Amor Mundi 10/5/14

10-06-2014

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.

We Have Nothing To...

In a brilliant profile of Marilynne Robinson, whose new book Lila will be out this month, Wyatt Mason (a Senior Fellow at the Arendt Center) notes that Robinson thinks that fear dominates our contemporary condition; fear, she says, is the root of a cultural cynicism: "I hate to say it, but I think a default posture of human beings is fear." Robinson comes to speak about fear in answer to Mason's question: "What do you think people should be talking about more?" Her answer: "'One of the things that bothers me,' she began, with feeling, 'is that there are prohibitions of an unarticulated kind that are culturally felt that prevent people from actually saying what they think.' From there, she raised her well-documented relationship to faith; said that students at Iowa from faith-based backgrounds seek her out; sketched the inhibition these students nonetheless feel in describing the sacred ('If you're Jewish or Catholic, you can make all the jokes about your mother or the nun, but in terms of saying on one's deathbed, "What will it mean to me that this is how I would have described myself, how does the cosmos feel as it nestles in my particular breast?" they are completely inarticulate about that'); addressed that inhibition and suggested its root ('It's as if when you describe something good, you are being deceived or are being deceptive'); offered Flannery O'Connor as an example of a religious writer who fails to describe goodness ('Her prose is beautiful, her imagination appalls me'); evoked the nature of O'Connor's failure ('There's a lot of writing about religion with a cold eye, but virtually none with a loving heart'); complained about the widespread ignorance of religion in American life; told the story of Oseola McCarty, a laundress who bequeathed most of her life savings to the University of Southern Mississippi ('[An] interviewer was talking about how McCarty took down this Bible and First Corinthians fell out of it, it had been so read. And you think, Here is this woman that, by many standards, might have been considered marginally literate, that by another standard would have been considered to be a major expert on the meaning of First Corinthians!'); suggested that McCarty's understanding of First Corinthians - in which Paul lays out the kind of communitarian behaviors upon which Christian decency might depend - reveals what it means to read a text well ('It makes you think that comprehension has an ethical content'); jumped to some reading she has been doing that has an explicit ethical content - essays by John Wycliffe, who played a crucial role in the first English translations of the Bible ('Wycliffe says that if you do not object strenuously to a superior's bad behavior, you are as bad, as guilty as he is of what happens'); and rehearsed the radical activist tradition of translating the Bible, how rendering it into English was a courageous act, a risky resistance of royal authority. ... And it was here that Robinson brought up fear: How it has come to keep us at bay from our best selves, the selves that could and should 'do something.' In her case, that 'something' has been writing. For Robinson, writing is not a craft; it is 'testimony,' a bearing witness: an act that demands much of its maker, not least of which is the courage to reveal what one loves."

Same Spot, Different Day

Steven Heller considers cartoonist Richard McGuire's newly updated project Here, a comic set in one room over the course of many centuries: "Here is, furthermore, a meditation on 'impermanence,' which is what makes it emotionally compelling yet unsettling-as though every moment in time is preserved in some random playback mode. Structurally, everything and everyone has what McGuire calls a 'walk-on part' as the mysterious scenes go flowing by. 'If you stop to think about this, the "now" becomes heightened,' he says. 'We are so rarely "in the moment," we spend most of our time thinking of the past or worrying about the future. The "now" is the only thing that really exists. The book starts with the question, "Why did I come in here again?" Which is what I was asking myself when I started this project. It took me a long time to figure out how exactly to make this book. The book ends with a moment of recognition of the "now." The person finds the book they are looking for. Which is also my answer, I came back to this idea to make it into a book.'"

Why Acadamese?

Steven Pinker suggests that, although there are lots of reasons why academics write so poorly, most it is because they are not encouraged to write well: "Fog comes easily to writers; it's the clarity that requires practice. The naïve realism and breezy conversation in classic style are deceptive, an artifice constructed through effort and skill. Exorcising the curse of knowledge is no easier. It requires more than just honing one's empathy for the generic reader. Since our powers of telepathy are limited, it also requires showing a draft to a sample of real readers and seeing if they can follow it, together with showing it to yourself after enough time has passed that it's no longer familiar and putting it through another draft (or two or three or four). And there is the toolbox of writerly tricks that have to be acquired one by one: a repertoire of handy idioms and tropes, the deft use of coherence connectors such as nonetheless and moreover, an ability to fix convoluted syntax and confusing garden paths, and much else. You don't have to swallow the rational-actor model of human behavior to see that professionals may not bother with this costly self-improvement if their profession doesn't reward it. And by and large, academe does not. Few graduate programs teach writing. Few academic journals stipulate clarity among their criteria for acceptance, and few reviewers and editors enforce it. While no academic would confess to shoddy methodology or slapdash reading, many are blasé about their incompetence at writing. Enough already. Our indifference to how we share the fruits of our intellectual labors is a betrayal of our calling to enhance the spread of knowledge. In writing badly, we are wasting each other's time, sowing confusion and error, and turning our profession into a laughingstock."

Weaponising Religion

Writing about former nun Karen Armstrong's new book Fields of Blood: Religion of History and Violence, Ferdinand Mound troubles the commonly understood relationship between the two: "Armstrong argues persuasively that it is under the cumulative pressure of invasion by outsiders and internal oppression that secular grievance morphs into jihad. To use an apt but unlovely term, invented I think by Dr. Henry Kissinger, religion is 'weaponised' - how Dr. Strangelove would adore the word. After years of Israeli blockade and creeping land grabs, Yasser Arafat's entirely secular Palestine Liberation Organisation has segued into the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. Israel herself, founded as a secular haven in the teeth of the rabbis, has become a holy land after half a century of Arab encirclement. Now young men all over the Middle East, many of them originally secular and ignorant of Islam, as were the majority of the 9/11 bombers, are being hyped up by selective quotation of holy writ to commit crimes as unspeakable as, well, Samson's. Religion makes its comeback into politics in this hideous perverted form for much the same reason as it emerged in the first place - as an anguished reaction against a heartless world. Westerners lament that Islam never had a Reformation. Muslims may retort that if we had not trampled all over them, they wouldn't have needed one."

Arendt's Kantianism

 The Secular Diamond

In an interview at the end of the regular season, baseball fan George Will takes on the idea that baseball is somehow religious: "Part of the beauty of baseball, and sport generally, is that it doesn't mean a damn thing. It's valued for itself. Now, it can be the pursuit of excellence. It is competition tamed and made civil by rules. It is aggression channeled in a wholesome direction. These are all virtues. They tiptoe up to the point and stop well short of giving baseball meaning. It's a game. It's a very pretty, demanding, and dangerous game. I do think that baseball satisfies a longing in people, particularly urban people. There is a vestigial tribal impulse in all of us. For instance, when you get on the L and the cars begin to fill up with people wearing their Cub blue and you're all going to the same place for the same reason, for about three hours a little community exists. It disperses after three hours, but it will come back tomorrow. Daniel Patrick Moynihan talked about what he called the 'liberal expectancy.' He said that with the coming of modernity the two drivers of history, religion and ethnicity, would lose their saliency. Sport caters to this and entertains this desire for group identification. But there's nothing transcendent about baseball."

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