text:
The Ethics of Eichmann's Defense
By Martin Wagner
"If the defendant excuses himself on the ground that he acted not as a man but as a mere functionary whose functions could just as easily have been carried out by anyone else, it is as if a criminal pointed to the statistics on crime — which set forth that so-and-so many crimes per day are committed in such-and-such a place — and declared that he only did what was statistically expected, that it was mere accident that he did it and not somebody else, since after all somebody had to do it."
--Hannah Arendt, (From the postscript to Eichmann in Jerusalem)
In the postscript to her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt presents us with a strange hypothetical. Think of a criminal — say, a murderer — who presents as his only excuse the statistical likelihood of a murder at the time and location where he committed his crime. Let us be clear that the murderer does not use these statistics to imply that the frequency of murders in his district suggests that homicide is less of a moral transgression there. Murder is not okay, and the criminal doesn't suggest otherwise. He merely says: look, statistically speaking, it was bound to happen — and I just happened to be the instrument through which the statistically expected incident occurred. Had I not done it, someone else probably would have. So how can you punish me for something that would have happened anyway.
Amor Mundi 12/13/15
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.
Hostile Climates
Jeannie Suk writes in the New Yorker about how her willingness to criticize a documentary film might lead to her being disciplined by Harvard Law School. The film in questions, "The Hunting Ground," is about sexual harassment on college campuses. The reason Professor Suk might end up being disciplined is the Federal Law referred to as Title IX, which requires all educational institutions to guarantee sexual equality in education. Since 2010, Title IX has been interpreted to mean that any act, speech, or gesture that contributes to a "hostile climate" connected to sexual matters must be investigated at a cost to the school and disciplined. Here is Suk's account of how her criticism of the documentary may trigger a Title IX investigation: "But last week the filmmakers did more than understandably disagree with criticism of the film, which has been short-listed for the Academy Award for best documentary. They wrote, in a statement to the Harvard Crimson, that 'the very public bias these professors have shown in favor of an assailant contributes to a hostile climate at Harvard Law.' The words 'hostile climate' contain a serious claim. At Harvard, sexual harassment is 'unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,' including verbal conduct that is 'sufficiently persistent, pervasive, or severe' so as to create a 'hostile environment.' If, as the filmmakers suggest, the professors' statement about the film has created a hostile environment at the school, then, under Title IX, the professors should be investigated and potentially disciplined. To my knowledge, no complaint of sexual harassment has been filed with Harvard's Title IX office--though I've been told by a high-level administrator that several people have inquired about the possibility--and I don't know if the school would proceed with an investigation. Precedent for such an investigation exists in the case of Laura Kipnis, a feminist film-studies professor at Northwestern University, who earlier this year wrote an article criticizing aspects of Title IX policies and culture and was accused of creating a hostile environment on campus; Northwestern conducted an investigation and ultimately cleared Kipnis of sexual-harassment charges. A handful of students have said that they feel unsafe at Harvard because of the professors' statement about the film. If a Title IX complaint were filed and an investigation launched, the professors wouldn't be permitted to speak about it, as that could be considered 'retaliation' against those who filed the complaint, which would violate the campus sexual-harassment policy."
Over the last two months, much attention has been paid to questions of racial discrimination on college and university campuses. Many have criticized students for making unreasonable demands. At Amherst, students demanded that other students who had put up free speech posters go through a disciplinary process including training for "racial and cultural competency." Students at Yale demanded that a lecturer who sent an email deemed offensive be fired from her position as Master of a College. And at Emory University, students demanded "that the faculty evaluations that each student is required to complete for each of their professors include at least two open-ended questions such as: 'Has this professor made any microaggressions towards you on account of your race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, language and/or other identity?' and 'Do you think that this professor fits into the vision of Emory University being a community of care for individuals of all racial, gender, ability and class identities?' These questions on the faculty evaluations would help to ensure that there are repercussions or sanctions for racist actions performed by professors. We demand that these questions be added to the faculty evaluations by the end of this semester, fall 2015." As excessive as these and other demands may be, they harmed no one, as they were all denied by administrators. What is more, while many of these conversations and protests were difficult and some were uncomfortable, they have largely been successful, leading to measured and at times meaningful change. While there were excesses--examples of youthful exuberance--the protests were in the end simply speech that could be, and was, met by more speech. In other words, the protests around the country were not attacks on free speech so much as they were examples of the way free speech works to articulate and respond to grievances.
When it comes to campus protests regarding perceived sexism, as is evident in what Professor Suk describes above, the reality of Title IX means that speaking freely is to risk losing one's job. We are in a strange situation in which discussions about race, as fraught as they are, are judged by standards of common sense, while speech touching upon sex or sexuality is subjected to the threat of disciplinary processes administered through a federally mandated bureaucracy. The contrast between the way race and sex are being treated is telling. What is worrisome is that student demands during the protests against racism are inflected by a desire to import the atmosphere of disciplinary threats to bear on speech and acts thought to create a racially hostile atmosphere. The better lesson is the opposing one, that free speech does work to allow students and others to make demands and influence changes on campuses without threatening others for their willingness to speak. --RB
Encryption and Morality
In a long but still accessible academic essay, UC Davis computer science professor Phillip Rogaway discusses what he calls the moral character of cryptography and also of science and engineering more generally: "Most academic cryptographers seem to think that our field is a fun, deep, and politically neutral game--a set of puzzles involving communicating parties and notional adversaries. This vision of who we are animates a field whose work is intellectually impressive and rapidly produced, but also quite inbred and divorced from real-world concerns. Is this what cryptography should be like? Is it how we should expend the bulk of our intellectual capital? For me, these questions came to a head with the Snowden disclosures of 2013. If cryptography's most basic aim is to enable secure communications, how could it not be a colossal failure of our field when ordinary people lack even a modicum of communication privacy when interacting electronically? Yet I soon realized that most cryptographers didn't see it this way. Most seemed to feel that the disclosures didn't even implicate us cryptographers. I think that they do. So I want to talk about the moral obligations of cryptographers, and my community as a whole. This is not a topic cryptographers routinely discuss. In this post-Snowden era, I think it needs to be." Rogaway dissents from Stanley Fish, who advises new professors to do their work and not worry about changing the world. "Perhaps such amorality, however revolting, is harmless in Fish's intellectual realm: one doesn't particularly expect literary theory to change the world. But scientists and engineers do just that. A refusal to direct the change we do is both morally bankrupt and ingracious." I think Rogaway misunderstands Fish, who preaches not amorality but rather humility. A teacher is to teach students what is; that includes the ethics and morality of the world. In doing so, the teacher inspires the student to raise ethical questions for themselves. It is not the teacher's job to tell students what should be but to prepare them to pose and then decide these ethical questions for themselves. What Rogaway shows us is that computer scientists need to teach more than computer science; they must also teach students about the ethical implications of computer science. They must ask themselves basic questions, like "Is computer science not benefiting man?"--RB
Leader of the People
Megan Garber talks about what we really mean when we call someone a demagogue: "As an insult, certainly--as an implicit invalidation of one's political rhetoric--'demagogue' is a very good word. It's slightly gentler than 'fascist' and slightly more dignified than 'buffoon'; it's extremely opinionated, and yet carries itself with the gravitas of informed objectivity. Uttered aloud--that evocative agog--it forces one's mouth to gape appropriately. And while Trump is certainly not the only contemporary politician to be dismissed under its auspices ('Demagoguery 101,' Charles Krauthammer wrote of President Obama and his policies), no figure has so clearly deserved the word since Huey Long and Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan riled the former century. So deep has the impact of Trump's fist-pounding rhetoric been that, at this point, there's a metonymic circularity to the whole thing. The Economist recently published an article titled 'The Art of the Demagogue.' It did not need to clarify who it was about.... Today, perhaps as a response to that vague but ongoing threat of media-driven menace, 'demagogue' has become a term of last resort: a description--a deeply loaded epithet--that is summoned only when a particular politician or media figure or other modern people-leader has moved so far away from the mainstream that the Overton Window has receded well into the distance. It's a word that doubles as a siren for a democratic system, directed at one person but implicating us all: Our house is on fire. It's this sense that gave the phrase its shock value, and its lasting power, when H.L. Mencken dismissed Huey Long as 'a backwoods demagogue.' And when Joe Kennedy decried Father Coughlin as 'an out and out demagogue.' It is why American history, its terrain so widely populated with people who bluster and flatter and smarm and shout, has anointed so few actual 'demagogues.'"
The Human Ear
Svetlana Alexievich received her Nobel Prize for Literature this week. In her acceptance speech, she describes the importance of non-fiction to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: "Right after the war, Theodor Adorno wrote, in shock: 'Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.' My teacher, Ales Adamovich, whose name I mention today with gratitude, felt that writing prose about the nightmares of the 20th century was sacrilege. Nothing may be invented. You must give the truth as it is. A 'super-literature' is required. The witness must speak. Nietzsche's words come to mind--no artist can live up to reality. He can't lift it. It always troubled me that the truth doesn't fit into one heart, into one mind, that truth is somehow splintered. There's a lot of it, it is varied, and it is strewn about the world. Dostoevsky thought that humanity knows much, much more about itself than it has recorded in literature. So what is it that I do? I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time. I'm interested in the history of the soul. The everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits, or disdains. I work with missing history. I am often told, even now, that what I write isn't literature, it's a document. What is literature today? Who can answer that question? We live faster than ever before. Content ruptures form. Breaks and changes it. Everything overflows its banks: music, painting--even words in documents escape the boundaries of the document. There are no borders between fact and fabrication, one flows into the other. Witnessеs are not impartial. In telling a story, humans create, they wrestle time like a sculptor does marble. They are actors and creators. I'm interested in little people. The little, great people, is how I would put it, because suffering expands people. In my books these people tell their own, little histories, and big history is told along the way. We haven't had time to comprehend what already has and is still happening to us, we just need to say it. To begin with, we must at least articulate what happened. We are afraid of doing that, we're not up to coping with our past. In Dostoevsky's Demons, Shatov says to Stavrogin at the beginning of their conversation: 'We are two creatures who have met in boundless infinity ... for the last time in the world. So drop that tone and speak like a human being. At least once, speak with a human voice."
Buying Power
Nicholas Confessore recounts in the NY Times Magazine a war in Illinois between a small group of wealthy families and the entrenched politics of the state. According to Confessore, the families "have poured tens of millions of dollars into the state, a concentration of political money without precedent in Illinois history. Their wealth has forcefully shifted the state's balance of power." Confessore tells how Bruce Rauner was boosted into the Governor's mansion on the shoulders of $27 million of his own money as well as $13.6 million from Kenneth C. Griffin's family. "The rich families remaking Illinois are among a small group around the country who have channeled their extraordinary wealth into political power, taking advantage of regulatory, legal and cultural shifts that have carved new paths for infusing money into campaigns. Economic winners in an age of rising inequality, operating largely out of public view, they are reshaping government with fortunes so large as to defy the ordinary financial scale of politics. In the 2016 presidential race, a New York Times analysis found last month, just 158 families had provided nearly half of the early campaign money. Many of those giving, like Mr. Griffin, come from the world of finance, an industry that has yielded more of the new political wealth than any other. The Florida-based leveraged-buyout pioneer John Childs, the private equity investor Sam Zell and Paul Singer, a prominent New York hedge fund manager, all helped elect Mr. Rauner, as did Richard Uihlein, a conservative businessman from the Chicago suburbs. Most of them lean Republican; some are Democrats. But to a remarkable degree, their philosophies are becoming part of a widely adopted blueprint for public officials around the country: Critical of the power of unions, many are also determined to reduce spending and taxation, and are skeptical of government-led efforts to mitigate the growing gap between the rich and everyone else."
Praising Doublethink
Elijah Millgram thinks we can never be as exact as we'd like to be and that we need more hedges in our language: "Imagine you really did have a repertoire of concepts and names that allowed you to say exactly what you meant, pretty much whatever you noticed, or whatever occurred to you. Adrienne Lehrer, a linguist at the University of Arizona, wrote Wine and Conversation (2009), a book about wine vocabulary: 'earthy', 'full-bodied', 'flowery', 'cloying', 'disciplined', 'mossy', and so on. Many, many such adjectives turn up in wine commentary, though evidently not enough of them to live up to Orwell's ideal. Imagine really having precise terms for all those flavour notes. Orwell was especially worried about capturing our inner lives, so imagine also having words for the day-to-day events that remind you of particular experiences that only you have undergone. Feeling a little swamped? It's not simply that your mind would be submerged in conceptual clutter; it's not just that it wouldn't be possible to learn most of these words, or to communicate with them. In fact, Lehrer found that people don't manage to communicate very well with their wine vocabularies; if subjects are asked to pick a wine out of a lineup on the basis of someone else's description of it, they mostly can't do it. Presumably this sort of talk isn't really about communication, but it's also something of an exception... For the most part, our repertoire of concepts and labels for individuals is important because we use it in our reasoning. Descriptions are useful in that we can draw conclusions from them. In the most basic case, you would use a rule: when certain conditions are met (for example, when you're making the American chef Deborah Madison's mashed potatoes and turnips), certain implications follow (an appropriate pairing would be a Sancerre in the summer, or a Cabernet Franc from the Loire in fall or winter). Your ever-so-precise mot juste might capture exactly what you see or feel but, if there's no inference you can fit it to, then there's nothing you can do with it. Descriptions that you can't fold into your reasoning are useless."
The Art of Friendship
Jamie Saxon collects a series of quotations from a recent interview of Alexander Nehamas that together tell a story of a life of the mind. In one series of quotations, Nehamas says: "What a friend should do is give the other person an opportunity to become themselves. For example, if you're making a big decision, friends can help you articulate what it is that you really want to do. My best friend at Princeton is John Cooper [the Henry Putnam University Professor of Philosophy]--we've been friends for 44 years. Few people can compare to him when it comes to interpreting a text. On an intellectual level, he showed me how to be a better reader than I was, how to try to hold myself to a higher standard of what counts as understanding something and having an idea. Not to go on talking without knowing what we're saying, which is something we all do, unfortunately. I learned a lot about friendship, family and life from him. There is a deep common element behind finding a work of art beautiful, loving a person and being a friend. In all three cases, your feelings for the object or for the person are open-ended: you think that you haven't found out everything about that person or that work or art; it's this idea that there's more to see, there's more to understand, there's more to love here. Manet's 'Olympia' is a piece of art that takes my breath away. It is an amazing thing. I love, for example, that the figure is both vulnerable and very strong. I enjoy very much the fact that you can't tell a story of what's happening in the painting [which depicts a nude courtesan lying on a bed and a black servant]; nobody has been able to tell a story. When I was in Paris in 2014 to speak at the Princeton-Fung Global Forum, I went to see 'Olympia' and it was like seeing an old friend. The painting was the topic of a series of lectures I gave at Yale in 2001, and the book 'Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art' that came out of them, but I hadn't thought seriously about the painting since then. When I saw it again, I realized that I didn't understand something about the picture, something I hadn't noticed before. She is holding a kind of silk coverlet, her hand towards the floor and you can't tell if she's about to cover herself with it or if she's just uncovered herself. The moment that I saw there was something else to learn here, something else to know, my love was rekindled. I kept thinking about her the way you keep thinking about a person you have a crush on."
Featured Events
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #16
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, January 8, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Vita Activa - The Spirit of Hannah Arendt
Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center, will be participating in the opening of the new film, VITA ACTIVA - THE SPIRIT OF HANNAH ARENDT, Directed by Ada Ushpiz, taking place at the Film Forum in New York City.
About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the "Banality of Evil" when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for theNew Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt's life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta's biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA
On OCTOBER 20-21, 2016 we will host our ninth annual fall conference: "How Do We Talk About Difficult Questions?: Race, Sex and Religion on Campus". We'll see you there!
Thursday and Friday, October 20 and 21, 2016
Olin Hall, Bard College, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
From the Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Samantha Hill observes how the despair expressed in Rilke's Duino Elegies is an expression of our human world and as such distills the loss we feel from gun violence in the Quote of the Week. Mao Zedong offers his thoughts on how a limited perspective can lead us to think small in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, Donna Weeks shares her personal Arendt library with us and her thoughts on studying the Kantian influence in IR in this week's Library feature.
Amor Mundi 9/13/15
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.
Marilynne Robinson, taking up questions of American sacred and secular religion, obliquely picks up on a famous maxim of Franklin Roosevelt. America is a Christian country, she says, but its political culture turns a deaf ear to that heritage and not in the way that people usually suggest: "There is something I have felt the need to say, that I have spoken about in various settings, extemporaneously, because my thoughts on the subject have not been entirely formed, and because it is painful to me to have to express them. However, my thesis is always the same, and it is very simply stated, though it has two parts: first, contemporary America is full of fear. And second, fear is not a Christian habit of mind. As children we learn to say, 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.' We learn that, after his resurrection, Jesus told his disciples, 'Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.' Christ is a gracious, abiding presence in all reality, and in him history will finally be resolved. These are larger, more embracing terms than contemporary Christianity is in the habit of using. But we are taught that Christ 'was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made....The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.' The present tense here is to be noted. John's First Letter proclaims 'the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us.' We as Christians cannot think of Christ as isolated in space or time if we really do accept the authority of our own texts. Nor can we imagine that this life on earth is our only life, our primary life. As Christians we are to believe that we are to fear not the death of our bodies but the loss of our souls. We hear a great deal now about the drift of America away from a Christian identity. Whenever there is talk of decline--as in fact there always is--the one thing that seems to be lacking is a meaningful standard of change. How can we know where we are if we don't know where we were, in those days when things were as they ought to be? How can we know there has been decline, an invidious qualitative change, if we cannot establish a terminus a quo? I propose attention to the marked and oddly general fearfulness of our culture at present as one way of dealing with the problem. In the twenty-sixth chapter of Leviticus we find a description of the state the people of Israel will find themselves in if they depart from their loyalty to God: 'The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues. They shall stumble over one another, as if to escape a sword, though none pursues.'" Robinson's point, apart from her claim that America is a Christian nation, is that if you fear indiscriminately, courage dissipates. Her worry is that the decline of religiosity is part and parcel of our fearful moral and political cowardice.
The University and Its Publics
Kwame Anthony Appiah appraises contemporary higher education: "Neither Utility U. nor Utopia U. has the full run of any one campus. In the familiar caricature, there's the performance-studies major who is putting up fliers for the Naomi Klein talk, collecting signatures for the fossil-free petition and wondering whether the student alliance for gender equity is as racially inclusive as it claims. Then there's the engineering major, first in the family to go to college, traipsing across the quad with a discounted, two-editions-out-of-date version of the material-science textbook. All that identity stuff is a dimly perceived distraction in this student's light cone, readily tuned out. One student thinks 'bi-curious' is a word; the other doesn't see why you would use molecular-orbital theory when valence bonding provides answers faster. The two students cross paths only physically. It's almost as if they're attending two different colleges. One reason this is a caricature is that people aren't always found on the expected side of the disciplinary (and class) divides. At liberal-arts campuses, certainly, almost everyone drinks from the fountain of human betterment, albeit some from a Dixie cup and others from a Big Gulp. And very few are completely unmindful of the getting-a-job thing that's rumored to follow graduation. But when you superimpose the two visions of college--as a forcing house of virtue and as means for building human capital--you inevitably get interference patterns, ripples and ridges of indignation and disquiet. That's what you're seeing when the safe-space ethic runs amok, as with students who claim offense when their ideas are challenged or who want to see 'trigger warnings' on even canonical literature, like those cardboard lids on hotel-room glasses. Here, the student is at once the sensitive servant of high causes and a demanding customer. Nor are these tensions likely to resolve themselves, because higher education has to play so many roles. The truth is that colleges and universities do a tremendous amount that neither of these pictures captures--that just can't be reduced to the well-being of their graduates. For one thing, the old ideal of knowledge for its own sake hasn't been extinguished. For another, universities are the homes of all kinds of public goods. They are, for example, the source of much of today's best research. Without them we would know much less than we do about the nature of the cosmos or the workings of the human brain or the ways of reading a novel. A flourishing literary culture is made possible not because institutions of higher learning create writers but because they prepare readers (and yes, it helps that they provide jobs for plenty of poets and novelists too). There's even something to be said, especially in a democracy, for an educated citizenry, able to question the creeds of the moment."
Stephen Greenblatt in the New York Times argues that teaching Shakespeare still is meaningful to today's students but frequently in new and unexpected ways. "Shakespeare has not lost his place in this new world, just as, despite the grim jeremiads of the cultural pessimists, he has not lost his place in colleges and universities. On the contrary, his works (and even his image) turn up everywhere, and students continue to flock to courses that teach him, even when those courses are not required. But as I have discovered in my teaching, it is a different Shakespeare from the one with whom I first fell in love. Many of my students may have less verbal acuity than in years past, but they often possess highly developed visual, musical and performative skills. They intuitively grasp, in a way I came to understand only slowly, the pervasiveness of songs in Shakespeare's plays, the strange ways that his scenes flow one into another or the cunning alternation of close-ups and long views. When I ask them to write a 10-page paper analyzing a particular web of metaphors, exploring a complex theme or amassing evidence to support an argument, the results are often wooden; when I ask them to analyze a film clip, perform a scene or make a video, I stand a better chance of receiving something extraordinary. A student with a beautiful voice performed Brahms's Ophelia songs, with a piano accompaniment by another gifted musician. Students with a knack for creative writing have composed monologues in the voice of the villainous Iago, short stories depicting an awkward reunion of Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, or even additional scenes in Shakespearean verse. This does not mean that I should abandon the paper assignment; it is an important form of training for a range of very different challenges that lie in their future. But I see that their deep imaginative engagement with Shakespeare, their intoxication, lies elsewhere. And I should add that no one, as far as I can tell, any longer dreams of establishing symbolic descent from Stratford-upon-Avon to substitute for or displace actual descent from Vilnius or Seoul or Johannesburg. Contrary to my expectations, my students at Harvard are far more diverse, in geographical origin, culture and class, than my students ever were at U.C. Berkeley. They embrace this diversity and confidently expect to make their way through a global environment linked by complex digital networks."
Tedious Gadflies Spoiling the Tailgate
There are the challenges of the humanities. Star professors rarely teach. And the profit motive corrupts of our college and universities. Writing in the The Boston Review, Robert L. Kehoe III considers all these criticisms, but hones in the particularly gruesome state of college athletics. "Echoing Albert Camus's belief that the most profound ethical teaching he experienced was on the soccer field, theologian Stanley Hauwerwas has argued, 'The most determinative moral formation most people have in our society is when they learn to play baseball, basketball, quilt, cook, or learn to lay bricks.' That college athletics (and academics) could support the intellectual and moral development of student-athletes, while enhancing the communal strength of campus life, is inarguable. But it is only a sustainable prospect if administrators and faculty at colleges and universities preserve the nonprofit values of higher education and treat athletics as more than a source of entertainment, revenue, and prestige. To do so would demand a vision of athletic education that resists the temptation to profiteer at a time when college football's popularity is soaring. Last season's national championship game garnered the highest ratings in cable TV history, for a contest that featured Ohio State (whose starting quarterback Tweeted about his disregard for academic responsibility) and the University of Oregon (whose football players have an at-best middling graduation rate but enjoy a $68 million locker room paid for by Nike co-founder and Chairman Phil Knight). No amount of compromise or corruption has dissuaded fans and investors from tuning in--with eyeballs and cash. And when those investors include media conglomerates that attempt to do the work of journalism while promoting entertainment they profit from, there can be little hope that visible sports writers and commentators will take a more active role in reforming the current system. As the New York Times reports, media outlets often have a vested interest in the status quo; ESPN, for example, has infused so many billions of dollars into college football that it has effectively become 'both puppet-master and kingmaker, arranging games, setting schedules and bestowing the gift of nationwide exposure on its chosen universities, players and coaches.' In such a landscape, those who question the centrality of football in college life appear little more than tedious gadflies spoiling the tailgate."
An author identifying herself as Michelle G, a student at MIT, acknowledges, "There is empirical evidence to support the idea that males have a higher capacity for spatial reasoning than females." But Michelle G. dives deeply into these and other studies to argue that such "evidence" is a "factual misconception." "I'm guessing that you're familiar with common notions that men are spatial and logical thinkers, while females are more verbally proficient. A man being tested for spatial ability might assume that he's going to have an easier time than a woman of otherwise equal intelligence, his conclusion based not on sexism but on objective science. And statistically speaking, he's right. It is true that men score higher on spatial reasoning tests, though you might have caught on that there's a little bit more to this picture (why would a female MIT student publicize stereotypes that actively work against her?). If you're now wondering whether I'm about to throw some kind of feminist rant at you, I'll give you a 'well, sort of,' because calling out factual misconception is just as important as promoting feminist ideals here, and because I think those two go hand in hand anyway. I'll largely put the romance of egalitarianism aside, though, to talk about empiricism.... I think it's important to acknowledge the very rightful discomfort that arises when scientific studies attempt to trace such differences to biologically determined origins. Yet, across decades of research, no biological cause has actually been identified as a suitable explanation for the spatial reasoning discrepancy. Studies regarding testosterone and mental rotation, for example, found inconsistent or absent effects across cultures, prompting inquiries into 'differing cultural values' to account for the results. And gaps between men's and women's scores on some spatially-geared tests have significantly shrunk in the past few decades, which is interesting because noticeable evolutionary or nature-based development might take thousands of decades to take effect. ('Nurture'-based conditions are of course rapidly changing.) Still though, the gap has lingered, and a satisfying and empirically-supported explanation as to 'what gives' was not achieved until 2008, when researchers eliminated the performance gap under a single simple condition."
Timothy Snyder in the New York Review of Books explores "Hitler's World" and what he finds will surprise some. Above all, human races were likes species involved in a fateful fight to the death. Life was a struggle that followed natural laws, but one that could be influenced by human action. And as Hannah Arendt so clearly emphasized in her Origins of Totalitarianism, Hitler and his Nazi party embraced a movement that transcended nations and states. In short, Nazism was not nationalist, a common misconception. "Hitler's basic critique was not the usual one that human beings were good but had been corrupted by an overly Jewish civilization. It was rather that humans were animals and that any exercise of ethical deliberation was in itself a sign of Jewish corruption. The very attempt to set a universal ideal and strain toward it was precisely what was hateful. Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's most important deputy, did not follow every twist of Hitler's thinking, but he grasped its conclusion: ethics as such was the error; the only morality was fidelity to race. Participation in mass murder, Himmler maintained, was a good act, since it brought to the race an internal harmony as well as unity with nature. The difficulty of seeing, for example, thousands of Jewish corpses marked the transcendence of conventional morality. The temporary strains of murder were a worthy sacrifice to the future of the race. Any nonracist attitude was Jewish, thought Hitler, and any universal idea a mechanism of Jewish dominion. Both capitalism and communism were Jewish. Their apparent embrace of struggle was simply cover for the Jewish desire for world domination. Any abstract idea of the state was also Jewish. 'There is no such thing,' wrote Hitler, 'as the state as an end in itself.' As he clarified, 'the highest goal of human beings' was not 'the preservation of any given state or government, but the preservation of their kind.' The frontiers of existing states would be washed away by the forces of nature in the course of racial struggle: 'One must not be diverted from the borders of Eternal Right by the existence of political borders.' If states were not impressive human achievements but fragile barriers to be overcome by nature, it followed that law was particular rather than general, an artifact of racial superiority rather than an avenue of equality. Hans Frank, Hitler's personal lawyer and during World War II the governor-general of occupied Poland, maintained that the law was built 'on the survival elements of our German people.' Legal traditions based on anything beyond race were 'bloodless abstractions.' Law had no purpose beyond the codification of a Führer's momentary intuitions about the good of his race. The German concept of a Rechtsstaat, a state that operated under the rule of law, was without substance. As Carl Schmitt explained, law served the race, and the state served the race, and so race was the only pertinent concept. The idea of a state held to external legal standards was a sham designed to suppress the strong."
Hua Hsu considers the case of white poet Michael Derrick Hudson, who occasionally published poetry under the assumed identity of a Chinese poet named Yi-Fen Chou but who, very unusually, owned up to the subterfuge when his work was admitted to the 2015 Best American Poetry anthology. The anthology's editor, Sherman Alexie, recently published a blog post about why he included Hudson's poem anyway, and that's where Hsu picks up: "The more revealing aspect of Alexie's response is his account of what attracted him to 'The Bees' once Hudson's calculated hunch had garnered the poem 'a close read.' The poem wasn't obviously 'Chinese,' however you might interpret that, Alexie explains. Instead, it referenced 'Adam and Eve, Poseidon, the Roman Coliseum, and Jesus.' It was, in other words, 'inherently obsessed with European culture.' Alexie goes on, 'When I first read it, I'd briefly wondered about the life story of a Chinese American poet who would be compelled to write a poem with such overt and affectionate European classical and Christian imagery, and I marveled at how interesting many of us are in our cross-cultural lives, and then I tossed the poem on the "maybe" pile that eventually became a "yes" pile.' Alexie is a sharp and self-aware Native American writer and filmmaker, and he didn't necessarily mean to suggest that a Chinese person raised in America wouldn't gravitate toward Western themes. (Isn't that how assimilation works?) But his phrasing reminds me of the odd standard often applied to marginalized voices: in this case, there was something refreshingly noteworthy about a Chinese poet writing about non-Chinese things. Consider the comparative privilege of the white artist, whose experiences are received as 'universal,' even if that artist chooses to assume the guise of the other. Ezra Pound's flawed 'translations' of Chinese poetry, for example, became a key foundation for modernism. The only limitation for such an artist, really, is the extent to which it can all be explained away as an avant-garde game if things get too weird... Perhaps, too, spoofing the Chinese struck Hudson as a relatively safe masquerade, likely to provoke less generalized rage than, say, the fake autobiography of a purported ex-gangster or a Holocaust survivor. Or maybe it was simply more efficient. When it comes to such hoaxes, it seems somehow easier to fake Asia, a land still distant and inscrutable to many Americans; while other hoaxes work because of their thoroughness and care, the Asian-themed sort often get by with only a few details, as long as those details seem just 'Asian' enough. After all, imitating the sound of Asian languages is something of a national pastime, from Mark Twain and Bret Harte's 'Ah Sin' to Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar's 'Cream of Sum Yung Guy.' In 2013, a Bay Area news report about an Asian Air crash listed the pilots' names as Ho Lee Fuk, Wi Tu Lo, Sum Ting Wong, and Bang Ding Ow, presumably because these names appeared sufficiently believable."
Hannah Arendt, Privacy, and the Constitution
Constitution Day (or Citizenship Day) is observed on September 17 to recognize the U.S. Constitution and those who have become U.S. citizens. In honor of Constitution Day, the Arendt Center extends an invitation to attend a lecture by Roger Berkowitz.
"[T]o the extent that they had a positive notion of freedom which would transcend the idea of a successful liberation from tyrants and from necessity, this notion was identified with the act of foundation, that is, the framing of a constitution."
-Hannah Arendt, "On Revolution"
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium, Bard College, 5:00 pm
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #12
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, September 11, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Why Privacy Matters: What Do We Lose When We Lose Our Privacy?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
**UPDATE** Registration for our conference is now open! Save your seat for this exciting two-day event here!
Thursday, October 15 and Friday, October 16, 2015
Olin Hall, Bard College, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Louise Brinkerhoff discusses how even in solitude there are always two sides in dialogue in the Quote of the Week. Sir Aubrey De Vere comments on how one thought immortalized in ink can lead millions to think in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We share a chapter from Stephen Most's Stories Make the World, a book which describes how Most applied Arendt's thinking about stories to his work as a filmmaker. Finally, Thierry Ternisien d'Ouville shares with us an image of his personal Arendt library on Twitter in this week's Library feature.
Amor Mundi 8/23/15
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.
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, writing in The Atlantic on students' demands for college courses and syllabi to have trigger warnings that inform them of potentially distressing material before they actually need to encounter it, track the rise of the trigger warning and wonder what effect it might have on college graduates: "What are the effects of this new protectiveness on the students themselves? Does it benefit the people it is supposed to help? What exactly are students learning when they spend four years or more in a community that polices unintentional slights, places warning labels on works of classic literature, and in many other ways conveys the sense that words can be forms of violence that require strict control by campus authorities, who are expected to act as both protectors and prosecutors? There's a saying common in education circles: Don't teach students what to think; teach them how to think. The idea goes back at least as far as Socrates. Today, what we call the Socratic method is a way of teaching that fosters critical thinking, in part by encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them. Such questioning sometimes leads to discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding. But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically."
Carina del Valle Schorske notes a striking mirroring in the way we talk about depression: "Both stigmatization and sanctification come with real ethical dangers. On the one hand, there is the danger that hidden in the wish for the elimination of depressive symptoms is a wish for the elimination of other essential attributes of the depressed person--her posture of persistent critique, her intolerance for small talk. On the other hand there is the danger of taking pleasure in the pain of the melancholic, and of adding the expectation of insight to the already oppressive expectations the melancholic likely has for herself. But these ethical dangers are not simply imposed on the unfortunate person from the outside. It is not only the culture at large that oscillates between understanding psychological suffering as a sign of genius and a mark of shame. The language used in both discourses bears a striking resemblance to the language the depressed person uses in her own head."
Sue Halpern in the New York Review of Books considers the grandiose vision of Elon Musk, the man behind Tesla and SpaceX, Musk's latest project to colonize Mars. "An even more significant connection is this: while Musk is working to move people away from fossil fuels, betting that the transition to electric vehicles and solar energy will contain the worst effects of global climate change, he is hedging that bet with one that is even more wishful and quixotic. In the event that those terrestrial solutions don't pan out and civilization is imperiled, Musk is positioning SpaceX to establish a human colony on Mars. As its website explains: 'SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of enabling human life on Mars.' 'The key thing for me,' Musk told a reporter for The Guardian in 2013, 'is to develop the technology to transport large numbers of people and cargo to Mars.... There's no rush in the sense that humanity's doom is imminent; I don't think the end is nigh. But I do think we face some small risk of calamitous events. It's sort of like why you buy car or life insurance. It's not because you think you'll die tomorrow, but because you might.' To be clear, Musk is not envisioning a colony of a few hundred settlers on the Red Planet, but one on the order of Hawthorne, California, the 80,000-plus industrial city outside of Los Angeles where SpaceX has its headquarters."
Steven Johnson suggests that the internet economy, which came with an increased ease in pirating and sharing art and entertainment, hasn't been as harmful to artists as some would like to believe: "The trouble with this argument is that it has been based largely on anecdote, on depressing stories about moderately successful bands that are still sharing an apartment or filmmakers who can't get their pictures made because they refuse to pander to a teenage sensibility. When we do see hard data about the state of the culture business, it usually tracks broad industry trends or the successes and failures of individual entertainment companies. That data isn't entirely irrelevant, of course; it's useful to know whether the music industry is making more or less money than it did before Ulrich delivered his anti-Napster testimony. But ultimately, those statistics only hint at the most important question. The dystopian scenario, after all, isn't about the death of the record business or Hollywood; it's about the death of music or movies. As a society, what we most want to ensure is that the artists can prosper--not the record labels or studios or publishing conglomerates, but the writers, musicians, directors and actors themselves. Their financial fate turns out to be much harder to measure, but I endeavored to try. Taking 1999 as my starting point--the year both Napster and Google took off--I plumbed as many data sources as I could to answer this one question: How is today's creative class faring compared with its predecessor a decade and a half ago? The answer isn't simple, and the data provides ammunition for conflicting points of view. It turns out that Ulrich was incontrovertibly correct on one point: Napster did pose a grave threat to the economic value that consumers placed on recorded music. And yet the creative apocalypse he warned of has failed to arrive. Writers, performers, directors and even musicians report their economic fortunes to be similar to those of their counterparts 15 years ago, and in many cases they have improved. Against all odds, the voices of the artists seem to be louder than ever."
Maybe We Do Want Privacy After All
Even as people complain about the erosion of privacy, they continue to use websites and devices that compromise their personal data and to support the governmental use of surveillance in the name of security. This has led many marketers and defenders of surveillance to suggest that privacy is simply not a real concern. A new study by Joseph Turow, Michael Hennessy, and Nora Draper complicates that assumption: "New Annenberg survey results indicate that marketers are misrepresenting a large majority of Americans by claiming that Americans give out information about themselves as a tradeoff for benefits they receive. To the contrary, the survey reveals most Americans do not believe that 'data for discounts' is a square deal. The findings also suggest, in contrast to other academics' claims, that Americans' willingness to provide personal information to marketers cannot be explained by the public's poor knowledge of the ins and outs of digital commerce. In fact, people who know more about ways marketers can use their personal information are more likely rather than less likely to accept discounts in exchange for data when presented with a real-life scenario. Our findings, instead, support a new explanation: a majority of Americans are resigned to giving up their data--and that is why many appear to be engaging in tradeoffs. Resignation occurs when a person believes an undesirable outcome is inevitable and feels powerless to stop it. Rather than feeling able to make choices, Americans believe it is futile to manage what companies can learn about them. Our study reveals that more than half do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened. By misrepresenting the American people and championing the tradeoff argument, marketers give policymakers false justifications for allowing the collection and use of all kinds of consumer data often in ways that the public find objectionable. Moreover, the futility we found, combined with a broad public fear about what companies can do with the data, portends serious difficulties not just for individuals but also--over time--for the institution of consumer commerce." If privacy is to be protected, it is important to ask why privacy matters. That is the theme of the Hannah Arendt Center's upcoming fall conference. You can register to attend here.
How Transparent Should Government Be?
Francis Fukuyama writing in the Financial Times argues that we should be suspicious of the cult of transparency even as he is supportive of Edward Snowden's revelations. There are, he argues, limits to transparency. "Given that 'transparency' has such positive connotations, it is hard to imagine a reversal of these measures. But the public interest would not be served if the internal deliberations of the US Federal Reserve or the Supreme Court were put on CSPAN, as some have demanded. Legislators and officials must preserve deliberative space, just as families need to protect their privacy when debating their finances or how to deal with a wayward child. And they need to be able to do so without donning a straitjacket of rules specifying how they must talk to each other, and to citizens." There may be dangers to transparency, yet David Brin, one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming Arendt Center fall conference "Why Privacy Matters," argues the opposing view in his book The Transparent Society: only transparency can in the end preserve both privacy and liberty. We encourage you to learn more about Brin and register for the conference.
Hua Hsu listens to President Obama's recent Spotify playlists: "Perhaps, as Bernie Sanders harrumphed when asked about his hair, idle focus on the leisure-time enthusiasms of politicians is just a ruse to distract us from what actually matters. But the playlists were a reminder of Obama's influence on American culture and of the way he has become a sort of lifestyle brand thanks to his Administration's indefatigable efforts to put him wherever young people might see him, from the late-night establishment and ESPN to the comparatively niche audiences of Vice News, 'Between Two Ferns,' and 'WTF.' Once, Bill Clinton pantomimed cool by playing the sax on the Arsenio Hall Show; now, we have a President who seems intent on proving that he's not too cool for the occasional Coldplay song...At a time when so many of our everyday choices get gussied up in the language of 'curation,' playlists and d.j.s (particularly celebrity d.j.s) have taken on an elevated role. The playlist has become a kind of biographical shorthand, a way of communicating something essential about ourselves through the performance of taste. Of course, taste and relatability mean something different when they involve someone with drones at his disposal. These are playlists meant to convey a set of values: knowledge of the past, an open ear, an interest in the future. There are the safe, modern-day crowd-pleasers like the Lumineers and Florence and the Machine alongside relative obscurities like Low Cut Connie and Aoife O'Donovan. There is no Linkin Park. And of course there is Beyoncé's 'Superpower,' because even the most powerful leader in the world wouldn't dare snub the most beloved human on the planet."
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #12
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, September 11, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Why Privacy Matters: What Do We Lose When We Lose Our Privacy?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
**UPDATE** Registration for our conference is now open! Save your seat for this exciting two-day event here!
Thursday, October 15 and Friday, October 16, 2015
Olin Hall, Bard College, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Samantha Hill discusses how Donald Trump and Jon Stewart both tap into a desire among the American public for truth in politics in the Quote of the Week. William Henry Bragg reflects on how science interacts with facts in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate the annotations Hannah Arendt made to her copy of Baruch Spinoza's Ethics in this week's Library feature.
On the Ethics of Baruch Spinoza
On a recent trip to the Hannah Arendt Collection housed in Bard College's Stevenson Library, we came across this copy of the works of the 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza.
Included in this particular volume are Spinoza's Ethics, selected letters, and On the Improvement of Human Understanding.
On pages 66 and 67 of Spinoza's Ethics, we see three discernible Arendt marginalia. The first and second both occur on page 66, with the former consisting of a single vertical line placed adjacent to the following passage:
God must be the sole cause, inasmuch as to him alone does existence appertain. (Prop. xiv. Coroll. i.) Q.E.D.
The second annotation on page 66 includes a vertical line but is also preceded by two exclamation points, thereby signifying its special importance to Arendt.
This [the notion that God is not the cause of the essence of things and therefore the essence of things] (by Prop. xv.) is absurd. [Underline Arendt's] Therefore, God is the cause of the essence of things. Q.E.D.
The final annotation on on the opposite page, page 67. It consists of three vertical lines placed to Spinoza's passage that reads,
Proof--Whatsoever is conditioned to exist and act, has been thus conditioned by God (by Prop. xxvi. and Prop. xxiv. Coroll.)
Want to share pictures of your own Arendt library?
Please send them to David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at firstname.lastname@example.com, and we will feature them on our blog!
The Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College is maintained by staff members at the Bard College Stevenson Library. To peruse the collection's digital entries, please click here.
For more Library photos, please click here.
Amor Mundi 8/9/15
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.
Claire Messud in Harpers writes of her nostalgia for boredom. "When I recall my formative years, of course there was loads of reading, and travel, and biking, and TV. But there was also a whole lot of boredom. I guess that's what concerns me, as a parent: that my kids, who lack for nothing even more than I did, are not only unversed in material deprivation and insufficiently familiar with self-restraint but, most terribly, they know nothing of nothingness. Having no truly empty time, they're unfamiliar too with the unexpected and exhilarating flowers that can grow there. I want my children to embrace doing nothing, to embrace the slowing of an afternoon to a near standstill, when all you can hear is the laborious ticking of the clock and the dog snoring on the sofa, the rain's patter at the window, the occasional swoosh of a slowly passing car. Remember those days? The exasperation, the excruciating itchiness of them? My kids would have to dive in, live through the agony, and come out the other side. They'd have to learn to lie on the lawn watching ants scale the grass blades; they'd have to linger, digits pruning, in the bathtub; they'd have to stop, to be still, and then to wait, and wait, and wait, allowing time to fatten around them, like a dewdrop on the tip of a leaf. And then, only then, who knows what they might imagine or invent? How can I teach them, when they're not of an age to listen, and when, more problematically, I too often live in the world just as they do? In practice, I set a poor example, never idling or ambling or reading in bed. I'd like to figure out how to be the kind of parent who holds at bay all demands and exhortations, all fripperies and nonsense. I'd like to show the wisdom of restraint. A different version of washing out Ziploc bags and mending moth holes, it arises from the same impulse: from the understanding that if you attend thoughtfully to what you already have, you need nothing more. It's all here, inside and in the room--not on the screen--before us."
Horrified and Baffled
In the New York Review of Books, a writer who wishes to remain anonymous suggests that, in order to understand ISIS, we have to admit that we don't have the tools to understand it: "Much of what ISIS has done clearly contradicts the moral intuitions and principles of many of its supporters. And we sense--through Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss's careful interviews--that its supporters are at least partially aware of this contradiction. Again, we can list the different external groups that have provided funding and support to ISIS. But there are no logical connections of ideology, identity, or interests that should link Iran, the Taliban, and the Baathists to one another or to ISIS. Rather, each case suggests that institutions that are starkly divided in theology, politics, and culture perpetually improvise lethal and even self-defeating partnerships of convenience. The thinkers, tacticians, soldiers, and leaders of the movement we know as ISIS are not great strategists; their policies are often haphazard, reckless, even preposterous; regardless of whether their government is, as some argue, skillful, or as others imply, hapless, it is not delivering genuine economic growth or sustainable social justice. The theology, principles, and ethics of the ISIS leaders are neither robust nor defensible. Our analytical spade hits bedrock very fast. I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better information. But that is to underestimate the alien and bewildering nature of this phenomenon. To take only one example, five years ago not even the most austere Salafi theorists advocated the reintroduction of slavery; but ISIS has in fact imposed it. Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough--even in hindsight--to have predicted the movement's rise. We hide this from ourselves with theories and concepts that do not bear deep examination. And we will not remedy this simply through the accumulation of more facts. It is not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled."
John Agresto renews the debate about what is killing the liberal arts. His answer: the liberal arts. "Still, it's not simply the high cost of higher education, or their supposed uselessness, that has buried today's liberal arts. More important, professors in the liberal arts have over-promised, or promised wrongly. We have these lovely phrases, like making our students 'well-rounded,' that are more or less just words. Are those who study medicine or nursing not 'well-rounded'? Are those who major in film studies or contemporary 'lit crit' more intellectually worthy than those who study economics and finance? Often enough over the years I've heard my humanities confreres say that a liberal education makes us finer people, more sensitive, more concerned, more humane, even more human. Pretentious shibboleths such as these, expressed in our egalitarian age, are an excellent way to lose one's audience. And that's exactly where the liberal arts are today. Liberal arts has not been killed by parental or student philistinism, or the cupidity of today's educational institutions whose excessive costs have made the liberal arts into an unattainable luxury. In too many ways the liberal arts have died not by murder but by suicide. To restore the liberal arts, those of us who teach should begin by thinking about students. Almost all of them have serious questions about major issues, and all of them are looking for answers. What is right? What is love? What do I owe others? What do others owe me? In too many places these are not questions for examination but issues for indoctrination. Instead of guiding young men and women by encouraging them to read history, biography, philosophy and literature, we'd rather debunk the past, deconstruct the authors and dethrone our finest minds and statesmen."
On Bullshit
Jon Stewart signed off as host of The Daily Show with a speech about bullshit. It is worth watching, but here is a rough transcription. "Bullshit is everywhere. Are the kids still in here? We'll deal with that later. Bullshit is everywhere. There is very little that you will encounter in life that has not been, in some ways, infused with bullshit. Not all of it bad. Your general, day-to-day, organic free-range bullshit is often necessary. Or at the very least innocuous. 'Oh what a beautiful baby--I'm sure it will grow into that.' That kind of bullshit in many ways provides important social contract fertilizer. It keeps people from making each other cry all day. But then there's the more pernicious bullshit. Your premeditated, institutional bullshit, designed to obscure and distract. Designed by whom? The bullshittocracy. It comes in three basic flavors. One, making bad things sound like good things. 'Organic, All Natural cupcakes.' Because factory-made sugar oatmeal balls doesn't sell. Patriot Act. Because 'Are You Scared Enough To Let Me Look At All Your Phone Records Act' doesn't sell. So, whenever something has been titled Freedom Family Fairness Health America, take a good long sniff. Chances are it has been manufactured in a facility that may contain traces of bullshit. Number Two, the second way: Hiding bad things under mountains of bullshit. Complexity. You know, I would love to download Drizzy's latest Meek Mill diss--(everyone promised me that that made sense). But I'm not really interested right now in reading Tolstoy's iTunes agreement. So I'll just click and agree, even if it grants Apple prima nocte with my spouse. Here's another one, simply put, banks shouldn't be able to bet your pension money on red. Bullshitly put, it's Dodd Frank. Hey, a handful of billionaires can't buy our elections right? Of course not. They can only pour unlimited, anonymous cash into a 501(c)4; otherwise they'd have to 501(c)6 it, or funnel it openly through a non-campaign coordinated Super Pac. 'I think they're asleep now, we can sneak out.' And finally, it's the bullshit of infinite possibility. These bullshitters cover their unwillingness to act under the guise of unending inquiry. We can't do anything because we don't yet know everything. We cannot take action on climate change, until everyone in the world agrees gay-marriage vaccines won't cause our children to marry goats, who are going to come for our guns. Until then, I say it leads to controversy. Now the good news is this. Bullshitters have gotten pretty lazy. And their work is easily detected. And looking for it is kind of a pleasant way to pass the time. Like an 'I Spy' of bullshit. So I say to you tonight, friends. The best defense against bullshit is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something."
Emma Green profiles Southern Baptist Convention political leader Russell Moore, who, instead of trying to bring the sacred and the profane as close together as possible wants to emphasize the separateness of the Church by redefining American Protestant identity with a seemingly pejorative rhetorical strategy: "Moore is making an argument for embracing Christian strangeness. 'Our message will be seen as increasingly freakish to American culture,' he writes. 'Let's embrace the freakishness, knowing that such freakishness is the power of God unto salvation.' This word, 'freak,' is both jarring and effective: It's a high-school-hallway diss, all hard-edged consonants and staccato contempt. Christians have reclaimed this word before; the 1960s-era 'Jesus freaks' mixed gospel teachings with hippie counter-culture. In many ways, Moore wants to capture a similar mentality, one of standing against and apart from culture, rather than trying to win it over. This is not quite the same as 'the Benedict option,' as Rod Dreher has called it--a strategic retreat from culture and fortification of communities that share similar values. As Moore pointed out, the core of being an evangelical is evangelism, spreading the good news of Christ; there's no low-church history of monastic retreat like there is in the Catholic or Orthodox traditions. But it is a strategic reorientation: to see the world through the eyes of the outcast, rather than the conqueror."
Copyediting a Hero
Benjamin Dreyer, who copyedited a new collection of material from writer Shirley Jackson, explains the joy and terror of working with a favorite, and long passed, writer: "I'm not much for telling tales out of school, so had I encountered any majorly irksome gaffes as I made my way through the manuscript, I'd likely be keeping them discreetly to myself anyway rather than spilling them here, but the God's honest truth is that even at close scrutiny--very close: I like to copyedit more or less in Cinerama, with a document set in 14-point type and, furthermore, at 150 percent, so that I can barely see beyond the margins unless I turn my head--Jackson's prose remained resolutely fine. I confess that I was oddly pleased to learn that my paragon was, in manuscript, not entirely infallible: Jackson goes to the well of 'suddenly' and 'and then' a bit too frequently (with the Hymans' approval, there are now quite a few fewer of those in the finished book), and she occasionally puts more pressure on the worthy semicolon than a semicolon can bear. (I may well, though I will not confirm it, on occasion have yelled at my screen 'A period, for Pete's sake, a period!') But mostly, sentence after sentence, I was happily awed. So happily awed that I quickly--and easily, I should stress--established a rule of self-restraint: Anything I felt the need to do that couldn't be easily accomplished with a mild rejiggering of punctuation or the addition or deletion of no more than two words at a time would be weighed carefully before I even dared suggest it. As it turned out, I found maybe a half-dozen knotted-up sentences that were easily untangled--just as, I'm certain, Jackson herself would have untangled them on a subsequent run-through. At one point I spent a good fifteen minutes willing a sentence to move from the beginning of a paragraph to the end before I decided it was fine where its author had placed it. Once and only once did I venture to suggest that a couple of words more interesting than 'that' or 'the' needed to be added to fill out a resolutely unsatisfactory sentence, and the Hymans accepted my suggestion. It's a heady thing for me that I actually contributed two whole substantive words to a Shirley Jackson story, but the truth is that if I did my job properly, if I did that brain burrowing that my colleague said was the real art of copyediting, they're not my words at all; they're Jackson's. I just had to listen for them."
This week was the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Of all the pieces looking back at the human terror and technological sublime of the first of two uses of such a weapon in recorded history, John Hershey's 1946 issue-length article in the New Yorker, published at a time when the magazine cost fifteen cents an issue, might still be the best. In honor of the anniversary, the magazine has put the whole article online for free.
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #12
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, September 11, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Why Privacy Matters: What Do We Lose When We Lose Our Privacy?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
**UPDATE** Registration for our conference is now open! Save your seat for this exciting two-day event here!
Thursday, October 15 and Friday, October 16, 2015
Olin Hall, Bard College, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Laurie Naranch wonders if education can prepare us to assume responsibility for and help renew the common world in the Quote of the Week. Alexander Hamilton reflects on how the fruit of labor and thought help constitute the appearance of genius in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we reflect on the extent to which Hannah Arendt respected American's love for freedom in this week's Library feature.
Should We Be Humble?
By Martin Wagner
"We are reminded of Socrates' great insight that no man can be wise, out of which love for wisdom, or philosophy, was born; the whole life story of Jesus seems to testify how love for goodness arises out of the insight that no man can be good."
-- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
At the core of Christian ethics stands a radical demand for the primacy of humility over all other virtues. The true Christian does not presume to judge anyone's behavior, not even his or her own. Today, in the age of tolerance, the Christian virtue of humility enjoys unprecedented authority. What we overlook in the shadow of humility's dominance, however, are the ways in which humility might threaten our most fundamental notions of justice.
The Courage to Be: Jeanne van Heeswijk
By Bethany Zulick
On April 27th, Jeanne van Heeswijk gave the keynote address for the third and final installment of our spring 2015 "The Courage to Be" dinner/lecture series.
Jeanne van Heeswijk is a curator and visual artist who collaborates with people all over the world to create socially engaged art. For one of her projects, Two Up Two Down, van Heeswijk banded together with residents of the Anfield and Breckfield neighborhoods in Liverpool to reclaim derelict buildings and transform them into thriving neighborhoods replete with affordable housing, a community bakery, and meeting places for the community. She is the recipient of numerous awards; most recently, the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Human Rights program at Bard College named her the first Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism.
The Courage to Be: Uday Mehta
From left to right: Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center; Uday Mehta, Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Zelda May Bas, author and student fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center.
(Image courtesy of Jessica Chappe.)
By Zelda May Bas
On Monday, March 30th, the Hannah Arendt Center welcomed Professor Uday Mehta as keynote speaker for its second "Courage to Be" dinner.
Amor Mundi 4/5/15
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Hannah Arendt was a bold thinker. One of the most controversial of her many provocative opinions was her support for the right of social discrimination. Arendt fiercely defended equality in public affairs and in politics, but she also saw equality as necessarily limited to the political sphere. Thus, Arendt strongly justified the right of Jews to spend their vacations at Jewish-only resorts as well as the right of others to "cater to a clientele that wishes not to see Jews while on holiday." Importantly, Arendt made a distinction between resorts on the one hand and buses, restaurants, theatres and museums on the other. The distinction is based on the criteria that some people go to resorts to congregate with others like themselves (they all are Jewish, all Muslim, all Catholic, or they all like to ski) while people who use buses and restaurants and museums are using "services which, whether privately or publicly owned, are in fact public services that everyone needs in order to pursue his business and lead his life." For Arendt, these private services are in the public domain and thus must be protected from social discrimination in order to guarantee political equality in the public sphere. And yet, Arendt affirms not only the right, but also the importance, of social discrimination as a necessary antidote against conformism. "The danger of conformism in this country--a danger almost as old as the Republic--is that, because of the extraordinary heterogeneity of its population, social conformism tends to become an absolute and a substitute for national homogeneity." In other words, the rise of the social realm "which has only one opinion and one interest"--whether in the one-interest of economic rationality or the one opinion of polite society--leads to the expectation that all citizens will behave, follow innumerable rules, and live according to normal standards that "exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement."
It is worth recalling Arendt's fear of the dangers presented by social conformity and her consequent defense of social discrimination in light of the intense anger directed at the State of Indiana and anyone who might dare to defend the state's passage of a law protecting persons and businesses from legal action if they refuse business deals that violate their religious beliefs. It is one thing to support the right to marry whomever one wants, which Hannah Arendt did. She specifically says that marriage is a private right and that the state should not in any way intrude on a person's private decision of whom to marry, be they of another race or of the same sex. She also fundamentally rejected those laws that would permit restaurants, bus lines, or museums to refuse service to gays or to Jews on religious grounds. Even when privately owned, these businesses operate in the public sphere and thus must treat all people equally. But if a business wants to only provide wedding cakes for gay weddings or another business only wants to provide wedding cakes for heterosexual weddings, the logic of Arendt's position (one should not speak for what Arendt would in fact say) also means that she would likely support that right and would most certainly oppose the societal and state efforts to force religious individuals to forgo their right to association. If the Indiana law would in fact allow restaurants to not serve homosexuals (as some of its critics but not its supporters suggest), it is unjust and would need to be rescinded or amended. But the cacophony of criticism has drowned out such nuance. The demand from critics is that Indiana affirm that the law not permit any social discrimination whatsoever. And Indiana has complied.
We don't have to agree with Arendt, god forbid. But one reason her thought is so important is because it provokes us to think deeply about the rise and danger of social conformity in the modern age. Arendt was clear that all public discrimination must be fought vigorously. But it will do all of us some good to think a bit more about her equally strong defense of social discrimination. Arendt pushes us to ask, are their meaningful limits to the drive for social equality?
Dylan Davis, a student from Bard College Berlin, penned the winning paper in the Hannah Arendt Center's essay contest on Hate and the Human Condition. The contest was open to students taking classes on "Hate and the Human Condition" at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Bard College Berlin, and Bard College in Annandale, NY. The courses were part of a Hannah Arendt Center program to explore the fact and meaning of hate, an emotion that has persisted and thrived in nearly every era of human existence. While groups and movements seek to eradicate or limit or ameliorate hatred, hate continues to evolve and thrive. We wanted to ask whether hate is an unavoidable part of human existence and whether hatred, if it is human, might also be valuable in some ways. Is there, for example, a benefit to hating those who are evil? Professors teaching the four classes nominated 10 papers for consideration in the essay contest. Davis' winning essay argues that against the common sense that increasing equality would reduce hate, experience teaches otherwise. "The different revolutions our class analyzed all conceived of equality as their proper end. Hate was symptomatic of either the revolutionary spirit or the conditions that led to revolution. Because of this, one might easily suppose that when revolutions reach their completion, with equality supposedly realized, hate would dissipate under this new order. Nonetheless, it always seems to survive and, paradoxically, become strengthened. Against common sense, I contend that the relationship between hate and revolution is such that, as equality increases in society, so does hate." Davis pursues his exploration of the constitutive relationship between hate and equality through readings of two texts by Alexis de Tocqueville. "Tocqueville confirms the phenomenon wherein hate increases in relation to equality by turning to the German peasantry where, because of social conditions inverse to those of France, he can observe the lack of hate relative to inequality. He writes, 'At first glance, it is surprising that the Revolution, whose essential object was to abolish what remained of medieval institutions everywhere, did not break out in countries where those institutions, being better preserved, made people more aware of their oppressiveness and rigor, but rather in countries where these things were felt the least. Thus their yoke seemed most unbearable where in fact its burden was lightest' (Tocqueville 31). Astonishingly, precisely because the conditions were worse outside of France, the revolutionary spirit was less palatable. The German peasantry didn't hate their lords because the system they were part of became naturalized over time. If benefits or privileges were granted, equalizing the conditions of the dominant and subjugated classes, hate would increase in relation to the extent that the lower classes were humanized. The revolutionary spirit, Tocqueville notes, spread to the areas outside of France that were in closest geographical proximity to it due to the fact that conditions in these areas were closer to France's." Davis' excellent paper is worth reading in full. In addition, you can read the rest of the winning essays here.
For National Poetry Month, The Boston Review is printing a two-part interview in which Adam Fitzgerald questions the recently deceased poet Mark Strand in what turns out to be his last interview. Part one is now available, where Strand talks about his early interest in art, his development as a poet, and what poetry can and should not do. "AF: In your famous Paris Review interview with Wallace Shawn, you say, 'We don't read a poem to find the meaning of life.' MS: Well, the meanings are embedded in the poems, but I think the poems represent a particular vision of an individual living in the mid-20th century. And into the 21st. I can't claim that they are more than that. They don't tell you how to live your life. Poems that purport to give the reader the meaning of life would tell you this should be the meaning of life, but I don't preach. I'm not a preacher. I'm always astonished when I read some of my earlier poems. They're very much like what I would have written today. They have a slightly different way, but the kind of anxiety that exists in the earlier poems, the sort of spookiness, even the humor is in some of them. I was writing prose poems all along. Because it's fun. I wrote because I enjoyed it. It was work, and it was frustrating, but all in all, when you've finished a poem, you have this thing that didn't exist and it exists independently of anything else. There's nothing else in the world exactly like it. It's not a multiple of anything. It's simply there. And you brought it into the world. It's pretty amazing. To do something that's never been done."
On the principle that what we don't see might matter more than what we do, UK-based artist James Bridle has put together a short movie of representations of British deportment centers using Computer Generated Images (CGI) rather than film or photographs. Cassie Packard considers how this changes how we understand what we're blind to: "As Bridle put it frankly in a recent interview, 'Having no pictures available of a phenomenon has become a technique of not talking about it.' Accordingly, Bridle's oeuvre has aimed to reveal the concealed. In past work he has drawn attention to covert drone strikes by regularly posting satellite imagery of strike locations to Instagram account Dronestagram and by painting life-size drone-shaped shadows onto the ground in such politicized locations as London and Washington DC. Through his work on drone strikes, Bridle became interested in issues of contested citizenships, and the manner in which UK citizenship is stripped or denied behind closed doors. On view at The Photographer's Gallery in London, his latest project Seamless Transitions sheds much-needed light on some of the UK's more out-of-sight immigration and deportation practices.... The Photographer's Gallery commissioned Seamless Transitions as a complement to the main exhibition on view, a show of black-and-white documentary photography entitled Human Rights Human Wrongs. The pairing of Seamless Transitions with Human Rights Human Wrongs is an astute one that puts two strains of human rights documentary side by side. Seamless Transitions can be a bit emotionally anesthetized as it expresses a concern for human rights without depicting any humans, instead focusing on the shifting legalities and neoliberal networks--there is no one person responsible for anti-immigration measures--that violate human rights. Human Rights Human Wrongs, on the other hand, features more traditional human rights documentary, engaging the viewer emotionally as it zooms in on the lives and narratives of oft-disenfranchised individuals in wars, racism, and political conflict. In marrying these two factions of the genre, The Photographer's Gallery wisely proposes that, to address today's numerous and nuanced human rights violations, we need both."
Extreme News for an Extreme World
Franҫois Kiper takes on the high energy HBO newsmagazine Vice, wondering aloud whether it's the news we need: "To be sure, the screaming promotion of 'real time' live action and melodramatic clashes is unremarkable in the age of 'infotainment,' where stories are fodder for the feeding frenzy of 24-hour news cycles. However, unlike CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, and their myriad online and TV epigones, VICE's mode of firsthand reporting purports to transcend the mind-numbing formula of clamoring demagogues and nonstop pulp newscasts we have all become inured to. Accordingly, VICE packages its 'real time,' 'on the ground'--but meticulously curated and slickly engineered-'exposés' as the gospel-truth of news, specifically targeting the all-important 18-40-year-old demographic that looks at everything with an overstimulated and jaundiced eye. While these jaded young and middle-aged viewers are unlikely to take what they see on cable news networks with anything more than a grain of salt, TV ratings reveal that they are susceptible to VICE's cult of Immersion... Nevertheless, it is not difficult to understand VICE's popularity: the show enthralls its audience with the frisson of alarm and impending melodrama. A more pressing question is: what's at stake? Smith contends that VICE's content--which Dan Rather felicitously termed 'more Jackass than journalism'--is just what 'young people, who are ... angry, disenfranchised, and ... don't like or trust mainstream media outlets' want. Indeed, a kind of mythomania has developed around VICE, as if Smith and his cohorts are media firebrands ruffling the hoary feathers of the fourth estate by intruding on its fusty, out-of-touch conventions. And yet, VICE's sensational approach is itself a radically conventional and historically reactionary journalistic method."
Ian Crouch worries about Amazon's new "dash button," a device designed to be placed at strategic points in your house to help speed the delivery of individual household items that you've run out of: "What if there is actual value in running out of things? The sinking feeling that comes as you yank a garbage bag out of the box and meet no resistance from further reinforcements is also an opportunity to ask yourself all kinds of questions, from 'Do I want to continue using this brand of bag?' to 'Why in the hell I am producing so much trash?' The act of shopping--of leaving the house and going to a store, or, at the very least, of one-click ordering on the Amazon Web site--is a check against the inertia of consumption, not only in personal economic terms but in ethical ones as well. It is the chance to make a decision, a choice--even if that choice is simply to continue consuming. Look, we're all going to keep using toothpaste, and the smarter consumer is the person who has a ten-pack of tubes from Costco in the closet. But shopping should make you feel bad, if only for a second. Pressing a little plastic button is too much fun."
Julia Hutton tracks the money that comes into communities, large and small, after a tragedy, and finds that many aid agencies have trouble sorting out how best to spend money: "With no template to guide their decisions, nonprofits and relief-fund panels are still being left to improvise in a charged atmosphere. Many cities today have no better option than picking up the phone and calling Columbine for advice. Small towns and suburbs may be especially hard-pressed to meet the challenges that come with dispersing victim funds, but claims of mismanagement and insensitivity also dogged New York following September 11th and Oklahoma City after the bombing there. Tucson, Arizona, is one community that found its way through the complexities of distributing aid to victims without a fight."
Property and Freedom: Is Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty and Promoting Freedom in South Africa?
A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and Rift Valley Institute.
Free and open to the public!
Monday, April 6, 2015
Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm
The Life of Roman Republicanism with Joy Connolly
Joy Connolly, a Professor of Classics at New York University, will discuss her book The Life of Roman Republicanism (Princeton 2014), which examines key themes in Roman republican thought: freedom, recognition, antagonism, self-knowledge, irony, and imagination.
Free and open to the public!
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Location TBA, 6:00 pm
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #7
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Friday, April 24, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Translating the Holocaust: H. G. Adler as Writer and Scholar
This event, which features a keynote address, several panels, and a performance, will offer a unique opportunity to consider the intersection of both the scholarly and artistic work of H. G. Adler, a major thinker and writer who is just becoming known in English.
Sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center, The Bard Translation Initiative, Jewish Studies, German Studies, and Human Rights Project.
Free and open to the public!
Monday, May 4, 2015
Location TBA, 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Jurgens explains how Arendt's treatment of Socrates warns us of the ways in which abridged thinking can beget cynicism in the Quote of the Week. Edward de Bono, originator of the term "lateral thinking," provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We announce the winners of the Academic Initiative on Hate and the Human Condition Essay Contest and publish their essays on our blog. And we share a photograph of a personal Arendtian library provided by one of our Twitter followers in this week's Library feature.
The Dangers of Cynicism
By Jeffrey Jurgens
"In the circle around Socrates, there were men like Alcibiades and Critias—God knows, by no means the worst among his so-called pupils—and they had turned out to be a very real threat to the polis, and this not by being paralyzed by the electric ray but, on the contrary, by having been aroused by the gadfly. What they had been aroused to was license and cynicism."
--Hannah Arendt, "Thinking and Moral Considerations"
Hannah Arendt regards Socrates as an apt model for the kind of thinking she admired and championed. He was, in her words, "a citizen among citizens," a man who thought "without becoming a philosopher." For rather than imparting a substantive notion of virtue or truth, he sought to "unfreeze" sedimented concepts like justice, courage, and happiness so that his interlocutors might examine them anew.
Amor Mundi 3/15/15
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.
Fenton Johnson in Harpers meditates on a fundamental question of our loud and distracted age: "What is the usefulness of sitting alone at one's desk and writing, especially writing those vast seas of pages that will see only the recycling bin? What is the usefulness of meditation, or of prayer? What is the usefulness of the solitary?" Being alone, avoiding society and choosing to live on one's own, is an art, something we need to practice and learn. And Johnson argues it is worth the effort. "I do not wish to say that being solitary is superior or inferior to being coupled, nor that the full experience of solitude requires living alone, though doing so may create a greater silence in which to hear an inner voice." That inner voice of solitude may, for one thing, speak differently than our outward voice: "Could solitaries model the choice for reverence over irony? Instead of conquering nations or mountains or outer space, might we set out to conquer our need to conquer? If that seems a tall order, I offer you Paul Cézanne, painting himself to the point of diabetic collapse, reinventing painting. Think about the hallucinatory quality of his late work; think about how modern art owes itself to solitude and low blood sugar. I offer Eudora Welty, writing magical realism when Gabriel García Márquez was a teenager. Henry James, portraying the caustic corruptions of fortress marriage, living alone in Lamb House by the sea. Zora Neale Hurston, who nurtured a flame of mysticism in a world hostile to it, and who showed that through her wits alone a black woman could live by her own rules, and who died in poverty and was buried in an unmarked grave in a potter's field. Thomas Merton, who spent twenty years in a monastery preparing for his true vocation, which was solitude. Walt Whitman, who taught us how to be American. Emily Dickinson, his sister in solitude, who taught us how to be alive to the world, most especially to the suffering of its solitaries. I offer you Jesus, that renegade proto-feminist communitarian bachelor Jew, who reminded us of the lesson first set forth a thousand years earlier in the Hebrews' holy book: to love our neighbors as ourselves. I offer you Siddhartha Gautama, who sat in solitude to achieve the understanding that everyone and everything are one." As does Hannah Arendt who distinguishes solitude from loneliness and writes that solitude is the precondition for thinking, Johnson suggests that amidst the "chatter and diversions of our lives," solitude is what can "keep the demons at bay." The question, unasked and unanswered, is how to find and nurture solitude in a world increasingly devoid of private places.
Gabriel Weinberg, whose DuckDuckGo search engine does not track users' web searches, thinks that the country is now ready for a thoughtful debate about data privacy. "Any day now President Obama is going to propose a new privacy bill of rights that will give you much more control over your personal information. A healthy debate will then ensue, and you can and should be a part of it. You can actually move the needle on this one. Let me try to convince you. First things first, this is not a partisan issue. This is not Obama's debate. This is our debate. It's our personal information. Obama is just sparking the flame. In 2012 he proposed something similar and it didn't catch. Three short years later, enough has changed in the world to expect this time it will be different.... The question in the upcoming debate will quickly become: what limits? The status quo of collect it all and reveal as little as possible has to go, but there is a massive range between maximum possible collection and minimum necessary collection. Here are a few things we could do. Companies (and governments) could explicitly tell you what is happening to your personal information. They could allow you to opt-out. They could give you granular control of your data. They could even tell you exactly what you're getting when you give out specific pieces of information. Disclosure requirements could mimic those in other areas like credit cards and mortgages where the most relevant risks are highlighted. In other words, there are a lot of options." Weinberg writes that people are beginning to care and that it is time to pass new regulations limiting the use of private data. That will only happen, however, if we the people actually see the gathering, use, and selling of immense amount of our personal data as a danger. Weinberg believes that this is happening: "We've all noticed those annoying ads following us around the Internet. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Most people still don't know that private companies build and sell profiles about them or that many retailers charge different prices based on these data profiles." The question is, once we know this is happening, will we change our behavior? Is the answer only if and when we understand what is truly lost when we give up our privacy? This is the question being asked at the Arendt Center Fall 2015 Conference "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?" Save the date: October 15-16.
Babette Babich publishes a long meditation on Margarethe von Trotta's film "Hannah Arendt," in which the theme is the celluloid expression of internal states. "Like Adorno, Arendt would be vigorously denounced for arrogance, an arrogance von Trotta's film also documents (Arendt's colleagues indict her in just this language and von Trotta's film thus illustrates a common side of academic non-collegiality). It is also Arendt's arrogance that colors von Trotta's depiction (this is more of the film's signal syncretism) of the falling out between Hannah Arendt and the Hans Jonas who would go on to make what one might describe as monotonic ethics his personal calling card. In von Trotta's film, Jonas is represented as the injured party, a favoring that is unsurprising as the film drew on Jonas' Memoirs (and therewith his point of view). The contrast between arrogance and the steadfast adherence to a conventionally received ethical viewpoint is key. Where arrogance is regarded as a vice, modesty is a virtue, most especially for a woman, a troublesome demand for an academic and an intellectual like Arendt. The vice of arrogance is also supposed to be emotive (though on whose side remains an open question) and perforce irrational."
The Writer at the Tech Company
Novelist Tom McCarthy thinks that while the best and most creative among us once turned to art, they're now working for Google: "It is not just that people with degrees in English generally go to work for corporations (which of course they do); the point is that the company, in its most cutting-edge incarnation, has become the arena in which narratives and fictions, metaphors and metonymies and symbol networks at their most dynamic and incisive are being generated, worked through and transformed. While 'official' fiction has retreated into comforting nostalgia about kings and queens, or supposed tales of the contemporary rendered in an equally nostalgic mode of unexamined realism, it is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers' essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones. If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they're probably working for Google, and if there isn't, it doesn't matter since the operations of that genius and vision are being developed and performed collectively by operators on the payroll of that company, or of one like it."
Are You Ready for Some Football?
Robert L. Kehoe III considers sociologist David Goldblatt's new book The Game of Our Lives on the newfound (at least, newfound to Americans) prominence of English soccer: "Borrowing from Don DeLillo's Underworld, Goldblatt's investigation of British football reminds us that 'longing on a large scale is what makes history.' Today those grand longings have become 'increasingly colonized by commercially manufactured imagery.' Gone are the days where witnessing a live sporting event was principally a physical and communal experience. Now, 'distant, mediated, artificial events' have become 'the central nodes of an atomized culture held together by a shared addiction to stupefaction and the spectacle.' Subsequently, intimacy, immediacy, spontaneity, and authenticity have been replaced by hype, cliché, and exaggeration, leaving the concrete human realities of sport in the shadows of the circus. According to Goldblatt, any institution or activity subject to mediation (and especially mass-mediation) is vulnerable to its 21st-century simulacra. Taken to its logical conclusion you arrive at the overt farce of professional wrestling, and while football faces similar dangers under the influence of organized match-fixing, its salvation is 'that the raw material out of which the media-football complex constructs the spectacle remains intensely local.' Still, vividly capturing the drama of English football through enhanced production methods can only create the illusion of a tangible social relationship between say fans at Anfield and a bar in Los Angeles. Illusory or otherwise, English football has a growing international consumer base that doesn't just enjoy the spectacle: they feel as though they're a part of it. Goldblatt calls this an imaginary community; full of religious fervor but devoid of any tangible communal purpose."
In an essay about the relationship between Charlie Brown and Charlie Hedbo, Sarah Boxer pens a paean to Peanuts: "Back in 1969, when Snoopy helped launch Charlie Mensuel, Peanuts was still seen as pretty subversive. It had a minimalist look and an existentialist twist that no other strip had. Timothy Leary, four years before writing his work on psilocybin mushrooms, praised Peanuts as 'masterful.' The English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wanted to use a picture of Linus with his blanket to illustrate what a transitional object was. And, according to Michaelis, it was 'the first mainstream comic strip ever to regularize the use of the word "depressed."' 'Nobody was saying this stuff,' said the cartoonist Jules Feiffer. 'You didn't find it in The New Yorker. You found it in cellar clubs, and, on occasion, in the pages of the Village Voice. But not many other places.' Schulz himself knew that he was doing something new, showing that even 'little kids can be very nasty' to each other--and miserable, too. With a subtlety that Charlie Hebdo would never dream of, Peanuts also made people look at their own meanness and zeal, including the religious kind. In 1965, according to Michaelis, Schulz got a letter complaining that 'the Great Pumpkin was sacrilegious.' (Schulz agreed.) And in a memorable strip penned shortly after Snoopy's doghouse went up in flames, while Snoopy was still mourning the cinders--his lost pool table, his books, his records, his Wyeth--you see Lucy yelling at him, in triumph: 'You know why your doghouse burned down? You sinned, that's why! You're being punished for something you did wrong! That's the way these things always work!'"
Peter Levine asks what Hannah Arendt might have meant when she praised Martin Heidegger for bringing thinking to life in his classrooms. Levine writes that philosophers can do three things: they can interpret the philosophical tradition, make rational arguments, and practice reflection and introspection. For Levine, Arendt was one of the last thinkers to do all three: "Arendt perceived Heidegger as putting these parts back together. Reading classical works in his seminar (or in a reading group, called a Graecae) was a creative and spiritual exercise as well as an academic pursuit. Karl Jaspers held different substantive positions, but he had a similar view of philosophy, the discipline to which he had moved after a brilliant career in psychiatry. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl writes that Jaspers'
new orientation was summarized in many different ways, but this sentence is exemplary: 'Philosophizing is real as it pervades an individual life at a given moment.' For Hannah Arendt, this concrete approach was a revelation; and Jaspers living his philosophy was an example to her: 'I perceived his Reason in praxis, so to speak,' she remembered (Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, pp. 63-4).
Arendt fairly quickly decided that 'introspection' was a self-indulgent dead-end and that Heidegger's philosophy was selfishly egoistic. Then the Nazi takeover of 1933 pressed her into something new, as she assisted enemies of the regime to escape and then escaped herself. She found deep satisfaction in what she called 'action.' From then on, she sought to combine 'thinking' (disciplined inquiry) with political action in ways that were meant to pervade her whole life. That combination is hard to find today, if it can be found at all."
Writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach, reaching way back into his past, wonders what it means to derive, to plagiarize, in the age of mass culture: "The amusing truth of the matter is this: often--especially in a mature career in a medium with six decades of mass visibility--you will hear a pitch that is derivative of something that was, itself, derivative of something else that the pitcher is not aware of. More than once I have heard a younger writer say, 'Do you remember that old episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Riker passes out in the teaser and wakes up 16 years later as captain of the Enterprise, but he can't remember anything ... and he cleverly realizes that his amnesia is really a Romulan ruse to get him to give up sensitive information?' only to be shocked when told, 'Yeah, it was a takeoff from an even older James Garner movie--based on a Roald Dahl short story--where he's an Allied spy who passes out before the D-Day invasion, wakes up in a U.S. Army Hospital six years later, and can't remember anything, then cleverly realizes that his amnesia is a German ruse to extract from him the location of the invasion.' Derivation is the air we breathe."
Film Screening, A Snake Gives Birth to a Snake and Director's Discussion by Michael Lessac
Synopsis: A diverse group of South African actors tours the war-torn regions of Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia to share their country's experiment with reconciliation. As they ignite a dialogue among people with raw memories of atrocity, the actors find they must once again confront their homeland's violent past, and question their own capacity for healing and forgiveness.
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Weis Cinema, Campus Center, 6:30 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Uday Mehta
Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge
Invite Only. RSVP Required.
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #6
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at email@example.com.
Friday, April 3, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?
A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and The University of The Western Cape
Free and open to the public!
Monday, April 6, 2015
Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm
Dinner Discussion with Michiel Bot, a Hannah Arendt Center Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow
"The Right to Literature"
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Hannah Arendt Center, 6:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Shmuel Lederman, Hannah Arendt Center Visiting Fellow
"Relations Between Hannah Arendt's Council System and the Human Condition"
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Hannah Arendt Center, 12:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Jeanne Van Heeswijk, Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism
Invite Only. RSVP Required.
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
This week on the Blog, Philip Walsh discusses Hannah Arendt's critique of the consumer society that was emerging in the 1950s in the Quote of the Week. Psychiatrist and academic Thomas Szasz provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. And we appreciate a student's personal Arendt library in our Library feature.
Amor Mundi 11/23/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
In The New Republic, Judith Shulevitz writes about the deadening impact of loneliness and how it can ravage our body and our brain. She traces modern interest in loneliness to Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, a psychoanalyst whose "1959 essay, 'On Loneliness,' is considered a founding document in a fast-growing area of scientific research you might call loneliness studies. Over the past half-century, academic psychologists have largely abandoned psychoanalysis and made themselves over as biologists. And as they delve deeper into the workings of cells and nerves, they are confirming that loneliness is as monstrous as Fromm-Reichmann said it was. It has now been linked with a wide array of bodily ailments as well as the old mental ones. In a way, these discoveries are as consequential as the germ theory of disease. Just as we once knew that infectious diseases killed, but didn't know that germs spread them, we've known intuitively that loneliness hastens death, but haven't been able to explain how. Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking. A partial list of the physical diseases thought to be caused or exacerbated by loneliness would include Alzheimer's, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer - tumors can metastasize faster in lonely people." The turn toward biology situates loneliness as a mental and a physical illness, one to be combated with public health programs. Shulevitz traces the efforts to medicalize loneliness, as well as programs to treat loneliness as a problem of inequality. And yet, in the end, she suggests that humans have incredible resources to fend off loneliness: "[T]here's something awe-inspiring about our resilience, too. Put an orphan in foster care, and his brain will repair its missing connections. Teach a lonely person to respond to others without fear and paranoia, and over time, her body will make fewer stress hormones and get less sick from them. Care for a pet or start believing in a supernatural being, and your score on the UCLA Loneliness Scale will go down. Even an act as simple as joining an athletic team or a church can lead to what Cole calls 'molecular remodeling.' 'One message I take away from this is, "Hey, it's not just early life that counts,"' he says. 'We have to choose our life well.'"
Loneliness was a constant theme in Hannah Arendt's work. In her most pregnant attempt at a definition of totalitarianism, published in 1950, Arendt writes: "Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated, individuals." Totalitarianism depends upon "the masses [who] grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class." Shorn of family and national and class connection, the modern atomized individual becomes a mass man. "The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships." Stripped of the political, social, and intellectual traditions that historically bound people together in publically meaningful institutions and networks, mass men turn to racism or consumerism to give their lives meaning. Both are dangerous in different ways. As Paul Morrow writes, "Loneliness can result from formal prohibitions on expression or action, as seen in totalitarian societies; but it can also result from informal standards and patterns of life which disvalue political - and overvalue social or commercial - interactions." And Bill Dixon adds: "To be lonely is to be deprived of both the public and the private realms and therefore to feel utterly abandoned by other human beings, to finally lose one's place in the world completely. The mass production of loneliness is closely linked to the experiences of 'uprootedness' and 'superfluousness' that have unevenly afflicted peoples across the earth since the industrial revolution and European imperialism. Pervasive loneliness as a modern way of life therefore amorphously anticipates the emergence of the totalitarian form, but it also serves to structure and vivify its psychic violence once underway. Loneliness perversely tends to intensify when felt in the presence of others, that is, when one is not strictly speaking alone."
David Bromwich reviews Laura Poitras' Citizenfour and argues that it shows Edward Snowden to be a modern hero, a courageous conscientious objector in the war on privacy: "An incidental strength of Citizenfour is that it will make such casual slanders harder to repeat. Nevertheless, they are likely to be repeated or anyway muttered in semiprivate by otherwise judicious persons who want to go on with their business head-down and not be bothered. It must be added that our past politics give no help in arriving at an apt description of Snowden and his action. The reason is that the world in which he worked is new. Perhaps one should think of him as a conscientious objector to the war on privacy - a respectful dissident who, having observed the repressive treatment endured by William Binney, Thomas Drake, and other recent whistle-blowers, does not recognize the constitutional right of the government to put him in prison indefinitely and bring him to trial for treason. His action constitutes a reproach to the many good citizens who have learned what is happening and done nothing about it. That, too, is surely a cause of the resentment that has a hard time finding the appropriate adjectives for Snowden." Bromwich is right that listening to Snowden in the movie is to be in the presence of someone of integrity: "The undeclared subject of Citizenfour is integrity - the insistence by an individual that his life and the principle he lives by should be all of a piece. Something resembling an aesthetic correlative of that integrity can be found in the documentary style of Laura Poitras." What Snowden, Poitras, and Bromwich show is that the core of privacy is integrity. It is thus the integrity of the person that is under attack in the age of surveillance.
In an essay about how it is for teachers, both now and in the past, Jonathan Zimmerman says he thinks he's figured out what's happened to teaching in America: "the federal Race to the Top program sponsored by the Obama administration encouraged schools to use students' test scores in evaluating individual teachers. The primary responsibility of teachers is no longer to encourage good behavior in future citizens, as Horace Mann insisted. Instead, it's to ensure that they get the right answers on a high-stakes test. The shift in goals has unfortunately done nothing to alter the tedious, anti-intellectual practices of American teaching. If anything, the strong commitment to 'academic' goals has probably made teaching less academic - so far as the quality of learning is concerned - and more routinized than it was before. When teachers were hired for their inborn ability to 'nurture' schoolchildren, many derided or disregarded their intellectual capacities. Now we've created a system that is so firmly tied to scholastic achievement - as narrowly defined by standardized tests - that no serious scholar would want to teach in it."
In the New York Times, seven writers reread some of their old work and write about how they feel about it all this time later. Marilynne Robinson, for example, tries to recall what it was like to write Housekeeping: "In writing 'Housekeeping' I was trying to recover the appearance and the atmosphere of a very particular place, northern Idaho. When I wrote it, I had not spent much time there for almost 20 years. So it was very much an exploration of memory that I was engaged in. I thought I was writing an unpublishable book, so I was undistracted by other considerations than my own interest in the workings of memory and the ability of language to evoke what I 'saw' in memory. I found that the common old question 'What was it like?' stimulated recollection and recruited words and images that made my sense of the thing remembered, a place or a smell or the glint of light on water, much more accessible to me than I could have anticipated. It became a discipline for me, always to keep a scene before my eyes and to be ready to value and explore any detail that presented itself to me with an especially pungent or plangent specificity. I wrote much of the book in a darkened room. This was not intended as part of the experiment, but it may have contributed to it. My memories were often as bright as dreams and often as highly detailed. Only the place is actually remembered in the book. None of the characters or events are real. The point was to let my imagination take on the colorations of memory and interpret the place, as music might do."
In an interview with Questlove Thompson, an interview that's as much about music as anything else, Cornel West defines courage: "But we all live in fear. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the working through and overcoming of fear. Brother Martin had fear. He just wouldn't allow fear to determine his behavior. As human beings, everyone has stuff coming at them, and a certain kind of fear. But courage is being true to yourself, true to a sense of integrity. And that's what is more and more difficult."
At the Intersection of Art and Commerce
In her National Book Awards acceptance speech, Ursula K. Lu Guin explains why she loves, and fears for, literature: "Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. I've had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don't want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn't profit. Its name is freedom."
In a piece about the resurfaced allegations of rape against Bill Cosby, Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us that he, like all writers, lives in history, with his own context and biography. Knowing that is a kindness - one, he suggests, that an ethical journalist must transcend: "The Bill Cosby piece was my first shot writing for a big national magazine. I had been writing for 12 financially insecure years. By 2007, when I finished my first draft, I had lost three jobs in seven years. I had just been laid-off by Time magazine. My kid was getting older. I was subsisting off unemployment checks and someone else's salary. A voice in my head was, indeed, pushing me to do something more expansive and broader in its implication, something that did not just question Cosby's moralizing, but weighed it against the acts which I believed he committed. But Cosby was such a big target that I thought it was only a matter of time before someone published a hard-hitting, investigative piece. And besides, I had in my hand the longest, best, and most personally challenging piece I'd ever written. It was not enough. I have often thought about how those women would have felt had they read my piece. The subject was morality - and yet one of the biggest accusations of immorality was left for a few sentences, was rendered invisible. I don't have many writing regrets. But this is one of them. I regret not saying what I thought of the accusations, and then pursuing those thoughts. I regret it because the lack of pursuit puts me in league with people who either looked away, or did not look hard enough. I take it as a personal admonition to always go there, to never flinch, to never look away."
Film Screening & Director's Discussion: Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt with Nazis
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium, 5:00 - 8:00 pm
Roundtable on Academic Freedom
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Bard College Campus Center, Multipurpose Room, 7:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Johannes Lang discusses Arendt's critique of obedience in political and moral matters in the Quote of the Week. Carl Sagan provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In our Video Archives, we remember a talk George Kateb gave at our 2011 annual fall conference on the ideal of governmental transparency. And we appreciate Arendt's impressive collection of Goethe's works in our Library feature.
Video Archives – A Discussion on the Intellectual Origins of the Financial Crisis (2011)
(Featured Image: American financial crisis, Source: Bossip)
Friday, June 10, 2011: A Discussion on the Origins of the 2008 Financial Crisis
-- Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities and Associate Professor of Politics at Bard College.
-- David Matias, Managing Principal of Vodia Capital.
In 2011, Roger Berkowitz had a discussion with David Matias about the origins of the 2008 financial crisis. Sponsored by the Bard Socially Responsible Investment Committee, their conversation explores different approaches we can use to make sense of the crisis. Berkowitz's perspective focuses on the "intellectual" origins of the crisis and uses Arendt as a basis of understanding. By contrast, Matias, who has been involved in finance for over two decades, brings to the discussion an advanced technical perspective, placing a strong emphasis on the way in which traditional economic models and trading practices have become obsolete.
Amor Mundi 10/12/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded this week to French novelist Patrick Modiano, whose work is more or less unavailable in English. Alexandra Schwartz offers an introduction: "[Modiano's first novel] La Place de l'Étoile appeared at a moment when the core tenet of French postwar identity-'the myth of France as a nation of resisters,' as the French writer Clémence Boulouque put it to me when I called her to discuss Modiano's win-was beginning to crumble. (The book was published in May, 1968, the same month that the famous student protests in Paris began; General de Gaulle, the President of the Republic and the living symbol of French heroism during the war, fled to a military base in Germany to wait it all out.) Modiano knew the soiled truth firsthand. His father had refused to wear the star and did not turn himself in when Paris's Jews were rounded up for deportation to concentration camps; he spent the war doing business on the black market and hanging around with the Gestapo stationed on the Rue Lauriston. Boulouque, who is currently a post-doctoral fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that in his three dozen or so novels Modiano has returned again and again to the same themes: the pull of the past, the threat of disappearance, the blurring of moral boundaries, 'the dark side of the soul.' Modiano, she told me, believes that 'the novelist has an ethical duty to record the traces of the people who have vanished, the people who were made to disappear.' It will not have escaped the attention of the Nobel committee that Modiano's win comes at a time when anti-Semitism in France is on the rise, as is the rate of French Jews' emigration to Israel. The fear that French Jews are not safe in their own land, that French Jewish culture may vanish, is once again palpable, and real."
Brian Castner asks why with so much fiction and poetry coming from veterans of the war in Iraq, almost no fiction has emerged from the war in Afghanistan. His best answer: "Afghanistan was always a Task Force war. It began with CIA officers and special forces soldiers on horseback, 'Just a couple guys dressed up like Afghans giving the middle finger to the camera,' according to Maurer. Eventually larger units arrived, but still Rangers and paratroopers and the air assets to support them. That culture survived as the war grew: every aspect of the mission was executed by a Task Force with a name like Odin and Paladin or, for the more secret elite units, a numerical designation alone. Regional commands were given greater autonomy, special forces teams blanketed the country and had freedom to operate, and small outposts were left to survive on their own. Contrast this experience with Iraq, a centrally controlled war where every armor division and artillery regiment took a turn; in military-speak, Big Army was in charge. 'Iraq was televised,' Maurer says. 'It was a big invasion, it was a lot of guys, and it was a combined arms wet dream. They got a chance to use all the stuff.' The long occupation of Iraq then required many average soldiers, many cogs of the war machine, to patrol streets, sweep highways, and simply be in the neighborhoods, on the forward operating bases (FOBs), in country. To use a term from military doctrine, Iraq became a war of mass. 'I think special operations is the overarching narrative of the Afghan War,' says Maurer, 'and those guys love their jobs. To get to that level, it isn't a part-time job, it is your life, it's how you define yourself. So it makes sense they want to do memoirs to recount their stories. I don't see a lot of those guys sitting quietly at the firebase with an existential crisis, some sort of deep journaling. Meanwhile, you go to any platoon in the major conventional units, and you have a cross section of the country.' 'Who's even drawn to write novels?' Molin asks me, not entirely rhetorically. Not only did the average soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan have vastly different experiences, they had different backgrounds, skill sets, and relationship with their chosen occupation. 'If you think of a young guy in an unconventional unit, a SEAL team or special forces, out at a fire base, they have a vote,' says Maurer. 'Even the newest guy on the team, they are going to look at him for his specialty, they will ask his input on certain parts of a mission. An 18-year-old assistant machine gunner in the infantry, you're not being asked to do anything other than pick up your machine gun and walk.'"
Nathan Jurgenson suggests that Big Data is the new positivism, but with a perverse twist: "The positivist fiction has always relied on unequal access: science could sell itself as morally and politically disinterested for so long because the requisite skills were so unevenly distributed. As scientific practice is increasingly conducted from different cultural standpoints, the inherited political biases of previous science become more obvious. As access to education and advanced research methodologies became more widespread, they could no longer support the positivist myth. The cultural ideology of Big Data attempts to reverse this by shifting authority away from (slightly more) democratized research expertise toward unequal access to proprietary, gated data. (Molly Osberg points out in her review of Dataclysm for the Verge how Rudder explains in the notes how he gathered most of his information through personal interactions with other tech company executives.) When data is said to be so good that it tells its own truths and researchers downplay their own methodological skills, that should be understood as an effort to make access to that data more valuable, more rarefied. And the same people positioning this data as so valuable and authoritative are typically the ones who own it and routinely sell access to it."
In an interview about the creation and teaching of a class on Landscape Artists at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Karen Russell talks revisiting the much-read: "In class, we take a sort of field trip of the mind together, and it's fun to see some of the places we've all been to before with fresh eyes-Nathaniel Hawthorne territory, Faulkner's county, Shirley Jackson's terrifying 'Lottery' village. The spots on the literary tram tour. I assumed Hemingway was on that itinerary, so I handed out the story without his name, but half the class wasn't familiar with it. It reads totally differently if you remove it from the context of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories and the war, so it became an accidental experiment to learn how much context informs your experience of a place in story. The students still loved it, but what they loved about it seemed more experiential-the animal happiness of being safe in a tent, for instance."
Eula Biss compares the crisis in education to the crisis in health care. At the root of it all, she says, is a consumer mentality: "Yes, we may be consumers, of health care as well as many other things, but that doesn't mean that it always serves us best to think like consumers. Health care is one of those areas, like art-making or community-building or education, where the consumerist approach of trying to get as much as you can for as little as possible can be counterproductive. As a teacher, I've had ample opportunity to observe what consumerism does to education. Students who approach their education as consumers may be passive, may want a product not a process, and may expect learning to feel like entertainment. Learning tends to hurt more than entertainment, and the inevitable disappointment felt by the consumerist learner is often interpreted as a defect in the product. The loss there is twofold-the learner loses the opportunity to learn, but also loses the awareness that she is responsible for that loss. This is not to say that we shouldn't be looking hard at the high cost of education, and the low returns some students get for that cost. We should absolutely interrogate the economy of education and its corruptions, just as we should interrogate the economy of health care and its corruptions. But we aren't served any better, within these troubled systems, by failing to understand our personal role and responsibilities."
Suddenly comics are everywhere. Best sellers are reissued in graphic editions and graphic books are best sellers. For the under 15 set, graphic novels are now a mainstay. Asked whether "Words Limit Art?" Art Spiegelman offers a theory about why comics have had trouble gaining cultural footing: "I would say that as words rose in our cultural firmament, pictures got smashed down to make room for them. And ever since, pictures have been more suspect. We're living in this Protestant country that doesn't respect imagery the same way it respects the word. And all of a sudden something like comics comes along that mixes the two together, and it's viewed as contraband. We're getting into a place where we're barraged with words and images all the time, and we have to get rid of our prejudices against one or the other, and this (tour) is like a controlled science experiment where you've got the pictures without the language."
Reading: Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler
Two of Germany's most distinguished contemporary playwrights read from Discovery of America and other works.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Olin Room 102, 7:30 pm
One Day University Film School Presents: "Robot and Frank" and a Discussion with Roger Berkowitz
Robot and Frank explores the depths of friendship and even love between a robot and a man. Though the film is a comedy, the underlying questions it raises are both timely and serious. What is friendship? Can a machine love? More importantly, what happens when humans fall in love with machines?
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Manhattan Movement and Arts Center, 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Ian Storey invokes two pieces by E. B. White to speculate about the United States' fear for the world it must confront today in the Quote of the Week. And Plato provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking.
On Thursday and Friday, we held our seventh annual fall conference "The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Ideals Worth Fighting For?" It was a busy two days full of talks and discussions, made all the more stimulating by audience members' insightful comments and questions. We hope you were able to make it, and if not, hopefully you were able to watch the conference using our live webcast.
We at the Hannah Arendt Center pride ourselves on our ability to host engaging, thought-provoking events for the Bard community and the greater public at large. We look forward to continuing this tradition well into the future.
Thank you for supporting the Hannah Arendt Center and for helping to make this past week's conference our best conference yet!