Prophet or Fool: An American Journey, Part 1

In 1944, when I was three, I remember my father galloping around the farmyard on a farm horse without a saddle. In certain seasons his routine was, Get up early and milk the cows. Plough rich coastal bottomlands all day behind a team of horses. Milk the cows.

It was an essential civilian occupation, and had exempted him from military service.

The next year, as the war was winding down, he enrolled in a junior college. From then to 1952, he completed college and divinity school.

Having been ordained, a Protestant denomination sent him (and his family) to an American territory as a “home missionary.”

Being a PK (Preacher’s Kid) shaped my outlook.

There is a personage in the New Testament who Low Protestants call the Rich Young Ruler. He is mentioned in the first three Gospels as approaching Jesus of Nazareth to join his movement. One day, reflecting back on this, I realized that no one can be characterized as such in our society. In fact, in the American culture, no one can legitimately be called a ruler. Democracies hold that their citizens enjoy liberty and are not “subjects.” They are not subject to the will of another, as they would be under rulership.

This distinction is found in our common language. The Mayor is never spoken of as our ruler, nor the County Executive, the Governor, or the President. In cartoons where a saucer lands, its strange creatures say, Take me to your leader.

“Rulership is illegitimate in our society.” So far, I haven’t found it stated anywhere else. Prophet? Or fool?

Instead, such language as “the will of the people” appears routinely in our public discourse: “once the legislature, reflecting the will of the people.” Even Federalist 46 appears to err: “But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force.” Federalist 46 should probably have used different language, such as “But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the conclusion of the national deliberation and direct the national force.”

I can live in a liberal democracy because I can live with public policies reflecting the considered deliberation of the people, flawed though it sometimes may be. But neither I, nor anyone else, should ever consent to be subject to the will of another. As Immanuel Kant wrote in “What is Enlightenment?” to enjoy freedom is to enjoy freedom from tutelage. “Dare to know,” and to act on your knowledge without guidance from another.

“I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice.”

During the second administration of W. Bush, the late, inimitable Englishman Christopher Hitchens rejected the claim of practitioners of Islam that they had the right to prevent, by violence, the scholarly analysis of Islam, or the creation of any image whatever of the Prophet:

The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and those who have reprinted its efforts out of solidarity, are affirming the right to criticize … Islam … Islam makes very large claims for itself. …

The prohibition on picturing the prophet … is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent. … [He seems to be saying,] For the moment, all I can do is claim to possess absolute truth and demand absolute immunity from criticism. But in the future, you will do what I say and you will do it on pain of death.

I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice.

Implicit in American liberal democracy from the Founding is that rulership is forbidden. Our highest official is a “presider,” not a “ruler.” No one anywhere in our society can subject us to their will. And as Kant says below, no one can tell us what to think and say:

In “What is Enlightenment?” the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote,

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! [Dare to know!] “Have courage to use your own reason!”—that is the motto of enlightenment.

/*****/

That is what bothers me about the way Bernie Sanders speaks to us. He lectures. He harangues. Constantly raises his right arm and points.

I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice.

Judging by the recent election, so do most Democrats.

[Afterword: The Hitchens article cited claims to make a “case for mocking religion.” I do not. I seek to identify and correct the errors of organized religion, which, not honoring the insight of Jesus of Nazareth, that God is to be considered kind, generous, loving, and good, seems to prefer the red meat of the Jealous God; the God of Wrath.

For me, religion is a sensibility, an intuition that reality is deeper, richer, more profound and wondrous than the secular outlook imagines.]

[https://tinyurl.com/I-RefuseToBeLectured]

[http://www.indiana.edu/~cahist/Readings/2010Fall/Islam_and_Modernity/Kant_Enlightenment.pdf]

The Amicus Podcast of March 16 on six ways the current chief executive fails to honor the Oath of Office

The Amicus podcast of March 16 features Protect Democracy and its emphasis on the Take Care clause of the Constitution to counter the effects of the Trump regime:

“Take care clause refers to a clause in the U.S. Constitution that imposes a duty on the President to take due care while executing laws. The purpose of this clause is to ensure that a law is faithfully executed by the President.”

This clause appears in two places in the Constitution, one being the Oath of Office which the Chief Executive must affirm in order to legitimately be President.

In the podcast Protect Democracy’s Ian Bassin and Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick discuss six ways the incumbent fails to honor his oath:

Politicizing independent institutions, such as the Justice Department

Spreading disinformation (“Fake News,” Nine Thousand lies and counting)

Executive Power Grabs (False emergencies)

Quashing Dissent (Suggesting SNL satire of the president* “should be looked into”)

Delegitimizing Communities (Hispanic “invasion,” demonizing Muslims)

Corrupting Elections (Voter suppression, Gerrymandering)

Liberalism is the underlying principle of modern civilization. It has nothing to do with the outlook of the left.

Because Enlightenment liberalism is universalist, egalitarian, committed to the dignity and rights of the single person, committed to evidence and reason where they apply, and characterized by a passionate desire for optimum outcomes, all democracy is inherently liberal, all justice is liberal, all genuine intellectuality is liberal, and all science is liberal.(1) As argued in The Liberal Founding, what is sometimes called the American idea is liberal.

One guide, in a milieu where media often treat "liberal" and "left" as more or less synonymous, is that liberalism has no Marxism in it. No collectivism with its "moral ties antecedent to choice";(2) win-win thinking instead of zero-sum-game thinking; cooperation, friendship, altruism, and meliorism rather than "adversarial," "oppositional," and "subversive." Liberalism rejects Marxism's romantic, anarchic, faux-heroic, anti-institutional, visionary narcissistic ruler whose self-affirmation is ultimately autocratic.

Stephen Holmes, in The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, distinguishes nonmarxist antiliberalism from Marxist antiliberalism:

Marxists are no less secular than liberals (they would eradicate religion, while liberals would depoliticize it). Nonmarxist antiliberals see secularism as a moral disaster. Like liberals, Marxists view ethnic identity and national solidarity as particularistic atavisms (they would eradicate ethnicity while liberals would demilitarize it). Nonmarxist antiliberals, by contrast, see the cutting of ethnic roots as an unparalleled human catastrophe. ... Marxists extol science, technology, and economic development, for example. Nonmarxist antiliberals interpret the authority of science and the spread of materialistic attitudes as two of liberalism's most abhorrent sins. ... Antiliberals in my sense assert with one voice that Marxism and liberalism, while superficially opposed, share a common ancestry and are secretly allied. They are two offshoots of a single and spiritually hollow Enlightenment tradition. (pp. 1-2)

An important difference in how the term "left" is used today is that the campus left, and opinion writers under their influence, such as the recently highly popular Ta-Nehisi Coates, are, as Andrew Sullivan recently described them, "neo-Marxist."(3)

Elected Democrats, with some exceptions, are closet liberals. As would be expected in a nation with an Enlightenment liberal founding, they honor such liberal principles as reason and universalism ("let facts be submitted to a candid world," says the Declaration); The Rights of Man (see Bill of Rights in the Constitution) and optimum outcomes ("We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty ..."). "Closet liberals" because in the current media climate we do not have a politician who can discuss liberalism as liberalism effectively with the American public.

Both Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies, and I. F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates are about liberalism, but seldom use the term. By contrast, Fritz Stern's Five Germanys I Have Known, and The Failure of Illiberalism, address applied liberalism directly. All are recommended, the last three highly so.

This cultural inability to have a meaningful discussion of liberalism in our politics may be a substantial reason for the calamitous dysfunction in which the Republic finds itself at the current moment.



-*--

(1) Commitment to evidence and reason: Democracy (the informed consent of the governed); Justice (rules of evidence); Intellectuality (rejects false premises and invalid syllogisms); Science (testable predictions). Egalitarian and universalist: Lincoln, praising the Declaration's "All men are created equal," called it "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times"

(2) De Tocqueville, surveying the young American nation, found "voluntary associations"

(3) Andrew Sullivan: We All Live On Campus Now: "Over the last year, the most common rebuttal to my intermittent coverage of campus culture has been: Why does it matter? These are students, after all. They’ll grow up once they leave their cloistered, neo-Marxist safe spaces. The real world isn’t like that. You’re exaggerating anyway. And so on. I certainly see the point. In the world beyond campus, few people use the term microaggressions without irony or an eye roll; claims of “white supremacy,” “rape culture,” or “white privilege” can seem like mere rhetorical flourishes; racial and gender segregation hasn’t been perpetuated in the workplace yet ..."

The "president" as Romantic hero: Anarchic optimistic will to power, unending series of self-affirmations, fighting against insuperable odds

"Trump, with his daring, will save us from our unresponsive elected leaders … 'more than ordinarily incoherent' about political issues … Such heroic vitalism, characteristic of Central European thought in the first half of the last century, contributed to the aura of such authoritarian figures as Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, as it now constitutes part of the charisma of Donald Trump."

Writing during the presidency of George W. Bush, Ethan Fishman recalled  Richard Hofstadter's article on “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt.” It was "'more than ordinarily incoherent' about political issues." "A politics," Fishman continued, "that emphasized unarticulated psychological impulses over reasonable analysis—a politics of the gut, in other words, rather than of the mind." Pseudo-Conservatives were "those who discount reason to practice a politics of largely inchoate sentiments."
Fishman added:

Pseudo-conservatives are suspicious of reasonable analysis and often rely on knee-jerk reactions to reach policy decisions.

Fishman saw a resemblance between today's pseudo-conservatives and the ideologues of the French Revolution:

In the context of Iraqi history, therefore, the administration’s vision of a democratic Iraq is reminiscent of the mistakes made by the French revolutionaries. Both acted as if dreams can easily be translated into political reality. Both upheld the ideal of freedom, but neither was able to adapt that ideal to the specific circumstances they encountered. Both were unable to appreciate the staggering costs in human lives and property that are unavoidable when radical change is pursued over a very short period of time.

Donald Trump's politics are those of W. taken to an extreme. He is "'more than ordinarily incoherent' about political issues." In a recent article:

Trump, in his recent interviews with the Washington Post and the New York Times, showed that he does not comprehend the system of global alliances the United States has developed, does not understand international trade, is unaware of the importance of the military bases the US has around the world, and is ignorant of nuclear protocols.

The pseudo-conservative as the person who is "suspicious of reasonable analysis and often rel[ies] on knee-jerk reactions to reach policy decisions" is exemplified in another recent article:
"Trump, with his daring, will save us from our unresponsive elected leaders."

Pseudo-conservatism is thus a form of romanticism. "Romanticism," as Professor Ian Johnston argued [PDF]:

celebrated, above all, the figure of the heroic visionary artist, struggling over time against a hostile or uncaring world, never giving up until death, living life as an unending series of self-affirmations, moments of collision in which the power of the individual's mind and his or her faith in the imagination, imposed a sense of order and gave value to his or her life against insuperable odds.

Such heroic vitalism, characteristic of Central European thought in the first half of the last century, contributed to the aura of such authoritarian figures as Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, as it now constitutes part of the charisma of Donald Trump. Such icons, symptomatically, are believed to represent "the power of the will."

The attractiveness of such willful political figures as Trump to youth is part of the pattern. The glamor of the romantic, larger-than-life authoritarian politician has an appeal, Johnston continues, to an anarchic youthful spirit:

At this level the Romantic spirit is a relatively uncomplicated celebration of the anarchic, optimistic, youthful spirit of sheer potentiality, an unfocussed affirmation of energy, motion, and good feelings. And if this were all there was to the Romantic ethic, it would never be much more than a pleasant but ultimately rather adolescent yearning for a spirit of total freedom (a good deal of popular Romanticism is little more than that).

"What happens," Johnston asks, "to this youthful creative spirit when it encounters the real world?" As we noted in Trump Reveals What's Wrong with Conservatism, it could "result in the selection of a dissimulating, bigoted, immature, bully":

In Trump, Republican voters have found their anti-Obama. Trump spurns not just political correctness, but correctness of any kind. He lies about Muslims and 9/11, insults women and people with disabilities, accuses a judge of bias for being Hispanic, and hurls profanities. ... Republicans are [at risk of] nominating a child.

Writing during the previous Republican administration, Fishman accurately predicted:

Just as McCarthyism was followed by the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” the Reagan presidency, and the current administration, it is inevitable that another version of pseudo-conservatism will appear on the American political scene.

The current state of the Republican party is a catastrophe decades in the making. Since at least the Goldwater era, Republicans have leveraged cheap, doctrinaire, simplistic politics to distort the deliberative character of American democracy. They sowed the wind, and now reap the whirlwind.

Since We Agree Neither Upon Principles Nor Upon Demonstrations There is No Place for Argument

From Season Three, Episode Four of The Newsroom: [It] is toxic. It poisons the national conversation and culture.

Not committed to having a coherent view about things like that - Michael Walzer: Can There be a Decent Left?

(The post title is from Francis Bacon, Novum Organum.)


Ta-Nehisi Coates in his own words:

1.
Sean Illing quotes Ta-Nehisi Coates:

“You write to your son, ‘Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.’ The innocent world of the dream is actually built on the broken bodies of those kept down below. If there were no black bodies to oppress, the affluent Dreamers ‘would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism.”

2.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells:

[Jeffrey] Goldberg asked what [Ta-Nehisi Coates] would do if he were in [Mitch] Landrieu’s position — surely there was something, “I don’t know what I’d do if I were mayor, but I could tell you what I’d do if I was king.” [Ta-Nehisi Coates would] let criminals out of prison, he said. “And, by the way, I include violent criminals in that.” Goldberg asked what he meant by “violent.” “Gun crime, too,” Coates said. (Emphasis added)

3.
Manuel Roig-Franzia:

But what also has been notable is the reaction of like-minded readers to the piece, which took two years to complete. Everywhere he goes, Coates hears versions of the same plea: What about my group? What about Native Americans? What about Latino immigrants? What about me?

“You get here and people say, ‘Why can’t you do that for our community?’ ” Coates says one morning at a Capitol Hill coffee shop. He calls the reaction “disrespectful” ... Disrespectful because he believes the experience of blacks in America deserves its own, focused examination.

4.
Terry Gross, Fresh Air:

Ta-Nehisi Coates: There was definitely another part of me that basically recognized them [the police] as another element within the society, within the community, with no real moral difference from the crews and the gangs and the, you know, packs of folks who dispensed violence throughout the neighborhood. ...

5.
Terry Gross, continued:

Ta-Nehisi Coates (On the unjustified shooting of Prince Jones by police): Oh, it was devastating. It totally devastated me. A year later 9/11 happened and I just - I had no compassion. I had none. I was cold. I was absolutely, absolutely cold because they killed him. They killed him, and no one was held accountable. (Emphasis added)

These statements by Ta-Nehisi Coates reveal that he does not agree at all with fundamental and indispensable principles of our liberal, public-spirited, egalitarian democracy. They also show that his "demonstrations" (his rhetoric, his "arguments") are indifferent to the criterion of evidence and reason, to the standard of good faith,* and to the principle that fallacy discredits.

As far back as 2002, Communitarian Michael Walzer refuted those who, like Ta-Nehisi Coates in (5.) above, acted as if the murder of three thousand of their fellow citizens was justified:

Michael Walzer:

Those emotions [festering resentment, ingrown anger,] were plain to see in the left's reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved. Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. ...

Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens, refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as politically incorrect. That’s why they had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of September 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed. Equally important, that’s why their participation in the policy debate after the attacks was so odd; their proposals (turn to the UN, collect evidence against bin Laden, and so on) seem to have been developed with no concern for effectiveness and no sense of urgency. They talked and wrote as if they could not imagine themselves responsible for the lives of their fellow-citizens. That was someone else’s business; the business of the left was...what? To oppose the authorities, whatever they did. The good result of this opposition was a spirited defense of civil liberties. But even this defense displayed a certain willful irresponsibility and ineffectiveness, because so many leftists rushed to the defense of civil liberties while refusing to acknowledge that the country faced real dangers--as if there was no need at all to balance security and freedom. Maybe the right balance will emerge spontaneously from the clash of rightwing authoritarianism and leftwing absolutism, but it would be better practice for the left to figure out the right balance for itself, on its own; the effort would suggest a responsible politics and a real desire to exercise power, some day.

But what really marks the left, or a large part of it, is the bitterness that comes with abandoning any such desire. The alienation is radical. How else can one understand the unwillingness of people who, after all, live here, and whose children and grandchildren live here, to join in a serious debate about how to protect the country against future terrorist attacks? There is a pathology in this unwillingness, and it has already done us great damage. (Emphasis added)

In thirteen years, Ta-Nehisi Coates has not "recovered [his] moral balance."

(1.) repeats Ta-Nehisi Coates' assertion, a year ago, that "Slavery Made America":  [He tells his son in his latest book] “The innocent world of the dream is actually built on the broken bodies of those kept down below. If there were no black bodies to oppress, the affluent Dreamers ‘would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism.”

This is economics as magical thinking. If there had never been a slave in North America the United States would be more prosperous than it is now. Slaves are less productive than free men for many reasons, among which are greater motivation and better education on the part of the free. Coates has inadvertently implied that, except for its moral problem, slavery is good economics and good utilization of human resources.

That is utter lunacy. (For that matter, "cannibalism?") 

(2.) [If he was king Ta-Nehisi Coates would] let criminals out of prison. ... “And, by the way, I include violent criminals in that.” Goldberg asked what he meant by “violent.” “Gun crime, too.”

It should be clear, even to Ta-Nehisi Coates' progressive sympathizers among national journalists, that rejecting the rule of law ought to disqualify anyone who poses as a political columnist. His assertion, in (4.) that public law enforcement officials are not morally different in principle from members of criminal gangs would make the law of the jungle the law of the land. (In this he echoes Michel Foucault's assertion that all power is the same: there is no moral difference between "power" in the hands of criminal justice system civil servants and "power" in the hands of violent felons.)

It may be relevant that seldom, if ever, has a journalist in a democracy expressed even an implied wish to be a totalitarian ruler. 

(3.) In a free society, in which the citizens constitute the government, "we are all in this together," as President Barack Obama has noted. Two of the first three words of the Constitution are "the People." When he was President George Washington spoke repeatedly of "the public good."

But just as Ta-Nehisi Coates was "cold"-hearted toward the slaughter of three thousand of his innocent fellow citizens on September 11, he is mean-spirited toward the "plea: What about my group? What about Native Americans? What about Latino immigrants?":

He calls the reaction “disrespectful” ... Disrespectful because he believes the experience of blacks in America deserves its own, focused examination.

This the same person who in The Case for Reparations called for his fellow citizens, in the name of shared moral obligation, to voluntarily assume a financial burden of hundreds of billions of dollars. (It reminds one of the piece, "Fie on Goodness" in the musical "Camelot": "If charity means giving, I give it to you.")


--*-

(*) One of the great passages concerning specious argument:

However, the greatest problem with historical revisionism is not its lack of objectivity but its lack of integrity. History is always being revised as new data come to light and new generations ask new questions. But ''revisionism'' has a characteristic trait: it is typically in the business of denying the obvious and uncovering conspiracies. [...]

The bad faith of all such ultra-revisionist undertakings lies in a sustained preference for a priori reasoning over human testimony. [...] Nothing can ever count as evidence against such assertions, because they do not rest on evidence in the first place. - Tony Judt, Writing History, Facts Optional, April 13, 2000

Enlightenment Liberalism in the 21st Century

The previous post argued the centrality of liberalism in American politics and culture. It cited the work of German-American historian Fritz Stern, one of the few intellectual thinkers who discusses liberalism as liberalism. Such great examinations of liberal political democracy as The Open Society and Its Enemies, I. F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates, John Murray Cuddihy's The Ordeal of Civility, and the works of George Orwell, are more typical, in that they are essentially about liberal modernity, but seldom, if ever, reference liberalism directly.

The Founders, despite the fact that “the Founding was an expression of the new liberal values of the Enlightenment,” likewise did not commonly speak of liberalism as the underlying spirit of their work. But examination of their work reveals abstract truths, applicable to all men and all times*, which they implied but did not articulate.

For example, the Founders relegated rulership to the dustbin of history. The title they conferred on the leader of the new nation they created, “president,” was no stronger at the time than “facilitator” is in ours. To this day no one is legitimately called “ruler” in our political hierarchy.

To be specific, what this implies is that liberalism holds that rulership is illegitimate. Rulership is incompatible with liberty. In “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant wrote, “Enlightenment is man's release from his self incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.” In liberal societies, each member of the people is a citizen, not a subject. The difference is that the citizen is not under “direction from another.”

A corollary is that liberalism holds that no one should be subject to the will of another. If we achieve a truly liberal outlook, we do not even want to take advantage of anyone else, to “rule” or dominate or “get over on” or coerce. We should be past such behavior by the time we get out of high school.

This is a high standard. It means that we should not speak of election results as reflecting “the will of the people.” (Orwell wrote, “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”) Rather, elections reflect the people's choice, arrived at by deliberation in which personal desire is mediated by reflection on the public good.

But isn't democracy that situation where the people rule? No. They govern. The Declaration does not say, “consent of the ruled,” it says “consent of the governed.”

Have you ever heard someone argue, “that's just semantics”? For liberalism, language is critically important. (Orwell, again, “the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”) For instance, one can argue that the French Revolution segued into the Terror because of a flawed vision of liberalism. The agents of the revolution misunderstood progress as a movement from the will of the King to Rousseau's “general will,” a version of “the will of the people.” (It is also significant that of the formula “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” only the first two terms made it into the Declaration. Fraternity, or brotherhood, involves obligations “antecedent to choice,” as a passage cited by Randall Kennedy notes. The abrogation of moral choice facilitated the emergence of the Terror's murderous violence. We are constituted by the terms we use, and liberalism asks us to choose carefully. Or, as a previous post implied, Fraternity points to group identity and its vested interests.)
 (*) Lincoln, of course.

My "Liberalism" Problem—And Ours

The ancient paradigm, so repugnant to a free people, of domination and submission. - Warraq, Ali and others

A politics phrased in the language of a war by the oppressed against oppressors clearly has abandoned the democratic perspective for something darker.

A brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. That is a matter of choice — constrained, to be sure, but a choice nonetheless. - Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy

An acquaintance of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous, wrote the following rough draft in imitation of Randall Kennedy's "My Race Problem—And Ours." With the former's permission:

"The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." - George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

Ultimate success and happiness comes from leading a principled life, not in getting the upper hand. - Sally Forth, comics section of Seattle Times, Sunday, 2/18/2007

Affirmative action is "the just spoils of a righteous war." - Julian Bond

There is one thing someone who surveys the current political scene can be confident of, that people believe, or say they believe, that "liberal" and "left" mean much the same thing. As a liberal, I find this to be a problem. The left as it is now constituted does not have the values which characterized the old left: rationality and individualism, civility, toleration, privacy, impartiality, objectivity, generosity, public-spiritedness, optimism, humanitarianism, and equality. When I ask what I should think with respect to the social and political issues of the day, neither the left (nor the right) seems to offer guidance that is intellectually, morally, or politically satisfactory.

How, for example, should I think about white people? (I happen to be white.) The left seems to find that the cases of man's inhumanity to man fall disproportionately on Caucasians. Should I view white people as uniquely bad, and perhaps deserving of punishment wherever I find them? Should I see white people as guilty because of the history of slavery? Some conduct reflecting these sentiments has entered into everyday life. Many depart from what may be their usual candor and frankness when the reference is racial or ethnic minority groups or members. Many whites, Shelby Steele observes, have confessed to him "that on some occasion they have not said something they truly believed for fear of being marked a racist." An unwritten rule that "We must say only good things about these people" seems to be in effect. In remembrance of a regrettable past, the joshing and jostling and hurly-burly which characterizes our conduct with equals is forgone. An unnatural politeness, even solicitude takes over with respect to members of certain groups.

One answer is suggested by the example of Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader said several things which guide me in my response to the injustices of the past. He said, "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust." He did not draw a distinction between one group of humans and another. "God is not merely interested in the freedom of brown men, yellow men, red men and black men," King said. "He is interested in the freedom of the whole human race." From such a perspective the problem with theories of group guilt is that it divides King's "human race" into two separate, unequal categories, one part burdened by accusation and shame, the other indignant, resentful, and inclined to feel justified in seeking retribution.

In a liberal society every person gets a fresh start. It was one of the goals of the civil rights revolution that blacks should no longer be asked to know their place, but should have as much opportunity for the full realization of their abilities as everyone else. Theories of racial guilt in practice means that some do not get a fresh start, free and clear, but will go through their lives being limited or targeted in visible or invisible ways because of the deeds of other people in another century. The problem of inequality which the civil rights revolution addressed is not solved by relocating the inequality from the formerly oppressed to the former oppressors, it is solved by resolutely opposing even the hint of inequality* in any form. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," King reminded us. "Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

But what of the continuing problem of racism? Perhaps the descendants of the people who did these things will be less likely to act in prejudiced or unjust ways if their self-esteem and confidence is reined in by a sense of guilt for the past. I answer that "we should not cultivate guilt in order to leverage policy." [James Piereson] We will not be serving our fellow citizens well if we insist on teaching them what is factually incorrect, even if we imagine that it would be better for them if we did so. [Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa, p. 196] Guilt is powerful. Its legitimacy derives from the care we take to establish it. For this reason liberal societies established the principle that a citizen is innocent until proved guilty, sought to maintain an independent judiciary, and honored due process and rules of evidence.

Instrumental guilt, guilt propounded in order to compel a course of action we deem desirable without a legitimate grounding in culpability, violates the fundamental rule of liberal societies that no one should be subject to the will of another. If I were to be found guilty of robbing a store, following a trial in which the rules of due process were observed, I could still count myself a free human being. My guilt, and any appropriate punishment resulting, would be a foreseeable consequence of my own actions freely taken. My deeper freedom—freedom from the arbitrary acts of another—would be unimpaired. White guilt, as Professor Steele also observed, is another animal; not a belief in one's guilt, but a vulnerability to being stigmatized as guilty because of one's skin color alone. It represents not a victory of anti-racism but a rebirth of racism in another form. It revives the ancient paradigm, so repugnant to a free people, of domination and submission.

Another problem with theories of group guilt is that they impair the sense that in the end the society we live in is the result of what we all do and think. Senator Barack Obama recently observed that the achievements of the civil rights revolution are dimmed somewhat by a lessening of the sense of our common interests and goals. The liberal ideas which emerged around the time of the American Revolution included the conviction that cooperation and altruism create a better society and a better life than any of the alternatives. The sense that we are all in this together runs through King's thought as it runs through Obama's, as when he reminded us that injustice to one endangers all. Over and over again King asked the mainstream society to live up to its own stated principles. "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: - 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'" His work reflected the sustained theme that within each of us, regardless of our differences, is the possibility of a better person. Theories of group guilt go in the opposite direction to this positive theme. Where King sought to unite us, these theories seek to divide us. Where King sought to uplift us, theories of group guilt invite suspicion and distrust by some of those he addressed.

"The poor you have always with you" is a timeless problem of every society. When we phrase this problem as the contemporary left seems to, postulating a "dominant culture" and its relationship to those who are left out or disadvantaged, we are making a specific assumption about humankind and our life together. When instead we phrase the problem of poverty and injustice as Martin Luther King did, in terms of great principles which uplift and unite us, we are in the presence of a completely different vision of humanity. One worldview perceives the problem as primarily one of identifying enemies who have taken what is not rightfully theirs. It conceptualizes the problem of the poor and outcast, the have-nots, as the result of intentional wrongdoing by the haves; and it imagines the solution in terms of punishment and redistribution. By contrast the vision which animated the civil rights movement was that when we the people work together to further the public good, we all benefit.

The vision of political democracy has always been that the people themselves can constitute the government, because they have common interests which they can identify and work toward together. The democratic outlook may or may not be correct, but a politics phrased in the language of a war by the oppressed against oppressors clearly has abandoned the democratic perspective for something darker. It is difficult to see how a better life for all can be achieved by a process which is primarily negative, such as identifying enemies to be deprecated and degraded. I have watched as the left has moved from attitudes resembling Martin Luther King's—attitudes of mutual respect and cooperation—to attitudes of opposition traceable to places in Central Europe which had never really known political freedom or democracy.

Sometimes, when I find myself in gatherings of the left, it seems that all I hear is a litany of negatives: "European, bad; white, bad; male, bad; corporations, bad; capitalism, bad—yet without any alternative suggested or a hint of what a world shaped as they think it should be would look like. This seeming vision of a world of enemies stands in sharp contrast to the principle of public-spiritedness. "The Americans, on the other hand," remarked Alexis de Tocqueville in his analysis of the democratic disposition, "are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of self-interest rightly understood; they show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist one another and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the state."

White people, the current left seems to say, committed foolish and terrible mistakes. They, and their European Civilization, despoiled the planet, polluted the skies, corrupted the earth with monstrous smoking factories, imposed the barbarism of colonialism on the third world, and enslaved a dark race. To prevent this from happening again, we must struggle against the people who committed such monstrous crimes, we must make them pay for what they did, and we must not aid and abet them by accepting or tolerating any aspect of them or their ways.

But King rejected the easy path of sweeping generalization and simple condemnation. When he received the Nobel Prize for Peace, Martin King said, "I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history." As Randall Kennedy wrote, "a brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. That is a matter of choice — constrained, to be sure, but a choice nonetheless."

If equality, in the form of the principle that no one is worse than anyone else because of their race, enabled Martin to end a century of Jim Crow prejudice, it cannot be a progressive principle to demonize white people or the civilization which originated the proposition that all men are created equal. There are no shortcuts: no group has a monopoly on virtue or evil.

The century of the American Revolution—the Eighteenth Century—was a heady time for liberalism. Voltaire, centuries early, wrote the appropriate response to the fanatics of September 11: "If we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities." Across the Atlantic, the fledgling American republic's declaration of human equality enabled Martin King to create a revolution simply by asking their descendants to live up to their own stated principles. As Abraham Lincoln had realized a century earlier, Americans believe in uplift, and it is not a mistake to appeal to the better angels of their nature.

I can find no such high-mindedness in what the left has become.

(*) Correction. Originally read: "it is solved by resolutely opposing even the hint of equality in any form."(Revised by editor 11/18/13)

The Peculiar Claim That Conservatism Simply Is

I still have a dream. It is deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. - Martin Luther King

An earlier post on this blog noted that rulership is illegitimate in our society:

In a world of kings and emperors, sultans and rajahs and warlords, the Founders created a nation with no rulers. To this day no one in our politics—mayor, county executive, governor, president—is legitimately called a ruler. This is because a ruler is someone who can subject others to their will, and in a free country no one can do that.

In a free country no one is subject to the will of another. Yet Mark Lilla detects

The aristocratic prejudice that “some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others.”

This trickles down to popular culture. In the second season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" the socialite Cordelia says, "Certain people are entitled to special privileges. They're called winners. That's the way the world works."

This is the inegalitarianism of conservative Social Darwinism:

[Conservatives] feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.

 - Russell Kirk,  “Ten Conservative Principles” (Emphasis added.)

No reason is given for this. It just is. In Why I Am Not A Conservative [PDF] Hayek wrote:

But, from its point of view rightly, conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them; and, by its distrust of theory and its lack of imagination concerning anything except that which experience has already proved, it deprives itself of the weapons needed in the struggle of ideas. Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality. (Emphasis added.)

In Conservatism Simply Is, self-labeled conservative Andrew Sullivan tacitly accedes to this view of conservative conceptual impoverishment:

Scott Galupo scoffs at the idea and makes a broader philosophical point:

In a 1974 appendix to his study Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Ideology, [Peter] Viereck wrote that classical conservatism, of the mostly British but also French variety, is “an inarticulate state of mind and not at all an ideology. Liberalism argues; conservatism simply is.” Once conservatism becomes conscious of itself—becomes aware that it is a thing set apart—it changes irrevocably; it becomes another species of rationalism. ...

The inarticulate tendency in conservatism is what led John Stuart Mill to say the following:

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. - www.goodreads.com/quotes/76179-i-never-meant-to-say-that-the-conservatives-are-generally

Sullivan adds,

Of course, I think that’s a misunderstanding. The inability to articulate the value of something you have come to love or do is, to my mind, part of its value. Some things in life are ineffable and to explain them almost a violation of their essence.

Frederick C. Crews parodied this position in 1970 (when aficionados of the Youth Movement began showing up in university classrooms):

Though it is only a short step from this state of mind to the virgin anti-intellectualism of our freshmen who regard all discourse as a profanation of selfhood, we believe our lack of curiosity to be more sophisticated and high-principled. - from "Do Literary Studies Have an Ideology?"

The only reasonable response would be, "OK, so you can't explain what you're talking about." Why does this matter? Because what what the Founders, echoing Cicero, called "right reason" is a necessary bulwark against the crude machinations of power. The democratic vote, for example, represents an attempt to substitute informed public choice for force in determining the succession of leaders. Justice is the attempt to substitute principle for violence in adjudicating disputes between citizens. A reasoned, principled equality powered a liberal society's rejection of public racial discrimination in the last half century.

Otherwise, we have “some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others,” but why the ostensibly fittest are superior is never explained. Logic texts, after presenting an invalid syllogism, note, "the argument cannot guarantee its conclusion, and no one should be persuaded by it."

Even more so, in the case of those who valorize "the inability to articulate."  It-just-is-ism is an avoidance of responsibility for implied claims. The non-argument argument stands alongside the non-apology apology.

Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values?

‘The theory of Ideas is not a democratic philosophy.’ (cited by Alvin Lim, below)

The true judge must not allow himself to be influenced by the gallery nor intimidated by the clamour of the multitude. - Plato, Laws 659a-b (also Laws 659a-b)

Whatever quibbles one might want to offer about Lilla's discussion of particular cases, he makes a convincing case that the impact of philosophical Platonism on European history has been overwhelmingly negative. Lilla amply confirms the view of Karl Popper that Plato, speaking in the voice of the fictional Socrates of the Republic, was the first and greatest enemy of the open society. - John Quiggin, reviewing Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics

Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them. ... The anti-empirical taint ... survives to this day. ... What slaves characteristically perform is manual labor. But scientific experimentation is manual labor, from which the slaveholders [such as Plato] are preferentially distanced; while it is only the slaveholders--politely called "gentlemen" in some societies--who have the leisure to do science. ... In the suppression of disquieting facts, the sense that science should be kept for a small elite, the distaste for experiment, the embrace of mysticism and the easy acceptance of slave societies, they set back the human enterprise. ... The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. p. 155 - Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Emphasis added)*

Book 8 of The Republic: “These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.” - Plato (Cited in The Condition of Equality Today)

The word "idealism" is a technical word in philosophy, and ... this usage has little to do with the common usage of that term, which refers to dedication to achieving ideal outcomes ...
Generally [philosophical idealism] has been associated with hierarchized societies ruled by an elite, embrace of dogma, and intolerance of dissent. - Stephen Den Beste (Emphasis added)**

In making the state more important than its parts, and allowing it to enter every sphere of the individual's life, Plato has been accused of totalitarianism, while charges of paternalism have been laid against the claim that the Philosopher-Rulers alone know what is best for the other classes. Nor are there any legal checks on the Rulers' behaviour. — Angela Hobbs***

This is a continuation of some of the arguments in Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture. The proposition is that there is a theory, originating symbolically with Plato, that the intellectual has a privileged form of knowledge which l'homme moyen sensuel—the average nonintellectual man—cannot know. Plato taught that the reality experienced by the senses is an appearance generated by invisible Forms (ideas) existing in a sort of Platonic heaven:

“In Parmenides and in Plato, we shall even find the belief that the changing world we live in is an illusion, and that behind it lies a more real world which does not change.” - Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

The philosopher (the intellectual) sees this underlying reality via a faculty—a form of "insight"—not available to the rest of us:

Alvin Lim: Plato’s argument for the inherent weakness of democracy in its potential to collapse into tyranny is strongly linked to his metaphysics, in particular his Theory of Forms. [4] In Plato’s ideal city the rulers are the Philosopher Rulers who have undergone the education sufficient for them to gain access to the Form of the Good, which allows them to know what justice is and hence to be able to rule the city justly (479e-484e). Since it is only the philosophers who have access to the Form of the Good, non-philosophers lack access to the Form of the Good and hence do not know what justice is. And since non-philosophers do not know what justice is, they cannot rule the city justly. Hence Cross and Woozley cite Adam’s comment that ‘the theory of Ideas is not a democratic philosophy’, [5] and this also explains what Finley describes as ‘Plato’s persistent objection to the role of shoemakers and shopkeepers in political decision making’. Zeitlin notes that in Laws 659a-b, Plato argues that:

Whether it is a matter of art, music or politics, it is only the ‘best men’ who are capable of true judgement. The true judge must not allow himself to be influenced by the gallery nor intimidated by the clamour of the multitude. Nothing must compel him to hand down a verdict that belies his own convictions. It is his duty to teach the multitude and not to learn from them. [6]

[Original link no longer active: web.singnet.com.sg/~chlim/plato.html]

Is there any truth in this? I repeat what I wrote in Analysis of Intellectual Subculture: "Extreme as this may sound, it resonates with my own experience. I attended two humanities classes of a major state university the day after the historic presidential election of 2008, certain that there would be at least some reaction to the opening of the presidency to minorities. After all, isn't diversity a mantra of the academic left? But it was business as usual."

As that long-suffering intellectual critic of intellectualists, Frederick C. Crews, wrote:

["Skeptical Engagements"] By the mid-eighties, many academic humanists had already contracted the bad habit of labeling “right wing” all dissent not only from the overt politicizing of academic life but also from poststructuralist theory, including its component of esoteric Lacanian Freudianism. In the increasingly conformist atmosphere that has ruled the universities from then until now, scorn is routinely heaped on the ordinary liberalism to which I have long subscribed. And anyone who explicitly upholds rationality within the framework of a discipline will now be suspected of following a sinister hidden agenda,
... Those themes are the specific failings of Freudian psychoanalysis; the nature, appeal, and consequences of closed, self-validating doctrines; the resultant indispensability of an empirical (evidence-oriented) point of view; and the dubious effects of literary-critical methods that spurn that point of view. The several themes really come down to just one: the fear of facing the world, including its works of literature, without an intellectual narcotic ready at hand.
To “do theory” these days, as that expression is understood by department chairs who hope to load their ranks with a full panoply of “theorists,” is not to maintain a thesis against likely objections, but rather to strike attitudes that will identify one as a loyal follower of some figure—a Roland Barthes, a Jacques Derrida, a Michel Foucault, a Jacques Lacan, a Fredric Jameson—who has himself made unexamined claims about the nature of capitalism or patriarchy or Western civilization or the collective unconscious or the undecidability of knowledge. Such gurus are treasured, I suspect, less for their specific creeds than for the invigorating Nietzschean scorn they direct at intellectual prudence. The rise of “theory” has resulted in an irrationalist climate in the strictest sense—that is, an atmosphere in which it is considered old-fashioned and gullible to think that differences of judgment can ever be arbitrated on commonly held grounds. (some of this material from www.cybereditions.com/cyextract.pdf)

Notes on starred material:
(*) Ordinary people were to be kept ignorant of the dodecahedron [because it was thought to represent a fifth essence (quintessence) that could only be the substance of the heavenly bodies]. p. 151
A disdain for the practical swept the ancient world. Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them. p. 152
Xenophon's opinion was: "What are called the mechanical arts carry a social stigma and are rightly dishonoured in our cities." [Cf. disdain for the banausic.] As a result of such attitudes, the brilliant and promising Ionian experimental method was largely abandoned for two thousand years. Without experiment, there is no way to choose among contending hypotheses, no way for science to advance. The anti-empirical taint of the Pythagoreans survives to this day. . . . What slaves characteristically perform is manual labor. But scientific experimentation is manual labor, from which the slaveholders [such as Plato] are preferentially distanced; while it is only the slaveholders--politely called "gentlemen" in some societies--who have the leisure to do science. p. 153
In the suppression of disquieting facts, the sense that science should be kept for a small elite, the distaste for experiment, the embrace of mysticism and the easy acceptance of slave societies, they set back the human enterprise. After a long mystical sleep in which the tools of scientific inquiry lay mouldering, the Ionian approach . . . was finally rediscovered. The Western world reawakened. Experiment and open inquiry became once more respectable. . . .
The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. p. 155 - Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Emphasis added)

(**) In philosophy [idealism] refers to efforts to account for all objects in nature and experience as representations of the mind and sometimes to assign to such representations a higher order of existence. It is opposed to materialism. Plato conceived a world in which eternal ideas constituted reality, of which the ordinary world of experience is a shadow.
And that was why you could figure it all out: if you could somehow attune yourself to that higher order of existence, you'd automatically know it all. And those who had come closer to achieving such enlightenment were therefore more wise than anyone else, and should be able to wield power over the others.
It's important to emphasize that the word "idealism" is a technical word in philosophy, and that this usage has little to do with the common usage of that term, which refers to dedication to achieving ideal outcomes without making compromises. ...
Of the three sides, [philosophical idealism] as a political force is the oldest. There's continuity going back to the pre-Christian Greeks, and generally [philosophical idealism] has been associated with hierarchized societies ruled by an elite, embrace of dogma, and intolerance of dissent. - Stephen Den Beste (Emphasis added)

(***) Plato's radical conceptions in the Republic of justice, social harmony, education, and freedom are enormously rich and have informed the thought of philosophers as diverse as Rousseau, Hegel, and J. S. Mill; his attitudes to property, the family, and the position of women have also proved highly influential. His ideal, however, has also come in for some fierce criticism. The convenient match claimed between the division of natural talents and the class divisions required by the state has been regarded as entirely without foundation. In making the state more important than its parts, and allowing it to enter every sphere of the individual's life, Plato has been accused of totalitarianism, while charges of paternalism have been laid against the claim that the Philosopher-Rulers alone know what is best for the other classes. Nor are there any legal checks on the Rulers' behaviour. Their methods of rule are also problematic: the analogy drawn between the Producers and the unreasoning appetites raises questions about whether the Producers can really be willingly persuaded or whether they have to be forced, and Plato's language is ambivalent on this point. In any case, the means of persuasion are themselves disturbing, involving both propaganda and extreme censorship of the arts. — Angela Hobbs