Amor Mundi 7/19/15

07-19-2015

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.

Revisiting a Fairy Tale

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is an industry and a cultural icon that has been read by millions of white Americans as a tale of courage and racial color blindness. Now, with the publication of Lee's original manuscript Go Set A Watchman--in which Atticus Finch is depicted as a somewhat typical if also honorable and generous man of the south--it is time to revisit our energetic worship of Atticus as well as our generations-long misreading of To Kill a Mockingbird. Randall Kennedy reminds us that Monroe Freedman had already in 1992 written--in an obscure law journal--that Finch was depicted in the book as a reluctant hero and someone who was at home with the racism and segregation of the South. For Freedman, it was wrong to see Finch as a model for lawyers. Kennedy argues that the Go Set a Watchman now proves Freedman right and requires that we ask ourselves how, and why, we got it so wrong--why for so long we have been satisfied with the fairy tale when a more nuanced and less comforting truth was staring us in the face. In Hannah Arendt's vocabulary, we should ask why and how is it that we have contented ourselves to embrace the coherent and pleasing fantasy of an exceptional white man fighting for racial justice in the 1960s south despite all the facts that show such an ideal to be a fantasy? Kennedy writes: "Generations have admired Finch for his fidelity to due process even at the risk of unpopularity and personal harm. Freedman noted, however, that Finch did not volunteer to represent Robinson; he did so only upon assignment by the court, saying that he had 'hoped to get through life without a case of this kind.' Freedman also pointed out that Finch abstained from challenging the obvious illicit racial exclusion of blacks from the jury that wrongly convicted Robinson and the racial segregation in the courtroom itself, where blacks were confined to the balcony. At the time of this fictional trial, there would have been good strategic reasons for forgoing objection to these customs. Confrontation would have had little chance at success and a large likelihood of provoking retaliation against the defendant. In Freedman's view, however, those considerations were not decisive in influencing Atticus Finch. Rather, Freedman inferred that Finch failed to oppose Jim Crow custom because he was at home with it. He told his children that the Ku Klux Klan was merely 'a political organization' and that the leader of the lynch mob was 'basically a good man' albeit with 'blind spots along with the rest of us.' To Freedman, Finch's acts and omissions defined a lawyer who lived his life as a 'passive participant' in 'pervasive injustice.' This column by a legal academic, published in a relatively obscure trade journal, so enraged admirers of Atticus Finch that this newspaper published an article about the column and the impassioned responses it provoked. Dismissed by some as the ravings of a curmudgeon, Freedman's impression of Atticus Finch has now been largely ratified by none other than his creator, Harper Lee herself.... In America in 1960, the story of a decent white Southerner who defends an innocent black man charged with raping a white woman had the appeal of a fairy tale and the makings of a popular movie. Perhaps even more promising, though, was the novel Lee first envisioned, the story of Jean Louise's adult conflicts between love and fairness, decency and loyalty. Fully realized, that novel might have become a modern masterpiece."

Go Set a Lawyer

Claire Suddath looks into the questions surrounding the release of To Kill A Mockingbird author Harper Lee's second novel, Go Set A Watchmen, which appears to be just a different, earlier draft of the former book: "Watchman is the most preordered book in HarperCollins's history. Its first print run is two-thirds larger than the final Hunger Games book and more than twice that of the last Game of Thrones installment. HarperCollins is selling the book for up to $20 to bookstores, which means a sold-out first printing could rake in close to $40 million. The novel's topped Amazon.com's best-seller list since its release was announced in February and is the website's most preordered book of any genre in the last four years. Monroeville's two-room bookstore has presold almost 7,000 copies and is trying to find a loading dock big enough to accept them the night before they go on sale. 'This Watchman publication is what physicists call a singularity. There has been nothing like it before now, and there never will be again,' says Daniel Menaker, a former editor at Random House and, before that, the fiction editor at the New Yorker. 'You couldn't plan for this if you tried.' But someone did plan for this, although it might not have been Harper Lee. Ever since Watchman was announced, rumors have persisted that a younger, more mindful Lee--the one who swore not to publish anything again--wouldn't abide any of this. At one point, the state of Alabama even got involved to assess a claim of possible 'elder abuse.' How aware is Lee, really, of this new book? Does she, as her publishers insist, approve of its publication? The answers lie with Lee's lawyer, friend, and confidante, Carter. So I traveled to Monroeville to talk with her."

Machines, Information, and Post-Capitalism

Paul Mason argues that the information economy is creating new material conditions that enable a post-capitalist economy based on sharing and zero-marginal cost production to emerge. What is more, he argues that all this was foreseen by Karl Marx in a little known fragment on Machines from 1858. "The scene is Kentish Town, London, February 1858, sometime around 4am. Marx is a wanted man in Germany and is hard at work scribbling thought-experiments and notes-to-self. When they finally get to see what Marx is writing on this night, the left intellectuals of the 1960s will admit that it 'challenges every serious interpretation of Marx yet conceived'. It is called 'The Fragment on Machines'. In the 'Fragment' Marx imagines an economy in which the main role of machines is to produce, and the main role of people is to supervise them. He was clear that, in such an economy, the main productive force would be information. The productive power of such machines as the automated cotton-spinning machine, the telegraph and the steam locomotive did not depend on the amount of labour it took to produce them but on the state of social knowledge. Organisation and knowledge, in other words, made a bigger contribution to productive power than the work of making and running the machines. Given what Marxism was to become--a theory of exploitation based on the theft of labour time--this is a revolutionary statement. It suggests that, once knowledge becomes a productive force in its own right, outweighing the actual labour spent creating a machine, the big question becomes not one of 'wages versus profits' but who controls what Marx called the 'power of knowledge'. In an economy where machines do most of the work, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be 'social'. In a final late-night thought experiment Marx imagined the end point of this trajectory: the creation of an 'ideal machine', which lasts forever and costs nothing. A machine that could be built for nothing would, he said, add no value at all to the production process and rapidly, over several accounting periods, reduce the price, profit and labour costs of everything else it touched. Once you understand that information is physical, and that software is a machine, and that storage, bandwidth and processing power are collapsing in price at exponential rates, the value of Marx's thinking becomes clear. We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could, if we wanted them to, last forever. In these musings, not published until the mid-20th century, Marx imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a 'general intellect'--which was the mind of everybody on Earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody. In short, he had imagined something close to the information economy in which we live. And, he wrote, its existence would 'blow capitalism sky high'."

Your Home Is Your Transparent Castle

Arne Svenson, an artist, used a telephoto lens to take pictures surreptitiously of everyday people in their apartments. He then exhibited these photos in an art gallery, obscuring the faces, seeking, in his telling, "to comment on the 'anonymity' of urban life, where individuals only reveal what can be seen through their windows." Photos included a half-naked young girl dancing in a tiara. Svenson's neighbors, recognizing themselves and their children, sued Svenson for a violation of their privacy. Two New York State Courts have now upheld Svenson's rights to artistic expression and denied that the neighbors had their privacy rights violated. This is how Justice Dianne Renwick of the New York Appellate Court summed up the decision. "In this action, plaintiffs seek damages and injunctive relief for an alleged violation of the statutory right to privacy. Concerns over privacy and the loss thereof have plagued the public for over a hundred years. Undoubtedly, such privacy concerns have intensified for obvious reasons. New technologies can track thought, movement, and intimacies, and expose them to the general public, often in an instant. This public apprehension over new technologies invading one's privacy became a reality for plaintiffs and their neighbors when a photographer, using a high-powered camera lens inside his own apartment, took photographs through the window into the interior of apartments in a neighboring building. The people who were being photographed had no idea this was happening. This case highlights the limitations of New York's statutory privacy tort as a means of redressing harm that may be caused by this type of technological home invasion and exposure of private life. We are constrained to find that the invasion of privacy of one's home that took place here is not actionable as a statutory tort of invasion of privacy pursuant to sections 50 and 51 of the Civil Rights Law, because defendant's use of the images in question constituted art work and, thus is not deemed 'use for advertising or trade purposes,' within the meaning of the statute." Justice Renwick does recognize that the violation of privacy in this case is real, but she calls upon the legislature to address it. "To be sure, by our holding here--finding no viable cause of action for violation of the statutory right to privacy under these facts--we do not, in any way, mean to give short shrift to plaintiffs' concerns. Undoubtedly, like plaintiffs, many people would be rightfully offended by the intrusive manner in which the photographs were taken in this case. However, such complaints are best addressed to the legislature--the body empowered to remedy such inequities. Needless to say, as illustrated by the troubling facts here, in these times of heightened threats to privacy posed by new and ever more invasive technologies, we call upon the legislature to revisit this important issue, as we are constrained to apply the law as it exists."

Getting Out

Using two ex-cons who pick recently released prisoners up from jail and get them to wherever they need to be going as a way in, Jon Mooallem peeks in at the lived experience of reentering a changed world: "It wasn't until the mid-2000s that this looming 'prisoner re-entry crisis' became a fixation of sociologists and policy makers, generating a torrent of research, government programs, task forces, nonprofit initiatives and conferences now known as the 're-entry movement.' The movement tends to focus on solving structural problems, like providing housing, job training or drug treatment, but easily loses sight of the profound disorientation of the actual people being released. Often, the psychological turbulence of those first days or weeks is so debilitating that recently incarcerated people can't even navigate public transportation; they're too frightened of crowds, too intimidated or mystified by the transit cards that have replaced cash and tokens. In a recent study, the Harvard sociologist Bruce Western describes a woman who 'frequently forgot to eat breakfast or lunch for several months because she was used to being called to meals in prison.' I met one man who explained that, after serving 15 years, he found himself convinced that parked cars would somehow switch on and run him over. So many years inside can leave people vulnerable in almost incomprehensibly idiosyncratic ways, sometimes bordering on helplessness: 'Like that little bird, getting his wings' is how one man described himself on Day 1. Many spill out of prison in no condition to take advantage of the helpful bureaucracies the re-entry movement has been busily putting in place."

The Euro on the Left

James K. Galbraith makes a prediction about the end of the Euro and where that end might come from: "SYRIZA was not some Greek fluke; it was a direct consequence of European policy failure. A coalition of ex-Communists, unionists, Greens, and college professors does not rise to power anywhere except in desperate times. That SYRIZA did rise, overshadowing the Greek Nazis in the Golden Dawn party, was, in its way, a democratic miracle. SYRIZA's destruction will now lead to a reassessment, everywhere on the continent, of the 'European project.' A progressive Europe--the Europe of sustainable growth and social cohesion--would be one thing. The gridlocked, reactionary, petty, and vicious Europe that actually exists is another. It cannot and should not last for very long. What will become of Europe? Clearly the hopes of the pro-European, reformist left are now over. That will leave the future in the hands of the anti-European parties, including UKIP, the National Front in France, and Golden Dawn in Greece. These are ugly, racist, xenophobic groups; Golden Dawn has proposed concentration camps for immigrants in its platform. The only counter, now, is for progressive and democratic forces to regroup behind the banner of national democratic restoration. Which means that the left in Europe will also now swing against the euro. As that happens, should the United States continue to support the euro, aligning ourselves with failed policies and crushed democratic protests? Or should we let it be known that we are indifferent about which countries are in or out? Surely the latter represents the sensible choice. After all, Poland, the Czech Republic, Croatia, and Romania (not to mention Denmark and Sweden, or for that matter the United Kingdom) are still out and will likely remain so--yet no one thinks they will fail or drift to Putin because of that. So why should the euro--plainly now a fading dream--be propped up? Why shouldn't getting out be an option? Independent technical, financial, and moral support for democratic allies seeking exit would, in these conditions, help to stabilize an otherwise dangerous and destructive mood."

On The Frontlines

Paul Stephens wonders if avant-garde poetry may help us work through the flood of information we carry around in our pockets and on our wrists: "Avant-garde poetry may have a small role to play in our understanding of global information flows--on the other hand, the avant-garde has always aspired to be predictive, to keep up with the present, to stay ahead of history. The avant-garde's attempts to maintain critical distance from mainstream bourgeois values may be grandiose and hyperbolic, but the questions raised by avant-garde movements should not be dismissed as nihilistic or unrepresentative of larger social developments. To adapt a question posed by Lyn Hejinian-'Isn't the avant-garde always pedagogical?'--I would ask: 'Isn't the avant-garde always technological?' Much of the work of the twentieth-century avant-garde was extremely self-conscious of the rapid changes in technologies of communication and data storage. From Dada photomontage to hypertext poetry, avant-garde methodology has been deeply concerned with remediation and transcoding--the movement from one technological medium or format to another. As Brian Reed has recently written, 'poetry is a language-based art with a penchant for reflecting on its channels of communication.' For Reed, poetry 'offers unparalleled opportunities for coming to grips with the new media ecology. Poets, as they experiment with transmediation, serially bring to light each medium's textures, contours, and inner logic.' While poetry may seem the most non-technological of literary genres, over the past century poets have frequently been obsessed with the changing nature of information and its dissemination. The news that there is more news than we can process is not so new; while avant-garde poetry may not figure prominently in the global information glut, the global information glut figures prominently in avant-garde poetry."

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From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Champlin discusses how in The Human Condition Arendt at one point refers to a type of monument that complicates the process of creating historical memory through a common world in the Quote of the Week. Lao-Tze traces how thoughts translate into an individual's destiny in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we relate the history of Bard College's Hannah Arendt Collection in this week's Library feature.