Amor Mundi 12/15/13
12-16-2013
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.
Readers around the world have been introduced to Dasani this week. Not the water, but the girl from the decrepit Auburn homeless shelter. Dasani is a force of nature as she struggles to raise her siblings, deal with her well-meaning but overwhelmed parents, and make a life for herself from out of the shadows of homelessness and dysfunction. Andrea Elliott’s five-part series in the NY Times follows Dasani over a year; it is expansive journalism, one of the best essays exploring the horrors and hopes of the poor and forgotten. Read all five parts, and you’ll understand what Elliott is after: “Dasani’s circumstances are largely the outcome of parental dysfunction. While nearly one-third of New York’s homeless children are supported by a working adult, her mother and father are unemployed, have a history of arrests and are battling drug addiction. Yet Dasani’s trials are not solely of her parents’ making. They are also the result of decisions made a world away, in the marble confines of City Hall. With the economy growing in 2004, the Bloomberg administration adopted sweeping new policies intended to push the homeless to become more self-reliant. They would no longer get priority access to public housing and other programs, but would receive short-term help with rent. Poor people would be empowered, the mayor argued, and homelessness would decline. But the opposite happened. As rents steadily rose and low-income wages stagnated, chronically poor families like Dasani’s found themselves stuck in a shelter system with fewer exits. Families are now languishing there longer than ever — a development that Mr. Bloomberg explained by saying shelters offered “a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before.””
Decay of American Political Institutions
Francis Fukuyama has a new essay up on “The Decay of American Political Institutions.” Fukuyama begins with a basic point that is undeniable, and is artfully made manifest in George Packer’s National Book Award Winning The Unwinding: “Many political institutions in the United States are decaying.” “The decay in the quality of American government has to do directly with the American penchant for a state of “courts and parties”, which has returned to center stage in the past fifty years. The courts and legislature have increasingly usurped many of the proper functions of the executive, making the operation of the government as a whole both incoherent and inefficient. The steadily increasing judicialization of functions that in other developed democracies are handled by administrative bureaucracies has led to an explosion of costly litigation, slow decision-making and highly inconsistent enforcement of laws. The courts, instead of being constraints on government, have become alternative instruments for the expansion of government. Ironically, out of a fear of empowering “big government”, the United States has ended up with a government that is very large, but that is actually less accountable because it is largely in the hands of unelected courts.” What Arendt saw in a way Fukuyama ignores is that Americans don’t distrust power so much as they distrust the concentration and centralization of power. It his been quintessentially American for citizens to engage in government, especially local government, and to take active part in public debates about political questions. From their arrival in the New World, Americans formed councils, engaged in public affairs, and empowered democratic institutions. The federalist elements of the Constitution provide ample support for vibrant democratic and local institutions. Beyond the judicializaiton of politics and the rise of a corruption by lobbyists, another cause of the present decay of American politics is the increasingly national approach to government and the hollowing out of local institutions.
If You Haven't Gotten Anything At All To Say...
In a defense of criticism, Tom Scocca takes on the public demand for a kind virulent niceness, a culture force that he calls smarm. Smarm, from Scocca's point of view, is a kind of "ethical misdirection," ruining the discourse with its nominal crusade for "civility", which distracts from the issues at hand by making the debate about the commentator rather than the comment. It is, in other words, an insidious, acceptable kind of ad hominem attack. Why has the discourse retreated to smarm? Scocca has a theory: "Smarm hopes to fill the cultural or political or religious void left by the collapse of authority, undermined by modernity and postmodernity. It's not enough anymore to point to God or the Western tradition or the civilized consensus for a definitive value judgment. Yet a person can still gesture in the direction of things that resemble those values, vaguely."
Kenneth Goldsmith examines the growing subculture of individuals who find digital glitches and turn them into art. These finds, he says, are imperfections in the seemingly perfect and timeless digital world: "The obsession with digital errors in Google Books arises from the sense that these mistakes are permanent, on the record. Earlier this month, Judge Denny Chin ruled that Google’s scanning, en masse, of millions of books to make them searchable is legal. In the future, more and more people will consult Google’s scans. Because of the speed and volume with which Google is executing the project, the company can’t possibly identify and correct all of the disturbances in what is supposed to be a seamless interface. There’s little doubt that generations to come will be stuck with both these antique stains and workers’ hands."
In an interview, talking about why she almost gave up on her book about Jane Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's sister, Jill Lepore describes the challenge of writing narrative history: "You have Jane and Benjamin and they start down here. And then, Franklin’s life is like a straight rise. His world gets bigger. He gets wealthier. Love and success. And Jane’s life is out of The Prince and the Pauper or Tale of Two Cities. And at some point, narratively, we need them to switch places. The reader wants them to switch places. And they’re not going to. And so, I just quit. I didn’t know how to satisfy the reader that needs the story to go in another direction, because the story is going nowhere for Jane."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Kathleen B. Jones responds to Richard Brody. And, if you haven't had a chance, check out Roger Berkowitz's weekend read from last week, on Arendt, Nelson Mandela, and violence. Finally, the current weekend read: American politics has elevated the judiciary to a position of power, and this has led to to the decay of our political institutions.