Logic Can't Tell You What Is Good or Right: Kant and Spock

Reason, Morals, and the Categorical Imperative. Kant wanted to deal with the problem of human dignity by appealing not to nature but to reason – which is the impartial judge of particular cultural practices. For Kant Reason was not, as it is for me, that part of our mind that can be in conformity or at least harmony with reality but something more narrow, pure reason: Aristotelian logic plus self-evident axioms. These self-evident axioms, furthermore, did not apply to nature. For example, Leibniz took the principle of sufficient reason as both self-evident and as telling us something about reality (i.e. the proposition that everything must have a cause). For Leibniz, Reason (intuition) assured us of this truth. But if like Kant you do not just assume that nature as it appears to us is the same as nature as it is in itself, then the claim that the principle of sufficient reason tells us something about the world itself rests on an assumption that is (no longer) self-evident. Thus it is not self-evident. 

   This attempt to ground morality in "pure reason" arose in part through the challenge of moral skepticism, i.e. the claim that no neutral standard exists to adjudicate conflicting claims given the mechanical universe he presupposed.

    It was also a response to a change in how nature was conceived. Kant took over – uncritically – the paradigm of nature worked out by people like Galileo and Newton. As a Galileo scholar described his idea of nature:

 

The sky is not blue and roses are not fragrant. I just experience them to be so, or they appear to me – affect me – as being like that. The real, objective world is therefore the world of the primary properties, while the realm of subjective secondary qualities is the domain of animals and human beings", and quotes Galileo:" ‘I think that if one takes away ears, tongues, and roses, there indeed remain the shapes, numbers, and motions, but not the odors, tastes, or sounds; outside the living animal these are nothing but names’ (Buyse, 2013)

 

A consequence of this idea is that morals are also projected onto nature or reality and cannot be conceived as a response to anything objectively real. Rape is wrong not because if violates the who and what a woman is, but is a projection of something secondary supplied by us, like odors, tastes, or sounds. Nature is indifferent, inherently without meaning or value. While the modern paradigm of nature seemed unquestionably true to Kant, he could not accept this implication for morality. Thus he tried to give morality a new foundation outside of nature, in pure reason (logic plus self-evident axioms).

    Moreover, grounding our moral or immoral responses in nature missed something essential about morality for Kant. This is complex, but I think what it all boils down to is this: nature, even for Aristotle, is contingent: it is what it is. Conforming our actions and responses to what happens to be the case – what happens to make us happy or to allow us to flourish – is thus also contingent. If our natures were different, morality would be different. For Kant – and he is right, I think – what is moral and immoral would be different. But that makes no sense. Morality is absolute. If it is evil to rape, then it is always necessarily evil.

     While Aristotle could not account for this in his idea of nature, Christian thinkers like Aquinas could, as God was the author of nature. God is absolute Being and Goodness in one. Rape then – as an example of a clearly evil act – violates the nature of a woman as she is created by known by God. [That by the way is an argument for the necessity of God in the grounding of morality.] But Kant rejected the idea of Creation as metaphysical. He didn’t deny it could be true, but he did deny that we could know that it was true. All we can know of nature is limited by the Galilean-Newtonian idea, which he uncritically accepted. Thus the only option to ground morality as absolute was pure reason.

      Thus Kant believed that the power of reason to uncover culturally non-relative truths in science, logic, and mathematics could be applied to morality as well - like Spock.   The issue thus seems to be whether such a neutral standard can be identified.  A good case can indeed be made that mathematical and scientific truths have validity for all human cultures; the idea of a European, Indian or Japanese physics or math seems absurd. But morality is not physics or math.  Reason is universal only to the extent it remains formal; as soon as appeals to the value-soaked world are made, reason cannot be appealed to as impartial judge.     

              Kant argued for a rational moral principle, one that would give us a calculus to tell us whether our actions were truly moral – the categorical imperative:

 

…handle nur nach derjenigen Maxime, durch die du zugleich wollen kannst, daß sie ein allgemeines Gesetz werde (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, p. 68).

 

… act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.

The categorical imperative was self-evident for Kant and indirectly applied to nature. We know that it must apply to nature for Kant because we experience duty and this experience, uniquely, cannot be doubted in spite of its being an alien in the Newtonian conception of nature. Of course, pure reason - logic -  is independent of a person's values: “All men or mortal.  Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal” is valid for all times and cultures.  Does Kant's rational principle have that same objectivity? Is it irrational for one man to insist that men have more dignity than women, and thus what may be made into a universal law for all men should not apply to women?  Only if one sees men and women as equal in dignity – but that is the very question supposed to be answered by the categorical imperative. A hopeless circularity.

            Put another way:  neither logic nor pure reason will not tell us what is good or bad, and thus what the content of the categorical imperative should be.  If one man believes that women should not be treated as of equal worth, and another man denies this, then both may universalize their beliefs without contradiction: one might claim: “Act so that you never treat a woman as of equal dignity to man, which would be a violation of the natural order of the world.”  If one claims that such discrimination is irrational, then she goes beyond logic and includes purely natural or cultural value-laden claims: it is irrational because it is wrong to treat women as inferior, whereby pure reason can't tell you if it is wrong or right. (I suppose if you could define 'inferior' as something that could be investigated by science - some standard of strength or intelligence - then reason would have something to say. But as morality has nothing to do with how smart or strong someone is - it is just as evil to rape a woman with an IQ of 200 as it would be to rape a woman with an IQ of 100 - this is a red herring.)

     But if “rational” is understood to imply or presuppose particular values, then what is morally “rational” cannot be determined independently of these:  as many conceptions of reason as there are moralities become possible.  Attempting to adjudicate between such claims by appealing to the categorical imperative is thus obviously circular. No independent conception of reason can underwrite one value argument against another. 

   The problem arises by conceiving of nature as Galileo did: as devoid of meaning. Thus meaning is exiled from nature, banned on a non-natural island: namely, in our minds. And there is no bridge from our minds (our morality) to this mechanical nature where we all have our being - contra Kant. Nature - including our bodies -  is on this conception nothing but a blank screen onto which we project meaning even as we project odors and colors. That was also Spock's conception of nature. 

   What is rational depends on what is real and what we can know. Kant's conception of pure reason is a function of his conception of nature and our mind's being cut off from nature, confined to its own representations of nature. Because nature for Aristotle and Aquinas are different from Kant's conception, reason and knowledge are different. To violate the inherent goodness of another human being - as a creature, not necessarily how they live - would be contrary to reason. For Kant it would be to violate a formal rule that only makes sense if you assume what Aquinas did, that human beings are precious in some way. 

   And this is what always frustrated me about Spock: his superstition that formal logic could solve substantive disputes – McCoy was more logical! If peoples, places, or anything else is not intrinsically good in some way, it goodness (that they exist in the first place) is not part of their reality, then no morality. Logic is just as useful to Hitler as it is to Primo Levi. It is indifferent to morals. What is self-evident depends already on a moral attitude. 

 

 . . .

The Second Categorical Imperative. Another example from within our culture using Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act so that you treat at all times the humanity in your own person as well as in other people as an end in itself, and never as a mere means to an end. (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 79).”  For some within our own culture, prostitution is a violation of dignity because it involves human beings (women) being used as a mere objects and not respected as ends in themselves. Others deny it must be such a violation, claiming that dignity is satisfied as long as they consent to the practice, their consent ensuring that they remain subjects and do not become mere objects.

                Reason (actually formal logic), again, cannot tell us who is right here. Whether x or y is right is beside the point; the point is that no independent conception of reason – including Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative – can help us here. To claim that prostitution is a violation of human dignity might be true, but one can't prove it by appealing to this principle of reason. The question at issue would be precisely whether consensual prostitution involves using women as objects, and only attention to one's values and the particulars of the social context of the practice can answer this.  And so, again, we are back to that part of nature / reality which is soaked in the values, histories, interpretations of human subjects.

               The real question is whether this “failure” implies that ‘there is no morality’ or whether ‘anything goes.’ The trap consists precisely in seeing appeals to value neutral standards as the proper method of argumentation in moral questions. The starting point is our moral response – for example, to evil. For me to say:  “Oh, Mr. Protagoras, I see you are right! And now I know that my subjective feelings about rape or racism have no ground in reason!”  The evident absurdity (and immorality) of this kind of thinking should make us wary of this trap. 

 Problems with Democracy

Truth, wisdom, and democracy. There is no value-free, person-free method guaranteed to crank out truth and wise, just laws. Politics is not, for that reason, subjective in the sense of reducible to personal preferences and prejudices. It does depend on the wisdom, character, spiritual energy, and imagination of the individual – much like being able to judge a performance of Bach or a painting of Rembrandt. About which even the wise can disagree, which is as it should be, since the being of such works transcends any particular attempt to conceptualize them – a metaphor for the finite human mind’s relation to being as a whole, which only God could understand completely. That doesn’t mean we cannot through effort understand something. Indeed, a disagreement between Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan about how a Beethoven symphony should sound has a radically different quality than a disagreement between either of them and me. Indeed, I am wise enough not to offer an opinion on the matter, precisely because there is a reality involved and I am largely ignorant of it.

       While music, important though I think it is, is not essential, being a good judge of life is. That qualities are not simply given to us as individuals makes it suspect in a ‘democratic culture’ where we are all supposed to be equal in judgment. We aren’t. The level of ignorance and incompetence even in managing one's own life in America is shocking, depressing - not that it is massively better in Europe. If we care about democracy, that must be our goal, to have citizens competent enough to judge intelligently between the alternative ways of dealing with justice and political realities – competent enough also to recognize these realities. Competence must be produced by the political culture, starting with the constitution itself. It belongs to competence to recognize that we are all fallible and thus need both to scrutinize our own beliefs and take those of other serious people seriously. Truth, insight - wisdom - is more important than winning a debate. The high art of 'thinking well' needs to be at the top of educational priorities. The figure of Socrates should haunt every democracy, to which for better or worse there is no humanly valuable alternative. Writing these words, I cringe at the pathetic state of American political discourse.

 

. . .

 

      The United States has reached a critical mass where the people no longer seem able to “govern themselves.” For all the various, familiar reasons – from social media to festering resentments, etc. – large sections of the population have become unhinged from reality and lack even the most basic sense of justice and proportion necessary for a free and open society. And there are no good alternatives to a free and open society. Of these, Trump’s brand of pop fascism his ego-and-greed-driven politics is one of the worst. If I had to choose between non-democratic alternatives, I would rather have military rule, as you are more likely to find individuals who serve the country as a whole and might more honestly strive to reestablish some basic responsibility and competence in government than in Trump’s corrupt and corrupting world. But in the American context, that is pure fantasy, just as is my fantasy of having a caste of wise people above economics and petty politics to guide the country until its citizens become enlightened enough to "govern themselves." This is paternalism and I despise it - but not as much as I despise ignorant puppets and potential mobs on the strings of manipulators like Trump.

     The only argument for democracy that convinces me at the present moment is Churchill's: all other forms of government are worse (as I fear we might soon find out). My ideal of a political community resembling, say, a group of dedicated historians, all decent people of course with no axe to grind, trying with the tools of reason and evidence to find consensus on historical questions like understanding how the First World War could happen - that, too, is a fantasy. But that is how it would have to be in a genuine democracy.

       I have very little hope left for my country. I have more hope, but still not much, that the countries of Europe – the last bastions of anything resembling liberal (small ‘l’) societies – will be able to deal with the crisis caused by America’s movement towards the water's edge. But as I have children, I don’t have the luxury of losing hope. 

      I am still waiting to see a political force capable of turning the tide. Will Europe unite, establish a deterrent to Putin (and Xi), insulate themselves from the consequences of a possible American moral and political collapse, and deal with their indigenous pop fascist lovers? 

     Perhaps it was a tragedy that Biden won the Democratic Party's nomination in 2020 and not Bernie Sanders, who may have been such a political force.  

      Is there any hope of a just and sustainable economy, and thus society, for all people - and thus a partial treatment at least for the world's disease as opposed to just treating all these horrible and complex symptoms? 

 . . .

History. If you look at any political reality, you will be like a dog watching TV unless you know the history as well as the social-economic power structure of that reality.  I’m afraid most citizens are like dogs watching TV when they see the news reports. I know I am in many cases.

    The underlying reality of Trumpism is the attempt to prevent a rollback of corporate-financial control over essential areas of the state. This began under Reagan and proceeded unabated until Obama made tentative moves to reverse it and Biden – under pressure from Sanders’ ‘progressives’ – even more so. Trump has the support of all those interests that want to keep America safe for the super-rich to write the rules we live under. (The culture wars are a sideshow for them, a way to keep the focus off economics.)    The history is much more complicated but involves keeping the resentments, the inferiority complexes of poor and working-class whites focused on race and religion as well as a hatred of ‘the government’ rather than who controls who gets what, when, and how. The support for Trump and billionaires in general today is not disconnected from the sorry show of poor farmers fighting and dying for the ‘right’ of slave-holding plantation owners (millionaires) to keep their slaves; or how playing the race card undermined the promising beginnings of what was called “Populism” in the post-Civil War reconstruction era.  

p.s. Some excellent works of history tell this story. I found these books compelling, for example:

Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, 2007.

Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists 1861-1901, 1962

Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America, 1978.

Gabriel Kolko, Triumph of Conservativism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, 1977.

I wish I had the time to read more in history. 

The Most Powerful Evidence Against Christianity. 

That is easy: by the fruit you know the tree. It is the people who call themselves Christians and yet do nasty things great and small in the name of Christ: wars against non-Christians; persecutions of heretics; justifications of usury, wars, and slavery; stealing children from the very arms of their mothers to “re-educate” them. The people who profess the truth revealed in ‘The Good Samaritan’ hate and denigrate immigrants. People who embrace the truth revealed in “The Prodigal Son” look down in scorn on those who fail to meet their standards of pure behavior. People who profess to love the man who gave us the “Sermon on the Mound” worshipping idols: the machines of war and the wealth of billionaires; Trump or some sentimental version of their country. People of the South wouldn’t let a fellow creature of God worship with them because God had created their skin darker, despite the fact that their own people had perpetuated unspeakable evils again the recent ancestors of these same people. I could go on and on and on ad nauseum. To make a list of the crimes of the servants of just the Catholic Church - from the sex abuse scandals, the concordats with Hitler and Mussolini to the conquest of the Americas to the Inquisition to the sacking of Constantinople: we all know this terrible history. 

     And of course on a less drastic note, most of us who want to be Christians fail to love and seek the Good in many ways in our daily life, and somehow all these private failures are like a matrix from which the big failures grow. Few of us can disassociate ourselves completely from this terrible history. Christians themselves have put the dark glass over God’s light, right from the beginning. 'Original sin' does not relativize this evidence. Nor do other examples of human depravity found in non-Christians, of which there are of course many. I see no evidence that being atheist makes it less probable that a person is decent. That fact alone should trouble every Christian.

       I am been blessed to have known some good people who were Christian, and see even that there was some connection between their goodness and their trust in Jesus: my grandfather Lovan and my grandmother Emerson, in very different ways. But the history of Christian people - which to be fair throws up the rare saint from time to time and many cases of ordinary decency - is so dismal compared to the ideals of its teacher: it is hard to see the tree as good when the fruit has been, in general, so bad.

   This was not very original. Others have made the point better. But I feel the need to make myself conscious of it as a weapon against my own tendency to sentimentalize.

Reflection on  Human Nature and World

Welt and Umwelt (world and environment). But it is much more complex. Imagine a young wolf, born a thousand years ago in what is now Yellowstone National Park. The young wolf would have an ideal environment to which it would become within its wolf pack perfectly adapted, perfectly healthy – always with a little luck.

     I think we human beings are also created (and evolved) into something like this – our environment (Umwelt) though is a world (Welt). Our natural world: a loving, caring family, a genuine community where everyone has a useful and valued role to play; a community that has preserved its cultural treasures and has a worldview that makes sense of its past and present, and relates its members to the world as a whole, perhaps what transcends our possible experience of the world; a community to which young people become habituated by acquiring the skills and above all the spiritual dispositions necessary to live in community with other members (common sense wisdom, justice, courage, self-restraint, mercy, etc.); a community that thoroughly knows its place in nature (including awareness of its ignorance) and can live from that place without diminishing or destroying it – I could go on. Something like this, I believe, is to us what Yellowstone is to the wolf.

       Now the human “Yellowstone” – the world most natural to human beings –  has been almost everywhere destroyed. Whenever it begins to recover for a group of people, it gets destroyed again. It has been destroyed partly because human societies almost everywhere come to be dominated by a power elite that arises when the production of needed goods surpasses what we need. It then controls the means of production, dominates the political decision-making process, and determines the forms of work and leisure. (Yes, I learned this from Marx, but it’s true. Jesus also preached as much.) This is partly a result of competition between groups within a society and between societies for the control of resources. We are correspondingly not only cast out, but become to some degree insane – as a young wolf would be if ripped out of Yellowstone and thrown into downtown Detroit. What is natural to us comes to seem like a mythical Eden. What is unnatural changes our nature over time. We live east of Eden.

. . .

Capitalism and bodies. Summer fashions for girls and young women - lots of skin, showcasing legs, waistlines, tummies, shoulders, backs, and bottoms: as if displaying their wares in a shopping window. Those with nothing to sell, like me, pull the curtains over our bodies as best we can. 

 Nietzsche and Truth

The love of truth and the love of the world. I used to be disoriented by Nietzsche’s attack on truth:

 

Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment; in this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating. (Beyond Good and Evil, Kaufmann trans.)

 

It doesn’t make sense on many levels. What is in truth life-promoting or species-cultivating? Well, Nietzsche apparently thinks he has the truth about that: the unfolding of power, which implies an unfolding of our highest capacities, which in turn makes culture, which in turn makes a world a man can affirm – or so I would paraphrase it. He is sure there is no reality but nature, as he understands it (a mix of Darwin and Schopenhauer as the matrix for his special addition – the will to power).  No God and no ‘other world’ exist – they are fantasies produced by the weak to make life bearable. They are laced with underlying fantasies of resentment and revenge against those able to master and so affirm life. Morality is an illusion that flows from the same source. Nature knows no morality. Nature is indifferent to human suffering. I could go on.

        At the deepest level, it seems, the hostility to truth is bound with a rather dim view of the world. If the world is horrible, then it is understandable that the truth would make life unbearable. We would need all kinds of illusions – comforting illusions as well as illusions that make us seem great in our own eyes. Whatever works! But what if Nietzsche is wrong about the world and wrong about us? His whole philosophy, his recommendations at least to the “strong” ones among us depend on its truth. If he is wrong, if his judgments are not true, then his philosophy, well, sucks.

       You will inevitably find that those who don’t care about truth are nihilists, openly or under the surface: that is, they believe in a meaningless, perhaps cruel interpretation of nature and human nature that places no inherent limits on the will. Like Nietzsche, they will just assume that nature and the world are amoral, indifferent bundles of matter and energy, and appeal to a kind of secret society to which their readers, if they desire to be cool, obviously want to belong – “we strong ones know the world sucks and the weak need their pitiful illusions.” It is yet another form of self-flattery. It is a bubble, a self-authenticating view of the world and their place in it.

            The love of truth, the practice of truthfulness as a virtue, as spiritual demeanor, is also not neutral. It makes sense only if the truth is good because the world and nature of which it is truth is good, is meaningful. The world and nature offer enough evidence for both views. The world is ambiguous, underdetermined. What is deeper? What is on the surface? We don’t understand our own lives and how to live without caring about the truth of such matters. In any case, the attitude to truth depends on the attitude toward the self, others, the world, and God. For me I can’t be a nihilist because I love my children – among other things – and have had occasion to be glad of life and the world. It is understandable to me that the people of Gaza or Sudan might have a different take on things. And that more than anything casts doubt on my view. 

 Anxieties about the Future of my Country- and Theses

  

  Trump did not initiate a crisis of democracy in America. He is only the latest form this crisis takes. Since 1980 corporate power has increased to the point where they are a de facto branch of government, and not the weakest branch. Wealth has been concentrating at the top while people who work for a living have been getting squeezed and have had to deal with real insecurity - while the situation for those at the bottom has only gotten more hopeless. The corporate concentration in media and its takeover of the Internet - started long before Fox as a matter of policy both of Democratic and Republican administrations - is itself a crisis in democracy. The flaws in our constitution prevent facing this reality and indeed have only eased this symbiosis between corporate power and government. This situation could not even be articulated in our politics before the advent of Bernie Sanders. 

 In the present, I struggle with this: there are two camps of Americans; these two camps of Americans see each other as enemies and threats – not just political opponents, not just as Americans who disagree, but as enemies such that Vladimir Putin is an ally against these other enemy Americans. In fact, only one of these camps sees the other as an enemy, but given that they have declared war on the other camp – a Cold War – the other camp has no choice but to see them as enemies. Within these two camps, there are factions, but they don’t matter now.

   And this Cold War is in the head. It results from a set of ideas about what is real. It is in the soul as well. It results from a spiritual disease. Here are some random thoughts or theses on this situation, which I will try to understand using the analogy of Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s and insights of Karl Marx and Hermann Göring.

 

 

Thesis One

  Hermann Göring said in an interview with an American psychologist names Gilbert after the war:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. [emphasis mine]

 

That works not only with countries as a whole, but also in factions within a country. Since Clinton became President, a host of TV and radio propagandists, led by Rush Limbaugh, labored to get working Republican voters to see Democrats not as political opponents but as unpatriotic enemies of the people. They denounced Republican politicians who were willing to compromise on policy issues, portraying them as compromising with the devil. A group of pragmatic, patriotic Republicans did persist – John McCain and Mitt Romney being the two most prominent examples. But their position within the party became increasingly precarious. Under Trump’s control, such pragmatists who cared about policy results and were committed to the country have all but disappeared.

    One way to understand their “achievement” was that they tapped into working men’s (mostly white men) resentments and created both an epistemological bubble that featured the Democrats being utterly corrupt perverters and destroyers of everything America was supposed to stand for, every that made America “great” in their minds. ‘Democrat’ became almost synonymous with ‘traitor.’ Fox News came along to nourish this epistemological bubble. The bubble was protected by constructing an echo chamber – an echo chamber that discredited information from any source other than the now official sources of Fox, Limbaugh & Co. The mainstream media was reduced to being the propaganda mouth of the enemy. [The corporate media has been problematic for democracy for many reasons, but that is beyond my purpose here to discuss. See Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times, 2000. A bit dated, but details the corporate takeover of media and the interpretation of the 1^st Amendment.]

 

The fruit of this pre-Trump attempt to demonize the enemy was the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party.

The enemy was the Democrat, the Liberal, i.e. who are really “socialist.” Like the West Europeans.

Part of the demonization was motivated by the need to stay blind to the fact that working people have it incomparably better in European states because the states actively work to patch up the worst effects of capitalism. In Germany, for example, I and my family are completely insured and even supported in ways that are unimaginable for working Americans. There is no college tuition so I don’t have to worry about being ruined by my children’s education. There is a wonderful public transportation system so those who can’t afford or who don’t want a car can live a normal life. Etc. Thus Bernie Sanders was such a threat. Trump was put up to counter that threat, to demonize people for wanting in the US what working people take for granted in Europe.

    These propagandists, aided by the loss of the USSR as the prime enemy, prepared the way for the Trump takeover.  They broke with the post-War consensus that framed political disagreement between the two parties and between factions within the parties.

   Now the two camps live in alternate universes, and the MAGA universe is completely untethered to facts. With their own active complicity, the MAGA faction has become epistemological equivalents of flat earthers or creationists or  astrology believers. No common-sense evidence can refute their views.

‘Trump won the election. He has proof.’

‘But his own Attorney General, head of Homeland Security, and FBI all stated unequivocally that the election was fair. He presented his evidence, such as it was, to the courts in 61 cases and lost every case – many overseen by judges he appointed. Massive evidence of his conspiracy to steal the election was presented to the Jan. 6 committee by his own people.’

‘The courts are part of the deep state. His AG and other folks sold out to the Democrats. The Jan 6 was a partisan propaganda circus.’

‘Use your common sense!’

‘I am. It makes no sense to me that a great man like Trump would lie about such things!’

Etc.

 

Thesis Two

  How can that be? What made so many people susceptible to irreality? Here some random suggestions.

·        Deplorables: many people have been made to feel ashamed for holding views – about sex, family, marriage, etc. – that not long ago were taken for granted. Many were made to feel ashamed of latent racism or being seen as racist for opposing particular policies like affirmative action. (I don't think the 'culture wars' were started by the right; the right just pounced on them and used them.)

·        Inferiority complex: in our DNA there is a suggestion: whoever is not rich and famous is a loser, and being a loser is your own fault. A kind of primitive nationalism is opium for this: ‘OK, I am a loser, but I am an American (white American); America is the greatest country; therefore, I am great.’ Or liberals who flaunt their college educations rub salt into this inferiority complex: ‘Trump will show them!’ etc.

·        More objectively, the uprooting and insecurity that has attended the near total destruction of rural farming life as well as the traditional manufacturing base – largely seen as a result of ‘globalization’ and ‘internationalism’ (American first!).

·        The squeezing of the middle class by the super-rich and corporate America – something MAGA has to camouflage and blame on the Democrats.

·        The evangelicals have always been a group apart. The Southern Democrats used to get them. After the Civil Rights Movement, they fell into the lap of the Republican Party. Their interests consist of laws banning abortions, protections for religious schools against public schools to keep their children in their bubbles - which I can partly understand, being not uncritical of the culture of the Great American Funhouse myself - and otherwise to be left alone. They have become politicized because they see secular society threatening their families and belief systems – somewhat like the Amish fear of ‘America.’  They tend to be single-issue voters indifferent to public life (except when it infringes on their lives). But now Christian Nationalism is a big part of MAGA. It’s like: we can only be safe from secular society if we control or have a veto over government policy. Many of these people see Trump for what he is, but see him as a tool to gain control over the government.

·        The absence of roots. We are the most rootless people that have ever existed on earth. If roots are a deep human need – and I agree with Simone Weil that they are (see her Need for Roots) – then we suffer emotional damage for the lack of roots. This is partly what explains the insanity of ‘identity politics.’ The deep need to latch onto some external category, whether be of race, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever. Thus politics transforms from (ideally) debates about what is just or what serves the common good to who a person happens to be – which as a question of ‘identity’ is beyond debate. That is a recipe for fanaticism. 

 

At some level, we are creatures of ego. We are drawn to what elevates or consoles the ego, repelled from what lowers it or makes it feel bad. These things are mediated by ideas of what is real and good. What I see is a massive system designed to elevate and comfort the egos of a portion of the population that suffers most from the economic regime they are de facto supporting and protecting.

There is something wrong. They sense that. As Umberto Eco has his enlightened monk (i.e. his nominalist monk), Brother William, say in The Name of the Rose: "The common people feel a truth that is perhaps truer than that of the theologians [the pundits] but they waste this feeling in ill-considered actions.” These people have chosen to live in a comforting, in an ego-elevating fantasy, and thus have become a threat to anything good that can come of the country. They have chosen to wallow in self-pity and victimhood rather than act according to their true interests and situation.

 

Thesis Three

   What interests did the new Republican propaganda machine serve? Where did the resentments come from that this machine fed? Complex questions to which I can only suggest directions for research.

   Marx wrote:

  The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.

 

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

 

What were the economic conditions following the end of the Cold War? Both Democrats and Republicans agreed on the corporate capitalist structure of the economy. The situation was not, as it was in Germany during the Great Depression, whether a communist revolution that would end capitalism would succeed, and force capitalists (as it did in Germany) into a choice between surviving under Hitler or losing everything under the German Communist Party (they had given up on the ability of the Weimar Republic to protect capital). Capitalism was the agreed-upon foundation for the country. To criticize capitalism put you outside the mainstream on the fringes (where I have spent most of my adult life).

     The ideological conflict was between Roosevelt’s New Deal – largely but not completely abandoned by the Democrats themselves until Bernie Sanders came along – in which capitalism would be forced to make compromises for the sake of working people and the good of the country as a whole. Corporations and the super-rich would have to pay their fair share of taxes, be subject to regulation from the state, etc. It was not an existential question of their survival but rather one of sharing power (e.g. as is taken for granted in German capitalism today). As opposed to this is the corporate drive – under pressure from corporate raiders in the form of hedge funds – to remove all barriers to profit maximization, to minimize or eliminate paying taxes, to regulate themselves, to be free to buy influence in government (money = free speech in the Supreme Court’s corporate-friendly ruling).

      It is not a question of capitalism versus socialism (i.e. public ownership of the means of industrial production and finance) but unfettered turbo-capitalism versus the control over capitalism that Roosevelt achieved to save it from itself during the Great Depression. That is the main (not only) underlying structural reality that has given rise to the Cold Civil War, as sections of the capitalist class finance ideological campaigns that seem remote from its main interest but in fact serve to protect their freedom and power over government policy at every stage.

   What is good for the corporate or billionaire bottom line is good for the country vs. the corporate capitalist class is one part of society that must, like the other parts, make compromises for the common good – those competing principles underlie the conflict. And a big part of the economic elites are willing to change the regime of the country to protect their interests if they have to.

   Within this complex, different industries – banking and finance, oil, military-industrial, pharmacy, etc. – have different and sometimes competing interests. But what unites them all is the agenda of maximizing control over the State in terms of policy and the minds of the public ideologically.

   Given the fact that the devasting effects of ‘globalization’ could no longer be denied, that they had given rise to a serious national candidate, Bernie Sanders, it is no surprise that a Trump followed soon thereafter, mirroring the much more existential decision of German capital to support Hitler as a protection against communist and socialist opponents. Not that all of American capital has thrown its lots in with Trump. Some see his type of fascism as a threat to their autonomy. Others are hedging their bets, waiting to see who comes out on top.

 

Thesis Four

   Not that this underlying structural power dynamic forms the motives of most individuals. These fight it out in the realm of ideas – ideas that often mirror the underlying conflict in distorted ways but are sometimes unconnected to it. The main ideological areas in which “the base” fight it out are the following:

·        Immigration and the replacement of white Americans by ‘minorities’

·        So-called ‘Woke’ progressivism

·        The legitimacy of the State and the rule of law

·        Abortion

·        The meaning of “America” and “democracy”

·        The legitimacy of the international liberal order erected and held up by American power since the end of WWII

 

In all these areas the issue is not one of policy differences. Each area is seen as part of a Democratic attempt to control the state and dominate and oppress the other camp. So the complexities of immigration policy give way to a Democratic conspiracy to replace the hard-working white majority with reliable voting blocks of lazy Hispanics, Muslims, or whatever, cementing the Democrats' power over the state and the “real Americans.” The same for all the other issues. 

 

Ego and Meaning (and Reality)

                                                                   Devil's Lake (Teufelssee)

The Ego-Drama. The thing that blurs our access to reality the most is the ego-drama, our little drama, the drama of our ‘self’ – I (my ego) produce it, write it, direct it, and of course star in it. It occupies most of us non-saints constantly. I make it up, this film, according to my own lights for my own purposes. (Facebook, Instagram, etc. did not invent the Ego; they merely amplify and empower it – pouring gasoline in its fire. Not that I would reduce all uses of such platforms to the ego drama.) The terrible irony is: while in this mostly extremely sentimental, and to an objective observer, an extremely boring low budget movie, we don’t even know who in the Hell we are. Until I break out, unplug myself; until something else becomes real, good, beautiful, lovable, joyful (or their opposites), as ego-centered I have no life. I think a big part of our culture is based on this. I accept you (your film, your spin on yourself); you accept me. There is nothing ‘out there’ to judge our pathetic little films to. 

       Now, this is very precisely described as the deadly sin of sloth: a lack of zeal for the life of the spirit-mind; an apathetic attitude toward truth; an indifference to others, your relationships to others and to the community, to nature, to myself. Thus the ego-drama is not only inherently uninteresting; it is downright bad for me. What gives a river purpose, energy, and a direction is the firmness of its banks (John Henry Newman). In a world of ego-dramatists, there is a placid, oxygen-poor swamp, or a kind of Devil’s lake, as we have here in Brandenburg – bodies of water without movement, going nowhere. I write this here because though someone otherwise starring in nothing but his ego-drama can maybe do some science or program a computer, it is impossible for that purpose to every connect with reality, to ever achieve even a modest measure of truth, understanding, wisdom. 

      All real religion and philosophy get you out of the ego-drama so that you can encounter in some way the real. A step before religion or philosophy, because it also requires suspension of the ego-drama, is to learn something: a foreign language, the piano, math – things which are real, that cannot be reduced to ego, that force you conform yourself to them. Even higher: love someone. What does the real good of my children, being the individuals they are, require from me as a father – a very demanding task of understanding! (“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.” – C. S. Lewis) Of course, acknowledging these criteria external to my ego do make demands on me, sets me up for failure. It does take courage, too.

     To understand anything or anybody requires the suspension of the ego-drama. God save me from “the clean, well-lighted space” of my own little ego" (Hemingway)! How joyful, in contrast, to discover something objectively wonderful! And there is nothing more objectively wonderful than my children.