Capitalist and Fascist Culture, Left and Right 

  Capitalist culture's attitudes toward the biological body may not indicate a rejection of simple biological facts like birth and death, but does seem to deny any link between such facts and what meanings may constitute our sense of self and world. It does seem committed to denying that anything inherent to the life of the flesh should condition any cultural understanding or norm regarding birth, sexuality, birth, death. Why do I think this? In this social form, it is not so much that our only access to nature is by means of “discourses,” but that nature is nothing but an "effect of discourse."  [You can substitute "narrative" or "construct" for "discourse" - same thing.] And discourses are all in some way implicated in the striving for power – that is, are potential moralities justifying some life forms, rejecting others. Thus if we want to live in a reality with 72 genders, we can. If we want to live in a reality in which Trump is a demigod and the rightful president, while the rest of the country is an evil swamp, we can. Constructing reality to suit your will. 

      What is real is relative to an individual or a group. It doesn't condition how we live; we are inclined to live this way or that way, choose to identify with this or that - and then tailor our constructs of reality to justify it. It doesn't make any sense within this culture to question your life choices - if choices they are - by referring them to an independent reality. Referring choices to reality is one discourse among others. Ultimately it is just a personal attack on your identity and lifestyle choices since there is no objective reality, at least outside of natural science and math (for some, not even there).

     Compare to Mussolini:

 

If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable.

 

I think it is an essential feature of fascism that it denies reality (i.e. is insane) - that it denies reality in the deeper sense that it reduces all possible reality to human constructs and nothing more. The idea of non-reducible reality is itself a human construct. It does this in order to impose its fantasies of power and godlike omnipotence onto nature and human nature. Left fascism, right fascism, the same. Without reality as a measure and a limit, anything goes. 

      Reality comes down to what is intelligible to us, what ultimately makes sense.  In most cases, we have to understand reality, interpret it - like a book. Perhaps their are different readings of reality that are plausible. We can talk about these readings only with reference to the book, to reality. Our readings must make sense of the book, of reality.  We cannot impose our readings onto reality, as though it were an inkblot. Reality talks back to us if we would only stop and listen. 

 Meditation on Happiness and a Thought of J. S. Mill

Happiness is a mediocre concept. Why do I say such a thing? Aren’t I happy to be happy, and sad to be sad? Of course I am. But the important thing is whether my happiness, when I am happy, is worth anything; whether my sadness, when I am sad, is not a fault. Only the happiness of a truly good man matters, one who is happy doing precisely what love requires of him, living precisely as love would have him live. Which of us can say what should make us happy is not sometimes a burden, a duty. Which of us can say that we are not sad merely over the frustration of petty desires?  What does the happiness of a man like Trump matter? As J. S. Mill wrote: "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question.”

 

A profound concept. Aristotle argued that the point of all striving was eudaimonia, which has traditionally been translated (badly) as happiness. Thomas Jefferson made “the pursuit of happiness” – no longer Aristotle’s eudaimonia, but subjective happiness feelings and states of mind – a natural right. I’ve been reading about Kierkegaard’s crazy thought (in Philosophical Fragments) that God – a perfect being – could actually experience something like grief and unhappiness. He – from our perspective insanely – desired to be loved by his creature, man, a creature who did not know or understand him. Love cannot be commanded, although it is said to be the highest commandment to love God. We cannot love God in all God’s power and infinity – our being would simply be absorbed in worship and adoration by God’s infinitely higher being: the beatific vision. 

       Perhaps God doesn’t want our adoration and worship; he wants our love. He wants us to know him. To make it possible for us to love God, God had to descend, to enter time and flesh, to become one of us. God suffered for his love. God didn’t enter into our existence to make himself happy. From God, we learn that the point of all striving is not happiness – especially not the trivial sense of subjective happy-feeling (though I have nothing against that in general). The point of all striving, our quest so to speak, is love. I confess: this is crazy. And yet if I think a universe without a loving God, well, would I choose to be born into such a universe? 

   Yes, there is the Good. You feel it when some absolute limit confronts you: impossible for me to do that! Or not to do it! I see a gang beating up on someone weaker. As fat and old as I am now, I would have to intervene no matter what; I could not live with myself otherwise. Or the spontaneous joy over the birth of my child. Or the awe and wonder of really beholding and contemplating the starry sky. Etc. God or no God, I would say yes to a universe like that. But to hold such things to be real, I think they must have a source, cannot just be part of the furniture of the universe like atoms and molecules. These experiences force the concept of God as love on me, not that I really understand what that means. In any case, such experiences make or break one's attitude toward life, give life or death to the soul. They - or their absence - goes so much deeper than happiness - i.e. the state of mind that accompanies the fulfillment of my desires. Kili is happy when he gets the new toy he wanted. 

         Indeed, “God is love.” Love is the union of two distinct lives, transcending the distinct individuality of the lovers without destroying it, completing it rather. In the case of God and man, two radically unequal lives. Love is what makes possible the most profound judgment: good, wonderful that you exist! Love makes us glad of our own existence, which makes the true love of our own souls possible. Even in human terms, this is true: who would rather not be unhappy (in Jefferson’s presumed sense) ‘in’ love with the ones you love than happy ‘outside’ of love and apart? What kind of a soul could be happy alienated, cut off from the love of God and other human beings? What is such happiness worth?

 

 Two truisms. In the end, all unhappiness is frustrated love. All sin is a failure of love.

Conscience is a Mediocre Concept 

Interesting how the conscience is socially conditioned. I have learned that for many Muslim men living in Germany, leading a white woman on for a sexual relationship doesn't make a dent in their conscience. Wanting their own child aborted doesn't make a dent. Disobeying a father, even one who takes money from his children, causes a crisis of conscience. That is why he will always be haunted by disobeying the patriarch, not by an aborted child, not by  the woman he seduced. 

   Many Nazis acted according to a strong sense of duty, according to their conscience, as they committed the most vile acts. The slave master suffered no genuine remorse for raping his property in the form of a slave woman. He would not have found it intelligible to suffer remorse because the body and sexuality of an African he had already so demeaned the rape that it was beyond his imagination that it could be an object of love, of a gentle caress. He would have ridiculed someone who made the argument that his property was an intelligible object of sexual love.

      If conscience were the whole story, the human conscience would be nothing more than Freud's super-ego. Conscience can be conditioned by culture – or ideology (false consciousness) communicated through media, as in the case of MAGA, or many feminists when it comes to the unborn, or the Hamas terrorists and their counterparts in Israel, or (at a qualitatively different level of evil) the Nazis. Conscience can be colonialized. I could spend the rest of the decade making of list of people and groups who did evil with a good conscience: not people who rationalized the evil done to deceive their conscience; people who did evil with a pure conscience. Culture or propaganda can invade and take over the conscience. Brains can be hacked and the conscience hijacked. I put no faith in it.

         To matter morally, conscience must be informed by the real Good. How do we know the real Good? Conscience itself doesn't tell us. I guess God's commands as revealed in the Old Testament (variously and mostly opportunistically interpreted) for most protestants, as revealed in the Koran and Hadith for the Muslims, or as revealed in the Torah and Talmud for the Jews. Reason determines the Good for the philosopher (and I would agree if Reason includes hope, faith, and love).

   Aquinas makes the most sense to me on this. The will – conditioned by the virtues – must conform what a clear mind and a pure heart recognize as Good into a duty to respect or love.  Christ's supernatural love reveals the Good for the Catholic and Orthodox; God's love for the world - the Creation - reveals it (John 3:16). Even if you want to think of this a metaphorical, it points you in the right direction. To me, it is revealed in Jesus' parables, the prodigal son, the good Samaritan, and in his compassion for the adulteress for example. Without love, there is no real Good. The Good is revealed in and through love. Jesus said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." An implication of that could be “where your love is, there will your conscience be also.” It’s love that does all the work. The good is what can be loved by a clear mind and a pure heart.        

    Needless to say, our human hearts and minds are to a greater or lesser extent darkened by injustice and sin; by fantasy, sentimentality, and the narcissism of the damaged, alienated ego . We are for much of our lives creatures living out fantasies - some of our own making, but usually emanating from some power complex. Our failures are failures of love, and failures of love happen because fantasy replaces a clear mind and a pure heart i.e. replaces Reason: that which apprehends reality and thus the Good, through thought and feeling. 

      But that which is in itself lovable – or beautiful (a kind of love) – is like the Northern Star or a compass for the conscience. I think the best most of us can do is start with our children - some can't even love their children but only sentimental fantasies of children. But for those who can love their children, imagine others - including those desperate people seeking not just a better life but survival at our southern border - as someone's child, as held by Christ, as a loving God's children. ["I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." - see Matthew 25:40-45] Even if you think of it as a metaphor, that works better than abstractions. Perhaps the first act is the steadfast refusal to reduce and demean other people, especially those you think of as "enemies." (There was a reason why Christ told us quite literally to love our enemies - not to like them, but to love them, to will their good, to pray for them: not to reduce them to orcs or liberals.) 

 

 Do we love it because it is good, or is it good because we love it? Indeed, the good is only revealed through love – at a minimum through it being intelligible that someone could love it even if I can’t. But if our loving it alone made it good, then good would have no reality. The Good is the real. Evil is a corruption or perversion of that which is real (as the Christian tradition teaches). Therefore loving it alone does not make it good. Through love, the deepest aspects of reality accessible to us are disclosed. We can only know our children, for example, through loving them. Outside of love, their reality remains hidden from view. 

see my entry from November 22, 2023

 Hamlet and Horatio

     Any attempt to limit what can possibly count as real by means of a metaphysical theory is bound to be reductive. There are either “more things in heaven and earth (i.e., in reality) than are dreamed of in your philosophies (i.e. including science).” Or: there are fewer things that we take for real: this seems to be the consequence of making a metaphysical philosophy out of the axioms and methods of natural science. For example, if all events involved agents consisting of matter-energy, and all things consisting of matter-energy are subject to the laws of cause and effect, then reality is denied to human freedom and to spiritual phenomena. Even something as fundamental to humanity as love or courage would be reduced to caused events of matter-energy, subject to the same kind of explanation of the orbit of the planets of the freezing of water. Another possibility broadens the second to include into the real other phenomena we can explain in human, worldly terms. 

        The first possibility seems true: there is the fact of mystery: why anything exists rather than nothing, why exactly this universe and not another, what exists beyond our sensory and cognitive limitations; the feeling of amazement over the beauty of the earth or the eyes of a beloved person; the sublime vastness of the universe, of some music, of Shakespeare and Dante…. The first option leaves open fundamental mystery, all so many of our most important experiences and insight presuppose Mystery. Reality as such, Being imagined as a limited whole, can never be one factual state-of-affairs among others. The second possibility reduces the fundamental Mystery into a Sherlock Holmes type mystery: there seem to be phenomena that science cannot explain; it is like a detective game to find the scientific explanation that do not so much explain these phenomena as explain them away, showing that only what science can investigate is real and in need of explanation.  Like in Star Trek (or Scooby Doo) – the apparently magical or divine always had a scientific explanation. I grew up thinking there was a scientific explanation to everything because of Star Trek.  Spock was my hero. Believe only what the scientific evidence supports, nothing more, and have faith that there is always a scientific explanation, which is to say have faith that all of reality without remainder is scientifically explainable.

        The third possibility – the Real is the rational and the rational is the Real – also leaves no space for Mystery. While more inclusive than reductionism, this “humanism” denies the reality of the sublime, the transcendent, which the first possibility leaves open. And that also makes it reductive, given that a border to drawn between the world and the other-worldly, although some phenomena just are other-worldly – Jesus’ actions to save the adulterous from stoning can be explained in worldly terms, but that would miss the essence of the action, for example. Metaphysics (or ontology) is a conception of Being as a limited whole, from the point of view of eternity as it were, which we can only access through imagination and our deepest core emotion-and-thought pregnant moments of most intense life. (A terrible mistake to think of

metaphysics as a dry logical or pseudo-scientific exercise in abstract thought.)

       Indeed it seems a blessing that we cannot know reality as such. A true metaphysical theory would tend to be dogmatic and totalitarian. We know how the Catholic Middle Ages, which believed themselves for long periods of their history to be in possession of such a theory, dealt with dissenters. A parallel case existed in the countries of real-existing socialism in the 20th century. [The metaphysical significance of the Hamlet quote was pointed out to me by Peter Kreeft in The Philosophy of Tolkien.]

Response to Sabine Hossenfelder on Free Will

 Here is the link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI5FMj5D9zU&t=321s

   Very interesting presentation! Is this a valid criticism of the basic argument? I put this forward in fear and trembling, having admired your logical prowess in many other videos.

   The basic assumption of the argument is that reality – absolutely, not just an aspect of nature, nature as it reveals itself to physics – is a closed, deterministic system. Not only physically, but metaphysically. What makes sense as an axiomatic assumption in physics – it yields interesting results – may or may not make sense as a metaphysical interpretation of reality as a whole. I agree that free will (in any meaningful definition) is incompatible with nature as a deterministic system – and therefore, with physics. The area of disagreement is over whether physics is not only valid as science – if I doubted that, I wouldn’t be here; I love physics – but whether science also provides us with a metaphysical interpretation of reality as such.

   The assumption that reality as a whole, in an absolute sense, is a closed system is not a possible scientific proposition. No experiment could prove it. No logical-mathematical proof could establish its soundness. The assumption that reality is not a closed system (e.g. the “strong emergence” view) is also not a scientific proposition for the same reason. It is an attempt to make sense of our experience of the world: the experience of being responsible for our actions, of being amazed over the goodness of certain people and actions, horrified over the evil that exists, of loving – find a person or a place good (‘good that you exist!), of being self-conscious (my particles change but the form of my particles show a kind of unity and I am conscious of it). I could go on. I don’t see how any conceptual space for the genuine experience of love, meaning, goodness, beauty, or freedom can exist in a closed system. Or rather, our experience of love, meaning, goodness, beauty, or freedom could reveal nothing about the world (or ourselves) if we in advance adopt a theory of determinism.

   I think such things reveal a deeper level of reality than physics can, as much as I love physics. The lived experience of all these spiritual qualities is powerful evidence that at some level determinism does not apply but our inner lives emerge, like Bach’s music emerges from the physics of sound; the fugue does not violate the laws of physics but it is qualitatively different and cannot be reduced to the latter. Physics is blind to the reality of the fugue.  (No I don’t think this implies a ghost in my machine; it does imply that my body is not a machine, or at least that it is more than a machine.)

    Equating all of Being to the closed systems studied by natural science is a possible, logically consistent version of the world. But to adopt it, if it makes sense to you, then you will have to reinterpret much of our experiential lives. When most of us say, for example, “The earth is beautiful”, we do not mean ‘when I see a picture of the earth my brain, following algorithms, produces a certain response in my organism, and we call that beauty.’ This is subject to further reductions until we get to the right equations. No, when we say the earth is beautiful we mean the earth is beautiful, really. The deterministic world interpretation reduces our experience to other categories – equations in the end. Our biographies could be translated without remainder into equations. Etc. It's like we lived in a Matrix. As though we must subject all experience to doubt and radical reinterpretation to see the world right: like we correct our experience of the sun rising.  Only one class of experience, science, reveals the world as it really is. I don’t really love my children, at least not in the common meaning of love; I am programmed by evolution, which reduces to particle physics, to behave and feel in certain ways about them, all things being equal. Same with the grief when a parent loses a child. I can’t refute that reductionism because to refute it we would have to get out of determinism and my common-sense worldview (“folk metaphysics”) and compare our versions of the world to the world as it is in itself, undescribed, unperceived, unconceptualized.

     You quoted Wittgenstein, perhaps the most powerful critic of reductionism in metaphysics. Philosophy leaves the world as it is. The urge to reduce it, to make one practice, science, epistemologically absolute, is the problem here, as I see it.

     Believing in reality as a closed system is no less an act of faith – of what makes sense – than my belief that at a certain level of complexity, determinism doesn’t apply. That all of reality conforms to one human epistemological construction, even one that gives us such power over nature, is a breathtaking leap of faith.

     I agree many conceptions of free will don’t make sense. We are never absolutely free – we are conditioned by our culture, our families, and much more, no doubt. But the kind of causality and determinism that makes sense in physics doesn’t make sense in a courtroom, for example, or in a family. As a physicist trying to understand nature, I can understand how determinism makes sense. But when the physicist leaves the laboratory, I can’t imagine how it can make sense without turning the world upside down.

       

 

 Loose Reflections on Representative (or Indirect) Democracy

    Direct democracy is not a good idea, except for very specific questions. But it is always a risk to entrust questions of fundamental importance to the people – in a referendum, say, Brexit being one glaring example. Representative democracy, or indirect democracy, however, is worthless if the representatives do nothing but vote according to public opinion polls – or much worse, special interest lobbying, a form of legalized corruption – or even worse, representatives who just do whatever Trump wants them to, no matter how toxic for the country.

  The criteria to vote for a representative should be emphasized in education. Above all competence – a person of independent judgment, experience, and virtuous character (wisdom, self-restraint, justice, courage). This means that a representative must be willing to lose the next election if necessary. There is little a political process can do to guarantee only competent, virtuous representatives will govern. You can take away all the corruption – legal and illegal – by getting the money and lobbying out of the system: elections should be publicly financed; instead of TV ads designed to pull emotional strings, only rational debates with competent moderation and editorial pieces in newspapers and magazines. Books of course. And speeches. This presupposes an enlightened public, which is not given in any current liberal democracy, though some are closer to it than others. This also presupposes a sense of community, which alone can give people a deeper sense of who they choose to represent their interests. There must be a healthy political culture if there is to be good representation, and this is sadly missing. The growing of a healthy political culture is paramount. Actually, if there were a healthy political culture and an enlightened public, the arguments against direct democracy would be correspondingly weakened.

   In Germany, the problem of competent representation is dealt with by the party system. The parties select their list of candidates based on internal criteria – political promise, character, intelligence, etc. (ideally). If elected to the Bundestag (Parliament), they are assigned to committees – foreign policy or military policy, for example – where they acquire expertise and experience. It’s like starting to work for a company. You get promoted if you show ability (or have good connections). By the time you reach the top policy-making positions, you will have usually already proven yourself over time. For example, the current minister of the health system, Dr. Karl Lauterbach,

 

Curriculum vitae

Born in Düren on 21 February 1963, career: university professor.

1982-1989: Medical studies at the RWTH Aachen, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, University of Texas San Antonio (USA), (PhD in Medicine).

1987: Research residency at the University of Arizona, Tucson (mentor: Prof. Dennis Patton).

1985 to 1990 PhD in Medicine at the Institute for Nuclear Medicine of the nuclear research facility in Jülich (mentor: Professor Ludwig Feinendegen).

1989-1990: Master of Public Health (MPH) at the Harvard School of Public Health focusing on Epidemiology, and Health Policy and Management.

1990-1992: Master of Science in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.

1992-1995: Doctor of Science in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health (mentors: Professor Marc Roberts and Professor Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences).

1992: Fellowship in Ethics and the Professions at Harvard University (Director: Professor Applbaum)

1993: Fellowship at Harvard Medical School’s Division of Medical Ethics (Director: Professor Lynn Peterson).

Since 1996: Guest lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

Since 1998: Director of the Institute for Health Economics and Clinical Epidemiology of the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne.

C4 professorship offers from the Ernst Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald and the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen.

Since 2008: Adjunct Professor at the Department of Health Policy and Management of the Harvard School of Public Health.

Main research focus: Primary and secondary prevention of chronic disease, in particular disease management of diabetes mellitus, hypertension, COPD, and hypercholesterinaemia. Health economics and health policy.

1999 until 2005: Member of the Advisory Council on the Assessment of Developments in the Health Care System.

2003: Member of the Commission on Sustainable Financing of the Social Security Systems (Rürup Commission). Member of the SPD Cologne Programme Committee.

2004: Member of the SPD Party Executive’s working group on citizens’ insurance.

Since 2005: Member of the Bundestag, on leave from his post as the Director of the Institute for Health Economics and Clinical Epidemiology of the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne. (In his absence, Professor Stephanie Stock is Acting Director).

2013-2019: Deputy parliamentary party leader of the SPD.

Since December 2021: Federal Minister of Health.

  

  Note that he only became a minister after years of experience making law in the Bundestag and within his party. Of course, other parties disagree with many of his policies. He is not popular among the doctors. But no one can doubt his qualifications. His personality and policies are well known. Disagreements with him are like two accomplished pianists disagreeing over how to perform the end of a Bach piece than between an accomplished pianist and an amateur like myself over the same subject. We have very few such qualified people in Congress, and why should we? Congress is not responsible for making policy, though they do have the power to wreck policy and leave the country without a policy – as is the case currently with Ukraine support, immigration policy, and many other issues.

  And of course, in the German system, the Bundestag produces the government. Should the SPD (Lauterbach’s party) not be part of the next election, Lauterbach would still be in the Bundestag and take part in debates about policy as a critic. These debates – ideally – would contribute to the political education of the citizens. Unfortunately, few citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany follow the discussions in the Bundestag. They – like everywhere – increasingly tend to get their news from Instagram or whatever. The public media does regularly cover Bundestag debates, however.

   Since our Congress does not make policy but only approves or disapproves the policies of the executive – or make deals with the executive to secure their approval – discussions, such as they are, have a very different quality. The fact that Congress has only this negative role reduces the need for expertise. At present, our Congress is so dysfunctional – a ground for shame.  But that is connected with the structure of our government: a debating society with the power to reject policy or make acceptance conditional on all kinds of things (concessions to big Pharmacy to the oil industry to the political needs of a certain congressman to the will of Trump) – that is so unworkable; only representatives of amazing character could overcome it, but how our representatives get chosen has nothing to do with the way Karl Lauterbach was. Money is usually all important, and of course public persona, which is a function of media access.

    The German system tends to produce better representatives because of the discipline imposed by the party system. To advance a representative is beholden to the party – not special financial interests or media access. Anything human is imperfect however: we have some fine representatives (too few) and there are some idiots in the Bundestag. But overall the Parliamentary system with the parties governing produces better representatives. I suppose the disadvantage is that party discipline means that policy decisions are made at the top; for a lower-level legislator to reject the policy decisions of their party leadership means an end to their political career. This is not necessarily bad: policy is made by the most experienced, the most proven. But every system needs the occasional maverick to buck it.

 

Parties in the Federal Republic of German and the United States

    I would like to have a system without parties, in which a representative was elected for their competence and character. But that requires a level of enlightenment and investment of time on the part of the voters that is utopian in the current society. In Germany, people vote for parties first, personalities second if at all – under normal circumstances. The general orientation of the parties is well-known enough for people to cast their vote without the kind of investment of time my party-less idea would require.

   Germany uses a mixed-member proportional representation system, which allows for a greater diversity of political parties to be represented in the national parliament (Bundestag). This system encourages the formation of coalition governments, as no single party typically wins an outright majority of seats. In contrast, the United States primarily employs a first-past-the-post electoral system for congressional elections, which tends to favor a two-party system. 

   German political culture places a strong emphasis on consensus-building and compromise, particularly due to the proportional representation system and the prevalence of coalition governments. German parties are often more ideologically disciplined, and there is generally a higher level of trust in political institutions compared to the United States. American political culture, on the other hand, tends to be more adversarial and polarized, with a focus on winner-takes-all elections and ideological purity within parties.

    Since the American system is a winner-take-all, we have only two parties. Within the two parties – before Trump – different groupings would have their own parties in Germany. For example, within the Democratic Party, there are so-called progressives, that are close to the Social Democratic Party or the Green Party in Germany. And you have liberals who are more friendly toward the corporate economy – like Clinton and Obama. Our system forces them into the same bed, which can become quite uncomfortable for the one or the other.  Sometimes compromises are made to ensure harmony going into an election – Biden was certainly moved to the left by the progressives, pissing off many “moderate” (hilarious ideology) Democrats like Joe Manchin. This is like the Social Democrats having to work out compromises with the Greens to form a government. In the German case, the compromises are worked out after the election, and the agreements are like a governing contract that is public. But Green voters don’t have to stomach voting for the SPD and vice-versa.

    Again, in my ideal of party-less candidates, the working out of compromises would be so complex as to be unworkable. Parties seem to be a necessary evil. German political parties tend to have a more centralized and hierarchical structure compared to American parties. Decision-making within German parties often involves party leaders and officials at the national level, with a strong influence from party headquarters. In contrast, American parties often have a more decentralized structure, with considerable autonomy given to state and local party organizations – i.e. less control over who is elected, who advances, etc. – and more beholden to private sources of money. When representatives represent corporate or billionaire class interests, we can no longer speak of indirect democracy. Indirect Plutocracy would be a better term, and that is where we increasingly were going in my home country. There has been under Biden hopeful movement in Democratic Party to correct this. 

 

    In the end, while the structure of a political process is important, it all comes down to how healthy is the pollical (democratic) culture; how enlightened are the voters; how competent and virtuous are the candidates. Political systems that encourage or make difficult these things, but not guarantee them. A democracy is only as good as its voters and representatives. 

 Reflections on Democracy as a Form of Government and the American Political System

 Plato identified the weakness of democracy. Political action requires either competence or virtue: competence, for example, when making security or economic policy; virtue when allowing policy to be infused with justice and the common good. The basis for democracy – literally “rule by the people” – is that sovereignty lies not in a monarch, not in an elite, but in the people. The people govern themselves in the sense that they are not governed by a king whose subjects they are or the traditional authority of an elite.

   The sovereign, more precisely, are the citizens. In Athens, the cradle of democracy, citizenship was restricted to Athenian men of a certain age. Women were not thought competent and in any case, had another role to play in the city-state. Foreigners were not citizens – their loyalty could not be counted on for one thing. And of course, slaves had no rights at all. Since the Enlightenment, women have had citizenship, implying they are competent, rational beings. That is the key point: rationality, competence, virtue. To govern well – to be able to make competent and just policy – requires a certain kind of education and certain natural abilities. It is one craft among others.

     Regimes – I mean by that term nothing more than the form of government or state – based on monarchy or oligarchy justify themselves by denying the competence of the common people (competence = reasoning powers and capacity for virtue), either by nature or because their role as laborers or craftsmen absorbs their energies, whereby a political class – mostly the richest – has the leisure and the sole purpose to govern. So if democracy is not denied because the nature of the common people is not up to the task of self-government, its denial is justified by the distribution of roles in society. Each person, to be good at their job, must devote their lives to it. Governing requires the development of reason and virtue, and that takes all one’s energy; education must be tailored to the development of reason and virtue. Craftsmen also need education but of a different kind. To be a good craftsman also requires all of one’s energies, thus leaving no time for political education and the duties of citizenship.

   The people, therefore, either by nature or occupation or both, are not capable of governing themselves. A particular man may be a good carpenter, but that doesn’t mean he can pilot a ship or knows what needs to be done in terms of foreign policy. To give the carpenter a voice in the conduct of foreign policy is analogous to giving a ship’s mechanic a voice in navigating the ship. The mechanic couldn’t even intelligently participate in a conversation about navigation choices – the same with foreign policy, for example. They lack the background knowledge and experience. The pilot or foreign minister doesn’t understand much about the ship’s engines either. People need to restrict their judgments to areas they know about. And of course, more natural gifts of intelligence and character are required for some occupations: a theoretical physicist or a stateman requires gifts that are more rare than those of a carpenter or a mechanic.

   So if the people have an equal voice in governing, how will they be able to judge sound from unsound, serious from unserious rhetoric? A mechanic could tell me any bullshit, and I would not be able to judge it as bullshit since I don’t know much about engines. The problem of a democratic people falling to propaganda was perhaps the worst feature of democracy for Plato. Competent pianists can disagree about how to perform a certain fugue of Bach; my opinion would be irrelevant to such a disagreement; indeed, I am not entitled to an opinion due to my ignorance. With today’s technology and a whole science industry behind it, propaganda is so powerful that it constructs reality itself, makes truth irrelevant. That was Plato’s definition of Sophism: language becomes an instrument not to reveal reality but to mask it for power. Language (including visual images) is one tool among others to get power. The only purpose is to create the desired effect, to make people think and feel like you, the power-seeker, need or want them to think and feel to serve your interests. Proof for Plato that the people cannot and should not govern themselves.

    Of course, the situation is far worse for us than it was for the Athenian democracy Plato criticized. To be a craftsman is to have mastered a discipline, which means that knowledge and virtue had to be acquired. And craftsmen, free men, had a kind of honor in most societies. Good government was obligated to do them justice. They were part of the community and their interests mattered. These interests, at least, they presumably were competent to speak about. But capitalist work has largely deskilled production. I suppose the mass of Trump supporters – not all – are unskilled and poorly educated, having never had to master a discipline because the economy does not need too many such qualified people. Factories make tables today, not skilled carpenters. And the quality of education possible for large masses of people is so poor that few understand even the most basic features of government or history. But the most ignorant QAnon nut’s vote counts the same as the government professor’s. The minds of most citizens – the Trump people are only the most extreme example – never come into contact with reality. Fantasies are constructed, and based on these fantasies they exercise their voice.

    Moreover, there is a world between most people and the financial elites in this country. And the purpose of politics, to the extent that it has any substance, is for the financial elites to keep and grow their wealth, and for the working masses to keep and grow their modest wealth by defending what they have again imagined enemies – poor immigrants mostly, and other non-white groups that are worse off than they are. This narrative is entirely the product of the financial elites and swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the masses of Trump supporters. When politics is reduced to a war of all against all, mediated by fantasy, to determine who gets what and how, the door is opened to what Tocqueville called the tyranny of the majority. Only with our constitution – topic for another day – the tyranny can also be of a minority.

    To sum up Plato’s critique, a quote from Winston Churchill: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

     The presupposition of democracy, the anthropology behind it, was the belief that the average voter is competent, rational, virtuous. Thus the average voter can, it is assumed, judge authentic arguments from propaganda, as Jefferson wrote:

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

 

No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, & which we trust will end in establishing the fact that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found is the freedom of the press. it is therefore the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.

 How melancholy to read these words after the experience of the 20^th century and the age of Trump. If anything has been proven by the history of the last 100 years it is this: people, especially people on the lower end of society but not only, are manipulable. They can be made to dance on the strings – nay, they often want to dance on the strings of a Hitler, Trump, or whoever. If any fact seems to make nonsense of the fundamental premise of democracy – that the common person is competent – it is this history and indeed present in the US.

    Jefferson was well aware that there is a sociological component to competence. He feared urban masses: “When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.” Since America was so big, he assumed (rightly) that there was enough land and wealth to go around, so that the democracy would be based on a large property-owning class and a fairly equal distribution of wealth. (The natives would either have to get “civilized” or face their ruin.) He thought a good public educational system and a free press would ensure the enlightenment of the sovereign. The contrast with modern America couldn’t be more stark, as this graph shows:

  

   The level of education corresponds to this, and even the best education for the elites is not the kind of education needed to produce wise and virtuous citizens devoted to the common good. Trump has supporters in every class, though their motives differ. This is just my feeling, but the best metaphor to picture the relation of the top to the rest is that of predator and prey, only the predator manages the prey to keep them docile and ignorant. Again, this makes nonsense of the idea of democracy.

. . .

   The problem is that it is almost utopian to imagine a selfless, devoted, virtuous class of servants who manage the ship of state in the best interests of all. The tendency of any such elite is to develop their own class interests and pursue them at the expense of the common good. As Churchill said,

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

I feel the same way. Even among modern liberal democracies, American democracy ranks near the bottom, but it is much preferable to an autocrat like Erdogan, Orban, or Putin, or an autocratic party like the Law and Order Party in Poland (even if that party represents the majority) controlling economic life and monopolizing the public realm (controlling nearly all communication). Why is a malfunctioning democracy preferable to what I would call pop-fascism? Here my short answer:

• I don’t want to have to watch what I say – for example, as a university instructor. Putting people in prison for their thoughts, words actions – insofar as these respect human dignity – is horrible.
• I – like Jefferson – think that freedom of the mind is one of the most important goods, and it can only be protected in some form of open society.
• A political life that does not center around open public debate but passive TV viewers consuming propaganda also demeans the human being.
• An autocrat and his oligarchs are like parasites, sucking the blood out of working people. (Thus many big capitalists will throw their support behind Trump, as German capitalists did behind Hitler, rather than face a democratically elected government that will challenge their privileges.)
• Education – especially the university – cannot be free when its prime function is to produce conformity to the regime.
• It belongs to human dignity to be free, and that at a minimum means giving one’s consent to being governed and respecting the rights of those who disagree (again, within the limits of respecting human dignity).

• I was born and raised in a society that was at least in theory devoted to the principle that all people are created equal. That is not as good as Germany's 'the dignity of man is inviolable' but it is pretty good. I can't change my loyalties at 64. People have sacrificed their lives for this principle.

Given that I feel compelled to support democratic government, how do I conceive it? The people are the sovereign – like a monarch, a collective monarch, a schizophrenic monarch who has different personalities, different conceptions of his interests. As the King had a cabinet of wise men to advise and conduct the day-to-day business of government (the King can’t be an expert at everything), so the democratic sovereign has a government to advise it on policy, to force it if need be to face the requirements of reality and justice. The job of the government is to enlighten the sovereign. It does this by means of reasonable dialog and criticism, always oriented to truth and justice. This should ideally be done by representatives in a legislature – like Parliament or the Bundestag. A free and above all responsible press should be limited to reporting and giving commentary in the form of rational debate between authorities representing different positions. The media must be public to do this task, and should be strictly supervised not for content so much as for respecting the ethic of truthful, rational speech. [Corporate media is the death of democracy; the only thing worse is the state control of media as in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, or China.]

    I think – I learned of this argument from my friend, Dr. Georg Bluhm, and I have never been able to refute it myself and know of no other refutation – the separation of powers system in my country makes this function of government difficult. The problem is that Congress has the power to reject any executive policy – e.g. in the Cold War, undermining Détente, as they did with the Jackson Amendment (many examples I could give) – without the responsibility of putting an alternative policy in its place. A debating club without responsibility lacks the discipline that only reality provides, for it is reality that policies must deal with. Thus debates in Congress tend to degenerate to Sophistry (with noble exceptions). In Parliament, it the government’s policy is not supported, the Parliament must replace the government with a new one that will put into place the alternative, which has been vigorously debated. The fact that any policies debated in Parliament might have to be enacted and that the government that enacts them will be judged by voters provides some measure of discipline to the rhetoric.

   The education of the citizens is obviously critical as well. Classes not only in government and history – classes that feature a clash of interpretations – should be combined with classes in so-called “critical thinking” (formal and informal logic, the art of making good arguments). The quality must be high in all classes of society. Don’t ask me how we get there.

   And the socio-economic status of the citizens must be addressed. You can’t only have a very sick democracy in a country with classes as far apart as in America, with so few at the top and so many at the bottom. Wealth and opportunity – a matter of justice in any case – must become more evenly distributed if a country is to have a meaningful democracy.

   I don’t know how to reconcile capitalism in its current form with democracy. To me, that has been the fundamental problem of American democracy, in addition to the consequences of racial hatred. (They are connected.) Capitalism dumbs the citizens down in drastic ways: through mindless work, through mindless consumerism, through the structure of media. This is too complex to discuss here, but Marx was right about one thing: the economic and class structure of society conditions the consciousness of the people in it; and some economic and class structures are compatible with democracy – and some are not. In America we have a Lockean liberal (nothing to do with the current meaning of ‘liberal’) ideology that has no roots in social-economic structure. Indeed, a pop-fascist regime is the "superstructure" that probably most reflects the economic-social "base" at the current time. That is a deep and probably intractable problem.