Amor Mundi - 10/13/13

10-14-2013

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 Educated Citizen in Washington

Roger Berkowitz opened the Arendt Center Conference "Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis": "In the early years of our federal-constitutional-democratic-republican experiment, cobblers, lawyers, and yeoman farmers participated in Town Hall meetings. Today, few of us have the experience or the desire to govern and we have lost the habit of weighing and judging those issues that define our body politic. Why is this so? Are we suffering an institutional failure to make clear that participation in governance is a personal responsibility? Do the size and complexity of bureaucratic government mean that individuals are so removed from the levers of power that engaged citizenship is rationally understood to be a waste of time? Or do gerrymandered districts with homogenous populations insulate congressmen from the need for compromise? Whatever the cause, educated elites  are contemptuous of common people and increasingly imagine that the American people are no longer qualified for self-government; and the American people, for their part, increasingly distrust the educated elite that has consistently failed to deliver the dream of a well-managed government that provides social services cheaply and efficiently. It is against this background that we are here to think about 'The Educated Citizen in Crisis.'  Over the next two days, we will ask: What would an educated citizen look like today? Read the whole talk; you can also watch his speech and the whole conference here.

When You Need a Job for Job Training

Clare McCann points to a surprising fact about government student loans: "Most people typically have undergraduates in mind when they think about the federal loan program, but in reality, the program is nearly as much about financing graduate studies as it is about undergraduate programs. Sure, graduate school can cost more than an undergraduate education, but that's not necessarily why graduate loans feature prominently in the breakdown. Actually, it's because the federal government does not limit how much graduate students can borrow." Perhaps more so than loans for undergraduates, loans to students entering grad programs can lead to enormous debt loads that they can't afford.

The Internet Arendt

David Palumbo-Liu considers the role of the public intellectual in the internet age. He argues that amongst the proliferation of intellectual voices on the web, the role of the public intellectual must change:  "A public intellectual today would thus not simply be one filter alongside others, an arbiter of opinion and supplier of diversity. Instead, today's public intellectual is a provocateur who also provides a compelling reason to think differently. This distinction is critical." In other words, what we need are more public intellectuals who write and think as did Hannah Arendt.

Dual Citizenship

Andrea Bruce's new photo project, Afghan Americans, depicts a group of people with a particular dual identity alongside quotes from its subjects. This work grew out of work she did as a photojournalist in Iraq, where she sought to "show that Iraqis weren't all that different from our readers... that they, too, love their children. They care about education. They have to deal with traffic and health care in ways that are surprisingly similar to Americans."

Ceasing to Make Sense of the World

In an interview about, among other things, whether a machine can help us separate art we like from art we don't, essayist Michelle Orange answers a question about why we like formulaic art, and the consequences of that preference: "In the 1960s there was a great hunger for tumult and experiment at the movies that matched the times. I often wonder about A.O. Scott's line on The Avengers: 'The price of entertainment is obedience.' When did it happen that instead of gathering to dream together, we trudged to the movies to get the shit entertained out of us? Robert Stone has a great line: 'The way people go crazy is that they cease to have narratives, and the way a culture goes crazy is that it ceases to be able to tell stories.' In American culture you find a mania for stories - the internet, social media, the news cycle, endless cable channels. But I wonder if being fed in constant junk-nutrition fragments only intensifies that appetite, because what it really wants is something huge and coherent, some structuring context."

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