Amor Mundi 6/1/14
06-02-2014Hannah 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.
The Lonely Masses Abandon the Center
Mary Beard asks why the anti-EU, anti-immigration, and anti-foreigner Independence Party is doing so well in England. "The UK Independence Party, it seems, has drawn its support from across the political spectrum. It attracts-in addition to the xenophobic-the socially conservative (against same-sex marriage and in favor of 'traditional British values'), and those who are deeply suspicious of the European Union ('Why be run by Brussels?'). Certainly it includes among its supporters and party candidates some people of extreme right-wing inclinations. But most of all, UKIP appeals to those who feel distanced from modern politics and politicians. They hate the sense of a political class, which consists of those who have never worked in anything other than professional politics, who speak only in carefully controlled, on-message sound bites, and never really engage with 'us voters.'" We see in England, as in Europe and the United States more generally, a growing mass of voters who feel forgotten, alone, and abandoned by the general political culture. As Beard notes, establishment politicians continually lose in debates to candidates from the fringe because the mainstream message rings untrue. Unless mainstream politics can provide the lonely masses a home and a narrative that gives sense to their lives, these masses will continue to seek more radical solutions.
The Artist at Work, Once, Twice, Three Times
In honor of writer Maya Angelou, who passed away this week at the age of 86, The Paris Review has posted an interview she did with the magazine in 1990. In it, Angelou describes the importance of revision as a limitation on her writing, while making sure that we understand that she fits in some living, too: "I write in the morning and then go home about midday and take a shower, because writing, as you know, is very hard work, so you have to do a double ablution. Then I go out and shop-I'm a serious cook-and pretend to be normal. I play sane-Good morning! Fine, thank you. And you? And I go home. I prepare dinner for myself and if I have houseguests, I do the candles and the pretty music and all that. Then after all the dishes are moved away I read what I wrote that morning. And more often than not if I've done nine pages I may be able to save two and a half or three. That's the cruelest time you know, to really admit that it doesn't work. And to blue pencil it. When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them-fifty acceptable pages-it's not too bad. I've had the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you're right. So what? Don't ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again. About two years ago I was visiting him and his wife in the Hamptons. I was at the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of about fourteen people. Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams over the years. From the other end of the table he said, And I've kept every one! Brute! But the editing, one's own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important."
In Solidarity with Jacek Kuron
Next week, on June 4, Poland will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its first free parliamentary elections and the victory of Solidarity, the union movement turned political party. Amidst enconiums for Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Lech Walesa, Slawomir Sierakowski argues, "room must also be made for Jacek Kuron, the main organizer and leader of the democratic opposition of the 1960s and '70s, without which Solidarity would not have come into being....Mr. Kuron came back in time for the enormous strikes of 1976 and the subsequent crackdown on Polish workers. The repression led Mr. Kuron to coin his famous slogan, 'Instead of burning committees, set up your own,' and, together with Polish intellectuals and activists, set up the Workers' Defense Committee, known by its Polish acronym KOR, the first overt opposition organization in the entire Communist bloc. His apartment became the committee's headquarters, where members gathered information on persecutions and communicated it to the foreign media and to Radio Free Europe, which then broadcast it and granted protection to the persecuted.... He urged people to be more active, and he dreamed of an educational revolution that would teach young people both nonconformism and cooperation. For subsequent generations, his legend will be a call to rebellion, the alternative to which is accommodation, obedience and imitation. It is a message that rings true regardless of what kind of government runs the country."
Noting that digital democracy, while promising, has proven difficult in practice, Carl Miller points to Wikipedia as a working model that combines the advantages of the new way of doing things with fresh takes on the old way: "Wikipedia stands out as a twinkling beacon of hope. As a technology, process and ethos, Wikipedia has been able to turn the variety of views and contributions of Wikipedians into meaningful and often constructive deliberation (the 'talk' page behind the entry), finally producing a single, unified result - the Wikipedia entry itself. This is an intricate process, and, impressively, one that has been self-developed, organically and democratically, by the Wikipedians themselves. There is now a dense cobweb of policies for how articles should be written and reviewed, structures for recognizing and rewarding individuals who productively contribute, featuring the best articles, and resolving disputes. As a Wikipedian, you can receive everything from the Ada Lovelace Award for those who have make significant contributions to Wikipedia about women and science to the Liberty Star for outstanding work on Philadelphia-related articles. The Village Pump is a thronging central gathering place where Wikipedians collectively discuss technical issues and policies for Wikipedia, work on new ideas and propose them to be considered."
Joan Acocella, in a consideration of J.R.R Tolkien's translation of Beowulf, which, although completed nearly ninety years ago, is first seeing publication now, points to what Tolkien saw as the artistic merits of a poem that has been perhaps been underappreciated: "Tolkien saw all this as an evasion of the poem's true subject: death, defeat, which come not only to Beowulf but to his kingdom, and every kingdom. Many critics, Tolkien says, consider 'Beowulf' to be something of a mess, artistically-for example, in its mixing of pagan with Christian ideas. But the narrator of 'Beowulf' repeatedly says that, like the minstrels who entertain the knights, he is telling a tale from the old days. 'I have heard,' he says. 'I have learned.' Tolkien claims that the events of the poem, insofar as they are real, occurred in about 500 A.D. But the poet was a man of the new days, when the British Isles were being converted to Christianity. It didn't happen overnight. And so, while he tells how God girded the earth with the seas, and hung the sun in the sky, he again and again reverts to pagan values. None of the people in the poem care anything about modesty, simplicity (they adore treasure, they count it up), or humility (they boast of their valorous deeds). And death is regarded as final. No one, including Beowulf, is said to be going on to a better place."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Paul Morrow uses a well-known fable to explore the notion of pluralistic ignorance in the Quote of the Week. Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle provides this week's Thought on Thinking. And Roger Berkowitz discusses Anand Giridharadas' "The True American," a tale of hatred, redemption, and America, in the Weekend Read.