Amor Mundi

Taking Liberties

Roger Berkowitz
One of the perils of running the Hannah Arendt Center is that I am expected to respond to controversies that I would rather avoid. I strive to be ecumenical, to allow all sorts of readings of Arendt, not to impose my own or disqualify others. One recent essay, however, has caused quite the stir. It is the pugilistic and highly conceptual essay by Samuel Moyn that warns us to be wary of reading Arendt’s work because, he argues, she was a “Cold War liberal.”

Friendship. Politics, and Human Meaningfulness

Roger Berkowitz
In the wake of the Alpine Fellowship on Human Flourishing in Fjallnas, Sweden last week, I’ve been reading Lisa Miller’s book The Awakened Brain. Miller makes what my daughter says is an obvious argument, that mental illness and especially depression and anxiety can be prevented and also helped by having a rich spiritual and inner life. Hannah Arendt isn’t mentioned in Miller’s book, but the fundamental idea underlying Miller’s work is the Arendtian worry about the loss of meaningfulness, the absence of purpose, and the feeling of abandonment that has become widespread in the modern world.
 

The Power of Past Prejudices

Roger Berkowitz
Wolfram Eilenberger finds in Hannah Arendt’s encounter with Rahel Varnhagen a paradox between the rational individual and the power of past prejudices.

The Double Weaponization of Loneliness

The existential crisis facing humanity is likely neither the devastation of the earth from global warming nor the destruction of humanity by a rogue AI. Indeed, artificial intelligence, in its promise of exponential technological advance, may change the calculus of the most apocalyptic climate change models. But what AI does threaten to do is to make ever increasing numbers of human beings economically superfluous.

Kidnapped

Hannah Arendt Center Senior Fellow Wyatt Mason writes about the poet Shane McCrae, who at the age of three was kidnapped by his white grandparents and raised separately from his black father.

Hannah Arendt Prize 2023

Roger Berkowitz
My Bard Colleague Masha Gessen has won the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking. Porter Anderson covers the announcement. 

Milan Kundera and the Slow Life of Complexity

Roger Berkowitz
Milan Kundera died last week at the age of 94. His major novels include The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a thoughtful meditation on Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return of the same. Robin Ashenden writes an intellectual obituary. 

AI-Tocracy

Roger Berkowitz
Does AI fundamentally support autocratic government? This is the question Martin Beraja, Andrew Kao, David Yang, and Noam Yuchtman ask in their paper AI-tocracy. 

Humanity in the Nuclear and AI Ages

Roger Berkowitz
To think how to respond to the challenge AI poses to humanity, David Nirenberg turns back and asks how the pioneers of the nuclear bomb set about to think about the future of man. J. Robert Oppenheimer helped bequeath humanity not only the nuclear bomb, but also the means to think about how to live as human beings in the nuclear age. After his work on the bomb as the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, Oppenheimer served 20 years as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.. home to some of the world’s leading scientists, including Albert Einstein.