Hannah Arendt is up for consideration today in CoPhi. She's often been misunderstood, just as Emerson said great people always are. Those who would be great often misunderstand themselves and wait for greatness to descend, rather than undertaking the effort to make it happen.
That's Maria Popova's understanding of Henry James's message in his "Beast in the Jungle"--the importance of doing something, even (as my old friend always said) if it's wrong. It's the flipside of Arendt's point about the banality of evil, that inactivity, inattention, and disinterest are the ultimate enablers of failure, misfortune, and tragedy in our world.
“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.” Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (NYer I, II)... Susan Neiman ("we could just possibly save ourselves...the world is a place fit for human habitation")
Hannah and Henry would have been disappointed but perhaps not surprised by this morning's headline in the Times:
Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn’t a Priority
Guess that begins to explain the absence of interest so far, at our school, in American Studies. "Interested in American culture? Concerned for the fate of American democracy?" Guess not.
On a more positive note...
In Environmental Ethics we consider cities, their contribution to the climate crisis and their potential for ameliorating it... For me of course, the crucial marks of a livable city include walkability and bikeability. If you can't pedal or perambulate to whatever you need in fifteen minutes, you might as well live in the 'burbs. But I won't say that in the middle of my 55-minute (on a really good day) auto commute.
What I will say is this: if we can muster care enough for the livability of our human habitat to design and inhabit walkable and bikeable cities and make them our norm and standard, we might stand a chance of saving democracy. But without the one, the other will most likely elude us. We're going to have to care, and to think.
It's a big if.
I lived in Boulder, Colorado for a few years, and I will always remember it fondly, despite the high cost-of-living, because I could - and did - bike or walk everywhere. Here in Tennessee, to bike to class or work would require either many miles on a four lane road with no shoulder or almost doubling the distance by taking backroads with loose gravel and blind curves. And don't get me started on the odd need to have large parking lots and lawns around every single business...
ReplyDeleteWell said.
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