Amor Mundi

A letter from Roger Berkowitz

This week, Italy's government fell apart and two far-right parties are favored to win upcoming elections. A war of aggression in Europe has upended basic assumptions about the liberal world order. And, in the United States, former President Trump threatens to run again for President even as a Congressional Committee has painstakingly demonstrated his efforts to illegally subvert a democratic election. It is at times like these that we must remember Hannah Arendt's warning: totalitarianism is now an ever-present possibility in our world. In such a world, Arendt argues, the fear of concentration camps and total domination invalidates all political differentiations and serves as "the politically most important yardstick for judging events in our time, namely: whether they serve totalitarian domination or not."

About Face:
A Portrait of David Schorr’s “Hannah Arendt Center: The Centenary Prints”

In 2011, the Hannah Arendt Center commissioned the artist David Schorr to create an original engraved series of 50 prints of Hannah Arendt based on his iconic drawing that graces the cover of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt, For Love of the World. These prints were lost for a decade, but were found and are now being made available through the Arendt Center. Learn more and join the center here.
Steven Maslow, then the Chairman of the Arendt Center’s board, a student and later friend of David Schorr’s, offers reflections below on the prints, their connection to Arendt’s writing and thinking, and his friendship with David Schorr.

The Eichmann Tapes are Discovered (Again)

Roger Berkowitz
Few books have defined an entire world-historical event as Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Not only has Arendt’s book dominated the reception of Adolf Eichmann and his trial, but also her account of the banality of evil has become a cultural, moral, and legal touchstone, an insight perennially invoked (rightly or wrongly) to explain how and why everyday people engage in genocidal and other evil acts.

Now Yariv Mozer, an Israeli filmmaker, has created and directed a new documentary series The Devils Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes that played recently in Israel. Transcripts of the tapes have existed since before the Eichmann trial, and Arendt read many of them. But the actual tapes had long been thought lost. Mozer uses excerpts from these tapes to argue that Eichmann was in fact an ideological Nazi and was hardly banal.

Richard Bernstein in Memoriam

Roger Berkowitz 
Richard Bernstein died this week. He is the author of Praxis and Action, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, and Why Read Hannah Arendt Now? amongst many other books.  He arrived at the New School for Social Research in 1989, where he taught courses on Hannah Arendt, amongst other interests. His obituaries are here,  here and in German here. Dick spoke at the first Hannah Arendt Center Conference Thinking in Dark Times in 2006. At that conference, I asked Dick to respond to the question, “Is Evil Banal?” In typical fashion, his response was to challenge the question. His talk is transcribed and published in the volume Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics.  

Repeated Defeat On Election Day

Roger Berkowitz 
A few weeks ago I linked to an article by Ryan Grim arguing that political organizations on the left are spending more time on internal politics than they are on actually organizing to achieve their political goals. Grim’s essay has drawn a lot of attention, positive and negative. Thomas Edsall has surveyed a dozen leaders of leftwing organizations as well as leftist organizers to solicit their views. Edsall makes clear how radically divided the Democratic left is in the United States and tries to make sense of those divisions.

Arendt and Big Data

Roger Berkowitz
Daniel Brennan has a new paper on Hannah Arendt’s thinking as it relates to Big Data and Artificial intelligence.

The Future of Security

Roger Berkowitz
Liberalism is the political system that claims to balance the competing claims of freedom and order on the side of freedom. The demands of order and security are strong everywhere. For that reason, it is important to take stock of the way China is using technology to preserve public order; China’s innovations will be seductive in Hobbesian liberal democracies as well. Paul Mozur, Muyi Xiao, and John Liu write about the efforts in China to employ big data and technology in surveillance and prevention of crimes. Increasingly, China is at the world leader in promoting technology as a way forward towards a secure society. The elevation of security over freedom, however, raises profound questions for a free society. 

Progressive Workplace Problems

Roger Berkowitz
Ryan Grim takes on the elephant in the room of progressive politics, the fact that political organizations on the left are spending more time on internal politics than they are on actually organizing to achieve their political goals. 
 

Everything Is Still Falling Apart

Roger Berkowitz
Mars Hill was an evangelical church founded by a charismatic figure Mark Driscoll that was based in Seattle. Driscoll proved a controversial figure, at once a brilliant evangelical leader and a bullying leader also accused of plagiarism and fraud. Mike Cosper tells this story in his podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. The podcast speaks to our present moment, whether or not one is interested in Christianity or in megachurches. It is an extraordinary example of how to tell a story of our time through an in-depth exploration of one exemplary cultural catastrophe. I had the pleasure of speaking with Cosper and Yuval Levin- who will also be speaking at our Fall Conference -on the most recent episode of Cosper's podcast.