Amor Mundi 2/28/16

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.

Could It Happen Here?

In an essay in the Washington Post, Danielle Allen invokes Hannah Arendt to suggest that we must speak out about the danger Donald Trump poses to constitutional democracy. "Like any number of us raised in the late 20th century, I have spent my life perplexed about exactly how Hitler could have come to power in Germany. Watching Donald Trump's rise, I now understand. Leave aside whether a direct comparison of Trump to Hitler is accurate. That is not my point. My point rather is about how a demagogic opportunist can exploit a divided country. To understand the rise of Hitler and the spread of Nazism, I have generally relied on the German-Jewish émigré philosopher Hannah Arendt and her arguments about the banality of evil. Somehow people can understand themselves as 'just doing their job,' yet act as cogs in the wheel of a murderous machine. Arendt also offered a second answer in a small but powerful book called 'Men in Dark Times.' In this book, she described all those who thought that Hitler's rise was a terrible thing but chose 'internal exile,' or staying invisible and out of the way as their strategy for coping with the situation. They knew evil was evil, but they too facilitated it, by departing from the battlefield out of a sense of hopelessness." Allen knows that Trump is not the same as Hitler. Hitler had written an ideological and racist book calling for the rise of an Aryan nation and the expulsion and murder of the Jews; Trump, on the other hand, is seemingly non-ideological. But Allen does rightly see that Trump is dangerous insofar as he seems to have no respect for limits to his power, whether those limits are civil or constitutional. "Donald Trump has no respect for the basic rights that are the foundation of constitutional democracy, nor for the requirements of decency necessary to sustain democratic citizenship. Nor can any democracy survive without an expectation that the people require reasonable arguments that bring the truth to light, and Trump has nothing but contempt for our intelligence." As first Chris Christie and now Maine Governor Paul LePage endorse Trump, it is clear that Trump is breaking down the resistance of the Republican establishment. While evangelical leaders are on record saying they will not support Trump if he is the nominee, establishment Republicans seem prepared to accept Trump as their standard-bearer.

Allen's essay was met with a barrage of ugliness on social media. In an update Allen published, she reproduces dozens of tweets she received. Everyone should read these tweets simply to recognize the racist and anti-Semitic boorishness pulsing within Donald Trumps supporters--if not Trump himself. One tweet from DMT Trump Wizard goes "You cannot stop Donald Trump. White people are going to stop hating themselves and there is nothing you can do to stop it." Another from War & Peace (an insult to Tolstoy) reads: "Jewish ancestry? 40%? 50%?" Another says, "You would be working a McDonalds if it wasn't for affirmative action. What exactly are you bringing to the country?" The same person then attaches an anti-Semitic cartoon and writes, "I smell a jew." Someone named Paul Harris asks, "why do third world people come to European ancestry countries to paracite of us? Why has the third world never created anything." An exceedingly angry racist named Theodore Bundy sends multiple tweets including: "imagine, no more affirmative action. How will you get a job? This PC shit has destroyed a once great nation." One writes, "My jewdar just went beep. Does the affirmative action negress have a bit of jew inside. No breaks on Trump train. Soz." Aristides writes, "I can't wait to see the look on your primitive monkey faces when the GOD-EMPEROR takes his throne. Go back to Africa posthaste." And adds: "Wow, you are one butt-ugly n---er. Your face makes me sick to my stomach. Please gas yourself." Ok, these tweets go on and on. Many are worse and call for Allen's death. You should read them also to remind yourselves that speaking publicly takes courage.

Is Donald Trump racist and anti-Semitic? One can't blame Trump or anyone for the opinions of his supporters. But when so many Trump supporters are so vocally racist and anti-Semitic, Trump owes it to himself and to the American people to publicly reject those vile opinions. That is a what someone must do if he aspires to be the leader of a multi-ethic and pluralistic democratic country. Not only has Trump not done so, but he has fanned the flames. Twice now he has retweeted tweets from members of white-supremacist groups, one of whose Twitter handle is @WhiteGenocideTM and whose profile tagline reads, "Get the f--- out of my country." Trump's attacks on President Obama, his birther comments, his questioning of Ted Cruz's citizenship, and his demonizing of Mexicans and Muslims have contributed to an atmosphere of hate that enables such racial attacks.

None of this means Trump himself is racist. He certainly does not pedal a consistent ideological racism of supremacy as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did. There is little to suggest that Trump would attack the laws guaranteeing equal voting rights or question the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Rather, Trump is responding at least in part to decades of repressed anger where many Americans have been told they can not speak their minds, express their feelings, or state their opinion. A dishonest and calculated political correctness has enabled Trump to appear as a liberator by unleashing a pent-up anger that is a result of a political culture that has prohibited people from saying what they believe. One real and meaningful attraction of Trump's campaign is his refusal to self-censor and his embrace of an honest if also low-class and boorish racial anger. Trump as President would likely make the USA a less tolerant and more hateful and angry country. Such a cultural transformation very well could happen here, and it is, of course, dangerous.

But the real danger of a Trump presidency may lie elsewhere. After Trump's victory in Nevada, he hammered home his main them: Grab as much as you can. "Now we're going to get greedy for the United States we're going to grab and grab and grab. We're going to bring in so much money and so much everything. We're going to make America great again, folks, I'm telling you folks we're going to make America great again." What Trump hates is politics, the collective striving after common ideals of democracy and justice. What he loves about America is simply its promise of abundance, not its tradition of self-government. Freedom for Trump is not the Arendtian freedom to act and speak in public in ways that matter; it is the freedom to get rich and plaster one's name on buildings and reality television shows.

Alongside Trump's contempt for politics is his dismissal of the rule of law. He threatens to ban Muslims, to bring back water boarding, and to kill family members of the Islamic State, which are all violations of either international or U.S. Law. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said recently on "Real Time With Bill Maher" that the US military should and would refuse to carry out such illegal orders if Trump as Commander-in-Chief were to issue them. Trump's contempt for the law and all political and civil limits is part and parcel of his disdain for politics and all limits on what works.

No doubt Trump's pragmatic and greedy America is part of America. But it is not the whole or even the best of the American tradition, a tradition that has its roots in Alexander Hamilton's expressed hope in the first of the Federalist Papers that the United States would stand not for economic liberty but for political freedom: "It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, to decide by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force." As corrupt as our political system is, the answer cannot be to simply demean and dismiss the nobility of our democratic and constitutional traditions. The danger Trump truly poses is that he seems to care only about the idea of America as a land of milk and honey and to have forgotten or simply dismissed the idea of America as a land of political liberty. And he seems ready, able, and willing to tear down our corrupt political structures with no plan or idea of how they would be rebuilt or re-imagined. Creative destruction is a classic axiom of capitalist innovation, but it rarely works so well in democratic politics. --RB

Make 'em Laugh

Mark Steyn comes as close to anyone in understanding both the appeal and the danger Trump represents. In a long and rambling account of his experience attending a Trump rally in Burlington, Vermont, Steyn writes: "And then the announcement: 'Ladies and gentlemen, the next President of the United States, Donald J Trump...' ~THE SHOW: He's very good at this. Very good. On the same day as Trump's speech, Peter Shumlin, the colorless dullard serving as Vermont's governor, came to the State House in Montpelier to deliver his 'State of the State' address. He required two prompters so he could do the Obama swivel-head like a guy with good seats at Wimbledon following the world's slowest centre-court rally. Two prompters! In the Vermont legislature! And for the same old generic boilerplate you forget as soon as you've heard it. Trump has no prompters. He walks out, pulls a couple of pieces of folded paper from his pocket, and then starts talking. Somewhere in there is the germ of a stump speech, but it would bore him to do the same poll-tested focus-grouped thing night after night, so he basically riffs on whatever's on his mind. This can lead to some odd juxtapositions: One minute he's talking about the Iran deal, the next he detours into how Macy's stock is in the toilet since they dumped Trump ties. But in a strange way it all hangs together: It's both a political speech, and a simultaneous running commentary on his own campaign. It's also hilarious. I've seen no end of really mediocre shows at the Flynn in the last quarter-century, and I would have to account this the best night's entertainment I've had there with the exception of the great jazz singer Dianne Reeves a few years back. He's way funnier than half the stand-up acts I've seen at the Juste pour rires comedy festival a couple of hours north in Montreal. And I can guarantee that he was funnier than any of the guys trying their hand at Trump Improv night at the Vermont Comedy Club a couple of blocks away. He has a natural comic timing. Just to be non-partisan about this, the other day I was listening to Obama's gun-control photo-op at the White House, and he thanked Gabby Giffords, by explaining that her husband Mark's brother is an astronaut in outer space and he'd called just before Mark's last meeting at the White House but, not wishing to disturb the President, Mark didn't pick up. 'Which made me feel kind of bad,' said the President. 'That's a long-distance call.' As I was driving along, I remember thinking how brilliantly Obama delivered that line. He's not usually generous to others and he's too thin-skinned to be self-deprecating with respect to himself, but, when he wants to get laughs, he knows how to do it. Trump's is a different style: He's looser, and more freewheeling. He's not like Jeb - he doesn't need writers, and scripted lines; he has a natural instinct for where the comedy lies. He has a zest for the comedy of life. To be sure, some of the gags can be a little - what's the word? - mean-spirited. The performance was interrupted by knots of protesters. 'Throw 'em out!' barked Trump, after the first chants broke out. The second time it happened, he watched one of the security guys carefully picking up the heckler's coat. 'Confiscate their coats,' deadpanned Trump. 'It's ten below zero outside.' Third time it happened, he extended his coat riff: 'We'll mail them back to them in a couple of weeks.' On MSNBC, they apparently had a discussion on how Trump could be so outrageous as to demand the confiscation of private property. But in showbusiness this is what is known as a 'joke'. And in the theatre it lands: everyone's laughing and having a ball. That's the point. I think it would help if every member of the pundit class had to attend a Trump rally before cranking out the usual shtick about how he's tapping into what Jeb called 'angst and anger'. Yes, Trump supporters are indignant (and right to be) about the bipartisan cartel's erasure of the southern border and their preference for unskilled Third World labor over their own citizenry, but 'anger' is not the defining quality of a Trump night out. The candidate is clearly having the time of his life, and that's infectious, which is why his supporters are having a good time, too. Had Mitt campaigned like this, he'd be president. But he had no ability to connect with voters. Nor does Jeb ('I've been endorsed by another 27 has-beens') Bush."

Brace Yourselves, America. It's Really Happening.

Matt Taibbi sees the appeal and the danger in Trump and worries he may well win. "In Manchester, a protester barely even manages to say a word before disappearing under a blanket of angry boos: 'Trump! Trump! Trump!' It's a scene straight out of Freaks. In a Trump presidency, there will be free tar and feathers provided at the executive's every public address. It's a few minutes after that when a woman in the crowd shouts that Ted Cruz is a p-ssy. She will later tell a journalist she supports Trump because his balls are the size of 'watermelons,' while his opponents' balls are more like 'grapes' or 'raisins.' Trump's balls are unaware of this, but he instinctively likes her comment and decides to go into headline-making mode. 'I never expect to hear that from you again!' he says, grinning. 'She said he's a p-ssy. That's terrible." Then, theatrically, he turns his back to the crowd. As the 500 or so reporters in attendance scramble to instantly make this the most important piece of news in the world--in less than a year Trump has succeeded in turning the USA into a massive high school--the candidate beams. What's he got to be insecure about? The American electoral system is opening before him like a flower. In person, you can't miss it: The same way Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, Donald on the stump can see his future. The pundits don't want to admit it, but it's sitting there in plain view, 12 moves ahead, like a chess game already won: President Donald Trump. A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible, but absent a dramatic turn of events--an early primary catastrophe, Mike Bloomberg ego-crashing the race, etc.--this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing 11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised. It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go. And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He's way better than average. His pitch is: He's rich, he won't owe anyone anything upon election, and therefore he won't do what both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e., approve rotten/regressive policies that screw ordinary people. He talks, for instance, about the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by insurance companies, an atrocity dating back more than half a century, to the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945. This law, sponsored by one of the most notorious legislators in our history (Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran was thought to be the inspiration for the corrupt Sen. Pat Geary in The Godfather II), allows insurance companies to share information and collude to divvy up markets. Trump may travel to campaign stops on his own plane, but his speeches are increasingly populist as he rails against money in politics, big pharma and insurance companies. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats made a serious effort to overturn this indefensible loophole during the debate over the Affordable Care Act. Trump pounds home this theme in his speeches, explaining things from his perspective as an employer. 'The insurance companies,' he says, 'they'd rather have monopolies in each state than hundreds of companies going all over the place bidding ... It's so hard for me to make deals ... because I can't get bids.' He goes on to explain that prices would go down if the state-by-state insurance fiefdoms were eliminated, but that's impossible because of the influence of the industry. 'I'm the only one that's self-funding ... Everyone else is taking money from, I call them the bloodsuckers.' Trump isn't lying about any of this."

Crescents

Adam Gopnik mourns the crescent croissant: "Why is a croissant shaped that way, anyway? The first truth is that they are not, necessarily. As veteran visitors to Parisian bakeries know, the superior, all-butter croissants are already commonly articulated as straight pastries--or, at least, as gently sloping ones--while the inferior oil or margarine ones must, by law, be neatly turned in. This sometimes leads those who expect clarity and logic, rather than complexity and self-cancelling entrapment, from French laws to think that the straight croissants are all butter and the curved ones are reliably not. The truth is that a butter croissant can be any shape it chooses, on the general atavistic aristocratic principle that, butter being better, it creates its own realm of privilege. One only wishes that Umberto Eco, whom we sadly lost last week, was still around to parse this issue, because Eco, long before he was king of the airport bookstore, was an emperor of signs, one of the world's leading linguists and semioticians. The underlying logic for the croissant being a crescent, one suspects he would have said, is 'Saussurean,' after the great early-twentieth-century linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who glimpsed the truth that linguistic signs are arbitrary and find their meaning only by being clearly distinguished from other opposing signs. We know 'Monday' only because it doesn't sound or look like 'Sunday.' P. G. Wodehouse, not surprisingly, showed his grasp of this rule when he had one of the Drones, on holiday in France, point out that he had been given a Continental breakfast consisting of 'a roll shaped like a crescent and a roll shaped like a roll.' Without the standard accompanying brioche, there would be no need for the curve; a roll-shaped roll produces a curved one, as 'Sunday' makes 'Monday.' The croissant, in this view, is curved in order to make plain what it isn't as much as what it is. Murkier depths of meaning surely reside here, too, which would have taken Eco's eye to plumb. Doubtless some social historian, a century or so hence, will get a thesis out of examining how, on the very verge of the threatened 'Brexit'--the exit of England, at least, from the European Community--the mass marketers of Britain ostentatiously rejected a form seen as so clearly French that it is a regular part of that ominously named 'Continental' breakfast. Adding an arbitrary national shape to an established one to attempt an entirely English croissant, that future scholar will argue, is an affirmation of refusing to be one with Europe. (The crescent, moreover, is the sign of the Islamic empire, and some damp, suspicious kinds will see meaning in that, too.)"

Bad Habits

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen reads the contemporary literature on habituation--that is, self-help achieved by the ritualisation of certain kinds of virtuous praxis. The topic goes back to Aristotle, and perhaps even farther, but Ratner-Rosenhagen thinks it's missing something these days: "Much of today's habits literature has a contemporary feeling, with its focus on time management, individual productivity, and business success, but the genre has a long history. For millennia, there has been a tradition of august thinkers writing about how healthy habits promote--and unhealthy habits undermine--self-fashioning and moral improvement. The ancient Stoics, for example, sought to understand how perfecting one's reason by making it a habit could be the path to virtue. The Enlightenment psychologist Maine de Biran had a harder time squaring rigorous intellect and habitual practices, contending that 'all that happens exclusively under the sway of habit should lose its authority before the eyes of reason'. Friedrich Nietzsche, too, was fascinated with habits. He had his own übermenschliche work habits, while at the same time he felt grateful to every bit of 'misery and... sickness' that came his way because they gave him 'a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits'. Gertrude Stein couldn't have disagreed more. For Stein, the habits of 'daily island life'--those simple, unglamorous rituals of cleaning, eating, sleeping--were the means by which people who had lived through the savagery and chaos of two world wars could orient themselves with the simple and commonplace. As ever, the habits literature of today promises order in a disordered world, but it also comes with a subtle and significant difference. The most important difference is not the forgotten art of style, though the staccato prose, exclamation points, bland generalisations, and clichéd motivational quotations of today's literature neither stimulate the imagination nor activate the will. Rather, it is the lost promise of habits literature as a form of ethical inquiry and social commentary. Individual improvement has always been the purpose of habits literature, but the genre used to require appraising the society in which the self, and the habits, formed. Historically, thinking about habits without social contexts or ethical consequences was unthinkable. Today it is axiomatic."

Aristotelian Safe Spaces

Charles Duhigg writes about Google's Project Aristotle seeking to understand why some corporate teams work better than others. The answer, it seems, has less to do with intelligence, leadership, or structure and more to do with psychological safety, or what Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a '"shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.'" Psychological safety in the new corporate lingo "'...describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.' When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was 'direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.' That team, researchers estimated, was among Google's accomplished groups. By contrast, another engineer had told the researchers that his 'team leader has poor emotional control.' He added: 'He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car.' That team, researchers presumed, did not perform well. Most of all, employees had talked about how various teams felt. 'And that made a lot of sense to me, maybe because of my experiences at Yale,' Rozovsky said. 'I'd been on some teams that left me feeling totally exhausted and others where I got so much energy from the group.' Rozovsky's study group at Yale was draining because the norms--the fights over leadership, the tendency to critique--put her on guard. Whereas the norms of her case-competition team--enthusiasm for one another's ideas, joking around and having fun--allowed everyone to feel relaxed and energized. For Project Aristotle, research on psychological safety pointed to particular norms that are vital to success. There were other behaviors that seemed important as well--like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google's data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work. 'We had to get people to establish psychologically safe environments,' Rozovsky told me. But it wasn't clear how to do that. 'People here are really busy,' she said. 'We needed clear guidelines.'" Duhigg writes that the rise of group work in Silicon Valley is driven by research showing that profitability and worker satisfaction increase when workers collaborate. What is unremarked is the confluence between the demand for safe spaces in universities and in corporations, which offers a whole new take on the corporatization of the university. --RB

Uncomfortable Learning

Williams College has a student organization that sponsors an "Uncomfortable Learning" lecture series that brings speakers to campus whose views are out of step with the majority opinion on campus. The group made news back in October when it first invited and then--in response to campus opposition--disinvited Suzanne Venker--a conservative woman and author of The War Against Men. Now Robby Soave reports that the group has made news again after a speaker it invited was prohibited from giving his speech by Williams' President Adam Falk. In a statement to campus, Falk writes: "'Today I am taking the extraordinary step of canceling a speech by John Derbyshire, who was to have presented his views here on Monday night. The college didn't invite Derbyshire, but I have made it clear to the students who did that the college will not provide a platform for him. Free speech is a value I hold in extremely high regard. The college has a very long history of encouraging the expression of a range of viewpoints and giving voice to widely differing opinions. We have said we wouldn't cancel speakers or prevent the expression of views except in the most extreme circumstances. In other words: There's a line somewhere, but in our history of hosting events and speeches of all kinds, we hadn't yet found it. We've found the line. Derbyshire, in my opinion, is on the other side of it. Many of his expressions clearly constitute hate speech, and we will not promote such speech on this campus or in our community. We respect--and expect--our students' exploration of ideas, including ones that are very challenging, and we encourage individual choice and decision-making by students. But at times it's our role as educators and administrators to step in and make decisions that are in the best interest of students and our community. This is one of those times.'" Zach Wood, a Williams student who helps run the "Uncomfortable Learning" series, explained his disagreement with Falk: "'I think that President Falk is an analytic and deliberative leader and I respect his decision; however, I sharply disagree with his decision and if I could challenge it, I certainly would. I think his decision to cancel the speaker not only does a disservice to the intellectual character of our institution, but is antithetical to the principles of free speech and intellectual freedom that he has previously claimed to endorse. This decision is evidence of the fact that President Falk has failed to show support for student efforts to instill and promote political tolerance at Williams. I radically disagree with John Derybshire. And he has said offensive, even hateful things about minorities, things that I have a problem with. That is precisely why I was looking forward to taking him to task. If every student does not desire that kind of intellectual challenge, that is perfectly okay. But for President Falk to deny Williams students that opportunity, I believe, is not merely injudicious, but undemocratic and irresponsible.'" As I write this, I am in Saratoga Springs at a two-day retreat on how to talk about difficult questions like race and sex on campus. The conversations here are inspiring. Students come from communities all over the world with meaningfully different values and traditions, and they arrive on campus and have to figure out how to live with and talk to people whose worldviews challenge them. The students I speak with are genuinely curious and want to hear what others have to say. In most cases, then, there is a false debate between hate speech and free speech. It is not the students at Yale or the students at Williams who shut down speech. When free speech is sacrificed, it is not done by students. Rather it is cowardly administrators who fear criticism and don't trust their students. --RB

Our Devices, Our Selves

Cypress Marrs takes a second to think about what Apple's devices are: "This campaign, like so much of Apple's marketing, attempts to render potential anxieties about new computing devices irrelevant. The customer has questions, gut level concerns--how will this device impact their privacy? Their political life? How they interact with other people? How they experience their life? Apple responds to these reservations with a nod and a wink. Its marketing campaigns show individuals using Apple's technologies toward ends that stand in contrast to the reality that consumers fear the devices will bring into being. The devices are not marketed through a catalogue of their functions but rather by conflating their functions with what they may facilitate. To do this, Apple employs our shared symbolic language... As imprecise use of these symbols spreads, it becomes increasingly difficult for individuals to think acutely about the world around them. Likewise, Apple ads are attempts to radically reshape the ways--the symbolic tools--which individuals use to comprehend the world. As personal computing devices become increasingly intimate--as they move from the desk to the book bag, from the pants pocket to the wrist--the symbolic fun-house of Apple's marketing continues to conflate what a device does with what it might do--the device becomes the time taken for a kiss, the appreciation of the skyline, and the revolutionary impulse in an authoritarian state. Such conflations in conjunction with the constant and intimate presence of telecommunication has shrunk the distance between the personal and the public--between an experience and the image of that experience. Taken together, all of this makes it difficult to conceive of ourselves--or even conceive of conceiving of ourselves--in relation to a large and symbolically complex whole."

Setting the Bar Low

Stephen J. Rose defends residential colleges against the threat of MOOCs and online education. But in so doing, Rose makes an argument for what colleges do best that is hardly inspiring and that certainly abandons any notion that college education is about learning to think with and against a tradition of intellectual, scientific, artistic, and humanist inquiry. "Higher education essentially has two functions: First, for those who reside on or near campus, it provides a period of semi-independence and autonomy in a protected environment with many social interactions; and second, it develops the workplace skills of general cognition, ability to learn, task completion, group and organizational skills, and, for many students, a field-specific knowledge base. While Carey does show the limitations of the current system, he falls very short in showing how a MOOC-based system can be scaled up and produce better results in preparing young people to enter and succeed in the labor force.... [I]n virtually all modern, industrialized societies, higher education has become the main path for preparing workers for the new service economy based in offices, health care, and education. The costs of such education in dollars and time are indeed immense--but there is a large payoff for the economy as a whole."

Featured Events

From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the blog, Dawn Herrera Helphand discusses why Bernie Sanders' appeal illustrates how widespread the political sentiments that Hannah Arendt identified as the causes of revolution are in both parties in the Quote of the Week. Marshall McLuhan comments on the power of critical thinking against automatic movement in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We are pleased to announce the first issue of AJPA News, the official newsletter of the American Jewish Peace Archive (AJPA). Finally, we appreciate the annotations Hannah Arendt made to her copy of Montesquieu's "The Spirit of Laws" in this week's Library feature.