Amor Mundi 3/30/14
03-31-2014
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.
Jonathan Schell has died. I first read "The Fate of the Earth" as a college freshman in Introduction to Political Theory and it was and is one of those books that forever impacts the young mind. Jim Sleeper, writing in the Yale Daily News, gets to the heart of Schell’s power: “From his work as a correspondent for The New Yorker in the Vietnam War through his rigorous manifesto for nuclear disarmament in "The Fate of the Earth", his magisterial re-thinking of state power and people’s power in “The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People,” and his wry, rigorous assessments of politics for The Nation, Jonathan showed how varied peoples’ democratic aspirations might lead them to address shared global challenges.” The Obituary in the New York Times adds: “With “The Fate of the Earth” Mr. Schell was widely credited with helping rally ordinary citizens around the world to the cause of nuclear disarmament. The book, based on his extensive interviews with members of the scientific community, outlines the likely aftermath of a nuclear war and deconstructs the United States’ long-held rationale for nuclear buildup as a deterrent. “Usually, people wait for things to occur before trying to describe them,” Mr. Schell wrote in the book’s opening section. “But since we cannot afford under any circumstances to let a holocaust occur, we are forced in this one case to become the historians of the future — to chronicle and commit to memory an event that we have never experienced and must never experience.””
Standing on Someone Else's Soil
In an interview, Simon Schama, author of the forthcoming book and public television miniseries "The Story of the Jews," uses early Jewish settlement in America as a way into why he thinks that Jews have often been cast as outsiders: "You know, Jews come to Newport, they come to New Amsterdam, where they run into Dutch anti-Semites immediately. One of them, at least — Peter Stuyvesant, the governor. But they also come to Newport in the middle of the 17th century. And Newport is significant in Rhode Island because Providence colony is founded by Roger Williams. And Roger Williams is a kind of fierce Christian of the kind of radical — in 17th-century terms — left. But his view is that there is no church that is not corrupt and imperfect. Therefore, no good Christian is ever entitled to form a government [or] entitled to bar anybody else’s worship. That includes American Indians, and it certainly includes the Jews. And there’s an incredible spark of fire of toleration that begins in New England. And Roger Williams is himself a refugee from persecution, from Puritan Massachusetts. But the crucial big point to make is that Jews have had a hard time when nations and nation-states have founded themselves on myths about soil, blood and tribe."
Don't Get Older: or Don't Show It
Noam Scheiber describes the “wakeful nightmare for the lower-middle-aged” that has taken over the world of technology. The desire for the new, new thing has led to disdain for age; “famed V.C. Vinod Khosla told a conference that “people over forty-five basically die in terms of new ideas.” The value of experience and the wisdom of age or even of middle are scorned when everyone walks around with encyclopedias and instruction manuals in our pockets. The result: “Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America. Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don’t think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its “careers” page: “We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.””
You and I Will Die Unbelievers, Tied to the Tracks of the Train
Kenan Malik wonders how non-believers can appreciate sacred art. Perhaps, he says, the godless can understand it as "an exploration of what it means to be human; what it is to be human not in the here and now, not in our immediacy, nor merely in our physicality, but in a more transcendental sense. It is a sense that is often difficult to capture in a purely propositional form, but one that we seek to grasp through art or music or poetry. Transcendence does not, however, necessarily have to be understood in a religious fashion, solely in relation to some concept of the divine. It is rather a recognition that our humanness is invested not simply in our existence as individuals or as physical beings but also in our collective existence as social beings and in our ability, as social beings, to rise above our individual physical selves and to see ourselves as part of a larger project, to project onto the world, and onto human life, a meaning or purpose that exists only because we as human beings create it."
The Niemen Journalism lab has the straight scoop about the algorithm, written by Ken Scwhenke, that wrote the first story about last week's West Coast earthquake. Although computer programs like Schwenke's may be able to take over journalism's function as a source of initial news (that is, a notice that something is happening,) it seems unlikely that they will be able to take over one of its more sophisticated functions, which is to help people situate themselves in the world rather than merely know what's going on in it.
In an interview, Kate Beaton, the cartoonist responsible for the history and literature web comic Hark A Vagrant!, talks about how her comics, perhaps best described as academic parody, can be useful for teachers and students: "Oh yes, all the time! That’s the best! It’s so flattering—but I get it, the comics are a good icebreaker. If you are laughing at something, you already like it, and want to know more. If they’re laughing, they’re learning, who doesn’t want to be in on the joke? You can’t take my comics at face value, but you can ask, ‘What’s going on here? What’s this all about?’ Then your teacher gets down to brass tacks."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, our Quote of the Week comes from Arendt Center Research Associate, Thomas Wild, who looks at the close friendship between Hannah Arendt and Alfred Kazin who bonded over literature, writers, and the power of the written word.