Amor Mundi 6/8/14
06-09-2014Hannah 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.
Jonathan Galassi offers an excellent account of the Futurist Movement, the best exemplars of which are currently on view at Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe, a show at the Guggenheim Museum. Futurism celebrated speed, vigor, and creative destruction, as expressed in the 1909 Manifesto of Futurism written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Here is how Galassi describes Marinetti's founding moment? "'My friends and I had stayed up all night, sitting beneath the lamps of a mosque, whose star-studded, filigreed brass domes resembled our souls,...listening to the tedious mumbled prayers of an ancient canal and the creaking bones of dilapidated palaces.' Their Orientalist idyll is disturbed by 'the sudden roar of ravening motorcars,' and Marinetti and friends leave the mosque in hot pursuit ('all the myths and mystical ideals are behind us. We're about to witness the birth of a Centaur'). 'Like young lions,' they go chasing 'after Death' and end up in a ditch. Marinetti apostrophized: 'O mother of a ditch, brimful with muddy water!... How I relished your strength-giving sludge that reminded me so much of the saintly black breast of my Sudanese nurse.... When I got myself up-soaked, filthy, foul-smelling rag that I was-from beneath my overturned car, I had a wonderful sense of my heart being pierced by the red-hot sword of joy!' Marinetti had found his way out of the cul-de-sac of too much civilization. The Futurist manifesto that follows on his dream, the first of many, glorifies 'aggressive action' and asserts that 'a roaring motorcar...is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace' (never mind that Boccioni's sculpture will uncannily resemble it). 'There is no longer any beauty except the struggle,' Marinetti declared. War is 'the sole cleanser of the world.'"
A Double-Edged Presidential Power
Underlying President Obama's decision this week to secure the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl by releasing five detainees allegedly affiliated with the Taliban from Guantanamo is the question of why Guantanamo remains open in the first place. Several commentators, including Glenn Greenwald on The Intercept, have declared that Obama's releasing of the detainees was in fact illegal, as he failed to provide Congress with the 30-day notice that is required by the 2014 defense authorization statute. As Greenwald argues, the only possible legal argument to justify the release is if the Obama White House maintains, as it has in the past, that such congressional restrictions do not bind them, and that the release of detainees is a decision solely allocated to the commander-in-chief. But if the President does in fact have the power to override these restrictions, what accounts for his ongoing failure to close Guantanamo as he pledged to do, or at least release those detainees who are already cleared? After the events of this week, writes Greenwald, the Obama administration now finds itself in a legal quandary: "The sole excuse now offered by Democratic loyalists for this failure (to close GITMO) has been that Congress prevented him from closing the camp. But here, the Obama White House appears to be arguing that Congress lacks the authority to constrain the President's power to release detainees when he wants...Obama defenders seem to have two choices here: either the president broke the law in releasing these five detainees, or Congress cannot bind the commander-in-chief's power to transfer detainees when he wants, thus leaving Obama free to make those decisions himself. Which is it?"
In reviewing Social Physics, a new book by Alex Pentland on what big data can teach us about human behavior, Joshua Rothman tells of a Bank of America call center: "Life at the call center was almost fanatically regimented: Pentland writes that call center managers 'often try to minimize the amount of talking among employees because operations are so routine and standardized.' At this call center, even the coffee breaks were scheduled individually, so as to maximize the number of workers on the phone at any given time. The mystery to be solved, in this environment of extreme solitude, was why different teams of operators handled their calls at different speeds. Pentland found that, of the four twenty-person teams he tracked, the ones with the fastest 'average call handling time,' or A.H.T., were also the most social. In fact, the most successful teams spent more time doing exactly what their managers didn't want them to be doing: talking. Pentland suggested the introduction of team-wide coffee breaks, designed to encourage mingling. The increase in speed was so dramatic that Bank of America did the same at all of its call centers, generating a fifteen-million-dollar increase in annual productivity (and, presumably, some newly quantifiable amount of good cheer)." Rothman sees the double edged quality of big data. In revealing the truth that human sociability can be productive, big data explodes myths that make our workplaces ever less human. At the same time, the statistical study of the most intimate details of our lives is both invasive and reductive, lending credibility to the managerial dream to optimize human resources.
Heidegger Caught in the Trap of His Own Ideas
Judith Wolfe, writing in Standpoint, has a strong account of the Black Notebooks and Heidegger's philosophical engagement with Nazism and the Jews. Here is her explanation of Heidegger's poetic use of Jewishness: "The conclusions that Heidegger drew from this last point were not as radical as we might hope: he questioned not the stereotype of the calculating Jews but only their uniqueness. He himself speculated that the Jews might have a role to play in the technological crisis of the modern world, though he never specified what. What Heidegger thoroughly rejected, however, was any description of the Jews as a 'race': 'The question of the role of World Jewry', he insisted, 'is not a racial one, but the metaphysical question of a form of humanity' characterized by deracination and instrumental reasoning. It would be absurd to assume that this 'form of humanity' could be eradicated by eliminating a particular group of people. On the contrary: such calculated extermination would only perpetuate the technological logic that Heidegger was calling his compatriots to abandon. That logic could only be overcome, as Heidegger wrote, by 'suffering and danger and knowledge.'" As Wolfe rightly sees, "The real danger of his comments about the Jews is not merely that they are racist but that they seem to hold out an abstract, poetic typology as a replacement for political awareness: by reducing the Jews to a poetic type, he becomes deaf to their practical plight. This sometimes takes grotesque forms: though he would never advocate or condone Hitler's and Himmler's 'final solution', for example, Heidegger seems to find a measure of poetic justice in the Nazis' calculating reduction of the Jews to a 'race' as matching the Jews' own reductive tendency towards racial thinking. He is, as Hannah Arendt later put it to Günter Gaus, 'caught in the trap of his own ideas.'"
Discussing the meaning of internet "nerd" celebrities John and Hank Green, Clare Malone suggests that habits are one of the things that allows humans to reach beyond themselves: "We haven't spent a whole lot of time talking about the audience that the Brothers Green are sending their video missives out to. But they're the people whose clicks make this world go 'round. This Vlogbrothers movement is a sort of 'revenge of the nerds' type of thing-except the movie based on it would probably be called 'the civil disobedience of the nerds,' because John and Hank are about encouraging people to channel outsiderness into something productive, like living well through small acts of kindness. I can imagine a person getting into the habit of watching these daily and thinking about their meaning (maybe not actively, more by osmosis), almost in the way a monk goes to vespers or a devout Muslim prays five times a day. I'm not even being theological; I'm just thinking about the importance of habit. Prayers involve repetition to get a person into a meditative state. To a certain extent it's Pavlovian, but we need that push into a different headspace to think about things outside necessities of the flesh."
Neil Richards suggests that privacy isn't dead, just changing, although not for the better: "Fifteen years ago, the Internet was heralded as a great forum for intellectual liberation-a place to think for ourselves and meet like- (and different) minded people unmediated by censors or surveillance. Yet, incrementally, the Internet has been transformed from a place of anarchic freedom to something much closer to an environment of total tracking and total control. All too often, it may seem like the digital future is unfolding before our eyes in some kind of natural and unstoppable evolution. But the final state of Internet architecture is not inevitable, nor is it unchangeable. It is up for grabs. In the end, the choices we make now about surveillance and privacy, about freedom and control in the digital environment will define the society of the very near future. I fear that the 'privacy is dead' rhetoric is masking a sinister shift, from a world in which individuals have privacy but exercise transparency over the powerful institutions in their lives, to a world in which our lives are transparent but the powerful institutions are opaque. That's a pretty scary future, and one which we've told ourselves for decades that we don't want. The availability of cheap smartphones and free apps shouldn't change that. We should choose both control of our digital information and the benefits of our digital tools. We can make that choice, but the 'privacy is dead' rhetoric is obscuring the existence of the choice."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Manu Samnotra discusses how the language of fate and destiny shaped Arendt's philosophy and political theory in the Quote of the Week. British philosopher Jeremy Bentham provides this week's Thought on Thinking. And Roger Berkowitz discusses nihilism and futurism in the Weekend Read.