Amor Mundi 8/23/15

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.

After Trigger Warnings

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, writing in The Atlantic on students' demands for college courses and syllabi to have trigger warnings that inform them of potentially distressing material before they actually need to encounter it, track the rise of the trigger warning and wonder what effect it might have on college graduates: "What are the effects of this new protectiveness on the students themselves? Does it benefit the people it is supposed to help? What exactly are students learning when they spend four years or more in a community that polices unintentional slights, places warning labels on works of classic literature, and in many other ways conveys the sense that words can be forms of violence that require strict control by campus authorities, who are expected to act as both protectors and prosecutors? There's a saying common in education circles: Don't teach students what to think; teach them how to think. The idea goes back at least as far as Socrates. Today, what we call the Socratic method is a way of teaching that fosters critical thinking, in part by encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them. Such questioning sometimes leads to discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding. But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically."

Melancholia

Carina del Valle Schorske notes a striking mirroring in the way we talk about depression: "Both stigmatization and sanctification come with real ethical dangers. On the one hand, there is the danger that hidden in the wish for the elimination of depressive symptoms is a wish for the elimination of other essential attributes of the depressed person--her posture of persistent critique, her intolerance for small talk. On the other hand there is the danger of taking pleasure in the pain of the melancholic, and of adding the expectation of insight to the already oppressive expectations the melancholic likely has for herself. But these ethical dangers are not simply imposed on the unfortunate person from the outside. It is not only the culture at large that oscillates between understanding psychological suffering as a sign of genius and a mark of shame. The language used in both discourses bears a striking resemblance to the language the depressed person uses in her own head."  

Looking for a New Home

Sue Halpern in the New York Review of Books considers the grandiose vision of Elon Musk, the man behind Tesla and SpaceX, Musk's latest project to colonize Mars. "An even more significant connection is this: while Musk is working to move people away from fossil fuels, betting that the transition to electric vehicles and solar energy will contain the worst effects of global climate change, he is hedging that bet with one that is even more wishful and quixotic. In the event that those terrestrial solutions don't pan out and civilization is imperiled, Musk is positioning SpaceX to establish a human colony on Mars. As its website explains: 'SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of enabling human life on Mars.' 'The key thing for me,' Musk told a reporter for The Guardian in 2013, 'is to develop the technology to transport large numbers of people and cargo to Mars.... There's no rush in the sense that humanity's doom is imminent; I don't think the end is nigh. But I do think we face some small risk of calamitous events. It's sort of like why you buy car or life insurance. It's not because you think you'll die tomorrow, but because you might.' To be clear, Musk is not envisioning a colony of a few hundred settlers on the Red Planet, but one on the order of Hawthorne, California, the 80,000-plus industrial city outside of Los Angeles where SpaceX has its headquarters."

But Is There Money In It?

Steven Johnson suggests that the internet economy, which came with an increased ease in pirating and sharing art and entertainment, hasn't been as harmful to artists as some would like to believe: "The trouble with this argument is that it has been based largely on anecdote, on depressing stories about moderately successful bands that are still sharing an apartment or filmmakers who can't get their pictures made because they refuse to pander to a teenage sensibility. When we do see hard data about the state of the culture business, it usually tracks broad industry trends or the successes and failures of individual entertainment companies. That data isn't entirely irrelevant, of course; it's useful to know whether the music industry is making more or less money than it did before Ulrich delivered his anti-Napster testimony. But ultimately, those statistics only hint at the most important question. The dystopian scenario, after all, isn't about the death of the record business or Hollywood; it's about the death of music or movies. As a society, what we most want to ensure is that the artists can prosper--not the record labels or studios or publishing conglomerates, but the writers, musicians, directors and actors themselves. Their financial fate turns out to be much harder to measure, but I endeavored to try. Taking 1999 as my starting point--the year both Napster and Google took off--I plumbed as many data sources as I could to answer this one question: How is today's creative class faring compared with its predecessor a decade and a half ago? The answer isn't simple, and the data provides ammunition for conflicting points of view. It turns out that Ulrich was incontrovertibly correct on one point: Napster did pose a grave threat to the economic value that consumers placed on recorded music. And yet the creative apocalypse he warned of has failed to arrive. Writers, performers, directors and even musicians report their economic fortunes to be similar to those of their counterparts 15 years ago, and in many cases they have improved. Against all odds, the voices of the artists seem to be louder than ever."  

Maybe We Do Want Privacy After All

Even as people complain about the erosion of privacy, they continue to use websites and devices that compromise their personal data and to support the governmental use of surveillance in the name of security. This has led many marketers and defenders of surveillance to suggest that privacy is simply not a real concern. A new study by Joseph Turow, Michael Hennessy, and Nora Draper complicates that assumption: "New Annenberg survey results indicate that marketers are misrepresenting a large majority of Americans by claiming that Americans give out information about themselves as a tradeoff for benefits they receive. To the contrary, the survey reveals most Americans do not believe that 'data for discounts' is a square deal. The findings also suggest, in contrast to other academics' claims, that Americans' willingness to provide personal information to marketers cannot be explained by the public's poor knowledge of the ins and outs of digital commerce. In fact, people who know more about ways marketers can use their personal information are more likely rather than less likely to accept discounts in exchange for data when presented with a real-life scenario. Our findings, instead, support a new explanation: a majority of Americans are resigned to giving up their data--and that is why many appear to be engaging in tradeoffs. Resignation occurs when a person believes an undesirable outcome is inevitable and feels powerless to stop it. Rather than feeling able to make choices, Americans believe it is futile to manage what companies can learn about them. Our study reveals that more than half do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened. By misrepresenting the American people and championing the tradeoff argument, marketers give policymakers false justifications for allowing the collection and use of all kinds of consumer data often in ways that the public find objectionable. Moreover, the futility we found, combined with a broad public fear about what companies can do with the data, portends serious difficulties not just for individuals but also--over time--for the institution of consumer commerce." If privacy is to be protected, it is important to ask why privacy matters. That is the theme of the Hannah Arendt Center's upcoming fall conference. You can register to attend here.

How Transparent Should Government Be?

Francis Fukuyama writing in the Financial Times argues that we should be suspicious of the cult of transparency even as he is supportive of Edward Snowden's revelations. There are, he argues, limits to transparency. "Given that 'transparency' has such positive connotations, it is hard to imagine a reversal of these measures. But the public interest would not be served if the internal deliberations of the US Federal Reserve or the Supreme Court were put on CSPAN, as some have demanded. Legislators and officials must preserve deliberative space, just as families need to protect their privacy when debating their finances or how to deal with a wayward child. And they need to be able to do so without donning a straitjacket of rules specifying how they must talk to each other, and to citizens." There may be dangers to transparency, yet David Brin, one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming Arendt Center fall conference "Why Privacy Matters," argues the opposing view in his book The Transparent Society: only transparency can in the end preserve both privacy and liberty. We encourage you to learn more about Brin and register for the conference.

Hail to the Chief's Mixtape

Hua Hsu listens to President Obama's recent Spotify playlists: "Perhaps, as Bernie Sanders harrumphed when asked about his hair, idle focus on the leisure-time enthusiasms of politicians is just a ruse to distract us from what actually matters. But the playlists were a reminder of Obama's influence on American culture and of the way he has become a sort of lifestyle brand thanks to his Administration's indefatigable efforts to put him wherever young people might see him, from the late-night establishment and ESPN to the comparatively niche audiences of Vice News, 'Between Two Ferns,' and 'WTF.' Once, Bill Clinton pantomimed cool by playing the sax on the Arsenio Hall Show; now, we have a President who seems intent on proving that he's not too cool for the occasional Coldplay song...At a time when so many of our everyday choices get gussied up in the language of 'curation,' playlists and d.j.s (particularly celebrity d.j.s) have taken on an elevated role. The playlist has become a kind of biographical shorthand, a way of communicating something essential about ourselves through the performance of taste. Of course, taste and relatability mean something different when they involve someone with drones at his disposal. These are playlists meant to convey a set of values: knowledge of the past, an open ear, an interest in the future. There are the safe, modern-day crowd-pleasers like the Lumineers and Florence and the Machine alongside relative obscurities like Low Cut Connie and Aoife O'Donovan. There is no Linkin Park. And of course there is Beyoncé's 'Superpower,' because even the most powerful leader in the world wouldn't dare snub the most beloved human on the planet."

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From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Samantha Hill discusses how Donald Trump and Jon Stewart both tap into a desire among the American public for truth in politics in the Quote of the Week. William Henry Bragg reflects on how science interacts with facts in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate the annotations Hannah Arendt made to her copy of Baruch Spinoza's Ethics in this week's Library feature.