Amor Mundi 2/7/16

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.

Public and Private

The New York Supreme Court recently decided Gifford v. McCarthy, a case that turned on the question of whether a Christian couple can deny a gay couple the right to marry on private land. "Petitioners Cynthia Gifford and Robert Gifford own and operate petitioner Liberty Ridge Farm, LLC, a nearly 100-acre property located in the Town of Schaghticoke, Rensselaer County. Registered as a limited liability corporation, Liberty Ridge is not a member organization, a non-profit organization or a religious entity. In addition to harvesting and selling various crops to the public, Liberty Ridge rents portions of the farm to the public as a venue for, among other things, wedding ceremonies and receptions. It hosts both religious and secular wedding ceremonies on the farm. When providing a venue site, Liberty Ridge offers several wedding-related event services, including transportation of guests within the premises, a light beverage station, decoration and set-up services, flower arrangements and event coordination. Such services are provided primarily by the Giffords themselves, particularly Cynthia Gifford, who serves as the 'event coordinator.' Liberty Ridge also offers food and beverages for wedding receptions through a catering contract and employs catering, kitchen and wait staff for that purpose. In October 2011, respondents Melisa McCarthy and Jennifer McCarthy--a same-sex couple--became engaged to be married. Approximately a year later, Melisa McCarthy spoke with Cynthia Gifford on the telephone concerning Liberty Ridge as a venue for her wedding ceremony and reception. During their conversation, Melisa McCarthy used the female pronoun to refer to her fiance?e, thus indicating that she was engaged to a woman. Cynthia Gifford promptly interjected that there was 'a problem' and that the farm did 'not hold same[-]sex marriages.' In response to Melisa McCarthy's query as to the reason for not allowing same-sex marriages, Cynthia Gifford explained that 'it's a decision that my husband and I have made that that's not what we wanted to have on the farm.' The McCarthys thereafter filed complaints and amended complaints with respondent State Division of Human Rights (hereinafter SDHR) alleging that petitioners engaged in unlawful discriminatory practices based upon sexual orientation."

Specifically, the McCarthys invoked the NY Human Rights Law, the purpose of which is "'to assure that every individual within this state is afforded an equal opportunity to enjoy a full and productive life' by 'eliminat[ing] and prevent[ing] discrimination in employment, in places of public accommodation, resort or amusement, in educational institutions, in public services, in housing accommodations, in commercial space and in credit transactions.'" In finding that the Giffords violated the Mccarthys' human rights, the court ultimately handed down its ruling based upon the definition of a public accommodation. "Executive Law § 292 (9) 'defines "place of public accommodation, resort or amusement" inclusively and illustratively, not specifically, and sets forth an extensive list of examples of places within the statute' .... Such term includes 'establishments dealing with goods or services of any kind' and 'any place where food is sold for consumption on the premises' (Executive Law § 292 [9]). Over the years, the statutory definition has been expanded repeatedly, 'provid[ing] a clear indication that the Legislature used the phrase place of public accommodation "in the broad sense of providing conveniences and services to the public" and that it intended that the definition of place of accommodation should be interpreted liberally.'"

As a matter of NY law, the court appears to be correct. But we do need to ask what such a broad and expanded definition of public accommodation does to the right of privacy and also to the right of free association. The court writes that the Giffords "open Liberty Ridge to the public as a venue for wedding ceremonies and receptions and offer several wedding-related event services in connection therewith." But is there not a difference between someone who opens a hair salon and someone else who once or twice a week cuts people's hair in her kitchen? Hannah Arendt agrees that we have a clear and necessary right to ride buses and sit where we want on public transportation, even if the company that operates the buses or trains is private. For Arendt, "when we are dealing with services that everyone needs in order to pursue his business and lead his life," the business is clearly public, even if privately owned. This includes also the "right to enter hotels and restaurants in business districts." But Arendt argues that not all places of business are public; she writes, "If as a Jew I wish to spend my vacations only in the company of Jews, I cannot see how anyone can reasonably prevent my doing so; just as I seen no reason why other resorts should not cater to a clientele that wishes not to see Jews while on a holiday. There cannot be a 'right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement,' because many of these are in the realm of the purely social where the right to free association, and therefore to discrimination, has greater validity than the principle of equality." The questions Arendt raises are essential if we are going to maintain meaningful rights of both free association and privacy.--RB

Head Coverings

Elif Batuman describes her brief flirtation with wearing a hijab in Turkey: "I found myself thinking about high heels. High heels were painful, and, for me at least, expensive, because they made walking more difficult and I ended up taking more taxis. Yet there were many times when I wore heels to work-related events in New York, specifically because I felt it made people treat me with more consideration. Why, then, would I refuse to wear a head scarf, which brought a similar benefit of social acceptance, without the disadvantage of impeding my ability to stand or walk? And yet, when I thought about leaving the scarf on for the rest of my stay, something about it felt dishonest, almost shameful, as if I were duping people into being kind to me. Those girls who smiled into my eyes--they thought I was like them. The guy who helped me on the bus--he thought I was his sister. At that point, another thought came to me, a kind of fantasy, so foreign that I could barely articulate it even to myself: What if I really did it? What if I wore a scarf not as a disguise but somehow for real? I was thirty-four, and I'd been having a lot of doubts about the direction my life was taking. I had had an abortion the previous year, with some reluctance, and everything--every minor defeat, every sign of unfriendliness--still hurt a little extra. I had never felt so alone, and in a way that seemed suddenly to have been of my design, as if I had chosen this life without realizing it, years earlier, when I set out to become a writer. And now a glimmer appeared before me of a totally different way of being than any I had imagined, a life with clear rules and duties that you followed, in exchange for which you were respected and honored and safe. You had children--not maybe but definitely. You didn't have to worry that your social value was irrevocably tied to your sexual value. You had less freedom, true. But what was so great about freedom? What was so great about being a journalist and going around being a pain in everyone's a--, having people either be suspicious and mean to you or try to use you for their P.R. strategy? Travelling alone, especially as a woman, especially in a patriarchal culture, can be really stressful. It can make you question the most basic priorities around which your life is arranged. Like: Why do I have a job that makes me travel alone? For literature? What's literature?"

To Live Another Day

Adam Thirlwell marvels at Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes's adaptation of The Arabian Nights into a six-hour anthology that is divided into three parts and then divided again within those, built around stories of Portugal's recent depression. It is, as the movie itself tells us, an adaptation of form but not of story: "The Arabian Nights, of course--written and rewritten between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, and translated into French by Antoine Galland at the beginning of the eighteenth century--have nourished many subsequent fictions, from Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq to James Joyce. A reader only needs to remember the celebrated names: Aladdin! Sinbad the Sailor! Or the tale that forms its outermost layer, where the Grand Vizier's daughter Scheherazade tells a story every morning before dawn, to avert her execution by Schahriar, the Sultan driven murderously misogynist on discovering his wife's infidelity. You can derive a sequence of theorems from the original Nights: that storytelling is a matter of life and death, since an execution can be postponed by a story; that a story can be infinitely extended, because any character is capable of beginning a new supernatural tale; and that what might seem a story about the supernatural may also, or in fact, be a story about power. (Money, in the Nights, is always woozy with transformative potential, all sudden multiplications and terrible subtractions.)... One way of talking about power in fiction is to talk about the marvelous, and while the original Nights represents one of literature's most exuberant explorations of what the marvelous might mean, it's a category that perhaps cinema can most fluently investigate--with the absolute materialist authority a film confers on visionary events (like the way in Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955) Inger Borgen seems, very quietly, to rise from the dead). Gomes has his own deadpan way with the supernatural--in his lo-fi filming of Scheherazade in an imaginary seaside Baghdad, or his presentation of a 'wind genie' as a man accidentally trapped in a bird-net. But the true meaning of the marvelous, Gomes seems to be suggesting, is in the way a life is constantly being changed by powers beyond its control or prediction--a system of everyday metamorphosis which is at its most intense in an era of austerity poverty. Not, however, that it must always therefore be a record of defeat. There's a hopeful version of the marvelous too, and it's visible in the final story, 'The Inebriating Chorus of the Chaffinches'--a study of bird-trappers in Lisbon's outer suburbs, living in government housing on the sites of former shanty towns out by the airport. It's very small, almost nothing, but in the miniature actions of cage-cleaning and bird-training, or the way the trappers invent impossible birdsongs on their computers by combining different melodies into a single artificial track, some kind of small-scale, improvised utopia emerges."

Dark Lit

Amy Brady interviews GMH (a pseudonym) and Robert Gehl (a communications professor), who are the editors of the new literary journal Torist, which is digital and accessible only on the dark web: "Reading through The Torist, you probably won't find any reasons for why the writers wouldn't want their identities known. Yes, the pieces share thematic concerns over individual privacy and the consequences of living under government surveillance. But there's nothing illegal about their complaints. In fact, some of the work is quite good. So why are these writers publishing in The Torist, anyway, a magazine accessible by only a fraction of Internet users, many of them presumably surfing the Dark Web for things other than literary discoveries? The whole project seems downright contrary to what most contemporary writers look for in a literary magazine--namely, an audience. With this question and others (so many) in mind, I sought out the editors of The Torist to see if they could shed some light on their literary contribution to the Dark-Web world. Both agreed to chat, mercifully, via clear-web email. The only exposure this luddite has to encrypted online communication is whatever that hacker character Gavin Orsay was up to in the second season of House of Cards (though I did figure out how to download the magazine). As it turns out, both editors are thoughtful proponents of personal privacy and literary art, dedicated as much to asking questions about what's possible in literature as to finding solutions to what they see as massive infringements on human rights. They also have some impressive favorite reads."

We're Watching

While considering filmmaker Laura Poitras's new exhibit on surveillance art, opening this week at the Whitney, Andy Greenberg relates the story of her life under surveillance: "The exhibit is vast and unsettling, ranging from films to documents that can be viewed only through wooden slits to a video expanse of Yemeni sky which visitors are invited to lie beneath. But the most personal parts of the show are documents that lay bare how excruciating life was for Poitras as a target of government surveillance--and how her subsequent paranoia made her the ideal collaborator in Snowden's mission to expose America's surveillance state. First, she's installed a wall of papers that she received in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information lawsuit the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed on her behalf against the FBI. The documents definitively show why Poitras was tracked and repeatedly searched at the US border for years, and even that she was the subject of a grand jury investigation. And second, a book she's publishing to accompany the exhibit includes her journal from the height of that surveillance, recording her first-person experience of becoming a spying subject, along with her inner monologue as she first corresponded with the secret NSA leaker she then knew only as 'Citizenfour.' Poitras says she initially intended to use only a few quotes from her journal in that book. But as she was transcribing it, she 'realized that it was a primary source document about navigating a certain reality,' she says. The finished book, which includes a biographical piece by Guantanamo detainee Lakhdar Boumediene, a photo collection from Ai Weiwei, and a short essay by Snowden on using radio waves from stars to generate random data for encryption, is subtitled 'A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance.' It will be published widely on February 23. 'I've asked people for a long time to reveal a lot in my films,' Poitras says. But telling her own story, even in limited glimpses, 'provides a concrete example of how the process works we don't usually see.' That process, for Poitras, is the experience of being unwittingly ingested into the American surveillance system."

What Digital Does

Richard Lea opens up about the digital novel: "Publisher Anna Gerber isn't trying to kill off the printed book--she'd just like you to spend a bit more time on your mobile. 'We don't really think the point is to change the way we read,' she says, 'but we do like the idea of trying to immerse readers in books on their phones.' Gerber has been pushing at the boundaries of the printed page since she and Britt Iversen founded Visual Editions in 2010, a publisher of mould-breaking books including Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes and Marc Saporta's Composition No 1. Now Visual Editions has teamed up with Google Creative Lab in Sydney to create Editions at Play, a publishing project and online bookstore that sells books that 'cannot be printed', with each one available through Google Play. 'We're trying to make books that are delightful, surprising and completely unprintable,' Gerber says. 'They're not games and they're not apps--they're all built out of HTML--but each one is impossible to envisage on paper.' ...'People like to talk about how physical books have qualities that don't transfer well to digital,' says Iversen. 'We want to show that digital books can have narrative and visual qualities that champion writing but can't be transferred to print. You wouldn't really sit and read a novel while at your desktop would you? You're more likely to curl up on your sofa or armchair and read a book--and you can do that on your phone just as easily as you can with a paperback.' With Editions at Play, Iversen, Gerber and Google are trying to create books that draw people in, so that they might spend an hour with a book on their phone 'in the way they might on Facebook--only to feel better about themselves once they have.'"

Hannah Arendt, the Neighbor

Hilton Obenzinger tells a story of Jane Kinzler and John Jacobs. Jacobs was a campus radical at Columbia in the 1960s. Kinzler, his girlfriend, lived in the same apartment building as Hannah Arendt. According to Kinzler, Jacobs and Arendt formed a unique relationship: "Many times, when John came by the apartment on 109th St and Riverside Drive he would put a tie on his blue work shirt. He would comb his fingers through his long tangled hair and go up a few floors to ring Hannah Arendt's doorbell. He would be gone for an hour or so and come back with his mind on fire, his eyes sparkling, his wild hair seeming to give off sparks. John was already very intense, but after a little time with Hannah Arendt he was electric. The philosopher had very mixed feelings about student revolutionaries, and their move toward more militant protests: she liked the energy of the young, their sheer courage, their 'astounding will to action,' as John quoted her; they were the generation that could imagine worldwide destruction and could hear the ticking of the bomb, yet they had 'supreme confidence in the possibility of change.' She told him that the whole idea of 'a student rebellion almost exclusively inspired by moral considerations certainly belongs among the totally unexpected events of this century.' John thrilled at Arendt's brilliance, and her praise. But Hannah Arendt would also criticize radicals, especially Chairman Mao, and John would argue with her. She was writing on violence and thought the idea that, 'Power grows out of a barrel of gun' was ridiculous. For sure, Marx knew about violence in history, but it was secondary, Arendt would argue; principally, it would be the contradictions within the old society that would bring it down. Mao's words were thoroughly non-Marxist to her. Violence certainly precedes a new society, like labor pains, but it does not cause its birth, she explained. Power comes from the people's support of the institutions of a country, by consent, or withdrawing consent. As John described it, Arendt thought violence is more often useless as a tactic. 'Revolutions are not made,' she said. He puzzled over that."

Featured Events

From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the blog, N. A. J. Taylor observes that if we are to have an Arendtian nuclear theory we must now construct it ourselves in the Quote of the Week. Paul Valery reflects on how man relates to his thoughts in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate the annotations Hannah Arendt made to an anthology of essays on political thought in this week's Library feature.