Amor Mundi 12/13/15

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.

Hostile Climates

Jeannie Suk writes in the New Yorker about how her willingness to criticize a documentary film might lead to her being disciplined by Harvard Law School. The film in questions, "The Hunting Ground," is about sexual harassment on college campuses. The reason Professor Suk might end up being disciplined is the Federal Law referred to as Title IX, which requires all educational institutions to guarantee sexual equality in education. Since 2010, Title IX has been interpreted to mean that any act, speech, or gesture that contributes to a "hostile climate" connected to sexual matters must be investigated at a cost to the school and disciplined. Here is Suk's account of how her criticism of the documentary may trigger a Title IX investigation: "But last week the filmmakers did more than understandably disagree with criticism of the film, which has been short-listed for the Academy Award for best documentary. They wrote, in a statement to the Harvard Crimson, that 'the very public bias these professors have shown in favor of an assailant contributes to a hostile climate at Harvard Law.' The words 'hostile climate' contain a serious claim. At Harvard, sexual harassment is 'unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,' including verbal conduct that is 'sufficiently persistent, pervasive, or severe' so as to create a 'hostile environment.' If, as the filmmakers suggest, the professors' statement about the film has created a hostile environment at the school, then, under Title IX, the professors should be investigated and potentially disciplined. To my knowledge, no complaint of sexual harassment has been filed with Harvard's Title IX office--though I've been told by a high-level administrator that several people have inquired about the possibility--and I don't know if the school would proceed with an investigation. Precedent for such an investigation exists in the case of Laura Kipnis, a feminist film-studies professor at Northwestern University, who earlier this year wrote an article criticizing aspects of Title IX policies and culture and was accused of creating a hostile environment on campus; Northwestern conducted an investigation and ultimately cleared Kipnis of sexual-harassment charges. A handful of students have said that they feel unsafe at Harvard because of the professors' statement about the film. If a Title IX complaint were filed and an investigation launched, the professors wouldn't be permitted to speak about it, as that could be considered 'retaliation' against those who filed the complaint, which would violate the campus sexual-harassment policy."

Over the last two months, much attention has been paid to questions of racial discrimination on college and university campuses. Many have criticized students for making unreasonable demands. At Amherst, students demanded that other students who had put up free speech posters go through a disciplinary process including training for "racial and cultural competency." Students at Yale demanded that a lecturer who sent an email deemed offensive be fired from her position as Master of a College. And at Emory University, students demanded "that the faculty evaluations that each student is required to complete for each of their professors include at least two open-ended questions such as: 'Has this professor made any microaggressions towards you on account of your race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, language and/or other identity?' and 'Do you think that this professor fits into the vision of Emory University being a community of care for individuals of all racial, gender, ability and class identities?' These questions on the faculty evaluations would help to ensure that there are repercussions or sanctions for racist actions performed by professors. We demand that these questions be added to the faculty evaluations by the end of this semester, fall 2015." As excessive as these and other demands may be, they harmed no one, as they were all denied by administrators. What is more, while many of these conversations and protests were difficult and some were uncomfortable, they have largely been successful, leading to measured and at times meaningful change. While there were excesses--examples of youthful exuberance--the protests were in the end simply speech that could be, and was, met by more speech. In other words, the protests around the country were not attacks on free speech so much as they were examples of the way free speech works to articulate and respond to grievances.

When it comes to campus protests regarding perceived sexism, as is evident in what Professor Suk describes above, the reality of Title IX means that speaking freely is to risk losing one's job. We are in a strange situation in which discussions about race, as fraught as they are, are judged by standards of common sense, while speech touching upon sex or sexuality is subjected to the threat of disciplinary processes administered through a federally mandated bureaucracy. The contrast between the way race and sex are being treated is telling. What is worrisome is that student demands during the protests against racism are inflected by a desire to import the atmosphere of disciplinary threats to bear on speech and acts thought to create a racially hostile atmosphere. The better lesson is the opposing one, that free speech does work to allow students and others to make demands and influence changes on campuses without threatening others for their willingness to speak. --RB

Encryption and Morality

In a long but still accessible academic essay, UC Davis computer science professor Phillip Rogaway discusses what he calls the moral character of cryptography and also of science and engineering more generally: "Most academic cryptographers seem to think that our field is a fun, deep, and politically neutral game--a set of puzzles involving communicating parties and notional adversaries. This vision of who we are animates a field whose work is intellectually impressive and rapidly produced, but also quite inbred and divorced from real-world concerns. Is this what cryptography should be like? Is it how we should expend the bulk of our intellectual capital? For me, these questions came to a head with the Snowden disclosures of 2013. If cryptography's most basic aim is to enable secure communications, how could it not be a colossal failure of our field when ordinary people lack even a modicum of communication privacy when interacting electronically? Yet I soon realized that most cryptographers didn't see it this way. Most seemed to feel that the disclosures didn't even implicate us cryptographers. I think that they do. So I want to talk about the moral obligations of cryptographers, and my community as a whole. This is not a topic cryptographers routinely discuss. In this post-Snowden era, I think it needs to be." Rogaway dissents from Stanley Fish, who advises new professors to do their work and not worry about changing the world. "Perhaps such amorality, however revolting, is harmless in Fish's intellectual realm: one doesn't particularly expect literary theory to change the world. But scientists and engineers do just that. A refusal to direct the change we do is both morally bankrupt and ingracious." I think Rogaway misunderstands Fish, who preaches not amorality but rather humility. A teacher is to teach students what is; that includes the ethics and morality of the world. In doing so, the teacher inspires the student to raise ethical questions for themselves. It is not the teacher's job to tell students what should be but to prepare them to pose and then decide these ethical questions for themselves. What Rogaway shows us is that computer scientists need to teach more than computer science; they must also teach students about the ethical implications of computer science. They must ask themselves basic questions, like "Is computer science not benefiting man?"--RB

Leader of the People

Megan Garber talks about what we really mean when we call someone a demagogue: "As an insult, certainly--as an implicit invalidation of one's political rhetoric--'demagogue' is a very good word. It's slightly gentler than 'fascist' and slightly more dignified than 'buffoon'; it's extremely opinionated, and yet carries itself with the gravitas of informed objectivity. Uttered aloud--that evocative agog--it forces one's mouth to gape appropriately. And while Trump is certainly not the only contemporary politician to be dismissed under its auspices ('Demagoguery 101,' Charles Krauthammer wrote of President Obama and his policies), no figure has so clearly deserved the word since Huey Long and Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan riled the former century. So deep has the impact of Trump's fist-pounding rhetoric been that, at this point, there's a metonymic circularity to the whole thing. The Economist recently published an article titled 'The Art of the Demagogue.' It did not need to clarify who it was about.... Today, perhaps as a response to that vague but ongoing threat of media-driven menace, 'demagogue' has become a term of last resort: a description--a deeply loaded epithet--that is summoned only when a particular politician or media figure or other modern people-leader has moved so far away from the mainstream that the Overton Window has receded well into the distance. It's a word that doubles as a siren for a democratic system, directed at one person but implicating us all: Our house is on fire. It's this sense that gave the phrase its shock value, and its lasting power, when H.L. Mencken dismissed Huey Long as 'a backwoods demagogue.' And when Joe Kennedy decried Father Coughlin as 'an out and out demagogue.' It is why American history, its terrain so widely populated with people who bluster and flatter and smarm and shout, has anointed so few actual 'demagogues.'"  

The Human Ear

Svetlana Alexievich received her Nobel Prize for Literature this week. In her acceptance speech, she describes the importance of non-fiction to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: "Right after the war, Theodor Adorno wrote, in shock: 'Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.' My teacher, Ales Adamovich, whose name I mention today with gratitude, felt that writing prose about the nightmares of the 20th century was sacrilege. Nothing may be invented. You must give the truth as it is. A 'super-literature' is required. The witness must speak. Nietzsche's words come to mind--no artist can live up to reality. He can't lift it. It always troubled me that the truth doesn't fit into one heart, into one mind, that truth is somehow splintered. There's a lot of it, it is varied, and it is strewn about the world. Dostoevsky thought that humanity knows much, much more about itself than it has recorded in literature. So what is it that I do? I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time. I'm interested in the history of the soul. The everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits, or disdains. I work with missing history. I am often told, even now, that what I write isn't literature, it's a document. What is literature today? Who can answer that question? We live faster than ever before. Content ruptures form. Breaks and changes it. Everything overflows its banks: music, painting--even words in documents escape the boundaries of the document. There are no borders between fact and fabrication, one flows into the other. Witness?s are not impartial. In telling a story, humans create, they wrestle time like a sculptor does marble. They are actors and creators. I'm interested in little people. The little, great people, is how I would put it, because suffering expands people. In my books these people tell their own, little histories, and big history is told along the way. We haven't had time to comprehend what already has and is still happening to us, we just need to say it. To begin with, we must at least articulate what happened. We are afraid of doing that, we're not up to coping with our past. In Dostoevsky's Demons, Shatov says to Stavrogin at the beginning of their conversation: 'We are two creatures who have met in boundless infinity ... for the last time in the world. So drop that tone and speak like a human being. At least once, speak with a human voice."

Buying Power

Nicholas Confessore recounts in the NY Times Magazine a war in Illinois between a small group of wealthy families and the entrenched politics of the state. According to Confessore, the families "have poured tens of millions of dollars into the state, a concentration of political money without precedent in Illinois history. Their wealth has forcefully shifted the state's balance of power." Confessore tells how Bruce Rauner was boosted into the Governor's mansion on the shoulders of $27 million of his own money as well as $13.6 million from Kenneth C. Griffin's family. "The rich families remaking Illinois are among a small group around the country who have channeled their extraordinary wealth into political power, taking advantage of regulatory, legal and cultural shifts that have carved new paths for infusing money into campaigns. Economic winners in an age of rising inequality, operating largely out of public view, they are reshaping government with fortunes so large as to defy the ordinary financial scale of politics. In the 2016 presidential race, a New York Times analysis found last month, just 158 families had provided nearly half of the early campaign money. Many of those giving, like Mr. Griffin, come from the world of finance, an industry that has yielded more of the new political wealth than any other. The Florida-based leveraged-buyout pioneer John Childs, the private equity investor Sam Zell and Paul Singer, a prominent New York hedge fund manager, all helped elect Mr. Rauner, as did Richard Uihlein, a conservative businessman from the Chicago suburbs. Most of them lean Republican; some are Democrats. But to a remarkable degree, their philosophies are becoming part of a widely adopted blueprint for public officials around the country: Critical of the power of unions, many are also determined to reduce spending and taxation, and are skeptical of government-led efforts to mitigate the growing gap between the rich and everyone else."

Praising Doublethink

Elijah Millgram thinks we can never be as exact as we'd like to be and that we need more hedges in our language: "Imagine you really did have a repertoire of concepts and names that allowed you to say exactly what you meant, pretty much whatever you noticed, or whatever occurred to you. Adrienne Lehrer, a linguist at the University of Arizona, wrote Wine and Conversation (2009), a book about wine vocabulary: 'earthy', 'full-bodied', 'flowery', 'cloying', 'disciplined', 'mossy', and so on. Many, many such adjectives turn up in wine commentary, though evidently not enough of them to live up to Orwell's ideal. Imagine really having precise terms for all those flavour notes. Orwell was especially worried about capturing our inner lives, so imagine also having words for the day-to-day events that remind you of particular experiences that only you have undergone. Feeling a little swamped? It's not simply that your mind would be submerged in conceptual clutter; it's not just that it wouldn't be possible to learn most of these words, or to communicate with them. In fact, Lehrer found that people don't manage to communicate very well with their wine vocabularies; if subjects are asked to pick a wine out of a lineup on the basis of someone else's description of it, they mostly can't do it. Presumably this sort of talk isn't really about communication, but it's also something of an exception... For the most part, our repertoire of concepts and labels for individuals is important because we use it in our reasoning. Descriptions are useful in that we can draw conclusions from them. In the most basic case, you would use a rule: when certain conditions are met (for example, when you're making the American chef Deborah Madison's mashed potatoes and turnips), certain implications follow (an appropriate pairing would be a Sancerre in the summer, or a Cabernet Franc from the Loire in fall or winter). Your ever-so-precise mot juste might capture exactly what you see or feel but, if there's no inference you can fit it to, then there's nothing you can do with it. Descriptions that you can't fold into your reasoning are useless."

The Art of Friendship

Jamie Saxon collects a series of quotations from a recent interview of Alexander Nehamas that together tell a story of a life of the mind. In one series of quotations, Nehamas says: "What a friend should do is give the other person an opportunity to become themselves. For example, if you're making a big decision, friends can help you articulate what it is that you really want to do. My best friend at Princeton is John Cooper [the Henry Putnam University Professor of Philosophy]--we've been friends for 44 years. Few people can compare to him when it comes to interpreting a text. On an intellectual level, he showed me how to be a better reader than I was, how to try to hold myself to a higher standard of what counts as understanding something and having an idea. Not to go on talking without knowing what we're saying, which is something we all do, unfortunately. I learned a lot about friendship, family and life from him. There is a deep common element behind finding a work of art beautiful, loving a person and being a friend. In all three cases, your feelings for the object or for the person are open-ended: you think that you haven't found out everything about that person or that work or art; it's this idea that there's more to see, there's more to understand, there's more to love here. Manet's 'Olympia' is a piece of art that takes my breath away. It is an amazing thing. I love, for example, that the figure is both vulnerable and very strong. I enjoy very much the fact that you can't tell a story of what's happening in the painting [which depicts a nude courtesan lying on a bed and a black servant]; nobody has been able to tell a story. When I was in Paris in 2014 to speak at the Princeton-Fung Global Forum, I went to see 'Olympia' and it was like seeing an old friend. The painting was the topic of a series of lectures I gave at Yale in 2001, and the book 'Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art' that came out of them, but I hadn't thought seriously about the painting since then. When I saw it again, I realized that I didn't understand something about the picture, something I hadn't noticed before. She is holding a kind of silk coverlet, her hand towards the floor and you can't tell if she's about to cover herself with it or if she's just uncovered herself. The moment that I saw there was something else to learn here, something else to know, my love was rekindled. I kept thinking about her the way you keep thinking about a person you have a crush on."

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From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Samantha Hill observes how the despair expressed in Rilke's Duino Elegies is an expression of our human world and as such distills the loss we feel from gun violence in the Quote of the Week. Mao Zedong offers his thoughts on how a limited perspective can lead us to think small in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, Donna Weeks shares her personal Arendt library with us and her thoughts on studying the Kantian influence in IR in this week's Library feature.