A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz--A Review

For several months I have anticipated the new book A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz. I was not disappointed. The book opens with a sad and dramatic episode showing the fragility of friendship. Berkowitz invited a speaker to a conference who, by the time of the conference, had been elected to the German Parliament as a member of Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD). The conference went well with students engaging with the controversial speaker.  But after the conference, a colleague who Berkowitz considered a friend signed an open letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education condemning him—without calling or in any way getting in touch.

Tensions between friends are precisely a theme of the book. Hannah Arendt lost long-time close friends after publishing an article questioning Zionism after World War II and more so after Ardent published Eichmann in Jerusalem the most condemned and misunderstood of her many books and articles.  Berkowitz knits together the various threads of this sad tale in Chapter 6, echoing his own hurtful experience of a friend who denounced him publicly without any prior private exchange.  At the same time, Arendt’s “Genius for friendship” is also woven through the entire text, maintaining friendship through and beyond negative experiences.  Arendt saw friendship not as romantic love, which fuses two people into one, but as a relationship that preserves each person’s independence based on trust and respect. Friendship allows individuals to “appear before one another as free and distinct beings,” creating the conditions for dialogue, mutual understanding, and the “unity of a plurality” in political community. Which makes friendship a political virtue, modeling the trust and openness necessary for a shared world.

Although I have read all of Arendt’s books and collected essays, I have not read many of her letters.  After reading this book, I moved Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975 to my “To Be Read” shelf.  Berkowitz devotes Chapter 5 of A World We Share to Arendt’s women friends.  In my mind, Arendt seemed very much like Marie Curie in holding a respected place among groups of accomplished men in the gender-segregated world of knowledge.  So, to read about Arendt sharing her complicated life with women navigating the patriarchal world of the mid-century was fascinating. 

For me, the center of the book, the part I most looked forward to reading, is Chapter 7 titled “From Love to Respect”. Why a chapter on Love? For centuries, Love and Friendship have been systematically contrasted (or defined by contrast?) by philosophers. As opposed to love (eros) which means being attracted to the essence of the beloved, the inner self, “…what we respect in a friend is not their inner self but their persona, says Hannah Arendt, the Roman term for the public face through which one’s dignity resounds.” As I read this chapter, I was hearing lines from The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. In it, he explains the four Greek words for love which we call friendship, eros, family love, and charity. Lewis says the posture of friendship is side by side: two sharing a walk or some activity. They look out into the world and discuss what they see. In Eros, the lovers are face to face: they look at and into each other.  

As Berkowitz states at the opening of chapter 7, “Arendt’s writing does not offer a theory of friendship. She did, however, identify three defining characteristics of friendship: sustained conversation, duration, and respect. … As she wrote, friendship ‘is between two: a cutout of the world.’ … in friendship, two people carve out a space in the world—a homeland of conversation and mutual recognition where truth can appear not as doctrine but as something revealed between them. … Unlike love which can erupt suddenly and fade just as quickly, friendship depends on duration. … the intimacy and trust friendship nurtures cannot be rushed; it requires the slow accumulation of shared experiences and tested trust that develops over years, even decades. … Indeed, friendship is often strongest between those who fundamentally disagree.”

Yet despite those contrasting definitions, both Arendt and Lewis envisage the possibility of a confluence between love and friendship. Arendt describes her husband Heinrich Blucher as the love of her life and her friend. Lewis believed friendship could “turn into love” both metaphorically and actually. The friends turn toward each other when they become lovers. It was another delight of reading this book that I could compare two very different authors I admire very much on the same subject.

The final Chapter of the book titled “Common Ground” ties together the limits and value of friendship.  Berkowitz presents a story about the NPR reporter Zack Mack and his conspiracy theory believing father and how they came to share what they could of their very different lives through shared interests.  The ability to find and share common ground, to forgive, to work together for love of a common world glows at the center of all of Arendt’s works. Through this book I now know that glow is from inside Arendt herself. At the close of the book, I found myself wanting the book to be much longer. Agreeing with C.S. Lewis when he said, “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” But I will keep reading Arendt and discussing her works in the Virtual Reading Group, so the discussion, unlike the book, does not end.

 

 

The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson--A Review

 

I am accustomed to thinking of modern life as a world of networks. The internet and social media make networks almost impossible to ignore. But in The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson argues that networks are not primarily a modern phenomenon. They have always existed, and understanding them can change the way we understand history.

The title comes from Siena, where the open Piazza del Campo—the square—sits beside the Torre del Mangia—the tower. For Ferguson, they represent two different ways human beings organize themselves: networks and hierarchies. The tower is government, church, army, corporation—the formal structures of authority. The square is the less formal world of friendships, families, intellectual circles, merchants, conspirators, correspondents, revolutionaries, and eventually Facebook.

History, Ferguson asserts, has traditionally been written from the tower. We study kings, presidents, generals, governments, and institutions because hierarchies keep records. Networks are harder to see. Yet again and again, networks have changed the world.

Ferguson ranges enormously widely, from the Renaissance and Reformation through the Enlightenment, revolutionary movements, the Rothschild banking network, imperialism, the world wars, the Cold War, and Silicon Valley. Martin Luther did not simply challenge the Catholic Church; his ideas spread through a network made vastly more powerful by the printing press. Revolutionary movements depended upon networks. Financial power depended upon them. So did scientific and intellectual revolutions.

One of Ferguson's most useful ideas is the importance of the highly connected person—the node through which an extraordinary number of relationships pass. Some people matter historically not simply because of their formal position but because they connect people who otherwise would not be connected. 

C.S. Lewis says this brilliantly in his essay "The Inner Ring." He opens the essay with a passage from Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace showing a purple-faced general waiting on a mere captain who was part of an exclusive network.

Power can come from where you stand in a network as much as from where you stand in a hierarchy. That idea immediately made me think of Phillips Payson O'Brien's The Strategists and his portraits of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt.

Seen through Ferguson's lens, their networks provide an interesting measure of their effectiveness. Hitler and Mussolini created powerful and hateful fascist networks that helped carry them to power. But power increasingly isolated them. Hitler ended in his bunker, surrounded by a shrinking circle while the state and military he commanded collapsed around him. Mussolini similarly lost the network that had sustained him and died violently at the hands of his own countrymen.

Stalin is more complicated. He rose through networks as well as the Communist hierarchy, but his paranoia repeatedly destroyed the human connections around him. He managed during the existential crisis of the German invasion to restrain some of that paranoia and listen to capable military commanders. The Soviet Union survived and eventually defeated Nazi Germany. Afterward, Stalin again descended into increasingly poisonous suspicion and isolation.

Churchill and Roosevelt were the opposite. Both were extraordinary networkers. They cultivated politicians, military leaders, journalists, advisers, friends, and correspondents across decades. During the war they became principal nodes in each other's networks. Their correspondence and personal meetings created a relationship that connected two enormous political and military systems. Roosevelt died in 1945, widely beloved, just before victory in Europe. Churchill lived another twenty years and died one of the most revered figures of the century.

Networks certainly do not explain everything about those five men or the outcome of the Second World War. But Ferguson gave me another way of looking at O'Brien's portraits. The ability to create networks may help people acquire power; the ability to maintain them may help determine how effectively they use it.

That is what I liked most about The Square and the Tower. Ferguson did not merely give me another history. He gave me another way of looking at history.  And those are the history books I value most.

Rereading Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

 Earlier this year I reread Julius Caesar, probably for the fourth time in forty years. I first encountered the play as an undergraduate, and I can trace something important in my life back to that reading: it led me to Shakespeare. I read Romeo and Juliet in high school but it did not resonate then. Reading Julius Caesar a decade later after seven years in the Army I was enchanted.

I knew almost nothing about Roman history then compared with what I know now. Today I can see everything Shakespeare changed. He compressed events, moved things around, invented conversations, and gave Mark Antony a funeral oration that Antony never delivered, nor could have. The real Anthony was much less cerebral, much more soldier.

None of that diminishes the play for me.

Antony's speech remains my favorite passage in Shakespeare. I have read it again and again, and I still marvel at what happens to those Roman citizens as Antony speaks. "Brutus is an honourable man" begins almost respectfully and gradually becomes devastating. Antony never tells the crowd what to think. He leads them there. It was probably my first great lesson in the power of rhetoric—and in what a writer can do with words.

And Julius Caesar opened the door.

Over the next forty years I kept walking through it. I read the histories, tragedies, comedies, and sonnets. I found Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, hardly original choices for favorites, but I don't feel any need to be original about Shakespeare. They are loved because they deserve to be loved.

What has changed is me.

I read Lear differently five years ago than I could have at thirty. An old man raging against the loss of power, the betrayal of children, the deterioration of the body, and finally death meant one thing when I was an undergraduate. It means something else after four more decades of living. The words haven't changed. I have.

That may be one reason Shakespeare has stayed with me. His characters don't become smaller as I grow older. They become larger. Macbeth's ambition, Hamlet's inner conflict, Lear's terrible pride and grief, Brutus's disastrous idealism—I understand more of them because life has given me more with which to understand them.

Next on my list Julius Caesar is Richard III. For all his flaws, he is a soldier.

There are writers I have admired and writers I have loved. Shakespeare is something beyond either category. He has been part of my reading life for more than forty years.

I began with Julius Caesar as an undergraduate.

I'm still reading him.

And I'm still enchanted.

Partly Strong, Partly Broken by Nathaniel Popkin

 

Nathaniel Popkin’s Partly Strong, Partly Broken is a novel about a Jewish congregation, but it is really about the much larger question of what it means to belong to a community when almost everyone in that community disagrees about what it means to belong to a community. Especially to a Jewish community.

At the center is a lesbian rabbi trying to hold together a congregation filled with competing convictions, grievances, friendships, histories, and political commitments. She is pulled in multiple directions, particularly because of her determination that Jewish responsibility extends beyond the boundaries of the Jewish community. Around her, Popkin creates a collection of wonderfully imperfect people whose relationships unfold through Torah study, book discussions, friendships, sexual relationships, family tensions, and tragedy.

Running through the novel is Cain’s question after killing Abel: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Popkin never supplies an easy answer. Instead, he keeps asking variations of it. What do Jews owe one another? What do they owe their neighbors? What does a congregation owe the larger community? What does Israel mean to American Jews? And what happens when obligations to one group appear to conflict with obligations to another? I remember the question of Cain coming up in Torah Study in my synagogue.  One guy folded his arms across his chest and said, "Who is my neighbor?"  

One of the pleasures of the novel is that these questions emerge from recognizable Jewish lives, not abstractions. Popkin can be very funny. Theo and Celia spend years as friends before finally becoming lovers after Theo asserts himself in public. After a lot of sex inside a vacation house Celia brings him to, Theo is not sure he wants a blow job by the pool. Throughout the book, the rabbi frets about her relationship with her lover--a Palestinian Arab woman who lives in Israel.  And when the rabbi goes to the beach to have a day alone before the high holy days, she drives her Subaru--of course.

The novel ends just as news of the slaughter on October 7 reaches America.  All of the various conflicts remain unresolved as events in Israel threaten to make every existing division within the congregation deeper. Popkin does not resolve anything. We know that these people are going to continue arguing because the questions they are arguing about cannot be settled. 

I read Partly Strong, Partly Broken while traveling through Europe just before the Jewish High Holy Days, and it made the book personal. I found myself thinking about what kind of Jew I am, what I mean when I call myself a believer, and how much I actually want to belong to any religious community.

Popkin has written an engaging novel about American Jewish life, but also something larger: a novel about the difficult difference between having an identity and accepting the obligations that come with it.

And like the best Jewish arguments, it ends without ending.

The Strategists: Character, Strategy, and the Fate of the World

 

Phillips Payson O’Brien’s The Strategists is ostensibly a study of five wartime leaders—Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini—but beneath its military history lies a fascinating argument about character. These men possessed enormous power over the greatest war in history, and the ways they exercised that power cannot be separated from the people they had become long before 1939.

One of the book’s vivid patterns is childhood. With the important exception of Roosevelt, O’Brien’s subjects experienced childhoods marked by serious rejection, deprivation, or violence, even by the standards of their era. Churchill suffered emotional rejection and verbal abuse. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini grew up amid poverty and violence; the latter three were themselves brutal and troublesome young men. O’Brien does not offer childhood trauma as a simple explanation for dictatorship. But these early experiences help illuminate the extraordinary insecurity, vanity, aggression, and need for dominance that later characterized several of these leaders.

Roosevelt stands apart. Born to privilege and raised in a secure environment, he possessed plenty of vanity and self-confidence, but his confidence did not require him to be right about everything. That distinction becomes enormously important. Roosevelt could change his mind, tolerate competing advisers, and adopt new technologies and strategies. His great strategic insight was that the United States should exploit its immense industrial power rather than fight the kind of war its enemies expected.

Churchill, despite a profoundly different personality, shared some of this flexibility. Both men understood that the Second World War would not simply be a larger version of the First. Air and sea power could destroy enemy production, transportation, shipping, and fuel supplies while Allied industry created forces the Axis could never match. Roosevelt especially understood that American factories, aircraft, ships, and logistical networks were themselves weapons of war.

Hitler and Mussolini were far less adaptable. Both remained intellectually trapped in the First World War. Mussolini emerges as particularly inadequate to the responsibilities he had assumed. He wanted greatness without possessing either the military resources or strategic judgment required to achieve it. Worse, he was extraordinarily sensitive to what he imagined to be the will and enthusiasm of the Italian people. Strategy became theater. Decisions that should have depended upon industrial capacity, logistics, geography, and military reality instead depended upon prestige and emotion.

Hitler’s failure was different and ultimately far more destructive. Early victories reinforced his conviction in his own genius. When his decisions succeeded, the successes proved his superiority. When they failed, the failures did not disprove it: generals, allies, weather, inadequate will, or betrayal were responsible. As Germany’s military position deteriorated, Hitler became not more flexible but more certain. Reality increasingly had to conform to Hitler rather than Hitler adapting to reality.

Stalin presents the most complicated case. His prewar brutality and catastrophic purges had badly damaged the Soviet state and military. Yet the existential crisis created by the German invasion forced him to adapt. He learned to rely more heavily on competent commanders and to make decisions based upon military necessity. For a time, survival disciplined Stalin. Once Soviet victory became increasingly certain, however, the old Stalin reemerged. Success reduced the necessity for flexibility.

This is where O’Brien’s portraits acquire implications far beyond biography. The personalities of five individuals helped determine where armies marched, which weapons were built, how economies were organized, and ultimately whether millions of people lived or died. Character became strategy, and strategy became history.

The contrast is especially striking because arrogance was hardly confined to the dictators. Roosevelt and Churchill could be vain, stubborn, and badly wrong. The crucial difference was not that democratic leaders always made better decisions. It was that they remained capable of recognizing new realities and changing course.

That fits the larger argument running through O’Brien’s work. Modern war is not ultimately decided by heroic battlefield gestures alone. It depends upon production, technology, transportation, fuel, shipping, aircraft, and the ability to replace what has been destroyed. Roosevelt and Churchill increasingly grasped this. Hitler and Mussolini never fully did.

Perhaps the most profound lesson of The Strategists is therefore not about World War II at all. Great power magnifies character. An insecure man’s vanity can become a nation’s strategy; an inability to admit error can become an army’s catastrophe. Conversely, curiosity, adaptability, and the willingness to listen can become strategic assets as consequential as battleships and bombers.

O’Brien shows us five enormously powerful men confronting the same global catastrophe. Their circumstances mattered. Their economies mattered. Their armed forces mattered. But so did something much harder to quantify: who they were when the moment came to decide.

Brave New World: The Dystopia We Chose

 

In the swirl of dystopian novels, movies and video series that haunt my mind, I had the idea that I had read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I hadn't read it. The Brave New World is a bright, fun, full of sex, drugs and rock and roll, but at the same time it is a genetically engineered hell where no one is allowed solitude and thinking will eventually get one banished to a remote island.  

The utopia Huxley imagines is more comprehensive and creepy than George Orwell's 1984, which imposes its horror on an existing society, much like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Mao's China.  The Brave New World eliminated birth and parents and family, the state is all.  Children are grown from embryos and seeded in five categories: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon in descending order of mental capacity.  

The population gets daily doses of the drug Soma to keep everyone happy.  Sex is entirely recreational with woman wearing contraceptive bandoliers. Entertainment is everywhere. Solitude forbidden. The only books are engineering and operating manuals.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 follows Huxley in the sense that entertainment--the screens--are the real center of control. Burning books is almost unnecessary. Most people don't want them. They want interactive video.  

The video series Pluribus is a another twist on Huxley. A pandemic makes the whole world "nice" except a dozen people.  The question that animates the series: "Do want to live in a world without conflict? What price will we pay?" 

All dystopian novels in the past century are inspired to some extent by WE written by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

I am glad I read it, but won't reread it. In one sense Huxley got closer to modern reality than anyone else. But while his predictions are amazing, he is not a great storyteller.  I never found myself absorbed into the world of the novel the way I did in reading A Canticle for Liebowitz--the post-nuclear war dystopia by Walter Miller Jr. The irony and artistry of Miller is wonderful.  

Chalk Drawings of Every Award at the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony

Soil Science Prize — For burying 1,000 identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries and digging them up two months later to assess soil health.

One of the many delights of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in Zürich was happening just off to the side of the main stage.

From my seat in the balcony, I could see Keira Lee Rice standing stage right beside a large chalkboard. Each time a new Ig Nobel Prize was announced, Rice began to draw. She had only a few minutes. While the winners were being introduced and their wonderfully improbable research explained, lines appeared rapidly across the blackboard. About three minutes later, there it was: a finished drawing that somehow captured the essence—and the humor—of the research we had just heard about.

Rice is particularly well suited to the assignment because she belongs to both worlds represented by the Ig Nobels: science and art. She is a developmental biologist as well as an artist, and her association with the Ig Nobels began in 2024, at the ceremony at MIT, she experimented with live-illustrating each of the ten prize-winning achievements on a blackboard. The idea worked so well that live drawing crossed the Atlantic Ocean this year. Rice also created the evocative logo for the 2026 ceremony, the first held in Europe after 35 years in the United States.

Rice had to identify its central idea, find the joke hidden within it, translate all of that into a visual image, and then execute the drawing while the ceremony continued around her before the awardees left the podium. 

Her pictures captured the spirit of the Ig Nobel Prizes themselves: research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. Rice managed to accomplish much the same thing—with chalk, a blackboard, and about three minutes.

I photographed every one of her finished drawings. Here are the other drawings:

Peace Prize — For documenting that people value friends who behave viciously toward people they dislike.

Olfaction Prize — For collecting evidence that babies smell wonderful to their parents—but teenagers do not.

Technology Prize — For pioneering “necroprinting”: using mosquito proboscises as high-resolution nozzles for 3D printing.

Physics Prize — For theoretical and experimental work aimed at designing a splash-free urinal.

Biology Prize — For repeatedly and gently stepping on venomous snakes, under varying conditions, to determine what does and does not provoke them to bite humans.

Medicine Prize — Awarded posthumously to Tokuji Unno for an aerodynamic study of how to blow the human nose.

Chemistry Prize — For discovering that milk proteins produced by viviparous cockroaches contain about three times as much energy as milk proteins from cows.

Economics Prize — For amassing evidence that upper-class people are more likely to take candy intended for children and engage in other forms of unethical behavior

Biomechanics Prize — For devising a more precise scientific definition of kissing by comparing kissing behavior in ants, birds, polar bears, and humans.