Amor Mundi 8/9/15

08-09-2015

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.

Remembering Boredom

Claire Messud in Harpers writes of her nostalgia for boredom. "When I recall my formative years, of course there was loads of reading, and travel, and biking, and TV. But there was also a whole lot of boredom. I guess that's what concerns me, as a parent: that my kids, who lack for nothing even more than I did, are not only unversed in material deprivation and insufficiently familiar with self-restraint but, most terribly, they know nothing of nothingness. Having no truly empty time, they're unfamiliar too with the unexpected and exhilarating flowers that can grow there. I want my children to embrace doing nothing, to embrace the slowing of an afternoon to a near standstill, when all you can hear is the laborious ticking of the clock and the dog snoring on the sofa, the rain's patter at the window, the occasional swoosh of a slowly passing car. Remember those days? The exasperation, the excruciating itchiness of them? My kids would have to dive in, live through the agony, and come out the other side. They'd have to learn to lie on the lawn watching ants scale the grass blades; they'd have to linger, digits pruning, in the bathtub; they'd have to stop, to be still, and then to wait, and wait, and wait, allowing time to fatten around them, like a dewdrop on the tip of a leaf. And then, only then, who knows what they might imagine or invent? How can I teach them, when they're not of an age to listen, and when, more problematically, I too often live in the world just as they do? In practice, I set a poor example, never idling or ambling or reading in bed. I'd like to figure out how to be the kind of parent who holds at bay all demands and exhortations, all fripperies and nonsense. I'd like to show the wisdom of restraint. A different version of washing out Ziploc bags and mending moth holes, it arises from the same impulse: from the understanding that if you attend thoughtfully to what you already have, you need nothing more. It's all here, inside and in the room--not on the screen--before us."

Horrified and Baffled
In the New York Review of Books, a writer who wishes to remain anonymous suggests that, in order to understand ISIS, we have to admit that we don't have the tools to understand it: "Much of what ISIS has done clearly contradicts the moral intuitions and principles of many of its supporters. And we sense--through Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss's careful interviews--that its supporters are at least partially aware of this contradiction. Again, we can list the different external groups that have provided funding and support to ISIS. But there are no logical connections of ideology, identity, or interests that should link Iran, the Taliban, and the Baathists to one another or to ISIS. Rather, each case suggests that institutions that are starkly divided in theology, politics, and culture perpetually improvise lethal and even self-defeating partnerships of convenience. The thinkers, tacticians, soldiers, and leaders of the movement we know as ISIS are not great strategists; their policies are often haphazard, reckless, even preposterous; regardless of whether their government is, as some argue, skillful, or as others imply, hapless, it is not delivering genuine economic growth or sustainable social justice. The theology, principles, and ethics of the ISIS leaders are neither robust nor defensible. Our analytical spade hits bedrock very fast. I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better information. But that is to underestimate the alien and bewildering nature of this phenomenon. To take only one example, five years ago not even the most austere Salafi theorists advocated the reintroduction of slavery; but ISIS has in fact imposed it. Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough--even in hindsight--to have predicted the movement's rise. We hide this from ourselves with theories and concepts that do not bear deep examination. And we will not remedy this simply through the accumulation of more facts. It is not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled."

Suicide and the Liberal Arts

On Bullshit
Jon Stewart signed off as host of The Daily Show with a speech about bullshit. It is worth watching, but here is a rough transcription. "Bullshit is everywhere. Are the kids still in here? We'll deal with that later. Bullshit is everywhere. There is very little that you will encounter in life that has not been, in some ways, infused with bullshit. Not all of it bad. Your general, day-to-day, organic free-range bullshit is often necessary. Or at the very least innocuous. 'Oh what a beautiful baby--I'm sure it will grow into that.' That kind of bullshit in many ways provides important social contract fertilizer. It keeps people from making each other cry all day. But then there's the more pernicious bullshit. Your premeditated, institutional bullshit, designed to obscure and distract. Designed by whom? The bullshittocracy. It comes in three basic flavors. One, making bad things sound like good things. 'Organic, All Natural cupcakes.' Because factory-made sugar oatmeal balls doesn't sell. Patriot Act. Because 'Are You Scared Enough To Let Me Look At All Your Phone Records Act' doesn't sell. So, whenever something has been titled Freedom Family Fairness Health America, take a good long sniff. Chances are it has been manufactured in a facility that may contain traces of bullshit. Number Two, the second way: Hiding bad things under mountains of bullshit. Complexity. You know, I would love to download Drizzy's latest Meek Mill diss--(everyone promised me that that made sense). But I'm not really interested right now in reading Tolstoy's iTunes agreement. So I'll just click and agree, even if it grants Apple prima nocte with my spouse. Here's another one, simply put, banks shouldn't be able to bet your pension money on red. Bullshitly put, it's Dodd Frank. Hey, a handful of billionaires can't buy our elections right? Of course not. They can only pour unlimited, anonymous cash into a 501(c)4; otherwise they'd have to 501(c)6 it, or funnel it openly through a non-campaign coordinated Super Pac. 'I think they're asleep now, we can sneak out.' And finally, it's the bullshit of infinite possibility. These bullshitters cover their unwillingness to act under the guise of unending inquiry. We can't do anything because we don't yet know everything. We cannot take action on climate change, until everyone in the world agrees gay-marriage vaccines won't cause our children to marry goats, who are going to come for our guns. Until then, I say it leads to controversy. Now the good news is this. Bullshitters have gotten pretty lazy. And their work is easily detected. And looking for it is kind of a pleasant way to pass the time. Like an 'I Spy' of bullshit. So I say to you tonight, friends. The best defense against bullshit is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something."

Keep the Church Weird

Emma Green profiles Southern Baptist Convention political leader Russell Moore, who, instead of trying to bring the sacred and the profane as close together as possible wants to emphasize the separateness of the Church by redefining American Protestant identity with a seemingly pejorative rhetorical strategy: "Moore is making an argument for embracing Christian strangeness. 'Our message will be seen as increasingly freakish to American culture,' he writes. 'Let's embrace the freakishness, knowing that such freakishness is the power of God unto salvation.' This word, 'freak,' is both jarring and effective: It's a high-school-hallway diss, all hard-edged consonants and staccato contempt. Christians have reclaimed this word before; the 1960s-era 'Jesus freaks' mixed gospel teachings with hippie counter-culture. In many ways, Moore wants to capture a similar mentality, one of standing against and apart from culture, rather than trying to win it over. This is not quite the same as 'the Benedict option,' as Rod Dreher has called it--a strategic retreat from culture and fortification of communities that share similar values. As Moore pointed out, the core of being an evangelical is evangelism, spreading the good news of Christ; there's no low-church history of monastic retreat like there is in the Catholic or Orthodox traditions. But it is a strategic reorientation: to see the world through the eyes of the outcast, rather than the conqueror."

Copyediting a Hero
Benjamin Dreyer, who copyedited a new collection of material from writer Shirley Jackson, explains the joy and terror of working with a favorite, and long passed, writer: "I'm not much for telling tales out of school, so had I encountered any majorly irksome gaffes as I made my way through the manuscript, I'd likely be keeping them discreetly to myself anyway rather than spilling them here, but the God's honest truth is that even at close scrutiny--very close: I like to copyedit more or less in Cinerama, with a document set in 14-point type and, furthermore, at 150 percent, so that I can barely see beyond the margins unless I turn my head--Jackson's prose remained resolutely fine. I confess that I was oddly pleased to learn that my paragon was, in manuscript, not entirely infallible: Jackson goes to the well of 'suddenly' and 'and then' a bit too frequently (with the Hymans' approval, there are now quite a few fewer of those in the finished book), and she occasionally puts more pressure on the worthy semicolon than a semicolon can bear. (I may well, though I will not confirm it, on occasion have yelled at my screen 'A period, for Pete's sake, a period!') But mostly, sentence after sentence, I was happily awed. So happily awed that I quickly--and easily, I should stress--established a rule of self-restraint: Anything I felt the need to do that couldn't be easily accomplished with a mild rejiggering of punctuation or the addition or deletion of no more than two words at a time would be weighed carefully before I even dared suggest it. As it turned out, I found maybe a half-dozen knotted-up sentences that were easily untangled--just as, I'm certain, Jackson herself would have untangled them on a subsequent run-through. At one point I spent a good fifteen minutes willing a sentence to move from the beginning of a paragraph to the end before I decided it was fine where its author had placed it. Once and only once did I venture to suggest that a couple of words more interesting than 'that' or 'the' needed to be added to fill out a resolutely unsatisfactory sentence, and the Hymans accepted my suggestion. It's a heady thing for me that I actually contributed two whole substantive words to a Shirley Jackson story, but the truth is that if I did my job properly, if I did that brain burrowing that my colleague said was the real art of copyediting, they're not my words at all; they're Jackson's. I just had to listen for them."

The Dawn of the Atomic Age

This week was the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Of all the pieces looking back at the human terror and technological sublime of the first of two uses of such a weapon in recorded history, John Hershey's 1946 issue-length article in the New Yorker, published at a time when the magazine cost fifteen cents an issue, might still be the best. In honor of the anniversary, the magazine has put the whole article online for free.

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From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Laurie Naranch wonders if education can prepare us to assume responsibility for and help renew the common world in the Quote of the Week. Alexander Hamilton reflects on how the fruit of labor and thought help constitute the appearance of genius in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we reflect on the extent to which Hannah Arendt respected American's love for freedom in this week's Library feature.