Amor Mundi Newsletter - 9/1/13
09-03-2013
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.
Wyatt Mason of the Arendt Center has a deeply honest and invigorating feature essay on the writer Norman Rush in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. Rush is the author of Mating (winner of the National Book Award), Mortals, and Whites (a book of stories which was scandalously denied a Pulitzer Prize in a story Mason unearths for the first time). Subtle Bodies, Rush's third novel, will be published this month. Mason writes: "An awareness of the mechanism - of how our minds work, of the transits between self-certainty and self-doubt and the endless inner arbitrations litigating each - is a central Rushian preoccupation. Of course, most works of fiction engage, at some level, with the imaginative leap that allows us to cross into the cloistered consciousness of another. But Rush’s own demonstration of that process - of voice as a measure of the mind - has been unusual." Rush wants his novels to make a difference, to change the world. He asks: "How can I say this without seeming grandiose? The sense of things in the world has come to feel increasingly apocalyptic. In a personal sense, the parts of the world that I follow and am interested in, things seem to be going quite ... badly. Increasingly so. That raises questions of what writing is for. And as I was writing this book, this feeling was deepening in me, and there’s an occult connection between what you do and what its potential significance is in a time of crisis. What does it do? ... The answer is you do your witness and you see what comes out.”
The Touching Innocence of the NSA's Defenders
Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal has a clear-eyed take on the dangers of the NSA and the innocence of those who think that collected information will not be misused. She gleans important lessons from Open Secret, the memoir of Stella Rimington, who in the early 1990s served as director-general of MI5, the British domestic spy agency. Noonan’s conclusions are important: “There are too many built-in dynamics that make the national-security state want to grow, from legitimate fears of terrorism, to bureaucratic pride, to the flaws in human nature. And there are too many dynamics that will allow it to grow. The aftermath of 9/11 happened to coincide with a new burst in American technological innovation and discovery: The government has the ways and means to do pretty much anything now, and if they can do it they will do it…. If you assume all the information that can and will be gleaned will be confined to NSA and national security purposes, you are not sufficiently imaginative or informed. If you believe the information will never be used wrongly or recklessly, you are touchingly innocent.”
Four years ago Ronald Arkin spoke at the Hannah Arendt Center and argued that artificially intelligence weapons systems carried the potential to make war more humane. Human warriors get tired, get angry, and get scared, leading them to make mistakes, take revenge, and shoot blindly at anything that moves. Machines can be programmed to only shoot once certain legal and ethical conditions have been confirmed. Which leads to the paradox that war might become more humane as it becomes less human. This indeed is Michael W. Lewis’ argument in a recent post in the Atlantic: “Like any other weapons system, drones have caused civilian casualties. But they also have the potential to dramatically reduce civilian casualties in armed conflicts, and particularly in counterinsurgencies. Their ability to follow targets for days or weeks accomplishes two things that contribute to saving the lives of innocents: First, it confirms that the target is engaged in the behavior that put them on the target list, reducing the likelihood of striking someone based on faulty intelligence. Second, by establishing a "pattern of life" for the intended target, it allows operators to predict when the target will be sufficiently isolated to allow a strike that is unlikely to harm civilians.”
There's been a lot of hand wringing about the newly digital world is doing to publishing, which, historically, was about publishing books, newspapers, and magazines that people could actually hold in their hands. As we've increasingly moved online, publishing has gone with it-- but is this transition changing just the way we read? Or the way we write as well? In a long essay with many threads, Thomas Larson suggests that's exactly what's happening. "Technology," he believes" has changed the writer's traditional role into that of the "author—that is, the private persona of the print-based writer is being overtaken by the public persona of the multimedia author. To be heard in the news din of our culture (internet and cable TV), writers add audio, video, and, if possible, a TV presence to their kit bags." Later, striking an Arendtian note, he adds that "When text rattles this many bells and whistles, it becomes as multiple and distractible as we are... I find this performative side of the literary equation, which the device offers and whose buttons I press, is doing a number on the writing side." Still, he concludes with a note of hope. Maybe this is just new, and we're not used to it yet. The answer, he seems to think, lies in new, what he calls transliterate, forms.
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Adam Leith Gollner, author of the newly published The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever, investigates the tantalizing promise of the afterlife: "When the four-thousand-year-old Edwin Smith Papyrus first resurfaced, it seemed to contain ancient methods of rejuvenation. The Egyptian scroll commences with a tantalizing promise: 'The beginning of the book for making an old man into a youth …' Once the hieratic scribbles were fully decrypted, however, the directives turned out to be a base recipe for fenugreek oil—used to mask liver spots and as a hair restorative for balding men."
This week on the blog, George Fitzi examines what might be coming in the way humans relate to machines.
October 3-4, 2013
The sixth annual fall conference, "Failing Fast:The Crisis of the Educated Citizen"
Olin Hall, Bard College
Learn more here.