The spirit of Hannah Arendt is still alive or finally back - and it feels so liberating to me - Finally I can breath and it's like comming home on the core what left means to me by heard.
She has the advantage of seemingly neither being interested in or needing to pitch to right wing populist sentiments. As with the established and committed Marxists who made critiques, she has other ideological commitments that are both anethma to such folks and are well integrated into these critiques. Now the challenge is .. can any of this significantly enter the filtering echo chamber of culture of mainstream media and politics.
Whilst I’m very much on the same page with Susan Neiman on almost all of her points, I (as a native German) would like to add, that one of the differences between the English language and German is actually how we express gender in grammar. In German we have three articles (der/die/das) which indicate the gender of a noun, whereas in English there’s obviously just „the“. It does make a difference. "The Teacher" can be male or female, „the“ doesn’t tell us the gender of the teacher, whereas in German the article before a noun is an indication of its gender. Therefore "der Lehrer“ in German is male, "die Lehrerin“ female.“Authoress“ sounds a bit unnecessary or redundant, since "the author“ could be female. But in German this wouldn’t be the same and so it’s not as comparable. 🤷🏻♀️
"politically correct" was always mockery of extreme sectarian Lefties, Maoists, Stalinists, etc. It was mockery by non sectarian, ecumenical Lefties having a laugh at the expense of dreary, rigid, doctrinaire Left cultists and lost boys in their late 30s, who hadn't found a real life and were still hanging around the "movement" for nothing better to do.
Aside from my general approval... I find her critique of modern evolutionary science an unfortunate hold over from the Lockean and adopted Marxist conceptions that presumed we were something apart from and as somewhat exempt from the natural world. In an era when absolutist Behaviourist theory still seemed plausible, perhaps understandable. The reality of evolution and study of the that suggested that wasn't the case. It caused dismissal first among the theocracy and then amongst secular utopian idealists. The former were understandably threatened, MANY of the latter fell into an unfortunate battle of choice with the probable realities... That. perhaps, unfairly detracts from their other arguments... Hopefully not too much, as there's lots of attention worthy critique also!!
