Amor Mundi 04/24/16
04-25-2016Hannah 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.”
One of the most telling aspects of the Communist Party’s crackdown, according to Schell, is its reliance on extra judiciary procedures. Investigations are carried out in part by the police, but also in part by Communist Party institutions. As Hannah Arendt argued, the creation of extra-legal and parallel political party institutions is a hallmark of totalitarian regimes. Arendt wrote of the “multiplication of offices” such that the “inhabitant of Hitler’s Third Reich lived not only under the simultaneous and often conflicting authorities of competing powers, such as the civil services, the party, the SA, and the SS; he could never be sure and was never explicitly told whose authority he was supposed to place above all others. He had to develop a kind of sixth sense to know at a given moment whom to obey and whom to disregard.” The point of such duplication is to create a sense of arbitrariness. The state bureaus would operate, suggesting legitimacy. When results were acceptable, they were accepted. But when the state institutions became unreliable, Party institutions would take over. The result is that citizens rarely knew who or which institutions were in charge and it gave the administration of government a chaotic and arbitrary sense even as the organizations of the liberal state continued to operate. Paradoxically, as the number of organizations multiplies, “every citizen feels himself directly confronted with the will of the Leader, who arbitrarily chooses the executing organ of his decisions.” What Schell reminds us is the importance of structure in the preservation of freedom. It is what Arendt calls the “structurelessness of the totalitarian state, its neglect of material interests, its emancipation from the profit motive, and its nonutilitarian attitudes in general” that succeed in making politics unpredictable, arbitrary, and dependent on the will of a single leader or cabal. —RB
China's Ancient Sages
Ian Johnson reports on the discovery of ancient Chinese texts dating from 300 BC, a period when Confucianism and other Chinese schools arose. “The manuscripts’ importance stems from their particular antiquity. Carbon dating places their burial at about 300 BCE. This was the height of the Warring States Period, an era of turmoil that ran from the fifth to the third centuries BCE. During this time, the Hundred Schools of Thought arose, including Confucianism, which concerns hierarchical relationships and obligations in society; Daoism (or Taoism), and its search to unify with the primordial force called Dao (or Tao); Legalism, which advocated strict adherence to laws; and Mohism, and its egalitarian ideas of impartiality. These ideas underpinned Chinese society and politics for two thousand years, and even now are touted by the government of Xi Jinping as pillars of the one-party state. The newly discovered texts challenge long-held certainties about this era. Chinese political thought as exemplified by Confucius allowed for meritocracy among officials, eventually leading to the famous examination system on which China’s imperial bureaucracy was founded. But the texts show that some philosophers believed that rulers should also be chosen on merit, not birth—radically different from the hereditary dynasties that came to dominate Chinese history. The texts also show a world in which magic and divination, even in the supposedly secular world of Confucius, played a much larger part than has been realized. And instead of an age in which sages neatly espoused discrete schools of philosophy, we now see a more fluid, dynamic world of vigorously competing views—the sort of robust exchange of ideas rarely prominent in subsequent eras.”
Can We Be Bored?
Sandi Mann exposes one of the central paradoxes of our time. “With so much to occupy us these days, boredom should be a relic of a bygone age – an age devoid of the internet, social media, multi-channel TV, 24-hour shopping, multiplex cinemas, game consoles, texting and whatever other myriad possibilities are available these days to entertain us. Yet despite the plethora of high-intensity entertainment constantly at our disposal, we are still bored. Up to half of us are “often bored” at home or at school, while more than two- thirds of us are chronically bored at work. We are bored by paperwork, by the commute and by dull meetings. TV is boring, as is Facebook and other social media. We spend our weekends at dull parties, watching tedious films or listening to our spouses drone on about their day. Our kids are bored – bored of school, of homework and even of school holidays. There are a number of explanations for our ennui. This, in fact, is part of the problem – we are overstimulated. The more entertained we are the more entertainment we need in order to feel satisfied. The more we fill our world with fast-moving, high-intensity, ever-changing stimulation, the more we get used to that and the less tolerant we become of lower levels.” There is something refreshing in the insight that we can still be bored. It is in moments of extended boredom that we can stop and think, and pull ourselves out of the mechanical obedience to the way things are. And yet, are there not different qualities of boredom? As Mann describes it, boredom today is an affront to our belief that we have a right never to be bored, never to cut the tether to the electronic doping mechanism, and never to have to think for ourselves. Boredom in such a world may emerge not as a openness to the limits of our overstimulated world, but as a faulty in the code, a problem to be fixed. In those instances, boredom ceases to inspire thinking and rather commits us to the technocratic elimination of boredom. —RB
Moving Pictures
Andrew Marantz looks into the nascent world of making virtual reality content, and suggests that the medium is tiptoeing its way into its own cultural space. He's excited about it but, well, there are some problems: "Cinematic grammar no longer applies. There is no frame in which to compose a shot. An actor who directly addresses the camera isn’t breaking the fourth wall, because the viewer is already in the middle of the action. The viewer can look anywhere, so the director often adds subtle visual or auditory cues to indicate where to look, or to signal that the viewer’s gaze can wander without missing anything important. Tracking shots must be steady and slow, because too much camera movement can cause discomfort—viewers have reported headaches, vertigo, and nausea. For the same reason, most V.R. experiences last only a few minutes; more sustained stories tend to be divided into episodes. With the current headsets, “virtual-reality sickness” can kick in after about twenty minutes. It seems to affect old people more strongly than young people and women more strongly than men. While researching this piece, I sometimes had trouble sleeping, which is unusual for me. I avoid looking at computers before bed, because they have been linked with disturbed sleep. I eventually realized that I had been spending much of my evening leisure time with a magnified AMOLED screen two inches from my face...[early V.R. maker] Oculus now has its own building on the Facebook campus, in Silicon Valley, and its ambitions have grown well beyond video games. Every new employee is given a copy of “Ready Player One.” Along with computer-vision engineers and diffractive-optics experts, the company employs about thirty people in a storytelling division called Oculus Story Studio. Saschka Unseld, the studio’s creative director, worked at Pixar for nearly six years; at Oculus, he makes short Pixaresque V.R. animations. The first of these, “Henry,” is about a porcupine who wants to make friends. “The goal was to do something funny and physical, almost like the old silent films,” Unseld told me. “But it turns out that what’s funny on a movie screen is not necessarily funny in an immersive environment. If Charlie Chaplin falls on his face, you can laugh at him. If you’re in the space and someone falls on their face right next to you, you feel concern.” Unseld has decided that he prefers V.R. experiences in which the characters somehow acknowledge the viewer. “If you aren’t ever acknowledged, it actually feels more artificial, like the characters are respecting a fourth wall that isn’t there,” he said. “We’re always learning things like this, and we’re always having conceptual discussions about what they mean, but ultimately we make decisions by trying things and seeing how they feel.”
Cha-Ching
In a strikingly similar article, John Lancaster outlines the problems and promise of Bitcoin: The reason a lot of people are excited about bitcoin and its associated technologies is that for the first time there is a genuine possibility of real change in this area. “Money has evolved in jumps, from the invention of writing to the invention of the balance sheet and the bank to the creation of the central bank, with all of these changes being variations on the theme of money as a register of credits and debits. And we’re now at a point when another jump is possible. The simplest and biggest possibilities concern connectivity. We are more connected in more ways to more people than we ever have been at any point in human history. This is changing everything, and it would be deeply strange if it didn’t change money too. There are many ways in which the impact could happen. For instance, a huge part of the money system is about intermediaries. It goes back to the Medici, to that central register where the debits and credits are all gathered together in one place. The bank is the intermediary between creditors and debtors. Obvious question: do we still need that intermediary? I have money I’m not using, you need more credit than you have, to buy a house or start a business or buy a car or whatever. I lend you the money, and you pay me back. Easy-peasy. We have historically needed a bank to mediate that transaction, and to take a generous cut in the process. It’s not at all obvious that we need it any more. We can find each other without the bank in the middle; thanks to the internet, we can locate each other without intermediaries. It seems very obvious to me that this area, that of P2P or peer-to-peer lending, is going to grow and grow. Why lend money to your bank for fuck-all interest when you can go to Zopa, the UK’s leading P2P site, and lend it directly to someone who needs it, for a return of 5 per cent? The answer at the moment is probably that the banks are old and have some deposit protection, whereas online lending is new and doesn’t. But that answer is not writ in stone, and one lesson of the internet is that when customers’ behaviour changes, it can change fast. A lot of money is at stake here. The cut being taken when A sends money to B amounts to $1.7 trillion – that’s right, trillion – every year...there are at least seven billion mobile phone subscriptions in the world (four and a half billion people have access to a flush toilet). So more than twice as many people have a mobile phone as have access to a bank account. If your phone can give you access to the things you would need from a bank, well, you’ve just disinvented the need for banks, and fundamentally changed the operation of the money system, across whole swathes of the developing and emerging world. The reason phones can do this is because they embody a remarkably high level of trust. You can trust that the phone is the property of the person who owns it, because the combination of sim card technology and pin numbers is very strong. Behind the user-friendly façade of chip and pin are cryptographic techniques of industrial strength. Indeed, the pin number technology used in cashpoint machines initially evolved as a question and response protocol to confirm nuclear weapon access codes. You can trust that this person who owns the phone is who they say they are: that basic act of trust is fundamental to the operation of all money systems."
Bring Up The Writers
Hilary Mantel describes her writing process: "I used to be a late starter, but now I get up in the dark like a medieval monk, commit unmediated scribble to a notebook, and go back to bed about six, hoping to sleep for another two hours and to wake slowly and in silence. Random noise, voices in other rooms, get me off to a savage, disorderly start, but if I am left in peace to reach for a pen, I feel through my fingertips what sort of day it is. Days of easy flow generate thousands of words across half a dozen projects – and perhaps new projects. Flow is like a mad party – it goes on till all hours and somebody must clear up afterwards. Stop-start days are not always shorter, are self-conscious and anxiety-ridden, and later turn out to have been productive and useful. I judge in retrospect. On flow days, I have no idea what I’ve written till I read it back. It’s a life with shocks built in. I don’t mind whether I write by hand or on a keyboard. I don’t mind anything, as long as I’ve woken up calmly in my own time. I’m a long thinker and a fast writer, so most days I don’t spend much time at my desk. I concentrate well. I’m not tempted by the internet. If I’m redrafting, fine-tuning, I print the text and take it away to read it on paper. But if I’m writing straight on to the screen, I tense up till my body locks into a struggling knot. I have to go and stand in a hot shower to unfreeze. I also stand in the shower if I get stuck. I am the cleanest person I know."