Amor Mundi 6/29/14
06-30-2014Hannah 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.
"It seemed to me to be half-sadness and half-fury, and I wondered what in her life could have put that expression in her eyes." This is how Reverend John Ames, the voice of Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead, describes his younger wife Lila, whose former life is largely a mystery even to Ames himself. Now, Robinson's much-anticipated fourth novel will tell Lila's story and how, after being rescued as a child by a drifter named Doll, the two craft a life together on the run and on the fringes of society. Though the novel does not come out until October, its description recalls another remarkable female pair in Robinson's work--the young Ruth and her aunt Sylvie from Robinson's first novel Housekeeping, which came out thirty-five years ago--and Housekeeping's theme of Christian homelessness. For now, FSG offers a sneak peek of Lila: "The child was four or five, long-legged, and Doll couldn't keep her covered up, but she chafed at her calves with her big, rough hand and brushed the damp from her cheek and her hair. She whispered, 'Don't know what I think I'm doing. Never figured on it. Well, maybe I did. I don't know. I guess I probly did. This sure ain't the night for it.' She hitched up her apron to cover the child's legs and carried her out past the clearing. The door might have opened, and a woman might have called after them, Where you going with that child? and then, after a minute, closed the door again, as if she had done all decency required. 'Well,' Doll whispered, 'we'll just have to see.'"
Simon Critchley seeks the bleeding obvious philosophical lessons from soccer-the priority of the coach over individual players: "Allow me to state the bleeding obvious: this is a tactical game. It is not about passion and individual genius, notwithstanding the relentless commodification of stars like Messi, Ronaldo, and Neymar. No, soccer is about the use of reason and intelligence in order to construct a collective team formation that will contain and defeat the opposition. It requires discipline and relentless training, particularly in order to maintain the shape of the team and the way it occupies and controls space. This is the job of the coach, who tends to get reduced to some kind of either bizarrely animated comic character or casually disaffected bystander when games are televised. But he is the one who sets the team up to play a certain, clearly determined way, the prime mover although sometimes moved rather than unmoved. Otherwise said, soccer is not about individual players." Soccer may then be the perfect game in our world of quantitative analysis and big data, one in which what matters less are exceptionally talented individuals and what wins in the end is well-managed, data-driven, carefully-crafted strategic analysis. Which would maybe explain why the Oakland A's are presently the best team in baseball.
When the People are the Fourth Estate
In an article for the most recent Nieman Report, Engin Ondin, the founder of the Turkish citizen journalism aggregator 140journos, describes the founding of the project, and its growth following last year's protests in Istanbul. Although he and his partners have increasingly relied on citizen-editors as informants, he finds that oversight remains important, and that he can use Twitter apps to help: "Turkey has about 12 million active Twitter users, roughly a third of the online population. We have more than 300 volunteer content producers all across the country, including a survivor of the Uludere attack. As the number of Turkish citizens feeding information to 140journos grew, we shifted gears. Instead of doing all the reporting ourselves, we focused on collecting, categorizing, validating and Storifying the news content sent to us. To verify news reports, we use free tools like Yandex Panorama (Russia's version of Google StreetView) and TinEye, a search service to help determine if images are new or pulled from websites. To monitor the flow of news tips, 140journos uses TweetDeck. We keep lists of 140journos contributors who tweet news from more than 50 cities, universities and other political hotspots in Turkey. We also keep lists organized by individual events, such as protests against executions in Egypt, and lists organized by factions, such as ultra-nationalists and conservatives." Although he doesn't quite come out and say it, this kind of work is important in any place where freedom of the press is limited, or perhaps merely focused on other things.
The Literature of the New Wealth
Pivoting off of Thomas Picketty's attention to classic literary fiction in Capital in the Twenty First Century, Stephen Marche points out that we have already seen the literary proof of the second gilded age, and that it is by and large Franzenite: "Future economic historians won't have to look very far to find fictional descriptions of our current financial realities. The social realist novel of the moment can be identified by the preeminent, almost exclusive, emphasis it places on social expressions of the changing economic reality. Currently, the large-scale realism of Jonathan Franzen, articulated in his famous article for Harper's in 1996 and achieved most fully in The Corrections and Freedom, stands utterly triumphant. The narrative forms that thrived in the mid-nineties - minimalism, with its descriptions of poor and rural men; magical realism which incorporated non-Western elements into the traditional English novel; the exotic lyricism of John Berger or Michael Ondaatje - have been pushed to the side."
Reporting from the trial set to determine whether or not the NCAA can continue to exclusively profit from the likenesses of its players, Charlie Pierce frames the debate in the language of personhood, and whether or not a digital representation of a person is the same thing as the person himself: "As near as I can tell, the video games in question were created by taking game films from various NCAA football and basketball games and then transferring them technologically until actual players found themselves with NCAA-licensed avatars that live forever. It was seeing his avatar that prompted Ed O'Bannon to launch his lawsuit in the first place and, having done so, he opened up a number of interesting questions about who he is, both in real life and in virtual reality. Is Ed O'Bannon's avatar really Ed O'Bannon, or is it an Ed O'Bannon made by someone else so that a lot of someone elses could make a whole lot of money? Isn't that a fundamental looting of one's fundamental identity? Doesn't the real Ed O'Bannon have a say in the use of his name, his image, and his likeness? After all, that's him in that game. The avatar runs the court like he did. It shoots the way he did. It passes the ball the way he did. There doesn't seem to be any moral basis for an argument that Ed O'Bannon doesn't have the right to control - let alone profit from - all the Ed O'Bannons that have been created out of the work that the real Ed O'Bannon did as an athlete. How can an actual person find himself an indentured servant in virtual reality?"
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Faisal Baluch explores Arendt's distinction between politics and violence as a way to understand her support of a Jewish army in the Quote of the Week. American philosopher Eric Hoffer provides this week's Thought on Thinking. And Roger Berkowitz distinguishes Arendt's banality of evil from Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" in the Weekend Read.