Amor Mundi 05/29/16

05-29-2016

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.

Run Toward The Noise

In the wake of last fall's campus protests, the protests that inspired this year's Arendt Center Conference, Real Talk (October 20th and 21st), Nathan Heller checks in with one of the most prominent cases, Oberlin College:

“In mid-December, a group of black students wrote a fourteen-page letter to the school’s board and president outlining fifty nonnegotiable demands for changes in Oberlin’s admissions and personnel policies, academic offerings, and the like. “You include Black and other students of color in the institution and mark them with the words ‘equity, inclusion and diversity,’ ” it said, “when in fact this institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy.”The letter was delivered by hand, but it leaked onto the Internet, and some of the more than seven hundred students who had signed it were hit with threats and hate speech online from anonymous accounts. The president, Marvin Krislov, rejected the letter’s stance, urging “collaboration.” All across Oberlin—a school whose norms may run a little to the left of Bernie Sanders—there was instead talk about “allyship”: a more contemporary answer to the challenges of pluralism. If you are a white male student, the thought goes, you cannot know what it means to be, say, a Latina; the social and the institutional worlds respond differently to her, and a hundred aggressions, large and small, are baked into the system. You can make yourself her ally, though—deferring to her experience, learning from her accounts, and supporting her struggles. You can reach for unity in difference.”

Heller spoke with Jasmine Adams, one of the signees of the fourteen-page letter. ““Me trying to appeal to people? Ain’t working. Me trying to be the quiet, sit-back-and-be-chill-and-do-my-work black person? Doesn’t work. Me trying to be friends with non-black folks? Doesn’t work.” She draws out her final syllables. “Whatever you do at Oberlin as a person of color or a low-income person, it just doesn’t work! So you’re just, like, I’ve got to stand up for myself.” “I have to be political,” Slay says. “I have to be political in whatever form or fashion,” Adams says. “Because I have nothing else to do.” There were negative responses to the fifty demands (which included a request for an $8.20-an-hour activism wage, the firing of nine Oberlin employees deemed insufficiently supportive of black students, and the tenuring of black faculty).” That students are being political is something we should applaud. Hannah Arendt applauded students who engaged in politics. She supported students who requested leaves from classes to engage in political organizing. To make political claims. To seek to realize their interests. To live a political life. For Arendt, these are essential attributes of citizenship. Arendt even wrote that of all the students engaging in violence in the 1960s, she understood the violence of the black students the best because they were fighting for real political interests. At the same time, Arendt insisted we separate politics from education. She saw education as at once conservative and revolutionary. Education is conservative insofar as it seeks to lead a student into the common world. The educator teaches students to love the world, the love of the world, Amor Mundi. We are, Arendt thinks, to love the world in full cognizance of its terrors and tribulations. And one important characteristic of the world that we love is that it is never static, never unquestionable, never sedentary. There is, she insists, always the possibility of a revolution, of a new direction, of an unexpected transformation. To love the world is to love it with both its horrors and its revolutionary potential. If liberals are too often overly critical and dismissive of the world we are living in, conservatives are frequently dismissive of revolutionary change. Education, for Arendt, is the teaching of the love of the world in both its conservative and revolutionary elements. It matters, however, what one’s political argument is. Calling for people one disagrees with to be fired and seeking to shut down the exchange of opinions that is at the heart of both politics and academic life are demands that while political go against the very idea of both politics and education. So too are the efforts to stop the teaching of so-called offensive books. One student objected to the teaching of Sophocles’ Antigone, arguing in the campus newspaper the Oberlin Review that Antigone’s case for suicide was a potential trigger. According to Heller, the student “argued that trigger warnings were like ingredient lists on food: “People should have the right to know and consent to what they’re putting into their minds, just as they have the right to know and consent to what they’re putting into their bodies.”” The demand for trigger warnings emerges from the medicalization of campus discussion so that literature is no longer part of the humanities and opinions are extracted from their traditional political context; now all words and images are understood medically as potential triggers that may induce traumas. Traumas, of course, are real and can be debilitating. Once the language of trauma invades the academic and political spheres, however, reason and persuasion give way to preventative medicine. What we are seeing emerge on college campuses is a hierarchy of oppressions in which each group insists that its sufferings need to be addressed and that it too must be protected from hostile and unwelcome speech. On February 25th, an Oberlin publication published an article that included screenshots from the Facebook feed of Joy Karega, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin. The posts suggested, among other things, that Zionists had been involved in the 9/11 plot, that ISIS was a puppet of Mossad and the C.I.A., and that the Rothschild family owned “your news, the media, your oil, and your government.” The posts did not sit well with everyone at Oberlin, where, weeks earlier, a group of alumni and students had written the president with worries about anti-Semitism on campus; the board of trustees denounced Karega’s Facebook activities. As a teacher, however, she’d been beloved by many students and considered an important faculty advocate for the school’s black undergraduates. The need for allyship became acute. And so, with spring approaching, students and faculty at one of America’s most progressive colleges felt pressured to make an awkward judgment: whether to ally themselves with the black community or whether to ally themselves with the offended Jews.” It is a sad day when a professor at an elite institution fans false, anti-Semitic, and hateful propaganda. Professors have a power to speak and be believed by students and spreading false facts corrupts the fundamental role of the professor as someone who leads students into the truth and beauty of the common world. But it is also sad the board of trustees felt the need to get involved. The answer to such claptrap is to respond clearly and strongly. Professors, students, and administrators should speak out, making clear that such statements are wrong and dangerous. There is no need to attack the professor personally. This is not a personal matter. It is a matter of the responsibility of a college to teach young people how to engage intellectually around controversial and difficult questions on which we may legitimately disagree. Yes the Professor was wrong. But we should attack her facts and her arguments. If there is a ray of hope visible in the chaos at Oberlin, it is the advice that Michelle Obama gave to the Oberlin students at a speech there last year. AT the 2015 commencement address, the First Lady advised Oberlin students to “run toward the noise.” Oberlin’s President told Heller that many students actually are eager to talk these matters through themselves. “One of the things we’ve heard from students is that they want to talk about difficult issues among themselves—they would prefer not to have people who purport to speak for them.” That is the right approach. What Heller finds at Oberlin, however, is that students want to run away from the noise. “But at Oberlin a number of students seem to want to run away. More than a few have told me that they are leaving Oberlin, or about to leave Oberlin, or thinking about leaving Oberlin—and this at one of the country’s most resource-rich, student-focussed schools…. Many also speak of urges to leave due to a fraying in their mental health, a personal price paid for the systemic stresses of campus life.” At Bard, the Hannah Arendt Center is working with students to create a “Dorm Room Conversation” series modeled after the national “Living Room Conversations” model, in which six students who disagree will sit down for difficult conversations on difficult issues that divide the campus. We also have inaugurated a “Tough Talk” lecture series designed to bring highly controversial speakers to campus, speakers who can and will challenge students in their basic presumptions. And we are dedicating our 2016 Fall Conference to the topic of “Real Talk: Difficult Questions About Race, Sex, and Religion on Campus.” There are real questions about inequalities of race, sex, and religion on campus, not to mention class and other inequalities that structure campus social and political life. It is worthwhile to talk about and struggle against such inequalities. But we must do so in a way that honors our common commitment to a shared political and intellectual world. The First Lady’s advice is sound: Run toward the noise.  

Stop Play

Mark Hertsgaard chronicles what happens after the whistle gets blown on the Pentagon:

"The Bush administration’s mass surveillance efforts were partly exposed in December 2005, when the New York Times published a front page article by reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, which revealed that the NSA was monitoring international phone calls and emails of some people in the US without obtaining warrants. Eight years later, that story would be dwarfed by Snowden’s revelations. But at the time, the Bush White House was furious – and they were determined to find and punish whoever had leaked the details to the New York Times. According to Crane, his superiors inside the Pentagon’s Inspector General’s office were eager to help. Henry Shelley, the general counsel – the office’s top lawyer – urged that the IG office should tell the FBI agents investigating the Times leak about Drake and the other NSA whistleblowers. After all, the NSA whistleblowers’ recent complaint had objected to the same surveillance practices described in the Times article – which made them logical suspects in the leak. Crane objected strenuously. Informing anyone – much less FBI investigators – of a whistleblower’s name was illegal. After debating the matter at a formal meeting in the personal office of the inspector general, Shelley and Crane continued arguing in the hallway outside. “I reached into my breast pocket and pulled out my copy of the Whistleblower Protection Act,” Crane recalled. “I was concerned that Henry was violating the law. Our voices weren’t raised, but the conversation was, I would say, very intense and agitated. Henry [replied] that he was the general counsel, the general counsel was in charge of handling things with the Justice Department and he would do things his way.” There the disagreement between Crane and Shelley stalled. Or so it seemed until 18 months later. On the morning of 26 July, 2007, FBI agents with guns drawn stormed the houses of Binney, Wiebe, Loomis and Roark. Binney was toweling off after a shower when agents accosted him; he and his wife suddenly found themselves with guns aimed directly between their eyes, the retired NSA man recalled.”

The Life of the Mind

Irina Dumitrescu considers the importance of liberal arts education in dark times, challenging the notion, a variety of which was recently put forward by a major advisor to one American political party's nominee for president, that the humanities are useless:

"One day, as I was running background checks and doing paperwork, my co-worker told me the story of her in-laws’ marriage. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the communist government of Romania carried out a massive program of re-education and extermination of the country’s cultural elites. Artists, intellectuals, lawyers, politicians, and priests were put in political prisons and work camps. In a notorious experiment at the Pitești prison, prisoners—many of them university students in the humanities—were “re-educated” using physical as well as psychological torture. Guards beat and subjected them to extreme cold and hunger. They were made to eat their own excrement, and, worst of all, to torture each other. My colleague’s father-in-law, then a student of literature, was one such prisoner. In order to maintain his sanity, the young man turned to his education. He knew French, his cellmate knew English, so they spent their captivity teaching one another their foreign languages. After his release, the student was forced to work in a factory, where he met a woman who had also studied literature and been imprisoned as a result. Neither could marry people with clean records for fear of ruining their “files” with the government, so they married each other. Their apartment in Bucharest became a kind of salon, with artists and writers always coming and going. This man, who had learned English in a jail cell, ultimately became a literary translator of English poetry. When I heard this story, I understood that the stereotype of the fluffy, useless liberal arts was a lie. If the study of literature or history were really that pointless, a government trying to control the minds of its subjects would not go to the trouble of putting humanities students and professors in jail. For educated prisoners, the love of language, art, and scholarship was no mere hobby. It was a lifeline, sometimes the only thread tying them to their identities, their dignity, their shredded sense of humanity. Nothing could be more practical."

The Tyranny of Borders

Joost Hiltermann considers the state of Kurdish independence:

"The Kurds may have thrown off central rule in Iraq and Syria but the border is still there: despite the Kurds or, perhaps more accurately, because of them. The Kurds have long talked of reuniting their people in a greater Kurdistan, but today their population is carved up between not only Syria and Iraq, but also Turkey and Iran, which have sizable numbers of their own. These different national populations have discovered over time that what sets them apart may be more significant than what they have in common: differences in dialect, tribal affiliation, leadership, ideology, historical experience. And Kurdish parties on both sides of the Syria-Iraq border are reaffirming these differences every day with remarkable bureaucratic fastidiousness. What’s more, the Kurdish parties seem to have internalized the very nation-states they scorn: in Syria, their leadership and members are almost exclusively Syrian Kurds; in Iraq, Iraqi Kurds; and in Iran, Iranian Kurds. Only the Kurdish movement in Turkey, which has pan-Kurdish ambitions, includes Kurds from neighboring states, though the top leadership is from Turkey (and some only speak Turkish). All this is apart from the deep political divisions that exist among the respective national populations. In Iraq, for example, the Kurdish leadership has developed strong relations with Turkey, which has become a principal source of investment and trade; while in Syria, the dominant Kurdish party, the PYD, is a sworn enemy of the Turkish government through its close links with the PKK, the militant Kurdish movement in Turkey that is now at war with the government. And within both Kurdish regions, the dominant parties face strong opposition from a number of other factions. Here is the quandary in which the Kurds find themselves when they make their claim for independence: Whose claim exactly? And how to realize it? To what territory, and under whose authority? As these questions remain unanswered, the old borders are proving stubbornly persistent—by the Kurds’ own hands.

Subway Walls, Tenement Halls

In an interview, Elana Ferrante suggests that true solitude, and true silence, are impossibilities:

"Some of the poor Neapolitan neighborhoods were crowded, yes, and rowdy. To gather oneself, so to speak, was physically impossible. One learned very early to have the greatest concentration amid the greatest disruption. The idea that every “I” is largely made up of others and by the others wasn’t theoretical; it was a reality. To be alive meant to collide continually with the existence of others and to be collided with, the results being at times good-natured, at others aggressive, then again good-natured. The dead were brought into quarrels; people weren’t content to attack and insult the living — they naturally abused aunts, cousins, grandparents, and great-grandparents who were no longer in the world. Of course, today I have small quiet places where I can gather myself — but I still feel that the idea is slightly ridiculous. I’ve described women at moments when they are absolutely alone. But in their heads there is never silence or even focus. The most absolute solitude, at least in my experience, and not just narrative experience, is always, to paraphrase the title of a very good book by Hrabal, too loud. To the writer, no person is ever definitively relegated to silence, even if we long ago broke off relations with that person—out of anger, by chance, or because the person died. I can’t even think without the voices of others, much less write. And I’m not talking only about relatives, female friends, enemies. I’m talking about others, men and women who today exist only in images: in television or newspaper images, sometimes heartrending, sometimes offensive in their opulence. And I’m talking about the past, about what we generally call tradition; I’m talking about all those others who were once in the world and who have acted or who now act through us. Our entire body, like it or not, enacts a stunning resurrection of the dead just as we advance toward our own death. We are, as you say, interconnected. And we should teach ourselves to look deeply at this interconnection — I call it a tangle, or, rather, frantumaglia — to give ourselves adequate tools to describe it. In the most absolute tranquility or in the midst of tumultuous events, in safety or danger, in innocence or corruption, we are a crowd of others. And this crowd is certainly a blessing for literature."

Up, Up, Up

Matt Donovan climbs the Pantheon:

"Although it may come as no surprise that the Pantheon’s roof is off-limits in our highly litigious times, groups of scholars and artists from the American Academy in Rome climbed the dome on a regular basis as recently as the 1970s. One visitor described the short walk as a straining and vertiginous affair, “a bit like rock climbing up a slope on a hike in the Appalachians.” He also told me that once those exterior stairs end, a climber feels utterly precarious. Differences in temperature between the building’s cool interior and the sun-warmed roof created downdrafts that could literally suck someone through the opening. In what might be read as a blurring of prudence, humility, and reverence, visitors needed to creep toward the roof’s opening on their stomachs in order to peer through its oculus — a full twenty-seven feet across, and known as the “eye of god” — down into the space below... As sublime as the Pantheon is — with forty-foot granite columns flanking the portico, and a dome that’s more than 140 feet in diameter and height — the actual space that we step into looks quite different from how it would have appeared in ancient times. It’s believed, for instance, that the interior dome was originally painted azure and each ribbed coffer had anchored in its center an enormous bronze rosette. In 609, after ordering the building stripped of its precious metals and all remnants of the pagan gods, Pope Boniface IV, who according to legend was armed with twenty-eight cartloads of martyrs’ bones, consecrated the space as a Christian church. Even if this change resulted in violent plunder, the Christianizing of the Pantheon also most likely saved it from the neglect and ruin that other ancient Roman temples fell victim to during the Middle Ages. And yet, as alluring as all of this history and guesswork is, when one stands inside the Pantheon, gazing up at the roof’s opening and the revealed light and sky, it’s wise at times to avoid any irritable reaching after fact and reason."