Amor Mundi 6/21/15

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.

Thinkable, Speakable Things

Charles P. Pierce suggests that those who are calling the fatal shooting of churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina earlier this week unthinkable or unspeakable are engaging in wishful thinking, assiduously avoiding the fact that fear is a reality of daily life for a certain percentage of Americans: "What happened in a church in Charleston, South Carolina on Wednesday night is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is 'unthinkable.' Somebody thought long and hard about it. Somebody thought to load the weapon. Somebody thought to pick the church. Somebody thought to sit, quietly, through some of Wednesday night bible study. Somebody thought to stand up and open fire, killing nine people, including the pastor. Somebody reportedly thought to leave one woman alive so she could tell his story to the world. Somebody thought enough to flee. What happened in that church was a lot of things, but unthinkable is not one of them. What happened in a Charleston church on Wednesday night is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is 'unspeakable.' We should speak of it often. We should speak of it loudly. We should speak of it as terrorism, which is what it was. We should speak of it as racial violence, which is what it was... There is a timidity that the country can no longer afford. This was not an unthinkable act. A man may have had a rat's nest for a mind, but it was well thought out. It was a cool, considered crime, as well planned as any bank robbery or any computer fraud. If people do not want to speak of it, or think about it, it's because they do not want to follow the story where it inevitably leads. It's because they do not want to follow this crime all the way back to the mother of all American crimes, the one that Denmark Vesey gave his life to avenge. What happened on Wednesday night was a lot of things. A massacre was only one of them."

The Pope's Green Robes

Emma Green considers Pope Francis's recent exhortation about climate change, noting his particular angle and how it is tied to Catholic morality. "The pope uses different language than a climate activist might. Throughout the encyclical, he refers to the modern world's 'throwaway culture.' This includes literal trash--'hundreds of millions of tons of waste are generated, much of it non-biodegradable, highly toxic and radioactive, from homes and businesses, from construction and demolition sites, from clinical, electronic and industrial sources,' he writes. But it also encompasses a mentality of excessive consumption and an orientation toward profit maximization, especially in the 'global north.' People in the developed world are morally obligated to those in developing countries, he says, because when they buy things, it's at the direct expense of the labor, health, and, sometimes, lives of the poor. As Benedict wrote in his 2009 encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, 'It is good for people to realize that purchasing is always a moral--and not simply economic--act...' In making this comment, he's taking aim at a whole swath of the development and environmentalist community, including aid organizations and governments. Throughout the encyclical, he slams what could roughly be called 'technological solutionism,' when 'life gradually becomes a surrender to situations conditioned by technology, itself viewed as the principal key to the meaning of existence.' It's a somewhat obtuse reminder that the pope is neither a liberal activist nor a technocrat intent on finding simple solutions. His encyclical is a sermon, not a white paper, and he's comfortable criticizing do-gooders and multinational corporations in the same breath."

The Struggle Over Omnisurveillance

The Financial Times reports that a coalition of privacy advocates in the United States have withdrawn from talks with the government and technology firms designed to develop a "voluntary code of conduct for the use of facial recognition technology." According to the article: "The nine groups, which include the American Civil Liberties Union and Consumer Federation of America, said that 16 months of negotiation with tech industry representatives and others had failed to bring agreement on even the most basic privacy issues raised by software that can identify people from images of their face.... In a joint statement, the privacy advocates blamed companies that hope to use the technology for refusing to give ground in the discussions. 'The position that companies never need to ask permission to use biometric identification is at odds with consumer expectations, current industry practices, as well as existing state law,' they said. They added: 'At a base minimum, people should be able to walk down a public street without fear that companies they've never heard of are tracking their every movement--and identifying them by name--using facial recognition technology.'"

Metaphors for Sale

For Hannah Arendt, metaphors are the source of all thinking and speaking since thinking is a metaphorical transformation of the visible into the invisible. Arendt argues that metaphor is the lifeblood of poets and thinkers. Now Michael Erard writes about the life of a metaphor designer: "Consider the thing to be communicated--a business strategy, a discovery, a new look at a familiar social problem--and then make a pseudo-mistake. Actually, create a lot of pseudo-mistakes, and test each one. At the end, the floor will be covered with the blood of failed comparisons. One way to create these mistakes is to deliberately miscategorise the thing you are trying to explain. What do paintbrushes have to do with pumps? Ah, they all move liquid. You choose the pump because it's the most prototypical member of the things-that-move-liquid category. Another way to create the mistake is to break the thing you want to explain into its components, then connect them to some other idea or domain of life. Say there's a city department that's in charge of lots of different programmes, all of them related to health. The department plays a centralising function for various programmes funded by multiple sources, operating over several jurisdictions. That diversity confuses audiences. Also, the programmes are often for vulnerable populations--the elderly, immigrants, people with addictions: people for whom the average taxpayer's sympathies are not necessarily assured. So the right metaphor must speak to inclusion and community, and suggest some benefit, such as health or opportunity, that's more widely shared. I tried 'bridge' and 'platform', but ultimately went with 'key ring': the department holds the keys for unlocking health."

Our Puritan Future

At a moment when so many decry the problems with liberal democracy at home and abroad, Jim Sleeper suggests we can find hope and rejuvenation from an old American source, the Puritans. "The Puritans were America's first Very Serious People.... What were they about? First, in attempting to emulate the earliest Christian communities, they turned their backs on the golden thrones of popes and kings and countenanced neither aristocracy nor destitution--a revolutionary innovation in the early seventeenth century. Although they were often shrewd businessmen, they never argued openly that prosperity brings freedom and dignity, preaching instead that it carried communal obligations. Second, they weren't out to 'make history,' as we try to, through scientific planning or by discerning great movements of Hegelian Reason in our strivings, but by fulfilling the pre-established biblical typology of the Israelites' exodus from Egypt on a sacred mission to a Promised Land. (Hence their naming some New England towns Salem, Goshen, Bethlehem, Sharon, and Lebanon; hence the Hebrew on the seals of Yale and Dartmouth.) What might seem a worldly enterprise financed by English entrepreneurs was, in the Puritan reality, a mission for 'The General Restoration of Mankind from the Curse of the Fall' that would bring a blessing upon all the nations of the Earth. Third, the Puritans' biblically covenanted, congregational communities combined public purpose with personal integrity in ways that survive in our understandings of the interplay between individual conscience and rights on the one hand and civic obligation on the other." To revivify the American moral spirit, Sleeper writes, we cannot rely on a non-judgmental liberal state or on neo-liberal market values. The Puritans, all their limitations notwithstanding, offer insights into a "new cosmology" that we can hope to use to address our spiritual needs "in ways that a liberal capitalist republic no longer can."

Pulling Themselves Up By Their Commencement Robes

Andrew Delbanco quotes Horace Mann to express the democratic hope that Americans have always placed upon education: "Death may be the great equalizer, but Americans have long believed that during this life 'the spread of education would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society.'" Writing in the New York Review of Books, Delbanco shows how the once vibrant connection between higher education and equality has been stalled. "At the top of the prestige pyramid, in highly selective colleges like those of the Ivy League, students from the bottom income quartile in our society make up around 5 percent of the enrollments." There are huge numbers of highly qualified students from poor families that don't attend elite colleges largely because they don't apply, "in part because most such students get little if any counseling in high school about the intricate process of applying to a selective college--so they rarely do." And even when one gets into college, universities seem to be failing the poorest students. "Critics like Bennett are right, however, to decry what's happening--or not happening--to many students who do get to college. Too few are challenged or given guidance and encouragement. Cheating is common, including at elite private colleges and the so-called public flagships. In a widely noted 2011 book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa gave a grim account of college as a place where students are held to low standards in an atmosphere of wasteful frivolity. In their new book, Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates, they stress that the likeliest victims of 'late adolescent meandering' are students from low-income backgrounds who come out of college aimless, demoralized, and with fewer chances than their more affluent peers to recoup lost opportunities. In Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton speak of 'an implicit agreement between the university and students to demand little of each other.' And they, too, make the case that students with the fewest family resources have the lowest post-college prospects." Delbanco concludes with a sad but too-often true complaint: "Perhaps concern for the poor has shriveled not only among policymakers but in the broader public. Perhaps in our time of focus on the wealthy elite and the shrinking middle class, there is a diminished general will to regard poor Americans as worthy of what are sometimes called 'the blessings of American life'--among which the right to education has always been high if not paramount."

Illiberalism

Colin Woodard checks in on the situation in Hungary: "Orbán has declared that he is building a new state in Hungary, 'an illiberal state' capable of guiding the Hungarian nation to victory 'in the great global race for decades to come.' Inspired by the alleged successes of illiberal states like Russia, China, Turkey and Singapore, Orbán promises a new order that puts the collective goals of the Hungarian people--including the more than two million of them living in neighboring countries that were once part of the Hungarian Kingdom--ahead of the liberal goal of maximizing individual liberty. Throughout his tenure, Orbán has slapped down EU criticisms of his policies with nationalist rhetoric, saying Hungary 'will not be a colony' and won't 'live according to the commands of foreign powers.' ... Orbán, a youthful anti-communist dissident when Hungarian communism fell in 1989, has spent the past two decades transforming a libertarian-minded youth group into an immensely powerful national conservative political machine. When he swept into power in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 global financial meltdown (during which Hungary accepted a $26 billion rescue package to avoid bankruptcy), Orbán's Alliance of Young Democrats (or Fidesz) and their loyal coalition partners used their two-thirds majority in parliament to rewrite the constitution and pass hundreds of new laws during their first year and a half in power. The combined effect: an erosion of the independence of the judiciary, the packing of courts with political loyalists, a wholesale political purge of the civil service and the chief prosecutor's office, new election rules that advantage the governing coalition and the intimidation of the news organizations (who can be issued crippling fines for content deemed 'not politically balanced' by a government-appointed panel.) When laws criminalizing homelessness, curtailing political advertizing, foreclosing the possibility of gay marriage and restricting judicial review were found unconstitutional, Orbán used his parliamentary supermajority to simply add the measures to the new constitution."

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