Amor Mundi -10/20/13
10-21-2013
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 Private Work of Democratic Professionals
Democracy is usually thought a political movement and participatory democracy points to public involvement in protests, plebiscites, and public action aimed at governmental change. But democracy may also be thought of as a way of life focused on individualism and respect for the power and judgment of each person. At the start of a new series about participatory politics that takes place in the typically apolitical spaces of schools, offices, and courtrooms, Albert Dzur generalizes a little about those who are engaged in this kind of "trench democracy": "they take their public responsibilities seriously and listen carefully to those outside their walls and those at all levels of their internal hierarchy in order to foster physical proximity between formerly separated individuals, encourage co-ownership of problems previously seen as beyond laypeople’s ability or realm of responsibility, and seek out opportunities for collaborative work between laypeople and professionals. We fail to see these activities as politically significant because they do not fit our conventional picture of democratic change. As if to repay the compliment, the democratic professionals I have interviewed in fields such as criminal justice, public administration, and K-12 education rarely use the concepts employed by social scientists and political theorists. Lacking an overarching ideology, they make it up as they go along, developing roles, attitudes, habits, and practices that open calcified structures up to greater participation. Their democratic action is thus endogenous to their occupational routine, often involving those who would not consider themselves activists or even engaged citizens." You can also read more about Dzur’s approach to administrative democracy in Roger Berkowitz’s Weekend Read.
The United States has come in for some mighty deserved criticism lately. China’s state newspaper has criticized the functioning of our democratic process (that’s rich) and Russia’s Vladimir Putin has editorialized in the New York Times, in another context, warned against American exceptionalism. And over in Europe, as Walter Russell Mead reports, they are united in laughing at the dysfunctional U.S. democracy. But as Mead reports, Europe has its own problems: “we should not ignore the continual weakening of the bonds that hold Europe together as the long agony of the eurozone grinds on. It’s not just that many Italians now loathe what they see as arrogant German posturing and that many people in the two countries live in completely different mental universes with radically different interpretations of recent history. As I traveled through Europe I felt that both foreign and domestic issues are pulling Europeans away from each other. There was less excitement about the prospect of building a united Europe than I’ve seen in the past, and more of a sense of nations following their own interests without expecting much support or help from their EU partners…. The bitter public feelings generated by the euro crisis and its long, painful aftermath are still working their slow and ugly way through the European political system. In country after country we are seeing steady gains by political movements that bear a superficial resemblance to the American Tea Party, but in fact flirt much more with the kind of dangerous nationalist and chauvinist ideas that have proven so destructive in Europe’s past.”
On the day that Canadian writer Alice Munroe won the Nobel Prize in literature, her Canadian country women Margaret Atwood published an appreciation in the Guardian. Atwood writes: “Munro's fictional world is peopled with secondary characters who despise art and artifice, and any kind of pretentiousness or showing off. It's against these attitudes and the self-mistrust they inspire that her central characters must struggle in order to free themselves enough to create anything at all. At the same time, her writer protagonists share this scorn of the artificial side of art, and the distrust of it. What should be written about? How should one write? How much of art is genuine, how much just a bag of cheap tricks - imitating people, manipulating their emotions, making faces? How can one affirm anything about another person - even a made-up person - without presumption? Above all, how should a story end? (Munro often provides one ending, then questions or revises it. Or else she simply distrusts it, as in the final paragraph of "Meneseteung" where the narrator says: "I may have got it wrong.") Isn't the very act of writing an act of arrogance, isn't the pen a broken reed? A number of stories - "Friend of My Youth", "Carried Away", "Wilderness Station", "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" - contain letters that display the vanity or falsity or even the malice of their writers. If the writing of letters can be so devious, what about writing itself?” It is time to read Munroe, if you haven’t. But first read the whole of Atwood’s wondrous and timely appreciation.
The Economist ponders whether or not Esperanto, the world's foremost invented language, will ever become the globe's lingua franca: "People may learn English or German or Chinese to get a job. But they also learn languages to experience travel, food, film, music and literature. Look at the cover of a language textbook and you’ll find an attractive person strolling down a stereotypically picturesque street from the country in question, or maybe a famous landmark. “That,” thinks the learner, “is what I want.” What would that picture be for an Esperanto textbook? The community is proud of its respect for existing cultures. Esperanto is to be the world's first choice for a second language in order to protect diversity, not to replace it. So to be motivated to learn Esperanto, you have to be motivated not by a living and breathing culture, but by an ideal of international harmony. That ideal has to compete with French food, Italian fashion, Brazilian music, Spanish nightlife, American rock'n’roll, Japanese film, and so on."
Recently, Hermann Goering's niece Bettina gave an interview that is, in part, about what it means to be closely related to someone so infamous. At a particularly candid moment, she describes her great-uncle as more than one thing: "Is somebody ever totally bad or good? I hope not. I think certain circumstances happen that might turn somebody into a psychopath. When I see Hermann as a family person, I think he’s really nice, and charming, and incredibly caretaking, and it’s hard for me to see flaws. But then you see what he does in politics."