Month: February 2016

By now it has become an established meme that Donald Trump’s standing in the competition for the Republican party’s nomination for president is a predictable result of the party’s strategy to build a coalition of voters by cynically appealing to the fears and loathings of various groups and subgroups in a highly heterogenous nation that is designed to be held together by an idea, namely, “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.”  This idea is an ideal, a goal, the achievement of which is resisted by that “human nature” that has been in the process of development since the Stone Age.

Now we are engaged in a great political struggle, “testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.”  Are the ideals of Liberty and Equality complementary, or are they contradictory?  Is it possible to create a durable polity conceived in liberty and dedicated to a proposition that has little warrant in human experience beyond tribal societies whose organization is based on consanguinity?

I think it’s fair to say that the American response to the Great Depression amounted to a paradigm shift, from an emphasis on Liberty to a corrective emphasis on Equality, and that since the Goldwater candidacy of 1964 there has been a concerted effort to rebalance the polity towards Liberty, achieving and then going too far in the Reagan presidency of 1980-88.  A correction was made by the Clinton years 1992-2000, followed by the regressive Bush presidency of 2000-2008, followed by an attempt to rebalance towards Equality by the present Obama administration.  In the midst of all this balancing and rebalancing, the question becomes most insistent: are these idea(l)s complementary or contradictory?  Can any nation so dedicated to these ideals long endure?

President Obama seems to have seen as his mandate the goal to “change the culture of Washington,” which by 2008 had become polarized between the party of Liberty vs. the party of Equality.  The Founders’ vision of the twin ideals as complementary had given way to the sense that they are contradictory.  Obama’s efforts to reorient this thinking utterly failed, and for several reasons, perhaps the main one being that few of our political leaders understand the radical challenge to human nature that was proposed by Jefferson and restated by Lincoln as the basis for national unity.

We all know that something is very wrong.  The “more perfect union” sought by the institutionalization of the principles of the Declaration in the Constitution and its amendment process is in a kind of crisis, and one symptom of that crisis is the rise of candidate Trump.

Information used to be the province of an elite.  From the invention of writing onward, each achievement in the development of information technology has made information increasingly accessible to more and more people.  What McLuhan called “the Gutenberg Galaxy”– world culture after the invention of the printing press with movable metal type in 1450–has been followed by the technology of electricity and all that it has made possible, from the telegraph to the Internet.  The effect of these technical developments has been the democratization of information: now anyone, anywhere, has access to all the information available to the intellectual elite.

Information, however, is not knowledge, nor is it understanding.  Knowledge is information coherently integrated into a whole; knowledge is information that can be used productively.  Information by itself is inert, mere data.  Knowledge is linked information, organized purposefully and linked to other information similarly organized.  Understanding is depth of knowledge, a grasp of its nature, of how knowledge works.

Because information has become democratized, many without knowledge have nonetheless a conceit of knowledge.  Everyone has an opinion, informed by information if not knowledge, and every opinion is now expressible and available in the public sphere.  Formerly, only the elites had informed opinions about matters beyond the narrow interests of economic and social life.  Now, by virtue of “social media,” of which this “web-log” is a part, anyone can make a claim on the attention of others beyond his or her immediate acquaintance.

I have resisted the temptation to enter the “blogosphere” until now.  What is the value of adding to what Bellow called “the noise” and what Beckett called “the mess”–this “blooming buzzing confusion” that William James called the activity of the infantile brain?  With a nod to the butterfly in Indonesia that, by flapping its wings begins a string of causation that eventuates in a hurricane in New Jersey, where I live, I’ve decided that I have nothing to lose by dipping my toe into this stream.  The effect on the stream is likely to be small (but who knows?), and in sum the whole business is likely to be a harmless way for me to explore and publish what the decades have taught me and have led me to question.

So, let there be communication.  Let all jump into the stream, the river, the ocean, and let the initial discord and cacophony swirl until a euphony emerges.  Who says euphony will come of it?  I don’t know.  Let’s call it a faith–a faith in the value of information that leads to knowledge that leads to reflection that leads to wisdom that leads to survival that leads to prosperity that leads to affirmation that leads to the Good that leads to what some call God.

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