker. It is also, given her writing about the thoughtlessness of Adolf Eichmann, jarring to see Arendt call ivy-league graduates with Ph.D.s both dangerous and thoughtless. And yet Arendt is clear that one of the great dangers facing our time is the prestige and power accorded to intellectuals in matters of government.
Arendt issues her warning in the introduction to her essay "On Violence." It comes amidst her discussion of the truth of Lenin's prediction that the 20th century would be a "century of wars" and a "century of violence."
And it follows her claim that even though the technical development of weapons have made war unjustifiable, war nevertheless continues for the "simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene." It is "under these circumstances" of extraordinary violence, Arendt writes, that the entry of social scientists and intellectuals into government is so profoundly frightening.
Whereas most political thinkers believe that in violent times we should welcome educated and rational "scientifically minded brain trusters" in government, Arendt is skeptical. Her reasoning is that these social scientists calculate, they do not think. She explains what she means writing that,
"Instead of indulging in such old-fashioned, uncomputerizable activity, [scientifically minded brain trusters] reckon with the consequences of certain hypothetically assumed constellations without, however, being able to test their hypotheses against actual occurrences."
She has in mind those consultants, talking heads, and commentators in and out of government who create logically convincing hypothetical constructions of future events. This could be the claim, heard so often today, that if Iran gets a nuclear bomb they will use it or that Al Qaeda and terrorism threatens the existence or freedoms of the United States. For Arendt, such claims always begin the same way, with a hypothesis. They state a possible outcome of a series of events. They then discuss and dismiss alternative possibilities. Finally, this hypothesis turns "immediately, usually after a few paragraphs, into a "fact," which then gives birth to a whole string of similar non-facts, with the result that the purely speculative character of the whole enterprise is forgotten." In other words, we move from the speculative possibility that Iran would use nuclear weapons or that terrorism is a meaningful threat to the United States to the conclusion that these outcomes are facts. The danger of intellectuals in politics is that they have a unique facility with ideas and arguments that are quite capable of so enrapturing their own minds with the power of their arguments that they lose sight of reality.
When Arendt speaks about the danger of intellectuals in government she has in mind the example of the Vietnam War. In her essay "Lying and Politics"—a response to the Pentagon Papers—she hammers at the same theme of the danger intellectuals pose to politics. The Pentagon Papers were written by and written about "professional 'problem solvers,'" who were "drawn into government from the universities and the various think tanks, some of them equipped with game theories and systems analyses, thus prepared, as they thought, to solve all the 'problems' of foreign policy." The John F. Kennedy administration is famous, very much as is the Presidency of Barack Obama, for luring the "best and the brightest" into government service. We need to understand Arendt's claim that of why such problem solvers are dangerous.
These "problem solvers," she argues, were men of "self-confidence, who 'seem rarely to doubt their ability to prevail.'" They were "not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being 'rational,' and they were indeed to a rather frightening degree above 'sentimentality' and in love with 'theory,' the world of sheer mental effort." They were men so familiar with theories and the manipulation of facts to fit logical argumentation, that they could massage facts to fit their theories. "They were eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them." They sought to transform the contingency of facts into the logical coherence of a lawful and pseudo-scientific narrative. But since the political world is not like the natural world of science, the temptation to fit facts to reality meant that they became practiced in self-deception. That is why the "hard and stubborn facts, which so many intelligence analysts were paid so much to collect, were ignored."
For Arendt, the "best-guarded secret of the Pentagon papers" is the "relation, or, rather, nonrelation, between facts and decision" which was prepared by the intellectual "defactualization" enabled by the problem solvers. "No reality and no common sense," Arendt writes, "could penetrate the minds of the problem-solvers."
Arendt's suspicion of intellectuals in politics long predates her concern about the Vietnam War, and began with her personal experience of German intellectuals in the 1930s. She was shocked by how many of her friends and how many educated and brilliant German professors, lawyers, and bureaucrats—including but not limited to her mentor and lover Martin Heidegger—were able to justify and rationalize their complicity in the administration of the Third Reich, often by the argument that their participation was a lesser evil.
Similarly, she was struck by the reaction to her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which intellectuals constructed elaborate critiques of her book and her argument that had nothing at all to do with the facts of what she had written. In both instances, Arendt became aware of the intellectual facility for massaging facts to fit theories and thus the remoteness from reality that can infect those who live too easily in the life of the mind.
The Iraq War under George W. Bush and the war on terrorism waged under Bush and President Barack Obama are, today, clear examples of situations in which now two U.S. administrations have convinced themselves of the need for military action and unparalleled surveillance of citizens under indisputably false pretenses. Iraq, contrary to assertions that were made by a policy of elite of brain-trusters, had no connection with the 9/11 attacks and had no nuclear weapons.
Similarly, terrorism today does not pose a threat to the existence or the freedom of the United States. What terrorism threatens is the continued existence of the U.S. as the world superpower. What we are fighting for is not our survival, but our continued predominance and power. Some might argue that the fight for continued world dominance is worth the costs of our privacy and liberty; others may disagree. But we should at the very least be honest about what we are fighting for and what the costs of that fight are.
We see a similar flight from fact to theory in the Trayvon Martin case. Shameless commentators on the right continue to insist that race played no role in the altercation, ignoring the fact of racism and the clear racial profiling in this case. But similarly hysterical leftist commentators insist that Zimmerman killed Martin primarily because of his race. Let's stipulate that George Zimmerman followed Martin in some part because of his race. But let's also recognize that he killed Martin—at least according to the weight of the testimony—from below after a struggle. We do not know who started the struggle, but there was a struggle and it is quite likely that the smaller and armed Zimmerman feared for his safety. Yes, race was involved. Yes racism persists. Yes we should be angry about these sad facts and should work to change the simply unethical environment in which many impoverished youths are raised and educated. But it is not true that Martin was killed primarily because of his race. It is also likely that the only reason Zimmerman was put on trial for murder was to satisfy the clamor of those advancing their theory, the facts be damned.
If Arendt is justifiably wary of intellectuals in politics, she recognizes their importance as well. The Pentagon papers, which describe the follies of problem-solvers, were written by the very same problem solvers in an unprecedented act of self-criticism. "We should not forget that we owe it to the problem-solvers' efforts at impartial self-examination, rare among such people, that the actors' attempts at hiding their role behind a screen of self-protective secrecy were frustrated." At their best, intellectuals and problems-solvers are also possessed of a "basic integrity" that compels them to admit when their theoretical fantasies have failed. Such admissions frequently come too late, long after the violence and damage has been done. And yet, the fidelity to the facts that fires the best of intellectual and scientific inquiry is, in the end, the only protection we have against the self-same intellectual propensity to self-deception.
The Perplexities of Secularism
Does a cross in a courtroom infringe on the religious freedom of non-Christians involved in legal proceedings? Does it violate the principles of a secular state? These questions have recently arisen in Germany thanks to the trial of Beate Zschäpe. Zschäpe is the one surviving member of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), a band of neo-Nazis that allegedly murdered eight people of Turkish descent, one person of Greek descent, and one non-immigrant German police officer in a string of premeditated attacks from 2000 to 2007.
Zschäpe is currently standing trial at the upper court of appeals in Munich, and like other legal chambers in the state of Bavaria, its décor includes a modest wooden cross.
This cross did not evoke comment from the judge and lawyers in the run-up to the trial, and it was not an initial source of concern for the victims' immediate relatives, who are acting as joint plaintiffs in the case. But it did draw the ire of Mahmut Tanal, a member of the Turkish parliament who attended the first day of the proceedings. Tanal, who is affiliated with the secularist Republican People's Party, argued that a religious symbol like a cross has no place in the courtroom and should be removed immediately. In his estimation, the cross not only violated the principle of state neutrality in religious affairs, but also constituted a "threat" for the Muslim relatives of the Turkish victims.
Several conservative politicians in Germany responded to his complaints with sharply worded defenses of the cross. Norbert Geis, a parliamentarian for Germany's Christian Social Union (CSU), announced that "the cross belongs to our culture" and urged Tanal to display more respect for the Christian influence on German life. Günter Krings, a member of parliament for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), contended that the cross "symbolizes brotherly love and tolerance and is an expression of our Christian-Western roots." And Günther Beckstein (CSU), Bavaria's former Minister President, insisted that it was important to make clear, even in a courtroom, that "God stands above the person."
The matter might have ended there if one of the joint plaintiffs, Talar T., had not agreed with Mahmut Tanal and filed a motion for the cross to be removed. Talar T. insisted that he had a pressing claim "not to be exposed to the influence of a religion—even in the form of a symbol—by the German state."
Significantly, there is no established legal precedent on this and related matters. The State Court in Saarbrücken ruled in 2001 that a cross must be removed from a courtroom when a concerned party believes that its presence injures her or his right to religious freedom. But it is not clear whether this judgment would apply to courts in Bavaria, especially when Germany's federalist system grants individual states considerable legal and policymaking autonomy. Indeed, it is precisely this system that has allowed Bavaria to hang crosses in its courtrooms when most other German states avoid and even disavow the practice.
We should not place undue emphasis on this aspect of the trial, which is highly charged for reasons that have nothing to do with the presence or absence of a cross. After all, German prosecutors accuse Zschäpe and her NSU compatriots of a string of xenophobic if not racist murders, and they charge that incompetence at the highest levels of German law enforcement allowed many if not all of these murders to occur. Nevertheless, I would argue that the contention and uncertainty surrounding the cross remain significant in their own right, for they speak to important arguments about the nature of secularism as a modern historical phenomenon.
In a series of recent articles and a concluding book, the University of Chicago anthropologist Hussein Agrama has proposed that secularism, contrary to the normative claims advanced in its favor, is not an institutional framework in which religion and politics are clearly separated. Instead, secularism consistently fashions religion as an object of governmental management and intervention, and it therefore expresses the state's sovereign power to decide "what count should count as essentially religious and what scope it can have in social life." Yet in the act of exercising this power, the secular state repeatedly blurs the very line between religion and politics that it aims to draw. For example: if a state insists that religiosity may only be expressed in the private sphere, what is the nature and extent of that sphere? Does it only include the home? Or does it also encompass communal places of worship, or believers' choice of clothing and other forms of adornment? Is not the demarcation of a private realm of legitimate religious expression itself a political act?
In the end, Agrama argues that secularism is not a solution that neatly defines religion's place in contemporary life. Instead, it constitutes a problem-space "wherein the question of where to draw a line between religion and politics continually arises." Moreover, this question cannot be easily ignored, for it is inextricably bound up with the distribution of liberal rights and freedoms.
In Germany's case, the state and federal governments, including the one in Bavaria, have adopted the principle that the state is independent of religious institutions and should not invoke or favor one religious tradition over another. The state and federal governments have also affirmed the right of all citizens to express their religious beliefs without undue interference from the state. These commitments are basic elements of German liberal governance, and the presence of the cross in Bavarian courtrooms would appear to complicate if not directly contradict them. To use Agrama's language, the cross blurs the line between religion and politics, and it raises questions about the substance of the religious freedom that citizens may claim.
As my preceding discussion indicates, proponents of the status quo in Bavaria have tended to finesse these difficulties by insisting that the cross is merely a "symbol." The cross, they imply, evokes a tradition that has exerted a formative influence on culture and politics in Germany and humanist thinking more broadly, but its presence is ultimately incidental to the legal proceedings and judgments that the state initiates. Moreover, the cross does not "threaten" non-Christians because it does not enshrine Christianity as the state's religion, and it does not infringe on citizens' freedom of religious belief or their equality before the law. To an important extent, this logic would seem to deny that the cross, at least in this context, is a "religious" artifact at all.
Of course, we might well wonder whether a symbol that is incidental to legal proceedings really needs to be present in a courtroom in the first place. More importantly, though, we might wish to question the innocence of the cross given the larger context of the case against Beate Zschäpe.
The NSU murders have led many migrants and post-migrants, including those from Muslim-majority countries like Turkey, to doubt their full inclusion in the German nation and polity. Moreover, the climate of lingering distrust surrounding Islam has only sharpened many Muslims' perception that their faith is not a welcome and integral aspect of German life. Thus, even if the inclusion of a cross is not meant to be a "threatening" gesture, it is hardly a neutral, merely "symbolic" one either.
In the wake of the Arab Spring, many Euro-American commentators have wondered whether the new governments in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries will be "secular" or "religious." At least some of them have also maintained that "secular" governments will further the region's democratization and long-term stability. To my mind, this line of thinking presumes that states in Europe and North America are exemplary polities which have more or less resolved the perplexities of secularism. But if the recent debates over the cross in Germany are any indication, such a judgment is premature if not complacent and self-serving. Even in those polities where secularism seems firmly established, uncertainty and dissension over religion persist. Indeed, such a condition may be the norm that defines secularist structures of power, not their fleeting and aberrant exception.
NOTE: as I was finishing this post, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it will rule on the constitutional status of prayer in town board meetings, based on a case from Greece, New York. Many of my remarks on the Zschäpe trial are pertinent in this instance as well.
-Jeffrey Jurgens