Amor Mundi 9/7/14
09-08-2014Hannah 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.
Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer is the new English translation of Bettina Stangneth's exhaustive history of the life of Adolf Eichmann. Stangneth writes that her book has two aims. The first is "to present all the available material, as well as the challenges that come with it." The second is to engage in a "dialogue with Hannah Arendt, and not simply because I first came to this topic many years ago through Eichmann in Jerusalem." Stangneth traces her interest in Eichmann to Arendt's book, a book that in Stangneth's words "had the courage to form a clear judgment, even at the risk of knowing too little." Her plunge into the depths of Eichmann's soul is an effort to reckon with power and provocation of Arendt's judgment. Stangneth goes to great lengths to praise Arendt in interviews and in her writing, citing Arendt as an inspiration and model for fearless and critical thinking about difficult and horrible events. In the end, however, Stangneth concludes that as brilliant as Arendt's book on the Eichmann trial is, Arendt herself was mistaken in her characterization of Eichmann as banal: "one of the most significant insights to be gained from studying Adolf Eichmann is reflected in Arendt: even someone of average intelligence can induce a highly intelligent person to defeat herself with her own weapon: her desire to see her expectations fulfilled." In other words, Arendt expected Eichmann to be thoughtless; in concluding that he was banal, she was fooled by him. Stangneth's book is the best account of Eichmann the man to appear since Arendt's trial report in 1963. You can read an excerpt here. You can read my account on the Arendt Center blog.
Ta-Nehisi Coates spent the summer in a French immersion program at Middlebury College. In an essay about the experience, he talks about how communicating and reading almost exclusively in French alienated him from the world outside of campus (except, perhaps, the world according to the French), how educational opportunities in America have been traditionally afforded to some and not others, and how the importance of the experience is, in part, discovering something counterintuitive: "One afternoon, I was walking from lunch feeling battered by the language. I started talking with a young master in training. I told her I was having a tough time. She gave me some encouraging words in French from a famous author. I told her I didn't understand. She repeated them. I still didn't understand. She repeated them again. I shook my head, smiled, and walked away mildly frustrated because I understood every word she was saying but could not understand how it fit. It was as though someone had said, 'He her walks swim plus that yesterday the fight.' (This is how French often sounds to me.) The next day, I sat at lunch with her and another young woman. I asked her to spell the quote out for me. I wrote the phrase down. I did not understand. The other young lady explained the function of the pronouns in the sentence. Suddenly I understood-and not just the meaning of the phrase. I understood something about the function of language, why being able to diagram sentences was important, why understanding partitives and collective nouns was important. In my long voyage through this sea of language, that was my first sighting of land. I now knew how much I didn't know. The feeling of discovery and understanding that came from this was incredible. It was the first moment when I thought I might survive the sea."
We are sick of politics, and who can blame us when the only rational conclusion is that getting involved doesn't make a difference? And yet every once in a while someone comes along who is convinced that they can make a difference, that politics can matter again. David Cole writes about Zephyr Teachout and her new book Corruption in America. "Indeed, according to Teachout, corruption is not just Cuomo's-or New York's-problem. It is the most pressing threat that our democracy faces. And the problem, as Teachout sees it, is that those in power refuse to admit it. Just as Cuomo shut down the Moreland Commission's inquiry into corruption, so the Supreme Court, by adopting an ahistorical and improperly narrow view of corruption, has shut down an exploration of the very real threat that unrestricted campaign spending actually poses to our democracy. In Corruption in America, an eloquent, revealing, and sometimes surprising historical inquiry, Teachout convincingly argues that corruption, broadly understood as placing private interests over the public good in public office, is at the root of what ails American democracy. Regulating corruption has been a persistent theme through American history and has bedeviled lawyers, politicians, and political philosophers alike. Everyone agrees that it is a problem, but few can agree on how to define it, much less fight it effectively." Teachout spoke at Bard last week as she prepares for the NY Democratic primary this Tuesday, in which she is challenging Andrew Cuomo. And she will be speaking as well with Lawrence Lessig at the Hannah Arendt Center Conference The Unmaking of Americans in October.
Daniel Bergner describes Eva Moskowitz as a one-woman tsunami bringing about the drive for educational excellence in New York. "'I thought that as chairwoman of the Education Committee, I could make a difference,' [Moskowitz] said. But labor was too intransigent, the government bureaucracy too cumbersome and entrenched. 'I kept getting more and more narrow: Well, if you can't bring better science or better arts - I held a hearing on toilet paper. I thought, That's going to be a winner, everyone's for toilet paper, surely we can come together. But you couldn't, because the administration denied' that there was a problem. 'I had to go around photographing bathrooms where there wasn't toilet paper. . . . I thought, This is not a system that delivers for children. Kids can't wait till all the policies change. That's going to be another two centuries.'" Moskowitz has created a series of schools in which mostly poor and disadvantaged students test better than students at the best public and private schools. Her technique might surprise: "Above all, there are her exacting standards for the network's adults - the teachers she hires straight from certification programs or after stints with public schools or Teach for America and the administrators who have been promoted from her faculty. It's their intellectual capacity that is her main concern; the training sessions I sat in on this summer were less about teaching teachers to teach than about teaching them to think. I watched Jessica Sie, the associate director of literacy, lead an auditorium full of elementary- and middle-school faculty members in a discussion of the nuances in a short essay from The New Yorker. They wouldn't be using the essay with their students. But Moskowitz wants her faculty to know how to read in the deepest way, so they can model this for their pupils right from the youngest grades, when everyone is discussing 'The Tortoise and the Hare.'"
While pursuing her Ph.D. at Vanderbilt, Tish Harrison Warren led the Graduate Christian Fellowship-a chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship-until a new policy led her group to be put on probation. Their fault was to require leaders of the group to affirm certain Christian beliefs. She hoped it was all a misunderstanding. "But as I met with other administrators, the tone began to change. The word discrimination began to be used-a lot-specifically in regard to creedal requirements. It was lobbed like a grenade to end all argument. Administrators compared Christian students to 1960s segregationists. I once mustered courage to ask them if they truly thought it was fair to equate racial prejudice with asking Bible study leaders to affirm the Resurrection. The vice chancellor replied, 'Creedal discrimination is still discrimination.' .... The line between good and evil was drawn by two issues: creedal belief and sexual expression. If religious groups required set truths or limited sexual autonomy, they were bad-not just wrong but evil, narrow-minded, and too dangerous to be tolerated on campus. It didn't matter to them if we were politically or racially diverse, if we cared about the environment or built Habitat homes. It didn't matter if our students were top in their fields and some of the kindest, most thoughtful, most compassionate leaders on campus. There was a line in the sand, and we fell on the wrong side of it." All of which leads Warren to ask, with justification, if there is still space for religious organizations in America's universities.
James Ward, who puts on something called the Boring Conference, talks to conference goers, including a woman who takes photographs of IBM cash registers, another who makes sound recordings of vending machines, and a man who keeps track of his sneezes. Why pay some attention to something so, well, boring? Ward explains: "'How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day?' asks the French writer Georges Perec in his 1973 essay on the 'infra-ordinary' (his word for everything that's the opposite of 'extraordinary'). Perec challenges us to question the habitual. 'But that's just it, we're habituated to it. We don't question it, it doesn't question us, it doesn't seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither question nor answers, as if it weren't the bearer of any information. Perec's point is that everything contains information. It's just that, sometimes, it takes a bit of work to notice it. These days, an audience and a platform can be found for even the most niche interests, as people demonstrate that nothing is truly boring - not if you look at it closely enough.'"
Lunchtime Talk with Kenan Malik
Details soon to follow.
Wednesday, September 17h, 2014
The Hannah Arendt Center, 12:30 pm
Bard College Public Debate
Resolved: "The fate of the world depends upon the success or failure of America's model of democratic self-government."
Tuesday, October 7th, 2014
Campus Center Multipurpose Room, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
SAVE THE DATE - 2014 FALL CONFERENCE
October 9-10
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?, will be held this year on October 9-10!
Registration is now OPEN! You can register here!
Want to know more about the schedule of the conference? Please click for details here!
Learn more about the conference here.
This week on the Blog, Richard Barrett discusses scientific and philosophic truth in the Quote of the Week. French philosopher Henri Bergson provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We look back on a Lunchtime Talk with Ory Amitay on the nature and history of monotheism in our Video Archives. We celebrate the return of our Library feature with a visit to the Hannah Arendt Library at Bard College. Roger Berkowitz addresses some of the common critiques leveled against Eichmann in Jerusalem in the Weekend Read. And as a special treat, Roger Berkowitz discusses Bettina Stangneth's Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer.