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Loneliness Unsolved
This article explores the modern phenomenon of loneliness, tracing its emergence as a widespread societal concern and examining its potential causes and impacts. It discusses various perspectives on loneliness, from historical to contemporary research, highlighting how societal changes and technological advancements have influenced social connections. The piece concludes by suggesting that current feelings of isolation may be part of a larger evolutionary process, as society adapts to new forms of connection and community in the digital age08-31-2024
Articles
It's Time for Our Winter Membership Drive
"Politics," Arendt tells us, "is based on the fact of human plurality." What this means is that politics deals with factual coexistence and the association of different people, people who disagree about fundamental questions of social, economic, moral, and political life. Amidst these differences, politics is the activity in which a plurality of persons works—by persuasion, compromise, speech, and action—to discover or create "essential commonalities...12-10-2020
Whiteness as Original Sin
Roger BerkowitzRobin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility has become a bestseller and a symbol, not to mention a cudgel. It promises to teach whtie people how to admit their racism and inveighs against any and all defense mechanisms—“silence, defensiveness, argumentation, certitude, and other forms of pushback”— by which white people might disclaim their racist tendencies. Coleman Hughes pushes back, writing without white guilt as a black man.
12-03-2020
The Threat to our Political Imagination
Roger BerkowitzThe “great evasion” is before us, writes Samuel Moyn. With the victory of Joe Biden and the defeat of Donald Trump, there is a deep desire to return to normalcy. Moyn writes that part of the great evasion is a continued worry that the threat posed by Donald Trump as to democracy. On the contrary, he argues, Trump was a weak President and “American democracy was never under systemic threat from so fickle and hamstrung a wannabe authoritarian.”
12-03-2020
Me Parler
Roger BerkowitzParler, the right-wing alternative to Twitter, has somewhere around 10 million users. This is a far cry from the 330 active Twitter accounts or the 2.7 billion Facebook accounts. And yet Parler has become a “swamp-like ecosystem” in which the likes of Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, and leading QAnon acolytes have free reign. In this fact-free reality, the CIA supercomputers changed votes from Trump to Biden, Republicans were given Sharpie pens to vote with...
11-28-2020
Making the World Beautifully Chaotic
Roger BerkowitzRecently the Hannah Arendt Center Race and Revolution lecture series featured a conversation between my former student Juliana Huxtable and Kimberly Foster. Now Philip Maughan pens a profile of Huxtable that offers one way to think about critical thinking: To resist simplicity and to make the world beautifully chaotic.
11-28-2020
An Autocratic Nationalism with Total Domination
Roger BerkowitzIn the United States, there is an industry of people turning to Hannah Arendt to raise the spectre of totalitarianism. Sam Moyn has rightly questioned this approach. But there are places where it is worth worrying about the rise of totalitarianism. China—where reeducation camps for Uighur are leading to detention and torture—is also engaging in an unprecedented use of technology and state-sponsored repression to censor its population.
10-29-2020
The Destruction of Truth
Roger BerkowitzMichiko Kakutani offers another approach to the meaning of the modern lie, what she calls the “destruction of truth.” Turning back to Hannah Arendt,
10-29-2020
Technocracy and the Prejudices of Liberal Democracy
Roger Berkowitz spoke to the Laboratory of Politics, Behaviour and Media at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo on Facebook Live. The talk “Politics Today: A Challenge to Democracy,” traces the crisis of liberal democracy to the entrance of intellectuals and elites into government.10-22-2020
Loneliness in the 20th Century
Roger BerkowitzIn thinking about totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt came to see it is a form of government founded upon a mass loneliness. Samantha Hill writes about the way that loneliness emerged as a mass phenomenon in the 20th century.
10-22-2020