Where Does Politics End? On Earth? How Far Into Space?

Gloria Maritza Gomez Revuelta, 

a PhD candidate at El Colegio de Mexico

At the conference on science diplomacy since World War II, one fascinating presentation was on a group of equatorial countries who in 1976 decided to claim the territory directly above their countries in space. These countries in South America, Africa and Asia were among the many non-aligned states who did not take the side of either the western democracies or the communist world.  

Pointing to a mercator map with the countries proposing the pact highlighted, Gloria Maritza Gomez Revuelta, a PhD candidate at El Colegio de Mexico, said the United States and Russia were both launching satellites into geosynchronous orbits for communication and surveillance.  The satellites travelled in space at the same speed as the earth's orbit so they remained in position until they fell from orbit.  As this band of space filled with satellites, the countries with land underneath the satellites wanted to control the space above their land.

The pact never became reality. In the discussion after the talk, several people discussed the issue of what a country can claim as sovereign territory. Where does space begin? At the limits of the atmosphere? Higher?  Gomez Revuelta said Hannah Arendt said politics is part of life on earth. 

Arendt opens her book The Human Condition by saying it was an event “second in importance to no other.”  Sputnik meant that human beings had taken a real step toward actualizing a long-wished-for goal: to escape the earth. In Arendt’s telling of the story, earth alienation is part and parcel of the all-too-human dream of freeing ourselves from our humanity. Sputnik’s launch thus signified not simply the lowering of humanity’s stature, but humanity's destruction of humanity itself. (from the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College)

The discussion continued raising serious issues, and also the issue of how far into space could an equatorial country claim territory? The solar system? The Milky Way?  The entire universe? 

The discussion continued at lunch about Hannah Arendt and space and the Cold War and world politics today.                                

Thinking and Feeling: The Inside, Outside Difference

 

The past and the future are infinite and meet at the moment we are thinking. 

Our thinking can reach into infinity.

A friend recently posted a question asking about the difference between thinking and feeling.  The French poet Paul Valery said:

"Sometimes I think and sometimes I am."

[Tantot je pense et tantot je suis]

When we think, we leave the world of feeling.  Valery says we leave the world altogether.  We engage in a dialogue within ourselves. In this inner conversation we examine an idea, weigh it, try to find its worth, but all of this is done within our minds.  

When external reality intrudes we stop thinking and return to living in the present, to sensing or feeling the world around us.  When we feel we take our world through our  five senses and act or react. We can take in that information and react immediately, or we can, as the expression goes, stop and think.  

Modern English usage hardly makes a difference between the words think and feel, but they are different to the point of being opposites in how they inhabit our lives.  

From the outside, the difference is just as big.  A person who is feeling, who is reacting to the world, will show that reaction.  We see a friend and smile: see an enemy and frown.  When we think, especially when we are deep in thought, we look like someone in a daze, or half awake.  We say a person is "lost in thought." The metaphor is right. The person lost in thought is not fully present in this world.  

When I think, I may sit and stare and not notice someone entering the room.  When I ride in traffic in Philadelphia, I am looking, listening in every way sensing my environment and reacting to multiple inputs every second.  

The graph above of thinking is especially evident in those who create. Whether art or science, thinking remains hidden within the thinker until the painting, or story, or building, or equation, or breakthrough formula expresses the thoughts hidden inside the mind.  

For more on thinking, The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt is fascinating.

The Philosopher of War and Terror and Politics: Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt 1906-1975

Today a friend asked and I were talking about politics and how refugee problems have led to wars in the past. Then we talked about how much current trouble stems from the way countries handle refugees at their borders. 

Which led me to recommend the books of Hannah Arendt. I am an obsessive reader. Arendt is one of about a dozen authors of whom I read most or all of their work.  So I thought I would make an annotated list of Arendt’s works. 

Hannah Arendt is a philosopher. She studied under Martin Heidegger, completing a PhD in 1928 at age 22 at the University of Heidelberg.  She escaped Germany in 1933 moving to France then to America where she became a citizen and is identified as an American Philosopher. 

I comment briefly on the books I have read. I also include at the end the books I have not yet read.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: Arendt’s most well-known book and most controversial is not philosophy, but reporting for the New Yorker magazine about the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961.  In this book Arendt uses the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Eichmann. Because Eichmann was responsible for deporting three million Jews to Death Camps, many wanted to see him as evil incarnate. But he was a failed salesman with a talent for logistics, a failure twisted into evil, not an evil mastermind.

Origins of Totalitarianism is a long and brilliant work on how modernity and the crisis of refugees and stateless people led to both world wars and to the creation of totalitarian states in Russia, Germany and later in China.  The book also clearly defines totalitarianism as a new form of government based on isolation and terror that did not exist before the 20^th Century.

The Human Condition: This brilliant book is not about Human Nature, but the circumstances of our collective life.  The book begins with the launching of Sputnik and the effect that event has had on all of humanity. 

On Revolution: The book I am reading now about the relatively modern phenomenon of revolution. She describes how the American Revolution succeeded and why nearly every other revolution has failed. 

Love and Saint Augustine: This book was her PhD thesis. I have never read anyone who better understands Christianity and what happened to the faith when it went from the margins to the center of political power.

Between Past and Future is a book of essays. All the essays are good, but the essays on education and tradition are stunning in their insight and how much they speak to problems right now.

The Promise of Politics follows up on the Origins of Totalitarianism with more analysis of Marxism and how the world of Ancient Greece, particularly Athens, still sets our expectations in the world of politics.

I have not read her collection Jewish Writings or Men in Dark Times because they essays are about the lives of people who I am unfamiliar with and Arendt takes for granted that the reader will know the work and significance of the subjects. I also have not read The Life of the Mind nor have I read On Violence. That will be next. If Democracy fails in America as it has in every other nation on earth. I want to have Arendt’s advice on violence fresh in my mind. 

If I could only read one book by Arendt, it would be The Human Condition. I wrote something on EVERY page of my copy. Next would be the Origins of Totalitarianism. Then Love and Saint Augustine.

I started reading Hannah Arendt shortly after I returned from Iraq.  I did not know it at the time, but in November 2016 I would become a political activist. Hannah Arendt describes clearly the best of politics and the worst. Because of Arendt, I am keenly aware of what political activism really means.  

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