Amor Mundi 5/3/15

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.

Our Daily Routine

Anna Sauerbrey has an op-ed in the NY Times about the ongoing trial of Oskar Gröning, what will likely be the last trial of a German Nazi for crimes against humanity. One captivating aspect of the trial is that Gröning has long admitted to his role in the genocide and expressed regret for it. For Sauerbrey, the core of the trial is Gröning's uncanny banality. "At the trial, Mr. Gröning said that from his perspective, the killing of the Hungarian Jews, which had been meticulously planned and for which several new gas chambers had been built in Auschwitz, was 'routine.' What shocked him were merely individual outbursts of violence, like an SS man beating a crying infant to death. The killings in the gas chambers, he said, were 'orderly' and 'clean.' He rarely said the word 'murder.' 'In 24 hours you could take care of 5,000 people,' he said. 'After all, that's how things went in a concentration camp.' Mr. Gröning's language naturally makes one think of Adolf Eichmann, and how his detached explanation of his role as a bureaucrat, at his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, led Hannah Arendt to coin the phrase 'the banality of evil.' Ms. Arendt was, some say, fooled by the defendant, and that Eichmann had embraced the hatred fueling the killing machine. But if Ms. Arendt was wrong about Eichmann, she was on to something, something we now see in what Mr. Gröning is saying. It is the horrifying, mind-wrecking banality of evil condensed in a sentence like 'that's how things went in a concentration camp' that has sustained the German self-narrative of guilt, much more than compassion ever could have. Mr. Gröning makes us question ourselves. I, too, am afraid I wouldn't have resisted. The victims tell us: We must never forget. The perpetrators say: We might do it again." Arendt did not accept Eichmann's claim that he was a mere bureaucrat; she insisted that he chose to participate in genocide and should be killed for his acts. More importantly, she agreed with Sauerbrey that the key question of the Eichmann trial was why some Germans chose to resist Nazi evil while others participated thoughtlessly. The question was, and remains, thus: why could people like Gröning conclude that the orderly planned killing of Jews was routine even as they were shocked by disorderly outbursts of violence? After a semester teaching a course on moral and political courage, it is now clear that what separates those who resist from those who cooperate is simple: it is character. The people who resist simply have an idea of themselves that disallows them from doing certain things. They have a sense of self and the courage to be who they are no matter the costs. They have depth, which is the opposite of banality.

Psycho Babble

We live in an age of social science. Everywhere we turn, and in every newspaper we read, we are bombarded with statistics about human behavior. Policy wonks from Cass Sunstein to David Brooks want to use social science research to nudge people to behave in more rational and more responsible ways. But not everyone is an advocate of such research. In her lifetime, Hannah Arendt was eternally suspicious of social science data. First, because she insists that human freedom means that we are never as predictable as data would have us believe. And second, because the admitted success of data as a predictor of mass behavior leads to a loss of faith in the freedom and thus greatness of human action, thus an acceptance of the machine-like behavior of humans. It is thus helpful to remember that many of the seemingly endless studies about human psychological behavior are total bunk, as Kas Thomas writes (in admittedly colorful language). "An effort to replicate 100 research findings in psychology turned up the disturbing fact that key findings from only 39 of the published studies could be reproduced. From the 30 April 2015 article in Nature: 'The results should convince everyone that psychology has a replicability problem,' says Hal Pashler, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, and an author of one of the papers whose findings were successfully repeated. 'A lot of working scientists assume that if it's published, it's right,' he says. 'This makes it hard to dismiss that there are still a lot of false positives in the literature.' But Daniele Fanelli, who studies bias and scientific misconduct at Stanford University in California, says the results suggest that the reproducibility of findings in psychology does not necessarily lag behind that in other sciences. There is plenty of room for improvement, he adds, but earlier studies have suggested that reproducibility rates in cancer biology and drug discovery could be even lower. 'From my expectations, these are not bad at all,' Fanelli says. 'Though I have spoken to psychologists who are quite disappointed.' In other words, these results aren't that bad, really, because they're just as shitty as in other, 'harder' sciences!"

Order and Violence

Violence can be useful. In response to injustice, it can even be justifiable on a utilitarian scale if violence brings attention to injustice and thus serves the doing of justice. But usually, violence does not lead to justice but rather to more violence. That is the danger of political uses of violence, as Hannah Arendt understood it in her essay On Violence. Responding to the protests following the unexplained brutal beating and subsequent death of Freddie Gray while he was held in police custody in Baltimore, Ta-Nehisi Coates says that calls for 'nonviolence' are being made in bad faith, although that does not in turn justify violence: "When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is 'correct' or 'wise,' any more than a forest fire can be 'correct' or 'wise.' Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community." The violent protests in Baltimore shed light on the injustice of police violence. There is a question of whether the violent protests were necessary in that aim. But so far, it is hard to deny that the violent protests have yielded what they sought and that they may prove to be one of those rare instances when violence proves itself in the service of justice.

Civility and Truth

The American Association of University Professors has released a report on the firing of Steven Salaita. As the report concludes, "At the heart of this case is the question of Professor Salaita's employment status at the University of Illinois when Chancellor Wise informed him that she would not forward his appointment to the board of trustees." Since the AAUP finds, correctly, that Salaita had indeed been hired, his irregular firing without procedural safeguards was a violation of his protected status. A larger question in the report concerns the claim by the University of Illinois that the firing was justified because of the uncivil nature of Professor Salaita's comments. On this point, the AAUP's report takes a strong stand against civility: "Statements by Chancellor Wise and the trustees insisted that 'civility' was a standard by which the fitness of a scholar and teacher could be judged. They used synonyms such as courtesy and respect, and they maintained that incivility threatened the comfort and security of students. The trustees claimed that disrespectful speech 'is not an acceptable form of civil argument' and 'has no place . . . in our democracy.' There are three objections to these claims. The first is that 'civility' is vague and ill-defined.... The second objection is that, inevitably, the standard of civility conflates the tone of an enunciation with its content.... The third objection is that, even if the tone of one's expression is highly charged, it does not constitute grounds for punishment. Whether it is a matter of First Amendment rights or of the principles of academic freedom, there is concurrence on the dangers to democracy of attempting to outlaw emotionally provocative speech. The CAFT report cites a 1971 Supreme Court case that struck down punishment because of a speaker's use of an offensive expletive-'an expletive Dr. Salaita's tweets are much given to.' The Court ruled, 'We cannot sanction the view that the Constitution, while solicitous of the cognitive content of individual speech, has little or no regard for that emotive function which practically speaking may often be the more important element of the overall message sought to be communicated.' In the Davis case at UCLA, one of the dissenting regents put it similarly: 'In this day and age when the decibel level of political debate . . . has reached the heights it has, it is unrealistic and disingenuous to demand as a condition of employment that the professor address political rallies in the muted cadences of scholarly exchanges. Professors are products of their times even as the rest of us.'" One problem with such reasoning, however, is that the AAUP wants to insist that professors are different from the rest of us and that professors deserve extra protection of academic freedom because they are engaged in the pursuit of truth that may and often is unconventional and controversial. If that is true, and it should be, then it may well require that professors act professorial in order to claim their academic freedom. In other words, the civility that often is out of place in political arguments is a structuring condition of academic inquiry.

An Ideologue and a Meddlesome Egoist

Pope Francis is on a mission, and the measure of his potential success is the fear he is causing. Garry Wills asks the right question: who is scared of Pope Francis? It turns out some very wealthy and powerful people are. "Those who profit from what harms the earth have to keep the poor out of sight. They have trouble enough fighting off the scientific, economic, and political arguments against bastioned privilege. Bringing basic morality to the fore could be fatal to them. That is why they are mounting such a public pre-emptive strike against the encyclical before it even appears. They must not only discredit the pope's words (whatever they turn out to be), they must block them, ridicule them, destroy them. The measure of their fear is demonstrated by an article in First Things, the Catholic journal that defended the donations to bishops of the pederast religious founder Marcial Maciel. The First Things writer Maureen Mullarkey calls the pope 'an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist,' and continues: 'Francis sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda.'" At a time of incredible inaction around the world on all issues from climate change and inequality to corruption and terrorism, the one world leader who seems able and willing to take bold action informed by common sense moral intuitions is the Catholic Pope. One hopes some other leaders follow his example.

Consider the Paragraph

Elisa Gabbert wonders after prose's forgotten unit of organization: "Reading a book, I always glance ahead to see where the section or chapter ends, so I know when I can stop reading if I want or need to. Stopping mid-paragraph is deeply unsatisfying--no sense of closure, no easy way to remember where I left off when I next pick it up. Claustrophobic tendencies aside, of late I am actively interested in paragraphs, their formal possibilities. Sentences are taken to be the basic unit of prose, and we use them metonymically--we say 'She writes wonderful sentences' when we mean to praise the author's prose. James Salter is so well-known for his sentences that it rises to the level (or sinks, I suppose) of critical cliché. In a 2013 profile in the New Yorker, Salter is quoted, in a letter to a friend: 'I wanted to get past the great-writer-of-sentences thing. I don't care about that, at this stage.' But why is it, I wonder, we rarely talk about a writer's way with paragraphs? It may be because there is a lot more you can do with a sentence to vary it; syntax and diction, all those micro-choices that add up to the macro-style of (say) a novel, happen at the level of the sentence. There are pretty much only two ways to vary your paragraphs. The first is length. Some writers work in short paragraphs, some in fluctuating lengths, others in long, multi-page-spanning paragraphs, like our incantatory friend above. Some writers work at both ends, depending on the book--compare As I Lay Dying to Absalom, Absalom! It's no coincidence that the former, with its many breaks, is easier to read; it could almost pass for YA. Bestsellers keep paragraphs and chapters short as a tactic--they make for more addictive, snack-like reading, so the reader repeatedly thinks I'll just read one more."

Not Just Clowning Around

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