Amor Mundi - 7/14/13

07-15-2013

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 Snowden Effect

Jay Rosen at Press Think has coined the term "The Snowden Effect" to signify "direct and indirect gains in public knowledge from the cascade of events and further reporting that followed Edward Snowden's leaks of classified information about the surveillance state in the U.S." Rosen provides a helpful list of precisely what we have learned about our government's spying activities since Snowden began releasing the secret documents he stole. For example, "Did you know that the United States Postal Service "computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States - about 160 billion pieces last year?"" I did not. The Snowden effect works like that. It widens the circle of people who know, even if the knowledge had been available before.Whatever may be the fate of Snowden, and whether or not you think he was right or wrong to release the documents, the Snowden Effect has initiated a much-needed conversation.

On Violence

As part of its 50^th Anniversary celebration, the New York Review of Books has made available Hannah Arendt's "On Violence," one of her greatest essays that was first published in the NYRB in 1969. The essay begins: "These reflections were provoked by the events and debates of the last few years, as seen against the background of the twentieth century. Indeed this century has become, as Lenin predicted, a century of wars and revolutions, hence a century of that violence which is currently believed to be their common denominator. There is, however, another factor in the present situation which, though predicted by nobody, is of at least equal importance. The technical development of implements of violence has now reached the point where no political goal could conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in armed conflict. Hence, warfare-since times immemorial the final merciless arbiter in international disputes-has lost much of its effectiveness and nearly all of its glamor."

Stepping Out Into the World

On the occasion of sending his son to a French language immersion program in France, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is himself currently in Paris, reflects on what it means to grow up and become a parent, inadvertently touching on the challenge of entering into the wide world: "First you leave your block. Then you leave your neighborhood. Then you leave your high school. Then your city, your college and, finally, your country. At every step you are leaving another world, and at every step you feel a warm gravity, a large love, pulling you back home. And you feel crazy for leaving. And you feel that it is preposterous to do this to yourself."

Ethical Mapmaking

Mapmaker Dennis Wood, who believes that maps are arguments about the way the world looks, discusses the ethics of cartography in that context: "I've been suggesting to the hardest-edged people of all that they could put their epistemological and ontological arguments on a really firm foundation by simply acknowledging the fact that they are making the world. And they recoil from that, viscerally and instinctively, as they continue to make the software that enables them to make the world...When someone drops a bomb on something and kills a bunch of kids, and they do that using a map that you made, you either accept the responsibility for it-a kind of well, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs responsibility-or you say, 'Damn it, I can't do this anymore.'" All of which reminds us of Hannah Arendt's essay, "Eggs Speak Up," where she writes, "Democratic society as a living reality is threatened at the very moment that democracy becomes a 'cause,' because then actions are likely to be judged and opinions evaluated in terms of ultimate ends and not on their inherent merits."

Lost in Translation

On the hundredth birthday of Catalan language writer Salvador Espriu, poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips considers what it meant for Espriu to write in his native language, banned for most of his lifetime by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco: "His was stubborn adherence to a language and to a culture that no matter how minimalized and denied by edict were still very obviously a reality. What gets lost at times in estimations of Espriu outside of his own language is that he was entirely a writer of his own language. His Catalan is hyper-expressive and inclusive of so many registers, idioms, and argots that it shakes free of a standardized expressive center. He is a writer of oi moiand not alas. It's almost as if the point was that the oppression of language is best met by the overflow of that language against its oppression. That all of it must rise at once and live: it is a palimpsest with sharp edges."

Pitching Humanities to the Engineers

John Horgan, pivoting off the recent release of a report to Congress on the state of the humanities, shares the pitch he gives to the future engineers he teaches at Stevens Institute of Technology on the first day of his great books course: "The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific. This skepticism is especially important when it comes to claims about humanity, about what we are, where we came from, and even what we can be and should be. Science has replaced religion as our main source of answers to these questions. Science has told us a lot about ourselves, and we're learning more every day. But the humanities remind us that we have an enormous capacity for deluding ourselves."

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