Martha Nussbaum on Thinking
"Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of
bad behavior."
-Martha Nussbaum
The Burqa and the Political Realm
“The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.”
-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Over the past decade, European public opinion has roiled with controversy over the full face covering – the niqab or burqa - of Muslim women. According to a Pew Global Attitudes Survey, conducted between April 7th and May 8th 2010, the majority of citizens in France, Germany, Britain, and Spain approve of banning veils that cover the whole face. Subsequently, France and Belgium have implemented national laws that ban the full veil in public places.
Municipal bans are sprinkled across Europe as a whole. Is there an Arendtian angle on the discomfiture that one finds in Europe over the niqab and the burqa (hereafter N/B), a properly political angle that avoids pathologizing the response as simply Islamophobic or xenophobic?
Arendt claimed that the word public evokes two “interrelated phenomena”. First:
everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance – something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves – constitutes reality. Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life – the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses – lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance…The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves…
The second referent of public is “the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it.”
Arendt captures an idea prominent in Western traditions: the notion, both intuitive and articulated, that being visible to one another is an integral part of politics. This expectation is registered in theories of judgment (consider the role played by the “spectator” in Adam Smith and Kant’s theories of judgment) and in some of our most potent democratic metaphors: enlightenment, openness, transparency, illumination, recognition, social legibility, accountability, “publicity” and, not least, public. Liberals trumpet the virtue of the Open Society and liberalized Marxists idealize the translucent speech-situation. Socialists and radicals extol debunking, the heir of Rousseau’s crusade to remove the “deceitful veil of politeness” which conceals “fear, coldness, reserve, hate, and fraud”. Negating these images are opacity, the Dark Ages, the dark arts, dark times, heart of darkness, artifice, living in the closet, a shadowy realm, cave-like illusion, Stygian gloom, moral blindness, the id, concealment, inscrutability, subterfuge, murkiness, obscurantism, and backroom deals - notions which variously imply various states of ignorance, menace and deceit. True, prominent French intellectuals of the last century sought to demote vision’s status in the pantheon of sensibility, while conservatives still remain attached to the “decent drapery of life” (Burke). Yet these perspectives have done little to impede the centrality of seeing within the Western, Apollonian political aesthetic.
This formulation suggests what is discordant about the N/B’s existence in the Western political space. While for its bearer the N/B may be understood as a badge of tradition and piety, from the standpoint of a constitutional pluralist citizenry it is a mode of concealment incompatible with public recognition in which visibility of face is central. The N/B denudes facial and, to a degree, vocal recognition. It standardizes human features and hence contributes to the very stereotyping that N/B wearers themselves deplore. Faces and voices are all different, evidence of human plurality. The N/B literally effaces these variations, with the partial exception of the eyes that may sometimes be seen. The N/B also symbolically ruptures the bond of citizenship reciprocity because while its wearer can see her real or potential interlocutor, can take advantage of the visibility of others, non-wearers are denied such access.
Consider two objections to this line of reasoning.
Users of the Internet are often obscured from view and no one assumes that their being invisible is uncitizenly. Indeed, under some definitions of politics, the internet might be considered the quintessentially modern medium of political life: informing the public of political events, orchestrating voting, requesting or inciting people to participate in demonstrations, directing attention to abuses of rule, mobilizing citizens for collective action. Search engines like Google ever more assume traditional government functions. Its engineers claim that the company’s predictions of flu epidemics and employment trends are already more accurate than those of the Centers for Disease Control and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even so, in Western societies the Internet is an ancillary to public display not a substitute for it, a tool to expand communication, rather than an obstacle to constrict it. Computer webcams are employed between interactants and in web chat rooms; interviews of foreign job applicants conducted via Skype grow daily in popularity. And it is no coincidence that the world’s most prominent social networking site is called Facebook. Moreover, where Internet use takes place without face recognition (as with email or instant messaging) it typically does so reciprocally: both users are in the same position and hence issues of visibility imbalance and citizen asymmetry do not arise.
A second objection to the claim that N/B attire in public places is uncitizenly turns the tables on the author: it draws on the Graeco-Roman tradition itself, the origins of Western notions of citizenship. In that tradition, being a public person was considered a kind of theatricality in which an agent adopts a persona, a mask. But the comparison between the N/B and the persona is superficial and not only because one mask is made of cloth while another is a metaphor. In antiquity, the function of persona was not to conceal public visibility but precisely to do the opposite: to shine the light of the polis on the political actor, to dramatize the fact that the individual had entered the public stage and that, as such, had left the private world of intimacy so as to consort freely with his peers and deliberate on political affairs. The political persona was, then, an addition to, or rather a rupture with, private life, not a replication or extension of it, a vehicle of distinction, not a mantle contrived to expunge from public view the unique personality of the woman beneath its folds. Politics, in Western traditions, entails a split within the being that engages in it, the construction of a second self: as an equal of others who are familial strangers bound together by the common tie of citizenship; a self able to cooperate with these strangers, to “see” things from multiple points of view and be seen seeing.
The N/B, however, is not a fictive mask designed to open up its wearer to the public recognition of peers acting in concert or in conflict; it is a carapace projected into the public space, a material mask that signals exclusivity, an emblem of segmental occlusion, of what Durkheim, discussing the primacy of resemblance in tribal societies, called the politico-familial.
Nor is the N/B artificial or dualistic. On the contrary, it signifies Sharia’s total claim on the individual in all her activities, the type of claim that the public-private distinction expressly repudiates. It transpires that the classical concept of the mask and the N/B have nothing substantively in common.
These brief reflections, prompted by my reading of Arendt, are not a rationale for banning the full veil but they do allow us to think of the European response to it in a political way. Readers who are interested in the more extensive argument that Dan Gordon (UMass Amherst) and I have developed on this topic, contrasting American and European legal regimes, may wish to read our “On the Edge of Solidarity: The Burqa and Public Life,” and “From the headscarf to the burqa: the role of social theorists in shaping laws against the veil,” Economy and Society 2012 (forthcoming).
-Peter Baehr, Lingnan University Hong Kong
Corruption Takes Root
What is the essence of corruption? This is a question raised by the recent Supreme Court jurisprudence around Citizens United v. FEC. For Justice Kennedy and the Court has concluded, as a matter of law, that only quid pro quo corruption is corruption. An out and out bribe is corrupting, but throwing a congressman a $100,000 party or treating them to fancy meals and trendy restaurants, that is just exercising the right to freely speak with one's elected representatives. That such lavish expenditures come with expectations is, the Court insists, improvable and simply part and parcel of our democratic system.
In Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It, Lawrence Lessig explores fully the impact of such "soft" corruption. He writes that the enemy we face today is not a Hitler or even the good Germans who would enable a Hitler. "Our enemy," Lessig writes, "is the good Germans (us) who would enable a harm infinitely less profound, yet economically and politically catastrophic nonetheless. A harm caused by a kind of corruption. But not the corruption engineered by evil souls. Indeed, strange as this might sound, a corruption crafted by good souls. By decent men. And women." Such a crime, he insists, is banal, but "not the banal in the now-overused sense of Hannah Arendt's The Banality of Evil—of ordinary people enabling unmatched evil (Hitler's Germany). Our banality is one step more, well, banal."
Lessig is right to worry that Arendt's phrase is overused, but what is more banal in the banality he so penetratingly describes in his book? In any case, his book better describes the kind of endemic corruption that infects our political system than any other. It should be read.
It is also important to remember that real corruption still exists in our world. It may be more a rarity at a time when one can accomplish so much corruption through legal means, but examples of bold and brazen corruption remain.
Lance Armstrong's web of corruption that silenced and intimidated dozens of his colleagues for over a decade is one example of how corruption can succeed, against all odds, but only for a time. Rumors of Armstrong's drug use floated around for a decade, and yet he still denies it. It took years for the web of deceit to break. As the NY Daily News wrote in an excellent review of the scandal:
The Armstrong myth was so lucrative that suppressing the truth came to require an endless behind-the-scenes campaign to bully and intimidate people into silence. Some of it bordered on gangsterism. Some of it was dressed up in the respectable wardrobe of elite law firms. But mostly it was just hot air - a fact that by 2010 had become clear enough to Floyd Landis that he stepped up and burst the bubble, blowing the whistle on the whole big fraud.
We tend to ignore corruption because it seems so inconceivable in our age of transparency. Corruption requires that the truth be kept hidden. This is extremely difficult and possible only through force and violence and even terror. But eventually, the truth comes out. As Hannah Arendt wrote in another context, "holes of oblivion do not exist." Eventually, the truth will emerge, no matter how many interests and how much money and violence is spent in the futile effort to prevent that from happening.
What brings to mind these brief reflections on the continued efficacy of corruption as well as its eventual failure is an article recently published in The Nation on the Hershey Trust. The author of the story is Ric Fouad, who is also a member of the Arendt Center's Board of Advisors. He is a graduate of the Milton Hershey School and together with a handful of other activists has been fighting a lonely battle against what he sees as the corruption of the Hershey Trust's Board, a fight that for him is inspired by Hannah Arendt's insistence on both truth, courage, and public action.
A little background. Milton Hershey was not just a brilliant chocolatier who had a radical vision of making chocolate—previously marketed only to the wealthy—available to the masses. He was also profoundly philanthropic. Unable to have children, Hershey left his entire personal fortune to the Hershey Trust, whose mission was to administer The Milton Hershey School, a school that Hershey founded to help and educate orphaned boys—the school is now coed and serves children with living parents. That fortune is now worth nearly $8 billion.
By his own account, Milton Hershey's life work would be to help orphaned children, whose plight touched him deeply. Hershey wanted his school to bring orphans into a revolutionary new kind of school, free from industrial buildings common to orphanages. The children were to live in beautiful homes in a bucolic paradise on 12,000 acres of land. They were to work on farms to learn character and attend a school that includes a vocational curriculum as well and have great teachers. It had all the potential to be an extraordinary facility set in truly magnificent settings.
So what is not to like? Well, for one thing, the Hershey Trust has been under investigation for six years, with no resolution and amidst plenty of accusations and charges about misspent funds and broken trust. The bucolic community-wide children's home was telescoped into a crowded centralized campus; the farms were all closed; the vocational program barely survives; and the poorest children, wards of the court, and foster care children came to be rejected in favor of what the administrators deemed a "better" class of child. Local developers made tens of millions in the process.
Tasked with administering the Milton Hershey School, the Trust's incredible resources enabled it to do much else besides. This could be an amazing opportunity to do good. It could also and become a magnet for powerful and connected people who finagled their ways onto the Hershey Trust board in order to access and control the vast wealth the Hershey Trust possessed. And that is what the article in The Nation, as well as numerous investigative articles here, here, and here, in The Philadelphia Inquirer, have alleged. You can also watch Ric Fouad's Harvard Law School lecture "Hershey's Broken Trust" here.
In Republic, Lost, Lessig writes:
The great threat to our republic today comes not from the hidden bribery of the Gilded Age, when cash was secreted among members of Congress to buy privilege and secure wealth. The great threat today is in plain sight. It is the economy of influence transparent to all, which has normalized a process that draws our democracy away from the will of the people. A process that distorts our democracy from ends sought by both the Left and the Right: For the single most salient feature of the government that we have evolved is that it discriminates against all sides to favor itself.
As true as that is about government, it is also true for cycling legends and political clubs. When corruption of all kinds pervades institutions throughout our society, it is only natural that cynicism abounds and we lose faith in the process of government as well as in the integrity of business. It is time to take corruption seriously in this country, and not explain it away as something that happens elsewhere in less civilized and less democratic countries.
You can read an excerpt of Lessig's Republic, Lost... here, at Amazon.com, where you can also buy his book.
-RB
In Memorium – Jacques Barzun
"Teaching is not a lost art but the regard for it is a lost tradition. Hence tomorrow's problem will not be to get teachers, but to recognize the good ones and not discourage them before they have done their stint."
—Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America
Jacques Barzun has died. With his passing we lose another of the grand European-born intellectuals who made America their home. Barzun was born in 1907, one year after Hannah Arendt. He did not come to the United States persecuted for his religion. He came in 1920 to pursue a university education at Columbia. He graduated Columbia in 1927, received his Ph.D. in 1932 and taught at Columbia until his retirement in 1975. Along the way he became one of the nation's preeminent scholars and public intellectuals.
Here is what Edward Rothstein writes today in the New York Times:
[Barzun] wrote dozens of books across many decades, demonstrating that old age did not necessarily mean intellectual decline. He published his most ambitious and encyclopedic book at the age of 92 (and credited his productivity in part to chronic insomnia). That work, “From Dawn to Decadence,” is an 877-page survey of 500 years of Western culture in which he argued that Western civilization itself had entered a period of decline.
Mr. Barzun was both of the academy and the public square, a man of letters and — he was proud to say — of the people. In books and in the classroom he championed Romantic literature, 19th-century music and the Western literary canon. He helped design the influential “great books” curriculum at Columbia, where he was one of its most admired figures for half a century, serving as provost, dean of faculty and university professor.
As an educator Mr. Barzun was an important critic of American universities, arguing in 1968 that their curriculums had become an undisciplined “bazaar” of miscellaneous studies.
But he was also a popularizer, believing that the achievements of the arts and scholarship should not be divorced from the wider American culture. Writing for a general audience, he said, was “a responsibility of scholars.”
Barzun's work touched nearly every part of humanistic thought, from his work on Berlioz to his late epic on the decadence of Western culture. In “Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage," he took up the critique of scientific culture initiated by Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber. As did Hannah Arendt, Barzun worried deeply about the way scientific thinking was intruding upon the realm of human freedom and human creativity. His last book, From Dawn to Decadence, traces Western civilization from the renaissance to the present. It is at once sad in its mourning of lost greatness and optimistic about the impending regeneration. Barzun is a brilliant guide through the ages of the western mind.
Above all Barzun was a teacher. For all of us committed to the dual goals of enlivening and making accessible the world of ideas, the loss of Jacques Barzun is a day to recall the nobility of that enterprise.
You can learn more about Jacques Barzun here. Treat yourself, and read Roger Kimball's review of From Dawn to Decadence.
Defining American Democracy Differently
How do our understandings of democracy shape how we imagine racial equality and the means by which it might be achieved? That was the question posed by Maribel Morey at the most recent lunchtime talk at the Arendt Center. Morey is currently a fellow at the New York University School of Law, and she has recently completed her dissertation in the Department of History at Princeton University. Building upon her research on the Swedish economist and social theorist Gunnar Myrdal, Morey offered an incisive comparative reading of Myrdal’s book An American Dilemma (1944) and Hannah Arendt’s essay “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959).
As became evident in the course of her talk, these texts posit different visions of democracy in the U.S., and they come to different conclusions about a central feature of the civil rights era: the federally enforced integration of public schools in the segregated South.
Myrdal was a strong advocate of such government intervention. In his argument, the premises and principles of American democracy effectively demand the racial integration of schools and other institutions, and it is legitimate for the federal government to enforce such integration for the sake of America’s ongoing democratic life. This position insists that education constitutes a crucial public resource provided by the state, and it proposes that inequitable access to this resource limits individual and collective participation in the political realm. Indeed, Myrdal goes even further by contending that discrimination and segregation violate the very “American creed”—the liberal commitment to equality and fair treatment—that makes national co-existence possible. Since its initial publication, Myrdal’s position has exerted a deep influence on U.S. public discourse: it played a key role in civil rights activism in the 1950s and ‘60s, and it figured prominently in the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision.
Arendt was also committed to the project of political equality in the U.S., but she parts ways with Myrdal by sharply questioning the legitimacy of federally enforced integration. On the one hand, she objects to this form of intervention because it “burden[s] children, black and white, with the working out of a problem which adults for generations have confessed themselves unable to solve”. Government-mandated integration thereby inserts young people into a political struggle for which they are not prepared and to which they do not properly belong. On the other hand, Arendt takes issue with the way that federally mandated integration transgresses the boundaries that ought to be maintained between the realms of political, social, and private life.
These boundaries are necessary, in Arendt’s argument, because polity, society, and privacy are defined by different animating principles. Politics is defined by the principle of equality: all adult citizens enjoy the same right to vote and be voted into office, and no differences should exist in their ability to participate in the polity. By contrast, the social realm is characterized by the principle of discrimination: social relations follow the adage “like attracts like,” according to Arendt, and individuals are therefore entitled to associate—and not associate—with others along the lines of profession, class origin, ethnicity, level of education, and other vectors of difference. Finally, the private realm is defined by the principle of exclusiveness: individuals choose the people with whom they will spend their lives on the basis of those people’s unique qualities, and the government should and indeed must assure “the rights of every person to do as he pleases within the four wall of his own home.”
Arendt charges that state action in the service of racial integration is acceptable when it attacks the legal enforcement of discrimination in the political realm. One of her key differences with Myrdal, however, lies in the fact that she does not regard the education provided by the school as necessary for political participation. Indeed, she does not ultimately consider the school to be a “political” institution at all. To be sure, the state has the right to prescribe educational content that will prepare children for future work and citizenship. But in Arendt’s argument government cannot dictate the forms of association and social life that emerge in school, and it cannot infringe on parents’ rights to bring up their children as they deem appropriate. These points lead her to a rather provocative conclusion: “to force parents to send their children to an integrated school against their will means to deprive them of rights which clearly belong to them in all free societies—the private right over their children and the social right to free association.”
As Roger Berkowitz writes in his essay "Solitude and the Activity of Thinking," Arendt's argument is grounded on her belief that a vibrant private realm is a constitutive need of a free political society. Without a strong protection of the private realm where people can grow to be different, unique, and self-thinkers, there will be no true plurality, which is the condition for action and politics. The price for plurality, she writes, is that we allow for people to live freely in private. It is for this reason that Arendt argues against anti-miscegenation law and why she would insist on the right to gay marriage. For Arendt, there is nothing more constitutive of privacy than the right to raise one's children as one wishes. For the state to forcefully require parents to send their children to a specific kinds of school means, she writes, that there would be no meaningful realm of privacy left—which would endanger the plurality she understands is the pre-condition of politics. As Berkowitz writes:
What offends Arendt in the Little Rock case is not the ideal of desegregation, but the danger that well-intentioned governmental attacks on social discrimination will erode the walls of privacy that nourish the possibility of thinking and of acting—and thus of plurality. Since the space for solitary thought depends on the protection of a vibrant private realm, the protection of privacy is a necessary first step in the cultivation of thoughtful political action.
Given the controversial nature of Arendt’s position, it should come as no surprise that much of the discussion turned on the questions her essay leaves unanswered. For example, many audience members wondered about the connections between private upbringing, social discrimination, and political equality. What is it that enables or requires citizens to forego the discrimination they practice in social life so that they might recognize other citizens as equals?
For that matter, how is it possible for people to transcend those aspects of their familial socialization that might hinder them from participating in politics without prejudice?
Other listeners focused on the two writers’ divergent intellectual predilections. As several of them noted, Myrdal’s work reveals a basic confidence in the ability of government, working in tandem with enlightened social science, to conceive and implement policies that further democratic freedoms. Arendt, on the other hand, betrays a much more skeptical stance not only on power of the state, but also on the capacity of social scientists (like Myrdal) to guide productive social and political interventions.
Finally, discussion turned to one point where Arendt, despite the contentious nature of her remarks, might be developing a more interesting view of democratic societies than Myrdal. As Morey noted in the Q and A, Myrdal’s reflections on democracy are ultimately premised on the existence of a national Volk defined by broad moral and cultural commonality. Prejudice and discrimination are pernicious, in his reading, because they prevent racial minorities from complete integration into the nation and its defining sense of peoplehood. Arendt’s vision, by contrast, adopts a much more guarded stance toward “conformism” of this sort. Indeed, “Reflections on Little Rock” proposes that people have a strong right to their opinions and sentiments in the private and social realms, even when those opinions and sentiments are deeply unpalatable in the wider public sphere and polity. As a result, Arendt’s notion of democracy appears to allow much greater room for the existence and maintenance of difference.
On the whole, then, Morey’s talk cast thoughtful light on the work of these two thinkers. It sought neither to venerate nor to dismiss their claims wholesale, but instead probed the many differences in their starting points and claims. In the end, Myrdal and Arendt’s positions seemed so divergent that it was hard not to regard them as “two ships passing in the night”—despite their common abhorrence of racial segregation.
You can view Maribel Morey's talk and the ensuing discussion on the Hannah Arendt Center website, here.
Maribel Morey's essay, "Reassessing Hannah Arendt's 'Reflections on Little Rock' (1959)" was published in the Journal of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. You can sign in with a password to read the article here.
-Jeff Jurgens
Judith Butler on Arendt & Revenge
“Arendt's Death Sentences”
Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 48 No. 3, 2011. pp. 280-295.
Over the last decade Judith Butler has expanded her focus from the constitutive role of performance for gender to broader questions of power. This article focuses on a contradiction between law and revenge in Eichmann in Jerusalem and examines the perplexing last pages of the postscript that appear, unexpectedly, to come down on the side of revenge.
As most readers of Arendt know, after a circuitous but impressive scholarly path, Arendt burst on to the cultural scene with Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963.
Often condemned for its tone as much (if not more) as its contents, the book continues to draw attacks from those who fault Arendt for criticizing the prosecutor's attempt to conflate the specific trial of Eichmann with the Holocaust as a whole and for discussing the role of the Jewish councils in Nazi Germany. Even the most refined minds of the time refused to accept the limited scope of Arendt's report: Gershom Scholem accused Arendt of lacking "ahavath Yisrael" (solidarity with the Jewish people).
From this perspective, Butler offers a particularly bold reading of the text. She begins with a description of the conflict between two conceptions of justice in the trial. Arendt continually argues against vengeance and criticizes the trial for scapegoating Eichmann and making him stand in for the entire Holocaust. Instead, she argues for a strictly legal judgment and sees the judges as deciding correctly in their verdict. One might expect the argument (and the book) to end there. However, in the last pages of the postscript she presents a long imagined speech from the judges that would better explain their reasoning, and this reasoning has an undeniable element of revenge:
“Because he had been implicated and had played a central role in an enterprise whose open purpose was to eliminate certain 'races' from the surface of the earth, he had to be eliminated.” (Arendt, Eichmann, 277)
Butler asks what justification this “verdict voice” can appeal to, since Arendt does not explain her statement that we can't “share the earth” with such a person. She carefully describes the tone and syntax of the speech, noting for example, that “the voice moves in sudden fugitive shifts between 'I' and 'we'” (Butler 294). Through these shifts the reader sometimes recognizes Arendt's voice from earlier in the book that calmly argues for norms, but often the voice supports revenge instead. Butler suggests that the two registers are not meant to meld but that the mix of voices itself might indicate a connection that she wish had existed between the judges and people. Drawing on a key concept from The Human Condition, Butler writes, “the plurality enacted here […] is unchosen, compelled, agonistic, and inconsistent” (295). In other words, the voice speaks for a people that is forced to present itself despite its divisions. One might say that Butler's reading of Eichmann, unlike that of Scholem, does indicate a sympathy with the Jewish people, albeit one that abandons unquestioning support.
Most strikingly, Butler says that this “punishment invariably continues some part of the crime” (Butler 295). The voice is not clearly attributed and in its multiplicity and lack of clear origin, Butler suggests a judgment from a specific kind of plurality, one that is implicated with the crime that it takes a stand on. As such it offers a specific case of a judgment that isn't based only on pre-existing law.
Butler's interpretation of the difficult moves that she highlights will undoubtedly provoke. Since she allows Arendt's plural voices including her view that revenge can play a role in Eichmann's verdict, her conclusion is counterintuitive- if not a stark affront to our common sense understanding of the law. Butler thus parallels recent arguments by Roger Berkowitz, that Arendt opens the question of vengeance because modern understandings of criminal law are inadequate to understand Eichmann's guilt. If Berkowitz finds Arendt's other voice in the language of non-reconciliation, Butler insists above all on plurality. By submitting one of the most perplexing passages of Eichmann to detailed examination and exegesis, both authors offer concrete examples of how Arendt's conception of judgment might work.
Read a related article by Judith Butler here.
-Jeffrey Champlin
Horace Walpole on Thinking
"The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”
― Horace Walpole
The Love of the World
"Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable."
—Hannah Arendt, The Crisis in Education
Hannah Arendt writes that the fact that we are born into the world—the fact of natality—is the essence of education. She means that every newborn baby comes into the world both free and yet also constrained. Newcomers are free insofar as there is no way of knowing in advance what a young person will become or who she will be. The newcomer is constrained, however, because he is always born into an already-existing world, one with particular customs, limitations, and opportunities. To educate that newcomer is to respond both to the freedom and constraint into which he is thrown. As free, the child must be taught to act courageously in new and surprising ways. As constrained, the newcomer must accept the responsibility as a member of an already existing world, one he must somehow make his own.
From the Latin educare, to educate means to lead into or draw out. Education is the activity of leading a child into the world, of drawing her into the world. Parents educate their children by drawing them out of their private selves and into the world of the family, their community, and their society.
Schools educate, in turn, by drawing students out of the confines of their families and into the wider political and social world. Education is always an entry into an old world. And yet, it is always a new experience with infinite possibilities for every new initiate.
Education, Hannah Arendt tells us in the quotation above, is about the love for the world. To have children, something she did not do, and to educate young people, something she did brilliantly, is to bring new young people into an old and existing world. To make that choice is to "assume responsibility" for that world, to love it enough—in spite of all of the evil and ugliness—to welcome the innocent. Only when we decide to assume such an awesome responsibility for the world as it is and to love that world, can we begin the activity of education.
Education is also a process of saving the world from ruin—a ruin that is inevitable for all mortal and human endeavors. Made by humans acting together, the world will disappear if we do not care for it and refresh it. The world is not a physical entity but is the "in-between" that connects us all. Like a "table that is located between those who sit around it," the world is the world of things, actions, stories, and events that connect and divide all persons living together in a common world. Without newcomers who are introduced into the world and taught to love it as their own, the world will die out.
There are of course some who reject the love for the world that makes education possible. There are always reasons to do so, ranging from poverty and racism to war and famine. Rebellion is, of course, sometimes justified. There are times, as with Arendt's judgment of Adolf Eichmann, where one must say simply: A world with such people as Eichmann in it is not a world I can love. That is why Arendt argues that Eichmann must be killed. But such judgments of non-reconciliation are, for Arendt, inappropriate in the act of educating young people.
To love the world enough to lead students into it means also that we love our children enough to both bring them into the world and leave to them the chance of changing it. Arendt writes:
And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing the common world.
If we love our children, and our world enough, then we do not make the decision to expel the children from that world. We don't make the decision of rebellion or non-reconciliation for them. The point is that education of the young must leave to the young the right of "undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us."
A teacher must not cross the line and tell the student what to do about the world, for that is the right of the student himself. All the teacher can and should do is prepare students for such a decision, by leading them into an existing world and offering them examples of those who, through freedom and constraint, have throughout history worked to renew and re-inspire our common world.
While teaching is never easy, it is particularly difficult in the 21st century, at a time when the "common world," the world of things that unite us, is changing at such a pace that that teachers and students increasingly live in very different worlds. It's one thing for teachers to not be up on the latest fashions or music; but when teachers and students increasingly get their news from different media, live in different virtual realities, and communicate differently about the worlds they inhabit, the challenges grow. Teaching is of course still possible, but it takes significantly more effort and reflection to think about what that common world is into which we are leading our students. The love of the world has never been so difficult or so necessary.
-Roger Berkowitz
The Rise of the Golden Dawn
Golden Dawn, the far-Right fascist party in Greece continues to grow in popularity and violence, according to the Wall Street Journal. Last week the Journal reports:
In a rundown, immigrant-filled neighborhood here, Ilias Panagiotaros, a member of Parliament from Greece's far-right Golden Dawn party, used a megaphone Friday night to exhort an angry crowd to "fight against foreign invaders."
A family watching from a second-floor balcony scrambled for cover as demonstrators hurled bottles and stones at them. "We're going to spill your blood, you Albanian pigs," a man in the flag-waving throng screamed.
Hundreds of protesters marched through the narrow streets—some spraying nationalist graffiti on building facades, others shouting obscene taunts at immigrants. Mr. Panagiotaros, a heavyset man with a shaved head, led them in a resounding chant: "Foreigners out. Greece for the Greeks."
Now this weekend the Washington Post has a follow up (as Walter Russell Mead writes). The Post describes a Greek army surplus store that proudly displays a sticker that carries a favorite party slogan: “Get the Stench out of Greece.” The Post continues:
By “stench,” the Golden Dawn — which won its first-ever seats in the Greek Parliament this spring and whose popularity has soared ever since — means immigrants, broadly defined as anyone not of Greek ancestry. In the country at the epicenter of Europe’s debt crisis, and where poverty and unemployment are spiking, the surplus shop doubles as one of the party’s dozens of new “help bureaus.” Hundreds of calls a day come in from desperate families seeking food, clothing and jobs, all of which the Golden Dawn is endeavoring to provide, with one major caveat: for Greeks only.
Attacks have not stopped at foreigners. One Golden Dawn legislator slapped a left-wing female politician on national television. Party supporters have attempted to shut down performances of progressive theater. Activists see the party’s hand behind three recent beatings of gay men. The Golden Dawn has also begun engaging left-wing anarchy groups in street battles — more evidence, observers say, of a societal breakdown that some here fear could slide into a civil war if Greece is forced out of the euro and into an even deeper crisis.
But perhaps more worrisome, critics say, are signs that the Golden Dawn is establishing itself as an alternative authority in a country crippled by the harsh austerity imposed by its international lenders. It has set up its own “pure” blood bank, providing and accepting donations to and from Greeks only, in a nation of 11 million that is also home to roughly 1.5 million refugees and migrants, many of them from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. As the party attempts to place a swelling number of unemployed in jobs, its officials say they have persuaded a major restaurant chain to begin replacing immigrants with Greek workers.
The Arendt Center is keeping a close eye on Golden Dawn. The increasing popularity of the party in Greece, which currently polls at over 20% of the Greek population, is a reminder that real economic crises rarely limit themselves to economic upheaval. Many names and words will be bandied about in and with regard to Greece. People will talk about fascism, racism, and totalitarianism. The point is to keep our eyes open to what is happening, which at this point is ugly political nativism along with racialized violence that is gaining enough popular appeal so that it is not being confronted and stopped by legal authorities. It is partly a result of racism, but also a consequence of the utter loss of power and legitimacy on behalf of the Greek elite and the Greek government that has abandoned Greek self-rule to a technocratic European elite. When people feel totally helpless and out of control, as Greeks do today, they will unfortunately seek out scapegoats and victims. The last thing they want to admit is that it is the Greek people themselves and their leaders who are to blame for their predicament.
Golden Dawn members giving a raised-fist salute as they are being sworn into Parliament 6/12
One key step in any move towards totalitarianism is the erasure of legal citizenship or legal protections for a defined minority. Legal and illegal immigrants are already vulnerable groups even in good times. The danger is that immigrants lose even the basic legal protections and rights that they currently have and, once they do, become superfluous people, the kind of people who simply can be rounded up, imprisoned, expelled, or killed without any legal notice or response—or even according to the law. That of course is not happening in Greece. Let's hope it does not.
-RB
Campaign Finance Laws and the First Amendment
The Arendt Center recently hosted Professor Zephyr Teachout to speak about Citizens United v. FEC and campaign finance reform. The talk was in honor of Constitution Day, which Professor Teachout joyfully informed us may very well be unconstitutional. We carried on.
Teachout began her talk by announcing that the "First Amendment is a terrible thing." Less provocatively, she argues that the First Amendment plays a "dangerous role" in our constitutional culture. Above all, she presented her argument that the Supreme Court's increasing reliance on the First Amendment to invalidate campaign finance laws is, ironically, used to shut down meaningful public debate around the proper role of lobbying in our politics.
She began by telling a story of the Supreme Court case Trist v. Child from 1874. The case involves Mr. Trist who had a claim against the U.S. Government for about $15,000 (about $100,000 in current dollars). Trist hired Child, a lawyer, to represent him and convince Congress to honor its debt. Among other things, Child encouraged Trist to have his friends write to Congressman threatening not to vote for them if they didn't honor this debt to Trist. Child also personally lobbied Congressman. He eventually succeeded in getting Congress to appropriate Trist's money.
Trist, however, refused to pay Child the fee agreed to in their contract. Child sued Trist to get his agreed upon money.
In the Supreme Court decision refusing to enforce the contract, the Court holds that Trist need not pay Child; a number of reasons are given, a few very technical. But the majority of the opinion by Justice Swayne rejects the legality of lobbying with a broad brush. Trist need not honor his contract with Child, Swayne writes, because there was no valid contract. In short, the original contract hiring Child as a lobbyist was immoral and illegal, and thus unenforceable. Justice Swayne argues that the very immorality of the practice of lobbying nullifies the contract between Trist and Child.
Teachout helpfully describes the issue this way. Child says something like: Our contract was just like a contract for me to sell you a car and now you don't want to pay me for the car now that you have it. Trist responds that, in Teachout's colorful analogy,
No, this is like we made a contract for prostitution, and you can't go to the cops after we made a contract for prostitution and get them to enforce that contract. Because lobbying is like prostitution. It is so corrupt that there is no way courts are going to enforce it.
Writing for the Supreme Court, Justice Swayne puts it this way:
The agreement in the present case was for the sale of the influence and exertions of the lobby agent to bring about the passage of a law for the payment of a private claim, without reference to its merits, by means which, if not corrupt, were illegitimate, and considered in connection with the pecuniary interest of the agent at stake, contrary to the plainest principles of public policy. No one has a right in such circumstances to put himself in a position of temptation to do what is regarded as so pernicious in its character. The law forbids the inchoate step, and puts the seal of its reprobation upon the undertaking.
If any of the great corporations of the country were to hire adventurers who make market of themselves in this way, to procure the passage of a general law with a view to the promotion of their private interests, the moral sense of every right-minded man would instinctively denounce the employer and employed as steeped in corruption and the employment as infamous.
There are two remarkable things about Justice Swayne's argument. First, as Teachout notes in her talk, there was nothing remarkable about it in 1874. Many states and governments throughout the U.S. made lobbying illegal. It was seen as an act of corruption. And few if any courts in the U.S. would find this unusual, at least before the turn of the 20th century.
The second remarkable thing to note is how utterly remarkable Justice Swayne's argument is today. To speak of the millions of lobbyists in the US as "adventurers who make market of themselves" as offending the "moral sense of every right-minded man" is a painful reminder of how far our political system has fallen. Not only is the moral prohibition against lobbying something of the past, but also the idea that the Supreme Court would invalidate contracts based on lobbying is nearly unimaginable.
The reason for this change in the legal and even moral status of lobbying is, Teachout argues, the rise of free-speech jurisprudence in the 20th century. Specifically, the Court's acceptance of the basic claim freedom of speech is the fundamental foundation of our democratic system has made lobbying not only legal, but morally defensible. If democracy depends on a marketplace of ideas, then having corporations and individuals hire lawyers and public relations firms to buy and sell influence in politics is at the very foundation of democratic governance. What Teachout forces us to consider is that our elevation of the First Amendment to foundational status in our constitutional firmament is predicated on a political theory that founds democracy on the unfettered marketplace of ideas. If we are to take back our government from corporate adventurers and their lobbyists, we will need to rethink our commitment to free speech, at least as the Court currently understands it.
Teachout's provocative talk attacks less freedom of speech itself than the Court's elevation of free speech to the first amongst all constitutional provisions—the foundational right in our constitutional and democratic system. She traces the rise of free speech jurisprudence to the point where, today, free speech is the paradigmatic right in our democracy. Free speech has become equated with democracy, so that "free speech is democracy."
It is important to see that Teachout is really pointing out a shift between two alternate political theories. First, she argues that for the founders and for the United States up until the mid-20th century, the foundational value that legitimates our democracy is the confidence that our political system is free from corruption. Laws that restrict lobbying or penalize bribery are uncontroversial and constitutional, because they recognize core—if not the core—constitutional values.
Second, Teachout sees that increasingly free speech has replaced anti-corruption as the foundational constitutional value in the United States. Beginning in the 20th century and culminating in the Court's decision in Citizens United, the Court gradually accepted the argument that the only way to guarantee a legitimate democracy is to give unlimited protection to the marketplace of idea. Put simply, truth is nothing else but the product of free debate and any limits on debate, especially political debate, will delegitimize our politics.
This view that free speech is the fundamental bastion of democracy is the basis of Justice Kennedy's decision in Citizens United. In Kennedy's opinion, laws regulating campaign finance regulate speech, and not just force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech." If we believe that fair elections require a free airing of all opinions, than restrictions on campaign finance are the most dangerous forms of censorship. Which is why Kennedy can worry that "The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach."
What he means is that all those corporations regulated by the campaign finance reform law invalidated by Citizens United—including large multinationals and also small mom and pop stores and even unions and non-profit corporations—are prohibited from expressing their views about political candidates during 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."
It is helpful to recall Justice Felix Frankfurter's concurring opinion in U.S. v. Congress of Industrial Organizations. The Smith Act had forbidden unions to use funds to pay for politicking, very much like the limitations on corporate funding in the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. In U.S. v. CIO, the Court refused to rule on the Constitutional question of whether the Congress can forbid unions from political speech. Frankfurter, however, does consider it. He argues that we must take seriously the evil of corporate and union speech in politics. The corruption of elections and federal officials by the expenditure of large masses of aggregated wealth But that evil, he counters, "is not one unmixed with good." For Frankfurter,
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.
Replace "Labor unions" with "corporations." That is what Justice Kennedy did in Citizens United. What he said is that corporations have a voice in our political landscape, just as do unions and non-profits. When such corporate entities engage in speech, there is a danger of corruption. But we cannot deny their speech is politically important. Instead of then balancing those interests in a practical way, Justice Kennedy simply said that the First Amendment insists that political speech never be abridged. Our Constitutional system, he argued, demands that the marketplace of ideas be allowed to work unimpeded.
The overriding desire to protect political speech proceeds under the assumption, with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., that "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” What Zephyr Teachout helps to make clear is that this elevation of free-speech to the first amongst constitutional provisions is fundamentally at odds with the desire to regulate political speech to keep politics free from corruption. If we want to get serious about fighting corruption in politics, we need to take seriously the need to question the now unquestionable faith that democracy is founded upon freedom of speech.
To fight against Citizens United and uphold the legal rejection of campaign finance limitations requires that we break the bi-partisan stranglehold that an extreme view of the First Amendment currently has on our constitutional jurisprudence. Only once we do so can we return to a meaningful public debate about when lobbying is and when it is not corrupting. And only once we free campaign finance laws from the First Amendment can we, as we must, have a serious discussion about how much money distorts and corrupts our political process.
These are difficult issues, and weakening the scope and impact of the First Amendment is risky. As Teachout argues, it is a risk we must take to save our democratic system.
To see why, I encourage you to watch Zephyr Teachout's talk here. You can also read the essay on which the talk is based here. Together, they are your weekend reads.
—RB
The Humanity of Robots
The Wall Street Journal ran an interview this week with Luke Muehlhauser, the Executive Director of the Singularity Institute. The Journal asked: Will Artificial Intelligence Make us Obsolete? Muehlhauser's answer was, well yes. In his words:
Cognitive science has discovered that everything the human mind does is done by information processing and machines can do information processing too.
The first statement is clearly false, or at least depends on a strangely mixed up idea of "information processing." The old determinist canard that humans are simply complex machines has not been proven or discovered by cognitive science. And even if humans do process billions upon billions of bits of information it is not at all clear that such a humanly fallible process is reproducible. That is not the claim that cognitive science can make.
But cognitive science can claim that machines can be built that act in ways that are so like humans as to be almost nearly indistinguishable from them. Or, they can even be better than humans in doing many quintessentially human tasks. So machines can not only beat humans at chess, they can make moves that seem like moves only a human could have made, as Gary Kasparov learned to his dismay in the second game of his rematch with Deep Blue. Machines can create paintings that appear to be fully creative, as does Aaron, the painting machine created by artist and computer scientist Harold Cohen. And machines can increasingly make ethical decisions in warfare, as the robo-ethicist Ron Arkin has argued—decisions that are more humane than those made by human warriors.
Too much of the debate over artificial intelligence is caught up in the technical and really irrelevant question of whether machines can fully replicate human beings. The point is that if machines act "as if" they are human, or if they are capable of doing what humans do better than humans, we will gradually and continually allow machines to take over more and more of the basic human activities that make up our world. Already computers make most of the trades on Wall Street and computers are increasingly used in making medical diagnoses. Computers are being used to educate our children and write news stories. Caregivers for the elderly are being replaced by robotic companions. And David Levy, artificial intelligence researcher at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, argues that we will be marrying robots in the near future. It is not that these robotic lovers or artificial artists are human, but that they love and paint in ways that do or will soon pass the Turing test: they will be impossible to distinguish from human works.
Undoubtedly one reason machines are acting more human is that humans themselves are acting less so. As we interact more and more with machines, we begin to act predictably, repetitively, and less surprisingly. There is a convergence at foot, and it is the dehumanization of human beings as much as the humanization of robots that should be worrying us.
-RB
Glowing River of Books
Literature versus Traffic by Spanish art collective Luzinterruptus.
An installation of 10,000 LED-lit books at Federation Square in Melbourne, Australia for The Light In Winter festival.
The books, recently retired from area public libraries, were given a second life as a glowing river that flowed through the square and into a nearby street. On the final day of the installation, onlookers were invited to take the books home.
See more great images here.
Barbara Hahn Lectures on Rahel Levin Varnhagen
Last week, Barbara Hahn, Distinguished Professor of German at Vanderbilt University and editor-in-chief of the works of the eminent German-Jewish intellectual Rahel Levin Varnhagen, spoke about Varnhagen's unpublished opus magnum "Rahel: A Book of Commemoration For Her Friends" at Bard College.
How did this work make its way from the early 19th century to our time? What challenges are faced publishing this volume in the 21st century? How did Hannah Arendt's book on "Rahel Varnhagen" approach this legacy? Being excluded from the modern (German) university as a woman and a Jew, Rahel Varnhagen debated the turmoil of revolutionary Europe with Goethe and Heine, the Humboldt brothers and Hegel trough Salon conversations, in diaries, and especially by letters.
Watch the video of Barbara Hahn's presentation here and explore how hidden traditions challenge us to rethink our past.
-Thomas Wild
Reviews of the Film ‘Hannah Arendt’
Margarethe Von Trotta's biopic about Arendt, starring German star Barbara Sukowa, will be released in select European theaters on January 17, 2013. However, it was recently screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Here are what some reviewers had to say about the film:
The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Cinemablographer, Exclaim.ca
In case you haven't seen it yet, here is the official trailer:
The Political Weakness of Empathy
Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints….This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not.
-Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics” in Between Past and Future, p. 241
In response to the shootings in Aurora, Colorado in July, President Obama had this to say:
While we will never know fully what causes somebody to take the life of another, we do know what makes life worth living. The people we lost in Aurora loved and they were loved….They had hopes for the future and they had dreams that were not yet fulfilled. And if there’s anything to take away from this tragedy, it’s the reminder that life is very fragile…What matters at the end of the day is not the small things; it’s not the trivial things…Ultimately it’s how we choose to treat one another and how we love one another.
This speech was disturbing for a number of reasons. Yes, it was full of clichés and tired appeals to the hopes and futures of people who are nothing but a vague idea to Obama’s audience. But most disturbing of all was the fact that it revealed the response of the country’s highest public official to a breakdown of public safety was essentially a complete abdication of responsibility for the public.
In this speech, Obama refuses to articulate what Arendt calls political thought, instead luxuriating in the experience of empathy and asking the audience to the do same. The problem with speaking and thinking of politics as a sphere in which individuals must try “to be or to feel like somebody else,” as Arendt saw it, is that feeling with another does nothing to acknowledge and maintain the plurality that is so necessary to politics. In empathy, one remains isolated and alone as an individual, albeit an individual with a different set of emotional experiences than what one had before. In this instance, Obama puts himself into the shoes of those individuals who lost family and friends in the shooting and asks his Florida audience to do the same. In so doing, he transforms the event from one that confronts the American polity with questions about our shared public space—about national gun control laws and issues connected to the lack of appropriate physical and mental health care—into a question of the appropriate personal response to loss. Seen in this light, it is not at all surprising that the President would conclude his speech by telling the audience that he and his wife will hug their daughters a bit more tightly that night.
Characterizing what is surely a public problem into an issue of bedtime rituals among family members reveals not only the extent to which politics has given way to personal concerns, but also the unhappy possibility that not even our political leaders are able to move beyond personal concerns to take responsibility for the public as a whole.
It is tempting to interpret Arendt’s quote as an admonition to individuals to reveal themselves in political action. This understanding of Arendtian politics and action is the most familiar one and Arendt’s language of “being and thinking in my own identity” certainly evokes the language of personal courage she uses to describe the political actor in The Human Condition. There she ascribes to the decision to enter politics a courage that is necessary to bring to the public light one’s thoughts and deeds as undeniably one’s own and to “ris[e] into sight from some darker ground” (The Human Condition, 71).
But these lines of “Truth and Politics” strongly suggest that the public appearance one makes as an individual must somehow be tied intimately to other people. What one reveals, in other words, is not oneself in one’s personal sentiments, but rather one’s opinion, which necessarily takes into account the viewpoints of other people. The rising from a dark ground into the light of the public is less about revealing oneself in all one’s uniqueness and more about situating or orienting oneself within a realm of others from whom one may or may not differ. It is for this reason, I think, that Arendt considers empathy to be destructive of politics. In empathy, we appropriate the other to collapse the distance between us that would make possible our orientation in the world. One cannot be “oriented” in the absence of external markers against which one can orient oneself.
The consequences of reading politics as a world of empathetic individuals are dire. Empathy makes it easy to justify the appropriation of others’ lives and perspectives as one’s own. In the name of feeling with the victim, we can often leave the victim even more impoverished than he was before the outpouring of empathy. The loss suffered by those in Aurora has become the sadness and pain of those for whom the victims of the shooting, both living and dead, were really nothing but examples of our country’s political failure. On top of what these victims had already lost, it is possible that they might also lose ownership of the event. Such an appropriation has implications beyond the aesthetic or moral. The political problem with Obama’s speech is not simply that he did not reveal himself or that he appropriated the suffering of the Colorado victims. It is that his empathy allowed him to refuse to take responsibility for the community as a whole and it made it easy for the rest of us to do the same and to do so with a clear conscience. Taking care of one’s community and one’s neighbors is measured by the degree to which one can take care of the imagined personal pains of others, not one’s response to the institutional and other structural conditions that have made such events so commonplace in this country.
Aurora shooting victims
Arendt’s distinction between engaging with the viewpoints of others and feeling with another is ultimately a foundation for political responsibility, not just courageous action understood independently of one’s responsibility to the public world. To the extent that politics requires courage, it requires courage not simply to reveal oneself in a crude individualism, but to take responsibility for the big questions of our community. There is of course nothing wrong with hugging one’s children at night. But to define one’s political self in this act and to ask others do so as well is to shirk one’s responsibility for the community and to tell us that such an abdication of responsibility is not only acceptable, but also laudable because it is “human” and feeling. This might not be a necessary consequence of empathy, but, as Arendt tells us, it is an inherent possibility and a threat.
-Jennie Han
Flipping Over The Flipped Classroom
There are few more contentious issues in thinking about education today than the place of technology in the classroom. For all of us parents struggling to figure out how to respond to the inevitable request from our children to use the ipad or the iphone—to play Brainquest, of course—there is an obvious trade off: No doubt, our kids learn math and reading with the ipad. And yet, there is something that seems wrong as they spend more and more time in front of the screen, interacting with a machine instead of with other human beings. As efficient and productive as that machine is at teaching, it thinks and acts like the electronic circuits that it is. As parents, we can't help but worry what is lost as our children spend an increasing amount of time engaged with machines—even educational machines.
For those of us who are teachers, there are similar trade offs. I wrote about one last weekend in my essay on the flipped classroom. I made it clear that there were many reasons to like the flipped classroom, and not only because it offered enormous cost savings. The main reason is that it frees the classroom up for advanced discussion, the clarification of uncertainties, and teacher-student engagement. A good seminar is based on the discussion of a book that all students have read. Now imagine that prior to the seminar the students have both read the book and watched a lecture by the professor on the book. They may even be able, in addition, to answer study questions about the book and the lecture. By the time they attend class, they are ready for a real engagement.
In an excellent comment on my post, Steven Tatum makes a strong case for the advantages of the flipped classroom. He writes that the flipped classroom would
look much more like a collaboration between students and teachers than a knowing teacher giving information about the past to passive students. We could turn to Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blucher, as an example of such a teacher. He saw teachers as “more experienced collaborators” who are engaged in the same thought process as their students: “[the teacher] must think together with his students and work out with them the problems of vital concern to the modern personality. He must place himself together with his students right into the midst of the situation which the modern world has created for man.” This situation is the loss of tradition and authority – and in the classroom, the teacher has to be a model for the kind of re-reading of the past that such times call for. This is undoubtedly the goal of an Arendtian education – to create the kind of independent and engaged thinkers that [Roger Berkowitz] talked about [in his original post]. How could we expect students to practice this kind of thinking if they don’t see their teachers practicing it too?
I do agree with Steven's citation from Blücher that a teacher "must place himself together with his students right into the midst of the situation which the modern world has created for man.” Any good teacher in a regular or a flipped classroom must reconcile him- or herself to the reality of our world, which includes the loss of tradition and political authority. That I find indisputable.
But there is a difference between reconciling oneself to the loss of political authority and reconciling oneself to the loss of authority in the parent-child or teacher-child relationship. Indeed, Arendt writes "The Crisis in Education" to counter the crisis in education. In doing so, she takes an approach that is deeply unpopular today, but is consistent throughout her work. In many essays—"Reflections on Little Rock," "Truth and Politics," "On Violence," and "The Crisis in Education"—Arendt insists that education not be seen is part of the public or political realm. Nor is education in the social realm. It is part of the private realm.
The importance of the private realm is core to Arendt's thinking about politics. It is in private that the child is free, with their parent or teacher, to grow into the person they are. The desire to mold or Americanize or normalize students in school is, for Arendt, an affront to the plurality of persons and the basic principle of individual uniqueness. She is not afraid of allowing some children to grow up in families or in schools that are racist or antisemitic or homophobic. This of course does not mean she is racist; it means only that her respect for plurality reaches even to her respect for individual prejudices.
Arendt is willing to accept prejudicial persons in the world, but only so long as those persons limit their prejudices to the private and the social realms. In the political realm, all persons must accept the fundamental political principle of equality. But we can only have a vibrant political realm in which plural persons talk and act in public when those people have grown up in a private realm, sheltered from the normalization of the social and the glare of the public, so that they have strong opinions and prejudices, precisely what makes them plural and different.
The private realm is and must be shielded from the public realm. "Everything that lives, not vegetative life alone, emerges from darkness." Children need a "place of security where they can grow." The political realm of equality, in turn, depends on a vibrant private realm of uniqueness and real difference. There are many reasons for this. One, which Arendt explores in "Truth and Politics," is that the public realm is the realm of opinion and makes no room for truth. Truth depends on the authority of the truthteller, someone who must be outside the political realm. One common place for the emergence of truthtellers is the university, a non-political space in which truth can emerge that is then essential for politics. Such truth is never prospective, but always turned toward the past. Which is why it is "the function of the school to teach children what the world is like and not to instruct them in the art of living." Arendt insists that educating citizens to be good citizens is something fully different from teaching them to be citizens. It is, instead, introducing them to the truth of the world as it presently is.
Arendt insists—against what she calls the "illusion" that public schools "serve to Americanize" children—that the "true situation" is that "children are introduced, even in America, [into] an old world, that is, a pre-existing world, constructed by the living and the dead." This is not a world of equality, but a world of prejudice and difference. It is not a homogeneous world of civic equality, but a plural world of private prejudices. It is a world of discrimination, inequality, mass incarceration, environmental degradation, consumerism, nihilism, and loneliness. It is also a world of opportunity, liberty, freedom of speech, plenty, individualism, globalization, travel, and self-actualization. School is not, for Arendt, a means by which "a new world is being built through the education of children." It is, rather, a means to introduce people to the old world, the present world, as it is.
All of this is to say that while a teacher today must recognize and accept the world in which we live as a world without authority and tradition, the teacher cannot accept such a loss of authority in the classroom. We may, Arendt writes, "remove authority from political and public life." But we cannot do so in education. She writes:
"In education, on the contrary, there can be no such ambiguity in regard to the present-day loss of authority. Children cannot throw off educational authority as though they were in a position of oppression by an adult majority."
It is of course true that "the more radical the distrust of authority becomes in the public sphere, the greater the probability naturally becomes that the private sphere will not remain inviolate." But Arendt does not conclude from this that we must reconcile to the loss of authority in private education. On the contrary, she doubly insists that "education must be conservative." She writes that "conservation... is the essence of educational activity, whose task is always to cherish and protect something—the child against the world, the world against the child, the new against the old, the old against the new." Education, she insists, must preserve the newness newcomers and children by teaching them the old, what the world is, and leaving to the children the task of revolution and renewal.
Steven writes in his comment that when Arendt
calls on teachers to teach “the world as it is,” she is insisting that teachers have the responsibility to make judgments about what should be taught, what elements of the past are worth learning about. The progressive educators she criticizes are the ones who a) think it should be up to the students to decide what’s worth learning (which often leads to education in “the art of living,” that is, practical training) and b) present the world as it could be, interpreting it for their students instead of presenting it as it is. Teachers make these decisions before they step into the classroom.
I agree fully with that. What I questioned in my post was the possibility, and it seems the reality according to the article about MIT that I cited, that the flipped classroom would dilute the teacher's responsibility to make judgments about what will be taught. This is the crux of what I was trying to point out in my post.
If teachers don't "teach" in the classroom but do so online, they may still tell people what to read or give a online lecture, but the reading and lecture are now read and digested by students on their own schedule, at their own time. Students can read a book half asleep. They can watch a lecture at 1.5 speed, fast-forwarding when they want, or while they are checking their email. The point is that the flipped classroom removes the performance of the teacher as an authority in the classroom. By diffusing the connection between teacher and student, by taking away the experience of being in the same room, by removing eye contact and physical interaction, by putting the teacher at the mercy of the student's fast forward, pause, and delete buttons, the video lecture empowers the student and dis-empowers the teacher and professor. The students can, precisely, increasingly decide what is worth learning, as Steven writes above about progressive educators. Above all, education becomes less and less a process of personal interaction and more an avenue of knowledge distribution.
Heinrich Blücher was renowned as a brilliant lecturer and teacher. He enraptured students. Inspired them. And yet, to read transcripts of his lectures or to listen to recordings of them now is to be struck by how unclear and unpersuasive they are as written texts. This does not mean they were bad lectures, but it does point to the power of personal presence and individual interaction in education. There is no doubt that the video lecture in a flipped classroom will sacrifice that experience.
Steven is right, that Arendt is less interested in pedagogy than in the fact that teachers have authority—by which she means that the teacher, not the student, guides and controls the educational experience. It is possible, of course, that in a flipped classroom the teacher facilitators in the classroom will remain respected figures who can push and challenge students to see uncomfortable and challenging truths about the world they share. But this is unlikely. Empowered, it is most likely that students will increasingly drive the classes. These courses will be judged by how popular they are and syllabi and lectures will be held to the metrics of "Like" and "Number of Eyeballs." This is already happening to some extent through the dominance of student teacher evaluation forms; but these forms still have limited power. That will no longer be the case in the flipped classroom, where the consumer will be King. This is, of course, not a revolution so much as a continuation of a longstanding trend. Which does not make it any less worrisome.
How We Became Estranged With Nature
“An albatross dips towards the sea, then lifts again, beating its wings as if repelled by the opposing magnetism of the water.” Beginning her book, On Extinction, with this scene of natural collision, Melanie Challenger’s image soon unfolds as her gaze turns down to the expansive water. "The sea is deathly calm, spread out like a cerecloth. Then a rocketing breath hurls a rainbow into the air." With this Challenger paints the experience of watching a rising blue whale.
Ms. Challenger sent us a copy of her book here at the Arendt Center, suggesting a connection with Arendtian themes. She is right. What albatross and whale mean, how we see them, and the ways in which we increasingly don't are the themes of Challenger's book. What is most visible in our world, she writes, is the loss of wonder at the natural world, the old Platonic thaumazein, “the wonder at what is” that is the birth of philosophy.
Modern life, however, seems to not simply repudiate the experience of thaumazein, but also the notion that anything occurring in nature is inherently meaningful, or, to put it in the economic terms which so pervade our thought processes, that anything has value “as it is.” Modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, replaces the wonder at the world with doubt regarding the world's existence or our ability to know it. But doubt does not have to lead to disregard. And even disregard for nature is not an adequate description for what Challenger has in mind. Human beings have and will continue to recognize the economic possibilities of nature, which is less disregard than use; it is precisely this use and exploitation of nature for economic purposes that bestows meaning on nature for modern man. Wonder and doubt have both been replaced by an attitude of unremitting mastery.
Of course, everyone does not seek to exploit nature, or accept the ultimately wishful assertion that man is superior to nature and that any natural activity is either superfluous to human life, profitable to man, or a problem man must figure out how to overcome. Pressed on whether one supports or rejects the vast damage man has committed to the earth, be it in the form of global warming, obliteration of environments, or human-induced extinctions many times the rate of estimated natural extinction (see the Guardian’s Human Activity is Driving Earth’s ‘sixth great extinction event), most would say they do not support it, that we must live in a more sustainable way.
Watching “Planet Earth,” however, and then donating some money to Greenpeace is not going to radically change things. It is necessary to recognize that this language of sustainability, of “green” products and efforts, including efforts made by some businesses, to condone the most destructive practices of global industry are largely technical or superficial solutions which mask the need for a more fundamental discussion that addresses not simply the symptoms of modern exploitation of nature, but seeks to understand what we are doing and why. We must think about and discuss both the relationship between nature and man and the basic activities that gives form to and conditions our lives. In other words, to address the destruction of our environment, and why we are acting in this manner, we must adopt Arendt’s proposal “to think what we are doing.”
Indeed, “to think what we are doing” is the underlying impetus of Melanie Challenger’s On Extinction. Confronted with her own “fragmented connection with nature,” Ms. Challenger writes “I became aware that I was living through another mass extinction of animals and plants without even knowing it, this one due to human behavior. I wanted to explore the idea of extinction in the light of this new, sobering reality.” Her “chief interest…in gathering a history of how we had become so destructive to the natural world and its diversity” springs from a determination “to understand why…marvels of nature were imperiled and why that should matter.”
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition provides a wonderful banister upon which we may begin to think, with Ms. Challenger, about our proclivity toward exploitation and destruction of nature. Broadly speaking, the rise of human induced extinctions (which began to increase dramatically in the 18th century) and the massive exploitation of natural resources accompanying industrialization may be traced to the rise in prominence of homo faber within the vita activa, followed shortly by the succession of the animal laborans. “The modern age,” Arendt writes, “has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society.” This reduction of the active life, comprised of labor, work, and action, into a life of mere laboring follows the modern commitment to infinite economic growth, and therefore limitless consumption, alongside an obsession with the life process itself.
The modern obsession with the life process is characterized by a continuous process of consumption. The laboring process is cyclical – we have needs, labor produces consumables to meet those needs, consumption occurs and the process begins anew. Arendt writes: “laboring always moves in the same circle which is prescribed by the biological process of the living organism and the end of its ‘toil and trouble’ comes only with the death of this organism.” It is not the biologically necessary process of labor and consumption, however, which has led to our massive exploitation of the earth’s resources, but rather the over-consumption symptomatic of the emergence of what Arendt calls a waste economy, “in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end.”
Exploitation and abuse of nature, however, does not derive strictly from our capacity to labor and the emergence of a modern society captivated by necessities of life and addicted to the endless laboring process. We are not simply laboring animals, but also fabricators, and it is from this perspective of homo faber that nature divorced from man is almost meaningless. Nature, Arendt writes, “seen through the eyes of homo faber, the builder of the world, ‘furnishes only the almost worthless materials as in themselves,’ whose whole value lies in the work performed upon them.
Reading Challenger's On Extinction with Arendt in the background calls up a picture of a society dominated by the never-ending process of labor and consumption coupled with humanity's ability to deny intrinsic value to nature; with such a picture, one cannot help but consider, in Challenger's words, that “the lunacy of pursuing profit despite all warnings to the contrary” may be characterized not as a reckless and irresponsible gamble pursued by some but rather the unavoidable consequence of living within and being a member of modern society. While we may question how anyone “back then” could have supported the almost total depletion of the whale population for oil, for example, there seems to be a similar ambivalence in our own time, as many bemoan the warming of the planet and nations pledge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions while the world’s leading economies and major oil companies are concurrently jockeying for drilling rights in the arctic to fuel the vehicles and supply power for those same people reflecting upon the destruction of nature and wishing it wasn’t so.
The consumerist society knows no boundary lines, and in the places most vulnerable to global warming, economic actors do not see tragic, avoidable destruction, but rather increased opportunities to profit from the exploitation of nature. While in Nunavut, Ms. Challenger spoke met an Inuit asking why she was there. Telling him that she was researching the changing relationship between the Inuit and their landscape, the man replied, “Nunavut’s future won’t be in the land…It’ll be funded by minerals.” Explaining that the Meta Incognita peninsula was recently surveyed and found to have significant deposits of iron, lead, gold, and diamonds, the man concluded by saying “The more the ice melts…the more they’ll get.”
Asking, and trying to answer a question such as why we have become so destructive to the natural world is by no means a worthless endeavor, even though it doesn’t always lead to directly positive results, or even anything tangible, unless one counts the confusion caused by the immensity of the subject. The simple fact that we do ask these questions though, people all over the world, every day, demonstrates that we are still ultimately world-seeking people conditioned by a world which includes the human artifice and earth’s nature. So despite the dominance of animal laborans and our fixation on limitless economic growth, despite the assertion of homo faber that man gives meaning to nature, man, seemingly in spite of himself, will still sometimes experience the state of thaumazein. If there is hope for better relations with the natural world in the future, hope in man recognizing the futility of limitless economic activity and exploitation of nature for objects of increasingly little permanence, then this hope rests in part with our capacity to still “wonder at everything that is as it is.” Ms. Challenger’s work provides a timely reminder to the importance of this wonder.
Ms. Challenger’s US edition of On Extinction may be pre-ordered and previewed here.
-David Breitenbucher
Mo Yan Wins the Prize
I haven't read Mo Yan's books, but congratulations to him for the Nobel Prize.
That said, his supporters have a funny way of explaining why he won. In the WSJ, I read this:
Chad Post, director of University of Rochester's Open Letter Books, a press that specializes in literature in translation, said he saw Mo Yan give a reading several years ago. "What struck me is that he seems to have an almost playful approach to writing," said Mr. Post. "For example, he's written a novel called 'Big Breasts and Wide Hips.' This is a good and interesting person to honor. Mo Yan is engaged with the issues of contemporary China but his books are also full of sex and food."
Not exactly the reasons I would choose for selection.
On the other hand, critics are overly focused on Mo Yan's politics, which lean towards the authoritarian Beijing regime. The great Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei is quoted as saying:
For a contemporary writer to avoid the very clear issues of today's struggle is something that's not negotiable. I cannot separate literature from the people's struggle.
What is most remarkable about the press coverage so far of Mo Yan's prize is the focus on politics, sex, and food, with painfully little attention to writing. I hope that changes soon as some of us have a chance to read his books.
Hegel on Thinking
“Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is immediately before us.”
-Georg Hegel
Thanks to Bruce Barnhart for sending us this 'thought on thinking.'
Voting for Frito Lay
In a column in The Daily Beast, Buzz Bissinger writes:
The tipping point toward a candidate is perhaps the greatest act of individuality in our unique democracy, although in this day and age of unprecedented political divide, telling somebody who you are voting for has no upside: There is no respect for your right as a citizen, but outright hatred from those who do not agree with you. I fear that I will lose friends, some of whom I hold inside my heart. Of course, I will also lose friends I really don’t like anyway.
There are two points in this short paragraph that bear reflection. The first is the claim in the opening sentence, that deciding whom to cast one's vote for is the greatest act of individuality in our democracy. From my view, that is a bit like saying that deciding which brand of potato chips to buy is the greatest act of individuality in our capitalist economy.
If choosing between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama exemplifies who I am, then I don't think there is much to my individuality. These two paperboard figures are eerily similar in spite of their profoundly different lives. One white, one black. One born rich, the other poor. One a community organizer and the other a capitalist. Yet both are products of the meritocratic culture of Harvard professional schools. Both have an unceasing faith in data and experts. Both are self-satisfied, arrogant, and confident in their unique abilities. And both are politicians who will do or say almost anything to get themselves elected. What is a choice between them really saying about oneself?
The very idea that voting is at the essence of our political world has sent thinkers into a tizzy. Henry David Thoreau had a different view of voting:
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.
And Hannah Arendt also saw that voting was a deeply circumscribed approach to politics. She once wrote: “The voting box can hardly be called a public place.” What distinguished the United States at the time of its revolution was what Hannah Arendt called the experience of "Public Happiness." From town hall meetings in New England to citizen militias and civic organizations, Americans had the daily experience of self-government. In Arendt's words,
They knew that public freedom consisted in having a share in public business, and that the activities connected with this business by no means constituted a burden but gave those who discharged them in public a feeling of happiness they could acquire nowhere else.
Public happiness was found neither in fighting for one's particular interests, nor in doing one's duty by voting or going to town-hall meetings. Rather, the seat of American democracy was the fact that Americans "enjoyed the discussions, the deliberations, and the making of decisions."
This brings us to Bissinger's second point, that he today is fearful of saying his opinion in public for fear of losing his friends. What kind of democracy is it when we are so afraid of and contemptuous of divergent opinions that we turn dissidents into pariahs. I know that I am only somewhat comfortable making my profound dislike of President Obama felt in my liberal academic circles, and only am able to do so because I have an equally visceral dislike of Mr. Romney. If I were to consider voting for Romney, that would be sacrilege to many of my friends and colleagues.
Yet that doesn't bother me. Voting is something that should be secret. If you hold back your voting preference you can actually have mature and thoughtful conversations, even one's that go against the grain of the groupthink you happen to exist in. You can critique the party of your friends and praise alternative policies. People are still rational on the issues. It is simply on the matter of the final vote that they insist on loyalty. But maybe the reason few care so little about the final vote is that the focus on the winner makes the impact ever less meaningful. If we focused more on the actual discussions of issues and less on the final outcome, we would have a more civil and thoughtful political world, one that tolerated much more disagreement and engagement.
—RB
Refugee Writers and Inner Emigrants
‘They must remember that they are constantly on the run, and that the world’s reality is actually expressed by their escape.’
-Hannah Arendt, ‘On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing’
Hannah Arendt never forgot that she was on the run from totalitarianism. Neither did she cease to express its reality in her work. She is the late twentieth-century’s most politically articulate refugee writer: an escapologist who taught us about the real nature of our chains. But the ‘they’ who must remember that they are ‘on the run’ in this quotation are not refugees from persecution. They are fugitives of the mind, the ‘inner emigrants’ who retreated from totalitarianism in their heads.
Two of Arendt’s most elegant and characteristic ironic gestures are present in this sentence. First, addressing the inner emigrant using language that more properly belongs to the refugee (running, escaping) performs the intimate and uneasy relation between existential homelessness and political and historical homelessness that is at the heart of her work. Don’t think all your lofty freethinking somehow allows you to rise out of the world’s darkness; don’t forget that your contemplation is as much a symptom of your political times as it is an escape from them. The inner emigrant must learn her lessons from the refugee, from the one, indeed, who is never allowed to forget she is on the run.
The imperative for the inner emigrant to listen to the refugee is what also makes the irony of this sentence situational. The occasion is Arendt’s acceptance of the Lessing prize in Hamburg in 1959. Her theme, ‘thinking in dark times’, would have held few initial surprises for her audience who would have anticipated the reference to Lessing’s famous Selbstdenken, self-thinking as the perquisite of freedom. But Arendt offers scant comfort to those thinkers in her audience who might have counted themselves as inner emigrants under the Reich. Thinking in Lessing doesn’t mean retreating into self-absorption, she reminds them, but anticipating what we say with others. No point in being one’s own angry comedian. There is little to be gained by muttering alone in the dark. The real scandal of totalitarianism is that it condemns the humanity that comes from this kind of exchange to worldlessness. Running directly parallel to ‘the invisibility of thinking and feeling’ into which inner emigrants escape, therefore, is the invisibility of totalitarianism’s superfluous people, the refugees, the inmates of work and death camps, who take refuge together, she says, quietly, in the weird companionability of the ‘closely packed human beings.’
Few in Arendt’s Hamburg audience would have missed the fetid historical referent behind those ‘closely packed human beings’. The point she was making was not that the experiences were comparable (compassionate empathy for Arendt was always besides the political point), but rather that under Nazi totalitarianism there was no more place for the thinking mind than there was for the Jew. And this is the reality that the inner emigrant must keep in mind: the irreality to which so many were condemned. With characteristic understatement and rhetorical control, Arendt uses the historical occasion of her lecture to demonstrate her argument: the Jewish refugee comes out of the darkness into the very public space of the Free City of Hamburg to think about what happens when thoughts and persons are expelled from humanity. She then expresses the reality of her journey in the ironic dialogism of her prose. The full quote reads:
Flight from the world in dark times of impotence can always be justified as long as reality is not ignored, but is constantly acknowledged as the thing that must be escaped. When people chose this alternative, private life too can retain a by no means significant reality, even thought it remains impotent. Only it is essential for them to realize that the realness of this reality consists not in its deeply personal note, any more than it springs from privacy as such, but inheres in the world from which they have escaped. They must remember that they are constantly on the run, and that the world’s reality is actually expressed by their escape. Thus, too, the true force of escapism springs from persecution, and the personal strength of the fugitives increases as the persecution and danger increase.
As much as the distinctions between different kinds of emigration, it is the movement of flight, and everything that can be expressed in it, that Arendt is conveying here. In his translation of Rilke’s Die Tauben, which he dedicated to Arendt, Robert Lowell, re-casts homesickness as a feeling for ‘flight’s lost moment of fluttering terror.’ Fluttering between registers and contexts, between the mind and what it must remember, between inner and outer emigrants, Arendt’s writing keeps that terror in worldly view.
To talk about Arendt as a refugee writer, then, is not just to acknowledge her biographical circumstance or her major importance as one of the first theorists of modern statelessness. ‘Refugeeness’ cuts straight through her work like, she might have said, a thin red thread. She does not so much think from the position of a refugee, as think through the experience of exile to the extent that it becomes the paradigm rather than the exception. Thinking itself, indeed, becomes a refugee art in her later work. In this, perhaps, she offers a model for how we might approach the often hybrid and hard-to-place writing of some of her contemporaries in exile. In fact, we might even say, Arendt teaches us to look at the reality of totalitarianism from the only perspective that can truly matter, from one remove from that reality.
The late Elisabeth Young-Bruehl was one of the first to grasp the significance of Arendt’s refugee method. Her still unsurpassed biography is bisected by the chapter, ‘Stateless Persons’, which describes Arendt’s flight from Europe and the origins, biographical, political and historical, of her work on totalitarianism. When Young-Bruehl next came to write the life of the psychoanalyst Anna Freud, she repeated the gesture: the chapter ‘On Losing and Being Lost’ describes the self-analysis Freud underwent after her escape to England. Mourning both her father (Sigmund Freud died in exile in 1938) and her lost home (‘How strange it is to carry a past within oneself which can no longer be built upon’), the experience of emigration shifts not only the thinker, but also the ground on which she thinks. For Freud, as for Arendt too, the new threat is about a reality in which it is possible to totally disappear; of retreating into the mind to the extent that one becomes as lost as the object, person, past, or country, one mourns. In a world shadowed by the dark, writes Freud in ‘About Losing and Being Lost’, the temptation is ‘to follow the lost object into death.’
Arendt would have been uncomfortable, to say the least, with keeping intellectual company with a psychoanalyst (she might have been wryly amused to know that her work was the subject of discussion at a conference on ‘Psychoanalysis and Totalitarianism’ in London in September). Psychoanalysis is precisely where the inner emigrant might forget the reality she is fleeing and vanish into a hole of private self-absorption. Read both Arendt and Freud as refugee writers, however, and they arrive in a very similar place: for both the task of the mind after totalitarianism is to become reconciled to a ‘seemingly unendurable reality’ (in Arendt’s words); a reality in which oblivion is an ever-present threat. ‘The best that can be achieved’ after Nazi totalitarianism, Arendt tells her Hamburg audience in 1959 ‘is to know precisely what it was, and to endure this knowledge, and then to wait and see what comes of knowing and enduring.’ ‘What is true for today can become nonsense in no time at all’, echoes Freud in a line quoted by Young-Bruehl: ‘So one lives just in the present and must get used to it.’ These are not the statements of women who have found a new home in the world, but rather of two thinkers who understand how emigration has transformed not only the earth, but the ways in which the mind inhabits it.
-Lyndsey Stonebridge
The Flipped Classroom
For those of us who care about education, at either the college or high school level, there is nothing more exciting and terrifying today than the promise of the use of technology in teaching. At this moment, numerous companies around the country are working with high schools and colleges to create online courses, tutorials, and webinars that will be able to provide training and information to millions of people around the world. In fact, I just took a webinar today, required by the New York Council for the Humanities, a mandatory course that was supposed to train me to facilitate a Community Conversation on democracy that will be held next week at the Arendt Center.
Many of these web-based courses are offered free. They will be taught by leading experts who teach at the best universities in the world. And they will be available to anyone in any country of any income with a computer. The possibilities and potential benefits of such courses are extraordinary. And yet, as with any great new technology, these courses are also dangerous.
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education describes Tony Hyun Kim, a MIT graduate who moved to Mongolia and spent three months tutoring and teaching local high school students as they took a course in circuits-and-electronics class, a class that is usually taken by MIT sophomores. The class offered free online by edX, a consortium of MIT and Harvard, uses video and interactive exercises and is available to anyone who signs up. What Mr. Kim did is use this advanced course taught by MIT professors as a basic resource for his high school students in Mongolia. He then helped the young students to take the course. Twelve of his students passed the course and earned a certificate of completion. "One 15-year-old, Battushig, aced the course, one of 320 out of students worldwide to do so." According to the Chronicle:
The adventure made the young MIT graduate one of the first to blend edX's content with face-to-face teaching. His hybrid model is one that many American students may experience as edX presses one of its toughest goals: to reimagine campus learning. EdX ended up hiring Mr. Kim, who hopes to start a related project at the university level in Mongolia.
What is now being called the "flipped classroom"—authoritative professors lecture thousands or hundreds of thousands in their dorm rooms while young facilitators then meet with students physically in classrooms—has enormous consequences for education around the world and also in the United States.
Currently, every university hires Ph.D.s as professors to teach courses and high schools hire teachers. These professors and teachers teach their own courses, set their curriculum, and are responsible for creating an educational environment. Often they are large lectures or poor classes in which students learn very little. Sometimes at research universities the professors have graduate students who spend time with the undergrads while professors do their own work. Often these graduate students in turn care less about teaching than their own research, leaving poor undergraduates to fend for themselves. In most instances, large lecture courses provide students with painfully little personal attention, the kind of one on one or small group interaction in which real education happens. What is more, these courses are expensive, since the universities subsidize the research and training of the professors.
Now imagine that community colleges and even large universities embrace the flipped classroom? Why not have students take a course from edX or Coursera, another similar service. The course is free. The college or university could then hire facilitators like Mr. Kim to work one on one with students. These facilitators can be cheap. They may even be free. As the Chronicle reports, Harvard professors E. Francis Cook Jr. and Marcello Pagano are working to mobilize a crowd of volunteers to help teach their courses.
The veteran professors will teach a class on epidemiology and biostatistics this fall, one of Harvard's first on edX. Details are still being worked out, but they hope to entice alumni to participate, possibly by moderating online forums or, for those based abroad, leading discussions for local students. Mr. Cook sees those graduates as an "untapped resource. We draw people into this program who want to improve the health of the world," he says. "I'm hoping we'll get a huge buy-in from our alums."
There will be many young people who will volunteer to facilitate such courses. In return they will learn something. They will meet smart young potential employees and recruit them to work in their business ventures. And they will do a service to their alma maters. This enlistment of free labor to help with online learning is already happening. And it will upend the teaching profession at all levels, just as star doctors at major hospitals will increasingly diagnose hundreds of patients a day from their offices while assistants around the world simply follow their instructions.
Will the new educational regime offer a better education for the students? In some cases yes. There are unmistakable advantages both in cost and maybe even in quality that such flipped courses offer. But there is also a profound loss of what might be called educational space and, more importantly, educational authority.
If such facilitators are recent college graduates, like Mr. Kim, or if they are Ph.D.s but hired not as professors and thus without the authority of present professors, there is a loss of the very sense of what a university or college is—a space for the transmission of knowledge from scholars and scientists to young citizens. What does it mean to lose the community of professors who currently populate these educational institutions?
And what about when this hollowing out of the professoriate infects elite universities like MIT and Harvard themselves? The Chronicle asks:
One question is how edX might improve elite universities, which are late to the e-learning game. In the spring, MIT tested the edX circuits class with about 20 on-campus students. It was a hit: A majority said they would take another Web class....Another benefit: Students could rewind or fast-forward their professor. Data showed MIT students tended to watch the videos at 1.5 speed, which makes voices sound almost like chipmunks but delivers information more rapidly. "I do want MIT to offer more online education," Ms. LaPenta says.
A hit with students it may be. And they may indeed learn the material and pass the course. But listening to their professor's lectures at 1.5 speed—that is fascinating and frightening. We all are aware of the ways that technology divorces us from the traditional pace of human life. We drive or fly and travel distances in hours that used to take years. We send mail at the speed of the internet. But what will it mean when we speak at 1.5 speed? And speaking is one thing. But teaching and learning?
I have no doubt that studies are being done right now to measure the optimal speeds at which students can listen to lectures and still process the information. Pretty soon students will watch lectures like many of us now watch t.v., on delay so that it can be fast-forwarded, rewound, and sped up. It is one thing to imagine this as useful for individuals who want to learn how to program a computer or fix an engine or publish a book. But to think that our most illustrious liberal arts institutions will adopt the motto of education at the personal speed of the internet is more than simply strange.
Education, writes Hannah Arendt in The Crisis in Education, is predicated on the basic fact that human beings are born into the world. Young people come into the world and, because they are newcomers and uninitiated, need to be educated, which means they must be introduced to the world. Parents do this to some degree in the home, bringing the child from the home into the wider world. But the primary institutions in which children are educated, in which they are led into the world, are schools.
Normally the child is first introduced to the world in school. Now school is by no means the world and must not pretend to be; it is rather the institution we interpose between the private domain of the home and the world in order to make the transition from the family to the world possible at all.
For Arendt, the key element of education is the authority of the parent, teacher or professor. The teacher takes responsibility for bringing the child into the world, which requires authority:
The teacher's qualification consists in knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it, but his authority rests on his assumption of responsibility for that world. Vis-à-vis the child it is as though he were a representative of all adult inhabitants, pointing out the details and saying to the child: This is our world.
The authority of the teacher is, at bottom, a matter of his or her willingness to take responsibility for the world. In other words, the teacher must be conservative in the sense that his or her role is to "cherish and protect something—the child against the world, the world against the child, the new against the old, the old against the new." The teacher conserves both the world as it is—insofar as he teaches the child what is rather than what should be or what will be—and the child in her newness—by refusing to tell the child what will be or should be, and thus allowing the child the experience of freedom to rebel against the world when and if the time is right.
Arendt's point is that education requires that a child be confronted with the world as it is, not how the student wants it to be. This will often be painful and uncomfortable. It requires authority, and it requires that the student learn to conform to the world. An essential part of education, therefore, is that the student not be in control and that students be led by an external, adult, and respected authority. Which is why, for Arendt, education depends upon the authority of teachers and professors. The idea that our best institutions are imagining an educational present where students spend more and more of their time online where they, and not the professors, control and determine their way of learning does present a threat to education.
Of course, the goal of education is to create independent thinkers. The capstone experience at Bard College, where I teach, and at Amherst College, where I studied, is a senior thesis (at Bard this is mandatory, at Amherst only for honors students). The senior thesis is the transition from education to adulthood and it can be an extraordinary and moving experience. But it is a mistake when students insist—as they often do—on doing too many tutorials or seminars too early in their careers. Students must first learn and such learning requires being led by an authority. Too many students and professors today ignore the importance of authority in education. Technology threatens to feed that already present cultural tendency to free students from their tutelage to professors.
Amongst the myriad of benefits promised by distance learning and the flipped classroom, it is imperative to see where the real dangers and pitfalls lie. The grave danger of the flipped classroom is precisely in the perpetuation of the dominant trend of progressive education that has infiltrated teaching at all levels since Piaget and Dewey. It is the claim that students can and ought to be in charge of their own education.
In freeing students from the classroom, in distancing them further from the authority figure of a professor, in replacing Ph.D.s and professors with lesser trained facilitators, in giving students the power to speed up or slow down the professor's lecture, we are empowering and liberating students and giving them ever more control over their education. This may allow them to learn better or graduate more quickly. It may reduce the cost of college and high school and it may train people better for certain jobs. They may enjoy their education more. But such an education does not teach students what the world is like. It does not insist that they first learn what is before they begin to fashion the world as they want it to be. It comes from a loss of faith in and love for the world as it is, a loss that pervades our society that no longer believes in itself. Such an attitude does not assume responsibility for the world and insist that young people must first learn about the world, at least as the world is now. And it is just such a responsibility that educators must adopt.
The real problem with the rush towards technological education is that is focused interminably on the future. On qualifications for jobs and preparation for what is to come. Education, at least education that might succeed in introducing young people into a common world which they love and treasure, requires a turn towards the past. Just such a turn from the backwards-glancing education of the liberal arts to the forward-thrusting education to prepare students for jobs and careers is the real threat inherent in the present mania for technologically-enhanced pedagogy. Technology is not evil; it can be greatly helpful. But we must first understand why it is we are so desperate for it if we are to integrate it into our world. Otherwise, it will break the world.
On this weekend, I encourage you to take up Hannah Arendt's essay, The Crisis in Education. You can order it here from Amazon. Or listen to Hannah Arendt read from her essay in animated form here.
-RB
“The Origin and Character of Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Judgment” – Jeff Marshall
“The Origin and Character of Hannah Arendt's Theory of Judgment”
David L. Marshall
Political Theory 2010 38 (3) 367-393
Drawing chiefly on entries between 1952 and 1957 in Arendt's recently published Denktagebuch, David Marshall proposes an account of the origin of Arendt's theory of judgment based on her early readings of Hegel, Aristotle, and Kant. Marshall sets the broader frame of his argument in terms of the shift between Arendt's negative appraisal of Kant's philosophy in the second Critique as recorded in her (unpublished) Berkeley lecture of 1955 and her embrace of the third Critique in 1970 (in Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy). Arendt saw the categorical imperative as concerning only the individual and thus ignoring the plurality of the world. Kant's aesthetics offers her the resources for a bold shift in political thinking but critics argue that too much emphasis on the individual's subjective decision (for example in the idea of taste) potentially undermines an eventual group judgment.
One of Marshall's strongest contributions helps explain how these group judgments develop in Arendt's view. Taking up an entry from December 1952 in the Denktagebuch on Hegel's Logic, he argues that Arendt's early understanding of judgment involves a move from particular to general characterized by “continuity” rather than “subsumption” (Hegel, cited by Marshall, 373). As an example, the judgment “Cicero is great” would not place Cicero under the already existing definition of greatness, but lead to a reconsideration of both terms. For Arendt this reconsideration points the way to a discussion about the shifts in meaning involved. Thus “in an Arendtian gloss, Hegel's emphasis on reflective judgment is a commitment to worldliness, to history, and to the particular” (375). From a broader perspective, Marshall's reading complicates Hegel's influence on Arendt by showing how he positively impacted her thought. Further work in this direction (drawing on the Denktagebuch) will be of great value in drawing a contrast with her general use of him in her published work to indicate an automatic development of history that threatens freedom.
The following section focuses on Aristotle's use of the term krinein in the Rhetoric and Arendt's double translation of the term as urteilen and entscheiden (judging and deciding). Marshall points out that the judge in Aristotle's text is not merely a spectator but also at least potentially and actor. As in the section on Hegel, Marshall sees this in terms of a turn away from the general and towards “a logic of the example” (379). One intriguing point for future research mentioned briefly relates to the connection between Arendt's reading of the Rhetoric and that of Heidegger in the summer semester of 1924 (published as Grundbegriffe der Aristotelischen Philosophie).
The remainder of the article places these specific engagements with Hegel and Aristotle in the context of Arendt's 1957 notes in the Denktagebuch that document her careful rereading of the Critique of Judgment. While Marshall sees these notes as being largely in line with the published 1970 Kant lectures, he employs the specifications made in his exegesis to respond to five criticisms of Arendt's theory of judgment from contemporary scholars broadly related to the supposed danger of the aesthetic dimension of her thought. Some readers may find this aspect of the article to be posturing and others may think that he sets himself too large a task, since each criticism could be explicated and parsed at much greater length. However, with his pointers to key sections of the Denktagebuch, Marshall offers a key contribution to growing work on the importance of this text and opens a number of lines of future inquiry.
-Review by Jeffrey Champlin
Asking—and Answering—the Question: Does the President Matter?
The Arendt Center recently completed its fifth annual conference, which revolved this year around the past and present state of the U.S. presidency. I attended most of the proceedings, and the presentations and discussions I witnessed were worthy of close attention. Perhaps above all, the conference sharpened my awareness for the prerogatives, possibilities, and limits that currently define the office of the President.
On the one hand, I now have a better appreciation for the ways that recent Presidents are even more powerful than they were in the past. For instance, they have taken on budgetary and policymaking responsibilities that Congress has effectively abdicated over the past several decades. And, particularly in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Presidential administrations have accumulated powers of surveillance, arrest, detention, extrajudicial execution, and war-making that circumvent public accountability—not to mention institutional checks and balances—in troubling ways.
On the other hand, recent Presidents face social and political circumstances that constrain their room for maneuver. In the narrow realm of governmental procedure, the frequent recourse to the filibuster and other forms of obstruction in Congress has curtailed President Obama’s power to promote legislation and fill judicial, diplomatic and other appointments. (As a result, he has increasingly turned to executive orders that, at least in certain realms of governance, bypass the House and Senate altogether.)
In the realm of public discourse, recent Presidents contend with a media and consulting culture that inhibits their ability—and perhaps even their desire—to engage the citizenry in informed debate. And in the realm of epistemology, recent Presidents face a confluence of events which do not merely stretch their personal and institutional capacities, but challenge the very terms by which we understand the world. The current state of the Presidency, in other words, is but one part of a larger problem of knowing and thinking in the present.
The conference’s panels and presenters did an admirable job examining these themes, and I do not mean that as faint or empty praise. Yet I was still struck by how resolutely “American” much of the conference was, and not simply because most of the panels dealt in one way or another with the Presidency and the wider U.S. political landscape. To some degree, this focus was only to be expected given the conference’s stated concern with “the American age of political disrepair” and its overlap with the presidential campaign. To my mind, however, the accumulated observations and arguments ultimately betrayed a form of what social scientists would call “methodological nationalism.” That is to say, much of the conference took it for granted that the U.S. nation-state was the appropriate frame of reference for collective reflection on the Presidency, even when the contexts and effects of recent Presidents’ actions reach well beyond this country’s borders.
The guiding question of the conference takes on a somewhat different light when we attempt to think beyond the bounds of the U.S. Indeed, when viewed from a planetary perspective, “does the President matter?” is not so much a provocative query as a curious, even peculiar one. Whenever global deliberations turn to issues like the Arab Spring, the prospect of a nuclear Iran, China’s growing economic might or the consequences of global material disparities, billions of people still regard the U.S. President as the most prominent representative of the world’s most prominent geopolitical power (all invocations of a “decentered” or “multipolar” world notwithstanding). Thus, despite the innumerable perplexities of their office, recent Presidents continue to claim, and continue to be granted, a disproportionate influence in the arena of political speech and action. For many if not most of the world’s residents, the reality of their significance seems so obvious that the weekend’s leitmotiv would not, I suspect, make much sense. Does the President matter? Of course! What is there to argue about here?
I do not, however, want to suggest that this guiding question is utterly baseless. It is in fact closely tied to Americans’ particular—and particularly pointed—anxieties about the accountability, trustworthiness, and effectiveness of their political leadership. Yet the existence of such anxieties should not, I think, imply in and of itself that the powers of the Presidency have been rendered irrelevant. After all, most if not all of the conference presenters ultimately affirmed that the President mattered, even as many of them deplored the current condition of public discourse and civic engagement in the U.S. Moreover, patterns of voter participation in Canada, Latin America, Europe, Japan, India and other parts of the world suggest (however crudely) that many of the world’s other democratic citizens have not reached the depths of apathy and cynicism that characterize the U.S. electorate. This is the case even if they too express distrust of the political figures who profess to govern and lead.
In the end, then, this year’s conference challenged me to consider the state of American and planetary politics with a more acute sense of the potentials, pitfalls, and stakes. Such an outcome is hardly the “miracle” that Arendt instructed us to expect in “What is Freedom?” But it at least offers a foundation for examining—and bearing consciously—some of those burdens which our new century has placed upon us.
-Jeff Jurgens
Terry Pratchett on Thinking
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
-Terry Pratchett
Malaise in the Classroom: Teaching Secondary Students About the Presidency
The gap between our citizens and our Government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.
-Jimmy Carter, July 15, 1979
Contemporary observers of secondary education have appropriately decried the startling lack of understanding most students possess of the American presidency. This critique should not be surprising. In textbooks and classrooms across the country, curriculum writers and teachers offer an abundance of disconnected facts about the nation’s distinct presidencies—the personalities, idiosyncrasies, and unique time-bound crises that give character and a simple narrative arc to each individual president. Some of these descriptions contain vital historical knowledge. Students should learn, for example, how a conflicted Lyndon Johnson pushed Congress for sweeping domestic programs against the backdrop of Vietnam or how a charismatic and effective communicator like Ronald Reagan found Cold War collaboration with Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev.
But what might it mean to ask high school students to look across these and other presidencies to encourage more sophisticated forms of historical thinking? More specifically, what might teachers begin to do to promote thoughtful writing and reflection that goes beyond the respective presidencies and questions the nature of the executive office itself? And how might one teach the presidency, in Arendtian fashion, encouraging open dialogue around common texts, acknowledging the necessary uncertainty in any evolving classroom interpretation of the past, and encouraging flexibility of thought for an unpredictable future? By provocatively asking whether the president “matters,” the 2012 Hannah Arendt Conference provided an ideal setting for New York secondary teachers to explore this central pedagogical challenge in teaching the presidency.
Participants in this special writing workshop, scheduled concurrently with the conference, attended conference panels and also retreated to consider innovative and focused approaches to teaching the presidency.
Conference panels promoted a broader examination of the presidency than typically found in secondary curricula. A diverse and notable group of scholars urged us to consider the events and historical trends, across multiple presidencies, constraining or empowering any particular chief executive. These ideas, explored more thoroughly in the intervening writing workshops, provoked productive argument on what characteristics might define the modern American presidency. In ways both explicit and implicit, sessions pointed participants to numerous and complicated ways Congress, the judiciary, mass media, U.S. citizens, and the president relate to one another.
This sweeping view of the presidency contains pedagogical potency and has a place in secondary classrooms. Thoughtful history educators should ask big questions, encourage open student inquiry, and promote civic discourse around the nature of power and the purposes of human institutions. But as educators, we also know that the aim and value of our discipline resides in place-and time-bound particulars that beg for our interpretation and ultimately build an evolving understanding of the past. Good history teaching combines big ambitious questions with careful attention to events, people, and specific contingencies. Such specifics are the building blocks of storytelling and shape the analogies students need to think through an uncertain future.
Jimmy Carter’s oval office speech on July 15, 1979, describing a national “crisis of confidence” presented a unique case study for thinking about the interaction between American presidents and the populations the office is constitutionally obliged to serve. Workshop participants prepared for the conference by watching the video footage from this address and reading parts of Kevin Mattson’s history of the speech. In what quickly became known as the “Malaise Speech,” Carter attempted a more direct and personal appeal to the American people, calling for personal sacrifice and soul searching, while warning of dire consequences if the nation did not own up to its energy dependencies. After Vietnam and Watergate, Carter believed, America needed a revival that went beyond policy recommendations. His television address, after a mysterious 10-day sequestration at Camp David, took viewers through Carter’s own spiritual journey and promoted the conclusions he drew from it.
Today, the Malaise Speech has come to symbolize a failed Carter presidency. He has been lampooned, for example, on The Simpsons as our most sympathetically honest and humorously ineffectual former president. In one episode, residents of Springfield cheer the unveiling of his presidential statue, emblazoned with “Malaise Forever” on the pedestal. Schools give the historical Carter even less respect. Standardized tests such as the NY Regents exam ask little if anything about his presidency. The Malaise speech is rarely mentioned in classrooms—at either the secondary or post-secondary levels. Similarly, few historians identify Carter as particularly influential, especially when compared to the leaders elected before and after him. Observers who mention his 1979 speeches are most likely footnoting a transitional narrative for an America still recovering from a turbulent Sixties and heading into a decisive conservative reaction.
Indeed, workshop participants used writing to question and debate Carter’s place in history and the limited impact of the speech. But we also identified, through primary sources on the 1976 election and documents around the speech, ways for students to think expansively about the evolving relationship between a president and the people. A quick analysis of the electoral map that brought Carter into office reminded us that Carter was attempting to convince a nation that looks and behaves quite differently than today. The vast swaths of blue throughout the South and red coastal counties in New York and California are striking. Carter’s victory map can resemble an electoral photo negative to what has now become a familiar and predictable image of specific regional alignments in the Bush/Obama era. The president who was elected in 1976, thanks in large part to an electorate still largely undefined by the later rise of the Christian Right, remains an historical enigma. As an Evangelical Democrat from Georgia, with roots in both farming and nuclear physics, comfortable admitting his sins in both Sunday School and Playboy, and neither energized by or defensive about abortion or school prayer, Carter is as difficult to image today as the audience he addressed in 1979.
It is similarly difficult for us to imagine the Malaise Speech ever finding a positive reception. However, this is precisely what Mattson argues. Post-speech weekend polls gave Carter’s modest popularity rating a surprisingly respectable 11-point bump. Similarly, in a year when most of the president’s earlier speeches were ignored, the White House found itself flooded with phone calls and letters, almost universally positive. The national press was mixed and several prominent columnists praised the speech. This reaction to such an unconventional address, Mattson goes on to argue, suggests that the presidency can matter.
Workshop participants who attended later sessions heard Walter Russell Mead reference the ways presidents can be seen as either transformative or transactional. In many ways, the “malaise moment” could be viewed as a late term attempt by a transactional president to forge a transformational presidency. In the days leading up to the speech, Carter went into self-imposed exile, summoning spiritual advisors to his side, and encouraging administration-wide soul searching. Such an approach to leadership, admirable to some and an act of desperation to others, defies conventions and presents an odd image of presidential behavior (an idea elaborated on by conference presenter Wyatt Mason). “Malaise” was never mentioned in Carter’s speech. But his transformational aspirations are hard to miss.
In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
It is this process—the intellectual act of interpreting Carter and his [in]famous speech as aberrant presidential behavior—that allows teachers and their students to explore together the larger question of defining the modern presidency. And it is precisely this purposeful use of a small number of primary sources that forces students to rethink, through writing and reflection, the parameters that shape how presidents relate to their electorate. In our workshop we saw how case studies, in-depth explorations of the particulars of history, precede productive debate on whether the presidency matters.
The forgotten Carter presidency can play a disproportionately impactful pedagogical role for teachers interested in exploring the modern presidency. As any high school teacher knows, students rarely bring an open interpretive lens to Clinton, Bush, or Obama. Ronald Reagan, as the first political memory for many of their parents, remains a polarizing a figure. However, few students or their parents hold strong politically consequential opinions about Carter. Most Americans, at best, continue to view him as a likable, honest, ethical man who is much more effective as an ex-president than he was as president.
Workshop participants learned that the initial support Carter received after the Malaise Speech faded quickly. Mattson and some members of the administration now argue that the President lacked a plan to follow up on the goodwill he received from a nation desiring leadership. Reading Ezra Klein, we also considered the possibility that, despite all the attention educators give to presidential speeches (as primary sources that quickly encapsulate presidential visions), there is little empirical evidence that any public address really makes much of a difference. In either case, Carter’s loss 16 months later suggests that his failures of leadership both transformational and transactional.
Did Carter’s speech matter? The teachers in the workshop concluded their participation by attempting to answer this question, working collaboratively to draft a brief historical account contextualizing the 1979 malaise moment. In doing so, we engaged in precisely the type of activity missing in too many secondary school classrooms today: interrogating sources, corroborating evidence, debating conflicting interpretations, paying close attention to language, and doing our best to examine our underlying assumptions about the human condition. These efforts produced some clarity, but also added complexity to our understanding of the past and led to many additional questions, both pedagogical and historical. In short, our writing and thinking during the Arendt Conference produced greater uncertainty. And that reality alone suggests that study of the presidency does indeed matter.
-Stephen Mucher
Stephen Mucher is assistant professor of history education in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College.
The workshop, Teaching the American Presidency, facilitated by Teresa Vilardi and Stephen Mucher, sponsored by the Institute for Writing and Thinking and Master of Arts in Teaching Program in collaboration with the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College was offered as part of the Center’s 2012 conference, “Does the President Matter? American Politics in an Age of Disrepair.”
New Book from the Hannah Arendt Center
The Hannah Arendt Center's latest book, The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis, is now shipping. We had forty advance copies at the conference last weekend and they all were sold. As the financial crisis lumbers into its fifth year, this book looks at the deeper cultural, philosophical and moral foundations for the crisis.
Here is a short excerpt from Roger Berkowitz's Introduction:
When this crisis hit, I happened to be teaching Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Two of Arendt’s insights struck me as having particular relevance to our present situation. First, Arendt confronted a similar phenomenon in which the crisis of totalitarianism was being normalized. The world has long known dictators. Hitler and Stalin, so it was said, were proof positive of the continuity of human frailty. Against this view, Hannah Arendt argued that it was mistaken to understand totalitarianism as simply the latest form of tyranny. Indeed, one should not understand totalitarianism, for to understand it is to normalize it and to desensitize ourselves to the fact of its extraordinary evil.
Against the effort to understand, Arendt counsels comprehension. By comprehension, she means, “the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.” The factual reality of totalitarianism, as Arendt comprehended it, was that in our world today any and every evil is possible and can even be rationally justified by otherwise well-meaning people. What is needed, she argued, was that we face up to the fact that totalitarianism, genocide, and administrative massacres were now ever-present dangers in our times. Originally titled “The Burden of Our Times,” Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism seeks not to explain totalitarianism but to face up to its singular actuality. Arendt’s passion was, as she later wrote, “to think what we are doing.”
Crises offer particularly good opportunities to think what we are doing. A crisis “tears away façades and obliterates prejudices” and thus allows us “to explore and inquire into whatever has been laid bare of the essence of the matter." When she discusses the crisis of education, Arendt affirms that the essence of education is natality—the fact that, born into a preexisting world, human beings must be educated both to fit into and also to remake that world. What we need to ask amid our contemporary crisis is: What is the essence of economics today that the crisis lays bare?
Surprisingly, since she is rarely cited as an authority on economic affairs, Arendt offers an original and thoughtful road map to think through the financial crisis, one that begins with the insight that the essence of economics is unlimited growth. In her telling, the seeds of the financial crisis are not in economics itself, but in the importation of economics into politics, or rather the dominance of infinite growth—an economic principle—in the realm of politics, where it does not belong.
Arendt develops her thesis about the dangerous subordination of politics to economics in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She argues that imperialism is the most important intellectual foundation of totalitarianism. At the root of imperialism is the transfer of the economic principle of unlimited growth to politics. Imperialism has its economic roots in the “realm of business speculation”—specifically the bursting of an investment bubble in the 1870s. As national entrepreneurs sought new markets, they enlisted state support for economic expansion. “Expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics is the central idea of imperialism.” The rise of imperialism, Arendt argues, means that politics becomes subservient to economics.
Arendt fears the confusion of economics and politics and especially the elevation of economics over politics. Since politics demands the imposition of limits and “stabilizing forces that stand in the way of constant transformation and expansion,” she argues that imperialist expansion brought with it a grave and destabilizing threat to the political order. When politics under the sway of economic imperatives is forced to expand on the world stage, political leaders must offer ideologies that give meaning to an ever-larger, undefined, disconnected, and homeless mass, a population that replaces a citizenry. Under the economic imperatives of growth, politics becomes world politics.
The book contains essays by Tracy Strong, Jerome Kohn, Antonia Grunenberg, David Callahan, Alex Bazelow, Sanjay Reddy, Hunter Lewis, Dimitri Papadimitriou, David Matias, Sophia Burress, Liah Greenfeld, Robyn Marasco, Olivia Custer, Miguel De Beistegui, Drucilla Cornell, Taun Toay, and Roger Berkowitz, as well as fascinating interviews with Paul Levy, Vincent Mai, and Raymondo Magliano Filho.
Withered Public, Disappearing Private
“What is necessary for the pubic realm is to shield it from the private interests which have intruded upon it in the most brutal and aggressive form.”
-Hannah Arendt
In 1973, Hannah Arendt was invited to participate in a series of conferences on the Humanities and Public Policy issues funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to be held at Columbia University. The first, scheduled for February 1974, was on the topic of “Private Rights and the Public Good,” and Arendt gave a speech in response to a paper on the subject given by Charles Frankel, a Professor of Philosophy and Public Affairs at Columbia University. (The original note cards of her presentation are available to researchers at the Library of Congress and can be viewed digitally online.)
Part of the grant’s requirements included taping the sessions and providing the Endowment with a transcript of all proceedings. Arendt objected to being taped and indicated she could do no more than present her oral commentaries; she had no time to develop a fuller paper. The organizers of the conference and Arendt reached a compromise: they would prepare a transcript of her comments from the tape; the tape would stay in the possession of Columbia University and no use would be made of the transcript, other than filing it with the Endowment as required, without Arendt’s express permission.
Some months after the conference, the coordinator of the conference sent Arendt the edited transcript, along with his wishes for her speedy recovery: while Arendt was in Scotland for the second of the Gifford Lectures, she had suffered a major heart attack. Unhappy with the transcription, Arendt indicated she still had her notes and would prepare something from them, adding that she thought this would present her thoughts more clearly, “even though these notes are written down in a rather apodictic style.” She had her secretary type up a version of the notes and then made a few additional minor changes and sent them to Columbia University.
“Notes on the Discussion of Professor Charles Frankel’s Paper...” provides several succinct insights into Arendt’s critical distinctions between public and private, which are especially germane to today’s political situation.
“Every individual by virtue of his citizenship receives a sort of second life in addition to his private life. He belongs to two orders of existence. Throughout his life he moves within what is his own, and what is common to him and his fellow man.” Public happiness was something that could only be attained “in public, independent of...private happiness.”
Today, Arendt bemoaned, the opportunities for experiencing this public happiness by participating in public life had shrunk, adding, “The voting box can hardly be called a public place.” It was better represented in the activities of a jury. But the paradigmatic “public right” for Arendt was the right to peaceable assembly provided by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Its exercise was still evident in “voluntary association”, she remarked, “of which the civil disobedience groups were an outstanding examples.” Arguably, it has been more recently evident in dimensions of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its iterations. (Though, for interesting commentary and documentary materials on this see Cindy Weber’s recent essay in Open Democracy). But what was definitely not an example of the exercise of public rights was the degeneration of peaceable assembly into “lobbying,” which Arendt saw as “the organization of private interest for the purpose of public political influence.
Evidence from the current campaign suggests that the bipartisan perversion of public into private interests continues at an obscene pace. A recent article in The New Yorker provided some frightening facts: The impact of the 2010 Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has meant that “very wealthy Americans have begun wielding increasingly disproportionate power in U.S. politics...A pool of only 2100 people has given a total of 200 million dollars to the 2012 campaigns and their Super PACs—fifty-two million dollars more than the combined donations of the two and a half million voters who have given two hundred dollars or less. In other words, the top .07 per cent of donors are exerting greater influence on the 2012 race than the bottom 86%.” (August 27, 2012)
What this means, using Arendt’s terminology, is that only a tiny portion of private interests will exert tremendous political influence. Not only has the public realm shrunk; the private realm of influencing politics has all but disappeared for everyone except the very few. Entering the voting booth in 2012 will mean exercising your private right to choose between one form of oligarchy or another. What then of public life? How can it be restored?
Arendt was typically vague about what to do about the influence of oligarchies on public and private life. “Neither the capitalist system [nor] the socialist system respects ownership any more—inflation and devaluation of currency are capitalist modes of appropriation—although both, in different ways, respect acquisition,” she wrote in the same speech. As to the consequences of enshrining acquisition as a principle of social organization, Arendt had nothing but criticism—see The Human Condition for this. To protect private life, we must “restore ownership to private individuals under conditions of modern production.” And what is necessary for public life to be restored is “to shield it against the private interests which have intruded upon it in the most brutal and aggressive form.” Yet all recent legislation that would have restored “ownership” or secured the public realm against brutalization by private interests seem to disappeared from the legislative agenda.
Is it time to call upon the 99% to boycott the election entirely? What other act of civil disobedience would be adequate to the task of renewing public life and salvaging it from its bastardization at the hands of greedy private interests?
-Kathleen B. Jones
The Dark Days of the Golden Dawn
Fascism is making a mainstream comeback. That is fascism in the sense of a nationalist and nativist movement, to be distinguished from totalitarianism, which is an internationalist and imperialist movement. The scene for the return of fascism is Greece. In the birthplace of democracy, the failure of the European Union has combined with the utter impotency of mainstream Greek politicians to offer an opening for Golden Dawn, a neo-Nazi and anti-immigrant party that is openly and violently taking the law into its own hands. The New York Times writes:
The video, which went viral in Greece last month, shows about 40 burly men, led by Giorgos Germenis, a lawmaker with the right-wing Golden Dawn party, marching through a night market in the town of Rafina demanding that dark-skinned merchants show permits.
The video is harrowing. It is racist and rightly condemned by legitimate parties. But no one, it seems, is willing to do more than to condemn Golden Dawn. Article after article speaks of the close relationship between Golden Dawn and the Greek police. They appear to act with impunity.
The real danger is only in part the destruction of shops and stands owned by brown people who don't have documentation; it is the shock, passivity, and even the support of the people and the police. Greek society is, as The Guardian reports, making media darlings of Golden Dawn. Multiple reports suggest that Golden Dawn has support of more than 20% of the Greek people.
The problems Greece faces are extreme. Overly indebted, the Greeks have not been able to choose a coherent response. They have refused to leave the Euro or nationalize their banks and their debt. But nor have they willingly embraced the kind of severe austerity that would allow them to return to good economic standing. The sad result is enforced and partial austerity at the barrel of an economic pistol. It is a painful and humiliating submission to international bureaucrats.
At the same time, the broken immigration politics of the European Union puts an impossible burden on Greece to police its huge and porous borders. Since illegal immigrants can travel freely in the EU once inside Greece, it has become an easy port of entry to the whole of the EU. There are now, according to the NY Times, more than 1.5 Million immigrants in a country of 11 million people. Other sources put the number lower at 850,000. Whichever is correct, the politics of immigration are underwriting Golden Dawn's popular vigilantism.
The combination of a broken political system, economic austerity, and growing illegal immigration is, as the video and the increasingly mainstream popularity of Golden Dawn show, a dangerous mix. This is a mass movement that is filling a vacuum of legitimate leadership. It is a sign of what happens when the political system refuses to honestly address the reality of the problems a nation faces; the complete breakdown in legitimacy and the turn to extremism.
Read more about Golden Dawn in the Times article.
-RB
Sign up for HAC News
Recent Comments
- Homepage on Can We Know Ourselves?
- michael kraft on The Delusion of the Omnipotence
- michael kraft on The Delusion of the Omnipotence
- Eugenia on The Alternative to Forgiveness
- On MOOCs; and some possible futures for higher ed | noelbjackson on On MOOCs; and Some Possible Futures for Higher Ed
Archives
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- April 2010
Tags
Blogroll
- Black Octavo
- Daily Dish
- Fortnightly Review
- Hannah Arendt Center
- Hannah Arendt Center Multimedia at Vimeo
- Harpers
- NY Review of Books
- Praxis at Big Think
- The Contemporary Condition
- The Point
- The Relative Absolute
- Via Meadia
- Who's Afraid of Social Democracy?
- WordPress Blog
- WordPress Planet