Amor Mundi 2/14/16

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.

Let 'er Rip

To all those "adults" in the press and the chattering classes who are telling kids who "feel the Bern" to grow up, Holly Wood has something she'd like to share: "If Millennials are coming out in droves to support Bernie Sanders, it's not because we are tripping balls on Geritol. No, Sanders's clever strategy of shouting the exact same thing for 40 years simply strikes a chord among the growing number of us who now agree: Washington is bought. And every time Goldman Sachs buys another million-dollar slice of the next American presidency, we can't help but drop the needle onto Bernie's broken record: The economy is rigged. Democracy is corrupted. The billionaires are on the warpath. Sanders has split the party with hits like these, a catchy stream of pessimistic populism. Behind this arthritic Pied Piper, the youth rally, brandishing red-lettered signs reading 'MONEYLENDERS OUT.' If you ask them, they'll tell you there's a special place in Hell for war criminals who launch hedge funds.... If anything concerns me at this pivotal moment, it's not the revolutionary tremors of the youth. Given the Great American Trash Fire we have inherited, this rebellion strikes me as exceedingly reasonable. Pick a crisis, America: Child poverty? Inexcusable. Medical debt? Immoral. For-profit prison? Medieval. Climate change? Apocalyptic. The Middle East is our Vietnam. Flint, the canary in our coal mine. Tamir Rice, our martyred saint. This place is a mess. We're due for a hard rain. If I am alarmed, it is by the profound languor of the comfortable. What fresh hell must we find ourselves in before those who've appointed themselves to lead our thoughts admit that we are in flames? As I see it, to counsel realism when the reality is f--ked is to counsel an adherence to f--kery. Under conditions as distressing as these, acquiescence is absurd. When your nation gets classified as a Class D structure fire, I believe the only wise course is to lose your sh-t."

Truth to the Party

For all those "adults" moaning about the unhinged popularity of Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson has something he'd like to say. "Not everyone finds it funny. On my street in Northwest Washington, D.C., there's never been anyone as unpopular as Trump. The Democrats assume he's a bigot, pandering to the morons out there in the great dark space between Georgetown and Brentwood. The Republicans (those relatively few who live here) fully agree with that assessment, and they hate him even more. They sense Trump is a threat to them personally, to their legitimacy and their livelihoods. Idi Amin would get a warmer reception in our dog park. I understand it of course. And, except in those moments when the self-righteous silliness of rich people overwhelms me and I feel like moving to Maine, I can see their points, some of them anyway. Trump might not be my first choice for president. I'm not even convinced he really wants the job. He's smart enough to know it would be tough for him to govern. But just because Trump is an imperfect candidate doesn't mean his candidacy can't be instructive. Trump could teach Republicans in Washington a lot if only they stopped posturing long enough to watch carefully.... It turns out the GOP wasn't simply out of touch with its voters; the party had no idea who its voters were or what they believed. For decades, party leaders and intellectuals imagined that most Republicans were broadly libertarian on economics and basically neoconservative on foreign policy. That may sound absurd now, after Trump has attacked nearly the entire Republican catechism (he savaged the Iraq War and hedge fund managers in the same debate) and been greatly rewarded for it, but that was the assumption the GOP brain trust operated under. They had no way of knowing otherwise. The only Republicans they talked to read the Wall Street Journal too. On immigration policy, party elders were caught completely by surprise. Even canny operators like Ted Cruz didn't appreciate the depth of voter anger on the subject. And why would they? If you live in an affluent ZIP code, it's hard to see a downside to mass low-wage immigration. Your kids don't go to public school. You don't take the bus or use the emergency room for health care. No immigrant is competing for your job. (The day Hondurans start getting hired as green energy lobbyists is the day my neighbors become nativists.) Plus, you get cheap servants, and get to feel welcoming and virtuous while paying them less per hour than your kids make at a summer job on Nantucket. It's all good. Apart from his line about Mexican rapists early in the campaign, Trump hasn't said anything especially shocking about immigration. Control the border, deport lawbreakers, try not to admit violent criminals--these are the ravings of a Nazi? This is the 'ghost of George Wallace' that a Politico piece described last August? A lot of Republican leaders think so. No wonder their voters are rebelling."

The Hunt for Hypocrites

This is the most exciting presidential primary season in a generation. Six short months back, we were resigned to the drumbeat of the dynasties. No doubt, Hillary Clinton is the most experienced and qualified candidate for President in decades. And Jeb Bush seems earnest, polished, and smart. But the prospect of choosing between a third Bush or a second Clinton was simply demeaning to democracy. Sadly, it seemed we had no choice. Oh how things have changed. Ted Cruz just became the first Latino candidate to win a major state primary or caucus. Bernie Sanders became the first Jewish American to win a primary. All of this is promising. But nothing comes close to excitement generated by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

Both Sanders and Trump style themselves truthtellers. That does not mean they don't lie or deceive. Trump seems incapable of dealing with facts and repeats falsehoods with the conviction of someone sure in his power to make fiction into reality. And Sanders is offering up a "plan" to raise the share of government spending in our economy from 21% to over 40%, a shift so radical that he either is deceptive in trumpeting it as a plan or he is delusional in believing in his power to bring about the revolution that would make it possible. But such untruths are the bread and butter of politics. No, in styling themselves truthtellers, both Sanders and Trump allude to another kind of truth. They are saying that they speak from conviction. Trump because he is self-funded and Sanders because he refuses to take Super PAC money and has been saying the same thing for 40 years. Both insist that they speak the truth that is in their hearts, and this separates them from Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton who speak the interests of their donors on Wall Street and K Street.

The appeal in truthtelling is that it speaks from the heart; it is founded upon the fear of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, as Hannah Arendt writes, is based upon the Greek word for "play-actor." The hypocrite "falsely pretends to virtue." He or she "plays a role as consistently as the actor in the play who also must identify himself with his role." What distinguishes the hypocrite is that his or her duplicity "boomerangs back upon himself, and he is no less a victim of his mendacity than those whom he set out to deceive. Psychologically speaking, one may say that the hypocrite is too ambitious; not only does he want to appear virtuous before others, he wants to convince himself." The hypocrite, in convincing himself of his goodness, populates the world with "illusions and lying phantoms" and expunges from the world the incorruptible self, "the only core of integrity from which true appearance could arise again." This is why Arendt calls the hypocrite "rotten to the core" and says of revolutions that they look like "the explosion of an uncorrupted and incorruptible inner core through an outward shell of decay and odorous decreptitude." What revolutionaries promise, above all, is to tear "the mask of hypocrisy off the face" of a corrupt society, to tear "the façade of corruption down" and expose "behind it the unspoiled, honest face of the people."

Arendt worries, however, that the "hunt for hypocrites" and the desire to unmask the hypocrite "would leave nothing behind the mask." What those truthtellers and revolutionaries who would unmask the hypocrites forget, Arendt writes, is that all persons appear in public wearing a mask. The word "person" from the Latin "persona" means that which sounds through a mask. The Roman "person" was a citizen, someone granted the public mask of citizenship and thus someone in whom the law sounded through. To appear unmasked is to appear naked, exposed in one's raw humanity--someone reduced to a biological or zoological body without any human qualities. In short, the hunt for hypocrites may not emancipate citizens, but it might reduce all citizens to mere natural humans, shorn of the "protecting mask of a legal personality."  

The hunt for hypocrites is a symptom of a corrupt society, and there is a reason that the discourse of hypocrisy is so powerful today. Trump and Sanders both are mobilizing the charge of hypocrisy with justification; there is a reason it is proving effective. But the hunt for hypocrites is a dangerous game, not least because no one can stand to have their private motives exposed to the light of day. Even more dangerous, however, is that the hatred of hypocrisy idealizes a kind of 'natural' person, someone who is "nothing behind the mask." Such a nothing, Arendt argues, may help root out deception, but it also obliterates all truth, insofar as truth too can only sound through a mask. --RB

The HAC Is Hiring a Media Coordinator

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College is looking for a dependable, hard-working part-time Media Coordinator (20 to 25 hours/week) who can supervise the ongoing evolution of the Center's impact and media presence, both online and in print. While no deep knowledge of Hannah Arendt is required, we seek someone passionate about the power of ideas to provoke thinking and elevate our public discourse. This job may be done remotely, but the Media Coordinator will need to be on campus at Bard College to assist with major events 2-3 times per year. 

Hearing Einstein's Black Holes

Nicola Twilley in the New Yorker does as well as anyone in trying to explain what a gravitational wave is and how it was discovered. "[Rainer] Weiss's detection method was altogether different from Weber's. His first insight was to make the observatory 'L'-shaped. Picture two people lying on the floor, their heads touching, their bodies forming a right angle. When a gravitational wave passes through them, one person will grow taller while the other shrinks; a moment later, the opposite will happen. As the wave expands space-time in one direction, it necessarily compresses it in the other. Weiss's instrument would gauge the difference between these two fluctuating lengths, and it would do so on a gigantic scale, using miles of steel tubing. 'I wasn't going to be detecting anything on my tabletop,' he said. To achieve the necessary precision of measurement, Weiss suggested using light as a ruler. He imagined putting a laser in the crook of the 'L.' It would send a beam down the length of each tube, which a mirror at the other end would reflect back. The speed of light in a vacuum is constant, so as long as the tubes were cleared of air and other particles the beams would recombine at the crook in synchrony--unless a gravitational wave happened to pass through. In that case, the distance between the mirrors and the laser would change slightly. Since one beam would now be covering a shorter distance than its twin, they would no longer be in lockstep by the time they got back. The greater the mismatch, the stronger the wave. Such an instrument would need to be thousands of times more sensitive than any previous device, and it would require delicate tuning in order to extract a signal of vanishing weakness from the planet's omnipresent din."

Work Harder, Be Better

Gillian B. White in The Atlantic writes about new research confirming what many have long known: "For decades, black parents have told their children that in order to succeed despite racial discrimination, they need to be 'twice as good': twice as smart, twice as dependable, twice as talented. This advice can be found in everything from literature to television shows, to day-to-day conversation. Now, a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that when it comes to getting and keeping jobs, that notion might be more than just a platitude. There's data that demonstrates the unfortunate reality: Black workers receive extra scrutiny from bosses, which can lead to worse performance reviews, lower wages, and even job loss. The NBER paper, authored by Costas Cavounidis and Kevin Lang, of Boston University, attempts to demonstrate how discrimination factors into company decisions, and creates a feedback loop, resulting in racial gaps in the labor force."

A New Way of Teaching Old Things

Christine Gross-Loh takes a peek into what might be the history classroom of the future: "One of the reasons American children often appear to struggle in history, Bain says, is because their knowledge is primarily assessed through multiple-choice tests. Multiple-choice assessment, by nature, often privileges factual content over historical thinking. 'If you're testing historical content out of context, that might explain why they don't do so well,' Bain says. He advocates embracing the use of narrative--even if that narrative is flawed or one-sided. 'The grand narrative is pejorative to many in the historical profession--people say that it tries to inculcate a particular viewpoint in kids. But having a big picture or story is cognitively critical to historical knowledge.' Similarly, history textbooks appear omniscient and objective, and tend to gloss over competing narratives. But educators say that understanding whose narrative is being told helps students to engage with it; even if it is wrong or they disagree with it, the narrative provides context and a more effective way to learn and remember. 'The argument I make all the time is, it's like if I were to ask someone to assemble a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle without the box-top picture of it. You could of course eventually put it together but the effort to match shapes and colors on each piece would be monumental, and you'd likely give up quite quickly. Such is what happens to many kids in school.'... It's difficult to track down research corroborating the academic benefits of the case method, but anecdotal evidence speaks to its power. Moss tells me he has observed the results of story-based teaching in his classroom. 'People remember cases incredibly well--and often at a level of detail that's almost shocking. Stories stick in the mind, and when you learn history with a focus on particular stories it's much easier to remember the pieces around them.' David Kaufman, a student who took the course last year, says that discussing history through a series of cases allowed the students to 'focus a lot more on the process than on, say, the actual legislative result, which I think was much richer.' It is well known that stories aid learning because of how memory is structured. The cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner wrote of two modes of knowing: paradigmatic and narrative; with the latter, attention and emotion influence the strength of a memory. Stories activate emotion, which helps students stay engaged and remember. They also feed the human need to fit things into a coherent structure in order to make meaning of them."

Excellent Excellence Excels Excellence

Nicholas B. Dirks, Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, sent a letter to the Berkeley community informing them of a "strategic planning process designed to ensure our excellence in the face of continuing financial challenges." Long term changes to preserve excellence include: "Evaluating our workforce in relationship to our changing needs and resources. This will also entail a new mechanism for the monitoring and control of staffing levels"; "Achieving additional revenues through our 'brand,' land, and other assets"; and "the redesign of some of our academic structures. Realignment will ensure that we are excellent in all we choose to do, in our research and in our educational mission." Here is an excerpt of Chancellor Dirk's letter: "Today, we announce a strategic planning process designed to ensure our excellence in the face of continuing financial challenges. This process is comprehensive, encompassing academic and administrative realignment, investment in our fundraising and revenue-generating activities, and the reexamination of all our discretionary expenditures, including athletics and capital costs. ...Accordingly, we are embarking on a comprehensive strategic planning process, the aim of which is to reimagine the fundamental structures and processes of our university. We need to evaluate how best to structure the university so as to maintain, above all, our excellence as an institution. To be sure, ahead of us lie difficult decisions and hard work, but we are fortunate to be taking this on early enough that we have the resources and time necessary to be thoughtful and strategic.... Every aspect of Berkeley's operations and organizational structure will be under consideration. Our decision-making, however, will be strategic. We are identifying areas in which new investments will both produce additional resources and enhance our strength; and we are identifying other areas in which the expenditure of resources may be less critical to our overall excellence and core mission. Some important campus-level initiatives, such as the Berkeley Global Campus and the Undergraduate Initiative, will be entirely supported by philanthropy and external partnerships (aside from small amounts of seed funding).... This endeavor must not be interpreted as an abandonment of our commitment to a public mission nor to our efforts to advocate for increased public funding for higher education. We are fighting to maintain our excellence against those who might equate 'public' with mediocrity, against those who have lost faith in the need for higher education to serve as an engine of social mobility, and against those who no longer believe that university-based inquiry and research have the power to shape our society and economy for the better. What we are engaged in here is a fundamental defense of the concept of the public university, a concept that we must reinvent in order to preserve."

Free Urban Style

Masha Gessen, noting Moscow's recent destruction of almost a hundred buildings housing small businesses, suggests that the tear-downs were as much about style as they were about corruption (and they're definitely about corruption): "The new Russia is not, at present, a fully fledged totalitarian regime--but it increasingly feels like a totalitarian society, with its unanimity on all matters and suspicion of all difference. It wants to look like one too. Back in the eighties, Moscow and other large Soviet cities (with the exception of part of Leningrad) looked empty and orderly. Their avenues were wider than many American highways, with sidewalks the width of a Manhattan street. Their buildings were imperial architecture on steroids, with courtyards the size of a Manhattan block and arches through which you could squeeze a few townhouses. Façades were impenetrable--buildings were often entered through courtyards--and this, combined with the vastness of distances, kept people from clogging the streets. What humans one did see generally looked the same, dressed in basic gray and more gray. The absence of private business kept what passed for commerce looking uniform too. The first legal private commerce consisted of people standing on the sidewalks. In early 1992 Boris Yeltsin issued a decree legalizing the sale of consumer goods by individuals, and some individuals cut the decree out of the newspaper, pinned it to their clothes to ward off police, and went out to procure scarce goods for resale. Foreigners who happened to visit Russia back then will never forget the spectacle of people standing in the street holding out pieces of raw steak or fried chicken--and, perhaps more shockingly, that of others buying these goods. 'Fresh meat, I just got it today!' was the advertising slogan of the era. After a few months, the private traders' assortment grew, along with their sense of security, and they started putting out folding tables for their wares and folding chairs for themselves. Then they started building makeshift structures out of glass, plywood, and aluminum siding. They were eyesores, though still an improvement over the sight of men with raw meat in their hands and a piece of newspaper on their jackets. The structures, known as kiosks, also provided some protection from dirt and weather for both the merchandise and the people who sold it. The sellers could now continue working late into the night... The proliferation of kiosks also brought the city down to human scale. They filled the vast squares and occupied parts of the too-wide sidewalks. They put objects at eye level, filling what had been an eerily empty field of vision. Being a person in Moscow stopped feeling like being a Lilliputian in the land of Gulliver. Over the years, many of the kiosks grew into more permanent structures, often referred to as pavilions. Successful traders erected one- and two-story buildings that connected to the city's power and plumbing infrastructure, and soon those buildings housed mini-marts, cell-phone shops, and cafés. Some of them were still ugly, usually in a bland prefab way. Others, like a pyramid-shaped glass structure in one of the city's most central squares, were ostentatiously ridiculous. A few used scaled-down elements of the architecture of surrounding buildings to serve as attractive bridges between larger-than-life Moscow and its people."

High Score

Alfie Bown gets distracted: "Distracting games and websites appear to be totally useless and nothing more than a complete waste of our precious time. But precisely because these distractions are seen as completely wasteful and useless, they make the mundane work we perform for capitalists seem so much the more 'productive' and 'useful' by contrast. They stimulate a feeling of guilt that sends us back to work eager to make reparations. After we have 'wasted' five minutes on Cookie Clicker, we feel like we are carrying out an act that is both productive and reparative when we return to work afterward. Reporting on a recent study, The Entrepreneur, a business magazine, reported that productivity on CRM (Microsoft's data management server) could be massively increased when workers were allowed to play games. Likewise, the company Snowfly specializes in improving company productivity by employing regulated game use in the workplace. In short, we input data quicker after playing Candy Crush. The idea is the game simply offers a much needed refreshing break, but I think there is more to it than this. By seeming useless and wasteful these distractions not only consolidate our impression that capitalist productivity is comparatively useful and positive, but they also make us feel indebted and keen to make amends. They renew our commitment to capitalist production when we might otherwise be reflecting on how unfulfilling our working conditions are... The usual line would be that a culture of distraction prevents us from concentrating on what is really important and doing truly worthwhile things. This often is nothing more than the age-old generational complaint that young people ought to do something better with their time, and worse, it endorses specific ideas of what 'worthwhile' time expenditure consists of, just as Candy Crush does in the very act of distracting us. A culture of distraction doesn't stop us doing really important things; it makes us believe that there really is something that is really important: capitalist production. Distractions only serve to focus our faith in that myth."

Graphic Violence

Brad Evans and Sean Michael Wilson have created a short account of Arendt's banality of evil, one that is illustrated by Chris Mackenzie. They give a short and schematic account of the Eichmann trial from arrest through judgment and then ask how the banality of evil remains meaningful in the modern world. "Errol Morris' Film 'Standard Operating Procedure' emphasized how these U.S. soldiers were not exceptional but following routine standards. It asked: '...How could American values become so compromised that Abu Ghraib could happen?' This sounds very similar to what was asked of Germany in the Nazi Period.... Again it seems too simple to say such soldiers are crazy or 'bad apples'. Perhaps these problems of cruel acts carried out in positions of power, of following whatever authorities say in blind obedience are still very much with us. Perhaps the banality of evil is something that, in the wrong circumstances, could touch us all."

Featured Events

From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the blog, Ian Storey looks to the Iowa Caucuses to wonder at what point electoral politics is reduced to the manufacture of crisis in the Quote of the Week. Anne Frank reflects on the irrevocable right to have an opinion in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate Arendt's annotations with regards to how trust factors into Locke's Two Treatises of Government in this week's Library feature.