Amor Mundi 7/12/15

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.

The Blessings of the Black Church

Walter Russell Mead, a son of South Carolina, argues that one lesson of the response to the Dylann Roof shooting is how the black church holds an exceptional place in American culture. "But beyond all the yapping and the buzzing about gun control, the Confederate flag, and whether Dylann Roof was a terrorist or not, a very powerful truth emerged from the horror in Charleston: that the African-American church remains one of America's great national blessings. Yet again the African American church in the United States bore steadfast witness to the boundless, the infinite, the compassionate love of God. When the families of the murdered, martyred saints told Dylann Roof that they forgave him, when they prayed that he in his darkness might somehow find the light and the love of God, they reminded us what heroism truly is, and they showed us all what it means to follow Jesus Christ. Too often the worst people in the religious world dominate the headlines: hucksters and hustlers, money-grubbing televangelists, preacher-politicians, judgmental hypocrites, and sanctimonious snake oil peddlers. But every now and then something happens to show us what Christianity really is, and when it does the world stops in awe. President Obama was right to make grace the focus of his riveting eulogy; grace is always amazing, and without it no person, no family, and no nation can stand. Watching the news from Berlin, I was reminded yet again that if the United States can be said to be an exceptional nation, it is the black church that has helped to make us one. Beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, blacks (often after suffering rejection by white churches) organized their own congregations and denominations. Black churches were the first serious social institutions that African Americans were free to shape and control in their own way, and the spiritual and cultural blessings that have come to Americans of all races and indeed to the whole world from the witness and work of the black church are greater than most of us have ever understood."

Whose Dream?

In an essay formed as a letter to his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates takes on an American rhetoric on race derived from a certain very famous speech about a dream: "That Sunday, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of an 11-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about 'hope.' And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indistinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you."

Whose Keys Are Under the Doormat?

Governments around the world insist on the need and the right to read and listen to what potential terrorists or enemies write and say. To balance security with privacy, there is a demand that governments have the right to subpoena records from internet and telephony providers. And governments--worried that new encryption technology will make such practices impossible--are considering legislation that would essentially mandate the keys to the internet. But a fascinating report by leading encryption experts argues that such a move would be disruptive and dangerous. "The goal of this report is to similarly analyze the newly proposed requirement of exceptional access to communications in today's more complex, global information infrastructure. We find that it would pose far more grave security risks, imperil innovation, and raise thorny issues for human rights and international relations.... The greatest impediment to exceptional access may be jurisdiction. Building in exceptional access would be risky enough even if only one law enforcement agency in the world had it. But this is not only a US issue. The UK government promises legislation this fall to compel communications service providers, including US-based corporations, to grant access to UK law enforcement agencies, and other countries would certainly follow suit. China has already intimated that it may require exceptional access. If a British-based developer deploys a messaging application used by citizens of China, must it provide exceptional access to Chinese law enforcement? Which countries have sufficient respect for the rule of law to participate in an international exceptional access framework? How would such determinations be made? How would timely approvals be given for the millions of new products with communications capabilities? And how would this new surveillance ecosystem be funded and supervised? The US and UK governments have fought long and hard to keep the governance of the Internet open, in the face of demands from authoritarian countries that it be brought under state control. Does not the push for exceptional access represent a breathtaking policy reversal? The need to grapple with these legal and policy concerns could move the Internet overnight from its current open and entrepreneurial model to becoming a highly regulated industry. Tackling these questions requires more than our technical expertise as computer scientists, but they must be answered before anyone can embark on the technical design of an exceptional access system."

Hannah Arendt's Cosmopolitanism

James McAuley has an essay holding up Arendt's idea of the conscious pariah as a model for a 21^st century cosmopolitanism. "[T]here is more to Arendt's unsettled legacy than glamour, controversy and a provocative set of historical and philosophical interpretations. Forty years after her death, perhaps the most enduring contribution of this decidedly 20th-century thinker is her thinking about a cosmopolitanism suited to the challenges of the 21st century she'd never see.... Hannah Arendt never wrote explicitly on cosmopolitanism, or indeed even used the term, but she was a model cosmopolitan. She loved her adopted US, but never effaced her past to fabricate a new present. Her understanding of Jewish history and her experience of her own Jewishness remained central to her life and to her work, helping to illuminate a disparate, difficult whole. Arendt was fascinated by the concept of 'the pariah', the outcast, which in her mind conveyed the Jewish experience in Europe. As she wrote in Origins of Totalitarianism, Jews 'always had to pay with political misery for social glory and with social insult for political success'. For Arendt, being a pariah was not an inherently negative position; it could also bring a certain value. In a series of essays written in the 1940s, she referred to the poets and writers Heinrich Heine, Rahel Varnhagen, Bernard Lazare, and Franz Kafka as conscious pariahs. By this, she meant they never escaped their Jewishness but also used their difference 'to transcend the bounds of nationality and to weave the strands of their Jewish genius into the general texture of European life', who administered 'the admission of Jews as Jews into the ranks of humanity'. In other words, who did not efface their particularity but celebrated it, finding within it a world of substance on a universal scale. This was the crux of her cosmopolitanism."

Politics and Technocracy

Slavoj Zizek argues that Greece and its debtors aren't talking in the same language, and then he picks a side: "That a compromise formula always eludes at the last moment in the ongoing negotiations between Greece and the EU administrators is in itself deeply symptomatic, since it doesn't really concern actual financial issues--at this level, the difference is minimal. The EU usually accuses Greeks of talking only in general terms, making vague promises without specific details, while Greeks accuse the EU of trying to control even the tiniest details and imposing on Greece conditions that are harsher than those imposed on the previous government. But what lurks behind these reproaches is another, much deeper conflict. The Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, recently remarked that if he were to meet alone with Angela Merkel for dinner, they would find a formula in two hours. His point was that he and Merkel, the two politicians, would treat the disagreement as a political one, in contrast to technocratic administrators such as the Eurogroup president, Jeroen Dijsselbloem. If there is an emblematic bad guy in this whole story, it is Dijsselbloem, whose motto is: 'If I get into the ideological side of things, I won't achieve anything.' This brings us to the crux of the matter: Tsipras and the former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who resigned on 6 July, talk as if they are part of an open political process where decisions are ultimately 'ideological' (based on normative preferences), while the EU technocrats talk as if it is all a matter of detailed regulatory measures. When the Greeks reject this approach and raise more fundamental political issues, they are accused of lying, of avoiding concrete solutions, and so on. It is clear that the truth here is on the Greek side: the denial of 'the ideological side' advocated by Dijsselbloem is ideology at its purest. It masks (falsely presents) as purely expert regulatory measures that are effectively grounded in politico-ideological decisions."

Three Cheers For Post-Humanity

Martin Rees makes the optimist's case for the human capacity to evolve past our human limitations. "The far future will bear traces of humanity, just as our own age retains influences of ancient civilisations. Humans and all they have thought might be a transient precursor to the deeper cogitations of another culture--one dominated by machines, extending deep into the future and spreading far beyond earth. Not everyone considers this an uplifting scenario. There are those who fear that artificial intelligence will supplant us, taking our jobs and living beyond the writ of human laws. Others regard such scenarios as too futuristic to be worth fretting over. But the disagreements are about the rate of travel, not the direction. Few doubt that machines will one day surpass more of our distinctively human capabilities. It may take centuries but, compared to the aeons of evolution that led to humanity's emergence, even that is a mere bat of the eye. This is not a fatalistic projection. It is cause for optimism. The civilisation that supplants us could accomplish unimaginable advances--feats, perhaps, that we cannot even understand."

Dark Horse

Jill Lepore profiles Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders: "Sanders ran for office four times--twice each for governor of Vermont and the U.S. Senate--before running for mayor of Burlington and winning by ten votes. In 1981, he took office in Burlington; Reagan took office in Washington. Sanders isn't a Debsian socialist; he's a socialist in the sense that Reagan used that word to describe L.B.J. 'He campaigned on the promise of a better life for the working man,' Alan Richman wrote in the Boston Globe. 'Nobody seemed to mind that the dream Sanders believes in is called socialism.' He drew the attention of the national press when he ran for reelection, in 1983. In the Wall Street Journal, for instance, Jane Mayer (who is now at The New Yorker) reported that Sanders began a speech at a fundraiser for the United Way by saying, 'I don't believe in charities.' (He later explained by pointing at the donors: 'Most of them were conservative Republicans busy cutting services to low-income people. Then they go collect nickels and dimes, mostly from working people, and congratulate each other on their generosity. I find that hypocritical.') The head of the Burlington United Way told Mayer, 'His speech was, uh, a little longer than we expected.' He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990, as Vermont's only congressman. He told Elizabeth Kolbert, then a political reporter for the Times, that there were perks to being the only socialist in Congress. 'I can't get punished,' Sanders said. 'What are they going to do? Kick me out of the party?' At the time, the most notable way in which he had bucked the Democratic Party had to do with gun control: Sanders opposed the Brady Bill, which placed regulations on the purchase of handguns, a position that's come up, lately, now that the press is taking him a bit more seriously. (Sanders said then that he did not believe gun control was a federal matter; more lately, he has said that, as a man who holds a middle ground on the issue, he can broker a compromise. Many critics are unpersuaded.) After serving eight terms in the House, he was elected to the Senate in 2006. He is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress."

The Power of the Line

In an appreciation of Finnish author and cartoonist Tove Jansson, Sheila Heti relates the moment when she discovered the power of the line: "One day my mother--who immigrated from Hungary forty years ago--was visiting my apartment. She noticed that on the fridge my boyfriend and I had taped a large picture of Charlie Brown, which we had torn from the pages of The New Yorker. It was just Charlie Brown standing there with his hands at his sides. Upon seeing the picture she stopped and said, 'What a nice boy! Who is it?' The remarkable thing wasn't only discovering that my mother had strangely never encountered Charlie Brown, but that upon seeing him for the first time, she immediately liked him, felt sympathy and tenderness. Until that moment, I had not fully understood the power of comics: I had never witnessed so starkly what a perfect line can summon. A line drawn with love can make us as vulnerable as what the line depicts. Whatever cynicism I had about how commerce creates familiarity creates conditioned responses creates 'love,' it crumbled in that instant. An artist's love for what they create is what creates love. The first time I encountered Tove Jansson's Moomin strips, I had the same feeling as my mother: what a nice boy! (Or whatever sort of creature Moomin is--a creature from a tender dream.) There is such vulnerability in his eyebrows, in his little round tummy, in the way he doesn't have a mouth, in the babyish slope of the bottom of his face. It was strange, then, to learn that Jansson's first drawing of Moomin was an attempt to draw 'the ugliest creature imaginable' after a fight with her brother about Immanuel Kant."

Featured Events

From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Hans Teerds discusses how Arendt reveals that by having an interest in local issues, people can band together, create shared initiatives, and thereby disclose the promise of action in the Quote of the Week. Henry David Thoreau reflects on how continuous thought helps to create a deep mental path that will shape our lives in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we are pleased to share an image of a personal Arendt library sent along by Natasha Saunders, a student at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, in this week's Library feature.

HAC Virtual Reading Group #10 - The Human Conditon: Chapters 27-30

This past Friday, July 10th, the Hannah Arendt Center hosted the tenth session of its Virtual Reading Group. We discussed Chapters 27-30 of The Human Condition.

As a special treat, we have decided to make the recording of this meeting available to all of our Amor Mundi subscribers for the next week. Afterwards, the video will once again be available only to members and virtual reading group participants.

You can access the recording here. If you would like to learn more about our virtual reading group, including how you can become a regular participant and gain access to all of our recordings, please click here.