Amor Mundi 9/6/15

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.

A Post-Privacy Future

In commenting on the enormous dump of private email addresses associated with the marital affairs website Ashley Madison, Albert Wenger takes the approach of radical transparency. Since privacy will be impossible in the future, Albert proposes that we have to move past privacy. This means we need to change our values and our morals. "I believe that this hack and subsequent data leak provides a glimpse of a post privacy future. As I have argued before here on Continuations it is not ultimately possible to protect data and what we should be focused on instead is protecting people. Whether en masse, as in this case, or one person at a time, data will continue to come out. We need to work towards a society and individual behaviors that acknowledge this fact and if anything err on the side of more transparency and disclosure. People have always had affairs. There is nothing new about that. People have also used technology as part of their affairs. For instance, when letters were the technology of the day people wrote letters to their lovers, which then occasionally were discovered. That's for instance how Eleanor Roosevelt found out about FDR's affair with Lucy Mercer. So it shouldn't be at all surprising that people have been using the internet to have affairs. Facebook is apparently cited in one third of divorce cases. The way forward here is not to pretend that there is a technological solution or to be sanctimonious about affairs. Instead what we need is to acknowledge that affairs are part of human behavior." The comments below Wenger's essay are worth reading as well. As Ryan Borker writes: "I think a post-privacy world leads us dangerously close to a 1984 future. This is especially true since our actions, emotions, and even beliefs change. Since we're 'biologically designed' to forget, full, permanent disclosure enabled by technology only prevents you from erasing the past. This would be horrible, since every single mistake you'd make is on public record." The debate about full transparency and the move beyond privacy always has at least two steps. The first is technological, that privacy is impossible. The second is messianic, that transparency will lead to a new kind of human freedom. And there is always a suspicion that the second belief gives credence to the factuality of the first assumption. What is always overlooked is what is lost when privacy is lost. For Hannah Arendt, the great danger of full transparency was the sacrifice of depth, which is also the essence of thinking. Discussion about this drive for transparency will be front and center at the Hannah Arendt Center's upcoming fall conference "Why Privacy Matters: What Do We Lose When We Lose Our Privacy?" You can register now.

The Expectation of Privacy

Writing in The New York Times, Farhad Manjoo has a slightly different response to the Ashley Madison hack and the prospect of a post-privacy future. While agreeing with Wenger about the need for increased tolerance about personal indiscretions, Manjoo also thinks we need to take concrete steps to protect our privacy. "But the victims of the Ashley Madison hacking deserve our sympathy and aid because, with slightly different luck, you or I could just as easily find ourselves in a similarly sorry situation. This breach stands as a monument to the blind trust many of us have placed in our computers--and how powerless we all are to evade the disasters that may befall us when the trust turns out to be misplaced. 'I feel reticent to blame people for ignorance or the consequences of their actions when they're simply sitting there at home doing something perfectly reasonable in an environment where there was an expectation set for privacy,' Mr. Hunt told me. 'I think what this does is demonstrate that everything you put online may become public.' There are several steps to take to minimize future damage from hackings like this one. But first, we could all become a bit more tolerant of online lapses; maybe the way to solve the problem of rampant disclosure of private stuff is to strive to look away from the stuff when it leaks--and to give those who've been harmed the benefit of the doubt. Second, we should all learn a little 'opsec'--hackers' jargon for 'operational security,' or a guide for conducting yourself online to minimize the possibility of your secrets getting spilled. It wouldn't hurt the tech industry to help us in that endeavor, building warnings and guidelines into the same machines that are leaking our secrets. Perhaps we should even start teaching opsec in schools." Manjoo goes on to list concrete technological steps to help protect your privacy online. His suggestions are worth reading.

We Come as Saviors

Documentarian Hubert Sauper, whose most recent film is about the founding of South Sudan, talks about the kind of documentary about Africa he tries not to make and how he sometimes makes that movie anyway: "I don't watch these very much because I get bored easily. Too many have the same tone. They're actually very postcolonial. Basically: 'I am from this sophisticated world, and I'm going to this chaos to show you guys back home in New York all these problems that these Africans have. And I will also, in the film, provide some solution, usually represented by someone from our culture.' To stretch a cliché, it would be a blond woman from Europe or the US taking children under her arms. She is us, of course, and she is there doing a good job. It's not only boring, it actually angers me, because it doesn't stir people up, it comforts the audience. In a political sense, it's counterproductive...They're basically an extension of this Judeo-Christian salvation nonsense. It's like Jesus comes and saves everyone. I went to Tanzania with my friend. You go to a village and, like with any other white person, the kids all run up to you to say hello, and you rub their heads. They look up at you as this figure from somewhere else, and you represent all these clichés that are implanted in our brains, our sick memory of colonialism: that we are hygienic, are wise, that we bring security--that we are something close to what we refer to as God. And we were doing just that. As two white dudes, that's what you do. Sometimes we saw footage of ourselves, and it was painful. How stupid it looks. How awful. Then I saw this movie about Jesus, where that cliché is pushed to the breaking point. Jesus comes to these villages, he's this long-haired, hippie-like dude and everyone looks up to him. It's exactly the same! And I don't know if you remember, but I took a piece of this movie--where Jesus brings all the fish--for Darwin's Nightmare, because this is the same narrative. But my film is not [meant] to describe an injustice, or some kind of world that could be better, because if you do that, you're claiming to know what 'better' is."

To the Most Parve Place on Earth

Ruth Margalit profiles Sayed Kashua, an Arab-Israeli writer enormously popular with Jewish Israelis who recently moved to Champaign, Illinois to teach Hebrew to college students. Kashua is, Margalit writes, "the most visible representative of Palestinian life in Israel." But Kashua has left the Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem in which he lived, and he says he's not going back. In her portrait, Margalit teases out the paradoxes--and the dangers--of Kashua's identity: "Political debate in Israel is vigorous, if not always elegant, often summoning the old Hebrew phrase that describes 'a dialogue between deaf people.' But it has been dampened in recent years by a series of government-sponsored bills: one demanding that non-Jewish Israelis take loyalty oaths; another authorizing the finance ministry to withhold funds from organizations deemed--however vaguely--to be violating Israel's foundational tenet of a 'Jewish and democratic' state. Kashua, like other Arab Israelis in the public eye, was used to having his words scrutinized. But the summer's events felt different. As the conflict in Gaza escalated into war, the première of a movie based on his memoir 'Dancing Arabs' was hastily scrapped. Flag-draped extremists in Tel Aviv brandished metal rods at antiwar demonstrators. The atmosphere of intimidation became so intense that Ayman Odeh, the youthful leader of the Joint List, an alliance of Arab-backed parties that represent Palestinian aspirations in Israel, announced that an 'age of ostracism' had taken hold. Within the Green Line that separates Israel proper from Gaza and the West Bank, Arab Israelis make up twenty per cent of the population. For liberal Israelis, and for Arabs who hope to be accepted as equals, Kashua embodied the country's stated ideal of coexistence--of Arab Israelis' full legal and civil integration. For a decade, he had lived with his wife, Najat, in Ramat Denya, a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem, and their children attended the city's only bilingual school. In a country where columnists have a flair for grandiloquence, Kashua's columns are conversational, confiding, anecdotal, centered on the rituals and trials of bourgeois life, like the 'holiday tour' that includes stopping at sixteen relatives' houses, or the visiting electrician who reprimands him for his children's excessive television viewing. While his writing is rarely explicitly political, a sense of uprootedness lurks; when the electrician, also an Arab, overhears the kids speaking Hebrew, Kashua can't stop apologizing. Coexistence of the kind that Kashua represents seems increasingly out of reach these days, when more than a third of Jewish Israelis openly say that Arab citizens shouldn't be entitled to equal rights. Of 1.7 million Arabs in Israel, perhaps forty thousand lead middle-class lives in mixed cities. Ayman Odeh told me that his party's goal is for Arab citizens 'to take part in every institution in the country--except for security, foreign relations, and immigration absorption, because these institutions blur the lines of our national identity.' But even his more hopeful speeches don't envision such inclusiveness for ten more years."

And He Was There

Marcela Valdes writes in The New York Times Magazine about what causes the admiration among the Spanish speaking audience in the United States for journalist Jorge Ramos--the journalist whose recent confrontation with Donald Trump has made him a hero to some. "A few months later, Ramos asked the former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari if he had ordered the assassination of his would-be successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio, in 1994, a death that traumatized Latin American politics for years. Salinas's response, transcribed in Ramos's 2001 book, 'A la caza del león' ('Hunting for the Lion'), begins with this parry: 'Luis Donaldo Colosio was my dear friend.' Dissatisfied with the absence of an explicit no, Ramos renews his attack: 'I want to ask again: You had nothing to do with Colosio's assassination?' 'I was among those who lost the most with Colosio's death,' Salinas replies. It is precisely this pattern of confrontation--not his poker-faced anchoring of the nightly news with his colleague Maria Elena Salinas on 'Noticiero Univisión'--that has won Ramos the trust of so many Hispanics. They know that in many countries south of the United States, direct questions can provoke not simply a loss of access but also a loss of life. Ramos's aggressive reporting on Latin America is possible because he is based in Miami. 'The United States is my journalistic trench,' he has written, 'and I am extremely grateful.' It's very unlikely that he expected to contend with bodyguards here."

Calling Adjuncts to Arms

Randall Smith argues that the situation of adjunct professors at our nation's largest universities is so abysmal that the time has come for the guild of university professors to fight for their poorest and most abused members. He calls for a general strike. "Today, adjunct instructors make up half or more of all faculty. There is, of course, a legitimate role for such faculty. The category was created to cover those outside the academy who might come in to share their expertise in a special course--say, for example, a marketing executive who comes in to teach a business school course on marketing. These people aren't looking to achieve a tenured academic position, but they are 'faculty' nonetheless. What such people are generally paid is what we might call an 'honorarium' rather than a salary. We can't really afford to pay the high-level executive what she earns at her regular job, but we feel it 'honors' her to be paid something. The justification for not paying them benefits is due to the presumption that they have benefits (and usually better benefits) through their full-time jobs, and so offering them employee benefits such as health insurance (as opposed to, say, free parking, use of the library, and access to the gym) would be superfluous. The kind of 'adjunct' faculty we're discussing now, however, are not in this category. Most of the adjunct faculty that now make up more than half of higher education faculty are not 'honored' members of the community who have come into the university to provide students with the benefits of their practical experience. They are hired at poverty-level wages with no health-care benefits and no guarantee of continued employment from semester to semester.... Senior faculty must demand basic justice for those who are at the lowest end of the hierarchy and who are the weakest before the ever-increasing power of the corporate university establishment: the 'invisible' men and women of the adjunct faculty. These academic guilds have been able to get themselves together to do all sorts of things--print journals, arrange conferences in expensive hotels in big cities, condemn apartheid, affirm global warming, decry racism--but somehow they never have had the time or will to vote for something that might involve 'goring their own ox,' so to speak: namely, a nationwide strike among all the guilds of any and all institutions that do not agree to transition all adjunct faculty in the country who do not have full-time jobs elsewhere to 'Instructor' or 'Assistant Professor' rank, with a regular salary and health-care benefits."

The Case of the Patchwork Holmes

Zach Dundas suggests Sherlock Holmes is as much a product of a fascinated culture as the work of one man: "As I researched my recent book The Great Detective, an examination into the history of Sherlock Holmes in popular culture, I was struck by the degree to which Conan Doyle's creation belongs to others as much as to him. Long before the post-meta-everything fan fiction milieu took over, Sherlock Holmes evolved as a boundless collaborative project, with many hands molding critical components of the mythos. The actor William Gillette, for example, helped enshrine 'Elementary, my dear Watson' as the detective's motto; illustrator Sidney Paget welded Holmes to his deerstalker. The character thrived because so many people grabbed this and that from Conan Doyle and made it their own. And yet, paradoxically, Holmes remains Conan Doyle's creature, too--essentially of the author, but not wholly by him any more. So it is with Old Holmes: the idea of the detective in his retirement, even dotage, aged far beyond the Victorian era of his canonical adventures. Many have taken their crack. At this point, with literally millions of fan-fiction stories adrift on the Internet's high seas and uncounted thousands of more conventional pastiches and parodies gathering dust in collectors' libraries and used bookshops, there have been innumerable extra-Conan Doyle versions of retired Sherlock Holmes. A quick consultation of amateur fan-fiction websites like Archive of Our Own reveals 'Retirementlock' as a healthy subgenre within a vast literary sub rosa. But like all things Sherlockian, Old Holmes starts with Conan Doyle himself."

Privacy and Politics

In five easy lessons, Scott Horton explicates the complicated relationship that politicians have with their secrets. Lesson one: "Secrets are routinely leaked by politicians for political gain; many of those who regularly complain about leaks are leakers themselves. The current controversy offers us a whirlwind of leaks within leaks and leaks about leaks. If it leaves any lasting footprint, then it will be as a demonstration of the art of simultaneously leaking and suppressing information to serve purely partisan political goals." Also worth noting is Lesson Five: "Secrecy regularly deprives decision-makers of the information they need in order to form valid judgments. Beltway insiders routinely agree that Washington makes far too many secrets. They also accept that secrecy is a tool used for bureaucratic antics. But by and large they insist that there's no real downside to the secrecy game. This is nonsense. In fact, secrecy regularly stands in the way of an informed public and a sensible political discussion of questions that are vital for the nation's future. It protects those who have made serious mistakes and fear accountability." Horton will be speaking on privacy and security with Robert Litt, General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, at the upcoming Hannah Arendt Center conference "Why Privacy Matters: What Do We Lose When We Lose Our Privacy?" You can register now.

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From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Jennifer M. Hudson discusses how bureaucracy, as imagined by both Kafka and Arendt, embodies an ideology of necessity through which humans abdicate responsibility for their common world in the Quote of the Week. Thomas Jefferson comments on the value and glow of thoughts in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We welcome Dr. Ulrich von Bulow, a visiting scholar with the Hannah Arendt Center and the German Studies Program, to Bard College. Finally, Ryan Butler, a student of environmental activism, shares an image of his personal Arendt library with us in this week's Library feature.