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Our 2016 100/10 Membership Challenge Contests and Drawings Begin!
We at the Hannah Arendt Center are very excited about this year's 100/10 membership challenge, especially all of the contests and drawings we have planned!
The Big Three
First up, we have three drawings that will last the duration of the challenge. Each of these contests has its own rules:
- Perks for New and Renewing Members - All new members receive a complimentary copy of the inaugural HA Journal, Vol. I. Additionally, All new & renewing members are all entered into a raffle for a complimentary DVD of the film, Hannah Arendt by Margarethe von Trotta
- Referral Challenge – Like last year, we have included a text field in our membership form that reads, "Please enter the contact name of the person who requested you to submit your donation." If you have a friend enter your name here when they are purchasing or renewing their membership, you will be entered into a drawing to win our Tote Bag package, which includes (1) HA Tote Bag, (1) copy of HA: The Journal, Vol. 1, 2, 3 and 4, and (1) signed copy of Thinking in Dark Times.
- $1000 Challenge – Any person who purchases or renews a membership of $1000 and above will be entered to win a copy of Hannah Arendt's Library, an exclusive artist book by Heinz Peter Knes, Danh Vo, and Amy Zion. More info can be found about the book here: http://hac.bard.edu/membership/
The winners will all be announced sometime on or after Sunday, July 31st after their names have been selected in a random drawing.
Please note that different winners will be selected for the Referral and $1000 challenges.
Social Media Mini-Contests!
We also have three mini-contests scheduled, all of which have the same basic guidelines:
Share, like or comment any Tweet/Status Update/Instagram posted during our #100in10 Challenge and you will be entered into a drawing for three (3) Tote Bag Packages.
We will be giving away three (3) Tote Bag Packages, one on July 26th, another on July 29th, and the last one on August 1st. Each contest will run a total of approximately three days. At midnight on the 25th, the 28th, and August 1st, we will close each of our contests and will draw a winner randomly from those who have participated. We will then contact the winner and announce their names on our social media accounts pending their approval. This means that each person has three chances to win, but please note you can win only once. **Each entrant may enter on Facebook, Twitter and/or Instagram
A few rules to consider:
- Anyone found to be using multiple accounts in this contest will be deemed ineligible to win and will be withdrawn from all future contests during this year's challenge.
- Participants can only be entered ONCE for each one of the three mini-contests. We have three mini-contests scheduled, which means each person has three chances to win. However, please note you can only win once, regardless of whether it is on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram
- You will NOT be considered an entrant if you use your personal Timeline or someone else's Timeline to share a contest post. Entry into each contest is limited to liking or commenting the contest post, which will be found on our Facebook page.
- Please note that this contest is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook. As such, all entrants to this promotion agree to release Facebook of all responsibility.
- Anyone found to be using multiple accounts in this contest will be deemed ineligible to win and will be withdrawn from all future contests during this year's challenge.
- Participants can only be entered ONCE for each one of the three mini-contests. We have three mini-contests scheduled, which means each person has three chances to win. However, please note you can only win once, regardless of whether it is on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram
- Please make sure to include our Twitter handle, @Arendt_Center, in your Tweet should you decide to re-Tweet our contest post.
- Please note that this contest is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Twitter. As such, all entrants to this promotion agree to release Twitter of all responsibility.
- Anyone found to be using multiple accounts in this contest will be deemed ineligible to win and will be withdrawn from all future contests during this year's challenge.
- Participants can only be entered ONCE for each one of the three mini-contests. We have three mini-contests scheduled, which means each person has three chances to win. However, please note you can only win once, regardless of whether it is on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram
- Please make sure to include our Instagram handle, @hannaharendtcenteratbard, in your "regram" should you decide to regram our contest post.
- Please note that this contest is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Instagram. As such, all entrants to this promotion agree to release Instagram of all responsibility.
New Membership Thank-You
As part of The Big Three mentioned above, all new members will receive a free copy of the Hannah Arendt Center's inaugural edition of the HA: The Journal. Additionally, all new & renewing members are entered into a raffle for a complimentary DVD of the film, Hannah Arendt by Margarethe von Trotta. More information on the journal can be found here.
Any questions, comments, or concerns should be directed to Daniel Fiege, Media Coordinator of the Hannah Arendt Center, at email@example.com.
Thank you, and good luck to all of the participants!
The Hannah Arendt Center
Amor Mundi 04/24/16
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.
Centralization and Duplication
Orville Schell writes in the NY Review of Books about the rise of "an old-style Leninist party in a modern world." The Chinese Communist Party Schell argues is using a wide-ranging crackdown on corruption to execute a massive purge of opposition leaders. "As different leaders have come and gone, China specialists overseas have become accustomed to reading Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tea leaves as oscillating cycles of political "relaxation" and "tightening." China has long been a one-party Leninist state with extensive censorship and perhaps the largest secret police establishment in the world. But what has been happening lately in Beijing under the leadership of Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping is no such simple fluctuation. It is a fundamental shift in ideological and organizational direction that is beginning to influence both China's reform agenda and its foreign relations. At the center of this retrograde trend is Xi's enormously ambitious initiative to purge the Chinese Communist Party of what he calls "tigers and flies," namely corrupt officials and businessmen both high and low. Since it began in 2012, the campaign has already netted more than 160 "tigers" whose rank is above or equivalent to that of the deputy provincial or deputy ministerial level, and more than 1,400 "flies," all lower-level officials. But it has also morphed from an anticorruption drive into a broader neo-Maoist-style mass purge aimed at political rivals and others with differing ideological or political views. To carry out this mass movement, the Party has mobilized its unique and extensive network of surveillance, security, and secret police in ways that have affected many areas of Chinese life. Media organizations dealing with news and information have been hit particularly hard. Pressured to conform to old Maoist models requiring them to serve as megaphones for the Party, editors and reporters have found themselves increasingly constrained by Central Propaganda Department diktats. Told what they can and cannot cover, they find that the limited freedom they had to report on events has been drastically curtailed. The consequences of running afoul of government orders have become ever more grave. Last August, for instance, a financial journalist for the weekly business magazine Caijing was detained after reporting on government manipulation of China's stock markets and forced to denounce his own coverage in a humiliating self-confession on China Central Television (CCTV). And more recently media outlets were reminded in the most explicit way not to stray from the Party line when Xi himself dropped by the New China News Agency, the People's Daily, and CCTV. All news media run by the Party [which includes every major media outlet in China] must work to speak for the Party's will and its propositions, and protect the Party's authority and unity," Xi warned. In front of a banner declaring "CCTV's family name is 'the Party,'" Xi urged people who work in the media to "enhance their awareness to align their ideology, political thinking, and deeds to those of the CCP Central Committee." Then, only days later the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced new regulations banning all foreign-invested media companies from publishing online in China without government approval."
Amor Mundi 1/10/16
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.
What We Cling To
Adam Gopnik investigates why some pasts are more available than others: "The most persistent mistake that historians and politicians have made in analyzing the modern world is to imagine, again and again--a fallacy shared by liberals and Marxists alike--that people will pursue their own economic interests in preference to their ideological fixations. They don't. They never will. Nationalist ideology has been a much stronger force in the modern world than class interest. This dates at least to the memorable moment when the Great War began and socialists throughout Europe were sure that transnational class-consciousness would trump nationalist war fever. It didn't. It never has. The better question may be what divides our past so radically between the things we remember and the things we don't. It may be that the general force of anxiety that affects everything in modern life is also responsible for the way our pasts get divided. The truth about modern life is that it creates enormous anxiety at every moment. It's like a traumatic force that suppresses some memories and refuses to suppress others at all. Our past is divided between the archival and the available exactly because it is so quickly past--so rapidly dissolved in confusion. We all want to stop the process of traumatic change from happening, and sometimes we do it by forgetting everything, sometimes by remembering almost too much. The Beatles linger; other bands unduly fade. (Do we really need to remember 'Mr. Moonlight' or 'Don't Pass Me By?' We do, though.) When he was running for President the first time, Barack Obama got into some trouble for saying that people in small towns that had lost manufacturing jobs 'cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them' as a way to explain their frustrations. It was impolitic, but, with a crucial proviso added, true: we all are clinging to something, if no more than an app at our Beatle-loving fingertips." Gopnik is right that people cling to fantasies over and above their interests. Nationalism is at times one of those fantasies, but as Hannah Arendt points out, nationalism, while dangerous, is nevertheless limited by national boundaries. As bad as nationalism is, the real danger in the modern world is when coherent fantasies are ideological and transnational. This is part of what she means by the total domination of totalitarianism, when fantasies expand eternally with the aim of overrunning the world.--RB
The Critic-in-Chief
Edward Mendelson praises President Obama's college-age criticism of T.S. Eliot: "Obama sees that Eliot's conservatism differs from that of fascist sympathizers who want to impose a new political hierarchy on real-world disorder. Eliot's conservatism is instead a tragic, fatalistic vision of a world that cannot be reformed in the way that liberalism hopes to reform it; it is a fallen world that can never repair itself, but needs to be redeemed. Behind this insight into Eliot's conservatism is Obama's sense that the goal of partisan politics is not the success of one or another party or program, but the means by which private morality can be put into action in the public sphere. So the liberal Obama can respect the conservative Eliot, because both seek what are ultimately moral, not political, ends... Obama asks his friend, 'You seem surprised at Eliot's irreconcilable ambivalence; don't you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?' Instead of isolating Eliot in some social, ethnic, or sexual category, instead of hearing in him the voice of political or ideological error, Obama finds a deep ambivalence that might be felt by anyone, just as Kermode sees Eliot's 'shudder' as a special case of something felt by everyone. And instead of making an assertion to his friend about her own ambivalence, Obama asks her a rhetorical question, because no one can be certain about someone else's inner life, though sympathy makes it possible to guess. Having first placed Eliot in his historical and literary context, then having pointed to what is unique in him, Obama ends by showing how he speaks to any individual reader who pauses to listen. This is what the finest literary criticism has always done."
The Color of the Sky
Dai George writes about the upcoming T.S. Eliot Prize and Citizen by Claudia Rankine: "The T. S. Eliot Prize carries serious money (£20,000, the most of any single poetry prize in the UK) and serious bragging rights. The list of its past winners doubles as a one-stop index of poetic celebrity on this side of the Atlantic: David Harsent, Carol Ann Duffy, Don Paterson, John Burnside, and Sinéad Morrissey take their places alongside a host of other stars in the contemporary British firmament. In recent years the prize has also acted as a lightning rod for minor controversy. David Harsent's win last year led some observers to suggest that an oligarchy was rigging the system, dishing out prizes among its members while a growing constituency of smaller presses and their poets are effectively disenfranchised. One doesn't have to travel too far down the road of conspiracy and recrimination to recommend the sober, factual analysis of Fiona Moore, a poet and blogger who has done valuable work crunching the numbers to prove how far British poetry prizes have to go before they can claim to represent the full breadth of an increasingly vibrant and diverse publishing ecosystem. The representation question feels particularly urgent this year since the favorite has to be Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric, a book that scrutinizes how black men and women--particularly black American men--are diminished and violated every day. It would seem a woeful category error to invite comparison between the serious, insidious brutality exposed in Citizen and this rarefied anxiety over how a book by a black woman will fare in competition for a literary prize that reflects the white cultural establishment--would seem so, were it not for the fact that Citizen confronts the white British literary establishment in its very text. In a passage titled 'August 4, 2011 / In Memory of Mark Duggan,' Rankine restages an encounter between her multivalent 'you' and 'A man, a novelist with the face of the English sky--full of weather, always in response, constantly shifting, clouding over only to clear briefly.' They are talking at a party in an expensive house in Hackney, the borough that erupted into violence during the 2011 London riots. The casus belli for the riots was, ostensibly, the police execution of the unarmed Duggan, and our craggy, well-meaning novelist wants to know if Rankine would ever write about this moment of specifically British racism. His question, apparently innocent and engaged, turns into one of those flare points of estrangement that Rankine captures with gut-churning precision: Why couldn't he write about it himself? 'How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? Are the tensions, the recognitions, the disappointments, and the failures that exploded in the riots too foreign?' Rankine pulls off a great, and slightly risky, technical feat when she turns the novelist by degrees into first 'the man made of English sky' and then simply 'the English sky.' By conflating him with the low-key melodrama of English weather, Rankine risks demeaning the novelist as an exotic 'other' himself, an object defined by the clichés of his homeland. But this transition to 'sky' works precisely because it enacts the inverted prejudice that prejudice provokes: the blankness, the zoning out from particularities, the reflexive withdrawal that occurs when someone feels unexpectedly isolated by racial assumptions."
Rage in America
Over at Esquire, they have published one of the most fascinating surveys of the year. (OK, it is only January.) "American Rage" is an exploration of how angry we are and who is angry at whom. The results are worth considering: "LET'S BEGIN WITH THE BIG REVEALS: Half of all Americans are angrier today than they were a year ago. White Americans are the angriest of all. And black Americans are more optimistic about the future of the country and the existence of the American dream. There are depths and dimensions, dark corners and subtle contours to our national mood, and setting aside the issue of who actually has a right to be angry and about what--these pages are neutral territory; everyone is allowed their beef--we found three main factors shaping American rage. EXPECTATIONS: Are you disappointed? Do you feel stifled and shortchanged and sold a bill of goods? Then you're probably pretty angry. Consider the white men and women in our survey: From their views on the state of the American dream (dead) and America's role in the world (not what it used to be) to how their life is working out for them (not quite what they'd had in mind), a plurality of whites tends to view life through a veil of disappointment. When we cross-tabulate these feelings with reports of daily anger (which are higher among whites than nonwhites), we see the anger of perceived disenfranchisement--a sense that the majority has become a persecuted minority, the bitterness of a promise that didn't pan out--rather than actual hardship. (If anger were tied to hardship, we'd expect to see nonwhite Americans--who report having a harder time making ends meet than whites, per question three--reporting higher levels of anger. This is not the case.) Indeed, despite having what many would consider a more legitimate case for feeling angry, black Americans are generally less angry than whites. Though they take great issue with the way they are treated by both society in general and the police in particular, blacks are also more likely than whites to believe that the American dream is still alive; that America is still the most powerful country in the world; that race relations have improved over the past eight years; and, most important in the context of expectations, that their financial situation is better than they thought it would be when they were younger. Their optimism in the face of adversity suggests that hope, whatever its other virtues, remains a potent antidote to anger." And one further note: "Seventy-three percent of whites say they get angry at least once a day, as compared with 56 percent of blacks and 66 percent of Hispanics. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans get angry at least once a day, as compared with 67 percent of Democrats. The least angry household-income brackets: the very rich ($150,000-plus) and the very poor ($15,000 and less). The most angry: the middle of the middle class."
From the Mouths of Babes
Mark Edmundson wonders at the fact that profanity seems to have the most power when children are the ones with the foul mouths: "I suspect that the swearing of kids cracks open illusions for adults. When a mom overhears her beloved child swear for the first time, her heart contracts until it feels like it will disappear. But imagine how she feels when she overhears a son or daughter who not only curses, but is truly adept at profanity--someone who summons up what Shakespeare might have been, if he decided to become practiced in the art of the headlong cursing symphony. And who knows, lover of language that he was, he may actually have created such compositions from time to time. What if mom hears her little boy, not long out of Pampers, still in shorts, reel off a euphonious string of curses that sounds like the work of a top sergeant in rage at his recruits? What's lost then is the myth of innocence. Suddenly your child has become a kid. And what better way for the child to rebel against his period of confinement as a child than to become an adept curser? It's not like having sex just at puberty, or holding up the neighbors with a wooden gun and scampering away with a wallet and a purse. But it really can create a gap, a true facture, between the self that was and the self that now is. The first time you hear your beloved 10-year-old say motherfucker: well, on that day something changes. Why does it disturb us so? I suppose something called parental narcissism is involved. We want the child to be perfect. We want the child to avoid all the wounds and disappointments that we suffered. We want the child to be without flaws. (For surely we had our flaws.) The child is a sort of second chance for us--a way to approach life another time and this time to get it right."
We're Gonna Make It Through This Year
Mensah Demary praises the New Year's Resolution: "New Year's resolutions attempt to correct that which has gone awry. It often doesn't, in part because New Year's resolutions are abandoned so often that their abandonment is woven into American culture. A local newscaster speaks over stock footage of round bellies jiggling on treadmills in gyms, and, at the end of the segment, offers a reminder that it's okay if resolutions are forgotten, because there's always next year, and no one achieves their resolutions anyway. Failure is assured, or implied. But while New Year's resolutions are absurd, they are not without value. That the tradition even exists at all engenders a frame of mind necessary for personal change: Thinking about resolutions means I'm thinking about improving myself. I do need to return to the gym to remove the flab once and for all; I could also resolve to call my mother more often, or take a flight south to see her for the first time in four years; I might decide to write difficult essays that take me out of my head, my comfort zones, even if they won't garner any immediate shares, or likes, or favorites. Expanding my reading tastes is a worthwhile resolution; I could certainly stand to read more often, which would mean less time for other things, such as Twitter, but this would be a small loss, a trifle to relinquish, since social media has become anathema to my artistic pursuits. (I would rather be known as a bad writer than a good tweeter; this is a realization that is so baffling to me, and unexpected, that I've been unable to do anything about it except to sit with it, turn it over, and find the lie in it, if it exists.) I could be a better sibling to my brothers and sister, as well as a better uncle to their children; I could turn to God as I deal with my mortality; I could stop wasting my money on the latest gadgets and take-out lunches, and any money saved could then be used to see more of the world with my partner. We could go to South America, or Central America, and I could peck out some words on my laptop at the beach, brushing sand away from my keyboard; I could look at the tapestries and churches, the sculptures and the jewelry, all the details my partner sees and points out; we could forget to take photos and instead resolve to remember it all, to use both of our minds to remember this one, singular trip for ourselves, and keep all of it in our heads and offline; I could finish my book, and make a note in the acknowledgements that the book was written on a trip with my partner, who reminds me of black love, of black friendship, of black power, black excellence, black family, Blackness with a capital B; I could resolve to taste more varieties of bourbon, to give gin another chance (but only one more chance), and to continue to laugh at all the wrong times, at all the wrong things; I could resolve to be even more absurd."
Non-Professors Teaching Non-Students
Ron Srigley offers yet another condemnation of the modern university. But unlike most, he identifies what kind of universities he is writing about. "A word about which universities I have in mind, because not all universities are the same. I wish to speak about third- and fourth-tier Canadian schools that are primarily undergraduate institutions. Historically, these schools have had few graduate programs and have focused their curriculum on the liberal arts and sciences. Today they are abandoning this tradition at an alarming rate in favor of professional programs like engineering, nursing, education, and business. As they stand, these schools are about as similar to, say, the Claremont Colleges as pickled eggs are to Coquilles Saint-Jacques. They're both universities, but ... So just to be clear about my subject, I'm going to be talking about the pickled eggs." Srigley writes in the Los Angeles Review of Books, which raises the following question: Why should we readers of the LARB care about the failure of lower-tier Canadian colleges? He answers that one, too: "But one more thing before I begin: Why should you, parents of students at Claremont or Stanford or one of the UC schools, care? What's it to you how these universities are faring? Perhaps you shouldn't care. But I think it might be good for you, for two reasons. First, it's always good to think about the less fortunate. It can make you more merciful, because you see how fickle fate can be and how, social capital notwithstanding, one or two slight turns of the screw either way could have caused things to turn out quite differently. It can also build community and even create more equity because seeing others' misfortunes tends to make us less inclined to add to them. But second, and more to the point, the disease from which my university suffers, yours does too. It's not as bad where you are, stage one or two as opposed to stage four, but it is recognizably the same disease, and its just as aggressive: administrative bloat, student illiteracy, lots of 'student experience' but very little 'student intelligence,' dumb and dumber no longer a bad Hollywood joke but the unacknowledged consequence, if not the principle, of higher education. If you think I exaggerate, please read on. The university education you save may be your child's." And this is too good not to include: "During one class a couple of years ago, I dimmed the lights in order to show a clip of an interview. The moment the lights went down I saw dozens and dozens of bluish, illumined faces emerge from the darkness. That's when I understood that a lecture or discussion is now only one of several entertainment options available to students in the university classroom. Given the way the game is played, lectures and discussions rank well below Facebook or Tumblr. You can't get mad at them for this, not like in the old days. 'Hey, you, pay attention! This is important.' Say that today and you won't hear anger or shame. You'll hear something like: 'Wha...? Oh, sorry sir. My bad. I didn't mean anything.' And they don't. They don't mean anything. They are not dissing you; they are not even thinking about you, so it's not rebellion. It's simply that the ground has shifted and left you hanging there in empty space, like Wile E. Coyote. Just a few more moments (or years) and down we'll all tumble. These people look like students. They have arms and legs and heads. They sit in a class like students used to do; they have books and write papers and take exams. But they are not students anymore, and you are not a professor. And there's the rub."
Featured Events
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #17
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, February 5, 2016
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
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
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
Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center, will be participating in the opening of the new film, VITA ACTIVA - THE SPIRIT OF HANNAH ARENDT, Directed by Ada Ushpiz, taking place at the Film Forum in New York City.
About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the "Banality of Evil" when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for 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
Olin Hall, Bard College, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
From the Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Wolfgang Heuer notes how it is worth analysing the different forms of violence and asking why and how they transgress various boundaries to approach omnipotence in the Quote of the Week. Sir Joshua Reynolds comments on the lengths to which a man will go to avoid the real labor of thinking in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We are pleased to announce the winners of our 2015 student opinion contest. Finally, we appreciate the annotations Arendt made to her copy of Nisbet's "Social Change and History" in this week's Library feature.
Amor Mundi 12/6/15
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
The Rojava Commune
Wes Enzinna has an extraordinary essay in the NY Times Magazine on the utopian, anarchist, military experiment of Rojava, a small, quasi-autonomous territory in Syria that a part of the Kurdish PKK is trying to turn into a secular and liberal homeland. Enzinna traveled there to teach a class in free speech. He describes some of the surprising aspects of life in Rojava: "In accordance with a philosophy laid out by a leftist revolutionary named Abdullah Ocalan, Rojavan women had been championed as leaders, defense of the environment enshrined in law and radical direct democracy enacted in the streets." The territory is governed by the PKK, which includes "an all-female force called the Y.P.J., or Female Protection Units. These forces have become key American allies in the region." Turkey considers the PKK terrorists. But many others have a different view. "...[T]o sympathetic Western visitors, Rojava was something else entirely: a place where the seeds of the Arab Spring promised to blossom into utopia. 'What you are doing,' said Raymond Joliffe, a member of Britain's House of Lords, during a trip in May 2015, 'is a unique experiment that deserves to succeed.' A Dutch professor named Jan Best de Vries arrived in December 2014 and donated $10,000 to help buy books for Kurdish university students. David Graeber, a founder of Occupy Wall Street, visited that same month and wrote before his trip that 'the autonomous region of Rojava, as it exists today, is one of few bright spots--albeit a very bright one--to emerge from the tragedy of the Syrian revolution.' In May, I saw an announcement on Facebook for the Mesopotamian Social Sciences Academy, a new, coed university in Rojava's de facto capital, Qamishli. This in itself was revolutionary. For years, Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, forbade many Syrian Kurds to study. In ISIS territory just 15 miles away, Kurdish girls were routinely tortured for being Westernized heretics--sometimes tied by their ponytails to car bumpers and dragged to their deaths. In Rojava, they were being educated. When I sent a message to the academy's Facebook page, requesting more information, I received a reply from Yasin Duman, a Kurdish graduate student living in Turkey. He had taught several courses there, he said, and when he found out I was a writer and professor in New York, we discussed a journalism class. Duman explained that Rojava's youth had little experience with the idea of free speech. Perhaps I could teach them: 'A free people has to have freedom of speech,' he said. It would be a cultural exchange. I would teach writing, and my students would show me what life was like in Rojava. We decided that I would spend a week in July giving a crash course in journalism basics: how to report, how to interview and how to document the war raging around them." The people in Rojava have a near-fanatical loyalty to Abdullah Ocalan, the charismatic founder of the PKK who sits in jail in Turkey. Enzinna notes that Ocalan "looms as a Wizard-of-Oz-like presence in Rojava." He also points out that amidst a horrific war, the PKK-based government in Rojava has committed war crimes and fallen short of the ideals it was charged to uphold. But overall, Enzinna offers an incredible glimpse into a unique and hopeful social experiment in the midst of the hell that now is Syria.
Learning How to Love
Rosamund Urwin writes about Deeyah Khan, creator of the new film Jihad: A British Story. For Khan, recruiting young Brits into ISIS is a matter of teaching them about love. "Khan feels frustrated about the media debate after the Paris attacks. 'One guy will say, "it's all about Islam". The other will say, "it has nothing to do with Islam". I want to throw something at the TV! What are we doing about it? We don't have time for douchebags in suits to be pointing fingers at each other. Of course Islam has something to do with it--people are doing it in the name of Islam--but it's also about human vulnerabilities--needs that get filled somehow.' IS, she notes, spends hundreds of hours recruiting each fighter. It builds an intimate connection on Skype: finding out who this person is, their dreams. 'IS takes the yearning, the sadness, the anger, preys on that and draws people into becoming cannon fodder.' Perhaps because we're sitting in a Canary Wharf restaurant, Plateau, surrounded by Savile Row suits, I suggest IS may be the ultimate headhunters. Khan nods. 'They are. It's also like grooming. They find out what all your needs are, they build that loyalty and love.' Love, she acknowledges, seems a strange word to use when we're talking about a hateful ideology. 'It doesn't start with hate. It starts out as a human need that is not being met, and with love and loyalty between the recruiter and the follower.' Those radicalised by former über-recruiter Abu Muntasir describe him as the father they wished they had had."
Good Cop, Bad Cop
Steve Locke writes about how he was stopped and questioned because he fit the description of someone who had committed a crime. After he was let go, he went back to his office on his way to teach his class: "My colleague was in our shared office and she was able to calm me down. I had about 45 minutes until my class began and I had to teach. I forgot the lesson I had planned. I forgot the schedule. I couldn't think about how to do my job. I thought about the fact my word counted for nothing, they didn't believe that I wasn't a criminal. They had to find out. My word was not enough for them. My ID was not enough for them. My handmade one-of-a-kind knit hat was an object of suspicion. My Ralph Lauren quilted blazer was only a 'puffy coat.' That white woman could just walk up to a cop and talk about me like I was an object for regard. I wanted to go back and spit in their faces. The cops were probably deeply satisfied with how they handled the interaction, how they didn't escalate the situation, how they were respectful and polite." The cops probably were deeply satisfied with their performance. The vastly different reactions different people will have to this account are themselves many reasons it should be read.
Owning a Vermeer
In an interview, Teju Cole makes a case for the critic in the age of a bloated art market: "[W]hen someone pays $160 million for a Rembrandt or a de Kooning... I don't even know what's going on there. Is it only acquisitiveness? I don't know what kind of feeling they have for the art... Maybe the question should be: someone who privately owns a Vermeer, there's some in museums, they're very nice. Some of it can be in private ownership, it's okay, it's part of the circulation. What it's our job to do [as critics] is to help create and sustain value for overlooked work... So to do the kind of writing around that work, the celebration of that work, to give an account of how that work functions in the world: to say, here's this photographer from Mali, here's this sculptor from Nigeria, here's this Honduran filmmaker, we're doing this festival of Brazilian film. You know! Those things. I'm talking about this not as a fiction writer but as a critical writer. Some of our work is to look at the overlooked, to draw attention to those worthy things. The question is not always about what people are paying $50 million for, but the stuff that is only fifty thousand, only ten thousand, and getting that stuff into the museum space and have it be what it needs to be, to write books about it, to get it in the syllabus."
Giving to Charity
In the wake of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's announcement that he will donate 99% of his stock in his company to charity over the course of his lifetime, John Cassidy considers the present and future of philanthrocapitalism: "It's not just the size of the donations that the wealthy are making that demands attention, though. Charitable giving on this scale makes modern capitalism, with all of its inequalities and injustices, seem somewhat more defensible. Having created hugely successful companies that have generated almost unimaginable wealth, Zuckerberg, Gates, and Buffett are sending a powerful message to Wall Street hedge-fund managers, Russian oligarchs, European industrialists, Arab oil sheiks, and anybody else who has accumulated a vast fortune: 'From those to whom much is given, much is expected.'... People like Zuckerberg and Gates, by virtue of their philanthropic efforts, can have a much bigger say in determining policy outcomes than ordinary citizens can. (As Matthew Yglesias pointed out on Vox, one of the advantages of registering the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as an L.L.C. is that it can spend money on political ads.) The more money billionaires give to their charitable foundations, which in most cases remain under their personal control, the more influence they will accumulate. And relatively speaking, anyway, the less influence everybody else will have. Some Americans--not all of them disciples of Ayn Rand--might say that this is a good thing. I have already cited some of the Gates Foundation's good works. Isn't Michael Bloomberg, with his efforts to reform gun laws, promoting the public interest? Isn't George Soros, through his donations to civil-rights organizations, lining up on the side of the angels? In these two instances, my own answers would be yes and yes; but the broader point stands. The divide between philanthropy and politics is already fuzzy. As the 'philanthrocapitalism' movement gets bigger, this line will be increasingly hard to discern."
Physical Media in a New World
J. Malcolm Garcia profiles a bookseller in Afghanistan: "She walks without hurry, somewhat stiffly, sore, a diminutive woman unnoticed, burdened, using her chin to clamp down on a column of books she holds against her chest. Thin paperbacks most of them, a few hardcover. All written by her husband. The books appear worn as she does. Her tired eyes, lined face. Her forehead wrinkled into streams. Maybe from long, nightly exposure to the humid, grainy air, the white smoke rising from kabob grills wafting around and powdering her with ash. Maybe from seventeen years of selling her homebound husband's books. She does not know, does not really consider her fatigue any more than she reflects on how she sees and breathes. Block by block she maneuvers through the teeming sidewalks of Kabul's Shar-E-Naw shopping district until she enters Ice-Milk Restaurant, stops at tables. 'Would you like to buy a book?' she says. The twentysomething customers talk to one another staring at their iPhones and ignore her. Outside, more young people gather, dressed in tight blue jeans and dazzling, multicolored shirts reminiscent of the disco era. They talk loudly, with an air of We are special, laughing, hurrying past storefronts promoting Mastercard Premium, Marco Polo Garments, Alfalah Visa, United Bank, Body Building Fitness Gym, New Fashions Kabul Shop. Their shadows converge and fade into the glow of so many green and blue and red blinking lights dangling from awnings, unfolded above advertisements for pizza and club sandwiches and chicken fingers, and those same shadows cross a boy standing in the middle of the sidewalk and leaning on crutches, his left leg gone, his right hand out for money, and the young people swerve around him as if he were standing in the center of a traffic roundabout, and amid this confusion the book lady leaves Ice-Milk Restaurant without having sold one book and stops at another restaurant, Fast Food Pizza and Burger. The West's influence can be seen throughout Shar-E-Naw in the kaleidoscopic displays of consumerism and high prices that for a moment render the decades of ongoing war here as obsolete as the donkey-drawn carts plodding next to black Hummers stalled in traffic. But the sight of a maimed begging child, injured, she presumes, by a mine, reminds her that beneath the sequined mannequins and suggested affluence and rush to catch up with the Twenty-First Century, Shar-E-Naw is still Afghanistan."
Amazing and Boring
Rebecca Solnit reports from Paris's conference on climate change: "It was amazing to be in that room with Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, and Barack Obama--quite possibly the four most powerful people on earth--along with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Framework Convention Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres, and dozens of other world leaders. It was amazing and often also boring. The statements were largely positive, predictable, vague, and repetitious. Of course, world leaders have to be graded on a curve. Putin's statement at least recognized the reality of climate change and suggested that we should do something about it, which is an improvement over his record of denying and dismissing the problem. Obama spoke of his summer trip to Alaska, whose melting permafrost and burning tundra are 'a preview of one possible future'--though it's the present, not the future, for Alaska. Still, Obama did acknowledge one of the central facts of the day: 'We know the truth that many nations have contributed little to climate change but will be the first to feel its threats.' Given this fact, it's no surprise that things got real when some of the less famous world leaders took their turns. Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi noted that Africa is both the continent that emits least per capita and the one that faces the gravest consequences. Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, the president of Djibouti, itemized the ways his region would be destroyed, and is being destroyed now. 'It is clear that if nothing is done,' he said, 'the peoples of East Africa will find it impossible to survive.'"
Independence and Liberation
Chris Lebron in the The Stone writes about what a certain kind of unhappiness means, one that comes when one realizes that independence does not yield liberation. "My first serious life lesson in those promising and formative adult years was that independence and liberation are not the same thing. Indeed, they work at different levels. Independence is local. The powers that be take a step back from managing your life. Liberation is still far away. You believe you will step into the space opened up to steer your own life, and you do step in, but find that you are shackled from the inside. But you did not place those restraints there. Rather, you inherited them. Maybe from your father's sad face. More likely from the very ways of the world that placed that sadness in him--those beatings in the street, unfair treatment by employers, and his precarious stewardship over the local young women and men whose own young lives could still be saved from the inheritance their own parents most likely had ready for them. You may later look in a mirror and wonder where the lightness of being in your own face went. Then, one day, your son begins asking you: 'Daddy, are you happy?' And you resolve to cut him out of the bum will handed down over the generations. You think, this is an heirloom he can do without.... I spend most of my days on the campus of Yale University, one of the world's most elite, respected and powerful, where I try to contribute knowledge to a world in need of viewpoints like mine, but surely not only mine. This, and all other college campuses, are supposed to allow for, among other things, the flourishing of hope. College students are meant to be spending their time formulating the meaning of their newfound independence and discovering how to convert that independence into liberation. For many, it goes as planned. But a great many black and brown students nationally find themselves instead subject to a corrupt and perverse set of manners. They find that some person, some institution, some history, malignant ignorance or benignly neglectful force intends for them to mind their shackles. They are reminded that their independence is comparatively worth far less than that of their white counterparts, never mind their liberation. These students sense that they do not want their own kids asking: 'Are you happy?' Critics have dismissed the nation's student protesters as mere coddled young people in a rage over some nonsense having to do with costumes or fraternity parties or whatever else the headlines say is the matter. I can tell you that none of these really is at the root. Rather, these and similar events are the catalyst for a revelation--that the rage and sadness these students inherited have been there for years, waiting to make themselves known. The inheritance of disaffection can only really come into its own with the maturity of social consciousness."
Featured Events
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
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #16
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Friday, January 8, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
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, Jennie Han explores the concept of "home" with respect to our discussions of the ongoing student protests on American college campuses in the Quote of the Week. Madame Swetchine draws a metaphor between thinking and nature in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, in a special feature, Jerome Kohn remembers Hannah Arendt on the 40th anniversary of her death.
Amor Mundi 8/2/15
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.
Hasan Elahi started a self-surveillance art series when he was mistakenly reported to the FBI's terrorist watch list in 2001, and he's been reporting his movements online through his website every day since. But what started as a series on the way people are being watched became a series about the way we're watching ourselves: "Making the mundane details of his life publicly available became 'a very pragmatic solution to keep from being shipped off to Guantanamo.' He still faithfully updates his location every time he makes a major move--from his house to the gas station, from the gas station to his job. And he takes pictures of literally everything he does, whether shopping at the grocery store, eating at his favorite Chinese restaurant, or peeing in the bathroom. Strangely enough, Elahi says doing so has allowed him to live a relatively anonymous, quiet existence. 'I like to think of it as aggressive compliance,' he said. 'I've always been fascinated with Magellan and the concept of circumnavigation: going far enough in one direction to end up in the other.' But while the project started out as a response to state surveillance, it's become a parody of the way people now put their entire lives online for anyone--friends, stalkers, government agents--to follow. And it's remarkable how quickly it's happened: when Elahi first started photographing his meals, his friends thought it was weird. Now everyone does it, and some restaurants even have no-photo policies. Elahi doesn't think what he's doing is any stranger than if he were constantly tweeting, checking in on location apps, or posting photos on Facebook. 'These days, we're so wired 24/7 that you have to go out of your way not to be connected,' he said." All of this recalls Richard Sennett's "paradox of visibility and isolation" in his classic The Fall of Public Man. As we are ever more visible in public through cameras, data collection, and the expressiveness of clothes, tweets, and public displays of affection, there is the consequent compensation that we insist on not revealing our true selves. As Sennett writes: "Isolation in the midst of visibility to others was a logical consequence of insisting on one's right to be mute when one ventured into this chaotic yet still magnetic realm." There is a way in which we expose ourselves, but in doing so neutralize and appease those who observe us without actually revealing our true passions, hopes, and desires. The problem, as Sennett argues, is that we then begin to lose the ability to "imagine social relations which would arouse much passion...." The result is that we come to imagine a passionless "public life in which people behave, and manage their behavior, only through withdrawal, 'accommodation,' and 'appeasement.'"
Rosemary Pooler and Richard Wesley penned Turkmen v. Ashcroft, an important decision from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals this month. (h/t Alan Sussman) The decision reinstated a lawsuit against John Ashcroft and other prison and government officials. The plaintiffs are a group of eight Muslims who were arrested on immigration charges after 9/11 and who were then held and interrogated for between three and eight months. The complaint concerned discriminatory treatment based upon a policy by Ashcroft and FBI Director Mueller "whereby any Muslim or Arab man encountered during the investigation of a tip received in the 9/11 terrorism investigation . . . and discovered to be a non-citizen who had violated the terms of his visa, was arrested." The plaintiffs in this suit were arrested, sent to maximum security prisons, subjected to constant strip searches, sleep deprivation, and other harsh interrogation techniques on no evidence except their apparent Muslim faith. Pooler and Wesley, in deciding to reinstate the plaintiff's lawsuit, offer these stirring and more than appropriate final thoughts: "If there is one guiding principle to our nation it is the rule of law. It protects the unpopular view, it restrains fear-based responses in times of trouble, and it sanctifies individual liberty regardless of wealth, faith, or color. The Constitution defines the limits of the Defendants' authority; detaining individuals as if they were terrorists, in the most restrictive conditions of confinement available, simply because these individuals were, or appeared to be, Arab or Muslim exceeds those limits. It might well be that national security concerns motivated the Defendants to take action, but that is of little solace to those who felt the brunt of that decision. The suffering endured by those who were imprisoned merely because they were caught up in the hysteria of the days immediately following 9/11 is not without a remedy. Holding individuals in solitary confinement twenty-three hours a day with regular strip searches because their perceived faith or race placed them in the group targeted for recruitment by al Qaeda violated the detainees' constitutional rights. To use such a broad and general basis for such severe confinement without any further particularization of a reason to suspect an individual's connection to terrorist activities requires certain assumptions about the 'targeted group' not offered by Defendants nor supported in the record. It assumes that members of the group were already allied with or would be easily converted to the terrorist cause, until proven otherwise. Why else would no further particularization of a connection to terrorism be required? Perceived membership in the 'targeted group' was seemingly enough to justify extended confinement in the most restrictive conditions available." Plaintiff's brought this lawsuit in April, 2002, over 13 years ago. Justice can be slow. But one hopes that at least eventually it will be served.
Tom Engelhardt asks the important and difficult question--Is there a new political system emerging in the United States? His five-part account suggests that may well be. "Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name. And here's what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is all around us and yet it's as if we can't bear to take it in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so. Let me make my case, however minimally, based on five areas in which at least the faint outlines of that new system seem to be emerging: political campaigns and elections; the privatization of Washington through the marriage of the corporation and the state; the de-legitimization of our traditional system of governance; the empowerment of the national security state as an untouchable fourth branch of government; and the demobilization of 'we the people.' Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be based, at least in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and power in a new plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is underway and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system somewhat in disarray."
Thinking about global warming and environmental disasters can be numbing and depressing. But in the New Yorker this week, Bill McKibben offers a reason to hope. He tells of Mark and Sara Borkowski in Rutland, Vermont. With help from Vermont's Green Mountain Power, the Borkowski's "stuffed the house with new insulation, put in a heat pump for the hot water, and installed two air-source heat pumps to warm the home. They also switched all the light bulbs to L.E.D.s and put a small solar array on the slate roof of the garage. The Borkowskis paid for the improvements, but the utility financed the charges through their electric bill, which fell the very first month. Before the makeover, from October of 2013 to January of 2014, the Borkowskis used thirty-four hundred and eleven kilowatt-hours of electricity and three hundred and twenty-five gallons of fuel oil. From October of 2014 to January of 2015, they used twenty-eight hundred and fifty-six kilowatt-hours of electricity and no oil at all. President Obama has announced that by 2025 he wants the United States to reduce its total carbon footprint by up to twenty-eight per cent of 2005 levels. The Borkowskis reduced the footprint of their house by eighty-eight per cent in a matter of days, and at no net cost. I've travelled the world writing about and organizing against climate change, but, standing in the Borkowskis' kitchen and looking at their electric bill, I felt a fairly rare emotion: hope. The numbers reveal a sudden new truth--that innovative, energy-saving and energy-producing technology is now cheap enough for everyday use. The Borkowskis' house is not an Aspen earth shelter made of adobe and old tires, built by a former software executive who converted to planetary consciousness at Burning Man. It's an utterly plain house, with Frozen bedspreads and One Direction posters, inhabited by a working-class family of four, two rabbits, and a parakeet named Oliver." McKibben also writes of Richard Kauffman, the NY State energy czar, who cites Hannah Arendt for inspiration. "Kauffman has all sorts of plans, from a 'green bank'--to attract private-sector capital to finance extensive energy-saving retrofits--to new rules that would pressure utilities to play nicely with outside partners like Solar City. 'It's kind of a Hannah Arendt thing,' he said. 'There's not a lot of intentional evil in utilities. But we've created a golden cage for them, protected them from enormous trends.' We were on the subway again, and as it clattered back toward Manhattan Kauffman had to shout to be heard: 'Our aim is to create a policy environment that is not standing against the forces of history but is in line with them.'"
In an interview, author and ghostwriter Hilary Liftin talks about the way she interacts with her subjects: "I have a particular role: to represent the person I'm writing for and to create a voice for that person. But the other thing that I bring to it is empathy. There are certain jobs I don't take because I feel no connection to the person. But if somebody is open with me, and honest about their motivations, and has some level of self-awareness, then I'm going to understand them. The same way you'd feel if you sat down with a criminal and they told you their life story. You would probably understand the crime and forgive it. None of my clients are criminals, but to a much lighter degree that's what goes on. I hear the story, and I hear it with the level of detail that breeds empathy.... I'm not creating a voice out of thin air. Everyone has a public voice, and a lot of actors have developed sound-bitey public voices. But that doesn't translate to paper. That's why they can't just dictate a book, even if they're good storytellers. So the question is: how can I manifest the quirks and thoughts and uniqueness of their own personalities? In part, I do that by typing when they talk. I don't record. That is a way for my brain to take in the voice. My goal is that when my client reads a book they feel like, 'Hilary did something but mostly she just made it happen quickly.' I think people dismiss celebrity memoirs as unreal, contrived and maybe partially made up. But that's definitely not true for anything that I write."
Tamar Adler waxes poetic about preserves: "I have felt lucky, as a grown person, to discover that this thing I loved in innocent abstraction had real importance. Salting and drying meat and fish helped human beings to last through long winters, sea voyages and treacherous overland trails. If cultivating soil was what let us settle, it was harnessing bacterial cultures and sugar, salt, acid, fat, sun and wind to paralyze microorganisms and save food from decay that let us unmoor, discovering all the world that was not visible from our cabbage patches. Basque cider allowed seamen to cross oceans. Dutch pickled herring fueled the exploration of the New World. Vikings spread cod in the riggings of their ships to dry and stiffen in the cold wind, then traded on it as they battled through Scandinavia, the Mediterranean and Central Asia. Cheese was first a way of preserving milk; wine, of grape juice; sauerkraut, of cabbage; prosciutto, of pork. In this sense, all preserved things are additionally miraculous, in that they all are also ways of storing other things: part vessel, part content."
Tiffany Jenkins responds to the query, "Why Value Privacy?" with this answer citing Hannah Arendt. "Where privacy is as important, but perhaps less obviously so, is in relation to the development of the human person. Privacy allows us to retreat from the world, for a while, to not be 'on show' all the time, to take our face off. It is space without scrutiny and immediate judgment in which we can take time out and reflect. Here, we can be vulnerable. Here, we can experiment and try things out. Here, we can make mistakes. We can be ourselves; learning and developing what that means. And that we have some say over what others know and what they do not know, is a way to develop autonomy and self-possession. All this helps us to sure up psychological and social depth. As the writer Hannah Arendt put it: 'A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.'" We couldn't agree more, which is why the Hannah Arendt Center is hosting our 8th Annual Conference "Why Privacy Matters: What Do We Lose When We Lose Our Privacy?" The Conference is Oct. 15-16. You can read about it and register here.
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #12
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at email@example.com.
Friday, September 11, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Why Privacy Matters: What Do We Lose When We Lose Our Privacy?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
**UPDATE** Registration for our conference is now open! Save your seat for this exciting two-day event here!
Thursday, October 15 and Friday, October 16, 2015
Olin Hall, Bard College, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Charles Snyder reflects on how dianoetic laughter frees us from the misery that arises from our constant failure to be able to converse with ourselves in the Quote of the Week. Australian philosopher Peter Singer discusses how thinking helps constitute the meaning of philosophy in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we share an image sent to us by the Goethe-Institut New York of some of Arendt's writings housed in its library in this week's Library feature.
Announcing Our 100/10 Membership Challenge Contests and Drawings!
**UPDATED: Please see our Social Media Mini-Contest section**
We at the Hannah Arendt Center are very excited about this year's 100/10 membership challenge, especially all of the contests and drawings we have planned!
The Big Three
First up, we have three drawings that will last the duration of the challenge. Each of these contests has its own rules:
- Referral Challenge – Like last year, we have included a text field in our membership form that reads, "Please enter the contact name of the person who requested you to submit your donation." If you have a friend enter your name here when they are purchasing or renewing their membership, you will be entered into a drawing to win our Tote Bag package, which includes (1) HA Tote Bag, (1) HA mug, (1) copy of both HA Journal Vol. 1 & 2, and (1) signed copy of Thinking in Dark Times.
- $100 Challenge – Any person who purchases or renews a membership of $100 and above will be entered to win a copy of Hannah Arendt's Library, an exclusive artist book by Heinz Peter Knes, Danh Vo, and Amy Zion. More info can be found about the book here: http://www.bard.edu/hannaharendtcenter/membership/
- DVD Challenge – Any person who purchases or renews a membership at the $50 level will be entered to win a DVD copy of Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt. The DVD comes with a special edition booklet featuring essays from von Trotta and Roger Berkowitz.
The winners of the Big Three will all be announced sometime on or after Friday, July 31st after their names have been selected in a random drawing.
Please note that different winners will be selected for the Recruiting and $100 challenges.
Social Media Mini-Contests!
We also have three mini-contests scheduled, all of which have the same basic guidelines: please favorite or RT our contest Tweets, or like or comment on our Facebook contest posts, to be entered into a drawing for three Tote Bag Packages. Each contest Tweet/Facebook post will begin with the word "#HAC_CONTEST" and will include a picture of the package, as shown at left.
**UPDATE** We now will be giving away six (6) Tote Bag Packages away, so there will be three (3) contest Tweets/Facebook posts published in total: one on July 22nd, another on July 25th, and the last one on July 28th. Each contest will run a total of approximately three days. At midnight on the 25th, the 28th, and August 1st, we will close each of our contests and will draw a winner randomly from those who have participated. We will then contact the winner and announce their names on our social media accounts pending their approval. This means that each person has three chances to win, but please note you can win only once. **Each entrant may enter on both Facebook and Twitter, and we will now be announcing one winner (three in total) for each mini-contest per social media platform. We WILL be having separate mini-contests in which we choose winners on both Facebook and Twitter.**
A few rules to consider:
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- Please note that this contest is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook. As such, all entrants to this promotion agree to release Facebook of all responsibility.
- Anyone found to be using multiple accounts in this contest will be deemed ineligible to win and will be withdrawn from all future contests during this year's challenge.
- Participants can only RT or favorite ONCE for each one of the three mini-contests. We have three mini-contests scheduled, which means each person has three chances to win. However, please note you can only win once, regardless of whether it is on Twitter or Facebook.
- Please make sure to include our Twitter handle, @Arendt_Center, in your Tweet should you decide to re-Tweet our contest post.
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New Membership Thank-You
Last but not least, we have a special gift for all new members who purchase a membership: irrespective of the membership level, all new members will receive a free copy of the Hannah Arendt Center's inaugural edition of the HA Journal. More information on the journal can be found here.
Any questions, comments, or concerns should be directed to David Bisson, Media Coordinator of the Hannah Arendt Center, at email@example.com.
Thank you, and good luck to all of the participants!
The Hannah Arendt Center
Amor Mundi 6/14/15
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.
Zeynep Tufekci takes a critical look at a recent study (by Facebook) showing that the social media's algorithm reduces the number of "cross-cutting" posts that we see, posts that challenge our political beliefs. In other words, if you're liberal, Facebook highlights liberal posts, and vice versa for conservatives. It gives the people what they want, or what they think you want. "Here's the key finding: Facebook researchers conclusively show that Facebook's newsfeed algorithm decreases ideologically diverse, cross-cutting content people see from their social networks on Facebook by a measurable amount. The researchers report that exposure to diverse content is suppressed by Facebook's algorithm by 8% for self-identified liberals and by 5% for self-identified conservatives. Or, as Christian Sandvig puts it, 'the algorithm filters out 1 in 20 cross-cutting hard news stories that a self-identified conservative sees (or 5%) and 1 in 13 cross-cutting hard news stories that a self-identified liberal sees (8%).' You are seeing fewer news items that you'd disagree with which are shared by your friends because the algorithm is not showing them to you.... Overall, from all aspects, this study confirms that for this slice of politically-engaged sub-population, Facebook's algorithm is a modest suppressor of diversity of content people see on Facebook, and that newsfeed placement is a profoundly powerful gatekeeper for click-through rates. This, not all the roundabout conversation about people's choices, is the news." The censoring of oppositional content is subtle and minor, and yet it persists. All of this means that people with different politics will actually see different posts, making them susceptible to meaningfully different realities.
Business Week asked Paul Ford a simple question: "We are here because the editor of this magazine asked me, 'Can you tell me what code is?' 'No,' I said. 'First of all, I'm not good at the math. I'm a programmer, yes, but I'm an East Coast programmer, not one of these serious platform people from the Bay Area.'" 31,000 words and hours later, you realize Ford is telling the truth but answering like a coder. You can't read his long essay--interspersed with video explanations and offers to learn basic coding ("We can't teach you to code, but we can hold your hand through a live-fire exercise. It will be dry, because code is dry until it 'clicks,' and often even then. Want to give it a shot?") without gaining some insight into the beauty, chaos, complexity, and importance of answering the unanswerable question. "A computer is a clock with benefits. They all work the same, doing second-grade math, one step at a time: Tick, take a number and put it in box one. Tick, take another number, put it in box two. Tick, operate (an operation might be addition or subtraction) on those two numbers and put the resulting number in box one. Tick, check if the result is zero, and if it is, go to some other box and follow a new set of instructions. You, using a pen and paper, can do anything a computer can; you just can't do those things billions of times per second. And those billions of tiny operations add up. They can cause a phone to boop, elevate an elevator, or redirect a missile. That raw speed makes it possible to pull off not one but multiple sleights of hand, card tricks on top of card tricks. Take a bunch of pulses of light reflected from an optical disc, apply some math to unsqueeze them, and copy the resulting pile of expanded impulses into some memory cells--then read from those cells to paint light on the screen. Millions of pulses, 60 times a second. That's how you make the rubes believe they're watching a movie.... You can make computers do wonderful things, but you need to understand their limits. They're not all-powerful, not conscious in the least. They're fast, but some parts--the processor, the RAM--are faster than others--like the hard drive or the network connection. Making them seem infinite takes a great deal of work from a lot of programmers and a lot of marketers. The turn-of-last-century British artist William Morris once said you can't have art without resistance in the materials. The computer and its multifarious peripherals are the materials. The code is the art."
Jennifer Gonnerman's eulogy for Kalief Browder, a young New Yorker who spent three years in jail without being charged with a crime, is an indictment of the whole criminal justice system and specifically of the cruel and unusual technique of solitary confinement: "He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a robbery he insisted he had not committed. Then he spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he attempted to end his life several times. Once, in February 2012, he ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose, and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell. In November of 2013, six months after he left Rikers, Browder attempted suicide again. This time, he tried to hang himself at home, from a bannister, and he was taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas Hospital, not far from his home, in the Bronx. When I met him, in the spring of 2014, he appeared to be more stable. Then, late last year, about two months after my story about him appeared, he stopped going to classes at Bronx Community College. During the week of Christmas, he was confined in the psych ward at Harlem Hospital. One day after his release, he was hospitalized again, this time back at St. Barnabas. When I visited him there on January 9th, he did not seem like himself. He was gaunt, restless, and deeply paranoid. He had recently thrown out his brand-new television, he explained, 'because it was watching me.'" Ta-Nehisi Coates further contextualizes Browder's short life in terms of the way the criminal justice system treats African American men.
Josh Marshall wonders at the crazy complexities of Rachel Dolezal's existence, including the fantastic levels at which she, born white, made up a past and present life for herself as a black woman. Against criticism that she may have claimed blackness only when it suited her or that she embraced blackness to get a job at the NAACP, Marshall writes, "Maybe Dolezal had a separate life as a white person or put herself down as a white on a home loan application. (Obviously whatever her intentions she had the freedom which dark-skinned African-Americans lack to just become white again whenever she wanted.) But that's not at all the impression I get of this woman by reading her story. I get the impression that in her mind Dolezal actually had at some level become black, possibly even to the level of some aspect of body dysmorphia. (The counter to that perception, though not necessarily invalidating it, is that according to her adopted brother she warned or perhaps even threatened family members not to expose her.)" Her embrace of her blackness even led to hate crimes being committed against her (at least some of which she fabricated). But the basic point that Marshall insists on is that Dolezal is simply a liar living in an increasingly fictional reality: "I read the Rachel Dolezal story before it got picked up by any national outlets in the original story in the Coeur d'Alene Press on Thursday (yes, epic aggregation fail ... what can I say I was traveling). If you've only read pick-ups or follow-ups, read the original if you get a chance. It's an amazing piece of reporting and will make you appreciate what a great thing small paper journalism is--just an amazingly detailed piece of shoe-leather reporting. Since I read it I've been trying to think what if anything there is to add beyond the peristaltic WTF that seems to be the near universal response. So let me just go with bullet points. Point 1: The one simple thing is the online debate about whether Dolezal is simply 'transracial' like Caitlyn Jenner is transgender. No. It's not like that. In fact, I think we can dispense with this entirely because I have not seen anyone suggesting this anywhere online who wasn't just some wingnut concern-trolling transgenderism and frankly racial identity itself. You can dress yourself up however you want and identify however you want. But when you start making up black parents and all the rest that went into this story, you're just lying. Full stop." Dolezal's story may raise fascinating questions about race and identity. But let's remember that making up coherent fantasies that one holds to in the face of facts is dangerous, demonstrating a disdain for reality. To rewrite history, even one's personal history, diminishes the power of factual truth and habituates one to living in coherent fictions, which Hannah Arendt argues is one of the root causes of totalitarianism.
Anne Fausto-Sterling wonders how we're supposed to know what's good for us, especially in light of "new government guidelines released in February" that reverse a long-standing view that cholesterol should be limited. Suddenly, she writes, "It seems I am free to eat eggs, lobster, and oysters without fear for my life. How, in a mere five years, could our ideas about nutrition do such an about-face? There are several possible explanations. First, it may be really hard to do a good study linking cholesterol intake to ill health. Over time scientists may have designed better and better study methods, until, finally, a more justified truth has emerged. Second, vested interests--giant agribusinesses (purveyors of lobster, eggs, and well-larded beef) and pharmaceutical companies (purveyors of cholesterol-lowering drugs such as statins)--may have influenced the guidelines. Third, foods have changed. Perhaps newer studies differ from older ones because an egg circa 1960 is not an egg circa 2000. Today's chickens are more inbred. Their own food intake has changed, possibly altering the cholesterol in their eggs. Fourth, we have started to focus on human metabolism at the level of multi-organ interactions. Instead of treating diabetes as a disease of the pancreas and obesity as a problem of fat storage, we now talk about a metabolic syndrome, which links high blood sugar, high blood pressure, excess midriff fat, and abnormal cholesterol levels to increased risk of heart disease and diabetes. As conceptions of disease change, so do ideas about the sources of disease. And fifth, the tried-and-true 'all of the above.'"
Zach Pontz considers Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation, a retelling of Albert Camus's The Stranger: "Meursault has divorced himself from history, has, as he tells the investigator tasked with questioning him following his crime, given up analyzing himself. Assigning meaning to the world is something he has lost the energy to do. Harun, on the other hand, is driven by the desire to impose form on a lifetime of quasi-intelligible incidents, the foremost of which is the murder of his brother and its aftermath, which has sentenced its victims--Musa, Harun, their mother--to anonymity. 'There's not a trace of our loss or of what became of us afterward,' Harun tells his interlocutor. 'The whole world eternally witnesses the same murder in the blazing sun, but no one saw anything, and no one watched us recede into the distance.' If Meursault is the stranger, Harun's brother is the invisible man. But the tragedy here is that Harun understands he can't will his brother into being, that he's forever been written out of history by Meursault, in whose book 'The word "Arab" appears twenty-five times but not a single name, not once.' In this way does Daoud, a popular columnist in Algeria who has become a vocal critic of the government, set up one of his main theses: that both the French colonial system, the French Algerian population of which (known as pied-noirs) populated Algeria for a century and a half, and Algerians themselves are complicit in the country's current state of affairs."
Dwight Garner shares the work of Juan Felipe Herrera, the newly appointed US poet laureate: "Mostly, though, you'd like to hear him at the National Mall because his work is built to be spoken aloud. His best poems are polyrhythmic and streaked with a nettling wit. He puts you in mind of something the writer Dagoberto Gilb once said: 'My favorite ethnic group is smart.' Witness Mr. Herrera's long poem, '187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border (Remix),' for example. In it, he flies a freak flag, in a manner that resembles a blend of Oscar Zeta Acosta and Allen Ginsberg, on behalf of his determined politics. Among those reasons Mexicanos can't cross: 'Because it's better to be rootless, unconscious & rapeable'; 'Because the pesticides on our skin are still glowing'; 'Because pan dulce feels sexual, especially conchas & the elotes'; 'Because we'll build a sweat lodge in front of Bank of America'; 'Because we're locked into Magical Realism'; and 'Because Freddy Fender wasn't Baldemar Huerta's real name.'"
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #10
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Friday, July 10, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Why Privacy Matters," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
Olin Hall, Bard College, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Jurgens uses the protests in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD to understand both the differences and the relations between violence and power in the Quote of the Week. Military strategist Carl von Clausewitz discusses the effect that rules and principles have on a thinking man in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate an image of a graduate student's personal "shelf library" of Arendt in this week's Library feature.
Amor Mundi 5/31/15
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.
Laura Kipnis wrote an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education on sexual paranoia in the academy. She argued that new campus sexual misconduct codes "infantilized students while vastly increasing the power of university administrators over all our lives." She also asserted that "students' expanding sense of vulnerability, and new campus policies that fostered it, was actually impeding their educations as well as their chances of faring well in postcollegiate life, where a certain amount of resilience is required of us all." Students at her university, Northwestern, protested. Instead of responding to her arguments, they filed a petition with the University President to have her disciplined. Two students filed Title IX complaints against Kipnis, suggesting that her published essay "had a 'chilling effect' on students' ability to report sexual misconduct." Kipnis, noting the irony that such Title IX cases are having a chilling effect on professors and academic freedom, quickly found herself immersed in the non-transparent quasi-legal world of the Title IX kangaroo courts: "I'd plummeted into an underground world of secret tribunals and capricious, medieval rules, and I wasn't supposed to tell anyone about it.... The Title IX bureaucracy is expanding by the minute. A recent emailed update from my university announced new policies, programs, hires, surveys, procedures, websites, and educational initiatives devoted to sexual misconduct. What wasn't quantified is how much intellectual real estate is being grabbed in the process. It's a truism that the mission of bureaucracies is, above all, to perpetuate themselves, but with the extension of Title IX from gender discrimination into sexual misconduct has come a broadening of not just its mandate but even what constitutes sexual assault and rape. Ambivalent sex becomes coerced sex, with charges brought months or even years after the events in question. Title IX officers now adjudicate an increasing range of murky situations involving mutual drunkenness, conflicting stories, and relationships gone wrong. They pronounce on the thorniest of philosophical and psychological issues: What is consent? What is power? Should power differentials between romantic partners be proscribed? Should eliminating power differences in relationships even be a social goal--wouldn't that risk eliminating heterosexuality itself?" What is often forgotten in the debate around Title IX is that bureaucracies Title IX has spawned are aimed not simply at the real problem of rape and the potential problems of ambiguous sexual relations but also at the discussion, writing, or reading of anything sexual. There is a desire to make college campuses safe, not merely physically safe but intellectually safe, which flies in the face of the very idea of a university. Kipnis' essay is more than worth reading to see how the Title IX bureaucracy is morphing and expanding to insist upon intellectual and political conformity. And you can read a draft of my new essay discussing campus Title IX sexual misconduct codes here.
Colson Whitehead interrogates our obsession with photographs in an iPhone world, arguing in the NY Times Magazine that pictures offer a window into our souls. "Lynching photography proves the enduring truth of the phrase 'The eyes are the window of the soul.' In a 1919 picture of the burning corpse of William Brown, for example, dozens of men pose for the camera while the body is consumed by flames in the foreground. One man knows which is his 'best side' and offers his strong right profile to the lens. Some of the men are smiling over their accomplishment. One boy touches his fingers to his chin thoughtfully, his lips curled in amusement. What do we see in their eyes, what glimpse of their souls? Pure American darkness. 'When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.' That was Nietzsche, and he could have been describing the scene at the lynching of Rubin Stacy in 1935. It was an all-ages affair. In the intimate photograph, Stacy hangs from a tree, while a few feet away two young girls of 5 or 6 squint up at his limp body, their faces covered by a shadow. Another girl, a bit older, is more adventuresome and stands closer to the dangling man. She grins up at his corpse. Given her youth at the time of the picture, she may still be alive today, occasionally sifting through her box of souvenirs to reminisce. There were plenty of pics, and yet it didn't matter. 'Or it didn't happen' is a colossal mandate, undermining the brutalities that escape the lens. Certainly the current surfeit of footage chronicling lethal encounters doesn't speak to an increase in incidents, but merely an increase in our ability to capture and transmit. 'Or it didn't happen' erases all those victimized when there was no one present to record, the thousands of human beings strung up when there was no one to testify for them. When there was no one to say, This is our history, whether we want to remember it or not."
Government Jobs and the Black Middle Class
Amidst all the articles and analyses of the Great Recession over the last seven years, only a few pointed out the racial implications, that the retreat of public sector jobs and the attacks on public sector unions (whether right or wrong) has had a disproportional and disastrous impact on the Black middle class. Patricia Cohen has an essay in the NY Times that gives the issue some context. "Roughly one in five black adults works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, driving buses, processing criminal justice and managing large staffs. They are about 30 percent more likely to have a public sector job than non-Hispanic whites, and twice as likely as Hispanics. 'Compared to the private sector, the public sector has offered black and female workers better pay, job stability and more professional and managerial opportunities,' said Jennifer Laird, a sociologist at the University of Washington who has been researching the subject. During the Great Recession, though, as tax revenues plunged, federal, state and local governments began shedding jobs. Even now, with the economy regaining strength, public sector employment has still not bounced back. An incomplete recovery is part of the reason, but a combination of strong anti-government and anti-tax sentiment in some places has kept down public payrolls. At the same time, attempts to curb collective bargaining, like those led by Wisconsin's governor, Scott Walker, a likely Republican presidential candidate, have weakened public unions."
Rebecca Onion takes a look at an online archive of 19th century boyhood, a "library" of nearly 60 hand-written books created by the three young Nelson brothers as a way to pass the long New Hampshire winters: "An existing set of 19th-century juvenilia produced by children like the Nelsons--farmers' kids, who lived in a rural setting and didn't go on to become famous authors--is rare. Reading the Nelsons' books, we get a unique perspective on late-19th-century American childhood, learning how farm kids felt about farm work; how young, rural readers processed and remixed the books and magazines they read; and how boys absorbed the era's ideas about manhood. Like the Brontës, the Nelsons created an imaginary world--what scholars call a 'paracosm'--and all of their stories took place inside of it. The Nelsons' paracosm, the Big, Long, and Round Continents, had a history of war and colonization and was undergoing rapid and enthusiastic infrastructural development and agricultural improvement. This backdrop provided plenty of room for adventure stories, but also for world-building of a more prosaic nature. Most of the publications that the Nelsons created were for imaginary readers who lived on one of the continents: newspapers like the Chit-Chat, which reported on the visits of residents of one continent to another; seed catalogs trumpeting varieties specially adapted to the growing conditions in an imaginary place; and 'history' books remembering military events like the fictional Battle of Poplington. The Nelsons were influenced by the print culture they had access to in rural New Hampshire. The town had a library during the years that the Nelsons were producing their books, though we don't know which titles that library held. (Walter Nelson, who wrote a history of Goshen in 1957, described the collection that formed the basis for the town library of the 1890s as 'rather extensive and cosmopolitan.') A few years after the boys ceased production on their collaborative writings, Elmer, the oldest brother, wrote a school assignment on the topic 'My Library'; from this composition we know that the Nelsons liked to read adventure fiction. Elmer mentioned Uncle Tom's Cabin ('intensely interesting'), one Oliver Optic book, a few James Fenimore Coopers, and Jules Verne's Michael Strogoff ('I consider [it] far ahead of some of his book[s] like "A Trip to Moon" [sic] "Twenty-thousand Leagues Under the Sea"'). Elmer wrote that he liked adventure books 'both for the story and for the word Pictures which I get of foreign or distant places.' 'Perhaps [because] I am restless whatever the season,' he wrote, 'such books interest me.'"
Samuel Moyn, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, offers a critique of human rights that begins with the ancient King Croesus: "Imagine that one man owned everything. Call him Croesus, after the king of ancient lore who, Herodotus says, was so 'wonderfully rich' that he 'thought himself the happiest of mortals.' Impossibly elevated above his fellow men and women, this modern Croesus is also magnanimous. He does not want people to starve, and not only because he needs some of them for the upkeep of his global estate. Croesus insists on a floor of protection, so that everyone living under his benevolent but total ascendancy can escape destitution. Health, food, water, even paid vacations, Croesus funds them all." Croesus' world is, Moyn argues, largely the world of human rights, one in which a tiny rich minority applauds itself for keeping the vast majority alive and free from torture and the worst deprivations. Human rights offers a floor, but little more. Gone in a world where human rights represents our vision of the good is a vibrant vision of social democracy or welfarism. Thus human rights has little or nothing to offer in the fight against inequality. "After the 1970s, Croesus' world came closer and closer to being a reality, for his dreams became our dreams. To the extent that a utopia of justice survived, it was global but minimal, allowing for the worst state abuses to be decried, while in the socioeconomic domain it pictured a floor of protection without a ceiling on inequality. Whatever its potential in theory, the human rights movement adapted in practice to the new ambiance. For one thing, the idea of human rights followed the transformation of political economy to a global outlook. Further, activists no longer gave priority to the agency of states to launch and manage national welfare but rather to the rights of individuals to be free from harm and to enjoy a rudimentary government that averts disaster and abjection. In the economic realm, social equality was forsaken as an ideal. In exchange for its cosmopolitanism, the human rights movement abandoned postwar egalitarianism in both theory and practice."
Megan Garber suggests that, in the internet age, to be a comedian may mean being a public intellectual: "The point of comedy has always been, on some level, a kind of productive subversion. Observational comedy, situational comedy, slapstick comedy, comedy that both enlightens and offends--these are forms of creative destruction, at their height and in their depths, and they've long allowed us to talk about things that taboos, or at the very least taste, might otherwise preclude. Long before Jon Stewart came along, there was Richard Pryor and Joan Rivers and George Carlin. There were people who used laughter as a lubricant for cultural conversations--to help us to talk about the things that needed to be talked about. The difference now, though, is that comedians are doing their work not just in sweaty clubs or network variety shows or cable sitcoms, but also on the Internet. Wherever the jokes start--Comedy Central, The Tonight Show, Marc Maron's garage--they will end up, eventually and probably immediately, living online. They will, at their best, go 'really, insanely viral.' The frenzy to post a John Oliver rant after it airs on HBO has become a cliché at this point; its effect, though, is to create a kind of tentacular influence for an otherwise niche comedy show. Some people may watch Oliver's stuff live, or DVRed; but most watch it while riding the bus, or waiting for a meeting, or eating a sad desk lunch, delivered via Facebook or Twitter or the Huffington Post. Most people watch Schumer's stuff that way, too. And Wilmore's. And Stewart's. Comedy, like so much else in the culture, now exists largely of, by, and for the Internet. Which is to say that there are two broad things happening right now--comedy with moral messaging, and comedy with mass attention--and their combined effect is this: Comedians have taken on the role of public intellectuals. They're exploring and wrestling with important ideas. They're sharing their conclusions with the rest of us. They're providing fodder for discussion, not just of the minutiae of everyday experience, but of the biggest questions of the day. Amy Schumer on misogyny, Key and Peele on terrorism, Louis C.K. on parenting, Sarah Silverman on Rand Paul, John Oliver on FIFA ... these are bits intended not just to help us escape from the realities of the world, but also, and more so, to help us understand them. Comedians are fashioning themselves not just as joke-tellers, but as truth-tellers--as intellectual and moral guides through the cultural debates of the moment."
Frederick Bohrer places the recent destruction of Iraqi antiquities by ISIS into a global context: "The destruction of artworks and antiquities is hardly the unique behavior of a single group much less an essential property of any culture. We can recall the allied bombs that dropped on the Dresden Museum as on that of Baghdad, or the savage shelling of the Parthenon by Venetian armies that resulted in the disastrous collapse of its roof. If we had a video of the almost complete destruction during the French Revolution of the legendary medieval church of Cluny, or similar devastations wreaked on St. Denis or Notre Dame, it would likely have much the same effect as that of ISIS. Moreover, to any listing of secular destructions in the West must be added those of religious authorities, such as the systematic and wholesale destructions of images under the periods of Byzantine iconoclasm. As in ISIS', these attacks on the human image were accompanied by attacks on humans themselves in a long-running history of mutilations of the bodies of enemies--blinding, castration, rhinokopia (cutting off the nose), and more. Of course, the murderous activities on behalf of Christianity are hardly confined to Byzantium. The French wars of religion in the 17th century slaughtered as many as 4 million people. The massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day in Paris alone, in 1572, was responsible for the deaths of up to 30,000 lives of French Huguenots. For that event, 'The Pope ordered a Te Deum to be sung as special Thanksgiving (a practice continued for many years after) [...].' Accordingly, there is no unique Islamic propensity to perpetual iconoclasm and violence, much less one to be contrasted with a civilized and 'iconophilic' West. Rather, there are enough crimes to go around."
The short film Everyday Borders tracks "bordering from the margin into the center, from the extraordinary to the everyday life," which in the wake of the UK's 2014 immigration act "is threatening to destroy the conviviality of pluralist, metropolitan London and multicultural Britain in general," says Nira Yuval-Davis in the film's opening minutes. It goes on to consider what it means to be British, while not looking so, in an environment that encourages citizen surveillance and restricts the actions and movement of Britons, naturalized or not, within Britain.
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 email@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, Jennifer M. Hudson uses Arendt and David Eggers' The Circle to understand man's quest to free himself from nature and to infinitely expand his knowledge in the Quote of the Week. C. S. Lewis distinguishes a life dedicated to the pursuit of truth from one committed to finding comfort in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate Hannah Arendt's copy of The Foundations of music in human consciousness in this week's Library feature.
This coming Friday, June 5th, the Hannah Arendt Center will host the ninth session of its Virtual Reading Group. We will be discussing Chapters 24-26 of The Human Condition.
The reading group is available to all members and is always welcoming new participants! Please click here to learn more, including how you can join!
The Dystopia of Knowledge
Featured Image Source: IMG Arcade
By Jennifer M. Hudson
**This post was originally published on February 17, 2014.**
"This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself."
-- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
The future man of whom Arendt writes is one who has been released from earthly ties, from nature. He has been released from earth as a physical space but also as "the quintessence of the human condition." He will have been able to "create life in a test tube" and "extend man's life-span far beyond the hundred-year limit." The idea that this man would wish to exchange his given existence for something artificial is part of a rather intricate intellectual historical argument about the development of modern science.
The more man has sought after perfect knowledge of nature, the more he has found himself in nature's stead, and the more uncertain he has felt, and the more he has continued to seek, with dire consequences. This is the essential idea. The negative consequences are bundled together within Arendt's term, "world alienation," and signify, ultimately, the endangerment of possibilities for human freedom. Evocative of dystopian fiction from the first half of the twentieth century, this theme has enjoyed renewed popularity in our current world of never-ending war and ubiquitous surveillance facilitated by technical innovation.
Arendt's narration gravitates around Galileo's consummation of the Copernican revolution, which marks the birth of "the modern astrophysical world view." The significance of Galileo, Arendt writes, is that with him we managed to find "the Archimedean point" or the universal point of view. This is an imagined point outside the earth from which it should be possible to make objective observations and formulate universal natural laws. Our reaching of the Archimedean point, without leaving the earth, was responsible for natural science's greatest triumphs and the extreme pace of discovery and technical innovation.
This was also a profoundly destabilizing achievement, and Arendt's chronicle of its cultural effects takes on an almost psychological resonance. While we had known since Plato that the senses were unreliable for the discovery of truth, she says, Galileo's telescope told us that we could not trust our capacity for reason, either. Instead, a manmade instrument had shown us the truth, undermining both reason and faith in reason.
In grappling with the resulting radical uncertainty, we arrived at Descartes' solution of universal doubt. Arendt describes this as a turn towards introspection, which provides a solution insofar as it takes place within the confines of one's mind. External forces cannot intrude here, at least upon the certainty that mental processes are true in the sense that they are real. Man's turn within himself afforded him some control. This is because it corresponded with "the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from the new physical science: though one cannot know truth as something given and disclosed, man can at least know what he makes himself." According to Arendt, this is the fundamental reasoning that has driven science and discovery at an ever-quickening pace. It is at the source of man's desire to exchange his given existence "for something he has made himself."
The discovery of the Archimedean point with Galileo led us to confront our basic condition of uncertainty, and the Cartesian solution was to move the Archimedean point inside man. The human mind became the ultimate point of reference, supported by a mathematical framework that it produces itself. Mathematics, as a formal structure produced by the mind, became the highest expression of knowledge. As a consequence, "common sense" was internalized and lost its worldly, relational aspect. If common sense only means that all of us will arrive at the same answer to a mathematical question, then it refers to a faculty that is internally held by individuals rather than one that fits us each into the common world of all, with each other, which is Arendt's ideal. She points to the loss of common sense as a crucial aspect of "world alienation."
This loss is closely related to Arendt's concerns about threats to human political communication. She worries that we have reached the point at which the discoveries of science are no longer comprehensible. They cannot be translated from the language of mathematics into speech, which is at the core of Arendt's notion of political action and freedom.
The threat to freedom is compounded when we apply our vision from the Archimedean point to ourselves. Arendt cautions, "If we look down from this point upon what is going on on earth and upon the various activities of men, … then these activities will indeed appear to ourselves as no more than 'overt behavior,' which we can study with the same methods we use to study the behavior of rats." ("The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man" in Between Past and Future)
She argues against the behaviorist perspective on human affairs as a false one, but more frightening for her is the fact it could become reality. We may be seeking this transformation through our desire to control and know and thus live in a world that we have ourselves created. When we look at human affairs from the Archimedean, objective scientific point of view, our behavior appears to be analyzable, predictable, and uniform like the activity of subatomic particles or the movement of celestial bodies. We are choosing to look at things with such far remove that, like these other activities and movements, they are beyond the grasp of experience. "World alienation" refers to this taking of distance, which collapses human action into behavior. The purpose would be to remedy the unbearable condition of contingency, but in erasing contingency, by definition, we erase the unexpected events that are the worldly manifestations of human freedom.
To restate the argument in rather familiar terms: Our quest for control, to put an end to the unbearable human condition of uncertainty and contingency, leads to a loss of both control and freedom. This sentiment should be recognizable as a hallmark of the immediate post-war period, represented in works of fiction like Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, Beckett's Endgame, and Orwell's 1984. We can also find it even earlier in Koestler's Darkness at Noon and Huxley's Brave New World. There has been a recent recovery and reemergence of the dystopian genre, at least in one notable case, and with it renewed interest in Arendt's themes as they are explored here.
Dave Eggers' The Circle, released in 2013, revolves around an imagined Bay Area cultish tech company that is a combination of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and PayPal. In its apparent quest for progress, convenience, and utility, it creates an all-encompassing universe in which all of existence is interpreted in terms of data points and everything is recorded. The protagonist, an employee of the Circle, is eventually convinced to "go transparent," meaning that her every moment is live streamed and recorded, with very few exceptions. Reviews of the book have emphasized our culture of over-sharing and the risks to privacy that this entails. They have also drawn parallels between this allegorical warning and the Snowden revelations. Few, though, if any, have discussed the book in terms of the human quest for absolute knowledge in order to eliminate uncertainty and contingency, with privacy as collateral damage.
In The Circle, the firm promotes transparency and surveillance as solutions to crime and corruption. Executives claim that through acquired knowledge and technology, anything is possible, including social harmony and world peace. The goal is to organize human affairs in a harmonious way using technical innovation and objective knowledge. This new world is to be man made so that it can be manipulated for progressive ends. In one key conversation, Mae, the main character, confronts one of the three firm leaders, saying, "… you can't be saying that everyone should know everything," to which he replies, "… I'm saying that everyone should have a right to know everything and should have the tools to know anything. There's not enough time to know everything, though I certainly wish there was."
In this world, there are several senses in which man has chosen to replace existence as given with something he has made himself. First and most obviously, new gadgets dazzle him at every turn, and he is dependent on them. Second, he reduces all information "to the measure of the human mind." The technical innovations and continuing scientific discoveries are made with the help of manmade instruments, such that: "Instead of objective qualities … we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe—in the words of Heisenberg—man encounters only himself." (The Human Condition, p. 261) Everything is reduced to a mathematical calculation. An employee's (somewhat forced) contributions to the social network are tabulated and converted into "retail raw," the dollar measure of consumption they have inspired (through product placement, etc.). All circlers are ranked, in a competitive manner, according to their presence on social media. The effects in terms of Arendt's notion of common sense are obvious. Communication takes place in flat, dead prose. Some reviewers have criticized Eggers for the writing style, but what appears to be bad writing actually matches the form to the content in this case.
Finally, it is not enough to experience reality here; all experience must be recorded, stored, and made searchable by the Circle. Experience is thus replaced with a man made replica. Again, the logic is that we can only know what we produce ourselves. As all knowledge is organized according to human artifice, the human mind, observing from a sufficient distance, can find the patterns within it. These forms, pleasing to the mind, are justifiable because they work.
They produce practical successes. Here, harmony is discovered because it is created. Arendt writes:
"If it should be true that a whole universe, or rather any number of utterly different universes will spring into existence and 'prove' whatever over-all pattern the human mind has constructed, then man may indeed, for a moment, rejoice in a reassertion of the 'pre-established harmony between pure mathematics and physics,' between mind and matter, between man and the universe. But it will be difficult to ward off the suspicion that this mathematically preconceived world may be a dream world where every dreamed vision man himself produces has the character of reality only as long as the dream lasts."
If harmony is artificially created, then it can only last so long as it is enforced. Indeed, in the end of the novel, when the "dream" is revealed as nightmare, Mae is faced with the choice of prolonging it. We can find a similar final moment of hope in The Human Condition. As she often does, Arendt has set up a crushing course of events, a seeming onslaught of catastrophe, but she leaves us with at least one ambiguous ray of light: "The idea that only what I am going to make will be real—perfectly true and legitimate in the realm of fabrication—is forever defeated by the actual course of events, where nothing happens more frequently than the totally unexpected."
Amor Mundi 4/26/15
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
John Gray, writing in The Guardian, takes on Steven Pinker's argument that progress and the Enlightenment are bringing about the decline and extinction of violence. "It may be true that the modern state's monopoly of force has led, in some contexts, to declining rates of violent death. But it is also true that the power of the modern state has been used for purposes of mass killing, and one should not pass too quickly over victims of state terror. With increasing historical knowledge it has become clear that the 'Holocaust-by-bullets'--the mass shootings of Jews, mostly in the Soviet Union, during the second world war--was perpetrated on an even larger scale than previously realised. Soviet agricultural collectivisation incurred millions of foreseeable deaths, mainly as a result of starvation, with deportation to uninhabitable regions, life-threatening conditions in the Gulag and military-style operations against recalcitrant villages also playing an important role. Peacetime deaths due to internal repression under the Mao regime have been estimated to be around 70 million. Along with fatalities caused by state terror were unnumbered millions whose lives were irreparably broken and shortened. How these casualties fit into the scheme of declining violence is unclear. Pinker goes so far as to suggest that the 20th-century Hemoclysm might have been a gigantic statistical fluke, and cautions that any history of the last century that represents it as having been especially violent may be 'apt to exaggerate the narrative coherence of this history' (the italics are Pinker's). However, there is an equal or greater risk in abandoning a coherent and truthful narrative of the violence of the last century for the sake of a spurious quantitative precision."
How About Improving High Schools?
David Leonhardt takes on the conventional wisdom that college is not for everyone. (Although I thought the conventional wisdom is that college is for everyone.) In his Upshot column in the NY Times, Leonhardt argues that new studies show that college benefits even the most marginal students. "The fate of students like Mr. Escanilla is crucial to today's debate over who should go to college: How much money should taxpayers spend subsidizing higher education? How willing should students be to take on college debt? How hard should Washington and state governments push colleges to lift their graduation rates? All of these questions depend on whether a large number of at-risk students are really capable of completing a four-year degree. As it happens, two separate--and ambitious--recent academic studies have looked at precisely this issue. The economists and education researchers tracked thousands of people over the last two decades in Florida, Georgia and elsewhere who had fallen on either side of hard admissions cutoffs. Less selective colleges often set such benchmarks: Students who score 840 on the SAT, for example, or maintain a C+ average in high school are admitted. Those who don't clear the bar are generally rejected, and many don't attend any four-year college. Such stark cutoffs provide researchers with a kind of natural experiment. Students who score an 830 on the SAT are nearly identical to those who score an 840. Yet if one group goes to college and the other doesn't, researchers can make meaningful estimates of the true effects of college. And the two studies have come to remarkably similar conclusions: Enrolling in a four-year college brings large benefits to marginal students. Roughly half of the students in Georgia who had cleared the bar went on to earn a bachelor's degree within six years, compared with only 17 percent of those who missed the cutoff, according to one of the studies, by Joshua S. Goodman of Harvard and Michael Hurwitz and Jonathan Smith of the College Board. The benefits were concentrated among lower-income students, both studies found, and among men, one of them found." What is unasked in Leonhardt's argument is, "What about high school?" It is not controversial that sending someone to college will help people. But does it make sense for us to continue offering free high school educations that are horrific and then charge people for better college educations? Wouldn't the money and effort spent on community colleges and financial aid for lower tier colleges be better spent reforming high school education in a meaningful way? It seems most people simply have given up on high school, which is why college becomes an expensive and next-best alternative.
Your Smart Things, They're Spying On You
Justin McGuirk says the smart house is here and that it's here less to make your life convenient and more to gather data about what you do at home: "For the first time since the mid-twentieth century--with its labor-saving household appliances and rising quality of life--the domestic is once again the site of radical change. And though domestic space appears to fall within the realm of architecture, architects themselves have been almost mute on the implications of such change. Architecture, it seems, has given up its dreams of imagining how we might live, and so into that void technology is rushing. That tired old trope of 'the house of the future' has been replaced by what is now called the 'smart home.' The smart home is the network's great white hope for ubiquitous connectivity. It sounds benign enough, and may conjure Jacques Tati-style mise-en-scènes populated by absurd devices--the smart home is prime territory for farce--but it is also an ideology. It is the house-shaped manifestation of the internet of things, according to which all our devices and appliances will join the network, communicating with us and each other. To say that the internet of things is an ideology is to suggest that the use-value of the concept has yet to be sold to the consumer. It is easily mocked by skeptical hacks who question the need for talking fridges and washing machines that you can program with your smartphone ('You still need to put the clothes in yourself, right?'). Bruce Sterling argues that the internet of things has nothing to do with the consumer and everything to do with the business interests of the service providers. Given that data is the new currency, the internet of things is an epic power grab by the lords of the network--Sterling focuses on the 'big five' of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft--to gain control of as much human data as physically possible. As the primary interface of the internet of things, the smart home is effectively the tendrils of the network rising out of the ground and into every one of our household appliances to allow mass data collection and digital surveillance." And while it used to be that you could strategically opt out of this data gathering, McGuirk suggests that the smart home will just render you redundant. Home, then, is no longer any retreat from the public space.
Mindfulness and Social Control
Virginia Heffernan is wary of the way "mindfulness," an idea brought into Western thought from various Eastern religions, has been taken up by businesses and 21st century self-help gurus: "Mindfulness as 'keeping in tune' has a nice ring to it. But it's 'focused on the task at hand' that appeals to managers, like Jackson, who are conscious of performance goals. Might workplace mindfulness--in the cubicle or on the court--be just another way to keep employees undistracted and to get them to work harder for nothing but airy rewards? In this context of performance enhancement, 'mindfulness' seems perilously close to doggerel from the same playbook that brought us corny affirmations, inner children and vision boards. Maybe the word 'mindfulness' is like the Prius emblem, a badge of enlightened and self-satisfied consumerism, and of success and achievement. If so, not deploying mindfulness--taking pills or naps for anxiety, say, or going out to church or cocktails--makes you look sort of backward or classless. Like driving a Hummer."
Françoise Mouly, in an interview, talks about the relationship between thought and emotion in art: "Often, we separate intellectual discourse from emotional reaction. But I take such genuine pleasure in things that are intellectually well architected. It's definitely an integrated experience for me. Much more than any kind of cheap, emotional pulls that you get in popular culture, when I read a sentence and it's beautifully written, it can bring me to tears. I know what I respond to is a voice. A voice is not just a stylistic thing, but it means someone who really has something to say. I think a lot of what I get from books--whether they be books of comics or books of literature--is a window into somebody's mind and their way of thinking. I love it when it's so specific. It's a new way to look at the world. It's as if I could get in and see it through their eyes. It also reaches a level of universality because, somehow, I can recognize some of my feelings in seeing somebody who is actually expressing their own inner reality. Even though Flaubert has not been in Madame Bovary's skin, you do get a sense of what it's like to be that person. It's a kind of empathic response when you're reading it."
In a piece on the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, Janet Malcom, starting with facts from a new biography of Mitchell, tries to work out whether it matters that his tendency to exaggerate or flat-out invent in his profiles for the magazine, more prevalent than previously believed, matters. Ultimately, she says, it doesn't. But only because he was good at it: "Every writer of nonfiction who has struggled with the ditch and the bushes knows what Mitchell is talking about, but few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted than Mitchell. The idea that reporters are constantly resisting the temptation to invent is a laughable one. Reporters don't invent because they don't know how to. This is why they are journalists rather than novelists or short-story writers. They depend on the kindness of the strangers they actually meet for the characters in their stories. There are no fictional characters lurking in their imaginations. They couldn't create a character like Mr. Flood or Cockeye Johnny if you held a gun to their heads. Mitchell's travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat. His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they're so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition. In the title piece of The Bottom of the Harbor, a short work of great subtlety about the ability of fish and shellfish to survive in polluted water, Mitchell mentions a small area of the New York waterfront where, in contrast to the general foulness, 'clean, sparkling, steel-blue water' can be found. This image of purity in the midst of contamination could serve as an emblem of Mitchell's journalistic exceptionalism. He has filtered out the impurities other journalists helplessly accept as the defining condition of their genre. Mitchell's genre is some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named."
What We Talk About When We Talk About Dresses
Megan Garber wonders what might have caused the backlash against some designer dresses that went on sale at Target this week, coming up with an answer that suggests, as always, that when we're talking about clothes, we're not just talking about clothes: "A common phrase you'll hear associated with Pulitzer is 'uniform'--as in, as Givhan put it, 'part of a preppy uniform that announces itself from fifty paces,' or, as the Boston Globe put it, 'a uniform of the well-heeled WASP.' Which is ironic, of course: Uniforms are about the constriction of freedoms, and preppiness and WASPiness are, in general, about the freedom that comes with privilege. And clothing, furthermore-'fashion,' in haughtier moments--is most optimistically about the freedoms of self-expression and self-reinvention. It recognizes very little distinction between faking it and making it. If you have the money and the inclination, you can stock your closet--and swath your body--with Alice + Olivia and Thakoon and Marc Jacobs and Marchesa, or with very convincing knockoffs. You can balance them out, as the fashion magazines have taught you to do, with items from H&M and Zara and Forever 21. We live in an economy of sartorial abundance; one outcome of that is that 'style' is something we have come to associate with freedom. But Pulitzer's clothes are, again, 'uniforms'--which are, on the whole, designed to free their wearers from the burdens of free thinking. And this is perhaps the main source of the ire about Pulitzer's clothes: The garments suggest a kind of willful conscription, celebrating what happens when wealth and status are accompanied by an insistent rejection of creativity. It was, and to some extent still is, popular to deride women for being 'basic,' which is to say for loving pumpkin-spice lattes, Ugg boots, Gucci handbags, and other predictable outcomes of commercialized femininity. 'Basic' is a terrible epithet in many ways, but it is also, as far as 'Lillys' are concerned, an instructive one: Pulitzer's clothes are, in this sense, the worst kind of basic. They promise class and community and the relief of conformity. They are marketed to people of privilege. Worst of all, though, they suggest that the best thing one can do with one's privilege is to use it to go on vacation."
Translating the Holocaust: H. G. Adler as Writer and Scholar
This event, which features a keynote address, several panels, and a performance, will offer a unique opportunity to consider the intersection of both the scholarly and artistic work of H. G. Adler, a major thinker and writer who is just becoming known in English.
Sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center, The Bard Translation Initiative, Jewish Studies, German Studies, and Human Rights Project.
Free and open to the public!
Monday, May 4, 2015
Bard Hall, Bard College, 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #8
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Friday, May 15, 2015
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!
This week on the Blog, Jennie Han discusses how Arendt's and Kant's conceptions of critical thinking help open us up to the rest of the world in the Quote of the Week. Albert Einstein provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In a special feature, Zelda May Bas, a student fellow with the Hannah Arendt Center, recounts our second "Courage to Be" dinner, during which Professor Uday Mehta spoke on Gandhi. Finally, we visit the Hannah Arendt Collection and peruse a number of books dedicated to understanding the character and political aspirations of Adolf Hitler in this week's Library feature.
The Deprivations of Privacy
**This post was originally published on December 3rd, 2012**
By Lance Strate
"The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political; it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen. Not only would we not agree with the Greeks that a life spent in the privacy of 'one's own' (idion), outside the world of the common, is 'idiotic' by definition, or with the Romans to whom privacy offered but a temporary refuge from the business of the res publica; we call private today a sphere of intimacy whose beginnings we may be able to trace back to late Roman, though hardly to any period of Greek antiquity, but whose peculiar manifoldness and variety were certainly unknown to any period prior to the modern age."
-- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Here are the titles of some posts on the Deeplinks Blog, which is published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, America's leading organization advocating for citizens' digital rights:
- Who's Tracking Your Reading Habits? An E-Book Buyer's Guide to Privacy, 2012 Edition
- Ninth Circuit Gives the A-OK for Warrantless Home Video Surveillance
- Attempt to Modernize Digital Privacy Law Passes the Senate Judiciary Committee
- NASA's Data Valdez: Thousands of Employees' Personal Information Compromised in Embarrassing Data Breach
- Don't Be a Petraeus: A Tutorial on Anonymous E-Mail Accounts
- ECPA and the Mire of DC Politics: We Shouldn't Have to Trade Video Privacy to Get Common Sense Protections of Our Email
- EFF to Supreme Court: Limit Release of Driver Info
- Do Not Track Update: Professor Peter Swire to Co-Chair W3C Tracking Protection Working Group
- Reform to Require Warrant for Private Online Messages Up for Vote, but Down on Privacy
- Jones Meant What It Said: EFF Urges Court to Stop Warrantless GPS Tracking
Privacy is far from the only issue addressed by the EFF, but this list does account for 10 out of 16 posts appearing on the Deeplinks Blog between November 21st and 29th of 2012. And concerns about invasions of privacy surface repeatedly in regard to Facebook's data mining of user profiles and updates, Google tracking and analysis of search queries (not to mention their indiscriminate street view photography, monitoring of wifi signals, and use of gmail address books), and Apple's tracking of the whereabouts and movements of iPhone users (also done by Android and other mobile systems). Companies are known to monitor their employee's internet use, email, and some even demand access to their social media accounts. Law enforcement and other government agencies (foreign and domestic) seek access to citizens' email and text messages and records of websites visited and documents downloaded. Personal messages, photos, and videos are forwarded and distributed without permission. Sites like Wikileaks publish secret government and corporate documents. Hackers break into databases, steal information, take credit card numbers and banking information, and in the ultimate invasion of privacy, engage in identity theft.
Amor Mundi 1/18/15
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.
Abdelkader Benali has a revealing first person account of his own brush with Islamic extremism. For Benali, Islamic rage may be misplaced and horrific, but it is understandable. He is right: there are many horrific things in the world that we must nevertheless try to understand. As Hannah Arendt writes, we must strive to face up to, and also to resist, reality, whatever it may be. Benali's essay is one good place to begin our process of facing and resisting Islamic radicalism: "What happened last week is not about lack of humor, or a failure to understand caricature. Nor is it about hatred of the West. It's about anger taking a wrong turn. What makes us human and creative is our doubt. But doubt on its own can turn into anger and fundamentalism. As the French writer Michel Houellebecq said in an interview: 'People cannot live without God. Life becomes unbearable.' The terrorists found their God in a godless society. Charlie Hebdo mocked their God by declaring him nothing more than a cartoon. They came back to rescue their God and left 12 dead behind. They fell prey to a powerful delusion. It was the same delusion I felt as a teenager: that by attacking the messenger your anger will disappear and you will be victorious. But the only way to conquer your anger is to understand where its roots lie. For me the freedom to doubt, to not choose sides and to feel empathy for characters and people with whom I disagree, was liberating. Today I still embrace my Islamic background, but without the dogma, repression and strict adherence to ritual."
Zygmunt Bauman has important insights about the meaning of the Charlie Hedbo attacks and what they say about political violence in the 21st century. "There were two aspects of the Charlie Hebdo murders that set them apart from the two previous cases: First: on 7th January 2015 political assassins fixed a highly media-visible specimen of mass media. Knowingly or not, by design or by default, the murderers endorsed--whether explicitly or obliquely--the widespread and fast gathering public sense of effective power moving away from political rulers and towards the centres viewed as responsible for public mind-setting and opinion-making. It was the people engaged in such activities that the assault was meant to point out as culprits to be punished for causing the assassins' bitterness, rancour and urge of vengeance. And second: alongside shifting the target to another institutional realm, that of public opinion, the armed assault against Charlie Hebdo was also an act of personalized vendetta (going back to the pattern set by Ayatollah Khomeini in his 1989 Fatva imposed on Salman Rushdie). If the 11 September atrocity chimed in with the then tendency to 'depersonalise' political violence (following the pour ainsi dire 'democratisation' of violence by mass-media publicity that divided its attention according to the quantity of its--mostly anonymous and incidental--victims, and the volume of spilt blood), the 7th January barbarity crowns the lengthy process of deregulation--indeed the 'de-institutionalisation', individualization and privatisation of the human condition, as well as the perception of public affairs shifting away from the management of established aggregated bodies to the sphere of individual 'life politics'. And away from social to individual responsibility. In our media-dominated information society people employed in constructing and distributing information moved or have been moved to the centre of the scene on which the drama of human coexistence is staged and seen to be played." The attacks, Bauman argues, are neither traditional political assassinations of political leaders nor the depersonalized terrorism of 9/11. They are, instead, opening sallies in a general revolt of plebians of many ideological views from established democratic systems that are losing their legitimacy and support. In short, Bauman sees these attacks as moving hand-in-hand with the anti-democratic National Front movement in France as well as increasing radicalism around the world.
In the wake of last week's shootings in Paris and the subsequent rallies that revolved around the need to protect "freedom of speech," Teju Cole considers the state of that freedom and of Western civil religion on the whole: "Rather than posit that the Paris attacks are the moment of crisis in free speech--as so many commentators have done--it is necessary to understand that free speech and other expressions of liberté are already in crisis in Western societies; the crisis was not precipitated by three deranged gunmen. The U.S., for example, has consolidated its traditional monopoly on extreme violence, and, in the era of big data, has also hoarded information about its deployment of that violence. There are harsh consequences for those who interrogate this monopoly. The only person in prison for the C.I.A.'s abominable torture regime is John Kiriakou, the whistle-blower. Edward Snowden is a hunted man for divulging information about mass surveillance. Chelsea Manning is serving a thirty-five-year sentence for her role in WikiLeaks. They, too, are blasphemers, but they have not been universally valorized, as have the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo. The killings in Paris were an appalling offense to human life and dignity. The enormity of these crimes will shock us all for a long time. But the suggestion that violence by self-proclaimed Jihadists is the only threat to liberty in Western societies ignores other, often more immediate and intimate, dangers."
Filmmaker Ava DuVernay has caused a controversy with her film Selma. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew writes: "By distorting an essential truth about the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King over the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Selma has opened a very large and overdue debate over whether and how much truth the movie industry owes to the public. The film suggests that there was a struggle between King and Johnson over whether such a bill should be pushed following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, signed into law in July of that year. The clear implication is that Johnson was opposed to a voting rights bill, period, and that he had to be persuaded by King. This story has now been propagated to millions of viewers, to the point where young people in movie houses boo Johnson's name. But there was no struggle. This is pure fiction." As movies and YouTube videos replace books as the way people acquire history, how much artistic license should they have? I was asked this question often when Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt came out last year. The film took liberties, turning Arendt's good friend into her secretary and putting the words of Gershom Scholem into the mouth of Kurt Blumenfeld. These struck me as legitimate examples of artistic license. But when the film made up an encounter with a threatening group of Israeli Mossad agents who spring upon Arendt and demand she stop the publication of her book, that struck me as too much. Such a fabrication suggests an official Israeli response to the controversy that did not exist and creates a false image of Israel, one that fits with and confirms many uninformed narratives. Similarly, it does seem that Selma goes too far in its efforts to lionize Martin Luther King Jr (who needs no lionization). On Twitter, DuVernay has responded to the criticism: "Bottom line is folks should interrogate history. Don't take my word for it or LBJ rep's word for it. Let it come alive for yourself. #Selma." Well yes, folks should interrogate history, but history also has facts. When those who gather and present those facts as historical narrative change the facts, it poisons the world. Politics does mean having different opinions about facts, but when we all have our own facts, politics becomes impossible. In our age of technological reproduction, facts are easily manipulated, and untruths are widely dispersed as truth.
Reading has traditionally been a solitary experience. Francine Prose wonders how the practice of reading is changing in the world of ebooks and big data. "Solitude is and has always been an essential component of reading; many children become readers in part to enjoy the privacy it offers. And in an age in which our email messages can be perused by the NSA and our Facebook posts are scanned for clues to our habits and our desires, what joy and a relief it is, to escape into a book and know that no one is watching. But now it turns out that someone or something may have been reading over my shoulder, that I haven't been quite so alone as I'd imagined, that Becky and I and her circle may have had some silent, unsuspected, uninvited company. Largely because I've been traveling, and because my volume of Thackeray weighs several pounds and is printed in a typeface that borders on the microscopic, I've been reading the novel on my e-reader. According to a recent article in The Guardian, e-book retailers are now able to tell which books we've finished or not finished, how fast we have read them, and precisely where we snapped shut the cover of our e-books and moved on to something else. Only 44.4 percent of British readers who use a Kobo eReader made it all the way through Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, while a mere 28.2 percent reached the end of Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave. Yet both these books appeared--and remained for some time--on the British bestseller lists." There are few more frustrating experiences than reading a book and being told by Amazon that 67% of readers have underlined the following sentence. Does the rise of hive-reading mean the loss of another private space? That is one of the questions we'll be asking at the Hannah Arendt Center 2015 Fall Conference: "Privacy: Why Does it Matter?"
Ed Levine dives into the ontology of the American diner: "People talk about Starbucks reintroducing the notion of what sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the 'third place' in American life: spaces where we gather besides home and work to form real, not virtual, communities. Starbucks and more high-minded cafes that followed in its wake have surely succeeded on this point, but long before 1971, when the first Starbucks opened in Pike Place Market in Seattle, diners were already serving that invaluable function for us, along with the corner tavern. And that's why we need to cherish our local diners, whether it's a mom and pop or a Waffle House or a Greek coffee shop. They're some of the few cheap, all-inclusive places to eat and hang out and laugh and cry and stay viscerally connected with other folks. A few days ago I asked my server at a diner if I could order a patty melt, even though it wasn't on the menu. 'Sure,' she replied with a half smile. 'Just tell us what you want and if we have the fixin's we'll make it for you.'"
Jeet Heer considers John Updike's affection for comic strips: "tingling prose, where every idea and emotion is rooted in sensory experience, owes much to such modern masters as Joyce, Proust, and Nabokov, but it was also sparked by the cartoon images he saw in childhood, which trained his eyes to see visual forms as aesthetically pleasing. Indeed, the comparison with Nabokov is instructive since the Russian-born author of Lolita was also a cartoon fan. The critic Clarence Brown has coined the term bedesque (roughly translated as 'comic strip-influenced') to describe the cartoony quality of Nabokov's fiction, including its antic loopiness, its quicksilver movement from scene to scene, and its visual intensity. I think one reason Updike felt an affinity for Nabokov is because they both wrote bedesque prose."
From A to Z, In Ones and Zeroes
In a long ode to Merriam Webster's ongoing attempt to update its Unabridged dictionary, Stefan Fatsis considers the future of the dictionary: "But while the Internet has upended a publishing model that dates to Robert Cawdrey's 1604 A Table Alphabeticall, it also has strengthened the feeling among lexicographers that the public cares deeply about language--and that there is still a place for the dictionary. For Merriam specifically, the potential of digital lexicography, a belief that people crave guidance and trust authority, and its own historical place in American letters have combined to convince it of the wisdom of rolling the dice and redoing the Third. 'Creating a new Unabridged Dictionary gives us the opportunity to revisit the biggest questions of all,' Morse says. 'What is it that ought to be said and shown about the words in the dictionary? What should we talk about when we talk about words? The Unabridged provides the platform to present the fullest explication of words and hence the opportunity to say what it is that ought to be said. And the answer shifts from generation to generation.'" The pleasures for word nerds abound here, though, bleeding into the dictionary's history and into the nature of the way it updates itself. Pair it with David Foster Wallace's "Authority and American Usage" for a different perspective on a different kind of dictionary.
Now Accepting Applications for Post-Doctoral Fellowships!
The Hannah Arendt Center announces three post-doctoral fellowships for the 2015-2016 academic year.
To learn more about the fellowships, including how to apply, click here.
Application Deadline: Thursday, March 5, 2015
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Eyal Press
The Courage To Refuse
Monday, February 9, 2015
Kline Faculty Dining Room, 6:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism, Jeanne van Heeswijk
Monday, February 16, 2015
Kline Faculty Dining Room, 6:00 pm
Courage To Be: Lecture and Dinner Series, with Uday Mehta
Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge
Monday, March 30, 2015
Manor House Cafe, 6:00 pm
Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?
A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and The University of The Western Cape
Monday, April 6, 2015
Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, Time TBA
Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year on Thursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015!
This week on the Blog, Thomas Wild and Anne Posten discuss how we need to read Hannah Arendt in the plurality of her languages in the Quote of the Week. Bertrand Russell provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. And we appreciate Arendt's interest in the Gnostics in our Library feature.
Amor Mundi 11/9/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
The Creep In Our Kitchen, In Our Car, And Everywhere
Sue Halpern writes that the internet is getting creepy. Beyond smart phones and smart watches, we now also are confronted with smart cars and smart refrigerators. Cars remember where we like to go and can direct us there; they will soon even drive for us. Refrigerators know our favorite milk and our guilty pleasures and can order them to be delivered before we realize we need them. All these smart appliances are wired, connecting us and the immense and revelatory data of our lives to the world of commerce and security. Companies can, of course, pay for that data and subtly or not suggest new products. And the government, or others, can hack into the streams of data we trail behind us to know where we've been, what we're doing, and even what we want. Halpern cites Jeremy Rifkin, an evangelist of the coming internet of things, who is clear that in this new age, there will be no privacy: "Connecting everyone and everything in a neural network brings the human race out of the age of privacy, a defining characteristic of modernity, and into the era of transparency." For Rifkin, we should have no qualms about trading privacy for a coming age of unparalleled convenience and security. The more information about ourselves we offer up to the internet of things, the more benefits we will receive. As Halpern argues this week in the NY Review of Books, "These trade-offs will only increase as the quotidian becomes digitized, leaving fewer and fewer opportunities to opt out. It's one thing to edit the self that is broadcast on Facebook and Twitter, but the Internet of Things, which knows our viewing habits, grooming rituals, medical histories, and more, allows no such interventions-unless it is our behaviors and curiosities and idiosyncracies themselves that end up on the cutting room floor." We are entering a world in which we need to rethink what it means to be private in a world when we are so connected to the internet of things that the internet-and those who can mine it-knows more about ourselves than we do.
Linda Holmes talks up the pleasure of being alone and asks how, if at all, we can truly be by and with ourselves: "We have a certain cultural mistrust of solitude, I think. It is for weirdos and lost souls, spinsters and misfits. But in truth, I can't tell you what a luxury I think it is to be entitled to it. Most of the time, I want good company, like most people do. But the experience of earned, voluntary aloneness is, among other things, instructive. I don't think you can really understand how accustomed you are to being scheduled and operating off an internal to-do list at almost all times until you think to yourself, 'My goal will be to get to Providence by 4,' and then you think, 'Why is there a goal?' And then it begins to make you internally rebellious: What if I drove with no goal? What if I had nowhere to be all day until it was time to sleep and I discussed with no one where to stop and take a picture, where to have lunch, what shop to go in, or which way to turn on the trail? What would I do if I could do anything - in this micro-environment, in this moment, at the point of this particular pause, what is my wish?"
Attorney General Eric Holder is about to resign. His legacy: after six years as the nation's top law enforcement officer, no one has gone to jail either for breaking American laws against torture or for breaking U.S. laws regarding financial fraud relating to the financial crisis. In a recent speech at NYU, Holder explained why it is that corporate executives are not criminally prosecutable: "Responsibility remains so diffuse, and top executives so insulated, that any misconduct could again be considered more a symptom of the institution's culture than a result of the willful actions of any single individual." As Matt Taibi glosses such doublespeak in Rolling Stone, "In other words, people don't commit crimes, corporate culture commits crimes!" Taibi's moral clarity comes in an article on Alayne Fleischmann: "the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported - more on that later) to keep the public from hearing. Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as 'massive criminal securities fraud' in the bank's mortgage operations. Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she's kept her mouth shut since then. 'My closest family and friends don't know what I've been living with,' she says. 'Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview.'" Fleischmann saw crimes committed, blew the whistle on them, and is angry that these crimes are still not being prosecuted. Her choice to speak now appears to be a brave one: "And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. 'I could be sued into bankruptcy,' she says. 'I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don't start speaking up, then this really is all we're going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.'"
Oligarchy, From Left And Right
In a short essay seeking to revive the 20th century American conservative James Burnham, Daniel McCarthy argues that we need to learn from Burnham's combination of unblinkered realism regarding power and insight into the non-ideological managerial elite. He suggests that, as a political culture, there's just one way forward: "What has happened in America since the end of the Cold War, however, is that competition for popular favor has been reduced to a propaganda exercise-employing myths, symbols, and other 'derivatives'-disconnected from policies of material interest to the ruling class. Thus monetary policy, foreign policy, and positions on trade and immigration vary little between Republican and Democratic presidents. This is a terrible situation-if you're not part of the elite. If you are, all the gridlock and venom of our politics is simply irrelevant to the bottom line. For the non-elite, however, insecurity of all kinds continues to rise, as does a sense that the country is being sold out from under you. America's ruling class has bought itself time-for continuing capitalism in an age of worldwide managerial revolution-at the expense of America's middle and working classes. Reform, alas, will not come from 'throw the bums out' populism of either the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street varieties. It can only come from two directions: the best of the people must grow conscious of how oligarchy operates and why populist leadership is a paradox, and new factions among the elite must be willing to open competition on more serious fronts-campaigning not only on myths and formulas but on the very substance of the managerial revolution."
Charles P. Pierce takes on the myth of American sportsmanship: "Sports today are conducted in a context that makes true sportsmanship - which is nothing more and nothing less than recognizing that your opponent is basically the same common clay deserving of the same respect as you are, not because of talent, but simply because he or she is another human being - almost impossible. Sports today, at almost every level, have arranged themselves in such a way that the athlete is made a commodity. The games are a clash of walking narratives, of competing sales campaigns, of a design competition between marketing techniques and strategies. This has exacerbated the emotional conflict that always has been present when we talk about our athletes - we want ferocious, brain-scrambling passion from them when the ball is in play, and conspicuous public politesse when it is not. If the latter gets tangled up in the former, then we get what seem to be endless arguments about how America is being wussified, and how we have become a soft and passive people, and a lot of rancid talk about people playing in skirts and so on. It's a wonder more athletes don't simply go mad." But if sportsmanship is a no go, what's left? Ultimately, Pierce wonders if it is anything more or less than kindness.
What's the Matter With Goodness?
In a conversation with Angela Davis, Toni Morrison gives a short history of the end of goodness: "It wasn't true in literature in the early days. There was always a hero who prevailed. As awful as things could happen in a Dickens novel, it ended up with the survival and triumph of high morality, of people who deserved to triumph. But something happened. Now, I'm not entirely sure about this, but I think it is after World War I with novelists at any rate, and certainly some of the war poets. Perhaps they understood themselves as attacking evil but they ended up theatricalizing it and the good people were fairly stupid or unlucky or what have you. There are references in literature to the silencing of goodness ... I am interested in pulling from the modern canon what I know and what I believe about this adoration and fascination, this compulsion to display evil. Even if there is a mild attempt to say that it is evil, nevertheless, it's hogging the stage in many novels. I think goodness is weak in literature almost like it is in the culture. This is just a general observation."
Arendt and the Question of Positive Freedom
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
The Hannah Arendt Center, 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Champlin reflects on Arendt's understanding of violence and the origins of power in the Quote of the Week. John Stuart Mill provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In our Video Archives, we look back on a 2010 Lunchtime Talk with Ursula Ludz, a former visiting scholar of the Hannah Arendt Center. And we appreciate a copy of Publii Virgilii Maronis Opera in our Library feature.
Amor Mundi 9/21/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
John Jeremiah Sullivan tells a tale of the anxieties and rare talents of Donald Antrim. At one point he recounts the story of Antrim's battles with mental illness and Antrim's decision to check himself into a psychiatric hospital. His doctors said: "'You're very sick, and you're very psychotic, and we can take care of you.' They told him they wanted him to undergo electroconvulsive therapy. He could take time to think about it. A nurse led him back into the hallway and down to his room. The news destroyed him. Not because he didn't believe them, that it was the best thing for him, nor even because he feared the procedure itself (though naturally it terrified him to face it), but because he believed it would mean the end of him as a writer. That his talent would be scattered. His brains scrambled. The mechanism disassembled. Not to write? A living death. What would it even mean to go about your day? Also he felt that it was, he said, 'a confirmation that I would never leave hospitals.' He sat down on a chair. 'Not 20 minutes later,' he said, 'a patient called out, "Mr. Antrim, there's a phone call for you."' He shuffled down to the phones near the medication dispensary. He picked up. 'Donald,' a voice said, 'this is Dave Wallace. I heard you were in bad shape....' Wallace, who had undergone the procedure himself, spent at least an hour telling Antrim that he shouldn't be afraid, that he would still be there when it was over, that it would still be there."
We live in a time dominated by the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, the idea that one aspect of a person's life dominates the whole. Thus someone who has strong faith in God is dismissed as a fundamentalist just as someone who opposes the wearing of Burqas in public is labeled an Islamophobe and those who oppose Israel are called antisemites. In each of these instances, one opinion or quality of the person is used to devalue the entirety of their persona, as if to hold an offensive opinion makes one offensive. There are few opinions that are considered to disqualify one for good society more than to be a Nazi, which is why the publication of Martin Heidegger's Black Notebooks has unleashed a frenzy of self-satisfied accusation. In two recent reviews, Gregory Fried in the LA Review of Books and Peter Gordon in the New York Review of Books each make obligatory statements that the Notebooks prove Heidegger was a Nazi. But each also makes the effort then to ask what that means, to understand Heidegger's fully atypical and metaphysical Nazism. Here is Fried: "For one thing, the Notebooks show that the Nazi revolution was only an opportunity for Heidegger, a moment when the overturning might be possible, not guaranteed. He was proud enough to think he could become the leader in spirit of this movement, as Marx was to Communism, but the movement failed him and the historical rupture it should have served, not the other way around. Furthermore, Communism itself was, for Heidegger, just another form of Platonism. Much like the Christian end-times and apocalypse, Communism promises an end of history, a complete fulfillment of human destiny. Platonism in all its forms, according to Heidegger, explains what it means to be human as something grounded in a timeless realm beyond history that applies universally to all human beings, whether as created in God's image, or as bearers of human rights that apply to 'all men' - as the American Declaration would have it - or as participants in Communism's world revolution that would put an end to the question of what humanity has been and will become. To all such movements Heidegger applies the name 'liberalism,' not in the parochial, contemporary sense of modern welfare liberalism, but rather in a sense that reaches back to Plato and that defines human 'liberty' on the basis of an appeal to timeless and universal truths. In the Nazis, Heidegger thought he had found a movement that would reject universalistic liberalism in all its forms - Christianity, the secular Enlightenment, Communism - in favor of a politics that would root human history in the communal belonging of a finite historical people. By the end, though, the Notebooks show Heidegger accusing Nazism itself of falling prey to liberalism through its metaphysical reduction of all human differences to race, its treating the Volk as kind of super-subject akin to conventional liberalism's subjective individual, and its capitulation to the idols of machination and gigantism.... The promise of the Nazi revolution had devolved, for Heidegger, into a kitschy mish-mash of blood-and-soil myth-making, its followers qualified only by their willingness not to think or to question the meaning of modernity." You can view a discussion between Roger Berkowitz and Peter Trawny, the translator of the Black Notebooks, here.
Peter Gordon also makes an effort to explore the depths and not simply the fact of Heidegger's Nazism: "As rector he tried to resist 'vulgar National Socialism.' He knew that Nazism was a concatenation of competing ideologies, and he expressed both resentment at his rivals and fear that the ascendant language of allegedly scientific racism would mislead the German people from its true historical mission. Although he grasped at the official jargon of 'blood and soil,' he eschewed 'dull biologism' because he felt it wrongly applied the schema of the natural sciences to human existence, as if the entire 'intellectual-historical world' grew in a 'plantlike' fashion from the body of the Volk. In April 1934, Heidegger tendered his resignation as rector. The details of his career have received ample documentation, notably in the scrupulous historical study by Hugo Ott. But the notebooks give us a fuller picture of Heidegger's personal disappointment. On April 28 he made sketches for a farewell address, desperately seeking a higher significance for the 'wrecked year.' The failure was not his alone, he wrote, and perhaps it was not a failure at all, since wreckage itself was 'the highest form of human experience, in which we meet with the effective world-powers in their merciless efficacy.' Failure or not, from this point onward the notebooks assume a tone of marked bitterness. Everywhere he saw only 'rushers and alarmists, makers and strivers.' By the summer of 1936 Heidegger was under surveillance, and although he continued to nourish hopes for Germany's political future, his own chances for a career as a public official of the Third Reich began to dwindle." You can view a discussion between Roger Berkowitz and Peter Trawny, the translator of the Black Notebooks, here.
Robert Darnton wonders at the relationship between author and censor: "When exiles from the Soviet system invoked 'freedom' and 'truth,' they were not appealing to the protection of the First Amendment or speaking as philosophers. They were using words to describe their experience of censorship as a force operating in specific circumstances, a force that determined the nature of literature in an oppressive political system. 'Freedom of speech' served as a standard against which to measure the oppression. It did not apply to constraints of all kinds, although many kinds had weighed on the lives of the writers. Freedom for them was a principle made meaningful by the experience of its violation. Experiences varied, of course, and the variations make it hopeless to search for a general proposition that would encompass all of them, including some that have been studied up close, such as censorship under apartheid in South Africa. They also understood that literature in what Westerners called the 'free world' suffered from constraints. Does their experience argue for a relativistic notion of freedom?"
In an interview, Richard Rodriguez describes his writing life: "My own writing life is as predictable as the old priest preparing to say the dawn mass. The pleasant cold, the mild pain of being alive. I have the same breakfast every day-cold cereal, yogurt, coffee. I read the newspapers. I take a fistful of vitamins. I shower. I linger at my bookshelf or at the window. I read a chapter or a poem from a shelf I keep above my desk of former lovers and seducers, impossible rivals-Nabokov or Lawrence, Larkin. Woolf. Sitting down at the computer is as daunting as the altar boy's first genuflection. Aquinas described writing as a form of prayer. Writing is for me dishearteningly hermetic. Revision is writing. Revision is humiliation-Tuesday saying something less well than Monday. Revision is open to noticing connections. Revision is joy at precisely that moment when the sentence no longer seems mine but speaks back to me and haughtily resists further revision. I read in the afternoons. I take long walks. I watch TV in the evening. I write letters at all times." Richard Rodriguez gave the keynote lecture at the 2013 Hannah Arendt Center Conference. Revisit it here.
How Easy It Is to Distort Reality
Jake Flanagan offers a cautionary tale of internet deception on Facebook. "Zilla van der Born, a Dutch national, spent five weeks traveling through Southeast Asia and documented the trip in photos on Facebook. She posed for pictures while dining on dumplings, snorkeling among colorful fish in azure waters and visiting ornately decorated Buddhist temples - compiling the lot into a series of videos for her Vimeo account. All in all, Ms. van der Born seemed to have enjoyed a busy, albeit conventional, trip to Phuket, Luang Prabang or some other regional tourist hub. Or so it would appear. In reality, Ms. van der Born never left her home city, Amsterdam. Each photograph was expertly contrived.... The ultimate goal was to 'prove how easy it is to distort reality,' she said. 'Everybody knows that pictures of models are manipulated. But we often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives.'"
As a Fellow at Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry, in Munich, Mr. Mantell replicated the Milgram experiment.
Monday, October 6, 2014
The Hannah Arendt Center, 3:00 pm
Resolved: "The fate of the world depends upon the success or failure of America's model of democratic self-government."
Tuesday, October 7th, 2014
Campus Center Multipurpose Room, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
October 9-10
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?, will be held this year on October 9-10!
Registration is now OPEN! You can register here!
Want to know more about the schedule of the conference? Please click for details here!
Learn more about the conference here.
This week on the Blog, Laurie Naranch discusses Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt's shared investment in literary pearls, fragments, and moments in the Quote of the Week. French dramatist Jean Racine provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We look back on Roger Hodge's talk "Alchemies of Deception" for our 2011 conference in our Video Archives. In our Library feature, we admire Arendt's impressive collection of Kant's writings. And Roger Berkowitz reflects on American exceptionalism and its decline in the Weekend Read.
Walter Benjamin and "Drilling" for Pearls
"Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by the citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of 'peace of mind,' the mindless peace of complacency."
–Hannah Arendt, "Introduction" to Walter Benjamin's Illuminations
Hannah Arendt was a capacious thinker. She tackled topics such as totalitarianism in Fascist and Stalinist forms, the tradition of Western political philosophy, the human condition, international law and human rights, and the destruction of the world in an atomic age. Moreover, as her former students and current readers can attest, her range of knowledge is daunting as she moves with ease among languages, time periods, historical detail, and philosophical abstraction. Yet Arendt was also invested in fragments, moments, poetry, and individuals as a way to remember the past and speak to present political needs. One place where this is well-represented is in her introduction to Walter Benjamin's Illuminations.