Amor Mundi 11/30/14

12-01-2014

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.

The State of Refugees

Writing in The Diplomat, Ben Reynolds invokes Hannah Arendt to illustrate the paradoxical ineffectiveness of protecting refugees under international law. "The stateless may be technically protected under international law, but they lack enforceable rights without the corresponding protection of a state. International law recognizes the right of states to determine who they recognize as citizens. This is a fundamental component of state sovereignty. States are thus permitted to deny citizenship and its corresponding rights to persons fleeing war, disaster, and tyranny who seek shelter within their borders. Lacking the normal rights of citizens, refugees are subject to the caprice of the host nation. Paradoxically, the very ideas of nationality and citizenship deprive human beings of their rights the moment they leave their own polity. The resulting 'natural' response of states has been to contain the stateless within refugee camps, isolating them from the normal civic and social life of the host nation. International agreements, like the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, seem to offer some level of protection for the rightless. They are, however, essentially unenforceable. No one should believe that international law will convince the government of Myanmar, for example, to provide an acceptable level of rights to all of the Rohingya people, much less citizenship. Even if someone were to naturalize every currently stateless person, an almost impossible task, the very next large scale political crisis would create a new wave of refugees which states would seek to exclude from their political communities." 

The Right to Have Rights

"Without the existence of a right to belong to a political community, the 'right to have rights,' there can be no lasting solution to the problem of statelessness." Pointing to Arendt's idea of the "Right to have rights," he suggests that there is such a right to belong to a political community that has little to do with states as they are understood in the international legal system. It's worth revisiting what Roger Berkowitz writes about Arendt and human rights: "Human rights, in other words, are only those rights to speak and act amidst a people such that one's words and deeds are seen and heard in such a way that they matter. At bottom, the only truly human right - the right to have rights - is the right to speak and act as a member of a people. Confusion over this point - and thus the efforts of human rights advocates to extend human rights to life and liberty (and also to second and third generation rights like economic prosperity) - cleaves human rights from its foundation in the human condition and risks, therefore, exposing the entire edifice of human rights as nonsense upon stilts. Arendt names the human condition of acting and speaking that underlies the right to have rights natality. Natality, the capacity to be born, is, as Peg Birmingham has seen, a double principle. On the one hand, natality reflects the fact that man can, by acting and speaking, start something new. In this sense, natality refers to man's freedom in the sense of his spontaneity, the ability to begin and initiate something new. On the other hand, natality says also that a human being is born and, having been born, is given the gift of existence. This givenness - this 'mere existence' that is 'mysteriously given us at birth' - is an 'anarchic' principle that is '[c]ut off and adrift from any sovereign constituting power or foundation....' Since human existence, as physis, is cut off from any prior reason or ground, man is unjustifiable and thus vulnerable. Man stands alone as alien and strange. And this radical singularity that attaches to man's natality both underlies Arendt's defense of plurality and her insistence that the right to have rights includes the right to be as you are. It is the obligation in the face of the alien that must be respected as part of the human that, pace Birmingham, underlies Arendt's guarantee of the right to have rights to every human being."

A Foreign Idea in Congress

Walter Russell Mead makes the case that if we are to resurrect our foreign policy, we need to move beyond the President and his appointees: "not many of our executive appointees are either as wise or as all-seeing as they may think they are: witness the Libya mess. From the side of the Congress, what's needed is a serious personal commitment from a critical mass of members to master the knowledge required to play a role in American foreign policy commensurate with the needs of the hour and the importance of Congress's constitutional role - combined with efforts to upgrade the processes and institutions through which the Congress carries out its mission. What we need to do at this point is begin to rethink the role of the Congress in American foreign policy.... The United States Congress has to be part of the solution. The Congress has, for example, the power to review and reform the agencies in the executive branch, and this power may need to be invoked. Is it, for example, a good thing that the National Security Council in the White House has accreted so much power? If the President's closest adviser on foreign policy is no longer the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense, what degree of Congressional oversight is required in the NSC? Should its officials be subject to senatorial confirmation? If not, should the President accept limits on the NSC staff and the role of its chief? But to really live up to its potential and to carry out its constitutional role in foreign policy, the Congress is going to have to raise its sights. It's time to rethink what oversight means and how it should work. In particular, the Congress is the place where the country's most serious public conversations and deliberations about foreign policy should be held. As it is, this country's most important foreign policy debates are held on cable television and other news programs. That isn't good either for American foreign policy or for the long term health of American democracy."

Not an Extraordinary Case

Hannah Arendt insisted that a trial, even a Grand Jury Trial, requires that we pay attention to the individual accused. That is not what most people wanted following the trial of Darren Wilson. Yet to abide by Arendt's words, we must recognize that the case against Wilson as a singular individual was incredibly weak. Thus it is important, as Ta-Nehisi Coates demands, that we understand Michael Brown's death as a manifestation of institutional, rather than individual, racism: "Black people know what cannot be said. What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is the idea of superhuman black men who 'bulk up' to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson but a staple of American racism."

Anger. Frustrated. Fearful. Embarrassed. Sympathetic. Confused.

 

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