RES PUBLICA

RESPONSE TO TIM SMITH’S DEFENSE OF TRUMP’S ‘FAVOR’

In his “Usually Right” column titled “Seeking a Legal Quid Pro Quo” in the Observer-Tribune for November 28, Tim Smith argues that the rough transcript of President Trump’s July 25th telephone call to the newly-elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Velensky, indicates that Trump’s request “would indeed be a quid pro quo, but it is one ‘favor’ being traded for another, and not only is it not a crime—it’s business as usual in every capital across the globe.” Mr. Smith, who touts his “analytical” approach to “policy and philosophical arguments,” claims to have arrived at this conclusion through a careful analysis of the document. His argument contains several logical and factual errors, however, and his conclusion does not follow. Interestingly enough, he projects the source of these errors through his unintentionally ironic statement that “analytical people infer all sorts of nefarious things when they lack direct information to fill gaps—and when they lack trust.” Yes, indeed they do.

Mr. Smith starts with the premise that Trump “wanted greater efforts at stamping out internal corruption,” an assertion that has no basis in the transcript and no basis in whatever information is available about Trump’s behavior. Anti-corruption was certainly the policy of the State Department—as stated repeatedly by Ambassador Yovanovich, charge d’affairs Taylor, special envoy Volker, and others. It had also been the policy of the Obama administration, and Vice President Biden had pressed the Ukrainian government on that policy. In the transcript, however, Trump’s concern about “stamping out internal corruption” is exclusively and particularly focused on Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that once had Hunter Biden on its board. Trump also claims that Joe Biden “stopped the prosecution” (of corruption, presumably in Burisma), a claim for which there is no evidence. In addition, if, as Trump claims, the defense aid was held up pending guarantees that Ukraine is serious about prosecuting corruption, then what are we to make of the letter written to congressional committees in May by Undersecretary of Defense John Rood in which he certifies that “Ukraine has taken substantial actions to make defense institutional reforms for the purposes of decreasing corruption,” and “now that this [. . . ] has occurred, [ . . .] implementation of this further support will begin no sooner than 15 days following this notification.” In other words, there was no valid reason to withhold the promised aid authorized by Congress. As J. Brian Atwood, a former Foreign Service officer has stated, “If the president delayed aid to extract a favor from Ukraine’s government, that not only would have undermined our policy, but it also would have fallen outside of his legal authority as chief executive and violated federal election laws. He could have delayed the aid to further policy objectives. He could have, pursuant to the Impoundment Act, asked for the funds to be redirected. He could not, however, legally, direct congressionally appropriated funds to achieve personal political ends.” In addition, if Trump had been concerned about corruption going forward (if indeed that is why the funds were on hold), then how are the Bidens at all even relevant? Hunter Biden left the Burisma board in early 2019; and Joe Biden has been out of office for three years. If they were corrupt, their alleged corruption would be in the past! [If indeed Senator Graham’s Senate Judiciary Committee investigates past corruption concerning Burisma and somehow finds Joe Biden guilty of shielding his son—again, no evidence so far that this is so—then that would be a black mark on Biden the presidential candidate. But isn’t this the point? To weaken Biden’s candidacy in 2020, not to uncover present corruption in Ukraine, and Burisma in particular? This has nothing to do with getting at present corruption as a condition for releasing defense aid and setting a date for Velensky to visit the White House.]

The next flaw in Mr. Smith’s argument is his statement that “it is in our national interest to know whether or not a former vice president, and current presidential candidate, may have somehow been involved in influence peddling.” Certainly the voters in the 2020 election would want to know if a candidate has been so involved, but the proper way to get this information is through the State Department or, pace Senator Graham, such congressional committees as Senate Judiciary. Asking a foreign government to pursue an investigation into an officer of a former administration who is also a current candidate for president is to present that government with a manifest conflict of interest; and, given that Ukraine is currently at war with Russia and in desperate need of military and diplomatic assistance from the U.S., that conflict of interest is acute. The pressure on Zelensky to do the requested “favor,” given the stakes of the proffered aid, would be intense; and since Trump made his prejudgment clear (“Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution . . . It sounds horrible to me.”), Zelensky would feel pressure to see that the investigation’s conclusions would align with Trump’s feelings of horror. In addition, for Ukraine to investigate an American presidential candidate on the request of the incumbent American president would require them to roll the dice: any investigation would either favor the incumbent or damage the challenger, and the incumbent could punish Ukraine if it did not favor him; likewise the challenger, if he were to become president in 2020, could do the same. This whole thing may be, as Mr. Smith avers, “business as usual in every capitol across the globe,” but if it is, then organized crime is the model; and if the USA participates in this model of transactional politics, we can say goodbye to the “shining city upon a hill” that President Reagan used to uphold as our model for the world.

The next flaw in Mr. Smith’s argument is in his reading of the “favor”: he writes, “there is no sense of a demand there, and certainly in none of the language is there any suggestion that something is going to be withheld if the ‘asks’ are not met.” Let’s do our own analysis.

First, Trump establishes that Ukraine is unlikely to get much help from countries other than the U.S. “We [the U.S.] do a lot for Ukraine. [. . .] Much more than the European countries are doing [. . .] . The United States has been very very good to Ukraine. I wouldn’t say it’s reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine.” The notion of reciprocity is thus inserted, with a nod to Ukraine’s difficulties (presumably the war in the Donbass and the struggle of the new government to establish itself), giving Ukraine an excuse for lack of reciprocity. Zelensky acknowledges Europe’s lack of help and the U.S.’s generosity, and then mentions “the next steps specifically,” namely, that Ukraine is ready to “buy [not to accept as gifts] more Javelins.” Zelensky thus expresses gratitude for help and then immediately announces willingness to purchase weapons, implying that Ukraine doesn’t expect to depend entirely on American largesse. The next words are Trump’s: “I would like you to do us a favor though [. . . ].” Much has been made of that word “though,” and rightly so. In context, it is being used as a conjunctive adverb in the sense of qualifying what has been said immediately before. The sense would be: Even though I acknowledge the difficulty you might have had in reciprocating our friendly gestures, I have a request that even you, in your difficulties, should be able to do for me. The pronoun reference shifts from first person plural “we” [the U.S.] to singular “I,” thus framing the reciprocity as a personal transaction between Zelensky and Trump. He first asks for investigations into “Crowdstrike.” This involves a conspiracy theory that Ukraine has a “server” proving that the 2016 election was hacked by Ukraine, not Russia. This theory was categorically described by Fiona Hill, Trump’s former top Russian expert in the State Department’s office in Ukraine, as a “fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.” Trump then says, “I guess you have one of your wealthy people . . . “. He fails to elaborate, but apparently he is referring to a wealthy Ukrainian who is in charge of Crowdstrike, which is false, since Crowdstrike Holdings (a cyber-security technology company based in California) is owned by co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch, a Russian-born American whose company was funded by American venture capital. Trump then refers to the “whole nonsense” about a “whole situation” that “ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine.” Mueller, former Special Counsel appointed by the Justice Dept., had conducted a long investigation that concluded that Russia, seeking to denigrate Hillary Clinton and to promote Trump’s candidacy, interfered in the 2016 election. Calling Mueller “incompetent” indicates clearly that Trump rejects the authority or validity not only of an investigator who had received unanimous bipartisan acclaim for his competence and impartiality, but whose investigation was loudly embraced by Trump when it found that no one in Trump’s campaign had actively “colluded” or conspired with Russian agents to undermine his 2016 opponent. Trump then advances his surmise that Ukraine was the culprit—a neat inversion of the facts. The Mueller report concluded definitively that Russia meddled to promote Trump, an established fact that Trump continues to deny in favor of the debunked theory that Ukraine meddled to promote Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Zelensky’s response to Trump’s request is expressed as an enthusiastic affirmative. He pledges to cooperate fully with the request, expressing a strong desire for friendship and a “strategic partnership.” This is followed by Trump’s approval, after which he encourages Zelensky to work with Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer (rather than anyone in the State Department, as would be more proper), and with “the Attorney General,” not of Ukraine, but of the United States. Trump calls Giuliani “a very capable guy” and “a highly respected man.” Trump is thus implying that Zelensky’s government would be incompetent (like America’s government-appointed Special Counsel Mueller?!) to do the investigation itself. The implication is that Ukraine is in the position of a client state, isolated and unsupported by anyone but the U.S. under Trump’s leadership.

Trump then gets to “the other thing” (besides Crowdstrike and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election), namely: “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution [of Burisma’s corruption and Hunter Biden’s seat on its board] and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.” Trump later refers to the prosecutor that Biden helped to remove as “a very fair prosecutor” who was “treated very badly.” That prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, contrary to Trump’s characterization, was fired after strong complaints not only from Biden representing the U.S. government but European diplomats and such organizations as the International Monetary Fund that Shokin was shielding corrupt Ukrainian officials. Among other misdeeds, he had shielded Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, from prosecution by British authorities in a money-laundering probe. Vice President Biden called for Shokin’s removal after it was obvious that Shokin would not seriously prosecute corrupt Ukrainian politicians and oligarchs, including Zlochevsky. This is to say the exact opposite of Trump’s claim: Biden called for the removal of Shokin not because Shokin was trying to prosecute Burisma, but rather because Shokin was failing to prosecute Burisma at the time Hunter Biden was on Burisma’s board!

Certainly it must be acknowledged that Hunter Biden showed poor judgment in agreeing to sit on Burisma’s board, and poor judgment on his father’s part not to counsel his son against such a venture. Yes, it is not unusual for companies with international aspirations to bring on high-profile individuals for public-relations purposes. Hunter Biden was joined on Burisma’s board by Joseph Cofer Black, former counter-terrorism chief under George W. Bush’s administration, and Aleksander Kwasniewski, former president of Poland. Nonetheless, for Hunter Biden to join the board while Burisma’s owner was under investigation for corruption, with his main qualification for such a lucrative position being the son of the sitting American vice-president, is unseemly at best. It can be credibly argued that young Biden wanted to lend his (borrowed) prestige to help a Ukrainian company gain a foothold in the global market so that Ukraine could develop its economy and, not incidentally, not have to depend on foreign aid in its struggle to fully disengage from Russia, its former imperial overlord and present invading adversary. That would be the plausible noble motive of other board members such as Black and Kwasniewski. Nothing illegal, to be sure! But the financial motive—the lucrative remuneration!—is obviously the compelling motive for all the board directors, and young Biden’s participation smells particularly bad.

The Bidens’ poor judgment, however, is far from evidence of corruption; and, as noted above, Joe Biden’s efforts were to root out corruption, not contribute to it. This brings us to Trump’s contravention of the facts relating to the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovich. In March of this year she was asked by the State Dept. (under Secretary Pompeo) to extend for an additional year her three-year appointment as U. S. Ambassador to Ukraine; in May, just a month and a half later, her appointment was abruptly terminated for no cause other than President Trump had ‘lost confidence’ in her. On what possible grounds? Ms. Yovanovitch’s record on anti-corruption efforts was stellar enough for the State Dept. to urge her to stay on to continue its firm policy of rooting out Ukrainian corruption for the very reason Trump has given for holding up military aid: so that aid would not be misused. But, as George Kent, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State memorably testified, “ You can’t promote principled anti-corruption action without pissing off corrupt people.”

Corruption was rampant in Ukraine from the time it secured its independence from the Soviet Union, largely due to subversion of its democratic efforts by Russia under the Putin regime and the puppet government of Viktor Yanukovych. The Ukrainian Prosecutor General who succeeded Viktor Shokin is Yuri Lutsenko, who was dismissed by the Ukrainian Parliament last August, a few months after Zelensky won the presidency with broad support on an anti-corruption platform. After Lutsenko’s investigation of the death (resulting from a sulphuric acid attack) of anti-corruption activist Kateryna Handziuk failed to satisfy human rights organizations’ demand for justice, Lutsenko agreed to resign, but then-president Petro Poroshenko refused to accept his resignation. Poroshenko was notoriously corrupt, and Zelensky’s decisive election victory over him indicated the strong will of the Ukrainian electorate for serious reform. Ambassador Yovanovitch was on to Poroshenko’s corruption and Lutsenko’s weakness and incompetence. In March of this year, Lutsenko gave an interview with John Solomon, a conservative columnist for The Hill, alleging that Yovanovitch had interfered with Ukrainian prosecutions of corruption, an allegation that our State Department called “an outright fabrication.” Why would Lutsenko do such a thing? Because Rudy Giuliani wanted Yovanovitch removed, and Lutsenko wanted to please Giuliani because Giuliani represented President Trump, who temporarily is invested with the world’s most powerful office. Why would Giuliani be against Yovanovitch? Because she rejected Giuliani’s allegation that Joe Biden shielded his son Hunter from prosecution when he sat on Burisma’s board. Where did Giuliani get that idea? From Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, Ukrainian-Americans now convicted of bribery and violating federal election financing laws. And why did Parnas and Fruman want Yovanovitch ditched? Because she was on to their corruption, Lutsenko’s corruption, and Giuliani’s dogged determination to promote the interests of his chief client, President Trump, a determination that still pursues any avenue—even if it is invented out of whole cloth—to protect the most corrupt, mendacious, and irresponsible president in American history.

So here we are. As of this writing (12/5/2019) the House Intelligence Committee has passed the impeachment torch to the House Justice Committee, which has just concluded its open hearing consulting with four highly-distinguished academic experts on Constitutional law. Three of them (selected by the majority Democrats) stated unequivocally that Trump violated his oath of office by seeking to bribe President Zelensky and should be impeached; the fourth, selected by the minority Republicans, said it’s too soon to impeach, that the process should slow down by allowing the courts to become more involved. The Republican response has been to decry the process as a ‘hoax’ and a ‘sham’, an ‘unfair’ effort of the Democrats to ‘undo the 2016 election.’ This last claim has merit. It is an effort to undo the 2016 election of a man who for the past three years has demonstrated over and over again that he is unfit to hold the office; and his attempt to bribe a foreign national with congressionally-appropriated funds to help compromise the candidacy of a political rival is precisely why the impeachment clause was included in the U. S. Constitution.

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According to my online dictionary, a demagogue is “a person, especially an orator or political leader, who gains power and popularity by arousing the emotions, passions, and prejudices of the people.”  By this definition, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy were demagogues, for they certainly gained power and popularity by arousing emotions, passions, and prejudices. In fact, with the possible exception of Calvin Coolidge, it’s difficult to imagine anyone in a democratic society gaining power and popularity, especially the presidency, without arousing strong feelings.  The Wikipedia entry gets it more accurately, at least according to common usage: “a leader in a democracy who gains popularity by exploiting prejudice and ignorance among the common people, whipping up the passions of the crowd and shutting down reasoned deliberation.”

Emotions, passions, and prejudices are not the result of deliberation, defined as “careful consideration before decision.”  They are feelingsrather than thoughts, and therefore are not rationalor derived from the exercise of reason.  As a basisfor action they are therefore very dangerous, for their roots are unconnected to the ends to which they are committed.  Indeed, an action based on feelings can easily produce the opposite of what a process of due deliberation would aim at.

On the other hand, no action of any kind can occur without the motive power of feeling or emotion, for emotion is what moves us, what puts us in motion, what motivatesus to act.  This is so because we act not on the basis of thoughts or facts or even reasons but on the basis of value. That is, values inform our emotions, passions, and prejudices.

Values are personal and cultural.  We value something personally or, as members of a group, culturally, if we believe that that something contributes to our welfare. Conversely, we disvalue something if we believe it threatens our welfare. We acquire our personal and cultural values over time and experience and reflection on that experience.

Reflection is a rational process.  It is an attempt to gain control over the valuation process so as to give us greater confidence that what we value indeed promotes our welfare rather than threatens it. It requires that we bring all relevant information to consciousness so that we can examine that information in a rational process of thinking, of deliberation.

Here is an illustration of what I mean, drawn from my personal experience.

I value my marriage.  I believe that it promotes my welfare, and to a high enough  degree that I assign a very high valueto it; which is to say that I am prepared to sacrifice  other things I value to maintain and to keep it (or, “to have and to hold” it, as the old ritual line says).  So, when conflicts with my spouse became so regular and repeated as to threaten marital dissolution (or ongoing misery), I began to question my evaluationnot only of my particular marriage but marriage in general, even though my culture gives marriage a high–although, it seems, diminishing–value.  My personal welfare—immediate, intermediate, and long-term (“till death do us part”)—was on the line, and a very large decision needed to be confronted, resolved, and undertaken.

I found that I was unable to resolve this decision by myself or in dialogue with my spouse.  My deliberation (“careful consideration before decision”) on a suggestion from her that we seek marital counseling led at first to denial (no holding-hands-remember-our-vows bullshit for me) and then, finally, to acceptance, as if I were rehearsing the stages of the dying process.  The main thing, I think, that I had to confront was: did I really value this marriage?  Was this person really good for me?  Till death do us part?  This unfortunately was not, is not, a question that can be answered definitively. I can definitively say that my mental and physical health has a very high value for me.  But the value of my marriage to this person was and remains a matter of faith.  I don’t know; I believe. 

 

So, we betook ourselves to a marriage counselor; and, to make a long story short, I discovered that, in a phrase, “I can be right, or I can have a relationship.”  That is, my spouse and I are a unit, and we must function as a unit or fall apart.  Self-knowledge—Socrates’ great and simple goal—must be applied to our marital unit. I must know, understand, and appreciate how she thinks, feels, and values, and she must do the same for me. Our conflicts derived from our ignorance.  Keeping the faith that what had attracted us to each other has a basis other than superficialities, some deeper connection such as “this person really sees who I am and values that,” led us both into the deep waters of mutual self-knowledge, how we are alike and how we are different, and how recognizing those likenesses and differences promotes rather than threatens our welfare as individuals and as a couple.  My fear of losing my integrity, my sovereign personhood, in the compromising give-and-take of marriage was, I discovered, a false fear born of a mistaken notion of the self, or my self.  Indeed, my natural determination to “be right,” to hold on to my hard-won understanding of my self and the world of my experience, was what was preventing me from seeing more clearly that self and that world.  I now understand that my marriage—indeed, any marriage or deep friendship—is a vehicle for an expanded consciousness of value, of what and how to value; that is, to recognize what contributes my welfare, and what threatens it.

Values, then, inform our emotions, passions, and prejudices.  We act through the energy of those feelings on the basis of our values, and we acquire our values through our experience.  If, however, those values acquired through experience are not examined by rational reflection, through deliberation, our embrace of those values may be misplaced, for despite our belief that they promote our welfare, they may in fact promote the opposite.  Had I not resolved to get to the bottom of my marital conflicts by seeking professional help, I would have continued to believe that I was right, my spouse was wrong, and that we were not suited to each other.  The value I had placed on what I took to be adequately complete self-knowledge would have led me to a miserable marriage, or divorce, and neither of those outcomes would have been in my best interests.

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“This should be our safe place.” – Dakota Shrader (16), student at Sante Fe High School (TX).

As a child growing up in a small Massachusetts town, I regularly walked to school, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone.  At the age of five, I learned from my parents and neighboring adults to be aware of two threats to my safety: motorized road vehicles and untethered dogs.  I was taught not to cross a road until I had looked both ways to determine if the road was clear, and not to run from a menacing dog but to face it, arms down, and slowly back away.  One time in an unfamiliar neighborhood, while I was selling raffle tickets to raise money for my Boy Scout troop, I turned and walked quickly away from an angrily confrontational dog, who then jumped and bit me on my back.  Lesson relearned, the hard way.

In my little world, there were two places I could always count on to be safe: my home, and my school. In both places I could focus my attention freely on whatever engaged my interest, and in such manner I was able to learn and grow.  Between home and school, however, was the danger zone, for there I had to be alert to possible threats to my health, even my existence.

As a parent, I imparted to my children what had been imparted to me: the message that the world is a wonderful place, but it nonetheless contains dangers of which you must be aware and against which you must be ready to defend yourself.  Home, and the homes of your friends, and your school, are safe places where you can let your guard down and feel free to live, love, and grow.

We can now no longer take this conventional wisdom for granted.  Since the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, according to the Washington Post’s database of school shootings, 141 students and teachers have been killed, 284 have been wounded, and over 214,000 have been traumatized by the experience of armed violence occurring during normal school hours, usually at the hands of members of their own school community, 70% of whom were under the age of 18.  In a population of millions, these numbers are relatively small, but they indicate a destructive trend that’s likely to worsen unless effective measures are undertaken to arrest it.  In addition, we should note that today’s mass media are so powerful and omnipresent that almost everyone—adult and child alike—has instant access to information that before the Digital Age had been the exclusive purview of the gods.  This access to information, and our now habitual if not obsessive use of it, intensifies our emotional lives, especially our fears and anxieties, and in consequence we and our children have effectively lost the belief that a school is a safe space.  This is a loss of innocence on a grand scale.

In the past nineteen years, 216 of our nation’s schools have been subjected to the kind of collective horror that, in the hands of emotionally disturbed and disaffected youths, only guns can engender.  The failure of our elected representatives to take effective action against this horror is shameful and unconscionable.  But then we must realize that our representatives—local, county, state, national–represent us.  The failure is thus oursas a political community responsible for self-government.

I think that it is not for want of courage that we have failed.  The failure is more due, I think, to a kind of Hamlet’s Dilemma concerning the 2^ndAmendment.  On the one hand we have “the right to bear arms,” which is an extension of our right to self-defense.  If illegitimate force is used against us, we have the right to oppose it; and to be ready to do so, we must be prepared with appropriate means.  On the other hand, possession of appropriate means such as the kinds of firearms that are today readily available to virtually everyone makes it increasingly possible for such weapons to get into the hands of irresponsible and emotionally disturbed people.  An 18^thcentury musket—the mainstay firearm available when the 2^ndAmendment was written and ratified–is one thing, an AR-15 is another. One simply could not go on a mass killing spree with a muzzle-loaded smooth-bore musket.  Today, even a semiautomatic handgun with 9 mm. Parabellum cartridges can make a ten-year-old a killing machine.  Damned if we fail to regulate, but also damned if we do. Result: inaction.

The resistance to any form of regulation or restriction seems to be largely based on the absolutist position that sees any compromise of “the right to bear arms” as a dilution or debilitation of an absolute principle, as if a compromise would deny the “natural” right of self-defense.  On the face of it, this seems a reasonable position.  If others have access to guns to threaten me, I must have access to defend myself.  If access to guns is prohibited by law, than the law-abiding will lack the means to resist the law-breaking.  Therefore, “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” as the NRA puts it.

The flaw in this reasoning, I think, is that it regards regulation as a compromise of principle. “The right to bear arms” is a right, and thereforeit “shall not be infringed.”  Any right, as a right, is “unalienable,” which is to say, it can no more be eliminated than the law of gravity.  It can be “infringed,” however, or indefinitely suspended, by action of others in positions of power over me, such as a parent over a child, or a government over a society.  The 2^ndAmendment denies the right, if not the ability, of government to do that.  It does not, however, deny the right of government to regulatethe right to bear arms.  Indeed, government is obligated, through the establishment and execution of laws, to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  The disruption of our domestic tranquility from the increasing incidence of gun violence demandsthat we subject “the right to bear arms” to such regulation as will allow our children, and ourselves, to devote less of our psychic energy to a constant fear of being threatened by a bad guy with a gun.

If our elected representatives fail to enact legislation that effectively addresses the solutions to this growing problem, we have ourselves to blame.

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Robert Reich’s latest book, THE COMMON GOOD (NY: Knopf, 2018) addresses a fundamental concept of the American polity that is in danger of being lost. He defines “the common good” as a belief in “shared values about which we owe one another as citizens who are bound together in the same society.” These values for Americans have been a respect for the rule of law and a dedication to the actualization of ideals, principally the ideals of freedom (or liberty) and equality. Commitment to these principles and ideals is what defines American identity: not language, not race, not religion, not geography, but the proclamations of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . .” Reich claims that these values are being submerged by another set of values, especially the pursuit of power and wealth, the effect of which pursuit is undermining “the common good” for the sake of the private good of a plutocratic elite.

I agree with most of what Reich says, but I also agree with Michael Sandel’s critique (NYTimes, 4/2/18) of Reich’s argument that “the ground rules for a decent society” can be separated from “the policies that citizens should pursue within these ground rules.” It seems like a means-ends argument, with the principles as the end and policies as the means to achieve the end. Sandel says that this “nonpartisan conception of the common good” is too abstract to be of much use, and demonstrates how Reich in fact fails to separate his means and ends when he gets to particulars. When Reich says, for example, that “the common good is about inclusion” and not about “erecting walls and keeping others out” (a reference to Trump administration policies), he introduces a policy question into a discussion of democratic principles, thereby confusing the two. The “conservative” view is that indiscriminate immigration, especially illegal immigration, is not compatible with national sovereignty and identity–that is, not compatible with the “conservative” understanding of the common good.

Reich’s valuation of “inclusion” over its implied opposite, exclusion, certainly fits with the American idea of a national identity based on a commitment to principles and ideals rather than fortuitous grouping by language, race, religion, and other non-rational determiners. Principles and ideals are products of a rational mind freely engaged in determining the contours of a political culture, and a rational mind is possessed by all humans. Such a notion of inclusion does not entail an indiscriminate welcome, however; on the contrary, inclusion into the American polity requires that all citizens and prospective citizens fully adopt an absolute commitment to those ideals and principles. Illegal immigrants by definition exhibit by their behavior an indifference to the rule of law and thereby and automatically exclude themselves from inclusion. Such people must be “kept out” if the national identity is to be kept secure.

I think it’s possible, and important, to separate “ground rules” from “policies,” but to do so requires a rethinking. For one thing, these ground rules are premises, not ends or means. We declare certain ideas to be SELF-EVIDENTLY TRUE. We will not argue about them. This “declaration” is what language philosophers call a “performative utterance,” a speech act that, as an action, constitutes its own reality. In fact one could argue whether or not “all men are created equal”–once, of course, we settle on what that statement refers to!–but the “declaration” affirms that the statement will not be argued. As such, it is, as in religious affirmation, a STATEMENT OF BELIEF, a FAITH, if you will. Instead of proclaiming, “I believe in One God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son . . .,” an American citizen proclaims: “I believe that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . . .” This is the American Credo (fr. Latin, “I believe”), and it defines an American as much as the Nicene Creed defines a Christian. If you accept with total conviction the Muslim “shahada“–“There is no god but God, and Mohammad is His prophet”–then you are a Muslim in spirit. If you accept the American Credo with similar conviction, then you are at least an American in spirit.

“Total conviction,” of course, entails a host of particulars. A fundamental “credo” is logically the essential property of a person’s or a society’s identity; matters of detail that logically follow such an essence, or are logically compatible with it, are arguable. For a major example, is the American Constitution completely consistent and compatible with the credo of the Declaration? The allowance of the amendment process would indicate that the framers and signers of the original Constitution realized that time and experience may require adjustments so that the essence of the faith can be preserved. The Declaration, then, is an inviolable and unchangeable document; the Constitution, on the other hand, as an attempt to establish a practical means by which to institutionalize the credo, is very much a “living” document, for not only must it be continuously interpreted (the function of the Supreme Court), but it must be changed–through the amendment process–by the Legislature when its core principles are determined to be violated in practice.

So, if what Reich calls “ground rules” are really premises, not ends, what are the ends of the American nation “so conceived and so dedicated,” as Lincoln put it? The Declaration implies that “happiness” is the primary end for an individual citizen (the “pursuit” of that end being a right) and “a just society” is the primary end for the nation as a whole. The presumption is that to make possible the individual’s pursuit of happiness, a just society is required.

I think that before we can restore the shine to the idea of “the common good” we need to focus our attention on another aspect of the American Idea; namely, the distinction between PRIVATE and PUBLIC. This distinction is related to that between the INDIVIDUAL and the COMMUNITY, but I think that before we address either of these terminological pairs, we need to address attention to the pair of ideals that inform the American Idea: liberty (or freedom) and equality.  Individual liberty is perhaps the core value of “conservatives,” and “equal justice for all” is its counterpart for “progressives.” The ideals of LIBERTY (or freedom) and EQUALITY are, however, far from being natural partners; in fact, they are virtual opposites. Maximizing freedom tends to lead to inequality of result, while maximizing equality tends to lead to restriction of individual liberty.

Normally, opposites tend to cancel each other out, like contradictions. I would argue, however, that these ideals are in dialectical relationship with each other, and have been since 1776. When it became clear, for example, that slaves had been denied both freedom and equality, the nation hit a crisis that led to a bloody Civil War. The resolution of that war was a military victory for one side and a crushing defeat for the other, but the fundamental issues were only militarily and then legally resolved. The beliefs that underlay slavery (that men are NOT created equal and that only some men are endowed with certain rights) remained in the hearts of the defeated: not equality, but HIERARCHY was and is the implied belief–of men over women, whites over blacks, rich over poor, and so on. This notion of hierarchy tends to inform the “conservative” mindset today, despite lip service to the contrary. Emphasis on the ideal of liberty, especially the liberty of the individual, has led to a de-emphasis of the ideal of equality, and the general consequence has been a decline in the valuation of “the common good.”

The dialectical movement between the ideals of freedom and equality in the post-WW II era moved against the hierarchical (or anti-egalitarian) bias of the post-WW I culture of the 1920s, which had resurfaced after the Progressive reforms under Theodore Roosevelt. Under President Coolidge, a deregulated economy favoring individual liberty led to the financial meltdown of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression of the 30s. This crisis was eventually reversed by FDR’s social programs and Keynesian economic restructuring; that is, individual liberty was subordinated to the needs of the national community as a whole, and the ideal of equality was invoked as a corrective to the excesses of the ideal of liberty. Success in the huge national effort to combat the existential threat of international fascism required dedication to the nation’s identity as a society committed to a credo denied by its enemies. The victory of the Allied forces over the Axis powers re-established the general dominance of the ideology of liberal democracy, and made the United States the intellectual and practical leader of that ideology. In turn, within the United States, the success of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs led to a continuation of reform along the lines of the equality ideal. The Civil Rights movement focused on completing the promise of full citizenship and opportunity for the descendants of former slaves, who by historical circumstance are readily identified by their racial phenotype; and other similar social movements focused on establishing de jure and de facto rights for women and for citizens of unconventional sexual orientation. These movements are all expressions of the Equality ideal.

Inevitably, then, these social and political movements met with a backlash from those citizens for whom freedom is the core principle. They believe in equality, but their interpretation of that ideal focuses on equal OPPORTUNITY, not equal results. They believe that “all men are created equal” in the sense that no law may restrict them from their “pursuit of happiness” as individuals.  The attainment of happiness is another matter entirely. Inequality of result is, then, not only acceptable but expected; for while all citizens may have no external legal barriers to hinder their pursuit, all citizens are limited by their intrinsic capacities, their use of the reason that all humans are endowed with, and of course sheer luck. Failure to achieve happiness, in the “conservative” view, is not due to any flaw in the American social contract, but in the failure of the individual to choose wisely and to act in their own best interests. Such would be an individual’s MORAL failure, not the failure of a nation of law and shared beliefs and principles.  Egalitarians, on the other hand, tend to emphasize the role of luck in determining outcomes; for example, being born into a rich family is a huge advantage, and being born into a poor family is a huge disadvantage, in one’s “pursuit of happiness.”  The notion of “equal opportunity” is therefore false, and therefore a just society is obligated to give assistance to the poor by, in part, increasing taxes on the affluent.

Today’s American political culture is, as has been much observed and analyzed, extremely polarized. Let us identify for reasons of argument those who emphasize the ideal of freedom as “libertarians,” and identify those who emphasize the ideal of equality as “egalitarians.” Naming inevitably involves oversimplification, and certainly each group accepts the other’s emphasized ideal to a degree; but I think it fair to note the different emphases, to note that the two ideals are in a meaningful sense opposites; and that the two ideals are in dialectical relation with each other. If they are in dialectical relationship, then their interaction is a process that is at least tacitly aiming for a SYNTHESIS. That synthesis could reasonably be named, as suggested above, a JUST SOCIETY, which we have identified as the implicit goal of the American polity as informed by its credo.

[This is Part One of a longer essay in response to Robert Reich’s fine book, THE COMMON GOOD.]

Referring to the world of today as a “global village” was part of Marshall McLuhan’s attempt to explain how electric technology (made exponentially more powerful by digitization and integrated circuits), and communications technology in particular, has had the effect of reducing the barriers of time and space to the point where once distant and isolated societies are now virtually integrated within a complex social whole.  Human society is now more like a single organism with a single environment than a disparate collection of different organisms, each with its own unique environment to which it has adapted.  That is, despite the continuing condition of different geographical and climatological environments and the different cultures that have evolved to adapt to those environments, electric technology has created an artificial (i.e., man-made) environment that has come increasingly to dominate the natural environment, for better or for worse.  In this sense, humankind is carrying out the responsibility given to us by the God of Genesis of having “dominion” over the Creation.  Failure to recognize the existential implications of this new artificial environment, and then to make the adjustments necessary for adaptation to it, is to court the possibility of extinction. We have created this artificial environment in order to prosper, not just survive; and we have succeeded greatly, but at the great cost of unintended consequences such as climate change resulting from the release of “greenhouse gasses” into the atmosphere, the threat of nuclear war, and rapid species extinction.  Successful adaptation to our own artificial environment requires that we moderate or eliminate these unintended consequences.

We can begin to address our predicament by rethinking McLuhan’s metaphor.  I think it was a good one for the time he made it (the 1960s), but perhaps a slight tweaking might help make his point better by calling the human social world a “global city.”  “Village” denotes a small homogeneous social unit, thus figuratively emphasizing how electric technology has served to shrink time and space, with the homogeneity of a village implying a common culture.  But essential to understanding our new artificial environment is to recognize the heterogeneity of human society.  As Vaclav Havel put it, “our civilization has essentially globalized only the surface of our lives.”  He saw that in the face of  massive social disruption due to rapid and accelerating change, people tend regressively to “cling to the ancient certainties off their tribe.”  This new kind of “tribalism” can be as much ideological as ethnic, racial, religious, or national.  Thus, today’s world looks more like the demographics of a city divided into “neighborhoods” each with its own particular unifying identity.

Thinking of the human social world as a “global city,” then, might help us move forward to address the challenges of the global artificial environment we have created.  We now have–pace Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”–a single global civilization of many different cultures.  “City” and “civilization” derive from the same Latin roots: civis (‘townsman’) and civitas (‘city’).  To be “civilized” means to have grown accustomed to living in a city, where people are packed together with strangers and must learn to get along.  When it works, the “neighborhood” arrangement of cities helps people who share distinct identities and common values and interests to build their own communities to support each other.  Their relation to the other communities of the city they share is mediated by a representative political system and moderated by a central city government that provides services without discrimination.  The ethic of tolerance prevails, and the various neighborhoods live side by side according to shared laws, rules, and regulations.  When this system fails to work well, good-faith efforts to re-establish harmony can succeed as long as the original understanding–basically, a government of consensual law–prevails.  When that premise is taken over by a different premise, harmony is jeopardized.

Understanding the world as a “global city” implies a unifying consensus of law and government.  That consensus is based on the idea of the legal equality of all its “citizens” (from the same root, civitas, as “civilization” and “civil”), one of the basic premises of Enlightenment rationalism.  It is the belief that homo sapiens is a single species, and that the various “varieties” called “races” are distinguished by superficial features that are genetically transmitted but have no bearing on the essence of the species. Similarly, the various social units, whether “states” or “nations,” must be regarded as having equal rights to sovereignty and respect.  Each state or nation has the right to live under its own laws and customs–as long as, of course, its laws and customs do not contradict the more general “laws of humanity” stated or implied in the United Nations Charter.

Since all nations or states of the world today have agreed to the principles of the United Nations, they have then tacitly agreed to the validity of the metaphor of the human social world as the “global city” described above.  Getting a metaphor right–one that accurately identifies the complex reality it attempts to express–is an important step in the process of understanding and positive action.  Of course the metaphor may be more aspirational than accurately descriptive.  The world may be in fact as Hobbes described it, a “war of all against all” which is “without a common Power to keep them all in awe.”  This political “realism” regarding a narrow view of “national interest” seems to be gaining favor in the post-Cold War world of autocratic regimes and a declining respect for the values and processes of liberal democracy.  Such a world is regressive and self-destructive, especially with the powers that have emerged from Western technology.  If the “global city” metaphor is accurate, we need to imagine it as the Rome of the Antonines or the Baghdad of Haroun al-Rashid, not the Rome of Caligula or the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein..

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Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s recently-confirmed Head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” the following: “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so, no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.” [NYT, 3/9/17]

At least he doesn’t deny the existence of global warming.  That’s a start.

What about this “tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact” of human activity, namely, the release of heat-trapping pollutants into the atmosphere that has been on the increase since the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America and accelerating with the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union under Stalin and, since 1945, of China and India?  As the Times report noted, “The basic science showing that carbon dioxide traps heat at the Earth’s surface dates to the 19th century, and has been confirmed in many thousands of experiments and observations since.”

What is this “tremendous disagreement”?  Well, it’s not among climate scientists, whose job it is to acquire knowledge of the reality of Nature and who reached consensus on this question decades ago.  So then it’s among members of the political class, those people whose job is to deliberate on public matters and to propose appropriate action to secure the common welfare.  Of course members of the political class are likely to disagree on what is in the best interests of the people who elected them, and even if there is general agreement on ends, the means are debatable.  Eventually, through the political process of debate and compromise, general agreement is achieved and a plan of action is undertaken through the legislative branch and implemented by the executive branch.  That is how the democratic system works.

But now we are faced with an executive branch that has decided that it’s not only in the business of action but also in the business of knowledge.  Mr. Pruitt’s reference to a “tremendous disagreement” implies that the broad consensus of climate scientists is simply one source of opinion, and that other sources of opinion are equally valid.  His position, then, amounts to a rejection of the very notion of authority.

I suspect that, if pressed, Mr. Pruitt would qualify his claim that human activity is not “a primary contributor to the global warming that we see” by his reference to “measuring with precision.”  There is no scientific consensus concerning the precise degree to which human activity has contributed to global warming, but merely that human activity is not only “a primary contributor” but the primary contributor to the acceleration of a natural process that has occurred cyclically over the eons.  So Mr. Pruitt’s mitigating term “precision” is a weasel word that clouds the fundamental question.

An apologist for Mr. Pruitt’s position on global warming is the CNN pundit Jeffrey Lord, who boasts that he was an early supporter of the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.  When questioned by Bill Maher on his TV show “Real Time” (3/3/17), Lord claimed that the word “consensus” in the phrase “the consensus of climate scientists” (long identified as 97%) is not a “scientific” term but a “political” term.  Here is a confusion not only lexicological but of the difference between scientific opinion and political opinion.  First, “consensus” refers to general agreement or a “harmony” of opinion.  It is not necessarily the opinion of a majority (which could mean a mere 51%), but rather, as the Quakers say, “the sense of the meeting.”  Slight disagreements there may be, but a consensus agreement means that all, or nearly all, of a particular group agree in the essentials of a question.  “Precision” is another matter.  A simple example is the consensus agreement among all American citizens concerning “the rule of law” as opposed to autocratic rule.  The extent or limits of executive power may be debated, but no one questions that all political power is constrained by law.

In matters of knowledge, then, the scientific community is authoritative.  Scientists acquire this authority by long training and approval by a body of peers, whose institutional authority is firmly rooted in long tradition.  In matters of political action, members of the political community acquire their authority through the election process established by law and instituted over generations of practice.  The authority of science in matters of knowledge and the authority of politicians and their appointees in matters of deliberation and action in the service of the public maintain their validity only if their separate realms are distinguished from one another.

 

 

A recent analysis of the New York Times‘s coverage of international news over the past couple of decades indicates its editorial emphasis on the Middle East as opposed to elsewhere.  This ‘bias’ is attributed to ‘reader interest,’ which means that readers are attracted to a news source if that source gives them information that interests them, and if that news source fails to deliver the information they want, they will turn to other sources.  The author of the analysis at <www.nemil.com> simply offers it as information rather than a critique of a newspaper that prides itself on its fact-based, source-confirming objectivity, but notes that if the Times has an implicit bias, then we can expect other news purveyors with fewer resources and a less rigorous devotion to ‘truth’ will have a more pronounced bias.  All of which implies that ‘objectivity’–the notion that it is possible to behold and to communicate information about the world as it is as opposed to the world as it seems–is an extremely difficult if not impossible condition to achieve.

The world of is as opposed to the world of seems.  Objectivity vs. subjectivity.  Sub specie aeternitatis vs. sub specie temporis.  God vs. you, or me, or anyone, or . . . ‘us.’  Let’s focus on the us.

We understand the notion of subjectivity as referring to the fact that all perception is grounded in individual states of consciousness.  What you experience is not exactly what I experience, even if we are experiencing an event or situation together, and for a host of reasons, including the quality of our perceiving equipment (I may be deaf; you may have acute hearing) and our various cognitive and emotional resources.  Thus, even if the five senses of two different subjects are equally acute, the disparate experience each subject brings to a perceived event alters the understanding of that event.  This understanding is called apperception.  Since disparate perceptual, cognitive, and emotional states inform the way we experience what is, we must therefore conclude that what is is always filtered by every subject, and therefore what is is always perceived–or apperceived–as what seems to be.

But now we ask, How is it possible to live in a common world?  A world that seems to be more or less the same world for you and me?  The answer is consensus, the tacit understanding of a shared world based on the socialization process and regular social interaction.  While plants and animals pass on to the next generation their ‘understanding’ of the world through genetic codes, humans add to that genetic transmission a cultural knowledge passed on through each individual’s learning process.  The cultural heritage of a particular society thus informs its members’ view of the world, of what is, through a certain lens, so to speak.  This ‘lens’ is the social filter that admits or limits or ‘spins’ information perceived by the subject.  It comprises the language, religion, values, etc.–the culture–of the society into which one is born and raised.  Behind this social filter is the personal filter that develops for each person as that person acquires his or her unique experience of living-in-the-world, or, as Heidegger called it, Dasein.  We experience our world in time and space, and an individual inhabits a sequence of spaces and times that are unique to that individual.   

Two filters, then, mediate our experience of the world: our social filter and our personal filter.  The social filter limits our perception of what is (we’ll call that objective reality) to what our socialization process has taught us; the personal filter limits our perception of what is to what our personal experience–stored forever in our memory–guides us to value as important to our survival and happiness.  Our memory is divided into what is immediately accessible–our conscious mind–and what is only indirectly accessible, our unconscious mind.  As depth psychology has demonstrated, we are motivated to act at least as much by the promptings of the information stored in our unconscious mind as by that in our conscious mind.

We live, then, in a more-or-less common world due to our socialization.  But this means that the ‘common world’ is really only common to the members of our particular society.  What about other societies and the various individuals living in them?  What of ‘objective reality’ do we share with them?  The answer to this question is twofold.  We share the generic genetic inheritance of genus Homo, species sapiens; and we share the cultural heritage of a global society.

E.O. Wilson, in Consilience and in other of his writings, refers to what he calls “gene-culture co-evolution.”  The genetic inheritance of homo sapiens evolves very slowly: we are little different from our ancestors of 100,000 years ago.  Human culture, by contrast, evolves must faster: the isolated clans and tribes of prehistoric humans gradually evolved into nations, empires, and nation-states.  The advent of electric power and multiple sources of kinetic energy (carbon-based fossil fuels, nuclear fission, and the various alternative sources such as wind and sun) facilitated the growth of transportation and communication systems, thus leading human societies to become less isolated.  Today, in the famous phrase of Marshall McLuhan, humans live in a virtual “global village.”  The mountain ranges, deserts, and oceans that once separated human societies from one another now no longer constitute impediments to social interaction.  So, is our common world like a village, a society with shared knowledge and values?

In The Art of the Impossible (1997), Vaclav Havel characterized today’s world, not as a “global village,” but as a “single planetary civilization,” the various cultures of which are in conflict.

The single planetary civilization to which we all belong confronts us with global challenges.  We stand helpless before them, because our civilization has essentially globalized only the surface of our lives.  But our inner selves continue to have a life of their own.  And the fewer answers the era of rational knowledge provides to the basic questions of Human Being, the more deeply it would seem that people–behind its back, as it were–cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe.  [ . . . ] The end of the era of rationalism has been catastrophic.  Armed with the same super modern weapons, often from the same suppliers, and followed by television cameras, the members of the various tribal cults are at war with one another.  By day we work with statistics; in the evening, we consult astrologers and frighten ourselves with thrillers about vampires.  The abyss between the rational and the spiritual, the external and the internal, the objective and the subjective, the technical and the moral, the universal and the unique, grows constantly deeper.

However we seek to characterize today’s world–global society, global village, planetary civilization, or Buckminster Fuller’s “spaceship earth”–it’s pretty clear that its unity is superficial, held together with international laws that have shallow roots in custom and a technology that is constantly changing.  One area of our lives we all have in common, however, is the enterprise of science, especially natural science.  It is now truly international, and its norms and methods are shared and respected in every culture and society.  The Paris Agreement at the United Nations Climate Change Conference of December, 2015, signed by 174 nations on Earth Day, 22 April 2016, is but one example of  global accord on a shared concern for the natural environment in which all humans must live.  All signatories accepted the assessment by an international consensus of climate scientists that Earth’s climate is significantly affected by human activity, and that the human community is thereby imperiled. This global accord on the value of science is greatly to be cheered, but science faces its own challenges, especially from politicians, who must respect the immediate needs of their constituents as well as, or unfortunately more than, the long-term welfare of their descendants.  Politicians skeptical of scientific claims to knowledge of, for example, biological evolution and the dynamics of climate change, seem to be pandering to the fears and desires of an unenlightened constituency, and while this is probably true in most cases, it is also true that an intellectual support for their skepticism has been established by post-modern theories of epistemology and metaphysics.  These theories question the very premise of objectivity upon which all science proceeds and depends.

The very notion that we can know “objective reality” has been in vigorous contention since Friedrich Nietzsche, the hugely influential modernist philosopher par excellence, argued reasonably and effectively that, as he said, “There are no facts, only interpretations.”  His “perspectivism” is grounded in radical subjectivity, the claim that all cognitive judgments are derived from individual or group states of consciousness and are thus limited by that consciousness.  Such an epistemic understanding is behind all the post-modern “centrisms,” from the familiar “ethnocentrism” to “Eurocentrism,” “logocentrism,” “androcentrism,” “phallocentrism,” and so on, all of which emphasize that truth claims come from a point of view or perspective, and therefore are more in the service of power rather than disinterested truth.  “It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against.  Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm” (Will to Power, sect. 481).  This critique of disinterested knowledge claims sounds very much like the rationalist’s critique of religion: something is not so simply because we feel a strong desire that it be so.

I conclude these thoughts with this proposition: A belief in objective knowledge is as much a faith as a belief in a certain kind of spiritual reality.  It is the scientist’s faith.  Without this faith, science could no more have produced its astonishing and consequential conclusions than the world’s religions their enormous power over the minds and behavior of humans for millennia.  It is the faith that the human mind is capable of understanding natural processes, and so far, that faith has been justified by results.  What has shaken that faith has been: (1) the weaknesses of its method when applied to human affairs (the social sciences); and (2) the non-science community’s failure to understand science as an ongoing process of hypothesis-testing, verification, falsification, application, and, sometimes, misapplication. The Nietzschean critique has been a salutary injection of metaphysical and epistemological skepticism into the tendency of science to become “scientism”–the belief that the scientific method is the only valid approach to truth claims.  But that critique needs to recognize its own excesses, and one of them is the claim–the truth claim!–that the pursuit of objective knowledge, the faith in that pursuit, is itself inherently vain.  In matters of ultimate reality and our relation to it, faith is not only required, but unavoidable.

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David Remnick, in “It Happened Here” (New Yorker, 11/28/16), quotes from Richard Rorty’s 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, in which Rorty refers to the plight of the American working class in the age of globalization, which incentivizes corporations to seek cheap labor pools in developing countries, thereby dooming the merely high-school educated to a marginal economic status.

“Something will crack.  The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for–someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. [ . . . ]  One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out.  Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. [ . . . ]  All the resentment which the badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

So now we can see why the Black Lives Matter movement had (and still has) the unintended consequence of fueling the rage of the white working class, and why the “gains made in the past forty years” by the previously marginalized–homosexuals, “people of color,” Native Americans, women–are at risk.  For the white working class, comprising as much as 42% of the population (2010 census data)–has become itself another marginalized group.  In the post-war period of the 50s and 60s, when indeed all boats were lifted in the rising tide of the American economy, the white working class could believe in the American Dream.  As President Clinton put it in 1993: “The American dream that we were all raised on is a simple but powerful one: If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you.”  But the rules changed, and not to the benefit of the working class.  In 1999, for example, on Bill Clinton’s watch, the 1935 Banking Act (aka the Glass-Steagall Act) was repealed, enabling commercial banks to practice investment banking, thus putting deposits and loans at risk, and this eventually resulted in the collapse of the mortgage industry and massive foreclosures throughout the country.  The deregulation mania begun by President Reagan in the 1980s and continued by Clinton in the 90s and Bush in the first decade of the millennium led to the financial crisis of 2008, from which the nation has only incompletely recovered.  Everyone has been negatively affected by this crisis, but the group whose fortunes have fallen the farthest is working class whites of European background.

The above is by now a familiar post-mortem.  What I’m concerned about now is to focus on the mortem.  What has died?  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Washington to be born?

A friend has characterized the Trump “election” (the scare quotes are to acknowledge the College, despite the 2.5 million plurality of the opposition) as a wake-up call to the educated fully-employed elite of “symbolic analysts” that in effect have constituted a political-economic-cultural oligarchy.  She says that this will be an “exciting” time.  That’s a positive spin on what seems to be a crisis of confidence in the System that brought us to the prospect of the leadership of a man whose public record is that of a crude and vulgar huckster.  True to the instincts of the demagogue, Trump saw his opportunity for power (“the ultimate aphrodisiac,” as Henry Kissinger once said) in the 2008 election to the presidency of Barak Hussein Obama–a mulatto with a name that conjures up “black African,” “Muslim,” and the late dictator of Iraq.  Obama won the election in large part for the same reason Jimmy Carter won in 1976: his predecessor was despised, and Obama, like Carter, was regarded as a consummately decent man who could cleanse the White House.  While those who voted for Obama saw a Kennedyesque young man of character, intelligence, and hopeful vision, Trump saw a foreigner–black, Islamic, essentially “unAmerican”–whose image he could exploit by focussing attention on Obama’s surface appearance, which coincided neatly with that of of America’s present enemy, Islamic terrorists.  By pushing forward and sustaining against all evidence his allegation that Obama was born in Kenya, the birthplace of Obama’s father, Trump sent an unmistakable signal to the “nonsuburban electorate” of Middle America that he knew was his core constituency.  His message to that resentful group was this:

“The Ivy League multiculturalists of the coastal cities and suburbs are now in charge.  They don’t give a damn about you.  They are the cosmopolitan elite whose allegiance is to themselves and their privileged kids.  To justify their greed they spout idealistic crap about ‘social justice’–raising the fortunes of blacks and Hispanics and Asians–instead of the real Americans of white European descent, the people like you who built this great country, which is being given over to this pack of losers from loser cultures.  This Harvard-educated law professor with his African father and flower-child hippie mother looks down on you.  This fucking nigger looks down on you!  He condescendingly says you ‘cling to your Bibles and your guns’ to keep ‘meaning’ in your lives, as if religion and your Constitutional right to protect yourself and your families were things to be pitied!  And how did this uppity nigger get to be President?  Two things: the System, which is designed for them, not for you; and, I have to tell you, your own passivity!  You let this happen!  And why?  Why?  Because you put your trust in the System!  The very System that screws you right, left, and center!  I know this better than anybody!  I’m fabulously rich because I know the System, I play the System!  I know how fucked up it is!  But I’ll be damned if I let it beat me!  And now that I’m at the top, I look out over this great country, this once-great country, and I see that all my wealth and fabulous success is not enough to fill my cup.  What I want now, more than all my wealth, more than anything, is to help you help me to make this country great again!  You are what made this country great, and we can make it great again!  Hillary says we can be ‘stronger together.’  I like that.  It’s a good slogan, but . . . ‘together’ with whom?  With the colored? With Lakeisha and Wing Dong and Pablo and Ahmed and Ramaswamy?  I don’t think so!”

What Trump intuitively understands is deep motivation.  Despite rational self-interest, despite law-based community, despite the Christian love ethic, despite e pluribus unum, Americans share with everyone else the social ethics and instincts of the tribe.  Tribalism is based on the identity of blood, whereby one’s neighbors are kinfolk.  The automatic assumption of tribalism is that anyone outside a broad kinship network is a potential enemy.  The primary reason a stranger enters your neighborhood is that he wants something you have.  He may want to trade or barter, but until he gives convincing proof that he’s willing to give you something he has in return for something you have, you must assume that he is prepared and willing to take what you have by force or swindle.  The liberal left naively prefer to assume goodwill; the conservative right, believing in the power of Original Sin more than the power of Love, prefer to assume ill will.  The multicultural experiment of the liberal left, Trump says, is now exposed as a Trojan Horse. Opening the gates of the Promised Land to the non-Europeans is like ancient Israel accommodating the Assyrians or Judah accommodating the Babylonians–an invitation to dissolution and destruction.

The election of Trump is a crisis, not only for America but for the world.  The vision expressed in the Declaration of Independence, instituted by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and reaffirmed by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address, is now under siege by a counter-statement of what may be called “neo-tribalism,” a tacit doctrine that posits racial and ethnic identity as the primary glue of social cohesion.  This doctrine defined the human social systems of the pre-modern world.  With the founding of the United States of America in 1776, inspired by the Enlightenment doctrine of Reason, a new basis of social cohesion emerged, most eloquently and succinctly stated in the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address: “Four score and seven years ago our father brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  That is, America is based on an idea rather than blood relationships.  What binds Americans together is not blood kinship, which implies racial and ethnic identity, but a common belief: that the values and ideals of freedom and equality define an American’s personal and social and political identity.  It is this fundamental belief that the election of 2016 has put in question.  Americans now must decide whether they belong to the party of Lincoln or the party of Trump.

 

 

 

 

At the end of my last post, back in March of this hideous year, I teased my readers by referring without explanation to a lecture by Gregory Bateson titled “From Versailles to Cybernetics,…

Source: A Break in the System, Pt. II

As I suppose is true for many of you, I find it hard not to be mesmerized by the Trump phenomenon.  This is a “reality show” like no other, and we are part of it.  We see unfolding before our eyes and ears our national id breaking free of the constraints imposed by our superego.  Penis size has become a political issue.  The leading Republican candidate says, “My daughter Invanka is so hot, if she weren’t my daughter I’d be dating her.” And of course, these days, we understand that “dating” = coitus.  Someone said that Trump is holding up a mirror to the Republican Establishment, and they don’t like what they see.  He renders into plain English all those dog-whistle-coded messages they have been sending since Nixon’s “southern strategy,” messages that have infected the body politic and that have been metastasizing, just waiting for an opportunity to break out.  OK, this is pretty clear.

So here’s a perspective I think worth considering.  Let’s look at this phenomenon, this set of appearances, as part of a system, as of course it is; as of course everything is.  A system is an organization of parts that function together as a whole. Three types of system are: natural, social, and artificial.  There is one natural system, and it is studied by the “hard” sciences of physics, chemistry, biology, geology, etc.  There are many social systems, and they are studied by the social sciences, which are “softer” than the natural sciences because they focus on the human world, which has introduced Mind into the natural world, and thus the human world, having the freedom to transcend the system of Nature, is less “determined” than the natural system, thus less predictable.  (Of course this assertion is vigorously contested, but I am here assuming it as true.)  Artificial systems are solely the creation of the human Mind, and are purposive and intentional.

“Man proposes, God disposes” is one way of putting the notion that purposive human systems–such as politics in general, democratic politics in particular, American democratic politics more particularly, and so on–may become counter-productive (counter-purposive) by generating unintended consequences, such consequences resulting from imperfect input into the system, the result of ignorance, folly, or just bad luck.  Human systems tend to be built synchronically, whereas humans live diachronically, in time, and time inevitably introduces random variables that can be toxic to any system.

The notion of “a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation” is a repeated trope throughout the Bible, and can be applied as an insight about human systems in general.  The word “jealous” is itself a trope, an application of a human emotion to an anthropomorphic principle called “God,” which is one way of naming the System of All Systems, the unified field theory of Everything.  Other ways of expressing “God’s jealousy” is the Greek image of dike, the image of justice as a double-edged sword; or karma, the Hindu notion of moral cause and effect.  In brief, human actions are subject to “cosmic justice,” the self-balancing mechanism immanent in all systems.  Self-correction is immanent because a system, to remain a system, must remain organized, or it ceases to be a system.  A break-down of any system is itself part of the system, or rather, part of a larger system of which the broken system is a subset.  The broken system signals to the larger system the need for repair.  A good example is “the curse on the house of Atreus” as described in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.  The horrific cycle of revenge and counter-revenge can only be stopped by an agent outside the cycle-system–namely, Athena, who renames the system’s principle source of energy, the Furies, and calls them the Semnai (“venerable ones”), later called the Eumenides (“kindly ones”) by Euripides.  The new name gives them a new twist on an old function, from promoting revenge justice to protecting rational justice.  It is most interesting to note that Athena is able to achieve this feat by skillfully manipulating the Furies’ emotions.  Her rhetoric of persuasion is much more important than the logic of her arguments, for reason is impotent in the face of desire.

The Trump phenomenon reveals the system built up by the Republican Party to be broken. The party’s leaders are scrambling to find materials to repair it.  But the system of the party is part of a larger system of American politics, which itself is part of a larger system of democratic politics that is increasingly being constructed in other parts of the world, each nation-state having its own version of the larger system of democratic politics, which is itself part of a yet larger system called “Politics,” or the organization of social power to the end of the survival and prosperity of a human community, or the human community. Systems within systems within systems . . . within the System.

How we conceive and understand the System of systems is pretty, pretty important.  I refer the reader to a speech given by Gregory Bateson in 1966 titled “From Versailles to Cybernetics” and reprinted in his classic, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972; 2000).