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

Beware the Recasting of Racial Issues in Terms of Academic Assertions Concerning "Culture"

Professor Stacey Patton recently declared, Black America Should Stop Forgiving White Racists. "The almost reflective [sic] demand of forgiveness, especially for those dealing with death by racism, is about protecting whiteness, and America as a whole," she wrote concerning the recent murder of black parishioners in Emmanuel AME Church. 

The first false equivalency here arises from the misreading of the private exercise of Christian forgiveness (Mat 5:44 "But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you . . .") as incompatible with vigorous action in the political sphere. Ms. Patton missed a unique chance to contrast the authentic Christianity of black worshipers with the faux-religious posturing of the religious right.

It gets worse. Dr. Patton adds:

Matthew P. Guteral, an historian of race at Brown University, says: “For all the public talk about supposedly absent black fathers and derelict black culture, the extraordinary act of forgiveness might remind us that the nation’s most historically oppressed group does a better job of doing what we all say we want most: being decent and human. Even when it seems impossible. We cannot say the same thing about whiteness or what we should call white culture, which insists it is superior, ... (Emphasis added)

Our first black President doesn't think "absent black fathers" is fictitious:

It’s true that if I’m giving a commencement at Morehouse that I will have a conversation with young black men about taking responsibility as fathers that I probably will not have with the women of Barnard. And I make no apologies for that. And the reason is, is because I am a black man who grew up without a father and I know the cost that I paid for that. And I also know that I have the capacity to break that cycle, and as a consequence, I think my daughters are better off.

I once worked for a supervisor of Asian extraction, who told me, "individualism is a white idea." (Given that civil rights are the rights of the individual, this, if true, would have been a matter of praise.) So let's say this right now: Ideas don't have a color. Culture does not have a color. It is dismaying that creatures of the university such as Professors Patton and Guteral have not internalized this concept.

Sir V.S. Naipaul has said, of Our Universal Civilization, "it fits all men."* That is the cosmopolitan outlook, the outlook which those deserving of the university manifest. Before mentioning other passages in which Sir Vidya describes the way this supposedly "white" culture benefits all races, let's look at Professors Patton and Guteral's other remark, about "supposedly . . . derelict black culture."

We once had a brilliant black writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates I, who gave a matchless description of the benefit of moving from a subculture to modern, first-world, culture—and of the wrenching personal change entailed:

When we talk "culture," as it relates to African-Americans, we assume a kind of exclusivity and suspension of logic. Stats are whipped out (70 percent of black babies born out of wedlock) and then claims are tossed around cavalierly, (black culture doesn't value marriage.) The problem isn't that "culture" doesn't exist, nor is it that elements of that "culture" might impair upward mobility.

It defies logic to think that any group, in a generationaly entrenched position, would not develop codes and mores for how to survive in that position. African-Americans, themselves, from poor to bourgeois, are the harshest critics of the street mentality. ...

To the young people in my neighborhood, friendship was defined by having each other's back. And in that way, the personal shields, the personal willingness to meet violence with violence, combined and became a collective, neighborhood shield--a neighborhood rep. ...

I think one can safely call that an element of a kind of street culture. It's also an element which--once one leaves the streets--is a great impediment. "I ain't no punk" may shield you from neighborhood violence. But it can not shield you from algebra, when your teacher tries to correct you. It can not shield you from losing hours, when your supervisor corrects your work. And it would not have shielded me from unemployment, after I cold-cocked a guy over a blog post.

I suspect that a large part of the problem, when we talk about culture, is an inability to code-switch, to understand that the language of Rohan is not the language of Mordor. I don't say this to minimize culture, to the contrary, I say it to point how difficult it is to get people to discard practices which were essential to them in one world, but hinder their advancement into another. And then there's the fear of that other world, that sense that if you discard those practices, you have discarded some of yourself, and done it in pursuit of a world, that you may not master.

'Elements of that "culture" might impair upward mobility,' Coates said back then. "It's also an element which--once one leaves the streets--is a great impediment," he added.**

Professors Patton and Guteral also allege that "white culture . . . insists it is superior." Naipaul, who also moved from a third world culture, by contrast describes modernity as (to borrow Lincoln's words) "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times":

It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism.

How crabbed and narrow and bitter, by contrast, is the outlook of Patton, Guteral, and (unfortunately) the later, ideological Ta-Nehisi Coates, who politicize culture as propaganda, in the process fanatically denying the "immense human idea" of the "awakened spirit." “The central conservative truth,” observed Pat Moynihan, “is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

Many previous posts in this blog address the charge that "white supremacy" founded America, as if the development of a dynamic democracy with a liberal founding was the effect of a monstrous racism embedded in the soul, and not the well-grounded prospering of a great culture with an awakened spirit. 


(*) Our Universal Civilization:
The universal civilization has been a long time in the making. It wasn’t always universal; it wasn’t always as attractive as it is today. The expansion of Europe gave it for at least three centuries a racial taint, which still causes pain. ... A later realization—I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk—has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. ... I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.

(**) Ta-Nehisi Coates II, by contrast, says:

The notion that black irresponsibility is at least part of the "race problem" is widely shared among black America's most prominent figures, beginning—but not ending—with the president of the United States. ...

Respectability politics is, at its root, the inability to look into the cold dark void of history. For if black people are—as I maintain—no part of the problem, if the problem truly is 100 percent explained by white supremacy, then we are presented with a set of unfortunate facts about our home.

I Refuse to be Spoken to in That Tone of Voice

So said Christopher Hitchens about an ideology that "makes very large claims for itself," and lectures those who do not share that ideology concerning what they are allowed to do.

In The Case for Reparations a once-respected national magazine, purporting to advance civil rights, adopts in disguised form the dysfunctional foregone conclusions and disproved socio-political theories of a radical failed ideology (see Hollander's Political Will and Personal Belief, which depicts the utter loss of faith of the radical left's most passionate supporters). It postures morally over the results. It sneers not only at our ways ("scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July "), but at our virtues ("the great democratizer," "And that is us as the uncomplicated, the unvarnished, the un-nuanced champion of liberty the world over. And what the question of reparations ultimately raises, is that this land of liberty, this land of freedom, was made possible by slavery, was made possible by plunder.").

We are told that Slavery Made America. We are told, illogically, that the magnitude of the Civil War represents, not a great moral commitment to ending slavery, but a demonstration of the wickedness of white folks' lust for supremacy:

I roughly understood then that the Civil War—the most lethal conflict in American history—boiled down to the right to raise an empire based on slaveholding and white supremacy.* What had not yet clicked for me was precisely how essential enslavement was to America, that its foundational nature explained the Civil War's body count.

The Liberal Founding announced the central proposition of A Dissenter's Notes: that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are representative Enlightenment documents; and that Enlightenment liberalism was and continues to be the underlying rationale of our country. It quoted eminent German-American historian Fritz Stern:

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.”

A left critique of liberalism by professor Charles K. Rowley reads:

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. - What Is Living and What Is Dead in Classical Liberalism

In a minute I'll talk about the profound differences between liberal and left in these matters, but first, it should be noted the Democratic Party is not a left party, despite the slovenliness of our language. A left party would not have not bailed out those monster capitalist corporations, Chrysler Corp. and General Motors, or spent much of the last presidential campaign lauding the middle class. For a surprisingly doctrinaire left perspective, look not at the Democratic party but at the academic humanities professoriate. (Books (none by conservatives) about academic radicalism: Follies of the Wise; Fashionable Nonsense**; The Reckless Mind; Literature Lost)

Universalism is illustrated in the Declaration, and in American Revolution writer Thomas Paine. The Declaration: "Having a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"; "let facts be submitted to a candid world." Paine: "I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness." A universalist worldview underlies the words which begin the Constitution: "We the People."

The left by contrast is particularist, from the ending of the Communist Manifesto ("Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.") to Seattle's Kshama Sawant ("Environmentalists and Workers Must Link Up to Stop Global Warming and Fight"). There is always a radical binary, Oppressed and Oppressor, the latter consigned to outer darkness. In the words of Romer v. Evans, "A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws. Amendment 2 violates the Equal Protection Clause." (This is why The Atlantic's crusade is so jarring. It is such a crude violation of our inclusive values.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates' crusade in The Atlantic is not about any sort of rainbow coalition (contrast M. L. King's "God is ... interested in the freedom of brown men, yellow men, red men and black men ... He is interested in the freedom of the whole human race."). It's strictly about what professor Randall Kennedy called a "self-aggrandizing" group—Coates' own. For public-spirited citizens, Native Americans have an argument which is strongly-related to that of African-Americans, but what Coates had to say about their cause, in a video, was "if they can make the case."

Individualism: The romantic tenor inherited from the counterculture may cause us to think of individualism in terms of egotism. However, in the context of liberalism the emphasis on the individual means that civil rights are the rights of the single person: the citizen.

This may be contrasted with the tendency to think of the group as everything, a context which may demote the concerns of the person to mere selfishness. Mill's On Liberty mentions, about page 3, "social tyranny," a pressure for groupthink and conformity resulting from (in left jargon) "solidarity," "group rights," "collectivism," and "communitarianism." (Kennedy, above critiques "the notion that blackness gives rise to racial obligation and that black people should have a special, closer, more affectionate relationship with their fellow blacks than with others in America's diverse society." Emphasis added.) Justice operates at the level of the person; by working toward the civil rights of each individual it militates for the civil rights of all, and serves as a defense against social tyranny.

Egalitarianism: Neither the left nor the right supports that foundational American principle, "all men are created equal." (See The Condition of Equality Today.) To say "white supremacy" and "white guilt," as The Atlantic's crusade does, imputes unique evil to white folks. This parallels the Manifesto's belief in the wickedness of the bourgeoisie. As for the right, Russell Kirk included in his Ten Conservative Principles:

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.

Meliorism: Steven Den Beste spoke of the optimistic spirit of liberal democracy: "dedication to achieving ideal outcomes." It appears in the Christian scriptures as the parable about experiencing more joy over the one sheep that had been lost, but was found, than over the ninety-nine that were never lost. Meliorism is the constructive aspect of liberalism.

I will close by quoting an earlier post, Reparations: The Worst Fallacies are Those that Trash Liberal Principles:

In his essay "Dragon Slayers,"* Jerald Walker recounts a conversation with "a man who wanted me to hate him. I should hate all whites, he felt. ... 'How about slavery,' he asked. I explained, as politely as I could, that I had not been a slave. 'But you feel its effects,' he snapped. 'Racism, discrimination, and prejudice will always be a problem for you in this country. White people,' he insisted, 'are your oppressors.' ... 'After all,' I continued, 'slaves and their immediate descendants were by and large heroic, not pathetic, or I wouldn't be standing here.'The man was outraged. 'You're absolving them of responsibility, of the obligation to atone for past and present wrongs.'"

When I saw this passage yesterday, I realized that Ta-Nehisi Coates is presenting a concealed demand for atonement in The Case for Reparations:

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

 I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice. And so should you.


-*--

(*) The growth of the United States should not be pychologized as "white supremacy." David Auerbach suggested (as did our previous post), that it was an effect of the processes of modernity:

From the moment the Industrial Revolution triggered the massive 200-year explosion in growth, we made a Faustian bargain. From that point on, it was pretty much a given that the motor of technological progress and economic growth would lead us to where we are today. Henry Adams called this the dynamo, embodying the dominant force and technological motor of modern human history.

(**) For an extensive background on Fashionable Nonsense, see co-author Alan Sokal's page:

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/
 
In particular, see Linda Seebach's "Scientist takes academia for a ride with parody"

Excerpt:

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.

Many scientists believe that the emperors of cultural studies have no clothes. But Sokal captured the whole royal court parading around in naked ignorance and persuaded the palace chroniclers to publish the portrait as a centerfold.

Once the article was safely in print, Sokal revealed his modest experiment. "Would a leading journal of cultural studies," he wrote in the May/June issue of Lingua Franca, "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?"

Unfortunately yes, and Sokal's deliberate nonsense is anything but subtle. Translated into plain English from the high-flown language he borrowed for the occasion, his first paragraph says that scientists "cling to the dogma" that the external world exists and its properties are independent of what human beings think.

But nobody believes that old stuff any more, right? Now we all know that physical reality is "at bottom a social and linguistic construct."

Is there a sound when a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it? Under the theory of social construction, there's not even a tree.

There are so many red flags planted throughout the paper that even non-scientists should have spotted at least one and started laughing, Sokal said Thursday (May 9). "Either this is a parody or the author is off his rocker."

The Atlantic Revives Radical Chic: Ta-Nehisi Coates and the English Language

Recently Chris Bodenner's In the Wake of Baltimore: Your Thoughts quoted Ta-Nehisi Coates:

White Supremacy is foundational to America. White Supremacy is not a bump on the road toward a better America. It is the road itself, the means by which America justified the taking of land and enslaving of humans, which is to say the means by which America came to be.

Last year TNC wrote, "I would be remiss if I did not offer two other entries into the debate." In this case, what he left out is what the Americans themselves said was foundational: "All men are created equal." While this is a principle oft more honored in the breach than the observance, particularly in the early days of the nation, TNC's sweeping assertion leaves out what is most important.

Equality—liberty and justice for all—is a hard fight. But that fight was and still is the essence of our nation. It gave the suffragists an unanswerable argument for extending the vote to women. It gave Martin Luther King the argument for persuading the nation to undertake the monumental effort to end Jim Crow.

The effort to achieve a free democratic society marshals justice to constrain the abuse of power. Our past—"the taking of land and enslaving of humans"—was a consequence of the enormous advantage of modernity relative to the native societies of North America, and Africa, at that time, which inadequate justice failed to constrain. The nation which did these things has improved since then, because contrary to TNC's misleading language, equality is a fundamental principle, beside which "supremacy" is an aberration. Example: The Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act:

In 1971, barely one million acres of land in Alaska was in private hands. ANCSA together with section 6 of Alaska Statehood Act which the act allowed to come to fruition affected ownership to about 148.5 million acres of land in Alaska once wholly controlled by the federal government. That is larger by 6 million acres than the combined areas of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. When the bill passed in 1971, it included provisions that had never been attempted in United States settlements with Native Americans. The newly passed Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act created twelve Native regional economic development corporations. Each corporation was associated with a specific region of Alaska, and the Natives who had traditionally lived there. This innovative approach to native settlements engaged the tribes in corporate capitalism. It was the idea of the AFN [Alaska Federation of Natives], who believed that the Natives would have to become a part of the capitalist system in order to survive. As stockholders in these corporations, the Natives could earn some income and stay in their traditional villages. If the corporations were managed properly, they could make profits that would enable individuals to stay, rather than having to leave Native villages to find better work. This was intended to help preserve Native culture. (Emphasis added)

TNC next critiques a commenter who 'rejects “collective responsibility” because he believes it "implicate(s) an individual’s [responsibility] based not on their actions but on their 'race.'"' One must start, TNC begins, 'by acknowledging that without "collective responsibility" we do not have a country. Perhaps the most significant form of “collective responsibility” is our tax system.'

What TNC is confusing here is legal responsibility and moral guilt. He associated "white supremacy" and guilt in The Case for Reparations:

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

This is a long way from the obligation to pay levied taxes, which has nothing to do with moral responsibility for the misdeeds of other people. Martin Luther King rejected the idea of judging people based on the group they supposedly belong to when he said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
 
TNC's shift in which he seems to imply that being a citizen of a nation is membership in a collective wrongly places emphasis on collective rather than individual action or identity—just what the commenter objected to. This is argument by misnaming.

The measure of TNC's extremism is the way he seizes on the most extreme term in many situations, leaves out authoritative counter-arguments, and ignores middle-ground and practical arguments. The measure of TNC's intellectual dishonesty is that he ignores the most articulate defender of American principles we have had, Abraham Lincoln. The measure of TNC's radicalism is that he ignores the most successful African American civil rights crusader we have, Martin Luther King; and disputes the practical advice of the most successful African American politician we have ever had, Barack Obama.

This is because TNC's case is weak. His real problem isn't white people and their supposed supremacism. His real problem is modernity—what V. S. Naipaul called "Our Universal Civilization"—and its tremendous effectiveness. Success in the United States, as in the rest of the first-world countries, requires what is well-known: Education, and 21st-century skills. The Alaska Federation of Natives, above, opted to "become a part of the capitalist system." Ta-Nehisi, in opting instead for a handout, promotes dependency. That's his best idea.

Recently Barack Obama, asked about Ta-Nehisi's criticism, said:

It’s true that if I’m giving a commencement at Morehouse that I will have a conversation with young black men about taking responsibility as fathers that I probably will not have with the women of Barnard. And I make no apologies for that. And the reason is, is because I am a black man who grew up without a father and I know the cost that I paid for that. And I also know that I have the capacity to break that cycle, and as a consequence, I think my daughters are better off. (Applause.)
And that is not something that—for me to have that conversation does not negate my conversation about the need for early childhood education, or the need for job training, or the need for greater investment in infrastructure, or jobs in low-income communities.

Ta-Nehisi called this "moral invective."

The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple—talk about class and hope no one notices.
This is not a “both/and.” It is a bait and switch. The moral failings of black people are directly addressed. The centuries-old failings of their local, state, and federal government, less so. (Emphasis added)

That's a radical, extremist slanting of what the first black president said, which unmistakably is a "both/and."

Previous blog posts have noted that Lincoln in numerous speeches and writings decisively refuted many of the derogatory assertions in The Atlantic's Reparations series (here, here and here, among others.) The Atlantic mentions none of them.

Wikipedia notes:

The phrase "radical chic" originated in a 1970 New York article by Tom Wolfe, titled "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's", which was later reprinted in his books Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Purple Decades. In the essay, Wolfe used the term to satirize composer Leonard Bernstein and his friends for their absurdity in hosting a fundraising party for the Black Panthers—an organization whose members, activities, and goals were clearly incongruous with those of Bernstein's elite circle. Wolfe's concept of radical chic was intended to lampoon individuals (particularly social elites like the jet set) who endorsed leftist radicalism merely to affect worldliness, assuage white guilt, or garner prestige, rather than to affirm genuine political convictions. (Emphasis added)

Exactly.

The Largest Minority

The US Office of Disability Employment Policy states:

Although the term is most often used to refer to differences among individuals such as ethnicity, gender, age and religion, diversity actually encompasses the infinite range of individuals' unique attributes and experiences. As the nation's largest minority — comprising almost 50 million individuals — people with disabilities contribute to diversity, and businesses can enhance their competitive edge by taking steps to ensure they are integrated into their workforce and customer base. (Emphasis added)

Comment: You'd never know it. The nation implements justice for minorities by several means: Protected class. Affirmative action. Heightened scrutiny concerning the effect of presumably neutral laws. Lawsuits concerning harassment, defamation, bullying, unequal pay, inequity in hiring practices, social exclusion. It is not that all these things necessarily belong in a liberal democratic society. In some cases they are inferior substitutes for justice. Protected class and heightened scrutiny look suspiciously like privilege.* Affirmative action, with its relationship to quotas and its adverse effect on merit hire and promotion, looks like favoritism.

But these are the currently operative ad hoc substitutes for actual justice. It is telling that people with disabilities are excluded. A news article from late 2012 concerning a child with cerebral palsy noted:

There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities. - Jennifer Fitzsimmons, the chief assistant city prosecutor in a rare case where legal action was taken

A year ago a courageous young woman with cerebral palsy wrote about the discriminatory reaction she often experiences in a supposedly progressive city:

I was born with cerebral palsy, and though I'm 30 years old, I didn't really accept that until I moved to Seattle last June. It was something I hid from, something I denied, and it was relatively easy to do so, because a lot of people seemed to notice other things about me before they noticed that. ... In Seattle, though, a lot of people seem to be a little unnerved by my disability, ... But I was caught entirely off guard by this sudden understanding that being alive in the only body I've got apparently makes some people uncomfortable in 2014, in one of America's most progressive cities. I moved here for books, coffee, writing, nature, food, even rain—not a daily crusade.

If she had been a member of the recognized minorities—a protected ethnicity, race, gender, or sexual orientation—the response would have included a lot of people saying, in effect, Yes, we still need to do more about the civil rights of minorities. Instead, there was a lot of backlash.

Many of those who quickly object to minority discrimination deny disability discrimination even as it is happening right in front of them. As commenter jacalope observes "The prevailing attitude seems to be that":

1. My disability isn't real
2. My disability is my own fault
3. If I tried harder I could just get over it
4. I'd magically get over it if I only tried my new acquaintance's latest diet/supplement/acupuncturist/exercise regimen

Why are these discriminatory attitudes alive and well in what Sarah Nielson called a "progressive city?" Because, since the civil rights revolution, discrimination against the minorities addressed by that revolution is subject to punishment under the laws. Social attitudes followed. "No colored need apply" notices were replaced by affirmative action. Society got the message. No one would think of telling a person of color, who described a discriminatory incident or attitude, to "just get over it."

Who is covered and who isn't covered sends a message. There's no affirmative action for cerebral palsy, for cleft palate, for little people, or for all those who are born different (unless the difference is race or gender). "There's nothing out there regarding disabilities," said Assistant City Prosecutor Jennifer Fitsimmons, above. That is, there has apparently never been a landmark civil rights case regarding a disabled person.

Again, society got the message. anonymous:

So you reject:

empathy
normal Seattle passive-aggressiveness
an obviously crazy homeless person
someone who mistakenly talks to your boyfriend instead of you
a mother who was caught in a sudden confrontation

Honey, those are all things we all deal with. It's called the real world.

An article defaming those with birth defects has resided on the Time.com website for over a decade:

Another six months of Monica, have mercy; I don't care if it harelips the Governor. - Molly Ivins, Time.com

Again, the double standard is evident. Would the public have stood for the above remark if Ms. Ivins had used the n-word instead of the h-word? For that matter, would Time have published the article unedited with the n-word?

It's unthinkable. But in the case of the largest minority, it attracts no attention.
 
 (*) "Privilege": "Private Law"

Fundamentals of Liberal Thought, Ctd.

Hypothesis: Every deduction is a concealed induction. (See below)

The previous post, Fundamentals of Liberal Thought, offered a beginning discussion of foundations—of the grounds of reason.

This post attempts elementary notes on the nature of fact and truth, from the Enlightenment liberal perspective. As before, the chief contestant for prevailing concept of truth is the archaic assumption implied by Plato's philosophic idealism. This is that entities have essences, that truth is a knowledge of essences, and thus that truth is absolute. A corollary is that what is true is necessarily so.

Liberalism's concept of truth is closely related to the perspective of empirical science: Truth is probabilistic. If a fact arrived at by induction is falsifiable—Karl Popper's famous proposition—it cannot be absolute.

Let's try a couple of definitions derived from the premise that truth is empirical and probabilistic:

1. Truth is a function of the current state of our knowledge; and
2. A truth is that conclusion, from the best available evidence that, when acted on, tends to produce the expected results.

(1) fits the Newton/Einstein case. At one time Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was considered the ultimate revelation of the laws of nature. 'Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light,' exclaimed Alexander Pope. But a glitch was discovered:

A long-standing problem in the study of the Solar System was that the orbit of Mercury did not behave as required by Newton's equations.

The work of Albert Einstein revealed what had happened. Newton's conclusions were based on  observations of non-relativistic phenomena, and worked satisfactorily under those conditions. The Principia was a brilliant analysis of the knowledge of its time. Newton's formulae are still widely used in a wide number of practical cases, where velocity is not even close to the speed of light, and the sort of powerful close-to-a-star gravity well experienced by Mercury is not a factor. In such non-relativistic conditions, Newton's math is far simpler.

Newton's treatment of the regularities of nature is a subset of Einstein's treatment of the regularities of nature. Einstein's propositions and equations apply under a much wider set of conditions. (There was a debate in the USENET discussion group rec.arts.books, where humanities professors could not understand scientists' argument, that to say that Newton was "wrong" and Einstein was "right" is simplistic. Degrees of confidence does not fit an outlook derived essentially from Plato.)

It could be said that Plato's philosophical idealism was an attempt to solve the problem of induction* by deriving all knowledge from deduction, thereby achieving metaphysical certitude. (His model may have been theoretical mathematics, which some mathematicians see as a great structure of a priori truths existing before and outside of the "reality" we think we experience. The idea or Form is a similar a priori construction which is immaterial, eternal, perfect, unchanging, and imperceptible to the senses.)

The scientific/liberal response is that there are no absolutes, and metaphysical certitude is a will-o-the-wisp. The Forms, after all, are off in some invisible Platonic heaven (which only the Philosopher can see). By contrast, "The moderns [liberals] built on low but solid ground" (Leo Strauss quoted by Allan Bloom). Induction can give results which are certain for all practical purposes. Did you ever run across a street dodging cars? In doing so, you wagered your life on where moving cars would be (an ephemeral truth if there ever was one) when you went.

Hypothesis: Plato's effort was doomed from the start for the reason that it is impossible to start from deduction because every deduction is a concealed induction. A familiar universal principle, i.e. deduction, from theoretical mathematics such as "2 plus 2 equals 4" becomes, in applied mathematics,** an induction, such as "2 oranges plus 2 oranges equals 4 oranges." This induction is falsifiable. All it would require is a case where a grocery clerk put 2 oranges in a sack, then another 2 oranges, and the sack, upon inspection, contained any other quantity than 4 oranges.***

"2 plus 2 equals 4" is not necessarily true; if it were, it would be a prophecy about the future which we mortals are not permitted to make. (Nevertheless, most of us do not anticipate a disjuncture between integer mathematics and household purchases.)

For a more wide-ranging discussion of liberal modernity's objection to Plato, see Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values?



(*) The problem of induction is that it consists of conclusions derived from observation of physical reality (which Plato calls the realm of "appearances") and, according to Plato, produces "opinion" rather than "knowledge." A future observation could contradict those on which the induction is based—that is the problem.

(**) One can say that Plato engaged in equivocation, acting as if applied mathematics possessed the immutability of theoretical mathematics. (Equivocation: When a key term is used in two different senses in the same passage without acknowledgement. An example of legitimate equivocation (because the reader is aware of it) is Pascal's The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing.)

(***) Perhaps this would be an example of definition (2) above: A truth is that conclusion, from the best available evidence that, when acted on, tends to produce the expected results.

Fundamentals of Liberal Thought

As stated in The Liberal Founding, modern liberalism's immediate antecedent was the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century. When Barack Obama remarked, back when he was a senator, We need a politics of evidence and reason rather than ideology, he was articulating what modern liberalism owes to the scientific outlook.

This is in fundamental conflict with another great influence on our thought, Plato's rejection of empiricism. As Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, "Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them."

Which is to say that liberalism will not substitute belief or ideology for evidence and reason where evidence and reason apply. This gave the Founders a rhetorical problem: How to speak of the ground of liberal principles? Reason works from foundations. A syllogism works from two premises, both held to be warranted. But what is a foundation founded on?

The Declaration of Independence, for example, begins

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

"Self-evident?" "Endowed by their Creator?"

Human beings must operate on working assumptions which at the most basic level do not have an antecedent (which would be a more basic level). These values are what, as the Founders wrote, we "hold." Their ground, if any, is not their precedent but their consequences. All that we can ask is that a value be well chosen.

That every person is to start out enjoying equality rather than subservience, and that a universal moral obligation exists to honor each person's right to life, freedom, and autonomy, for example, is not the only choice that could be made. In recent memory a nation declared that the world-historical mission of a master race (its own) should be the paradigm.

One can encounter a relativist argument that, absent proof concerning which is better, the choice is arbitrary, and therefore indefensible.

Liberals answer that they hold with what Fritz Stern* (who had seen the master race concept in action), called "the institutional defense of decency." And hold fast.



(*) as cited in The Liberal Founding

In The Atlantic: The Limits of Free Speech

At such times, old-fashioned liberal values like free speech and robust, open debate seem like tainted adjuncts of an oppressive system, and it’s still possible for radicals to believe that the ideas suppressed as hateful won’t be their own. – Michelle Goldberg, The Nation

Abraham Lincoln fought not only to defend America's physical integrity (by preventing its split into two nations), but America's spiritual integrity—its soul:

Lincoln wrote of the plantation owners' denial of the principle of equality in the Declaration:

The principles of Jefferson ["all men are created equal," etc.] are the definitions and axioms of free society.  And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success.  One dashingly calls them "glittering generalities." Another bluntly calls them "self-evident lies."  And others insidiously argue that they apply to "superior races."

The above was from an article in this blog responding to Ta-Nehisi Coates' claim, in The Atlantic, that a wish to degrade, debase, and enslave another people was the hidden essence of the Founding. We cited numerous instances in which Abraham Lincoln documented the actions the Founders took to set in motion the elimination of slavery in the United States.

In "The Limits of Free Speech," The Atlantic continues its disingenuous sabotage of the soul of America. Kent Greenfield writes (March 13):

We are told the First Amendment protects the odious because we cannot trust the government to make choices about content on our behalf. That protections of speech will inevitably be overinclusive. But that this is a cost we must bear. If we start punishing speech, advocates argue, then we will slide down the slippery slope to tyranny.
If that is what the First Amendment means, then we have a problem greater than bigoted frat boys. The problem would be the First Amendment.
No one with a frontal lobe would mistake this drunken anthem for part of an uninhibited and robust debate about race relations. The chant was a spew of hatred, a promise to discriminate, a celebration of privilege, and an assertion of the right to violence–all wrapped up in a catchy ditty. If the First Amendment has become so bloated, so ham-fisted, that it cannot distinguish between such filth and earnest public debate about race, then it is time we rethink what it means.

The sort of cowardly abandonment of liberalism represented by this thread in The Atlantic was skewered last April by a writer possessing the courage of her liberal convictions:

“Call it left-wing anti-liberalism: the idea, captured by Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” that social justice demands curbs on freedom of expression. “[I]t is possible to define the direction in which prevailing institutions, policies, opinions would have to be changed in order to improve the chance of a peace which is not identical with cold war and a little hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which does not feed on poverty, oppression, and exploitation,” he wrote. “Consequently, it is also possible to identify policies, opinions, movements which would promote this chance, and those which would do the opposite. Suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones.”

Note here both the belief that correct opinions can be dispassionately identified, and the blithe confidence in the wisdom of those empowered to do the suppressing. This kind of thinking is only possible at certain moments: when liberalism seems to have failed but the right is not yet in charge. At such times, old-fashioned liberal values like free speech and robust, open debate seem like tainted adjuncts of an oppressive system, and it’s still possible for radicals to believe that the ideas suppressed as hateful won’t be their own,” – Michelle Goldberg, The Nation.

Justice Holmes rejected Greenfield's suggestion that the First Amendment has become "bloated" more than eighty years ago, noting, in United_States_v._Schwimmer, that freedom of speech is "freedom for the thought we hate":

Surely it cannot show lack of attachment to the principles of the Constitution that she [Rosika Schwimmer] thinks that it can be improved. I suppose that most intelligent people think that it might be.

Some of her answers might excite popular prejudice, but if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

"As our Constitution provides," Firmin DeBrabander asserted, "liberty entails precisely the freedom to be reckless, within limits, also the freedom to insult and offend as the case may be."