Amor Mundi 5/10/15

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.

Who Watches the Watchers

There is nothing like a terrorist attack to create the political will for a surveillance state. Alissa J. Rubin reports in the New York Times about a new law in France that would empower the French authorities to monitor people in their homes, cars, and private spaces, as well to bug their computers. "The bill, in the works since last year, now goes to the Senate, where it seems likely to pass, having been given new impetus in reaction to the terrorist attacks in and around Paris in January, including at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher grocery, that left 17 people dead. As the authorities struggle to keep up with the hundreds of French citizens who are cycling to and from battlefields in Iraq and Syria to wage jihad--often lured over the Internet--the new steps would give the intelligence services the right to gather potentially unlimited electronic data. The provisions, as currently outlined, would allow them to tap cellphones, read emails and force Internet providers to comply with government requests to sift through virtually all of their subscribers' communications. Among the types of surveillance that the intelligence services would be able to carry out is the bulk collection and analysis of metadata similar to that done by the United States' National Security Agency. The intelligence services could also request a right to put tiny microphones in a room or on objects such as cars or in computers or place antennas to capture telephone conversations or mechanisms that capture text messages. Both French citizens and foreigners could be tapped.... The new law would create a 13-member National Commission to Control Intelligence Techniques, which would be made up of six magistrates from the Council of State and the Court of Appeals, three representatives of the National Assembly and three senators from the upper house of the French Parliament and a technical expert. Any requests to initiate surveillance would have to go through the commission. However, if the commission recommended not to set up the monitoring, it could be overridden by the prime minister." While the Times article implies that France is ramping up its surveillance as the United States is pulling back, the fact is that the French proposal still puts members of the council of state, the French Court of Appeals, the National Assembly, and the French Senate on the panel that must approve surveillance requests. Compare that group of elected and appointed public servants with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the United States, which is comprised of eleven unelected district court judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the United States. This reveals that even if the law is passed in France, at least there would be democratic representatives watching over the watchers.

Pulling the Trigger

In the Columbia Spectator, Columbia University's student newspaper, a letter by members of the Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board calls for trigger warnings before teaching Ovid's Metamorphoses as part of the college's core curriculum. "During the week spent on Ovid's 'Metamorphoses,' the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape throughout the work. However, the student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text. As a result, the student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation. She did not feel safe in the class. When she approached her professor after class, the student said she was essentially dismissed, and her concerns were ignored. Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.... Students need to feel safe in the classroom, and that requires a learning environment that recognizes the multiplicity of their identities." The medicalization of the language around trauma is confusing this issue, which concerns one thing simply: the infantalization of university students and of the adults around them. College, not to mention life, is a space that challenges us to confront shocking as well as inspiring ideas, images, and people. It is not a safe space, and it cannot be if it is to be a space for thinking.

The Days After

Photographer Giles Price was in Nepal before last month's earthquake. His project there has since changed following the natural disaster: "Price photographed Katmandu the morning after the earthquake, assisted by a local reporter named Pradeep Bashyal, who had been with him on Everest. The city is home to more than a million people, and crowds of them had hastily relocated to its open spaces. The quake leveled several centuries-old World Heritage Sites, but many of Katmandu's modern buildings fared comparatively well. Still, the fear of aftershocks was all-consuming--and warranted. The two tectonic plates whose movement caused the disaster were still lurching and fidgeting, trying to get comfortable again. Within days, there would be 60 more quakes of magnitude 4.1 or greater, and scientists project that this residual shaking could continue for years. 'Unfortunately, this is simply what earthquakes do,' one geologist told NPR. Price didn't intend for his two sets of pictures to go together, but somehow they do. Or at least they grind against each other evocatively, like jagged plates, and never exactly settle. In some, people have trekked far outside the stability of civilization to confront the extremity of nature--as hired guides, or voluntarily, for pleasure and at no small expense. Others show people with comparatively little, who had that stability heaved up from underneath them. Here are people daring to live on a mountain. And here is a mountain of debris, where a moment ago people had dared to live."

Hard Labor

Jed Rakoff takes a look at the American prison system and wonders what, if anything, is working: "This mass incarceration--which also includes about 800,000 white and Asian males, as well as over 100,000 women (most of whom committed nonviolent offenses)--is the product of statutes that were enacted, beginning in the 1970s, with the twin purposes of lowering crime rates in general and deterring the drug trade in particular. These laws imposed mandatory minimum terms of imprisonment on many first offenders. They propounded sentencing guidelines that initially mandated, and still recommend, substantial prison terms for many other offenders. And they required lifetime imprisonment for many recidivists. These laws also substantially deprived judges of sentencing discretion and effectively guaranteed imprisonment for many offenders who would have previously received probation or deferred prosecution, or who would have been sent to drug treatment or mental health programs rather than prison. The unavoidable question is whether these laws have succeeded in reducing crime. Certainly crime rates have come down substantially from the very high levels of the 1970s and 1980s that gave rise to them. Overall, crime rates have been cut nearly in half since they reached their peak in 1991, and they are now at levels not seen in many decades. A simple but powerful argument can be made that, by locking up for extended periods the people who are most likely to commit crimes, we have both incapacitated those who would otherwise be recidivists and deterred still others from committing crimes in the first place. But is this true? The honest answer is that we don't know."

What Cartoons Are

In an interview about why he agreed to co-host an event honoring the French humor magazine Charlie Hedbo, Art Spiegelman describes the power of the cartoon: "Cartoons are so much more immediate than prose. They have a visceral power that doesn't require you to slow down, but it does require you to slow down if you want to understand them. They have a deceptive directness that writers can only envy. They deploy the same tools that writers often use: symbolism, irony, metaphor. Cartoons enter your eye in a blink, and can't be unseen after they're seen." Numerous PEN society members boycotted the ceremony honoring Charlie Hedbo for their courage. As my Bard Colleague Neil Gaiman, who stepped in to co-host the event, said, "I was honoured to be invited to host a table. The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are getting an award for courage: They continued putting out their magazine after the offices were firebombed, and the survivors have continued following the murders."

Film and Frailty

Randolph Lewis considers the delicacy with which documentarian Errol Morris handles his subjects: "Though he is sometimes criticized for not pushing hard enough in his interviews, I think Morris is wise to put people in the center of the frame and let them run their mouths. Maybe I'm letting him off too easy, but I appreciate his willingness to let the story speak for itself without excessive punctuation or a melodramatic 60 Minutes-style confrontation, which is sometimes little more than a phony performance of moral outrage in which someone screams 'gotcha.' If Morris doesn't shout, 'Robert McNamara is a self-serving war criminal son-of-a-bitch' in The Fog of War, it's because he doesn't need to. Instead, he lays down plenty of rope for the viewer to hang the former defense secretary for his epic miscalculations, or better yet, to hang the system that elevated this blinkered technocrat to the apex of Cold War power. Or, even better still, the film encourages something more than easy denunciation and moral superiority: It invites a humane regard for McNamara's folly, as if he were a deluded king in Shakespearean tragedy who we can't quite reject outright. Without in any way excusing what McNamara did, Morris shows an awareness of human frailty and contradiction that we often attribute to great novelists."

Whither Industry

Deborah Rudacille takes a look at the effects of the old American industries on the bodies and minds of those who labored in them, and she wonders why we miss them: "Thousands of working-class communities around the country lament the shuttering of blast furnaces, coke ovens, mines and factories. This yearning for a vanishing industrial United States, a place in long, slow decline thanks to globalisation and technological change, has a name--smokestack nostalgia. It is a paradoxical phenomenon, considering the environmental damage and devastating health effects of many of the declining industries. Our forebears worked gruelling shifts in dangerous jobs, inhaling toxic fumes and particulates at work and at home. Many lived in neighbourhoods hemmed in by industries that pumped effluent into rivers, streams and creeks... Few of the steelworkers I've known deny the negative aspects of living and working on the Point, including long-standing racial, class and gender discrimination. Still, they grieve the shuttering of the Sparrows Point works, which provided not just union jobs with generous benefits, but a sense of family and community, identity and self-worth. At a ceremony on 24 November 2014 honouring the legacy and history of Sparrows Point, in advance of the demolition of what was once the largest blast furnace in the western hemisphere, steelworkers described what the Point meant to them. 'My heart will always be in this place. This is hallowed ground,' said Michael Lewis, a third-generation steelworker and union officer. Troy Pritt, another steel worker, read a poem calling the steelworks 'home'."

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