Amor Mundi 7/6/14
07-07-2014Hannah 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.
In a Fourth of July column on openDemocracy, Jim Sleeper invokes the Puritan tradition in America as a symbol of what we have lost: "Puritan beliefs had nourished in the embattled farmers (and, even long before 1775, in some of the Puritans themselves) a conviction that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God" and "The Puritan founders of America's oldest colleges ... expected that those colleges' graduates would serve a theocratic state that would control markets and everything else." Sleeper doesn't wish for a new Puritanism, but he does believe we need to imagine new ideals for America: "I'm not suggesting we can or should return to Puritanism! Anyone expecting to recover that faith and way of life is stumbling up dry streambeds toward wellsprings that have themselves run dry. But we do need wellsprings that could fortify us to take risks even more daunting than those taken by the embattled farmers. We'd somehow have to reconfigure or abandon empty comforts, escapes and protections that both free-market conservatives and readers of Salon are accustomed to buying and selling, sometimes against our own best hopes and convictions."
Reading and Misreading the Declaration
In her new book, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, Danielle Allen argues that we have been reading a mistaken transcription of the Declaration of Independence. Allen argues that the grammatical period typically inserted between the sentence on inalienable individual liberties and the sentence on the right to good government is not there in the original Declaration of Independence. In short, when Jefferson invoked those "self-evident" and "inalienable" rights of "all" men, he did not intend only the rights of equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but also the right to good government. Quoted in the New York Times, Allen says, "The period creates the impression that the list of self-evident truths ends with the right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'" And Jennifer Schuessler adds: "But as intended by Thomas Jefferson, she argues, what comes next is just as important: the essential role of governments - 'instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed' - in securing those rights. 'The logic of the sentence moves from the value of individual rights to the importance of government as a tool for protecting those rights,' Ms. Allen said. 'You lose that connection when the period gets added.' Correcting the punctuation, if indeed it is wrong, is unlikely to quell the never-ending debates about the deeper meaning of the Declaration of Independence. But scholars who have reviewed Ms. Allen's research say she has raised a serious question." Read more at the Arendt Center Blog.
Oversharing and Self-Promotion as Fine Art
Riffing on the way fine artists, photographer Richard Prince in particular, are using the photo-sharing app Instagram, Ben Davis uses John Berger's 1972 book Ways of Seeing. Berger draws connections between fine art and more popular fare as a model for understanding today's propensity for oversharing images of one's life: "Isn't it striking that the most-typical and most-maligned genres of Instagram imagery happen to correspond to the primary genres of Western secular art? All that #foodporn is still-life; all those #selfies, self-portraits. All those vacation vistas are #landscape; art-historically speaking, #beachday pics evoke the hoariest cliché of middle-class leisure iconography. (As for the #nudes, I guess they are going on over on Snapchat.) Why this (largely unintentional) echo? Because there is a sneaky continuity between the motivations behind such casual images and the power dynamics that not-so-secretly governed classic art. Last year, Slate speculated about how Instagram's photo-boasting tends to amplify feelings of isolation, perhaps even more so than the more textual braggadocio of Facebook and Twitter. ('Seeing, Berger writes, 'comes before words.') One expert described how Instagram in particular might accelerate the 'envy spiral' of social media: 'If you see beautiful photos of your friend on Instagram,' she postulated, 'one way to compensate is to self-present with even better photos, and then your friend sees your photos and posts even better photos, and so on. Self-promotion triggers more self-promotion, and the world on social media gets further and further from reality.'"
In an interview that maps his love of Proust to his work translating the Greco-Egyptian poet C.P. Cavafy, Daniel Mendelsohn describes the joy and importance of rereading In Search of Lost Time: "I don't think it's a question of proximity to the text. Rather, I think that something different can be found in the text each time. To use the Proustian metaphor that you evoked, each reading of Proust is a bit like a visit to the optician-depending on which pair of lenses you're given to try, you're either capable or incapable of distinguishing a pattern or a letter projected onto a screen in the dark. Successive readings of Proust are like those different sets of lenses-with each one, you see something different. For instance, when I was twenty, so much of French culture escaped me. I was inexperienced, I had never left the U.S. The whole Proustian world of Faubourg Saint-Germain and of Combray went straight over my head. I was incapable, for example, of understanding the type of person that Françoise represented in French heritage-the earthy peasant type that comes with the social territory, so to speak. Today, I'm not the same person I was when I was twenty. I have all the experience of a life. I'm also well traveled and I know France well, I have many friends living there, and so I understand French culture much better than I did thirty years ago and can appreciate aspects of Proust's novel I couldn't before. On the other hand, it must be said that I will never again feel the amazement I felt on my first reading of In Search of Lost Time. It's an aesthetic experience that you only have once in your life."
In a piece that is sure to be a controversial, Noam Chomsky argues in The Nation that in order for the peace movement to be effective, it must re-evaluate its goals and tactics in accordance with the reality of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Chomsky, supportive of a two-state solution, argues that to give peace a chance the left needs to abandon the goal of the Palestinian right of return: "The opening call of the BDS movement, by a group of Palestinian intellectuals in 2005, demanded that Israel fully comply with international law by '(1) Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall; (2) Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and (3) Respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.' This call received considerable attention, and deservedly so. But if we're concerned about the fate of the victims, BD and other tactics have to be carefully thought through and evaluated in terms of their likely consequences. The pursuit of (1) in the above list makes good sense: it has a clear objective and is readily understood by its target audience in the West, which is why the many initiatives guided by (1) have been quite successful-not only in 'punishing' Israel, but also in stimulating other forms of opposition to the occupation and US support for it. However, this is not the case for (3). While there is near-universal international support for (1), there is virtually no meaningful support for (3) beyond the BDS movement itself. Nor is (3) dictated by international law. The text of UN General Assembly Resolution 194 is conditional, and in any event it is a recommendation, without the legal force of the Security Council resolutions that Israel regularly violates. Insistence on (3) is a virtual guarantee of failure."
Nick Hanauer has a message for his fellow .01% of the wealthiest Americans. "But let's speak frankly to each other. I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all-I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?I see pitchforks. At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country-the 99.99 percent-is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent. But the problem isn't that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution. And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won't last."
This Week on the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Jennie Han explores two modern examples of exceptionalism as claims to power in the Quote of the Week. American artist Florence Scovel Shinn provides this week's Thought on Thinking. We take a look back at our 2009 fall conference in the new Video Archives segment. And Roger Berkowitz reexamines the Declaration of Independence and the role of good government in the Weekend Read.