Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities

Amor Mundi 2/1/15




The Age of Political Correctness?

political correctnessJonathan Chait explains the rules of the new political correctness movement: "Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing. This has led to elaborate norms and terminology within certain communities on the left. For instance, 'mansplaining,' a concept popularized in 2008 by Rebecca Solnit, who described the tendency of men to patronizingly hold forth to women on subjects the woman knows better--in Solnit's case, the man in question mansplained her own book to her. The fast popularization of the term speaks to how exasperating the phenomenon can be, and mansplaining has, at times, proved useful in identifying discrimination embedded in everyday rudeness. But it has now grown into an all-purpose term of abuse that can be used to discredit any argument by any man. (MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry once disdainfully called White House press secretary Jay Carney's defense of the relative pay of men and women in the administration 'man­splaining,' even though the question he responded to was posed by a male.) Mansplaining has since given rise to 'whitesplaining' and 'straightsplaining.' The phrase 'solidarity is for white women,' used in a popular hashtag, broadly signifies any criticism of white feminists by nonwhite ones. If a person who is accused of bias attempts to defend his intentions, he merely compounds his own guilt. (Here one might find oneself accused of man/white/straightsplaining.) It is likewise taboo to request that the accusation be rendered in a less hostile manner. This is called 'tone policing.' If you are accused of bias, or 'called out,' reflection and apology are the only acceptable response--to dispute a call-out only makes it worse. There is no allowance in p.c. culture for the possibility that the accusation may be erroneous. A white person or a man can achieve the status of 'ally,' however, if he follows the rules of p.c. dialogue. A community, virtual or real, that adheres to the rules is deemed 'safe.' The extensive terminology plays a crucial role, locking in shared ideological assumptions that make meaningful disagreement impossible." Chait goes too far when he suggests that the only discrimination worth fighting is the overt kind, that their aren't systematic race, gender, and class biases that need to be addressed. The problem is not the invention of a word like "mansplained," which can bring to light invisible harms in an original way. The problem is when such words become a weaponized jargon whose use not only brings new insights to light but also offers an ad hominem attack on a person as a clichéd member of a group. Instead of a conversation about ideas, p.c. accusations like "mansplaining" or "Islamophobia" address people as cardboard representations of ideological oppressors and seek to dismiss them through a jargon that has a multi-valenced meaning only accessible to those initiated into a particular worldview. This is a phenomenon that Peter Baehr has rightly called unmasking (an idea he discusses at length in "One to Avoid, One to Embrace: Unmasking and Conflict Pluralism as European Heritages," forthcoming in the soon to be published third volume of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center). Chait is right to call out such unmaskings that separate the world into cliques of initiates and barbarians. We live in a plural world full of people with whom we disagree; learning how to talk with them, rather than over them, is an essential aspect of finding our way in our world. 

Giving up on Law

anti-rape demonstrationZoë Heller has an important essay in the NYRB on the legal and political movement to shift rape trials from law courts to campus and other administrative tribunals. It is, Heller argues, "a moral and strategic error for feminism--or any movement that purports to care about social justice--to argue for undermining or suspending legitimate rights, even in the interests of combating egregious crime." And yet, as Heller writes, "most anti-rape campus activists remain strongly in favor of keeping rape allegations an internal college matter. Students, they point out, are usually reluctant to go to the police (whose willingness to take sexual assault claims seriously they have good reason to mistrust), and because of this any attempt to institutionalize partnerships between campus security and law enforcement will only result in even fewer assaults being reported. Danielle Dirks, a sociology professor at Occidental College, and one of a group of women who have filed Title IX complaints against the university, recently told The Nation: 'I say this as a criminologist. I've given up on the criminal justice system. College campuses, which are supposed to be the bastions of cutting-edge knowledge and a chance to shape the rest of the country, actually can do right.' There is no doubt that the police and the courts are guilty of all manner of negligence, insensitivity, and rank stupidity in handling cases of sexual assault, but the wisdom of 'giving up' on criminal justice--of retreating from the fight for fair treatment under the law--and taking refuge in a system of ersatz college justice remains highly questionable. In addition to the fear of not being believed, the chief reason that students cite for not reporting their assaults to law enforcement is their uncertainty about whether the incidents constitute sufficiently grave crimes. Asking those students to take their allegations to campus tribunals--to have their claims adjudicated in essentially the same manner as plagiarism charges--does nothing to clear up their confusion about the seriousness of sexual assault. On the contrary, it actively encourages the trivialization of sexual violence."

Admit It. You're Affluent.

american affluenceDavid Leonhardt writes in a letter to subscribers of "The Upshot" that there is a basic confusion in the country around the term "middle class." "My favorite phrase in Josh Barro's much-discussed piece this week about who's rich and who's not was this one: '$400,000 isn't a lot of money--after you spend it.' Josh's argument was that while many people with household income of $400,000--or $200,000--may consider themselves middle class, they're actually affluent. Nationwide, fewer than 5 percent of households make at least $200,000. In New York, the share is only modestly higher. A common response--and you can read many in the comments section--is that a couple of hundred thousand dollars of annual income doesn't make people feel rich. They still have to worry about their spending, unlike the truly rich. After they've paid for a nice house in a good school district, a couple of vehicles, a vacation or two and the normal expenses of life, not to mention putting away money for retirement and college, they don't have much left over. All of which is often true. But here's the thing: Being able to afford those things is pretty good definition of affluence in modern American society."

Upper Middle Class Warfare

upper middle classReihan Salam over in Slate also takes aim at what he calls the upper middle class in distinction from the rich. For Salam, it is the upper middle class and not the rich who are, in his words, ruining America. But Salam's argument is not the usual one. As a conservative, he finds common cause with the upper middle class whom, he writes, fends off tax hikes that could actually fund generous social democracies, such as those found in Europe. Instead, what bothers Salam is the way the upper middle class protects its privilege with zoning laws, professional registration fees, and immigration laws that make life more expensive and difficult for the merely middle class: "You might be wondering why I'm so down on the upper middle class when they're getting in the way of the tax hikes that will make big government even bigger. Doesn't that mean that while liberals should be bothered by the power of the upper middle class, conservatives should cheer them on? Well, part of my objection is that upper-middle-income voters only oppose tax hikes on themselves. They are generally fine with raising taxes on people richer than themselves, including taxes on the investments that rich people make in new products, services, and businesses. I find that both annoyingly self-serving and destructive. The bigger reason, however, is that upper-middle-class people don't just use their political muscle to keep their taxes low. They also use it to make life more expensive for everyone else. Take a seemingly small example--occupational licensing. In North Carolina, teeth-whiteners without expensive dental degrees would like to be allowed to sell their services but are opposed by the state's dentists, as Eduardo Porter noted in a recent New York Times column. Are the good dentists of North Carolina fighting the teeth-whiteners because they fear for the dental health of North Carolinians? It doesn't look like it. A more plausible story is that dentists don't want to compete with cut-rate practitioners, because restricting entry into the field allows them to charge higher prices. We often hear about how awesome it is that Uber is making taxi service cheaper and more accessible for ordinary consumers but how sad it is that they are making life harder for working-class drivers who drive traditional cabs.... You'd almost get the impression that while working- and lower-middle-class people are expected to compete, whether with the Ubers of the world or with Chinese manufacturing workers or with immigrants with modest skills, members of the upper middle class ought to be immune. The result is that all Americans have to pay more to get their teeth whitened, to get a formal education, or to do any of the other million things that we can only get through licensed providers." 

Privacy? Who Cares?

nsaOver at the Pew Research Center, a new set of surveys offers some surprising insights into the way Americans view their government. You may not be surprised to learn that the IRS is largely seen negatively, even more so by Republicans than by Democrats. But one surprising result is that the NSA has remained popular, even after the revelations by Edward Snowden and especially amongst young people. "Favorability ratings for the National Security Agency (NSA) have changed little since the fall of 2013, shortly after former NSA analyst Edward Snowden's revelations of the agency's data-mining activities. About half (51%) view the NSA favorably, compared with 37% who have an unfavorable view. Young people are more likely than older Americans to view the intelligence agency positively. About six-in-ten (61%) of those under 30 view the NSA favorably, compared with 40% of those 65 and older." This fits with the widely held belief that younger Americans are less protective of their privacy than their elders. Privacy, and why it matters, will be the theme of the Hannah Arendt Center's 8th annual conference this October 15-16th. Save the Date.

Unbounded Archive

archiveIn an article about groups who are attempting to archive the internet, Jill Lepore bemoans the way the web has made the footnote unreliable: "The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is--elementally--ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: 'Page Not Found.' This is known as 'link rot,' and it's a drag, but it's better than the alternative. More often, you see an updated Web page; most likely the original has been overwritten. (To overwrite, in computing, means to destroy old data by storing new data in their place; overwriting is an artifact of an era when computer storage was very expensive.) Or maybe the page has been moved and something else is where it used to be. This is known as 'content drift,' and it's more pernicious than an error message, because it's impossible to tell that what you're seeing isn't what you went to look for: the overwriting, erasure, or moving of the original is invisible. For the law and for the courts, link rot and content drift, which are collectively known as 'reference rot,' have been disastrous. In providing evidence, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges often cite Web pages in their footnotes; they expect that evidence to remain where they found it as their proof, the way that evidence on paper--in court records and books and law journals--remains where they found it, in libraries and courthouses. But a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, 'more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.' The overwriting, drifting, and rotting of the Web is no less catastrophic for engineers, scientists, and doctors. Last month, a team of digital library researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory reported the results of an exacting study of three and a half million scholarly articles published in science, technology, and medical journals between 1997 and 2012: one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot. It's like trying to stand on quicksand. The footnote, a landmark in the history of civilization, took centuries to invent and to spread. It has taken mere years nearly to destroy."

To Compute or Not to Compute

baseballHarris Nye has a fascinating essay about the way different baseball fans react to advanced statistics. There are two kinds of fan. "Proponents of sabermetrics in baseball tend to speak very strongly when preaching the gospel of Bill James, mostly because the individual nature of baseball and the precision of baseball stats has created a sense of absolute certainty among saber-minded fans." On the other side, "baseball fans who dislike advanced stats are inevitably turned off by the firebrand nature of sabermetrics proponents. To the traditional minded baseball fan, a large part of what makes sports appealing is their uncertain nature." What to make of this opposition? For Nye, the difference is defense: namely, that statistically minded fans seek to take defense into account while common sense fans do not. Nye uses the example of a truly surprising statistical conclusion--that the Braves' Jason Heyward was 25% more valuable last year than Freddie Freeman--to argue that the source of the radical difference between common sense and statistical analysis is that most common sense baseball fans ignore defense. "The fact that by fWAR the gap between the two players can so dramatically reverse the value of the two players is the kind of thing that is so offensive to traditional minded fans about sabermetrics and wins above replacement. A Braves fan who just watched the team last year without using advanced stats would find the notion of Heyward being better than Freeman obviously false. Nobody likes their preconceived notions being challenged and it is always these issues of defense that cause wins above replacement to tell fans something vastly different from what they already believe about the value of individual players." Data analysis is so complicated and depends on such immense processing of information that it is impossible without computers. Which means that we no longer can have an informed discussion about baseball--or anything for that matter--without relying on mechanical brains. For those who think baseball is a game viewed with human eyes and the human brain as opposed to through a screen and a computer, statistical insight challenges the common sense world.  

How Best to Save the World?

save the worldHans Rollman looks at Julio Cortozar's Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampire: An Attainable Utopia, a hybrid, comics-novel recently translated into English that Cortozar conceived after participating in the Second Russell Tribunal, which was convened to investigate crimes committed by South American dictatorships, and then reading his own cameo appearance in the Mexican comic book Fantomas: "The genius of the book lies in the fact that it both has no prescriptive point, and at the same time conveys a remarkable multiplicity of points. It's a reflection of Cortazar's own frame of mind following the Second Russell Tribunal--his alternating waves of doubt and confidence; anger and despair and hope. In a world where injustice and genocide continue their march without blinking an eye, what was the point of the tribunal at all? It takes a plot within a plot within a plot to convey the inextricable complexity of injustice and violence in today's world, and a surreal fusion of the real with the fantastic to arrive at the hope that solutions are possible. Not to arrive at solutions, mind you--that eludes everyone, from Fantomas to the Russell Tribunal. But to arrive at the hope, that solutions are still possible, that utopia is attainable."

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From the Arendt Center Blog

This week on the Blog, Hans Teerds draws upon the writings of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin to discuss the importance of the interior in people's lives in the Quote of the Week. John Dewey provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We appreciate two volumes of Churchill's history of the Second World War and how they may have influenced Arendt's understanding of the human condition in our Library feature. And we are pleased to acknowledge a Special Donation.

This coming Friday, February 6th, the Hannah Arendt Center will host the fourth session of its Virtual Reading Group. We will be discussing Chapter Two, Sections 7, 8, and 9 of The Human Condition.


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National Security and the End of American Exceptionalism










So shall our nation, formed on Virtue’s plan,
Remain the guardian of the Rights of Man,
A vast republic, famed through every clime,
Without a kind, to see the end of time.































Roger Berkowitz

Avoiding the Catch-22


The NY Times Editorial page takes aim at online education on Monday. It turns out that studies show that more students in online classes drop out of classes, more fail, and fewer graduate. This is not surprising. But one might ask so what? Online courses are proliferating and will continue to do so because they are less expensive. For some students, they may even be better. But for high-risk students, the track record is poor. Here is the Times editorial board’s conclusion:



The Times’ solution is based on a common lament, that young people are caught in a double bind, what Joseph Stiglitz recently described as a Catch-22:


Stiglitz, like the NY Times editorial board, worries that the current higher educational system is poorly suited to addressing questions of class. Both are right.  College education is too expensive for most poor and even many middle class Americans. This is especially true since many people spend much of their time (and money) in college taking remedial courses where they learn little of extra value. And when these at-risk students do attend college, they too often emerge with life-altering debt rather than a transformative education.

What both the Times and Stiglitz want is to change the system of college and how we subsidize it. I leave aside the argument over whether government subsidies for higher education are the right answer. That becomes a question of how much money we want to pay as a percentage of our GDP.

But what does seem strange is that we continue to see our colleges as the problem here. As the Times rightly sees, the problem is that students arrive at college unprepared.

Our overburdened public colleges must spend a fortune on remedial education for students. And then we charge students for this remedial education, which frequently fails, leaving them with debt and nothing else.

Whereas colleges cost students money, high school education is typically free. The first line of attack on inequality through education should be reforming and improving high schools. Yet no one speaks about that. President Obama’s education initiatives focus on early pre-school education and community college. High Schools are left out. But if we could divert the huge resources currently spent on remedial college education to high schools, maybe college wouldn’t be so necessary. And maybe those who attended college might then be ready to work at a college level.


To read more on the idea of shifting funds from college to high school education, click here. To read more from the Hannah Arendt Center blog about online education, click here  and here.

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