Amor Mundi 12/7/14
12-08-2014Hannah 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.
Dara Lind on Vox looks into the controversial number of police killings every year. A minimum of about 400 people are killed annually by what the FBI calls "justified police homicides"--but the actual number is likely much higher (see FiveThirtyEight). Within these statistics, those killed are predominantly male. About 50% are white, the rest largely black or Hispanic. But one important difference concerns the age of the victims: "The SHR lists 118 victims of 'justifiable homicide' who were killed while fleeing, committing a felony, or resisting arrest--not because they were attacking anyone. And 102 of those weren't killed with a rifle or a shotgun but with a handgun. In these 102 cases, the necessity of the officers' use of force is the most ambiguous. And in these 102 cases, the victims are more likely than in any other justifiable homicide categories to be black.... John Roman of the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute says these numbers indicate that many white justifiable-homicide victims are killed by police who are intervening in a domestic-violence dispute. Broader research on all types of homicide, he says, shows that victim and offender ages fall into a few distinct groups: 'You see one peak with little kids with infanticide, one peak with teenagers shooting each other, and then you see another big blip where the age of the victim and the offender are the same and they could be in their 30s, 40s or 50s. And that's mainly domestic violence. So when you see whites being shot by police officers, who are older than their early 20s, that's almost certainly domestic violence.' The concentration of death among young black and Hispanic men, meanwhile, is in part a demonstration that those are the people most likely to encounter police officers. They're the ones most likely to be arrested, and most likely to be living in the neighborhoods where police most frequently patrol."
The Daughter Against The Archivist
Marc Parry profiles Saskia Sassen, author of Global Cities, and daughter of Willem Sassen, the Nazi who is now famous for his interviews with Adolf Eichmann. Amidst an account of Sassen's innovative work on globalization, Parry gives Sassen's reaction to the stories being told about her father, most recently in Bettina Stangneth's book Eichmann Before Jerusalem. "But, to my surprise, Sassen hasn't seen that movie. Nor has she read Stangneth's book. And the longer I speak with Sassen about her father, the clearer it becomes that her account clashes with Stangneth's. Willem Sassen, in his daughter's description, is a more palatable figure. A bit of a fanatic, yes. A journalist aligned with the Nazis, yes. But a man whose great passions were theater and journalism. In Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Stangneth describes how Willem Sassen grew infatuated with Hitler in his youth. She tells me how, after Eichmann's capture, Sassen protected the murderer by manipulating the transcripts of their discussions and never going public with the original recordings. (Stangneth found no evidence that Sassen had betrayed Eichmann to the Israelis.) Stangneth's book also describes how, in a 1991 interview on Argentine TV, Sassen continued to justify Josef Mengele's 'experiments' on Auschwitz victims. By contrast, Saskia Sassen tells me that her father 'did not like the Nazis.' She emphasizes how he clashed with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister. 'My father detested Hitler,' she says. 'He detested him.' And the Argentina circle? The dreaming of Nazi restoration? Willem Sassen's attempt to discredit 'propaganda' about the Holocaust? 'That's not what I remember,' she says. In her telling, Willem Sassen comes across as a mouthpiece for local Nazis. He wrote for them but ranted about them at home. The 'ridiculous texts' he produced were 'to have an income,' she says. At another point in our conversation, Sassen says, 'My father was more a journalist--a journalist wants to discover stuff--than he was pro-Nazi, actually.' It's not that Stangneth is lying in her portrayal, she tells me. 'But she was dealing with archives.... She doesn't understand, in my home, what I experienced.'"
Seeing The World Through Others' Eyes
To think, Hannah Arendt writes, is to think from the perspective of others, what she calls enlarged thinking. But thinking from the perspective of others means many others, and not just from the perspective of one group. That is Jim Sleeper's point. He tells of Claudia Horwitz, "a spiritual/social activist and interim director of Houston's Rothko Chapel," who writes that the answer to the question, "What Are White People to Do?" is for whites to "put ourselves through some honest reflection and let that process lead us on to thoughtful action ... to dismantle a system of white supremacy that permeates every corner of our legal, economic, political, relational and cultural lives." Sleeper, author of the classic "The Closest of Strangers, Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York," has a different take: "But Horowitz doesn't address those millions of white guys (and gals) who run the gamut from a Zimmerman to a Signorelli. To do that, whites who think and write about race would have to 'peer into' the lives of whites who are perhaps even more deeply angry than we are--so angry they haven't enough words or even scapegoats to lift the sadness that accompanies their rage. We'd also have to discover that some of them are as angry at moralizing, liberal whites as they are at blacks--just as angry as they'd be if America were white from coast to coast, like the England of Charles Dickens, where grinding, gnawing differences in class weren't racial at all, as they also aren't in most majority-black societies. We'd have to understand why the white anger I've just mentioned is taking increasingly murderous and perverse turns that won't be deflected by our moralizing. Start with two contrasting images of generic American 'white guys,' taken from two historic moments less than a decade apart. When death-embracing fundamentalists attacked the World Trade Center on 9/11, perhaps the most telling response came from New York City firefighters and police officers who ran toward death in order to rescue others, not slaughter them." For Sleeper, white elites must indeed learn to think and feel from the perspective of blacks, but they must also attend to the ressentiment of the white working class.
Speaking at a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Education, Chris Lebron says that America, "while no longer white supremacist in the way it was before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, daily exhibits the visages of a country where public lynching was practiced and Jim Crow segregation was the norm." What is needed, Lebron argues, is a new idea of racial education: "When I speak of racial democratic education I mean something deeply humanistic. When we are presented with facts, numbers, and dates, we tend to think we have acquired knowledge. But more essentially we consider ourselves to be educated when knowledge opens a window letting in a new way of seeing the world--this is the moment when knowledge becomes erudition. I think a significant problem with regard to race in America today is that we have focused a great deal on, admittedly, a narrow range of knowledge regarding American history. These arebasic pedagogical tropes: Lincoln freed the slaves, Martin Luther King, Jr. made a momentous speech on the steps of the Washington Monument, the Civil Rights Act made racial equality law of the land. But these tropes do not allow us to see the world anew--they are the tropes that now allow us to be comfortable with the status quo, for surely if Martin had a dream and racial equality is law of the land, we can wake up today and go about our business. But it goes without saying that no conversation about the Civil Rights Movement can be complete without paying serious attention to Malcolm X or the Black Panthers. It goes without saying that no one can responsibly remark on the triumph of formal racial equality as law without also noting the concurrent and aggressive build-up of the carceral state and the penal system which disproportionately incarcerates young black men, resulting in what Michelle Alexander aptly calls the New Jim Crow. It would certainly help the cause of racial equality if more knowledge were brought before the minds of students and Americans more generally. But I want to explore another avenue. This avenue is not mutually exclusive to the knowledge-based approach I just mentioned. The kind of thing I've been thinking about lately has to do with something very essential: more than know what has happened in American history to blacks as a category of people (and here I note and bracket the obvious problems with a notion like racial categories). I think we need a better understanding of what it is like to be, to exist as a black person in America. In what follows I can only offer a philosophical account of the conceptual framework I have in mind--my expertise is far from advising educational policy in its particulars. It is my hope that some of what I say resonates here today with those of you who are surely better positioned than I am to think in terms of policy."
This week saw a mass resignation of editors and writers at The New Republic, one of the oldest and most venerable magazines in US history. No other resignation will be felt as strongly as that of Leon Wieseltier who ran the Books & The Arts section of the magazine for decades. R.R. Reno writes that Wieseltier's departure speaks volumes about both American liberalism and America's colleges: Wieseltier could leave, Reno writes, first because "American liberalism is shifting in the direction of a long tradition in American conservatism, one that is supremely confident in the wisdom of markets. For liberal idealists, the new technological utopianism married to the dynamism of capitalism has replaced the old utopian socialism of the bygone era." The second reason Wieseltier is going "reflects changes in the university. A liberal arts education educates young people into a particular way of life, a particular culture. Some of them become virtuosos in this way of life, which means they absorb its animating ideas and sentiments, but can improvise. All cultures need these virtuosos, because all cultures face external and internal challenges that require adaptation, revision, and renewal. The prophets of Israel were virtuosos. Socrates, Luther, Burke, and Emerson were virtuosos.... As an editor, Wieseltier sought liberal virtuosos. (Conservatives were not part of his mix. He was interested only in a conversation about a progressive future.) And when he found them he gave them an extraordinary amount of space to speak to us about things that matter. But today's universities don't train virtuosos. A shallow scientism and materialism has found its way to the classroom. Political correctness shuts down conversation, insisting on sterile platitudes. Conservative ideas are largely excluded, and many of the most important questions facing us today simply aren't posed in ways relevant to our public life (which unlike the university culture isn't monochromatic). And anyway, if starting a company and cashing out as a billionaire is the way to change the world, who needs Shakespeare?"
In an interview, publisher Gary Groth situates underground comix in terms of other art movements from the 60s and 70s: "Zap was obviously part of the '60s-counter-cultural zeitgeist--it couldn't have happened without the larger cultural shift that it epitomized--but I tend to think the whole underground comix revolution was too singular to compare tidily with the stylistic and attitudinal shifts in the other arts in the '60s (and '70s). You can observe parallels in other media: artists like Stan Brackage, Jonas Mekas, Frank Jacobs, and Kenneth Anger were pushing the formal elements of film; Vonnegut, Pynchon, Brautigan, Kesey, and others were emerging in prose fiction. But they didn't represent a decisive split from the past. By contrast, in terms of visual art, I don't see much connection to other artists emerging in the '60s. Surely the Zap artists had little in common with (and I bet most were even fundamentally opposed to) Warhol (who showed his first comic strip painting in 1960) or Litchenstein (who did his first comic strip painting in 1961) or Claus Oldenberg or Gerhard Richter or Ed Ruscha, whose ascendancy parallels the underground artists. Their respective values seem quite different to me. The only art movement that I can see that Zap or the underground artists generally shares any affinity with is the Chicago Imagists (or the Hairy Who) (who had their first show in '66)--artists like Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Karl Wirsum. They had a cartoony, occasionally psychedelic cast to their work, but used to different ends, the results of which were pretty remote from those of underground comix. You could make a case that Kesey and his Merry Pranksters had the same aesthetically anarchic spirit as much of the undergrounds, but that too seems a bit of a stretch. And maybe rock was as huge a break from previous pop music as Zap was from previous industrial comics production, but the explosion of rock seems more like a continuation or culmination of musical trends, whereas underground comix was a decisive break from the past--a deliberate, incendiary reaction to the censored blandness of comics over the previous 15 years. So it seems to me that the Zap crew was somehow part of but apart from their countercultural brethren in the other arts."
Freddie de Boer admits to being suspicious of crowdfunding: "After all, crowdfunding is a type of crowdsourcing; what's being crowdsourced is the gatekeeping functions that investors and organizations used to perform. The essential work isn't just sorting through various projects and determining which are cool or desirable but determining if they're responsible and plausible--capable of being successfully pulled off by the people proposing them within the time frames and budgets stipulated. It turns out that most people are not good at that. But then, why would they be? Why would the average person be good at fulfilling that function? Where does that faith come from? There are so many places where we've turned over functions once performed by experts to amateurs, and we're consistently surprised that it doesn't work out. 401(k)s aren't crowdsourced, exactly, but they exist thanks to a choice to turn over control of retirement funds to individuals away from managers, in the pursuit of fees, of course. The results have been brutal. But why wouldn't they be brutal? Why would you expect every random person on the street to have a head for investment in that sense? It's worth pointing out that crowdsourcing was first introduced for simplistic tasks that a human can do better than a machine, often through rote repetition--bilingual speakers checking machine translation, for example, a task still far better performed by humans than machines. (Yes, folks.) But now, we seem to expect to hand tons of essential tasks off to computers and crowds, and in many cases, we don't bother to check and see how well they're actually doing because the hype about both is so loud."
Roundtable on Academic Freedom
A panel discussion with guests Andrew Ross, Steven Salaita, and Katherine M. Franke.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Bard College Campus Center, Multipurpose Room, 7:00 pm
This week on the Blog, Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen discusses how the absence of experience leads philosophy and ideology into useless abstractions that ignore the reality of human interactions in the Quote of the Week. Russian mathematician and esotericist P. D. Ouspensky provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In this week's Video Archives, we look back on a lecture Roger Berkowitz gave on the relationship between revenge and justice. And we appreciate two passages on Nietzsche that Arendt found worthy of annotation in our Library feature.
As the holiday season is now upon us, please consider donating to the Hannah Arendt Center. A tax-deductible gift says that you agree that an institutional space for thinking about the world from an Arendtian perspective is vital at a moment of thoughtless and predictable debates.
Please donate by clicking the button below.
