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Amor Mundi 5/3/15
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.
Anna Sauerbrey has an op-ed in the NY Times about the ongoing trial of Oskar Gröning, what will likely be the last trial of a German Nazi for crimes against humanity. One captivating aspect of the trial is that Gröning has long admitted to his role in the genocide and expressed regret for it. For Sauerbrey, the core of the trial is Gröning's uncanny banality. "At the trial, Mr. Gröning said that from his perspective, the killing of the Hungarian Jews, which had been meticulously planned and for which several new gas chambers had been built in Auschwitz, was 'routine.' What shocked him were merely individual outbursts of violence, like an SS man beating a crying infant to death. The killings in the gas chambers, he said, were 'orderly' and 'clean.' He rarely said the word 'murder.' 'In 24 hours you could take care of 5,000 people,' he said. 'After all, that's how things went in a concentration camp.' Mr. Gröning's language naturally makes one think of Adolf Eichmann, and how his detached explanation of his role as a bureaucrat, at his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, led Hannah Arendt to coin the phrase 'the banality of evil.' Ms. Arendt was, some say, fooled by the defendant, and that Eichmann had embraced the hatred fueling the killing machine. But if Ms. Arendt was wrong about Eichmann, she was on to something, something we now see in what Mr. Gröning is saying. It is the horrifying, mind-wrecking banality of evil condensed in a sentence like 'that's how things went in a concentration camp' that has sustained the German self-narrative of guilt, much more than compassion ever could have. Mr. Gröning makes us question ourselves. I, too, am afraid I wouldn't have resisted. The victims tell us: We must never forget. The perpetrators say: We might do it again." Arendt did not accept Eichmann's claim that he was a mere bureaucrat; she insisted that he chose to participate in genocide and should be killed for his acts. More importantly, she agreed with Sauerbrey that the key question of the Eichmann trial was why some Germans chose to resist Nazi evil while others participated thoughtlessly. The question was, and remains, thus: why could people like Gröning conclude that the orderly planned killing of Jews was routine even as they were shocked by disorderly outbursts of violence? After a semester teaching a course on moral and political courage, it is now clear that what separates those who resist from those who cooperate is simple: it is character. The people who resist simply have an idea of themselves that disallows them from doing certain things. They have a sense of self and the courage to be who they are no matter the costs. They have depth, which is the opposite of banality.
We live in an age of social science. Everywhere we turn, and in every newspaper we read, we are bombarded with statistics about human behavior. Policy wonks from Cass Sunstein to David Brooks want to use social science research to nudge people to behave in more rational and more responsible ways. But not everyone is an advocate of such research. In her lifetime, Hannah Arendt was eternally suspicious of social science data. First, because she insists that human freedom means that we are never as predictable as data would have us believe. And second, because the admitted success of data as a predictor of mass behavior leads to a loss of faith in the freedom and thus greatness of human action, thus an acceptance of the machine-like behavior of humans. It is thus helpful to remember that many of the seemingly endless studies about human psychological behavior are total bunk, as Kas Thomas writes (in admittedly colorful language). "An effort to replicate 100 research findings in psychology turned up the disturbing fact that key findings from only 39 of the published studies could be reproduced. From the 30 April 2015 article in Nature: 'The results should convince everyone that psychology has a replicability problem,' says Hal Pashler, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, and an author of one of the papers whose findings were successfully repeated. 'A lot of working scientists assume that if it's published, it's right,' he says. 'This makes it hard to dismiss that there are still a lot of false positives in the literature.' But Daniele Fanelli, who studies bias and scientific misconduct at Stanford University in California, says the results suggest that the reproducibility of findings in psychology does not necessarily lag behind that in other sciences. There is plenty of room for improvement, he adds, but earlier studies have suggested that reproducibility rates in cancer biology and drug discovery could be even lower. 'From my expectations, these are not bad at all,' Fanelli says. 'Though I have spoken to psychologists who are quite disappointed.' In other words, these results aren't that bad, really, because they're just as shitty as in other, 'harder' sciences!"
Violence can be useful. In response to injustice, it can even be justifiable on a utilitarian scale if violence brings attention to injustice and thus serves the doing of justice. But usually, violence does not lead to justice but rather to more violence. That is the danger of political uses of violence, as Hannah Arendt understood it in her essay On Violence. Responding to the protests following the unexplained brutal beating and subsequent death of Freddie Gray while he was held in police custody in Baltimore, Ta-Nehisi Coates says that calls for 'nonviolence' are being made in bad faith, although that does not in turn justify violence: "When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is 'correct' or 'wise,' any more than a forest fire can be 'correct' or 'wise.' Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community." The violent protests in Baltimore shed light on the injustice of police violence. There is a question of whether the violent protests were necessary in that aim. But so far, it is hard to deny that the violent protests have yielded what they sought and that they may prove to be one of those rare instances when violence proves itself in the service of justice.
The American Association of University Professors has released a report on the firing of Steven Salaita. As the report concludes, "At the heart of this case is the question of Professor Salaita's employment status at the University of Illinois when Chancellor Wise informed him that she would not forward his appointment to the board of trustees." Since the AAUP finds, correctly, that Salaita had indeed been hired, his irregular firing without procedural safeguards was a violation of his protected status. A larger question in the report concerns the claim by the University of Illinois that the firing was justified because of the uncivil nature of Professor Salaita's comments. On this point, the AAUP's report takes a strong stand against civility: "Statements by Chancellor Wise and the trustees insisted that 'civility' was a standard by which the fitness of a scholar and teacher could be judged. They used synonyms such as courtesy and respect, and they maintained that incivility threatened the comfort and security of students. The trustees claimed that disrespectful speech 'is not an acceptable form of civil argument' and 'has no place . . . in our democracy.' There are three objections to these claims. The first is that 'civility' is vague and ill-defined.... The second objection is that, inevitably, the standard of civility conflates the tone of an enunciation with its content.... The third objection is that, even if the tone of one's expression is highly charged, it does not constitute grounds for punishment. Whether it is a matter of First Amendment rights or of the principles of academic freedom, there is concurrence on the dangers to democracy of attempting to outlaw emotionally provocative speech. The CAFT report cites a 1971 Supreme Court case that struck down punishment because of a speaker's use of an offensive expletive-'an expletive Dr. Salaita's tweets are much given to.' The Court ruled, 'We cannot sanction the view that the Constitution, while solicitous of the cognitive content of individual speech, has little or no regard for that emotive function which practically speaking may often be the more important element of the overall message sought to be communicated.' In the Davis case at UCLA, one of the dissenting regents put it similarly: 'In this day and age when the decibel level of political debate . . . has reached the heights it has, it is unrealistic and disingenuous to demand as a condition of employment that the professor address political rallies in the muted cadences of scholarly exchanges. Professors are products of their times even as the rest of us.'" One problem with such reasoning, however, is that the AAUP wants to insist that professors are different from the rest of us and that professors deserve extra protection of academic freedom because they are engaged in the pursuit of truth that may and often is unconventional and controversial. If that is true, and it should be, then it may well require that professors act professorial in order to claim their academic freedom. In other words, the civility that often is out of place in political arguments is a structuring condition of academic inquiry.
An Ideologue and a Meddlesome Egoist
Pope Francis is on a mission, and the measure of his potential success is the fear he is causing. Garry Wills asks the right question: who is scared of Pope Francis? It turns out some very wealthy and powerful people are. "Those who profit from what harms the earth have to keep the poor out of sight. They have trouble enough fighting off the scientific, economic, and political arguments against bastioned privilege. Bringing basic morality to the fore could be fatal to them. That is why they are mounting such a public pre-emptive strike against the encyclical before it even appears. They must not only discredit the pope's words (whatever they turn out to be), they must block them, ridicule them, destroy them. The measure of their fear is demonstrated by an article in First Things, the Catholic journal that defended the donations to bishops of the pederast religious founder Marcial Maciel. The First Things writer Maureen Mullarkey calls the pope 'an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist,' and continues: 'Francis sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda.'" At a time of incredible inaction around the world on all issues from climate change and inequality to corruption and terrorism, the one world leader who seems able and willing to take bold action informed by common sense moral intuitions is the Catholic Pope. One hopes some other leaders follow his example.
Elisa Gabbert wonders after prose's forgotten unit of organization: "Reading a book, I always glance ahead to see where the section or chapter ends, so I know when I can stop reading if I want or need to. Stopping mid-paragraph is deeply unsatisfying--no sense of closure, no easy way to remember where I left off when I next pick it up. Claustrophobic tendencies aside, of late I am actively interested in paragraphs, their formal possibilities. Sentences are taken to be the basic unit of prose, and we use them metonymically--we say 'She writes wonderful sentences' when we mean to praise the author's prose. James Salter is so well-known for his sentences that it rises to the level (or sinks, I suppose) of critical cliché. In a 2013 profile in the New Yorker, Salter is quoted, in a letter to a friend: 'I wanted to get past the great-writer-of-sentences thing. I don't care about that, at this stage.' But why is it, I wonder, we rarely talk about a writer's way with paragraphs? It may be because there is a lot more you can do with a sentence to vary it; syntax and diction, all those micro-choices that add up to the macro-style of (say) a novel, happen at the level of the sentence. There are pretty much only two ways to vary your paragraphs. The first is length. Some writers work in short paragraphs, some in fluctuating lengths, others in long, multi-page-spanning paragraphs, like our incantatory friend above. Some writers work at both ends, depending on the book--compare As I Lay Dying to Absalom, Absalom! It's no coincidence that the former, with its many breaks, is easier to read; it could almost pass for YA. Bestsellers keep paragraphs and chapters short as a tactic--they make for more addictive, snack-like reading, so the reader repeatedly thinks I'll just read one more."
Matt Taibbi thinks Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders's run for the presidency could invigorate our moribund political culture, and he is infuriated that some people don't think that the Senator is being serious: "this whole question of 'seriousness'--which will dominate coverage of the Sanders campaign--should really be read as a profound indictment of our political system, which is now so openly an oligarchy that any politician who doesn't have the blessing of the bosses is marginalized before he or she steps into the ring."
Michelle Garcia offers a haunting tale of memory and time that somehow unite her father's death and her decision to go and work in refugee camps in the Sahara: "No longer do I organize time chronologically. Keeping time reminds me of where I went wrong. Saturday afternoon: I call my father and promise to call back on Sunday. The conversation was difficult, we talked about my brother. Sunday: I prepare for bed and remember to call my father, but my boyfriend says, The last conversation upset you and it's late. Call tomorrow first thing. I remember the moment vividly. Monday morning: I walk into the office, sit down at my desk, and lift the phone to call my father. My cellphone rings. It's my brother and he's crying. Time, in that moment, was like a record player needle on a scratched album, unable to advance. But I was just about to call, the phone was in my hand.... Neat divisions of time are largely obliterated in the war of forgetting. The past and present co-mingle, speak to, and inform each other. Anyone who has ever lived through war, with its echoes of regret, knows that a war of forgetting endures after the bodies are buried, the peace accords are signed, and the soldiers remove their uniforms. The war of forgetting is the undocumented legacy of war, often relegated to the psycho-analytic bins of trauma, nostalgia, and remorse. For the next seven years, the war of forgetting would dominate my travels and my attention, but after each experience, I hesitated to write about what I had seen until I could give shape and words to the absence, the missing."
Omid Safi diagnoses the modern disease of business, or busyness. "This disease of being 'busy' (and let's call it what it is, the dis-ease of being busy, when we are never at ease) is spiritually destructive to our health and wellbeing. It saps our ability to be fully present with those we love the most in our families, and keeps us from forming the kind of community that we all so desperately crave.... It doesn't have to be this way. In many Muslim cultures, when you want to ask them how they're doing, you ask: in Arabic, Kayf haal-ik? or, in Persian, Haal-e shomaa chetoreh? How is your haal? What is this haal that you inquire about? It is the transient state of one's heart. In reality, we ask, 'How is your heart doing at this very moment, at this breath?' When I ask, 'How are you?' that is really what I want to know. I am not asking how many items are on your to-do list, nor asking how many items are in your inbox. I want to know how your heart is doing, at this very moment. Tell me. Tell me your heart is joyous, tell me your heart is aching, tell me your heart is sad, tell me your heart craves a human touch. Examine your own heart, explore your soul, and then tell me something about your heart and your soul. Tell me you remember you are still a human being, not just a human doing. Tell me you're more than just a machine, checking off items from your to-do list. Have that conversation, that glance, that touch. Be a healing conversation, one filled with grace and presence. Put your hand on my arm, look me in the eye, and connect with me for one second."
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
Bard Hall, Bard College, 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #8
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, May 15, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 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 Champlin discusses how Arendt's use of the "Archimedean point" in Chapter 5 of The Human Condition helps us understand the Anthropocene in the Quote of the Week. Ray Bradbury provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate a photo of a personal Arendt library that includes, among other things, a thinking cap that is used to aid the reader in the battle of ideas in this week's Library feature.
Archimedes and the Anthropocene
Source: YouTube
By Jeffrey Champlin
"Without actually standing where Archimedes wished to stand (dos moi pou sto), still bound to the earth through the human condition, we have found a way to act on the earth and within terrestrial nature as though we dispose of it from outside, from the Archimedean point. And even at the risk of endangering the natural life process we expose the earth to universal, cosmic forces alien to nature's household."
-- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
The final chapter of The Human Condition takes an apparently disheartening turn beyond Arendt's core development of the concepts of labor, work, and action. While Chapter 4 on "Action" offers the hope of people coming together to start something new in a reinvigorated sense of the political, Chapter 5 seems to narrate the inevitable decline of "the modern age's triumphal world alienation." In particular, her use of the way science can now "act on the earth" fundamentally challenges the optimistic sense with which she discussed "action" earlier in the book.
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.
To Transform the Human Species
By Jeffrey Champlin
In Chapter 13 of The Origins of Totalitarianism, "Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government," Arendt connects the universal claim of totalitarianism to its project of completely transforming humanity:
The law of Nature or the law of History, if properly executed, is expected to produce mankind as its end product; and this expectation lies behind the claim to global rule of all totalitarian governments. Totalitarian policy claims to transform the human species into an active unfailing carrier of a law to which human beings otherwise would only passively and reluctantly be subjected (Origins, 462).
Arendt's interchangeable reference to "the law of Nature or the law of History" indicates one of the most controversial claims of her study: that the racist Nazi government and Soviet communist government both followed a deeper underlying idea. To some liberals of the day, the "or" marked an outrageous equivalence since they held the Soviet Union to be qualitatively different due to its stated goals of equality. For Arendt though, the parallel works because both governments have the same understanding of the law. Arendt argues that traditionally the law functions as an imperfect mediator between a higher, stable source of authority and the changeable nature of human beings. For Nazi and Soviet governments, however, the law itself takes on a transcendent and unquestionable status. Law no longer represents authority but announces it immediately.
Amor Mundi 11/9/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
The Creep In Our Kitchen, In Our Car, And Everywhere
Sue Halpern writes that the internet is getting creepy. Beyond smart phones and smart watches, we now also are confronted with smart cars and smart refrigerators. Cars remember where we like to go and can direct us there; they will soon even drive for us. Refrigerators know our favorite milk and our guilty pleasures and can order them to be delivered before we realize we need them. All these smart appliances are wired, connecting us and the immense and revelatory data of our lives to the world of commerce and security. Companies can, of course, pay for that data and subtly or not suggest new products. And the government, or others, can hack into the streams of data we trail behind us to know where we've been, what we're doing, and even what we want. Halpern cites Jeremy Rifkin, an evangelist of the coming internet of things, who is clear that in this new age, there will be no privacy: "Connecting everyone and everything in a neural network brings the human race out of the age of privacy, a defining characteristic of modernity, and into the era of transparency." For Rifkin, we should have no qualms about trading privacy for a coming age of unparalleled convenience and security. The more information about ourselves we offer up to the internet of things, the more benefits we will receive. As Halpern argues this week in the NY Review of Books, "These trade-offs will only increase as the quotidian becomes digitized, leaving fewer and fewer opportunities to opt out. It's one thing to edit the self that is broadcast on Facebook and Twitter, but the Internet of Things, which knows our viewing habits, grooming rituals, medical histories, and more, allows no such interventions-unless it is our behaviors and curiosities and idiosyncracies themselves that end up on the cutting room floor." We are entering a world in which we need to rethink what it means to be private in a world when we are so connected to the internet of things that the internet-and those who can mine it-knows more about ourselves than we do.
Linda Holmes talks up the pleasure of being alone and asks how, if at all, we can truly be by and with ourselves: "We have a certain cultural mistrust of solitude, I think. It is for weirdos and lost souls, spinsters and misfits. But in truth, I can't tell you what a luxury I think it is to be entitled to it. Most of the time, I want good company, like most people do. But the experience of earned, voluntary aloneness is, among other things, instructive. I don't think you can really understand how accustomed you are to being scheduled and operating off an internal to-do list at almost all times until you think to yourself, 'My goal will be to get to Providence by 4,' and then you think, 'Why is there a goal?' And then it begins to make you internally rebellious: What if I drove with no goal? What if I had nowhere to be all day until it was time to sleep and I discussed with no one where to stop and take a picture, where to have lunch, what shop to go in, or which way to turn on the trail? What would I do if I could do anything - in this micro-environment, in this moment, at the point of this particular pause, what is my wish?"
Attorney General Eric Holder is about to resign. His legacy: after six years as the nation's top law enforcement officer, no one has gone to jail either for breaking American laws against torture or for breaking U.S. laws regarding financial fraud relating to the financial crisis. In a recent speech at NYU, Holder explained why it is that corporate executives are not criminally prosecutable: "Responsibility remains so diffuse, and top executives so insulated, that any misconduct could again be considered more a symptom of the institution's culture than a result of the willful actions of any single individual." As Matt Taibi glosses such doublespeak in Rolling Stone, "In other words, people don't commit crimes, corporate culture commits crimes!" Taibi's moral clarity comes in an article on Alayne Fleischmann: "the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported - more on that later) to keep the public from hearing. Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as 'massive criminal securities fraud' in the bank's mortgage operations. Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she's kept her mouth shut since then. 'My closest family and friends don't know what I've been living with,' she says. 'Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview.'" Fleischmann saw crimes committed, blew the whistle on them, and is angry that these crimes are still not being prosecuted. Her choice to speak now appears to be a brave one: "And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. 'I could be sued into bankruptcy,' she says. 'I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don't start speaking up, then this really is all we're going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.'"
Oligarchy, From Left And Right
In a short essay seeking to revive the 20th century American conservative James Burnham, Daniel McCarthy argues that we need to learn from Burnham's combination of unblinkered realism regarding power and insight into the non-ideological managerial elite. He suggests that, as a political culture, there's just one way forward: "What has happened in America since the end of the Cold War, however, is that competition for popular favor has been reduced to a propaganda exercise-employing myths, symbols, and other 'derivatives'-disconnected from policies of material interest to the ruling class. Thus monetary policy, foreign policy, and positions on trade and immigration vary little between Republican and Democratic presidents. This is a terrible situation-if you're not part of the elite. If you are, all the gridlock and venom of our politics is simply irrelevant to the bottom line. For the non-elite, however, insecurity of all kinds continues to rise, as does a sense that the country is being sold out from under you. America's ruling class has bought itself time-for continuing capitalism in an age of worldwide managerial revolution-at the expense of America's middle and working classes. Reform, alas, will not come from 'throw the bums out' populism of either the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street varieties. It can only come from two directions: the best of the people must grow conscious of how oligarchy operates and why populist leadership is a paradox, and new factions among the elite must be willing to open competition on more serious fronts-campaigning not only on myths and formulas but on the very substance of the managerial revolution."
Charles P. Pierce takes on the myth of American sportsmanship: "Sports today are conducted in a context that makes true sportsmanship - which is nothing more and nothing less than recognizing that your opponent is basically the same common clay deserving of the same respect as you are, not because of talent, but simply because he or she is another human being - almost impossible. Sports today, at almost every level, have arranged themselves in such a way that the athlete is made a commodity. The games are a clash of walking narratives, of competing sales campaigns, of a design competition between marketing techniques and strategies. This has exacerbated the emotional conflict that always has been present when we talk about our athletes - we want ferocious, brain-scrambling passion from them when the ball is in play, and conspicuous public politesse when it is not. If the latter gets tangled up in the former, then we get what seem to be endless arguments about how America is being wussified, and how we have become a soft and passive people, and a lot of rancid talk about people playing in skirts and so on. It's a wonder more athletes don't simply go mad." But if sportsmanship is a no go, what's left? Ultimately, Pierce wonders if it is anything more or less than kindness.
What's the Matter With Goodness?
In a conversation with Angela Davis, Toni Morrison gives a short history of the end of goodness: "It wasn't true in literature in the early days. There was always a hero who prevailed. As awful as things could happen in a Dickens novel, it ended up with the survival and triumph of high morality, of people who deserved to triumph. But something happened. Now, I'm not entirely sure about this, but I think it is after World War I with novelists at any rate, and certainly some of the war poets. Perhaps they understood themselves as attacking evil but they ended up theatricalizing it and the good people were fairly stupid or unlucky or what have you. There are references in literature to the silencing of goodness ... I am interested in pulling from the modern canon what I know and what I believe about this adoration and fascination, this compulsion to display evil. Even if there is a mild attempt to say that it is evil, nevertheless, it's hogging the stage in many novels. I think goodness is weak in literature almost like it is in the culture. This is just a general observation."
Arendt and the Question of Positive Freedom
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
The Hannah Arendt Center, 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Champlin reflects on Arendt's understanding of violence and the origins of power in the Quote of the Week. John Stuart Mill provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In our Video Archives, we look back on a 2010 Lunchtime Talk with Ursula Ludz, a former visiting scholar of the Hannah Arendt Center. And we appreciate a copy of Publii Virgilii Maronis Opera in our Library feature.
The Weakening of Power Through Violence
**This post was originally published on October 11, 2011**
"Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it."
--Hannah Arendt, On Violence
As we continue to see pro-democracy protest movements such as those in Hong Kong sprout up around the world, many today look back to the 1960s with a romantic fascination. Hannah Arendt had great respect for the student protest movements—most of all she appreciated the joy they took in acting in public. And yet, she was also critical of the use of violence. Arendt approached political violence during the late 1960s as a sign of the decline in power.
Amor Mundi 10/19/14
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.
Chair of the Federal Reserve Board Janet Yellen made waves this week by giving a speech arguing that the unprecedented rise in income inequality in the U.S. may be incompatible with American values (she should have been a speaker at last week's Arendt Center Conference "The Unmaking of Americans"). The American dream, the idea that all Americans of whatever economic or racial group can succeed through grit and perseverance, may no longer be true, the Federal Reserve Chairwoman admitted. She writes: "The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me. The past several decades have seen the most sustained rise in inequality since the 19th century after more than 40 years of narrowing inequality following the Great Depression. By some estimates, income and wealth inequality are near their highest levels in the past hundred years, much higher than the average during that time span and probably higher than for much of American history before then. It is no secret that the past few decades of widening inequality can be summed up as significant income and wealth gains for those at the very top and stagnant living standards for the majority. I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation's history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity."
There is an undeniable and too-often unacknowledged problem with sexual violence on college campuses and in our society at large. Too many women are raped and subjected to unwanted sexual acts or abuse. But instead of having an open discussion about the issue, activists have mobilized an obscure Federal guideline to create an alternative legal system outside to deal with sexual crimes without the protections and transparency of the law. Now a group of Harvard Law School professors is fighting back. They published an op-ed in the Boston Globe in which they "call on the university to withdraw this sexual harassment policy and begin the challenging project of carefully thinking through what substantive and procedural rules would best balance the complex issues involved in addressing sexual conduct and misconduct in our community." As the professors write, in part: "As teachers responsible for educating our students about due process of law, the substantive law governing discrimination and violence, appropriate administrative decision-making, and the rule of law generally, we find the new sexual harassment policy inconsistent with many of the most basic principles we teach. We also find the process by which this policy was decided and imposed on all parts of the university inconsistent with the finest traditions of Harvard University, of faculty governance, and of academic freedom. Among our many concerns are the following: Harvard has adopted procedures for deciding cases of alleged sexual misconduct which lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process, are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused, and are in no way required by Title IX law or regulation. Here our concerns include but are not limited to the following: the absence of any adequate opportunity to discover the facts charged and to confront witnesses and present a defense at an adversary hearing; the lodging of the functions of investigation, prosecution, fact-finding, and appellate review in one office, and the fact that that office is itself a Title IX compliance office rather than an entity that could be considered structurally impartial; and the failure to ensure adequate representation for the accused, particularly for students unable to afford representation."
Ta-Nehisi Coates on what it means to communicate well, in a second language, with a native speaker of that language: "I am approaching the end of my third year studying French. This was the first time I'd had a complicated conversation with a native French speaker who I did not know, and managed to follow along. This means more than is immediately apparent. Before I began studying I did not understand that comprehension comes on several levels. It is one thing to understand someone whom you know and speak with regularly. It's still another to understand a stranger. And another still to understand a group of strangers who are talking about something of which you have no knowledge. So this small conversation was a moment for me-like the novice yogi going from bridge to wheel. And there again I felt one of the revelation, the discovery, the neurons firing, stretching, growing."
In a review of Jonathan Simon's Mass Incarceration on Trial, Jessica Pishko points to his understanding of dignity in the law as the source of his optimism for the future of the prison system: "Simon ultimately argues that American society is entering a new age of dignity-based policies, a 'dignity cascade' in his words, based on the Supreme Court's decision in Plata, where Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority, 'Prisoners retain the essence of human dignity.' He traces Kennedy's logic to other Supreme Court decisions that suggest that the Eighth Amendment should be read to protect 'dignity' as an important individual right, albeit one not mentioned in the Constitution. (This is, of course, no real bar, since many well-established rights are not in the Constitution.) Dignity-based policies are an evolution that allows for a broader understanding of the Eighth Amendment, rather than relying on the civil rights arguments of the past. The 1972 Supreme Court case Furman v. Georgia first raised the idea of human dignity as a value worth protecting, something beyond physical sustenance, when it invalidated the death penalty as it existed in every state for being too broad. Justice Brennan wrote in his concurring opinion that the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause forbids punishments not just because they are painful but also because 'they treat members of the human race as nonhumans, as objects to be toyed with and discarded.' Dignity-based rulings would allow for invalidation of mass incarceration as a practice because it treats people as cogs in the machine. This is where Simon focuses his efforts - he wants his readers to believe that the problem with current incarceration practices is that they treat inmates as something subhuman, and that this can be stopped. He suggests that American courts look to European laws, which have long held that humans should be treated with dignity even if they have committed crimes." For more, read Roger Berkowitz's essay on "Dignity Jurisprudence."
Nick Smith considers the state of the public apology, now that it's been taken up by corporations and state institutions: "Once divorced from blame, apologies emerge as a tactical defence. Attorneys can deploy them as what they describes as an 'attitudinal structuring tactic' in order to 'lubricate settlement discussions'. Southwest Airlines in the US employs a full-time 'apology officer' who sends out roughly 20,000 letters - which all include his direct phone number - to dissatisfied customers per year. At best, apologies are now a standard customer satisfaction tool: 'We're sorry for the inconvenience,' but frankly we're not admitting blame nor will we change. At worst, they become wolves in sheep's clothing, preying on a deep-rooted spiritual desire to reconcile."
Childhood Writ as Beauty and Terror
Sonya Chung takes up the way that author and Moomin cartoonist Tove Jansson considers children, even in her work for adults: "Jansson respected the fine tuning of a child's sensibilities: children know better than anyone - better than they do as adults - that the world is a dangerous, beautiful, terribly alive place. And a place - as in stories like 'The Storm' and 'The Squirrel,' featuring female characters whose conflicts are waged within their own minds - where one must work things out for oneself, often in pained solitude. I knew all this as a lonely child, and when I finally found literature, those truths were reflected back to me, and I found comfort. Am still finding it. And very much so in Jansson. Thankfully, art may be slow, but never too late."
The Exceptionalism of Corruption
Roger Berkowitz recently gave the opening lecture at the Hannah Arendt Center Conference "The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Ideas Worth Fighting for?" The conference, held at Bard College, included talks by David Bromwich, Anand Girdirhardas, Kennan Ferguson, Jerome Kohn, Ann Lauterbach, Lawrence Lessig, Charles Murray, George Packer, Robert Post, Joan Richardson, Amity Shlaes, Jim Sleeper and Kendall Thomas. You can view the conference in its entirety here. For this week's Weeekend Read, we provide an edited transcript of Berkowitz's speech: "American Exceptionalism: What Are We Fighting For?"
One Day University Film School Presents: "Robot and Frank" and a Discussion with Roger Berkowitz
Robot and Frank explores the depths of friendship and even love between a robot and a man. Though the film is a comedy, the underlying questions it raises are both timely and serious. What is friendship? Can a machine love? More importantly, what happens when humans fall in love with machines?
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Manhattan Movement and Arts Center, 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Yasemin Sari
An Arendtian Recognitive Politics: "The Right to Have Rights" as a Performance of Visibility
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
The Hannah Arendt Center, 1:30 pm
Rediscovering the Humanities: Humanities Advocacy in the Digital Age
The Fall Experimental Humanities Mellon Lecture
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Alexei Gloukhov
Arendt and the Question of Positive Freedom
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
The Hannah Arendt Center, 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Champlin explores Arendt's writings on humanity and the models of self-awareness it commonly uses to understand its earthly existence in the Quote of the Week. We observe Hannah Arendt's 108th Birthday. Horace Walpole provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In our Video Archives, we look back on a 2011 discussion between Roger Berkowitz and David Matias on the origins of the 2008 financial crisis. We appreciate Arendt's varied note-taking methods in our Library feature. And Roger Berkowitz reflects on American exceptionalism and what we're fighting for in the Weekend Read.
Arendt on Humanity's Cosmic Awareness
(Featured Image: An aerial view of a jumble of cars, Source: Slickzine)
"If, in concluding, we return once more to the discovery of the Archimedean point and apply it, as Kafka warned us not to do, to man himself and to what he is doing on this earth, it at once becomes manifest that all of his activities, watched from a sufficiently removed vantage point in the universe, would appear not as activities of any kind but as processes, so that, as a scientist recently put it, modern motorization would appear like a process of biological mutation in which human bodies gradually begin to be covered by shells of steel."
--Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 322-3.
In the preface to The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt not only starts provocatively with the point of view of an "earth born object made by man," but describes this object, the recently launched Sputnik satellite, as the realization of the dream of science fiction literature that illuminates "mass sentiments and mass desires". In this passage quoted above from the very last section of the book, Arendt returns to space and for a moment herself sounds like a science fiction writer, inviting the reader to look with her from a number of challenging perspectives.
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.
Arendt on Thinking with Kant and Kafka
"The inner I: That I of reflection is the self, a reflection of the appearing human, so mortal, finite, growing old, capable of change, etc. On the other hand, the I of apperception, the thinking I, which does not change and is timeless. (Kafka Parable)"
—Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, February 1966
In an age overcome with the reach of globalization and the virtual expanse of the Internet, Arendt's notes in her Denktagebuch on a seemingly obscure technical question on activity of thought in Kant gain new relevance by differentiating modes of thinking with depth and over time. Her reference to Kafka and the form of the entry pushes her profound temporal ideas in the direction of narrative fiction.
Amor Mundi 3/2/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
David Cole wonders if we've reached the point of no return on the issue of privacy: "Reviewing seven years of the NSA amassing comprehensive records on every American's every phone call, the board identified only one case in which the program actually identified an unknown terrorist suspect. And that case involved not an act or even an attempted act of terrorism, but merely a young man who was trying to send money to Al-Shabaab, an organization in Somalia. If that's all the NSA can show for a program that requires all of us to turn over to the government the records of our every phone call, is it really worth it?" Everyone speaks about the need for a National Security State and the necessary trade-offs involved in living in a dangerous world. What is often forgotten is that most people simply don't care that much about privacy. Whether snoopers promise security or better-targeted advertisements, we are willing to open up our inner worlds for the price of convenience. If we are to save privacy, the first step is articulating what it is about privacy that makes it worth saving. You can read more on an Arendtian defense of privacy in Roger Berkowitz's Weekend Read.
In the New Republic, Evgeny Morozov questions the newly trendy rhetoric of "mindfulness" and "digital detox" that has been adopted by a variety of celebrities and public figures, from Deepak Chopra to Google chairman Eric Schmidt to Arianna Huffington. In response to technology critic Alexis Madrigal, who has argued in The Atlantic that the desire to unplug and live free of stress and distractions amounts to little more than "post-modern technoanxiety"—akin to the whole foods movement in its dream of "stripping away all the trappings of modern life"—Morozov contends that there are legitimate reasons for wanting to disconnect, though they might not be what we think. "With social media—much like with gambling machines or fast food—our addiction is manufactured, not natural," he writes. "In other words, why we disconnect matters: We can continue in today's mode of treating disconnection as a way to recharge and regain productivity, or we can view it as a way to sabotage the addiction tactics of the acceleration-distraction complex that is Silicon Valley. The former approach is reactionary but the latter can lead to emancipation, especially if such acts of refusal give rise to genuine social movements that will make problems of time and attention part of their political agendas—and not just the subject of hand-wringing by the Davos-based spirituality brigades."
"Evil is unspectacular and always human"
Edward Mendelsohn has a moving and powerful portrait of W.H. Auden in the New York Review of Books, including this discussion of Auden's account of evil: "He observed to friends how common it was to find a dedicated anti-fascist who conducted his erotic life as if he were invading Poland. Like everyone who thought more or less as he did, Auden didn't mean that erotic greeds were morally equivalent to mass murder or that there was no difference between himself and Hitler. He was less interested in the obvious distinction between a responsible citizen and an evil dictator than he was in the more difficult question of what the citizen and dictator had in common, how the citizen's moral and psychological failures helped the dictator to succeed. Those who hold the opposite view, the view that the citizen and dictator have nothing in common, tend to hold many corollary views. One such corollary is that a suitable response to the vast evil of Nazi genocide is wordless, uncomprehending awe—because citizen and dictator are different species with no language they can share. Another corollary view is that Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), was offensively wrong about the "banality of evil," because evil is something monstrous, exotic, and inhuman. The acts and thoughts of a good citizen, in this view, can be banal, not those of a dictator or his agents. Auden stated a view like Arendt's as early as 1939, in his poem "Herman Melville":
"Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table."
Yiyun Li tells why, if you were to run into her on the subway, you might find her staring at you: "Writing fiction is this kind of staring, too. You have to stare at your characters, like you would a stranger on the train, but for much longer than is comfortable for both of you. This way, you get to know characters layer by layer, until any dishonesty is stripped away. I believe all characters try to trick us. They lie to us. It's just like when you meet someone in the real world—no one's going to be 100 percent honest. They're not going to tell you the whole story about themselves; in fact, the stories they do tell will say more about how they want to be perceived than how they actually are. There's always a certain resistance with being known, and that's true of characters and real people. People don't want to tell you their secrets. Or they lie to themselves, or they lie to you."
In an interview, writer Jennifer Percy discusses rethinking how we talk about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: "I wanted to more fully imagine the homecoming experience of soldiers and their time at war. The language we use to talk about PTSD has historically been determined by political and economic factors. It's attached to a vocabulary that intentionally limits our ability to imagine atrocity because it's protective and reductive. It benefits the perpetrators but dehumanizes the other. It's a process of rationalization. But what happens when that vocabulary is discarded, and we partake in an effort to fully imagine the experience of soldiers and veterans? This is the space I hoped to inhabit. We might refuse to imagine wartime experience because it's outside the realm of the ordinary; or maybe it feels unnecessary, or is too demanding on our psyches. But when we do imagine it, what we find is often the familiar. It's ourselves. And that might also be a reason we turn away."
Emily Gould, who once sold a book for a big payday, only to find that her book sold just a few thousand copies, writes about what happened after the money ran out and she found she couldn't write anything else: "With the exception of yoga earnings and freelance assignments, I mostly lived on money I borrowed from my boyfriend, Keith. (We'd moved in together in fall 2010, in part because we liked each other and in larger part because I couldn't afford to pay rent.) We kept track of what I owed him at first, but at some point we stopped writing down the amounts; it was clear the total was greater than I could hope to repay anytime soon. He paid off one credit card so that I wouldn't have to keep paying the monthly penalty. When I wanted to cancel my health insurance he insisted I keep it, and paid for it. He was patient when my attempts to get a job more remunerative than teaching yoga failed; he didn't call me out on how much harder I could have tried. Without questioning my choices, he supported me, emotionally, creatively, and financially. I hated that he had to. At times he was stretched thin financially himself and I knew that our precarious money situation weighed heavily on his mind, even though he never complained. 'You'll sell your book for a million dollars,' he said, over and over again."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Michiel Bot discusses Étienne Balibar's interpretation of Arendt's work, Jeffrey Champlin considers whether Arendt's celebration of the council system, as discussed in On Revolution, can be applied to feminism, and Roger Berkowitz examines the promise and peril present in today's Ukraine. And in the Weekend Read, Berkowitz argues the importance of the private realm for the political world.
Blogging and the New Public Intellectual - A Discussion with Tom Goldstein
Sunday, March 9, 2014 , 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Bard Graduate Center, NYC
Learn more here.
R.S.V.P. to email@example.com
"Colors Through the Darkness: Three Generations Paint and Write for Justice"
Monday, March 10, 2013, 1:30 pm
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Zito '60 Auditorium (RKC 103)
Learn more here.
Amor Mundi 1/26/14
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 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 Part One (Antisemitism) and Part Two (Imperialism) of her book. Underlying both Antisemitism and Imperialism, however, is what Arendt calls "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." In a world of individualism in which the human bonds of religion, family, clan, and nation are increasingly seen as arbitrary, tenuous, and weak, so that individuals people find themselves uprooted, redundant, and superfluous. "Metaphysical loneliness," Arendt writes, is the "basic experience" of modern society that is "the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims, 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 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. How to make life meaningful, how 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? There are, he writes, at least three paradigmatic answers, represented alternatively by three of the greatest contemporary writers, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and George Saunders. Reviewing Saunders Tenth of September (a 2012 finalist for the National Book Award), Mason writes suggests 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."
Ai Weiwei describes what he thinks Internet access has done for his home country: "the Internet is the best thing that ever happened to China." If Mason and Saunders (see above) worry that technology magnifies the loneliness of modern mass society, Ai Weiwei argues that the World Wide Web "turns us into individuals and also enables us to share our perceptions and feelings. It creates a culture of individualism and exchange even though the real society doesn't promote it. There isn't a single Chinese university that can invite me to give a talk. Even though I know there are many students who would like to hear what I have to say."
In an interview about art, politics, and the intersection between the two, Sudanese poet Mamoun Eltlib describes a revolution for those who have rejected the political: "When you come to politicians now, people don't really care about them, because they find out it's just a chair or election problem between them. It's not about them as Sudanese. So when you do something for the people without asking them to vote for you or elect you or to do anything, just to make a very beautiful, attractive program, they respond. I was in Doha for a conference for three days, to solve the problem in Sudan. They brought all the intellectuals and the writers and the thinkers from the political parties and from the rebel groups and from the government itself, as well as independent writers like me and Faisal, and they made this paper called, 'Loving Your Enemy Through Culture,' because I was saying that we don't just need to change the people, we need to change the politicians. If we really want to fight now, we have just one way, the cultural way."
In Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville argues that the American brand of religion—strong on morality while permissive on rituals and dogma—is deeply important to liberal democracy. While democracy imagines political and civil liberties, religion maintains a "civic religion" that privileges moral consensus over dogmatism provides a common core of moral belief even amongst a plurality of faiths and sects. Under this view, the continued religiosity of Americans especially in comparison to the irreligiosity of Europeans is an important part ingredient in the American experience of democracy. With this in mind, consider this snippet from Megan Hustad's memoir More Than Conquerors. Hustad talks about growing up in a missionary household, and how her father is coping with changes he sees happening around him: "Thanks be to God, my parents would say. Thanks to my ability to take care of myself, I would say. My father knows I choose to fill my time with people for whom Christianity is an outmoded concept, a vestigial cultural tail humanity would be better off losing. He knows most of my friends are of the opinion that the country would be better off without people who think like he does. His new status as cultural relic bothers him. He finds it ironic that moral relativists temporarily misplace their relativism when talk turns to Jesus. He doesn't like how "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" are so often conflated in news reports and in opinion pieces, as if there were no shadows between them. It seems to him more evidence that the United States is becoming a post-Christian society like England and much of Europe before it. Used to be, he remembers, one didn't have to explain the contours of faith. Billy Graham appeared on prime-time television. Everyone in this country, he remembered, knew what faith was for."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Roger Berkowitz explores the literary responses to loneliness in the writing of George Saunders via Wyatt Mason. Jeffrey Champlin discusses how Arendt read Adam Smith.
The Unproductive Labor of Politics: Arendt's reading of Adam Smith
Richard Halpern, "Eclipse of Action: Hamlet and the Political Economy of Playing," Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 59, Number 4, Winter 2008, pp. 450-482
As he formulates an original response to the classic problem of Hamlet's non-action, Halpern offers one of the few critical analyses of Arendt's reading of Adam Smith in The Human Condition. He shows how Arendt draws on Smith's concepts of productive and unproductive labor to articulate her key concepts of work and labor. Moreover, his close reading draws our attention to an intriguing paradox in the temporality of action that may indicate a corrective—albeit a difficult one—to the current demand for instant gratification that often leads to cynicism in the face of great political challenges.
Halpern reminds us that Aristotle separates action from labor; Smith replaces action with production; and Arendt seeks to restore action to a place of prominence in the political realm. Arendt explicitly says that "the distinction between productive and unproductive labor contains, albeit in a prejudicial manner, the more fundamental distinction between work and labor" (HC 87). She does not simply take over Smith's idea, but wishes to transfer his distinction from his own economic system (the "prejudice" of his own thought) to her own thinking of labor and work. Halpern's analysis of Arendt's move helps us start to think about her surprising appeal to 18th century economic theory. Moreover, it her discussion of Smith (and better known critique of Marx), I see her posing an even broader question: what does it mean to be productive and what are the appropriate spheres of different types of productivity?
Within the realm of production, Halpern looks at how Smith offers a further distinction in Book 2, Chapter 3 of The Wealth of Nations, under the heading "Of the Accumulation of Capital, or of Productive and Unproductive Labor":
There is one sort of labor which adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed: there is another which has no such effect. The former, as it produces a value, may be called productive; the latter, unproductive labour. Thus the labour of a manufacturer adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his master's profit. The labor of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing. (Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976), 351.)
Smith draws a distinction between labor that holds or builds value (say the manufacture of a chair), and labor that evaporates the moment the worker completes it (such as cleaning the house or washing clothes). Classical political economists of the 18th and 19th century engaged in wide ranging debates over what should "count" as value before capitalist countries agreed on the ratio of labour to output or per capita GDP as the standard; socialist countries, following the USSR, adopted an alternative "material product system" that prioritized the amount of goods. In a time of environmental change, this glimpse into the history of economic theory may offer a helpful reminder that society can decide to change the standard of economic success.
According to Halpern, Arendt draws from Smith not to rehabilitate an outmoded aspect of economic theory, but to draw inspiration for her creation of distinct conceptual spaces for labor, work, and action. Specifically, she aligns Smith's "unproductive labor" with her circular conception of labor and "productive labor" with her linear conception of work. This does not mean that labor is unproductive but it does require a clarification of different types of productivity. I see it as useful to keep the discussion on productivity since these spheres of private life and cultural and industrial economy then offer a contrast to the political sphere where action can happen. Action is neither circular like labor, nor linear like work, but has its own peculiar directionality and temporality. Halpern's analysis helpfully zeroes in on the perplexing relation between the ephemerality of labor and action and action's desire for permanence:
The temporal paradox of the political is that while it aims at immortality, action and speech are, in themselves, evanescent: "Left to themselves, they lack not only the tangibility of other things, but are even less durable and more futile than what we produce for consumption" (HC 95). Like Smith's unproductive labor, action disappears in the moment of its occurrence because it leaves no material trace behind. (Halpern, 457)
Politics demands an extraordinary effort. It asks that one expend energy indefinitely for an uncertain reward. Discussion and debate goes on and on, only occasionally clicking with spectacular agreement or deflationary compromise. Arendt's analysis can help us perceive the difficulty of contemporary politics that attempts to fit into consumer culture that preserves, and thus remembers, nothing.
Arendt's attention to the aspects of debate and negotiation that might be seen as unproductive (a dimension that in other parts of the Human Condition she relates to menial work, again often in relation to Smith) offers a corrective to a misguided understanding of politics that leads to frustration and despair.Even if we are not at the extreme level of the menial functioning of a New England town hall meeting debating the budget for potholes or an Occupy Wall Street discussion that requires unanimous consensus for closure, politics works in a different temporality. Rather than the fever pitched accusations of crisis that in the U.S. actually covers up rather than encourage political risk, a more humble sense of public debate as requiring something like the patience of the menial task may be a corrective.
Political action in Arendt's sense differs from work in being freed from a fixed goal. She links this freedom, which for her is based on self-referentiality, to drama:
Arendt's discomfort with the economic dimension of theater reveals itself when she criticizes Adam Smith for grouping actors, along with churchmen, lawyers, musicians, and others, as unproductive laborers and hence as lowly cousins of the menial servant (HC 207). Arendt would distinguish all of these activities from labor in that they "do not pursue an end . . . and leave no work behind . . . , but exhaust their full meaning in the performance itself " (206). Smith's inclusion of these autotelic activities under the category of labor is for Arendt a sign of the degradation that human activity had already undergone by the early days of the modern era. By contrast, "It was precisely these occupations—healing, flute-playing, play-acting—which furnished ancient thinking with examples for the highest and greatest activities of man" (207–21). What Arendt overlooks is that—already in the ancient world—healing, flute playing, and playacting became remunerated professions and differed in this respect from politics, which was not the work of a professional class of politicians. (Halpern 458)
Arendt agrees that actors on the stage perform fleeting scenes, but wishes to link this to "the highest and greatest activities of man," ie. those of politics. Halpern argues that in fact, actors in ancient times already worked for wages and were thus not independent like citizens in their roles as politicians. Nonetheless, Arendt shows us that in the modern period we can learn something about acting in politics from acting in the arts. The key point for Halpern is that drama, etc. are "autotelic activities." They do not even keep up the house like menial work; they have their own end and really evaporate in reaching this end. Political action works along an undecidable edge: even less productive than labor but at any moment potentially the most lasting. Against the odds, politics holds open the space in which something new can begin and thus renew the human world against the circular forces of nature.
One could reasonably argue that in his focus on the connection between labor and action, Halpern fails to adequately emphasize the importance of work. In a world of labor and the victory of animal laborans, there is no work to preserve action and no polis/world to give action memorialization. Indeed, we face the danger of the collapse of the world into the "waste economy" (HC 134) and the seductions to action disappear. However, Halpern does not say that play is action for Arendt but rather, as I understand his argument, that it there is an aspect of action that is like play. Action requires debate that may seem to be going nowhere, or just be undertaken for its own sake up to the moment that it takes a risk. When it dares to venture into the public realm, action clearly very different from play as a hobby.
Labor is both constant and fleeting. On the one hand, the demands of the body never end, nor do the cycles of nature. On the other hand, labor is also fleeting in that its mode of production only temporarily maintains life. Action is also fleeting from the perspective that the risk it takes often evaporates but has the utmost political constancy when one considers those actions that succeed in forming the power of a new beginning.
In the remainder of the article, Halpern moves from The Human Condition to Hamlet, arguing that Shakespeare replaces action on the classical model of tragedy with the ceaseless activity of Hamlet's thoughts. This activity runs in circles like unproductive labor in Smith and labor in Arendt rather than the action of Aristotle's aesthetic and Arendt's political ideal. From an Arendtian point of view, the modernity of the drama reveals a challenge to politics, the challenge of a time out of joint that action has to face again and again.
-Jeffrey Champlin
Born into a World of Plurality
This Quote of the Week was originally posted on August 20, 2012
We are born into this world of plurality where father and mother stand ready for us, ready to receive us and welcome us and guide us and prove that we are not strangers."
-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch
Notebook 19, Section 39, February, 1954
When Rousseau opens Of The Social Contract with the striking phrase "Man is born free andeverywhere he is in chains" he sets up a stark opposition between nature and culture that powers his reconsideration of social bonds. Hannah Arendt also speaks of birth to open the problem of freedom but rather than relegating it to a merely natural state she employs it within a wide variety of narratives, figures of speech, and explanations of novel concepts. Most famously, she employs the term "natality" in The Human Condition to work out a thinking of freedom that offers true interruption and surprise in the face of growing historical and technological automation in the second half of the 20th century. Although Arendt's Thought Diary does not reveal the kind of precise development of natality that would satisfy the demands of scholars of Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts), a number of entries refer to birth in a manner that illuminates her later work by establishing sites of concern and questioning.
In the passage above, we see Arendt honing in on the connection between man and world to establish a relation that at first appears surprisingly untroubled to readers of her later work. She describes the mother and father as being there for the child in four ways. In being "ready," they have prepared for him in advance. They will "receive" him, bringing him to the place that they made. In "welcoming" we might think of additional signs of acceptance that indicate a broader, social incorporation. Further, the parents do not just take in the child at that moment, but offer to "guide" him, accompanying him for a time in the world. The parents do all of this to show that the child belongs, but in Arendt's repetitions I see an awareness of the difficult amount of work needed in this regard. Moreover, in the "we" of the last line the reader might see not just another reference to the child but to the parents as well. The repeated welcome affirms the place of the parents and child.
The passage above helps us consider society's response to the newcomer in contrast to Arendt's idea of "second birth" in which an individual moves beyond the welcome of the world. Now one takes one's stance in relation to the world by reflecting on the distinction between actual birth and an idea of freedom that emerges from thinking about birth. In chapter 5 of theHuman Condition, Arendt writes: "With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our physical appearance." By speaking of insertion, she indicates making room, a gesture of opening a place. In the second birth, one realizes that the plurality of the world does not simply pre-exist but that our own arrival refigures it.
The two kinds of birth that Arendt describes lead us to reflect on the pressures of globalization and the continuing debt crisis in a new light. With the immense weight of previous decisions assigned to them even before they are able to assume a role in society, young people might never reach the stage of feeling that they are "not strangers." From this starting point, without having a sense of the welcome of the first birth, they may not be able to make the leap through the "like" to the second birth of making a change in the world.
-Jeffrey Champlin
Amor Mundi 12/8/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
"If I were asked what was the greatest problem in the university I work in today, I would definitely say bureaucracy: in particular, the obsession with codifying, regulating, recording, reviewing, verifying, vetting, and chronicling, with assessing achievement, forecasting achievement, identifying weak points, then establishing commissions for planning strategies for regular encounters to propose solutions to weak points, and further commissions empowered to apply for funding to pay for means to implement these solutions, and so on." I thank my lucky stars daily that I teach at a small college that prides itself on the minimization of bureaucracy and whose President—a student of Arendt's—affirms that we will gladly sacrifice bureaucratic efficiency for innovation. That said, nowhere in the university—or outside it—is one immune from the mania for review, consulting, and assessment that displaces the angst of individual responsibility through the security of constant collective evaluation. To many who would defend the humanities, study of the human arts and literature are a respite to the bureaucratic "rule of nobody," as Hannah Arendt called it. Yet in a fascinating essay in the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks teases out a surprising dependence connecting bureaucracy and literature: both relish control and thus flee the world of chance, individuality, and uniqueness. Literature shares with bureaucratic impersonality "the desire for a control that stands off from participation, and perhaps substitutes for it: the desire to turn the world into words, page numbers, segments." Which raises the question: "Is all locution inevitably circumlocution (as Beckett tended to think), and will the West perhaps slowly and voluptuously choke itself in a mounting tangle of red tape, meantime entertaining itself to death with a mountain of literature that describes and charmingly castigates the whole scandalous process?"
Lelac Almagor gives the lie to character education: "Some of that is about strength of character — about being more independent, assertive, and persistent than kids who enter school with greater advantages. But some of it isn't about character at all, only the appearance of it. When we teach a kid to give a firm formal handshake, we are not strengthening his character. We are teaching him how to translate his strength into a language that people in power will understand. The deficit in this case is theirs, not his.
In principle this liberationist approach to character education is appealing. The trouble is that, in practice, it loses a little of its clarity. We start out wanting our kids to be heroes and revolutionaries, to beat the system from the inside and then challenge its premises. But while they are with us, our school represents the system; if they assert their independence, we are the authority they defy."
It matters when you die. Everyone will talk about Nelson Mandela for the next month. As they should. But let's also recall Andre Schiffrin, the extraordinary editor of Pantheon Books for 28 years. As Dennis Johnson writes, Schiffrin studied with Hannah Arendt, who apparently was a regular guest at his parent's home (his father founded Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.) Johnson takes aim at the common wisdom that Schiffrin was fired from Pantheon because it was losing money. And he reminds us of what Schiffrin did do: "Nowhere does the [Times] article mention, for example, the story behind one of the biggest-selling books of the late twentieth century — Studs Terkel's Working, which was entirely André's idea, thought up after listening to Terkel's radio show, and leading to a life-long partnership (André was one of those editors authors would never leave.) Nor does it tell the story behind one of his weirder hits, Wisconsin Death Trip, which André coaxed Michael Lesy into writing after he read Lesy's PhD thesis. There's no explanation of how André came to be the first publisher to translate Günter Grass, with The Tin Drum, nor of how he came to be the first American publisher of Foucault and so many others, nor of how he got Sartre away from Knopf. There's nothing about André's prescient interest in graphic fiction, evidenced by Pantheon's acquisition, just before he left, of Matt Groening's first book of Bart Simpson cartoons, and of Art Spiegelman's Maus (a mega-seller that itself puts the lie to the claim that André's Pantheon books never made money). It doesn't mention how he turned down an offer to head Knopf — an offer that came from Alfred Knopf himself — to take the job at Pantheon."
In an interview, poet Fady Joudah discusses what it means to be a "hyphenated poet" working in America: "We fall into the old stuff of textuality, and almost everything becomes safe because nobody wants to talk about what is not safe in poetry. We fall back on the psychologic, the ethnic, the quota, and serve the perpetuation of the machine. So not much new is being examined or flayed open in the poetry world about a relationship between text and context, as it relates to a particular author. And this becomes even more pronounced, but by no means unique, in the case of the minority American. For example, a Palestinian American or an Arab American discussing ethics and morals becomes "political." If a "bona fide," non-minority American does, chances are it will be considered "moral," "ethical," "amazing spiritual vision," and so forth, and barely the word "political" would get in."
In a Little Bit of Flour and Fat
Essayist Amy Butcher tells a story about her family's relationship to spaetzle: "The recipe for the dish is my grandmother's, and it is simple: whisk together flour and egg, whisk until the dough sticks to the spoon and then, at last, snaps back against the bowl. It's all about consistency, something you can't put your finger on, something you just have to know. That is why there is no written recipe for this dish, this congealed mess of white that gets boiled in bits and drenched in sour cream and salt and pepper. There is no written recipe because how do you put your finger on dumpling elasticity?"
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog: Jeffrey Champlin reviews Kimberley Curtis's article "Hannah Arendt, Feminist Theorizing, and the Debate Over New Reproductive Technologies." Wout Cornelisson considers Arendt's relationship to quotation. And, with the death of Nelson Mandela, Roger Berkowitz looks at the confluence of Arendt and Mandela's thoughts regarding violence.