Amor Mundi 11/3/13
11-04-2013
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.
Decline, writes Josef Joffe in a recent essay in The American Interest, “is as American as apple pie.” The tales of decline that populate American cultural myths have many morals, but one common shared theme: Renewal. Here is Joffe: “Decline Time in America” is never just a disinterested tally of trends and numbers. It is not about truth, but about consequences—as in any morality tale. Declinism tells a story to shape belief and change behavior; it is a narrative that is impervious to empirical validation, whose purpose is to bring comforting coherence to the flow of events. The universal technique of mythic morality tales is dramatization and hyperbole. Since good news is no news, bad news is best in the marketplace of ideas. The winning vendor is not Pollyanna but Henny Penny, also known as Chicken Little, who always sees the sky falling. But why does alarmism work so well, be it on the pulpit or on the hustings—whatever the inconvenient facts?” You can read more about Joffe’s tale of decline in Roger Berkowitz’s weekend read.
James Somers considers recent advances in machine learning and whether or not they answer the big question: whether or not we can make machines that think like humans. In a essay that's part rofile of Douglas Hofstadter, author of Godel, Escher, Bach, and part history of artificial intelligence, Hofstadter argues that the AI community has abandoned the big questions for smaller ones,
more easily answered, more obviously profitable.
Using the left's ambivalence on marriage equality as a starting point, Sam Brody considers two groups of the American left, joiners and quitters. Joiners, to Brody's thinking, seek to have queer individuals granted the same rights long prized by American liberals, in this case the right to marry and have the associated economic benefits of that status, as heterosexual couples. Quitters, on the other hand, see the whole endeavor as a canard, an attempt to normalize an outsider group by buying into a deeply corrupt system. Brody, for his part, sees both groups as missing the point and suggest that the struggle he's described needs to be redirected inward. The solution, he says, is a "a vision of love and commitment that is open and flexible, but not subordinated to the consumerist logic of individual whims. A left committed to such a vision might discover resources to combat the social disintegration of post-industrial life, without the false panaceas of nationalism, trade solidarity, or state-sponsored religious initiatives... the utopian imagination must be directed inward, from which point it can radiate out to the neighbor, the spouse, the neighborhood, the city, the country and the world."
Garret Keizer thinks about the meaning of momento mori in a world threatened by increasingly violent natural disasters: "I wonder if the tradition of memento mori exists more vividly in the remnants of the gay community than in any remaining monastic tradition. From those who have lived daily in the shadow of AIDS, we may be able to learn something about that complex ethos of care-giving, self-denial, and mortal merriment without which environmentalism has about the same chances of survival as the polar bears do."
Have you seen the “The Banality of the Banality of Evil,” the altered landscape by the elusive street artist who calls himself Banksy? It has caused quite a furor, and seemingly over nothing. “We're really not sure what to make of Banksy's latest installment in "Better Out Than In." His website describes it as "The banality of the banality of evil, Oil on oil on canvas, 2013" and "a thrift store painting vandalized then re-donated to the thrift store." What we see is a beautiful pastoral landscape, except there's an SS officer on a bench in the foreground. What exactly is he getting at with "the banality of the banality of evil"? Doing loop-de-loops around Hannah Arendt's theoretical reckoning of the Nazis' rise to power isn't really how we want to spend our afternoon, but we're guessing it has something to do with Banksy not really caring much about what he's actually saying.”
November 9-10, 2013