Amor Mundi 11/1/15

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.

Permanent Purgatory

Elizabeth Dunn uses the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe to consider the ever-present fact of refugee camps around the world. The average refugee lives in a camp for 12 years, while many spend the remainder of their lives in these places. As Dunn writes, "the purgatory of camp life lasts decades or even generations, as the politics of refugees' home countries remains unstable." For Dunn, the refugee "problem" cannot be thought of as a border problem but must be seen as a question of resettlement. Her view is buttressed by an uncompromising look at the reality of living in a camp. "The problem is compounded by the total failure of the refugee camp as a humanitarian and political technology. Since the 1950s, Western Europe has tried to keep displaced people outside its borders by funding large-scale refugee camps in Third World countries. Despite the United Nations High Commission for Refugees' call for 'durable solutions' for displaced people, the plan for most refugees is for them to wait in camps until they can return home, even when there is no foreseeable end to the wars or occupations that have displaced them. But while these camps offer politicians a convenient way to avoid making decisions about foreign wars and domestic immigration issues, the camps can only offer refugees a way of life that is permanently temporary. With no prospects for permanent relocation and the basic necessities for sustaining life in short supply, it is no surprise that displaced people are attempting the dangerous voyage to Europe. 'This isn't living; it's just existing,' Mzia Khizanishvili told me in the summer of 2014, as we sat outside her small cottage in a refugee camp in the Republic of Georgia. During the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia, Khizanishvili, a middle-aged school principal, became a victim of ethnic cleansing along with 28,000 other people in the breakaway province of South Ossetia. More than six years later, most of them were still stuck in the camps, which the government euphemistically called 'new settlements.' With unemployment rates at more than 80 percent and little farmland available for the camp's residents, the internally displaced people in Georgia did what displaced people around the world do in refugee camps: they sat and waited to begin new lives."

Free Expression on Campus

Nadine Strossen went to Harvard's Shorenstein Center to deliver the eighth annual Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press. In her talk, Strossen discussed "how university sexual harassment policies increasingly go well beyond the Supreme Court's definition of sexual harassment, 'extending to speech with any sexual content that anyone finds offensive.' Strossen argued that this concept has become 'entrenched' on university campuses as the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has threatened to pull federal funding from schools that do not 'enact sexual misconduct policies that violate many civil liberties.' 'Combating gender discrimination, violence and sexual assault is of the utmost urgency,' said Strossen, 'but OCR's distorted concept of sexual harassment actually does more harm than good to gender justice, not to mention free speech.' 'OCR's flawed sexual harassment concept reflects sexist stereotypes that are equally insulting to women and men. For women, it embodies the archaic infantilizing notion that we are inherently demeaned by any expression with sexual content,' she continued. Strossen critiqued the current trend toward shielding students from ideas that may make them uncomfortable. 'Last fall, Brown University set up a safe space for students who felt endangered by the mere fact that a debate was taking place on campus on the topic of how should campuses handle sexual assault,' she said, noting that the space was equipped with calming music, videos of puppies, and playdough. 'This focus on safety from disturbing ideas is especially misplaced given the ongoing serious threats to students' physical safety, including rape and sexual assault,' said Strossen. 'Also in the wake of the latest mass gun murders on a campus, we have to contrast government pressure to shield students from ideas with its failure to shield them from guns...when it comes to safety our students are being doubly disserved, too often denied safety from physical violence, which is critical for their education, but too often granted safety from ideas, which is antithetical to their education.'" The question of "How Do We Talk About Difficult Questions?: Race, Sex, and Religion on Campus" is the topic for the ninth annual Hannah Arendt Center Conference on Oct. 20-21, 2016. Save the date.

Triggering the Teacher

Rani Neutill was teaching a class on the representation of sex throughout American cinema and at the same time working as Director of the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention Services at her university. Her students demanded trigger warnings and even still came crying hysterical to her office. She complied, even as she worried that doing so was neither effective nor productive. That is, until she lost patience. She has left teaching because of her experiences. Colleges, she writes, "are the new helicopter parents, places where the quest for emotional safety and psychic healing leads not to learning, but regression." Here was the final straw that sent Neutill over the edge: "Nevertheless, I did it. Each night I sent a meticulous email detailing which scene I was showing, where in the film the scene was, and what the content of the scene included. My role as a sexual assault prevention services specialist and survivor advocate eclipsed my role as a professor as I tried to accommodate students over and over again. The next film to piss them all off was 9 1/2 Weeks. The film is about an S&M relationship between a character played by Micky Rourke and one played by Kim Basinger. At first Basinger's character is drawn to Rourke and they begin an S&M style consensual relationship. As the film goes on, Rourke becomes abusive and the sex becomes non-consensual, but the beauty of the film is that Basinger is eventually able to let go and take something from the relationship--a heightened sense of her sexuality and desires. There's an infamous scene with Rourke feeding Basinger a number of food items while she's blindfolded. It's basically a series of soft-core money shots. It is a consensual scene. When conversation began in class, a white male student started talking about the scene as one of consent. Four hands shot up. One said, 'no--it is clearly not consensual.' Other students concurred. They argued that if someone is in an abusive relationship, they can never consent to sex because they are being manipulated. This triggered me. I was furious. Sexual assault survivor support is about empowerment. The model says, 'Hey! It's not for you to tell the survivor what happened to them; that's their story, they know, don't f--king label it.' What these students were essentially doing was stripping every person in an abusive relationship of all their agency. They were telling every survivor that they were raped, even when the survivor may have wanted to have sex with their abuser. They were claiming god like knowledge of every sexual encounter. And they were only 20. If that. Their frontal lobes haven't even fully developed. I was done with it. I was drained. I was anxious. I was tired. I was fed up. But I didn't want to be. I had been teaching for ten years with passion."

Humility

Arthur C. Brooks argues in the NY Times that increasing homogeneity of thought on college and university campuses is endangering free and critical thinking. "But even honest researchers are affected by the unconscious bias that creeps in when everyone thinks the same way. Certain results--especially when they reinforce commonly held ideas--tend to receive a lower standard of scrutiny. This might help explain why, when the Open Science Collaboration's Reproducibility Project recently sought to retest 100 social science studies, the group was unable to confirm the original findings more than half the time. These concerns aren't a modern innovation. In one classic experiment from 1975, a group of scholars was asked to evaluate one of two research papers that used the same statistical methodology to reach opposite conclusions. One version 'found' that liberal political activists were mentally healthier than the general population; the other paper, otherwise identical, was set up to 'prove' the opposite conclusion. The liberal reviewers rated the first version significantly more publishable than its less flattering twin." For Brooks, we should welcome opposing and dissenting voices not simply because they may be right and we wrong, but rather because responding to dissent will force us to respond and recalibrate. It is, Brooks argues, a question of humility: "[I]mproving ideological diversity is not a fundamentally political undertaking. Rather, it is a question of humility. Proper scholarship is based on the simple virtues of tolerance, openness and modesty. Having people around who think differently thus improves not only science, but also character."

The Commons

In Part II of the conversation between President Obama and writer Marilynne Robinson, President Obama speaks about the loss of common literature, common culture, and "common reference points."

"The President: Part of the challenge is--and I see this in our politics--is a common conversation. It's not so much, I think, that people don't read at all; it's that everybody is reading [in] their niche, and so often, at least in the media, they're reading stuff that reinforces their existing point of view. And so you don't have that phenomenon of here's a set of great books that everybody is familiar with and everybody is talking about. Sometimes you get some TV shows that fill that void, but increasingly now, that's splintered, too, so other than the Super Bowl, we don't have a lot of common reference points. And you can argue that that's part of the reason why our politics has gotten so polarized, is that--when I was growing up, if the president spoke to the country, there were three stations and every city had its own newspaper and they were going to cover that story. And that would last for a couple of weeks, people talking about what the president had talked about. Today, my poor press team, they're tweeting every two minutes because some new thing has happened, which then puts a premium on the sensational and the most outrageous or a conflict as a way of getting attention and breaking through the noise--which then creates, I believe, a pessimism about the country because all those quiet, sturdy voices that we were talking about at the beginning, they're not heard. It's not interesting to hear a story about some good people in some quiet place that did something sensible and figured out how to get along.

"Robinson: I think that in our earlier history--the Gettysburg Address or something--there was the conscious sense that democracy was an achievement. It was not simply the most efficient modern system or something. It was something that people collectively made and they understood that they held it together by valuing it. I think that in earlier periods--which is not to say one we will never return to--the president himself was this sort of symbolic achievement of democracy. And there was the human respect that I was talking about before, [that] compounds itself in the respect for the personified achievement of a democratic culture. Which is a hard thing--not many people can pull that together, you know.... So I do think that one of the things that we have to realize and talk about is that we cannot take it for granted. It's a made thing that we make continuously."

The common sense that we cannot take for granted and that we must continuously make is a central theme of Hannah Arendt's understanding of political action. Action is new, surprising, and shocking. It is the spontaneous surprise of action that gathers people around and initiates the conversations, dialogue, and discourses that gather a plural and diverse group of individuals into a political people. The worry Arendt voices is that in an era of spectacle and statistics, surprising action is rare and easily dismissed as an aberration. Action can be either criminal or heroic. To surprise and shock, action must become ever more extreme, which leads to it increasingly being seen as criminal, or at least irrelevant. The result is the splintering of attention and the loss of a common focus.

Look at Me

Trinie Dalton reviews Anselm Kiefer's Notebooks, Volume 1, 1998-99 in the LA Review of Books. "These Notebooks, which also often remark upon his burgeoning computer skills and how it takes up to '25 minutes to upload a file to the floppy disk,' are eerily all-too-contemporary when it comes to that existential angst that drives some social media fixations today--again the fine line between BE HERE NOW and LOOK AT ME. These journals are a reminder that our obsessions with staying occupied and proving we are real (i.e. selfies for some; jerking off for others) are not dictated by technology but rather are innate human traits expressible across behaviors and mediums. Kiefer's art and writing remind us that these compulsions have driven artistic practice since the dawn of time, not only in time-specific mediums (like narrative writing and music) but also in textual and visual mediums (like poetry and painting), which are arguably less tethered to time." One seemingly exemplary entry reads: "Sitting with my laptop, waiting. For what? What differentiates this waiting from waiting for a train or a flight? In both cases you wait until something arrives. In the case of waiting for something to write, the waiting is already a part of what is to be written down. Because something is already 'at work' while you wait, which could end the wait."

Featured Events

From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Hans Teerds discusses how being at home in a desert-like landscape invokes the danger of losing any real contact with the world and its (other) inhabitants in the Quote of the Week. The Persian poet Rumi reflects on the heartache and sorrow involved in thinking in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We publicize the news that the Department of Philosophy at West Chester University will be hosting the tenth independent conference of the Hannah Arendt Circle, March 10-12, 2016 and that the Hannah Arendt Circle is now accepting papers for this event. Finally, we appreciate Arendt's three-volume copy of The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History in this week's Library feature.