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

"Be proud, do not apologize": State Department, Newcomers to The West

"The Shi'ites have no right to live in this country"

"Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies."

 John Kerry sets the tone for the State Department:

Secretary of State John Kerry offered a defense of freedom of speech, religion and thought in the United States on Tuesday telling German students that in America "you have a right to be stupid if you want to be."
"As a country, as a society, we live and breathe the idea of religious freedom and religious tolerance, whatever the religion, and political freedom and political tolerance, whatever the point of view," Kerry told the students in Berlin, the second stop on his inaugural trip as secretary of state.
"People have sometimes wondered about why our Supreme Court allows one group or another to march in a parade even though it's the most provocative thing in the world and they carry signs that are an insult to one group or another," he added.
"The reason is, that's freedom, freedom of speech. In America you have a right to be stupid - if you want to be," he said, prompting laughter. "And you have a right to be disconnected to somebody else if you want to be.
"And we tolerate it. We somehow make it through that. Now, I think that's a virtue. I think that's something worth fighting for," he added. "The important thing is to have the tolerance to say, you know, you can have a different point of view."

Ibn Warraq, originally from India/Pakistan, some years ago expressed similar values from the perspective of a sojourner in the West:

A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth. ... Do not apologize.
This raises another more general problem: the inability of the West to defend itself intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not apologize. ... The west is the source of the liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights and cultural freedom. It is the west that has raised the status of women, fought against slavery, defended freedom of enquiry, expression and conscience. ... By defending our values, we are teaching the Islamic world a valuable lesson, we are helping them by submitting their cherished traditions to Enlightenment values. [Original link no longer functional: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,398853,00.html] 

As Historian Fritz Stern wrote in the New York Times September 4, 1988:

Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . [I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best . . . a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” ... In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.”

Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others issued a "manifesto" defending underlying liberal values of the modern world against the excesses of Islamism:

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.

We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.

The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.

Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man's domination of woman, the Islamists' domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.

We reject « cultural relativism », which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of "Islamophobia", an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.

We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas.

We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism.

As Kerry, Warraq, and Ali remind, liberty and a largely peaceful and prosperous society are more valuable than we may realize. Only a few centuries back our ancestors were chopping off heads and burning dissenters at the stake. The civil society of today was won through centuries of hard progress. Yet now our universal civilization, as V. S. Naipaul calls it, is confronted by a jihadist movement which would eradicate these freedoms. It is horrifying beyond belief:

The group doing the killing [in Pakistan] is called Lashkar e Jhangvi, "The Army of Jhangvi" ... LEJ is using massive bombs in places frequented by Shia civilians: social clubs, computer cafes, markets and schools. About 1,300 people have been killed in these attacks since 1999, according to a website dedicated to raising awareness about them. More than 200 have been killed so far this year. ...
"We are solely fighting this war in Allah's name," a spokesman for LEJ told local media, "which will end in making Balochistan a graveyard for the Shias." In an open letter that began to circulate a year and a half ago, LEJ made plain their belief that "all Shi'ites are worthy of killing. We will rid Pakistan of unclean people. Pakistan means land of the pure and the Shi'ites have no right to live in this country."
And as if to acknowledge that theirs is not merely a sectarian conflict but an ethnic one, they laid bare their desire to eliminate one group in particular: "We will make Pakistan the graveyard of the Shi'ite Hazaras and their houses will be destroyed by bombs and suicide bombers. Jihad against the Shi'ite Hazaras has now become our duty."

There is no need to temporize, or posit a false equivalency between such fanatical values and the values of a liberal society, as can be seen when Wafa Sultan, formerly of Syria, debates an imam (French version):

The clash we are witnessing around the world ... is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. ...

We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.

The "promise of the West" may be clearer to those who come from elsewhere. But so long as we resist the pressure to betray it, it still stands, as the Secretary of State reaffirmed, as a beacon to the world. "Be proud, do not apologize."

Executive Power and Imminent Threat

Today's news brings a discussion of

[a] white paper [PDF] . . . which lays out when, precisely, the administration believes it is entitled to order a drone strike against an American citizen.

Ta-Nehisi Coates continues, citing Mike Isikoff:

The 16-page memo, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News, provides new details about the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama administration's most secretive and controversial policies: its dramatically increased use of drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects abroad, including those aimed at American citizens, such as the September 2011 strike in Yemen that killed alleged al-Qaida operatives Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Both were U.S. citizens who had never been indicted by the U.S. government nor charged with any crimes.

Andrew Sullivan quotes Jacob Sullum:

The problem is that to accept this position, you have to put complete trust in the competence, wisdom, and ethics of the president, his underlings, and their successors. You have to believe they are properly defining and inerrantly identifying people who pose an imminent (or quasi-imminent) threat to national security and eliminating that threat through the only feasible means, which involves blowing people up from a distance. If mere mortals deserved that kind of faith, we would not need a Fifth Amendment, or the rest of the Constitution.

Bill Moyers interviewed Vincent Warren and Vicki Divoll on the topic of drones over the weekend. Warren noted, "the way that the Obama administration is using that [drones] is that they're dropping bombs, targeting for killing of terrorist suspects in countries in which we are not at war, including Yemen, including Pakistan, including places in Africa. ... There is no legal authority for these types of drone attacks. The U.S. cannot drop bombs on people in places that they cannot send troops." Divoll added, "There's plenty of evidence that lots of people are suspected of doing lots of things. And that doesn't mean we shoot them from the sky." (emphasis added)

What does the administration mean by what the "white paper" calls "an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States?"

Certain aspects of this legal framework require additional explication. First, the condition that an operational leader present an "imminent" threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future.

As Conor Friedersdorf wrote, "You can't make this stuff up." 

Non-imminent imminence, extra-judicial capital punishment by the chief executive of people who have not been charged with a crime, are part of a lack of transparency concealing arbitrary exercise of power solely on the basis of the presumed decency, trustworthiness, and inerrant ability to detect guilt, of the person in power.

This is not a new theory. It was in vogue for centuries before the rise of modern liberal democracies, before the American colonies rose up against similar presumption of the English King. It is the theory of the Benevolent Despot—the fond hope that a wise and good absolute ruler might be the best form of government of all.

It should not be difficult to see what is wrong with this. The question is whether this is a free country. The question is whether we are a free people, with our freedom protected by the indispensable concomitant of freedom, the rule of law.

As Coates concluded:

I understand that on some level a democracy generally elects human leaders who will not abuse the spirit of the law. I think Barack Obama is such a leader. That is for the historians to determine. But practically, much of our foreign policy now depends on the hope of benevolent dictators and philosopher kings. The law can't help. The law is what the kings say it is. 

Theoretical Mathematics vs Empirical Mathematics

In Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture, I wrote that one of the problems of the intellectual tradition is:

Inattention to the cognitive problem posed by the difference between mathematics as an incorporeal conceptual order and mathematics as a predictor of the behavior of real physical systems (2 + 2 = 4 by the rules of the game mathematics, but 2 oranges + 2 oranges = 4 oranges is a falsifiable prediction about the future). Mathematics is not reality. It is a description of the possible relationships between real things.

Recently on the Scientific American website, Ted Grinthal wrote:

“Machines of the Infinite,” by John Pavlus, states that the “universe itself is beholden to the computational limits imposed by P versus NP,” the question of whether tough problems whose solutions can be quickly verified can also be quickly solved.
This is a common misunderstanding. Nothing in the real world (whatever that is) is constrained in any way by our mathematics, physical laws or anything else we invented. Mathematics is merely a useful tool created to describe the universe. When we find something that we can't calculate or describe with our math, it may be that we've found a limit or constraint on the universe; it could also be that we've found a limit or constraint to our mathematics. (Emphasis added)

The a priori concept of math—that math exists prior to the reality that we can see and touch—is first cousin to Plato's philosophical idealism, which was described in The Two Realms as follows:

To summarize, Plato taught that the [physical] table we think is real is an effect—in the parable of the cave a “shadow”—of a pre-existing immaterial template of the table. The template is usually referred to as a form (idea in Greek, producing the term philosophical idealism).

[Thomas] Cahill: In the Platonist model of knowledge, the real physical thing which you can see or touch is only an “appearance” generated by a hidden Form.

 Of philosophical idealism Aristotle said:
This form, which exists in the carpenter’s mind, is the formal cause of the table—but it can have no existence except in the carpenter’s mind and at length in his work. To speak otherwise—to say that there is an absolute Tableness floating somewhere that gives form to all particular tables—is “to speak abstractly and idly.” - Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter

Absent convincing evidence to the contrary, it is best to consider every deduction a concealed induction. The general principles of the theoretical approach (and of what was once called Theory) were arrived at by experience. They can in principle be falsified by a future experience.

The "problem of induction" is that what is demonstrated by experience can never provide metaphysical certitude. It can be certain for all practical purposes. We can even bet our lives on it (and we do, every day). But that perfect knowledge we would like to have is not attainable.

The error of Plato's abstract theory of reality is that it assumes that the real can start with deduction, escaping the provisional nature of the physical. This is an elemental intellectual error.

The First Six Months' Wrap

This might be subtitled "An Enlightenment Liberal Blog," and probably the most representative post would be The Liberal Founding, which said, among other things,

In this blog the term ‘liberalism’ means Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism is substantially different from the outlook of the left, and from Marxism, progressivism, libertarianism, and conservatism (as Historian Fritz Stern writes, “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.”)

The knotty problem of the definition of liberalism is addressed by various posts which attempt to suggest the dimensions of a political philosophy which underlies the modern world, and which may represent humankind's best effort so far to address the problem of achieving liberty and justice for all: Defining Liberalism: Randall Kennedy's 'My Race Problem—And Ours'; Defining Liberalism: Hayek, Habakkuk and More; Defining Liberalism: Published Arguments for Liberalism; Defining Liberalism: An Overview; and Defining Liberalism: "Passing".

An unfriendly definition related by Charles K. Rowley:

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

There has also been an ongoing concern with our intellectual heritage, and the state of the academic humanities, as expressed in The Two Realms, Intellectual Prudence, and Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture.

A perhaps related post was a retelling of "Oedipus Rex," This Is The Son of Kings, which attempted a reinterpretation of classical literary criticism on the topic of the most famous play of the ancient world.

A germane concern was Conscience and Language: Orwell, which noted, “Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind. … If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.”

There were a number of posts on the presidential election of 2012: How Fares The Republic: The Liberal View of The Market; How Fares The Republic: The Post Truth Candidate; and How Fares The Republic: Movement Conservatism Cruelty. Related were: Mendacious Debater Disgraces Self: Media Call Him Victor; and The Third Debate: Mendacious Candidate Disgraces Self Redux.

And a post by an honorable Republican: Mitt's Father Articulates Republican Principles Before Goldwater.

There were various perhaps memorable quotes, including: Snippets 7/27/12:

I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together, and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold, pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities: that the world is brutal and coarse, that God in fact has not saved us.

- Anna Akhmatova, in Red Square by Martin Cruz Smith

Molly Ball, who wrote:

“A smart [GOP] party strategist” ... wrote, “Bain was a critical part of the Romney image that just couldn't sell to enough voters in Ohio. He came off as the guy who got rich by buying your Dad's employer, firing your Dad, stripping down the business, and making hundreds of millions and buying jet-skis and houses with car elevators and dancing horses while your Dad visits the food bank and is forced onto unemployment. The Romney team should have known this was going to be a problem.” (Emphasis added.)

There were two articles addressing a little-known aspect of the civil rights revolution of the mid-twentieth century: In Retrospect: The Supreme Court and The Disabled; and Followup: Courts and the Civil Rights of the Disabled. In the latter a prosecutor noted:

There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities.

An early post wondered who now believes "that all men are created equal": The Condition of Equality Today, which cited, among others:

 [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)

"Passing" Ctd.

With respect to the previous post, Defining Liberalism: "Passing", a reader of Andrew Sullivan's weblog wrote:

How would Foster being out of the closet have helped [gay people]? . . . This is extremely silly, collectivist, identity politics. Jodie Foster is an autonomous individual with her own ambitions, her own thoughts, and her own desires, as we all are. Just because she happens to share your and your friends’ sexual orientation does not make her part of your "community" in any meaningful way, and it certainly does not make her obligated to take up the cause of this [community] . . .

As the post on passing argues, "a liberal democracy . . . means complete freedom to live a private life so long as doing so does not infringe the rights and liberties of others."
 
[I elided the end of the reader's comment because I disagree with it. The reader concluded, "it certainly does not make her obligated to take up the cause of this community’s self-inflicted health problems" (my emphasis). "They asked for it?" No more than a multitude of voluntary activities which have downsides as well as upsides. The liberal spirit is a spirit of toleration, of being, as a version of the OED said, "generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others." There is no place for what Frederick C. Crews called the "reckless dispensation of guilt."]

Defining Liberalism: "Passing"

Andrew Sullivan writes today, "Every gay person in the closet is an enabler of homophobia." Sullivan denies the right of the one who is different in some way to "pass" as part of the mainstream if he or she can.

This pains me, because for the last decade self-described conservative Sullivan's "Dish" blog has in many ways been a reliable guide to the liberal spirit in the public life of a democracy. But personal liberty in  a liberal democracy (see The Liberal Founding), while it encourages—and needs—public-spiritedness, means complete freedom to live a private life so long as doing so does not infringe the rights and liberties of others. (As Pericles' Funeral Oration notes, "And we live not only free in the administration of the state but also one with another void of jealousy touching each other’s daily course of life, not offended at any man for following his own humour, nor casting on any man censorious looks.")

It's a free country, and this means that Barry Goldwater gets to be an Episcopalian and Madeleine Albright gets to live as a gentile (when a media discussion arose concerning the fact that Albright is of Jewish descent, someone remarked, "She doesn't want to know from Jewish"). People of African-American descent who don't look black are free to just live as a person and need not deal every day with the identity issues which would arise if they did not pass as white. A gay actress (in this case Jodie Foster, the subject of Andrew Sullivan's article above) has no obligation to come out, and excellent reasons not to. The general roles Foster has played, and their conventional romantic scenes, probably wouldn't have been available to her if she had been out.

Privacy is a freedom of enormous value. Privacy means that one is free from being arbitrarily identified with some group, supposed to be in dire plight. It means that one is free from being saddled by others, or by what John Stuart Mill called "social tyranny," with an involuntary obligation to alleviate that plight. As Jim Sleeper observed in Liberal Racism, the assumption that each person of color is to be treated as a "racial delegate" is just wrong. Nor is Jodie Foster, or anyone else, to be involuntarily enlisted in the sexual orientation wars. It's a free country. We get to choose our battles, or no battles.

A signature difference between liberal and left is that liberal does not care about identity. As mentioned in these pages before, liberalism is public and civil. One's subculture, race, gender, religion or irreligion, esthetic taste, etc., may be freely enjoyed or ignored under the aegis of the liberal society, but are not otherwise of public concern. "We live . . . free," as Pericles said above.

In a liberal society the only identity that matters is that one is a citizen. A free citizen, not subservient to anyone or anything, unless in free and informed voluntary consent. As Immanuel Kant said in "What Is Enlightenment?" "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."

Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture

Honest people just get out, leaving the field to those who don't mind deception or don't recognize it. - Linda Seebach, "Scientist Takes Academia for a Ride with Parody"

Last August's Intellectual Prudence discussed Literary Critic Frederick C. Crews' remark on the "Nietzschean scorn" often leveled by humanities intellectuals at what he called "intellectual prudence." Last week, in slate.com, Ron Rosenbaum warned "against the kind of grad school-nurtured exegesis of Shakespeare most egregiously represented by James Shapiro in the section of his book, 1599, wherein he purports to read Shakespeare’s mind and discover that Shakespeare would have wanted to cut, trash, delete, and disappear Hamlet’s final soliloquy; one of the high points of the play and of Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre." Rosenbaum concluded:

But grad school for literature, I can't advocate. I escaped Yale before it became the center of the frenzied fad for French literary theorists, as a result of which students read more about arcane metaphysics of language, semiotics and the like than the actual literature itself. But, even though many of the most sophisticated contemporary intellectuals who once bought into this sophistry (such as Terry Eagleton) have abandoned it, the tenured relics who imposed this intellectual regime are still there, still espousing their view that literature itself is only to be understood through their diminishing deconstructing lens. I can testify to it, having sat through enough seminars at the Shakespeare Association of America conferences to last a life time. Please don't waste your life this way.

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.
In Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert Pirsig called the university the "church of reason," devoted to the disinterested search for truth. A church of reason would, as Socrates said, "follow the argument wherever it leads," without regard to the conventional wisdom or to social pressure. But the inhabitants of the faculty lounge are as much a subculture as any other, a vested interest which logically would be subject to sociological study in much the same fashion as an anthropologist studies the folkways of a stone age tribe. Such a meta-intellectual analysis of the intellectual would ask, as Crews once did, "Do Literary Studies Have an Ideology?"
But there is resistance to this. The Dissenter was once accused by a philosophy TA, in fact, of harboring the notion of a "meta-intellectual" examination of the way academic philosophy is taught. Anyone who did not realize that such a critique is self-evidently wrong, he implied, reveals intellectual inadequacy.
Much of what we consider the intellectual heritage violates the principles of the intellectual discipline. It is true that there are intellectuals who critique the intellectual tradition (Crews, Orwell, Popper—who spoke of "intellectualists"—and others) but the pressure not to break ranks is strong.
Here is a rough draft, written some time ago, critiquing Great Books-ism:

• Most of those who claim to participate in intellectual endeavors are metaphysically confused: 1. No clear concept of what the realm of the senses does and does not tell us; 2. Failure to distinguish between the kinds of knowledge afforded by nature, by the aesthetic, and by the mystical, and failure to distinguish between the knowledge methods applicable to each; 3. Using, impermissibly, metaphysical certitude as a standard of deductive proof; 4. Inattention to the cognitive problem posed by the difference between mathematics as an incorporeal conceptual order and mathematics as a predictor of the behavior of real physical systems (2 + 2 = 4 by the rules of the game mathematics, but 2 oranges + 2 oranges = 4 oranges is a falsifiable prediction about the future). Mathematics is not reality. It is a description of the possible relationships between real things.
• Iron age ontology and epistemology (i.e., Plato's philosophical idealism and such descendants as postmodernism)
• Inadequate definition of fact/truth
• Failure to examine the sociology of the great thinkers and of the intelligentsia
• Absence of meta-intellectual analysis
• Complacency about the reckless mind
• Inattention of the intellectual class to its own methodology. For example, are evidence and reason an indispensable starting point or simply one of many approaches which may be adopted?
• Treating propositions unworthy of critical inspection as if they were holy writ
• Reverse ad hominem; that is, treating the notions of canonical figures as indiscussable
• Failure to define the standards of the intellectual discipline
• Incoherence: Failure to recognize that two great, mutually inconsistent ideas cannot both be true
• Anti-intellectualism: Countenancing the notion that power can impose its own truth (cf. Nietzsche et al.)
• Anti-intellectualism: Failure to enforce a global prohibition on all argument by fallacy, including ad hominem
• Anti-intellectualism: Rejection of Kant's observation that a good will is the one indispensable intellectual quality, as all the others can be subverted to anti-intellectual and unethical ends
• Anti-intellectualism: Lack of comprehension that the intellectual realm defines an implied ethical order (cf. the cynicism of German idealism). As Benda cried, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.”
• The intellectual tendency to embrace esotericism and with it, elitism
• Crime against humanity: the Leo Strauss doctrine that intellectuals are the only humans that matter and therefore, as a kind of Herrenvolk, are entitled to treat the rest of the human instrumentally (as Kant said, as means only, and not also as ends).

Any one of these could in itself be the subject to one or more posts. However, "reverse ad hominem" may have a bearing on the lack of response to Obama's precedent-shattering election noted above. Where ad hominem purports to discredit a proposition by discrediting the person who propounds it, reverse ad hominem implies that a proposition is valid because of the greatness of its author.
For example, Plato, whom many humanities academics may consider the greatest thinker of all time, dismissed political democracy. It is quite possible that the historic election of 2008 was dismissed in the classes I witnessed because they were influenced by Plato's attitude toward democracy.
Does this seem preposterous? See "Scientist Takes Academia for a Ride with Parody", by Linda Seebach:

Physicist Alan Sokal of New York University meticulously observed all the rules of the academic game when he constructed his article on postmodern physics and submitted it to a prestigious journal of cultural studies called Social Text.
The people he cites as authorities in cultural studies are the superluminaries of the field, the quotations he uses to illustrate his argument are strictly accurate and the text is bristling with footnotes.
All the rules but one, that is: Sokal's article is a parody. Under the grandiloquent title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," it appeared in the Spring/Summer 1996 special issue of the magazine, one entirely devoted to "the science wars," as the editors term the tension between people who actually do science and the critics who merely theorize about it. ...

Sokal's successful spoof calls into question the intellectual standards of the whole field.
If you're chuckling, but inclined to think it's just professors doing their usual angels-on-a-pinhead thing, please do think again. Tuition and fees at the priciest private universities run nearly $1,000 for each week of class. Taxpayers pick up a big chunk of the bill for public universities. Many of those classes are being taught, it appears, by professors who deny the distinction between truth and falsity and consequently can't distinguish double-talk from rational argument.
Maybe some of the junior professors and the graduate students do know what they're hearing is nonsense, but think it would be harmful to their careers to speak out. Living with such deception, possibly for a lifetime, is profoundly corrupting. Honest people just get out, leaving the field to those who don't mind deception or don't recognize it. ...
There is a political point to Sokal's demonstration, but it's not the right-wing one he's sure will be attributed to him. He's proud to call himself a leftist, and his resume includes a stint teaching mathematics at the National University of Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. "If you take up crazy philosophies you undermine your ability to tackle questions of public policy, like ecology," he said. "It really matters whether the world is warming up."
I don't remotely share Sokal's political views, but I agree with him that the corruption of clear thought and clear language is dangerous. And corruption has to be exposed before it can be cleaned up.

One might also note that Thomas Jefferson was horrified by what he found in Plato, noting that "Education is chiefly in the hands of persons who, from their profession, have an interest in the reputation and the dreams of Plato. They give the tone while at school . . . "

I amused myself [recently] with reading Plato's Republic. I am wrong, however, in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to get through a whole dialogue. While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this? How the soi-disant Christian world, indeed, should have done it, is a piece of historical curiosity. But how could the Roman good sense do it? And particularly, how could Cicero bestow such eulogies on Plato? Although Cicero did not wield the dense logic of Demosthenes, yet he was able, learned, laborious, practiced in the business of the world, and honest. He could not be the dupe of mere style, of which he was himself the first master in the world. With the moderns. I think, it is rather a matter of fashion and authority. Education is chiefly in the hands of persons who, from their profession, have an interest in the reputation and the dreams of Plato. They give the tone while at school, and few in after years have occasion to revise their college opinions. But fashion and authority apart, and bringing Plato to the test of reason, take from him his sophisms, futilities and incomprehensibilities, and what remains?In truth, he is one of the race of genuine Sophists, who has escaped the oblivion of his brethren, first, by the eloquence of his diction, but chiefly, by the adoption and incorporation of his whimsies into the body of artificial Christianity. His foggv mind is forever presenting the semblances of objects which, half seen through a mist, can be defined neither in form nor dimensions. * * * Socrates had reason, indeed, to complain of the misrepresentations of Plato; for in truth, his dialogues are libels on Socrates. - Jefferson writing to John Adams