9/6/2020--One of the saddest book review/essays I have ever read is by the writer Rumaan Alam, reviewing Collected Stories by Lorrie Moore in the New York Review August 20, 2020 issue. (here).
It's a really good review. Alam admires Moore's work and has great insights into it. But he detects and shares a decline in optimism over the years: "In the decade that elapsed between Birds of America [1998] and A Gate at the Stairs [2009], that premillennial optimism—we thought Al Gore would be president!—hardens. ...The writer sees the world differently now, and maybe with the wisdom of age, it's more difficult to sustain optimism."
But it's not really a matter of optimism or pessimism. It's worst than that. In the end, art does not console us. But nothing else does either. That conclusion is the source of Alam's last line--"This story reminds us that art is not enough, but it is all we have."
But is it all we have?
In terms of my new book, Alam answers no to Bernard Lonergan's question, is the universe on our side? You can build a civilization out of the no, but it is not easy to do so.
Nor is it necessary. There is also a potential yes, even for those who do not believe in God. That is the secret of renewal.
Showing posts with label hallowed secularism in the age of nihilism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hallowed secularism in the age of nihilism. Show all posts
Sunday, September 6, 2020
Saturday, February 15, 2020
The Age of the Decadent Thinker
2/15/2020—Here is the letter to the editor that I wrote addressing Ross Douthat’s several page essay in the New York Times last Sunday—The Age of Decadence.
To the Editor:
Ross Douthat’s essay, The Age of Decadence (2/9/2020) was disappointing. Not because he was wrong—since the piece was basically Douthat’s view of things, he could hardly be called wrong—but because it was so pointless. Douthat’s view of history is that of ebb and flow. We happen to be in an age of decadence now. A renaissance will come, but all we can do, he writes, is “look and hope” for it. Conveniently, this lets Douthat completely off the hook.
Douthat’s view is especially odd because one of his prime examples of previous ages of decadence, the decline of the Roman Empire, was occurring at the same time that the Patristic Era was unfolding—one of the most creative periods in the history of the Church. Those Christian leaders presumably did not feel decadent.
If Douthat is too worn out and fatalistic to find the creativity occurring right now, let him turn his column over to someone who is not so jaded. The decadence here is that of Douthat, not of society.
**************
The passivity of Douthat’s thinking is striking. Here we are and there is nothing to do about it. I suppose there is such a thing as decline. The US certainly seems to be in decline right now. Britain was in decline after WWII. China has been on the rise. Etc. And surely there are forces involved that no one can immediately alter.
But is any of this relevant to how we should live? What we should do? It is certainly not an excuse for doing and thinking nothing. Offering no help at all.
Can’t one look into the sources of this supposed decadence? Are they material? Cognitive? Spiritual?
And why didn’t the editors at the New York Times ask Douthat about any of this?
To the Editor:
Ross Douthat’s essay, The Age of Decadence (2/9/2020) was disappointing. Not because he was wrong—since the piece was basically Douthat’s view of things, he could hardly be called wrong—but because it was so pointless. Douthat’s view of history is that of ebb and flow. We happen to be in an age of decadence now. A renaissance will come, but all we can do, he writes, is “look and hope” for it. Conveniently, this lets Douthat completely off the hook.
Douthat’s view is especially odd because one of his prime examples of previous ages of decadence, the decline of the Roman Empire, was occurring at the same time that the Patristic Era was unfolding—one of the most creative periods in the history of the Church. Those Christian leaders presumably did not feel decadent.
If Douthat is too worn out and fatalistic to find the creativity occurring right now, let him turn his column over to someone who is not so jaded. The decadence here is that of Douthat, not of society.
**************
The passivity of Douthat’s thinking is striking. Here we are and there is nothing to do about it. I suppose there is such a thing as decline. The US certainly seems to be in decline right now. Britain was in decline after WWII. China has been on the rise. Etc. And surely there are forces involved that no one can immediately alter.
But is any of this relevant to how we should live? What we should do? It is certainly not an excuse for doing and thinking nothing. Offering no help at all.
Can’t one look into the sources of this supposed decadence? Are they material? Cognitive? Spiritual?
And why didn’t the editors at the New York Times ask Douthat about any of this?
Sunday, February 9, 2020
The Sprit of the Age
2/9/2020—Humanism and materialism are not sustainable. Neither is solipsism. Nor, for that matter, is skepticism.
So, today, I can read in the New York Times on both the Right and Left, Ross Douthat and Jamelle Bouie, repetitive theories of history. (Right now we’re down).
I also have on my desk the a January 19, 2019 review of books on liberalism and democracy by David Bell, “ Each of the three books under review makes a renewed case for elements of the liberal ideal, but with a powerfully heightened sense of its fragility and of the contingent factors behind its historical development.”
And also on my desk a letter to the editor about a review by Elain Blair, which will not get published. Here is what I wrote.
To the Editor:
Elaine Balir writes, concerning a moment in Ben Lerner’s novel, 10:04, “Lerner…is writing in a time of doubt about the realist writer’s authority to take us very far beyond the bounds of his own experience.” [“Learning to Fight,” NYR, February 13, 2020]
Undoubtedly, Blair does speak for the cultural moment. But this unthinking solipsism must be confronted in order to defeat it.
Think of the implications of Blair’s understanding. The rich author cannot write about a poor person. Not really. Because he cannot know what it is like to be poor. Similarly, a man cannot write about a woman. A white author cannot write about a person of color.
But why stop there? The soloistic student famously said to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “No one can know my pain.” How could an author have “authority” to write about anyone else? He cannot know another.
Furthermore, Wittgenstein retorted, “Are you sure you know?” How can Blair grant the author authority to write about “his own experience,” as if that fraught category were self-evident? We don’t know ourselves.
The only authority is truth. Ben Lerner can write a social novel to the extent he is true to its characters and situations. That is our only authority and it is an exacting one. There is no escaping judgment. Vapid nihilism leads only to the abyss. An abyss all too obvious in our current political life.
*****************
The problem with all of this is that we take these views as obvious and self-evident. Or as beyond investigation. In other words, there is no actual truth we might learn.
This is really the age of evasion about learning anything.
So, today, I can read in the New York Times on both the Right and Left, Ross Douthat and Jamelle Bouie, repetitive theories of history. (Right now we’re down).
I also have on my desk the a January 19, 2019 review of books on liberalism and democracy by David Bell, “ Each of the three books under review makes a renewed case for elements of the liberal ideal, but with a powerfully heightened sense of its fragility and of the contingent factors behind its historical development.”
And also on my desk a letter to the editor about a review by Elain Blair, which will not get published. Here is what I wrote.
To the Editor:
Elaine Balir writes, concerning a moment in Ben Lerner’s novel, 10:04, “Lerner…is writing in a time of doubt about the realist writer’s authority to take us very far beyond the bounds of his own experience.” [“Learning to Fight,” NYR, February 13, 2020]
Undoubtedly, Blair does speak for the cultural moment. But this unthinking solipsism must be confronted in order to defeat it.
Think of the implications of Blair’s understanding. The rich author cannot write about a poor person. Not really. Because he cannot know what it is like to be poor. Similarly, a man cannot write about a woman. A white author cannot write about a person of color.
But why stop there? The soloistic student famously said to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “No one can know my pain.” How could an author have “authority” to write about anyone else? He cannot know another.
Furthermore, Wittgenstein retorted, “Are you sure you know?” How can Blair grant the author authority to write about “his own experience,” as if that fraught category were self-evident? We don’t know ourselves.
The only authority is truth. Ben Lerner can write a social novel to the extent he is true to its characters and situations. That is our only authority and it is an exacting one. There is no escaping judgment. Vapid nihilism leads only to the abyss. An abyss all too obvious in our current political life.
*****************
The problem with all of this is that we take these views as obvious and self-evident. Or as beyond investigation. In other words, there is no actual truth we might learn.
This is really the age of evasion about learning anything.
Saturday, January 18, 2020
Tamsin Shaw and “the need for us to converge on some shared values to have a functioning form of government.”
1/18/2020—I received this in an email from the NYR Daily, which is a really interesting effort by the New York Review to bridge the gap between the day to day and the magazine itself, which comes out twenty times a year.
Shaw wrote an essay on William Barr and Carl Schmidt, which I understand because of the friend/enemy distinction that Barr is prone to, but which is also really overblown given that Barr is a practicing democrat.
Shaw’s first book was about Nietzsche’s political ideas—Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism (2007). This is from the Princeton Press description:
"Shaw argues that the modern political predicament, for Nietzsche, is shaped by two important historical phenomena. The first is secularization, or the erosion of religious belief, and the fragmentation of moral life that it entails. The second is the unparalleled ideological power of the modern state. The promotion of Nietzsche’s own values, Shaw insists, requires resistance to state ideology. But Nietzsche cannot envisage how these values might themselves provide a stable basis for political authority; this is because secular societies, lacking recognized normative expertise, also lack a reliable mechanism for making moral insight politically effective."
The quote in the title of this entry is actually quite despairing given Shaw’s view. She clearly believes that Nietizsche is on to something. But the problem is the lack of “recognized moral expertise.” Well, how could there be expertise about the will to power? Why should the will to power “converge on some shared values?”
There is a pretty obvious answer to this problem, but Shaw would say that it just isn’t true—moral realism of some form. If values are real—leaving aside what real would mean—then such a thing as “recognized moral expertise” would be possible. The problem would be to convince a culture that one moral answer is better than another—closer, at least, to true.
This would be difficult but not insurmountable.
It would be a task that one might attempt. As things stand, Shaw must remain essentially hopeless—-as was Nietzsche. So, why should she even hold out the possibility of achieving political legitimacy? Should she not admit that this is now impossible and we are doomed? Why does she lack the fortitude to face the facts?
I suggest that her inability to do this stems from Shaw's unwillingness to give up. Good for her. I suggest, however, that she then get to work and stop lamenting. Are there real values or not?
Shaw wrote an essay on William Barr and Carl Schmidt, which I understand because of the friend/enemy distinction that Barr is prone to, but which is also really overblown given that Barr is a practicing democrat.
Shaw’s first book was about Nietzsche’s political ideas—Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism (2007). This is from the Princeton Press description:
"Shaw argues that the modern political predicament, for Nietzsche, is shaped by two important historical phenomena. The first is secularization, or the erosion of religious belief, and the fragmentation of moral life that it entails. The second is the unparalleled ideological power of the modern state. The promotion of Nietzsche’s own values, Shaw insists, requires resistance to state ideology. But Nietzsche cannot envisage how these values might themselves provide a stable basis for political authority; this is because secular societies, lacking recognized normative expertise, also lack a reliable mechanism for making moral insight politically effective."
The quote in the title of this entry is actually quite despairing given Shaw’s view. She clearly believes that Nietizsche is on to something. But the problem is the lack of “recognized moral expertise.” Well, how could there be expertise about the will to power? Why should the will to power “converge on some shared values?”
There is a pretty obvious answer to this problem, but Shaw would say that it just isn’t true—moral realism of some form. If values are real—leaving aside what real would mean—then such a thing as “recognized moral expertise” would be possible. The problem would be to convince a culture that one moral answer is better than another—closer, at least, to true.
This would be difficult but not insurmountable.
It would be a task that one might attempt. As things stand, Shaw must remain essentially hopeless—-as was Nietzsche. So, why should she even hold out the possibility of achieving political legitimacy? Should she not admit that this is now impossible and we are doomed? Why does she lack the fortitude to face the facts?
I suggest that her inability to do this stems from Shaw's unwillingness to give up. Good for her. I suggest, however, that she then get to work and stop lamenting. Are there real values or not?
Wednesday, October 9, 2019
Yom Kippur and the Shootings
10/9/2019—The Jewish community in Pittsburgh continues to struggle to come to terms with the shootings a little more than a year ago that killed 11 persons and wounded others at a synagogue building housing three congregations. Because of the timing, the shootings have been on the minds of many during this High Holy Day season.
Actually, all of Pittsburgh is reminded of these events. That is obviously true of me, but I retain many ties to Judaism, including an awareness of the liturgical calendar.
Commemorations climax today, on the holiest day of the year—Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
On this day of fasting, Jews seek forgiveness of sins, both individually and collectively.
The Christian question after such a horrific act tends to be one of forgiveness of the perpetrator. This echoes Jesus’s call from the cross—Father forgive them for they know not what they do.
This is a theme that Dan Leger, who was badly wounded in the shootings, referred to in a story in the Jewish Chronicle. Dan, whom I have known for years, and who is a spiritual source for many at Dor Hadash and in the community generally, said that when he awoke after the shooting, the first thing he said was the Shema, the second was “I love you” to his family. The third thing was, “God forgive him,” very much like Jesus.
I am not aware that this fits exactly with the meaning of Yom Kippur, however. On the cross, Jesus is not concerned with his own sin and the point of Christian theology is that he was blameless—without sin.
Yom Kippur, on the other hand, is about one’s own sin. Obviously, there is no direct relationship to a terrible Anti-Semitic act of violence, for which the victims bear no blame.
On the other hand, Rabbi Friedman, an Orthodox rabbi in the Chasidic tradition, tells a story from the Baal Shem Tov, the founder, who told of a man who kept two ledgers—one of his sins and the other of God’s sins. He tossed both in the fire, saying, “if you forgive mine, I will forgive yours.” We could think of the shooting as an offense by God.
Then there is the communal theme. On Yom Kippur in the Torah, the sins considered are more national than personal. The sins of the Jewish people. After the Holocaust, this led Jewish thinkers like Emil Fackenheim to radically rethink the relationship of the Jewish people to God.
Here is what Fackenheim said: “we are, first, commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. We are commanded, secondly, to remember in our very guts and bones the martyrs of the Holocaust, lest their memory perish. We are forbidden, thirdly, to deny or despair of God, however much we may have to contend with him or with belief in him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden, finally, to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted. To abandon any of these imperatives, in response to Hitler's victory at Auschwitz, , would be to hand him yet other, posthumous victories.”
Fackenheim should be remembered today, but I actually cannot remember anyone talking about him. Of course, I have not been attending these remembrances, so maybe I just missed it. Fackenheim was not enough to keep me within Judaism. But I have been living with the world as a meaningless place, just as he feared.
Actually, all of Pittsburgh is reminded of these events. That is obviously true of me, but I retain many ties to Judaism, including an awareness of the liturgical calendar.
Commemorations climax today, on the holiest day of the year—Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
On this day of fasting, Jews seek forgiveness of sins, both individually and collectively.
The Christian question after such a horrific act tends to be one of forgiveness of the perpetrator. This echoes Jesus’s call from the cross—Father forgive them for they know not what they do.
This is a theme that Dan Leger, who was badly wounded in the shootings, referred to in a story in the Jewish Chronicle. Dan, whom I have known for years, and who is a spiritual source for many at Dor Hadash and in the community generally, said that when he awoke after the shooting, the first thing he said was the Shema, the second was “I love you” to his family. The third thing was, “God forgive him,” very much like Jesus.
I am not aware that this fits exactly with the meaning of Yom Kippur, however. On the cross, Jesus is not concerned with his own sin and the point of Christian theology is that he was blameless—without sin.
Yom Kippur, on the other hand, is about one’s own sin. Obviously, there is no direct relationship to a terrible Anti-Semitic act of violence, for which the victims bear no blame.
On the other hand, Rabbi Friedman, an Orthodox rabbi in the Chasidic tradition, tells a story from the Baal Shem Tov, the founder, who told of a man who kept two ledgers—one of his sins and the other of God’s sins. He tossed both in the fire, saying, “if you forgive mine, I will forgive yours.” We could think of the shooting as an offense by God.
Then there is the communal theme. On Yom Kippur in the Torah, the sins considered are more national than personal. The sins of the Jewish people. After the Holocaust, this led Jewish thinkers like Emil Fackenheim to radically rethink the relationship of the Jewish people to God.
Here is what Fackenheim said: “we are, first, commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. We are commanded, secondly, to remember in our very guts and bones the martyrs of the Holocaust, lest their memory perish. We are forbidden, thirdly, to deny or despair of God, however much we may have to contend with him or with belief in him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden, finally, to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted. To abandon any of these imperatives, in response to Hitler's victory at Auschwitz, , would be to hand him yet other, posthumous victories.”
Fackenheim should be remembered today, but I actually cannot remember anyone talking about him. Of course, I have not been attending these remembrances, so maybe I just missed it. Fackenheim was not enough to keep me within Judaism. But I have been living with the world as a meaningless place, just as he feared.
Saturday, September 28, 2019
Taking Court-Packing Off the Table
9/28/2019—It would be nice to be able to take Court-packing off the table. On Friday, I gave a talk at the Elon Law Review Symposium on Court-packing—“Saving Judicial Independence From Court-Packing’s Nihilism.” I argued that Court-packing—the addition of the number of Justices beyond the nine set in 1869—bespoke a kind of jurisprudential nihilism. Marbury v. Madison pronounced America a government of laws and not of men. But the proponents of Court-packing did not believe that. They need bodies and votes.
And the Republicans are just the same. That is why they are busy packing the courts in their own way. Mitch McConnell says he wants to have a permanent impact. But how can you know how judges will rule in the years to come—unless this is all party and partisan and not reason.
Akhil Amar of Yale Law School delivered the keynote address of the symposium. And he also condemned Court-packing. He added an additional objection to partisan Court-packing—that the other side, the Republicans in this case, would regain power and add even more Justices to the Court. It would spin out of control, he warned.
I was impressed that there was a feeling of agreement in the room. The kind of agreement that goes beyond politics.
I also criticized the AALS for having “Pillars of Democracy” as the theme for the January 2020 annual meeting, while refusing to raise the issue of Court-packing. Presidential candidates discuss it, but not law professors? Are they afraid to confront the progressive wing of the Democratic Party?
Now that I have heard a national figure like Amar weigh in, I believe the academy will not much longer be able to avoid the issue.
And the Republicans are just the same. That is why they are busy packing the courts in their own way. Mitch McConnell says he wants to have a permanent impact. But how can you know how judges will rule in the years to come—unless this is all party and partisan and not reason.
Akhil Amar of Yale Law School delivered the keynote address of the symposium. And he also condemned Court-packing. He added an additional objection to partisan Court-packing—that the other side, the Republicans in this case, would regain power and add even more Justices to the Court. It would spin out of control, he warned.
I was impressed that there was a feeling of agreement in the room. The kind of agreement that goes beyond politics.
I also criticized the AALS for having “Pillars of Democracy” as the theme for the January 2020 annual meeting, while refusing to raise the issue of Court-packing. Presidential candidates discuss it, but not law professors? Are they afraid to confront the progressive wing of the Democratic Party?
Now that I have heard a national figure like Amar weigh in, I believe the academy will not much longer be able to avoid the issue.
Sunday, September 22, 2019
Nihilism in the Heartland
9/22/2019--I don't think I have ever read a book review that depressed me so. This is what it looks like when the universe doesn't care about my purpose--nothing left but cut off individualism and conspiracy theories. This is why the Socialist Workers Party hates the identity politics of the progressive wing--it divides people. Rich Lord's review of We Are Still Here in the PG.
**************************************
Jennifer M. Silva spent Nov. 8, 2016, in a coal town in Central Pennsylvania, and when she arrived for an interview wearing an “I voted” sticker, it didn’t go over well.
“I wouldn’t be proud of it, no offense,” her interviewee told her. “Are you paying attention to what’s going on around you?”
Yes, she was, and if you are too, you’ll find many chilling moments in Ms. Silva’s second book, “We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America.” If you’re familiar with post-industrial towns and neighborhoods, you’ll recognize her interviewees, ache for them and likely quake for our future.
"WE’RE STILL HERE: PAIN AND POLITICS IN THE HEART OF AMERICA"
By Jennifer M. Silva
Oxford University Press ($24.53).
Ms. Silva, an assistant professor at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington, spent months in midstate coal towns, conducting more than 100 interviews with a diverse selection of natives and newcomers. Her goal was to explore the ways the lives of working-class Americans inform their politics. She ended up scraping for something — even something painful — on which to pin some hope.
“They have all become acutely distrustful of the institutions that could connect their individual problems up to collective action,” she writes. Many of her interviewees were “struggling to convince themselves that ‘America’ stands for something larger than individual greed,” and diving deep into cynicism and conspiracy theories that only render them less politically relevant.
Studies from decades back found that most working people had some sense of allegiance — to their union, church, profession, political party or country, Ms. Silva writes. In 2016, she found allegiance “virtually nonexistent,” replaced by a fatalistic version of rugged individualism.
Ellen, for instance, “derives a sense of self-worth from rejecting dependence on others and sacrificing to make it on her own,” while maintaining a cold distance from a heroin-using sister and frowning on the family members and public servants that preserve her.
Jacob, a welder, “projects fearlessness, emphasizing his willingness to take risks and live with the consequences” and scorns fast-food workers who aspire to earn more, noting that he has “more chances of dying at my job than they do at theirs.”
The parade goes on, with interviewees reflecting that great American value of standing on your own two feet — and getting nowhere. Asked whether they’ll vote, nearly two-thirds say no.
“Whoever they want to win is gonna win, and it’s all a matter of who has more money,” Danielle tells Ms. Silva.
“Big money runs this country,” Austin adds, explaining his decision not to vote. “If you think they’ll take less so you can have more, you’re ignorant. They keep us bickering amongst ourselves while they live above the law.”
The decision not to vote, of course, does nothing to shake the grip “they” have on our nation’s resources. And yet, even those of Ms. Silva’s interviewees who have coherent hopes for government don’t vote on that basis.
Her subjects “express a great deal of support for policies that expand opportunity in terms of education, health care, fair pay and good jobs,” she writes. But if they vote at all, they’re likely to choose the candidate who is “in your face” and “don’t give a crap” what anybody else thinks, as one interviewee puts it, “because we don’t give a crap, and that’s what this country needs.”
One thread excited most younger interviewees: conspiracy theories. “Betrayed by institutions, detached from political or religious organizations, and distrustful of government,” Ms. Silva writes, “young working-class adults briefly lit up, their faces flushed, words flowing quickly, when they proved to me that they could not be fooled by the illusion of democracy.”
Ms. Silva notes that democracy historically serves working people only to the extent that they “form associations based on a larger sense of ‘we.’”
What unites many of her characters? The presence of trauma, often due to sexual abuse, abandonment, economic dislocation, injury or addiction in their lives or their families. Ms. Silva wonders “whether affinities built around pain could serve as a bridge between individuals and the larger society, perhaps replacing or supplementing older kinds of identity politics, like class or race.”
Certainly, the #MeToo movement has shown that alliances built on trauma can move the needle. It remains to be seen whether pain can be a long-term organizing principle and can overpower interviewee Daniela’s chosen philosophy: That as long as “nobody’s messing with us, and nobody comes to my door and nobody’s threatening me, putting a gun to my face, I don’t have to worry about nothing.”
**************************************
Jennifer M. Silva spent Nov. 8, 2016, in a coal town in Central Pennsylvania, and when she arrived for an interview wearing an “I voted” sticker, it didn’t go over well.
“I wouldn’t be proud of it, no offense,” her interviewee told her. “Are you paying attention to what’s going on around you?”
Yes, she was, and if you are too, you’ll find many chilling moments in Ms. Silva’s second book, “We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America.” If you’re familiar with post-industrial towns and neighborhoods, you’ll recognize her interviewees, ache for them and likely quake for our future.
"WE’RE STILL HERE: PAIN AND POLITICS IN THE HEART OF AMERICA"
By Jennifer M. Silva
Oxford University Press ($24.53).
Ms. Silva, an assistant professor at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington, spent months in midstate coal towns, conducting more than 100 interviews with a diverse selection of natives and newcomers. Her goal was to explore the ways the lives of working-class Americans inform their politics. She ended up scraping for something — even something painful — on which to pin some hope.
“They have all become acutely distrustful of the institutions that could connect their individual problems up to collective action,” she writes. Many of her interviewees were “struggling to convince themselves that ‘America’ stands for something larger than individual greed,” and diving deep into cynicism and conspiracy theories that only render them less politically relevant.
Studies from decades back found that most working people had some sense of allegiance — to their union, church, profession, political party or country, Ms. Silva writes. In 2016, she found allegiance “virtually nonexistent,” replaced by a fatalistic version of rugged individualism.
Ellen, for instance, “derives a sense of self-worth from rejecting dependence on others and sacrificing to make it on her own,” while maintaining a cold distance from a heroin-using sister and frowning on the family members and public servants that preserve her.
Jacob, a welder, “projects fearlessness, emphasizing his willingness to take risks and live with the consequences” and scorns fast-food workers who aspire to earn more, noting that he has “more chances of dying at my job than they do at theirs.”
The parade goes on, with interviewees reflecting that great American value of standing on your own two feet — and getting nowhere. Asked whether they’ll vote, nearly two-thirds say no.
“Whoever they want to win is gonna win, and it’s all a matter of who has more money,” Danielle tells Ms. Silva.
“Big money runs this country,” Austin adds, explaining his decision not to vote. “If you think they’ll take less so you can have more, you’re ignorant. They keep us bickering amongst ourselves while they live above the law.”
The decision not to vote, of course, does nothing to shake the grip “they” have on our nation’s resources. And yet, even those of Ms. Silva’s interviewees who have coherent hopes for government don’t vote on that basis.
Her subjects “express a great deal of support for policies that expand opportunity in terms of education, health care, fair pay and good jobs,” she writes. But if they vote at all, they’re likely to choose the candidate who is “in your face” and “don’t give a crap” what anybody else thinks, as one interviewee puts it, “because we don’t give a crap, and that’s what this country needs.”
One thread excited most younger interviewees: conspiracy theories. “Betrayed by institutions, detached from political or religious organizations, and distrustful of government,” Ms. Silva writes, “young working-class adults briefly lit up, their faces flushed, words flowing quickly, when they proved to me that they could not be fooled by the illusion of democracy.”
Ms. Silva notes that democracy historically serves working people only to the extent that they “form associations based on a larger sense of ‘we.’”
What unites many of her characters? The presence of trauma, often due to sexual abuse, abandonment, economic dislocation, injury or addiction in their lives or their families. Ms. Silva wonders “whether affinities built around pain could serve as a bridge between individuals and the larger society, perhaps replacing or supplementing older kinds of identity politics, like class or race.”
Certainly, the #MeToo movement has shown that alliances built on trauma can move the needle. It remains to be seen whether pain can be a long-term organizing principle and can overpower interviewee Daniela’s chosen philosophy: That as long as “nobody’s messing with us, and nobody comes to my door and nobody’s threatening me, putting a gun to my face, I don’t have to worry about nothing.”
Bends Toward Justice Podcast--Where You Can Hear It Now
9/22/2019--here is the announcement made at Duquesne this week by Jennifer Rignani, our communications director.
All,
It is with great enthusiasm that I share with you the pilot podcast series “Bends Towards Justice”, an original podcast created and hosted by Duquesne University School of Law Professor Bruce Ledewitz and executive produced by the school of law communications office. We’d told you all previously that this was in production and we just wrapped it!
This thought-provoking show is produced in partnership with The August Wilson African American Cultural Center and funded by The Pittsburgh Foundation. The podcast asks a simple, but fundamental question—do we agree with Dr. King that arc of the moral universe bends toward justice? The guests in this series provide a variety of perspectives on that question. The goal of the podcast is for the listener to understand what is at stake in this question and to come to a decision.
We are working on a rollout of the series on social media and encourage you to please share on your feeds and please provide Bruce and I feedback or thoughts on the show.
Here it is: Soundcloud
Thanks all!
Warm regards,
Jennifer Rignani
Communications Director
Duquesne University School of Law
600 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15282
www.law.duq.edu
O 412.396.2462 C 412.977.5795
All,
It is with great enthusiasm that I share with you the pilot podcast series “Bends Towards Justice”, an original podcast created and hosted by Duquesne University School of Law Professor Bruce Ledewitz and executive produced by the school of law communications office. We’d told you all previously that this was in production and we just wrapped it!
This thought-provoking show is produced in partnership with The August Wilson African American Cultural Center and funded by The Pittsburgh Foundation. The podcast asks a simple, but fundamental question—do we agree with Dr. King that arc of the moral universe bends toward justice? The guests in this series provide a variety of perspectives on that question. The goal of the podcast is for the listener to understand what is at stake in this question and to come to a decision.
We are working on a rollout of the series on social media and encourage you to please share on your feeds and please provide Bruce and I feedback or thoughts on the show.
Here it is: Soundcloud
Thanks all!
Warm regards,
Jennifer Rignani
Communications Director
Duquesne University School of Law
600 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15282
www.law.duq.edu
O 412.396.2462 C 412.977.5795
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
Change Point in the Culture
8/20/2019—I have been writing about nihilism so long that I assume everyone knows that this is the fundamental problem facing our culture. But, of course, most people have no idea what nihilism is and why and how it might be a threat—-let alone how to combat it.
So, the juxtaposition of two op-eds on Monday—one from the right and one from the left—Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel, on the one hand, and Michelle Goldberg, on the other, may mark a cultural shift. We can call them twin diagnoses of nihilism.
Carlson and Patel are telling the story of a culture in which “nothing matters”—quoting James Kunstler. Such a culture breeds the despair of the mass killer or the suicide addict.
Goldberg is telling the story of a post-truth culture that lacks faith in a rational future, referring to the thought of Peter Pomerantsev. The need for facts is predicated on an evidence based future.
Each column exhibits the usual partisan myopia. Carlson and Patel ignore the role of capitalism, because that doesn’t fit their preconceived notions of the problem—the problem with “the jobs they hold” is not that they are controlled by “tech monopolists” but by their boses. Goldberg thinks the lack of faith in history came from philosophy and ignores the collapse of religion.
But they both see the same thing. There are no objective values—there is no source of meaning.
Ah, but what do we do about it? The problem has nothing to do with Washington, as such. And there is no way to “get history moving again” without talking about why it stopped moving in the first place.
So, the juxtaposition of two op-eds on Monday—one from the right and one from the left—Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel, on the one hand, and Michelle Goldberg, on the other, may mark a cultural shift. We can call them twin diagnoses of nihilism.
Carlson and Patel are telling the story of a culture in which “nothing matters”—quoting James Kunstler. Such a culture breeds the despair of the mass killer or the suicide addict.
Goldberg is telling the story of a post-truth culture that lacks faith in a rational future, referring to the thought of Peter Pomerantsev. The need for facts is predicated on an evidence based future.
Each column exhibits the usual partisan myopia. Carlson and Patel ignore the role of capitalism, because that doesn’t fit their preconceived notions of the problem—the problem with “the jobs they hold” is not that they are controlled by “tech monopolists” but by their boses. Goldberg thinks the lack of faith in history came from philosophy and ignores the collapse of religion.
But they both see the same thing. There are no objective values—there is no source of meaning.
Ah, but what do we do about it? The problem has nothing to do with Washington, as such. And there is no way to “get history moving again” without talking about why it stopped moving in the first place.
Thursday, August 8, 2019
America Needs a Substitute for God
8/8/2019—The genre that is needed today is an answer to the question, What Has Gone Wrong and What Can We Do About It? This was the subtitle of the book, Democracy in America, by Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens. But it is the question lots of people have been asking since Donald Trump was elected President.
But it’s obvious that whatever went wrong predated Trump and in fact paved the way for such a person to be nominated in the first place. Furthermore, if we can imagine a world without Donald Trump, it is not clear that the hatred in American politics will be healed by voting him out of office.
So, if what went wrong was not Trump and if what we can do is not just get rid of him, what did go wrong and what can we do?
What went wrong is that God died. People, especially on the American Left, have a very hard time accepting that diagnosis. But if we think of the pathologies of American life, from baseless hatred, to the death of truth, to the deaths of despair in the opioid epidemic, to distrust of science—and on and on and on, we can see that they are mostly what you could call spiritual matters. If nihilism is the lack of a story that answers the question, what is this all about?, we have fallen into nihilism.
Anyway, grant me that for the moment. Grant me that there is no longer a culturally shared, beneficent and reliable universe that works for our good. When there was, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., could remind us that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, we could hope to one day to join with our opponents to jointly serve truth. As he did.
If this is the problem, what is the solution? You can’t go home again. The God who could deliver all that is gone for many people—too many for that story to serve as the foundation for our civilization. And many of the people for whom He is gone still go to church. That is why so many churchgoers are angry at the world, rather than grateful for Christ.
But just because God is dead, it does not follow that the beneficent universe of right and wrong died with Him. All we need are new sources for meaningful human life. Meaningful here means “meaning filled.” It used to be said, if you want peace, work for justice. Now we can say, if you want healthy politics, work to ground meaning. Those sources are available. More on that.
But it’s obvious that whatever went wrong predated Trump and in fact paved the way for such a person to be nominated in the first place. Furthermore, if we can imagine a world without Donald Trump, it is not clear that the hatred in American politics will be healed by voting him out of office.
So, if what went wrong was not Trump and if what we can do is not just get rid of him, what did go wrong and what can we do?
What went wrong is that God died. People, especially on the American Left, have a very hard time accepting that diagnosis. But if we think of the pathologies of American life, from baseless hatred, to the death of truth, to the deaths of despair in the opioid epidemic, to distrust of science—and on and on and on, we can see that they are mostly what you could call spiritual matters. If nihilism is the lack of a story that answers the question, what is this all about?, we have fallen into nihilism.
Anyway, grant me that for the moment. Grant me that there is no longer a culturally shared, beneficent and reliable universe that works for our good. When there was, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., could remind us that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, we could hope to one day to join with our opponents to jointly serve truth. As he did.
If this is the problem, what is the solution? You can’t go home again. The God who could deliver all that is gone for many people—too many for that story to serve as the foundation for our civilization. And many of the people for whom He is gone still go to church. That is why so many churchgoers are angry at the world, rather than grateful for Christ.
But just because God is dead, it does not follow that the beneficent universe of right and wrong died with Him. All we need are new sources for meaningful human life. Meaningful here means “meaning filled.” It used to be said, if you want peace, work for justice. Now we can say, if you want healthy politics, work to ground meaning. Those sources are available. More on that.
Saturday, June 29, 2019
All Our Problems are Related
26/29/2019—When you’re a hammer, everything is a nail. I’m that way about nihilism, which I blame for all our problems.
Nihilism is closely related to Hallowed Secularism, because nihilism is what happens to a believing culture when God dies and you don’t develop hallowed secularism.
So, today in the New York Times, Roger Cohen laments the decline of the liberal idea—basically, the American post-war consensus of democracy, market capitalism and the rule of law.
But Cohen does not understand what happened. It was not erosion, though there was some of that. Americans no longer believe in the universe. The liberal idea was founded on faith. Not just in God, but in the path of history, the reasonableness of people and a benevolent universe.
When, instead, history is contingency, people are flawed in their thinking, and the universe is just forces, all that is left is the will to power. Then power is serving only oneself. That is our decline. It would be stupid to be magnanimous in a reality like that.
Same issue with Bret Stephens’ column—nothing for him in the Democratic debates. Why? They are all narrow identity politics. But that is what happens when universal ideals decline. You are left with identity and tribe. Try truth and justice instead. That’s what we used to have. Dr. King even believed that the racist would be redeemed. Try telling that to Senator Harris.
Nihilism is closely related to Hallowed Secularism, because nihilism is what happens to a believing culture when God dies and you don’t develop hallowed secularism.
So, today in the New York Times, Roger Cohen laments the decline of the liberal idea—basically, the American post-war consensus of democracy, market capitalism and the rule of law.
But Cohen does not understand what happened. It was not erosion, though there was some of that. Americans no longer believe in the universe. The liberal idea was founded on faith. Not just in God, but in the path of history, the reasonableness of people and a benevolent universe.
When, instead, history is contingency, people are flawed in their thinking, and the universe is just forces, all that is left is the will to power. Then power is serving only oneself. That is our decline. It would be stupid to be magnanimous in a reality like that.
Same issue with Bret Stephens’ column—nothing for him in the Democratic debates. Why? They are all narrow identity politics. But that is what happens when universal ideals decline. You are left with identity and tribe. Try truth and justice instead. That’s what we used to have. Dr. King even believed that the racist would be redeemed. Try telling that to Senator Harris.
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Sohrab Ahmari Doesn’t Believe in God
6/27/2019—A lot has been written about an essay in First Things last May by Sohrab Ahmari. In the essay, Ahmari argues that the civility exhibited by National Review writer David French is inappropriate given the stakes in the culture war. Ahmari also says that cultural renewal is not enough to win back the culture war—"it doesn’t work that way.”
The reason I say that Ahmari does not believe in God, aside from one revealing aside when he accuses French of “an almost supernatural faith” in culture—as if supernatural faith were a bad thing—is that he does not take seriously the idea that God is the Lord of history.
In the context of losing the culture war—drag queen readings in the public library is the one that sets Ahmari off—there are two options for someone who believes that God is in charge. The first option is the route of Gamaliel in Acts—if this is from God, we must understand it and not oppose it. If it is not from God, it will pass away. Since abortion remains a moral concern for Americans while same sex marriage does not, maybe God has done a new thing. Maybe same sex marriage is God’s will. Many Jew hated what the new Jesus movement stood for (also a Jewish movement, of course)—they thought it violated traditional morality.
The second option is to assume that the people I am contending with are sinning and will be punished along with our whole society. This is Jesus addressing the women of Jerusalem—don’t weep for me, but for yourselves and your children. The days are coming when people will say it is better not to have been born. If Ahmari believed this, he would say to French, your mistake is that you do not love your enemies. If you did, you would do everything to save them from God’s wrath. You would not be held back by the secondary virtue of civility.
What Ahmari believes is that God is powerless and irrelevant. It is all up to Ahmari. He is Lord of history. So, he decides what must be done.
We are all atheists now. We are all nihilists now. This is the time of the will to power.
The reason I say that Ahmari does not believe in God, aside from one revealing aside when he accuses French of “an almost supernatural faith” in culture—as if supernatural faith were a bad thing—is that he does not take seriously the idea that God is the Lord of history.
In the context of losing the culture war—drag queen readings in the public library is the one that sets Ahmari off—there are two options for someone who believes that God is in charge. The first option is the route of Gamaliel in Acts—if this is from God, we must understand it and not oppose it. If it is not from God, it will pass away. Since abortion remains a moral concern for Americans while same sex marriage does not, maybe God has done a new thing. Maybe same sex marriage is God’s will. Many Jew hated what the new Jesus movement stood for (also a Jewish movement, of course)—they thought it violated traditional morality.
The second option is to assume that the people I am contending with are sinning and will be punished along with our whole society. This is Jesus addressing the women of Jerusalem—don’t weep for me, but for yourselves and your children. The days are coming when people will say it is better not to have been born. If Ahmari believed this, he would say to French, your mistake is that you do not love your enemies. If you did, you would do everything to save them from God’s wrath. You would not be held back by the secondary virtue of civility.
What Ahmari believes is that God is powerless and irrelevant. It is all up to Ahmari. He is Lord of history. So, he decides what must be done.
We are all atheists now. We are all nihilists now. This is the time of the will to power.
Saturday, June 22, 2019
What the Supreme Court Should Have Said, But Didn't, in the Maryland Cross Case
6/22/2019--This is the op-ed I wrote last March for the Washington Examiner in the Cross Case decided this week. The cross stayed, as predicted. There was no majority opinion on how to approach religious imagery in the public square. (This is a repeat of the March 21 blog entry since this is the time people are interested in the case.)
*****************************************************************************************************
The World War I memorial cross in Bladensburg, Md., isn’t going anywhere. That was clear from the oral argument in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association. The Supreme Court may even be unanimous that the cross can stay on public land.
That is not surprising. The cross is an almost hundred years old WWI memorial without further religious reference. Crosses have symbolized the dead of the Great War since John McCrae’s epic 1915 poem, "Flanders Fields."
What matters is how the cross stays — do the justices add to American divisions, or do they begin the process of healing?
Thanks to President Trump, there is now a pro-religion majority on the court. That majority could abolish the requirement of a secular purpose in Establishment Clause cases — the Lemon test — and substitute a no-coercion test. This would be seen as a big win for one side in the culture wars.
The treatment of religion as an either-or proposition goes back a long way. The legal theorist Ronald Dworkin once asked whether America would be a religious country tolerating non-belief or a secular country accommodating believers. This is like asking who’s the real American.
These cases pit believers against nonbelievers because the Court has never asked seriously what secular meaning a religious symbol can have. Religious symbols don’t just endorse sectarian commitments, after all. They can just as clearly stand for a whole set of other commitments.
The national motto, "In God We Trust," for example, certainly refers to the God of the Bible for the monotheistic believer. But it also means that we live in a trustworthy universe and not in chaos. That is the reason why John Dewey, not himself a religious believer, never gave up using the word "God."
Those Ten Commandments displays that so often end up in court remind the religious believer that God is the foundation of human law. But they also proclaim that law must serve a higher truth. These monuments reinforce Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s teaching that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. These displays are as much a rebuke to value-free originalism as they are to materialism.
To uphold religious imagery for its common, secular meaning is not to bring back the much-derided “ceremonial deism,” which claims that religious symbols no longer have religious meaning. Nor is it equivalent to the sanitized claim that religious imagery symbolizes a “religious heritage,” as if religion is now just a curiosity for museums.
It is rather that the real division in this country is not between religion and irreligion but between those who see meaning and purpose at the heart of the universe and those who do not. Religious symbols communicate very well on this level to believers and nonbelievers alike.
America is well on its way to becoming a secular society. The question is, what kind of secular society are we going to be? The opioid crisis, the spike in suicides, the general hopelessness and anger in American society, point toward a secularist nihilism. We will just have to get used to the idea that we are alone in an indifferent universe.
But there is another possibility. We can be secularists who still embrace transcendent norms.
Government should not be neutral with regard to the question of meaning. It should endorse cosmic purpose. It should proclaim hope. Religious symbols are not the only way to do that, but they do represent one way.
Any judicial decision in favor of religion versus non-religion will only be temporary. It will ensure that some future secular majority will insist on a naked public square. But a decision that fills that public square with common meaning for all of us can endure.
The justices have a choice. They can participate in, and further, our divisions or they can help us find common ground and healing. It depends on how they rule in favor of the cross.
*****************************************************************************************************
The World War I memorial cross in Bladensburg, Md., isn’t going anywhere. That was clear from the oral argument in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association. The Supreme Court may even be unanimous that the cross can stay on public land.
That is not surprising. The cross is an almost hundred years old WWI memorial without further religious reference. Crosses have symbolized the dead of the Great War since John McCrae’s epic 1915 poem, "Flanders Fields."
What matters is how the cross stays — do the justices add to American divisions, or do they begin the process of healing?
Thanks to President Trump, there is now a pro-religion majority on the court. That majority could abolish the requirement of a secular purpose in Establishment Clause cases — the Lemon test — and substitute a no-coercion test. This would be seen as a big win for one side in the culture wars.
The treatment of religion as an either-or proposition goes back a long way. The legal theorist Ronald Dworkin once asked whether America would be a religious country tolerating non-belief or a secular country accommodating believers. This is like asking who’s the real American.
These cases pit believers against nonbelievers because the Court has never asked seriously what secular meaning a religious symbol can have. Religious symbols don’t just endorse sectarian commitments, after all. They can just as clearly stand for a whole set of other commitments.
The national motto, "In God We Trust," for example, certainly refers to the God of the Bible for the monotheistic believer. But it also means that we live in a trustworthy universe and not in chaos. That is the reason why John Dewey, not himself a religious believer, never gave up using the word "God."
Those Ten Commandments displays that so often end up in court remind the religious believer that God is the foundation of human law. But they also proclaim that law must serve a higher truth. These monuments reinforce Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s teaching that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. These displays are as much a rebuke to value-free originalism as they are to materialism.
To uphold religious imagery for its common, secular meaning is not to bring back the much-derided “ceremonial deism,” which claims that religious symbols no longer have religious meaning. Nor is it equivalent to the sanitized claim that religious imagery symbolizes a “religious heritage,” as if religion is now just a curiosity for museums.
It is rather that the real division in this country is not between religion and irreligion but between those who see meaning and purpose at the heart of the universe and those who do not. Religious symbols communicate very well on this level to believers and nonbelievers alike.
America is well on its way to becoming a secular society. The question is, what kind of secular society are we going to be? The opioid crisis, the spike in suicides, the general hopelessness and anger in American society, point toward a secularist nihilism. We will just have to get used to the idea that we are alone in an indifferent universe.
But there is another possibility. We can be secularists who still embrace transcendent norms.
Government should not be neutral with regard to the question of meaning. It should endorse cosmic purpose. It should proclaim hope. Religious symbols are not the only way to do that, but they do represent one way.
Any judicial decision in favor of religion versus non-religion will only be temporary. It will ensure that some future secular majority will insist on a naked public square. But a decision that fills that public square with common meaning for all of us can endure.
The justices have a choice. They can participate in, and further, our divisions or they can help us find common ground and healing. It depends on how they rule in favor of the cross.
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
Babbling Barr
6/5/2019--It needs more than I can write at the moment, but the extraordinary words of Attorney General William Barr must at least be noted.
Here is more or less the whole quote:
In an interview aired Friday on "CBS This Morning," Attorney General William Barr explains why he opened an investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation. He doesn't say what the evidence is, but Barr tells CBS News legal correspondent Jan Crawford that there is evidence that makes him believe senior government officials may have acted improperly to authorize surveillance of President Trump's 2016 campaign. He says that led to "spying" on the campaign.
He said the hyper-politicized nature of politics today is a danger to longstanding institutions and he took the job of attorney general because he is at the end of his career.
"Nowadays, people don't care about the merits or the substance. They only care about who it helps, whether my side benefits or the other side benefits. Everything is gauged by politics, and I say that is antithetical to the way the Department [of Justice] runs, and any attorney general in this period is going to end up losing a lot of political capital," Barr said. "And that's one of the reasons I decided I should take [the job] on. At my stage in my life, it wouldn't make any difference."
"I'm at the end of my career," he said. "Everyone dies. I don't believe in the Homeric idea that immortality comes by having odes sung about you over the centuries."
"In many ways, I'd rather be back at my old life, but I love the Department of Justice, I love the FBI, I think it is important that in this period of intense partisan feelings we do not destroy our institutions."
******************************
What does he believe immortality consists in? Clearly, he believes he is doing the right thing and that his critics are wrong. He does not expect reasoned discourse. So to do the right thing means to be criticized.
But this situation is not new. It is the sort of situation John F. Kennedy described in Profiles in Courage.
Except of course that Barr is not giving up anything. He is not being fired. He is remaining Attorney General. He is defending powerful people and making no sacrifice at all. He is just whining.
Barr doesn't have the faith to say, "I am doing the right thing and history will recognize the truth of that. So my conscience is clear." Instead, he invokes extraordinary nihilism--we all die and that is that and so what difference does it make what people think of me? What a juvenile thing from an AG.
Here is more or less the whole quote:
In an interview aired Friday on "CBS This Morning," Attorney General William Barr explains why he opened an investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation. He doesn't say what the evidence is, but Barr tells CBS News legal correspondent Jan Crawford that there is evidence that makes him believe senior government officials may have acted improperly to authorize surveillance of President Trump's 2016 campaign. He says that led to "spying" on the campaign.
He said the hyper-politicized nature of politics today is a danger to longstanding institutions and he took the job of attorney general because he is at the end of his career.
"Nowadays, people don't care about the merits or the substance. They only care about who it helps, whether my side benefits or the other side benefits. Everything is gauged by politics, and I say that is antithetical to the way the Department [of Justice] runs, and any attorney general in this period is going to end up losing a lot of political capital," Barr said. "And that's one of the reasons I decided I should take [the job] on. At my stage in my life, it wouldn't make any difference."
"I'm at the end of my career," he said. "Everyone dies. I don't believe in the Homeric idea that immortality comes by having odes sung about you over the centuries."
"In many ways, I'd rather be back at my old life, but I love the Department of Justice, I love the FBI, I think it is important that in this period of intense partisan feelings we do not destroy our institutions."
******************************
What does he believe immortality consists in? Clearly, he believes he is doing the right thing and that his critics are wrong. He does not expect reasoned discourse. So to do the right thing means to be criticized.
But this situation is not new. It is the sort of situation John F. Kennedy described in Profiles in Courage.
Except of course that Barr is not giving up anything. He is not being fired. He is remaining Attorney General. He is defending powerful people and making no sacrifice at all. He is just whining.
Barr doesn't have the faith to say, "I am doing the right thing and history will recognize the truth of that. So my conscience is clear." Instead, he invokes extraordinary nihilism--we all die and that is that and so what difference does it make what people think of me? What a juvenile thing from an AG.
Sunday, May 19, 2019
The Universe Doesn’t Care About Your Purpose
5/19/2019—Tomorrow, I will be interviewing Joseph Carter for the Bends Toward Justice Podcast Series. He wrote the piece in the New York Times in 2017 entitled The Universe Doesn’t Care About Your Purpose.
Carter is not one of the hard-edged atheists types who disdains the human need for purpose. But he does describe the sense of significance that we have as an illusion.
Aside from the truth of his view of things, or even what truth here means, there is the question of the effect of such a belief on our culture. Is this view responsible for the way we are with each other right now? Does it lead to anger and despair?
Let me point to Camus, who came to believe that the answer to that question is yes. Here is a quote from Camus’ Notebooks, which I found in an 2013 essay by Claire Messud in the New York Review of Books. Camus is at a gathering with Koestler, Sartre, Malraux and Manes Sperber, when he said the following:
“Don’t you believe we are all responsible for the absence of values? And that if all of us who come from Nietzscheism, from nihilism, or from historical realism said in public that we were wrong and that there are moral values and that in the future we shall do the necessary to establish and illustrate them, don’t you believe that would be the beginning of a hope?”
Actually, I’m not sure it would matter what certain people say. That might be Camus’ view of the power of the intellectual elite in France. But if people again became convinced… .
Carter is not one of the hard-edged atheists types who disdains the human need for purpose. But he does describe the sense of significance that we have as an illusion.
Aside from the truth of his view of things, or even what truth here means, there is the question of the effect of such a belief on our culture. Is this view responsible for the way we are with each other right now? Does it lead to anger and despair?
Let me point to Camus, who came to believe that the answer to that question is yes. Here is a quote from Camus’ Notebooks, which I found in an 2013 essay by Claire Messud in the New York Review of Books. Camus is at a gathering with Koestler, Sartre, Malraux and Manes Sperber, when he said the following:
“Don’t you believe we are all responsible for the absence of values? And that if all of us who come from Nietzscheism, from nihilism, or from historical realism said in public that we were wrong and that there are moral values and that in the future we shall do the necessary to establish and illustrate them, don’t you believe that would be the beginning of a hope?”
Actually, I’m not sure it would matter what certain people say. That might be Camus’ view of the power of the intellectual elite in France. But if people again became convinced… .
Friday, May 10, 2019
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.
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.
Sunday, April 14, 2019
Two Cases of Independence--the Court and the Fed--and What They Tell Us About American Nihilism
4/14/2019--I will be speaking at Elon Law School in September--see events on the side. The occasion is a law review symposium on judicial independence at Elon on the anniversary of the Judiciary Act of 1869 that set the number of Justices on the Supreme Court at nine.
It is a well-timed event, since calls for Court-packing are only getting louder every day. As readers know, I am appalled by such calls. But they contrast strangely with what is going on with the Federal Reserve.
Donald Trump is packing the Fed with hacks--or trying to. But no one says, well, there are Trump Board Members and Obama Board members. There are, but people are willing to defend the idea of independent Fed decision-making.
Not so with the Supreme Court. Here, in principle there are only influences. There is nothing objective or scientific about the underlying matter--no need for actual expertise. For the Court, it's just, which side has a majority.
There is a lot one could say about this. Money is the most important thing. Capitalism is our main occupation. All of the nominees for the Court are competent, whereas, some of these Fed nominees or potential nominees are unqualified altogether.
But in terms of nihilism, the conclusion is that economic performance is not a value whereas justice is. And values are subjective.
Even people who would prefer a different tradeoff of unemployment and growth versus inflation don't want a President to have any say. They don't want to change the number of Board members to get their way. The reason is that they figure that any qualified member will have the same basic goals.
So, why is this not the case for the Court? Dr. King said the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Brown was a unanimous opinion. The Court ended holding American citizens as enemy combatants without charge 8-1. Aren't there principles of justice as obvious and powerful as any theories of economics?
It is a well-timed event, since calls for Court-packing are only getting louder every day. As readers know, I am appalled by such calls. But they contrast strangely with what is going on with the Federal Reserve.
Donald Trump is packing the Fed with hacks--or trying to. But no one says, well, there are Trump Board Members and Obama Board members. There are, but people are willing to defend the idea of independent Fed decision-making.
Not so with the Supreme Court. Here, in principle there are only influences. There is nothing objective or scientific about the underlying matter--no need for actual expertise. For the Court, it's just, which side has a majority.
There is a lot one could say about this. Money is the most important thing. Capitalism is our main occupation. All of the nominees for the Court are competent, whereas, some of these Fed nominees or potential nominees are unqualified altogether.
But in terms of nihilism, the conclusion is that economic performance is not a value whereas justice is. And values are subjective.
Even people who would prefer a different tradeoff of unemployment and growth versus inflation don't want a President to have any say. They don't want to change the number of Board members to get their way. The reason is that they figure that any qualified member will have the same basic goals.
So, why is this not the case for the Court? Dr. King said the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Brown was a unanimous opinion. The Court ended holding American citizens as enemy combatants without charge 8-1. Aren't there principles of justice as obvious and powerful as any theories of economics?
Sunday, March 17, 2019
The Response to My anti-Court-Packing Message
3/17/2019—Just back from the well-organized and insightful symposium on voting rights at the Memphis Law School—maybe the most impressive law school building in the nation (the old customs house in downtown Memphis). Thanks to the marvelous law review staff.
I was the final speaker, late in the day. But energy did not flag when people realized what I was talking about. The responses depended on the orientation of the questioner.
Certainly, the major response was surprise. People had no idea that Court-packing was so likely to be attempted. It helped that Beto O’Rourke endorsed something like it when he announced.
The response by moderates was agreement—I did not hear from anyone really on the Right. I suppose they would have been even more grim. And the agreement was not just about Court-packing, but my more basic point about the destruction of democratic life itself.
There was also the fatalist response—this too shall pass. People are always doing terrible things and we don’t self-destruct—an absolutely true observation, until we do destruct.
Finally, there is the response from the Left—you are telling us to disarm while the Republicans win. This will be the response most difficulty to overcome. Steven Mulroy, a speaker and professor at Memphis, made a creative suggestion that the Democrats use Court-packing as a threat to force bipartisan agreement on an amendment to create term limits for Justices. Certainly that would be better than Court-packing and it would limit the control of the Court that Republican believe they will have for the next 25 or 30 years.
Hard to arrange though, unless you have already overcome the mutual anger of the moment.
I was the final speaker, late in the day. But energy did not flag when people realized what I was talking about. The responses depended on the orientation of the questioner.
Certainly, the major response was surprise. People had no idea that Court-packing was so likely to be attempted. It helped that Beto O’Rourke endorsed something like it when he announced.
The response by moderates was agreement—I did not hear from anyone really on the Right. I suppose they would have been even more grim. And the agreement was not just about Court-packing, but my more basic point about the destruction of democratic life itself.
There was also the fatalist response—this too shall pass. People are always doing terrible things and we don’t self-destruct—an absolutely true observation, until we do destruct.
Finally, there is the response from the Left—you are telling us to disarm while the Republicans win. This will be the response most difficulty to overcome. Steven Mulroy, a speaker and professor at Memphis, made a creative suggestion that the Democrats use Court-packing as a threat to force bipartisan agreement on an amendment to create term limits for Justices. Certainly that would be better than Court-packing and it would limit the control of the Court that Republican believe they will have for the next 25 or 30 years.
Hard to arrange though, unless you have already overcome the mutual anger of the moment.
Thursday, October 18, 2018
Rhodri Lewis Responds
10/18/2018--Rhodri Lewis, Professor of English at Princeton and author of Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, responded to my blog post here last Friday. Since I did not obtain his permission, I will only set forth a paragraph from the book that he sent me in arguing that the book does not associate Shakespeare with an entirely nihilistic view. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet as an exercise in truth-telling, an actual way out of the collapse of classical humanism.
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It might be objected that I am describing Hamlet as a work of nihilism, in which nothing signifies “but as ’tis valued”. Not so. Rather, this book has endeavoured to demonstrate the extraordinary pains that Shakespeare took to represent the cultural world of humanism as fundamentally indifferent to things as they really are, and as one in which the pursuit of truth is therefore all but an impossibility. All but: taken in new directions that Hamlet lays out for it, dramatic poetry might be able to offer a likeness of this cultural world in all of its self-deceit, illusion, and pretence. Humanist models of history, of poetry, and of philosophy cannot “show ... the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (3.2.24-25), and are in large measure a part of the problem. By insisting on their own sufficiency, they impede the proper comprehension of the human lot. But precisely because Hamlet is a post-humanist work of tragedy (one might call it anti-humanist but for the fact that the fabric from which it is assembled is so consistently that of sixteenth-century convention), it is not bound by the sort of strictures that Shakespeare brings to bear on superficially imitative neo-classicism. In place of preordained moral reflections that show the world as the playwright and his authorities think it should be, Hamlet – as most clearly articulated in chapter 5 above – provides its readerly and theatrical audiences with the prompt to examine themselves, their presuppositions, and their beliefs about the status of humankind within the moral and physical universes. The audacity of Hamlet is to demonstrate by example, rather than theoretical disquisition, that in the humanistic world of which Shakespeare and his work were a part, dramatic poetry – not history, not philosophy, and certainly not theology – is the medium best fitted to telling the truth. Best fitted to revealing that in its attachment to various forms of theatrum mundi, humankind not only propagates its own ignorance and self-alienation, but ensures that it will remain unable to devise a better way in which to live. Kings, their challengers, and their impetuous heirs will come and go, but the nature of the masquerade will continue unchanged. Only by dramatizing this most self-reflexive of truths alongside the evasions and authority with which it ordinarily eludes scrutiny can fulfilment or progress become a possibility. What that progress might look like, Shakespeare does not say; nor will he do so in Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. Instead, and to borrow a phrase from Lafew in All’s Well, his tragedies enjoin their audiences to “submit” themselves to “an unknown fear” – one that the canons of neither ancient nor modern wisdom can help them to allay.
****************************************************************
It might be objected that I am describing Hamlet as a work of nihilism, in which nothing signifies “but as ’tis valued”. Not so. Rather, this book has endeavoured to demonstrate the extraordinary pains that Shakespeare took to represent the cultural world of humanism as fundamentally indifferent to things as they really are, and as one in which the pursuit of truth is therefore all but an impossibility. All but: taken in new directions that Hamlet lays out for it, dramatic poetry might be able to offer a likeness of this cultural world in all of its self-deceit, illusion, and pretence. Humanist models of history, of poetry, and of philosophy cannot “show ... the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (3.2.24-25), and are in large measure a part of the problem. By insisting on their own sufficiency, they impede the proper comprehension of the human lot. But precisely because Hamlet is a post-humanist work of tragedy (one might call it anti-humanist but for the fact that the fabric from which it is assembled is so consistently that of sixteenth-century convention), it is not bound by the sort of strictures that Shakespeare brings to bear on superficially imitative neo-classicism. In place of preordained moral reflections that show the world as the playwright and his authorities think it should be, Hamlet – as most clearly articulated in chapter 5 above – provides its readerly and theatrical audiences with the prompt to examine themselves, their presuppositions, and their beliefs about the status of humankind within the moral and physical universes. The audacity of Hamlet is to demonstrate by example, rather than theoretical disquisition, that in the humanistic world of which Shakespeare and his work were a part, dramatic poetry – not history, not philosophy, and certainly not theology – is the medium best fitted to telling the truth. Best fitted to revealing that in its attachment to various forms of theatrum mundi, humankind not only propagates its own ignorance and self-alienation, but ensures that it will remain unable to devise a better way in which to live. Kings, their challengers, and their impetuous heirs will come and go, but the nature of the masquerade will continue unchanged. Only by dramatizing this most self-reflexive of truths alongside the evasions and authority with which it ordinarily eludes scrutiny can fulfilment or progress become a possibility. What that progress might look like, Shakespeare does not say; nor will he do so in Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. Instead, and to borrow a phrase from Lafew in All’s Well, his tragedies enjoin their audiences to “submit” themselves to “an unknown fear” – one that the canons of neither ancient nor modern wisdom can help them to allay.
Friday, October 12, 2018
So, Shakespeare Is Now a Nihilist
10/12/2018—By nihilism, I mean the belief in the culture that claims of value are just matters of opinion, and are often just manipulations masking the will to power. I have been arguing for years that nihilism has infected the culture and that the effects are dire, especially in the political realm, leading to hyper-partisanship and the death of truth. Still, it is always a shock to see nihilism in an unvarnished state, certain of itself and unwilling to acknowledge its own uncertainty.
I received one of those shocks when reading a review by James Shapiro of Rhodri Lewis’s book on Hamlet, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness in the April 19, 2018 issue of the New York Review. For Lewis, Hamlet is not the model of nascent subjectivity, inwardness, that he is often seen to be: “’He is instead the finely drawn embodiment of a moral order that is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.’” (Lewis’s words, quoted by Shapiro)
And the reason readers have largely missed this? Because we have been unwilling to acknowledge that Shakespeare himself rejected humanism:
Shakespeare repudiates two fundamental tenets of humanist culture. First, the core belief that history is a repository of wisdom from which human societies can and should learn…. Second, the conviction that the true value of human life could best be understood by a return ad fontes—to the origins of things, be they historical, textual, moral, poetic, philosophical, or religious (Protestant and Roman Catholic alike). For Shakespeare, this is a sham…. Like the past in general, origins are pliable—whatever the competing or complementary urges of appetite, honour, virtue, and expediency need them to be.
Shapiro notes that in Lewis’ view of Shakespeare’s vision, the search for absolutes by which to live and act is doomed to failure. In the search for meaning or fixity, one discovers nothing of significance.
Shapiro draws the natural conclusion from Lewis—“The absence of any moral certainties means that it’s a ‘kill or be killed’ world.” That is the jungle President Trump lives in, and increasingly, so do we. We can learn from Shakespeare that “the world has always been amoral and predatory.”
If I may say so, Professor Shapiro, renowned Professor of English at Columbia, seems unwilling to really criticize Lewis beyond acknowledging that “Lewis’s Hamlet is not mine.” I believe Shapiro generously wishes to give a newer generation its say without insisting on his own vision of Hamlet.
Fair enough—more than fair. But I have to ask, how is it that we can have “paid a steep political price for failing to heed Shakespeare’s warning” when we, including Lewis, basically share the vision that Lewis attributes to Shakespeare? We have paid a steep price, but we have paid it for accepting what Lewis is offering. We now need to expose this dark vision for the dead end it has proved to be.
I received one of those shocks when reading a review by James Shapiro of Rhodri Lewis’s book on Hamlet, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness in the April 19, 2018 issue of the New York Review. For Lewis, Hamlet is not the model of nascent subjectivity, inwardness, that he is often seen to be: “’He is instead the finely drawn embodiment of a moral order that is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.’” (Lewis’s words, quoted by Shapiro)
And the reason readers have largely missed this? Because we have been unwilling to acknowledge that Shakespeare himself rejected humanism:
Shakespeare repudiates two fundamental tenets of humanist culture. First, the core belief that history is a repository of wisdom from which human societies can and should learn…. Second, the conviction that the true value of human life could best be understood by a return ad fontes—to the origins of things, be they historical, textual, moral, poetic, philosophical, or religious (Protestant and Roman Catholic alike). For Shakespeare, this is a sham…. Like the past in general, origins are pliable—whatever the competing or complementary urges of appetite, honour, virtue, and expediency need them to be.
Shapiro notes that in Lewis’ view of Shakespeare’s vision, the search for absolutes by which to live and act is doomed to failure. In the search for meaning or fixity, one discovers nothing of significance.
Shapiro draws the natural conclusion from Lewis—“The absence of any moral certainties means that it’s a ‘kill or be killed’ world.” That is the jungle President Trump lives in, and increasingly, so do we. We can learn from Shakespeare that “the world has always been amoral and predatory.”
If I may say so, Professor Shapiro, renowned Professor of English at Columbia, seems unwilling to really criticize Lewis beyond acknowledging that “Lewis’s Hamlet is not mine.” I believe Shapiro generously wishes to give a newer generation its say without insisting on his own vision of Hamlet.
Fair enough—more than fair. But I have to ask, how is it that we can have “paid a steep political price for failing to heed Shakespeare’s warning” when we, including Lewis, basically share the vision that Lewis attributes to Shakespeare? We have paid a steep price, but we have paid it for accepting what Lewis is offering. We now need to expose this dark vision for the dead end it has proved to be.
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