text:
Dianoetic Laughter
By Charles Snyder
"… laughter, a humorous excitement that permits man to prove his essential freedom through a kind of serene superiority to his own failures."
-- Hannah Arendt, "Franz Kafka: A Revaluation" in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism
Enter Michael Rubin. Resident scholar of Mideast policy at the American Enterprise Institute and former Pentagon official during the first term presidency of George W. Bush. It is important to grasp the reality of this person. He has written as an expert on the mentality of Iranians, and he asserts that Iranians and Americans "think in very different ways." Rubin worries aloud about projecting our values onto those who "think" differently. To great effect, Rubin cites his knowledge that most Iranians are imperialistic and nationalistic, even condescending to other states. The expert attributes to Iranians possession of the concept "near abroad." With this concept, Iranians chalk up nearby states in the same manner Vladimir Putin considers the "near abroad" of Russia, that is, by assuming a right to exert major influence in that region. For dramatic illustration of how different Iranians "think," the expert invokes the image of inexperienced Americans and Europeans being fleeced in Isfahan's Naqsh-e Jahan Square. That's right. Rubin can also be funny.
Amor Mundi 6/7/15
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.
Edward Snowden writes in the New York Times that the public is finally waking up to the dangers of surveillance and the need to protect privacy. "Two years on, the difference is profound. In a single month, the N.S.A.'s invasive call-tracking program was declared unlawful by the courts and disowned by Congress. After a White House-appointed oversight board investigation found that this program had not stopped a single terrorist attack, even the president who once defended its propriety and criticized its disclosure has now ordered it terminated. This is the power of an informed public. Ending the mass surveillance of private phone calls under the Patriot Act is a historic victory for the rights of every citizen, but it is only the latest product of a change in global awareness. Since 2013, institutions across Europe have ruled similar laws and operations illegal and imposed new restrictions on future activities. The United Nations declared mass surveillance an unambiguous violation of human rights. In Latin America, the efforts of citizens in Brazil led to the Marco Civil, an Internet Bill of Rights. Recognizing the critical role of informed citizens in correcting the excesses of government, the Council of Europe called for new laws to protect whistle-blowers." None of this would have happened if Snowden had not blown the whistle and gone public with his revelations about NSA activities. As David Cole writes this week in the New York Review of Books, "Sunsets require sunshine. That may be the most enduring lesson from the Senate's passage on Tuesday of the USA Freedom Act, which will bring an end to the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' phone records. If Edward Snowden had not revealed the NSA's sweeping surveillance of Americans, Congress would have simply renewed Section 215, the USA Patriot Act provision that the NSA relied on before its expiration on June 1--as Congress had done on seven previous occasions since 2001. But Snowden's leaking of top secret NSA documents let Americans in on the previously secret fact that their government was collecting all of their phone data, without regard to whether they had ever engaged in any terrorist, criminal, or even suspicious activity. As a result, Congress has now imposed restrictions on national security surveillance for the first time since the September 11 attacks."
In a wide ranging conversation with Neil Gaiman about the relevance of literary genre in contemporary writing, Kazuo Ishiguro suggests a reason why fantasy seems to be coming out of the shadows: "But maybe the stigma against fantasy is something much wider than in the fiction world. Since industrial times began, it's sort of true to say that children have been allowed a sanctioned world where fantasy and imagination is deemed to be fine, in fact, almost desirable. But then when they get to a certain age, they have to start getting prepared to be units of the labour force. And so, society has to start getting the fantasy element out of the children, so that they can become factory workers, soldiers, white-collar workers, whatever, because it's seen to be not useful to the overall economic enterprise to have children growing up maintaining that fantasy element. You don't want people who are too dreamy or who are imagining things: you want them to accept this is the nitty-gritty of real life, that they've just got to get on with it. I'm not suggesting we're necessarily being manipulated by some sinister government or anything; it's just there in society. Parents will naturally discourage children once they get to a certain age from continuing with the fantasy element in their lives; schools will, too. It becomes taboo in the society at large. Maybe the reason it's been loosening up, and the stigma is going away to some extent in the last 25 years or so, is that the nature of our capitalist enterprise has changed. We're no longer factory workers, white-collar workers, soldiers, and so on. And with the advent of blue-sky thinking, the new tech industries that have led the way in the last two decades seem to require some kind of imagination. Perhaps people are beginning to think there is some economic use in actually allowing us to indulge in what was once deemed childish fantasy. I sound like some sort of Seventies sociology professor, but I feel there's something in this."
True long-form journalism in mainstream publications is a rarity, but Adrian Chen's investigative essay on a shadowy Russian agency that fabricates stories, spreads misinformation, and destabilizes facts is proof that the medium can still exist. Chen's tale melds geopolitics with philosophy; it unfolds slowly, but it is gripping. After a few choice examples of the way Russia ruthlessly attacks inconvenient facts and manufactures alternative realities, Chen concludes: "All of this has contributed to a dawning sense, among the Russian journalists and activists I spoke with, that the Internet is no longer a natural medium for political opposition. 'The myth that the Internet is controlled by the opposition is very, very old,' says Leonid Volkov, a liberal politician and campaign manager to Alexei Navalny. 'It's not true since at least three years.' Part of this is simple demographics: The Internet audience has expanded from its early adopters, who were more likely to be well-educated liberal intelligentsia, to the whole of Russia, which overwhelmingly supports Putin. Also, by working every day to spread Kremlin propaganda, the paid trolls have made it impossible for the normal Internet user to separate truth from fiction. 'The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won't want to touch it,' Volkov said, when we met in the office of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation. 'You have to remember the Internet population of Russia is just over 50 percent. The rest are yet to join, and when they join it's very important what is their first impression.' The Internet still remains the one medium where the opposition can reliably get its message out. But their message is now surrounded by so much garbage from trolls that readers can become resistant before the message even gets to them. During the protests, a favorite tactic of the opposition was making anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Today, waves of trolls and bots regularly promote pro-Putin hashtags. What once was an exhilarating act of popular defiance now feels empty. 'It kind of discredited the idea of political hashtags,' says Ilya Klishin, the web editor for the independent television station TV Rain who, in 2011, created the Facebook page for the antigovernment protests. Russia's information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history, and its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space. In the midst of such a war, the Runet (as the Russian Internet is often called) can be an unpleasant place for anyone caught in the crossfire. Soon after I met Leonid Volkov, he wrote a post on his Facebook wall about our interview, saying that he had spoken with someone from The New York Times. A former pro-Kremlin blogger later warned me about this. Kremlin allies, he explained, monitored Volkov's page, and now they would be on guard. 'That was not smart,' he said."
Miya Tokumitsu, citing Frank Lloyd Wright, calls out the recent trend of marketing "artisanal" and "homemade" goods for obscuring certain economic realities: "The ongoing turn-of-the-last-century nostalgia spell, fueling contemporary markets for mustache wax and obscure herbaceous liquors--excuse me, tonics (tonics that I find delightful, by the way)--shows no sign of waning anytime soon. Yet as others have argued, this obsession with the artisanal production of yesteryear is hardly unproblematic, ignoring as it does the widespread racial, gender, and class oppression that it entailed and still perpetuates. As Rachel Laudan explains, in casting foodstuffs like handmade tortillas, traditionally pressed olive oil, and home-cooked meals as more wholesome, both nutritionally and morally, we overlook the fact that these delicacies necessitate hours of physical labor--labor that was traditionally performed by women and poorly paid agricultural and domestic workers. Nostalgia is a form of remembrance, but one that simultaneously demands willful forgetting. And that is why it is so dangerous--it always runs the risk of justifying and replicating the injustices of past eras by making them invisible."
Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel wonder at why ISIS and other Islamist groups are so fond of poetry: "It may seem curious that some of the most wanted men in the world should take the time to fashion poems in classical metres and monorhyme--far easier to do in Arabic than in English, but something that still requires practice. And these are only the most obvious signs of the jihadis' dedication to form. The poems are full of allusions, recherché terms, and baroque devices. Acrostics, in which the first letters of successive lines spell out names or phrases, are especially popular. One of al-Nasr's poems, a declaration of her commitment to ISIS, is based on the group's acronym, Daesh. ('Daesh' is generally a derogatory label, and al-Nasr's embrace of it is a gesture of defiance.) The militants' evident delight in their virtuosity turns their poems into performances. The poets are making sure that we know they are poets--laying claim to the special authority that comes with poetry's status in Arabic culture. Yet behind the swagger there are powerful anxieties: all jihadis have elected to set themselves apart from the wider society, including their families and their religious communities. This is often a difficult choice, with lasting consequences. By casting themselves as poets, as cultural actors with deep roots in the Arab Islamic tradition, the militants are attempting to assuage their fears of not really belonging." It is worth in this context recalling Hannah Arendt's essay on Bertolt Brecht, where she observed that "poets have not often made good, reliable citizens." Perversity is an artistic privilege as long as it produces good art. The problem is that once poets become political, they turn their gaze from truth to persuasion. This is why Brecht's odes praising Stalin are both politically odious and artistically sterile. It may be worth asking why ISIS members turn to poetry, but one shouldn't confuse political rhymes with poetry.
In a retrospective on the work of sculptor Duane Hanson, Douglas Coupland suggests that the selfie may come to have an important place in the art world: "In fact, could there be any work out there more selfie-friendly than Hanson's? Technology has inverted some of the rules of appreciating art. What was once forbidden in the museum (the photo) is now encouraged. The eyeballs of Hanson's figures no longer look out into space, but at the viewer's camera, along with the viewer. What was once a power imbalance--the institution and the viewer--instead becomes intimate, curious, democratic and highly engaged. A new museum archive category seems to be emerging: a continuum of 'selfieness'. At one end of the selfie spectrum is, say, the work of Donald Judd. It's hard to imagine taking a selfie with one of his minimalist wall pieces. And at the other end of the selfie continuum, we have Hanson and, say, Jeff Koons. Selfieness is no indication of a work's depth or anything else except, well, its selfieness. But whatever selfieness is, it's possibly what institutions are looking for to help them navigate through the next 20 years. So maybe it's not so odd a category after all."
Gideon Lewis-Kraus takes a look at much bemoaned computational translations and wonders if they'll ever be any good and, for that matter, what "good" means in this context: "Though some researchers still endeavor to train their computers to translate Dante with panache, the brute-force method seems likely to remain ascendant. This statistical strategy, which supports Google Translate and Skype Translator and any other contemporary system, has undergone nearly three decades of steady refinement. The problems of semantic ambiguity have been lessened--by paying pretty much no attention whatsoever to semantics. The English word 'bank,' to use one frequent example, can mean either 'financial institution' or 'side of a river,' but these are two distinct words in French. When should it be translated as 'banque,' when as 'rive'? A probabilistic model will have the computer examine a few of the other words nearby. If your sentence elsewhere contains the words 'money' or 'robbery,' the proper translation is probably 'banque.' (This doesn't work in every instance, of course--a machine might still have a hard time with the relatively simple sentence 'A Parisian has to have a lot of money to live on the Left Bank.') Furthermore, if you have a good probabilistic model of what standard sentences in a language do and don't look like, you know that the French equivalent of 'The box is in the ink-filled writing implement' is encountered approximately never. Contemporary emphasis is thus not on finding better ways to reflect the wealth or intricacy of the source language but on using language models to smooth over garbled output. A good metaphor for the act of translation is akin to the attempt to answer the question 'What player in basketball corresponds to the quarterback?' Current researchers believe that you don't really need to know much about football to answer this question; you just need to make sure that the people who have been drafted to play basketball understand the game's rules. In other words, knowledge of any given source language--and the universal cultural encyclopedia casually encoded within it--is growing ever more irrelevant."
Orin Kerr has this nugget in the Washington Post: "If I understand the history correctly, in the late 1990s, the President was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy. Yikes."
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #10
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, July 10, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Why Privacy Matters," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
Olin Hall, Bard College, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Philip Walsh discusses some of the startling conclusions Hannah Arendt arrived at with regards to moral philosophy in the Quote of the Week. French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal offers up his comments on human nature in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate several copies and translations of "The Origins of Totalitarianism" found in the Hannah Arendt Collection in this week's Library feature.
Amor Mundi 4/26/15
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.
John Gray, writing in The Guardian, takes on Steven Pinker's argument that progress and the Enlightenment are bringing about the decline and extinction of violence. "It may be true that the modern state's monopoly of force has led, in some contexts, to declining rates of violent death. But it is also true that the power of the modern state has been used for purposes of mass killing, and one should not pass too quickly over victims of state terror. With increasing historical knowledge it has become clear that the 'Holocaust-by-bullets'--the mass shootings of Jews, mostly in the Soviet Union, during the second world war--was perpetrated on an even larger scale than previously realised. Soviet agricultural collectivisation incurred millions of foreseeable deaths, mainly as a result of starvation, with deportation to uninhabitable regions, life-threatening conditions in the Gulag and military-style operations against recalcitrant villages also playing an important role. Peacetime deaths due to internal repression under the Mao regime have been estimated to be around 70 million. Along with fatalities caused by state terror were unnumbered millions whose lives were irreparably broken and shortened. How these casualties fit into the scheme of declining violence is unclear. Pinker goes so far as to suggest that the 20th-century Hemoclysm might have been a gigantic statistical fluke, and cautions that any history of the last century that represents it as having been especially violent may be 'apt to exaggerate the narrative coherence of this history' (the italics are Pinker's). However, there is an equal or greater risk in abandoning a coherent and truthful narrative of the violence of the last century for the sake of a spurious quantitative precision."
How About Improving High Schools?
David Leonhardt takes on the conventional wisdom that college is not for everyone. (Although I thought the conventional wisdom is that college is for everyone.) In his Upshot column in the NY Times, Leonhardt argues that new studies show that college benefits even the most marginal students. "The fate of students like Mr. Escanilla is crucial to today's debate over who should go to college: How much money should taxpayers spend subsidizing higher education? How willing should students be to take on college debt? How hard should Washington and state governments push colleges to lift their graduation rates? All of these questions depend on whether a large number of at-risk students are really capable of completing a four-year degree. As it happens, two separate--and ambitious--recent academic studies have looked at precisely this issue. The economists and education researchers tracked thousands of people over the last two decades in Florida, Georgia and elsewhere who had fallen on either side of hard admissions cutoffs. Less selective colleges often set such benchmarks: Students who score 840 on the SAT, for example, or maintain a C+ average in high school are admitted. Those who don't clear the bar are generally rejected, and many don't attend any four-year college. Such stark cutoffs provide researchers with a kind of natural experiment. Students who score an 830 on the SAT are nearly identical to those who score an 840. Yet if one group goes to college and the other doesn't, researchers can make meaningful estimates of the true effects of college. And the two studies have come to remarkably similar conclusions: Enrolling in a four-year college brings large benefits to marginal students. Roughly half of the students in Georgia who had cleared the bar went on to earn a bachelor's degree within six years, compared with only 17 percent of those who missed the cutoff, according to one of the studies, by Joshua S. Goodman of Harvard and Michael Hurwitz and Jonathan Smith of the College Board. The benefits were concentrated among lower-income students, both studies found, and among men, one of them found." What is unasked in Leonhardt's argument is, "What about high school?" It is not controversial that sending someone to college will help people. But does it make sense for us to continue offering free high school educations that are horrific and then charge people for better college educations? Wouldn't the money and effort spent on community colleges and financial aid for lower tier colleges be better spent reforming high school education in a meaningful way? It seems most people simply have given up on high school, which is why college becomes an expensive and next-best alternative.
Your Smart Things, They're Spying On You
Justin McGuirk says the smart house is here and that it's here less to make your life convenient and more to gather data about what you do at home: "For the first time since the mid-twentieth century--with its labor-saving household appliances and rising quality of life--the domestic is once again the site of radical change. And though domestic space appears to fall within the realm of architecture, architects themselves have been almost mute on the implications of such change. Architecture, it seems, has given up its dreams of imagining how we might live, and so into that void technology is rushing. That tired old trope of 'the house of the future' has been replaced by what is now called the 'smart home.' The smart home is the network's great white hope for ubiquitous connectivity. It sounds benign enough, and may conjure Jacques Tati-style mise-en-scènes populated by absurd devices--the smart home is prime territory for farce--but it is also an ideology. It is the house-shaped manifestation of the internet of things, according to which all our devices and appliances will join the network, communicating with us and each other. To say that the internet of things is an ideology is to suggest that the use-value of the concept has yet to be sold to the consumer. It is easily mocked by skeptical hacks who question the need for talking fridges and washing machines that you can program with your smartphone ('You still need to put the clothes in yourself, right?'). Bruce Sterling argues that the internet of things has nothing to do with the consumer and everything to do with the business interests of the service providers. Given that data is the new currency, the internet of things is an epic power grab by the lords of the network--Sterling focuses on the 'big five' of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft--to gain control of as much human data as physically possible. As the primary interface of the internet of things, the smart home is effectively the tendrils of the network rising out of the ground and into every one of our household appliances to allow mass data collection and digital surveillance." And while it used to be that you could strategically opt out of this data gathering, McGuirk suggests that the smart home will just render you redundant. Home, then, is no longer any retreat from the public space.
Mindfulness and Social Control
Virginia Heffernan is wary of the way "mindfulness," an idea brought into Western thought from various Eastern religions, has been taken up by businesses and 21st century self-help gurus: "Mindfulness as 'keeping in tune' has a nice ring to it. But it's 'focused on the task at hand' that appeals to managers, like Jackson, who are conscious of performance goals. Might workplace mindfulness--in the cubicle or on the court--be just another way to keep employees undistracted and to get them to work harder for nothing but airy rewards? In this context of performance enhancement, 'mindfulness' seems perilously close to doggerel from the same playbook that brought us corny affirmations, inner children and vision boards. Maybe the word 'mindfulness' is like the Prius emblem, a badge of enlightened and self-satisfied consumerism, and of success and achievement. If so, not deploying mindfulness--taking pills or naps for anxiety, say, or going out to church or cocktails--makes you look sort of backward or classless. Like driving a Hummer."
Françoise Mouly, in an interview, talks about the relationship between thought and emotion in art: "Often, we separate intellectual discourse from emotional reaction. But I take such genuine pleasure in things that are intellectually well architected. It's definitely an integrated experience for me. Much more than any kind of cheap, emotional pulls that you get in popular culture, when I read a sentence and it's beautifully written, it can bring me to tears. I know what I respond to is a voice. A voice is not just a stylistic thing, but it means someone who really has something to say. I think a lot of what I get from books--whether they be books of comics or books of literature--is a window into somebody's mind and their way of thinking. I love it when it's so specific. It's a new way to look at the world. It's as if I could get in and see it through their eyes. It also reaches a level of universality because, somehow, I can recognize some of my feelings in seeing somebody who is actually expressing their own inner reality. Even though Flaubert has not been in Madame Bovary's skin, you do get a sense of what it's like to be that person. It's a kind of empathic response when you're reading it."
In a piece on the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, Janet Malcom, starting with facts from a new biography of Mitchell, tries to work out whether it matters that his tendency to exaggerate or flat-out invent in his profiles for the magazine, more prevalent than previously believed, matters. Ultimately, she says, it doesn't. But only because he was good at it: "Every writer of nonfiction who has struggled with the ditch and the bushes knows what Mitchell is talking about, but few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted than Mitchell. The idea that reporters are constantly resisting the temptation to invent is a laughable one. Reporters don't invent because they don't know how to. This is why they are journalists rather than novelists or short-story writers. They depend on the kindness of the strangers they actually meet for the characters in their stories. There are no fictional characters lurking in their imaginations. They couldn't create a character like Mr. Flood or Cockeye Johnny if you held a gun to their heads. Mitchell's travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat. His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they're so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition. In the title piece of The Bottom of the Harbor, a short work of great subtlety about the ability of fish and shellfish to survive in polluted water, Mitchell mentions a small area of the New York waterfront where, in contrast to the general foulness, 'clean, sparkling, steel-blue water' can be found. This image of purity in the midst of contamination could serve as an emblem of Mitchell's journalistic exceptionalism. He has filtered out the impurities other journalists helplessly accept as the defining condition of their genre. Mitchell's genre is some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named."
What We Talk About When We Talk About Dresses
Megan Garber wonders what might have caused the backlash against some designer dresses that went on sale at Target this week, coming up with an answer that suggests, as always, that when we're talking about clothes, we're not just talking about clothes: "A common phrase you'll hear associated with Pulitzer is 'uniform'--as in, as Givhan put it, 'part of a preppy uniform that announces itself from fifty paces,' or, as the Boston Globe put it, 'a uniform of the well-heeled WASP.' Which is ironic, of course: Uniforms are about the constriction of freedoms, and preppiness and WASPiness are, in general, about the freedom that comes with privilege. And clothing, furthermore-'fashion,' in haughtier moments--is most optimistically about the freedoms of self-expression and self-reinvention. It recognizes very little distinction between faking it and making it. If you have the money and the inclination, you can stock your closet--and swath your body--with Alice + Olivia and Thakoon and Marc Jacobs and Marchesa, or with very convincing knockoffs. You can balance them out, as the fashion magazines have taught you to do, with items from H&M and Zara and Forever 21. We live in an economy of sartorial abundance; one outcome of that is that 'style' is something we have come to associate with freedom. But Pulitzer's clothes are, again, 'uniforms'--which are, on the whole, designed to free their wearers from the burdens of free thinking. And this is perhaps the main source of the ire about Pulitzer's clothes: The garments suggest a kind of willful conscription, celebrating what happens when wealth and status are accompanied by an insistent rejection of creativity. It was, and to some extent still is, popular to deride women for being 'basic,' which is to say for loving pumpkin-spice lattes, Ugg boots, Gucci handbags, and other predictable outcomes of commercialized femininity. 'Basic' is a terrible epithet in many ways, but it is also, as far as 'Lillys' are concerned, an instructive one: Pulitzer's clothes are, in this sense, the worst kind of basic. They promise class and community and the relief of conformity. They are marketed to people of privilege. Worst of all, though, they suggest that the best thing one can do with one's privilege is to use it to go on vacation."
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 firstname.lastname@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, Jennie Han discusses how Arendt's and Kant's conceptions of critical thinking help open us up to the rest of the world in the Quote of the Week. Albert Einstein provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In a special feature, Zelda May Bas, a student fellow with the Hannah Arendt Center, recounts our second "Courage to Be" dinner, during which Professor Uday Mehta spoke on Gandhi. Finally, we visit the Hannah Arendt Collection and peruse a number of books dedicated to understanding the character and political aspirations of Adolf Hitler in this week's Library feature.
Amor Mundi 2/22/15
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.
Andrew M. Schocket thinks he knows why the American Revolution is such a fertile ground for rhetoric in contemporary American politics: "the American Revolution was indeed unusual, as is its relation to the American present. Unlike many other countries, the United States can point to a period of less than two decades as its seminal founding moment. Most other nations have either multiple founding moments or have lived through various evolutions. Unlike the United States, most countries trace their origins to ethnicity and language, rather than to the establishment of a particular political structure. The United States retains its governmental form from the federal constitution that served as the Revolution's crowning achievement, and so its citizens look to the people who established that form as authorities on it. Most other countries have been through multiple iterations of their national governments. The founding generation of the United States was a particularly articulate bunch, whose vast public and private writings have been preserved, ever at the ready. Few other nations have a single generation of leaders that happen to have left such a wordy legacy, always available for apparent authority and, perhaps, exploitation." Schocket's reflections come from his new book, Fighting over the Founders: How We Remember the American Revolution, which is about the continuing fights over the founding documents of American government--fights, he argues, about nationalism and belonging. Hannah Arendt too saw our continuing worship of the U.S. Constitution as central to the American ideal of freedom, but Arendt argued that the substantive innovation in American constitutional democracy was the abolition of sovereignty: "The great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politics of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same." The truly innovative idea of American government for Arendt was to so multiply sources of power on the federal, state, and local levels so that powerful institutions throughout society would exist to resist tyranny whenever it would begin to emerge, as undoubtedly it does. The real danger to American freedom, in Arendt's reading, is the rise of centralized government bureaucracies that undermine the power-based institutions of civic life. Read more about Arendt's view of American democracy here.
Bard College President Leon Botstein was asked by James Traub about the moral core of running a Liberal Arts College. Botstein's answer is well worth hearing. In part, Botstein talks about the lesson he learned as a child of immigrants and how it has affected his understanding of how to run a liberal arts college: "The moral of the story is that we learned two things. Which have stuck with all of us. One is that if you are ever in the position of privilege, which we as immigrants never expected ourselves to be, you have an obligation to do the right thing and to do the right thing now. You cannot excuse not acting on behalf of what is right and what is needed. You have to imagine that what went wrong in the Second World War among other things was the failure of ordinary people to stand up for what was right. We never expected ourselves to be in a position to help. We turned out to be in such a position. And it informs what I do.... We run, public, not charter schools, high-school early colleges, that reach underserved populations: Two in NYC; Two full high schools; a one-year college prep program in Harlem Children's Zone; A full high school in Newark; One in Cleveland and we're opening one in Baltimore. And a one-year program in New Orleans. We're a private college, unendowed. And we're running these public institutions." He was then asked: "Is this by the way, as a practical question, is this an affordable expense for a school like Bard, that is barely surviving?" Botstein's answer: "It is the wrong question--because you have nothing to lose. The people who are risk-averse are the rich, who become like Fafnir in Wagner's Ring. You know in Wagner's Ring, the gold is cursed. The two brothers fight each other over the gold. Fasolt gets killed. And Fafnir gets the gold and what does he do? (From the viewer's point of view for the next 12 hours in Valkyrie and Siegfried,...) In real life, for a long time, until Siegfried becomes mature, he sits immobilized, having turned himself into a dragon guarding the gold. So what was the gold for?"
Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone tells the story of Michael Winston, a whistleblower who has both been celebrated as a hero for exposing fraud at Countrywide Financial and sued and penalized to an extraordinary degree. "This is the age of the whistleblower. From Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden to the latest cloak-and-dagger lifter of files, ex-HSBC employee Hervé Falciani, whistleblowers are becoming to this decade what rock stars were to the Sixties--pop culture icons, global countercultural heroes. But one of America's ugliest secrets is that our own whistleblowers often don't do so well after the headlines fade and cameras recede. The ones who don't end up in jail like Manning, or in exile like Snowden, often still go through years of harassment and financial hardship. And while we wait to see if Loretta Lynch is confirmed as the next Attorney General, it's worth taking a look at how whistleblowers in America fared under the last regime." We venerate whistleblowers because they have the moral courage to stand up in the face of bureaucratic evil and do the right thing. But such moral actors are also disloyal and even lawbreakers, leading them to be scorned and punished. Taibbi details the way that Winston and others have had their lives destroyed after first being venerated for being heroes.
One of the great intellectual institutions in the United States has just been reinvigorated. The NY Times Magazine--until recently a sickly image of its former self--arrived this weekend not only bigger and printed on weightier paper, but newly committed to the world of letters. One example of the new Times Magazine will be the repeating column on photography by Teju Cole. In his first column, Cole writes of some of his favorite imagistic chroniclers the Civil Rights Movement, first among them Roy DeCarava. He begins with a description of DeCarava's "Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963": "One such image left me short of breath the first time I saw it. It's of a young woman whose face is at once relaxed and intense. She is apparently in bright sunshine, but both her face and the rest of the picture give off a feeling of modulated darkness; we can see her beautiful features, but they are underlit somehow. Only later did I learn the picture's title, 'Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963' which helps explain the young woman's serene and resolute expression. It is an expression suitable for the event she's attending, the most famous civil rights march of them all. The title also confirms the sense that she's standing in a great crowd, even though we see only half of one other person's face (a boy's, indistinct in the foreground) and, behind the young woman, the barest suggestion of two other bodies. The picture was taken by Roy DeCarava, one of the most intriguing and poetic of American photographers. The power of this picture is in the loveliness of its dark areas. His work was, in fact, an exploration of just how much could be seen in the shadowed parts of a photograph, or how much could be imagined into those shadows. He resisted being too explicit in his work, a reticence that expresses itself in his choice of subjects as well as in the way he presented them.... All technology arises out of specific social circumstances. In our time, as in previous generations, cameras and the mechanical tools of photography have rarely made it easy to photograph black skin. The dynamic range of film emulsions, for example, were generally calibrated for white skin and had limited sensitivity to brown, red or yellow skin tones. Light meters had similar limitations, with a tendency to underexpose dark skin. And for many years, beginning in the mid-1940s, the smaller film-developing units manufactured by Kodak came with Shirley cards, so-named after the white model who was featured on them and whose whiteness was marked on the cards as 'normal.' Some of these instruments improved with time. In the age of digital photography, for instance, Shirley cards are hardly used anymore. But even now, there are reminders that photographic technology is neither value-free nor ethnically neutral. In 2009, the face-recognition technology on HP webcams had difficulty recognizing black faces, suggesting, again, that the process of calibration had favored lighter skin."
Aminatta Forna wonders why we need canons: "Forty years ago the great Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o argued against the idea of national canons. There should, he said, be a single department with a single word on the door and that word should be LITERATURE. A perfectly excellent idea, it seems to me, which naturally never came to pass. Instead, the study of literature became fragmented by the politics of university departments. Categories were added: American literature, post-colonial literature, comparative literature, women's literature. The creative output of the world's writers was hived off, territory was staked out and defended. In university departments no doubt this stuff mattered, because it came with opportunities for funding, career advancement and empire building. (In fact, it has been interesting to observe in recent times something of a reversal of fortunes, as English departments in British universities have their funding cut, while in the US a diverse student body has begun to insist on a range of subjects to reflect their interests. We will have to wait and see what long-term impact these changes will have.) All this classifying, it seems to me, is the very antithesis of literature. The way of literature is to seek universality. Writers try to reach beyond those things that divide us: culture, class, gender, race. Given the chance, we would resist classification. I have never met a writer who wishes to be described as a female writer, gay writer, black writer, Asian writer or African writer. We hyphenated writers complain about the privilege accorded to the white male writer, he who dominates the western canon and is the only one called simply 'writer.'"
In an essay about the rhetorical strategies engaged in Mein Kampf, Albrecht Kaschorke suggests that the book, rather than more modern forms of communication, is the great form of dictatorial communication: As different as the works of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and Mu'ammar Gadhafi are in style and ideology, the bibliocentric orientation of their regimes is something they have in common. In simplified, ideal-typical terms, we may speak of the book as the symbolic center of the totalitarian system. It forms the sacral center of a state propaganda that otherwise employs more modern media: radio, film, and television. The book is given out to party cadres, even to the entire population, and assumes the character of a constitutional document; at a minimum, it is endowed with an authority to which tribute must be paid in the regime's public displays and within its power networks. The book's guiding idea is to provide a durable foundation for a political formation that has emerged from the tumultuous events of war and revolution and is extremely precarious when it comes to legitimacy and stability. Consequently, the book serves a quasi-religious function and is meant to inherit the mantle of the holy books of the great world religions. This explains the tension between, on the one hand, the use of technical and industrial media by the regime's propaganda and, on the other, the archaizing rituals carried out around the sacral book, blending bibliophilic splendor, fetishism, talismanic touching, and other forms of magical performance in a peculiar syndrome."
Ta-Nehisi Coates, eulogizing David Carr, tells the story of how Carr hired him to his first journalism job: "In the February of 1996, I sent David Carr two poorly conceived college-newspaper articles and a chapbook of black-nationalist poetry--and David Carr hired me. I can't even tell you what he saw. I know that I immediately felt unworthy--a feeling that never quite faded--because I was a knucklehead and a fuck-up. But what I didn't then know about David Carr was that he'd written and edited the knucklehead chronicles, and published annual editions wholly devoted to the craft of fucking-up. I think that David--recovering crack addict, recovering alcoholic, ex-cocaine dealer, lymphoma survivor, beautiful writer, gorgeous human--knew something about how a life of fucking up burrows itself into the bones of knuckleheads, and it changes there, transmutes into an abiding shame, a gnawing fear which likely dogs the reformed knucklehead right into the grave. Perhaps that fear could be turned into something beautiful. Perhaps a young journalist could pull power from that fear, could write from it, the way Bob Hayes ran with it, because the fear was not of anything earthly but of demons born from profound shame and fantastic imagination."
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
Screening of The Decent One and Q&A with Director Vanessa Lapa and Sound Designer Tomer Eliav
The film is based on the newly discovered diaries of Heinrich Himmler. Watch a trailer here.
Monday, February 23, 2015
Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Charles Snyder, a Hannah Arendt Center Post-Doctoral Fellow
"Natality and its Vicissitudes"
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 12:00 pm
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #5
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, March 6, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Ari-Elmeri Hyvonen, a Hannah Arendt Center Visiting Fellow
"Arendt's Critique of Modern Society as an Analysis of Process Imaginary"
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 1:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Uday Mehta
Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge
Invite Only. RSVP Required.
Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?
A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and The University of The Western Cape
Monday, April 6, 2015
Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
This week on the Blog, Etienne Tassin discusses how we can use Arendt to understand the political success of those demonstrators who rallied together in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in the Quote of the Week. Leo Tolstoy provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We appreciate Arendt's collection of books on Marxist capitalism in our Library feature. And we congratulate our post-doctoral fellow Michiel Bot on receiving the Witteveen Memorial Fellowship in Law and Humanities at Tilburg University for the summer of 2015.
Amor Mundi 2/8/15
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
The artist, Hannah Arendt wrote, was the last person who could resist the dominant role of laborer and produce works that transfigured the everyday into the extraordinary. To do so, she saw, required the artist to exist outside of society as a conscious pariah, in solitude, where the artist could acquire his or her unique and original thoughts about the world. Bill Deresiewicz has an essay in The Atlantic on the transformation of artists into creative entrepreneurs. "Creative entrepreneurship, to start with what is most apparent, is far more interactive, at least in terms of how we understand the word today, than the model of the artist-as-genius, turning his back on the world, and even than the model of the artist as professional, operating within a relatively small and stable set of relationships. The operative concept today is the network, along with the verb that goes with it, networking.... What we see in the new paradigm--in both the artist's external relationships and her internal creative capacity--is what we see throughout the culture: the displacement of depth by breadth. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? No doubt some of both, in a ratio that's yet to be revealed." But Deresiewicz clearly has his worries: "It's hard to believe that the new arrangement will not favor work that's safer: more familiar, formulaic, user-friendly, eager to please--more like entertainment, less like art. Artists will inevitably spend a lot more time looking over their shoulder, trying to figure out what the customer wants rather than what they themselves are seeking to say. The nature of aesthetic judgment will itself be reconfigured. 'No more gatekeepers,' goes the slogan of the Internet apostles. Everyone's opinion, as expressed in Amazon reviews and suchlike, carries equal weight--the democratization of taste. Judgment rested with the patron, in the age of the artisan. In the age of the professional, it rested with the critic, a professionalized aesthete or intellectual. In the age of the genius, which was also the age of avant-gardes, of tremendous experimental energy across the arts, it largely rested with artists themselves. 'Every great and original writer,' Wordsworth said, 'must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.' But now we have come to the age of the customer, who perforce is always right."
The common world, that world of appearance we share amidst are meaningful differences, is ever more fragile. In her book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt worries that we lose faith in anything true or great that could unite plural individuals in a common world. She sees that the loss of a concern with immortality and with acts, deeds, and works that deserve to be remembered would deprive us of a shared world. All politics, Arendt writes, demands transcendence in the sense that we step beyond our solipsistic experiences and enter a world we share with others. Pursuing this Arendtian theme, Michael W. Clune in the LA Review of Books explores the effort of some contemporary art to cultivate the experience of "mere appearance," appearances so fleeting that they resist any shared commonality. Such art celebrates the radically individual transcendental experience against the transcendence of a common world: "Here is the fact: Something is wrong with the world. There is a fundamental flaw in society. Relations between people seem to have something wrong with them. Something ... off. Sometimes, when I want to share something with you, I realize that my experience has an unsharable dimension. I realize that we encounter each other only by peering across the thick boundary of our social personas. I don't know how to fix this problem, but I don't like it. I can only meet other people on the terrain of a common world that seems too heavy, too alien, too uncomfortable, too cold. Sometimes I protest by looking away, by watching the part of my experience that none of you can touch." For Clune, the effort of contemporary artists to dwell in mere appearance is, but is not only, a "turn away from the world."
Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses the importance of popular art that's cheap to produce: "One reason why I still enjoy books, including comic books, is that there's still more room for a transgressive diversity. If Greg Pak wants to create an Amadeus Cho, he doesn't have to worry about whether America is ready for a Korean-American protagonist. Or rather, he doesn't have to put millions of dollars behind it. I don't know what that means to a young, Asian-American comic books fan. But when I was eight, the fact that Storm could exist--as she was, and in a way that I knew the rest of society did not accept--meant something. Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected. Monica Rambeau was my first Captain Marvel. James Rhodes was the first Iron Man I knew...one reason I'm always cautious about the assumption that everything is improved by turning it into a movie is that the range of possibility necessarily shrinks. I'd frankly be shocked if we ever see a Storm, in all her fullness and glory, in a film."
If you carry a cell-phone, use the internet, or walk down the street, you abandon your expectation of privacy. Even in your home, your life is increasingly transparent. There is no place to hide from the bright light of the public. But in Europe, unlike in the United States, there is an effort to think about the right to have your private failures publicly forgotten. Heather Roff explores how this might work. "Last year, The European Court of Justice ruled in Google vs. Costeja that European citizens have the right, under certain circumstances, to request search engines like Google, to remove links that contain personal information about them. The Court held that in instances where data is 'inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive' individuals may request the information to be erased and delinked from the search engines. This 'right to be forgotten' is a right that is intended to support and complement an individual's privacy rights. It is not absolute, but must be balanced 'against other fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression and of the media' (paragraph 85 of the ruling). In the case of Costeja, he asked that a 1998 article in a Spanish newspaper be delinked from his name, for in that article, information pertaining to an auction of his foreclosed home appeared. Mr. Costeja subsequently paid the debt, and so on these grounds, the Court ruled that the link to his information was no longer relevant. The case did not state that information regarding Mr. Costeja has to be erased, or that the newspaper article eliminated, merely that the search engine result did not need to make this particular information 'ubiquitous.' The idea is that in an age of instantaneous and ubiquitous information about private details, individuals have a right to try to balance their personal privacy against other rights, such as freedom of speech." Privacy, and why it matters, will be the theme of the Hannah Arendt Center's 8th annual conference this October 15-16th. Save the Date.
With Liberty and Justice for All
Slavoj Zizek considers the possibilities of solidarity in the shadow of neoliberalism and colonialism: "It was relatively easy to identify with the Charlie Hebdo journalists, but it would have been much more difficult to announce: 'We are all from Baga!' (For those who don't know: Baga is a small town in the north-east of Nigeria where Boko Haram executed two thousand people.) The name 'Boko Haram' can be roughly translated as 'Western education is forbidden,' specifically the education of women. How to account for the weird fact of a massive sociopolitical movement whose main aim is the hierarchic regulation of the relationship between the sexes? Why do Muslims who were undoubtedly exposed to exploitation, domination and other destructive and humiliating aspects of colonialism, target in their response the best part (for us, at least) of the Western legacy, our egalitarianism and personal freedoms, including the freedom to mock all authorities? One answer is that their target is well chosen: the liberal West is so unbearable because it not only practises exploitation and violent domination, but presents this brutal reality in the guise of its opposite: freedom, equality and democracy."
Lucy Kellaway explores the excruciating and unbounded silence of unanswered emails. "Silence is not just a response to job searches, but to pitches, invitations, proposed meetings, memos, general requests--or to anything sent by email. From this non-communication everyone loses, though some more than others. For the purveyors of silence, not replying may be neither polite nor efficient, but is vital for survival. Every day I fail to reply to dozens of messages as with so much dross coming in, silence is the only way of staying sane. But such sanity on one side breeds insanity on the other. The jobseeker is demented by the silence--the certainty of rejection, he told me, would have been kind by comparison. On any given day I am anywhere between mildly and debilitatingly anxious about why assorted people have failed to reply to my messages. Was the silence that greeted a slightly cheeky email due to disgust at its fresh tone? When I sent an email containing the outline of a column idea in it, was the resulting silence dismay? Or disagreement? Or something else entirely? What is so distracting about silence on email is that it is impossible to fathom. When you are speaking to someone, you can see whether they are struck dumb from amazement, disapproval or boredom. But emails give no clues. Has the person even seen your message? Are they deliberately ignoring you? Are they disgusted? Busy? Out of battery? Or could it be that--as often happens to me--they have read the message on their mobile without reading glasses to hand, and by the time they have got their glasses the moment has passed." Kellaway has some excellent insights into how and when to nag or follow up on email. But no techniques will eradicate the nausea of email overload or the anxiety of unanswered emails.
Ian Crouch lauds new Larry Wilmore's Comedy Central fake news show, The Nightly Report, as he chronicles its growing pains: "The show has included the kinds of voices that don't normally get much of a fair airing on Comedy Central, or in the wider Jon Stewart produced or inspired universe of political comedy. Last Wednesday, the conservative radio host David Webb could be seen defending the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. The night before, an anti-vaccine activist named Zoey O'Toole argued that immunization should be more about individual choice than public safety. This week, the Baptist pastor Michel Faulkner talked about his opposition to gay marriage. None of these arguments were particularly persuasive or, to the average Comedy Central viewer, likely even plausible, but they were at least freely expressed, as part of the show's nightly unscripted discussion between Wilmore and a changing four-person panel made up of journalists, politicians, activists, and comedians. One of the trademarks of Comedy Central's political comedy has been its insularity. The sets of Stewart and Colbert were safe spaces for liberals to mock the powerful and fatuous, and laugh together through their shared outrage. The chanting and hooting from the studio audience was polite liberalism tapping into its id. On 'Colbert,' the anti-vaxxer would have been discredited by the eager support of the idiotic Colbert character; on 'The Daily Show,' she would have been openly ridiculed. Here, Wilmore and the other guests on the panel mostly tried to reason with her, which is more generous, and perhaps even more useful, than simple excoriation or humiliation. But can the search for consensus or good will be funny? 'I'm not interested in doing a show where I give my opinion and people react to my opinion,' Wilmore said a few weeks ago, during a press appearance. 'Our show is more about the discovery of things. I want people who will teach me something.' So far, however, there has been little evidence of discovery."
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
Lunchtime Talk with Angela Maione, our Klemens Von Klemperer Post-Doctoral Fellow
"Wollstonecraft and the Right to Political Community
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 6:00 - 7:00 pm
Screening of The Decent One and Q&A with Director Vanessa Lapa and Sound Designer Tomer Eliav
The film is based on the newly discovered diaries of Heinrich Himmler. Watch a trailer here.
Monday, February 23, 2015
Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Charles Snyder, a Hannah Arendt Center Post-Doctoral Fellow
"Natality and its Vicissitudes"
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 12:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Uday Mehta
Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge
Monday, March 30, 2015
Manor House Cafe, 6:00 pm
Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?
A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and The University of The Western Cape
Monday, April 6, 2015
Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
This week on the Blog, Ian Storey discusses how a problem of language and appearance in our society fails to account for untold millions of people who are suffering in the Quote of the Week. J. William Fulbright provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. And we appreciate a particular passage that Arendt underlined in Machiavelli's history of Florence in our Library feature.
Amor Mundi 12/7/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Dara Lind on Vox looks into the controversial number of police killings every year. A minimum of about 400 people are killed annually by what the FBI calls "justified police homicides"--but the actual number is likely much higher (see FiveThirtyEight). Within these statistics, those killed are predominantly male. About 50% are white, the rest largely black or Hispanic. But one important difference concerns the age of the victims: "The SHR lists 118 victims of 'justifiable homicide' who were killed while fleeing, committing a felony, or resisting arrest--not because they were attacking anyone. And 102 of those weren't killed with a rifle or a shotgun but with a handgun. In these 102 cases, the necessity of the officers' use of force is the most ambiguous. And in these 102 cases, the victims are more likely than in any other justifiable homicide categories to be black.... John Roman of the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute says these numbers indicate that many white justifiable-homicide victims are killed by police who are intervening in a domestic-violence dispute. Broader research on all types of homicide, he says, shows that victim and offender ages fall into a few distinct groups: 'You see one peak with little kids with infanticide, one peak with teenagers shooting each other, and then you see another big blip where the age of the victim and the offender are the same and they could be in their 30s, 40s or 50s. And that's mainly domestic violence. So when you see whites being shot by police officers, who are older than their early 20s, that's almost certainly domestic violence.' The concentration of death among young black and Hispanic men, meanwhile, is in part a demonstration that those are the people most likely to encounter police officers. They're the ones most likely to be arrested, and most likely to be living in the neighborhoods where police most frequently patrol."
The Daughter Against The Archivist
Marc Parry profiles Saskia Sassen, author of Global Cities, and daughter of Willem Sassen, the Nazi who is now famous for his interviews with Adolf Eichmann. Amidst an account of Sassen's innovative work on globalization, Parry gives Sassen's reaction to the stories being told about her father, most recently in Bettina Stangneth's book Eichmann Before Jerusalem. "But, to my surprise, Sassen hasn't seen that movie. Nor has she read Stangneth's book. And the longer I speak with Sassen about her father, the clearer it becomes that her account clashes with Stangneth's. Willem Sassen, in his daughter's description, is a more palatable figure. A bit of a fanatic, yes. A journalist aligned with the Nazis, yes. But a man whose great passions were theater and journalism. In Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Stangneth describes how Willem Sassen grew infatuated with Hitler in his youth. She tells me how, after Eichmann's capture, Sassen protected the murderer by manipulating the transcripts of their discussions and never going public with the original recordings. (Stangneth found no evidence that Sassen had betrayed Eichmann to the Israelis.) Stangneth's book also describes how, in a 1991 interview on Argentine TV, Sassen continued to justify Josef Mengele's 'experiments' on Auschwitz victims. By contrast, Saskia Sassen tells me that her father 'did not like the Nazis.' She emphasizes how he clashed with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister. 'My father detested Hitler,' she says. 'He detested him.' And the Argentina circle? The dreaming of Nazi restoration? Willem Sassen's attempt to discredit 'propaganda' about the Holocaust? 'That's not what I remember,' she says. In her telling, Willem Sassen comes across as a mouthpiece for local Nazis. He wrote for them but ranted about them at home. The 'ridiculous texts' he produced were 'to have an income,' she says. At another point in our conversation, Sassen says, 'My father was more a journalist--a journalist wants to discover stuff--than he was pro-Nazi, actually.' It's not that Stangneth is lying in her portrayal, she tells me. 'But she was dealing with archives.... She doesn't understand, in my home, what I experienced.'"
Seeing The World Through Others' Eyes
To think, Hannah Arendt writes, is to think from the perspective of others, what she calls enlarged thinking. But thinking from the perspective of others means many others, and not just from the perspective of one group. That is Jim Sleeper's point. He tells of Claudia Horwitz, "a spiritual/social activist and interim director of Houston's Rothko Chapel," who writes that the answer to the question, "What Are White People to Do?" is for whites to "put ourselves through some honest reflection and let that process lead us on to thoughtful action ... to dismantle a system of white supremacy that permeates every corner of our legal, economic, political, relational and cultural lives." Sleeper, author of the classic "The Closest of Strangers, Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York," has a different take: "But Horowitz doesn't address those millions of white guys (and gals) who run the gamut from a Zimmerman to a Signorelli. To do that, whites who think and write about race would have to 'peer into' the lives of whites who are perhaps even more deeply angry than we are--so angry they haven't enough words or even scapegoats to lift the sadness that accompanies their rage. We'd also have to discover that some of them are as angry at moralizing, liberal whites as they are at blacks--just as angry as they'd be if America were white from coast to coast, like the England of Charles Dickens, where grinding, gnawing differences in class weren't racial at all, as they also aren't in most majority-black societies. We'd have to understand why the white anger I've just mentioned is taking increasingly murderous and perverse turns that won't be deflected by our moralizing. Start with two contrasting images of generic American 'white guys,' taken from two historic moments less than a decade apart. When death-embracing fundamentalists attacked the World Trade Center on 9/11, perhaps the most telling response came from New York City firefighters and police officers who ran toward death in order to rescue others, not slaughter them." For Sleeper, white elites must indeed learn to think and feel from the perspective of blacks, but they must also attend to the ressentiment of the white working class.
Speaking at a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Education, Chris Lebron says that America, "while no longer white supremacist in the way it was before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, daily exhibits the visages of a country where public lynching was practiced and Jim Crow segregation was the norm." What is needed, Lebron argues, is a new idea of racial education: "When I speak of racial democratic education I mean something deeply humanistic. When we are presented with facts, numbers, and dates, we tend to think we have acquired knowledge. But more essentially we consider ourselves to be educated when knowledge opens a window letting in a new way of seeing the world--this is the moment when knowledge becomes erudition. I think a significant problem with regard to race in America today is that we have focused a great deal on, admittedly, a narrow range of knowledge regarding American history. These arebasic pedagogical tropes: Lincoln freed the slaves, Martin Luther King, Jr. made a momentous speech on the steps of the Washington Monument, the Civil Rights Act made racial equality law of the land. But these tropes do not allow us to see the world anew--they are the tropes that now allow us to be comfortable with the status quo, for surely if Martin had a dream and racial equality is law of the land, we can wake up today and go about our business. But it goes without saying that no conversation about the Civil Rights Movement can be complete without paying serious attention to Malcolm X or the Black Panthers. It goes without saying that no one can responsibly remark on the triumph of formal racial equality as law without also noting the concurrent and aggressive build-up of the carceral state and the penal system which disproportionately incarcerates young black men, resulting in what Michelle Alexander aptly calls the New Jim Crow. It would certainly help the cause of racial equality if more knowledge were brought before the minds of students and Americans more generally. But I want to explore another avenue. This avenue is not mutually exclusive to the knowledge-based approach I just mentioned. The kind of thing I've been thinking about lately has to do with something very essential: more than know what has happened in American history to blacks as a category of people (and here I note and bracket the obvious problems with a notion like racial categories). I think we need a better understanding of what it is like to be, to exist as a black person in America. In what follows I can only offer a philosophical account of the conceptual framework I have in mind--my expertise is far from advising educational policy in its particulars. It is my hope that some of what I say resonates here today with those of you who are surely better positioned than I am to think in terms of policy."
This week saw a mass resignation of editors and writers at The New Republic, one of the oldest and most venerable magazines in US history. No other resignation will be felt as strongly as that of Leon Wieseltier who ran the Books & The Arts section of the magazine for decades. R.R. Reno writes that Wieseltier's departure speaks volumes about both American liberalism and America's colleges: Wieseltier could leave, Reno writes, first because "American liberalism is shifting in the direction of a long tradition in American conservatism, one that is supremely confident in the wisdom of markets. For liberal idealists, the new technological utopianism married to the dynamism of capitalism has replaced the old utopian socialism of the bygone era." The second reason Wieseltier is going "reflects changes in the university. A liberal arts education educates young people into a particular way of life, a particular culture. Some of them become virtuosos in this way of life, which means they absorb its animating ideas and sentiments, but can improvise. All cultures need these virtuosos, because all cultures face external and internal challenges that require adaptation, revision, and renewal. The prophets of Israel were virtuosos. Socrates, Luther, Burke, and Emerson were virtuosos.... As an editor, Wieseltier sought liberal virtuosos. (Conservatives were not part of his mix. He was interested only in a conversation about a progressive future.) And when he found them he gave them an extraordinary amount of space to speak to us about things that matter. But today's universities don't train virtuosos. A shallow scientism and materialism has found its way to the classroom. Political correctness shuts down conversation, insisting on sterile platitudes. Conservative ideas are largely excluded, and many of the most important questions facing us today simply aren't posed in ways relevant to our public life (which unlike the university culture isn't monochromatic). And anyway, if starting a company and cashing out as a billionaire is the way to change the world, who needs Shakespeare?"
In an interview, publisher Gary Groth situates underground comix in terms of other art movements from the 60s and 70s: "Zap was obviously part of the '60s-counter-cultural zeitgeist--it couldn't have happened without the larger cultural shift that it epitomized--but I tend to think the whole underground comix revolution was too singular to compare tidily with the stylistic and attitudinal shifts in the other arts in the '60s (and '70s). You can observe parallels in other media: artists like Stan Brackage, Jonas Mekas, Frank Jacobs, and Kenneth Anger were pushing the formal elements of film; Vonnegut, Pynchon, Brautigan, Kesey, and others were emerging in prose fiction. But they didn't represent a decisive split from the past. By contrast, in terms of visual art, I don't see much connection to other artists emerging in the '60s. Surely the Zap artists had little in common with (and I bet most were even fundamentally opposed to) Warhol (who showed his first comic strip painting in 1960) or Litchenstein (who did his first comic strip painting in 1961) or Claus Oldenberg or Gerhard Richter or Ed Ruscha, whose ascendancy parallels the underground artists. Their respective values seem quite different to me. The only art movement that I can see that Zap or the underground artists generally shares any affinity with is the Chicago Imagists (or the Hairy Who) (who had their first show in '66)--artists like Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Karl Wirsum. They had a cartoony, occasionally psychedelic cast to their work, but used to different ends, the results of which were pretty remote from those of underground comix. You could make a case that Kesey and his Merry Pranksters had the same aesthetically anarchic spirit as much of the undergrounds, but that too seems a bit of a stretch. And maybe rock was as huge a break from previous pop music as Zap was from previous industrial comics production, but the explosion of rock seems more like a continuation or culmination of musical trends, whereas underground comix was a decisive break from the past--a deliberate, incendiary reaction to the censored blandness of comics over the previous 15 years. So it seems to me that the Zap crew was somehow part of but apart from their countercultural brethren in the other arts."
Freddie de Boer admits to being suspicious of crowdfunding: "After all, crowdfunding is a type of crowdsourcing; what's being crowdsourced is the gatekeeping functions that investors and organizations used to perform. The essential work isn't just sorting through various projects and determining which are cool or desirable but determining if they're responsible and plausible--capable of being successfully pulled off by the people proposing them within the time frames and budgets stipulated. It turns out that most people are not good at that. But then, why would they be? Why would the average person be good at fulfilling that function? Where does that faith come from? There are so many places where we've turned over functions once performed by experts to amateurs, and we're consistently surprised that it doesn't work out. 401(k)s aren't crowdsourced, exactly, but they exist thanks to a choice to turn over control of retirement funds to individuals away from managers, in the pursuit of fees, of course. The results have been brutal. But why wouldn't they be brutal? Why would you expect every random person on the street to have a head for investment in that sense? It's worth pointing out that crowdsourcing was first introduced for simplistic tasks that a human can do better than a machine, often through rote repetition--bilingual speakers checking machine translation, for example, a task still far better performed by humans than machines. (Yes, folks.) But now, we seem to expect to hand tons of essential tasks off to computers and crowds, and in many cases, we don't bother to check and see how well they're actually doing because the hype about both is so loud."
Roundtable on Academic Freedom
A panel discussion with guests Andrew Ross, Steven Salaita, and Katherine M. Franke.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Bard College Campus Center, Multipurpose Room, 7:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen discusses how the absence of experience leads philosophy and ideology into useless abstractions that ignore the reality of human interactions in the Quote of the Week. Russian mathematician and esotericist P. D. Ouspensky provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In this week's Video Archives, we look back on a lecture Roger Berkowitz gave on the relationship between revenge and justice. And we appreciate two passages on Nietzsche that Arendt found worthy of annotation in our Library feature.
As the holiday season is now upon us, please consider donating to the Hannah Arendt Center. A tax-deductible gift says that you agree that an institutional space for thinking about the world from an Arendtian perspective is vital at a moment of thoughtless and predictable debates.
Please donate by clicking the button below.
Amor Mundi 11/2/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Meline Toumani has a great essay about the ways hatred between the Armenians and the Turks renders impossible the necessary objectivity of art. Toumani, an Armenian, can recount her version, but even telling her story she realizes that she tells one side and hates that: "I am doomed to be what is known as an unreliable narrator. I hate the way it feels." Her essay brings the power and force of hating to view in multiple perspectives. She acknowledges the fact of hatred, that "there are two things I know to be true. One: I know that if your grandmother told you she watched as her mother was raped and beheaded, you would feel something was yours to defend. What is that thing? Is it your grandmother you are defending? Is it the facts of what happened to her that you are defending, a page in an encyclopedia? Something as intangible as honor? Is it yourself that you are defending? If the story of the brutality that your grandmother encountered were denied or diminished in any way, you would feel certain basic facts of your selfhood extinguished. Your grandmother, who loved you and soothed you, your grandmother whose existence roots you in the world, fixes you somewhere in geography and history. Your grandmother feeds your imagination in a way that your mother and father do not. Imagination is farsighted; it needs distance to discern and define things. If somebody says no, what your grandmother suffered was not really quite as heinous as you're saying it is, they have said that your existence is not really so important. They have said nothing less than that you don't exist. This is a charge no human being can tolerate." But also, that hating corrupts her writing, her art. "Artistic objectivity: the ability to see a problem or an experience from multiple points of view; to tell a story for the sake of a deeper understanding, not to further an agenda; to inhabit the mind of the villain as fully as that of the victim. The villain, for me, had always been the Turk. It was time to try to understand him."
Diane Ravitch in the NY Review of Books looks at the myth of the exceptional Chinese schools and how it is fueling a testing craze in the United States. "At this juncture comes the book that Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, members of Congress, and the nation's governors and legislators need to read: Yong Zhao's Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World. Zhao, born and educated in China, now holds a presidential chair and a professorship at the University of Oregon. He tells us that China has the best education system because it can produce the highest test scores. But, he says, it has the worst education system in the world because those test scores are purchased by sacrificing creativity, divergent thinking, originality, and individualism. The imposition of standardized tests by central authorities, he argues, is a victory for authoritarianism. His book is a timely warning that we should not seek to emulate Shanghai, whose scores reflect a Confucian tradition of rote learning that is thousands of years old. Indeed, the highest-scoring nations on the PISA examinations of fifteen-year-olds are all Asian nations or cities: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Korea, Macao (China), and Japan."
Frank Bruni writes about "Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools," Joel Klein's forthcoming book on education. Bruni hones in on Klein's conclusion that the key to improving education is better teachers. Klein wants to make it easier to remove poor teachers. But he also argues that we need to rethink how we educate our teachers. "He said the curriculum at education schools should be revisited as well. There's a growing chorus for this; it's addressed in the recent best seller 'Building a Better Teacher,' by Elizabeth Green. But while Green hones in on the teaching of teaching, Klein stressed to me that teachers must acquire mastery of the actual subject matter they're dealing with. Too frequently they don't." Here Klein sounds like Hannah Arendt, who argues that teachers must teach young people about the world as it is; the first qualification for teaching, she writes, is "knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it." Which is why the Bard College Masters of Arts in Teaching "requires an equal amount of advanced study in the elected academic discipline and in education courses challenging preservice teachers to apply the results of research and pedagogical analysis to their teaching."
Should international law apply to the Global War On Terror? Marty Lederman and Naz Modirzadeh are debating this question on their respective blogs. Lederman has argued that the Obama administration should be praised for trying to bring the War on Terror within international law. Modirzadeh worries that in doing so, the administration is making International Humanitarian Law into a "toolkit for targeting" civilians and combatants. In other words, International Law is being turned into a guidebook for how and when to target civilians in the war on terror. Modirzadeh writes: "The lawyers, professors, and others, such as Lederman, who have been instrumental in shaping the Obama administration's legal framework have a vested interest in defending the administration's interpretations of international law and policy. I understand that. But I would urge us to consider the long-term implications for the legitimacy and coherence of how international law regulates war of both the legal arguments and the way they have been presented. The arguments for a seemingly boundary-less conception of non-international armed conflict against a terrorist organization or network (one that is quickly splintering and disaggregating), while crafted in response to pressing national security threats, have tremendous implications for international law in the future. In the hands of Syria, Russia, China, and other nations, such legal arguments-especially when seen as legitimized by the world's superpower-may unleash a wave of other boundary-less NIACs. Surely it isn't only the Obama administration lawyers who would like to argue that international law allows for the determination that traveling terrorist fighters can be targeted outside of situations of 'hot' battlefields. These arguments also matter, not only for the immediate debate in the U.S. but also for the decades of state action to come. Poking holes in the divide between the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello, blurring law and policy, drawing from IHL targeting rules for situations that do not rise to the level of armed conflict: we should, at a minimum, pause to reflect on the implications of these legal and strategic arguments in the hands of decision-makers other than those in the current administration."
In an essay in The National Post, Bettina Stangneth, author of the recent book Eichmann Before Jerusalem, writes of the many and conflicting versions of Adolf Eichmann. Stangneth's book deepens our understanding of Eichmann and helps show the complexity of any attempt to understand him according to simple reductions. She writes: "Depending on whose account you read, Eichmann comes across variously as an ordinary man who was turned into a thoughtless murderer by a totalitarian regime; a radical anti-Semite whose aim was the extinction of the Jewish people, or a mentally ill man whose innate sadism was legitimated by the regime. We have a multitude of irreconcilable images of Eichmann, made even more so by the controversy around Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The public view, however, largely remains an empty shell. We are still missing a view of the 'Eichmann phenomenon' before Jerusalem: the way Eichmann was perceived during the different periods of his life."
Sarah Burnside despairs over the fact that we can buy ourselves new hobbies, and therefore new identities, seeing it as a symptom of a larger cultural fracture: "'Identity politics' is commonly criticized for focusing on the narrowly personal at the expense of the structural, but such criticisms must be viewed with a skeptical eye. It would be ludicrous to argue that a person's race, gender, or sexuality has no impact on his or her lived experiences; you might as well claim that social class doesn't exist. Identities that are based on likes and dislikes, unmoored from the material world, are another matter entirely, however. It's jarring to read a journalist using the language of civic participation to refer to, say, enthusiastic adult fans of My Little Pony as 'the brony community.' The growth of bespoke selves may also be part of something broader: a kind of fracturing and splintering of the ways we conceptualize ourselves. If we're purchasing and inhabiting new identities, it's merely a continuation of our packaging and repackaging of curated versions of ourselves, such as in that minor absurdity of modern life: the Twitter bio."
Kelly Osgood sought out the music of the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Anne Sexton and couldn't quite put it away: "Anne Sexton the performer stands in some contrast to Anne Sexton the poet. Though both Linda Sexton and Bob Clawson claim she had no sense of rhythm and often fell into a kind predetermined modulation better suited for readings than musical performances, her voice on the recordings is lilting and measured, rising and softening in accordance with the band. Listening to a performance of 'Protestant Easter,' a hilarious poem that digs at New England Calvinism from the point of view of a child ('After that they pounded nails into his hands / After that, well, after that / everyone wore hats'), I begin to envision her covered in sweat, down on her knees in front of a congregation, shouting 'Praise Jesus!' as the organ trills away behind her. It becomes clear to me that I cannot separate the less comfortable aspects of Sexton and her work from the parts that are more easily accessible and more widely lauded. It was her unusual daring--can you imagine Plath doing a doo-wop version of 'Ariel?'--that fueled Sexton's work. I couldn't take only the fine formal verse and discard the later, sloppier, more desperate writings. I couldn't discard her failed experiments with prose and cling to only what was deemed Pulitzer-worthy."
Michael Powell spent the days before and the hours after Madison Bumgarner's heroic World Series performance with the pitcher's father back home in Hudson, North Carolina. His essay makes vivid the small town and homespun world from which Bumgarner hails and to which he still returns every year. Powell also introduces us to Kevin Bumgarner, Madison's father, who reminds us all that pride, while a sin in general, is a thing of beauty when expressed by a father to his son: "Then Kevin pulled out his phone. He had texted Madison after the eighth inning, and he tried to read it to me. He began to choke up and just handed me the phone. 'OMG. You're so much more than awesome,' Kevin had written to his son. 'To see you work on the mound reminds me of watching you in high school. You are willing yourself to perfection and dragging the team along with you. I couldn't be more proud of your baseball accomplishments.' Kevin looked at me. 'I knew he wouldn't read that text before the game was over,' he said, 'but I wanted him to know this was what his daddy thought of him.'"
The Fall Experimental Humanities Mellon Lecture
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Alexei Gloukhov
Arendt and the Question of Positive Freedom
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
The Hannah Arendt Center, 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Jurgens discusses Arendt's analysis of the Western tradition of revolution and how revolutionary episodes for her failed to enshrine the people's freedom in lasting institutions in the Quote of the Week. Marcel Proust provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In our Video Archives, we look back on a 2011 roundtable discussion on Occupy Wall Street. And we appreciate a particular passage that Arendt felt worthy of being underlined and marked with other annotations in our Library feature.
This coming Friday, November 7th, the Hannah Arendt Center will host the first session of its new Virtual Reading Group. We will be discussing the Prologue and the Introduction to The Human Condition.
The reading group is available to all members and is always welcoming new participants! Please click here to learn more!
Amor Mundi 9/14/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
A.O. Scott reflects on the juvenile nature of American culture in "The Death of Adulthood in American Culture:" "[T]he journalist and critic Ruth Graham published a polemical essay in Slate lamenting the popularity of young-adult fiction among fully adult readers. Noting that nearly a third of Y.A. books were purchased by readers ages 30 to 44 (most of them presumably without teenage children of their own), Graham insisted that such grown-ups 'should feel embarrassed about reading literature for children.' Instead, these readers were furious. The sentiment on Twitter could be summarized as 'Don't tell me what to do!' as if Graham were a bossy, uncomprehending parent warning the kids away from sugary snacks toward more nutritious, chewier stuff. It was not an argument she was in a position to win, however persuasive her points. To oppose the juvenile pleasures of empowered cultural consumers is to assume, wittingly or not, the role of scold, snob or curmudgeon. Full disclosure: The shoe fits. I will admit to feeling a twinge of disapproval when I see one of my peers clutching a volume of 'Harry Potter' or 'The Hunger Games.'" Scott captures something essential in American culture, that in their solidarity with children, Adults enact a "refusal of maturity [that] also invites some critical reflection about just what adulthood is supposed to mean." He is right that, increasingly in public, "nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore. Adulthood as we have known it has become conceptually untenable." Yet Scott is too much part of the culture of immaturity to be willing to judge it. "A crisis of authority is not for the faint of heart. It can be scary and weird and ambiguous. But it can be a lot of fun, too. The best and most authentic cultural products of our time manage to be all of those things. They imagine a world where no one is in charge and no one necessarily knows what's going on, where identities are in perpetual flux. Mothers and fathers act like teenagers; little children are wise beyond their years. Girls light out for the territory and boys cloister themselves in secret gardens. We have more stories, pictures and arguments than we know what to do with, and each one of them presses on our attention with a claim of uniqueness, a demand to be recognized as special. The world is our playground, without a dad or a mom in sight." The crisis of authority will not be overcome by calls for renewed authority; that said, we do suffer from the lack of adult judgment in public. Read more on the Arendt Center blog.
Betsy Huete suggests something counterintuitive about making art: "art is not a creative endeavor. It is an athletic one. If any artist still sits in her studio waiting to be struck with genius inspiration, she is playing an artist, not being one. Artists don't wait, they practice. And fail. And try again, and so on until they get it right, until their work is resolved. Just like their counterparts, athletes spend hours per day training, failing, trying, not quitting. To be either means one must have an enormous amount of resolve and resiliency, and the courage to constantly face the possibility of rejection. Whether it means getting benched, getting cut from the team, losing the championship game, getting a proposal rejected, losing grant money, not getting accepted into a residency: both sides are filled with victories and losses both large and small. Both must work extremely hard to achieve whatever goals they have set for themselves. It is no coincidence that some of the most successful contemporary artists of our day, like Bruce Nauman and Matthew Barney, were former athletes."
In a long essay that amounts, more or less, to a eulogy, writer and eminent professor Marina Warner describes why she loved the University of Essex, and why she left it: "What is happening at Essex reflects on the one hand the general distortions required to turn a university into a for-profit business - one advantageous to administrators and punitive to teachers and scholars - and on the other reveals a particular, local interpretation of the national policy. The Senate and councils of a university like Essex, and most of the academics who are elected by colleagues to govern, have been caught unawares by their new masters, their methods and their assertion of power. Perhaps they/we are culpable of doziness. But there is a central contradiction in the government's business model for higher education: you can't inspire the citizenry, open their eyes and ears, achieve international standing, fill the intellectual granary of the country and replenish it, attract students from this country and beyond, keep up the reputation of the universities, expect your educators and scholars to be public citizens and serve on all kinds of bodies, if you pin them down to one-size-fits-all contracts, inflexible timetables, overflowing workloads, overcrowded classes."
Jack Goldsmith wonders aloud at President Obama's "Breathtaking Expansion of a President's Power to Make War:" "Future historians will ask why George W. Bush sought and received express congressional authorization for his wars (against al Qaeda and Iraq) and his successor did not. They will puzzle over how Barack Obama the prudent war-powers constitutionalist transformed into a matchless war-powers unilateralist. And they will wonder why he claimed to 'welcome congressional support' for his new military initiative against the Islamic State but did not insist on it in order to ensure clear political and legal legitimacy for the tough battle that promised to consume his last two years in office and define his presidency. 'History has shown us time and again . . . that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the Legislative branch,' candidate Barack Obama told the Boston Globe in 2007. 'It is always preferable to have the informed consent of Congress prior to any military action.' President Obama has discarded these precepts. His announcement that he will expand the use of military force against the Islamic State without the need for new congressional consent marks his latest adventure in unilateralism and cements an astonishing legacy of expanding presidential war powers." Worries about the Imperial Presidency are now common and for good reason. But as Jeffrey Tulis argues in the latest version of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center, the real issue is a feckless legislature: "I want to suggest something different - that the presidency is very strong, but not imperial. This executive strength may indeed pose problems for democratic governance, but the source of those problems does not lie in the presidency. The presidency looks somewhat imperial today because of the failure of the Congress. In other words, the problem of presidential power today is actually not the exercise of presidential power; it's the gross abdication of responsibility by the legislative branch, the Congress of the United States."
Aaron Gilbreath considers the past and the present of the mechanized restaurant: "In Japan, where restaurant mechanization has been constant for decades, something in the culture or the economy has ensured that human interaction remains prominent. At Matsuya, shokkenki have freed staff from having to push register keys, make change, chit-chat, and stand idly by while customers decide what to order. But whenever I entered one, people were still on hand to cook, deliver, and clean. The machines seemed to me like a supplement to human service, a way to remove one task from the chain of production and lower costs, rather than a step toward eliminating everyone. The corporate rhetoric, at least, is that tabletop devices and self-serve kiosks will function the same way in the United States. We already use ATMs instead of bank tellers, place takeout orders by phone, check ourselves out at some grocery stores, and check ourselves in at the airport. We require technicians and programmers to keep the machines running, as well as staff to stand nearby and tell us to place our groceries back down on the scanner before placing them in the bag. The ideal, in this telling, is that technology and automation give us more time for human interactions with our friends and family. The reality, of course, is that they often just give us more time with our other tech."
The Provocation of Understanding What Is
Gal Beckerman speaks with Bettina Stangneth and asks, "Why do you think Arendt was so taken in by Eichmann's performance on the stand? Does it tell us something about her?" Stangneth, author of the newly translated Eichmann Before Jerusalem, responds: "If it tells us something about her, it tells us something about nearly every spectator of the trial in 1961. It is a legend that only she was misled by Eichmann. But we have forgotten the other reports about the trial. Example? Alfred Wolfmann, the correspondent from Germany's most important Jewish newspaper, Allgemeine Jüdische Wochenzeitung, described him as a 'pathetic weakling.' Joachim Schwelien wrote in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that Eichmann was nothing more than a 'Hanswurst' [a buffoonish character from German folklore]. And everybody agreed. Some years later, Arendt only repeated these words, and people were shocked. In 1961 the astonishment about Eichmann was that he seemed to be a man without his own thoughts and convictions. This was common sense. When Arendt restated this common experience in 1963, it provoked a scandal. This tells us something about Hannah Arendt: She was not willing to deny the public astonishment of the year 1961 - she wanted to understand it."
Hannah Arendt and the American Constitution
In honor of Constitution Day, or "Citizenship Day."
Wednesday, September 17h, 2014
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium, 5:00 pm
As a Fellow at Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry, in Munich, Mr. Mantell replicated the Milgram experiment.
Monday, October 6, 2014
The Hannah Arendt Center, 3:00 pm
Resolved: "The fate of the world depends upon the success or failure of America's model of democratic self-government."
Tuesday, October 7th, 2014
Campus Center Multipurpose Room, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
October 9-10
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?, will be held this year on October 9-10!
Registration is now OPEN! You can register here!
Want to know more about the schedule of the conference? Please click for details here!
Learn more about the conference here.
This week on the Blog, Hans Teerds discusses the importance of work and how it helps produce a sharable world in the Quote of the Week. Helen Keller provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We look back on a discussion with Roger Berkowitz, Walter Russell Mead, Jay Rosen, and Megan Garber on the state of journalism today in our Video Archives. We appreciate a note of gratitude written to Arendt in our Library feature. And Roger Berkowitz reflects on the crisis of authority and adulthood in American society in the Weekend Read.
Video Archives – "Blogging and the New Public Intellectual – A Conversation with Jay Rosen and Megan Garber" (2013)
October 27, 2013: "Blogging and the New Public Intellectual – A Conversation with Jay Rosen and Megan Garber"
-- Roger Berkowitz, Associate Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Bard College.
-- Walter Russell Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities, Bard College.
-- Jay Rosen, Professor of Journalism, NYU.
-- Megan Garber, media critic and staff writer, The Atlantic.
Roger Berkowitz and Walter Russell Mead of Bard College have a discussion with Jay Rosen and Megan Garber about the state of journalism today.
Amor Mundi 6/22/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Black in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Hilton Als, in reviewing a new book co-edited by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. entitled The Image of the Black In Western Art, The Twentieth Century: The Impact of Africa, is struck by a particular painting, Portrait of Tonia Stieltjes by the Dutch artist Jan Sluyters. The book focuses broadly on "image of the black during the age of mechanical reproduction and how it changed, was modernized, denigrated, and, often, fetishized." Als, however, fixes on the singular humanity of one portrait: "Tonia's grave face is powdered white, as was the fashion of the time, but then there is her 'real' skin and her style, which is something 'other.' My imagination reacts to those levels of density and nonverbal expression more readily than to portraits of black people by artists ranging from Goldie White to Brent Malone. I find their work predictable: it elevates blackness to a kind of folkloric purity and strength that doesn't allow for labyrinthine humanness, or for the fact that most blacks come from some place they don't know but, like Tonia, make themselves up out of the whole cloth of Europe, or Africa, or whatever temporary home will have them.... It's Tonia's isolation in public, the theatricalization of her different self through paint and dress, that encompasses so much of what makes the black in Western art incalculably lonely, unknowable, troubling, and, sometimes, beautiful, just like other people."
In the New Republic, Christopher Ketcham makes the case that journalist idol Chris Hedges has a plagiarism problem. Ketcham's account, though bordering on the tedious, overly personal, and the monomaniacal, seems to make its case. It has recently been given further support by a long post by Adam Weinstein at Gawker, which both uncovers further instances of plagiarism and argues that Hedges habitually recycles 1000s of words of his own writing and even whole articles in longer articles and books that he claims to be original work. Hedges forcefully denies Ketcham's charges and has written a response here that also includes responses from Ketcham and The New Republic. Ketcham's thesis is that Hedges's plagiarism must be outed to protect the integrity of journalism, an argument he puts in the words of a journalism expert: "Trust is a journalist's and journalism's most precious commodity…if there is even a hint of the possibility that misconduct was covered up, it's even worse. Journalism will take another hit." That is true. But equally central to this story is the nature of power. Hedges has said, "You have a choice between which two sets of principles you serve. Justice and truth or privilege and power…. The more you make concessions to those whose fealty is to privilege and power, the more you diminish the capacity for justice and truth." He is so right. Admirably, Hedges has stood up for his principles, angering the right and the left, and always speaking his mind. We need more publicly courageous intellectuals like Hedges. But in his belief in his own importance to the cause for which he fights, Hedges has not only made mistakes (which can be forgiven) but also has refused to own up to his mistakes and instead has sought to drown out his critics with bluster. His response suggests that privilege and power may mean more to Hedges than he lets on.
In an interview with Granta, cartoonist Adrian Tomine discusses the value of a very informal education: "I've learned a lot of tangible, practical things from studying all kinds of things: comics, illustration, movies, prose, etc. But I think I've learned more from just hanging around creative people and talking to them and learning from their example. I suppose I'm talking about the kind of osmotic learning that comes from getting to know other artists (or writers or musicians or whatever). If you go over to the house of someone whose work you admire, and you look at their bookshelves and ask about things that jump out at you, that right there can be kind of an education. I've even learned a lot from just going to an art store with other cartoonists. Invariably they'll know about some drafting tool I'd never heard of, or have some preference for some brand of ink that they've arrived at after years of trial and error. And on a broader scale, it's really useful to watch how someone - especially someone who's been at it for longer - deals with issues that arise in their art and just in life in general."
The Beautiful Game as an Expression of National Character
In the midst of the international frenzy of the World Cup, Matthew Futterman describes USA's German-born coach Jürgen Klinsmann as soccer's "Alexis de Tocqueville," endeavoring to create an American style of the game, saying that "he wanted to create a squad that represented what he sees as the defining American characteristic-a visceral hatred of being dictated to." Since, paradoxically, this change came from the top down, it, of course, turned out to be more difficult than easy.
I Come to Praise the CPA, Not to Bury Him
Jacob Soll yearns for the heroic accountant of the early modern Dutch, for whom keeping one's books in order took on a spiritual meaning: "Double-entry accounting made it possible to calculate profit and capital and for managers, investors, and authorities to verify books. But at the time, it also had a moral implication. Keeping one's books balanced wasn't simply a matter of law, but an imitation of God, who kept moral accounts of humanity and tallied them in the Books of Life and Death. It was a financial technique whose power lay beyond the accountants, and beyond even the wealthy people who employed them. Accounting was closely tied to the notion of human audits and spiritual reckonings. Dutch artists began to paint what could be called a warning genre of accounting paintings. In Jan Provoost's 'Death and Merchant,' a businessman sits behind his sacks of gold doing his books, but he cannot balance them, for there is a missing entry. He reaches out for payment, not from the man who owes him the money, but from the grim reaper, death himself, the only one who can pay the final debts and balance the books. The message is clear: Humans cannot truly balance their books in the end, for they are accountable to the final auditor."
Alexandra Schwartz, riffing off the recent release of a book documenting Marcel Proust's letters to his upstairs neighbor, considers the loneliness and alienation of the city's crowd and remembers that, far from the mere writer of In Search of Lost Time, Proust was a real person who lived under neighbors whose loud banging sometimes annoyed him, too. Here is one such missive sent upstairs by Proust: "Madame, I hope you won't find me too indiscreet. There's been a lot of noise these past few days and as I'm not well, I'm more sensitive to it.... If the hammering must be done in the morning, might it be done in the part of your apartment that is above my kitchen, not my bedroom.... If there's too much noise on Sunday morning I won't be able to get out of bed until the afternoon." Schwartz adds, "We who toss and turn, fantasizing about the exquisitely cutting emails we'll never have the guts to send to the invisible others keeping us awake, are happy to have him on our team."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Christopher C. Robinson discusses intergenerational justice and the ecological crisis in the Quote of the Week. Lord Byron provides this week's Thought on Thinking. And Roger Berkowitz discusses the conscience of Edward Snowden in the Weekend Read.
Amor Mundi 3/30/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Jonathan Schell has died. I first read "The Fate of the Earth" as a college freshman in Introduction to Political Theory and it was and is one of those books that forever impacts the young mind. Jim Sleeper, writing in the Yale Daily News, gets to the heart of Schell's power: "From his work as a correspondent for The New Yorker in the Vietnam War through his rigorous manifesto for nuclear disarmament in "The Fate of the Earth", his magisterial re-thinking of state power and people's power in "The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People," and his wry, rigorous assessments of politics for The Nation, Jonathan showed how varied peoples' democratic aspirations might lead them to address shared global challenges." The Obituary in the New York Times adds: "With "The Fate of the Earth" Mr. Schell was widely credited with helping rally ordinary citizens around the world to the cause of nuclear disarmament. The book, based on his extensive interviews with members of the scientific community, outlines the likely aftermath of a nuclear war and deconstructs the United States' long-held rationale for nuclear buildup as a deterrent. "Usually, people wait for things to occur before trying to describe them," Mr. Schell wrote in the book's opening section. "But since we cannot afford under any circumstances to let a holocaust occur, we are forced in this one case to become the historians of the future — to chronicle and commit to memory an event that we have never experienced and must never experience.""
Standing on Someone Else's Soil
In an interview, Simon Schama, author of the forthcoming book and public television miniseries "The Story of the Jews," uses early Jewish settlement in America as a way into why he thinks that Jews have often been cast as outsiders: "You know, Jews come to Newport, they come to New Amsterdam, where they run into Dutch anti-Semites immediately. One of them, at least — Peter Stuyvesant, the governor. But they also come to Newport in the middle of the 17th century. And Newport is significant in Rhode Island because Providence colony is founded by Roger Williams. And Roger Williams is a kind of fierce Christian of the kind of radical — in 17th-century terms — left. But his view is that there is no church that is not corrupt and imperfect. Therefore, no good Christian is ever entitled to form a government [or] entitled to bar anybody else's worship. That includes American Indians, and it certainly includes the Jews. And there's an incredible spark of fire of toleration that begins in New England. And Roger Williams is himself a refugee from persecution, from Puritan Massachusetts. But the crucial big point to make is that Jews have had a hard time when nations and nation-states have founded themselves on myths about soil, blood and tribe."
Don't Get Older: or Don't Show It
Noam Scheiber describes the "wakeful nightmare for the lower-middle-aged" that has taken over the world of technology. The desire for the new, new thing has led to disdain for age; "famed V.C. Vinod Khosla told a conference that "people over forty-five basically die in terms of new ideas." The value of experience and the wisdom of age or even of middle are scorned when everyone walks around with encyclopedias and instruction manuals in our pockets. The result: "Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America. Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don't think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. "Young people are just smarter," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its "careers" page: "We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.""
You and I Will Die Unbelievers, Tied to the Tracks of the Train
Kenan Malik wonders how non-believers can appreciate sacred art. Perhaps, he says, the godless can understand it as "an exploration of what it means to be human; what it is to be human not in the here and now, not in our immediacy, nor merely in our physicality, but in a more transcendental sense. It is a sense that is often difficult to capture in a purely propositional form, but one that we seek to grasp through art or music or poetry. Transcendence does not, however, necessarily have to be understood in a religious fashion, solely in relation to some concept of the divine. It is rather a recognition that our humanness is invested not simply in our existence as individuals or as physical beings but also in our collective existence as social beings and in our ability, as social beings, to rise above our individual physical selves and to see ourselves as part of a larger project, to project onto the world, and onto human life, a meaning or purpose that exists only because we as human beings create it."
The Niemen Journalism lab has the straight scoop about the algorithm, written by Ken Scwhenke, that wrote the first story about last week's West Coast earthquake. Although computer programs like Schwenke's may be able to take over journalism's function as a source of initial news (that is, a notice that something is happening,) it seems unlikely that they will be able to take over one of its more sophisticated functions, which is to help people situate themselves in the world rather than merely know what's going on in it.
In an interview, Kate Beaton, the cartoonist responsible for the history and literature web comic Hark A Vagrant!, talks about how her comics, perhaps best described as academic parody, can be useful for teachers and students: "Oh yes, all the time! That's the best! It's so flattering—but I get it, the comics are a good icebreaker. If you are laughing at something, you already like it, and want to know more. If they're laughing, they're learning, who doesn't want to be in on the joke? You can't take my comics at face value, but you can ask, 'What's going on here? What's this all about?' Then your teacher gets down to brass tacks."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, our Quote of the Week comes from Arendt Center Research Associate, Thomas Wild, who looks at the close friendship between Hannah Arendt and Alfred Kazin who bonded over literature, writers, and the power of the written word.
Amor Mundi 3/23/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Data journalist Nate Silver reopened his FiveThirtyEight blog this past week, after leaving the New York Times last year. Although the website launched with a full slate of articles, the opening salvo is a manifesto he calls "What The Fox Knows," referencing the maxim from the poet Archilochus', "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." For Silver, this means, "We take a pluralistic approach and we hope to contribute to your understanding of the news in a variety of ways." What separates FiveThirtyEight is its focus on big data, the long trail of information left by everything we do in a digital world. From big data, Silver believes he can predict outcomes more accurately than traditional journalism, and that he will also be better able to explain and predict human behavior. "Indeed, as more human behaviors are being measured, the line between the quantitative and the qualitative has blurred. I admire Brian Burke, who led the U.S. men's hockey team on an Olympic run in 2010 and who has been an outspoken advocate for gay-rights causes in sports. But Burke said something on the hockey analytics panel at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference last month that I took issue with. He expressed concern that statistics couldn't measure a hockey player's perseverance. For instance, he asked, would one of his forwards retain control of the puck when Zdeno Chara, the Boston Bruins' intimidating 6'9″ defenseman, was bearing down on him? The thing is, this is something you could measure. You could watch video of all Bruins games and record how often different forwards kept control of the puck. Soon, the NHL may install motion-tracking cameras in its arenas, as other sports leagues have done, creating a record of each player's x- and y-coordinates throughout the game and making this data collection process much easier." As the availability of data increases beyond comprehension, humans will necessarily turn the effort of analysis over to machines running algorithms. Predictions and simulations will abound and human actions—whether voting for a president or holding on to a hockey puck—will increasingly appear to be predictable behavior. The fact that actions are never fully predictable is already fading from view; we have become accustomed to knowing how things will end before they begin. At the very least, Nate Silver and his team at FiveThirtyEight will try to "critique incautious uses of statistics when they arise elsewhere in news coverage."
All in All, Another Tweet in the Wall
Author Teju Cole recently composed and released an essay called "A Piece of The Wall" exclusively on Twitter. In an interview, along with details about the technical aspects of putting together what's more like a piece of radio journalism than a piece of print journalism, Cole notes that there may be a connection between readership and change: "I'm not getting my hopes up, but the point of writing about these things, and hoping they reach a big audience, has nothing to do with "innovation" or with "writing." It's about the hope that more and more people will have their conscience moved about the plight of other human beings. In the case of drones, for example, I think that all the writing and sorrow about it has led to a scaling back of operations: It continues, it's still awful, but the rate has been scaled back, and this has been in specific response to public criticism. I continue to believe the emperor has a soul."
Peter Berger has a thoughtful critique of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, one that accepts Taylor's philosophical premise but denies its sociological reality. "I think that Taylor's magnum opus makes a very significant contribution, though I disagree with its central proposition: We don't live in a "secular age"; rather in most of the world we live in a turbulently religious age (with the exception of a few places, like university philosophy departments in Canada and football clubs in Britain). (Has Taylor been recently in Nepal? Or for that matter in central Texas?) Taylor is a very sophisticated philosopher, not an empirically oriented sociologist of religion. It so happens that we now have a sizable body of empirical data from much of the world (including America and Europe) on what ordinary religious people actually believe and how they relate their faith to various secular definitions of reality). Let me just mention the rich work of Robert Wuthnow, Nancy Ammerman and Tanya Luhrmann in the US, and Grace Davie, Linda Woodhead and Daniele Hervieu-Leger in Europe. There is a phrase that sociology students learn in the first year of graduate study—frequency distribution: It is important for me to understand just what X is; it is even more important for me to know how much X there is at a given time in a given place. The phrase is to be recommended to all inclined to make a priori statements about anything. In this case, I think that Taylor has made a very useful contribution in his careful description of what he calls "the immanent frame" (he also calls it "exclusive humanism")—a sense of reality that excludes all references to transcendence or anything beyond mundane human experience. Taylor also traced the historical development of this definition of reality." Maybe the disagreement is more subtle: Religion continues in the secular age, but it is more personal. Quite simply, churches were once the tallest and most central buildings, representing the center of public and civic life. That is no longer the case in Europe; nor in Nepal.
Anthony Lane in The New Yorker asks the question, "Why should we watch Scarlett Johansson with any more attention than we pay to other actors?" His answer concerns Johansson's role and performance in her new movie "Under the Skin." Lane is near obsessed with Johansson's ability to reveal nothing and everything with a look—what he calls the "Johansson look, already potent and unnerving. She was starting to poke under the skin." He continues describing Johansson in a photo shoot: ""Give me nothing," Dukovic said, and Johansson wiped the expression from her face, saying, "I'll just pretend to be a model." Pause. "I rarely have anything inside me." Then came the laugh: dry and dirty, as if this were a drama class and her task was to play a Martini. Invited to simulate a Renaissance picture, she immediately slipped into a sixteenth-century persona, pretending to hold a pose for a painter and kvetching about it: "How long do I have to sit here for? My sciatica is killing me." You could not wish for a more plausible insight into the mind-set of the Mona Lisa. A small table and a stool were provided, and Johansson sat down with her arms folded in front of her. "I want to look Presidential," she declared. "I want this to be my Mt. Rushmore portrait." Once more, Dukovic told her what to show: "Absolutely nothing." Not long after, he and his team began to pack up. The whole shoot had taken seventeen minutes. She had given him absolutely everything. We should not be surprised by this. After all, film stars are those unlikely beings who seem more alive, not less, when images are made of them; who unfurl and reach toward the light, instead of seizing up, when confronted by a camera; and who, by some miracle or trick, become enriched versions of themselves, even as they ramify into other selves on cue. Clarence Sinclair Bull, the great stills photographer at M-G-M, said of Greta Garbo that "she seems to feel the emotion for each pose as part of her personality." From the late nineteen-twenties, he held a near-monopoly on pictures of Garbo, so uncanny was their rapport. "All I did was to light the face and wait. And watch," he said. Why should we watch Johansson with any more attention than we pay to other actors?"
Geoffrey Gray suggests a reason why we've become obsessed with the missing plane: "Wherever the Malaysia Airlines plane is, it found a hiding place. And the longer it takes investigators to discover where it is and what went wrong, the longer we have to indulge in the fantasy that we too might be able to elude the computers tracking our clicks, text messages, and even our movements. Hidden from the rest of the world, if only for an imagined moment, we feel what the passengers of Flight 370 most likely don't: safe."
This Week on the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, learn more about the Program Associate position now available at the Arendt Center. In the Quote of the Week, Ian Zuckerman looks at the role some of Arendt's core themes play in Kubrik's famed nuclear satire, "Dr Strangelove." And, HannahArendt.net issues a call for papers for their upcoming 'Justice and Law' edition being released in August of this year.
Blogging and the New Public Intellectual – Jay Rosen & Megan Garber
On October 27, 2013, Walter Russell Mead and Roger Berkowitz sat down with Jay Rosen and Megan Garber as part of the "Blogging and the New Public Intellectual" series. The series engages in ongoing discussion with the nation's leading bloggers in politics, history, art, and culture.
Jay Rosen is a media critic, a writer, and a professor of journalism at New York University. You can visit his blog, "Pressthink" here. Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She was formerly an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab, where she wrote about innovations in the media. Read her work from The Atlantic here.
Roger Berkowitz started the evening by asking: Should journalists be objective or should they be political actors?
Jay Rosen answered: "Journalists have to do more than just flood us with facts." Rosen thinks of the journalist, "as a heightened form of an informed citizen." The panel discussed the idea of the journalist vs. the citizen and the myriad of ways in which the two overlap. As well, the role the Internet plays in creating an informed public through the sharing of information.
Megan Garber added, "I'm not interested in getting my ideas out, I'm interested in exploring things publicly...There is value in convening people together to talk about one thing."
Watch the video of the discussion here.
The next event in the "Blogging and the New Public Intellectual" series will take place March 9 and features a discussion with Tom Goldstein, the Publisher and a regular contributor to the SCOTUSblog.
Learn more about the event here and RSVP to email@example.com.
Amor Mundi 1/19/14
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.
On Muckraking and Political Change
Jim Sleeper turned me on to Dean Starkman's excerpt from his new book chronicling the failure of the press to expose wrongdoing in the lead up to the financial crisis, The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism. Starkman writes: "Now is a good time to consider what journalism the public needs. What actually works? Who are journalism's true forefathers and foremothers? Is there a line of authority in journalism's collective past that can help us navigate its future? What creates value, both in a material sense and in terms of what is good and valuable in American journalism? Accountability reporting comes in many forms—a series of revelations in a newspaper or online, a book, a TV magazine segment—but its most common manifestation has been the long-form newspaper or magazine story, the focus of this book. Call it the Great Story. The form was pioneered by the muckrakers' quasi-literary work in the early 20th century, with Tarbell's exposé on the Standard Oil monopoly in McClure's magazine a brilliant example. As we'll see, the Great Story has demonstrated its subversive power countless times and has exposed and clarified complex problems for mass audiences across a nearly limitless range of subjects: graft in American cities, modern slave labor in the US, the human costs of leveraged buyouts, police brutality and corruption, the secret recipients on Wall Street of government bailouts, the crimes and cover-ups of media and political elites, and on and on, year in and year out. The greatest of muckraking editors, Samuel S. McClure, would say to his staff, over and over, almost as a mantra, "The story is the thing!" And he was right." Starkman has incredible optimism in the power of the press is infective. But in the weekend read, Roger Berkowitz turns to Walter Lippmann to raise questions about Starkman's basic assumptions.
Our Unconstitutional Standing Army
Kathleen Frydl has an excellent essay in The American Interest arguing against our professionalized military and for the return of a citizen's army. "Without much reflection or argument, the United States now supports the professional "large standing army" feared by the Founding Fathers, and the specter of praetorianism they invoked casts an ever more menacing shadow as the nation drifts toward an almost mercenary force, which pays in citizenship, opportunity structures (such as on-the-job technical training and educational benefits), a privileged world of social policy (think Tricare), and, in the case of private contractors, lots of money. Strict constructionists of the Constitution frequently ignore one of its most important principles—that the military should be large and powerful only when it includes the service of citizen-soldiers. This oversight clearly relates to the modern American tendency to define freedom using the neo-liberal language of liberty, shorn of any of the classical republican terminology of service. We would do well to remember Cicero's most concise summary of a constitutional state: "Freedom is the participation in power."" I don't know what Hannah Arendt would have thought about the draft. But I do know she'd sympathize with Frydl's worries about a professionalized army.
Tim Wu marvels at the human augmented by technology. Consider what an intelligent time traveler would think if talking to a reasonably educated woman today: "The woman behind the curtain, is, of course, just one of us. That is to say, she is a regular human who has augmented her brain using two tools: her mobile phone and a connection to the Internet and, thus, to Web sites like Wikipedia, Google Maps, and Quora. To us, she is unremarkable, but to the man she is astonishing. With our machines, we are augmented humans and prosthetic gods, though we're remarkably blasé about that fact, like anything we're used to. Take away our tools, the argument goes, and we're likely stupider than our friend from the early twentieth century, who has a longer attention span, may read and write Latin, and does arithmetic faster. The time-traveler scenario demonstrates that how you answer the question of whether we are getting smarter depends on how you classify "we."" We, the underlying humans may know less and less. But "we," the digitally enabled cyborgs that we've become, are geniuses. Much of the focus and commentary about artificial intelligence asks the wrong question, about whether machines will become human. The better question is what will become of humans as we integrate more fully with our machines. That was the topic of Human Being in an Inhuman Age, the 2010 Arendt Center Conference. A selection of essays from that conference are published in the inaugural edition of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center.
In an interview with high school teacher David Cutler, history professor Eric Foner explains how we could make history education more effective: "Knowledge of the events of history is important, obviously, but also I think what I see in college students, that seems to be lacking at least when they come into college, is writing experience. In other words, being able to write that little essay with an argument. I see that they think, 'OK, there are the facts of history and that's it—what more is there to be said?' But of course, the very selection of what is a fact, or what is important as a fact, is itself based on an interpretation. You can't just separate fact and interpretation quite as simply as many people seem to think. I would love to see students get a little more experience in trying to write history, and trying to understand why historical interpretation changes over time." Foner wants students to think history, not simply to know it.
Gary Shteyngart, Google Glass wearer and author of the recently published memoir Little Failure, explains the arc of his reading habits: "When I was growing up, I was reading a lot of male fiction, if you can call it that. I was up to my neck in Saul Bellow, which was wonderful and was very instrumental but I think I've gone, like most people I think I've expanded my range quite a bit. When you're young you focus on things that are incredibly important to you and read, God knows, every Nabokov that's ever been written. But then, it is time to move beyond that little place where you live and I've been doing that; I'm so curious to see so many people send me books now it's exciting to go to the mailbox and see a work of Croatian fiction."
This week on the blog, Sandipto Dasgupta discusses Arendt and B.R. Ambedkar, one of the authors of the Indian constitution. In the weekend read, Roger Berkowitz examines the merit of muckraking journalism and its role as watchdog of corruption.
Amor Mundi 12/15/13
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.
Readers around the world have been introduced to Dasani this week. Not the water, but the girl from the decrepit Auburn homeless shelter. Dasani is a force of nature as she struggles to raise her siblings, deal with her well-meaning but overwhelmed parents, and make a life for herself from out of the shadows of homelessness and dysfunction. Andrea Elliott's five-part series in the NY Times follows Dasani over a year; it is expansive journalism, one of the best essays exploring the horrors and hopes of the poor and forgotten. Read all five parts, and you'll understand what Elliott is after: "Dasani's circumstances are largely the outcome of parental dysfunction. While nearly one-third of New York's homeless children are supported by a working adult, her mother and father are unemployed, have a history of arrests and are battling drug addiction. Yet Dasani's trials are not solely of her parents' making. They are also the result of decisions made a world away, in the marble confines of City Hall. With the economy growing in 2004, the Bloomberg administration adopted sweeping new policies intended to push the homeless to become more self-reliant. They would no longer get priority access to public housing and other programs, but would receive short-term help with rent. Poor people would be empowered, the mayor argued, and homelessness would decline. But the opposite happened. As rents steadily rose and low-income wages stagnated, chronically poor families like Dasani's found themselves stuck in a shelter system with fewer exits. Families are now languishing there longer than ever — a development that Mr. Bloomberg explained by saying shelters offered "a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before.""
Decay of American Political Institutions
Francis Fukuyama has a new essay up on "The Decay of American Political Institutions." Fukuyama begins with a basic point that is undeniable, and is artfully made manifest in George Packer's National Book Award Winning The Unwinding: "Many political institutions in the United States are decaying." "The decay in the quality of American government has to do directly with the American penchant for a state of "courts and parties", which has returned to center stage in the past fifty years. The courts and legislature have increasingly usurped many of the proper functions of the executive, making the operation of the government as a whole both incoherent and inefficient. The steadily increasing judicialization of functions that in other developed democracies are handled by administrative bureaucracies has led to an explosion of costly litigation, slow decision-making and highly inconsistent enforcement of laws. The courts, instead of being constraints on government, have become alternative instruments for the expansion of government. Ironically, out of a fear of empowering "big government", the United States has ended up with a government that is very large, but that is actually less accountable because it is largely in the hands of unelected courts." What Arendt saw in a way Fukuyama ignores is that Americans don't distrust power so much as they distrust the concentration and centralization of power. It his been quintessentially American for citizens to engage in government, especially local government, and to take active part in public debates about political questions. From their arrival in the New World, Americans formed councils, engaged in public affairs, and empowered democratic institutions. The federalist elements of the Constitution provide ample support for vibrant democratic and local institutions. Beyond the judicializaiton of politics and the rise of a corruption by lobbyists, another cause of the present decay of American politics is the increasingly national approach to government and the hollowing out of local institutions.
If You Haven't Gotten Anything At All To Say...
In a defense of criticism, Tom Scocca takes on the public demand for a kind virulent niceness, a culture force that he calls smarm. Smarm, from Scocca's point of view, is a kind of "ethical misdirection," ruining the discourse with its nominal crusade for "civility", which distracts from the issues at hand by making the debate about the commentator rather than the comment. It is, in other words, an insidious, acceptable kind of ad hominem attack. Why has the discourse retreated to smarm? Scocca has a theory: "Smarm hopes to fill the cultural or political or religious void left by the collapse of authority, undermined by modernity and postmodernity. It's not enough anymore to point to God or the Western tradition or the civilized consensus for a definitive value judgment. Yet a person can still gesture in the direction of things that resemble those values, vaguely."
Kenneth Goldsmith examines the growing subculture of individuals who find digital glitches and turn them into art. These finds, he says, are imperfections in the seemingly perfect and timeless digital world: "The obsession with digital errors in Google Books arises from the sense that these mistakes are permanent, on the record. Earlier this month, Judge Denny Chin ruled that Google's scanning, en masse, of millions of books to make them searchable is legal. In the future, more and more people will consult Google's scans. Because of the speed and volume with which Google is executing the project, the company can't possibly identify and correct all of the disturbances in what is supposed to be a seamless interface. There's little doubt that generations to come will be stuck with both these antique stains and workers' hands."
In an interview, talking about why she almost gave up on her book about Jane Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's sister, Jill Lepore describes the challenge of writing narrative history: "You have Jane and Benjamin and they start down here. And then, Franklin's life is like a straight rise. His world gets bigger. He gets wealthier. Love and success. And Jane's life is out of The Prince and the Pauper or Tale of Two Cities. And at some point, narratively, we need them to switch places. The reader wants them to switch places. And they're not going to. And so, I just quit. I didn't know how to satisfy the reader that needs the story to go in another direction, because the story is going nowhere for Jane."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Kathleen B. Jones responds to Richard Brody. And, if you haven't had a chance, check out Roger Berkowitz's weekend read from last week, on Arendt, Nelson Mandela, and violence. Finally, the current weekend read: American politics has elevated the judiciary to a position of power, and this has led to to the decay of our political institutions.