Peter Gordon Fails to Come to Grips With the Problem

1/20/2021—Now that the Trump era is behind us, we can go back to trying to figure out how we arrived at our state of nihilism.

A good starting point is Peter Gordon’s review of Charisma and Disenchantment, which is a new translation of two lectures Max Weber gave in 1917 and 1919—Scholarship as a Vocation and Politics as a Vocation.

Here is Gordon’s key attribution to Weber:

To be a scholar one must acknowledge that in the modern age an irreparable chasm separates facts from values: facts are objective, values are not. Weber stated this point as early as his 1905 essay on objectivity: “the fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge” is that “we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis.” The highest ideals are formed “only in the struggle with other ideals,” and we must abandon our hope for their reconciliation. Weber portrays this predicament as a final consequence of the millennia-long process of disenchantment that has gradually stripped the cosmos of any objective meaning. For the individual who wishes to pursue scholarship as a calling, this process has a paradoxical consequence. If the heavens are empty, one can no longer speak of a caller behind the call; one can make one’s career into a calling only by a sheer act of will.

Gordon criticizes Weber’s sharp distinction between facts and values on two grounds. First, values cannot just be an act of will if society is to survive and prosper:

The distinction between fact and value left Weber with a one-sided image of social rationalization. He failed to grasp the crucial point that a rationalized society is not necessarily a rational one; the latter demands not only a formal rationality of systems and procedures but also a substantive rationality in the values we endorse because they are right.

Second, and sort of inconsistently, Weber was wrong to ascribe sheer objectivity to facts:

No less questionable is Weber’s trust in the solidity of facts, seeing them as a hard and obdurate reality that intrudes upon the latticework of our value-commitments as if from the outside. An effective teacher, he declared, is one who makes the student look unflinchingly at facts even when they are “uncomfortable” or push against one’s partisan opinions. But in an age that is now drowning in “alternative facts,” the old distinction between facts and values may have lost its credence. Values not only frame facts, as Weber knew; they also lend facts their authority, propelling them into the public sphere where they are taken up into our political deliberations. But a fact can only count as a fact if society treats it as one. Today’s demagogues are not content with reshaping political values; they also seek to reshape facts, turning debate over policy into a struggle over what is real.

But Gordon himself participates in the distinction between facts and values in his review. Gordon says “we cannot blame him for failing to anticipate our modern tilt into the relativity of facts.”

We can. Because, as Gordon well knows, and says, facts depend on values. So, if values are acts of will, so are facts. This is the point Hilary Putnam makes in The Fact Value Distinction.

Gordon is sharp but at least in this review he takes the easy way out. The question is, how do we get to the substantive rationality that enables us to discourse about values. That source has to be grounded in the real, in the universe.

This will be my point in my upcoming book—The Universe Is On Our Side: Restoring Faith in American Public Life.

The Refusal on the Right to Condem the Stolen Election Narrative

 12/7/2020--Yesterday, Ross Douthat was given a whole page in the New York Times to discuss the willingness of millions of Americans to accept the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. And it was very good and helpful. He is on the right, but he admits he is not the person who can be helpful in debunking this narrative because he works for the New York Times.

Bill Barr, our Attorney General, could be helpful. That is why his quoted comment to the AP, “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election” and, on allegation that Dominion voting machines switched votes from Trump to Biden, the feds “have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that” are infuriating.

These namby-pamby not quite denials are cowardly and dishonest. They are the kind of comments that lead Steve Kelley, in a cartoon in the Post-Gazette about giving change, to write, "Maybe there are some counterfeit bill, but not enough to matter."

Any fraud is a crime. So how about quotes like these, We're still investigating but we haven't found any fraud yet. If we do, we will put anyone involved in jail. Certainly there was no national conspiracy for Biden. And the machines were fine. That allegation is not true. 

That is actually the substance of what he said, but he did not want to anger Trump anymore than he had to.

And it's not just Barr. I have been disappointed in the silence of influential people on the Right who say they care about the Constitution--law professors like Randy Barnett, Josh Blackman* and Michael McConnell--Federalist Society bigwigs, to denounce these claims. To say simply, they're not true, Biden was elected and it's dangerous to promote these lies.

Because it is dangerous. If millions of ordinary Americans believe the election was stolen, why would they not support a military coup or an assassination? Wouldn't it be the patriotic thing to do? People on the Right ran a great risk in electing Donald. They did it because they could get things--the Supreme Cour, deregulation, the end of the Iran deal. They thought the Constitution would endure, that those of us afraid that Donald would destroy it, were paranoid. 

Well, he's destroying it right now, in front of our eyes and they are dong nothing to stop him.  

*Not that Josh reads this blog, but today, 12/10, he was quoted calling the Texas lawsuit frivolous. I'm sure the Justices did not need him to say it, but that is surely the end of it. So, Josh at least gets off my list of those who would not defend constitutional democracy.  

 

 

 

The 75th Anniversary of Justice Jackson's Opening at Nuremberg.

 11/21/2020--

The 75^th Anniversary of the opening at Nuremberg (From the Jackson List of John Barrett)

At 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, November 20, 1945, Lord Geoffrey Lawrence of the United Kingdom, president judge of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), commenced its trial of the principal Nazi war criminals.  The trial occurred in Courtroom 600 in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, in the United States occupation zone of the former Nazi Germany.

           The World War II Allied nations—the U.S.A., the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the Provisional Government of the French Republic—had created the IMT in their August 8, 1945, London Agreement.

In October 1945, prosecutors from the Allied nations filed with the IMT an indictment charging twenty-four Nazi prisoners and six Nazi organizations with four international crimes:  common plan, agreement and conspiracy; waging aggressive war; committing war crimes; and committing crimes against humanity.

The trial opened on November 20 with prosecutors reading the extensive Indictment.  French assistant prosecutor Pierre Mounier read a portion of Count Three, charging defendants with committing particular War Crimes in France.  The charge included—Mournier stated in court—the word “genocide.”  This was the first official public utterance of this new word, which had been coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin and, at his urging, added by the Americans as they finished drafting the Indictment.

Seventy-five years ago today, on November 21, 1945, twenty individual defendants—Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Walter Funk, Hjalmar Schacht, Karl Doenitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Saukel, Alfred Jodl, Franz von Papen, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Albert Speer, Constantin von Neurath and Hans Fritszche—announced to the IMT their pleas of not guilty.  The four other defendants were not present—Ernst Kaltenbrunner was absent due to illness, Martin Bormann was being tried in abstentia, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach had been declared incompetent to stand trial, and Robert Ley had committed suicide.  The IMT permitted no defendant to make a speech—the USSR had agreed to begin the trial only on that condition because its chief prosecutor, General Roman Rudenko, had not yet arrived in Nuremberg.

Justice Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Chief of Counsel, then delivered his opening statement, which he had been writing and honing for over a month.  The first five paragraphs, here as he spoke them, explained the entirety of the Nuremberg trial undertaking:

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility.  The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.  That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.

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Now me—here in one phrase, “the most significant tribute[] that power has ever paid to reason” is the clearest expression of our sickness. We no longer believe in reason as the foundation of law or anything else.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star Column

7/1/2020--Take a look at today's column in the Pennsylvania Capital-Star addressing reason and truth in American public life.

Douthat on Truth in the Humanities

1/12/2020--It's like a breath of fresh air. Ross Douthat wrote a column in today's New York Times about what the Humanities Department professors say about themselves. It's not an attack but feels like one.

Douthat was reading Endgame in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Douthat starts with Simon During, who likens the decline of the Humanities to the decline in Christianity.

During’s essay is very shrewd, and anyone who has considered secularization in a religious context will recognize truths in the parallels it draws. But at the same time they will also recognize the genre to which it belongs: a statement of regretful unbelief that tries to preserve faith in a more attenuated form (maybe “our canon does not bear any absolute truth and beauty,” but we don’t want to live with an “empty heritage” or “disown and waste the pasts that have formed us”) and to make it useful to some other cause, like the wider left-wing struggle against neoliberalism.

And if there’s any lesson that the decline of Christianity holds for the painful death of the English department, it’s that if you aspire to keep your faith alive even in a reduced, non-hegemonic form, you need more than attenuated belief and socially-useful applications.

But what could that "more" be?

A thousand different forces are killing student interest in the humanities and cultural interest in high culture, and both preservation and recovery depend on more than just a belief in truth and beauty, a belief that “the best that has been thought and said” is not an empty phrase. But they depend at least on that belief, at least on the ideas that certain books and arts and forms are superior, transcendent, at least on the belief that students should learn to value these texts and forms before attempting their critical dissection.

It's simply that some things are better--contain more wisdom about the human condition--than other things.

The Humanities must offer judgment about what is worthwhile, says Michael Clune. No, say G. Gabrelle Starr and Kevin Dettmar--we can offer only approaches to knowledge. But no other discipline promises only an approach; they offer knowledge.

The irony says Douthat is that the age of white male hegemony is over. Now it is possible to assemble a worldwide canon. But there must be faith in the thing itself.

Things Are Worse for Truth than We Think

12/15/2019—Paul Krugman wrote a column this week about climate change and the Republican Party that contained his usual invective. Republican leaders are evil.

But the column got me thinking about my friends who are skeptical about climate change claims and what their skepticism really means.

My friends, after all, are not receiving money from the fossil fuel industry. They have nothing to gain either way from denial.

One thing is certain. My friends are convinced that there is a political agenda that uses climate change as an excuse for policies that have nothing to do with climate change. This is the reaction to the Green New Deal. And they are clearly right about that.

But the rest of the reaction is quite strange. My friends say that no model can predict the future,or some such thing. This is certainly true in a theoretical sense, but we use models all the time.

My friends are also skeptical about the agenda of the researchers themselves—that they have professional interests in promoting climate change and in suppressing evidence that points in the opposite direction.

This is actually quite crazy. Science does not usually work that way. A scientist who showed that climate change is not happening would receive scorn at first, as scientists always do when they confront a settled consensus, but there are many examples of such revolutionary work eventually winning the day. Such a person would eventually be vindicated.

My friends are treating scientists as if they are politicians, which they are not.

Of course, the big example of the same kind of thinking among people on the Left is the denial of the efficacy and need and safety of vaccines for childhood infectious diseases. It is not as widespread as climate change denial, but it is just as impervious to evidence.

And all of this is part of the revolt, at least in the West, against expertise. Maybe that revolt is overstated, but something is happening.

The question is, how did all this happen and what does it mean? I believe it all roots in the Death of God, but that is another subject.

Putin on Western Values

8/10/2019—On Sunday, my column about mass shootings will appear in the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, for which I write a biweekly column. So, I won’t scoop myself here. But the column ends with a quote from Vladimir Putin that has not received enough attention in America.

Putin said in June that the liberal idea has become “obsolete.” He was referring to specific matters that of course people differ about—gay rights, multiculturalism, etc. But on a deeper level, he was equating popular views with truth. So, he was claiming a great deal more. He was claiming that rights are not real. That truth has no power. That self-determination of a people can be manipulated.

Putin was not exactly greeted with outrage. And this is the issue. Would Americans die to save the Union, as thousands did in the Civil War? Would Americans die to save democracy and human rights, as thousands did in WWII? Maybe. Americans would fight to protect America from invasion or attack—in fact we do. But what about our ideas and ideals?

America has always been about an idea, not group and not place. This is why the notion of American nationalism is so repulsive. That idea has basically three manifestations—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address—you can add other pieces of Lincoln’s expression. Rights are primary. Governments must be limited by structure and law. Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

That’s really it. It’s also the liberal idea that Putin says is obsolete.

The validity of Putin’s claim rests with us and he knows it. He meant, even the West no longer believes in this. If we do, he is wrong. If we don’t, he is right.

Roger Cohen on Truth

7/27/2019—The New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote a column about the inhumanity of Donald Trump today. It was pretty searing in its depiction of Trump’s reaction to Nadia Murad at a meeting on July 17.

But Trump was not the point, really. Cohen started out with the notion of truth as an absolute commitment. Cohen begins with a quote from Robert Musil: “No culture can rest on a crooked relationship to truth.”

But what Cohen doesn’t realize, or doesn’t want to realize, is that the attack on truth did not begin and does not rest on Trump or Boris Johnson. Nihilism began on the Left, with sophisticated opinion. And it is with us still.

When will the Left accept responsibility for paving the way for the death of truth and, more importantly, come to a decision about truth? (I’m talking to you, Mark Lilla) Are there universal truths about humans and the universe? Is nationalism false because of those universal truths? If so, identity politics and the anti-appropriation movement are also false.

Cohen is right on the disease but wrong on source and on the cure.

Bruno Latour, Science and the Post-Truth Moment

5/25/2019—Leafing through old issues of the New York Review, you get a sense of the speed of cultural dissemination these days. One such cultural moment occurred last fall, when Bruno Latour’s new book, Down to Earth appeared. Ava Kofman did a long review/essay in The New York Times.

Latour is the prophet of the philosophy of science. He and other critics challenged the authority of science back in the 1980’s. I taught his book, We Have Never Been Modern, for years.

So, isn’t Latour responsible in part for the post-truth age that he now bitterly regrets? Does he confess—the same kind of confession that Camus engaged in and which I wrote about last week here?

Not at all. Instead, Latour seems to feel that the unreasonable claims of objective authority—the facts speak for themselves and differ from values—finally came crashing down. Not because of him but because that image of science is not true.

That is not how Latour puts it, but it is the case. Latour would say it is not convincing. But it is not convincing because it is not true. Truth—or rather falsehood—has consequences.

This is what is missing in Latour—the acknowledgment that it is not all up to humans. It is up to us to a great extent. But as one scientist said, sometimes nature kicks you in the ass. We can amend that to say that sometimes reality kicks you in the ass. And here was one such instance—science as purely objective was not true and no amount of convincing would hold it up forever.

I am now beginning to see Dr. King’s teaching in a new light. If your society is built on injustice, it will to that extent be weaker and less resilient than social structures that people agree are just. And, again, this is not because of how convincing we are, but that some structures actually are unjust. Eventually their injustice is seen, though it may take a long time.

Robert Taylor used to call this minimal realism. I don’t know if he would still assent, but I believe this is a fair statement of how things are.

How Nihilism Cripples the Left

5/10/2019—Actually, nihilism does not cripple the Left, but it should. Often, when the Left or Left-leaning institutions want to criticize others, they do so in the name of universalist values, such as “the rule of law” or “truth.” But in other contexts, such claims would be taken to be totalizing fronts for rhetorics of domination. As in, there are many truths. Or, there is no rule of law, only political commitments.

I saw this tendency again recently in an article in the New York Times and an add for The New Republic—not that Left, I know.

The story was from May 7 and concerned the interference by the far right in Europe where the Right has attained actual government power or influence. Political agendas are now interfering with judicial and security functions that had long been thought to be outside politics.

So, for example, the agency that monitors security threats was asked to turn over the identities of informants who had infiltrated the far-right movement. The agency refused. Then the agency was raided by the police.

Yascha Mounk, the author of The People vs. Democracy, called this in the article “an assault on independent institutions, the separation of powers and the rule of law.”

But what is Court-packing but that exact same thing? An assault on the rule of law.

The far right just believes there are Trump judges and Obama judges—just like most people do here.

Now take The New Republic ad I got last week—headed “Trump’s War on Truth.” “Only fearless, fact-based journalism can stand up to him.”

Aside from the slippery fact/value distinction imposed here—do we really disagree about facts or do we use facts to support positions we would hold anyway? Even if we limit ourselves to facts, I thought there were no texts, only interpretations. And I thought all interpretations were equal.

The point is, a new kind of objective viewpoint is needed to combat the war on truth. And Trump is not the only, or main, or most important, combatant in the war. That war had been waged for many years, including in the pages of The New Republic. Until the Left takes some responsibility for where we are, we cannot move forward.

More Universalism

4/11/2019--George Hutchinson is 89 years old and he has written an essential book for this culture: Facing the Abyss. Now I have only read this review by Edward Mendelson in the New York Review. But it will do for now. The point is universalism.

Hutchinson examines the literary culture of the 1940's and discovers that there were writers. Oh, they were black, white, gay straight, male, female. But they were writers about the human condition, despite their differing viewpoints. It was not unusual for Ann Perry, for example, to write about a white family. No concerns about cultural appropriation. Catetorization is the enemy.

Actually, that is not mostly what Hutchinson is getting at. There are cultures of virtue and cultures of penitence. The culture of virtue trumpets itself. That of penitence aims at self-reflection. The 1940's were one. We are the other. (Guess).

The Universal Declaration of Rights proclaimed by the United Nations in 1948 was not an instrument of Western imperialism celebrating personal autonomy. It was derived from Confucianism and Dewey's pragmatism and emphasized mutual relations. A collaboration between Eleanor Roosevelt and Zhang Pengchun.

The 1940's was a time of unspeakable horror. And of many American sins. Hutchinson does not gloss over that and neither did these figures. But it was also a time of some genuine introspection. We could use some of that. Cable news is self-righteousness. So is our politics.

The Power of Truth

3/3/2019—Why is it the Democrats cannot quite clear themselves of the charge of infanticide? The real reason is that human life begins at conception. There is no line after that one that makes any sense.

An abortion decision that centered on the life, health and safety of the pregnant woman would still be possible. But not abortion on demand, which is the problem. The issue is terminating a pregnancy that is just not in the person’s plans, but is otherwise no threat.

A lot of the issue here is sexism. The father’s life will continue more or less unaffected. Her life will radically change. If this were different, there would be much more support for abortion. But less demand for it, too.

Matters are quite otherwise with same sex marriage. Here the religious teachings are arbitrary and everyone can see it, which is why there is no longer any support at all for criminalizing this “sin”. Try that experiment with adultery and you will see that people will say it would be a bad idea to criminalize it, but there is still some support for some kind of legal sanction—a penalty in the divorce, for example.

I hope gay Methodist believers will stay and make the denomination throw them out. It may not happen. But even if it does, it will be homicide and not suicide.

Conservatives are always going on about traditional morality. But gay relationships are not actually immoral. Those other teachings are about practices that actually are, even though the teachings are rigid—-most sex outside marriage is exploitive and that which is not is often on the way to marriage and always went on.

So, life and love are the truth. When we go against them, we always run into difficulties. That is the power of truth.

Journalism, Truth and Originalism

10/6/2018—I now see that Kimberley Strassel, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, did not mean what she wrote. But what she tweeted, which was retweeted by Randy Barnett, thus probably indicating his approval, demonstrates how nihilism infiltrates a culture, even a culture that thinks it believes in truth.

Here is the tweet: “Actually, the goal of journalism is presenting facts--and presenting them on both sides of any given issue. Americans then get to work out themselves, on the basis of those facts, the truth. We don't need press to divine it for us. Just try who/what/where/when/why/how”

The tweet was in response to Matthew Dowd, ABC News political analyst, who had written, “So kim so what do you think the goal of journalism if it isn’t the truth? Do you think we should have people on panels that argue the earth is flat?”

Now the reason I say that Strassel does not believe what she wrote is that she does not practice it on twitter. On twitter, she tells a story she believes to be true—-for example, that Democratic Party tactics over the Kavanaugh nomination were an unprecedented attack on a nominee.

That is a factual claim in a sense, but it is also an important truth claim. Any news report that, at least over time, did not make it clear that the Kavanaugh attacks were something new, would not be telling the story about the nomination.

Strassel might say here that twitter is not journalism, but the line between them is not particularly clear. A real reporter is always a reporter.

Notice that Strassel did not respond to Dowd’s actual example. You don’t put a flat earth person in a story and say neutrally that some people say the earth is flat. If there is a demonstration of people claiming the earth is flat, it would be poor journalism to present that claim as possibly accurate. The story would have to say that the flat earth position contradicts all that is known about the earth.

In the context of flat earth claims, the correction is not needed. But the broader point is that facts depend on values, as the philosopher Hilary Putnam showed years ago. That doesn’t make facts a matter of opinion, because those values—-consistency, integrity, beauty—-are themselves a matter of truth. Science does not advance based on facts, but on these values.

The goal of journalism is to present the relevant facts and explain their relevance. That is telling the story, which by the way is how journalism self-defines: telling the story.

When Walter Cronkite finally concluded and announced that the Vietnam War was being lost and that the government was lying, he was not violating journalistic norms. He was explaining the meaning of the relevant facts.

The reason Strassel wants to deny all this is that much of the media is biased. It claims that truth is on one side when there is actually room for perfectly reasonable disagreement—-that Justice Thomas is a sexual predator, for example, which is taken for a fact by much of the Left, but of course may be completely false.

But debating bias is hard. Denouncing truth is unfortunately easy. And so Strassel makes the big mistake of undermining truth.

The reason that Randy Barnett retweeted Strassel is that proponents of originalism make the same mistake she did. There is a truth of free speech, equal protection, free exercise, takings, etc. There is even a truth of fundamental, nontextual rights. Liberal jurisprudence has abandoned the search for these truths and just proclaims certain outcomes. Frustrated with that process, conservatives deny there is any truth to these values and so retreat to making historical claims about original public meaning (claims that often turn out to be disguised truth claims anyway, but that is for another day).

Showing that liberal claims are false is hard. In fact, conservatives are not even sure anymore that they are false. Denying truth, on the other hand, is easy.

Ironically, the framers themselves were liberals—-they thought there was a truth to free speech and would not be unhappy that we now know more about free speech than they did. The framers were not nihilists. Conservatives are turning themselves nihilists because they don’t understand their own position.

Randy Barnett wants to return to the Lochner era of judicial evaluation of economic legislation. But Randy does not ever want to defend such judicial outcomes on their merits. He wants to say that he is just returning to the framers’ understanding.

The framers, however, are all standing there saying, Randy, in a world of trillion dollar corporations and massive human populations that change the climate by their very existence, the meaning of individual liberty and limited government have to change. If you try simply to go back to us, you mistake us and undermine our goals.

Why I Took Out a Billboard

8/27/2018—Friends and family—and other people by now—are wondering why I would take out a billboard in Erie County that reads “Tax Cuts Threaten Social Security.” It wasn’t primarily because I am worried about social security. It’s that I hate lying.

I became enraged that politicians who plainly knew the truth would repeat the lie that tax cuts pay for themselves.

But, of course, we now live in a post-truth age and so the issue of lying is much deeper and more sinister than that. Lying about the effect of policies makes democracy impossible. The people are treated like children and cannot make effective decisions. We are encouraged to believe that money grows on trees.

But it is even worse and deeper than that. The lie is the foundation of totalitarianism, as Hannah Arendt argued in The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

This is why I took out the billboard, so truth would have a champion.

This culture has become convinced that there are no objective truths. This view arose first on the academic Left in postmodernisn. Now it lives on in the anti-elitism of both the Right and the Left—climate change and vaccine denial.
We must reclaim realism. Not just about truth, but about the good, the beautiful and the just. I am trying to fund a podcast series highlighting the teaching of Dr. King that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Go to kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bendstowardjustice/the-bends-toward-justice-podcast-project?ref=user_menu

Why Won’t Free Speech Save Us?

6/1/2018—This is a letter I wrote to the New York Times commenting on a Sunday column by Ross Douthat.

To the Editor:

Ross Douthat wrote an excellent column arguing that a purely procedural free speech will not save us, (5/27/2018) but neglected to say why that is. The reason is that free speech was never meant to function procedurally. The purpose of free speech is to aid in a society's search for truth. Once the concept of truth is surrendered, there is no point to free speech. Therefore, to save ourselves from the rot, we must ask a simple question. When Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "...the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," was he speaking gibberish or was he correct? For too long, left-wing intellectuals, joined now by Donald Trump, the nihilist-in-chief, have gotten away with leading our society into the ditch by denying King's vision. Let's finally have an actual debate about materialism and moral realism. I believe Dr. King will hold up very well.
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In a pitch for a piece in the Online magazine Starting Points, I amplified this point.

Douthat suggested briefly why he thought that free speech by itself is an inadequate response—free speech has become merely a procedural value, a right to argue and nothing more: “If you want a healthy culture of debate, it’s not enough to complain that Marxists and postmodernists are out to silence you; you need your own idea of what education and human life itself are for.”

The very form of Douthat’s suggestion requires some form of moral realism. It requires the commitment that there is an actual answer to the question, or at least better and worse attempts to answer the question, what is human life for? That sounds very much like what would be called today an essentialist and foundational account of free speech. Free speech would then be justified not as a procedural right alone, but as a part of a people’s search for truth.

Without that underlying substantive commitment, there is little point to free speech and no good reason to tolerate speech that we hate. Unfortunately, that commitment today is lacking, both on the political Left and the political Right. We have become materialists, relativists and nihilists. Not free speech alone, but only a commitment to truth, will save us.
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There is a difference here between law and culture. As a matter of law, the First Amendment protects the right to speak without regard to anything else. The law ignores the content of speech and the purpose of speech in all but the most extremes contexts, ie., an immediate threat of violence. That is why free speech is treated as a procedural right.

But in terms of the culture, it was always assumed that there was a point to free speech as a whole. The best, the only, way to assure progress toward truth was to let the people hear the speech of all and then decide over time what to do and what to believe. Yes, at a certain point, Justice Holmes seemed to turn this upside down by defining truth as what people came to believe, rather than the other way round, but there was still an assumption that deliberation and decision by the people were the ultimate goal.

We live at a time when this faith—that deliberation can be encouraged and trusted—is missing. When people think about it at all, they do not trust their fellow citizens. Therefore, bad ideas must be kept from them. Free speech transforms from an engine of liberation to a weapon of oppression. Robust exchange is just another form of harassment. Obviously this is bad for universities—and bad for football teams disciplining their players. But it is disastrous for anything like democracy.

On Memorial Day, 2018, How Do You Fight for Democracy?

5/28/2018—I wished a man I know a “happy” Memorial Day. He responded that he had served and lost many friends. So, it was not a happy day for him, though an important one.

I am far from a veteran worldview, having never served. It is easy for me to forget just what the meaning of Memorial Day is supposed to be. To remember those who served our Nation and died doing so.

This leads me to the question raised by Dan Rather today—how do we fight for democracy? In one sense, in a military sense, this is not a difficult question. In the Civil War, the North fought against secession that would have destroyed America—the fight was for our country, not directly for democracy. On the other hand, it was also a fight against the slave power that was undemocratic to its core.

Other wars have been over land—against Mexico, for example. Not a fight for democracy.

WWI was complex. But we understand it today usually as a fight against the expansions of Germany and the Austrian Empire. We stood with the other major democracies, Great Britain and France. But we were also acting in self-defense against unrestricted submarine warfare.

WWII was a fight against racism and fascism. Nazi Germany and Japan represented everything that democracy is not. They were powerful totalitarian States. But we fought on the side of the Soviet Union against Hitler, another totalitarian State. The struggle against Communism that followed was more than a contest about majority rule.

And today the fight against Islamic terrorism—whatever that might mean—seems more like a series of actions against criminals. Against violence.

The struggle of Israel against Iran is not a question of democracy, but of something else—international aggression? The Palestinian people are occupied militarily. Certainly their democratic rights are not being respected. And can a religious State really be democratic toward its minority religious population? Not over time if the minority religions threaten to become a new majority.

Randy Barnett, the conservative Georgetown University law professor, told a group of law professors in a 2014 debate, that the point of the Constitution was never democracy. Majority rule is as much a threat to individual liberty as anything else. That is why the Constitution does not enshrine democracy, but limited government and individual rights.

This is why the undemocratic aspects of our political system—the Electoral College, equal representation in the Senate—do not bother Randy. Now, this is more than a bit of hypocrisy on Randy’s part—the framers were not dealing with a two-Party system. They would have rejected minority rule much more than majority rule—and it is minority rule that the undemocratic Constitution is currently delivering.

But Randy does raise the question about what we celebrate when we celebrate democracy. I will put the word freedom in Randy’s mouth. We celebrate and protect a free society on Memorial Day.

Democracy must be a part of that freedom, of course, though Randy might disagree. It is not freedom to be ruled by a minority, which is the situation today.

But the most important defense of democracy is faith in history. I don’t believe a nihilistic culture can be democratic. The most important right is the right of free speech. That is the right of free determination. That is the right to discuss and think. That is the sign of a free society and people—that and the concomitant freedom of the press.

But free speech requires truth as its goal. Otherwise, as Ross Douthat wrote yesterday in the New York Times, free speech is just a procedural right.

We defend democracy when we defend the right of a people to pursue truth. I wish you a solemn Memorial Day.

What Was the Most Radical Thing Martin Luther King Jr. Ever Said?

4/4/2018—On this solemn occasion of the death of Martin Luther King Jr. fifty years ago today in Memphis, people all over the world have taken the opportunity to reconsider King’s life and contributions. Much of this is political—an attempt to enlist King in various causes.

Nothing wrong with that. If people don’t know that King cared deeply about militarism and poverty, they should be reminded.

But I doubt that this aspect of his life is the most important.

Not even his dedication to nonviolence and loving engagement, although the very core of King’s being, is the most important thing today.

For, before King could engage the world in that way, he had to believe something very specific. He had to believe, as he apparently often said, that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

This is the message that our culture today desperately needs to hear. This is what we no longer believe. Sometimes, as in the case of the writer Rich Cohen in Vanity Fair, we actually say we no longer believe this. More often, we don’t think about it. We just assume in our materialism and nihilism, that the universe is cold and indifferent, if not hostile.

Not only confessed atheists doubt King. Plenty of people in the pews do also.

The reason that we today doubt King on this crucial matter is that God died. As Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw, that monumental death would take 1000 years to be understood and withstood. It is an open question whether a culture without a belief in God can survive.

It is because we no longer believe as Martin Luther King Jr. did that we hate each other. For if I believe the universe has an arc of goodness, I can, as King did, as Jesus did, love my enemies. For not only will I be vindicated, but I can hope realistically that my enemies will come to see the Truth of things.

But if, instead, the universe is forces and chaos, then it is my will to power versus the will to power of my enemies. We have to eliminate each other, one way or the other.

Of course, the catastrophe of the death of God does not reverse it. This culture will not just believe in God. I will not just believe in God.

That is not the end matters, however. For the question, as the Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan saw, is not whether God exists. The first question is whether the universe is on our side. There is plenty of evidence that it is. We have not yet seen the necessity of investigating Lonergan’s question in a serious way. He and King were seeing the same arc. I can see that arc.

Do religious believers have a stake in this debate within secularism? Certainly. For, as CS Lewis argued, the fundamental divide is not between religious believers and nonbelievers. The fundamental divide is between those persons who believe that goodness, truth and beauty are real and those who believe they are merely human projections.

I line up here with Lewis. Our culture will not be healed until we decide where we stand—with Lewis, Lonergan and King or not?

A Little More Death of Truth—the Case of the Canadian Trade Figures

3/21/2018—Who can keep up with the outrages? President Trump insists to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a meeting that Canada runs a trade surplus with the US, when it is not the case—in goods, yes, offset by services, where the US runs a surplus.

Charles Blow wrote a good column about this, calling Trump the un-American President. First, why doesn’t Trump know—the subsequent reported comments by the President and later tweet demonstrate he didn’t know.

Since Trump gets nothing out of this but the thrill of lying and the unencumbered style Trump loves, Blow calls this “lying for sport.”

Blow puts his finger on the real issue later in the column: “One of Trump’s most lasting legacies will likely be the damage he’s doing to the fundamental idea that truth matters.”

So, now we have to ask this fundamental question—does Truth matter?

In the pragmatic sense, truth matters. People won’t trust each other if they have to double check everything. Society falls apart.

But does Truth really matter? Here, if secularists are right that physical forces are all that exist, the answer is no, because nothing intrinsically matters. Or maybe I should say, Truth matters only if we say so.

This is related to the column by Joseph Paul Carter in the New York Times last summer—the Universe Doesn’t Care About Your Purpose. Only now we say, the universe doesn’t care about Truth. I hope my readers see the connection.

Neil deGrasse Tyson said on the 2014 Cosmos series redo that humans engage in science “because it matters what’s true.” He did not just mean matters to us. He meant the human feeling for intrinsic significance. Truth matters, period. Once, we would have said, matters to God. Now, we have to say, matters to the universe, because we have no other language for something intrinsic and real, but not physical. The novelist E.L. Doctorow calls it living “in moral consequence.”

The positivists, nihilists, materialists, relativists destroyed Truth in this culture. Trump is just another one of them—worse, of course, but not really different. Carter says we make purpose. Well, if so, then we can make Truth, too, and it won't matter.

Mark Rylance Called Me a Poacher

3/8/2018—Travel is wonderfully broadening. Last night, we saw Farinelli and the King, starring Rylance in a play written by his wife, Claire van Kampen. His performance was riveting of course. We were so close to the stage that he looked down at me and asked whether I was the poacher who had been frequenting the King’s forest—Philippe V of Spain.

But you also don’t leave home. A friend on another night greeted with incredulity my claim that there might be more than opinion about right and wrong, good and evil. He accused me of reading too much David Brooks.

It is true that David Brooks asked the right question in a column last Monday in the New York Times—what comes after the chaos of Donald Trump? But, unfortunately, Brooks does not know how to get to a new foundation. How to set ourselves on a healthier course.

I did not mind my friend’s incredulity. I actually prefer it to the disguised nihilism I usually get. Usually, people claim to believe in right and wrong when they don’t. As Steven Smith wrote, their epistemology is out of step with their ontology.

There was one moment that brought a pause at the table. I said I knew someone else who thought there was no truth—Donald Trump. The death of truth is not something my friend would readily endorse with Donald in the White House.

Truth and Art

8/27/2017—A fascinating review of an art exhibition by Jed Perl in The New York Review of Books’ August 17 issue. The review is of the exhibit going on now in Paris of the works of Andre Derain, Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, known as Balthus, and Alberto Giacometti. According to Perl, the exhibit is about the artistic connection between Derain, whom many believed had become very conservative after a turn as an avant-garde celebrity in the first two decades of the twentieth century and the two younger artists of the mid-century. I had never heard of them.

What I found most compelling is Perl’s understanding of what these artists were trying to accomplish. Perl writes, “These three were determined to revisit the relationship between art and reality following the revolutions of early-twentieth-century artists, who had so often rejected the naturalism that dominated Western painting and sculpture for five hundred years. They were gathering together the broken pieces of what some disparaged as the sunny old reality. The wanted to discover a new, moonlit truth.”

Well, aren’t we non-artists in the same boat? We want a new relationship to truth after the revolutions in thinking and science of the twentieth century, and earlier, displaced simple metaphysical realism—the God’s eye view guaranteeing reality as safe, secure and beneficent. They could not go back. Neither can we.

Picasso and Matisse, whom Perl calls the “supreme magicians of modernism,” define painting for us and for these three as changeable expression by the artist. These three, whom Perl calls the “metaphysicians of modernism” were not satisfied with such expressionism. They were investigating anew “the relationship between style and truth.”

These three artists accepted the end of the truth of art as naturalistic—much as we are forced to accept the end of metaphysical realism. They accepted pictorial truth as the standard of truth. So a painting is not the world, but an imaginary world. In this, they follow Picasso and Matisse et al. But, Perl writes, “they wanted their imaginary worlds to have a logic and inevitability that transcended their own emotional appetites.”

The only way to achieve an impersonal view was through an intensely personal struggle beyond the subjective idiosyncratic to where thought and passion led them.

The painting shown in the review do not seem successful to me. They lack the expressive power of the artists from whom these three departed. On the other hand, who exactly stands up to Picasso and Matisse in the years since?

There is in this review and exhibit a model for us in the search for truth today and for the Symposium on the resurrection of truth at Duquesne Law School in November.