Amor Mundi 12/22/13
12-23-2013
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.
The Boycott and Intellectual Freedom
The American Studies Association, a group of about 5,000 scholars, voted overwhelmingly this week to support the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. The vote has almost no practical import. According to the NY Times, It “bars official collaboration with Israeli institutions but not with Israeli scholars themselves; it has no binding power over members, and no American colleges have signed on.” But symbolically, the vote is a sign of the increasing disillusionment of the American left with Israel. My colleague Walter Russell Mead has a long and passionate rebuttal, one that is noteworthy for what Arendt calls “enlarged thinking,” namely, the effort to understand those with whom he nevertheless still strongly disagrees. Amidst his account, which many will disagree with but no one will be able to say is irrational, he writes: “Speaking personally, I don’t boycott. I’ve met with representatives from both Hamas and Fatah over the years in Gaza, on the West Bank and in Beirut. I’ve also met with Israelis on all points of the political spectrum there, including radical settlers in and around Hebron. Globally, as a journalist and a scholar, I’ve met with all kinds of people whose viewpoints I find objectionable. I’ve had dinner with Fidel Castro, I’ve interviewed neo-Nazi skinhead thugs in the former GDR, I’ve visited North Korea and met with officials of that regime. (I’ve never broken US law on these trips, by the way.) I did stay out of South Africa until the first majority elections had been held, but would have met with officials or scholars representing the old regime had there been some reason to do so, as I have met with scholars from Iran and with officials of Hezbollah. I am on the board of the New America Foundation, an organization that has come under criticism when one of its senior fellows invited the controversial author of a book very critical of Israel to speak. I neither resigned from that board nor criticized the event. When Brandeis University recently canceled its cooperation agreement with Al-Quds, a Palestinian university where students held a demonstration in support of the terrorist organization Islamic Jihad, I supported the decision of Bard College, where I teach, to continue our relationship based on the facts as we understood them. I may not always succeed, but it is my intention and my goal as a scholar and a writer to provide a consistent defense of intellectual freedom and to promote the ideal of free exchange of ideas.”
Scribblings, Notes, Poetry Jotted Down on Envelopes
Hillary Kelly zeroes in on what makes a new edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry, one that reproduces the original scraps of paper she wrote her poems on, so interesting: "The result is a collection of scrap paper that says more about the Belle of Amherst than most biographies could. The madcap pencil strokes, torn edges, and higgledy-piggledy line breaks are the work of a quick-thinking, passionate woman. But the carefully crossed through and reworked prose are the mark of a poet bent on perfection. The harmony between the content and use of space, most of all, reveals Dickinson’s self-awareness and inherent knack for poetic construction."
[caption id="attachment_12283" align="alignleft" width="179"]
Illustration by Robert Neubecker[/caption]
Rebecca Schuman argues for the end of the essay exam in most college humanities and social science courses. On the heels of the news that the current average grade at Harvard is A- and that the most often given grade at Harvard is a straight up A, it is time to revisit our means of evaluating college students. I personally make increasing use of written exams in my courses. It is not that students cannot write, for many can. It is that if the aim is to get them to engage deeply and thoughtfully with the material, studying that material is an essential first step. Exams are much better incentives than papers. Here is Schuman’s rationale for replacing essays with exams: "With more exams and no papers, they’ll at least have a shot at retaining, just for a short while, the basic facts of some of the greatest stories ever recorded. In that short while, they may even develop the tiniest inkling of what Martha Nussbaum calls 'sympathetic imagination'—the cultivation of our own humanity, and something that unfolds when we’re touched by stories of people who are very much unlike us. And that, frankly, is more than any essay will ever do for them."
It is dinner party season and last week I met the artist and scientist Catherine Chalmers. This led me to her website where I found fascinating photographic images as well as interviews from her book “American Cockroach.” Here is one excerpt:“With American Cockroach, I am interested not so much in troublesome behavior as in an animal humans find problematic. The roach, and the disgust we feel for it, make for a rich conduit to the psychological landscape that inculcates our complex and often violent relationship with the animal world. I can think of few species that are as thoroughly loathed as the cockroach. But interestingly enough, although they carry this heavy burden of our hostility, they don’t do very much in terms of behavior. They don’t eat in a dramatic way, and they certainly don’t have the wild sex life of, say, the praying mantis. They don’t sting, bite, or carry the dangerous pathogens that flies, mice, and mosquitoes regularly do. Having a cockroach in your kitchen is not like having a venomous snake living in the house. There’s nothing about the animal that is life-threatening. The dichotomy of the roach being a loaded subject, yet in habit, a fairly blank canvas, allowed me to bring more to this work.”
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Lance Strate details the concept of the laboratory as an anti-environment. The weekend read revisits a post detailing Michael Ignatieff's acceptance speech upon winning the Hannah Arendt prize in Bremen.