Amor Mundi Newsletter 3/16/14
03-17-2014
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.
On the Guernica blog, David Bromwich examines “how Obama became a publicist for his presidency (rather than the president).” In his first term Obama delivered 1,852 separate speeches, comments, or scheduled public remarks and granted 591 interviews. These exceptional numbers, Bromwich writes, were the result of “magical thinking” on the part of the Obama White House: if the American public heard the president often enough, they would see how sincere and bipartisan he was and accept his policies. An endless string of speeches, road trips, and town hall meetings thus came to serve as a stand-in for the decision-making and confrontation that true leadership requires, and genuine conviction demands. Argues Bromwich: “…The truth is that Obama’s convictions were never strong. He did not find this out until his convictions were tested, and they were not tested until he became president. Perhaps the thin connection between Obama’s words and his actions does not support the use of the word “conviction” at all. Let us say instead that he mistook his preferences for convictions—and he can still be trusted to tell us what he would prefer to do. Review the record and it will show that his first statement on a given issue generally lays out what he would prefer. Later on, he resigns himself to supporting a lesser evil, which he tells us is temporary and necessary. The creation of a category of permanent prisoners in “this war we’re in” (which he declines to call “the war on terror”) was an early and characteristic instance. Such is Obama’s belief in the power and significance of his own words that, as he judges his own case, saying the right thing is a decent second-best to doing the right thing.” For more see a commentary on the Arendt Center blog.
Borrowing More than Just Vowels
Phillip Durkin, author of the forthcoming book Borrowed Words, uses an interactive tool to show how English has changed over the last thousand years. Although still mostly dominated by Latin and French, English has also begun to borrow from languages with more distant origins, like Japanese, Russian, and Greek. Durkin's tool, and presumably his book, is a reminder of the fact that both words and their speakers exist in history, something all too easily lost in the hegemony of any present context.
The Aspirationism of the Creative Class
Leonard Pierce takes aim at the aspirationism of the creative class, who, he says, are selling us their luck as our own failure. He concludes from the long view, “It is hard enough just being alive, just living and trying to be a decent person without being overwhelmed by shame and guilt and the demands of the world; the last thing we need is someone who got a few extra pulls of the handle at the cosmic slot machine telling us we’re doing it all wrong. If there is something we should aspire to, it certainly cannot be a position from which we look upon ordinary people, people no less miraculous but perhaps just a little less lucky than ourselves, as a lesser form of life."
In a speech to German Parliament, Angela Merkel, that country's chancellor, explains her position on privacy and surveillance. The question is about more than what happens in what country's borders, she says, and "millions of people who live in undemocratic states are watching very closely how the world’s democracies react to threats to their security: whether they act circumspectly, in sovereign self-assurance, or undermine precisely what in the eyes of these millions of people makes them so attractive—freedom and the dignity of the individual."
Considering the Philippine writer and hero Jose Mizal in the wake of reading Benedict Anderson's short book Why Counting Counts, Gina Apostol notes his two legacies: “For a Filipino novelist like myself, Rizal is a troubling emblem. Many writers like to dwell on the burden of his monumental legacy. But my problem is that Rizal is forgotten as an artist. Remembered (or dismembered) as a patriot, a martyr, a nationalist, a savior, a saint, Rizal is not discussed much as a writer — he is not read as an artist. Our national hero now shares the fate of all of us who attempt to write about our country in fiction. No one really reads his novels."
Audra Wolfe, taking note of Neil Degrasse Tyson's resurrection of Carl Sagan's TV science epic Cosmos, suggests that any hope that the series may bring increased attention, and therefore increased funding, to scientific pursuits may be misguided: "As is so often the case with science communication, the assumption seems to be that public understanding of science—sprinkled with a hearty dose of wonder and awe—will produce respect for scientific authority, support for science funding, and a new generation of would-be scientists. If only Americans loved science a little more, the thinking goes, we could end our squabbling about climate change, clean energy, evolution, and funding NASA and the National Science Foundation. These are high hopes to pin on a television show, even one as glorious as Cosmos." Although Wolfe makes a good argument about how Sagan's world is different from the world we now inhabit with Tyson, there's something more basic at work, here: the pernicious notion that, if we educate people who don't agree with us just a little bit more, they'll come around to our way of thinking. This, obviously, is a deeply dismissive point of view, one that suggests that everyone should think as we do, and that they don't is a question of status rather than viewpoint. If Cosmos gets people interested in science, it will be the possibility, the things that we are yet to understand, that get them excited, rather than what has already been settled. Speak to that sense of wonder and people very well may listen; speak to what you think people don't know and should, and they'll tune you out.
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, read a recap and watch the video of Roger Berkowitz and Walter Russell Mead speaking with SCOTUSblog founder, Tom Goldstein, as part of our “Blogging and the New Public Intellectual series. Jason Adams relates Arendt’s belief that the act of thinking slips humanity out of historical and biographical time and into a non-time that reconstitutes the world.Roger Berkowitz ponders whether President Obama lacks conviction, and in the Weekend Read, Roger Berkowitz examines the current antisemitic controversies surrounding both Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man.