Amor Mundi 9/29/13
09-30-2013
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.
Megan Garber points to research that suggests that soldiers who use battlefield robots as part of their missions often become quite fond of, maybe even empathetic towards, their helpers. "It makes sense that the tools that do so much work in the high-stakes environment of the battlefield would engender devotion from the people they benefit. According to... research, the soldiers assigned their robotic companions 'human or animal-like attributes, including gender.' Furthermore, they 'displayed a kind of empathy toward the machines.' And ‘they felt a range of emotions such as frustration, anger, and even sadness when their field robot was destroyed.'" Machines are increasingly able to act “as if they are human,” even when they are simply following complex algorithms. Shirley Turkle has shown how even people who understand the robotics involved develop deep human emotions for their robots. And David Levy has proposed legalizing marriage with robots. The question is: As we learn to love and relate to robots that are tireless, devoted, and obedient, how will that impact our relationships with humans who are often tired, cranky, and stubborn?
By the way, Megan Garber will be speaking in NYC on Oct. 27th along with Jay Rosen, Walter Russell Mead and Roger Berkowitz at the Bard Graduate Center as part of the Hannah Arendt Center’s panel on Blogging and the New Public Intellectual. Information here. RSVP at [email protected].
In a consideration of MoMA's recently erected gallery of Walker Evans photographs, James Polchin emphasizes just how shocking Evans' photographs were when he took them more than three quarters of a century ago, suggesting that he did little other than represent what was: "Evans’ images exude a longing and melancholy for something lost. They are relics of a past, as much today as they were 75 years ago. They are decrepit sharecropper porches, ornate Victorian architecture, and decaying southern verandas. They are hauntingly empty small-town street corners and portraits of people who seem to have no place to go. There is in American Photographs no modernist romance of a dynamic future, no awe of machines or the possibilities of the future that were so often modernism’s compelling allure. Instead we are left with a certain absence that is both material and psychological. American Photographs remind us that modernism was also heaped in a kind of creative longing for all that was disappearing."
In an interview, J.B. Mackinnon, author of the recent book The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be talks about what it would mean to "rewild" the planet: “I now find myself comparing co-existence with other species to life in a multicultural city: it’s complicated and demands innovation and often education, but when it works it creates the most exciting societies the world has ever known. Few people who live in multicultural cities would say it’s easy, but even fewer, I think, would say they would prefer homogeneity. The shared culture of difference becomes a part of our individual identities, and at that point, a harm to diversity really does become a harm to us all. Now consider a similar relationship, this time not to cultural but to ecological complexity, and we have what I would consider the rewilding of the human being. Ecology as a part of identity." An interesting thought experiment, but who does MacKinnon have to displace to make it work? Perhaps more importantly, is such an environmental modification really returning to nature in some way, or is it instead more proof of man's supposed mastery over his environment? Indeed, isn’t so much of the talk about sustainability and the preservation of nature rather a furthering of the human desire to master, control, and make of nature what man wants—except that we now want nature to be natural. Marianne Constable makes this argument beautifully in her essay “The Rhetoric of Sustainability: Human, All Too Human,” available in HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center.
In order to better understand the situation in Greece, Arnon Grunberg went to Thessaloniki, the country's second largest city. There, he met with the mayor and some of the city's citizens; one of them, Debbie, echoes Arendt when she talks about what Greeks might glean from their current situation: “Efficiency is a capitalist term that assumes one has the goal of achieving a certain level of productivity. That’s not the way we think. Capitalism, of course, is what sired this crisis. But the crisis is also an opportunity to ask the right questions. We want to teach people that they have the power to fight back. No one can take away your dignity, that’s what I tell them. No one has to be embarrassed by the fact that the system can’t guarantee that everyone has health insurance. The power of capitalism lies in how it presents itself as the sole alternative. I don’t have any illusions about ever seeing it disappear, but we can create little fissures in it.”
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Jennifer Hudson writes about the “False Culture of Utility” in an excellent Quote of the Week coming from a reading of Arendt’s essay “The Crisis of Culture.” In advance of our sixth annual conference next week, "Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis," your weekend read is on the topic of education.
October 3-4, 2013
The sixth annual fall conference, "Failing Fast:The Educated Citizen in Crisis"
Olin Hall, Bard College
Learn more here.