Amor Mundi - 6/9/13
06-10-2013
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.
From amidst the praise for Margarethe von Trotta's film "Hannah Arendt" comes a comment about one particular aspect of the film: "In ... "Hannah Arendt," the political theorist's friendship with the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy gets its first cinematic treatment. The results are not good... Nearly every exchange between the two women is about men and love. It is symptomatic of a trend, I think. We are in a moment of unprecedented popular interest in the matter of female friendship, and this has been greeted as a triumph for feminism. But what we get, for all that, is rather flat portraiture: women giggling about crushes before finding real fulfillment in heterosexual romance and the grail of marriage." Writer Michelle Dean goes on to characterize Arendt and McCarthy as true literary friends, and their friendship as a bulwark against and a balm for reactions against their works; she captures something essential about Arendt-also made clear in the movie-by referring to Arendt as "Hannah Arrogance." The point is that Arendt and McCarthy's special relationship was built around a shared sense of their independence from the male-dominated world of New York intellectuals that turned on Arendt so furiously.
Jane Meyer in the New Yorker asks the hard question that emerges from the revelation that the U.S. government is continuing to use the Patriot Act to spy on all U.S. citizens by monitoring with whom they are speaking on the phone. The government argues that it is not listening to the content of the calls, but only looking at who is calling. The question that needs to be asked: Is this mining of metadata-of data not connected with specific content but only data that can attach us to webs of contacts and connections-a meaningful invasion of privacy that violates the Constitution and threatens our liberties? Meyer has this to say: "The answer, according to the mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau, whom I interviewed while reporting on the plight of the former N.S.A. whistleblower Thomas Drake and who is also the author of "Surveillance or Security?," is that it's worse than many might think. "The public doesn't understand." she told me, speaking about so-called metadata. "It's much more intrusive than content." She explained that the government can learn immense amounts of proprietary information by studying "who you call, and who they call. If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening-you don't need the content."
Bob Duggan calls attention to the recent decision of a Texas death row inmate to donate his body to art. The artist, Martin Martensen-Larsen, plans to use the corpse as part of a trilogy to be called The Unifier, as part of which he has put up for sale five front row seats to the inmate's execution. Is this art? Is it even ethical?
Orhan Pamuk prefaces the past week's protests in Turkey: "My whole family used to live in the flats that made up the Pamuk apartment block, in Nisantas?. In front of this building stood a fifty-year-old chestnut tree, which is thankfully still there. In 1957, the municipality decided to cut the tree down in order to widen the street. The presumptuous bureaucrats and authoritarian governors ignored the neighborhood's opposition. When the time came for the tree to be cut down, our family spent the whole day and night out on the street, taking turns guarding it. In this way, we not only protected our tree but also created a shared memory, which the whole family still looks back on with pleasure, and which binds us all together."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Roger Berkowitz takes on a dim view of thinking. Noel Jackson considers the MOOC's future. Wolfgang Heuer addresses the folly of feeling omnipotent. And in the age of big data, the weekend read ponders if we should be living in awe of machines.