Amor Mundi 1/26/14
01-28-2014
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.
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Flickr - Manky M.[/caption]
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt asks after the “elements” of totalitarianism, those fundamental building blocks that made possible an altogether new and horrific form of government. The two structural elements she locates are the emergence of a new ideological form of Antisemitism and the rise of transnational imperialist movements, which gives the structure to Part One (Antisemitism) and Part Two (Imperialism) of her book. Underlying both Antisemitism and Imperialism, however, is what Arendt calls “metaphysical loneliness.” Totalitarian government, Arendt writes, “bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” In a world of individualism in which the human bonds of religion, family, clan, and nation are increasingly seen as arbitrary, tenuous, and weak, so that individuals people find themselves uprooted, redundant, and superfluous. “Metaphysical loneliness,” Arendt writes, is the “basic experience” of modern society that is “the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the breakdown of political institutions and social traditions in our own time.” The question underlying so much of Arendt’s work is how to respond to what she calls “the break in tradition,” the fact that the political, social, and intellectual traditions that bound people together in publically meaningful institutions and networks have frayed beyond repair. The customs and traditions that for millennia were the unspoken common sense of peoples can no longer be presumed. How to make life meaningful, how to inure individuals from the seduction of ideological movements that lend weight to their meaningless lives? If metaphysical loneliness is the basic experiences of modern life, then it is not surprising that great modern literature would struggle with the agony of such disconnection and seek to articulate paths of reconnection. That, indeed, is the thesis of Wyatt Mason’s essay “Make This Not True,” in this week’s New York Review of Books. Modern fiction, Mason argues, struggles to answer the question: How can we live and die and not be alone? There are, he writes, at least three paradigmatic answers, represented alternatively by three of the greatest contemporary writers, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and George Saunders. Reviewing Saunders Tenth of September (a 2012 finalist for the National Book Award), Mason writes suggests an important link between Saunder’s Buddhism and his writing: “In Buddhist practice, through sitting meditation, the mind may be schooled in the way of softness, openness, expansiveness. This imaginative feat—of being able to live these ideas—is one of enormous subtlety. What makes Saunders’s work unique is not its satirical verve or its fierce humor but its unfathomable capacity to dramatize, in story form, the life-altering teachings of such a practice. … [I]f fiction is to continue to exert an influence over a culture that finds it ever easier to connect, however frailly, to the world around them through technology, Saunders’s stories suggest that the ambition to connect outwardly isn’t the only path we can choose. Rather, his fiction shows us that the path to reconciliation with our condition is inward, a journey we must make alone.”
Ai Weiwei describes what he thinks Internet access has done for his home country: "the Internet is the best thing that ever happened to China.” If Mason and Saunders (see above) worry that technology magnifies the loneliness of modern mass society, Ai Weiwei argues that the World Wide Web “turns us into individuals and also enables us to share our perceptions and feelings. It creates a culture of individualism and exchange even though the real society doesn't promote it. There isn't a single Chinese university that can invite me to give a talk. Even though I know there are many students who would like to hear what I have to say."
In an interview about art, politics, and the intersection between the two, Sudanese poet Mamoun Eltlib describes a revolution for those who have rejected the political: "When you come to politicians now, people don’t really care about them, because they find out it’s just a chair or election problem between them. It’s not about them as Sudanese. So when you do something for the people without asking them to vote for you or elect you or to do anything, just to make a very beautiful, attractive program, they respond. I was in Doha for a conference for three days, to solve the problem in Sudan. They brought all the intellectuals and the writers and the thinkers from the political parties and from the rebel groups and from the government itself, as well as independent writers like me and Faisal, and they made this paper called, ‘Loving Your Enemy Through Culture,’ because I was saying that we don’t just need to change the people, we need to change the politicians. If we really want to fight now, we have just one way, the cultural way."
In Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville argues that the American brand of religion—strong on morality while permissive on rituals and dogma—is deeply important to liberal democracy. While democracy imagines political and civil liberties, religion maintains a “civic religion” that privileges moral consensus over dogmatism provides a common core of moral belief even amongst a plurality of faiths and sects. Under this view, the continued religiosity of Americans especially in comparison to the irreligiosity of Europeans is an important part ingredient in the American experience of democracy. With this in mind, consider this snippet from Megan Hustad’s memoir More Than Conquerors. Hustad talks about growing up in a missionary household, and how her father is coping with changes he sees happening around him: "Thanks be to God, my parents would say. Thanks to my ability to take care of myself, I would say. My father knows I choose to fill my time with people for whom Christianity is an outmoded concept, a vestigial cultural tail humanity would be better off losing. He knows most of my friends are of the opinion that the country would be better off without people who think like he does. His new status as cultural relic bothers him. He finds it ironic that moral relativists temporarily misplace their relativism when talk turns to Jesus. He doesn’t like how “evangelical” and “fundamentalist” are so often conflated in news reports and in opinion pieces, as if there were no shadows between them. It seems to him more evidence that the United States is becoming a post-Christian society like England and much of Europe before it. Used to be, he remembers, one didn’t have to explain the contours of faith. Billy Graham appeared on prime-time television. Everyone in this country, he remembered, knew what faith was for."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Roger Berkowitz explores the literary responses to loneliness in the writing of George Saunders via Wyatt Mason. Jeffrey Champlin discusses how Arendt read Adam Smith.