Amor Mundi 1/31/16

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.

Pardon Me

Isabel Kershner in the New York Times reports that a pardon request by Adolf Eichmann was recently discovered--along with other original documents from his 1961 trial. "After he was convicted and sentenced to death in Israel for his role in the annihilation of millions of Jews by Nazi Germany, Adolf Eichmann pleaded for his own life. 'There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders,' pleaded Eichmann--the Nazi war criminal who oversaw the lethal logistics of the Holocaust--in a letter dated May 29, 1962, the day that Israel's Supreme Court rejected his appeal. Eichmann asked the Israeli president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, for a pardon, arguing, 'I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.'" Eichmann's attempt to deny responsibility mirrors his arguments at his trial. But Kershner goes further and wrongly suggests that Arendt agreed with Eichmann's appraisal. Kershner writes: "Eichmann's role and influence in the Nazi machine has been the subject of historical debate. David Cesarani, a historian of 20th-century Jewish life who died last year, wrote a biography of Eichmann that cast him as a committed subscriber to Nazi ideology, rebutting the author Hannah Arendt's famous appraisal of him as a banal bureaucrat who simply followed orders."

Kershner's suggestion that Arendt thought Eichmann was a bureaucrat who simply followed orders is a common misunderstanding. Over and again in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt says that the defense that he was following orders was Eichmann's own argument, and she rejects it. While Eichmann was a bureaucrat, Arendt emphasizes that he also disobeyed orders when those orders contradicted what he took to be Hitler's commands or his understanding of Nazi policy. Eichmann was not simply a follower of orders; he also took initiative and sought to innovate in carrying out his genocidal tasks. Quite simply, what Arendt means by calling Eichmann's banal is not the banality of a bureaucrat who simply follows orders. That mistaken interpretation of Eichmann was made famous by Stanley Milgram. Arendt rejects Milgram's conclusion that all of us have a bit of Eichmann in ourselves and that normal people obey orders they don't support. On the contrary, Arendt argues that "obedience and support are the same."

The claim that Arendt saw Eichmann as a banal bureaucrat mistakes Arendt's argument about banality. To be banal is not to follow orders; it is to be thoughtless. Eichmann was banal because he could not think from the perspective of others. As I write in the latest volume of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center, "Locked in the logical coherence of his own simplified view of the world, Eichmann held fast to the truths that gave meaning to his fantastic version of the world. In short, Eichmann was a dedicated Nazi. He sought and worked for a Nazi victory, and he was willing to do anything and everything within his power to contribute to the cause. He did not think hard or at all about that cause; Arendt wonders if he really understood it. But Arendt understands that Eichmann's thoughtlessness names his willingness to do anything for a cause. What drove Eichmann to become a dedicated mass murderer was less hatred than a deep need to serve the Nazi movement that gave his life weight and importance." Bureaucrats can be thoughtless, of course. but Arendt saw that Eichmann's thoughtlessness was not the thoughtlessness of a bureaucrat so much as it was driven by a deep need to find meaning and worth in belonging to the Nazi movement. She does not see him as simply following orders. The reason he must be hung, as she argues he must, is not that he obeyed orders but that he supported those orders. Eichmann claimed--and there is evidence to support him--that he personally disagreed with some of the orders. But the facts are that he overcame his objections and fully and enthusiastically carried out those orders. Eichmann took pride in the fact that he suppressed his personal and subjective revulsion and acted heroically for the good of a cause larger than himself. He did so, as Arendt saw, because he found his self worth in belonging to a world-historical movement. Read more here.--RB

Occupying a Partisan Fragment

Jedediah Purdy, at the end of the armed standoff over public lands in Oregon, considers Ammon Bundy and the other occupiers: "Finicum had told reporters that he would rather die in the occupation than go to jail. He seems to have regarded this as the proper and lawful attitude of a citizen. The Malheur occupation, which was triggered by disputes over ranchers' use of public lands, has also been a theatrical public argument about the scope of legal violence in America. For nearly four weeks after the Bundys and their allies occupied Malheur, on January 2nd, it was the federal government that stood down as armed men (and a few women) defied its authority, used its buildings as a staging ground for a thoroughly improbable scheme to bring public lands under state and local control, and promised to meet force with force. As LaVoy Finicum must have known, a person facing arrest is not entitled to meet force with force, but really the occupiers were promising to meet law with counter-law. In their constitutional cosmology, a localist version of rock-ribbed originalism, they were the law in Malheur, and the federal agents the usurpers. Federal agents tolerated this secessionist theatre, allowing the occupiers to leave the refuge for groceries, permitting supporters to join the occupation, and even keeping electricity flowing to Malheur headquarters. But this indulgent attitude, presumably intended to avoid repeating the disastrous nineteen-nineties confrontations at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, could not last indefinitely. There could not be two governments in Malheur. The federal stance, which looked from the outside like diplomacy, turned out to be police strategy instead. When Ammon Bundy and other leaders left the refuge, they were done.... It is not a coincidence that only white men have filled this role, nor that the Ku Klux Klan is the major example of such vigilantism in the hundred and fifty years since the Civil War. That the Bundys imagined that their gathering could speak for 'the people' of the Western states, let alone of the country, revealed how anachronistic and narrow their vision of the country was. All 'occupy' movements, whatever they call themselves, have the problem that they claim to represent the people while being, in fact, a partisan fragment."

Ideology Critique

Jonathan Chait goes beyond the silly complaint that Bernie Sanders is an idealist or that he won't be able to get all of his proposed policies passed. Idealism is hardly a sin. Indeed it is a requirement for leadership. But Chait finds a deeper worry in Sanders's candidacy. "Note that Sanders, asked about Republican opposition to his proposals, defined that opposition as 'protecting the interest of the wealthy and the powerful.' It is certainly true that fealty to the interests of the rich heavily colors Republican policy. But Sanders is not merely presenting corruption as one factor. It is the entirety of it. Likewise, Sanders has difficulty imagining any reason other than corruption to explain disagreements by fellow Democrats, which he relentlessly attributes to the nefarious influence of corporate wealth. One does not have to dismiss the political power of massed wealth to acknowledge that other things influence the conclusions drawn by Americans who don't share Sanders's full diagnosis. In reality, people have organic reasons to vote Republican. Some of them care more about social issues or foreign policy than economics. Sanders would embrace many concepts--'socialism,' big government in the abstract, and middle-class tax increases--that register badly with the public. People are very reluctant to give up their health insurance, even if it is true that Sanders could give them something better. What's more, the interests of the wealthy do not cut as cleanly as Sanders indicates. It's true that business and the rich tend to oppose parts of his program like higher taxes on the rich, more generous social insurance, and tougher regulation of finance. But the Obama administration's stimulus encountered intense Republican opposition even though it did not pose a threat to any business interests. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce even endorsed the stimulus, which profited business both directly (by pumping billions into contracts for projects like infrastructure) and indirectly (by goosing public demand for its members' products). That did not stop 100 percent of House Republicans from opposing it. Nor did the unified opposition of the business lobby dissuade Republicans from holding the debt ceiling hostage in 2011, or persuade them to pass immigration reform in 2013. Sanders currently proposes a massive infrastructure program, which would make lots of money for the construction industry. Clearly, subservience to big business only goes so far in explaining Republican behavior. The depiction of conservatism as a mere cover for greed is a habit Sanders indulges over and over."

In short, Chait worries that there is a bit too much of the ideological true believer in Sanders, that he is someone who sees the entire world and all the problems of the world through one single lens: the evils of wealthy people and capitalism. Hannah Arendt argues that "an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the 'riddles of the universe,' or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man." We are all subject to the charm of ideology now and then. But ideologies become problematic, and dangerous, when they are believed. Arendt writes: "Ideologies are harmless, uncritical and arbitrary opinions only as long as they are not believed in seriously. Once their claim to total validity is taken literally they become the nuclei of logical systems in which, as in the systems of paranoics, everything follows as comprehensibly and even compulsorily once the first premise is accepted.... The curious logicality of all isms, their simpleminded trust in the salvation of stubborn devotion without regard for specific, varying factors, already harbors the first germs of totalitarian contempt for reality and factuality." There is, no doubt, some truth behind Sanders's relentless focus on income inequality and political corruption. The question Chait raises is whether focusing so sharply on one explanation for our political dysfunction purports to reveal a common truth but actually expresses a partisan fragment.--RB

A Muslim in the West

Wyatt Mason in the NYRB discusses Laila Lalami's writing about being a Muslim in the West. "Shortly after the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, an essay by the Moroccan-born writer Laila Lalami appeared in The New York Times Magazine. In 'My Life as a Muslim in the West's "Gray Zone,"' Lalami, whose Ph.D. is in linguistics and who regularly produces opinion pieces, criticism, and essays on a range of cultural and human rights subjects, discussed some of the challenges she has faced during her quarter-century as a Muslim immigrant to the United States: 'Some months ago, I gave a reading from my most recent novel in Scottsdale, Ariz. During the discussion that followed, a woman asked me to talk about my upbringing in Morocco. It's natural for readers to be curious about a writer they've come to hear, I told myself. I continued to tell myself this even after the conversation drifted to Islam, and then to ISIS. Eventually, another woman raised her hand and said that the only Muslims she saw when she turned on the television were extremists. "Why aren't we hearing more from people like you?" she asked me. "You are," I said with a nervous laugh. "Right now." I wanted to tell her that there were plenty of ordinary Muslims in this country. We come in all races and ethnicities. Some of us are more visible by virtue of beards or head scarves. Others are less conspicuous, unless they give book talks and it becomes clear that they, too, identify as Muslims.'" Mason continues, at the end of his essay: "As I write this, Donald Trump has spent the past few weeks hinting at and then saying explicitly that were he elected president, he would establish a database to track Muslims in the United States. That the outcry against such stupidity has been swift comes as no less a relief than his continued and increasing lead over his fellow Republican candidates remains a harbinger of a profound civic disorder. But such clearly unacceptable ideas--historically unacceptable; morally unacceptable; intellectually unacceptable; constitutionally unacceptable--have been muddled further by reactions to the horrendous news that a Muslim couple in San Bernardino (the wife swore her allegiance to ISIS on Facebook) slaughtered fourteen people at an event for employees of the county Public Health Department where the husband worked. 'Our nation is under siege,' Chris Christie said, campaigning in Iowa, after hearing of the shooting. 'What I believe we're facing is the next world war. This is what we're in right now, already.' And Jeb Bush broadsided that 'they have declared war on us, and we need to declare war on them.' That the prior week's shooting at a Planned Parenthood by a devout Christian gunman did not produce a similar rhetorical outcry by the same candidates is, unambiguously, a difference based in race--in racism. It is a clear call to people of conscience that to be Muslim in America right now is to be enduring a period of terror in the land of the free. As Lalami wrote in The New York Times Magazine: 'Terrorist attacks affect all of us in the same way: We experience sorrow and anger at the loss of life. For Muslims, however, there is an additional layer of grief as we become subjects of suspicion. Muslims are called upon to condemn terrorism, but no matter how often or how loud or how clear the condemnations, the calls remain. Imagine if, after every mass shooting in a school or a movie theater in the United States, young white men in this country were told that they must publicly denounce gun violence. The reason this is not the case is that we presume each young white man to be solely responsible for his actions, whereas Muslims are held collectively responsible. To be a Muslim in the West is to be constantly on trial.'"

What If the World Were...

Lizzie Wade thinks there's something to admire in those who think the world is flat: "Take a look especially at the tweet that started it all: 'The cities in the background are approx. 16 miles apart ... where is the curve? please explain this.' There's something touchingly genuine about this to me, some deep seated desire to work through confusion and toward truth. This isn't a man who never learned science, or who has some fundamentalist objection to examining empirical evidence about the world. This is a man who has looked at the world around him and decided that mainstream science isn't doing a good job at explaining what he sees. So he's collecting evidence, seeking out literature by well-versed 'experts,' and working out a better theory on his own. This is the hallmark of people I've come to think of as outsider physicists. You might know them by other names: loons, kooks, crackpots. Most scientists and science writers consider them a nuisance, as they often clog up our inboxes and even (shudder) voicemails with their wacky theories, desperate for validation. I occasionally get those emails, and I almost always ignore them. But years ago, the physicist-turned-science-writer Margaret Wertheim decided to pay attention to the fringe theories that came her way. 'The Big Bang theory accepted by a majority of scientists constitutes the greatest blunder and misinterpretation in the history of cosmology.' The universe is a '12 lobed Raspberry in a dodecahedral configuration.' And oh so many more. Some had an internal logic she could follow. Others made no sense at all. But as she wrote in her 2011 book Physics on the Fringe, their architects all shared a sense that physics had veered woefully off-track somewhere around the time it started relying on differential equations to describe invisible phenomenon, from magnetic fields to Higgs bosons. In the last 150 years or so, physics has taken a turn away from the intuitive and toward the abstract. It's not rolling balls and falling apples anymore; it's quantum states and curved spacetime. (And let's not even get into string theory, which might as well be an outsider theory itself for all the experimental evidence it has backing it up--i.e., none so far.) That turn has left some people--perhaps B.o.B included--extremely unsettled. Physics is supposed to be about understanding the world I live in, they think. But I don't see any time dilation/entangled quarks/curvature of the Earth when I look around me. Why should I trust this math I can't understand over what I see with my own eyes?" The parting of science and common sense is one of the starting points of Arendt's The Human Condition. The true world of science is one increasingly inaccessible to human understanding and human speech--even leading scientists know an increasingly partial and specialized bit of truth and cannot understand and explain what their colleagues in other fields know. One result is what Arendt calls world alienation, a skepticism about common sense. This loss of a faith in the common world is the root of our increasing inability to distinguish truth from lies.

A Private Public Life

An anonymous blogger (apparently scared of recrimination) writes on Blue Nation Review about her experience reading all of the emails Hillary Clinton wrote that were released during the month of August. The blogger, who had been a Clinton hater, fell for the former Secretary of State while reading her immense paper trail. "Her tenure as Secretary of State, of course, led to the bogus email scandal, which in turn led to the slow-drip release of the emails on her home server. I decided I was going to read them. In those emails, I discovered a Hillary Clinton I didn't even know existed. I found a woman who cared about employees who lost loved ones. I found a woman who, without exception, took time to write notes of condolence and notes of congratulations, no matter how busy she was. I found a woman who could be a tough negotiator and firm in her expectations, but still had a moment to write a friend with encouragement in tough times. She worried over people she didn't know, and she worried over those she did. And everywhere she went, her concern for women and children was clearly the first and foremost thing on her mind. In those emails, I also found a woman who seemed to understand power and how to use it wisely. A woman of formidable intellect who actually understood the nuances of a thing, and how to strike a tough bargain. I read every single one of the emails released in August, and what I found was someone who actually gave a damn about the country, the Democratic party, and all of our futures. She watched along with all of us as the Affordable Care Act made its way through Congress, with the same anxiety and aggravation many of us felt, and she rejoiced when it finally passed. She knew the Democrats who voted against it in the House, and she knew the ones who put their political careers on the line in support of it. The Hillary caricature you see in the press is not the Hillary Clinton I came to know by reading those emails. Yes, she had powerful friends in powerful places--though I didn't actually see any emails from Goldman Sachs. And yes, she approached those friends the very same way she approached people on her staff, or people she met in the course of being Secretary of State. She rejoiced in their joys and shared their sorrows. They weren't just ticks on a political scoreboard. They were friends. You could tell there were some squabbles internally with other members of the Obama administration, but there was also unflagging, utmost respect for the man who occupied the White House--the office she fought so valiantly to attain." Clinton has been tone deaf to the email scandal. At the same time, the assumption behind the email scandal is that public employees have no right to private communication. Such an assumption will inevitably lead public figures to avoid exactly the kind of passionate and honest emails that the anonymous blogger finds in the cache of Clinton's correspondence. If public figures can't expect some privacy, how will they ever engage in the kind of risky, spontaneous, and honest conversation that is the soil of all thinking?--RB

Can We Be Heroes?

Ramzi Fawaz considers the utopian potential of the comic book superhero and contrasts it with an approach derived from identity politics: "If one were to try and explain this question by turning to recent public debates about superhero comics, we might put forward the answer: 'diversity.' Yet this term and its shifting meanings--variety, difference, or representational equality--would have rung false to my thirteen year old ears. It was not simply the fact of Storm's 'diverse' background as Kenyan, immigrant, woman, or mutant that drew me to her, but rather her ethical orientation towards those around her, her response to human and mutant differences, and her familial bond with her fellow X-Men. These were qualities significantly shaped by her distinct differences, but not identical to them. This was not any traditional idea of diversity then, understood as the mere fact that different kinds of people exist. Rather what Storm and the X-Men embodied was true heterogeneity: not merely the fact of many kinds of people but what those people do in relation to their differences. As I became a dedicated comic book fan, I realized that every issue of the X-Men was both an extended meditation on the fact that people are different from one another, and that this reality requires each and every person to forge substantive, meaningful, intelligent responses to those differences. As a teenage reader, I simply took this fact for granted as part of the pleasures of reading superhero comics. As a scholar years later, I came to realize that the ability to respond to differences and forge meaningful relationships across them was a capacity, a super-power if you will, that comics could train their readers to exercise, an imaginative skill fit for a truly heterogeneous world.... Recent public dialogue about the rapidly diversifying ranks of superhero comic books have overwhelmingly celebrated the increased racial, gender, sexual, and religious variety of America's greatest fictional heroes. Yet every time a news outlet lauds the major comics companies for introducing a gay superhero, or a Pakistani superhero, or a classically male superhero replaced by a powerful woman, the historian in me thinks, 'but comics were doing that in 1972, so what's the big deal now?' Certainly, one potentially distinct element of today's push for diversity is the range of 'real-world' or identifiable differences comics are willing to name and represent on the comic book page. But in writing The New Mutants, I came to the conclusion that without an underlying democratic ethos or worldview, such real-world differences have little meaning."

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From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the blog, Hans Teerds discusses how action and interaction both relate to the public space but how they differ significantly in where and how they occur in the world in the Quote of the Week. Horace reflects on how we can all live life to its fullest in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we realize the types of affairs conducted in the intimate kitchens of communist systems in this week's Library feature.