A reader's journal sharing the insights of various authors and my take on a variety of topics, most often philosophy, religion & spirituality, politics, history, economics, and works of literature. Come to think of it, diet and health, too!
Alas, in 2020, one story about our collective future that’s becoming increasingly ubiquitous— and maybe even appealing to those inclined to resignation— starts with the opening line “we’re doomed” (or, in the vernacular, that we’re “fucked” or “screwed”). I hear this kind of declaration from a substantial and rapidly growing proportion of the students I teach. I respond to these young people by saying, as I say to Ben and Kate, that humanity is in fact doomed only if we collectively choose to be doomed.
--Thomas Homer-Dixon
For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.
John F. Kennedy
Oddly enough, I notice that since things got really bad, everyone I meet is less dismayed.
--C.S. Lewis (around the time of the Dunkirk evacuation)
To regain our full humanity we have to regain our experience of connectedness with the entire web of life.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink.”
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
--Ernest Becker
The most fateful consequence of mental time travel may be the understanding that we will all die.
--Michael Corballis
If you know others and know yourself, you’ll not be imperiled in a hundred battles.
--Sun Tzu
It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, found religions, get locked up or ‘disappeared’ or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.
--Donella Meadows
Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.
[T]his new WIT [combination of worldview, institutions, & technology] will also need to incorporate a renovated discipline of economics— one that recognizes that human economies are complex systems intimately connected with nature; that markets won’t automatically find good substitutes for some of the most precious things nature gives us, like moderate temperatures and enough water for our crops; and that economics must be grounded in moral principles attuned to our world’s demanding new material and social realities. And, to top it all off, our alternative economic WIT should avoid the suffocating burden of increasingly complex government regulation, while retaining the technological creativity of modern capitalism within a democratic framework.
Nothing is more frightful than to see ignorance in action.
--Goethe
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its power of acting and reasoning as fear.
--Edmund Burke
Our imagination displays before us the ever-changing picture of the possible. It is with this picture that we incessantly confront what we fear and what we hope.
--Francois Jacob
Science in the service of humanity is technology, but lack of wisdom may make the service harmful.
--Isaac Asimov
Comprehension [means] examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us— neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight.
--Hannah Arendt
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.
--E.O. Wilson
Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope.
--Greta Thunberg
Power over the rules is real power. That’s why lobbyists congregate when Congress writes laws, and why the Supreme Court, which interprets and delineates the Constitution— the rules for writing rules— has even more power than Congress. If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules, and to who has power over them.
The great political philosopher Hannah Arendt captured the moment’s sentiment brilliantly, with language that resonates eerily today. “Never has our future been more unpredictable,” she declared. “Never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest— forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”
Throughout most of human history and up to 100 years ago — up to 20 years ago, in some parts of the world — a man or woman could lead their entire life snugly within the cocoon of the local tunnel-reality. Today, we all constantly collide with persons living in wildly different tunnel-realities. This creates a great deal of hostility in the more ignorant, vast amounts of metaphysical and ethical confusion in the more sophisticated, and growing disorientation for all — a situation known as our “crisis of values.”
Even the most devout radicals remain circumscribed by their context of the worldwide Crystal Palace, mirroring or parodying, like [Oklahoma City bomber Timothy] McVeigh, their supposed enemies, but at an accelerated rate: they obey the logic of reciprocity and escalating mimetic violence rather than any scriptural imperative.
Let's keep it short today from Hannah Arendt:
"We know today that the greatest danger of tyranny is from the executive."
— Hannah Arendt
Politics demands a great capacity for self-deception, which rescues the politician from hypocrisy. He can normally manage to believe what he is saying for the time it takes to say it. This gives him a certain sincerity even when he is saying opposite things to opposite people. Since he loves to be pleased, he tries to please people back. He genuinely dislikes disagreements with anyone. It interrupts the reciprocal laving of egos; it puts grit in the butter bath.
Garry Wills, Confessions of a Conservative (1979), p. 178
But in reality the best one can ever do with hypocrisy is take a stand for or against one kind or another, not for or against hypocrisy itself. We might regret the prevalence of hypocrisy, but if we want to do anything about it we have to get beyond generalised regret, and try instead to identify the different ways in which hypocrisy can be a problem.
Runciman, David Political Hypocrisy (2018) Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
. . . .
Hypocrisy turns on questions of character rather than simply coincidence with the truth. Likewise, though hypocrisy will involve some element of inconsistency, it is not true that inconsistency is itself evidence of hypocrisy. People often do, and often should, change their minds about how to act, or vary their principles depending on the situation they find themselves in. It is not hypocrisy to seek special treatment for one’s own children—to arrive, say, in a crowded emergency room with an ailing child and demand immediate attention—though it may be unrealistic or even counter-productive to behave in this way; it is only hypocrisy if one has some prior commitment not to do so. It is the prior commitment not to be inconsistent, rather than the fact of inconsistency, that generates the conditions of hypocrisy. That, of course, is one reason why hypocrisy is such a problem for politicians.
Id.
. . . .
From one perspective the act of concealment makes things worse—it simply piles vice on top of vice, which is why hypocrites are often seen as wickeder than people who are simply, and openly, bad. But from another perspective the concealment turns out to be a form of amelioration—it is, in Rochefoucauld’s timeless phrase, “the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” Hypocrites who pretend to be better than they really are could also be said to be better than they might be, because they are at least pretending to be good.
Id.
. . . . .
Once we acknowledge that some element of hypocrisy is inevitable in our political life, then it becomes self-defeating simply to try to guard against it. Instead, what we need to know is what sorts of hypocrites we want our politicians to be, and in what sorts of combinations. Do we want them to be hypocrites like us, so that they can understand us, or to be hypocrites of a different kind, so that they can manage our hypocrisy? Do we want them to be designing hypocrites, who at least know what they are doing, or do we want them to be more innocent than that? Do we want them to expose each other’s hypocrisy, or to ameliorate it?
Id.
. . . .
Clearly, a line needs to be drawn somewhere between the hypocrisies that are unavoidable in contemporary political life, and the hypocrisies that are intolerable. But it is hard to see where.
Id.
Son, in politics you've got to learn that overnight chicken shit can turn to chicken salad.
Lyndon B. Johnson (perhaps apocryphal)
I share all of the above quotes--and there must be thousands of more like them I could have cited--because I'm perplexed by the issue of hypocrisy and politics. Of course, on a basic level, the politician isn't always enamored of the colleague or voter or donator with whom she or he has to have a photo taken with, big beaming smile and all. They can't really think all of those babies are cute or all those chicken dinners really delicious. Of course not, and even those of us who aren't politicians engage in these venial hypocrisies on a regular basis. So, as David Runciman notes, it's not hypocrisy in general that we can rail against, it has to be certain type or level of hypocrisy--if this is the right word at all--that strongly disapprove of.
And I have to admit that within certain limits or situations, I appreciate a degree of hypocrisy. Runciman cites the well-worn adage of Rouchcufould that hypocrisy is “the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” And I have to admit on the basis of this adage I've praised Richard Nixon as a better type of crook than Donald Trump because Nixon was at least a hypocrite. He at least tried to cover-up his wrong-doing, and his campaign theme and rhetoric (as opposed to his actions in office) were "bring us together" and other nobler sentiments. (N.B. Nixon was also a great deal smarter than Trump as a politician, as a statesman, and as the head of a government, although the bar of comparison has now been set ridiculously low by Trump.) Nixon was at least a hypocrite. One suspects, even with all of the spiders in his mind, that there was some sense of propriety, perhaps even shame, in Nixon, while Trump seems utterly without a sense of shame and immune to the opinion of others. Of course, these dynamics also play out in the actions of those around these two law-breaking, norm-destroying presidents. In 1974, Republican senators led by Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott and former presidential nominee Barry Goldwater went to Nixon and told him that he should resign because he would be removed from office if impeached. (Nixon resigned before he was impeached, as he certainly would have been had he decided not to resign.) It's hard to imagine from those who recall that time, but the public debate and the conduct of politics for the most part were in a better state under the hypocrite (and crook) Nixon than they are under Donald Trump, with his blatant scorn for law, norms, and principles. Chalk one up for hypocrisy.
Also, as Runciman also states, "though hypocrisy will involve some element of inconsistency, it is not true that inconsistency is itself evidence of hypocrisy. People often do, and often should, change their minds about how to act, or vary their principles depending on the situation they find themselves in. "
I don't think that this point can receive enough emphasis. We can and should and do change our minds--and so should politicians. Emerson--"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds"--and economist Paul Samuelson--"Well when eve,nts change, I change my mind. What do you do?" (This quote is most often attributed to Keynes, but apparently this isn't correct.) That politicians should and do change their minds makes them better, not worse, if they have sound grounds. That is, if they act on grounds other than deception and sheer expediency. However, the public is not quick to pick-up on such distinctions, and you will find politicians pilloried by a bamboozled electorate over changes of mind that were no more than parliamentary maneuvers. (Remember the ridicule aimed at John Kerry for his supposed "he was for it before he was against it" opinion about the Iraq War?) The public, if wise, would want elected leaders, especially legislators, who change positions as events--such as negotiations and novel incentives--change. But ask any experienced politician if she or he would want to try to finesse this point or educate the public about it, and I don't believe you'd find any takers.
So now to the case in point, the most recent incident that has led to the concept and role of hypocrisy coming so loudly into my mind. I'm referring to the attitude of Republican senators on record stating that a Supreme Court vacancy shouldn't be filled in an election year. We have a large number of senators (all Republican) who've made statements to this effect. (The New York Times has conveniently cataloged their statements here.) And I've addressed this issue concerning my current Senator Cory Gardner (R-CO) and two senators from my native state of Iowa, Senators Charles Grassley and Joni Ernst. All of them have (as said of John Kerry) "flip-flopped" on this issue, to put in the kindest term possible. But because of the starkness of his statements, the brazenness of his reversal, and the convenience of Youtube, let's focus on Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Below are two clips of him, one from 2016 (during the refusal of the Republican Senate to consider the nomination Merrick Garland by President Obama) and the second came in 2018, during the Trump administration.
(Staring at about the 21'30" mark for the second clip.)
Despite what he said in 2016 and in 2018, very soon after the death of Justice Ginsberg, Senator Graham announced that he would support Senate action on a replacement nomination by President Trump even though the nomination process is over and voting for president has begun in some jurisdictions. Graham stated:
"After Kavanaugh, the rules have changed as far as I'm concerned," he told reporters, referring to the contentious confirmation for Justice Brett Kavanaugh. "We'll see what the market will bear if that ever happens."
Graham also said in a tweet on Saturday he "fully understands" Mr. Trump's desire to move quickly on filling the vacancy.
"I fully understand where President @realDonaldTrump is coming from," Graham wrote, referring to a tweet where Mr. Trump said Republicans had an "obligation" to fill the seat with "no delay."
N.B. The second Youtube clip posted above from The Atlantic Festival in 2018 occurred after the Kavanaugh nomination and hearings. In fact, if you, Kavanaugh hearing process was discussed at length in the immediately preceding portion of the conversation that I embedded above.
So, is the change in position taken by Senator Graham (and representative of many of his Republican colleagues) hypocrisy or something else? Does anyone contend that this is a fully justified, principled change in position? If it's hypocrisy, is it the venial kind or is it a more deadly sin? If it's something more than hypocrisy, does it constitute a lie? Does it constitute an abuse of power? Or is it--or should it be--"just politics" where power (as control) is the entire game and the devil take the hindmost?
I'm going to adjourn my essay at the enod of the paragraph and ask any reader who would kindly do so to weight in on this topic. I have a tolerant attitude toward most hypocrisy, including that of politicians. (My understanding and appreciation of American politics is greatly influenced by the brilliant early works of Garry Wills, political reporter-classicist par excellence, especially his Confessions of a Conservative (1979) quoted above and Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970). Wills's arguments about elections, bureaucrats, do-gooders, good-doers, and politicians appreciate the political process, including the sometimes maddening foibles of politicians.) Thus, I need to determine how to characterize the actions of the Republican senators. Should I have believed Senators Grassley and Graham and the others? (Their excuses, disclaimers, and "events changed" arguments have all come post facto.) Should I--should all of us--become more cynical? How big a sucker was I to expect some principled consistency (assuming, as I do, that the excuses offered by the Senators are not principled but mere rhetorical figleaves). Do these actions help or hurt the democratic process? To what extent do these actions by these senators represent a degneration of the quality of the democratic process (or not)? Let me know your thoughts. How do we explain, justify, or condemn these positions?
Nota Bene: Today, I'll only quote from one piece of writing, the source of our "deeper dive" with Hannah Arendt. I'll be quoting again from Arendt's "Understanding & Politics," published in 1953 in Partisan Review. I'm jumping ahead a bit here, but in reviewing my notes, these remarks near the conclusion of the essay struck me as quite striking. I'll add some comments after the quotes:
If we wish to translate the biblical language [King Solomon's prayer for an "understanding heart"] into terms that are closer to our speech (though hardly more accurate), we may call the faculty of imagination the gift of the “understanding heart.” In distinction from fantasy, which dreams something, imagination is concerned with the particular darkness of the human heart and the peculiar density which surrounds everything that is real. In distinction from fantasy, which dreams something, imagination is concerned with the particular darkness of the human heart and the peculiar density which surrounds everything that is real.
. . . .
True understanding does not tire of interminable dialogue and “vicious circles,” because it trusts that imagination eventually will catch at least a glimpse of the always frightening light of truth. To distinguish imagination from fancy and to mobilize its power does not mean that understanding of human affairs becomes “irrational.” On the contrary, imagination, as Wordsworth said, “is but another name for . . . clearest insight, amplitude of mind, / And Reason in her most exalted mood” (The Prelude, Book XIV, 190–92).
Imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias and prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair.
. . . .
Without this kind of imagination, which actually is understanding, we would never be able to take our bearings in the world. It is the only inner compass we have. We are contemporaries only so far as our understanding reaches. If we want to be at home on this earth, even at the price of being at home in this century, we must try to take part in the interminable dialogue with the essence of totalitarianism.
SNG: What caught my eye is Arendt's emphasis on "imagination" as an essential faculty of mind is so widely shared by other significant thinkers. Upon reading this, one thinks of Kant, Coleridge (who shares Kant as a common ancestor with Arendt), Owen Barfield, R.G. Collingwood, and the thinkers and commentary in Gary Lachman's Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. And this is a shortlist. All of these thinkers--and many others--realize that we can't gain understanding without the use of imagination. And we need imagination and understanding more than ever--even more than knowledge--as much as we sorely need further knowledge to address our current challenges.
Thus, at times when it seems as if people of color or women will become equal to white men, oligarchs are able to court white male voters by insisting that universal equality will, in fact, reduce white men to subservience. Both slaveholders in the 1850s and Movement Conservatives a century later convinced white American men that equality for people of color and women would destroy their freedom.
Postmodernists can be prone to narcissism, value relativism, a return to magical or mythical thinking, and intense forms of antimodernism that threaten to undermine the social foundations upon which postmodern culture itself ultimately depends.
There is never much point, whether in aesthetic or philosophic criticism, in arguing for coherent patterns of thought in the life’s work of a thinker or a poet. The history of all thought is broken up into new starts, blind alleys, reactionary retreats, fake advances, whether in one person’s work or in a collective movement. Yet in a life, as in an epoch, we search out form and direction. A biography is an attempt to place a life against a moral horizon, to frame it with its recognisable landmarks and pathways. One such framing was for Collingwood the long journey to make philosophy and history synonymous.
Pythagoras seems to have interposed numbers between the One and the Many, formulating for seemingly the first time the One-Few-Many which Empedocles would transpose into his theory of elements and Plato would expand into his Theory of Ideas. This doctrine is expressed in a range of ways which embody the transition from mythology to philosophy. There is a more imagistic mythological mode of expression, in which the idea of the Cosmic Person is used, perhaps under Orphic influence, and a more abstract structuralist mode, in which mathematics takes the place of myth.
And if the above wasn't deep enough for you, here's Hannah Arendt for the deeper dive, but I'm happy to report, quite succinct today:
1. Do you remember the "King's X" on the playground from when you were a kid? You know, when someone offered you a deal and you took it, only to get shortchanged because the kid pulls his hand from behind his back & says "I don't have to, I had a King's X"? Why did this come to mind? Keep reading.
2. In his statement, Grassley grows about the voters electing more Republicans to the Senate in 2018 after Trump appointed Gorsuch & Kavanaugh. Consider this from THE ATLANTIC:
"Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the United States Supreme Court by a vote of 50–48, with one senator absent and one abstaining. Only one Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, voted with the solidly Republican majority, which represented just 44 percent of the country’s population. Indeed, when Americans last voted for their senators (over a period of six years), Democrats won the popular vote by more than 8 percent. It’s that disproportionality—and the reality that a majority of the country’s population is represented by just 18 senators—that is driving concerns about the Senate’s ability to function as a representative body in a changing America." [Full link to the article: https://www.theatlantic.com/.../senators.../572623/ ]
3. Grassley now says that it's okay to approve a nominee after presidential voting has begun because the Senate & the President are of the same party, there's no "divided government" (although he neglects to mention that this president lost the popular vote and that the Republican Senate majority represents as a distinct minority of the U.S. population and of the votes cast for Senate seats.) But I digress. Here is a portion of Senator Grassley's letter to me in March 2016 that lays out his argument for the "Biden rule," as he labels it.
Grassley wrote:
"As Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, I take very seriously the advice of my predecessors, on the appropriateness for the Senate to withhold consent on any nominee to the Supreme Court, should the President not follow the example of his predecessors, such as President Lincoln, who abstained from making a nomination during a presidential election year until after the people voted. In 1992, while serving as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, then-Senator Joe Biden spoke on the Senate floor about the proper actions of the Senate in this very circumstance. My friend and colleague stated "Senate consideration of a nominee under these circumstances is not fair to the president, to the nominee, or to the Senate itself...Where the nation should be treated to a consideration of constitutional philosophy, all it will get in such circumstances is partisan bickering and political posturing from both parties and from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue."
I share the concerns of my friend Vice President Biden. We know that a nominee will not ultimately get confirmed, and because election season is well underway, no matter the qualifications of any potential nominee, the hyper-political environment would cause harm to the court, to the nominee, and to the nation.
It is important to remember that Congress is a coequal branch of government, and our founders sought to protect each branch of government from undue influence from either of the other two."
Perhaps, when reading Grassley's letter to me and then his most recent statement, you know why I was reminded of the "King's X" and, I must add, playground arguments. Of course, I learned not to trust those who used the "King's X." And I learned from my parents that "everyone else does it" isn't a valid excuse for my choices, not in an adult world. And I don't know that I ever floated the "they WOULD do it" argument that Senator Grassley usus in his attempt to justify the actions of himself and most of his Republican colleagues. I knew my (Republican) parents well enough to know that the "they would do it" excuse wouldn't fly (and would only elicit greater sanctions for me). My, how times change.
Well, here you have it: Grassley in 2016 and Grassley in 2020. Do you see the "King's X?"
I’m writing to you about whether it would be appropriate to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death of Justice Ginsberg before the beginning of the next presidential term. I read in the Washington Post that “The Colorado GOP senator said in 2016, after Justice Antonin Scalia died, that “I think we’re too close to the election. The president who is elected in November should be the one who makes this decision.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/18/gop-senators-who-will-decide-ginsburgs-vacancy/ & the link to the original quote in the Denver Posthttps://www.denverpost.com/2016/02/18/cory-gardner-hardens-stance-on-supreme-court-obama-should-not-pick/ ). I trust that the Denver Post quoted you accurately. But much more importantly, I hope that you made that statement in good faith and with a sincere belief that this was in the best interest of our republic. I know that for me and for millions of other Americans, if the Senate approves a nominee before the inauguration of a new term for President Trump or the beginning of a term for President Biden, it would be a slap in the face to we voters. Further, it would provide additional grounds for Americans to disbelieve whatever any politician says, all to the degradation of our democratic system. Also, as a lawyer, I’m deeply concerned about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. This type of midnight appointment would further cripple the esteem upon which the legitimacy and efficacy of the Court depends.
American voters were told four years ago by Republicans that even early in an election year, they--the voters--should have a say in the selection by waiting to fill a vacancy until after the beginning of a new presidential term. Now some of your colleagues want to rob the voters of this prerogative because they fear losing power as a result of the upcoming election and hope to maintain control by ramming through a judicial nomination that will be opposed by so many.
While many of your Republican colleagues are doing an about-face, thereby making themselves out to be the more than just typically hypocritical, but downright craven and abject. But not all of them are supporting this rather desperate and shocking grasp at raw power (in the face of what they fear is a sinking ship). I want to point out that your colleague (and my former senator), Charles Grassley, seems to be sticking to his principles. If he continues to do so, along with Senators Collins and Murkowski, you would be in good company. Perhaps others would stand for principle.
In the end, if you and enough of your colleagues choose the high road, it will benefit the Court, the Senate (as an institution), and yourself.
Thank you for your consideration of this matter. I will eagerly watch for your decision.
“The job of the adult is protection and care,” he felt, and “the job of all responsible human beings is the same protection and care towards the universe.”
Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization—the learning organization’s spiritual foundation.
...an observer studying a certain form of experience often finds it impossible to give an account of it without stating certain principles and distinctions which are not actually recognized by the persons whose experience he is studying. Thus an artist constructs his work on principles which are really operative in the construction, but are not explicitly recognized by himself, in art they are implicit, to become explicit only in the criticism of art.
Everything that is perceived by the senses or apprehended by the mind is relative, since sense objects “exist” in relation to the perceiving sense, and mind-objects in relation to the mind.
