Respecting the Revolutionaries in Homs
Michael Ignatieff, former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and author of Human Rights as Politics and Idolotry, has an essay out calling for intervention in Syria. We should all, he writes, feel shame for abandoning the opposition.
The fighters in Homs are holding out now because utter desperation puts them beyond fear. Watching them fight on, we have reason to be ashamed if we think the only thing we can do is send them bandages. More
Ignatieff's is the attitude of the savior from afar. Yes, we should be ashamed, but for very different reasons.
Instead of shame at our abandoning of the Syrians, we should feel gratitude to them for showing us what it means to fight and stand up for and suffer for what they believe in. We should be ashamed less for abandoning the Syrians in Homs than for not heeding their example, for feeling defeated by a corrupt political system, for apathy in the face of a bankrupt political culture, and for not taking responsibility and acting to change our world.
Hannah Arendt was always careful to insist that life is not the most important human right. The core right of humanity is to speak and act in public, which Arendt also called The Right to Have Rights. The Right to Have Rights includes the right to resist and even to die for one's beliefs. To do so is human, and is not senseless, especially when one is then remembered for bravery and heroism. Indeed, human life can often have more meaning in martyrdom then in a comfortable life. Whatever else one can say about Syria, it is the case that people fighting and struggling there are being seen and heard both in Syria and around the world. For that, we should be grateful, awed, and respectful.
That respect may lead some to aid them in words, money, or action. I agree and am not opposed to some of the prescriptions Ignatieff suggests. But let's begin with respect for their incredible courage and willingness to act. We might be able to help the Syrians, but we may have more to learn from them.
Click here to read more about Arendt and Human Rights.
-RB
Maikel Nabil and Peaceful Resistance
What if the meaning of peaceful resistance had to be revisited for the 21st century? Where would you turn to then?
Though examples of civil disobedience, conscientious objectors and peaceful protests are by no means rare nowadays, it is necessary to turn to extraordinary events of the kind that attach new meanings to historical circumstances; the meanings are never new but what remains is the novelty of the event.
Revolution is of course the event par excellence in which history is interrupted and something is begun anew. In the 21st century even though the word revolution is constantly heard, there is no more salient example than the Egyptian revolution.
Inspired by Tunisia, on January 25, 2011 thousands of Egyptians took to the streets and assembled at the now iconic Tahrir Square to demand the end of Hosni Mubarak’s rule. On February 11 2011 the long-time president departed from office after the Egyptian army took the protesters’ side and apparently helped to complete the revolution.
A slogan – was coined then: “The Army and the People are one hand”. After weeks during which the same army brutalized the demonstrators and killed hundreds of them, the sudden change of heart was welcome and the power vacuum left by the regime was quickly filled by the army, with the promise implied that a transition to civilian rule would happen eventually.
The rest of the story of the Egyptian revolution is now known all over the world: Military trials, virginity tests, NGO raids, constant clashes – often violent – between demonstrators and the security apparatus, massacres, and more than anything a power vacuum that has left the country sliding into a fierce slope of violence and counter-violence, as it was aptly put by Egyptian businessman Hany Ghoraba in his article “Egypt: The Wild Wild East”.
What happened to the Egyptian revolution and to the peaceful protests that in theory overthrew a regime? The question here for political theory (an expression not free from irony) doesn’t have to do necessarily with the particulars of Egypt – the rise of Islamism, the weakness of liberalism and the fact that leftovers of the deposed regime remain intact in office.
One has to ask himself the question whether a revolution is possible nowadays and under which conditions. It is clear by now that the concept of revolution is challenged today by a variety of circumstances that should bring us to examine briefly two aspects of revolution: The distinction between power and violence and the nature of non-violent resistance.
In his reading of Kant, Foucault tells us what it is that Kant considers significant in revolution: “What is significant is the manner in which the Revolution turns into a spectacle, it is the way in which it is received all around by spectators who do not participate in it but who watch it, who attend the show and who, for better or worse, let themselves by dragged along by it.”
This might well lead us to a very basic insight of Hannah Arendt: “Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up”. What is then this power that Arendt is trying to grasp? There is almost unanimous agreement among her readers that the distinction between power and violence is the most crucial and yet difficult aspect of her political theory.
Power is the human ability to act not as an individual but in agreement within a group and this power remains alive only for as long as the group is bound together; it can disappear anytime and temporary as it might be, it is the only cure known to the fragility and meaninglessness of human affairs.
Violence is the opposite of power that has been for long glorified as its exact equivalent, turning power into an instrument that needs justification to pursue its own ends but is always at risk of outgrowing the means and remaining at the level of instrument only – means without an end. In her words: “And what needs justification by something else cannot be the essence of anything”.
Then we assume that power can become violent and violence but power can never grow out of violence and is in fact destroyed by it. Power – that unmediated action that grows out of common agreement in action between men – is the only thing that can destroy violence and tyranny as it is exemplified in Gandhi, but whatever the reality and success of this non-violent resistance as power is put to test in the modern world often with tragic results.
Arendt is no idealist at this point and she expresses herself with clarity about her reservation on the effectiveness of non-violent resistance after fascism: “In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. If Gandhi’s enormously powerful and successful strategy of non-violent resistance had met with a different enemy –Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, even prewar Japan, instead of England, the outcome would not have been decolonization, but massacre and submission. However, England in India and France in Algeria had good reasons for their restraint.” Needless to say this has been the outcome of each and every Arab revolution where power hasn’t been enough to defeat violence.
What is required from non-violent resistance to generate the quantity and quality of power that can effectively defeat violence? Here it is obvious that an association with the military and with militarism in general can never be the answer, and while there are no definite answers to draw from tradition or otherwise, there are always singular examples one can meditate on.
On March 28, 2011 an Egyptian blogger, Maikel Nabil, was arrested by the military police and sentenced to three years imprisonment on charges of insulting the military in a long blog post from March 8 2011, titled “The Army and the People Were Never One Hand”.
In his blog, Maikel Nabil provided sound evidence of how activists had been tortured and killed by the army, during and after the revolution and expressed in different words an insight that was already known to Toynbee in his studies of world history: One of the patterns in the breakdown of civilizations is the suicidalness of militarism and its intoxication with victory, out of which periods of freedom have never emerged.
This simple insight proved very dangerous at a time when the power of the people had become a monolithic whole, aptly expressed by Maikel in one fragment written from prison: “Maybe there are many who don’t know the simple distinction between seeking unity and seeking tolerance, but we saw the core difference between the two things and how unity leads to failure while tolerance earns you strength and pushes you to succeed.”
Human action and power – its plural version – can only unfold in plurality and the fact that such was no longer the case attests to the extent to which the suicidalness and intoxication of militarism had already infinitely weakened the power of the revolution. In an entirely un-revolutionary fashion, the sentence delivered on the blogger was celebrated by many and at best met with indifference because of his rather unpopular ideas: Peace with the State of Israel and the end of compulsory military conscription.
Nevertheless, the consensus fostered by militarism and the price paid by the search for unity at the expense of plurality and tolerance was levied on Maikel Nabil not because of a failed analysis but by simple exclusion in a battle of opinions from which truth as a public power – to use the metaphor of Philip Goodchild – was absent; which of course places power in the status of refugee and violence as the supreme ruler.
Arendt insisted that the truths of any age must be always challenged for every generation and it is in this challenge that the power of non-violent struggle resides. It was she who popularized the Austrian adage “there’s no discussion as heated as that on a book no one had read” in reference to the controversy sparked by her book about the Eichmann Trial.
Maikel Nabil wrote from jail that people who supported him should support him for his thoughts and not for his personality because it was his thoughts what put him in jail. It was his thoughts that led him to a hunger strike that lasted over a hundred days. And even after he ultimately was released after a long legal battle of ten months with a clearly illegitimate authority, most of the people who supported him—and those who did not—still don't know much about his thoughts.
Thinking becomes the keyword here: Roger Berkowitz writes of Hannah Arendt that reasoning and thinking are not the same and that thinking for Arendt constitutes a form of action and the basis of all political life and experience – nothing to do with political philosophy or Realpolitik but with our appearance in the world among others.
Thinking and the ability to take responsibility for the consequences of our thoughts is the building block of our ability to appear in the world and as such is the most effective form of resistance under totalitarianism and forms of tyranny in which truth – the material out of which power is made – is absent from the common world.
In an interview of 1974 with Roger Errera, Arendt concluded by saying:
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only a lie – a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days – but yet get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such people you can then do what you please.
This cynicism is precisely the risk that unthinking unity poses – that thinking, plurality and truth might disappear altogether, and with them power as well. For Arendt, plurality demands the courage for plural individuals to enter the public sphere, which is why courage, she writes, is the first virtue of politics.
Was Maikel Nabil courageous? The answer to this question is obvious but I disagree with Arendt about the political nature of courage as a virtue.
Susan Sontag writes that courage and resistance have no intrinsic value in themselves unless they are coupled with an adjective – for there is amoral courage and resistance too – by means of which it is qualified. The value of courage and resistance depends on the specific content of whatever it is that is being defended. Heroism isn’t what is stake here, for it is something that always comes in hand with tragedy and pathos and it is precisely heroism what the political consequences of thinking mean to dispose of.
Sandra Lehmann writes: “If heroism is to overcome, it can also dispense pathos and vanity. It needs no reward, not even that of great importance and meaning. Probably only heroism without reward is true heroism. It is a matter of the moment and of a far off future.”
What Maikel Nabil was defending was the life of the mind, and in this crusade against those who want to terrorize the life of the mind lies the true nature of non-violent resistance and the potential of every action that might attain revolutionary power – it begins in the solitude of our thoughts one good day and yet, it can unmake the world. All thinking is dangerous.
- Arie Amaya-Akkermans
A Study in Orange
Mixed Media on paper and wood by Shy Abady.
This piece currently resides at the Hannah Arendt Center.
Kierkegaard on Thinking
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. "
-Søren Kierkegaard
Click here to visit our Thoughts on Thinking Page.
Application Deadline Approaches for 2012-2013 Arendt Center Fellows
The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College announces two post-doctoral fellowships for the 2012-2013 academic year.
Application Deadline: March 8, 2012
The Hannah Arendt Center is offering two separate research and teaching fellowships for the coming year. The first fellowship entails teaching two courses in Bard’s First-Year Seminar Program, the second entails teaching two courses in a joint fellowship with the Bard Prison Initiative. Please indicate in your letter whether you are applying for one particular fellowship or would like to be considered for both.
The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities is dedicated to supporting humanities-focused scholarship relating to Hannah Arendt’s life and work, with a particular focus on her inquiry into the activity of political and ethical thinking. Through its annual conferences and regular lectures, seminars, and working groups, the Center seeks to take Arendt’s singular and much needed approach to political questions as a spur to rigorous, daring, and creative engagement.http://www.bard.edu/hannaharendtcenter/ .
- The first fellowship is for a Ph.D. in political theory, philosophy, or a related field in the humanities or social sciences. The fellow's work should intersect meaningfully with Hannah Arendt’s thinking. In residence at the Arendt Center, the fellow will pursue his or her independent research at the Center, which includes Hannah Arendt’s personal library. In addition, the fellow will have the opportunity to participate in seminars, conferences, lectures, colloquia, and workshops organized by the Center. As part of the fellowship, the fellow will teach 2 courses (1 and 1) at Bard College. The fellow will have access to Arendt’s Digital Archive through a relationship with the Arendt Center in New York City.
- Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and the Bard Prison Initiative are jointly searching for a postdoctoral fellow to be in residence at Bard College for the 2012-2013 academic year. The fellow should have a Ph.D. in political theory, philosophy, or a related field in the humanities or social sciences and his or her work should intersect meaningfully with Hannah Arendt’s thinking. In residence at the Arendt Center, the fellow will pursue his or her independent research. In addition, the fellow will have the opportunity to participate in conferences, lectures, colloquia, and workshops organized by the Center. As part of the fellowship, the fellow will teach 2 courses in their field of expertise at one of Bard College’s satellite campuses in a NY State Correctional facility. The fellow will be have access to the Hannah Arendt Library and access to Arendt’s Digital Archive through a relationship with the Arendt Center in New York City.
The Bard Prison Initiative is the largest privately-funded college in prison in the United States. It runs satellite Bard College campuses at prisons across New York, enrolling nearly 200 women and men full-time in academic programs that culminate in both associate and bachelor degrees. BPI's rigorous and ambitious courses represent the full diversity of the liberal arts including history, literature, social thought, mathematics and the practice of the arts. In 2009, BPI launched a national replication project to develop similar programs at other liberal arts colleges across the country. http://www.bard.edu/bpi/
To apply for either fellowship, please email a letter of application explaining your research project and interest in the Center, CV, and two letters of reference to: Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director, The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at hr11068@bard.edu.
. Include in the letter a description of your teaching experience. The Deadline for Consideration is March 8, 2012. Decisions will be made by early April. The fellowship runs from Sept. 1, 2012 through May 31, 2013 and includes a $25,000 stipend.
Candidates may also be considered for a teaching position in Bard's Language & Thinking Program, an intensive introduction to the liberal arts and sciences attended by all incoming Bard students during the last three weeks of August. For over three decades, Language & Thinking has fostered robust interdisciplinary, innovative pedagogy, and the study and practice of writing across many genres. Fellows who teach in the Program would attend a weekend orientation in June, a five-day training week in July, and would teach in the last three weeks of August. More information at: http://languageandthinking.bard.edu/
Compensation: $5000.00 plus domestic travel for June and July and room and board for the period during which the fellow is on campus for the Language and Thinking Program. Applicants who wish to be considered for this position should indicate so in the cover letter.
“Hannah Arendt”, the film
Director, Margarethe von Trotta speaks about the progress being made on her feature film, "Hannah Arendt".
Hannah Arendt and Barbara Sukowa have now merged into one for me, and that is not projection...Of course, it is just an approximation, and yet it is her – her spirit, her intellect, the way she moves and how she speaks.
Barbara Sukowa as Hannah Arendt
Click here to read more.
The Arendt Center Welcomes Dr. Thomas Wild
The Hannah Arendt Center is pleased to announce that Thomas Wild, a premiere Hannah Arendt scholar, will be a Research Associate at the Center this coming fall. Wild has been named Assistant Professor of German at Bard College and will begin teaching next semester.
Dr. Thomas Wild studied German literature and culture as well as political science in Berlin, and Munich, where he received his Ph.D. He has taught at institutions of higher learning in Germany, at Vanderbilt University, and at Oberlin College. Dr. Wild's research and teaching focus on twentieth-century German literature and film, the political dimensions of culture, art and thought, as well as contemporary developments in German media and society after 1989. Among his many publications are a monograph on Hannah Arendt's relationships with key postwar German writers such as Uwe Johnson, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Hilde Domin, and Rolf Hochhuth; an "intellectual biography" of Hannah Arendt; and an edition of Thomas Brasch's poetry. Most recently, he co-edited Arendt's conversations and correspondence with the eminent German historian and political essayist Joachim Fest. Additionally, he is a literary critic and cultural correspondent for the major German dailies Süddeutsche Zeitung and Der Tagesspiegel.
The Sandstorm of Repression
"If this practice [of totalitarianism] is compared with that of tyranny, it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth. The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms."
-Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Arendt's concluding image in The Origins of Totalitarianism leaves us with a bleak sense of how the mass of lonely and isolated individuals in modern society – the desert –can readily be swept into the "sandstorm" of totalitarianism.
The book sketches the forces that drive this new form of frenetic political motion, as well as the traditional resources that prevented it earlier: the loneliness of the frightened person as opposed to the solitude of the reflective individual; the community of discussion instead of the techniques of "mass movements."
Of the specific principles of totalitarianism that Arendt raises, few are as intriguing as her recasting of what is now termed polycracy [Neumann/ Hüttenberger/ Broszat], the notion that at every level individuals in a totalitarian society found themselves within overlapping systems of bureaucracy and power, unsure which level was of the most import. "All levels of the administrative machine in the Third Reich," she notes as a principal example, "were subject to a curious duplication of offices, with a fantastic thoroughness." At every level of society, individuals were unsure of how to calibrate actions and statements to their context for self-promotion, defense, or simply to be left alone, since there were often two or more overlapping systems of organization defining their position. The average worker, for instance, might be unsure what factor was decisive for their fate: the role of their actual boss, the party connections of colleagues, the intrigues of the secret police, the family connections of acquaintances, or even their role in apparently secondary organizations such as an automobile association. Ultimately, "regular" politics could never pertain, while the politics of the "movement" always had some traction.
The result in Arendt's telling was often a necessary striving beyond proscribed roles to express alignment with the ideals of the party and in the quest for advantage or mere safety. Unlike aspects of her later argument for the "banality of evil," here simply "fitting in" was not enough. In this manner, later scholars have argued, the decisive feature of totalitarian societies was neither the passive "structure" of organization nor the simple "intent" of members, but rather a new middle term created from the ill ease of masses of individuals.
The "conditions under which we exist today" no doubt still include the original possibilities of totalitarianism, but Arendt would also have us ask what has changed, what new aspects of society facilitate or act as windbreaks, so to speak, for such "sandstorms." Earlier windbreaks passively functioned, as Arendt suggests for even relatively dystopian societies such as tyrannies, through the exercise of clear lines of authority, the existence of an active private sphere of life, and the possible formation of a discursive community of individuals, even if only in small groups.
At first glance, the new social technologies credited in recent uprisings and protests suggest a strengthening of these windbreaks by giving voice to critiques of incompetent and unjust administration, the solitary opposition of conscience, and, perhaps most decisively, the possibility of organizing coordinated discussion and action on wide scales. Yet, apace with these changes there are also darker transformations allowed by vast increases in computing memory and power that make tracking information and people on social media progressively easier. In repressive societies this is already occurring through the aggregation of past communications, the profiling of individuals, and guilt by association with members of one's social orbit.
By definition secret, statistical, and yet deeply connected with personal preference and affiliations, the aggregation of data concerning the individual in the context of social networking presents a real potential for abuse by any number of outside powers. Although most apparent in directly repressive societies, this transformation has the potential for abuse in numerous forms of governance. For if not managed properly, the laws and infrastructure of the internet could increasingly give rise to the sense – and reality – that one's words and actions could be interpreted in any number of contexts and by many forms of institutions. The malign influence of polycracy on individual decision, previously a signal feature of totalitarian regimes, might start to appear in any political system whatsoever.
As data about the individual becomes potentially available to a spectrum of interests and parties, ranging from credit agencies and divorce lawyers to political opponents and work rivals, it is easy to imagine individuals (and software) attempting to "mask" or redefine preferences, interests, and affiliations.
The result would be a pervasive self-censorship, but also – in light of this confusing secondary power – a corollary attempt to act out in the manner that seems most open to reward. The ability of individuals to first believe in the honesty of their own choices and speech, and with this the honesty of others, could be profoundly altered, as would the nature of civil society.
Precisely in first connecting the private and public spheres in new ways, groups of friends and political action, social media has the possibility to atomize anew. Debates over the role of law and infrastructure in shaping these contexts takes on a new relevance for preserving the basis of the windbreaks of civil society, ranging from recent initiatives such as "do not track" to the separation of terrorist investigations from other forms of surveillance (such as occurs in Germany), to larger innovations such as the E.U.'s "right to data privacy" or plan for the "right to be forgotten." Although integral perhaps to preventing the "sandstorms" Arendt warned of, these innovations may also prove critical to amplifying the positive features of individual conscience and civil society allowed by social media.
-Greg Moynahan
The Meaning of Life
Three weeks into my seminar on Martin Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism," I am once again at that moment when the students are simultaneously exasperated and thrilled by the audacity of Heidegger's thinking. There is the confusion caused by Heidegger's re-fashioning of words and his insistence that basic concepts like "person" and "essence" are the products of a stale metaphysical language that hide more than they conceal. One senses as well, the joyful anticipation in the first glimpses of the power of sentences like: Being "is" not, and the being (Sein) of beings (Seiendes) is not itself a being (Seiende.).
Heidegger focuses relentlessly on human being, the being who can ask the question: "Who am I?" At our most vigorous, we human beings are characterized by our ability to think about ourselves in relation to the meaningfulness of our truth, to the truth understood not as one particular truth, but as that which gathers and calls us to be whom we most properly are. He does not tell us what we most properly are. Rather, he shows us that we are the beings who can live meaningfully in the world. We can give our existence and our world meaning.
Nietzsche had said that all human suffering is bearable if we can believe it has meaning. Religion gives suffering meaning by claiming that suffering faithfully in this world will bring us to heaven. Science gives suffering meaning, in its insistence that there is nothing that happens without a reason—so that all things, even the most awful—are part of the reason of the cosmos (secularly speaking). Mankind can endure all sufferings, so long as he believes it has meaning. The great danger of nihilism—the loss of belief in the highest values—is that we lose faith in either religion or science as guarantors of the meaningfulness of human suffering.
The political danger of nihilism is that human life loses its meaning. All sorts of killings, suicide bombings, and genocides are thereby justifiable in the service of any political project. Without a living sense of meaning, life is cheap, and human destruction can be sought in the name of any and every political or economic goal.
As the dominant contemporary response to the dangers of nihilism, human rights holds that human beings have dignity as living beings. Above all, we must be kept alive. But what is more, we must be treated with a certain basic dignity. Just like chickens, we should neither be killed nor penned up and force-fed. Like dogs we deserve basic health and love. And like dolphins and whales, we should not be indiscriminately killed.
Heidegger, like his student Hannah Arendt, insists that the response to nihilism that insists on the rights of human beings to live well with a certain basic dignity makes the tragic mistake of blurring the difference between humans and animals. The human rights community focuses on the right to life and the right to be fed and be clothed. It sometimes even insists on the right to housing and the right to a job. But all of these human rights are directed at our animality, the fact that the human being is a kind of living animal. This is of course true. And yet, human rights are the rights of man as animals. These rights do not name or protect human beings. The fight for human rights can, therefore, turn our attention towards preserving humans in their animality even as it covers over what is most meaningful about human being itself.
So what is the meaningfulness of human life? Heidegger develops his answer over his writing life, but his first effort to do so is in Being and Time, the most influential and important book of philosophy written during the 20th century. Being and Time is a difficult book. It is also unfinished. And Heidegger abandoned its ultimate project shortly after it was published. And yet, it remains one of the greatest works in the history of thinking.
Many commentaries have sought to help students through Being and Time. But Simon Critchley has done something no one else even thought possible. He has given a clear and simple account of the impact of Being and Time in five short columns for the British newspaper, The Guardian. While these columns are necessarily pithy, they are in my mind the best introduction to Being and Time.
In his first column, Critchley writes:
That said, the basic idea of Being and Time is extremely simple: being is time. That is, what it means for a human being to be is to exist temporally in the stretch between birth and death. Being is time and time is finite, it comes to an end with our death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death, what Heidegger calls "being-towards-death".
Such brevity will lead, no doubt to compromises. In this quote, for example, Being is used in multiple senses, but what is really at issue in Being and Time is the being of human being. In Heidegger's later work, that focus on the being of human being will come eventually to turn human beings away from human beings and towards being itself. That strikes many as anti-human. But as Heidegger insists, it is not inhuman, and it is driven by a profound humanity.
For one seeking a way into Heidegger's greatest book, Critchley's five-part introduction is a great place to start. You can read the first part of Critchley's account here.
-RB
Legislating Memories of Violence
The Constitutional Council, France’s highest court, will soon issue a ruling with significant implications for how we think about free speech, violence, and collective memory. The ruling, due by the end of February, will determine whether French lawmakers can criminalize the denial of the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
Legislation to this effect passed the French National Assembly in December 2011 and the Senate just last month, but the Council agreed to rule on the constitutionality of the provision after inquiries from dozens of parliamentarians. President Nicolas Sarkozy has indicated that he will sign the bill into law if and when it reaches his desk, but he cannot do so until the court announces its decision. The geopolitical implications of this ruling are potentially far-reaching, for it may decisively shape Turkey’s relationship with the European Union and other states in the Middle East. But the ruling’s cultural and philosophical ramifications are significant as well, for they raise important questions about public discourse and collective memory not simply within but also across national boundaries.
The bill that would criminalize Armenian genocide denial was introduced in the National Assembly by Valérie Boyer, a parliamentarian from Marseilles who is affiliated, like Sarkozy, with the center-right Union for a Popular Movement. It would require a year in jail and a fine of 45,000 Euros (approximately $59,000) for “those who have praised, denied, or roughly and publicly downplayed genocidal crimes, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.” Significantly, the legislation does not specifically mention the mass killings of Armenians, but the only other instance of genocide recognized by the French government is the Holocaust, and its denial is already defined as a criminal act under another law. Despite the bill’s generic formulation, then, its effective point of reference is rather targeted.
Members of the French opposition have charged that the bill constitutes a cynical effort to curry favor with the country’s sizable Armenian population in advance of this spring’s presidential elections. Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, meanwhile, has opposed the legislation because he believes it will hinder efforts to maintain Turkish cooperation on urgent matters of state, including Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the ongoing government crackdown in Syria.
But the bill’s proponents deny that they have any ulterior motives in either the national or international arena: Boyer insists that genocide is a general human concern that stands “over and above politics,” while Sarkozy asserts that the bill is in “no way aimed at any state or people in particular.” In this respect, the legislation and its overt rationale are consistent with an important strand of the French republican tradition, one that equates the nation and polity with a commitment to universal principles.
Given the state’s ideological position, it should come as no surprise that Turkish responses to the legislation have been hostile. The national government, led by the center-right Justice and Development Party, has suspended many of Turkey’s diplomatic, economic, and military relations with France, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has dismissed the bill as an instance of “evident discrimination, racism, and massacre of free speech.” In addition, Erdoğan has accused France of its own unacknowledged genocide during the era of colonial rule in Algeria, while other lawmakers have insisted that France has failed to confront its unseemly role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Far from regarding the legislation as a universalist condemnation of genocide and genocide denial, then, Turkish state officials have treated it as a direct attack on their national self-regard, and they have been quick to accuse the French government of a pernicious double standard: Sarkozy and his colleagues want Turkey to reckon with its burdened past when France has not scrutinized its own violent (post)colonial history.
On the one hand, I sympathize with the bill’s impulse to engage with past instances of violence. Remembrance of traumatic pasts is not a zero-sum game: attention to one instance of collective violence, such as the murder, deportation, and starvation of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, does not prevent or preclude attention to others, such as the assault, torture, and killing that accompanied French colonial domination in Algeria. In fact, as Michael Rothberg suggests, the remembrance of past violence across national and/or imperial contexts “has the potential to create new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice.”
On the other hand, I am uncomfortable with the premise that certain forms of public discourse, even those associated with the denial of genocide, should be prohibited by law. I am too committed to liberal thinking to believe that this kind of restriction on free public speech is acceptable, and I have my doubts that it will actually encourage a reasoned understanding—and condemnation—of collective violence in the past, present, and future.
In particular, I am very concerned that this legislation, if it indeed becomes law, will have a chilling effect on ongoing discussion and debate in Turkey.
Turkish state and public institutions have grown a bit more receptive to Kurdish grievances over the past decade, and in November 2011 Prime Minister Erdoğan took the remarkable step of apologizing for army and air force attacks that killed nearly 14,000 Kurds in Dersim (now known as Tunceli) from 1936 to 1939. To be sure, Erdoğan issued this apology as police and military personnel were detaining hundreds if not thousands of Kurdish activists in the state’s renewed counterinsurgency campaign. But we should not neglect the fact that such a pronouncement would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. How ready will Erdoğan’s government be to acknowledge other elements of Turkey’s fraught past if France criminalizes denial of the Armenian genocide? Not very, I suspect.
In the end, then, I support concerted public engagement with the nature and extent of the Armenian genocide in France, Turkey, and elsewhere. Precisely for this reason, however, I also oppose the criminalization of Armenian genocide denial.
For more discussion of the transnational politics of memory, I highly recommend Michael Rothberg’s book Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in an Age of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2009).
- Jeff Jurgens
Stevenson Library, Bard College
Stevenson Library, Bard College
Submitted by Anastasia Bank
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The Literature of Modern Day Russia
Russian literature is synonymous with Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nabokov. To the extent one thinks of Contemporary Russian literature, there is the samizdat prose of protest during the 20th century. But few, if any Russian literary writers are translated let alone read widely in America today.
On Monday evening, February 20th, the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard welcomed a group of young Russian authors to its campus, winners of Russia’s national Debut Literature Prize.
The Prize itself is worthy of description; its mission is to bring attention to the country’s new literary talent and publish young authors’ work (winners must be under 35 years old). Olga Slavnikova, former Russian Booker Prize winner and present Debut Prize Director, made no small efforts to emphasize her goals to not only revive the Russian literary tradition but to invest in its future. The Debut Prize winners tour which took them to the NY Public Library, Bard, and Harvard, is part of a mission to bring a new generation of Russian writers to the international reading public. As the evening’s organizer and translator John Narins, of Causa Artium, put it: we Westerners are one generation behind in our understanding of Russian civilization.
Identity stood out as the evening’s theme. Bridging the gap between the Soviet generation and young adults for whom the Soviet Union was an impersonal historical event is an uneasy task. One strategy, as offered by historian turned author Dmitri Biryukov, is historical fiction and exploring how history is perceived by his generation. In his Uritski Street (named after the former head of the USSR’s foreign spy master) he intertwines the lives of a contemporary young man named Igor with a 1917 shop keeper who both lived in the same building. For Biryukov, exploring Russia’s urban life and historical forgetfulness allows him to explore how the post-communist present is shaped by the Russian and Soviet past.
Looking into the past is one method for accepting the present, but another is self-reflection about one’s immediate circumstance. These young authors’ childhoods were not the propagated socialist utopia their parents grew up with but what is now ominously referred to by Russians as the “wild ‘90s.”
A decade often characterized for its disorder and criminality is reinvented with a personal perspective by authors like Igor Savelyev and Irina Bogatyreva. Their writings address the post-Soviet childhood and contribute to an emerging genre on hitch hiking, an activity extremely common amongst Russia’s newly mobile youth.
Individuality and mobility were contrasted by Alisa Ganieva’s reading of an except from her Salaam, Dalgat! set in Dagestan, a Muslim state located in the Northern Caucus. While the region is more often known for its political and social turmoil, Ms. Ganieva’s documentation intends to break domestic and international stereotypes about life on the Russian-Georgian border. By following a politically neutral narrative, her alternative focuses on individual existence within the country’s extremely heterogeneous territories as if to declare that this too is a form of Russian national culture and identity. Ms. Ganieva’s daring approach is evident not only in her subject matter but writing persona: she submitted her work under the male pseudonym of a violent young fighter Hirachev Hull, revealing herself for the first time at the ceremony where she received the Debut Prize.
The Debut Prize winners are not didactic about what the country and society today is or is not. Rather, they are experimenting and reflecting on their condition through writing truthfully, creatively, and beyond the former regime’s dogmas. As mentioned before, thinking and writing about the Soviet legacy remains the task for this lot of young authors. But their task does not end there. The writers that graciously presented their work at Bard are only the herald of Russian literature’s return to the world stage. As Ms. Slavnikova declared: Russian literature does not end at Dostoevsky.
Authors present included Olga Slavnikova, Igor Savelyev, Alisa Ganieva, Dmitry Biryukov, and Irina Bogatyreva. The event was organized and sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center, Bard’s Russian/ Eurasian studies program, and the Center for Civic Engagement in conjunction with Cause Artium.
You can watch a video recording of the event here.
Albert Einstein on Thinking
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."
-Albert Einstein
The Commonality of Occupy Wall Street & the Tea Party
Are the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street part of the same phenomenon? Both are populist responses to increasingly out of touch political, business, and intellectual elites. Many on the left point out that the Tea Party is predominantly white and older. That is true. And yet these privileged, older, white people feel they are losing control of their country. They are resentful. Many on the right point out that the Occupy Wall Street movement is largely made up of privileged liberal arts graduates. They are right. But these graduates have been sold a false bill of goods, told that their gold-plated educations would guarantee them the ability to live well while doing what they want. They see their colleagues working on Wall Street making millions in questionable ways. They are also resentful.
Beyond resentment, both sides also can articulate claims of justice. For Tea Partiers, the coddling of illegal immigrants has become a defining issue of the unwillingness of the elite to enforce the law. For Occupiers, the extraordinary wealth of the upper 1% (actually, the top .5%) is a rallying cry that something truly is wrong with our political system.
This week in the New York Review of Books, Sam Tanenhaus takes a closer look at the Tea Party phenomenon and its influence on Republican politics. One surprising conclusion is that the Tea Party is not the force that is driving Republicans to their most conservative and right wing positions. On the contrary, Tanenhaus portrays the Tea Partiers as more moderate than extremist:
In The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, Harvard scholars who have interviewed adherents of the new insurgency in different regions of the country, report that
fully 83% of South Dakota Tea Party supporters said they would prefer to “leave alone” or “increase” Social Security benefits, while 78% opposed cuts to Medicare prescription drug coverage, and 79% opposed cuts in Medicare payments to physicians and hospitals…. 56% of the Tea Party supporters surveyed did express support for “raising income taxes by 5% for everyone whose income is over a million dollars a year.”
These views, which are aligned with those of moderate Republicans and Democrats, corroborate the findings in a 2010 New York Times poll of Tea Partiers, which concluded: “Despite their push for smaller government, they think that Social Security and Medicare are worth the cost to taxpayers.”
The Tea Party that Tanenhaus describes is one that overwhelmingly wants to preserve social security and Medicare, two programs that are often targeted angrily by Republican politicians. While the Tea Party activists are eager to shrink government, they do not seem to welcome an decimation of the welfare state.
What unites the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movement is a conviction that America is abandoning its exceptional history as a land of freedom, law, and equality. For the Tea Party, we are experiencing a cultural decline, one epitomized by illegal immigration and welfare—two issues that have been wrongly painted in overly racial hues. For Occupy Wall Street, the decline is imagined as a takeover by the rich of an American meritocracy and also of our democratic politics—although often forgotten is the fact that the wealthy are neither homogeneous nor exclusively conservative.
What the Tea Party represents is the latest version of a long-standing conservative insurgency in the United States, a movement that has wielded influence but never had the votes or power to dominate the Republican party or the country. Occupy Wall Street offers a new force in recent American Politics, a left-wing insurgency. As such, it has much to learn from and even work with in the Tea Party. One might begin by thinking more deeply about the place of the Tea Party in American politics, and for that there are few better places to begin that Tanenhaus' essay. Enjoy it for this weekend's Weekend Read.
Prisoner of Time
Adam Gopnik’s piece in the January 30th edition of The New Yorker, “The Caging of America,” offers sober and sobering commentary on our country’s predilection for mass incarceration. Gopnik passionately denounces the indifference if not callous disregard that many Americans exhibit toward prisons and prisoners, and he unsettles some of the rigid certainties that dog run-of-the-mill discussions of criminal justice. And yet my appreciation is also mixed with a degree of unease, in no small part because his rendering of the experience of incarceration strikes me as one-sided. This one-sidedness in turn has implications for how we might conduct public conversations about this vital facet of contemporary American life.
Full disclosure: I am not a prison activist or expert, and I have never been imprisoned. I instead write as an anthropologist and educator with the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), a program that offers a rigorous liberal arts education to incarcerated students in five New York prisons.
This work affords me a measure of insight into the social dynamics of American incarceration, but my angle of vision is also (inevitably) limited and partial. I therefore approach this topic with considerable humility, but as shall become clear, such humility is precisely my point.
Many of us tend to think of imprisonment first and foremost in terms of physical confinement, but one of the real strengths of Gopnik’s article is his attention to the centrality of time. Indeed, the nature of American prison life gives new meaning to the “empty, homogeneous time” that Walter Benjamin diagnosed as a hallmark of modern existence. In Gopnik’s words:
“It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates…. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.”
My own experience with BPI certainly attests to this tyranny of time. Two of my students once asked if they could remove the clock from the classroom wall so that they would not have to look at it. They explained that time would pass faster this way, and making the time pass, in whatever way possible, was one of their chief concerns.
Yet even as inmates recognize the heavy weight of carceral time, many insist that they are not powerless in the face of it. As another of my students noted, inmates urge one another to take control of their situation to the extent that they are able. “You do the time,” the common injunction apparently goes. “Don’t let the time do you.” That is to say, many inmates aspire to endure and even exert a measure of autonomy, despite the regimentation, dreariness, and pain that often pervade their existence.
Gopnik says too little for my taste about this dimension of incarceration. I sympathize with his claim that “the scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life." And he is right to emphasize the anxiety, boredom and fear that so often suffuse prison life, just as he is to note the frequency of physical violence, including rape, committed by and against prisoners. But we do a disservice to inmates if we believe that they are entirely at the mercy of the institutions in which they reside—and that the time they serve is merely (to paraphrase Gopnik) “something being done to them.” Most of the inmates I know through BPI seek actively to give shape and direction to the time during and after their imprisonment. They are not defeated and destroyed by their current circumstances, but acutely reflective and articulate about them.
We would do well not merely to hold incarcerated men and women accountable for the offenses they have committed, but also to include their perspectives in necessary public deliberation over the ongoing epidemic of incarceration. They have inhabited and negotiated social worlds that many Americans cannot readily imagine, and they could contribute a great deal to debates where glib self-assurance and easy moralizing are far too common.
There is a pressing need for a more nuanced and democratic conversation about the state of American prisons, particularly when the poor and people of color bear the brunt of incarceration. But such a conversation will not happen if we disqualify current and former inmates from public discussion, either because we believe we know what prison is like and can therefore speak for them, or because we believe that they are not worthy or capable of participating.
-Jeff Jurgens
Alice and Hannah
Alice and Hannah Arendt, submitted by Hannah Spector.
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For the Welfare of All
A reader responds to my post on The Great Cultural Divide and reminds me that perhaps Charles Murray's most interesting suggestion in his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, is for a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) or what used to be called a "negative income tax." The post, by a reader named Murfmensch, reads:
Murray also calls for a Basic Income Guarantee to replace all other government provisions. I think his particular proposal would harm the wrong people. He thinks provisions for “widows and orphans” have wrought harms that I don’t see. However, I think a Basic Income Guarantee, funded by a tax on pollution and/or income past twice the median, would increase the number of people conducting civic, cultural, entrepreneurial, and political work. Alaska has a small BIG and it seems to help out in this way.
One point Murray made at a conference was interesting. With a BIG, not only would people receive money they need, others would [not] know you are receiving money.
While I don’t know what amount would “do the trick” I think a BIG would offer a corrective to problems that Hannah Arendt diagnoses as stemming from a “job-holder” society.
The Basic Income Guarantee is basically a refashioning of the proposal for a negative income tax (NIT), which is commonly thought to have originated with economist Milton Friedman, who advocated it in his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom. I have long been an advocate of a negative income tax, for many of the reasons Murfmensch mentions.
A negative income tax, as Friedman wrote in 1968 in Newsweek,
is to use the mechanism by which we now collect tax revenue from people with incomes above some minimum level to provide financial assistance to people with incomes below that level.
The point is to replace the overlapping and bureaucratic welfare programs in society (welfare, food stamps, unemployment, etc.) with a simple cash payment to every citizen.
Let's imagine that every person would receive—to take just one number often used—$8,000/year. Whatever the number, it is one we determine is necessary to live with some dignity in contemporary society. If you make $0 in a year, you receive $8,000 from the IRS—in essence a negative income tax. If you make $5,000, you'd receive $3,000. Anyone making more than $8,000 pays no taxes on that first $8,000 and begins paying the "positive" income tax on all extra income that supports those who make nothing. A family of four with no income would receive $32,000/year. With your base income you can do whatever you want. You can freeload or work, your choice. You can be an artist or a father. These are your choices.
The advantage of the negative income tax is that it offers a guaranteed minimal cash payment to every person and yet does away with the dehumanizing and costly apparatus of the welfare state. We could still offer Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. But all other bureaucracies go. Everyone, rich and poor, fills out the same tax forms. Those who choose not to work (let's stop calling them poor) simply get a check. They don't have to use food stamps or live in a shelter or apply for welfare. They can share apartments or group houses with others. There is no long-term unemployment insurance. They can simply use their money to live as they will.
Obviously some people will benefit pretty well doing nothing. Some will game the system and freeload. But the real advantage is that for those who don't care about making lots of money, for those who choose professions with inconsistent and often low remuneration, and even for those who simply prefer raising a family or doing community service to working, there is another option. You can basically choose to drop out of the jobholders society and the rat race with the security that you will have enough money to survive. Sure, you won't be buying fancy clothes or driving a big car. You won't be able to send your kids to fancy schools. But you can take years off work to take care of a dying relative or choose to be an artist, craftsperson, or thinker and know that in those years when you don't make enough to live on you will have a guaranteed income every year that you need it.
What the negative income tax or the Basic Income Guarantee does is make it possible to choose to opt out of the economy without stigma or danger to one's health and ability to live.
Political thinkers and economists on the left and right have embraced these proposals since Friedman originated them. There have been two major sticking points.
On the right, the fear of freeloaders and thus the desire to prevent people from choosing not to work—which is something I think is one of the great advantages of the program. There is a real debate about whether the negative income tax will increase laziness or free people to do what they love. It is probably some of both.
On the left, the fear is what happens when someone spends their money unwisely and then has nothing left. Once we get rid of welfare and food stamps to replace them with the negative income tax, there is always the danger that people will end up starving out in the cold. This too is a real risk and no doubt it will happen. There is of course charity, but that may not be enough for some people. And what about parents who waste their children's guaranteed income?
Questions remain about the negative income tax and there are details to be decided. But the benefits of negative income tax are worth these risks on both right and left. It seems that this is an Arendtian idea whose time has come.
Read an interview with Milton Friedman on the Negative Income Tax Here.
Read and essay in the NY Times about the Negative Income Tax Here.
-RB
Christopher Hitchens on Thinking
“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”
-Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian
The Weight of the Soul
Love is the "weight of the soul,” its law of gravitation, that which brings the soul’s movement to its rest.
-Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
Happy Valentine's Day from the Hannah Arendt Center.
The Cherry Battle
I won Hannah [Arendt] at the Ball with a comment made while dancing, that loving is that act by which something aposteriori--the by-chance-encountered other is transformed into an apriori of one's own life. --This pretty formula naturally has not been confirmed.
—Günther Anders
In honor of Valentine's week, we offer this account of Günther Anders courtship of Hannah Arendt. The quotation is taken from Günther Anders book, Die Kirschenschlact: Dialoge mit Hannah Arendt (The Cherry Battle: Dialogues With Hannah Arendt). The Cherry Battle is an extraordinary window into Arendt's early thinking.
I am always wary reading a book of biographical or personal content about Hannah Arendt. Her life is fascinating. I am always on guard against the seductive danger of reading too much of her biography into her work. And wow is this a riveting read.
Anders was Arendt's first husband. A fellow Jew, they met in Martin Heidegger's lecture hall where they both heard lectures on Hegel's Logic and participated in a seminar on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Arendt, at the time in love with their Professor, had little time for Anders (who went by his family name Günther Stern). Five years later, in 1929, they met again at a masked ball in Berlin, where he spoke the above words to Arendt while dancing.
Arendt and Anders were married not long afterwards and moved to Drewitz (now Potsdam) where they tried to make lives for themselves as independent writers. It was there, on the balcony of the apartment they sublet, that Arendt and Anders would eat bowls upon bowls of cherries.
We sat across from each other on the tiny balcony, between a colossal basket of cherries; on the left and right were empty marmalade jars, for we pitted the black, plump fruit, in order to cook it—what for her was a great joy, like cooking in general, which she mastered even as well as philosophy. We put the pits in one jar, the fruity flesh in the others. And always a few in our mouths—especially [Hannah], for she was just as desirous of cherries as she was of cigarettes...
Aside from Arendt's passion for cherries, there is much to learn from Anders' account of their early conversations. This is true even though the book is a reconstruction, part truth and part fantasy. As he writes, the dialogue itself is real (as is the scene of the cherry battle), but the words themselves are "just as much poetry as truth."
The topic of the dialogue is one that would occupy Arendt and Anders both for much of their lives: "The Irrelevance of Mankind." That is Anders formulation. What comes through in this magical dialogue is the joy in thinking and sparring by two young and gifted thinkers (Arendt was 22-23 at the time, Anders around 30). They punch and counterpunch, Anders taking up the Darwinian and scientific position that man is, in the end, merely one creature among others, not special or particularly relevant in any way. Or, as Arendt asks him, astonished: "You mean we are fully irrelevant? And unknown? And purely busybodies, things with no sense? Metaphysical busybodies?"
Arendt is, in Anders' words, "too Jewish" to concede that human beings were simply "pieces of the world." The world was, and remained for Arendt, "created for mankind."
At one point Anders insists: "we are simply not mature enough to concede the fact of our cosmic irrelevance; that we are too cowardly and possess too little civil courage to learn to accept that which has been that human modesty that follows from Copernicus."
Arendt counters that all species think of themselves as the center of the world, to which Anders parries: the fact that we share a defect with other species does not make us better than they. To be met with what Anders calls Arendt's "winning argument": "Naturally not. But perhaps we are the only species that is conscious of this defect; that at the least has a monopoly on the insight into its non-monopoly position."
We'll have a full review of Die Kirschenschlacht: Dialoge mit Hannah Arendt before long. For now, just think, it is only a few months before the cherries are ripe.
-RB
America’s Great Cultural Divide
You know that the problem of inequality has gone mainstream when even Charles Murray has written a book about it. Not only the Occupy movement and the Tea Party, but also Murray—the conservative force between The Bell Curve and other controversial contributions to the culture wars—is now loudly screaming about the dangers of inequality in America. But with Murray, there is a difference.
If the Occupy Wall Street movement focuses on the vast income inequality that divides the country into haves, have nots, and have-it-alls, and if the Tea Party divides the country into the self-sufficient and the governmental dependents, Murray points to yet another divide: the Cultural Divide.
Murray begins with a point that I take to be essential:
Life sequestered from anybody not like yourself tends to be self-limiting.
Americans (Murray means by this term always white Americans) are living increasingly amongst those like themselves. Murray means by this that American elites (both Republican and Democrat) have separated themselves from the rest of the country. Specifically, he is worried that wealthy white Americans live apart from and are ignorant of poor white Americans. And vice versa.
In his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, Murray argues that an enormous cultural divide has separated white Americans into classes that don't mix. While many liberals might welcome Murray's voice pointing to the rise of inequality in America, his analysis and prescriptions are radically different from those usually suggested by the left. For one thing, Murray focuses on white Americans between 30-49. Part of this focus is to support his argument that "Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity." This itself will strike many on the left as an evasion, which it is. And yet, Murray's focus on the increasingly vast class divisions amongst white Americans points to the profound depths of the rising class and income inequality that pervades and divides American society.
Murray does not only point out the vast class divide in the United States. He points to solutions as well. His book is a call to action, but one that has little if nothing to say about the need for government to help the poor. No, for Murray, what both the lower and upper classes need are better values. The lower classes must learn from the upper classes the values of hard work, marriage, and family. The upper classes must learn from the lower classes the value of community, patriotism, and religion.
Whatever one thinks of Murray's analysis, he is right that we all need to do more to read and think and interact with others with whom we don't always agree. Those interested in and concerned by inequality in American can learn from Murray's book, and they should, even as they should wonder at his single-minded concern with white people. Problematic books can teach us much. Thus, for this week's weekend read, I suggest you take a look at Murray's latest essay on "The New American Divide."
-RB
Digital Democracy
Cary H. Sherman has written a provocative Op-Ed piece, “What Wikipedia Won’t Tell You”, arguing in favor of the SOPA and PIPA bills that were recently withdrawn after an unprecedented uproar spurred by the protests of Wikipedia, Google, and other websites. Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry of America, accuses the bill's opponents of propaganda. He writes that the sites that participated in the so-called Internet blackout are guilty of “an abuse of trust and a misuse of power” for producing what Sherman calls “hyperbolic mistruths” about censorship.
It is no secret that the entertainment industry spends millions of dollars on lobbying Congress; information giants like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, also have large and active lobbying budgets. However, in this case, the Internet companies did not deal with Congressmen behind closed doors to secure legislation that would have been beneficial to their business. Instead, the digital world appealed to the people who depend on their technology every day – and it worked. By educating Internet users and voting citizens, the sites empowered people so that they could make an informed decision about how to act.
Sherman worries that the latest protest raises “questions about how the democratic process functions in the digital age.” He is right. It certainly does presage an era in which it is much easier to distribute information and activate a body of concerned citizens, something that offers great possibilities for democracy. He is also right that many of those who contacted their congressman had heard only one side of the issue and likely had only a tenuous understanding of what was complicated legislation. But how different is that from any protest or action by large groups of citizens? While mass democracy carries risks and is unpredictable, the “digital tsunami” that Sherman fears also points toward the potential for a more direct and interactive democracy—something along the lines of the “liquid democracy” promised recently by the Pirate Party in the Berlin government.
We should not underestimate the risks of allowing complicated decisions to be heavily influenced by mass protests. However, the reality is that this risk poses the greatest threat to those used to a democracy in which elections are bought and sold and in which a cadre of paid lobbyists has inordinate influence over the writing and passage of legislation. Sherman takes the party line on online piracy and copyright infringement, asking, “When the police close down a store fencing stolen goods, it isn’t censorship, but when those stolen goods are fenced online, it is?” A valid question; the digital age does pose problems in terms of traditional copyright law, and these problems must be addressed. Equally important, however, is that we as citizens take back our government from lobbyists and other power brokers. Perhaps Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit, expressed this frustration best:
Why is it that when Republicans and Democrats need to solve the budget and the deficit, there’s deadlock, but when Hollywood lobbyists pay them $94 million to write legislation, people from both sides of the aisle line up to co-sponsor it?
Reading The Origins of Totalitarianism
Reading Hannah Arendt in San Francisco, courtesy of Sonja.
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A Brief History of Campaign Finance
The NY Times penned one of those editorials Wednesday that makes one wonder who is home. The Times takes President Obama to task for forming a Super PAC--or for having someone form a Super PAC for him, because we know there is no coordination between the Super PAC and the Super PAC's beneficiary. As cynical as the current Super PAC frenzy is, and as disheartening as the crush of money being spent by the Republican Super PACs and hoarded by Karl Rove's Super PAC is, what would be served by President Obama refusing to feed at the trough? Recall, he is the first Presidential candidate since 1974 to opt out of the public matching funds system. The idea that he might run as an anti-big-money candidate is hard to imagine, so how could he meaningfully run a campaign claiming on principle to be opposed to the influence of big money, as the Times editorial suggests.
I am in Berlin where on Monday I gave a Keynote Talk to open the State of the World Week in Berlin, sponsored by the European College of Liberal Arts of Bard. My talk was on the Citizen United court case, the case that opened the door to Super PACs. I'll be blogging more about Campaign Finance Reform as the election progresses. But for now, here is a short excerpt of one part of my talk that offered a condensed history of Campaign Finance and Campaign Finance Reform in the United States.
We can divide the history of Campaign finance in the U.S. into 7 stages.
1. The first stage is the pre-History involving the 1787 Constitutional Convention. As Zephyr Teachout has shown, "Corruption was discussed more often in the Constitutional Convention than factions, violence, or instability. It was a topic of concern on almost a quarter of the days that the members convened." Teachout and Lawrence Lessig have argued that there was a strong sense among the founding fathers that the great threat to new Constitution was corruption. And they have pointed to a number of practical responses to that threat in the Constitution itself. These include Article I, Section 6, Clause 2, which prevents members of Congress from holding civil office while serving as a legislator, or from being appointed to offices that had been created—or in which the compensation was increased—during their tenure. The point was to prevent members of Congress from using their posts to enrich themselves and their friends.
Another innovation aimed to prevent corruption was the decision to have those in the House of Representatives serve only for two years. According to Teachout and Lessig, this was designed to counter the formation of bonds between legislators and the President. By turning over the members of the House on a regular basis, it would be less likely that the Representatives would form strong alliances with members of the Executive branch, thus helping to maintain their independence. The founding fathers would surely be astounded by the incumbent advantages apparent today.
2. The Second stage of American campaign finance history runs from the passage of the Constitution until the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. In early U.S. elections, most campaign expenses were paid directly by the candidates using their own money. Such expenses were relatively minimal, going toward an occasional campaign pamphlet and, sometimes, for food and drink at rallies. As Bradley Smith writes, "Though free from the "corrupting" effects of money, elections in this early period were generally contested by candidates representing aristocratic factions standing for election before a relatively small, homogeneous electorate of propertied white men."
3. The financing of American political campaigns begins to become interesting in 1828, with the election of Andrew Jackson. Jackson's presidency is rightly seen as the true beginning of modern American democracy. And Jackson's campaign for President was the first presidential campaign that appealed directly to the voters and not simply to party elites. Jackson's campaign was organized by Martin van Buren (who later served as his Vice President and thereafter as President). Van Buren was one of the original machine politicians from New York who created the machine concept Boss William Tweed would perfect later in the century at Tammany Hall. What Van Buren did for Jackson was to organize a campaign aimed at the people. This cost money. And what he and Jackson did was to raise money from those who were seeking jobs in the government. This was the beginning of the spoils system, whereby political campaigns were funded by current and prospective government employees; these employees in turn expected to be rewarded with jobs once their candidate won the election.
4. The spoils system lasted until the passage of the Pendleton Act, in 1883, which inaugurates the fourth stage of the development of campaign finance. The Pendleton Act professionalized the Federal Civil Service, instituting an exam for entry into the service and outlawing the Spoils system. The result was that campaign funds from federal officeholders dried up, and politicians needed new sources of funds. The obvious sources were wealthy individuals and corporations. And oh boy did corporations jump into the breach. By the late 19th century, the government was giving grants of land and cash to corporations, and in return the corporations were generously funding political campaigns. In 1888 40%, of Republican national campaign funds came from Pennsylvania manufacturing and business interests. By 1904, 73% of Teddy Roosevelt's presidential campaign funds were raised from corporate contributions. (I take these numbers from Bradley Smith). The age of corporate funded campaigns was here, and it has never left.
5. Once he was elected, Teddy Roosevelt made it a priority to reform the broken campaign financing system that he had exploited so well. With his support, Congress passed the Tillman Act in 1907, which made illegal all campaign contributions from corporations. The Tillman Act opens the Fifth stage of the development of Campaign Finance Reform in the United States.
While the Tillman Act carried penalties for its violation, it instituted no enforcement mechanism. The result is that not much changed. To take only one legendary example, in 1968 and 1972 Clement Stone contributed up to $10 million to President Richard Nixon's Presidential campaigns. Stone's contributions caused a scandal that, together with the outrage over Watergate, led Congress to finally institute a serious attempt at campaign finance reform.
6. The key moment of modern campaign finance reform is the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) in 1974, and the Supreme Court's partial upholding and partial overturning of that law in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976. In the wake of Watergate and the loss of trust in government, the Congress passed FECA which: limited individual contributions to individual candidates to $1,000; limited the amount candidates could spend on a campaign; established a system of public financing of campaigns that required a voluntary limit on campaign expenditures; required that candidates, parties, PACs and groups engaging in express advocacy disclose their fund-raising and spending; and created the Federal Elections Commission, to regulate and enforce the new rules.
In a landmark decision that still controls all legal approaches to the regulation of campaign financing, the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo upheld the disclosure requirement and the limits on individual contributions. It also upheld the limits on campaign spending when those limits were voluntary and in conjunction with the decision to accept public financing. But the Court struck down compulsory limits on spending both by individual candidates and by PACs and other groups. While the Court recognized that limits on campaign spending were a kind of censorship that limited the rights of people and corporations to speak about the most central political issues of the day, it also acknowledged "large contributions threaten the integrity of our system of representative democracy." Because large contributions, especially to individual candidates, at the very least appear to suggest a kind of quid pro quo corruption, the Court accepted that Congress has the right to censor such expressions of support. More general expenditures not given to or coordinated with a specific candidate were, the Court argued, not examples of the kind of corruption that would allow Congress to override the fundamental free speech interests of individuals and corporations who would want to influence the political debate. Thus, post-Buckley, the rule was: The Constitution limits censorship of political activity, political speech and political spending on campaigns. Any limit is censorship that violates the First Amendment. And yet the Court carved out One Narrow Exception: speech or activity that either is or gives the appearance of quid pro quo corruption could be regulated and banned.
In the aftermath of Buckley v. Valeo, money continued to pour into politics. Candidates and their supporters made use of "soft money," money given to political parties and other groups and thus not subject to the limits imposed on individual contributions to individual candidates. PACS began to bundle large sums of money that, while not individual contributions to candidates, nevertheless carried the tint of influence peddling. In the year 1993-94, the Democratic Party received $45 Million dollars in "soft money" and the Republic Party received $59 Million. By 1999-2000, the numbers were $92 Million and $244 Million respectively. In 2001-2002, the Democratic Party took in $200 Million and the Republicans $421 Million.
7. The failure of FECA to stem the tsunami of money in elections led Congress to try again, and in 2002 it passed the Bi-Partisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), also known as the McCain-Feingold Act—the seventh and until now final stage of the effort to regulate campaign finance in the United States. The main innovation of BRCA was to prohibit unlimited soft money contributions by corporations and unions. And it was this provision that was held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the now infamous case of Citizens United v. FEC.
The core of the Citizens United ruling was Justice Anthony Kennedy's argument that "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech." For Kennedy, "The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach." What he means is that the law bans all those corporations—including large multinationals and also small mom and pop stores and even non-profit corporations—from expressing their views about political candidates for either 30 or 60 days leading up to an election.
In Kennedy's telling, corporations are part of the country and, what is more, an important part of the country. The Government has “muffle[d] the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy." Here Kennedy channels Felix Frankfurter, who in the 1941 case of U.S. v.s. Congress of Industrial Organizations, wrote:
To say that labor unions as such have nothing of value to contribute to that process and no vital or legitimate interest in it is to ignore the obvious facts of political and economic life and of their increasing interrelationship in modern society.
U.S. v. C.I.O. dealt with the anti-Union Smith Act, which forbade unions and corporations from using treasury funds to pay for politicking. In this regard, the Smith Act was very much like 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. While the majority of the Court refused to consider the Constitutional Question and decided the case on narrow grounds, Frankfurter did. In his telling, the Court must take seriously the evil that Congress sought to address: namely, the corruption of elections and federal officials by the expenditure of large masses of aggregated wealth. And yet, Frankfurter saw that "the claimed evil is not one unmixed with good." The expression of corporate or union speech in elections is, he writes, a good thing! "The expression of bloc sentiment has always been an integral part of our democratic and legislative processes." Replace "Labor unions" with "corporations." That is what Kennedy did.
-RB
Hannah Arendt on Thinking
"One must think with the body and the soul or not think at all."
-Hannah Arendt
Education in a Transitory World – Jeffrey Champlin
"Basically we are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of joint, for this is the basic human situation, in which the world is created by mortal hands to serve mortals for a limited time as home."
-Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future
Facing the command of the ghost, Hamlet laments his task of revealing that his uncle murdered his father to rule Denmark: "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right." As the heir to the throne, Hamlet's personal situation is inherently political and Shakespeare's tragedy stages the premature death of the father as genealogical break that raises the question of succession. Arendt generalizes Hamlet's words in a manner that might appear paradoxical at first: how can the world always be becoming out of joint? Is there never a moment of rest or cohesion from which the disjunction starts?
Her conception of finitude is key here: humans make a world (comprised of structures and practices of living together) that lasts only for a set period. In this sense "home" for Arendt does not offer the permanent refuge that philosophers and poets often long for. The crisis in education that she writes of in the late 1950s is in part one of a particular time and place. She does critique specific pedagogical trends such as an emphasis on play-like activities in the classroom over "the gradually acquired habit of work." In a broader sense, however, the crisis of education actually responds to the crisis in authority that she sees occurring over a long historical arc. While she recognizes the declining power of the parent, teacher, and expert, however, Arendt does not merely advocate a harsh return to old models. Instead she advocates a "minimum of conservation" that allows the most basic operation of reinterpreting the past based on new conditions. The word "education" derives from the Latin root ēdūcĕre, meaning "to lead forth" but for Arendt such a journey could have little confidence in its destination.
Political and economic shifts in the post Cold-War era have put pressure on education such that today it is increasingly charged with directly preparing students for integration into a system of world trade. Students have in recent months raised demands against student debt in higher education which is the result of a system of individual financing that appears less reasonable to those now facing uncertain careers.
At the same time, higher education budgets continue to be cut in general (especially at public institutions) and the Humanities continue to come under specific attack, usually under the rubric of lack of immediate relevance. Rising debt without prospect of repayment and budget cuts both suggest something worse than a crisis in education: a threat to education itself in its role in transmitting ideas of the past in order to enable the new generation to reconfigure a common world.
Arendt Center Senior Fellow Appointed by Yale University Press
We are pleased to announce that Yale University Press has named Arendt Center Senior Fellow, Wyatt Mason, Consulting Editor at Large for the Margellos World Republic of Letters, the Press’s highly regarded series for literature in translation. Mason will be responsible for commissioning up to five titles per year for the series, selecting translators and developing translations.
A prize-winning critic, translator, and essayist, Mason is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor for Harper’s. His writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The New Republic, The Nation and GQ. Modern Library has published his translations of the works of Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete and I Promise to Be Good.
Robert Bresson Film Retrospective
The Robert Bresson Retrospective continues tonight and tomorrow at the Jim Ottaway Jr., Film Center at Bard College. All screenings are free to the public, but seating is limited, so you should arrive early. You can click here for details about this weekend's films as well as the schedule for the whole retrospective. This program will highlight the breadth and depth of his global influence by looking at representative works from more than a dozen countries.
Initially a painter, Bresson (1901-1999) completed thirteen features between 1943 and 1983, in the midst of some of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. Refusing to make concessions to the commercial cinema, Bresson pursued a largely independent course and quickly emerged as an exemplary figure during mid-century debates about cinematic modernism and film's status as an art, universally recognized as an important filmmaker even by those who were bewildered by his unusual style. The frequently discussed austerity of Bresson's approach is counterbalanced in each of his films by a unique, sometimes overwhelming, sensuality and a profound engagement with the concreteness of bodies, objects, and environments. Over the past several decades, his rich body of work has become a paradigm for international art cinema.
Revolution and Rebellion
David Brooks is giving advice to radicals today on how to be radical. It's a strange spot for the left's favorite conservative to be in, although it is a role he's taken up in now a few of his columns. And he's only partly wrong.
The occasion for Brooks' advice to radicals is the latest viral YouTube sensation, “Why I Hate Religion, but Love Jesus.” a video by Jefferson Bethke. The genre is not new. Mr. Jefferson's namesake, Thomas Jefferson, wrote a famous and wonderful little book, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, in which he separates out the purely ethical sprouts of Jesus' teachings from the religious chaff. Alexis de Tocqueville saw that religion in a democratic time would increasingly take the form of moral aphorisms without the strict commandments that democratic citizens would rebel against. And modern evangelicalism as practiced in mega churches like Rick Warren's Saddleback Church shuns discussion of sin and burdensome religious rituals or commands. The attraction of Jefferson Bethke's video poem is, precisely, how well it fits in with the anti-authoritarian spirit of our age that craves meaning and justice yet disdains the authority and tradition that give life meaning and embody the ideals of justice.
Brooks' column is less about Bethke's rebellion than about his re-conversion. For Bethke has, since his video, publicly admitted the error of his ways and returned to the bosom of the church. All of which leads Brooks to wonder: Why is rebellion so ineffective today?
This is a question many rebels ask today as well. One common complaint, on the left, is that the rise of humanitarianism has replaced political movements like Marxism, utopianism, and social democracy with the idea that it is simply enough to send food and clothes to those who are suffering. Today's radicals don't want to change the system, they simply perpetuate it by preventing the extreme suffering that might nurture real radicals. The dreamers of a better future seem to be busy with other pursuits. As Brooks rightly notes:
This seems to be a moment when many people — in religion, economics and politics — are disgusted by current institutions, but then they are vague about what sorts of institutions should replace them. This seems to be a moment of fervent protest movements that are ultimately vague and ineffectual.
Brooks has a theory for why this is so, one he has offered before.
My own theory revolves around a single bad idea. For generations people have been told: Think for yourself; come up with your own independent worldview. Unless your name is Nietzsche, that’s probably a bad idea. Very few people have the genius or time to come up with a comprehensive and rigorous worldview.
Aside from the silliness about Nietzsche—who certainly thought with and against a tradition—Brooks makes a valid point. Rebellion cannot be simply a negation of what is, an overturning.
Indeed, that was Nietzsche's point. Nihilism, which Nietzsche diagnosed, is the saying no to what is, an overturning of all values. Thus, a rejection of any value that is not simply a subjective value. This nihilism is precisely what Nietzsche saw and feared, which is why he struggled to think about how new higher values, new idols, new laws, new myths, might emerge.
Brooks wants young rebels to seek out the classics and find their mentors in rebellion. He is right that "Effective rebellion isn’t just expressing your personal feelings. It means replacing one set of authorities and institutions with a better set of authorities and institutions." He is also right that "Authorities and institutions don’t repress the passions of the heart, the way some young people now suppose. They give them focus and a means to turn passion into change."
But the point isn't simply to rediscover Marx so that we can, once again, fight for the proletarian revolution. That movie has run. The point of education is not to provide us with failed dreams of the past so that we can try again. As Arendt wrote in The Crisis of Education, the effort of education is to teach students about the world as it is. Only when they confront the world as it is, honestly, can they begin to resist it.
Instead of blaming our children, we need to look at ourselves. For Arendt, education requires teachers who "love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices." We must teach them about our world, as it is. And that means, we must teach them about what it means to live in a world in which there are no higher values that can sustain meaningful protests and rebellions. This is the world of nihilism Nietzsche saw emerging 130 years ago. And it is the world David Brooks is, in some ways, trying to articulate, even as he also refuses it and condemn it in his columns.
I don't disagree with Brooks' judgment of nihilism. But it is time for us, finally, to confront the reality of the world we live in. It is our world. If our leaders and public intellectuals won't be honest, how can we expect such courage from our youth?
We need to reconcile ourselves to the corrupting and debilitating nihilism of our world if we have any hope of educating young people who might be able to resist it. Arendt writes:
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same tame token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.
It is the job of education to “teach children what the world is like” so that they can begin the task of reconciling themselves with it; only then can they have a chance of truly resisting it. First come to see the ruin. Then learn to rebel against it. That is the promise of revolution, a circular process that offers the promise of a future that mere rebellion does not.
You'd do well to read Brooks' column.
Better yet, for your weekend read, pull out your edition of Between Past and Future and re-read The Crisis in Education.
Or, you can read an excerpt here, and listen to Arendt read from her essay here.
-RB
Magical Afternoon
Magical Afternoon
Submit your reading/book/library images to arendt@bard.edu.
Click here to visit our library page.
Social Media and the 2012 Election
The Arendt Center's Director of Outreach, Bridget Hollenback, has an interesting piece on the use of social media in the 2012 Presidential race which appeared on Media Psychology Impact:
This increase in social media users skewing Republican is interesting, but an easily explained phenomenon. It is not a reflection of Democrats tiring of social media or becoming less active with its use. Rather, technology has become more of a societal norm. Case in point, since 2008, the number of active Facebook users has grown astronomically from 100 million to 800 million. A good percentage of this increase reflects older, and often more conservative voters (many of whom would lean Republican), becoming more tech savvy and comfortable utilizing social media.
So, will social media impact this year’s election? For anyone still skeptical, 2011 studies by Digitas and SocialVibe may very well change their mind:
- 38% of responders say social media will help determine their voting choices in the upcoming election.
- 60% of social media users expect candidates to have a social media presence.
- 94% of respondents of voting age engaged by a political message on a social media site watched the entire message, and 39 percent of these people went on to share it with an average of 130 friends online.
As the race to choose a Republican candidate rages on, social media has become an inherent part of each candidate’s overall strategy. However, thus far the candidates are using it with varying degrees of savvy and success.
You can read the post in its entirety here.
Congratulations
We are pleased to offer congratulations to Laura Ephraim, a 2010-2011 Post-doctoral fellow at the HAC and a 2011-2012 Associate Fellow at the HAC. She has just accepted a position at Williams College as the Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Political Science Department. We wish her all the best in her new position.
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