Amor Mundi 10/27/13
10-28-2013
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.
Drones are simply one weapon in a large arsenal with which we fight the war on terror. Even targeted killings, the signature drone capability, are nothing new. The U.S. and other countries have targeted and killed individual leaders for decades if not centuries, using snipers, poisons, bombs, and many other technologies. To take a historical perspective, drones don’t change much. Nor is the airborne capacity of drones to deliver devastation from afar anything new, having as its predecessors the catapult, the long bow, the bomber, and the cruise missile. And yet, there is seemingly something new about the way drones change the feel and reality of warfare. On one side, drones sanitize the battlefield from a space of blood, fear, and heroic fortitude into a video game played on consoles. On the other side, drones dominate life, creating a low pitched humming sound that reminds inhabitants that at any moment a missile might pierce their daily routines. The two sides of this phenomenology of drones is the topic of an essay by Nasser Hussain in The Boston Review: “In order to widen our vision, I provide a phenomenology of drone strikes, examining both how the world appears through the lens of a drone camera and the experience of the people on the ground. What is it like to watch a drone’s footage, or to wait below for it to strike? What does the drone’s camera capture, and what does it occlude?” You can also read Roger Berkowitz’s weekend read on seeing through drones.
The Loss of the Christian Tradition
Marilynne Robinson, speaking to the American Conservative about her faith, elaborates on what she sees as the central flaws in contemporary American Christianity: "Something I find regrettable in contemporary Christianity is the degree to which it has abandoned its own heritage, in thought and art and literature. It was at the center of learning in the West for centuries—because it deserved to be. Now there seems to be actual hostility on the part of many Christians to what, historically, was called Christian thought, as if the whole point were to get a few things right and then stand pat. I believe very strongly that this world, these billions of companions on earth that we know are God’s images, are to be loved, not only in their sins, but especially in all that is wonderful about them. And as God is God of the living, that means we ought to be open to the wonderful in all generations. These are my reasons for writing about Christian figures of the past. At present there is much praying on street corners. There are many loud declarations of personal piety, which my reading of the Gospels forbids me to take at face value. The media are drawn by noise, so it is difficult to get a sense of the actual state of things in American religious culture."
Is poetry going the way of the Dodo bird? Vanessa Place makes this argument in a recent essay “Poetry is Dead. I Killed It,” on the Poetry Foundation website. And Kenneth Goldsmith, in the New Yorker, asks whether Place is right. The internet, he suggests, has killed or at least so rethought poetry that it may be unrecognizable. "Quality is beside the point—this type of content is about the quantity of language that surrounds us, and about how difficult it is to render meaning from such excesses. In the past decade, writers have been culling the Internet for material, making books that are more focussed [sic] on collecting than on reading. These ways of writing—word processing, databasing, recycling, appropriating, intentionally plagiarizing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, to name just a few—have traditionally been considered outside the scope of literary practice."
In a rare interview, famously reclusive Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson prognosticates on the future of the comics: "Personally, I like paper and ink better than glowing pixels, but to each his own. Obviously the role of comics is changing very fast. On the one hand, I don’t think comics have ever been more widely accepted or taken as seriously as they are now. On the other hand, the mass media is disintegrating, and audiences are atomizing. I suspect comics will have less widespread cultural impact and make a lot less money. I’m old enough to find all this unsettling, but the world moves on. All the new media will inevitably change the look, function, and maybe even the purpose of comics, but comics are vibrant and versatile, so I think they’ll continue to find relevance one way or another. But they definitely won’t be the same as what I grew up with."
Cambodian director Rithy Panh's new movie, The Missing Picture is about the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In making the film, he had to confront the challenge of making a movie about atrocities that are famously without explicit visual records, and he hit upon a unique solution: clay dolls. Although these figures "are necessarily silent, immobile, and therefore devoid of the intensity of those moments in other Panh films where his camera bores in on the face of a witness and lingers there as he remembers what happened, or what he did," Richard Bernstein suggests that they give the movie a unique power.
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Ian Storey revisits George Orwell's prescient essay, "Politics and the English Language." Jeffrey Champlin looks at James Muldoon's essay about Arendt's writngs on the advocacy of council systems in On Revolution. And your weekend read looks at the cultural impact of drones on the nations and groups that are employing them.