The Need for Heterodoxy

07-29-2018

The Need for Heterodoxy

Last month a group of student fellows from the Hannah Arendt Center’s Plurality Project attended the first Heterodox Academy Conference in New York City. Reflecting on her experiences at the conference, Isabella Santana argues that professors and students need to work together to make space for difficult conversations:

In order to address the free speech crisis on college campuses today, we need students and professors to work together and listen to one another. Pain felt by students in the classroom?—?including myself?—?needs to be addressed. By calling us “snowflakes,” the empty rhetoric that is antithetical to viewpoint diversity and open-mindedness is perpetuated. But those of us students who are fed up with a long history of injustice must also be open to having discussion with those we disagree with. By discussion I do not mean that black and brown students should have to debate members of the KKK, nor should they have to constantly be the individuals fighting the fight against racism. These conversations can be incredibly exhausting, lines can and should be drawn. What I mean by discussion is a willingness to hear, because a willingness to hear will create a willingness to be heard. Without listening to one another, particularly on college campuses, our learning and growth can only go so far. Although there is no clear solution, the first steps to me seem quite apparent: adopting an attitude that embraces viewpoint diversity and thus a willingness to learn.

Form more information visit: https://medium.com/@arendt_center/student-report-the-need-for-heterodoxy-on-college-campuses-7b872001ea4d

Paranoid Politics

Blake Smith seeks to shed light on dog-whistling, the common practice where politicians say something that may be inoffensive on the surface but appeals to unconscious hatreds. One well-known recent example is President Trump’s claim during the campaign that Mexicans who were coming to the United States were overwhelmingly criminals. While the President explicitly said in his comments that “some” Mexicans, and also some Mexican immigrants, are good people, the implication that most Mexican immigrants are criminals was seen by many on the left as racism, the suggestion that Mexicans are in some sense disproportionately bad people who have some predisposition to criminality. That the President never said such a thing is thought to be unimportant; as a dog whistle is inaudible to humans but seductive to canines, so too are political dog whistles thought to be subconscious and unstated red meat for racists. Smith turns to Paul Ricoeur and Eve Sedgewick to help understand the dog whistle phenomenon. —Roger Berkowitz

“In his book Freud and Philosophy, Ricoeur asks us to imagine two basic styles of interpretation, or hermeneutics. One focuses on “unmasking” and “demystification,” exposing what a speaker really means, or why they said what they said. This reading is based on an attitude of suspicion, and sees statements as “masks” that conceal the speakers’ agenda. Ricoeur argues that this style of interpretation is that of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the “masters of suspicion.” The other style of interpretation focuses on the “restoration of meaning.” Instead of asking why a speaker made a statement (in order to do what? in order to conceal what?), the interpreter considers how the statement is addressed to them “in the manner of a message,” and how it encourages them to engage with it to achieve understanding. In Ricoeur’s analysis, hermeneutics remain confined to the intellectual sphere; but Sedgwick ran with his insights into politics. In her 2002 essay, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” Sedgwick accused the Left of being stuck in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion. Academics and activists make a virtue of paranoia, she argued, flaunting their interpretive prowess in detecting the subtlest instances of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Sedgwick, herself writing from the Left, came to the same conclusion as Bonevac: that listening with such intensity for the hidden discourse of one’s opponents was a kind of insanity. But rather than let that diagnosis be the end of her analysis, she took it as her point of departure. Sedgwick did not directly address the notion of dog-whistling (which was a term only just gaining currency at the time of writing), but her analysis of the suspicious hermeneutic style of left-wing “oppositional theorists” illuminates today’s headlines. She explained that this style of interpretation is grounded in, and perpetuates, a psychological condition that tries to avoid negative surprises by anticipating bad news. What the subject fears—“patriarchy, racism, sex difference”—is always on their mind, and constantly being ‘discovered’ in the world. This may may seem like a successful strategy, Sedgwick warned her friends, but it is a self-defeating one. Paranoid interpreters imagine themselves to be maintaining a “terrible alertness” that wards off danger. In fact they are unobservant and naive. They seem to find the things that they oppose lurking around every corner; but in practice they are continually surprised and defeated when these forces do manifest themselves. Sedgwick points out that her colleagues and comrades were baffled by the victories of Reagan and Bush. Today, they are just as baffled today by Trump. Listening for reaction everywhere, they never hear it coming.”

Form more information visit: https://quillette.com/2018/07/16/understanding-and-misunderstanding-dog-whistling/

Permanent Citizenship

Denaturalization is one of the telltale signs of what Hannah Arendt calls totalitarianism. While it is undoubtedly true that international law permits sovereign nations to control emigration, naturalization, and expulsion, the choice to denaturalize citizens risks artificially creating groups of people who are stateless refugees, shorn of any home or harbor. What is more, the impulse to denaturalize citizens proceeds from the totalitarian desire to expunge difference and dissent from a state. When a political collectivity decides that it would “rather lose its citizens than harbor people with different views,” it has, Arendt writes, begun the road to perdition. She adds: “One is almost tempted to measure the degree of totalitarian infection by the extent to which the concerned governments use their sovereign right of denationalization.” I bring up Arendt’s reflections on the supreme danger of denationalization because President Trump and many in Washington have begun calling for and enacting large-scale denationalizations. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has created a task force to investigate those who may have lied on their naturalization applications—when fraud is discovered, the cases can be referred to the Justice Department, which could choose to denaturalize citizens. Denaturalization for fraud can, of course, be justified on purely legal grounds. But in Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt showed how the impulse to denaturalize citizens is rooted in a deep and dangerous idea of purity. Arendt traced the denaturalization movement in 20th century Europe to the period around WWI. Prior to the Great War, a few countries, including the United States, had the legal right to revoke naturalization when “the naturalized person ceased to maintain a genuine attachment to his adopted country. A person so denaturalized became stateless. During the war, the principal European States found it necessary to amend their laws of nationality so as to take power to cancel naturalizations.” Arendt points to a French war measure in 1915 “which concerned only naturalized citizens of enemy origin who had retained their original nationality.” She added that

“Portugal went much farther in a decree of 1916 which automatically denaturalized all persons born of a German father.  Belgium issued a law in 1922 which canceled naturalization of persons who had committed antinational acts during the war…. In Italy, since 1926, all persons could be denaturalized who were not ‘worthy of Italian citizenship” or a menace to the public order…. Germany, finally, in 1933 followed closely the various Russian nationality decrees since 1921 by stating that all persons ‘residing abroad’ could at will be deprived of German nationality.”

The result of the wave of denaturalizations across Europe and the United States was the emergence of a class of stateless persons. At first, the numbers were small; but Arendt rightly argues that these stateless persons became a precedent for the mass denaturalizations against Germans of Jewish origins in 1933; not only Germany, but Belgium, Greece, and other countries passed laws in the 1930s allowing for mass denaturalizations. John Ganz invokes Arendt in an essay about President Trump’s efforts at denaturalization. He quotes a letter Arendt wrote to Robert Hutchins, President of the University of Chicago, in which Arendt argues—during the height of McCarthyism—that the U.S. may need a constitutional amendment prohibiting denaturalization.

"It seems absurd, but the fact is that, under the political circumstances of this country, a Constitutional Amendment may be needed to assure American citizens that they cannot be deprived of their citizenship no matter what they do... it should also be made constitutionally impossible to deprive naturalized citizens of their citizenship--which, for various historical reasons, they can no lose more easily in this country than anywhere else--..."

Ganz recognizes that it is "currently extremely difficult to denaturalize an American citizen, and it almost never happens. Even during McCarthyism, when there was the political will and legal machinery to expatriate people, the process was slowed down considerably by procedure and the courts. And in 1958, the Supreme Court ruled in Trop v. Dulles that denaturalization as a penalty for crimes was a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments, with Earl Warren sharing some of Arendt’s sentiments about its horrors: 'It is a form of punishment more primitive than torture, for it destroys for the individual the political existence that was centuries in development.'" Ganz, citing Arendt, argues we should always be wary of movements to denaturalize U.S. citizens. —Roger Berkowitz

“Today, the Trump administration is looking to deport people for offenses they committed before they were citizens but did not disclose on their forms. For instance, the Miami Herald reported that the Citizenship and Immigration Services is attempting to denaturalize a Florida woman, Norma Borgogno, who immigrated from Peru, on the grounds that she did not disclose a criminal past on her citizenship application. Ms. Borgogno, a 63-year-old secretary, got involved in a fraud scheme her boss had perpetrated, cooperated with the F.B.I., pleaded guilty and served a year of house arrest and four years of probation. Not exactly Ivan the Terrible. The number of potential denaturalization cases that are being considered is reportedly in the thousands, so the Trump administration can’t hope to permanently alter the demographics of the country with this unwieldy device. Maybe it doesn’t have to. It’s possible that the true intent — and the probable consequence — of the Trump policy is that naturalized citizens will not actively participate in political activity for fear that some old mistake on their forms could put their status in jeopardy. This makes denaturalization policy a tool of political repression:Immigrants might not exercise their rights for fear that they will lose them all, or at least be dragged in front of a court and required to pay expensive lawyers’ fees. Since it is virtually impossible for a natural-born citizen to lose his citizenship, even the small possibility that naturalized citizens can lose theirs makes them, in effect, second-class citizens, unable to freely participate in public life without looming state repression. When Arendt warned that “totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes” and return disguised in otherwise free countries, things like this and Mr. Anton’s perverse proposals may be the sort of things she had in mind.”

Form more information visit: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/opinion/trump-birthright-citizenship-mccarthy.html