Amor Mundi, July 31st 2016 - #100in10 Final
07-31-2016The Lonely Crowd
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by Gage Skidmore[/caption] Robert Zaretsky, citing a 19th century Frenchman but taking on a tradition that goes as far back as Aristotle, wonders whether there really is such a thing as mob rule in the age of Trump, or at any other time:
"For those who have followed Le Donald’s rise to power, the crowd again seems to be rearing its massive head. It is the crowd, it appears, that swells Trump’s campaign events where the candidate praises the torture of terrorism suspects and justifies the violence of aides and followers. It is the crowd, one might believe, that shouts as he brands his political opponents as criminals, and promises to deport entire ethnic groups and deny entry to religious groups because of the alleged danger they present to the republic. It is the crowd, so it seems, that encourages Chris Christie’s call and answer to lock up Hillary Clinton and cheers Ben Carson’s suggestion that Clinton is a Lucifer’s apprentice. It is the crowd—this late-19th-century creature theorized by [Gustave] Le Bon, then ridden by the likes of Mussolini and Hitler (both of whom read the Frenchman’s work)—that Trump has apparently resurrected. But here’s the rub: “le crowd” is, in part, a mythical creature. As contemporary sociologists and psychologists like Stephen Reicher, a professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews, argue, the crowd is less a feature of the modern political landscape than a creature of Le Bon’s private nightscape. Rather than surrendering their identity or losing themselves in the crowd, as Le Bon argued, individuals who join the group instead embrace a collective identity, one usually hedged by limits and informed by rules. In his work on riots in 18th-century England, the historian E.P. Thompson revealed how these so-called mobs were, in fact, governed by what he called a “moral economy.” Similarly, in his landmark work on crowds in the French Revolution, the historian George Rudé showed how the “mob” that took the Bastille was not bestial and base, but instead shaped by the actions of literate artisans... Despite the correctives offered by social scientists, however, Le Bon’s vision remains very powerful. In part, this is because at times it does reveal telling traits to both crowds and those who seek to lead them. Yet, Le Bon’s vision also persists because it reveals truths about our own fears and resistances. Those of us who identify with America’s humane and liberal traditions are rightly horrified by Trump’s racist, violent worldview. But, ironically, Democrats risk committing the very same error that Trump has made his stock in trade: seeing his supporters in terms of abstractions, not particulars; groups, not individuals. When they see Trump’s supporters as a crowd, Trump’s opponents relieve themselves of the task of seeing them as men and women driven by an array of motives. The challenge is to defeat not just Trump, but the all-too-human tendency to turn the world into us versus them.”Zaretsky and Reicher argue that social science shows that the crowd is more normal than one might think. The effort to normalize, rationalize, and thus to explain away what is unique and meaningful in a social phenomenon is a central effort of social science. By studying the behavior of large numbers of people, social science creates a bell curve in which most people act normally and only the outliers on the fringe are abnormal. By the law of large numbers, nearly all behavior is normalized and action - a surprising and exceptional act that can change and impact the course of the world - is excluded, in all but the most exceptional circumstances. Reichert’s argument that the modern mob is really rational may be true, but, as Zaretsky concedes, such a sociological reduction also doesn’t deal adequately with the power of the mob today. How then are we to understand the rise of the mob that is so consequent around the world? Hannah Arendt argued that one distinctive feature of totalitarian movements is what she saw to be the transformation of the mob, the crowd, into a mass. Confronted with something new, like the 20th century totalitarian mass movements in Germany and the Soviet Union, Arendt insisted we understand what was new and extraordinary about them. In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt distinguishes the mob from the mass in ways that are deeply instructive for our contemporary politics. Continue on Medium... Form more information visit: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/07/trump-le-bon-mob/493118/
Diversity v.s. Multiculturalism
Kenan Malik gives an interview in Knack that is republished in English on his website. He speaks about the democratic deficit in Europe, the divide between a global technocratic elite and those who are left out of the new world order, his support for open borders, and his love of diversity along with his worries about multiculturalism.
“KM: First, we need to distinguish between the lived experience of diversity and multiculturalism as a political process. The experience of living in a society that’s less insular, more vibrant and more cosmopolitan is positive. As a political process, however, multiculturalism means something very different. It means forcing people into particular ethnic and cultural boxes, defining individual needs and rights by virtue of the boxes into which people are put, and using those boxes, rather than people’s needs, to shape public policy. Multiculturalism suggests that your origins should determine how the state should treat you. It means that people belonging to a minority group get lumped together and treated as if they constitute a homogeneous group. It also transforms the idea of equality, from the belief that everyone should be treated equally despite racial and cultural differences, to the insistence that people should be treated differently because of them. Diversity within minority groups becomes ignored. We tend to sideline progressive voices within minority communities and to look on reactionaries as if they expressed the authentic views of those communities. Naser Khader, a Danish member of parliament and a Muslim, tells of a conversation he had with a leftwing journalist, shortly after the controversy surrounding the Mohammed cartoons, ten years ago. The journalist claimed that ‘the cartoons insulted all Muslims’. When Khader responded that ‘I am not insulted’, the journalist told him he was ‘not a real Muslim’. From this supposedly ‘leftwing’ perspective, to be a Muslim you have to be reactionary. We also have only a limited notion of diversity. We think of diversity largely in terms of culture, religion or ethnicity; many other forms of diversity – class, say, or gender, or age – are often ignored.”Form more information visit: https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2016/07/28/on-brexit-borders-being-offensive-but-not-being-in-a-hollywood-movie/
The Architecture of The Deal
"The Donald... inhabits interiors in lieu of an interior life and shows them off with hyperbolic self-celebration. The tour of the penthouse with its 53 rooms, African-blue-onyx lavatory, ivory friezes, and chandelier “from a castle in Austria” always seems to culminate in a view of Central Park and the skyline outside the glass walls, Trump’s own Alps. Excess is irresistible. Trump himself recalls an early meeting with the architect Der Scutt at his first Manhattan apartment, in which Scutt opined that there was simply too much furniture and proceeded to move half of it into the hall. However, while Trump’s architectural taste isn’t exactly refined, it does have a certain middle-of-the-road precision, as seen in his eye for branded talent and pedigree. Trump’s “portfolio” adumbrates grandiosity without actual risk-taking: The architecture is far more Ralph Lauren than John Galliano—product, not provocation. Indeed, like his father before him (who had Morris Lapidus do a few lively lobbies in his otherwise generic Brooklyn apartment houses), The Donald has fundamentally conservative taste. His buildings break no artistic ground but are accessorized like crazy with shiny signifiers of the sumptuous."
“Few people better embody the virtues commonly associated with the “public intellectual” than the German Jewish political theorist (and frequent Partisan Review contributor) Hannah Arendt, best known for her responses to the rise of totalitarianism, the forced desegregation of American schools, and the trial of the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann. And yet Arendt often used the term “intellectual” with scorn. She never accepted the idea that specialized education provided political wisdom, nor was she invested in the fantasy that the public would be won over by superior arguments or share some professional thinkers’ disinterested love of truth. In her 1958 book The Human Condition, Arendt rejected the idea that politics would be improved by the presence of expert opinions. Furthermore, she described intellectuals, as a class, in strikingly critical terms, as creatures of the marketplace for whom that market mattered much more than the life of the mind; they used their skills primarily to earn their bread — “only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living” — and felt none of the anguish that true artists might feel while in the throes of creation. This was not really their fault; the conditions of modernity themselves force us to emphasize our “usefulness,” and to glorify intellectual life as a form of labor, if indeed this can be called glory. Five years later, in her 1963 study On Revolution, Arendt once again characterized “intellectuals” as individuals who instrumentalized education; they found nothing in their mental lives, in other words, to transport them beyond the means-ends world whose pointlessness Wordsworth once described with the line “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”Form more information visit: https://www.thenation.com/article/the-donald-trump-blueprint/