Amor Mundi 10/18/15

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.

Making Violence Violent

Wyatt Mason interviews filmmaker Steve McQueen in the T Magazine: "Consider the opening of McQueen's 'Hunger,' in which we see a man's hands as he removes his wedding ring and then soaks his bruised, scraped knuckles in an ice-cold sink of water. We watch the man have breakfast, those same hands tidily brushing crumbs from his cloth-napkined lap, and later see him standing outside, in winter, in a prison guard's uniform, smoking, his gaze empty, snowflakes falling, the shirt of his uniform sweated through, and his hands now bruised and bloodied further, flakes of snow falling onto and dissolving into them. He looks utterly destroyed. Only later in the film will we see him doing the work that has wounded those hands: Repeatedly, we watch him savagely beat I.R.A. prisoners nearly to death. By then, it's not so much that the viewer sympathizes with the villain as that we are made to feel how the guard, no less than the prisoner, is being destroyed by the violence he is made to be a part of. All of McQueen's feature films document brutality with unflinching power, whether in a prison in Northern Ireland, the figurative jail of sexual addiction or the serial tortures of slavery. In an entertainment culture that has only grown increasingly hospitable to violent diversions, McQueen's preoccupation with the reality of violence in our lives would be meaningless had he not found forms of depicting it that were meaningfully new. As his short films, though shorn of narrative, made clear to me, McQueen has a cunning range of means to make us feel what we have been habituated to barely notice."

All In The Families

Nicholas Confessore, Sarah Cohen, and Karen Yourish describe in the New York Times how 158 families have contributed about one-half of all political contributions so far in this 2016 presidential election cycle. The families "are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns. And in an economy that has minted billionaires in a dizzying array of industries, most made their fortunes in just two: finance and energy. Now they are deploying their vast wealth in the political arena, providing almost half of all the seed money raised to support Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found. Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision five years ago."

But What To Do With It All?

Writing on the same theme as our just concluded annual conference, Walter Kirn looks at the devices and algorithims that are collecting data on him and wonders aloud about what it's doing to him and what it's doing to us: "I wanted to behold up close, in person, one of the citadels of modern surveillance: the National Security Agency's recently constructed Utah Data Center. I wasn't sure what I was after, exactly--perhaps just a concrete impression of a process that seemed elusive and phantasmagoric, even after Snowden disclosed its workings. The records that the NSA blandly rendered as mere 'data' and invisibly, silently collected--the phone logs, e-mails, browsing histories, and digital photo libraries generated by a population engaged in the treasonous business of daily life--required a tangible, physical depository. And this was it: a multibillion-dollar facility clearly designed to unscramble, analyze, and store imponderable masses of information whose ultimate uses were unknowable. Google's data mines, presumably, exist merely to sell us products, but the government's models of our inner selves might be deployed to sell us stranger items. Policies. Programs. Maybe even wars. Such concerns didn't strike me as farfetched, but I was reluctant to air them in mixed company. I knew that many of my fellow citizens took comfort in their own banality: You live a boring life and feel you have nothing to fear from those on high. But how could you anticipate the ways in which insights bred of spying might prove handy to some future regime? New tools have a way of breeding new abuses. Detailed logs of behaviors that I found tame--my Amazon purchases, my online comments, and even my meanderings through the physical world, collected by biometric scanners, say, or license-plate readers on police cars--might someday be read in a hundred different ways by powers whose purposes I couldn't fathom now. They say you can quote the Bible to support almost any conceivable proposition, and I could only imagine the range of charges that selective looks at my data might render plausible."

Democracy and Others

"Marilynne, it's wonderful to see you." So starts one of the most unusual interviews in recent memory, an interview conducted by, of all people, President Obama, with the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson. Robinson suggests that one of the keys to a democratic society is that "You have to assume that basically people want to do the right thing. I think that you can look around society and see that basically people do the right thing. But when people begin to make these conspiracy theories and so on, that make it seem as if what is apparently good is in fact sinister, they never accept the argument that is made for a position that they don't agree with--you know?... Because [of] the idea of the 'sinister other.' And I mean, that's bad under all circumstances. But when it's brought home, when it becomes part of our own political conversation about ourselves, I think that that really is about as dangerous a development as there could be in terms of whether we continue to be a democracy."

Passing The Time

On Thursday evening, following Day One of the Hannah Arendt Center Conference and at the end of the dinner for the event's participants, whispers started flying around the room--the Mets first tied and then went ahead of the Dodgers. The next day, we went to our source. Roger Angell's been writing about this year's MLB playoffs, and it's a delight. Here's a sample on Thursday's NLDS finale between the Mets and the Dodgers: "The Mets scored a run in the first, on an opening infield single by Curtis Granderson and Murphy's double, but quickly fell behind when Jacob deGrom gave up four successive singles (the last a bloop) and the tying and go-ahead runs to the Dodgers in the home half. He steadied, fanning the last two batters of the inning, but the damage felt dire, because of the swiftness of response and because deGrom wasn't himself, running up pitch counts and going wild with his upper fastballs. He was matched against Zack Greinke, who went 19-3 this year and had not lost a game when given a Dodger lead all year, so the early and middle innings felt ominous, even after Murphy's stroll and tying run. My wife, a chronic 'Oh-my-Godder' in taut games, did not lift the mood chez nous, and who can blame her? DeGrom, giving up a few walks and a couple of doubles, allowed base runners in each of the next four innings, all to no avail. How you assess this comes down to the old eschatological dilemma. Were the Dodger hitters terrible, stranding four runners in scoring position (or 'R.I.S.P.,' in the parlance), or was deGrom magnificent on an off day? Always in the soup, he struck out a final batter four times in his six innings, and two last batters twice. 'DeGrom has vanished!' I wrote in my notebook in the second, Oh-my-Godding on my own--only he hadn't."

A Perfect Record

Thursday and Friday were thrilling days at Bard College, where we hosted our eighth annual conference "Why Privacy Matters: What Do We Lose When We Lose Our Privacy?" We will be posting edited video of the conference shortly. For now, you can watch unedited footage here. Or, make your way through the highlights of the conference via Twitter. For example, Emiljana Ulaj tweeted these words from Edward Snowden: "We all instinctively understand that the private realm is where we can act, think, speak, write, experiment, and choose how to be, away from the judgmental eyes of others. Privacy is a core condition of being a free person." Snowden also said at the conference, "I wanted a fair trial and to speak to the jury, but I wasn't allowed to." They said, "We won't torture you." You can read more tweets from this year's conference by looking back on our event's official hashtag, #ArendtCon2015.

The Drone Whistleblower

Widely referenced at the Arendt Center conference was a new series of articles published by The Intercept that is based on the U.S. drone and assassination program. "The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the U.S. military's kill/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars--between 2011 and 2013. The documents, which also outline the internal views of special operations forces on the shortcomings and flaws of the drone program, were provided by a source within the intelligence community who worked on the types of operations and programs described in the slides. The Intercept granted the source's request for anonymity because the materials are classified and because the U.S. government has engaged in aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers. The stories in this series will refer to the source as 'the source.'"

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