November 6th, 2016

11-06-2016

Generosity and The Real Evil

[caption id="attachment_15795" align="alignleft" width="196"] The Origins of Totalitarianism (Source: Amazon)[/caption] Writers are turning to Hannah Arendt's thinking about totalitarianism and fascism to try to understand Donald Trump. Last week Ingrid Burrington offered 14 quotations from Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism that she thinks shed light on Trump. This week in the New York Times, Jason Stanley offers this quotation from Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism on his way to arguing that Trump is a dangerous authoritarian figure.

Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered with corruption … The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience … What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

Arendt did rightly see that a deep human need for simplicity and coherence lie as one of the foundations of totalitarianism. Such simplicity leads totalitarianism to adopt and push ideologies, pseudo-scientific truth claims that reduce the world's problems to one basic cause. If there is poverty, it is because of Jews, or Africans; and it is because of the capitalists or the one percent. Ideologies insist that "one idea is sufficient to explain everything." The danger of ideologies is that logical coherence replaces free thinking. Ideologies free us from the messiness of reality. In offering truths that... continue this piece on Medium.

Form more information visit: http://fusion.net/story/363002/hannah-arendt-donald-trump-origins-of-totalitarianism/

The Loss of Generosity

[caption id="attachment_18453" align="alignright" width="189"] By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1987-074-16 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de[/caption] Marilynne Robinson tries to understand the problems of our present by approaching them with another's eye:

"Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave us a beautiful model of Christian behavior over, against, and within, a terrible moment in history. Events in Germany in the last century have epitomized for us the deviancy of which a modern society is capable. It seems sometimes as if we feel we have put a period to evil at this scale, or as if the ocean and all the cultural difference it signifies isolates or immunizes us from the impulses behind a moral disaster of such proportions, or, again as though the severity of harm we know we do or permit is less grave intrinsically because it is so much exceeded in scale and ferocity by the events of the last century. Indeed, in some quarters it has been held that to suggest these events were not essentially unique is to minimize their gravity rather than to acknowledge that they tell us how very grave history can be. In other quarters, of course, there are many who see moral collapse as imminent, brought on by big government, or by departures from whichever construction of religion they consider sufficient to stay divine wrath, or at least to deflect it onto others. These political and religious anxieties are frequently found together. The effect of such insistence that we are already turning on the event horizon of just such a vortex, or that we are already halfway down its throat, is to corrupt the data of contemporary history with frivolous panic. Still, there are real grounds now for anxiety about the future of the West and the world. The effect of the insistence on the unique horror of the European midcentury should not be to distract us from a true recognition of our vulnerability to cascading error. Out of profound respect for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and with deep faith in the clarifying power of Christian humility, I will look at our moment as he might have looked at his, before the forces that had been gathering strength in Europe at least since the late 19th century became irresistible. I will not be speaking here about skinheads or militias or survivalists or Klansmen, or even about the unashamed racism that has emerged in public life in recent years, not only in America. I will be speaking about a deeper tectonics that, in my opinion, produces the energy behind all these surface tremors and disruptions.... I am proposing that the West is giving up its legal and cultural democracy, leaving it open to, or ceding it to, the oldest and worst temptations of unbridled power. Nowhere in all this is there a trace of respect for people in general—indeed, its energies seem to be fueled by contempt for them. Nowhere is there any hint of a better future foreseen for people in general than an economically coerced subordination to the treadmill of “competitiveness,” mitigated by the knowledge that at least no poor child expects a free lunch. This is repulsive on its face, destructive of every conception of value. And it proceeds by the destruction of safeguards that would protect us from consequences yet more repulsive. At this moment, world civilization is being wrenched into conformity with a new and primitive order that has minimal sympathy at best with thought and art, with humanity itself as an object of reverence. If we are to try to live up to the challenges of our time, as Bonhoeffer did to his, we owe it to him to acknowledge a bitter lesson he learned before us, that these challenges can be understood too late."

Form more information visit: http://lithub.com/marilynne-robinson-against-oligarchy/

In the Face of a Black Man, Not a Person, But a Shade

[caption id="attachment_18455" align="alignleft" width="300"] Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis Köln 2014 - Verleihung an Kerry James Marshall - 12.04.2014 (photo by Jürgen Schulzki)[/caption] Wyatt Mason' profiles the artist Kerry James Marshall in T Magazine for the New York Times.

"FROM THE HISTORICAL sense that, throughout the American experiment, very little has been possible for black people; to a generational sense that, despite a great deal of change in American society through time, a great deal still isn’t possible; to Marshall’s personal sense that, nonetheless, everything is possible: That’s the short version of the story that his work has been telling — mostly in paint but also in sculpture, photography and installations — since he became the first member of his family to go to college, graduating from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in 1978. In that interval, Marshall has become a preeminent American artist, one whose work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a dozen other major American museums. He has received a MacArthur fellowship and his paintings can command over 2 million dollars at auction. This past spring, Marshall’s career became the subject of its first major retrospective, a chronological march through 35 years of extraordinary creation, a vast show that opened in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art and moves to New York this week — opening at the Met Breuer on Oct. 25 — before its final stop in Los Angeles, at the MOCA, next year. Let’s look at the very first painting you come to in the show, one that Marshall made when he was 25, a painting called “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self.” The first thing you notice is its size — 8 by 6½ inches — small by any measure but particularly so given the monumentality of the paintings Marshall has become famous for since. From this small vertical surface, seen as if in silhouette, a black face stares. Male, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a heavy coat, he’s all eyes and grin. Literally: The only features that one can discern in this carbon-black face are two cartoonishly white eyes and, rooted in dark pink gums, 18 large white teeth with a gap dead center, a top incisor mysteriously gone, a void in a face that, in its way, is itself a void. In Chicago, I watched one museumgoer after another walk up to it and reflexively smile back, and I can report — as one of those people — that you get an odd feeling when you do, the sense that you shouldn’t be smiling. For the only other pictorial detail on that little canvas is a bright white glimpse of shirt peeking out from the general darkness, and the funny thing about the shirt is that if you stare at it long enough, its sharply drawn dimensions finally snap into focus: It looks like the blade of an axe, one poised at the neck of that huge, haunting, gap-toothed smile. This portrait of the artist as a shadow of his former self looks like something out of minstrelsy, a white actor in blackface. What we have before us is a portrait of a black man by a black man, but one that looks the way a black man might feel about being looked at in a white world by people who see, in the face of a black man, not a person but a shade, a shadow, a pigmentation: blackness. “Everything changed when I made that painting,” Marshall told me in his studio this summer.""

Form more information visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/t-magazine/kerry-james-marshall-artist.html