text:
Education Without Authority?
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By Jennie Han
"Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable."
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education"
Education carries a heavy burden for Arendt. As in politics, we declare our love for the world, both or own and the world of future generations. To say that education is in crisis, then, is for Arendt not to lament the fact that "Johnny can't read." It is to acknowledge a generalized dissatisfaction with and alienation from the world that has us say to our children, "[i]n this world even we are not very securely at home….You must try to make out as best you can; in any case you are not entitled to call us to account. We are innocent, we wash our hands of you." So alienated, one might still be qualified to teach if one has knowledge of subjects, but one has no authority to do so. For without assuming the responsibility for the world that is necessary to say to the child, "This is our world," there can be no relationship of teaching and learning between the adult who is to introduce the child to the world and the child who is developing into adulthood to accept this responsibility in turn.
A Home Away From Home
By Jennie Han
"Children are first of all part of a family and home, and this means that they are, or should be, brought up in that atmosphere of idiosyncratic exclusiveness which alone makes a home a home, strong and secure enough to shield its young against the demands of the social and the responsibilities of the political realm."
-- Hannah Arendt, "Reflections on Little Rock"
In the video of the Yale University student confronting her residential college master, Nicholas Christakis, the student insists that it is Christakis's "job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman." There is no need to rehearse the entire range of controversy that this video has provoked. Here I want only to explore this concept of "home" with respect to our discussions of the video and ongoing student protests.
Amor Mundi 11/22/15
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Home Away From Home
Jeannie Suk notices that the student protests that erupted last week at Yale, Mizzou, and elsewhere mobilize the rhetoric of home and the family: "Particularly in the way things have unfolded at Yale, students' social-justice activism has been expressed, in part, as the need for care from authority figures. When they experience the hurt that motivates them to political action, they're deeply disappointed with parental surrogates for not responding adequately or quickly enough to support and nurture them. The world in which it's not bizarre for a young person to rebuke someone for failing to 'create a place of comfort and home,' or to yell, 'Be quiet ... You're disgusting!,' and storm away, is the world of family, where a child in pain desperately desires empathy and understanding from a parent. The online scorn heaped on the student who was filmed behaving this way represents an unproductive refusal to compassionately translate her behavior across the generational divide. In a piece called 'Hurt at Home,' another Yale student wrote, 'I feel my home is being threatened,' and contrasted her comforting relationship with her father to the care she felt students emphatically did not receive from the master of Silliman College. Yale tells its students that the residential college is their 'home away from home,' but this generation might be the first to insist so literally on that idea.... The president of Claremont McKenna College--which has recently seen racial-bias protests, hunger strikes, and a high administrator's resignation--wrote in an e-mail to the community that one role of higher education is to 'provide a very special home for our students as a bridge from their families to the truly adult and independent world.' This formulation is particularly poignant at a time when material independence will be elusive for many college students, who are coming of age during a recession, with onerous debt, and may actually go home to their parents for much of their twenties in order to make ends meet. In the midst of the developing story on campus activism, the horror of mass violence in Paris wrought by ISIS brought us back to our experience of the September 11th attacks, an event seared into the child psyches of current college students, and sufficient to have robbed them of the basic sense of safety that my generation enjoyed. The students' preoccupation with safe spaces and the comfort of home seems a plausible manifestation of the profound lack of security--from violence to financial insolvency--that their generation faces. No wonder that their calls for social justice return to the talisman of safety and care of parental figures."
This isn't the first time that metaphors of home have been marshaled as pleas for safety in a suddenly dangerous world. They appeared during the Cold War, when the suburbs turned into a refuge for white families attempting to protect themselves in a homogenized home from the dual threats of Communism and the atomic bomb. The family and social formations encouraged by those metaphors led to an infamously flat and seemingly conformist culture, which led to the countercultural spasms of the 1960s and in turn to the conservative revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, which also mobilized home and family as symbols of a time when the world seemed a little safer, that is, somewhat ironically, than the 1950s. In both cases, the symbolism of the home was used to protect the private lives of white people.
In her essay "What Is Freedom," Arendt writes that "the public realm stands in the starkest possible contrast to our private domain, where, in the protection of family and home, everything serves or must serve the security of the life process." Similarly, Richard Rodriguez in his book Hunger of Memory distinguishes the intimacy and safety of the home life of a young Latino immigrant from the publicity and challenges of life at school. As Rodriguez argued at his talk during the 2013 Arendt Center conference "Failing Fast," becoming a citizen means learning to switch between the two worlds of home and public life; it means acquiring a public self. One important role of higher education is to give students the experience of living away from home, in public, where they can experiment with and learn to assume their public personas. That college, which constitutes a time for taking chances, also means that it is a moment of failure and danger. This has always been the case, but it is also true that students today negotiate a more complicated world of class, race, religion, and gender than students of any prior generation. So many college students now find themselves without safe homes and private places to which they can retreat at moments of crisis. More students at colleges and universities are from diverse and insular communities than ever before. Thrust from their often-sheltered lives, students now must negotiate public interactions with people whose opinions they have never before encountered and that they frequently find threatening. And in college dorms teeming with sometimes obnoxious students eager to try out new ideas, tensions can rise.
No one can live in public all the time, and all of us need moments alone where we can, in private, collect ourselves and steel ourselves for the courage public life demands. At a time when the security of a private space is fleeting for so many young people, colleges and universities have added layers of student deans and counselors to help students through emotional, racial, and sexual crises. Students now call upon and depend on the very administrators for help whom they criticize and protest against. In such a situation, the danger lies less with students and more with administrators who, in the name of consumerism and motivated by an aversion to risk, are creating policies and procedures that shut down the vibrancy of the student experience. Some students may demand trigger warnings, disciplinary procedures, and censorship. That is part of the experience of being young and experimenting with new and powerful if also dangerous ideas. We shouldn't blame students for speaking and trying out new ideas. The fault, if there is one, is with administrators who accede to these demands. --RB (with assistance from JK)
Save the date for the Hannah Arendt Center's 2016 conference: "How Do We Talk About Difficult Questions?: Race, Sex, and Religion on Campus." October 20-21, 2016.
The Challenge of Unmediated Media
In the New Yorker, Jelani Cobb interviews Yale Dean Jonathan Holloway. Cobb: "There have been people who look at this situation and say, 'These students, who are at one of the most élite institutions in the United States and are reacting in this way, they are coddled and thin-skinned and they should just maybe toughen up. That's the biggest thing they need to do." Holloway: "I understand that. This is not just a black problem or a brown problem or a women's problem or whatever. We are seeing a generation of students, and I don't know why, who do seem less resilient than in the past. I think part of it is that things aren't mediated like they have been in the past. You don't have the luxury of sitting down and pondering what somebody just said, because you're too busy putting it into a Tweet and saying, 'This is an outrage.' There's no mediation of ideas. It's all off the top of my head and it's pain, in this case. I think that, because people are not getting enough sleep, and these things just keep on, Tweets keep coming in, that they are not equipped properly to process it all. I think that's a major part of it. The other part is that students have been struggling at Yale for a long time, and at similar institutions. The administrations were not set up even to care about them. It's not just that maybe students are less resilient, it's that the administrations actually are doing more work to identify people who are struggling. In a different era, if you had a drinking problem, there's a nod and a wink, and that's just the way Buster behaved. Now we understand women's side, that this thing is a real problem, and, hey, wait a second, this guy drinks and he sexually assaults somebody. We've got to deal with that. You build up an apparatus to deal with people in crisis, and it actually helps us understand that--you know what?--more people are in crisis than we actually thought. I think these things go hand in hand, and I don't think anybody's really figured it out. We can claim we figured it out, but I think no one's got the patent on that one yet. I think I've said it, but I've actually been buoyed in the last couple days, because I've seen the Yale that I believe is normal--a really smart school confronting a problem and trying in a creative way to solve it together. That sounds like an advertisement but I actually believe that it operates that way. People are being increasingly willing to presume good faith on someone else's behalf instead of just being negative. It's as simple as that. Time will tell where this all shakes out, but I am cautiously optimistic that we are moving to a different place here. Hell, I've been wrong three or four times already this week, so who knows?"
Snowden Against Sousveillance
Among the many accounts of Edward Snowden's recent talk at the Hannah Arendt Center's conference "Why Privacy Matters," Ruth Starkman's essay in the LA Review of Books stands out for raising the wide range of issues discussed, including some of the more controversial. For example, Starkman focuses on Snowden's somewhat unpopular (at least at Bard) rejection of sousveillance as a response to surveillance. Sousveillance means to observe from below as opposed to the observation from above, that is, surveillance. "Indeed, Snowden flung the doors wide open on public discussions of privacy and the internet. His legacy was clear at the Bard College 'Why Privacy Matters' conference, which featured prominent speakers whose careers have one way or another been shaped by Snowden, including Ben Wizner. Senior editor from The Intercept Peter Maass interviewed Snowden. Fritz Schwarz of the historic Church Commission took student questions about information before and after 9/11. Kate Crawford asked questions about the sort of ethical education computer science students should receive. Jeremy Waldron argued for 'an accountable, open' surveillance, which allows people to talk back to and cooperate with government agencies. Astrophysicist and sci-fi author David Brin took the radical position that students and the general public at large should fight surveillance with their own cameras, as people have in the Black Lives Matter movement. Brin describes this kind of grassroots, defensive surveillance as 'sousveillance.' Sousveillance appeals to students of all stripes. In fact, when the Bard College Debate Union invited the West Point Debate Society to debate the question of surveillance, both sides argued that surveillance could become an instrument of the public as well as the government, and could protect 'black and brown bodies, the LBGTQ community and other vulnerable populations.' West Point debaters on both sides of the debate reminded the audience that this debate was purely educational and did not reflect the opinions of the United States or its military. Snowden disagrees with sousveillance: 'We don't need a surveillance arms race; we need to protect individual privacy.' Bard students defended grassroots public surveillance as a tactic against the elite (an elite to which institutions like Bard, Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton also belong). Snowden didn't budge much here."
Unintended Consequences
Alfredo Corchado in The New Yorker cites Hannah Arendt Center Fellow Natalia Mendoza as a means to explore the unexpected consequences of beefed up security at the U.S.-Mexican border. "Like many other policies from Washington, this one had unintended consequences. The anthropologist Natalia Mendoza, a fellow at Bard College, observes that, because of greater border securitization, 'the cost of smuggling has increased to a point that smugglers can no longer be independent.' That is, as small, autonomous, local 'mom and pop' smuggling became more expensive and difficult, bigger, more structured, and violent organizations took over. Common-use crossing points, for instance, were now 'privatized' by criminal networks able to keep their operations going, absorb the rising costs, and still make a profit. Hence, groups of smugglers who used to work on their own or as subcontractors for different bosses were either pushed out of business or forced to join a larger cartel. Even if unanticipated, this process of criminal professionalization was a perfectly rational result of border security acquiring 'industrial' proportions: with the post-9/11 clampdown, the business of drug smuggling consolidated. The old and close-knit communities along the border never prevented drug trafficking or illegal crossing. Yet they used to function as a sort of social-control mechanism that kept drug-related violence relatively under check. People knew one another; they kept an eye on things. Suddenly, though, fear and hardened policies broke those bonds. Border communities started resembling ghost towns. The result was a surge of violence in Mexico, as cartels fought to establish dominance over important drug-shipping routes. According to estimates, the drug trade makes up between half a per cent and four per cent of Mexico's $1.2 trillion annual G.D.P.--totaling between about six billion dollars and forty billion dollars--and employs at least half a million people. Contraband U.S. guns that are trafficked into Mexico facilitate the drug traffickers' work. Around two hundred and fifty thousand firearms are purchased each year to be trafficked, and U.S. and Mexican authorities are seizing only about fifteen per cent of them, according to a study by the University of San Diego and Igarapé Institute."
Seeking a way through the questions, the grandstanding about whether or not the United States should accept Syrian refugees following last week's attack in Paris, Matt Ford suggests that we look back to the internment of Japanese residents and citizens during WWII, as well as the Supreme Court case, Korematsu v. United States, that upheld that policy: "The Supreme Court has never overturned Korematsu, largely because federal and state governments have not attempted the mass internment of an entire ethnic group since then. But the decision belongs to what legal scholars describe as the anti-canon of American constitutional law--a small group of Supreme Court rulings universally assailed as wrong, immoral, and unconstitutional. Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Buck v. Bell, and Korematsu form the anti-canon's core; legal scholars sometimes include other decisions as well. Korematsu's place in that grim pantheon is well-earned. Courts apply strict scrutiny, the highest level of review, when weighing laws or policies that discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, or alienage. Korematsu was the standard's first application; it was also the last time it failed to protect the group in question. 'There is only one situation in which the Court expressly upheld racial classifications burdening minorities: the rulings affirming the constitutionality of the evacuations of Japanese-Americans during World War II,' wrote Erwin Chemerinsky, a UC Irvine law professor and prominent scholar of constitutional law. 'No evidence of a specific threat was required to evacuate and intern a person. Race alone was used to determine who would be uprooted and incarcerated and who would remain free.'... Expelling all Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast would have seemed unthinkable in 1940. Then came the fear and paranoia that pervaded cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco after Pearl Harbor. Frenzied reports of Japanese submarines off Oregon and saboteurs in California fueled a climate in which extreme constitutional violations towards an unpopular few seemed reasonable to a fearful many. Korematsu is a reminder that, in times of crisis, there will always be an unpopular minority to fear and opportunistic demagogues to demonize them. But central to the Bill of Rights' purpose is the protection of the few from the cruelty of the many, no matter who that few or many may be."
A Lesson in Courage
Phil Klay, a decorated Marine and winner of the National Book Award, engaged the debate over refugees in a series of twelve tweets. Here are a few: "3. The Marine hymn claims that Marines are the 'first to fight for right and freedom and to keep our honor clean.'--Phil Klay (@PhilKlay) November 19, 2015. 4. You're not supposed to risk your life just for the physical safety of American citizens--Phil Klay (@PhilKlay) November 19, 2015. 5. You're supposed to risk your life for American ideals as well.... 11. Millions of pilgrims are hurtling through the darkness, but it's Germany that has recently been the beacon standing strong and true. Phil Klay (@PhilKlay) November 19, 2015."
The Risk It May Be Boring
In the NY Times Magazine, Arendt Center Senior Fellow Wyatt Mason recommends Christopher Logue's half-completed and finally posthumously published translations of Homer's Iliad. "'I find it boring,' Logue said to a friend, Doris Lessing, about Homer's epic, echoing a feeling that I--and perhaps you, too--have had upon trying to read any of the translations we've endured in school: I'm looking at you, Richmond Lattimore! 'Professor Lattimore adheres to the literal at times as stubbornly as a mule eating briars,' wrote the Thoreauvianly literate American critic Guy Davenport in his great 'The Geography of the Imagination.' Lattimore's literality--English words arranged in Greek syntax--produces a language that is barely English, let alone representative of Homer's poetry. 'One can say in this language,' Davenport explains, quoting Lattimore, 'such things as "slept in that place in an exhaustion of sleep" (for Homer's "aching with fatigue and weary for lack of sleep") and "the shining clothes are lying away uncared for" (for "your laundry is tossed in a heap waiting to be washed").' Carne-Ross, who was commissioning his new 'Iliad' to evade translatorese, wouldn't accept Logue's demurral. He, too, found many translations of Homer--Lattimore's especially--boring and had the Greek to back it up. He also had a plan for how Logue could manage the impossible task of translating a language he did not know. 'I will make you a crib,' Carne-Ross told Logue. A crib: a word-for-word translation of the Greek for Logue to work from. Carne-Ross also read the Greek aloud to Logue, to give him a sense of how it felt. Logue quickly discovered that there was nothing boring about Homer, only the risk of translating Homer into something boring."
Jared Gardner suggests that comics may be a form particularly suited for describing illness: "As the authors behind the Graphic Medicine Manifesto argue, the comics form that emerged simultaneously with the new imaging technologies at the end of the 19th century was in the 20th the constant subject of experiments in the relationship between two semantic systems--word and image--as they collaborated and competed to convey meaning. The highly charged relationship wherein neither text nor image conveys the truth but together succeed in saying something more true than either could individually has been termed 'the vital blend' by Robert C. Harvey. This blend extends further to the relationship between creator and reader, who must, as Scott McCloud and others have argued, collaborate at every turn to make meaning by filling in the gaps of what this highly elliptical and fragmentary form necessarily leaves unwritten and undrawn. Arguably more than any other narrative form, comics have always wrestled with the challenges of making meaning out of competing systems and storytellers, yielding something different--and, when it is done right, better--than either could tell alone. And here is where comics can come to the rescue of medicine, as they did for this patient and for so many others over the last generation, modeling generative collaborations between image and text, data and narrative, creator and reader, and doctor and patient in the face of experiences seemingly impossible to relate. Graphic autobiography was born with an illness narrative--Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972), about debilitating OCD--but it was not until the 1990s that illness memoirs began truly to proliferate in comics, with such seminal texts as Al Davison's The Spiral Cage (spina bifida) and Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner's Our Cancer Year (testicular cancer and chemotherapy). In the 21st century, narratives about mental and physical illness have emerged as the dominant form of nonfiction comics."
Featured Events
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #15
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, December 4, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Images of Surveillance: The Politics, Economics, and Aesthetics of Surveillance Societies
Roger Berkowitz, director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, will be a participant at the interdisciplinary symposium: Images of Surveillance: The Politics, Economics, and Aesthetics of Surveillance Societies. The symposium is presented by the Goethe-Institut in New York, NY December 4-6, 2015.
The symposium will combine lectures, panel discussion, artist talks, and presentations to explore the topic in its various political, economic, and aethetic dimensions and open new ways to think about surveillance in the 21st century. At the heart of Images of Surveillance is the recognition that surveillance as object of study is far too complex to be grasped from any single point of view and thus requires us to combine multiple perspectives into a fuller picture of what surveillance might be. Such an approach rejects both disciplinary boundaries and post-modern indeterminacy in favor of a concerted effort to create overlaps and conceptual chains across a wide variety of practices and discourses.
To learn more about the symposium, schedule, and participants visit goethe.de/ny/sensitivedata.
Friday, December 4 through Sunday, December 6, 2015
Goethe Institut, 30 Irving Place, New York, NY 10003
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, Stefanie Rosenmüller discusses how Arendt scarcely addressed distributive justice but how her reasoning could nonetheless augment that of Martha Nussbaum, who criticized the liberal model of John Rawls, in the Quote of the Week. Albert Camus discusses the responsibility of thinking people in a world of victims and executioners in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate the annotations Hannah Arendt made to E. P. Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class" in this week's Library feature.
On the Justice of Institutions and of Persons: Impartiality and Dependency in Martha Nussbaum and Hannah Arendt
By Stefanie Rosenmüller (translated by Alison Borrowman)
"Menschen finden zueinander als Personen, weil sie einander bedürfen (Liebe), und leben zusammen als 'citizens', weil sie der anankaia [Naturbedürfnisse, Notwendigkeiten] Herr werden und bleiben müssen. Diese gemeinsame Herrschaft aber […] ist das eigentliche Gebiet des Handelns. […] Im Handeln, unter den Anspruch der Gerechtigkeit gestellt und dauernd versucht von der Möglichkeit, sich durch Gewalt von dem Zwang der anankaia [Naturbedürfnisse, Notwendigkeiten] zu befreien, ist der Mensch mit Anderen zusammen in der politischen Verantwortung. [...]"
"Human beings find one another as persons because they need one another (love), and they live together as 'citizens' because they must become and remain masters of the anankaia [natural necessities]. This collective mastery though […] is the real domain of action. […] In acting, the human being, called upon to aspire to justice and constantly tempted by the possibility of using violence to free himself from the compulsion of the anankaia [natural necessities], bears political responsibility together with others."
-- Hannah Arendt: Denktagebuch, [3] Notebook IX, April 1952, Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (eds.), Piper Munich Zurich 2002.
How does Arendt understand justice in acting? Social justice is of primary importance from the standpoint of social work, with which Hannah Arendt was engaged in practice but did not address in theory. How is the aspiration for social justice with respect to persons fulfilled in institutions and in the actions of individuals? Although Hannah Arendt scarcely addressed the topic of distributive justice, her reasoning could augment that of Martha Nussbaum in a useful manner. Nussbaum has criticized the application of impartiality as a principle of justice in the liberal model of John Rawls. In Arendt, it does appear to constitute a standard for just action.
Beyond Forgiveness
"It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable. This is the true hallmark of those offenses, which, since Kant, we call a 'radical evil' and about whose nature so little is known, even to us who have been exposed to one of their rare outbursts on the public scene. All we know is that we can neither punish nor forgive such offenses and that they therefore transcend the realm of human affairs and the potentialities of human power, both of which they radically destroy wherever they make their appearance."
— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Last Friday afternoon, Dylann Roof appeared in court for arraignment through a closed-circuit television, all the while flanked by law enforcement officers. The protection of the blue screen seemed a testament to the degree of his offence: murdering 9 people during a Bible study at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The scene was made more surreal for viewers who listened to the disembodied voices of the victims' family members address Roof directly, confronting him with their suffering and pain and offering their forgiveness. The daughter of one victim, Ethel Lance, said: "I forgive you. You took something very precious from me and I will never talk to her again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul." The words of forgiveness were so remarkable even President Obama tweeted: "In the midst of darkest tragedy, the decency and goodness of the American people shines through in these families."
Amor Mundi 4/19/15
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.
Director of the FBI James B. Comey requires his agents to visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. He explains why in a speech he gave on Holocaust Remembrance Day this past week. "The Holocaust was, as I said, the most horrific display in world history of inhumanity. But it was also the most horrific display in world history of our humanity, of our capacity for evil and for moral surrender. And that second significance is the reason I require every new FBI special agent and intelligence analyst to go to the Holocaust Museum. Naturally, I want them to learn about abuse of authority on a breathtaking scale. But I want them to confront something more painful and more dangerous: I want them to see humanity and what we are capable of. I want them to see that, although this slaughter was led by sick and evil people, those sick and evil leaders were joined by, and followed by, people who loved their families, took soup to a sick neighbor, went to church and gave to charity. Good people helped murder millions. And that's the most frightening lesson of all--that our very humanity made us capable of, even susceptible to, surrendering our individual moral authority to the group, where it can be hijacked by evil. Of being so cowed by those in power. Of convincing ourselves of nearly anything." If Comey doesn't mention Arendt's thesis concerning the banality of evil, the resonances are clear. It might be worth noting that while Arendt would agree with Comey about the need to fight both sick and evil leaders and their normal followers, she had serious reservations about doing so through spying and surveillance.
You have no privacy. Get over it. Such sentiments are now cliché and represent the sense of many. Both the government and corporations offer security and convenience in return for our most intimate information, and over and over we provide that information. While many bemoan the loss of privacy, pitifully few take any actions to protect their privacy. Which raises the question: "Why Does Privacy Matter?" This is the question we will ask at the Hannah Arendt Center's 8th Annual Conference from Oct. 15-16, 2015. David Brooks offers one answer. "Privacy is important to the development of full individuals because there has to be an interior zone within each person that other people don't see. There has to be a zone where half-formed thoughts and delicate emotions can grow and evolve, without being exposed to the harsh glare of public judgment. There has to be a place where you can be free to develop ideas and convictions away from the pressure to conform. There has to be a spot where you are only yourself and can define yourself. Privacy is important to families and friendships because there has to be a zone where you can be fully known. There has to be a private space where you can share your doubts and secrets and expose your weaknesses with the expectation that you will still be loved and forgiven and supported. Privacy is important for communities because there has to be a space where people with common affiliations can develop bonds of affection and trust. There has to be a boundary between us and them. Within that boundary, you look out for each other; you rally to support each other; you cut each other some slack; you share fierce common loyalties."
Virginia Jackson considers the work of critic Lauren Berlant and in the process wonders what criticism means for us now and what genre might mean for us in the future: "Berlant wants that recognition to mean that genres can become the vehicles of social change, or at least of degrees of adjustment. She can skate the outlines of received genres with more precision than any of us, but she also wants to make those boundaries turn out toward a utopian horizon where the barriers between us may not exactly fall but will be illuminated as shared in what Berlant likes to call 'the history of the present.' As she said recently in an interview on the 'Society and Space' blog (as an old friend of mine once said, Berlant 'has a lot of language,' so the interview is a good genre for her, and the blogosphere a good generic medium, since so much of the language she has so much of can overflow and circulate there), 'it's never about shaming people's objects, it's always about creating better and better objects. It's always about creating better worlds, making it possible for us to think in more and different kinds of ways about how we relationally can move through life.' If for Arnold the function of criticism at the present time was to help us agree to be mutually and soberly bummed out, to move through life in a shared state of exile from literary scenes of fulfillment, distinguished only by our cultivated taste for more such disappointments, for Berlant the function of criticism at the present time is to create better worlds, worlds in which genres are not settled states of common disappointment and classed distinction in the experience and expression of that disappointment, but are instead signs and figures for shared world making."
Tim Parks considers the relationship between literature and the paper that it's printed on: "With the arrival of print in the late fifteenth century, it was suddenly possible to start thinking of a mass audience; 20 million books had been printed in Europe by 1500. Yet it was the printing shops--often more than one if a book was popular--rather than the authors, who made the money. You might write out of a passion to get your ideas around, or out of megalomania--never a condition to be underestimated where writers are concerned--but there was still no steady money to be had producing writing of whatever kind. In economic terms, it was hardly worth insisting you were the author of a text, hence the anonymous book was rather more common than it is today. Meantime, with this new possibility of printing so many books it made sense to start thinking of all those people who didn't know Latin. The switch to writing in the vernacular had begun; this meant that, though more copies were being sold, most books were now trapped inside their language community. There were scholars capable of translating of course, and a book that made a big impression in one country would eventually be translated into another. But it took time, and it wouldn't happen if a book didn't impress in its original language. Nor for the most part were these translators under contract with publishers. Initially, they were simply scholars who translated what they were interested in and what they believed was worth disseminating. Think of that."
Franco Moretti and Dominique Pestre have a fascinating essay in the New Left Review that analyzes the important changes in vocabulary and grammar used by the World Bank in its Annual Reports from the 1960s to the present. Moretti and Pestre find significant shifts, noting a move from concrete nouns like "loans," "development," and "power" to abstract and technical nouns like "fair value," "portfolio," "derivative," "accrual," "equity," "hedging," "liquidity" and "liabilities." They trace the rise of what they call with a nod to Orwell "bankspeak." "Aside from individual words, it's the nature of the Bank's language that is changing: becoming more abstract, more distant from concrete social life; a technical code, detached from everyday communication and pared down to the economic factors crucial to the repayment of the debt. Solutions are disengaged from any specificity: they are the same for everybody, everywhere. Faced with the potentially devastating consequences of default, the Bank's chief objective is no longer development, but, more simply, the rescue of private lenders (Harpagon: 'My casket! My casket!'). The banker must be saved before the client: doubts have disappeared, and the Bank's core beliefs are hammered home over and over again: the economy must be strengthened by making it leaner; the public sector must be restructured to create favourable conditions for private business and the market; the state must shrink and become more efficient. Such 'solutions' transcend the need to respond to the debt crisis: they aim at social transformation through the return to an uncompromising liberalism."
Democracy And the Monopoly On Force
Ta-Nehisi Coates thinks we've thrown out all the tools of domestic statecraft, save one: "Police officers fight crime. Police officers are neither case-workers, nor teachers, nor mental-health professionals, nor drug counselors. One of the great hallmarks of the past forty years of American domestic policy is a broad disinterest in that difference. The problem of restoring police authority is not really a problem of police authority, but a problem of democratic authority. It is what happens when you decide to solve all your problems with a hammer. To ask, at this late date, why the police seem to have lost their minds is to ask why our hammers are so bad at installing air-conditioners. More it is to ignore the state of the house all around us. A reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It's avoidance. It's a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems."
The Atlantic offers a stunning photo essay about the "nail houses" in China, properties whose owners have refused to sell to enable developments sprouting around them. The results are visually shocking, revealing both China's unstoppable growth and the stubborn individuality of Chinese homeowners.
In the Financial Times, Edwin Heathcote writes about the changing face of architecture for nuclear power plants. "High quality global journalism requires investment. In Britain, home of the world's first civil nuclear power programme, the architect Sir Basil Spence was commissioned to design one of its earliest power stations, begun in 1959 in Trawsfynydd in Snowdonia, Wales. Spence, the designer of Coventry Cathedral, a symbol of postwar reconstruction, was arguably Britain's biggest architectural name at the time. Trawsfynydd is an elegant concrete mass that sits somewhere between Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's brick-mountain Bankside Power Station (now Tate Modern) in London, and a kind of picturesque castle. There had been local opposition to the plans and Spence's architecture represented an effort to allay fears and to give it presence and dignity. Walking around the crinkly tin sheds and anonymous industrial landscape of Sizewell B, completed in 1995 and still Britain's most recent nuclear power station, it seems that either those concerns have died away and the architecture is no longer considered important as a vehicle for reassurance, or that our culture has changed so radically that we now accept banality as an expression of safety. The concrete lump of the neighbouring Sizewell A, which was completed in 1966, still has some of the solidity we might expect from a nuclear power station. Its mass conveys its purpose, the heavy concrete expressed as what it is, an impenetrably dense, protective shell. At Sizewell B, everything is covered up, clad in the same corrugated metal sheet that has become the default language of anonymous roadside industry. There is no sense of celebration of this extraordinary technology. I asked Ian Bryant, head of planning at EDF Energy, what scope architects had in the design of new nuclear power stations, given the fearsome barrage of regulation they are subject to. 'They can try to ensure that they sit into the local environment,' he replies. 'Colour can make a real difference.' I'm not entirely sure how they could not sit into their natural environment but it does seem a shame that the architects' role has been reduced to choosing the paint."
The Life of Roman Republicanism with Joy Connolly
Joy Connolly, a Professor of Classics at New York University, will discuss her book The Life of Roman Republicanism (Princeton 2014), which examines key themes in Roman republican thought: freedom, recognition, antagonism, self-knowledge, irony, and imagination.
Free and open to the public!
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Bard College, Olin 204, 6:00 pm
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #7
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at email@example.com.
Friday, April 24, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Translating the Holocaust: H. G. Adler as Writer and Scholar
This event, which features a keynote address, several panels, and a performance, will offer a unique opportunity to consider the intersection of both the scholarly and artistic work of H. G. Adler, a major thinker and writer who is just becoming known in English.
Sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center, The Bard Translation Initiative, Jewish Studies, German Studies, and Human Rights Project.
Free and open to the public!
Monday, May 4, 2015
Location TBA, 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
This week on the Blog, Michiel Bot discusses how Arendt's use of the term "savages" and "Dark Continent" in The Origins of Totalitarianism can advance our political thinking in the Quote of the Week. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we visit the Hannah Arendt Collection and appreciate the annotations Arendt made to her copy of a biography written about Leon Trotsky in this week's Library feature.
Amor Mundi 3/22/15
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Judith Shulevitz skewers the increasing prevalence of safe spaces on college campuses. She talks of a Brown student who, "alarmed" that a speaker was coming to campus to debate and criticize the term "rape culture," went to the administration and had them organize a competing lecture affirming rape culture and safe spaces "available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting." "The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments 'troubling' or 'triggering,' a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and 'sexual assault peer educator' who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point, she went to the lecture hall--it was packed--but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. 'I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,' Ms. Hall said. Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being 'bombarded' by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material." Shulevitz investigates how "the quasi-medicalized terminology of trauma" is mobilized by student activists to force university administrators to censor speech and shut down debate. Colleges are not intended to be safe spaces but spaces of tumult and inspiration. It is distressing how universities have rolled over and adopted safe spaces, trigger warnings, and speech codes in an effort to palliate young people who have been misled regarding the strictures of the life of the mind. When Hannah Arendt wrote "there are no dangerous thoughts. Thinking itself is dangerous," she expressed a simple point: Thinking risks destroying and upending your common sense and your most cherished beliefs. All thinking risks negating one's identity and values. Which is why thinking harbors within itself the danger of nihilism. But the only thing more dangerous than thinking, Arendt insisted, was thoughtlessness. While thoughtlessness may appear safe, its long-term consequences are the uncritical acceptance of ideologies. Only the dangerous and difficult work of thinking, Arendt believed, might be able to prevent the rise of thoughtless horrors like totalitarianism. It is time we made our colleges and universities once again safe for dangerous thoughts.
Amichai Magen has a long and intense account of the dangers posed by the rise of Salafist Jihad to Europe. He insists that we stare the threat in the eye, which means first understanding it. "This violent utopianism inspires Salafist jihadism's vision of conflict, society, and politics. To their mind, the Ummah (or 'community of believers') is in a state of total war with the West, 'the Jews', and other non-believers, including apostate Arab regimes and Shia Muslims. This war not only justifies acts of extreme violence against those who have conspired to 'suppress the true faith'--beheadings, crucifixions, mass executions and rape--but involves the rejection of all forms of man-made law, democracy, and the Westphalian international system. Indeed, Salafist jihadism is contesting the essential values and institutions of modern liberal societies in a manner not experienced by the West since the defeat of Nazism." Salafism, writes Magen, is an ideology as was Nazism, one that has both the strengths and weaknesses of all ideologies. One weakness of ideological movements is that their members are not psychopaths: "Reducing terrorist motivation involves both short-term deployment of sticks and carrots and deeper, societal counter-radicalisation efforts. Although their values and conduct are abhorrent, terrorists are rarely psychopaths. Most terrorists calculate their action based on the dual logics of consequentialism and appropriateness. Accordingly, the motivation of would-be perpetrators can be greatly reduced where intelligence makes the likelihood of early detection high, the chances of escaping an attack low, legal sanctions against involvement in terrorist activity of any kind tough and, at the same time, the benefits of lawful citizenship and integration into society are visible and attractive. The best way to deal with a terrorist threat is to prevent its emergence or spread. Understanding processes of radicalisation and developing effective de-radicalisation policies ought therefore to be at the heart of European-Israeli dialogue about prevention of Islamist political violence. Studies of Islamic groups in Europe are somewhat encouraging in this area, finding that although young Muslim men in many European communities often feel frustration and humiliation they have to be actively radicalised by others to cross the line into terrorist activity. Contrary to popular myths about spontaneous internet-based radicalisation of lonely and unhinged individuals, the process of radicalisation is almost always a social one. Peer-pressure, systematic indoctrination, separation from general society and repetitive training--which can more readily occur in prisons, secluded religious centres, remote training camps, or in fighting abroad--are typically preconditions for getting vulnerable recruits to cross the line into terrorist activity."
Sue Halpern wonders after our future in the age of technological unemployment: "There are physical robots like Jibo and the machines that assemble our cars, and there are virtual robots, which are the algorithms that undergird the computers that perform countless daily tasks, from driving those cars, to Google searches, to online banking. Both are avatars of automation, and both are altering the nature of work, taking on not only repetitive physical jobs, but intellectual and heretofore exclusively human ones as well. And while both are defining features of what has been called 'the second machine age,' what really distinguishes this moment is the speed at which technology is changing and changing society with it. If the 'calamity prophets' are finally right, and this time the machines really will win out, this is why. It's not just that computers seem to be infiltrating every aspect of our lives, it's that they have infiltrated them and are infiltrating them with breathless rapidity. It's not just that life seems to have sped up, it's that it has. And that speed, and that infiltration, appear to have a life of their own." Nearly 70 years ago, Hannah Arendt wrote that the second most threatening event of the modern age was the "advent of automation." Automation, she predicted "will empty the factories and liberate man-kind from its oldest and most natural burden, the burden of laboring and the bondage to necessity." The danger of automation, she argued, was that it threatens to realize a long-held dream of humanity: to free ourselves from labor itself. The problem, in Arendt's telling, is that we are at the precipice of freeing ourselves from labor at the very moment when we value labor above all else; the old "higher and more meaningful activities"--religion, family, nobility, tradition, public service, and war--for which freedom from labor might be won have been lost. The absence of meaningful life without a job is why the prospect that automation might actually deliver us from labor is so terrifying.
Greg Beato explores the exploding market for edutainment and the "academization of leisure." "What does it mean when people who can afford to spend their time however they please hunker down in front of their flat screens to watch theoretical physicists or experts on other subjects lecture for hours? Entertainment values have come to dominate many aspects of life, but another trend has been playing out, too. Call it the academization of leisure. It can be found in the live-streaming TED Talks lectures, the Great Courses, learning vacations, podcasts, science centers, brain-training games and retirement communities like Lasell Village in Newton, Mass., whose residents must complete 'a minimum of 450 hours of learning and fitness activity each calendar year,' its website says." Edutainment has long had negative connotations, Beato writes, some of which were described by Neil Postman in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. "In it, [Postman] argued that culture's primary mode of discourse was shifting from print to TV, and that as a result, 'politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce' had all been 'transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business.'" For Beato, the new paradigm moves beyond mere amusement: "In 'Amusing Ourselves to Death,' Mr. Postman lamented that a former Hollywood actor could be president. Now, former presidents are replacing professional entertainers as the top-billed stars on cruise ship vacations. Lech Walesa, former president of Poland, will visit with Smithsonian Journeys participants in Gdansk this summer. César Gaviria, former president of Colombia, will be on hand on a National Geographic Expeditions cruise off South America this fall. While lunching with celebrity politicians on luxury cruises may seem frivolous, what has actually happened is that a purely recreational activity has acquired new intellectual ambition. 'There's an increasing demand for meaningful experiences,' says Lynn Cutter, National Geographic's executive vice president for travel and licensing. 'When people have choices on how to spend their money, they're valuing experiences more than material things.'"
Walter Russell Mead offers some plain analysis of the impact of Benjamin Netanyahu's win for the future of U.S.-Israeli relations. Netanyahu's campaign comment that he rejects the two-state solution threatens to "have a chilling effect on U.S.-Israel relations that will outlast President Obama's time in the White House. It will also deepen Israel's international isolation and put useful weapons into the eager hands of Israel's enemies in Europe and elsewhere.... The belief that every people on Planet Earth has the right of self-determination is deeply engrained in American political and moral culture. Historically, supporters of Israel benefitted from this widespread American belief. That conviction cannot be turned on and off; support for the goal of a Palestinian state is a permanent feature of American politics. Americans are, I think, prepared to show some understanding both for the difficulties of Israel's position and the problems caused by the deep structural issues within the Palestinian movement, but it would be extremely difficult to build a long term U.S.-Israeli relationship on the basis of the rejection of Palestinian national rights. There is a minority of Americans, perhaps on the order of a quarter, whose support for Israel is strong enough (or theologically grounded in certain evangelical readings of Scripture) to embrace an Israel that sets itself openly against the goal of a Palestinian state. Other Americans are so worried about terrorism and radical Islam that they are willing to support Israel no matter what stand the Jewish state takes or doesn't take on the Palestinian question. But there are enough Americans (and, additionally, enough American Jews) whose support for Jewish self-determination in Israel is linked to support for Palestinian self-determination in a Palestinian state that U.S.-Israeli relations will be significantly and progressively harmed if Israel's leaders choose to close the door on Palestinian statehood."
Frank Cottrell Boyce remembers fantasy satirist Terry Pratchett, who died last week after an illness: "We live in a society whose culture is driven by fear of death. We adore youth. We pay for science that extends life rather than enriches it. In his life and in his work, Death--'not cruel, just terribly terribly good at his job'--was the final and finest target of Pratchett's satire. In Mort--Pratchett's most popular novel--Death takes on an apprentice so he can have some time to himself. As he learns to appreciate life, so the apprentice comes to appreciate Death.... This twist is at the heart of Pratchett. In an age of fundamentalisms, he embraced doubt, the possibility that a stupid belief might have something going for it, whereas an obvious and rational truth might get you nowhere. I hope that that is the twist he is enjoying today--that having dismissed all hope of an afterlife, he is sitting on a cloud with Jonathan Swift and Swift is saying: 'By Jesus, Terry, I wish I'd written Truckers.'"
Rod Dreher worries that we've abandoned the humanities because we've lost the light: "But I think it's also true that we as a society have lost the sense that within the study of art, literature, and the humanities, there are things vital to shaping our souls, and to discovering and taking into ourselves what it means to be fully human. That Homer, Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Michelangelo, and all these great men saw more deeply into the human experience than almost any other, and came back to tell us what they learned, and to help us see what they saw. In the end, I think it comes down to a deadening of the soul among our people--that is, a sense that there is no need to learn or to experience anything beyond what we desire to learn and experience, because our desires are self-justifying, and do not need cultivation."
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
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #6
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at email@example.com.
Friday, April 3, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Property and Freedom: Is Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty and Promoting Freedom in South Africa?
A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and Rift Valley Institute.
Free and open to the public!
Monday, April 6, 2015
Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
This week on the Blog, Lance Strate discusses how Arendt teaches us about the mutability of privacy in the Quote of the Week. American botanist Luther Burbank provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. And we appreciate the annotations Arendt made to her copy of "The Age of the Democratic Revolution" in our Library feature.
Amor Mundi 1/4/15
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.
Yuval Levin argues that our basic understanding of liberty today is wrong. Both liberals and libertarians see liberty as the absence of constraint, the liberty to do and to choose as one wants. He suggests that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in the 1992 abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey encapsulates the modern bi-partisan version of liberty: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." Opposed to what Levin calls this thin version of liberty (what is usually referred to as negative liberty) is a thicker liberty bound up in institutions that demands that individuals not only be free to choose, but that they be free to choose well. This, what is usually called positive liberty, assumes that we humans are not simply willful beings but that we are also rational, and that rationality means something. It contains standards and truths. For Levin, one element of this rational liberty of limitation is the family: "The long way to liberty begins unavoidably with marriage and the family, and the case for the short way begins as a case against their necessity. The family is above all the nursery of the next generation, which enters the world incapable of exercising liberty and plainly in need of both protection and moral formation. The family is proof against the notion that all human relations can be turned into matters of choice." Another is work: "Work is another crucial element of the long way to liberty. Like the family, it, too, has an obvious economic utility, enabling us to support ourselves and our families financially. But work also buttresses dignity, inculcates responsibility, encourages energy and industry, and rewards reliability. It can help form us into better human beings and better liberal citizens. To see only its material utility is to imagine that work, like family, could be replaced by more efficient forms of distribution." In other words, liberty requires we embrace not only our free will but also the common truths made palpable by our rational reflection upon the institutions and the world we live in. The real difference between liberals and conservatives today is that liberals see all claims to rational or institutional truths as a threat to freedom, whereas conservatives see all attacks on institutional truths as a threat to morality and authority. Both are correct. At times, in a liberal mood, we reject convention in the name of progress. At other times, in a conservative mood, we insist on common truths and traditions that give meaning to our lives. Liberals and conservatives both make essential contributions, but in making their arguments in absolute terms that insist either on progress or tradition, they risk undermining both freedom and authority.
Jeddediah Purdy writes that Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-first Century was only partially helpful. It helped put hard numbers on the inequality of our times and on the historical connection between capitalism and inequality. But, writes Purdy, Piketty "does not say where economic inequality comes from: uneven bargaining power, political corruption, globalized labor and capital markets, the ineluctable progress of technology, or what? Piketty only waves his hands around the all-important question of whether economic inequality undermines democracy. He has nothing to say about how much inequality is too much, or which kinds of inequality are worst--in access to education, for instance, or health care, or political power? Without answers to these questions, Piketty's work illuminated a vast landscape but left his readers with no compass to navigate it." In response, Purdy gathered students from Duke University to read the classics of liberal political economy and philosophy from the 18th and 19th centuries--Smith, Marx, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Nietzsche. What he learned: "For all of these figures--meaning for serious people across the time when they wrote--economic and political life were the two great and inseparable problems. Each was a frontier of new human powers--technological mastery and growing wealth on the one hand; collective mobilization, self-government, and equal citizenship on the other. These powers could come into conflict: politics could dampen the economy, as Smith argued, or economic inequality could override the possibility of real democracy, as Marx insisted. The question they all asked, in different versions at different times, was how these great domains of change could be knitted together--and, the other side of the same coin, how they most gravely threatened each other. The second lesson is that no one writing before the twentieth century holds a key to our problems. Our time is so vastly different in its particulars that the parallels work only in broad strokes. Neither Smith nor Marx can carry us far into the guts of globalized financial capitalism. Neither de Tocqueville nor Mill can sort out the prospects of democracy--or even the proper meaning of the term--in North Africa and the Middle East, China, or the European Union and the United States. How could they? When we can barely illuminate our own world, it would be superstitious to imagine that dead men could do it for us. But these old works do invite us to live questions that they lived, which many of us had complacently forgotten, and which Pikettymania was an effort to remember. These are the inescapable questions of a world where the economy, including global ecology, does not take care of itself, and where it may come into conflict with democracy. They are questions for a world where we need to get clearer on what we mean by democracy, and what we lose when we neglect or betray it."
Fritz Schwarz, who once served as chief counsel for the U.S. Senate's Church Committee's investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies under six presidents--Franklin Roosevelt through Richard Nixon--argues that the Senate's recently released torture report made a mistake in placing all the blame on the CIA. "[P]lacing blame almost exclusively on the CIA is neither accurate nor fair. The Church Committee initially risked going down the same path in its investigation of CIA assassination plots. Senator Frank Church speculated to the press that the CIA may have acted like a 'rogue elephant on a rampage.' Other senators, also speculating, opined the CIA 'took orders from the top.' But, after extensive investigation and when the committee released its Interim Report on Assassinations, it declined to adopt either theory. Instead, the Church Committee presented substantial evidence for both views, saying the conflicting evidence made it impossible to be certain whether or not Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy authorized the assassination plots. Then, in its final reports issued six months later, based on facts from six administrations and review of many more programs and many more agencies, the Church Committee was ready to fix responsibility at the top. Yes, some agency programs were concealed from higher authority, but more frequently it was senior officials themselves who through pressure for results created a climate for abuse, failed to assure compliance with the law, and demanded action without carefully providing for future oversight. In the case of torture, the Bush-Cheney White House was clearly involved. It pushed for and approved the program; it was complicit in obtaining the deeply flawed legal opinions that redefined the ban on torture to meaningless nothings. White House officials forgot that both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln barred torture in perilous times when Americans were hard pressed in their fight to create the nation or to save it. They also forgot that after World War II the United States led the way in drafting the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit torture and other forms of inhumane treatment. They locked out voices of experience from the State Department and the military who would have warned of harm to America's reputation and risks to American captives. They failed to listen to FBI experts on interrogation who could have explained we were getting important intelligence through interrogation techniques other than torture. And they forgot, or nobody told them, that after World War II we had prosecuted Japanese officials as war criminals for using on American soldiers the same torture techniques the White House authorized and the CIA implemented after 9/11." Schwarz's Democracy in the Dark: The Seduction of Government Secrecy will appear this year, and Schwarz himself will be speaking at the Hannah Arendt Center's 2015 fall conference on privacy.
David Bromwich sees important connections between the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA and the Staten Island grand jury that chose not to return an indictment for the police killing of Eric Garner. They both, Bromwich suggests, begin with Dick Cheney and the war on terror: "Cheney worked hard to eradicate from the minds of Americans the idea that there can be such a thing as a 'suspect'. Due process of law rests on the acknowledged possibility that a suspect may be innocent; but, for Cheney, a person interrogated on suspicion of terrorism is a terrorist. To elaborate a view beyond that point, as he sees it, only involves government in a wasteful tangle of doubts." The continuation of the Cheney doctrine into the Obama Presidency means that aside from a more humane face, there remains no effort to hold responsible those who break our laws: "The promise of impunity that has greeted the lawless conduct of government officials obeys the ancient maxim fac et excusa. The deeds in fact are free to recur because the excuses are potentially limitless. We are all patriots--Obama's word for CIA interrogators--and under enemy attack, we respond as patriots do. The truth of course is that we know nothing about the motives of the torturers or the motives of those who wrote up the exculpating rationale for torture before the fact. Selfless patriotism may be part of it. Sadistic self-indulgence may also be part of it. Who can say in what proportions they were mixed? A principle such as an unconditional ban on torture is tested precisely by its observance in a fear-engendering crisis. If your belief in the principle gradually disintegrates, it was never a solid belief." And it is the disintegration of our strong convictions against torture and police violence that Bromwich worries is undermining our democracy: "The object of torture is a slave as long as the infliction lasts; a slave has no recourse against torture so long as the master chooses to inflict it. To suppose that slavery is a matter of ownership is a half-truth that misses the political basis of the oppression. The evil consists in the ability to dominate other persons without check, the ability to do with them what you will, armed with assurance of impunity. Such a custom of acquittal or habit of non-accountability may have broad consequences in the treatment by the state of its own people--the treatment, for example, of a large black man on the streets of New York by a huddle of police who are determined to subdue him. The suspect becomes a rightless subject and not a person who bears the inalienable rights of a citizen."
The New York Public Library recently discovered a box of reference questions from before the invention of the search engine. Our favorite? "Is it possible to keep an octopus in a private home?"
Roland Kelts talks to graphic designer Chip Kidd about how the latter illustrated Haruki Murakami's novella The Strange Library: "Kidd's visual accompaniment is a sheaf of blowups--insect motifs collide with origami paper and the face of a geisha; a spectral half-moon is completed by one half of a donut (the only graphic that didn't come from his collection of Japanese ephemera; he purchased it from a food card in front of the Knopf offices and 'stuck it into a scanner.') Kidd wasn't trying to graphically tell the story. Instead, he said, his goal was to 'graphically play around with form and content so it surprises you.'"
Knit Together in This Work By a Fabric Made of Ballot Boxes
Etgat Keret hopes that the upcoming elections in Israel will force alienated Israelis back to the ballot boxes and, in turn, will bring the country closer together: "There's no better time than a new election campaign to bring my left-wing neighbor and his dog down to earth again. Instead of burying his head in a good book, he will be forced to look reality in the eye and drop a ballot into the box in what might be the most important elections in Israel's history. And if he chooses not to, he will be partly responsible for any injustices that follow. Deep down, every citizen in this country knows that the coming elections will determine not only our political and economic future, but first and foremost, the social and moral future of this country. Do we aspire to be, as the original formulators of the Jewish State bill demand, a country that is first of all Jewish and only then democratic, or will we seek to be an egalitarian society that while keeping its Jewish identity does not distinguish between and discriminate against citizens who hold different religious beliefs? Some will say that if we don't choose the Third Temple we will find ourselves in Sodom and Gomorrah. Others will claim that if we don't hold onto the Western model, we'll end up in Iran."
The forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are made possible by the radical disjunction between those who authorize the wars and those who fight them. James Fallows points to how the average Americans citizen's estrangement from the military makes it easier for us to go to war: "If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk Nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going. It would be the story of a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously. As a result, what happens to all institutions that escape serious external scrutiny and engagement has happened to our military. Outsiders treat it both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules. The tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. But for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now. A chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness."
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #3
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, January 9, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Eyal Press
The Courage To Refuse
Monday, February 9, 2015
Kline Faculty Dining Room, 6:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism, Jeanne van Heeswijk
Monday, February 16, 2015
Kline Faculty Dining Room, 6:00 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Angela Maione, our Klemens Von Klemperer Post-Doctoral Fellow
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 6:00 - 7:00 pm
Now Accepting Applications for Post-Doctoral Fellowships!
The Hannah Arendt Center announces three post-doctoral fellowships for the 2015-2016 academic year.
To learn more about the fellowships, including how to apply, click here.
Application Deadline: Thursday, March 5, 2015
Lunchtime Talk with Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen, a Hannah Arendt Center Doctoral Fellow
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center, 1:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Uday Mehta
Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge
Monday, March 30, 2015
Manor House Cafe, 6:00 pm
Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?
A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and The University of The Western Cape
Monday, April 6, 2015
Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, Time TBA
The Life of Roman Republicanism with Joy Connolly
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Aspinwall Room 302, Bard College, 6:00 pm
Translating the Holocaust: H. G. Adler as Writer and Scholar
Monday, May 4, 2015
Location and Time TBA
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015!
This holiday week on the Blog, Kazue Koishikawa reflects on Arendt's observation that thinking acquires political significance when we think beyond our own limitations in the Quote of the Week. Edgar Allan Poe provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. And we appreciate Arendt's possession of one of J. E. Erdmann's investigations into the history of philosophy in our Library feature.
This coming Friday, January 9th, the Hannah Arendt Center will host the third session of its new Virtual Reading Group. We will be discussing Chapter Two, Sections 4, 5, and 6 of The Human Condition.
The reading group is available to all members and is always welcoming new participants! Please click here to learn more!
Amor Mundi 11/23/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
In The New Republic, Judith Shulevitz writes about the deadening impact of loneliness and how it can ravage our body and our brain. She traces modern interest in loneliness to Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, a psychoanalyst whose "1959 essay, 'On Loneliness,' is considered a founding document in a fast-growing area of scientific research you might call loneliness studies. Over the past half-century, academic psychologists have largely abandoned psychoanalysis and made themselves over as biologists. And as they delve deeper into the workings of cells and nerves, they are confirming that loneliness is as monstrous as Fromm-Reichmann said it was. It has now been linked with a wide array of bodily ailments as well as the old mental ones. In a way, these discoveries are as consequential as the germ theory of disease. Just as we once knew that infectious diseases killed, but didn't know that germs spread them, we've known intuitively that loneliness hastens death, but haven't been able to explain how. Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking. A partial list of the physical diseases thought to be caused or exacerbated by loneliness would include Alzheimer's, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer - tumors can metastasize faster in lonely people." The turn toward biology situates loneliness as a mental and a physical illness, one to be combated with public health programs. Shulevitz traces the efforts to medicalize loneliness, as well as programs to treat loneliness as a problem of inequality. And yet, in the end, she suggests that humans have incredible resources to fend off loneliness: "[T]here's something awe-inspiring about our resilience, too. Put an orphan in foster care, and his brain will repair its missing connections. Teach a lonely person to respond to others without fear and paranoia, and over time, her body will make fewer stress hormones and get less sick from them. Care for a pet or start believing in a supernatural being, and your score on the UCLA Loneliness Scale will go down. Even an act as simple as joining an athletic team or a church can lead to what Cole calls 'molecular remodeling.' 'One message I take away from this is, "Hey, it's not just early life that counts,"' he says. 'We have to choose our life well.'"
Loneliness was a constant theme in Hannah Arendt's work. In her most pregnant attempt at a definition of totalitarianism, published in 1950, Arendt writes: "Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated, individuals." Totalitarianism depends upon "the masses [who] grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class." Shorn of family and national and class connection, the modern atomized individual becomes a mass man. "The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships." Stripped of the political, social, and intellectual traditions that historically bound people together in publically meaningful institutions and networks, mass men turn to racism or consumerism to give their lives meaning. Both are dangerous in different ways. As Paul Morrow writes, "Loneliness can result from formal prohibitions on expression or action, as seen in totalitarian societies; but it can also result from informal standards and patterns of life which disvalue political - and overvalue social or commercial - interactions." And Bill Dixon adds: "To be lonely is to be deprived of both the public and the private realms and therefore to feel utterly abandoned by other human beings, to finally lose one's place in the world completely. The mass production of loneliness is closely linked to the experiences of 'uprootedness' and 'superfluousness' that have unevenly afflicted peoples across the earth since the industrial revolution and European imperialism. Pervasive loneliness as a modern way of life therefore amorphously anticipates the emergence of the totalitarian form, but it also serves to structure and vivify its psychic violence once underway. Loneliness perversely tends to intensify when felt in the presence of others, that is, when one is not strictly speaking alone."
David Bromwich reviews Laura Poitras' Citizenfour and argues that it shows Edward Snowden to be a modern hero, a courageous conscientious objector in the war on privacy: "An incidental strength of Citizenfour is that it will make such casual slanders harder to repeat. Nevertheless, they are likely to be repeated or anyway muttered in semiprivate by otherwise judicious persons who want to go on with their business head-down and not be bothered. It must be added that our past politics give no help in arriving at an apt description of Snowden and his action. The reason is that the world in which he worked is new. Perhaps one should think of him as a conscientious objector to the war on privacy - a respectful dissident who, having observed the repressive treatment endured by William Binney, Thomas Drake, and other recent whistle-blowers, does not recognize the constitutional right of the government to put him in prison indefinitely and bring him to trial for treason. His action constitutes a reproach to the many good citizens who have learned what is happening and done nothing about it. That, too, is surely a cause of the resentment that has a hard time finding the appropriate adjectives for Snowden." Bromwich is right that listening to Snowden in the movie is to be in the presence of someone of integrity: "The undeclared subject of Citizenfour is integrity - the insistence by an individual that his life and the principle he lives by should be all of a piece. Something resembling an aesthetic correlative of that integrity can be found in the documentary style of Laura Poitras." What Snowden, Poitras, and Bromwich show is that the core of privacy is integrity. It is thus the integrity of the person that is under attack in the age of surveillance.
In an essay about how it is for teachers, both now and in the past, Jonathan Zimmerman says he thinks he's figured out what's happened to teaching in America: "the federal Race to the Top program sponsored by the Obama administration encouraged schools to use students' test scores in evaluating individual teachers. The primary responsibility of teachers is no longer to encourage good behavior in future citizens, as Horace Mann insisted. Instead, it's to ensure that they get the right answers on a high-stakes test. The shift in goals has unfortunately done nothing to alter the tedious, anti-intellectual practices of American teaching. If anything, the strong commitment to 'academic' goals has probably made teaching less academic - so far as the quality of learning is concerned - and more routinized than it was before. When teachers were hired for their inborn ability to 'nurture' schoolchildren, many derided or disregarded their intellectual capacities. Now we've created a system that is so firmly tied to scholastic achievement - as narrowly defined by standardized tests - that no serious scholar would want to teach in it."
In the New York Times, seven writers reread some of their old work and write about how they feel about it all this time later. Marilynne Robinson, for example, tries to recall what it was like to write Housekeeping: "In writing 'Housekeeping' I was trying to recover the appearance and the atmosphere of a very particular place, northern Idaho. When I wrote it, I had not spent much time there for almost 20 years. So it was very much an exploration of memory that I was engaged in. I thought I was writing an unpublishable book, so I was undistracted by other considerations than my own interest in the workings of memory and the ability of language to evoke what I 'saw' in memory. I found that the common old question 'What was it like?' stimulated recollection and recruited words and images that made my sense of the thing remembered, a place or a smell or the glint of light on water, much more accessible to me than I could have anticipated. It became a discipline for me, always to keep a scene before my eyes and to be ready to value and explore any detail that presented itself to me with an especially pungent or plangent specificity. I wrote much of the book in a darkened room. This was not intended as part of the experiment, but it may have contributed to it. My memories were often as bright as dreams and often as highly detailed. Only the place is actually remembered in the book. None of the characters or events are real. The point was to let my imagination take on the colorations of memory and interpret the place, as music might do."
In an interview with Questlove Thompson, an interview that's as much about music as anything else, Cornel West defines courage: "But we all live in fear. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the working through and overcoming of fear. Brother Martin had fear. He just wouldn't allow fear to determine his behavior. As human beings, everyone has stuff coming at them, and a certain kind of fear. But courage is being true to yourself, true to a sense of integrity. And that's what is more and more difficult."
At the Intersection of Art and Commerce
In her National Book Awards acceptance speech, Ursula K. Lu Guin explains why she loves, and fears for, literature: "Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. I've had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don't want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn't profit. Its name is freedom."
In a piece about the resurfaced allegations of rape against Bill Cosby, Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us that he, like all writers, lives in history, with his own context and biography. Knowing that is a kindness - one, he suggests, that an ethical journalist must transcend: "The Bill Cosby piece was my first shot writing for a big national magazine. I had been writing for 12 financially insecure years. By 2007, when I finished my first draft, I had lost three jobs in seven years. I had just been laid-off by Time magazine. My kid was getting older. I was subsisting off unemployment checks and someone else's salary. A voice in my head was, indeed, pushing me to do something more expansive and broader in its implication, something that did not just question Cosby's moralizing, but weighed it against the acts which I believed he committed. But Cosby was such a big target that I thought it was only a matter of time before someone published a hard-hitting, investigative piece. And besides, I had in my hand the longest, best, and most personally challenging piece I'd ever written. It was not enough. I have often thought about how those women would have felt had they read my piece. The subject was morality - and yet one of the biggest accusations of immorality was left for a few sentences, was rendered invisible. I don't have many writing regrets. But this is one of them. I regret not saying what I thought of the accusations, and then pursuing those thoughts. I regret it because the lack of pursuit puts me in league with people who either looked away, or did not look hard enough. I take it as a personal admonition to always go there, to never flinch, to never look away."
Film Screening & Director's Discussion: Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt with Nazis
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium, 5:00 - 8:00 pm
Roundtable on Academic Freedom
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Bard College Campus Center, Multipurpose Room, 7:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Johannes Lang discusses Arendt's critique of obedience in political and moral matters in the Quote of the Week. Carl Sagan provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In our Video Archives, we remember a talk George Kateb gave at our 2011 annual fall conference on the ideal of governmental transparency. And we appreciate Arendt's impressive collection of Goethe's works in our Library feature.
Amor Mundi 4/27/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Race, Democracy and the Constitution
Looking for scandal, the press is focusing on the apparent conflict between Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor. But the case of Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action is more important than the scandal. It raises fundamental questions about the democracy, race and the constitution. Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, writes: "And race matters for reasons that really are only skin deep, that cannot be discussed any other way, and that cannot be wished away. Race matters to a young man's view of society when he spends his teenage years watching others tense up as he passes, no matter the neighborhood where he grew up. Race matters to a young woman's sense of self when she states her hometown, and then is pressed, 'No, where are you really from?', regardless of how many generations her family has been in the country. Race matters to a young person addressed by a stranger in a foreign language, which he does not understand because only English was spoken at home. Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: 'I do not belong here.'" John Roberts, in his concurring opinion, responds: "The dissent states that "[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race." And it urges that "[r]ace matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: 'I do not belong here.'" But it is not "out of touch with reality" to conclude that racial preferences may themselves have the debilitating effect of reinforcing precisely that doubt, and-if so-that the preferences do more harm than good. To disagree with the dissent's views on the costs and benefits of racial preferences is not to "wish away, rather than confront" racial inequality. People can disagree in good faith on this issue, but it similarly does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate. Both opinions are worth reading. And read more about them in The Weekend Read.
The Sanctification of A Christian Pope
Pope Francis I has declared two prior popes Saints. One is well known, Pope John Paul II. But Pope John XXIII is perhaps forgotten by many. As NPR reports, "John XXIII, also known as 'Good Pope John,' was nearly 77 at his coronation and, because of his advanced age, was widely regarded as a 'stopgap' pope who wasn't going to make waves. Instead, he called the Vatican II Council, which promulgated one of the most far-reaching and controversial reforms in the Roman Catholic Church's history." John XXIII also published a little book Journal of a Soul, which Hannah Arendt reviewed for the New York Review of Books. For the Jewish thinker, Good Pope John is a Christian Pope, one of the few. Arendt tells of a "Roman chambermaid" in a hotel who asked her, in all innocence: "Madam," she said, "this Pope was a real Christian. How could that be? And how could it happen that a true Christian would sit on St. Peter's chair? Didn't he first have to be appointed Bishop, and Archbishop, and Cardinal, until he finally was elected to be Pope? Had nobody been aware of who he was?" Arendt had a simple answer for the maid. "No." She writes that Pope John was largely unknown upon his selection and arrived as an outsider. He was, in the words of her title, a true Christian living in the spirit of Jesus Christ. In a sense, this was so surprising in the midst of the 20th century that no one had imagined it to be possible, and the Good Pope John was selected without anyone knowing who he was. On the day of Pope John XXIII's Sainthood, it is worth revisiting Arendt's full review.
The Human Factor—Hannah Arendt
Taking Hannah Arendt's quote, "There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous," as its starting point, the Canadian Public Radio show Ideas with Paul Kennedy explores Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. The program features Roger Berkowitz, Adam Gopnik, Adam Kirsch, and Rivka Galchen. The conversation was heated at times, but overall offers a good account of Arendt's book, her thoughts on thinking, and the reason her thought matters. Take some time to listen to program.
Patricia Lockwood, at the Poetry Foundation blog, seems to be tired of being asked if poetry is work: "IS it work, though? The question persists. Is a single muscle exerted during the process? Do you sweat at all, besides the weird thing that sometimes happens under your right arm because you haven't lifted it up for 8 hours? Do you get to retire after you work at it faithfully for 50 years? The answers are no, no, and no. Can anyone fire a poet? Only Death can fire a poet." She is, of course, making a joke. For Arendt, though, poetry, and art more generally, is in fact work. Indeed, making art may be the last vestige of work in a world where the primary activity of life has become the repetitive, never ending, activity of consumption, in which nothing is left behind and all labor seeks only to further the process of consumption. Poetry, and painting, and art are outliers in the modern world to the extent they leave something behind and resist the process of consumption.
"So far, the year 2014 has been a tumultuous one, as geopolitical rivalries have stormed back to center stage. Whether it is Russian forces seizing Crimea, China making aggressive claims in its coastal waters, Japan responding with an increasingly assertive strategy of its own, or Iran trying to use its alliances with Syria and Hezbollah to dominate the Middle East, old-fashioned power plays are back in international relations." Walter Russell Mead believes that geopolitics, never really gone, is back for good: "Westerners should never have expected old-fashioned geopolitics to go away. They did so only because they fundamentally misread what the collapse of the Soviet Union meant: the ideological triumph of liberal capitalist democracy over communism, not the obsolescence of hard power. China, Iran, and Russia never bought into the geopolitical settlement that followed the Cold War, and they are making increasingly forceful attempts to overturn it. That process will not be peaceful, and whether or not the revisionists succeed, their efforts have already shaken the balance of power and changed the dynamics of international politics.
On the occasion of the publication of a biography of the author, Hermione Lee describes what John Updike was up to: "As he said of himself... he is the artist of middleness, ordinariness, in-betweenness, who famously wanted 'to give the mundane its beautiful due.' For over half a century-even though his own life moved far away from 'middleness';-he transformed everyday America into lavishly eloquent and observant language. This-even more than his virtuoso writing about sex, his close readings of adultery and husbandly guilt, his tracking of American social politics, his philosophizing on time and the universe-is his great signature tune. No wonder that some of the narrators in his stories are archaeologists, or that he's so interested in vanished cities, ancient civilizations, and extinct species."
On the 450th birthday of William Shakespeare, Bob Duggan remembers that what are understood as his great contributions now were not his most well known plays during his life: "During Shakespeare's own lifetime he was known best as the "honey-tongued" poet of such works as Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, in which he used classical and ancient characters to his own artistic purposes as well as practical purposes of making money during the plague-forced theater closures of 1593-1594. Readers literally read published copies of these works to pieces, making surviving copies extremely rare today. People went to see the plays, of course, but the emphasis of the theaters was on making money as much as making art."
Eric Hoover, in an essay about the ways that colleges and universities may begin to evaluate students, describes one measure designed to quantify the information in a recommendation: "Motivated by such findings, the Educational Training Service developed an online rating tool called the Personal Potential Index. Designed to quantify what's conveyed in a recommendation, it asks past instructors to rate students on a five-point scale in six categories: communication skills, ethics and integrity, knowledge and creativity, planning and organization, resilience, and teamwork. To gauge resilience, for instance, respondents are asked to what extent a student 'accepts feedback without getting defensive; works well under stress; can overcome challenges and setbacks; works extremely hard'. Recommenders can type in comments to elaborate on their ratings, if they choose." Adding comments, of course, is not the same thing as real qualitative assessment; perhaps, instead of attempting to replace the tests, institutions of higher education should abandon that requirement altogether, and instead evaluate students as students, rather than as data.
From The Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog we revisit Tracy Strong's Quote of the Week on "Thinking Without Bannisters." And in the Weekend Read, Roger Berkowitz looks at the relation of race, democracy, and the constitution in Schuette decision.
Amor Mundi 1/26/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt asks after the "elements" of totalitarianism, those fundamental building blocks that made possible an altogether new and horrific form of government. The two structural elements she locates are the emergence of a new ideological form of Antisemitism and the rise of transnational imperialist movements, which gives the structure to Part One (Antisemitism) and Part Two (Imperialism) of her book. Underlying both Antisemitism and Imperialism, however, is what Arendt calls "metaphysical loneliness." Totalitarian government, Arendt writes, "bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man." In a world of individualism in which the human bonds of religion, family, clan, and nation are increasingly seen as arbitrary, tenuous, and weak, so that individuals people find themselves uprooted, redundant, and superfluous. "Metaphysical loneliness," Arendt writes, is the "basic experience" of modern society that is "the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the breakdown of political institutions and social traditions in our own time." The question underlying so much of Arendt's work is how to respond to what she calls "the break in tradition," the fact that the political, social, and intellectual traditions that bound people together in publically meaningful institutions and networks have frayed beyond repair. The customs and traditions that for millennia were the unspoken common sense of peoples can no longer be presumed. How to make life meaningful, how to inure individuals from the seduction of ideological movements that lend weight to their meaningless lives? If metaphysical loneliness is the basic experiences of modern life, then it is not surprising that great modern literature would struggle with the agony of such disconnection and seek to articulate paths of reconnection. That, indeed, is the thesis of Wyatt Mason's essay "Make This Not True," in this week's New York Review of Books. Modern fiction, Mason argues, struggles to answer the question: How can we live and die and not be alone? There are, he writes, at least three paradigmatic answers, represented alternatively by three of the greatest contemporary writers, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and George Saunders. Reviewing Saunders Tenth of September (a 2012 finalist for the National Book Award), Mason writes suggests an important link between Saunder's Buddhism and his writing: "In Buddhist practice, through sitting meditation, the mind may be schooled in the way of softness, openness, expansiveness. This imaginative feat—of being able to live these ideas—is one of enormous subtlety. What makes Saunders's work unique is not its satirical verve or its fierce humor but its unfathomable capacity to dramatize, in story form, the life-altering teachings of such a practice. … [I]f fiction is to continue to exert an influence over a culture that finds it ever easier to connect, however frailly, to the world around them through technology, Saunders's stories suggest that the ambition to connect outwardly isn't the only path we can choose. Rather, his fiction shows us that the path to reconciliation with our condition is inward, a journey we must make alone."
Ai Weiwei describes what he thinks Internet access has done for his home country: "the Internet is the best thing that ever happened to China." If Mason and Saunders (see above) worry that technology magnifies the loneliness of modern mass society, Ai Weiwei argues that the World Wide Web "turns us into individuals and also enables us to share our perceptions and feelings. It creates a culture of individualism and exchange even though the real society doesn't promote it. There isn't a single Chinese university that can invite me to give a talk. Even though I know there are many students who would like to hear what I have to say."
In an interview about art, politics, and the intersection between the two, Sudanese poet Mamoun Eltlib describes a revolution for those who have rejected the political: "When you come to politicians now, people don't really care about them, because they find out it's just a chair or election problem between them. It's not about them as Sudanese. So when you do something for the people without asking them to vote for you or elect you or to do anything, just to make a very beautiful, attractive program, they respond. I was in Doha for a conference for three days, to solve the problem in Sudan. They brought all the intellectuals and the writers and the thinkers from the political parties and from the rebel groups and from the government itself, as well as independent writers like me and Faisal, and they made this paper called, 'Loving Your Enemy Through Culture,' because I was saying that we don't just need to change the people, we need to change the politicians. If we really want to fight now, we have just one way, the cultural way."
In Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville argues that the American brand of religion—strong on morality while permissive on rituals and dogma—is deeply important to liberal democracy. While democracy imagines political and civil liberties, religion maintains a "civic religion" that privileges moral consensus over dogmatism provides a common core of moral belief even amongst a plurality of faiths and sects. Under this view, the continued religiosity of Americans especially in comparison to the irreligiosity of Europeans is an important part ingredient in the American experience of democracy. With this in mind, consider this snippet from Megan Hustad's memoir More Than Conquerors. Hustad talks about growing up in a missionary household, and how her father is coping with changes he sees happening around him: "Thanks be to God, my parents would say. Thanks to my ability to take care of myself, I would say. My father knows I choose to fill my time with people for whom Christianity is an outmoded concept, a vestigial cultural tail humanity would be better off losing. He knows most of my friends are of the opinion that the country would be better off without people who think like he does. His new status as cultural relic bothers him. He finds it ironic that moral relativists temporarily misplace their relativism when talk turns to Jesus. He doesn't like how "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" are so often conflated in news reports and in opinion pieces, as if there were no shadows between them. It seems to him more evidence that the United States is becoming a post-Christian society like England and much of Europe before it. Used to be, he remembers, one didn't have to explain the contours of faith. Billy Graham appeared on prime-time television. Everyone in this country, he remembered, knew what faith was for."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Roger Berkowitz explores the literary responses to loneliness in the writing of George Saunders via Wyatt Mason. Jeffrey Champlin discusses how Arendt read Adam Smith.
Loneliness and Expansive Writing
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt asks after the "elements" of totalitarianism, those fundamental building blocks that made possible an altogether new and horrific form of government. The two structural elements she locates are the emergence of a new ideological form of Antisemitism and the rise of transnational imperialist movements, which gives the structure to her book: Part One (Antisemitism) and Part Two (Imperialism) lead into Part Three (Totalitarianism). Underlying both Antisemitism and Imperialism is what Arendt calls metaphysical rootlessness and metaphysical loneliness.
Totalitarian government, Arendt writes, "bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man." The loneliness of modern humanity is multifaceted. It is "closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the breakdown of political institutions and social traditions in our own time." The image of the factory worker laboring repetitively on a conveyor belt is forever associated with Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. In his 1950 classic The Lonely Crowd, David Reisman describes how middle class Americans had lost their meaningful connections to religion, to class, and to family. They take their values increasingly from a mass culture and they become malleable and subject to the influence of propaganda and advertising.
"Metaphysical rootlessness," Arendt argues, is both the "basic experience" of modern society and also the generative impulse behind ideological racisms (which Arendt distinguishes from older non-scientific versions of racism). Without a core of personal and collective identity, the lonely mass man is "the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims." Racism is based in hatred of a world in which lonely and rootless people are confronted with their meaninglessness, their belonging to no place, and their superfluousness. It is these masses that seek to build an imaginary and coherent togetherness based on race. Thus is rootlessness characteristic of all racism and all totalitarianism.
In her most pregnant attempt at a definition of totalitarianism, Arendt writes: "Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated, individuals." Totalitarianism depends upon "the masses [who] grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class." Shorn of family and national and class connection, the modern atomized individual becomes a mass man. "The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships."
The question underlying so much of Arendt's work is how to respond to what she calls "the break in tradition," the fact that the political, social, and intellectual traditions that bound people together in publically meaningful institutions and networks have frayed beyond repair. The customs and traditions that for millennia were the unspoken common sense of peoples can no longer be presumed. Stripped of these meaningful institutions of transcendence, mass men turn to racism or consumerism to give their lives meaning. Both are dangerous in different ways. Arendt ask repeatedly, how are we to make life meaningful, how are we to inure individuals from the seduction of ideological movements that lend weight to their meaningless lives?
If metaphysical loneliness is the basic experiences of modern life, then it is not surprising that great modern literature would struggle with the agony of such disconnection and seek to articulate paths of reconnection. That, indeed, is the thesis of Wyatt Mason's essay "Make This Not True," in this week's New York Review of Books. Modern fiction, Mason argues, struggles to answer the question: How can we live and die and not be alone?
In the guise of a review of George Saunders Tenth of September (a 2012 finalist for the National Book Award), Mason suggests at least three paradigmatic answers to this question "How do I die?" The answers are represented alternatively by three of the greatest contemporary writers, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Saunders. In brief, Wallace combats the loneliness and inattention of the distracted masses by writing prose that is so seductively difficult that it demands attentiveness and thus membership in a community of readers. Franzen seeks the antidote to loneliness in palpable scenes of connection amidst the wreckages of modern relationships. For both Wallace and Franzen, connection is to be found in the cultivation of quintessentially modern relationships.
Saunders is notable for pursing a different path through the wilderness of contemporary isolation. Instead of external connections, Saunders is a master of the inward journey we must make alone. For Mason, there is an important link between Saunder's Buddhism and his writing:
In Buddhist practice, through sitting meditation, the mind may be schooled in the way of softness, openness, expansiveness. This imaginative feat—of being able to live these ideas—is one of enormous subtlety. What makes Saunders's work unique is not its satirical verve or its fierce humor but its unfathomable capacity to dramatize, in story form, the life-altering teachings of such a practice. … [I]f fiction is to continue to exert an influence over a culture that finds it ever easier to connect, however frailly, to the world around them through technology, Saunders's stories suggest that the ambition to connect outwardly isn't the only path we can choose. Rather, his fiction shows us that the path to reconciliation with our condition is inward, a journey we must make alone.
Mason's essay is subtle and profound. It is your weekend read. And if you have the time, read Saunders' masterful short story, "The Falls", which Mason discusses at length in his essay. Best of all, order Tenth of December. I spent a few rapturous days reading Saunders' stories this summer. They can warm your January as well.
Amor Mundi 1/5/14
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 Missing NSA Debate About Capitalism
Hero or traitor? That is the debate The New York Times wants about Edward Snowden. But the deeper question is what, if anything, will change? Evgeny Morozov has a strong essay in The Financial Times: "Mr. Snowden created an opening for a much-needed global debate that could have highlighted many of these issues. Alas, it has never arrived. The revelations of the US's surveillance addiction were met with a rather lacklustre, one-dimensional response. Much of this overheated rhetoric - tinged with anti-Americanism and channelled into unproductive forms of reform - has been useless." The basic truth is that "No laws and tools will protect citizens who, inspired by the empowerment fairy tales of Silicon Valley, are rushing to become data entrepreneurs, always on the lookout for new, quicker, more profitable ways to monetise their own data - be it information about their shopping or copies of their genome. These citizens want tools for disclosing their data, not guarding it.... What eludes Mr. Snowden - along with most of his detractors and supporters - is that we might be living through a transformation in how capitalism works, with personal data emerging as an alternative payment regime. The benefits to consumers are already obvious; the potential costs to citizens are not. As markets in personal information proliferate, so do the externalities - with democracy the main victim. This ongoing transition from money to data is unlikely to weaken the clout of the NSA; on the contrary, it might create more and stronger intermediaries that can indulge its data obsession. So to remain relevant and have some political teeth, the surveillance debate must be linked to debates about capitalism - or risk obscurity in the highly legalistic ghetto of the privacy debate."
Considering the Fourth Amendment implications of the recent Federal injunction on the NSA's domestic spying program, David Cole notes something important about the world we're living in: "The reality of life in the digital age is that virtually everything you do leaves a trace that is shared with a third party-your Internet service provider, phone company, credit card company, or bank. Short of living off the grid, you don't have a choice in the matter. If you use a smartphone, you are signaling your whereabouts at all times, and sharing with your phone provider a track record of your thoughts, interests, and desires. Technological innovations have made it possible for all of this information to be collected, stored, and analyzed by computers in ways that were impossible even a decade ago. Should the mere existence of this information make it freely searchable by the NSA, without any basis for suspicion?"
Jason Kottke thinks that the blog is no longer the most important new media form: "The primary mode for the distribution of links has moved from the loosely connected network of blogs to tightly integrated services like Facebook and Twitter. If you look at the incoming referers to a site like BuzzFeed, you'll see tons of traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Pinterest but not a whole lot from blogs, even in the aggregate. For the past month at kottke.org, 14 percent of the traffic came from referrals compared to 30 percent from social, and I don't even work that hard on optimizing for social media. Sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy aren't seeking traffic from blogs anymore. Even the publicists clogging my inbox with promotional material urge me to 'share this on my social media channels' rather than post it to my blog." Of course, it may be the case that the blog form remains deeply important, but only for those blogs that people visit regularly and then distribute through social media. The major blogs are more powerful and popular than ever. What we are learning is that not everyone is a blogger.
Ta-Nehisi Coates explains why he's frustrated about the way we're having the conversation about paternity leave: "So rather than hear about the stigma men feel in terms of taking care of kids, I'd like for men to think more about the stigma that women feel when they're trying to build a career and a family. And then measure whatever angst they're feeling against the real systemic forces that devalue the labor of women. I think that's what's at the root of much of this: When some people do certain work we cheer. When others do it we yawn. I appreciated the hosannas when I was strolling down Flatbush, but I doubt the female electrician walking down the same street got the same treatment."
The Professional Palate Unmasked
Breaking a tradition of his profession, New York magazine restaurant critic Adam Platt has decided to reveal his face. During his explanation, he stakes a claim for the continued importance of the critic in the digital age: "So is there still room for the steady (and, yes, sometimes weary) voice of the professional in a world where everyone's a critic? Of course there is. This is especially true in the theatrical realm of restaurants, where the quality and enjoyment of your dinner can vary dramatically depending on where you sit, what time of day you eat, how long the restaurant has been open, and what you happened to order. Anonymity would be nice, but it's always been less important than a sturdy gut and a settled palate. Most important of all, however, is a healthy expense account, because if a critic's employer allows for enough paid visits to a particular restaurant, even the most elaborately simpering treatment won't change his or her point of view."
Hannah Arendt on Education and Excellence
"Neither education nor ingenuity nor talent can replace the constituent elements of the public realm, which make it the proper place for human excellence."
-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
I am proud to attend a college that envisions education as a life devoted to intellectual excellence. I am also proud of the fact that the school promotes a genuine love for knowledge and ideas and not simply what is practical and useful. It is easy to believe that education represents the peak of human excellence. And I have experienced few joys in my education as deeply as that of reading Hannah Arendt.
What a surprise, therefore, to see that Hannah Arendt writes that education and ingenuity are not and have never been the proper place for the display of human excellence. Arendt writes that excellence is found only in the public realm, that space to which "excellence has always been assigned." Educational achievements—for example learnedness and scholarship—are important for students, but have nothing to do with excellence. But what does Arendt mean by human excellence? And why does it require a public realm? More to the point of modern debates, why is education not the proper locus of excellence?
Education is one of the elementary and necessary human activities. The word education comes from the Latin verbs educare (to mold) and educere (to lead out). To teach and educate is to take a human being in the process of becoming and lead him or her out of the confines of the home into the world, into his or her community. Formal education, Arendt argues in The Crisis in Education, is the time when schools and teachers assume the responsibility for "what we generally call the free development of characteristic qualities and talents." This is the stage in the educational development of the student in which he or she is not only introduced to the world, but when he or she becomes freely and spontaneously acquainted with those qualities that make one unique and further refined as a person.
It is also in school that we learn what human excellence is and the conditions in which human excellence is properly displayed. Human excellence, Arendt argues, is what the ancient Greeks called arête and the Roman virtus. The concepts of arete and virtus were always used by the ancients to denote the good and distinctive qualities embodied by those who performed in public. Drawing upon these concepts, Arendt argues that human excellence is a public act that manifests what she calls "inspiring principles," e.g, prudence, justice, and courage, qualities of conduct that allow one to excel and distinguish oneself from all others.
Unlike the realm of the school, where one is expected only to learn and develop the characteristics used to make these principles manifest, the public realm demands that one act and embody excellence. It is our capacities for speech and action that allows for this display of excellence to be distinctively human. Arendt argues that only "in acting and speaking, [do] men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identity and thus make their appearance in the human world." In contrast to education, which is concerned with the development of talents and virtues of the developing human being, in the political realm, these talents and virtues are fully developed and displayed.
Schools for Arendt are neither public nor private but "the institutions that we interpose between the private domain of home and the world in order to make the transition from the family to the world." Schools are hidden from the world, as are the activities through which the student first displays his or her qualities and talents. Schools offer the student "the security of concealment in order to mature undisturbed." But in order to achieve excellence, action needs an audience, a stage, a public realm where these characteristics can be properly manifested and properly received. Activities completed in school hide these characteristics and nurture the creative process, in contrast to those performed public, which always display the virtuosity, the excellence inherent in action.
The public realm is also the space of equality, which is alien to schools. In schools, the teacher is the authoritative figure, the one who knows the world, and in order to teach it, deference to authority is required. Arendt argues that this responsibility of authority is given to the educator because the educator not only knows the world but also belongs and acts in it. In the school, the educator acts as a representative of that world by "pointing out the details and saying to the child: this is our world." Once the student knows the world and assumes responsibility for it, he or she can go into the world and act virtuously, display human excellence and start something new, which could potentially change it. This is why Arendt argues that school is not the "proper place" to display excellence, to act, and create something new. The ability to be excellent—to act, and to start something new—demands responsibility for the world. In education, this responsibility takes the form of authority, which is why it is given to the educator, and not to the student.
This does not mean, however, that Arendt is against changing the world; she is against changing it by disturbing the activity of education. Change, the new, is a phenomenon of the political realm, an activity performed among equal and fully-grown human beings. For Arendt, the "conservative function" that preserves traditions and the status quo in education comes to an end in the political realm. This conservative attitude in politics, she says, can only lead to destruction. As she explains: "because the world is made by mortals it wears out; and because it continuously changes its inhabitants it runs the risk of becoming as mortal as they. To preserve the world from the mortality of its creators and inhabitants it must be constantly set right anew." Arendt maintains that to act and to change the world is expected of those who get educated and enter the community of adults and the political world.
As an immigrant student, I was surprised by the extraordinary commitment of my peers to be excellent. The dream of greatness and the desire for changing the world is also common among armchair "politicians" in academia. This ever-present enthusiasm for changing the world in academia is natural, especially if one believes to be living the true life of excellence. This desire, at times overconfident or even arrogant, is particular to Americans, not only in academia but also in every other sphere of life, and arises from what Arendt calls the "indefinite perfectibility" spirit that characterizes Americans.
At a place like Bard College, most students I come in contact with trade insights and debate about what has to be changed on a daily basis. This constant craving for the new and their commitment to excellence uplifts my spirit and has stirred in me the desire to do great things as well; this is very inspiring. Yet, we are still students and Bard or any other educational institution is not the public world, and, as Arendt argues, "it must not pretend to be." Bard represents the sphere where we are welcomed to and learn about the world from educators, so that one day we can change it, hopefully through human acts that embody excellence.
School for Arendt is where we learn and decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and renew it or watch it fall as a victim of our very own condition of mortality. In order to change the world, one has to love and understand it. For Arendt, one has to learn to love the world, whether ones wishes to propagate and preserve it or to set it entirely anew; love of the world for her is what constitutes the world because it "fits me into it," it allows one to 'under-stand,' to grasp while being in the midst of things. The world has to be constantly renewed but this can only happen once we leave the concealment of the classroom and acquire the courage to enter the political realm.
-Angel Arias
Here's How to Demonize Thinking
Richard Brody writes of "Hannah Arendt," the new movie by Margarethe von Trotta, "The movie, unfortunately, doesn't do Arendt justice"—a rhetorical gambit that suggests at least a fair-minded inquiry into Arendt's thought. But Brody then proceeds to accuse Arendt of a propensity toward "monstrous abstractions." Her tendency toward abstraction occurs despite what Brody calls "her meticulous pileup of facts," which has such "a terrifying, implacable, unbearable power" as to render her book "overwhelming, incommensurable, alien to human experience." Brody repeats the widespread error that Arendt accepts "at face value" Eichmann's claim not to be an anti-Semite. Arendt, Brody writes, misses the "mystery, ambiguity, vastness, complexity, and horror" of the Eichmann trial. Arendt and von Trotta, Brody writes in a synthesis of reality and fiction, both make "the same mistake" of setting up "'thinking'" as a special category of activity." Arendt, pace Brody, "writes from the point of view of a philosopher, not of a journalist"—as if that critique explains her mistake in thinking that "thinking" might be important. The only half-positive sentence about Arendt comes in the last line where he concedes: "From [Arendt's] philosophical, historical, and journalistic failures, Arendt created an accidental literary masterwork despite itself." If von Trotta's movie doesn't do Arendt justice, one wonders what Brody would think necessary for the movie to do her justice.
He tells us. To do Arendt justice, von Trotta should have focused on "giving small gestures and daily labors grand scope." He actually says that Arendt should be more ridiculous and less dignified: "Von Trotta preserves Arendt's dignity to the point of dehumanization, depriving the protagonist of any trait that could render her ridiculous." He insists on seeing more of her regular life with family and friends, after acknowledging that von Trotta's movie does offer a balanced insight into the importance of Arendt's friends in her life. The implication is we want more gossip and less thinking, a portrayal of the chatty girlish Hannah rather than the austere chain smoker. Aside from the misogyny in such a statement about one of the great thinkers of the 20th century who happened to have been a woman, Brody here exhibits his fundamental lack of understanding of all things concerning Arendt. For Arendt was not the least bit interested in "small gestures and daily labors." She was a thinker of surprising and unexpected deeds that, she argued, can only be measured by their greatness. Nothing chatty here.
What galls Brody above all is that a serious movie is made about a serious thinker that takes seriously precisely what is unique (for better or worse) about Arendt—her insistence on being different and apart. Arendt called herself an "intentional pariah," someone who sought freedom and independence by standing aloof from society. Brody finds such moral seriousness silly and Arendt's insistence on self-thinking brings forth his disdain for what he dismisses as the false "gleaming nobility of the life of the mind" that diverts us from the truth of "the turmoil of regular life." Von Trotta's movie, with the extraordinary assistance of Barbara Sukowa's acting, nails this most essential characteristic of Arendt's persona to perfection. For that achievement of cinematic, biographical, and intellectual fidelity, Brody skewers both von Trotta and Arendt. The exploration of uniqueness is apparently something Brody cannot abide.
The absolute low point of his rejection of Arendt's idea of thinking comes when he expresses through multiple examples his complete discomfort with thinking itself. As A.O. Scott and others including myself have argued, the genius of von Trotta's movie is the setting to screen not a theory of thinking, but the act itself. For Brody, this is no accomplishment. This is because for him thinking is nothing special. Thinking, he argues, is banal. It is, as he writes, commonplace and, in the end, common. Thus thinking and showing thinking both are easy: "Actually, the work of thinking is easy, almost effortless, to show—it's what almost every movie is made of."
To bring home his point, Brody offers six links to putative examples of thinking on display in movies. The first is to an actress peeling a potato for 150 seconds, an exercise in the profundity of mundane life. The second extols the virtue of killing and violence for masculinity. The third, from Murnau's silent "The Last Laugh," shows Max Schreck in emotional agony. The fourth, from "Bringing up Baby," has Katharine Hepburn tricking Cary Grant into coming over and helping her with a leopard. You get the idea. There is no thinking going on in these scenes. That is apparently Brody point: thinking doesn't exist except in the most mundane and calculating of ways.
Brody's antipathy to the act of thinking is flagrant. He writes: "The movie's sanctimonious depiction of "thinking" as something greater than what the regular run of people do is one of the signs of its artistic failure." But Brody's defense of the common man is misplaced, for Arendt in no ways denies that run of the mill people can think. On the contrary, she imagines that uneducated people raised with traditions and character are frequently more thoughtful than intellectuals. Those trained in ideas and abstractions are uniquely susceptible to the power of rationalization and the sway of ideologies in ways that those relying on common sense are not.
That everyone can think does not mean that we all do. Thinking, Arendt insists, is rare. It is fundamentally distinguished from reasoning. It is not the same as calculating. It is also not the same as being creative, intelligent, inventive or smart. Thinkers are not necessarily intellectuals. Above all, thinkers are distinguished from "problem solvers," those educated persons of "great self-confidence" who are uncommonly adept at convincing themselves of their infallibility. Thinking doubts and puts up obstacles. Its primary effect is to raise questions rather than offering answers.
We need to understand that by thinking Arendt means something specific. Thinking means, above all, Selbstdenken—an untranslatable German word for "self-thinking," or thinking for oneself. It is the act of having a conversation with oneself in which one acknowledges the basic moral premise that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. Such thinking is free from social conventions, clichés, and oversimplifications. Thinking is also quite distinct from social science, which seeks answers precisely in the kind of normalization of unique actions that thinking rebels against. Only thinking, Arendt argued, has the potential to remind us of our human dignity and free us to resist our servility. Such thinking, in Arendt's view, cannot be taught: it can only be exemplified.
We cannot learn thinking through catechism or study. We learn thinking only through experience, when we are inspired by those whose thinking enthralls us—when we encounter someone who stands apart from the crowd.
Brody's review dismisses Arendt's understanding of thinking with an unknowing wave of his hand. He reduces thinking to an emotional scream—like the agony on Shreck's face— or cunning—Hepburn knocking over a tea set and pretending a leopard is attacking her. Brody doesn't much like thinking and finds it pretentious and overly intellectual. So he makes fun of those who strive to write or make films about thinking, calling what he won't understand "soft-core philosophical porn."
At another point, Brody cites interviews with Claude Lanzmann to raise questions about Arendt's portrayals of the Jewish leaders who collaborated or cooperated with the Nazis during the war. There are legitimate disagreements one can have with Arendt on this issue, and von Trotta's film gives these opposing views full voice, something a reader of Brody's review would never learn. In the film two of Arendt's dearest friends turn away from her and Hans Jonas lambasts her for unfeeling arrogance in refusing to see the moral and practical tragedies of Jewish leaders during the war. Jonas is right to point to Arendt's arrogance, and von Trotta confronts that arrogance head on, leaving it to the viewer to decide whether such independence is called for. Jonas' critique of his friend is more blistering—and more insightful—than anything Brody might add.
Hannah Arendt was neither a saint nor infallible. She may in the end be wrong about the power of thinking to save or dissuade people from doing evil. Neither I nor the Arendt Center has an interest in holding her on a pedestal. The Center regularly publishes posts and essays critical of her work; on our blog you can find a collection of reviews of "Hannah Arendt," the movie, with critical reviews that raise meaningful questions about both her and the movie. I have no problem with criticizing Arendt intelligently. Such criticism, however, demands some baby steps toward taking Arendt seriously. Brody merely crawls around throwing sand.
You can read Brody's review here.