Amor Mundi 10/11/15

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 Importance of Being Honest

A.O. Scott makes an argument for snobbery, which is to say that he makes an argument for taste: "It seems to be an article of modern democratic faith that disputing taste is taboo: at best a lapse in manners, at worst an offense against feelings or social order (which sometimes seem to amount to the same thing). Our nation is at present riven by social inequality and polarized by ideology, but the last thing anyone wants to be called is an elitist. That epithet has a political sting that the old one lacked, and 'snob' is not wielded as readily as it used to be. Instead of food snobs--or 'gourmets,' as they once called themselves--we now have foodies. Literary snobbery died when Jonathan Franzen fell out with Oprah and conquered the best-seller list anyway. The hot narrative art form of the moment, television, is genetically immune to snobbery. For most of modern history, the only way to be a TV snob was not to own a set. (Or maybe to say that you only watched PBS, not that anyone would have believed you.) The arrival of 'serious,' 'difficult' cable dramas and spiky, insidery comedies has not changed the essentially populist character of the medium. We all have our binge watches, our guilty pleasures, and our relationship to them is less exclusive than evangelical. Television is horizontal rather than hierarchal. And the flowering of television coincides with the digital transformation of cultural consumption, a great leveling force that turns a forbidding landscape of steep crags and hidden valleys into a sunlit plain of equivalence. The world of the Yelp score, the Amazon algorithm and the Facebook thumb is a place of liking and like-mindedness, of niches and coteries and shared enthusiasms, a Utopian zone in which everyone is a critic and nobody is a snob because nobody's taste can be better than anyone else's. That's the theory, anyway. But permit me a moment of dissent, even if I risk looking like a reactionary nostalgist." The loss of snobbery is a part of what Hannah Arendt worried about with regards to the end of judgment. Arendt was hardly an elitist in the traditional sense of an inherited or moneyed elite. But she did insist that a meaningful public sphere that can inspire many and last over time feeds upon the doing of deeds that are and deserve to be talked about by others.

Nobel and the Non-Fiction Novel

Philip Gourevitch introduces this year's Nobel Prize winner for literature, Svetlana Alexievich: "In a brief manifesto, 'In Lieu of Biography,' on her Web site, Alexievich argues that in our time--'when man and the world have become so multifaceted and diversified'--reportorial documentation is the best means of representing reality, while 'art as such often proves impotent.' And, having written five books from documentary material in the course of twenty years, she goes on to say, 'I declare that art has failed to understand many things about people.' Alexievich, you see, is a reporter--she started out, in her native Belarus, writing for newspapers--and her books are woven from hundreds of interviews, in a hybrid form of reportage and oral history that has the quality of a documentary film on paper. But Alexievich is anything but a simple recorder and transcriber of found voices; she has a writerly voice of her own which emerges from the chorus she assembles, with great style and authority, and she shapes her investigations of Soviet and post-Soviet life and death into epic dramatic chronicles as universally essential as Greek tragedies. So it is precisely because her work renders meaningless the distinction she draws between documentation and art that she is now the first full-time, lifelong journalist to win the literature prize."

Fireside Chats

Brian Hanrahan remembers an unexpected figure in the history of children's radio: "Of all mass media, radio has always had the least developed relation to children. The history of film or photography, of TV or the Internet, could hardly be written without reference to the child: images of children, children as audience and market, children's actual or hysterically invoked vulnerability. But radio has always been an overwhelmingly adult phenomenon Of course, there has long been broadcast radio aimed at children. There were kids' serials in the American network golden age, cozy British stuff like Listen with Mother in the 1960s, various kinds of educational radio. There are Sirius satellite channels, and Radio TEDDY, a German children's broadcaster, still transmits on the airwaves. But all this--and even radio hardware marketed to children--is a small and relatively unimportant part of radio as a historical phenomenon. Moreover, radio's relation to children is indirect, even uncanny: for children, radio is above all something addressed to grown-ups, but they can overhear it, or listen in on it. Radio, in this way, becomes a channel to a world beyond the home. Voices and sounds from the radio bring traces of a different life into the cloistered spaces of childhood and family. Any serious history of children and radio--any history going beyond a chronicle of program offerings--must include the German writer Walter Benjamin. Benjamin wrote extensively for the radio, and most of those broadcast writings--now newly translated and collected--were written for children, at least at first glance. More than that, something quintessentially Benjaminian happens in that uncanny encounter of radio and child: the hint of an unsettling remainder in the everyday, in the dislocation of sent message and received meaning, in the figure of the child who knows something his parents do not."

The Lost Art of Disagreeing

Daniel Faggella finds it tragic that the debate around the dangers of artificial intelligence is so shallow and ideological. Considering the heated denunciations and defenses of Elon Musk's warning that "With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon," Faggella writes: "What I believe is tragic, is when a debate no longer serves the end of finding truth, or unearthing concerns / opportunities. One class of fruitless conversation comes in the form of mis-informed and close-minded dismissal of an idea. Advanced technologies are far from being the only domain in which such 'disagreement' squashes the possibilities of progress / assessment, but I believe that there hasn't been enough media-worthy attention on AI to bring this unfortunate facet of human nature out of hiding and into open debate, until now. A few minutes of Googling will unearth a good deal of articles and videos from those who do and those who do not consider AI to be a significant near-term threat. More often than I'd hope, the perspectives given are often 'clearly those who disagree aren't even sane.' A second class of fruitless conversation seems about as hard to avoid as the first, namely, the protection of our beliefs and the swaying of our opinions to further our own outcomes. Some of the most ardent backlash to Elon Musk's comments about AI came from those who are most heavily invested in developing AGI, or those who are 'rooting for the Singularity' in one way or another. Of course, there's positively nothing wrong with work on AGI, or with enthusiasm and interest in the Singularity... but someone invested in those domains is more likely to want to spit on concerns about technological progress."

Globlish

In a review of Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura's book The Fall of Language in the Age of English, Haruo Shirane considers the fate of world literature in an Anglophone global culture: " In the medieval and early modern periods, transnational languages such as Latin, Arabic, or literary Chinese served as the language of high culture and technology; in the modern period, 'national languages' have taken on that role. However, unlike the premodern period, when there were multiple 'universal' (transnational, cosmopolitan) languages, or the modern period (late 19th and the first half of the 20th century for Japan), in which national languages and national literatures flourished, the present age has seen a single tongue become the one and only universal language. English's dominance in all spheres from science to literature is far greater than that of the earlier cosmopolitan languages such as Latin in medieval Europe, literary Chinese in East Asia, Arabic in the Middle East, or French in 19th-century Europe. Because there are now more literate people than at any other time in world history and because of new technologies that create global simultaneity on an unprecedented scale, English now penetrates every sphere. Much has been said recently about the growth of world literature in the age of globalization, but this has overwhelmingly come from those writing in English and/or dealing with literatures in the Romance languages. For example, Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters ([1999] 2004) traces the rise and dominance of French language and literature; David Damrosch's What Is World Literature? (2003) examines the ways in which literature travels around the world, either in translation or from one language to another, often following trade routes. In secondary and higher education in the United States, the traditional canons of national literature have been expanded or broken up to include a larger corpus of literature from around the world. However, almost all of the literature dealt with in these studies is based on European languages, and these representatives of 'world literature' are read almost entirely in English translation. The assumptions of this Anglophone view of 'world literature' are reflected in the genres and texts that have been chosen by Anglophone critics and scholars to represent 'world literature.' Franco Moretti, for example, in his attempt to draw up a 'world literary' map, ends up focusing on such modern European-based themes and genres as the "rise of the novel." In most of Asia, the so-called novel was a minor genre, not even considered serious literature until the 19th century, mostly under the impact of the European novel, while poetry (particularly the lyric), historical writings (chronicles and biographies), and philosophical writing were central. Compared to educated Europeans, until the modern period, elite East Asians (especially Confucian literati) had a very low view of fiction, at least on the surface, and almost all canonical literary genres were thought to be direct reflections of individual or historical experience. In other words, the very notion of 'world literature' that has emerged in English largely reflects the modern European notion of literature as imaginative narrative, with particular emphasis on the epic, the novel, and the short story."

The Right Stuff

John Branch considers the meaning of a baseball word: "Baseball considers itself the most thoughtful of games, a pastime more than a sport, written about with reverence and lyricism, in which pitching is considered more art than athleticism. Yet the primary term used to explain the art of pitching, which often determines who wins and who loses, is an inelegant word of ill-defined mush. Stuff. 'Stuff is a big word in baseball,' said Roger Craig, who pitched for 12 seasons in the major leagues, beginning in 1955, and coached pitchers and managed for nearly 25 more. 'It's probably used more than any word that I can think of, especially in pitching.' Its use as a descriptor in baseball dates back more than a century. It is a word so ordinary that it avoids consideration as a cliché, hidden behind an ever-creative spectrum of modifiers: pure stuff, ace stuff, nasty stuff, hit-and-miss stuff, electric stuff, primary stuff, secondary stuff, top-rotation stuff. Stuff can be good, great, tremendous. Some pitchers have plus stuff. Some have more...The word is both meaningful and meaningless. There are no synonyms. Like pornography, stuff is defined mostly by example. And only pitchers have stuff. Hitters do not have stuff. 'Hitters got tools,' Dempster said. 'We never say the pitchers got tools. We say the pitchers got stuff.'"

Your Own Private Border Collie Yelping in Distress

Back in 2005 in the New Yorker (h/t Travis Wentworth), Jonathan Franzen responded to the Starr report with an essay on privacy, one that sounds deeply influenced by Hannah Arendt. On the one hand Franzen begins, we have more solitude and privacy than ever. "The 'right to be left alone'? Far from disappearing, it's exploding. It's the essence of modern American architecture, landscape, transportation, communication, and mainstream political philosophy." On the other hand, the dissolving boundary between the private and the public spheres threatens to eradicate the public sphere. "If privacy depends upon an expectation of invisibility, the expectation of visibility is what defines a public space. My 'sense of privacy' functions to keep the public out of the private and to keep the private out of the public. A kind of mental Border collie yelps in distress when I feel that the line between the two has been breached. This is why the violation of a public space is so similar, as an experience, to the violation of privacy. I walk past a man taking a leak on a sidewalk in broad daylight (delivery-truck drivers can be especially self-righteous in their 'Ya gotta go, ya gotta go' philosophy of bladder management), and although the man with the yawning fly is ostensibly the one whose privacy is compromised by the leak, I'm the one who feels the impingement.... Reticence, meanwhile, has become an obsolete virtue. People now readily name their diseases, rents, antidepressants. Sexual histories get spilled on first dates, Birkenstocks and cutoffs infiltrate the office on casual Fridays, telecommuting puts the boardroom in the bedroom, 'softer' modern office design puts the bedroom in the boardroom, sales people unilaterally address customers by their first name, waiters won't bring food until I've established a personal relationship with them, voice-mail machinery stresses the 'I' in 'I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you dialed,' and cyberenthusiasts, in a particularly groteseque misnomer, designate as 'public forums' pieces of etched silicon with which a forum's unshaved 'participant' may communicate while sitting crosslegged in tangled sheets. The networked world as a threat to privacy? It's the ugly spectacle of a privacy triumuphant." The Hannah Arendt Center conference "Why Privacy Matters" begins Thursday. ("Imperial Bedroom" was published in How To Be Alone. To order, click here. To read, click here).

The Ink of History

In a BBC series of video essays on the oak tree, we learn about the historical impact of the Gall wasp, which lays eggs in the buds of trees. In doing so, the wasps seemingly take over the genetic structure of the oak tree's flower so that instead of acorns, galls emerge that nourish young wasp larvae. "The myriad of different types of structures these wasps create for their offspring is simply staggering. But of all the weird and wonderful types of Oak Gall, there's one that has a strange connection with the human race. One type of Oak Gall has shaped our history. That's because for a thousand years it was the source of a special kind of ink with which nearly all our historical documents were written." The Magna Carta, Newton's scientific theories, Leonardo da Vinci's drawings, Mozart's music, Darwin's letters, and more were written in this oak-derived ink.

Featured Events

HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #14

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 protected].

Friday, November 6, 2015

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From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Dawn Herrera Helphand considers how Pope Francis I's posture of humility resembles that of Roncalli, whose confidence as a follower of God Arendt sought to understand, in the Quote of the Week. Former Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat offers his comments on how one can change reality and make progress in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate a member's personal Arendt library as well as her book "The Political Tradition in the Work of Hannah Arendt" in this week's Library feature.