Amor Mundi

Race and Class At Smith

Jodi Shaw resigned from her staff position at Smith College where she earned about $40,000 annually. Michael Powell has a long post-mortem of the controversy in The New York Times. Shaw wrote an open letter to Smith’s President Kathleen McCartney.

How To Fight Illiberal Democratic Movements?

Roger Berkowitz
There is a widespread misconception that we are seeing a threat to democracy. More rightly, we are witnessing a democratic revolt against liberal-constitutional-limited government. The question, then, is how liberal-constitutional republics should react to threats from populist democratic movements. The general view at least in the United States is that constitutional democracies allow its critics—even its existential critics—the benefit of freedom of speech.

On the Contradictions of Nikki Haley: Republican 

Roger Berkowitz
I am not a prognosticator. Take what I am going to say with a large dose of skepticism. It is very likely that in four years the United States will elect a minority woman as its President. The question may be, will that woman be Vice President Kamala Harris or former South Carolin Governor Nikki Haley?

From Data to Data, Without the Theory

Roger Berkowitz
Hannah Arendt was skeptical of social science theories. Theorists, or problem solvers as she often referred to them, are people of “great self-confidence.” They are confident in the education and intelligence and they “pride[] themselves on ‘rational.’” Dedicated to rationality, they “were indeed to a rather frightening degree above ‘sentimentality’ and in love with ‘theory...'"

An Asia-African World Block

There have been many devastating pandemics in the past. Each time people managed to pull through them and take stock of things, they found their world completely transformed. After this pandemic, are we going to be confronted with a similarly strange new world? Quite possibly. Those from the right like Henry Kissinger to leftists like Slavoj Žižek have been making prognostic statements and there have been all sorts of assessments of the situation...

Play

Roger Berkowitz
Susanna Crossman reflects on the power of play. “Play is a powerful motor.” Play involves a “leap in the dark” and requires trust. Play, the thinker Eugen Fink writes, “unites ‘the highest desire and the deepest suffering’.” Play is thus deeply connected to the very human way of being alive, something we can hear in its etymologies, many of which go back to the Latin ludere. “Ludere in Latin refers to leaping fishes and fluttering birds. The Anglo-Saxon lâcan means to move like a ship on the waves, or to tremble like a flame.

Firings and Prosecutions This Week

Roger Berkowitz
In what seems a fairly usual occurrence, two journalists and two professors were fired or prosecuted this week for running afoul of mainstream opinions or, in Poland, legally prohibited opinions. John McWhorter argues that firing a New York Times reporter for using the N-word to refer to the N-word and not as a slur obfuscates the difference between a slur and a taboo. Ben Cohen reports on the prosecution of Professors Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski in Poland.

Arendt, Brecht, and Bowie

Last week Roger Berkowitz inaugurated the reading of The Human Condition in the Virtual Reading Group (amidst a record 185 attendees) with a short lecture about Arendt’s addition of an epigraph by Bertolt Brecht to the Prologue of the German edition of the Vita Activa. The epigraph consists of the first and last paragraphs of Brecht’s opening hymn to his play Baal.

Seyla Benhabib on “Tradition and the Modern Age”

As part of the “On Hannah Arendt” year-long art exhibition at the Richard Saltoun Gallery in London, Seyla Benhabib joined Roger Berkowitz in a discussion of Arendt’s essay “Tradition and the Modern Age.” Moving from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin, Benhabib shed light on Arendt’s claim that Karl Marx represents the end of the western tradition of political thought.