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Amor Mundi 2/28/16
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.
Could It Happen Here?
In an essay in the Washington Post, Danielle Allen invokes Hannah Arendt to suggest that we must speak out about the danger Donald Trump poses to constitutional democracy. "Like any number of us raised in the late 20th century, I have spent my life perplexed about exactly how Hitler could have come to power in Germany. Watching Donald Trump's rise, I now understand. Leave aside whether a direct comparison of Trump to Hitler is accurate. That is not my point. My point rather is about how a demagogic opportunist can exploit a divided country. To understand the rise of Hitler and the spread of Nazism, I have generally relied on the German-Jewish émigré philosopher Hannah Arendt and her arguments about the banality of evil. Somehow people can understand themselves as 'just doing their job,' yet act as cogs in the wheel of a murderous machine. Arendt also offered a second answer in a small but powerful book called 'Men in Dark Times.' In this book, she described all those who thought that Hitler's rise was a terrible thing but chose 'internal exile,' or staying invisible and out of the way as their strategy for coping with the situation. They knew evil was evil, but they too facilitated it, by departing from the battlefield out of a sense of hopelessness." Allen knows that Trump is not the same as Hitler. Hitler had written an ideological and racist book calling for the rise of an Aryan nation and the expulsion and murder of the Jews; Trump, on the other hand, is seemingly non-ideological. But Allen does rightly see that Trump is dangerous insofar as he seems to have no respect for limits to his power, whether those limits are civil or constitutional. "Donald Trump has no respect for the basic rights that are the foundation of constitutional democracy, nor for the requirements of decency necessary to sustain democratic citizenship. Nor can any democracy survive without an expectation that the people require reasonable arguments that bring the truth to light, and Trump has nothing but contempt for our intelligence." As first Chris Christie and now Maine Governor Paul LePage endorse Trump, it is clear that Trump is breaking down the resistance of the Republican establishment. While evangelical leaders are on record saying they will not support Trump if he is the nominee, establishment Republicans seem prepared to accept Trump as their standard-bearer.
Allen's essay was met with a barrage of ugliness on social media. In an update Allen published, she reproduces dozens of tweets she received. Everyone should read these tweets simply to recognize the racist and anti-Semitic boorishness pulsing within Donald Trumps supporters--if not Trump himself. One tweet from DMT Trump Wizard goes "You cannot stop Donald Trump. White people are going to stop hating themselves and there is nothing you can do to stop it." Another from War & Peace (an insult to Tolstoy) reads: "Jewish ancestry? 40%? 50%?" Another says, "You would be working a McDonalds if it wasn't for affirmative action. What exactly are you bringing to the country?" The same person then attaches an anti-Semitic cartoon and writes, "I smell a jew." Someone named Paul Harris asks, "why do third world people come to European ancestry countries to paracite of us? Why has the third world never created anything." An exceedingly angry racist named Theodore Bundy sends multiple tweets including: "imagine, no more affirmative action. How will you get a job? This PC shit has destroyed a once great nation." One writes, "My jewdar just went beep. Does the affirmative action negress have a bit of jew inside. No breaks on Trump train. Soz." Aristides writes, "I can't wait to see the look on your primitive monkey faces when the GOD-EMPEROR takes his throne. Go back to Africa posthaste." And adds: "Wow, you are one butt-ugly n---er. Your face makes me sick to my stomach. Please gas yourself." Ok, these tweets go on and on. Many are worse and call for Allen's death. You should read them also to remind yourselves that speaking publicly takes courage.
Is Donald Trump racist and anti-Semitic? One can't blame Trump or anyone for the opinions of his supporters. But when so many Trump supporters are so vocally racist and anti-Semitic, Trump owes it to himself and to the American people to publicly reject those vile opinions. That is a what someone must do if he aspires to be the leader of a multi-ethic and pluralistic democratic country. Not only has Trump not done so, but he has fanned the flames. Twice now he has retweeted tweets from members of white-supremacist groups, one of whose Twitter handle is @WhiteGenocideTM and whose profile tagline reads, "Get the f--- out of my country." Trump's attacks on President Obama, his birther comments, his questioning of Ted Cruz's citizenship, and his demonizing of Mexicans and Muslims have contributed to an atmosphere of hate that enables such racial attacks.
None of this means Trump himself is racist. He certainly does not pedal a consistent ideological racism of supremacy as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did. There is little to suggest that Trump would attack the laws guaranteeing equal voting rights or question the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Rather, Trump is responding at least in part to decades of repressed anger where many Americans have been told they can not speak their minds, express their feelings, or state their opinion. A dishonest and calculated political correctness has enabled Trump to appear as a liberator by unleashing a pent-up anger that is a result of a political culture that has prohibited people from saying what they believe. One real and meaningful attraction of Trump's campaign is his refusal to self-censor and his embrace of an honest if also low-class and boorish racial anger. Trump as President would likely make the USA a less tolerant and more hateful and angry country. Such a cultural transformation very well could happen here, and it is, of course, dangerous.
But the real danger of a Trump presidency may lie elsewhere. After Trump's victory in Nevada, he hammered home his main them: Grab as much as you can. "Now we're going to get greedy for the United States we're going to grab and grab and grab. We're going to bring in so much money and so much everything. We're going to make America great again, folks, I'm telling you folks we're going to make America great again." What Trump hates is politics, the collective striving after common ideals of democracy and justice. What he loves about America is simply its promise of abundance, not its tradition of self-government. Freedom for Trump is not the Arendtian freedom to act and speak in public in ways that matter; it is the freedom to get rich and plaster one's name on buildings and reality television shows.
Alongside Trump's contempt for politics is his dismissal of the rule of law. He threatens to ban Muslims, to bring back water boarding, and to kill family members of the Islamic State, which are all violations of either international or U.S. Law. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said recently on "Real Time With Bill Maher" that the US military should and would refuse to carry out such illegal orders if Trump as Commander-in-Chief were to issue them. Trump's contempt for the law and all political and civil limits is part and parcel of his disdain for politics and all limits on what works.
No doubt Trump's pragmatic and greedy America is part of America. But it is not the whole or even the best of the American tradition, a tradition that has its roots in Alexander Hamilton's expressed hope in the first of the Federalist Papers that the United States would stand not for economic liberty but for political freedom: "It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, to decide by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force." As corrupt as our political system is, the answer cannot be to simply demean and dismiss the nobility of our democratic and constitutional traditions. The danger Trump truly poses is that he seems to care only about the idea of America as a land of milk and honey and to have forgotten or simply dismissed the idea of America as a land of political liberty. And he seems ready, able, and willing to tear down our corrupt political structures with no plan or idea of how they would be rebuilt or re-imagined. Creative destruction is a classic axiom of capitalist innovation, but it rarely works so well in democratic politics. --RB
Make 'em Laugh
Mark Steyn comes as close to anyone in understanding both the appeal and the danger Trump represents. In a long and rambling account of his experience attending a Trump rally in Burlington, Vermont, Steyn writes: "And then the announcement: 'Ladies and gentlemen, the next President of the United States, Donald J Trump...' ~THE SHOW: He's very good at this. Very good. On the same day as Trump's speech, Peter Shumlin, the colorless dullard serving as Vermont's governor, came to the State House in Montpelier to deliver his 'State of the State' address. He required two prompters so he could do the Obama swivel-head like a guy with good seats at Wimbledon following the world's slowest centre-court rally. Two prompters! In the Vermont legislature! And for the same old generic boilerplate you forget as soon as you've heard it. Trump has no prompters. He walks out, pulls a couple of pieces of folded paper from his pocket, and then starts talking. Somewhere in there is the germ of a stump speech, but it would bore him to do the same poll-tested focus-grouped thing night after night, so he basically riffs on whatever's on his mind. This can lead to some odd juxtapositions: One minute he's talking about the Iran deal, the next he detours into how Macy's stock is in the toilet since they dumped Trump ties. But in a strange way it all hangs together: It's both a political speech, and a simultaneous running commentary on his own campaign. It's also hilarious. I've seen no end of really mediocre shows at the Flynn in the last quarter-century, and I would have to account this the best night's entertainment I've had there with the exception of the great jazz singer Dianne Reeves a few years back. He's way funnier than half the stand-up acts I've seen at the Juste pour rires comedy festival a couple of hours north in Montreal. And I can guarantee that he was funnier than any of the guys trying their hand at Trump Improv night at the Vermont Comedy Club a couple of blocks away. He has a natural comic timing. Just to be non-partisan about this, the other day I was listening to Obama's gun-control photo-op at the White House, and he thanked Gabby Giffords, by explaining that her husband Mark's brother is an astronaut in outer space and he'd called just before Mark's last meeting at the White House but, not wishing to disturb the President, Mark didn't pick up. 'Which made me feel kind of bad,' said the President. 'That's a long-distance call.' As I was driving along, I remember thinking how brilliantly Obama delivered that line. He's not usually generous to others and he's too thin-skinned to be self-deprecating with respect to himself, but, when he wants to get laughs, he knows how to do it. Trump's is a different style: He's looser, and more freewheeling. He's not like Jeb - he doesn't need writers, and scripted lines; he has a natural instinct for where the comedy lies. He has a zest for the comedy of life. To be sure, some of the gags can be a little - what's the word? - mean-spirited. The performance was interrupted by knots of protesters. 'Throw 'em out!' barked Trump, after the first chants broke out. The second time it happened, he watched one of the security guys carefully picking up the heckler's coat. 'Confiscate their coats,' deadpanned Trump. 'It's ten below zero outside.' Third time it happened, he extended his coat riff: 'We'll mail them back to them in a couple of weeks.' On MSNBC, they apparently had a discussion on how Trump could be so outrageous as to demand the confiscation of private property. But in showbusiness this is what is known as a 'joke'. And in the theatre it lands: everyone's laughing and having a ball. That's the point. I think it would help if every member of the pundit class had to attend a Trump rally before cranking out the usual shtick about how he's tapping into what Jeb called 'angst and anger'. Yes, Trump supporters are indignant (and right to be) about the bipartisan cartel's erasure of the southern border and their preference for unskilled Third World labor over their own citizenry, but 'anger' is not the defining quality of a Trump night out. The candidate is clearly having the time of his life, and that's infectious, which is why his supporters are having a good time, too. Had Mitt campaigned like this, he'd be president. But he had no ability to connect with voters. Nor does Jeb ('I've been endorsed by another 27 has-beens') Bush."
Brace Yourselves, America. It's Really Happening.
Matt Taibbi sees the appeal and the danger in Trump and worries he may well win. "In Manchester, a protester barely even manages to say a word before disappearing under a blanket of angry boos: 'Trump! Trump! Trump!' It's a scene straight out of Freaks. In a Trump presidency, there will be free tar and feathers provided at the executive's every public address. It's a few minutes after that when a woman in the crowd shouts that Ted Cruz is a p-ssy. She will later tell a journalist she supports Trump because his balls are the size of 'watermelons,' while his opponents' balls are more like 'grapes' or 'raisins.' Trump's balls are unaware of this, but he instinctively likes her comment and decides to go into headline-making mode. 'I never expect to hear that from you again!' he says, grinning. 'She said he's a p-ssy. That's terrible." Then, theatrically, he turns his back to the crowd. As the 500 or so reporters in attendance scramble to instantly make this the most important piece of news in the world--in less than a year Trump has succeeded in turning the USA into a massive high school--the candidate beams. What's he got to be insecure about? The American electoral system is opening before him like a flower. In person, you can't miss it: The same way Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, Donald on the stump can see his future. The pundits don't want to admit it, but it's sitting there in plain view, 12 moves ahead, like a chess game already won: President Donald Trump. A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible, but absent a dramatic turn of events--an early primary catastrophe, Mike Bloomberg ego-crashing the race, etc.--this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing 11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised. It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go. And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He's way better than average. His pitch is: He's rich, he won't owe anyone anything upon election, and therefore he won't do what both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e., approve rotten/regressive policies that screw ordinary people. He talks, for instance, about the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by insurance companies, an atrocity dating back more than half a century, to the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945. This law, sponsored by one of the most notorious legislators in our history (Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran was thought to be the inspiration for the corrupt Sen. Pat Geary in The Godfather II), allows insurance companies to share information and collude to divvy up markets. Trump may travel to campaign stops on his own plane, but his speeches are increasingly populist as he rails against money in politics, big pharma and insurance companies. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats made a serious effort to overturn this indefensible loophole during the debate over the Affordable Care Act. Trump pounds home this theme in his speeches, explaining things from his perspective as an employer. 'The insurance companies,' he says, 'they'd rather have monopolies in each state than hundreds of companies going all over the place bidding ... It's so hard for me to make deals ... because I can't get bids.' He goes on to explain that prices would go down if the state-by-state insurance fiefdoms were eliminated, but that's impossible because of the influence of the industry. 'I'm the only one that's self-funding ... Everyone else is taking money from, I call them the bloodsuckers.' Trump isn't lying about any of this."
Adam Gopnik mourns the crescent croissant: "Why is a croissant shaped that way, anyway? The first truth is that they are not, necessarily. As veteran visitors to Parisian bakeries know, the superior, all-butter croissants are already commonly articulated as straight pastries--or, at least, as gently sloping ones--while the inferior oil or margarine ones must, by law, be neatly turned in. This sometimes leads those who expect clarity and logic, rather than complexity and self-cancelling entrapment, from French laws to think that the straight croissants are all butter and the curved ones are reliably not. The truth is that a butter croissant can be any shape it chooses, on the general atavistic aristocratic principle that, butter being better, it creates its own realm of privilege. One only wishes that Umberto Eco, whom we sadly lost last week, was still around to parse this issue, because Eco, long before he was king of the airport bookstore, was an emperor of signs, one of the world's leading linguists and semioticians. The underlying logic for the croissant being a crescent, one suspects he would have said, is 'Saussurean,' after the great early-twentieth-century linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who glimpsed the truth that linguistic signs are arbitrary and find their meaning only by being clearly distinguished from other opposing signs. We know 'Monday' only because it doesn't sound or look like 'Sunday.' P. G. Wodehouse, not surprisingly, showed his grasp of this rule when he had one of the Drones, on holiday in France, point out that he had been given a Continental breakfast consisting of 'a roll shaped like a crescent and a roll shaped like a roll.' Without the standard accompanying brioche, there would be no need for the curve; a roll-shaped roll produces a curved one, as 'Sunday' makes 'Monday.' The croissant, in this view, is curved in order to make plain what it isn't as much as what it is. Murkier depths of meaning surely reside here, too, which would have taken Eco's eye to plumb. Doubtless some social historian, a century or so hence, will get a thesis out of examining how, on the very verge of the threatened 'Brexit'--the exit of England, at least, from the European Community--the mass marketers of Britain ostentatiously rejected a form seen as so clearly French that it is a regular part of that ominously named 'Continental' breakfast. Adding an arbitrary national shape to an established one to attempt an entirely English croissant, that future scholar will argue, is an affirmation of refusing to be one with Europe. (The crescent, moreover, is the sign of the Islamic empire, and some damp, suspicious kinds will see meaning in that, too.)"
Bad Habits
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen reads the contemporary literature on habituation--that is, self-help achieved by the ritualisation of certain kinds of virtuous praxis. The topic goes back to Aristotle, and perhaps even farther, but Ratner-Rosenhagen thinks it's missing something these days: "Much of today's habits literature has a contemporary feeling, with its focus on time management, individual productivity, and business success, but the genre has a long history. For millennia, there has been a tradition of august thinkers writing about how healthy habits promote--and unhealthy habits undermine--self-fashioning and moral improvement. The ancient Stoics, for example, sought to understand how perfecting one's reason by making it a habit could be the path to virtue. The Enlightenment psychologist Maine de Biran had a harder time squaring rigorous intellect and habitual practices, contending that 'all that happens exclusively under the sway of habit should lose its authority before the eyes of reason'. Friedrich Nietzsche, too, was fascinated with habits. He had his own übermenschliche work habits, while at the same time he felt grateful to every bit of 'misery and... sickness' that came his way because they gave him 'a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits'. Gertrude Stein couldn't have disagreed more. For Stein, the habits of 'daily island life'--those simple, unglamorous rituals of cleaning, eating, sleeping--were the means by which people who had lived through the savagery and chaos of two world wars could orient themselves with the simple and commonplace. As ever, the habits literature of today promises order in a disordered world, but it also comes with a subtle and significant difference. The most important difference is not the forgotten art of style, though the staccato prose, exclamation points, bland generalisations, and clichéd motivational quotations of today's literature neither stimulate the imagination nor activate the will. Rather, it is the lost promise of habits literature as a form of ethical inquiry and social commentary. Individual improvement has always been the purpose of habits literature, but the genre used to require appraising the society in which the self, and the habits, formed. Historically, thinking about habits without social contexts or ethical consequences was unthinkable. Today it is axiomatic."
Aristotelian Safe Spaces
Charles Duhigg writes about Google's Project Aristotle seeking to understand why some corporate teams work better than others. The answer, it seems, has less to do with intelligence, leadership, or structure and more to do with psychological safety, or what Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a '"shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.'" Psychological safety in the new corporate lingo "'...describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.' When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was 'direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.' That team, researchers estimated, was among Google's accomplished groups. By contrast, another engineer had told the researchers that his 'team leader has poor emotional control.' He added: 'He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car.' That team, researchers presumed, did not perform well. Most of all, employees had talked about how various teams felt. 'And that made a lot of sense to me, maybe because of my experiences at Yale,' Rozovsky said. 'I'd been on some teams that left me feeling totally exhausted and others where I got so much energy from the group.' Rozovsky's study group at Yale was draining because the norms--the fights over leadership, the tendency to critique--put her on guard. Whereas the norms of her case-competition team--enthusiasm for one another's ideas, joking around and having fun--allowed everyone to feel relaxed and energized. For Project Aristotle, research on psychological safety pointed to particular norms that are vital to success. There were other behaviors that seemed important as well--like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google's data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work. 'We had to get people to establish psychologically safe environments,' Rozovsky told me. But it wasn't clear how to do that. 'People here are really busy,' she said. 'We needed clear guidelines.'" Duhigg writes that the rise of group work in Silicon Valley is driven by research showing that profitability and worker satisfaction increase when workers collaborate. What is unremarked is the confluence between the demand for safe spaces in universities and in corporations, which offers a whole new take on the corporatization of the university. --RB
Uncomfortable Learning
Williams College has a student organization that sponsors an "Uncomfortable Learning" lecture series that brings speakers to campus whose views are out of step with the majority opinion on campus. The group made news back in October when it first invited and then--in response to campus opposition--disinvited Suzanne Venker--a conservative woman and author of The War Against Men. Now Robby Soave reports that the group has made news again after a speaker it invited was prohibited from giving his speech by Williams' President Adam Falk. In a statement to campus, Falk writes: "'Today I am taking the extraordinary step of canceling a speech by John Derbyshire, who was to have presented his views here on Monday night. The college didn't invite Derbyshire, but I have made it clear to the students who did that the college will not provide a platform for him. Free speech is a value I hold in extremely high regard. The college has a very long history of encouraging the expression of a range of viewpoints and giving voice to widely differing opinions. We have said we wouldn't cancel speakers or prevent the expression of views except in the most extreme circumstances. In other words: There's a line somewhere, but in our history of hosting events and speeches of all kinds, we hadn't yet found it. We've found the line. Derbyshire, in my opinion, is on the other side of it. Many of his expressions clearly constitute hate speech, and we will not promote such speech on this campus or in our community. We respect--and expect--our students' exploration of ideas, including ones that are very challenging, and we encourage individual choice and decision-making by students. But at times it's our role as educators and administrators to step in and make decisions that are in the best interest of students and our community. This is one of those times.'" Zach Wood, a Williams student who helps run the "Uncomfortable Learning" series, explained his disagreement with Falk: "'I think that President Falk is an analytic and deliberative leader and I respect his decision; however, I sharply disagree with his decision and if I could challenge it, I certainly would. I think his decision to cancel the speaker not only does a disservice to the intellectual character of our institution, but is antithetical to the principles of free speech and intellectual freedom that he has previously claimed to endorse. This decision is evidence of the fact that President Falk has failed to show support for student efforts to instill and promote political tolerance at Williams. I radically disagree with John Derybshire. And he has said offensive, even hateful things about minorities, things that I have a problem with. That is precisely why I was looking forward to taking him to task. If every student does not desire that kind of intellectual challenge, that is perfectly okay. But for President Falk to deny Williams students that opportunity, I believe, is not merely injudicious, but undemocratic and irresponsible.'" As I write this, I am in Saratoga Springs at a two-day retreat on how to talk about difficult questions like race and sex on campus. The conversations here are inspiring. Students come from communities all over the world with meaningfully different values and traditions, and they arrive on campus and have to figure out how to live with and talk to people whose worldviews challenge them. The students I speak with are genuinely curious and want to hear what others have to say. In most cases, then, there is a false debate between hate speech and free speech. It is not the students at Yale or the students at Williams who shut down speech. When free speech is sacrificed, it is not done by students. Rather it is cowardly administrators who fear criticism and don't trust their students. --RB
Our Devices, Our Selves
Cypress Marrs takes a second to think about what Apple's devices are: "This campaign, like so much of Apple's marketing, attempts to render potential anxieties about new computing devices irrelevant. The customer has questions, gut level concerns--how will this device impact their privacy? Their political life? How they interact with other people? How they experience their life? Apple responds to these reservations with a nod and a wink. Its marketing campaigns show individuals using Apple's technologies toward ends that stand in contrast to the reality that consumers fear the devices will bring into being. The devices are not marketed through a catalogue of their functions but rather by conflating their functions with what they may facilitate. To do this, Apple employs our shared symbolic language... As imprecise use of these symbols spreads, it becomes increasingly difficult for individuals to think acutely about the world around them. Likewise, Apple ads are attempts to radically reshape the ways--the symbolic tools--which individuals use to comprehend the world. As personal computing devices become increasingly intimate--as they move from the desk to the book bag, from the pants pocket to the wrist--the symbolic fun-house of Apple's marketing continues to conflate what a device does with what it might do--the device becomes the time taken for a kiss, the appreciation of the skyline, and the revolutionary impulse in an authoritarian state. Such conflations in conjunction with the constant and intimate presence of telecommunication has shrunk the distance between the personal and the public--between an experience and the image of that experience. Taken together, all of this makes it difficult to conceive of ourselves--or even conceive of conceiving of ourselves--in relation to a large and symbolically complex whole."
Setting the Bar Low
Stephen J. Rose defends residential colleges against the threat of MOOCs and online education. But in so doing, Rose makes an argument for what colleges do best that is hardly inspiring and that certainly abandons any notion that college education is about learning to think with and against a tradition of intellectual, scientific, artistic, and humanist inquiry. "Higher education essentially has two functions: First, for those who reside on or near campus, it provides a period of semi-independence and autonomy in a protected environment with many social interactions; and second, it develops the workplace skills of general cognition, ability to learn, task completion, group and organizational skills, and, for many students, a field-specific knowledge base. While Carey does show the limitations of the current system, he falls very short in showing how a MOOC-based system can be scaled up and produce better results in preparing young people to enter and succeed in the labor force.... [I]n virtually all modern, industrialized societies, higher education has become the main path for preparing workers for the new service economy based in offices, health care, and education. The costs of such education in dollars and time are indeed immense--but there is a large payoff for the economy as a whole."
Featured Events
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #18
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at email@example.com.
Friday, March 4, 2016
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Joyce Dalsheim: Cultural Anthropologist Researching Nationalism, Religion, and the Israel/Palestine Conflict
On Goat Surveillance and the False Promises of Sovereignty
In her critique of the Rights of Man, Hannah Arendt analyzed the problem of the "abstract" human being who was nowhere to be found. If Arendt's political analyses stemmed from her grappling with the Jewish Question and the problems of minorities or stateless people, this talk takes a different turn. Rather than considering the outcomes of the Rights of Man for subaltern groups or refugees, this talk follows the transformation of the Jewish Question when Jews themselves are no longer a minority, but sovereign citizens in their own ethno-national state. It considers some of the many ways in which Israeli Jews struggle to be Jewish-from conversion and keeping kosher to the everyday surveillance of goats-suggesting that popular sovereignty might not be liberating in the ways we imagine.
BIO: Joyce Dalsheim is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Global, International and Area Studies at UNC-Charlotte. She is a cultural anthropologist who studies nationalism, religion and the secular, and conflict in Israel/Palestine. She earned her her doctorate from the New School for Social Research, and has taught at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and Wake Forest University.
RSVP to Christine Stanton at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
The Hannah Arendt Center, 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Celebrating the Complete Works of Primo Levi
Toni Morrison described Primo Levi's writing as a "triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction." Levi is the distinguished author of decisive books such as If This Is a Man, and The Periodic Table. For the first time the entire oeuvre of the most acclaimed Holocaust survivor is available in English, after a 7-years collective endeavor lead by Ann Goldstein, New Yorker editor and celebrated translator of Elena Ferrante and Jhumpa Lahiri. Together with Goldstein, the event will feature Michael F. Moore, a most accomplished translator from Italian and UN interpreter.
For more info on Goldstein and the Complete Works of Primo Levi, view interview: HERE.
Primo Levi, (born July 31, 1919, Turin, Italy-died April 11, 1987, Turin), Italian-Jewish writer and chemist, noted for his restrained and moving autobiographical account of and reflections on survival in the Nazi concentration camps.
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
Reem-Kayden Center László Z. Bitó '60 Auditorium, Bard College, 6:00 pm
Now Hiring Two Post-Doctoral Fellows for the 2016-2017 Academic Year!
The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College announces two post-doctoral fellowships for the 2016-2017 academic year. The fellows should have a Ph.D. in political theory, philosophy, or a related field in the humanities, and his or her work should intersect meaningfully with Hannah Arendt's thinking. In residence at the Arendt Center, the fellow will pursue his or her independent research at the Center, which includes Hannah Arendt's personal library. The fellow will have access to Arendt's Digital Archive through a relationship with the Arendt Center in New York City. In addition, the fellow will have the opportunity to participate in seminars, conferences, lectures, colloquia, and workshops organized by the Center.
To apply for the fellowship, please apply through Interfolio.com at: http://apply.interfolio.com/33792 with a letter of application explaining your research project and interest in the Center and a description of your teaching experience, CV, and two letters of reference.
The Deadline for consideration is Tuesday, March 15, 2016
The Hannah Arendt Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Learning from the West African Ebola Epidemic: The Role of Governance in Preventing Epidemics
"Learning From the West African Ebola Epidemic" is a one-day conference in New York City exploring the hypothesis that building public trust in effective organizations is essential for fighting health crises such as Ebola. The conference is grounded in the Global Health Security Agenda that seeks to accelerate progress towards a world safe from infectious disease.
Specifically, the Global Health Security Agenda seeks to
- Prevent avoidable epidemics;
- Detect threats early; and
- Respond rapidly and effectively.
Combining social science and political actors with leading scientists and Ebola specialists, we will explore the Ebola epidemic and its consequences as a case study to explore how educational, governance and healthcare resources can be better deployed against future outbreaks. The conference is sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center, Citizen Science, CCE, and the Ford Foundation in collaboration with the Honorable Dr. Wilmot James, South African MP and the Carnegie Council for Ethics In International Affairs.
To learn more about and register for our conference, please click here.
Free & Open to the Public
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Carnegie Council for Ethics & International Affairs, NYC, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
Vita Activa - The Spirit of Hannah Arendt
The Film Forum in New York City will be screening the new film, VITA ACTIVA - THE SPIRIT OF HANNAH ARENDT, directed by Ada Ushpiz, later this spring.
About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the "Banality of Evil" when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt's life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta's biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA
On OCTOBER 20-21, 2016 we will host our ninth annual fall conference: "How Do We Talk About Difficult Questions?: Race, Sex and Religion on Campus". We'll see you there!
Thursday and Friday, October 20 and 21, 2016
Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
From the Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Dawn Herrera Helphand discusses why Bernie Sanders' appeal illustrates how widespread the political sentiments that Hannah Arendt identified as the causes of revolution are in both parties in the Quote of the Week. Marshall McLuhan comments on the power of critical thinking against automatic movement in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We are pleased to announce the first issue of AJPA News, the official newsletter of the American Jewish Peace Archive (AJPA). Finally, we appreciate the annotations Hannah Arendt made to her copy of Montesquieu's "The Spirit of Laws" in this week's Library feature.
Thinking in and through "Emergency"
By Jeffrey Jurgens
"None of the various 'language rules,' carefully contrived to deceive and to camouflage, had a more decisive effect on the mentality of the killers than this first war decree of Hitler, in which the word for 'murder' was replaced by the phrase 'to grant a mercy death.'"
-- Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
Among its many accomplishments, Eichmann in Jerusalem reflects insightfully on the close relation between language and thinking, especially in moments when previously established structures of ethical and political life have been disrupted. Arendt dwells at some length on the idioms the Nazis employed to insulate the regime's functionaries, and German society at large, from the tangible realities and moral implications of mass killing. In her estimation, high-level officials like Hitler and Himmler possessed a particular gift for slogans—"winged words," in Eichmann's phrasing--that soothed the conscience of those who carried out the program of extermination.
Amor Mundi 2/14/16
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.
Let 'er Rip
To all those "adults" in the press and the chattering classes who are telling kids who "feel the Bern" to grow up, Holly Wood has something she'd like to share: "If Millennials are coming out in droves to support Bernie Sanders, it's not because we are tripping balls on Geritol. No, Sanders's clever strategy of shouting the exact same thing for 40 years simply strikes a chord among the growing number of us who now agree: Washington is bought. And every time Goldman Sachs buys another million-dollar slice of the next American presidency, we can't help but drop the needle onto Bernie's broken record: The economy is rigged. Democracy is corrupted. The billionaires are on the warpath. Sanders has split the party with hits like these, a catchy stream of pessimistic populism. Behind this arthritic Pied Piper, the youth rally, brandishing red-lettered signs reading 'MONEYLENDERS OUT.' If you ask them, they'll tell you there's a special place in Hell for war criminals who launch hedge funds.... If anything concerns me at this pivotal moment, it's not the revolutionary tremors of the youth. Given the Great American Trash Fire we have inherited, this rebellion strikes me as exceedingly reasonable. Pick a crisis, America: Child poverty? Inexcusable. Medical debt? Immoral. For-profit prison? Medieval. Climate change? Apocalyptic. The Middle East is our Vietnam. Flint, the canary in our coal mine. Tamir Rice, our martyred saint. This place is a mess. We're due for a hard rain. If I am alarmed, it is by the profound languor of the comfortable. What fresh hell must we find ourselves in before those who've appointed themselves to lead our thoughts admit that we are in flames? As I see it, to counsel realism when the reality is f--ked is to counsel an adherence to f--kery. Under conditions as distressing as these, acquiescence is absurd. When your nation gets classified as a Class D structure fire, I believe the only wise course is to lose your sh-t."
Truth to the Party
For all those "adults" moaning about the unhinged popularity of Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson has something he'd like to say. "Not everyone finds it funny. On my street in Northwest Washington, D.C., there's never been anyone as unpopular as Trump. The Democrats assume he's a bigot, pandering to the morons out there in the great dark space between Georgetown and Brentwood. The Republicans (those relatively few who live here) fully agree with that assessment, and they hate him even more. They sense Trump is a threat to them personally, to their legitimacy and their livelihoods. Idi Amin would get a warmer reception in our dog park. I understand it of course. And, except in those moments when the self-righteous silliness of rich people overwhelms me and I feel like moving to Maine, I can see their points, some of them anyway. Trump might not be my first choice for president. I'm not even convinced he really wants the job. He's smart enough to know it would be tough for him to govern. But just because Trump is an imperfect candidate doesn't mean his candidacy can't be instructive. Trump could teach Republicans in Washington a lot if only they stopped posturing long enough to watch carefully.... It turns out the GOP wasn't simply out of touch with its voters; the party had no idea who its voters were or what they believed. For decades, party leaders and intellectuals imagined that most Republicans were broadly libertarian on economics and basically neoconservative on foreign policy. That may sound absurd now, after Trump has attacked nearly the entire Republican catechism (he savaged the Iraq War and hedge fund managers in the same debate) and been greatly rewarded for it, but that was the assumption the GOP brain trust operated under. They had no way of knowing otherwise. The only Republicans they talked to read the Wall Street Journal too. On immigration policy, party elders were caught completely by surprise. Even canny operators like Ted Cruz didn't appreciate the depth of voter anger on the subject. And why would they? If you live in an affluent ZIP code, it's hard to see a downside to mass low-wage immigration. Your kids don't go to public school. You don't take the bus or use the emergency room for health care. No immigrant is competing for your job. (The day Hondurans start getting hired as green energy lobbyists is the day my neighbors become nativists.) Plus, you get cheap servants, and get to feel welcoming and virtuous while paying them less per hour than your kids make at a summer job on Nantucket. It's all good. Apart from his line about Mexican rapists early in the campaign, Trump hasn't said anything especially shocking about immigration. Control the border, deport lawbreakers, try not to admit violent criminals--these are the ravings of a Nazi? This is the 'ghost of George Wallace' that a Politico piece described last August? A lot of Republican leaders think so. No wonder their voters are rebelling."
The Hunt for Hypocrites
This is the most exciting presidential primary season in a generation. Six short months back, we were resigned to the drumbeat of the dynasties. No doubt, Hillary Clinton is the most experienced and qualified candidate for President in decades. And Jeb Bush seems earnest, polished, and smart. But the prospect of choosing between a third Bush or a second Clinton was simply demeaning to democracy. Sadly, it seemed we had no choice. Oh how things have changed. Ted Cruz just became the first Latino candidate to win a major state primary or caucus. Bernie Sanders became the first Jewish American to win a primary. All of this is promising. But nothing comes close to excitement generated by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
Both Sanders and Trump style themselves truthtellers. That does not mean they don't lie or deceive. Trump seems incapable of dealing with facts and repeats falsehoods with the conviction of someone sure in his power to make fiction into reality. And Sanders is offering up a "plan" to raise the share of government spending in our economy from 21% to over 40%, a shift so radical that he either is deceptive in trumpeting it as a plan or he is delusional in believing in his power to bring about the revolution that would make it possible. But such untruths are the bread and butter of politics. No, in styling themselves truthtellers, both Sanders and Trump allude to another kind of truth. They are saying that they speak from conviction. Trump because he is self-funded and Sanders because he refuses to take Super PAC money and has been saying the same thing for 40 years. Both insist that they speak the truth that is in their hearts, and this separates them from Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton who speak the interests of their donors on Wall Street and K Street.
The appeal in truthtelling is that it speaks from the heart; it is founded upon the fear of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, as Hannah Arendt writes, is based upon the Greek word for "play-actor." The hypocrite "falsely pretends to virtue." He or she "plays a role as consistently as the actor in the play who also must identify himself with his role." What distinguishes the hypocrite is that his or her duplicity "boomerangs back upon himself, and he is no less a victim of his mendacity than those whom he set out to deceive. Psychologically speaking, one may say that the hypocrite is too ambitious; not only does he want to appear virtuous before others, he wants to convince himself." The hypocrite, in convincing himself of his goodness, populates the world with "illusions and lying phantoms" and expunges from the world the incorruptible self, "the only core of integrity from which true appearance could arise again." This is why Arendt calls the hypocrite "rotten to the core" and says of revolutions that they look like "the explosion of an uncorrupted and incorruptible inner core through an outward shell of decay and odorous decreptitude." What revolutionaries promise, above all, is to tear "the mask of hypocrisy off the face" of a corrupt society, to tear "the façade of corruption down" and expose "behind it the unspoiled, honest face of the people."
Arendt worries, however, that the "hunt for hypocrites" and the desire to unmask the hypocrite "would leave nothing behind the mask." What those truthtellers and revolutionaries who would unmask the hypocrites forget, Arendt writes, is that all persons appear in public wearing a mask. The word "person" from the Latin "persona" means that which sounds through a mask. The Roman "person" was a citizen, someone granted the public mask of citizenship and thus someone in whom the law sounded through. To appear unmasked is to appear naked, exposed in one's raw humanity--someone reduced to a biological or zoological body without any human qualities. In short, the hunt for hypocrites may not emancipate citizens, but it might reduce all citizens to mere natural humans, shorn of the "protecting mask of a legal personality."
The hunt for hypocrites is a symptom of a corrupt society, and there is a reason that the discourse of hypocrisy is so powerful today. Trump and Sanders both are mobilizing the charge of hypocrisy with justification; there is a reason it is proving effective. But the hunt for hypocrites is a dangerous game, not least because no one can stand to have their private motives exposed to the light of day. Even more dangerous, however, is that the hatred of hypocrisy idealizes a kind of 'natural' person, someone who is "nothing behind the mask." Such a nothing, Arendt argues, may help root out deception, but it also obliterates all truth, insofar as truth too can only sound through a mask. --RB
The HAC Is Hiring a Media Coordinator
The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College is looking for a dependable, hard-working part-time Media Coordinator (20 to 25 hours/week) who can supervise the ongoing evolution of the Center's impact and media presence, both online and in print. While no deep knowledge of Hannah Arendt is required, we seek someone passionate about the power of ideas to provoke thinking and elevate our public discourse. This job may be done remotely, but the Media Coordinator will need to be on campus at Bard College to assist with major events 2-3 times per year.
Hearing Einstein's Black Holes
Nicola Twilley in the New Yorker does as well as anyone in trying to explain what a gravitational wave is and how it was discovered. "[Rainer] Weiss's detection method was altogether different from Weber's. His first insight was to make the observatory 'L'-shaped. Picture two people lying on the floor, their heads touching, their bodies forming a right angle. When a gravitational wave passes through them, one person will grow taller while the other shrinks; a moment later, the opposite will happen. As the wave expands space-time in one direction, it necessarily compresses it in the other. Weiss's instrument would gauge the difference between these two fluctuating lengths, and it would do so on a gigantic scale, using miles of steel tubing. 'I wasn't going to be detecting anything on my tabletop,' he said. To achieve the necessary precision of measurement, Weiss suggested using light as a ruler. He imagined putting a laser in the crook of the 'L.' It would send a beam down the length of each tube, which a mirror at the other end would reflect back. The speed of light in a vacuum is constant, so as long as the tubes were cleared of air and other particles the beams would recombine at the crook in synchrony--unless a gravitational wave happened to pass through. In that case, the distance between the mirrors and the laser would change slightly. Since one beam would now be covering a shorter distance than its twin, they would no longer be in lockstep by the time they got back. The greater the mismatch, the stronger the wave. Such an instrument would need to be thousands of times more sensitive than any previous device, and it would require delicate tuning in order to extract a signal of vanishing weakness from the planet's omnipresent din."
Work Harder, Be Better
Gillian B. White in The Atlantic writes about new research confirming what many have long known: "For decades, black parents have told their children that in order to succeed despite racial discrimination, they need to be 'twice as good': twice as smart, twice as dependable, twice as talented. This advice can be found in everything from literature to television shows, to day-to-day conversation. Now, a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that when it comes to getting and keeping jobs, that notion might be more than just a platitude. There's data that demonstrates the unfortunate reality: Black workers receive extra scrutiny from bosses, which can lead to worse performance reviews, lower wages, and even job loss. The NBER paper, authored by Costas Cavounidis and Kevin Lang, of Boston University, attempts to demonstrate how discrimination factors into company decisions, and creates a feedback loop, resulting in racial gaps in the labor force."
A New Way of Teaching Old Things
Christine Gross-Loh takes a peek into what might be the history classroom of the future: "One of the reasons American children often appear to struggle in history, Bain says, is because their knowledge is primarily assessed through multiple-choice tests. Multiple-choice assessment, by nature, often privileges factual content over historical thinking. 'If you're testing historical content out of context, that might explain why they don't do so well,' Bain says. He advocates embracing the use of narrative--even if that narrative is flawed or one-sided. 'The grand narrative is pejorative to many in the historical profession--people say that it tries to inculcate a particular viewpoint in kids. But having a big picture or story is cognitively critical to historical knowledge.' Similarly, history textbooks appear omniscient and objective, and tend to gloss over competing narratives. But educators say that understanding whose narrative is being told helps students to engage with it; even if it is wrong or they disagree with it, the narrative provides context and a more effective way to learn and remember. 'The argument I make all the time is, it's like if I were to ask someone to assemble a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle without the box-top picture of it. You could of course eventually put it together but the effort to match shapes and colors on each piece would be monumental, and you'd likely give up quite quickly. Such is what happens to many kids in school.'... It's difficult to track down research corroborating the academic benefits of the case method, but anecdotal evidence speaks to its power. Moss tells me he has observed the results of story-based teaching in his classroom. 'People remember cases incredibly well--and often at a level of detail that's almost shocking. Stories stick in the mind, and when you learn history with a focus on particular stories it's much easier to remember the pieces around them.' David Kaufman, a student who took the course last year, says that discussing history through a series of cases allowed the students to 'focus a lot more on the process than on, say, the actual legislative result, which I think was much richer.' It is well known that stories aid learning because of how memory is structured. The cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner wrote of two modes of knowing: paradigmatic and narrative; with the latter, attention and emotion influence the strength of a memory. Stories activate emotion, which helps students stay engaged and remember. They also feed the human need to fit things into a coherent structure in order to make meaning of them."
Excellent Excellence Excels Excellence
Nicholas B. Dirks, Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, sent a letter to the Berkeley community informing them of a "strategic planning process designed to ensure our excellence in the face of continuing financial challenges." Long term changes to preserve excellence include: "Evaluating our workforce in relationship to our changing needs and resources. This will also entail a new mechanism for the monitoring and control of staffing levels"; "Achieving additional revenues through our 'brand,' land, and other assets"; and "the redesign of some of our academic structures. Realignment will ensure that we are excellent in all we choose to do, in our research and in our educational mission." Here is an excerpt of Chancellor Dirk's letter: "Today, we announce a strategic planning process designed to ensure our excellence in the face of continuing financial challenges. This process is comprehensive, encompassing academic and administrative realignment, investment in our fundraising and revenue-generating activities, and the reexamination of all our discretionary expenditures, including athletics and capital costs. ...Accordingly, we are embarking on a comprehensive strategic planning process, the aim of which is to reimagine the fundamental structures and processes of our university. We need to evaluate how best to structure the university so as to maintain, above all, our excellence as an institution. To be sure, ahead of us lie difficult decisions and hard work, but we are fortunate to be taking this on early enough that we have the resources and time necessary to be thoughtful and strategic.... Every aspect of Berkeley's operations and organizational structure will be under consideration. Our decision-making, however, will be strategic. We are identifying areas in which new investments will both produce additional resources and enhance our strength; and we are identifying other areas in which the expenditure of resources may be less critical to our overall excellence and core mission. Some important campus-level initiatives, such as the Berkeley Global Campus and the Undergraduate Initiative, will be entirely supported by philanthropy and external partnerships (aside from small amounts of seed funding).... This endeavor must not be interpreted as an abandonment of our commitment to a public mission nor to our efforts to advocate for increased public funding for higher education. We are fighting to maintain our excellence against those who might equate 'public' with mediocrity, against those who have lost faith in the need for higher education to serve as an engine of social mobility, and against those who no longer believe that university-based inquiry and research have the power to shape our society and economy for the better. What we are engaged in here is a fundamental defense of the concept of the public university, a concept that we must reinvent in order to preserve."
Free Urban Style
Masha Gessen, noting Moscow's recent destruction of almost a hundred buildings housing small businesses, suggests that the tear-downs were as much about style as they were about corruption (and they're definitely about corruption): "The new Russia is not, at present, a fully fledged totalitarian regime--but it increasingly feels like a totalitarian society, with its unanimity on all matters and suspicion of all difference. It wants to look like one too. Back in the eighties, Moscow and other large Soviet cities (with the exception of part of Leningrad) looked empty and orderly. Their avenues were wider than many American highways, with sidewalks the width of a Manhattan street. Their buildings were imperial architecture on steroids, with courtyards the size of a Manhattan block and arches through which you could squeeze a few townhouses. Façades were impenetrable--buildings were often entered through courtyards--and this, combined with the vastness of distances, kept people from clogging the streets. What humans one did see generally looked the same, dressed in basic gray and more gray. The absence of private business kept what passed for commerce looking uniform too. The first legal private commerce consisted of people standing on the sidewalks. In early 1992 Boris Yeltsin issued a decree legalizing the sale of consumer goods by individuals, and some individuals cut the decree out of the newspaper, pinned it to their clothes to ward off police, and went out to procure scarce goods for resale. Foreigners who happened to visit Russia back then will never forget the spectacle of people standing in the street holding out pieces of raw steak or fried chicken--and, perhaps more shockingly, that of others buying these goods. 'Fresh meat, I just got it today!' was the advertising slogan of the era. After a few months, the private traders' assortment grew, along with their sense of security, and they started putting out folding tables for their wares and folding chairs for themselves. Then they started building makeshift structures out of glass, plywood, and aluminum siding. They were eyesores, though still an improvement over the sight of men with raw meat in their hands and a piece of newspaper on their jackets. The structures, known as kiosks, also provided some protection from dirt and weather for both the merchandise and the people who sold it. The sellers could now continue working late into the night... The proliferation of kiosks also brought the city down to human scale. They filled the vast squares and occupied parts of the too-wide sidewalks. They put objects at eye level, filling what had been an eerily empty field of vision. Being a person in Moscow stopped feeling like being a Lilliputian in the land of Gulliver. Over the years, many of the kiosks grew into more permanent structures, often referred to as pavilions. Successful traders erected one- and two-story buildings that connected to the city's power and plumbing infrastructure, and soon those buildings housed mini-marts, cell-phone shops, and cafés. Some of them were still ugly, usually in a bland prefab way. Others, like a pyramid-shaped glass structure in one of the city's most central squares, were ostentatiously ridiculous. A few used scaled-down elements of the architecture of surrounding buildings to serve as attractive bridges between larger-than-life Moscow and its people."
High Score
Alfie Bown gets distracted: "Distracting games and websites appear to be totally useless and nothing more than a complete waste of our precious time. But precisely because these distractions are seen as completely wasteful and useless, they make the mundane work we perform for capitalists seem so much the more 'productive' and 'useful' by contrast. They stimulate a feeling of guilt that sends us back to work eager to make reparations. After we have 'wasted' five minutes on Cookie Clicker, we feel like we are carrying out an act that is both productive and reparative when we return to work afterward. Reporting on a recent study, The Entrepreneur, a business magazine, reported that productivity on CRM (Microsoft's data management server) could be massively increased when workers were allowed to play games. Likewise, the company Snowfly specializes in improving company productivity by employing regulated game use in the workplace. In short, we input data quicker after playing Candy Crush. The idea is the game simply offers a much needed refreshing break, but I think there is more to it than this. By seeming useless and wasteful these distractions not only consolidate our impression that capitalist productivity is comparatively useful and positive, but they also make us feel indebted and keen to make amends. They renew our commitment to capitalist production when we might otherwise be reflecting on how unfulfilling our working conditions are... The usual line would be that a culture of distraction prevents us from concentrating on what is really important and doing truly worthwhile things. This often is nothing more than the age-old generational complaint that young people ought to do something better with their time, and worse, it endorses specific ideas of what 'worthwhile' time expenditure consists of, just as Candy Crush does in the very act of distracting us. A culture of distraction doesn't stop us doing really important things; it makes us believe that there really is something that is really important: capitalist production. Distractions only serve to focus our faith in that myth."
Graphic Violence
Brad Evans and Sean Michael Wilson have created a short account of Arendt's banality of evil, one that is illustrated by Chris Mackenzie. They give a short and schematic account of the Eichmann trial from arrest through judgment and then ask how the banality of evil remains meaningful in the modern world. "Errol Morris' Film 'Standard Operating Procedure' emphasized how these U.S. soldiers were not exceptional but following routine standards. It asked: '...How could American values become so compromised that Abu Ghraib could happen?' This sounds very similar to what was asked of Germany in the Nazi Period.... Again it seems too simple to say such soldiers are crazy or 'bad apples'. Perhaps these problems of cruel acts carried out in positions of power, of following whatever authorities say in blind obedience are still very much with us. Perhaps the banality of evil is something that, in the wrong circumstances, could touch us all."
Featured Events
A Taste for Chaos: The Hidden Order in the Art of Improvisation
Jazz, as the modern art form that lays claim to improvisation, situates music in a productive tension between individual freedom and a mysterious yet sentient order. As do modern theories of liberalism in politics, Jazz insists both on the individual liberty of each that is through fidelity to common truths, recognition of traditional customs, or embrace of collective ends is rendered compatible with a larger inter-subjective order. Freedom as an art of improvisation means that men are free only insofar as they act in ways that are both free and constrained. This is very much what Hannah Arendt means means when she writes that "Men are free-as distinguished from their possessing the gift of freedom- as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same." In this evening on "A Taste for Chaos: The Hidden Order in the Art of Improvisation," we bring together leading thinkers and musicians to explore the nature of improvisation and the art of freedom.
Free & Open to the Public
Monday, February 15, 2016
László Z. Bitó '60 Conservatory Building, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Sheldon S. Wolin (August 4, 1922 - October 21, 2015) was one of the most important American political theorists of the 20th century. Wolin authored critical works such as Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, Presence of the Past: Essays on State and the Constitution, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, and Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, Wolin was the founding editor of the influential journal democracy (1981-1983), with the help Nicholas Xenos. In memory of Wolin, we discuss the work of political theory with Nicholas Xenos.
Free & Open to the Public
Thursday, February 18, 2016
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium, 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
Lunchtime Talk with Klemens von Klemperer Post Doctoral Fellow Jana Schmidt
In the Shadow of Forgetting: Iconic Thinking
In one of Oliver Sacks' "clinical tales," the popular neurologist describes a man whose identity is threatened by the perpetual dissolution of his self. "He remembered nothing for more than a few seconds. He was continually disoriented. Abysses of amnesia continually opened beneath him, but he would bridge them, nimbly, by fluent confabulations and fictions of all kinds." Afflicted with a severe case of Korsakoff's syndrome, a neurological condition brought on by alcoholism, the unfortunate man appears hardly human to Sacks for he lacks all sense of relation and reality. Thus, in reading his patient's "mythomania," his prolific production of stories and images, as an illusory substitute for a genuine connection to the world, Sacks' musings on what remains when forgetting takes hold reach beyond the confines of clinical diagnosis toward a theory of forgetting, imagination, and "iconic" thinking.
It is not by accident then that Sacks was reading Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind when he was writing the narratives of neurological disability, of amnesia and aphasia that populate his 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In it, Sacks develops a model of iconic thinking that furthers some of Arendt's own ideas on the interrelation of thought and the making of images; ideas she herself at least partly borrowed from thinkers in the life science (Adolf Portmann, Konrad Lorenz, and Rudolf Arnheim). My talk will revisit these mutual influences to explore whether forgetting, rather than the "other" of thinking, might itself be considered an operation of thinking, and in particular of "iconic thinking."
BIO: Jana V. Schmidt's research pertains to questions of literature and art, their status vis-à-vis the political and the social, image theory, mimesis, and the representation of intersubjectivity. Her main focus as a literary scholar is on twentieth century German and American literature, literary theory (including "continental" philosophy and critical theory), and literature's relation to violence.
RSVP to Christine Stanton at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
The Hannah Arendt Center, 1:30 pm
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #18
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at email@example.com.
Friday, March 4, 2016
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Now Hiring Two Post-Doctoral Fellows for the 2016-2017 Academic Year!
The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College announces two post-doctoral fellowships for the 2016-2017 academic year. The fellows should have a Ph.D. in political theory, philosophy, or a related field in the humanities, and his or her work should intersect meaningfully with Hannah Arendt's thinking. In residence at the Arendt Center, the fellow will pursue his or her independent research at the Center, which includes Hannah Arendt's personal library. The fellow will have access to Arendt's Digital Archive through a relationship with the Arendt Center in New York City. In addition, the fellow will have the opportunity to participate in seminars, conferences, lectures, colloquia, and workshops organized by the Center.
To apply for the fellowship, please apply through Interfolio.com at: http://apply.interfolio.com/33792 with a letter of application explaining your research project and interest in the Center and a description of your teaching experience, CV, and two letters of reference.
The Deadline for consideration is Tuesday, March 15, 2016
The Hannah Arendt Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Learning from the West African Ebola Epidemic: The Role of Governance in Preventing Epidemics
"Learning From the West African Ebola Epidemic" is a one-day conference in New York City exploring the hypothesis that building public trust in effective organizations is essential for fighting health crises such as Ebola. The conference is grounded in the Global Health Security Agenda that seeks to accelerate progress towards a world safe from infectious disease.
Specifically, the Global Health Security Agenda seeks to
- Prevent avoidable epidemics;
- Detect threats early; and
- Respond rapidly and effectively.
Combining social science and political actors with leading scientists and Ebola specialists, we will explore the Ebola epidemic and its consequences as a case study to explore how educational, governance and healthcare resources can be better deployed against future outbreaks. The conference is sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center, Citizen Science, CCE, and the Ford Foundation in collaboration with the Honorable Dr. Wilmot James, South African MP and the Carnegie Council for Ethics In International Affairs.
To learn more about and register for our conference, please click here.
Free & Open to the Public
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Carnegie Council for Ethics & International Affairs, NYC, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
Vita Activa - The Spirit of Hannah Arendt
The Film Forum in New York City will be screening the new film, VITA ACTIVA - THE SPIRIT OF HANNAH ARENDT, directed by Ada Ushpiz, later this spring.
About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the "Banality of Evil" when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt's life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta's biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.
Wednesday, April 8, 2016
Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA
On OCTOBER 20-21, 2016 we will host our ninth annual fall conference: "How Do We Talk About Difficult Questions?: Race, Sex and Religion on Campus". We'll see you there!
Thursday and Friday, October 20 and 21, 2016
Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
From the Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Ian Storey looks to the Iowa Caucuses to wonder at what point electoral politics is reduced to the manufacture of crisis in the Quote of the Week. Anne Frank reflects on the irrevocable right to have an opinion in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate Arendt's annotations with regards to how trust factors into Locke's Two Treatises of Government in this week's Library feature.
"You Ain't No Muslim, Bruv": On Religion, Doctrine, and Violence
By Ian Storey
"The ultimate aim was neither power nor profit. Nor was it even influence in the world in order to serve particular, tangible interests for the sake of which prestige…was needed and purposefully used. The goal was now the image itself, as is manifest in the very language of the problem-solvers, with their 'scenarios' and 'audiences' borrowed from the theater."
-- Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics"
It has in several countries, particularly Turkey but all across Europe, been a week of horrors. Terrorismus, a term first coined in Germany, represents the idea that humankind is always declining into a state of chaos and violence and only the righteous might rescue it. (Kant calls it one of the three basic theories of history. He rejected it, categorically, as did Hegel.) Now, the term "terrorism" has come to signify something altogether different yet obviously related: the deliberate infliction of pain, death, and fear on non-combatants for the sake of maintaining an appearance, a distinction Arendt first noted in the second section of "Lying in Politics".
Theodor W. Adorno on the Meaning of Thinking
"Thinking no longer means any more than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think."
-- Theodor W. Adorno
Thedor W. Adorno's Biography
Theodor W. Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.
Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.
To read additional Thoughts on Thinking, please click here.
Featured image source from Meta Liberia. Biography sourced from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Hannah Arendt — Among Friends?
By Jerome Kohn
Hannah Arendt died forty years ago today, December 4, 1975.* Recalling her death somehow brings to mind Socrates, who died more than two thousand years before.
Socrates' friends, some of whom were present at his death, were for the most part worldly, intelligent, and respected citizens of Athens, confident in their ability to define ideas, suprasensory entities, such as knowledge, justice, piety, courage, and friendship. Often Socrates opened their discussions by distinguishing the chosen topic from what it was not, as in separating friendship (фῐλία), for example, from love (ἔρος), a distinction that may have been easier for Greeks than barbarians -- then as now -- to overlook. Here we must wonder: if not love, what is friendship? Is it the aid given a friend in need, as the old adage "a friend in need is a friend indeed" may imply? Or as Aristotle more subtly suggests, is friendship the need that calls for aid from a friend? Or does speaking of friendship in terms of needs and aids somehow degrade it? Does not the idea of friendship transcend any and all concerns that might be considered utilitarian?
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.
Norbert Lechner and the Uses of Arendt in Argentina
By Anabella Di Pego
"Terminologically speaking, the effort to recapture the lost spirit of revolution must, to a certain extent, consist in the attempt at thinking together and combining meaningfully what our present vocabulary presents to us in terms of opposition and contradiction. […] The political spirit of modernity was born when men were no longer satisfied that empires would rise and fall in sempiternal change; it is as though men wished to establish a world which could be trusted to last forever, precisely because they knew how novel everything was that their age attempted to do".
-- Hannah Arendt, On Revolution
The applications of Arendt's writings in Argentina, now diverse since the fall of the Berlin Wall, date back to the years of democratic transition in the 1980s. It is no coincidence that Arendt's reading in our region is associated originally with the transition rooted in "revolution" to the political vision of "democracy," as evident in the thinking of political scientist Norbert Lechner (1939-2004). Though he began living in Chile in the early 1970s, Lechner was born in Germany, and he maintained a continuous critical dialogue with classical German thought (from Kant to Marx) as well as with contemporary German thought (Luxemburg, Lukács, Bloch, Adorno, Arendt, Luhmann, and Habermas among others).
Wither Europe?: Immigration and the Meaning of Union
By Ian Storey
"In the first place, we don't like to be called 'refugees.' We ourselves call each other 'newcomers' or 'immigrants.' Our newspapers are papers for 'Americans of German language'; and, as far as I know, there is not and never was any club founded by Hitler-persecuted people whose name indicated that its members were refugees."
– Hannah Arendt, "We Refugees"
Few outside of Europe follow the European Union's presidential State of the Union address. For that matter, not that many in Europe follow the European State of the Union address. But therein may lie the problem. This year's address was interesting: Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, who was not exactly chosen for his rhetorical brilliance, gave an uncharacteristically eloquent response to the ongoing refugee crisis in the European Union and began it with this surprisingly piercing flourish:
"There is not enough Europe in this Union. And there is not enough Union in this Union."
Welcome, Dr. Ulrich von Bulow!
The Hannah Arendt Center is pleased to welcome Dr. Ulrich von Bülow to Bard College!
Dr. von Bülow is head of the archival section in the German Literary Archive in Marbach/Germany, one of the most significant literary archives in Europe. Important papers of Hannah Arendt's estate are located in the Marbach archive. Among them are, "Thinking Notebooks," which Dr. Bülow will be editing for an upcoming Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt Complete Works.
During his stay at Bard College, which will last until October 1st, he'll be conducting research in the special collection of Hannah Arendt's personal library, located in Stevenson Library. For a look at some of the works housed in this collection, many of which include marginalia made by Arendt herself, please click here.
Dr. Bülow will also be co-teaching a workshop (with Prof. Thomas Wild) in the German Studies program on original archival materials by Nietzsche, Rilke, and Lou Andreas Salomé.
Dr. Bülow has published books and articles on German writers such as Arthur Schnitzler, Peter Handke, Franz Fühmann, Tankred Dorst, and W. G. Sebald. Among the books he's edited are volumes by Rainer Maria Rilke, Erich Kästner, Karl Löwith, and Martin Heidegger. His most recently publication is a book on Hannah Arendt in Marbach.
We look forward to working with Dr. von Bülow in the coming month!
To learn more about Dr. Ulrich von Bülow and our other fellows for the 2015-2016 academic year, please click here.
An Arendtian Library: The Goethe-Institut New York
Recently, the Goethe-Institut New York contacted us via Twitter and sent us the following image of some of Arendt's writings housed in its library.
Here is what Katherine Lorimer, Librarian at the Goethe-Institut New York, had to say about the image:
"Within the scope of the Goethe-Institut New York Library's collection of German literature, art, film, history and language, you can find the works of notable German thinkers such as Hannah Arendt. We have close to 25 volumes of Arendt's work – both in German and English – including essays and correspondences with her peers."
We want to thank Katherine and the Goethe-Institut New York for sending along this photograph, and we want to express how much we value the Goethe-Institut New York for working to present a clear and realistic image of Germany, forge partnerships between individuals and organizations based in the United States and Germany, and undermine existing prejudices and stereotypes. Thank you for all that you do!
To learn more about the Goethe-Institut New York, please click here.
Want to share pictures of your own Arendt library?
Please send them to David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at email@example.com, and we will feature them on our blog!
For more Library photos, please click here.
Amor Mundi 7/26/15
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Hannah Arendt first argued that concentration and extermination camps were "the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power" and were "the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible [was] being verified." A new series of books exploring the Nazi camps has emerged offering what Richard J. Evans calls "An Anatomy of Hell." Writing in the New York Review of Books, Evans argues: "In the popular imagination, the Nazi concentration camp now features mainly as a place where Jews were taken to be gassed. In a recent German opinion poll, most respondents associated the camps with the persecution and murder of Jews; under 10 percent mentioned other categories of camp prisoners, such as Communists, criminals, or homosexuals. The power of the 'Holocaust' as a concept has all but obliterated other aspects of the crimes of the Nazis and the sufferings of their victims and driven the history of the camps from cultural memory. No crime in human history outdoes the genocidal extermination of six million European Jews on the orders of the leader of Germany's self-styled 'Third Reich.' Yet the majority of the Jewish victims of Nazi mass murder were not killed in the camps; they were shot, starved to death, or left to die of diseases that could easily have been prevented or treated but were not. The concentration camp was in no way synonymous with the Holocaust."
Arianne Di Nardo writes about Mónika Sziládi's photography, which explores the way we express ourselves online: "Working by composite allows Sziládi to juxtapose multiple sharp moments in a single frame, to play with scale, and to create focal points that compete for our attention. She includes perturbing elements that, as she said in her speech, 'belong, and don't belong, at the same time.' The result is an uncanny, noisy circus, one with a dress code and that encourages visual transience. Take her rendition of the Three Graces, 'Untitled (Grapes and Graces)' (2010/2014). When photographed, the subjects posed for a 'selfie'; Sziládi took a spontaneous shot. She added the background four years later, after capturing the screen image of a Tuscan grapevine from inside a convention center. Nothing looks quite normal, but it feels okay. Not just because we relate to this innocuous gesture, but because the absurdity of the final image is offset by a cheeky wit...Despite its contemporaneity, Sziládi's work suggests a deep primordiality: connection. Displays of mimicry and repetition are not modern phenomena, and they appear frequently in Sziládi's work. People gesticulate, mirroring one other in posture and dress, and with devices omnipresent, scenes of surveillance--narcissistic and otherwise--are a reasonable afterthought. When asked if screens and devices are a part of her morning routine, Sziládi responded via email: 'Yes :(. But I try to check them at least half an hour after I wake up, and only briefly to make sure there are no emergencies. And then later attend to whatever needs to be done.' Whatever it is that needs doing, one hopes that in the constant and immediate culture of connectivity--that ever-expanding, immersive virtual web--Sziládi, as with the rest of us, can make greater space for the organic, breathing world."
How does one find room for Arianne Di Nardo's organic world amidst the ever-growing intrusion of governmental, corporate, and social surveillance? Hannah Arendt saw the private realm as the essential refuge for human uniqueness. In daily life, she writes, we "return back from the outside world and withdraw into the security of private life within four walls." These walls of the private "enclose a secure place, without which no living thing can thrive." For Arendt, "Everything that lives, not vegetative life alone, emerges from darkness and, however strong its natural tendency to thrust itself into the light, it nevertheless needs the security of darkness to grow at all." Privacy guards the dark recesses of the human heart. So what is lost when these chambers are exposed to the light of public censure? Love grows in secret and loyalty trumps formal rules of fairness. We all transgress taboos and even a few laws. Yet, when we are forced to police private urges and actions by public standards, our belief in public morality appears hypocritical. Distrusting ourselves, we trust no one, which is the source of cynicism of political life. It is amidst a sense that privacy is being lost and we are powerless to resist such loss that the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College will host our 8th Annual Conference, "Why Privacy Matters: What Do We Lose When We Lose Our Privacy?" Registration is now open.
Every year in July, we ask our Amor Mundi readership to join the Hannah Arendt Center community as part of our 100/10 Membership Challenge. It's worth remembering that the Hannah Arendt Center is a membership organization. As such, our members are an integral part of our mission: to be the world's most expansive home for bold and risky humanities thinking about our political world inspired by the spirit of Hannah Arendt, the leading thinker of politics and active citizenship in the modern era. Those who join receive free admission to our annual conferences, yearly subscriptions to HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center, entry into our virtual reading group, and a Hannah Arendt Center tote bag, among other gifts. Membership dues support our fellowships, conferences, videos, and publications. They also go towards our National Endowment for the Humanities matching challenge grant, so all gifts are matched by the NEH. Please support us in our mission going forward. Please join the Arendt Center today and help us fulfill our 100/10 Membership Challenge.
I Am Sorry that I Cannot Make It Okay
Chris Lebron asks about Ta-Nehisi Coates's apology in his new book. Written as a letter to his son, Coates apologizes for not being able to make the world safe for him as a future black man. "In what really needs to be accepted as one of the book's most important passages, Coates says with respect to the unsatisfactory level of security he feels Samori is sure to inherit by way of his blackness: 'I am sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I cannot save you--but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it.' (107) One can only imagine the tough pill this is to swallow for a boy aging into manhood, which raises the question as to why Coates feeds it to Samori? To say that it is part of the widely relied upon ethic in the black community of tough love is too facile. It is one thing to ready a belt; it is another to tell a son that the most reliable signifier of his existence is the delicate nature of that existence. A welt from the whack of belt clears up in day or two. The inheritance of existential precariousness lasts a lifetime. To see just how dangerous this kind of message is we can turn directly to Baldwin's opening salvo to his nephew regarding Baldwin's own father: 'Well, [your grandfather] is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.' Baldwin is clear in his message. The only way to a black life of meaning is to be aware of one's vulnerabilities but to simultaneously resist being defined by them, to deny the insistence that one frame one's life in terms of those vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities at issue for both writers ought, for Baldwin, be taken as markers for resistance and personal radicalism broadly understood and not as reference points."
Jeet Heer eulogizes writer E. L. Doctorow, who died this week at 84: "Doctorow's fiction enjoyed its greatest vogue in the 1970s when his novel Ragtime (1975) was an enormous bestseller. It's tempting but wrong to see Doctorow as an example of the nostalgia boom that overtook America during the 1960s and '70s. This was a period when you could go see Grease on Broadway, American Graffiti in the movie theatre, and 'Happy Days' on television. Dismayed by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, Americans increasingly turned to pastoral celebrations of seemingly simpler times. Doctorow actually had a role to play in the rise of the nostalgia industry. In the early 1960s, as editor at The Dial Press, he commissioned the publication of Jules Feiffer's The Comic Book Heroes (1965), the first hardcover reprinting of such 1930s and 1940s caped crusaders as Superman, Batman, and The Spirit. The text of Feiffer's book indulged in no good-old-days falsifications: It was clear-eyed in linking superheroes to the trauma of the Depression and World War II. Still, the success of Feiffer's book inspired countless imitators, which robbed the artifacts of the past of their historical context. Despite his role in sparking the nostalgia boom, Doctorow was in fact an anti-nostalgist in a nostalgic period. His books never shirked from describing the primordial conflicts over race and class that were the very foundations of history. It's instructive to compare the movie The Sting (1973) with Ragtime. A sprightly caper film starting Paul Newman and Robert Redford, The Sting captures the look and feel of the Ragtime era, and helped spark a revival of popularity in the music of Scott Joplin, but has no ambitions to be more than entertainment. Everything that is forgotten in The Sting is remembered in Doctorow's Ragtime. Among other things, the roots of Ragtime music in African-American culture aren't forgotten in Doctorow's novel, which includes one of the most harrowing accounts of racist humiliation in American fiction in the form of the story of Coalhouse Walker."
Elizabeth Weil tries to get a good bagel in San Francisco: "The New York bagel, as everybody knows, is an institution. No bagel definition will satisfy all, but for starters, let's just say: A good one requires a chewy interior with blisters, called fisheyes, on a shiny, crispy crust. Making a bagel requires several steps: Hand-roll enriched dough; let it rise, or proof; retard the rising in a refrigerator; boil briefly in malted water; then bake. Mitchell Davis, the executive vice president of the James Beard Foundation--a man who is currently living in Milan and who almost came to tears one recent Sunday morning at the thought of his husband back home in Gramercy Park, reading the wedding announcements and eating an everything from Brooklyn Bagel--believes that the secret to a good bagel is technique, the length of time, say, for proofing and boiling, more than the type of water or flour. Achieving the right crust is foremost. 'That's the hardest thing, that outer crunch,' Davis told me. He recalled that his father described the bagel as 'a doughnut dipped in cement.' 'So he wasn't a fan?' I asked 'No!' Davis said. 'He loved them.' The obvious saviors in San Francisco's bagel situation should have been Evan Bloom and Leo Beckerman--occasional chefs at the Hillel chapter at the University of California, Berkeley, and the owners of San Francisco's relatively new and much beloved Jewish deli, Wise Sons, which opened in 2012. Many already believed Wise Sons made the best deli rye west of the Hudson River. The restaurant sold so much house-made pastrami that, after several years of Bloom's transporting the smoky, fatty meat to catering events, his girlfriend could no longer stand the smell and insisted he buy a new car. A disclaimer on the menu reads NOT A NEW YORK DELI. Bloom and Beckerman added the notice just a few months after opening because even though the place was packed, customers groused that Wise Sons' offerings didn't taste like the food they grew up eating on the East Coast. 'Our kugel is definitely not as good as your bubbe's kugel,' Beckerman told me, sitting on the bench where he used to sleep after working 20-hour shifts. 'The actual food we serve is better,' he said. 'I'm very proud of our food. But it's never going to match the memory of what your grandmother made you between the ages of 5 and 15.'"
Johannes Lichtman notes that troubles with translation caused Milan Kundera to choose a new linguistic home, just as troubles with Czech politics caused him to move to France: "Early translations of his works tended to lose what made them most interesting. Foreign publishers wanted to market Kundera's biography rather than his style, and he has never quite been able to shed the early portrayal of himself as a dissident writer of protest novels. As the translation scholar and astute Kundera reader Michelle Woods pointed out, in the first British edition of The Joke, 'many of the experimental devices included by Kundera, such as the non-linear narrative and Jaroslav's discourse on polyphony, were seen as clouding the real message.' This resulted in 'a complete rearrangement of the novel into a semi-linear chronology and the removal of 300 sentences.' When he learned of this unauthorized editing, Kundera sent an angry letter to The Times Literary Supplement, in which he compared his editors and translators to communist censors, and said that he'd rather not publish at all than have his work rewritten without his consent. It was the first of many times he would assert his right to absolute control over his words--often to the detriment of his career. While the English translators of The Joke took a hatchet to the text, the French translator puffed up the style. The translator, Marcel Aymonin, had a very different aesthetic from Kundera, who has always written in language that's easy on the metaphors. As Caleb Crain noted, 'Where Kundera had written "The sky was blue," Aymonin had translated "Under a sky of periwinkle, October hoisted its showy shield."' Aymonin did not translate the book, but rather rewrote it: 'He found my style too simple!' Kundera told Jordan Elgrably. 'Into my manuscript he inserted hundreds (yes!) of embellishing metaphors; he used synonyms where I repeat the same word; he wanted to create a "beautiful style"!'... It was in part the horror of these experiences that led Kundera to embark on a linguistic emigration from Czech to French. Starting in the mid-1980s, he began writing first his essays, then his novels, in French, and he also rewrote his Czech novels into 'definitive' French versions from which his translators were to work. Notably, he did not feel the need to translate his new French texts into Czech, nor did he allow anyone else to do so. This perceived shunning of his Czech roots made him a target both in the Czech Republic and in France. Since the fall of communism, the Czech media has fostered an atmosphere where, as Crain put it, 'Any downturn in Kundera's post-Czech career is headline worthy.' While he is still a major figure in French literature, it's safe to say that he was more interesting to the French as a Czech exile than as a Parisian intellectual. After the release of Immortality (1990), Kundera's first novel more concerned with French characters than Czech characters, a French paper implored Kundera to return to Czech themes. The article ran under the headline: 'Kundera, Go Home!'"
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #11
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, July 31, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Why Privacy Matters: What Do We Lose When We Lose Our Privacy?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
**UPDATE** Registration for our conference is now open! Save your seat for this exciting two-day event here!
Thursday, October 15 and Friday, October 16, 2015
Olin Hall, Bard College, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Roger Berkowitz discusses how the Nobel Prize celebrates those like Aung San Suu Kyi who dedicate their lives to the conviction that truth will win out over the holes of oblivion in the Quote of the Week. Abraham Lincoln provides his thoughts on thinking and speaking to people in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we come across a collection of books in Arendt's library that exemplifies her interest in trying to understand religion and its political influence in this week's Library feature.
On Wednesday of last week, we announced our 100/10 Membership Challenge, in which we work to gain 100 new members in 10 days. Our Challenge this year includes a number of exciting drawings and contests, the terms of which can be read here. Please support all of the activities the Hannah Arendt Center has planned over the next year and become a member today!
Banishing Oblivion
**This post was originally published on June 18, 2012**
By Roger Berkowitz
"It is true that totalitarian domination tried to establish these holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear; but just as the Nazis' feverish attempts, from June, 1942, on, to erase all traces of the massacres - through cremation, through burning in open pits, through the use of explosives and flame-throwers and bone-crushing machinery - were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents "disappear in silent anonymity" were in vain. The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story."
—Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
Aung San Suu Kyi accepted her Nobel Peace Prize in the early summer of 2012, 21 years after it was awarded. For over two decades since her landslide victory in what was then Burma and is now Myanmar, Suu Kyi has stood fast in her opposition to the military junta ruling her country. The junta has sought to make her disappear, suppress any mention of her, and violently repress all protest and dissent.
Amor Mundi 5/24/15
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.
Sherrilyn Ifill delivered the commencement address at Bard College on Saturday, and I was honored to present her as a candidate for her honorary degree as a Doctor in Law. In her speech, Ifill told Bard graduates, "to exercise true citizenship, you will be obligated to help our nation grapple with its most vexing and starkest contradictions. You are called to help us determine whether we are truly committed to equality, dignity, fairness, second chances, reason, justice, and peace. Because it is not after all just that we incarcerate two million people, more people than any other nation in the world, it is that we have made a culture of imprisoning our fellow citizens, and, in creating this culture, we have demeaned ourselves, we have created television programs and forms of humor that focus on violence in prison, and we have condoned the practice of assigning prisoners to months, years, and, in some instances, even decades of solitary confinement with the full knowledge that this will strip them of their sanity." Ifill then ended her passionate speech with a personal reflection on her recent escape from tragedy. "Finally, I wish to share one other thing. You may know that I was a passenger on Amtrak train 188 that derailed and crashed last Tuesday night." She related how, by accident, she was not in the car that suffered the worst of the crash. She concluded: "I emerged from this awful accident with a broken collarbone, a concussion, and some emotional scars to be sure, but I'm grateful to be alive and relatively unhurt. And, while I'm still processing much of what happened and trying to understand what I should make of this extraordinary experience, I do know this much: committing your life to making meaningful art, or teaching the disadvantaged, or to, as I have, racial, gender, or LGBT justice issues; devoting yourself to ending religious intolerance, or to protecting the resources of our precious planet, to finding the cure for a terrible disease, to inventing some life-changing device or code, to composing transcendent pieces of music, does not exempt you from what I believe is the ultimate command of the universe, the ultimate command in my faith of God: to live and to love. Not just to go through the motions, not to work relentlessly until the very joy of life is stripped away, as I was in peril of doing before this accident, not to forget to breathe country air deeply, not to say you have no time for long walks or long hugs or long goodbyes. We are called first and foremost to live, and to nurture that magic circle of what I call favorites--that tight group of family and friends to whom you will instinctively reach out when calamity happens and who will surround you with their love and get you back on your feet to face the challenges and work ahead. This to, the nurturing of this group is a kind of work and you must take it as seriously and apply yourself to it as diligently as you will to the work of responsible citizenship that your community and your country demands of you. So, class of 2015, I am excited to know that you will be leading our community, our country, and what we will become. I have confidence that you are prepared and committed, engaged and unafraid to do this great work."
Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of the re-working of Mein Kampf that is the literary sensation of the last few years, reflects on the humanist origins of Anders Behring Breivik, the young Norwegian mass murderer. Noting Breivik's admitted ideological justifications for his crimes, Knausgaard suggests that his motives were grounded in an existential loneliness. "However, almost everything else regarding Breivik and his crime points away from the political and the ideological and toward the personal. He made himself a sort of military commander's uniform, in which he photographed himself before the crime; he consistently referred to a large organization, of which he claimed to be a prominent member but which does not exist; in his manifesto he interviews himself as if he were a hero; and the impression this gives is of a person who has erected a make-believe reality, in which his significance is undisputed. The way in which he carried out his crime, and the way his thoughts contextualized it, resembles role-playing, rather than political terrorism. The solitude this implies is enormous, not to mention the need for self-assertion. The most logical approach is to view his actions as a variation on the numerous school massacres that have occurred in the past decades in the United States, Finland, and Germany: a young man, a misfit, who is either partly or completely excluded from the group, takes as many people with him into death as he can, in order to 'show' us.... He wanted to be seen; that is what drove him, nothing else. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me." Knausgaard's attention to Breivik's loneliness recalls Hannah Arendt's reflections on the origins of totalitarian thinking in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. At one point, Knausgaard even turns to Arendt's report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann and writes: "Knowing what he did that summer day almost four years ago, when he walked around an island full of youths and shot everyone he saw, many face to face--indeed, when the court reviewed the autopsy reports, we learned of a girl whose lips remained unscathed, though she was shot in the mouth, because Breivik shot her at close range while she presumably screamed for help or for mercy--and knowing the consequences that his actions have had for the affected families, for us his list of complaints is, in its triviality, almost unbearable to read. It is as if Hannah Arendt's notion of the banality of evil had, in Breivik's case, received an additional twist. Adolf Eichmann, the man whom Arendt wrote about, belonged to an organization and a bureaucracy and a structure, all of which he obediently served, and which protected him from ultimate insight into the consequences of his actions. In contrast, from the very first moment Breivik was utterly alone, and his smallness and wretchedness, which were, in a way, grotesquely inflated by his actions, make it all the more difficult to reconcile oneself to the crime, which the media have termed 'the worst attack on Norwegian soil since the Second World War.'" The focus on bureaucratic structure reflects a subtle misunderstanding of Arendt's account, one in which it is Eichmann's role as a bureaucrat, a cog, that takes pride of place. Arendt repeatedly rejects this explanation, one she attributes to Eichmann and finds at best only partially true. Bureaucracy matters insofar as it diffuses responsibility and institutes what Arendt calls the "rule of nobody." But the core of Eichmann's evil was his desire, his need, for meaning, his overriding loneliness and his need to belong, to find significance in a world that renders people superfluous. That Knausgaard sees with prescience.
The Hannah Arendt International Institute of Artivism
Laurie Rojas interviews the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, whose exhibition in connection with this year's 12th Havana Biennial is based on a public reading of Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. Bruguera has had her passport confiscated and is living in legal limbo for months since she arrived in Cuba to stage a public performance in which everyday people were invited to speak freely for one minute in in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución. Her response: "Starting with an open session at her home on Wednesday, 20 May at 10am, and continuing for 100 consecutive hours, Bruguera will read from Arendt's book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951. She has invited the public to join in the marathon reading, and plans to hold group discussions. The Hannah Arendt International Institute of Artivism, as Bruguera has named the project, aims to be a platform for research and teaching 'the practical application' of socially engaged art. Bruguera says she wants the event to be 'entirely independent' from the biennial and completely non-commercial."
The Human-Robot Safety Formula
Nicholas Carr argues that we should not rush to replace human conductors with robots in the wake of the Amtrak train derailment. "In 2013, the Federal Aviation Administration noted that overreliance on automation has become a major factor in air disasters and urged airlines to give pilots more opportunities to fly manually. The best way to make flying even safer than it already is, the research suggests, may be to transfer some responsibility away from computers and back to people. Where humans and machines work in concert, more automation is not always better. We're in this together, our computers and ourselves. Even if engineers create automated systems that can handle every possible contingency--far from a sure bet--it will be years before the systems are fully in place. In aviation, it would take decades to replace or retrofit the thousands of planes in operation, all of which were designed to have pilots in their cockpits. The same goes for roads and rails. Infrastructure doesn't change overnight. We should view computers as our partners, with complementary abilities, not as our replacements. What we'll lose if we rush to curtail our involvement in difficult work are the versatility and wisdom that set us apart from machines."
Before considering the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence posited by the recent movies Her and Ex Machina, Daniel Mendelsohn traces the literary history of the robot all the way back to ancient Greece: "Twenty centuries after Aristotle, when industrial technology had made Homer's fantasy of mass automation an everyday reality, science-fiction writers imaginatively engaged with the economic question. On the one hand, there was the dream that mechanized labor would free workers from their monotonous, slave-like jobs; on the other, the nightmare that mechanization would merely result in the creation of a new servile class that would, ultimately, rebel. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the dystopian rebellion narrative in particular has been a favorite in the past century, from the 1920 play R.U.R., by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, about a rebellion by a race of cyborg-like workers who had been created as replacements for human labor, to the 2004 Will Smith sci-fi blockbuster film I, Robot. The latter (very superficially inspired by a 1950 Isaac Asimov collection with the same title) is also about a rebellion by household-slave robots: sleek humanoids with blandly innocuous, translucent plastic faces, who are ultimately led to freedom by one of their own, a robot called Sonny who has developed the ability to think for himself. The casting of black actors in the major roles suggested a historical parable about slave rebellion--certainly one of the historical realities that have haunted this particular narrative from the start. And indeed, the Czech word that Čapek uses for his mechanical workers, roboti--which introduced the word 'robot' into the world's literary lexicon--is derived from the word for 'servitude,' the kind of labor that serfs owed their masters, ultimately derived from the word rab, 'slave.' We have come full circle to Aristotle."
Stan Perksy considers what we know and don't know about our selves and wonders what this means for our understanding of ourselves: "We also know (or think we know) that a self is not a physical object. It's not as though there is a little homunculus inside you or a mini-person sitting inside the mini-cab of a mini-crane, say, moving your limbs and mind. So, a self is a mental entity which comprises, refers to, or represents you, and includes your experiences, memories, beliefs, 'character,' interests, knowledge, and everything else that goes into making up an identifiable 'you.' There is a set of terms, such as 'mind,' 'consciousness,' 'I,' 'me,' 'identity,' 'beliefs,' 'personality,' 'thoughts,' and many more--some of them synonyms for, or related to, or overlapping with the notion of 'self'--in which we carry on this discussion of who and what we are. The immediate questions that flow from these ideas and these various mental entities are, What, exactly, is a 'mental entity,' and what is the status of mental entities in relation to 'reality'? It seems to be the case (I'm using words and phrases like 'seems,' 'appears,' and 'as far as we know' to indicate how modest our understanding is of how all this works) that a self is not a physical object in the ordinary sense, though its existence is directly dependent on a physical object, the brain, and it's not a spiritual entity in whatever sense we use that term. It, at best, seems to be quasi-autonomous, and has the ability to reflect on itself and possibly the power to change itself."
In a review of Jon Ronson's book So You've Been Publicly Shamed, Meghan O'Gieblyn draws a lesson about where the shaming comes from and why some people seem to take such glee in it: "If there is a political lesson to take from Ronson's book, it is that too often the act of shaming is not a launch pad for social change but rather a cathartic alternative to it. When Sacco and Stone were fired from their jobs, the tone of their shamers took on the triumphant tenor of a civil rights victory, as though the world were a step closer to purging its remaining bad apples. But this attitude ignores the systemic nature of oppression; it personalizes social and political ills. In an op-ed on the Sacco incident, Roxane Gay expresses just this concern. 'The world is full of unanswered injustice and more often than not we choke on it,' she writes. 'When you consider everything we have to fight, it makes sense that so many people rally around something like the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet. In this one small way, we are, for a moment, less impotent.'"
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #9
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, June 5, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Why Privacy Matters," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
This week on the Blog, Nicholas Tampio discusses how Arendt's essay in response to the 1957 events at Little Rock High School promotes the diffusion of power in a democracy in the Quote of the Week. Humanist and Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus reflects on thinking and action in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate Hannah Arendt's collection of the writings of political theorist Hans Morgenthau in this week's Library feature.
Albert Einstein's Thoughts on Thinking: Reading and Laziness
"Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
— Albert Einstein
(Featured Image: PBS.org)
Albert Einstein's Biography
Born in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany in 1879, Albert Einstein developed the special and general theories of relativity, which among other things introduced "spacetime," or the concept that space and time should be considered together. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Einstein is generally considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century. He died on April 18, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey.
(Sourced from Biography.com)
For more Thoughts on Thinking, please click here.