Amor Mundi 9/14/14

09-15-2014

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 Death of Adulthood

A.O. Scott reflects on the juvenile nature of American culture in "The Death of Adulthood in American Culture:" "[T]he journalist and critic Ruth Graham published a polemical essay in Slate lamenting the popularity of young-adult fiction among fully adult readers. Noting that nearly a third of Y.A. books were purchased by readers ages 30 to 44 (most of them presumably without teenage children of their own), Graham insisted that such grown-ups 'should feel embarrassed about reading literature for children.' Instead, these readers were furious. The sentiment on Twitter could be summarized as 'Don't tell me what to do!' as if Graham were a bossy, uncomprehending parent warning the kids away from sugary snacks toward more nutritious, chewier stuff. It was not an argument she was in a position to win, however persuasive her points. To oppose the juvenile pleasures of empowered cultural consumers is to assume, wittingly or not, the role of scold, snob or curmudgeon. Full disclosure: The shoe fits. I will admit to feeling a twinge of disapproval when I see one of my peers clutching a volume of 'Harry Potter' or 'The Hunger Games.'" Scott captures something essential in American culture, that in their solidarity with children, Adults enact a "refusal of maturity [that] also invites some critical reflection about just what adulthood is supposed to mean." He is right that, increasingly in public, "nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore. Adulthood as we have known it has become conceptually untenable." Yet Scott is too much part of the culture of immaturity to be willing to judge it. "A crisis of authority is not for the faint of heart. It can be scary and weird and ambiguous. But it can be a lot of fun, too. The best and most authentic cultural products of our time manage to be all of those things. They imagine a world where no one is in charge and no one necessarily knows what's going on, where identities are in perpetual flux. Mothers and fathers act like teenagers; little children are wise beyond their years. Girls light out for the territory and boys cloister themselves in secret gardens. We have more stories, pictures and arguments than we know what to do with, and each one of them presses on our attention with a claim of uniqueness, a demand to be recognized as special. The world is our playground, without a dad or a mom in sight." The crisis of authority will not be overcome by calls for renewed authority; that said, we do suffer from the lack of adult judgment in public. Read more on the Arendt Center blog.

Paint Hard, Sculpt Fast

Betsy Huete suggests something counterintuitive about making art: "art is not a creative endeavor. It is an athletic one. If any artist still sits in her studio waiting to be struck with genius inspiration, she is playing an artist, not being one. Artists don't wait, they practice. And fail. And try again, and so on until they get it right, until their work is resolved. Just like their counterparts, athletes spend hours per day training, failing, trying, not quitting. To be either means one must have an enormous amount of resolve and resiliency, and the courage to constantly face the possibility of rejection. Whether it means getting benched, getting cut from the team, losing the championship game, getting a proposal rejected, losing grant money, not getting accepted into a residency: both sides are filled with victories and losses both large and small. Both must work extremely hard to achieve whatever goals they have set for themselves. It is no coincidence that some of the most successful contemporary artists of our day, like Bruce Nauman and Matthew Barney, were former athletes."

That's All Over Now

In a long essay that amounts, more or less, to a eulogy, writer and eminent professor Marina Warner describes why she loved the University of Essex, and why she left it: "What is happening at Essex reflects on the one hand the general distortions required to turn a university into a for-profit business - one advantageous to administrators and punitive to teachers and scholars - and on the other reveals a particular, local interpretation of the national policy. The Senate and councils of a university like Essex, and most of the academics who are elected by colleagues to govern, have been caught unawares by their new masters, their methods and their assertion of power. Perhaps they/we are culpable of doziness. But there is a central contradiction in the government's business model for higher education: you can't inspire the citizenry, open their eyes and ears, achieve international standing, fill the intellectual granary of the country and replenish it, attract students from this country and beyond, keep up the reputation of the universities, expect your educators and scholars to be public citizens and serve on all kinds of bodies, if you pin them down to one-size-fits-all contracts, inflexible timetables, overflowing workloads, overcrowded classes."

What Constitution?

Jack Goldsmith wonders aloud at President Obama's "Breathtaking Expansion of a President's Power to Make War:" "Future historians will ask why George W. Bush sought and received express congressional authorization for his wars (against al Qaeda and Iraq) and his successor did not. They will puzzle over how Barack Obama the prudent war-powers constitutionalist transformed into a matchless war-powers unilateralist. And they will wonder why he claimed to 'welcome congressional support' for his new military initiative against the Islamic State but did not insist on it in order to ensure clear political and legal legitimacy for the tough battle that promised to consume his last two years in office and define his presidency. 'History has shown us time and again . . . that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the Legislative branch,' candidate Barack Obama told the Boston Globe in 2007. 'It is always preferable to have the informed consent of Congress prior to any military action.' President Obama has discarded these precepts. His announcement that he will expand the use of military force against the Islamic State without the need for new congressional consent marks his latest adventure in unilateralism and cements an astonishing legacy of expanding presidential war powers." Worries about the Imperial Presidency are now common and for good reason. But as Jeffrey Tulis argues in the latest version of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center, the real issue is a feckless legislature: "I want to suggest something different - that the presidency is very strong, but not imperial. This executive strength may indeed pose problems for democratic governance, but the source of those problems does not lie in the presidency. The presidency looks somewhat imperial today because of the failure of the Congress. In other words, the problem of presidential power today is actually not the exercise of presidential power; it's the gross abdication of responsibility by the legislative branch, the Congress of the United States."

Automatons

Aaron Gilbreath considers the past and the present of the mechanized restaurant: "In Japan, where restaurant mechanization has been constant for decades, something in the culture or the economy has ensured that human interaction remains prominent. At Matsuya, shokkenki have freed staff from having to push register keys, make change, chit-chat, and stand idly by while customers decide what to order. But whenever I entered one, people were still on hand to cook, deliver, and clean. The machines seemed to me like a supplement to human service, a way to remove one task from the chain of production and lower costs, rather than a step toward eliminating everyone. The corporate rhetoric, at least, is that tabletop devices and self-serve kiosks will function the same way in the United States. We already use ATMs instead of bank tellers, place takeout orders by phone, check ourselves out at some grocery stores, and check ourselves in at the airport. We require technicians and programmers to keep the machines running, as well as staff to stand nearby and tell us to place our groceries back down on the scanner before placing them in the bag. The ideal, in this telling, is that technology and automation give us more time for human interactions with our friends and family. The reality, of course, is that they often just give us more time with our other tech."

The Provocation of Understanding What Is

Gal Beckerman speaks with Bettina Stangneth and asks, "Why do you think Arendt was so taken in by Eichmann's performance on the stand? Does it tell us something about her?" Stangneth, author of the newly translated Eichmann Before Jerusalem, responds: "If it tells us something about her, it tells us something about nearly every spectator of the trial in 1961. It is a legend that only she was misled by Eichmann. But we have forgotten the other reports about the trial. Example? Alfred Wolfmann, the correspondent from Germany's most important Jewish newspaper, Allgemeine Jüdische Wochenzeitung, described him as a 'pathetic weakling.' Joachim Schwelien wrote in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that Eichmann was nothing more than a 'Hanswurst' [a buffoonish character from German folklore]. And everybody agreed. Some years later, Arendt only repeated these words, and people were shocked. In 1961 the astonishment about Eichmann was that he seemed to be a man without his own thoughts and convictions. This was common sense. When Arendt restated this common experience in 1963, it provoked a scandal. This tells us something about Hannah Arendt: She was not willing to deny the public astonishment of the year 1961 - she wanted to understand it."

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