Amor Mundi 1/24/16

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.

Waking the Sleeping Sovereign

In an essay loosely imagined as a review of of Richard Tuck's new book The Sleeping Sovereign, Jedediah Purdy argues that the American Constitution deserves its special reverence. "The genius of a constitution was that it gave the whole citizenry a way of making its own law: not by constantly engaging in self-government through assemblies or parliaments, but by occasionally mobilizing, through special institutions such as conventions and plebiscites, to authorize the fundamental law of their polities. A constitution was the law that the people authorized, directly rather than through their representatives. This power to make fundamental law was called sovereignty, and a democracy was a political community where sovereignty lay with the citizens. By contrast, the ordinary laws that legislatures passed were simply government, the apparatus that carried out sovereign decisions. Government, as Rousseau wrote, mediates between the sovereign, which makes the law, and the people, who live under it. In a democracy, government mediates between two aspects of the people: as democratic sovereign lawmakers, and as everyday law-abiders. Less mystically, government is what the mobilized people sets up to keep order after the sovereign citizens disperse to their private lives. A constitution, Tuck argues, was an answer to a problem that had long been thought insoluble: how could democracy possibly be revived in the modern world? What difference does this make? Some contrasts are helpful. In this way of thinking, the distinctive thing about a constitution, its special interest and force, is not in the structure of government that it sets up, but in the theory of sovereignty that underlies it. It is true that the US Constitution has the democracy-baffling 'republican' features that clog and divert political decisions, such as the divided Congress, the unrepresentative Senate, and the presidential veto. But these checks and balances were intended originally to keep the government from usurping the powers of the sovereign but dispersed people, according to whose collective will it was originally established." Purdy and Tuck argue that while it includes anti-democratic elements like the Supreme Court and limitations on majority rule, the American Constitution is fundamentally democratic not least because it was approved by the people and can--at times--be revised by the people. The Constitution is both an act of the people and a way for the people to protect themselves from the very democratic government they establish. Tuck and Purdy call this Constitutional power sovereignty.

Hannah Arendt, who had a similar view of the democratic importance of the U.S. Constitution, saw that the Constitution's fundamental democratic role rests with its emergence in opposition to sovereignty. She writes: "In this respect, the great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same. The defect of the Confederacy was that there had been no 'partition of power between the General and the Local Governments'; and that it had acted as the central agency of an alliance rather than as a government; experience had shown that in tis alliance of powers there was a dangerous tendency for the allied powers not to act as checks upon one another but to cancel one another out, that is, to breed impotence. What the founders were afraid of in practice was not power but impotence, and their fears were intensified by the view of Montesquieu, quoted throughout these discussions, that republican government was effective only in relatively small territories." The American Constitution succeeds, at least initially in Arendt's telling, in part because it establishes multiple and overlapping power centers--the Federal government, state governments, local governments, and non-governmental civic organizations--all of which mobilize democratic citizens to govern themselves when necessary. It is because there is no single sovereign source under the American Constitution that the democratic power of the people is protected. By the 1960s, Arendt worried that this pluralization and dispersal of power at the foundation of the American Constitution had eroded; as power has increasingly been centralized under single and increasingly sovereign national government, the American "Revolutionary spirit"--what Arendt calls the "new American experience of power"--has waned. It may be that the people are simply sleeping and might awake, as Purdy and Tuck appear to hope. But one lasting effect of the nationalization of power is that most American citizens have little or no experience in self-government aside from voting. The temptation in such a situation is not self-government, which is time-consuming and messy, but the election of a demagogue who promises to deliver what we want. The question is how the sleeping sovereign can be awoken while still protecting and strengthening our democratic constitutional traditions.--RB

So Sad

Earlier this week, I went to see Guy Maddin's 2003 film The Saddest Music in The World, in which contestants from countries all around the world compete to win a $25,000 prize for playing, well, the saddest music in the world, as judged by a Canadian beer magnate. Set in the Depression, and filmed as if it were actually from that period, the film satirizes the way that sadness can be evoked through kitsch and a little "razzle dazzle," even as it also takes aim at those who seek out suffering in far flung parts of the world and take it for granted that suffering must live in places outside of the West. At the heart of Maddin's movie is the idea that sadness is incommensurate and that it can't be transmitted, least of all through music. In the New York Times, Ben Ratliff suggests that what we're hearing isn't sadness at all: "We do a lot of extra work in our listening around the notion of sadness--a phantom quality in listening that most of us nonetheless recognize and agree on--and through our extra work, we become especially vested in the music. The extra work takes the form of myths that we build around the reasons and circumstances of a recording, and through that myth-building we temporarily disbelieve in artifice. Artifice is the practice and process of being something one is not, and it is used to small or large degree by every artist in the world. It's as transcendent as truth. But sadness portrayed in music, whether the zombified reserve of some English bohemian folk singers during the 1960s--Nick Drake, Jacqui McShee, Vashti Bunyan--or a sustained low note on a cello, is Lethe water: You recognize the symbol, drink it as you listen, and you forget all possible practical circumstances around the sadness you think you're hearing. These can be the musician's desire to connect with the tradition and audience of an earlier musician, and thereby to have his work accepted more quickly and earn some money; a producer's desire to add emotional variety to an artist's work; a singer's decision to use a different part of his voice or capture it differently through microphones; or a fully contrived aesthetic absolutism equating misery, integrity and obscurity--the Romantic era's interest-bearing gift to the future. On the listener's end, the circumstances adding up to a 'sad' listening experience can be practical and not sad at all: the need for a focused and isolated stretch of time that is all his; the need for a bracing effect in order to focus while doing something boring, like being in transit; or the need to re-enact the emotions around something awful, which paradoxically makes you feel alive--a death, a breakup, a rejection, a failure... What is sadness in sound per se? Nothing. It doesn't exist. There is no note or kind of note that in and of itself is sad and only sad. (Heard differently, Drake's voice can also be relaxed, or tired, or content.) But the construct of sadness, and the attendant contract that it helps build between musician and listener, has to do with how we might recognize it person-to-person: through silence and dissonant long tones, or through agitation and mania; through closed systems of harmony or phrasing, or through unnervingly open and dark ones. We hear it through voices and through instruments. And as listeners agree to play by the official rules of sadness, so do most musicians, and so do most singers, imitating the sound of instruments." Ratliff, I think, takes it a step too far. Even if artful sadness is manufactured, it still creates a real effect in those who hear it, generating or articulating something which is felt within which, in turn, might (or might not) create a community of people who feel the same way, if never for exactly the same reasons. The question, then, is not whether sadness in art is real. Instead, it's something like "what does it mean to share the unsharable"? Is empathy always empty, the ethical facade for what is essentially entertainment for the more fortunate? Or can it catalyze love of the world?--JK

Comparatively

Benedict Anderson, a famed scholar of Indonesia who wrote the much-taught book Imagined Communities, died last month. In a posthumously published essay, he tells the tale of his intellectual development: "The 35 years I spent as a professor of government at Cornell taught me two interesting lessons about US academia. The first was that theory, mirroring the style of late capitalism, has obsolescence built into it, in the manner of high-end commodities. In year X students had to read and more or less revere Theory Y, while sharpening their teeth on passé Theory W. Not too many years later, they were told to sharpen their teeth on passé Theory Y, admire Theory Z, and forget about Theory W. The second lesson was that--with some important exceptions like the work of Barrington Moore, Jr--the extension of political science to comparative politics tended to proceed, consciously or unconsciously, on the basis of the US example: one measured how far other countries were progressing in approximating America's liberty, respect for law, economic development, democracy etc. Hence the rapid rise, and equally rapid fall, of an approach that today looks pretty dead--modernisation theory. Needless to say, there was often an openly stated Cold War objective behind this kind of theory. Namely, to prove that Marxism was fundamentally wrong. In its innocence, this kind of 'look at me' theory typically ignored such embarrassing things as the very high murder rate in the US, its hugely disproportionate black prison population, persistent illiteracy and significant levels of political corruption. Even so, there is no doubt in my mind that my experience as a graduate student unconsciously prepared me for later comparative work. My duties as a teaching assistant in American politics and (European) comparative politics obliged me to study a great many texts that I would not otherwise have read. The undergraduates in those days were 90 per cent American and knew very little about Europe. To help them, I found it useful to make constant comparisons between the US, the UK, France and Germany. I myself took graduate courses on the Soviet Union, Asia, the US and Western Europe. Finally, the format of the Southeast Asia programme forced me not only to start thinking across the region in a comparative sense, but also to read across disciplines, especially anthropology, history and economics. It was all fun because it was so new to me. My gradual introduction to comparative thinking, however, was quite bookish and 'intellectual' until I went to Indonesia. There, for the first time, my emotional and political leanings came into play in my work. Yet the main effect was not to make me think more theoretically in any general sense. Rather I found myself becoming a kind of Indonesian (or Indonesian-Javanese) nationalist, and feeling annoyed when I ran into bullying American officials who clearly looked down on Indonesians, had no time for Sukarno and were anti-communist, to the point that when Sukarno angrily uttered his famous anti-American phrase, 'To hell with your aid!', I felt like cheering."

In Search of a More Elevated Public

Corey Robin profiles the 'public intellectual,' that mix between a celebrity and a scholar: "The public intellectual is not simply interested in a wide audience of readers, in shopping her ideas on the op-ed page to sell more books. She's not looking for markets or hungry for a brand. She's not an explainer or a popularizer. She is instead the literary equivalent of the epic political actor, who sees her writing as a transformative mode of action, a thought-deed in the world. The transformation she seeks may be a far-reaching change of policy, an education of manners and morals, or a renovation of the human estate. Her watch may be wound for tomorrow or today. But whatever her aim or time frame, the public intellectual wants her writing to have an effect, to have all the power of power itself. To have that effect, however, she must be attuned to the sensitivities of her audience. Not because she wishes to massage or assuage them but because she wants to tear them apart. Her aim is to turn her readers from what they are into what they are not, to alienate her readers from themselves. The public intellectual I have in mind is not indifferent to her readers; her project is not complete without them. But there's a thin line separating her needing readers from her being needy of and for readers. And it is on that thin line--that tension wire between thinker and actor, intellectual and celebrity--that she must stand and balance herself. 'I want to make 200 million people change their minds,' said Gore Vidal, a writer who, not coincidentally, stretched that wire to its breaking point. Though the public intellectual is a political actor, a performer on stage, what differentiates her from the celebrity or publicity hound is that she is writing for an audience that does not yet exist. Unlike the ordinary journalist or enterprising scholar, she is writing for a reader she hopes to bring into being. She never speaks to the reader as he is; she speaks to the reader as he might be. Her common reader is an uncommon reader."

On Not Being a Journalist

Mimi Howard considers Friedrich Nietzsche's "On the Future of Our Educational Institutions," which has been re-translated, re-published, and re-titled Anti-Education. "Like the screw-maker, who becomes virtuosic in executing his only task, the scholar's total separation from all other fields is held up as evidence of his genius. The total remoteness of his work is 'a badge of honor, a sign of noble moderation.' Likewise, the philosopher's student is eminently concerned with this narrowing of scholarship against the background of greater democratization. In a turn of phrase that Nietzsche uses once more at the end of his last lecture, calling it the 'thesis' of his argument, he says: It seems to me we need to distinguish between two dominant tendencies in our educational institutions, apparently opposed but equally ruinous in effect and eventually converging in their end results. The first is the drive for the greatest possible expansion and dissemination of education; the other is the drive for the narrowing and weakening of education. He later adds that this phenomenon has allowed scholarship to be eclipsed by journalism. 'It is in journalism that the two tendencies converge,' he says. 'The daily newspaper has effectively replaced education, and anyone who still lays claim to culture or education, even a scholar, typically relies on a sticky layer of journalism.' Gravitation toward journalism and other popular forms of critique was wrapped up in a forgetting of classical education. This forgetting begins with the curriculum at the gymnasium, which instructs its students to prematurely cultivate their personalities by writing indulgent personal essays, among other worthless exercises, and ends with the mindless vocational training that goes on in university. And even though both the gymnasium and the university claim to appreciate the classics, a true classical model would involve something to which they have not yet committed, namely, a serious consideration of language. 'In sum,' the old philosopher says, 'the gymnasium has neglected and still neglects the one place where true education begins, and the readiest subject to hand: the mother tongue.' Disciplined mastery of German is, for the philosopher, the only way that a pupil can begin to formulate true critique. Once he understands how difficult language is, how slippery and misguiding, only then will he 'feel physical disgust for the "refined diction" of our literati and the "elegance" of style so beloved and praised in our novelists and mass-producers of journalism.' At first this whiff of snobbery seems reasonable enough. But it soon takes on an intensely elitist, if not vehemently oligarchic, bent. Education is necessary only insofar as it allows a society to recognize its own, very select number of geniuses. It is a mistake, the older philosopher says, to think that education can produce a large amount of exceptional individuals. In reality, it produces very few. But it is the responsibility of the cultured and educated to keep one's eye out for these truly remarkable individuals, and to nurture them when they emerge. 'The genius is not actually born of culture, or education: His origin is, as it were, metaphysical,' the philosopher says. 'But for him to appear, to emerge from a people [...] all of this the genius can only do if he has been ripened in the womb and nourished in the lap of his people's culture.' It appears the purpose of the institution is not simply to keep afloat amid a sea of deceptive drudgery, but also something more essential, and more authoritarian."

Republican Class Warfare

David Frum in The Atlantic looks into the origins of the Trump phenomena and finds a class divide within the Republican Party. "The mutiny of the 2016 election cycle has been different. By the fall of 2015, a majority of Republicans favored candidates who had never been elected to anything: Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina. Fiorina's campaign was perhaps not so unusual. A former CEO, she appealed to the same business-minded Republicans who might have voted for Romney in 2012. Carson appealed to the same religious conservatives that candidates like Mike Huckabee and Santorum had appealed to in prior presidential cycles. What was new and astonishing was the Trump boom. He jettisoned party orthodoxy on issues ranging from entitlement spending to foreign policy. He scoffed at trade agreements. He said rude things about Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. He reviled the campaign contributions of big donors--himself included!--as open and blatant favor-buying. Trump's surge was a decisive repudiation by millions of Republican voters of the collective wisdom of their party elite. When Trump first erupted into the Republican race in June, he did so with a message of grim pessimism. 'We got $18 trillion in debt. We got nothing but problems ... We're dying. We're dying. We need money ... We have losers. We have people that don't have it. We have people that are morally corrupt. We have people that are selling this country down the drain ... The American dream is dead.' That message did not resonate with those who'd ridden the S&P 500 from less than 900 in 2009 to more than 2,000 in 2015. But it found an audience all the same. Half of Trump's supporters within the GOP had stopped their education at or before high-school graduation, according to the polling firm YouGov. Only 19 percent had a college or postcollege degree. Thirty-eight percent earned less than $50,000. Only 11 percent earned more than $100,000. Trump Republicans were not ideologically militant. Just 13 percent said they were very conservative; 19 percent described themselves as moderate. Nor were they highly religious by Republican standards. What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and the intensity of their economic nationalism. Sixty-three percent of Trump supporters wished to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born on U.S. soil--a dozen points higher than the norm for all Republicans. More than other Republicans, Trump supporters distrusted Barack Obama as alien and dangerous: Only 21 percent acknowledged that the president was born in the United States, according to an August survey by the Democratic-oriented polling firm PPP. Sixty-six percent believed the president was a Muslim. Trump promised to protect these voters' pensions from their own party's austerity. 'We've got Social Security that's going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn't bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I'm not going to cut it at all; I'm going to bring money in, and we're going to save it.' He promised to protect their children from being drawn into another war in the Middle East, this time in Syria. 'If we're going to have World War III,' he told The Washington Post in October, 'it's not going to be over Syria.' As for the politicians threatening to shoot down the Russian jets flying missions in Syria, 'I won't even call them hawks. I call them the fools.' He promised a campaign independent of the influences of money that had swayed so many Republican races of the past. 'I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that's a broken system.' He promised above all to protect their wages from being undercut by Republican immigration policy."

The Death of Privilege

Sunita Puri, a doctor of palliative medicine, is attentive to the economic and social inequalities she witnesses when making house calls to patients dying at home. "I think ahead to my next visit in Baldwin Village with Janice, a woman in her 60s with advanced breast cancer. Because she is estranged from her children and sisters, her landlady and two friends from church take turns caring for her. 'Just list Jesus Christ as my emergency contact,' she snapped at me once. 'You can't trust nobody, especially not family.' After Janice, I will see Joseph, a veteran in his early 50s whose lung cancer has spread to his bones. Even though he needs opiates to control the extreme pain his cancer causes when he tries to walk, he refuses to fill the prescription because he is afraid of being robbed and harmed if 'the youngsters find out I have that stuff in my house.' I will then visit 56-year-old Jorge, who has Lou Gehrig's disease. On my last visit, I found him alone at home, unable to reach for his medication for shortness of breath. He explained that his wife was returning from working an extra shift to make up for the income he could no longer provide. In three days, she will have enough money to pay for help, he reassured me and our team social worker. I constantly wonder whether, given these life circumstances, my patients fully benefit from the care my team and I try to provide. Aside from assessing symptoms and providing medications to ease them, perhaps just treating what I can with compassion is the best I can do for them. Still, I try to find some meaning in these visits, in the visits that preceded them, in all the visits that await, so that I can get up tomorrow and do this imperfect work again. My patients offer a vivid lesson in accepting inexplicable circumstances and choosing to live the best they can. I witness their hard-won wisdom and dignity and strength--and I know that these, too, are not things hospice can provide. Wisdom and dignity and strength have nothing to do with social or economic status or one's neighborhood. Yet they are perhaps the most essential components to the very private, internal process of making peace with life as part of the process of dying."

In Tibet

In a month when we've been discussing China's heavy hand in silencing dissent (or perceived dissent) from state policy in both Hong Kong and Taiwan, Tsering Woeser draws our attention to another area of contested political power. Why, he asks, are Tibetans setting themselves on fire?: "February 27, 2009, was the third day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year. It was also the day that self-immolation came to Tibet. The authorities had just cancelled a Great Prayer Festival (Monlam) that was supposed to commemorate the victims of the government crackdown in 2008. A monk by the name of Tapey stepped out of the Kirti Monastery and set his body alight on the streets of Ngawa, in the region known in Tibetan as Amdo, a place of great religious reverence and relevance, now designated as part of China's Sichuan Province. At least 145 other Tibetans have self-immolated since then. Of these, 141 did so within Tibet, while the remaining five were living in exile. According to the best information we have, 125 have died (including 122 within Tibet and three abroad). Most of these individuals are men, though some are women. Many were parents who left behind young children. The oldest was sixty-four, and the youngest was sixteen. Seven underage Tibetans have either self-immolated or attempted self-immolation; two of them died, and two were detained and their fate is unknown. The numbers include three monks of high rank (tulkus, or reincarnated masters), along with thirty-nine ordinary monks and eight nuns. But many were ordinary people: seventy-four were nomads or peasants; among the others were high school students, workers, vendors, a carpenter, a woodworker, a writer, a tangka painter, a taxi driver, a retired government cadre, a laundry owner, a park ranger, and three activists exiled abroad. All are Tibetan... In my interviews with international media on the topic of self-immolation, I have always tried to emphasize one area of frequent misunderstanding: self-immolation is not suicide, and it is not a gesture of despair. Rather, it is sacrifice for a greater cause, and an attempt to press for change, as can be seen in these two peaks in self-immolation. Such an act is not to be judged by the precepts of Buddhism: it can only be judged by its political results. Each and every one of these roaring flames on the Tibetan plateau has been ignited by ethnic oppression. Each is a torch casting light on a land trapped in darkness. These names are a continuation of the protests of 2008 and a continuation of the monks' decision that March: 'We must stand up!' Attempts to label these acts as suicide--or even, curiously, as a forbidden act of 'killing'--are either a complete misinterpretation of the phenomenon or, more likely, the type of deliberate misrepresentation that we see all too often in Chinese state propaganda. A high-ranking monk once confided in me very clearly: 'The cases of self-immolation in Tibet absolutely do not violate our Buddhist teachings on killing. They are not in any way opposed to Dharma, and certainly do not violate it. The motivations of self-immolators in Tibet, whether monks or laypeople, have nothing at all to do with personal interest.... These acts are meant to protect the Dharma and to win the Tibetan people's rights to freedom and democracy.' Self-immolators are bodhisattvas sacrificing the self for others, phoenixes reincarnated from the flames of death."

"The Summer of Our Discontent"

How better to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. day? In the Boston Globe, Jill Terreri Ramos reports about the discovery at Amherst College of a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. "The result is a clear recording of King's deliberate delivery of 'The Summer of Our Discontent,' in which he offers reasons for civil rights activism during the summer of 1963. The speech was delivered at the New School in New York City on Feb. 6, 1964, and was broadcast by the student radio station at Amherst College on Dec. 8, 1964. During the hour-long recording, King talks about low incomes in black communities, inequities in public schools, and the failure of political leaders to act on civil rights. The similarities between King's themes and modern events are not lost on Leavitt and her colleagues."

Featured Events

From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Kazue Koishikawa discusses how identifying freedom with free will has brought the "most dangerous consequence" by allowing us to claim freedom at the price of all others' sovereignty in the Quote of the Week. Alan Rickman reflects on the human need for storytelling and considering what's possible in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Roger Berkowitz, the Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center, announces that he is looking to hire a Part Time Research Assistant to assist with a book project. Finally, we appreciate the annotations Hannah Arendt made to her copy of Jules Monnerot's Sociology and Psychology of Communism in this week's Library feature.