Amor Mundi 8/24/14

08-25-2014

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 Unnecessary Irrelevance of Modern Philosophy

Charlie Huenemann takes on the ghettoization of philosophy: "Most academic philosophy departments see themselves primarily as housing a specialized academic discipline, and contributing only incidentally here or there to a university's general education curriculum. The priority needs to be reversed. Frankly, there is little or no need for specialized academic philosophy; if it disappeared overnight, the only ones who would notice would be the practitioners themselves. But on the other hand, despite the occasional iconoclastic polemic saying otherwise, there is a widespread recognition that philosophy provides a valuable contribution to the mind of an educated person, even if the person is not working toward a degree in the field. Philosophy professors need to see their primary job as enriching the mental lives, values, and discourses of non-philosophers. For almost everyone, we should be a side dish rather than the main course. That is where our societal value lies." I've ridden this hobby horse before: "As Hannah Arendt wrote 50 years ago in her essay 'On Violence,' humanities scholars today are better served by being learned and erudite than by seeking to do original research by uncovering some new or forgotten scrap. While such finds can be interesting, they are exceedingly rare and largely insignificant....We should, of course, continue to support scholars, those whose work is to some extent scholarly innovative. But more needed are well-read and thoughtful teachers who can teach widely and write for a general audience.... To say that excessively specialized humanities scholarship today is irrelevant is not to say that the humanities are irrelevant. The humanities are that space in the university system where power does not have the last word, where truth and beauty as well as insight and eccentricity reign supreme and where young people come into contact with the great traditions, writing, and thinking that have made us who we are today. The humanities introduce us to our ancestors and our forebears and acculturate students into their common heritage. It is in the humanities that we learn to judge the good from the bad and thus where we first encounter the basic moral facility for making judgments. It is because the humanities teach taste and judgment that they are absolutely essential to politics. It is even likely that the decline of politics today is profoundly connected to the corruption of the humanities." Read more here.

The Origins of Totalitarianism, II

Kenan Malik, who will speak at the HAC on Sept. 17th, writes in the NY Times this week about the deeply worrying rise of both antisemitism and islamophobia in Europe, particularly in France. He refers soberly to the Pew Survey that shows "not just that anti-Semitism had increased throughout Europe, but also that the 'publics that view Jews unfavorably also tend to see Muslims in a negative light.' The fusion of xenophobia, conspiracy theory, identity politics and anti-politics that has nurtured the new anti-Semitism has also cultivated hostility to Muslims. The Pew report found that in every country surveyed, 'Opinions about Muslims in almost all of these countries are considerably more negative than are views of Jews.'" Above all, what Malik sees, is the fundamental Arendtian thesis that antisemitism and Islamophobia are not about hatred of Jews or Muslims but are ideologies born of loneliness and emptiness that project fears and frustrations onto minority groups. He writes: "At the same time, the emergence of 'anti-politics,' the growing contempt for mainstream politics and politicians noticeable throughout Europe, has laid the groundwork for a melding of radicalism and bigotry. Many perceive a world out of control and driven by malign forces; conspiracy theories, once confined to the fringes of politics, have become mainstream. Anti-Semitism has become a catchall sentiment for many different groups of angry people." There is, unfortunately, too much truth in Malik's essay, and what it points to in the rise of ideological antisemitism and islamophobia is the profound malaise in Europe that has people searching for movements and ideologies that can give sense to their world. That is the origin of totalitarianism.

Liberal Dogma

Freddie deBoer takes aim at some of the practices of contemporary online social liberalism: "On matters of substance, I agree with almost everything that the social liberals on Tumblr and Twitter and blogs and websites believe. I believe that racism is embedded in many of our institutions. I believe that sexual violence is common and that we have a culture of misogyny. I believe that privilege is real. I believe all of that. And I understand and respect the need to express rage, which is a legitimate political emotion. But I also believe that there's no possible way to fix these problems without bringing more people into the coalition. I would like for people who are committed to arguing about social justice online to work on building a culture that is unrelenting in its criticisms of injustice, but that leaves more room for education. People have to be free to make mistakes, even ones that we find offensive. If we turn away from everyone that says or believes something dumb, we will find ourselves lecturing to an empty room. Surely there are ways to preserve righteous anger while being more circumspect about who is targeted by that anger. And I strongly believe that we can, and must, remind the world that social justice is about being happy, being equal, and being free." Or, as Hannah Arendt might say, true plurality is the basic condition of action and of politics, which means engaging with people as equals and finding our commonalities and shared ideals even when we fundamentally disagree with them. This is part of what it means to love the world, to reconcile ourselves with a world that is frustrating and angering and beyond our control - although there are, of course, some actions that cannot be loved. But they are much fewer and more rare than the one-sided screeds on social media would have you believe.

Moderate Reformism

In a long essay in The Nation, Samuel Moyn engages with David Bromwich's new book on Edmund Burke and also on Bromwich's new-found political voice that emerged as a critique of George W. Bush and has grown with his critical analysis of President Obama. Bromwich, who will be speaking at the Arendt Center Conference The Unmaking of Americans in October, sees the President's failure rooted in his disingenuous posture of moderate reformism. Moyn writes that Bromwich mobilizes Burke as a critic of the 'peace-prize war president': "Most of all, Bromwich offered an abstract critique of abstraction and an attack on dreamers for not being moderate enough, a Burkean indictment to which he added his own charge that moderates never get anything done: 'The position of a moderate who aspires to shake the world into a new shape presents a continuous contradiction. For the moderate feels constrained not to say anything startling, and not to do anything very fast. But just as there is trouble with doing things on the old lines, there is trouble, too, with letting people understand things on the old lines. At least, there is if you have your sights set on changing the nature of the game. Obama is caught in this contradiction, and keeps getting deeper in it, like a man who sinks in quicksand both the more he struggles and the more he stays still.' Or more concisely: 'If it is bad, all things being equal, to appear grandiose and worse to appear timid, it is the worst of all to be grandiose and then timid.' Obama couldn't win: to the extent that he tried to hew to his revolutionary promises he betrayed Burke, but the converse was also true. It wasn't so much Obama's unexceptional compromises as it was the way he fooled Americans with his promise of saving us from politics that gave Bromwich's criticisms their power. He made himself a harsh deprogrammer who tapped into the quiet fury of many a betrayed cult member. How much anger at Obama's triangulations masked, or fed on, embarrassment about prior credulity? Bromwich caught the mood of this ire. Yet as Obama's ratings - real and moral - tank daily, more depends on why we conclude the president failed. The strengths and weaknesses of Bromwich's diagnosis stem from a Burkean configuration of interests: the personal and the anti-imperial. Burke was at his most convincing when defending freedom against empire, a fact that Bromwich has long emphasized. But the Irish protector of English liberty was at his most bombastic when his political rhetoric slipped into a merely personal hatred. Bromwich understood this point in his first book - 'What is weakest and most imitable in Burke's style,' he noted then, 'is a quickness of scorn that amounts at times to superciliousness' - but he sometimes forgets the lesson."

The Threat From Broken States

Hisham Melhem issues an angry call to Arab states to confront their loss of legitimacy: "It is no longer very useful to talk about Syria and Iraq as unitary states because many people involved in the various struggles there don't seem to share a national narrative. It is instructive to observe that those who are ruling Damascus and Baghdad don't seem to be extremely moved to do something about a force that eliminated their national boundaries and in the process occupied one third of each country, and is bent on creating a puritanical Caliphate stretching from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean. ISIS is exploiting the rage and alienation of the minority Arab Sunni Iraqis by the increasing sectarian policies pursued by Nouri Maliki for 8 years, just as it is exploiting the anger of the Majority Sunni Arabs in Syria who have been marginalized by the Assad dynasty for more than 40 years.... ISIS may be the reject of al-Qaeda, but like al-Qaeda, it is the illegitimate child of modern political Islam that grew and expanded in what the Arabs refer to as ?????????????, an 'embracing environment.' The ugly truth is that the ISIS cancer was produced by a very ill and weak Arab body politic." Melham is correct to see the danger; as we witness the growing legitimacy crisis in Western democracies, leaders in the West should take note as well.

Always Loyal, Never Straying

In an interview, author and filmmaker Etgar Keret talks about our weird and intense proclivity for loyalty to sports teams, organizations which we follow by choice and can stop following whenever we please: "When I was young - this is a true story - I always wanted my parents to take me to football games. I had no interest in the teams; I just liked the people. I did have a distant relative who worked in a football club. The club had a fixture against an opposing club in which the losing team would drop down a division. I didn't care about that; I just wanted to watch people and I felt the vibe and was into it. What happened was that my relative's team lost in the last minute of the game. And he had got me there sitting on the front bench - I was six or seven years old. My interest was so abstract that when the other team won, I ran into the pitch and started hugging the players - and my relative didn't speak to me for ten years after that, because for him I was a traitor. But for me, I was just going to games for the joy of the players. Whenever I went to games, I focused on people who were happy. I was trying - and able, in fact - to be part of it. For me, it was beyond this totally arbitrary team thing. But when I tried to explain this to my relative, he almost killed me. It was one of the most aggressive experiences of my life."

Nothing is Certain But...

In this week's foray into the deep and perilous waters of The New Yorker archive, we've returned with a big one: Jill Lepore's essay on the history of the American income tax.

 

 

 

 

Featured Events

---

 

 

 

---

---

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!

Registration is now OPEN! You can register here!

Want to know more about the schedule of the conference? Please click for details here!

Learn more about the conference here.

 

 

---

From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Laurie Naranch discusses the significance of "betweenness" for Arendt's work to understand the meaning of politics in the Quote of the Week. Mahatma Gandhi provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We look back on a Lunchtime Talk with Victor Granado Almena on cosmopolitan citizenship in our Video Archives. And Roger Berkowitz discusses the nature of democracy in the modern world in the Weekend Read.