Amor Mundi 9/28/14

09-29-2014

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.

A Vacuum Floating on Air

If you want an example of why distrust of American institutions is at epidemic proportions, listen to the investigative report of the New York Federal Reserve based on secret tapes made by one of their Senior Bank Examiners, Carmen Segarra. Segarra, a lawyer with impeccable credentials, was hired by the Federal Reserve after the financial crisis as part of an effort to bring in new personnel who were more willing to stand up to the banks they were charged with regulating. Segarra's story is told jointly in a hour-long radio show by Ira Glass on "This American Life" and in an investigative article by ProPublica's Jake Bernstein. Here is one exchange between Bernstein, Segarra, and David Beim, author of a once secret report commissioned by the Federal Reserve to study why the Fed had failed to adequately regulate banks in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis.

David Beim: So I could just read the fear of speaking up list of quotations. And it goes like this: "Don't want to be too far outside from where management is thinking. The organization does not encourage thinking outside the box. After you get shot down a couple of times, you tend not to go there anymore. Until I know what my boss thinks, I don't want to tell you."  

Jake Bernstein: According to Beim's report, this culture of fear paralyzed the Fed in the years leading up to the financial crisis and prevented it from taking action. It's not that the Fed regulators didn't notice the problems accumulating in the financial system that eventually brought it down.  

David Beim: They were aware of those problems coming. There were lengthy presentations on subjects like that within the organization. It's just that none of those meetings ever ended with anyone saying, "and therefore let's take the following steps right now."  

Carmen Segarra: I mean they're meetings without a clear agenda, they're meetings without clear objectives. 

Jake Bernstein: Carmen was used to the private sector, where she says meetings ended with specific action items. People knew what they were supposed to do.  

Carmen Segarra: None of that happens at the Fed. It's like the information is discussed, and then it just ends up in like a vacuum floating on air, not acted upon. And the mere act of having this meeting, for them, is almost like akin to having done something about it.  

You can read more about Segarra and also about George Packer in this week's Weekend Read.

The Undignified Nudge

Jeremy Waldron in the NY Review of Books raises important questions about the "libertarian paternalism" of nudging as social policy. Nudging is the idea that government encourages healthy or rational behavior not by commanding it but by changing default choices. Instead of banning large sugary drinks, for example, the government could require that restaurants serve diet soda in medium cups unless the customer expressly asks for a large sugary drink. Customers remain free to fill themselves with sugar, but, nudged by the default choice, more customers will consume less. Waldron admits such nudging helps many live healthier. But he worries: "I am afraid there is very little awareness in these books about the problem of trust. Every day we are bombarded with offers whose choice architecture is manipulated, not necessarily in our favor. The latest deal from the phone company is designed to bamboozle us, and we may well want such blandishments regulated. But it is not clear whether the regulators themselves are trustworthy. Governments don't just make mistakes; they sometimes set out deliberately to mislead us. The mendacity of elected officials is legendary, and claims on our trust and credulity have often been squandered. It is against this background that we have to consider how nudging might be abused. There are deeper questions, too, than these issues of trust and competence. As befits someone who was 'regulation czar' in the Obama White House, Sunstein's point of view is a rather lofty one and at times it has an uncomfortable affinity with what Bernard Williams once called 'Government House utilitarianism.' Government House utilitarianism was a moral philosophy that envisaged an elite who knew the moral truth and could put out simple rules for the natives (or ordinary people) to use, even though in the commissioner's bungalow it was known that the use of these rules would not always be justified. We (the governors) know that lying, for example, is sometimes justified, but we don't want to let on to the natives, who may not have the wit to figure out when this is so; we don't trust them to make the calculations that we make about when the ordinary rules should not be followed. Williams saw the element of insult in this sort of approach to morality, and I think it is discernable in Sunstein's nudging as well."  

Political Creativity

In an interview, Hillary Mantel compares Thomas Cromwell, the subject of her books Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, and Margaret Thatcher, the subject of the only new story in a collection that's about to be released: "Creativity in politics is rare but I think she had it... Cromwell did too. But there are big differences. He was a negotiator and she detested consensus-she saw herself as an Old Testament prophet delivering the truth from on high. Cromwell used history to pretend the new things he was doing were old and thus to soothe the English temperament. Mrs. Thatcher despised history as a constraint."

Do We Want Our Artists Mad?

In a survey of the state of the essay about research into the relationship between madness and creativity, Tom Bartlett suggests that maybe we want our artists to suffer a little bit: "The depressed writer is a stock character, like the ditzy cheerleader or the slick salesman. It's something we believe almost without thinking about it, in part because that pathetic figure so frequently appears in books and movies, and because we can point to historical examples of artists plagued by mental illness. John Berryman leapt from a bridge. Virginia Woolf walked into a river. David Foster Wallace, a fairly new addition to this sad list, hung himself. We mull the meaning of their deaths, divine clues from the works they left behind. We do the same with other artists. After Robin Williams's recent suicide came the predictable musings about whether his comedic brilliance was fueled by his apparent depression. Was his manic humor a tool to keep the darkness at bay? Our readiness to accept the connection between mental illness and creativity makes Andreasen's research all the more palatable: It is approval from on high of what we already feel in our guts. Perhaps it's perversely comforting to us nongeniuses that artists, in a sense, pay dearly for their cultural accomplishments. Maybe you'll never produce a great American anything but at least you're not nuts. At the same time, it's nice to think that the mentally ill harbor some special skill, and to argue otherwise seems unkind."

Thinking Without Bannisters

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