Amor Mundi 05/01/16

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.

Arendt in Egypt

[caption id="attachment_17891" align="alignleft" width="300"] By Jonathan Rashad - Flickr, CC BY 2.0[/caption]

Amro Ali argues that Hannah Arendt’s understanding of power and violence can help understand the failure of the Egyptian revolution. “Egypt – politically, economically, and socially – cannot be saved through violent attack on dissenters, there is an urgent need for a broad political consensus to tackle longstanding crises.” To make this point, Ali enlists Arendt’s distinction between power and violence:

“Hannah Arendt’s understanding of violence can provide fundamental insights into the [Egyptian] regime’s behaviour. In her 1972 work Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution, Arendt points out that the rise of state violence is frequently connected to a decrease in substantive power as regimes mistakenly believe they can retain real control through violent measures (CR 184). Real and sustainable power arises when a concert of people get together in a space to exchange views. Thus, power arises through free choice. Violence sits outside the realm of legitimate politics. It is an expression of desperation. It renders speech, discussions and persuasion impossible, making support from the public harder to come by.”

Arendt does not argue against violence in all situations and she... continue on Medium.

Fantasy Strongmen, Real Strongmen

[caption id="attachment_17890" align="alignright" width="300"] Putin by Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Trump by Michael Vadon, CC BY-SA 2.0[/caption]

Timothy Snyder in the New York Review of Books has an essay on the Trump-Putin relationship. “It is not hard to see why Trump might choose Putin as his fantasy friend. Putin is the real world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television. Trump’s financial success (such as it is) has been as a New York real estate speculator, a world of private deal-making that can seem rough and tough—until you compare it to the Russia of the 1990s that ultimately produced the Putin regime. Trump presents himself as the maker of a financial empire who is willing to break all the rules, whereas that is what Putin in fact is. Thus far Trump can only verbally abuse his opponents at rallies, whereas Putin’s opponents are assassinated. Thus far Trump can only have his campaign manager rough up journalists he doesn’t like. In Russia some of the best journalists are in fact murdered. President Putin, who is an intelligent and penetrating judge of men, especially men with masculinity issues, has quickly drawn the correct conclusion. In the past he has done well for himself by recruiting among politicians who exhibit greater vanity than decency, such as Silvio Berlusconi and Gerhard Schröder. The premise of Russian foreign policy to the West is that the rule of law is one big joke; the practice of Russian foreign policy is to find prominent people in the West who agree. Moscow has found such people throughout Europe; until the rise of Trump the idea of an American who would volunteer to be a Kremlin client would have seemed unlikely. Trump represents an unprecedented standard of American servility, and should therefore be cultivated as a future Russian client. Trump correctly says that Putin respects strength. But of course Putin prefers weakness, which is what Trump offers.”

Free Speech and Freedom of Capital

In a symposium in Dissent Magazine on free speech and political correctness on campus, Jim Sleeper admits that conservatives who decry political correctness on campus have a point, but worries that the call for free speech is all too cozy with capitalism, wealth, and power. “Conservatives insist that a more creditable, more classical liberal education would temper the consolidation of wealth and power with Truth-seeking in the study of ancient classical wisdom, sometimes with Christian grace notes. But the capitalism that most college students are preparing themselves to serve is now global and corporate in ways that no longer sustain or reward this pedagogical mix, let alone nourish the classically liberal and republican virtues (or, for that matter, even the republican sovereignty) that conservatives say they cherish. Today’s capitalism would have appalled Adam Smith, John Locke, Alexander Hamilton, Clinton Rossiter, Russell Kirk, and other apostles of the social virtues of “free markets.” If “liberal” professors, deans, and students (and parents) make plausible scapegoats for this unfolding disaster, it’s because even their supposedly transgressive challenges to the marketing juggernaut often facilitate it. Deresiewicz notes rightly that most liberals who send their kids to selective colleges have done a bit too well by the current regime to be all that serious about reconfiguring it. But they can’t defend it wholeheartedly, either, so they and their children grasp at compensatory moralistic, gestures such as posting a “Like” for Bernie or celebrating United Colors of Benetton “diversity” that better prepares students, including students of color, for climbing the corporate ladder than for organized resistance and transformation.”

Nuclear Crit

Michael Lapointe considers the literature of Chernobyl: "Thirty years ago, the sky glowed at the edge of Ukraine. An ill-conceived and bungled safety test had gone critical at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Steam explosions blew the roof off Reactor Number Four, spewing uranium and graphite into the open air, and pouring radioactive particles into the atmosphere. The fire burned for days while Soviet authorities delayed evacuating the surrounding area, needlessly exposing thousands to the worst technological disaster of the 20th century. A radioactive cloud drifted over Europe, with particles eventually appearing in every corner of the world. Strontium, cesium, plutonium—all were present in the vast fallout area, out of which was carved a forbidden 30-kilometer landscape known as the Zone.Since then the Zone has spawned a literary genre of its own. Indeed, it seemed instantly to pass into myth, even possessing its own poetic language. The soldiers and firefighters who cleaned up the site—many of whom died from exposure—are referred to as the liquidators. Reactor Four remains encased in a concrete-and-steel shell known as the sarcophagus. In the Zone, there is a Red Forest; there was black rain. Yet unlike myth, as a professor says in Voices From Chernobyl, a 1997 oral history by Svetlana Alexievich, “We don't know how to capture any meaning from it.” Through three decades of literary response, Chernobyl has undermined the sort of authoritative depiction that might bring closure. But something closed can be forgotten. The finest works express profound doubts about the power of language to absorb a disaster of this magnitude, and so continually reopen it to new ways of being remembered."

Empathy

[caption id="attachment_17889" align="alignleft" width="300"] By Nikolas Coukouma, CC BY-SA 2.5[/caption]

After last week, during which Prince died and Beyonce Knowles surprise released a new album, Hilton Als takes stock of the past and future of black art. And in discussing the movie version of Beyonce’s new album “Lemonade,” Als argues that the film is indebted to the idiosyncratic black American science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Als tells us that Butler’s great theme is the black female body; for Beyonce, the exploration of infidelity ask what it means to struggle against and sometimes breaks free her pop perfection. "In “Lemonade,” Beyoncé travels between the present—a world filled with police brutality, marital rage, and alienation—and a past inhabited by the Louisiana-based female ancestors her mother and thus herself are born from. Toward the end of the film, as the singer moves further back into the past and examines her roots, we see any number of sharply dressed women sitting in the natural world, talking among themselves. This will remind readers of that extraordinary scene in “Beloved,” when the elder, Baby Suggs, commands those who have gathered in a clearing to love their hands, themselves—because if they don’t, who will? While that sentiment is clear in Beyoncé’s film—she includes an audio clip of Malcolm X talking about how black women are the least defended in the world—it’s [Octavia] Butler’s fantastic evocation of the history of black women being unloved and somehow finding a way that is the spiritual source of “Lemonade.” To live, the bright, resourceful heroines of Butler’s fiction must shape-shift to fit into various societies. While “Transformation” is just one of the sections making up “Lemonade,” shape-shifting is what Beyoncé does throughout; she is a pop star who must cut herself and her fashions to fit the times. Is her blackness a new style, or an accepted one? No amount of fame affords her the freedom to escape blackness, or the past, nor would she want to. (Even if she has jettisoned it before. Remember “Austin Powers”?) Because to abandon these things would mean leaving her mother, who, like her daughter, suffered the pain of infidelity—and survived. Toward the end of “Lemonade,” Beyoncé sings with her skin painted white. There, she is no longer “black,” but the style of her R. & B.-inflected sound is. How different is one’s body from one’s soul? Are they connected, and if so how does the body show what one feels? As Beyoncé sings, we see various shots of black mothers holding photographs of their sons—boys and men who have lost their lives to “accidental” police shootings. It’s in those moments that Beyoncé displays, most profoundly, what Butler called “hyper empathy”—the ability to identify with and feel the pain of others. Which, of course, has always been at the heart of black music, black style."

Take Me Out To The Ballgame

Lynn Murray on the high theory of youth baseball: "It’s springtime in Georgia, which means the hot pink azaleas are blooming, all gorgeous and tacky. The temperature hovers in the mid-70s, with no humidity yet, and a thin blanket of pollen turns everything kind of yellow. Youth baseball, which slows down a bit in the colder months, is in full swing by the time the calendar declares it’s April. Scores of baseball fields across Cobb County, where we live, get even busier; boys in clean white pants get dirtier, their coaches get louder, parents lean into the fence. For my son, whose young life seems organized by the rhythms of three distinct, overlapping sports seasons, this is his favorite—and the one that claims most of our time and money. From February through July, he’ll play in a baseball tournament almost every weekend. We’ll travel to Georgian towns with names like Ball Ground or Euharlee or Locust Grove. Like thousands of other baseball families, we’ll begin the season huddled under thick stadium blankets, welcome spring and then summer at a ballpark amid acres of green fescue and red clay, hemmed in by miles of chain-link fence. With a cheap folding camp chair and hours to kill, I’ll read books or grade essays or score my son’s games on an iPhone app. We’ll eat family meals out of a Igloo cooler or from a snack bar staffed by bored teenagers.  As I stroll around the ballpark on a big tournament Saturday, past rows of tents piled with t-shirts, baseball cards, fake Oakley sunglasses, and the arm sleeves all the boys seem to be wearing this year, I think about my own overlapping lives—teacher, writer, mother, baseball fan—and how they converge in this rowdy, familiar space. Something in the scene takes me back to a half-forgotten college lecture on literary theory. Picture it sort of like this: a fool dressed in motley steps out from the throngs of players and spectators, waves back the smoke from a concession stand barrel grill, and, with a flourish, presents me with a fancy word that perfectly describes the scene: carnivalesque. As it turns out, the source of the word carnivalesque is Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, and his ideas connect the sights and sounds of this modern version of the carnival to its medieval antecedents, to the rowdier, frolicking affairs that served a more important social function than their latter-day suburban successors. Carnivals took up, in total, as much as three months of a year in a large medieval city and were—here’s the best part—accepted subversions of authority (crown or church). In medieval carnivals, hierarchies were dismantled, second, parallel lives were lived, and all manner of creative debauchery reigned. The carnivalesque, as literary mode, signifies “a world inside out,” where fools are wise men and wise men are fools, where low culture and high culture swap masks, where class, gender, and economic distinctions fall away. Looking around the ballpark, I’d say most of that seems about right."

He Helped Save Hannah Arendt, Amongst Others

In the New York Times, Sarah Wildman has an exciting profile of my colleague Justus Rosenberg. Now 95 and still teaching, Rosenberg was part of the small group of people who along with Varian Fry helped save thousands of European Jewish intellectuals during World War II. One of the people Fry and Rosenberg helped bring from France to New York was Hannah Arendt. “The students know that [Rosenberg] lived through World War II, that he speaks several languages. And yet he has left that history a bit vague. “He has talked about his experience in the war in Paris, and how he had to flee, but he doesn’t really get into the full details,” said Vikramaditya Joshi, 19, who pressed Dr. Rosenberg to come further out of retirement and be his adviser. The details are worth knowing. Justus (pronounced YOO-stice) Rosenberg is thought to be the last remaining member of an extralegal team assembled by the journalist Varian Fry in 1940 to provide safe passage out of Vichy France to anti-fascist intellectuals and cultural figures fleeing the Nazis. Mr. Fry was something of a Raoul Wallenberg for artists: Two thousand men and women, including Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall and André Breton, were shepherded to safety by Mr. Fry’s network.”