Amor Mundi 5/11/14
05-12-2014
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.
Thomas Piketty is not the only Frenchman making waves with a new book about inequality. The Society of Equals by Pierre Rosanvallon was just published in a translation by Arthur Goldhammer with Harvard University Press (the same press that published Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century). Paul Star reviews The Society of Equals in the New York Review of Books. Rosenvallon begins, Star writes, by noting that the return of massive inequality in European and American societies has not been met with real anger or revolutionary unrest. There is, instead, "passive consent to inequality," and, as Rosanvallon writes, "a generalized sense that inequalities have grown 'too large' or even become 'scandalous.'" And yet, that sense "'coexists with tacit acceptance of many specific forms of inequality and with silent resistance to any practical steps to correct them.'" Economic inequality for Rosanvallon is rampant and important, but the widening income gap in and of itself is no longer seen as unjust. As Star writes: "The crisis of equality therefore involves more than widening economic disparities: 'it reflects the collapse of a whole set of old ideas of justice and injustice' and 'must be grasped as a total social fact.'" In other words, Rosanvallon wants to enlarge and transform what we mean when we speak about inequality. He seeks to "provide a comprehensive understanding that would help overcome the general sense of resignation and revive equality as a moral ideal and political project." Read more about Rosanvallon and Star in Roger Berkowitz's Weekend Read.
This week, Damon Linker called Neil Degrasse Tyson, America's most well known scientist, a "philistine" for saying that he had no time for philosophy. Degrasse "proudly proclaims his irritation with 'asking deep questions' that lead to a 'pointless delay in your progress' in tackling 'this whole big world of unknowns out there.' When a scientist encounters someone inclined to think philosophically, his response should be to say, 'I'm moving on, I'm leaving you behind, and you can't even cross the street because you're distracted by deep questions you've asked of yourself. I don't have time for that.'" Linker responds: "If the natural philosophers truly wished to liberate themselves from dogma in all of its forms and live lives of complete intellectual wakefulness and self-awareness, they would need to pose far more searching questions. They would need to begin reflecting on human nature as both a part of and distinct from the wider natural world. They would need to begin examining their own minds and motives, very much including their motives in taking up the pursuit of philosophical knowledge in the first place. Philosophy rightly understood is the mind's rigorous, open-ended, radically undogmatic pursuit of this self-knowledge." As if in response, Michiel Bot writes in response on the Arendt Center blog: "Arendt acknowledges that thinking can lead to license, cynicism, and nihilism through the relativizing of existing values, because 'all critical examinations must go through a stage of at least hypothetically negating accepted opinions and "values" by finding out their implications and tacit assumptions.' However, Arendt's anti-elitist suggestion is that the problem of nihilism is never that too many people think or that people think too much, but rather that people do not think enough."
For Dissent, Kathleen Frydll writes about how data sharing has impacted local law enforcement, making it possible for local officers to search records instantly and effortlessly and thus greatly expanding their ability to enforce coercive measures. One of the biggest examples of data-based law enforcement is "Secure Communities," a partnership among federal, state, and local law enforcement that allows local police officers to check the immigration status of every person they arrest or issue a ticket. Not only the perpetrators but also the victims of crimes can have their names run through the scanner to see if they have any outstanding warrants, a routine procedure that in New York has resulted in shooting victims being handcuffed to their beds by the NYPD once they are found to have committed a trivial offense in the past. Argues Frydll, "There is nothing inherently nefarious in the ability of a government agency to share information or plumb its own records. But as law enforcement agencies invest more and more resources into collecting and sharing data, particularly data about people and not about crime, they broaden the scope of their activities, and, by collapsing or automating what was once a sequence of discretionary decisions, they lower the bar for the application of force...gradually and for the most part unobtrusively, these (data sharing) efforts have produced countless uses of coercive state power that are more incidental than essential; guided more by what can be done rather than what would be smart to do; and biased toward data that can be readily submitted and searched, rather than information derived from a consideration of context and consequences."
No Place to Run, Nowhere to Hide
In order to test the possibility of "opting out" of big data, Janet Vertesi tried to keep the news of her pregnancy off-line. She found that the barriers to opting out were enormous, both because she pissed off her family and because some her attempts to keep her news offline looked out and out criminal. Vertesi's experiment shows the consequences of our brand new world: "It was no joke that taken together, the things I had to do to evade marketing detection looked suspiciously like illicit activities. All I was trying to do was to fight for the right for a transaction to be just a transaction, not an excuse for a thousand little trackers to follow me around. But avoiding the big-data dragnet meant that I not only looked like a rude family member or an inconsiderate friend, but I also looked like a bad citizen. The myth that users will 'vote with their feet' is simply wrong if opting out comes at such a high price. With social, financial and even potentially legal repercussions involved, the barriers for exit are high. This leaves users and consumers with no real choice nor a voice to express our concerns."
Irony from David Foster Wallace to Hannah Arendt
Marie Louise Knotte has a fascinating new book Unlearning With Hannah Arendt, in which she looks to the power of laughter and irony to find "escape routes from the dead ends of existing traditional conceptions of the world and the human being." Laura Miller interviews Knotte in Salon: "The question is here: What sort of detachment is aimed at and what sort of detachment is achieved? The detachment of Arendt's laughter is the contrary of the detachment that Wallace is talking about, if I understand the argument properly. Arendt detaches herself from her own feelings, her own prejudices that have turned out to be an obstacle to understanding the facts. She is doing this detachment by laughter to obtain the contrary of detachment, to be able to go deeper into what is at stake - to be able to attach her mind to what is there, instead of staying attached to what she expects or hopes to see. Wallace has a point in stating that irony can 'make viewers feel smarter than the naïve public, and to flatter them into continued watching.' That is a totally different phenomenon and one we have here in Germany too. This type of irony is keeping you at a distance from what is going on. Media irony is the result of a society, where people are thought of as consumers, while Arendt's irony is the contrary. She wants to get closer to reality by overcoming her own impediments of thinking."
Corruption, Thy Name is the West
Ben Judah looks at the impact of Europe's complicity in laundering Russian and Eastern European money. Not only is Europe's addiction to dirty Russian money preventing the European Union from standing up to Russian aggression in Ukraine, but also it is leading to loss of the West's reputation for democracy. "The director of one Ukraine's most important NGOs battling corruption spent years investigating how corruption actually works. But the more she learned, the more she viewed both America and the European Union as hypocrites. [Daria] Kaleniuk explains: 'What we found was that the money stolen in Ukraine was heading into British and European tax havens and hidden using shell companies inside the European Union. This was very uncomfortable to find out. What we felt is the Western elites were being hypocritical to us-preaching anti-corruption but allowing this offshore world to flourish.' As Nicholas Shaxson writes in Treasure Island: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens, 'The Offshore World is All Around Us. Over half of world trade passes, at least on paper, through tax havens. Over half of all bank assets, and a third of foreign direct investment by multinational corporations, are routed offshore. Some 85 percent of international banking and bond issuance takes place in the so-called Euromarkets, a stateless offshore zone that we shall soon explore. Nearly every multinational corporation uses tax havens, and their largest users-by far-are on Wall Street.'"
Ian Crouch praises the ethos John Oliver's new TV news satire: "Rather than become the leader of an audience of acolytes, he seems to be out to subtly correct his audience's prejudices and blind spots. If Stewart is evangelical, Oliver is professorial. His bit on the Indian election was akin to the current rush of explainer journalism, in which a smart person more or less reads the newspaper for you, tells you why this or that thing matters, and nudges you toward a final judgment. In the second episode, Oliver began a segment on Sharia law in Brunei by saying, 'There was big news out of Brunei this week. Wait, let me back up a second. There is a country called Brunei.' The joke here, partly, is that liberal American audiences enjoy being scolded about our ignorance of geography, especially when the person doing the scolding speaks in a British accent... But Oliver's line was also a muted challenge-one that left my own fluency in international politics feeling mighty exposed. It's a good thing for comedy to be aspiration, for the viewer to feel like he needs to get smarter in order to get the joke." Or isn't Oliver's comedy rather a diminishing comic sigh of relief at the social acceptability of our collective ignorance?
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Michiel Bot discusses Arendt's quote that the "inability to think is not the 'prerogative' of those many who lack brain power but the everpresent possibility for everybody-scientists, scholars, and other specialists in mental enterprises not excluded-to shun that intercourse with oneself whose possibility and importance Socrates first discovered." And Roger Berkowitz in the Weekend Read looks at the rise of a new understanding of equality that makes peace with economic inequality.