Amor Mundi 1/19/14
01-20-2014
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.
On Muckraking and Political Change
Jim Sleeper turned me on to Dean Starkman’s excerpt from his new book chronicling the failure of the press to expose wrongdoing in the lead up to the financial crisis, The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism. Starkman writes: “Now is a good time to consider what journalism the public needs. What actually works? Who are journalism’s true forefathers and foremothers? Is there a line of authority in journalism’s collective past that can help us navigate its future? What creates value, both in a material sense and in terms of what is good and valuable in American journalism? Accountability reporting comes in many forms—a series of revelations in a newspaper or online, a book, a TV magazine segment—but its most common manifestation has been the long-form newspaper or magazine story, the focus of this book. Call it the Great Story. The form was pioneered by the muckrakers’ quasi-literary work in the early 20th century, with Tarbell’s exposé on the Standard Oil monopoly in McClure’s magazine a brilliant example. As we’ll see, the Great Story has demonstrated its subversive power countless times and has exposed and clarified complex problems for mass audiences across a nearly limitless range of subjects: graft in American cities, modern slave labor in the US, the human costs of leveraged buyouts, police brutality and corruption, the secret recipients on Wall Street of government bailouts, the crimes and cover-ups of media and political elites, and on and on, year in and year out. The greatest of muckraking editors, Samuel S. McClure, would say to his staff, over and over, almost as a mantra, “The story is the thing!” And he was right.” Starkman has incredible optimism in the power of the press is infective. But in the weekend read, Roger Berkowitz turns to Walter Lippmann to raise questions about Starkman’s basic assumptions.
Our Unconstitutional Standing Army
Kathleen Frydl has an excellent essay in The American Interest arguing against our professionalized military and for the return of a citizen’s army. “Without much reflection or argument, the United States now supports the professional “large standing army” feared by the Founding Fathers, and the specter of praetorianism they invoked casts an ever more menacing shadow as the nation drifts toward an almost mercenary force, which pays in citizenship, opportunity structures (such as on-the-job technical training and educational benefits), a privileged world of social policy (think Tricare), and, in the case of private contractors, lots of money. Strict constructionists of the Constitution frequently ignore one of its most important principles—that the military should be large and powerful only when it includes the service of citizen-soldiers. This oversight clearly relates to the modern American tendency to define freedom using the neo-liberal language of liberty, shorn of any of the classical republican terminology of service. We would do well to remember Cicero’s most concise summary of a constitutional state: “Freedom is the participation in power.”” I don’t know what Hannah Arendt would have thought about the draft. But I do know she’d sympathize with Frydl’s worries about a professionalized army.
Tim Wu marvels at the human augmented by technology. Consider what an intelligent time traveler would think if talking to a reasonably educated woman today: "The woman behind the curtain, is, of course, just one of us. That is to say, she is a regular human who has augmented her brain using two tools: her mobile phone and a connection to the Internet and, thus, to Web sites like Wikipedia, Google Maps, and Quora. To us, she is unremarkable, but to the man she is astonishing. With our machines, we are augmented humans and prosthetic gods, though we’re remarkably blasé about that fact, like anything we’re used to. Take away our tools, the argument goes, and we’re likely stupider than our friend from the early twentieth century, who has a longer attention span, may read and write Latin, and does arithmetic faster. The time-traveler scenario demonstrates that how you answer the question of whether we are getting smarter depends on how you classify “we.”” We, the underlying humans may know less and less. But “we,” the digitally enabled cyborgs that we’ve become, are geniuses. Much of the focus and commentary about artificial intelligence asks the wrong question, about whether machines will become human. The better question is what will become of humans as we integrate more fully with our machines. That was the topic of Human Being in an Inhuman Age, the 2010 Arendt Center Conference. A selection of essays from that conference are published in the inaugural edition of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center.
In an interview with high school teacher David Cutler, history professor Eric Foner explains how we could make history education more effective: "Knowledge of the events of history is important, obviously, but also I think what I see in college students, that seems to be lacking at least when they come into college, is writing experience. In other words, being able to write that little essay with an argument. I see that they think, 'OK, there are the facts of history and that's it—what more is there to be said?' But of course, the very selection of what is a fact, or what is important as a fact, is itself based on an interpretation. You can't just separate fact and interpretation quite as simply as many people seem to think. I would love to see students get a little more experience in trying to write history, and trying to understand why historical interpretation changes over time." Foner wants students to think history, not simply to know it.
Gary Shteyngart, Google Glass wearer and author of the recently published memoir Little Failure, explains the arc of his reading habits: "When I was growing up, I was reading a lot of male fiction, if you can call it that. I was up to my neck in Saul Bellow, which was wonderful and was very instrumental but I think I’ve gone, like most people I think I’ve expanded my range quite a bit. When you’re young you focus on things that are incredibly important to you and read, God knows, every Nabokov that’s ever been written. But then, it is time to move beyond that little place where you live and I’ve been doing that; I’m so curious to see so many people send me books now it’s exciting to go to the mailbox and see a work of Croatian fiction."
This week on the blog, Sandipto Dasgupta discusses Arendt and B.R. Ambedkar, one of the authors of the Indian constitution. In the weekend read, Roger Berkowitz examines the merit of muckraking journalism and its role as watchdog of corruption.