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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
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Play
Roger BerkowitzSusanna Crossman reflects on the power of play. “Play is a powerful motor.” Play involves a “leap in the dark” and requires trust. Play, the thinker Eugen Fink writes, “unites ‘the highest desire and the deepest suffering’.” Play is thus deeply connected to the very human way of being alive, something we can hear in its etymologies, many of which go back to the Latin ludere. “Ludere in Latin refers to leaping fishes and fluttering birds. The Anglo-Saxon lâcan means to move like a ship on the waves, or to tremble like a flame.
02-11-2021
Can Moral Life Survive Dictatorship?
Roger BerkowitzPeter Baehr asks: “Can moral life survive dictatorship?” It is a question that many in politics think secondary. The rise of dictatorship—not to mention fascism—is said to justify resistance at all costs. The message of groups like Antifa is that in the fight against dictatorship and fascism, all means are acceptable and even necessary.
02-04-2021
Hannah Arendt and C.L.R. James
Roger BerkowitzIn 1958 in the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt published an Epilogue on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Two years later, the Caribbean intellectual and activist C.L.R. James delivered a series of public lectures in Trinidad that would be published as Modern Politics.
01-29-2021
The Re-Beginning of American Democracy
Roger BerkowitzThere has been a lot of worry recently about the health of American democracy. What the events of the last two weeks have confirmed, however, is that American democracy is quite robust and healthy. In spite of a President who sought to undermine an election, the system worked. The voters rejected a dangerous and narcissistic and corrupt President by over seven million votes and a large electoral college mandate.
01-21-2021
The Fabric of Reality
Roger BerkowitzTimothy Snyder argues that the abyss of American democracy is fed by a crisis in truth that has left us in a pre-fascist moment. But Snyder recognizes that President Trump never could bring himself to embrace fascism. He alienated the military, on which a fascist government would need to depend. He emboldened militias, but never organized them into a unit. His social media attacks were constant but scattered.
01-14-2021
The Habits of Democracy
Roger BerkowitzOn May 31, 1887, William James gave a speech dedicating a monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts regiment that he led. The Massachusetts 54th was the first black regiment in the United States. Gould, an abolitionist, led the regiment into battle and he, along with many of the soldiers, was killed during an assault in 1863 on Fort Wagner in South Carolina.
01-07-2021
Amor Mundi: The Miracle that Saves the World
Roger BerkowtizPope Francis published his annual Christmas Speech and, in his opening paragraph on the miracle of human freedom, invokes Hannah Arendt’s conviction that all men and women are beginners. Born free, we have the faculty and power to act and speak in ways that are unexpected and surprising. And such spontaneous doings can alter the course of history.
12-23-2020
Arendt on Judgment and Social Media
Roger BerkowitzIn a wide-ranging essay on Hannah Arendt’s approach to judgment and thinking, Blake Smith considers Arendt’s argument that “the dangers facing our political and moral life must be met with a particular kind of mental activity she called “judgment,” and distinguished from two others: “cognition” and “thinking.” As opposed to cognition that seeks truths and solutions, thinking aims for meaning.
12-17-2020
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