Amor Mundi 8/17/14

08-18-2014

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 Owl of Minerva Spreads Its Wings

Raymond Geuss looks back at the 1970s, when he was writing The Idea of a Critical Theory, and sees now what he could not see then: the world he was writing about was ending. As far as what was 'really' happening is concerned, we can now see that the period of unprecedented economic growth and political and social progress which took place in the West after the end of World War II began to plateau in the 1970s when productivity began to stagnate. By the early 1970s, though, the assumption that economic growth would continue, levels of prosperity continue to rise, and the social and political structures continue to evolve in the direction of greater flexibility, realism and humanity had become very firmly entrenched in Western populations.The period during which anything like that assumption was at all reasonable was ending just as I was beginning work on my book, although I, of course, did not know that at the time, any more than anyone else did. It would have been political suicide for any major figure in the West to face up to this situation courageously and to try to make clear to the population that the possibilities of relatively easy real growth were exhausted, that the era of ever-increasing prosperity was gone for good; this would have raised intolerable questions about the very foundations of the existing socioeconomic and political order." Geuss raises serious questions about the poverty of our political and philosophical thinking and its inability to address the reality of our situation. He worries that by seeking to justify and legitimate power, political thinking has turned away from the more important question of justice. You can read more about Geuss' essay in the Weekend Read on the Hannah Arendt Center Blog.

The Militarized State

In the wake of the controversial shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, protests and riots have been met by a heavily militarized police presence. The over-militarization of local police departments has been a theme for 30 years, but people are starting to pay attention. In the New York Times, Julie Bosman and Matt Apuzzo have a long article explaining how, for example, a suburban St. Louis district won a $360,000 U.S. government grant to purchase a heavily armored vehicle that was part of the militarized response to the protests: "For four nights in a row, they streamed onto West Florissant Avenue wearing camouflage, black helmets and vests with 'POLICE' stamped on the back. They carried objects that doubled as warnings: assault rifles and ammunition, slender black nightsticks and gas masks. They were not just one police force but many, hailing from communities throughout north St. Louis County and loosely coordinated by the county police. Their adversaries were a ragtag group of mostly unarmed neighborhood residents, hundreds of African-Americans whose pent-up fury at the police had sent them pouring onto streets and sidewalks in Ferguson, demanding justice for Michael Brown, the 18-year-old who was fatally shot by a police officer on Saturday. When the protesters refused to retreat from the streets, threw firebombs or walked too close to a police officer, the response was swift and unrelenting: tear gas and rubber bullets."

The Warrior Cop

Radley Balko's book, "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces," offers a detailed account of the way government programs have encouraged the development of heavily armed police forces and also the way SWAT teams are deployed for even routine police actions. In an excerpt on Copblock, Balko writes, "Police militarization would accelerate in the 2000s. The first half of the decade brought a new and lucrative source of funding and equipment: homeland security. In response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, the federal government opened a new spigot of funding in the name of fighting terror. Terrorism would also provide new excuses for police agencies across the country to build up their arsenals and for yet smaller towns to start up yet more SWAT teams. The second half of the decade also saw more mission creep for SWAT teams and more pronounced militarization even outside of drug policing. The 1990s trend of government officials using paramilitary tactics and heavy-handed force to make political statements or to make an example of certain classes of nonviolent offenders would continue, especially in response to political protests. The battle gear and aggressive policing would also start to move into more mundane crimes-SWAT teams have recently been used even for regulatory inspections."

The Critic as Oracle

In a review of a new collection essays, The Essential Ellen Willis, Hermione Hoby considers how Willis writes with a raw honesty that is bracing as it is compelling: "Throughout the fifty-one essays collected here, Willis writes as an interrogator, both of her world and of herself. As a self-identified optimist ('an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect'), she is more interested in examining the way things might be than pronouncing on the way things are: an inquiry which, in accordance with her own convictions, nearly always entails a personal dimension. One of this book's rawest pieces is 'Next Year in Jerusalem' (1977), in which she follows her brother, Mike, to Israel where he is undergoing a conversion to Orthodox Judaism. This prompts a spiritual crisis of her own, not of loss of faith, but of a loss of faith in her faithlessness. She spirals into a slough of confusion and depression regarding her spiritual and political convictions. The rabbi's wife seems to deliver Willis the 'cosmic mockery' of her predicament: 'The big lie of male supremacy is that women are less than fully human; the basic task of feminism is to expose that lie and fight it on every level. Yet for all my feminist militance I was, it seemed, secretly afraid that the lie was true - that my humanity was hopelessly at odds with my ineluctable female sexuality - while the rebbetzin, staunch apostle of traditional femininity, did not appear to doubt for a moment that she could be both a woman and a serious person.'"

The Past and the Present

In a short but sweet profile of the prominent classicist Mary Beard, Annalisa Quinn considers why Beard thinks that studying the classics remains important, even after two plus millennia of such scholarship: "'You do the ancient world much greater service if you keep arguing with them,' she says, gesticulating without bothering to put down her latte, which dipped dangerously...In the book, she writes that the way we read the subject 'says as much about us as it does about them.' I asked her what she meant. 'We raid them,' she says, simply. 'We have to ventriloquize the ancient world.' For example, scholarship on women in the ancient world has grown in the last few decades, Beard says, as a 'result of the feminist movements of the '70s and '80s. When I was an undergraduate, people didn't really talk about women in antiquity,' she says. But 'now, when we talk about Euripides, we talk about his female characters.' If the study of classics, then, can be a mirror of contemporary concerns, it also means scholars are never done."

The Mo Show

Nothing can liven up the dog days of August like a feel-good story from the Little League World Series. Mo'ne Davis, a 13-year-old girl from Pennsylvania, is only the 18^th girl to play in the Little League championship. She is now the first to throw a complete game shutout, completely dominating her male peers. She entered her latest game with huge expectations. "Could she live up to the hype? Yes. Davis pitched six innings, gave up a pair infield hits and struck out eight in a 4-0 victory over Nashville. By the end of fifth inning, with her Tennessee counterpart at the 85-pitch limit, Davis had thrown just 44. With each out in the final inning, the cheers became louder, and when Davis struck out the final batter, becoming the first girl in Little League World Series history to earn a win, the crowd exploded. Her parents hugged and then accepted the congratulations of strangers. Their modest 13-year-old girl had become an inspiration virtually overnight.... After Friday's game, Pennsylvania Manager Alex Rice put Davis's performance in perfect perspective, saying, 'It was the Mo show out there.'"

The Rarest of Beasts

From this week's dive into the New Yorker archives, we bring you the first part of Peter Matthiessen's essay "The Snow Leopard," the naturalist's trek into the Himalayas to try to catch a peak of the rare big cat.

 

 

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SAVE THE DATE - 2014 FALL CONFERENCE

October 9-10

The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?, will be held this year on October 9-10!

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From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Ian Storey discusses Isaiah Berlin and the need to understand others in politics in the Quote of the Week. Marcus Aurelius provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We look back on a public conversation on the nature of thinking between Roger Berkowitz and Bill T. Jones in our Video Archives. And Roger Berkowitz explores an essay by Raymond Guess on the weakness of contemporary thinking in the Weekend Read.