love of the world

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I have just completed one of my favorite teaching experiences ever, a semester of reading Hannah Arendt with about 20 students who were deeply committed to understanding her, debating her ideas critically, and living up to her expectations for integrity and rigor. On the first day, we watched a portion of her 1964 interview on German national television; and at the end of the semester, I think we agreed that she had cast a spell.

I have posted many short essays on Arendt here over the years.* For anyone who wants a taste of her distinctive thought, I could recommend this sentence from an article she published in The New Yorker on February 18, 1967:

The actual content of political life [is] the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, thus acquiring and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new.

This sentence contains several ideas that are characteristic of Arendt.

First, politics is intrinsically valuable. As she emphasizes a bit later in the paragraph, politics is not everything. However, it is a way of living well, of experiencing and earning joy and gratification. Almost everyone assumes that politics is a means to other ends–a necessary evil, or at least a necessary basis for justice, freedom, security, or other desirable goods. For Arendt, politics is a good.

But what is politics? Voting in a national election does not sound like what Arendt has in mind. For her, politics is being in company with peers–people who are equal and who can act together.

Arendt believes that individuals become peers when they can talk and act in a political forum whose rules and norms give them equal say. They need not have equal amounts of wealth, strength, or status to be equal in a fair political forum. My class debated this claim extensively, but it could be partly true, even if Arendt overstates it at times. Therefore, one reason that politics is good is that it enables equality. It makes us into peers.

Politics as acting-together also brings joy or gratification. This is because when we argue about what our group should do and commit to acting the way we have advocated, we make ourselves visible to others. And only by appearing before others and receiving a response do we know who we are as individuals. In this sense, appearing in public allows us to acquire a personal identity.

Bosses, dictators, and oligarchs fail to develop worthy identities because they never interact with peers. When they speak, everything they hear back from their subordinates is calculated and transactional. Only in the company of people who are free to agree or disagree do we learn what we are made of.

Finally, politics is about starting something new. A keyword for Arendt is “natality.” We are mortal creatures, which means not only that we must die–as many philosophers have emphasized–but also that we are born. Each human birth is a beginning of a story, and each new person changes the others’ stories.

About three weeks before Arendt published “Truth and Politics” in The New Yorker, I had turned one woman into a mother and one man into a father by being born. My story had just begun and had begun to change others’ stories. By acting together in this mortal world, we produce a legacy of “word and deed” that can outlast us.

For Arendt, “the world” is what people make by acting together. We are limited by nature, “by those things which men cannot change at will.” Failing to recognize stubborn facts prevents us from building a genuine world, within which “we are free to act and to change” (“Truth and Politics”). Science tells us what must be, and then politics allows us to make new things.

I suspect that Hannah Arendt’s ability to love the world was shaken by the Holocaust, from which she barely escaped. But the love came back. In 1955, she wrote to her former professor and lifelong friend Karl Jaspers, who was somewhat isolated at age 72, still living in German-speaking Europe as an anti-Nazi thinker with a Jewish wife. Arendt’s letter bubbles with enthusiasm for the books and ideas that she wants to share with him from her cosmopolitan life in New York. She writes:

Yes, I would like to bring the wide world to you this time. I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world that I shall be able to do that now. Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories ‘Amor Mundi.’ I want to write the chapters on work this winter, as a lecture series for Chicago University, which has invited me there in April.

This book was actually published as The Human Condition, and it represents the most comprehensive statement of her thought. Apparently, Arendt believed that it could have been entitled Amor Mundi: love of the world.

Another statement of that core idea came in her essay on “The Crisis in Education” (1955), which concludes with these sentences:

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. 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 a common world.

*See also: living life as a story; how Hannah Arendt moved away from pure thinking; Hannah Arendt seminar; Hannah Arendt: “The problem wasn’t what our enemies did, but what our friends did”; Hannah Arendt: I’m Nothing but a Little Dot; Reading Arendt in Palo Alto; “Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt; Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent, etc.

My Own Heart Let Me Have More Pity On

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This is the last of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “terrible sonnets” (terrible in the sense that they seem to describe deep depression):

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
 
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.
 
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, lét be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
 
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
'S not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

This poem begins with a clear problem–the narrator feels tormented–and a solution: he should be kinder to himself. This outcome is expressed as a wish (“Let me live. …:”), not as an explicit direction or decision. We might call the first stanza a “forgiveness meditation.” The syntax is straightforward and the words are familiar. The lines represent grammatical units and conclude with monosyllabic words that neatly rhyme, ABBA.

In contrast, the second stanza is an elaborate simile with challenging syntax, where adjectives function as nouns and nouns turn into verbs. The narrator gropes around his “comfortless.” He fails to find comfort there, just as blind eyes cannot “day.” He also resembles a thirsty person who finds no relief (“thirst’s all-in-all”) even though everything is wet. Perhaps he is alone at sea where there is ne’er a drop to drink.

These are tropes for being unable to obey one’s commands to oneself. If you are blind, you cannot order yourself to see light. If you are in Hopkins’ condition, your “sad self” will not comply with your entreaty to be “hereafter kind” to yourself. A person cannot decide to “day.”

In the third stanza, the narrator tries to grab his own attention, calling to his soul, then to his self, and then to his “poor Jackself,” where “Jack” means a regular guy, a common man. (You could get a stranger’s attention with, “Hey, Jack!). “Lét be” bears a stress mark, which is common in Hopkins; here it represents an interrupting cry.

The poem has moved from a hortatory subjunctive (“let me more pity”) to an insistent imperative. The neat line breaks of the first stanza have broken down as most lines are now enjambed. (This trend continues to the point that a later line begins with an apostrophe-S.)

The strategy has changed, too. At the start, the narrator had wished that his self would be kinder to itself. Taken as an instruction, this failed, just as you can’t tell a blind person to try harder to see. Now the narrator “advises” not trying to change. “Call off thoughts awhile,” and maybe comfort will begin to grow like a root left alone with room. (Also, a root-room sounds like a place of comfort, a quiet cellar in which to borrow.)

The final stanza begins, “At God knows when to God knows what.” This sounds like an idiom for ignorance–“God knows what” can mean “I have no idea.” I think the phrase is meant to land like that, representing the mental state of a despondent person. But we gradually realize that Hopkins is serious about God. The divine smile is not “wrung.” We can’t squeeze grace out of damp material after a rain. Instead, it just breaks out as sunshine between mountains, dappled like a cow.

Here the grammatical mood is indicative. In the phrase, “skies betweenpie mountains,” “betweenpie” is a verb of Hopkins’ invention. The subject of this verb is “the skies,” but behind them is the divine subject that makes them look pied, or dappled, or stippled.

The mile ahead is lovely, not because we have made ourselves happy but by sheer grace.

See also: for Gerard Manley Hopkins; Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Spring and Fall; gratitude and the sublime; Pied Beauty, illustrated; tangled beauty; when you know, but cannot feel, beauty

the Gulf War and the energy transition

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Whether the current war in the Persian Gulf will push the world away from carbon depends on many factors, including the trajectory of the war and the policy responses of many countries. David Wallace-Wells offers a roundup of recent news, which generally paints an optimistic picture about the rapid recent shift to renewables. I’d also note that Ukraine has developed the capacity to hit Russian oil infrastructure at long range, which could take another batch of oil off the world market.

Meanwhile, it’s worth taking stock of the energy transition so far. I don’t think the basic patterns are well known. Here I will make some observations based on two datasets that have limitations:

  • The World Bank presents data on carbon use from 2022, which is now significantly dated. However, it covers almost all countries.
  • The Energy Institute has data through 2024 but only for 75 countries, omitting most of the Global South.

The World Bank’s 2022 data show that the countries that used the highest proportions of renewables were very poor, such as the DRC at 96.3% and Somalia at 95.4%. All of Sub-Saharan Africa used 70.3% renewables, and all of the world’s low-income countries used 69.2%–compared to 10.9% in the USA. (The Energy Institute puts the US share even lower, at 7.2%.)

Poor countries use too little total energy per capita, but their people cannot afford to import oil, and the energy that they do use is mostly renewable. I presume that as the price of oil rises and the cost of solar panels and electric vehicles continues to fall, many poor countries will move almost entirely off oil. Tankers will virtually stop visiting them.

Rich countries will continue to have the option to buy oil and gas. As shown in the graph above this post, the relationship between a country’s wealth and its dependence on carbon energy was strong and monotonic in 2022, although the countries with the very lowest proportions of renewables were mostly petro-states. Bahrain and Qatar were at zero renewables, and Iran was at 0.9%. The Russian Federation got 2.6% of its energy from renewables, mostly hydroelectrics.

For 2024, I show the per capita income (from the IMF) and the share of renewable energy (from the Energy Institute) for each of 75 countries in 2024. The OECD countries–which are wealthier–are shown with x’s. Some outliers are labeled.

For this smaller set of more affluent countries, dependence on carbon is weakly related to income, and other factors evidently matter more. The highest performing wealthy countries are in Scandinavia, where policy and nature (mainly hydroelectrics) help.

The best performing large market is Brazil, at 35% renewables. Brazil is classified as upper-middle-income but has no oil and lots of hydropower (55% of the energy that it generates instead of importing). The USA is below the regression line.

In the Energy Institute data, the countries that had achieved the best improvements in carbon intensity by 2024 were Bulgaria and Chile. (Carbon intensity is the amount of carbon used to generate a unit of energy.)

I suppose the conclusion is that poor countries will virtually stop using oil, and petro-states will probably keep using it. Those with abundant hydropower will be more likely to wean off oil. The USA is a bit of a petro-state but also a dynamic and diversified economy, so we could go either way.

reforming the parties, and especially the Democrats

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We should change the functions of the US political parties. This is a different topic from the important–but permanent–debate about what each party should stand for.

As far as I know, every accountable legislative body in the world is organized into parties, which means that parties play an essential role in governance.

Our two-party system is generally thought to be a function of our electoral process. We could have more than two parties, but only if we reformed our elections in a fundamental way.*

When active Americans are dissatisfied with the party that they prefer, most opt to try to change it rather than quitting it (using “voice” instead of “exit”). Those who do quit tend not to vote at all rather than organize new parties. As a result, the Democratic and Republican Parties have repeatedly changed their ideologies and electoral bases since the 1860s and yet have never been replaced.

Although Americans have good reasons to be dissatisfied, they don’t actually rate the parties very poorly on average, nor have their ratings fallen very far. This is an additional reason to expect that our parties will persist.

However, the parties could function differently. Today, each party is basically a label for candidates and clusters of donors, consultants, and incumbent politicians who allocate money and volunteer labor to candidates on their side of the aisle.

Very few people join or belong to parties; we register to vote in one party’s primary elections. Parties per se do very little; campaigns and advocacy groups conduct almost all of politics.

As an example, I live in a heavily Democratic state of 7 million people, Massachusetts, where the state party has raised a bit less than half a million dollars so far in this election year. In 2023, it spent less than $300,000 for all purposes, including rent and salaries. The state party is not a major organization.

On the other hand, Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey’s political committees have spent about $16 million since 2019. (Elizabeth Warren’s political committees have raised about $28 million, but she’s an unusual case because of her presidential ambitions.) These figures illustrate a system that is based on candidates and their campaigns, not on parties as organizations.

People who choose to identify with a party argue about what it should stand for and whom it should support, but the decisions are decentralized. The outcomes depend on many individuals and committees who allocate funds and endorsements across a range of candidates and groups, plus candidates and the primary voters who make some key decisions at the polls. The phrase “the party decides” (from Cohen et al 2008) does not refer to a literal decision by an organization, but to the fact that certain well-placed insiders are influential.

Since parties organize lawmaking, they should be more accountable to regular people, and they should make their decisions about candidates and policies more deliberatively.

Their deliberations need not be wonkish seminars about policy. People who try to influence a party are entitled to care about ideology and values, power and ambition, various kinds of interests, emotions, and even “vibes.” But somehow a party’s conversation should be organized and productive, allowing the whole entity to learn, adjust, and accommodate a range of views.

Parties should also be pluralistic. Since our electoral system serves up just two parties for an extremely diverse country of 341 million people, each party should be home to heterogeneous people and communities. When a party must make a common decision, such as choosing its presidential nominee, these factions will have to compete. But on many other matters, factions can coexist–for example, Democrats can select Andy Beshear to lead Kentucky and Zohran Mamdani to lead New York City without contradiction.

Parties should provide ladders to influence for diverse people who discover political passions, talents, and ambitions. A sign that this is not happening is the fact that virtually no members of Congress held working-class jobs before they were elected (Carnes and Lupu, 2023).

(It is great that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a bartender and waitress before she ran for Congress, but she also held a BA from Boston University and had been a Senate intern. Graham Platner really is an oyster farmer, but he’s also the grandson of the designer of Windows on the World, and he attended the Hotchkiss School and George Washington University. It is hard to find any clear exceptions to the rule that Members of Congress are “bourgeois.”)

To connect parties to millions of ideologically and demographically diverse people requires changing how they operate.

Parties should be more than conduits for money and volunteering during elections. They should offer social and cultural opportunities, public education, recruitment and training, and perhaps direct services on a continuous basis. This implies that party organizations should have much larger budgets than they have now, especially relative to candidates.

Although donors could begin this shift by funding parties, party organizations must depend on dues or small contributions, not on wealthy donors. Besides, current federal law limits donations to parties while basically leaving support for campaigns wide open.

The parties should also interact regularly with other democratic organizations in our society, such as genuinely participatory voluntary groups and unions.

At the state and national levels, each party should organize its internal debates so that various constituencies are explicitly represented. This does not mean a shadowy struggle among donor-funded, DC-based organizations that can veto candidates and policy proposals–the dreaded “Groups” that are said to dominate the Democratic Party, especially (although the extent of their power is debated).

Instead, there should be an ongoing, public debate among organizations that are accountable to masses of voters, such as elected representatives of party committees from places like Kentucky and New York City. These factions should disagree and must ultimately settle some of their disagreements in primary campaigns. But they should also look for ways to mediate their conflicts, such as supporting different philosophies in different communities, running balanced slates, compromising on national legislation, or agreeing to take turns.

This is not an argument for moderation or centrism within the parties. Rather, we should expect debate and handle it productively.

These reforms are applicable to both parties. But I am especially concerned about the Democrats, not only because my own preferences align more with that side but also because the party that is further left should represent working-class voters. I have argued elsewhere (e.g., Levine 2026) that a serious threat to democracy across the developed world is a tendency for the left parties to represent upscale voters, leaving workers with nowhere to turn except to ethno-nationalism. The Democratic Party (such as it is) is actually a cluster of highly educated donors, candidates, and consultants. This is a particularly serious problem, and the solution must involve a different role for the party.

(These comments are informed by a recent Ash Center/Columbia World Projects meeting about Deliberation and Competition. Since Chatham House Rules applied, I am indebted to my fellow participants but I am not citing anyone specifically.)

See also: A System-Analysis of Democracy’s Crisis; why don’t young people like parties?; what if political parties structure our thinking for us?; two theories of American political parties; the Koch brothers network and the state of American parties; etc.

*A modest reform that I favor is fusion voting. Last fall, New Yorkers could vote for Zohran Mamdani as the Democratic Party candidate or as the Working Families Party candidate, which allowed voters to register an ideological preference while aggregating their votes behind one person. Mamdani voted for himself on the Working Families line while also leading the city’s Democrats.

Teaching Skepticism in Kyiv and Nablus

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This is a new piece by me in Public Seminar: “Teaching Skepticism in Kyiv and Nablus.”

It’s partly autobiographical (discussing my visits to Ukraine and the West Bank in 2025) and partly philosophical. I argue that skepticism supports compassion and commitment, when they might seem opposed.

It begins:

In 2025, I gave lectures and classes in Kyiv, Ukraine, and at two Palestinian universities in the occupied West Bank.

I have lived a tame life, and these were relatively intense experiences for me. 

As I had anticipated, Kyiv was heavily bombed while I visited, and I taught in a bomb shelter. In the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank—a zone of intensely concentrated poverty—I watched children literally playing with fire in the darkness, carrying burning garbage to build a make-believe lethal trap for the Israeli soldiers who frequently raid the camp later at night. Many of the walls are plastered with the photographs and names of armed young men (five to ten years older than the kids on the street) who have been killed.

I was invited to visit these universities by people who thought that their students might benefit from connections with a senior American academic. My best moment was when I demystified American financial aid for 65 Palestinian undergraduates who showed up to have office hours with me. 

I offered a lecture in each location on a philosophical theme: how to think about happiness.