Amor Mundi

The Caretakers
Roger Berkowitz
 

The primary need totalitarianism satisfies is the need for meaning. While fantasies of national belonging are part of the populist playbook, so too is the basic desire for a strongman to take care of us. There is a deep human need to be taken care of, and liberal democratic governments are failing in that task.  Francisco Toro argues that the model populist strongman today is Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Toro looks to Bukele’s incredible popularity to help understand the underlying factors driving the populist revolution. 

The Great Acceleration
 

Roger Berkowitz
All around us are warnings about the consequences of generative AI for our jobs, our democracy, and our humanity. And all around us is excitement for the possibilities that generative AI will make us richer, more informed, safer, and better. The transformation of human society will be intense, swift, and powerful. And we all need guides to help us through.  Walter Russell Mead does an excellent job of sketching out the challenges we face, contextualizing it in history, and posing questions for the present.

A Small Boat Across the Mediterranean

Roger Berkowitz
I came across this interview by Jeevika Verma with Marilyn Hacker, one of my favorite poets who for some reason I haven’t read in a long while. Verma asks Hacker about her use of form, how “discipline and intimacy work together in a way that might feel contradictory at first but provides a clear path toward open communication.” And then she and Hacker talk about the power of form to convey volatile movements and emotions.

Can We Stop Ourselves

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of AI research, has recently quit his job at Google to spread the word of his fears that AI will be used in ways that will do fantastic harm. “It is hard to see,” he says, “how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.” 

Our Spiritual Crisis

Roger Berkowitz
Francis X. Maier interviews N.S. Lyons, and asks “What are the main factors—political, cultural, technological, spiritual—in our historical moment that cause you the greatest concern?”

Our Crisis of Worldly Courage

The biggest obstacle to political action today, Arendt saw, is that we increasingly don’t have ideals for which we are willing to fight. We no longer know What We Are Fighting For. Maurits de Jongh argues that the war in Ukraine has laid bare our uncertainty about those common values that might inspire us to collective action. And he worries that as the world hurdles towards confrontations amongst nuclear powers, the courage needed to act politically may be lacking. 

A Climate Constitutionalism

Roger Berkowitz
Esmeralda Colombo turns to Hannah Arendt’s work on law, constitutionalism, and participatory democracy to argue for ways to limit state sovereignty and increase citizen participation in government through work on cli

Self-Government

Roger Berkowitz
Arendt Center members might recall Matthew Crawford, author of Shopclass as Soulcraft, from his talk at our 2013 Conference Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis. Crawford is a philosopher and has also been a motorcycle repairman in addition to a bestselling author. N.S. Lyons recently interviewed Crawford and asked him about “self-governance,” the lost art of being able to lead our lives freely. Very much in the spirit of Max Horkeimer and Theodore Adorno, Crawford is concerned with the ways modern society promises us freedom and enlightenment but inserts us within social, economic, and political systems that make personal as well as political autonomy impossible.

Artificial Intelligence and The Human Condition
 

Roger Berkowitz
As we struggle to contemplate the impact of humanly developed but now inhumanly powerful artificially intelligent machines, we would do well to recall some of the lessons Arendt drew already from the victory of science and the modern age. Arendt wrote in the Human Condition that the “mathematization of physics, by which the absolute renunciation of the senses for the purpose of knowing was carried through, had in its last stages the unexpected and yet plausible consequences that every question man puts to nature is answered in terms of mathematical patterns to which no model can ever be adequate, since one would have to be shaped after our sense experience.” For Arendt, this separation between “thought and sense experience” means that man can create a man-made reality that defies the human capacity to understand or predict that world. In a similiar way, Slavoj Zizek approaches the present panic around the rise of artificial intelligence. He argues that what will come from artificial intelligence is not simply domination by those who control them, but surprise on the part of those who have created machines they cannot control.