Amor Mundi 9/27/15

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.

Taking Antisemitism Seriously

Jonathan Derbyshire interviews Timothy Snyder about his new book Black Earth, in which Snyder makes the decidedly Arendtian claim that Nazi antisemitism was not simply the most recent version of traditional hatred against the Jews. Derbyshire notes that many critics have argued that Snyder downplays the connection to traditional anti-Semitism. "'We can't pretend,' [Adam] Gopnik argues, 'that the Hitlerian crimes can be released from an anti-Semitism rooted in European Christianity.' When I met Snyder in London last week, I began by asking him what he made of that charge. TS: Anti-Semitism becomes a way in which one short-circuits an argument about why the Holocaust actually happened. If it were just anti-Semitism--for example, just popular anti-Semitism--then we're left trying to understand why it happened then rather than at some other time. Hitler's anti-Semitism was not just a more radical hatred of the Jews than other people had. His anti-Semitism was a way of making the whole world make sense. It was a response to globalisation. Hitler was saying that in a world of finite resources what really should be happening is that races should be competing for land and therefore for food; and that this is our natural condition, this is a law of nature. And if we're not doing that, or if we're prevented from doing that, it's the fault of Jews." Arendt writes "antisemitism" instead of "anti-Semitism" to emphasize that Nazi antisemitism was a "secular nineteenth century ideology" and not the same as traditional hatred of the Jews. As an ideology, antisemitism articulated a truth that was the key to the world: namely, the Jews were the source of German suffering. Antisemitism made sense of the world and offered a solution: the extermination of the Jews. This radical ideological movement was a far cry from traditional anti-Semitism.

Liberty By Post

Mike Konczal turns to a series of recent books on legal history to land a glancing blow at those who worry that modern bureaucracy and administrative government is endangering American freedom. Legal historians have shown that well back into the 19^th century, Americans turned to administrative rules and agencies to maintain safety and govern wisely. Unacknowledged in Konczal's essay is that many--but not all--of these bureaucracies were local, as most government was in the 19^th century. But aside from a politicized history, Konczal wants to make a larger political point: that bureaucracy actually secures liberty. "The administrative state was not only built on the basis of American legal norms, but it also helped to create them, and, in the process, American conceptions of liberty itself. What sort of bureaucracy could do that? One of the strongest examples is also one of the most prosaic: the Post Office. The Post Office was, at one time, a massive federal state-building enterprise. Spanning and keeping pace with a rapidly expanding frontier, the Post Office was one of the most impressive features of the early state. But not just that. As legal scholar Anuj Desai argues, it is also via the Post Office that our notion of privacy gained shape." The early post office wanted to encourage literacy and struggled to convince a skeptical public that letters would not be subject to surveillance. It may have ultimately adopted norms preventing prying postal workers, but the post office is a governmental entity, and its record of protecting personal correspondence from government surveillance is hardly stellar. To credit the post office with the invention of privacy and the securing of liberty is more than a stretch.

Powerpoint Thinking

Andrew Smith thinks that the imperatives of Powerpoint are a contributor to a dearth of nuanced thinking: "Let's stay with teaching a moment. PP's enthusiasts claim that it emboldens nervous speakers and forces everyone to present information in an ordered way. To an extent, both contentions are true. But the price of this is that the speaker dominates the audience absolutely. Where the space around and between points on a blackboard is alive with possibility, the equivalent space on a PP screen is dead. Bullet points enforce a rigidly hierarchical authority, which has not necessarily been earned. One either accepts them in toto, or not at all. And by the time any faulty logic is identified, the screen has been replaced by a new one as the speaker breezes on, safe in the knowledge that yet another waits in the wings. With everyone focused on screens, no one--least of all the speaker--is internalising the argument in a way that tests its strength.... The presentational precursor to PowerPoint was the overhead projector, which is why PP screens are still called 'slides'. The program owes most to Whitfield Diffie, one of the time lords of online cryptography, but it was quickly snapped up by Microsoft. Its coding/marketing roots are intrinsic to its cognitive style, being relentlessly linear and encouraging short, affirmative, jargonesque assertions: arguments that are resolved, untroubled by shades of grey."

Somewhere Else

Susan Dominus considers the way the cell phone isolates us from each other: "My mother's address book is one of the small visual details of my childhood that I can perfectly conjure, although I am sure no photograph of it exists. Fake-leather-bound, filled with her formal, spidery script, it was, to me, barely legible, with addresses crossed out and replaced with new ones as friends' lives shifted. I often was dispatched to grab it for her from a kitchen drawer. I knew when she was looking for someone's phone number, which seems unremarkable, except that my own children do not know when I am searching for a phone number, because all they see is me, on my iPhone, intently focused on something mysterious and decidedly not them. It is that loss of transparency, more than anything, that makes me nostalgic for the pre-iPhone life. When my mother was curious about the weather, I saw her pick up the front page of the newspaper and scan for the information. The same, of course, could be said of how she apprised herself of the news. I always knew to whom she was talking because, before caller ID, all conversations started with what now seems like elaborate explicitness ('Hi, Toby, this is Flora'). And when my mother spent her obligatory 20 minutes a day on the phone with her own aging mother, it played out, always, in the kitchen, where I was usually half-listening as I did my homework, waiting impatiently for her to finish. All was overt: There was much shared experience and little uncertainty. Now, by contrast, among our closest friends and family members, we operate furtively without even trying to, for no reason other than that we are using a nearly omnipresent, highly convenient tool, the specific use of which is almost never apparent."

On the Margins

Evan Kindley considers the past and future of literary annotation: "Annotation is a form of literary lingering: It allows us to prolong our experience with a favorite book, to hang around the world of a beloved text a bit longer. But it can also serve as a gateway, for younger readers, to the pleasures of scholarship, by pointing to a larger universe of knowledge beyond. I first read The Annotated Alice at the age of eleven, and I was fascinated by its wealth of recondite information. I'm not quite sure why, at that stage of my life, I was interested in the fact that, say, the man in the folded paper hat in one of John Tenniel's Alice illustrations resembles British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli; I'm sure I'd never even heard of Disraeli. And yet I was interested; the book taught me how to be curious about such things. Leafing through Norton's new anniversary edition, I was surprised at how many of Gardner's notes I remembered vividly, like his reflection on Carroll's fondness for the number 42, or Humpty Dumpty's aristocratic habit of offering his inferiors a single finger to shake."

Higher Education in the Marketplace

Siva Vaidhyanathan turns to Thorstein Veblen to consider the paradoxical state of college education now that it's coming to be considered a service with students as its customers: "If more than one out of three American adults now has a bachelor's degree, the only way to maintain a premium value on some degrees is to attach artificial prestige to them. The markers of prestige include a premium price tag. Tuition and fees at selective and private Bennington College in Vermont amount to more than $48,000 per year. Tuition and fees at public Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, just twenty-three miles away from Bennington and with just as good access to skiing and Phish bootlegs, are only $9,065 per year for Massachusetts residents. So why would someone pay $39,000 more per year--almost $156,000 over four years--to attend Bennington? There are certainly differences between the institutions. Bennington is notoriously eccentric, and students there are forced to make up their own educational programs--something that more than a few of them aren't equipped to handle. But what justifies the premium? Prestige is part of the answer. Attending the school that produced Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt might inspire a young person in ways that sharing a degree with urban fantasy novelist Anton Strout or former Major League pitcher Ken Hill, the most notable alumni of MCLA, does not. Parents might boast of a child attending Bennington (and their own ability to foot the bill) with stickers on their Audis; an MCLA sticker, meanwhile, would look much more at home on the back of a Kia Rio. Is the quality of instruction better at premium private schools? Are the facilities better? Is the weed better? Is one school more queer-friendly than the other? Perhaps. But to understand how the good becomes all Vebleny, we must acknowledge that few students who attend expensive-looking private institutions actually pay the sticker price." Of course, Vaidhyanathan doesn't answer his rhetorical questions. People may be paying for prestige. But prestige is also a marker for something else--intellectual seriousness and the life of the mind. Elite colleges promise entry into an elite that is not determined by only economics. Whether elite colleges are delivering on their promise is another question.

It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over

Michael Carlson recalls the inimitable Yogi Berra in The Guardian. "Yogi Berra, who has died aged 90, was one of baseball's greatest catchers: he played on 14 American League championship teams and won 10 World Series titles, totals unmatched in the game's history. But while his sporting fame matched that of his fellow New York Yankees Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio, he also achieved a much wider celebrity--first because he served as the model for the popular cartoon character Yogi Bear, and second because his pursuit of a highly personal logic created such 'Yogisms' as 'it ain't over till it's over' and 'it's like deja vu all over again', which have long since passed into everyday currency. A stocky 5ft 8in with a jug-eared gnomish face, Berra hardly looked like a sportsman. The baseball writer Bill James once quipped: 'If he were a piece of furniture, you'd sand him.' But, as his longtime manager Casey Stengel, explained: 'He isn't much to look at, he looks like he's doing everything wrong, but he can hit.'"

Featured Events

From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Kathleen B. Jones notes how observing the reactions of European countries to the ongoing migrant crisis is cause for feelings of possibility followed by despair in the Quote of the Week. Peter Baehr explains why the People's Republic of China is fertile territory for Arendt scholars and wonders where they are as Chinese President Xi Jinping visits the United States. Charles William Eliot provides his comments on how an efficient man is capable of thinking in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate some marginalia Arendt made in her copy of "Lectures on the French Revolution" in relation to America, revolution theory, and liberty in this week's Library feature.