Amor Mundi - 7/7/13

07-08-2013

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.

Roger Berkowitz on Arendt's Unconventional Wisdom

In the New York Times, Roger Berkowitz takes on what he calls the new consensus emerging in responses to the new "Hannah Arendt" movie, that seems to be resolving the vitriolic debates over Arendt's characterization of Adolf Eichmann over the last 50 years. This new consensus holds that Arendt was right in her general claim that many evildoers are normal people, but was wrong about Eichmann in particular. As Christopher Browning summed it up recently in the New York Review of Books, "Arendt grasped an important concept but not the right example." As Berkowitz writes, this new consensus is founded upon "new scholarship on Eichmann's writings and reflections from the 1950's, when he was living amongst a fraternity of former Nazis in Argentina, before Israeli agents captured him and spirited him out of the country and to Israel. Eichmann's writings include an unpublished memoir, "The Others Spoke, Now Will I Speak," and an interview conducted over many months with a Nazi journalist and war criminal, Willem Sassen, which were not released until long after the trial. Eichmann's justification of his actions to Sassen is considered more genuine than his testimony before judges in Jerusalem. In recent decades, scholars have argued that the Sassen interviews show that Arendt was simply wrong in her judgment of Eichmann because she did not have all the facts." As tempting as this new consensus is, it is wrong, Berkowitz argues. Read his full argument here.

A Challenging World View

Geoff Dyer, flipping through the catalogue of a recent Gary Winograd retrospective at SFMoMA, considers the way that the street photographer presented what he saw: "the pictures didn't look right, they were all skewed and lurchy, random-seeming and wrong. They were, it was felt, an unprovoked assault on the eye... We were accustomed to viewing the world through a set of conventional lenses that Winograd wrenched from our face, making us conscious of how short-sighted we had been." Winograd's still pictures, in other words, act on their viewers, betraying our sense of the world, shifting it out of focus, and therefore revealing it for what it is.

The Meaning of Gettysburg

Tony Horwitz uses the upcoming 150th anniversary of Gettysburg to zoom out and consider the changing historical narrative about the American Civil War, in the process offering up an important reminder that history is a living, changing thing: "the 150th anniversary of the Civil War is too narrow a lens through which to view the conflict. We are commemorating the four years of combat that began in 1861 and ended with Union victory in 1865. But Iraq and Afghanistan remind us, yet again, that the aftermath of war matters as much as its initial outcome. Though Confederate armies surrendered in 1865, white Southerners fought on by other means, wearing down a war-weary North that was ambivalent about if not hostile to black equality. Looking backwards, and hitting the pause button at the Gettysburg Address or the passage of the 13th amendment, we see a "good" and successful war for freedom. If we focus instead on the run-up to war, when Lincoln pledged to not interfere with slavery in the South, or pan out to include the 1870s, when the nation abandoned Reconstruction, the story of the Civil War isn't quite so uplifting. "

Fixing the Digital Economy

Computer scientist and writer Jaron Lanier critiques the present digital economy with a close look at the evolving relationship between technology and power. To make his argument for change, he insightfully reinterprets what many consider to be a paradox - that the pairing of technology and power at once enriches and erodes the agency of individual actors. Companies like Google are so valuable, he argues, because they control enormously powerful and expensive servers-he calls them Siren Servers to emphasize their irresistible allure-that allow it to manipulate aggregate activity over time. "While people are rarely forced to accept the influence of Siren Servers in any particular case, on a broad statistical basis it becomes impossible for a population to do anything but acquiesce over time....While no particular Google ad is guaranteed to work, the overall Google ad scheme by definition must work, because of the laws of statistics. Superior computation lets a Siren Server enjoy the magical benefits of reliably manipulating others even though no hand is forced ... We need to experiment; to learn how to nurture a middle class that can thrive even in a highly automated society."

Reconciling Experience with History

Discussing her recent essay in Harper's, writer Rebecca Makkai talks about her experience of her grandfather, whom she knew as a yoga instructor who lived in Hawaii, who was also the principal author of Hungary's Second Jewish Law, which passed in 1939. At one point, she strikes a particularly Arendtian note: "There's also the fact that it's just very difficult, psychologically, to reconcile the face of a real person with one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century. It's not the same as looking at someone who's personally violent, likely to reach out and hit you. This guy is chopping up papaya on his balcony, telling jokes, and I think we have an instinct to forgive, to see just the best in that person, to see him at just that moment. (The irony being that this is what he and his colleagues failed to do - to see humans in front of them.)"

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