Amor Mundi 12/6/15

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.

The Rojava Commune

Wes Enzinna has an extraordinary essay in the NY Times Magazine on the utopian, anarchist, military experiment of Rojava, a small, quasi-autonomous territory in Syria that a part of the Kurdish PKK is trying to turn into a secular and liberal homeland. Enzinna traveled there to teach a class in free speech. He describes some of the surprising aspects of life in Rojava: "In accordance with a philosophy laid out by a leftist revolutionary named Abdullah Ocalan, Rojavan women had been championed as leaders, defense of the environment enshrined in law and radical direct democracy enacted in the streets." The territory is governed by the PKK, which includes "an all-female force called the Y.P.J., or Female Protection Units. These forces have become key American allies in the region." Turkey considers the PKK terrorists. But many others have a different view. "...[T]o sympathetic Western visitors, Rojava was something else entirely: a place where the seeds of the Arab Spring promised to blossom into utopia. 'What you are doing,' said Raymond Joliffe, a member of Britain's House of Lords, during a trip in May 2015, 'is a unique experiment that deserves to succeed.' A Dutch professor named Jan Best de Vries arrived in December 2014 and donated $10,000 to help buy books for Kurdish university students. David Graeber, a founder of Occupy Wall Street, visited that same month and wrote before his trip that 'the autonomous region of Rojava, as it exists today, is one of few bright spots--albeit a very bright one--to emerge from the tragedy of the Syrian revolution.' In May, I saw an announcement on Facebook for the Mesopotamian Social Sciences Academy, a new, coed university in Rojava's de facto capital, Qamishli. This in itself was revolutionary. For years, Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, forbade many Syrian Kurds to study. In ISIS territory just 15 miles away, Kurdish girls were routinely tortured for being Westernized heretics--sometimes tied by their ponytails to car bumpers and dragged to their deaths. In Rojava, they were being educated. When I sent a message to the academy's Facebook page, requesting more information, I received a reply from Yasin Duman, a Kurdish graduate student living in Turkey. He had taught several courses there, he said, and when he found out I was a writer and professor in New York, we discussed a journalism class. Duman explained that Rojava's youth had little experience with the idea of free speech. Perhaps I could teach them: 'A free people has to have freedom of speech,' he said. It would be a cultural exchange. I would teach writing, and my students would show me what life was like in Rojava. We decided that I would spend a week in July giving a crash course in journalism basics: how to report, how to interview and how to document the war raging around them." The people in Rojava have a near-fanatical loyalty to Abdullah Ocalan, the charismatic founder of the PKK who sits in jail in Turkey. Enzinna notes that Ocalan "looms as a Wizard-of-Oz-like presence in Rojava." He also points out that amidst a horrific war, the PKK-based government in Rojava has committed war crimes and fallen short of the ideals it was charged to uphold. But overall, Enzinna offers an incredible glimpse into a unique and hopeful social experiment in the midst of the hell that now is Syria.

Learning How to Love

Rosamund Urwin writes about Deeyah Khan, creator of the new film Jihad: A British Story. For Khan, recruiting young Brits into ISIS is a matter of teaching them about love. "Khan feels frustrated about the media debate after the Paris attacks. 'One guy will say, "it's all about Islam". The other will say, "it has nothing to do with Islam". I want to throw something at the TV! What are we doing about it? We don't have time for douchebags in suits to be pointing fingers at each other. Of course Islam has something to do with it--people are doing it in the name of Islam--but it's also about human vulnerabilities--needs that get filled somehow.' IS, she notes, spends hundreds of hours recruiting each fighter. It builds an intimate connection on Skype: finding out who this person is, their dreams. 'IS takes the yearning, the sadness, the anger, preys on that and draws people into becoming cannon fodder.' Perhaps because we're sitting in a Canary Wharf restaurant, Plateau, surrounded by Savile Row suits, I suggest IS may be the ultimate headhunters. Khan nods. 'They are. It's also like grooming. They find out what all your needs are, they build that loyalty and love.' Love, she acknowledges, seems a strange word to use when we're talking about a hateful ideology. 'It doesn't start with hate. It starts out as a human need that is not being met, and with love and loyalty between the recruiter and the follower.' Those radicalised by former über-recruiter Abu Muntasir describe him as the father they wished they had had."

Good Cop, Bad Cop

Steve Locke writes about how he was stopped and questioned because he fit the description of someone who had committed a crime. After he was let go, he went back to his office on his way to teach his class: "My colleague was in our shared office and she was able to calm me down. I had about 45 minutes until my class began and I had to teach. I forgot the lesson I had planned. I forgot the schedule. I couldn't think about how to do my job. I thought about the fact my word counted for nothing, they didn't believe that I wasn't a criminal. They had to find out. My word was not enough for them. My ID was not enough for them. My handmade one-of-a-kind knit hat was an object of suspicion. My Ralph Lauren quilted blazer was only a 'puffy coat.' That white woman could just walk up to a cop and talk about me like I was an object for regard. I wanted to go back and spit in their faces. The cops were probably deeply satisfied with how they handled the interaction, how they didn't escalate the situation, how they were respectful and polite." The cops probably were deeply satisfied with their performance. The vastly different reactions different people will have to this account are themselves many reasons it should be read.

Owning a Vermeer

In an interview, Teju Cole makes a case for the critic in the age of a bloated art market: "[W]hen someone pays $160 million for a Rembrandt or a de Kooning... I don't even know what's going on there. Is it only acquisitiveness? I don't know what kind of feeling they have for the art... Maybe the question should be: someone who privately owns a Vermeer, there's some in museums, they're very nice. Some of it can be in private ownership, it's okay, it's part of the circulation. What it's our job to do [as critics] is to help create and sustain value for overlooked work... So to do the kind of writing around that work, the celebration of that work, to give an account of how that work functions in the world: to say, here's this photographer from Mali, here's this sculptor from Nigeria, here's this Honduran filmmaker, we're doing this festival of Brazilian film. You know! Those things. I'm talking about this not as a fiction writer but as a critical writer. Some of our work is to look at the overlooked, to draw attention to those worthy things. The question is not always about what people are paying $50 million for, but the stuff that is only fifty thousand, only ten thousand, and getting that stuff into the museum space and have it be what it needs to be, to write books about it, to get it in the syllabus."

Giving to Charity

In the wake of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's announcement that he will donate 99% of his stock in his company to charity over the course of his lifetime, John Cassidy considers the present and future of philanthrocapitalism: "It's not just the size of the donations that the wealthy are making that demands attention, though. Charitable giving on this scale makes modern capitalism, with all of its inequalities and injustices, seem somewhat more defensible. Having created hugely successful companies that have generated almost unimaginable wealth, Zuckerberg, Gates, and Buffett are sending a powerful message to Wall Street hedge-fund managers, Russian oligarchs, European industrialists, Arab oil sheiks, and anybody else who has accumulated a vast fortune: 'From those to whom much is given, much is expected.'... People like Zuckerberg and Gates, by virtue of their philanthropic efforts, can have a much bigger say in determining policy outcomes than ordinary citizens can. (As Matthew Yglesias pointed out on Vox, one of the advantages of registering the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as an L.L.C. is that it can spend money on political ads.) The more money billionaires give to their charitable foundations, which in most cases remain under their personal control, the more influence they will accumulate. And relatively speaking, anyway, the less influence everybody else will have. Some Americans--not all of them disciples of Ayn Rand--might say that this is a good thing. I have already cited some of the Gates Foundation's good works. Isn't Michael Bloomberg, with his efforts to reform gun laws, promoting the public interest? Isn't George Soros, through his donations to civil-rights organizations, lining up on the side of the angels? In these two instances, my own answers would be yes and yes; but the broader point stands. The divide between philanthropy and politics is already fuzzy. As the 'philanthrocapitalism' movement gets bigger, this line will be increasingly hard to discern."

Physical Media in a New World

J. Malcolm Garcia profiles a bookseller in Afghanistan: "She walks without hurry, somewhat stiffly, sore, a diminutive woman unnoticed, burdened, using her chin to clamp down on a column of books she holds against her chest. Thin paperbacks most of them, a few hardcover. All written by her husband. The books appear worn as she does. Her tired eyes, lined face. Her forehead wrinkled into streams. Maybe from long, nightly exposure to the humid, grainy air, the white smoke rising from kabob grills wafting around and powdering her with ash. Maybe from seventeen years of selling her homebound husband's books. She does not know, does not really consider her fatigue any more than she reflects on how she sees and breathes. Block by block she maneuvers through the teeming sidewalks of Kabul's Shar-E-Naw shopping district until she enters Ice-Milk Restaurant, stops at tables. 'Would you like to buy a book?' she says. The twentysomething customers talk to one another staring at their iPhones and ignore her. Outside, more young people gather, dressed in tight blue jeans and dazzling, multicolored shirts reminiscent of the disco era. They talk loudly, with an air of We are special, laughing, hurrying past storefronts promoting Mastercard Premium, Marco Polo Garments, Alfalah Visa, United Bank, Body Building Fitness Gym, New Fashions Kabul Shop. Their shadows converge and fade into the glow of so many green and blue and red blinking lights dangling from awnings, unfolded above advertisements for pizza and club sandwiches and chicken fingers, and those same shadows cross a boy standing in the middle of the sidewalk and leaning on crutches, his left leg gone, his right hand out for money, and the young people swerve around him as if he were standing in the center of a traffic roundabout, and amid this confusion the book lady leaves Ice-Milk Restaurant without having sold one book and stops at another restaurant, Fast Food Pizza and Burger. The West's influence can be seen throughout Shar-E-Naw in the kaleidoscopic displays of consumerism and high prices that for a moment render the decades of ongoing war here as obsolete as the donkey-drawn carts plodding next to black Hummers stalled in traffic. But the sight of a maimed begging child, injured, she presumes, by a mine, reminds her that beneath the sequined mannequins and suggested affluence and rush to catch up with the Twenty-First Century, Shar-E-Naw is still Afghanistan."

Amazing and Boring

Rebecca Solnit reports from Paris's conference on climate change: "It was amazing to be in that room with Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, and Barack Obama--quite possibly the four most powerful people on earth--along with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Framework Convention Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres, and dozens of other world leaders. It was amazing and often also boring. The statements were largely positive, predictable, vague, and repetitious. Of course, world leaders have to be graded on a curve. Putin's statement at least recognized the reality of climate change and suggested that we should do something about it, which is an improvement over his record of denying and dismissing the problem. Obama spoke of his summer trip to Alaska, whose melting permafrost and burning tundra are 'a preview of one possible future'--though it's the present, not the future, for Alaska. Still, Obama did acknowledge one of the central facts of the day: 'We know the truth that many nations have contributed little to climate change but will be the first to feel its threats.' Given this fact, it's no surprise that things got real when some of the less famous world leaders took their turns. Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi noted that Africa is both the continent that emits least per capita and the one that faces the gravest consequences. Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, the president of Djibouti, itemized the ways his region would be destroyed, and is being destroyed now. 'It is clear that if nothing is done,' he said, 'the peoples of East Africa will find it impossible to survive.'"

Independence and Liberation

Chris Lebron in the The Stone writes about what a certain kind of unhappiness means, one that comes when one realizes that independence does not yield liberation. "My first serious life lesson in those promising and formative adult years was that independence and liberation are not the same thing. Indeed, they work at different levels. Independence is local. The powers that be take a step back from managing your life. Liberation is still far away. You believe you will step into the space opened up to steer your own life, and you do step in, but find that you are shackled from the inside. But you did not place those restraints there. Rather, you inherited them. Maybe from your father's sad face. More likely from the very ways of the world that placed that sadness in him--those beatings in the street, unfair treatment by employers, and his precarious stewardship over the local young women and men whose own young lives could still be saved from the inheritance their own parents most likely had ready for them. You may later look in a mirror and wonder where the lightness of being in your own face went. Then, one day, your son begins asking you: 'Daddy, are you happy?' And you resolve to cut him out of the bum will handed down over the generations. You think, this is an heirloom he can do without.... I spend most of my days on the campus of Yale University, one of the world's most elite, respected and powerful, where I try to contribute knowledge to a world in need of viewpoints like mine, but surely not only mine. This, and all other college campuses, are supposed to allow for, among other things, the flourishing of hope. College students are meant to be spending their time formulating the meaning of their newfound independence and discovering how to convert that independence into liberation. For many, it goes as planned. But a great many black and brown students nationally find themselves instead subject to a corrupt and perverse set of manners. They find that some person, some institution, some history, malignant ignorance or benignly neglectful force intends for them to mind their shackles. They are reminded that their independence is comparatively worth far less than that of their white counterparts, never mind their liberation. These students sense that they do not want their own kids asking: 'Are you happy?' Critics have dismissed the nation's student protesters as mere coddled young people in a rage over some nonsense having to do with costumes or fraternity parties or whatever else the headlines say is the matter. I can tell you that none of these really is at the root. Rather, these and similar events are the catalyst for a revelation--that the rage and sadness these students inherited have been there for years, waiting to make themselves known. The inheritance of disaffection can only really come into its own with the maturity of social consciousness."

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From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Jennie Han explores the concept of "home" with respect to our discussions of the ongoing student protests on American college campuses in the Quote of the Week. Madame Swetchine draws a metaphor between thinking and nature in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, in a special feature, Jerome Kohn remembers Hannah Arendt on the 40th anniversary of her death.