Amor Mundi 7/20/14

07-21-2014

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 Holy Hell

Sari Nusseibeh, recently retired President of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, thoughtfully writes of the end of his lifelong dream that Israel and Palestine might be able to live together in a peaceful and vibrant future. All that is left, he writes, is the promise of hell. "I can, of course, see and admire beautiful individuals. Israel boasts so many of them - poets, writers, journalists, scholars, artists - and just ordinary people in ordinary jobs, trying to live their harmless lives. But that special luster of an idealistic nation to be admired has vanished. I can no longer see it anywhere. It has become replaced, in my mind - sorry to say - by what appears to have become a scientifically skilled colonialist group of self-serving thugs, bent on self-aggrandizement, capitalizing on world-guilt for past pains and horrors suffered, and now hiding behind a religious fiction to justify all the pain and suffering it does to my own people, our heritage and culture.... I cannot see an Israeli government now offering what a Palestinian government can now accept. I can therefore only foresee a worsening climate - not a one-time disaster (say, an avalanche following the killing of a Jew while performing a prayer in the Noble Sanctuary, on what Israelis call the Temple Mount in Jerusalem) that can once and for all be put behind, by whichever side, but an increasingly ugly living climate in which only those who can acclimatize and be ugly themselves can survive. In simple words, even if called 'holy,' I can foresee this place turning into a hell for all those who live in it. It will not be place for normal human beings who want to pursue normal lives, let alone a place where anyone can hope to fulfill a sublime life." Read Roger Berkowitz's response on the Arendt Center blog.

Changing Vs. Loving the World

In the New York Review of Books Robert Pogue Harrison notes that changing the world through work has become a Silicon Valley cliché: "When Steve Jobs sought to persuade John Sculley, the chief executive of Pepsi, to join Apple in 1983, he succeeded with an irresistible pitch: 'Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?' The day I sat down to write this article, a full-page ad for Blackberry in The New York Times featured a smiling Arianna Huffington with an oversize caption in quotes: 'Don't just take your place at the top of the world. Change the world.' A day earlier, I heard Bill Gates urge the Stanford graduating class to 'change the world' through optimism and empathy. The mantra is so hackneyed by now that it's hard to believe it still gets chanted regularly. Our silicon age, which sees no glory in maintenance, but only in transformation and disruption, makes it extremely difficult for us to imagine how, in past eras, those who would change the world were viewed with suspicion and dread. If you loved the world; if you considered it your mortal home; if you were aware of how much effort and foresight it had cost your forebears to secure its foundations, build its institutions, and shape its culture; if you saw the world as the place of your secular afterlife, then you had good reasons to impute sinister tendencies to those who would tamper with its configuration or render it alien to you. Referring to all that happened during the 'dark times' of the first half of the twentieth century, 'with its political catastrophes, its moral disasters, and its astonishing development of the arts and sciences,' Hannah Arendt summarized the human cost of endless disruption: 'The world becomes inhuman, inhospitable to human needs-which are the needs of mortals-when it is violently wrenched into a movement in which there is no longer any sort of permanence.'" You can also watch Harrison's talk on Thinking and Friendship given at the Arendt Center.

The End of Dangerous Thinking?

In a piece on the place of theory and dangerous thinking in contemporary intellectual discourse, Henry Giroux describes why such practices appear to be in decline, citing its unintelligibility, an assault on them from particular political interests, as well as the corporatization of the university, among other things. It doesn't help that good critical thinking is hard to do, and that thinking and action aren't the same: "One important function of dangerous thinking is that it foregrounds the responsibility of artists, intellectuals, academics and others who use it. Mapping the full range of how power is used and how it can be made accountable represents a productive pedagogical and political use of theory. Theorizing the political, economic and cultural landscapes is central to any form of political activism and suggests that theory is like oxygen. That is, a valuable resource, which one has to become conscious of in order to realize how necessary it is to have it. Where we should take pause is when academic culture uses critical thought in the service of ideological purity and in doing so transforms pedagogy into forms of poisonous indoctrination for students. Critical thought in this case ossifies from a practice to a form of political dogmatism. The cheerleaders for casino capitalism hate critical theory and thought because they contain the possibility of politicizing everyday life and exposing those savage market-driven ideologies, practices and social relations that hide behind an appeal to commonsense. Both the fetishism of thinking and its dismissal are part of the same coin, the overall refusal to link conception and practice, agency and intervention, all aggravated by neoliberalism's hatred of all things social and public."

The Liberal Arts as Teacher Education

Stephen Mucher makes the case that liberal arts faculty should be more involved in teacher education, suggesting that teachers who are well versed in the humanities, in addition to teaching practice, prepare more curious, more creative students with better critical thinking skills: "Without a professional core of teachers who are versed in the humanities and steeped in the great questions of science, schools are especially vulnerable to forces that reduce teaching to a series of discrete measurable acts. Yet the more teaching is dissected, the less attractive the profession becomes for graduates who might otherwise consider it a viable and meaningful career option. More directly, these reductionist policy trends obscure something that humanists care deeply about -- the enduring beauty of teaching and learning. As one outgoing pedagogy chair lamented in 1900, 'the attempt to mechanize instruction is part of the monstrous error that free minds can be coerced; it has really the same root as religious persecution.' By remaining largely silent for so long, colleges of liberal arts and sciences have contributed to these developments. By pushing big questions about K-12 teaching to the margins and assigning them solely to education specialists, institutions of higher education became complicit in trends that continue to make public education more separate and more unequal."

Poetry and Tradition

In an interview, poet Carol Muske-Dukes takes on the notion of "unoriginal genius," which she thinks is alienating contemporary poetry from the public, and emphasizes instead an older way of thinking about verse. Let's bring back readable poetry we can recite: "Proponents of unoriginal genius would say that they are putting forward a version of interpretation and illumination of a technological age. But the fact is, this mirroring of disjunction represents no real speaking or reading or thinking population.... The struggle here, as it is with overly accessible, catchy poetry, is a struggle to be both popular and enlightening. We live in a time when language matters. Not only because of the constant threat of misunderstanding in translation - in diplomacy, in wartime, in the university and literary life - but, as always, in individual human relations. So the abdication of accessible rhetoric and a turn toward so-called scholarship is an abdication of the human. The academy has opted for pointless experimentation in language compared to my mother's generation - she's ninety-eight - of well schooled, publicly educated students of poetry who know pages and pages of poetry by heart. Should anyone who believes in sense be ostracized from the ongoing conversation of literature?"

The Laboring Animal in the Leisure Suit

Kate Losse suggests that there's something sinister behind the connection of work and leisure on the campuses of innovative tech companies: "Of course, the remaking of the contemporary tech office into a mixed work-cum-leisure space is not actually meant to promote leisure. Instead, the work/leisure mixing that takes place in the office mirrors what happens across digital, social and professional spaces. Work has seeped into our leisure hours, making the two tough to distinguish. And so, the white-collar work-life blend reaches its logical conclusion with the transformation of modern luxury spaces such as airport lounges into spaces that look much like the offices from which the technocrat has arrived. Perhaps to secure the business of the new moneyed tech class, the design of the new Centurion Lounge for American Express card members draws from the same design palette as today's tech office: reclaimed-wood panels, tree-stump stools, copious couches and a cafeteria serving kale salad on bespoke ceramic plates. In these lounges, the blurring of recreation and work becomes doubly disconcerting for the tech employee. Is one headed out on vacation or still at the office - and is there a difference? If the reward for participation in the highly lucrative tech economy is not increasing leisure but a kind of highly decorated, almost Disneyland vision of perpetual labour, what will be its endgame? As work continues to consume workers' lives, tech offices might compete for increasingly unique and obscure toys and luxury perks to inhibit their employees' awareness that they are always working." Maybe Silicon Valley's idea of changing the world is simply the collapse of the labor vs. leisure distinction.

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