Amor Mundi

Permissible But Bad Speech

Danielle Allen makes the important distinction between impossible speech and speech that is permissible and yet bad. She writes, "Permissible but bad speech is like peeing in the swimming pool — it doesn’t break the law, but it violates the norm of respect for others. On college campuses, impermissible speech is met with formal adjudication and sanctions. But how should we respond to permissible but bad speech?"

Con-solatio, Compassion, and Friendship

I was honored this week to have been chosen by Con-solatio to receive their annual Compassion Award at a ceremony in New York City. Con-solatio sends missionaries around the world to the poorest and most forlorn places on the planet. The goal is not to convert people or to educate them or to build them houses. It is simply to console them, to show them compassion, to be their friends.
 

Compassion and Politics

The Arendt Center will host a talk on Thursday this week by Mira Sucharov, a member of the Palestinian-Israeli non-profit A Land For All. The group seeks to imagine a future in which the 15 million inhabitants of Israel-Palestine live together between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. The form of such a togetherness would be a federation in which both Jewish and Palestinian peoples have their own sovereign states and yet live amongst each other.

On Campus Protests

Hannah Arendt believed that civil disobedience was a fundamental right and a distinctly American form of politics. Unlike Henry David Thoreau, who understood civil disobedience as an act of individual conscientious action, Arendt believed that civil disobedience was a form of collective political dissent. It is a group phenomenon that publicizes widely shared minority opinions via extraordinary means to contest unjust acts by a ruling majority.

Power and the University

George Packer reminds us of the liberal vision of the university and worries that such an ideal is being lost. Packer writes: "A university isn’t a state—it can’t simply impose its rules with force. It’s a special kind of community whose legitimacy depends on mutual recognition in a spirit of reason, openness, and tolerance . . . When one faction or another violates this spirit, the whole university is weakened as if stricken with an illness."

René Girard and Internet Influencers

René Girard was one of the great social theorists of the 20th century. His book Violence and the Sacred is a classic account of the problem of violence in society, the way that so many of our religious and legal rituals are designed to quell the human urge for violence and reassert peace. The rituals of sacrifice and even today the ritual of legal punishment allows a community to exercise its desire for violence legally and with priestly sanction on one person or even one sacrificial animal–a scapegoat. The scapegoat can’t be innocent, we must believe our violence against the scapegoat must be justified, even sacred.

Symbolic Beliefs

I was recently in Mechelen, a small and lively city in Belgium, to speak to a group of mayors from the European Union about diversity and polarization. My address to the European mayors in Mechelen made three points. First, Polarization is not necessarily something to be feared and derided. Second, while polarization can be dangerous, it only becomes dangerous when our politics fails. And, finally, politics is based on talking with one another in ways that nurture a common sense.

Arendtian Sardines

Gabriele Parrino, who was a visiting a scholar at the HAC this spring, wrote about an "unprecedented event" which occurred in the Bologna in November 2019. "Against the discriminatory policies of former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini," he writes, "four different people began to sing in Piazza Maggiore. This chant became a call that grew into a crowd of six thousand people and the [idea] of the 6000Sardines spread throughout the country.'"

On Gaslighting 

The term “gaslighting” is one of those words that comes out of nowhere and now seems to pop-up regularly.  It was Merriam Webster’s “word of the year” in 2022. In its pop-psychology usage, gaslighting refers to “Confident, high-achieving women” who are “caught in demoralizing, destructive, and bewildering relationships” that caused the woman “to question her own sense of reality.”