Amor Mundi 9/22/13

09-23-2013

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 Banality of Bureaucratic Evil

Peter Ludlow in the Stone remarks on the generational divide in attitudes towards whistle blowers, leakers, and hackers. According to Time Magazine, “70 percent of those age 18 to 34 sampled in a poll said they believed that Snowden “did a good thing” in leaking the news of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.”  Ludlow agrees and cites Hannah Arendt’s portrait of Adolf Eichmann for support: “In “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” one of the most poignant and important works of 20th-century philosophy, Hannah Arendt made an observation about what she called “the banality of evil.” One interpretation of this holds that it was not an observation about what a regular guy Adolf Eichmann seemed to be, but rather a statement about what happens when people play their “proper” roles within a system, following prescribed conduct with respect to that system, while remaining blind to the moral consequences of what the system was doing — or at least compartmentalizing and ignoring those consequences.” Against those who argue that it is hubris for leakers to make the moral decision to expose wrongdoing, Ludlow insists: “For the leaker and whistleblower the answer to Bolton is that there can be no expectation that the system will act morally of its own accord. Systems are optimized for their own survival and preventing the system from doing evil may well require breaking with organizational niceties, protocols or laws. It requires stepping outside of one’s assigned organizational role.” Roger Berkowitz judges Ludlow’s use of Arendt in the Weekend Read.

The Ghosts in Zuccotti Park

Two years on, Rebecca Solnit reflects on the failure of Occupy Wall Street. It is difficult to deny that failure. Yet "change," Solnit writes "is rarely as simple as dominos. Sometimes, it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly turn out to be flowers that emerge from plants with deep roots in the past or sometimes from long-dormant seeds." Solnit is not so sure that Occupy will prove to be as unsuccessful as it has seemed so far. It may be that the experience of acting and speaking in public left the occupiers with a feeling for the empowering nature of speech. And it may be that these newly empowered speakers have simply moved on to other movements. Or maybe, as did the Woodstock generation, they will grow up, move on, and retreat into their private lives. The protestors are gone. Zuccotti Park sits unoccupied. But the experience of public action and the sense of injustice in the face of unprecedented income inequality live on, which means that Occupy is still a story without an end. It has not failed—at least not yet.

The Expansive Individual

In a wide ranging interview conducted by a former student of hers, Marilynne Robinson opens up about what she finds dangerous in contemporary thinking: "I think there are limits to how safe a progressive society can be when its conception of the individual seems to be shrinking and shrinking. It’s very hard to respect the rights of someone you do not respect. I think that we have almost taught ourselves to have a cynical view of other people. So much of the scientism that I complain about is this reductionist notion that people are really very small and simple. That their motives, if you were truly aware of them, would not bring them any credit. That’s so ugly. And so inimical to the best of everything we’ve tried to do as a civilization and so consistent with the worst of everything we’ve ever done as a civilization." There are few writers today who speak so forcefully and so insightfully.

Shame on You

In an interview, Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård, author of the suggestively titled six book autobiographical series My Struggle, talks about the recent evolution of shame and the role he thinks it plays in writing: "It’s constructed for social purposes, to protect us and make us behave well to others. But for me, the shame has become a bit extreme. However, if you take for example my mother, you’ll see that she’s driven by moral values – meaning that you should behave and shouldn’t behave in certain ways, and not trespass any limits. If you go back further, to my grandmother, you’ll see that she’s even more like that: driven by shame and the thought that you shouldn’t think you’re someone special… but now, society has become almost shameless. That’s actually good since it gives a kind of freedom. We consider the old, functionless shame destructive. Today, if you have a strong sense of shame you also have a strong desire to overcome it. And that’s when you can write."

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