Amor Mundi 4/19/15

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.

Intelligence and Inhumanity

Director of the FBI James B. Comey requires his agents to visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. He explains why in a speech he gave on Holocaust Remembrance Day this past week. "The Holocaust was, as I said, the most horrific display in world history of inhumanity. But it was also the most horrific display in world history of our humanity, of our capacity for evil and for moral surrender. And that second significance is the reason I require every new FBI special agent and intelligence analyst to go to the Holocaust Museum. Naturally, I want them to learn about abuse of authority on a breathtaking scale. But I want them to confront something more painful and more dangerous: I want them to see humanity and what we are capable of. I want them to see that, although this slaughter was led by sick and evil people, those sick and evil leaders were joined by, and followed by, people who loved their families, took soup to a sick neighbor, went to church and gave to charity. Good people helped murder millions. And that's the most frightening lesson of all--that our very humanity made us capable of, even susceptible to, surrendering our individual moral authority to the group, where it can be hijacked by evil. Of being so cowed by those in power. Of convincing ourselves of nearly anything." If Comey doesn't mention Arendt's thesis concerning the banality of evil, the resonances are clear. It might be worth noting that while Arendt would agree with Comey about the need to fight both sick and evil leaders and their normal followers, she had serious reservations about doing so through spying and surveillance.  

Privacy and Individualism

You have no privacy. Get over it. Such sentiments are now cliché and represent the sense of many. Both the government and corporations offer security and convenience in return for our most intimate information, and over and over we provide that information. While many bemoan the loss of privacy, pitifully few take any actions to protect their privacy. Which raises the question: "Why Does Privacy Matter?" This is the question we will ask at the Hannah Arendt Center's 8^th Annual Conference from Oct. 15-16, 2015. David Brooks offers one answer. "Privacy is important to the development of full individuals because there has to be an interior zone within each person that other people don't see. There has to be a zone where half-formed thoughts and delicate emotions can grow and evolve, without being exposed to the harsh glare of public judgment. There has to be a place where you can be free to develop ideas and convictions away from the pressure to conform. There has to be a spot where you are only yourself and can define yourself. Privacy is important to families and friendships because there has to be a zone where you can be fully known. There has to be a private space where you can share your doubts and secrets and expose your weaknesses with the expectation that you will still be loved and forgiven and supported. Privacy is important for communities because there has to be a space where people with common affiliations can develop bonds of affection and trust. There has to be a boundary between us and them. Within that boundary, you look out for each other; you rally to support each other; you cut each other some slack; you share fierce common loyalties."

Genre and Futurity

Virginia Jackson considers the work of critic Lauren Berlant and in the process wonders what criticism means for us now and what genre might mean for us in the future: "Berlant wants that recognition to mean that genres can become the vehicles of social change, or at least of degrees of adjustment. She can skate the outlines of received genres with more precision than any of us, but she also wants to make those boundaries turn out toward a utopian horizon where the barriers between us may not exactly fall but will be illuminated as shared in what Berlant likes to call 'the history of the present.' As she said recently in an interview on the 'Society and Space' blog (as an old friend of mine once said, Berlant 'has a lot of language,' so the interview is a good genre for her, and the blogosphere a good generic medium, since so much of the language she has so much of can overflow and circulate there), 'it's never about shaming people's objects, it's always about creating better and better objects. It's always about creating better worlds, making it possible for us to think in more and different kinds of ways about how we relationally can move through life.' If for Arnold the function of criticism at the present time was to help us agree to be mutually and soberly bummed out, to move through life in a shared state of exile from literary scenes of fulfillment, distinguished only by our cultivated taste for more such disappointments, for Berlant the function of criticism at the present time is to create better worlds, worlds in which genres are not settled states of common disappointment and classed distinction in the experience and expression of that disappointment, but are instead signs and figures for shared world making."

Not Worth The...

Tim Parks considers the relationship between literature and the paper that it's printed on: "With the arrival of print in the late fifteenth century, it was suddenly possible to start thinking of a mass audience; 20 million books had been printed in Europe by 1500. Yet it was the printing shops--often more than one if a book was popular--rather than the authors, who made the money. You might write out of a passion to get your ideas around, or out of megalomania--never a condition to be underestimated where writers are concerned--but there was still no steady money to be had producing writing of whatever kind. In economic terms, it was hardly worth insisting you were the author of a text, hence the anonymous book was rather more common than it is today. Meantime, with this new possibility of printing so many books it made sense to start thinking of all those people who didn't know Latin. The switch to writing in the vernacular had begun; this meant that, though more copies were being sold, most books were now trapped inside their language community. There were scholars capable of translating of course, and a book that made a big impression in one country would eventually be translated into another. But it took time, and it wouldn't happen if a book didn't impress in its original language. Nor for the most part were these translators under contract with publishers. Initially, they were simply scholars who translated what they were interested in and what they believed was worth disseminating. Think of that."

Bankspeak

Franco Moretti and Dominique Pestre have a fascinating essay in the New Left Review that analyzes the important changes in vocabulary and grammar used by the World Bank in its Annual Reports from the 1960s to the present. Moretti and Pestre find significant shifts, noting a move from concrete nouns like "loans," "development," and "power" to abstract and technical nouns like "fair value," "portfolio," "derivative," "accrual," "equity," "hedging," "liquidity" and "liabilities." They trace the rise of what they call with a nod to Orwell "bankspeak." "Aside from individual words, it's the nature of the Bank's language that is changing: becoming more abstract, more distant from concrete social life; a technical code, detached from everyday communication and pared down to the economic factors crucial to the repayment of the debt. Solutions are disengaged from any specificity: they are the same for everybody, everywhere. Faced with the potentially devastating consequences of default, the Bank's chief objective is no longer development, but, more simply, the rescue of private lenders (Harpagon: 'My casket! My casket!'). The banker must be saved before the client: doubts have disappeared, and the Bank's core beliefs are hammered home over and over again: the economy must be strengthened by making it leaner; the public sector must be restructured to create favourable conditions for private business and the market; the state must shrink and become more efficient. Such 'solutions' transcend the need to respond to the debt crisis: they aim at social transformation through the return to an uncompromising liberalism."

Democracy And the Monopoly On Force

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