A Minor Musing On Populism, Work, And The Common Person

I keep trying to understand the right wing populist bent, and I end up failing. (To be clear, I don't understand left wing populism either.)

As I understand it, populism in its current iteration is based on an idea that wealthy, well-educated elites who have held the levers of power for the past few decades have failed. It is, therefore, incumbent on the populace to remove elites from power and replace them with leaders who will do the will of the common folk.

That sentiment brought Donald Trump to the White House and Kristi Noem to South Dakota's Governor's Mansion. The fact that common folk support either politician is one of the the universe's ultimate ironies.

This Dakota Free Press post about South Dakota's Week of Work reminded me of an exchange I had with PNR when he blogging in South Dakota. He replied to one of my comments on his blog (which has sadly been taken down) with phrasing something like "there's a way to ensure that there's dignity in work without feeding people to maw of capitalism."  The post points out, Noem, a woman who seems to be becoming a darling of many Trumpists, will have students "engage with employers" but not with workers. They will be told how they can work for South Dakota or some corporation and become a means to a another's end. There will be little talk of workers' dignity or the dignity of work. In short, they may well be urged to hurl themselves into the capitalist maw whether the action is in their best interest or not.

If populism as a movement or a philosophy is to make any sense at all, it needs to be predicated in the belief that individuals ought to be viewed as ends unto themselves not means to governmental, corporate, or social elites' ends.  However, we're approaching the third anniversary of Trumpism as a governing philosophy and those three years have been nothing if not Orwellian, not in the 1984 sense but in The Animal Farm sense. Orwell's fable concludes, "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

Just as Orwell's men and pigs became indistinguishable, the policies of the elites that populists believe failed them and Trump are nearly identical. Damon Linker, writing for The Week, makes the case:

. . . . On policy substance there has been a single actual change: the GOP is now far more nativist on immigration than it was from 1980 to 2008. Other than that, the only significant shift has been at the level of style. Trump is a lying, trash-talking BS artist who treats trolling as his preferred form of presidential address. A day during which he manages to "trigger the libs" is a good day for the Trump White House (and the days when he doesn't are exceedingly rare). That is the only meaningful respect in which Trump is a populist: He talks down to and encourages the meanest sensibilities of Republican voters rather than seeking to elevate them and the rest of the country with exalted rhetoric. 

That's it. In every other respect, the Trump administration might as well be the third term of George W. Bush.

Linker may be underselling the effect of nativism and "encourag[ing] the meanest sensibilities" of voters.  Both likely make it easier to view others as means to an end rather than an end unto themselves and, therefore, deepen the irony that populists support those who have little regard for the people who elected them and may well make the lives of common folk worse.

A Minor Musing About Libertarians In The Age Of Trump

This Dakota Free Press post about Bob Newland's speech to the 2019 Libertarian Party Convention caused a few ideas to gel for me. (As a quick aside, I believe I have met Mr. Newland only once and he struck me as an affable gentleman.)

First, it's refreshing to see a Libertarian discuss a role for government in infrastructure. I would like to hear Libertarians also espouse Hayek's view of social insurance:

There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained , the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom. . . .there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. . . . 

Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.

Hayek goes on to say, ". . . there is no incompatibility in principle between the state's providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom."

Libertarians' unwillingness to support a social safety net might have something to do with their view of socialism, a political theory Newland took time to attack. In 2019, however, the biggest threat to classic liberalism is not socialism but the new toxic mix of nationalism, populism, and Trumpism. 

Earlier this summer members of the conservative intelligentsia engaged in a rather heated argument about liberalism. Writing in First Things, Sohrab Ahmari attacked Never-Trumper David French because French, a cultural conservative,  "has individual autonomy [as] his lodestar: He sees 'protecting individual liberty' as the main, if not sole, purpose of government." In short, Ahmari is attacking French for being too Libertarian.

More importantly, Ahmari uses Trump, a man whose only political philosophy is an "I alone can fix it" narcissism as a blank slate. According to Ahmari,

[Trump's] instinct has been to shift the cultural and political mix, ever so slightly, away from autonomy-above-all toward order, continuity, and social cohesion. He believes that the political community—and not just the church, family, and individual—has its own legitimate scope for action. He believes it can help protect the citizen from transnational forces beyond his control.

Trump's recent "go back" to "crime infested places from which they came" tweets put the lie to any claims that he seeks "social cohesion." However, it seems clear that Ahmari wants to use Trump's followers to impose a form of "order" that will, unironically, attempt to force people to be autonomous and virtuous in ways that bend the terms "autonomy" and "virtue" beyond recognition. In short, government will exist to force citizens to relinquish rights to achieve the nationalists' or Trumpists' order.

Finally, the Ahmari article coincides with Newland's apprehension about what he calls an "insidious threat," "squincthy-eyed evangelicals" who attempt to impose "their version of God's will" on others. Ahmari is not an evangelical. He will, however, give intellectual heft to some social conservatives' desires to quell their inchoate fears with government imposed puritanical security. That threat should have all of us keeping one foot in the Libertarian camp.

A Musing About State Senator Stace Nelson's Wall Resolution, Facts, Lies, Truth, And Politics

Daniel Patrick Moynihan allegedly said that one is entitled to one's opinion, but not one's own facts.

I thought of Moynihan this morning when I read this Stace Nelson's comment on Dakota Free Press.

35+ posts of personal attacks and absolute rubbish with not one intelligent comment about the actual bill. Who does that? The Trump Derangement Syndrome is alive and well. Ranting and raving and not one of you have read the actual bill.. If you can’t debate the issues? Make things up and lie, lie, lie.

Nelson's outburst was in response to comments about his proposed resolution supporting Trump's border wall. His comment also contains a draft of his own resolution. My comment which contained a link to a Washington Post article and used numbers that come from various media sources was apparently one of those pieces of "rubbish."

Perhaps I am being nostalgic and naive, but the Moynihan assertion was made a time when people agreed what the facts were and political arguments were about the implications of those facts. Granted, I can't remember a time in my life when someone didn't mutter something about lies, damned lies and statistics or utter the phrase "figures don't lie, but liars sure do figure." Even with those caveats, it seems that people used to agreed about what the facts were. The political arguments were about the best way to deal with those facts.

In 2019 no one seems willing to agree what the facts are. I believe that Trump has said 3924 false things as president as of this writing. Based on his comment cited above, Nelson may accuse me of having Trump Derangement Syndrome. Nelson's proposed resolution contains a copious amount of numbers, many of which Nelson claims he found in congressional records. I recognize some of them as numbers originating from sources that I believe to be biased. As I did at Dakota Free Press, I will point out that Trump seems to have made up the number about the cost of illegal immigration. Many supporters of the wall will claim the article is an example of mainstream media bias.

A few years back, Chris Mooney wrote an article "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science." These conclusions seem relevant to the point at hand.

In other words, people rejected the validity of a scientific source because its conclusion contradicted their deeply held views. . . . The study subjects weren’t “anti-science”—not in their own minds, anyway. It’s just that “science” was whatever they wanted it to be. “We’ve come to a misadventure, a bad situation where diverse citizens, who rely on diverse systems of cultural certification, are in conflict,” says Kahan. 

And that undercuts the standard notion that the way to persuade people is via evidence and argument. In fact, head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.

Were this post a high schooler's original oratory, I would expect a solution at this point in the composition. I don't have one. I'm going to try to approach issues like I approached judging a debate round and look for the best evidence and the best arguments. Nelson and other supporters of Trump's wall will likely claim they're doing the same thing.

If we can't agree about facts and Mooney is correct that evidence and argument only cause people to hold their views more firmly, the political climate will get more charged and angry. To apply an overused Thomas Hobbes statement, it will be nasty and brutish, a war of everyone against everyone. Welcome to post-truth America.

Post-Truth America: A Minor Musing

Today's Argus Leader reports that several Sioux Falls residents have found plastic bags containing candy and a Klu Klux Klan recruitment flier. This tactic seems similar to one the Klan is apparently using in upstate New York. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists only one Klan group in South Dakota, the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan which is headquartered in Custer.

There was a time when I thought the best way to deal with groups like the Klan was to treat them like this tuba player treated some neo Nazis a few years back. Since then however, a man fired a gun inside a pizza restaurant because he was investigating whether the pizzeria was "the home of a Satanic child sex abuse ring involving top Democrats such as Hillary Clinton." Earlier this summer a man blocked  traffic on Hoover Dam demanding the release of a report that had already been released. His focus seems to have been Hillary Clinton's email server.

Meanwhile, the Holy fire  burning in California was allegedly set by Forrest Clark, Clark seems to share multiple versions of the truth that diverge from reality. This JJ MacNab tweetstorm gives the particulars, but the short version should suffice:

Based on his social media pages, Clark is a sovereign citizen who believes in just about every kooky conspiracy out there, including QAnon, Pizzagate, Jade Helm 15, flat earth theories, NESARA, Jesuit conservancies, shape-shifting lizard overlords. You name it, he believes it

It may be a long jump from candy on the end of the driveway to arson'', but the Klan denies the truth that all are created equal. If one denies what is essentially the nation's core creed because of some allegedly hidden, arcane knowledge it becomes easy to believe a high level official calling himself Q is using 4chan to send messages about an impending political storm that will destroy the "deep state," that the nation's elites use a public pizza parlor to perform Satanic rituals and abuse children, or that the American Republic ended in the 1870s.

The term post-truth seems frequently applied to Donald Trump who has as of this writing said 2291 false things as President. Philosopher Simon Blackburn contends that the phrase post-truth may be problematic because no one doubts that bus in bearing down him or her. Blackburn does, however, admit a danger in the political and realm:

It’s a bit like conspiracy theorists, who actually thrive on the fact that all the evidence points against their theory, because that just shows that the establishment is clever enough to conceal what’s really going on. People get attached to certain ideas and nothing will shake them. And when convictions start to live in opposition to reason or truth, that’s a very dangerous thing.

He offers a solution that may work at an individual level:

. . . I’m very cautious in matters of truth. If there is no evidence for a belief and lots of evidence against it, it should not matter what you would like to be true or hope or wish to be true. Follow the probabilities and put up with the inconvenience.

That’s an academic or a scholar speaking, but it has always been the only hope for human progress.

But Blackburn also tempers that optimism:

Of course, people are good at shirking the facts and threatening and bullying anyone who challenges them; this has always been the case. But I believe that all decent people eventually reject this kind of behavior, and want to see liars held responsible for their lies. 

I can’t say whether or not this will happen ... but I sure hope it does.

I too hope will happen, but I have more dread than hope. Too many are claiming a special truth that only they or their confederates can share, and too many are unwilling to look at the evidence that conflicts with their worldview. I hope we won't see more candy mixed with Klan fliers but I fear we're just seeing constitutes the beginning a long battle with dangerous lies.

Governor Daugaard Is Probably Glad She Didn't Mention Philosophy

It's about time for South Dakota's Governor Daugaard to issue one of his regular insults to philosophy majors. Because I believe there's always a place for philosophy and the humanities, I was pleased to listen to this WNAX report featuring University of South Dakota President Sheila Gestring defending the liberal arts.

Gestring makes several important points about the inherent value of the liberal arts. First, she rightfully points out that "there are jobs today we didn't even contemplate ten years ago." and "that will be true five years from now." She points out that a liberal arts education uniquely teaches students to meet the needs of jobs that don't exist now because the liberal arts teaches "students how to be problem solvers and how to think critically."

More importantly, she asserts that the creative thinking prompted by the liberal arts helps one "interpret what this job is evolving from and to" and gives employees an advantage in a world that changes quickly because of technology.

Finally, she points out that "communication skills are . . .very, very important and that's at the foundation of the liberal arts as well."

It's unfortunate that university heads have to defend the liberal arts from political leaders, but it's refreshing when they do so cogently.

A Musing About State Representative Michael Clark's Statements

State Representative Michael Clark brought some unwanted national attention to South Dakota this week when he opined on Facebook that businesses should be able to discriminate based on race.  To the best of my knowledge, I have never met Clark, so I have no basis to judge whether he is a racist or merely a person who refuses to think before he speaks. I know this is late, but a part of Clark's comment that got little attention stuck in my craw and I needed to think it through a bit.

Clark's racially charged comments overshadow a statement that revealed some deep cognitive dissonance inside the populist/Trumpist movement, a movement which mislabels itself as conservative.

Clark asserts, "The vote of the dollar is very strong." 

No one should dispute the dollar's power, but the statement contains many implications. In the context with the rest of his statements, one could take it to mean that businesses should discriminate against anyone they chose so long as the business makes a profit. In short, the public can legitimize racism, sexism or any form of otherization it chooses. This reading re-enforces the idea that Clark's comments reflect a deep racism.

The statement may also imply that good, hard-working decent folk will boycott businesses that unjustly discriminate based on race, creed, gender or sexual orientation. This reading implies that the United States has permanently rejected the hateful ideas that produced Jim Crow laws in a wide swath of the nation. This reading implies that human nature has somehow been altered since George Wallace said, "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever." [ellipsis in original]

While the latter reading may be more generous, the belief that human nature has changed and people will suddenly cease supporting with their dollars and voices those who practice injustice is flawed.

The self-proclaimed social conservatives who make up the backbone of the current populist moment used to hold as an article of faith that "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked" It's unlikely that the "wicked" will use their dollars to fight injustice. If one wants a secular source, all one has to do is compare the statements made by characters in the Iliad and the entitled pronouncements from professional athletes or other celebrities. If one wants a bit of science, humanity makes up .01% of life on Earth but have destroyed 83% of mammalian life. No amount of dollars seem to change behavior.

In short, trusting the dollar to change human behavior is as foolish and dangerous as advocating legalized discrimination.

The Post Office And FedEx Show I Am Warped

Yesterday, these two items were delivered to my house. I ordered both but seeing them side by side gives me pause

I don't think I have explain AntMan collectibles co-sponsored by Marvel and Funko.

According to Amazon, A Secular Age

offers a historical perspective. [Charles Taylor] examines the development in "Western Christendom" of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today's secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion--although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined--but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.

It may well be too deep for me, but the ideas fascinate.

Quotation Of The Day: Governor Daugaard Should "Stop Making Fun Of Philosophy And Read Some Philosophy" Edition

The quoted part of the post's title comes from this Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry piece in The Week The guts of the argument:

And at the level of our society, there is a dramatic pragmatic stake in philosophy. We live in enormously complex, technologically advanced societies where we have the power to do a great deal of harm and a great deal of good. Our societies are built on complex institutions (such as "democracy," "the free market," and "science"), which are in turn premised on ways of looking at the world and on ideas about the world and humanity — in other words, on philosophy.

But we have become like people in a Star Trek episode whose planet is ruled by a benevolent artificial intelligence, and who live such charmed lives as a result that, over generations, they have forgotten how the computer works, so that when it breaks down, they are completely powerless to repair it, and have to call the Enterprise for help. Our entire civilization is built on technology called "philosophy" that, in many ways, we are losing a basic understanding of. . . .

. . .

Serious philosophy is valuable in itself. It is worth studying for its own sake.

But it is also the case that our society is built on ancient philosophy, and that if we forget how it works, very soon, we will break it — or it will break us.

Daugaard The Sophist?

This was a post I wanted to get to last week, but given Governor Daugaard will likely continue to condemn philosophy and the liberal arts, it remains timely.

Madville Times does a great job of refuting South Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard's latest erroneous contention about the value of philosophy. If fact, Cory does such a great job that I would not even have bother with this post if Daugaard had not put out a weekly release with this sentence: "Everything is relative, of course."

The numbers Daugaard is referring to in the press release may need context, but they are not relative. Given Daugaard's distaste for liberal arts, one should not be surprised that the Governor is imprecise in his language use. All of us are at times, but no one in the South Dakota blogosphere has a paid staff hired to ensure usage is precise. It is more troubling that Daugaard sees nothing wrong with the phrase "everything is relative. In fact, not everything is relative.

Let's turn to philosopher Simon Blackburn.

Then, fortunately, there are countless small, unpretentious things that we know with perfect certainty.  Happiness is preferable to misery, and dignity is better than humiliation.  It is bad that people suffer, and worse if a culture turns a blind eye to their suffering.  Death is worse than life; the attempt to find a common point of view is better than manipulative contempt for it. –Simon Blackburn, Being Good, 134.

Terry Eagleton provides and even stronger statement:

All truths are established from specific viewpoints; but it does not make sense to say that there is a tiger in the bathroom from my point of view but not from yours.  You and I may contend fiercely about whether there is a tiger in the bathroom or not.  To call truth absolute here is just to say that one of us has to be wrong.

If it is true that racism is an evil, then it is not just true for those who happen to be its victims.  They are not just expressing how they feel; they are making a statement about the way things are.  ‘Racism is an evil’ is not the same kind of proposition as ‘I always find the smell of fresh newsprint blissful.’  It is more like the statement ‘There is a tiger in the bathroom.’  One could imagine someone murmuring consolingly to the victims of racism that he understands just why they feel the way that they do; that he understands just why they feel the way they do; that this feeling is of course entirely valid for them – indeed, that if he were in their shoes he would doubtless feel just the same way; but that in fact he is not in their shoes, and so does not consider the situation to racist at all.  This individual is known as a relativist.  He might conceivably be known, less politely, as a racist. – Terry Eagleton, After Theory, 106 

Off the top of my head, I can think of only two schools of philosophical thought that would accept "everything is relative" as true: the ancient sophists and their descendants, the postmodern deconstructionists. For whatever reason, Daugaard doesn't seem like one of the latter. 

Perhaps the Governor would know that if he brushed up on his philosophy instead of condemning it and trumpeting his wisdom about philosophy without understanding the subject. The latter quality does mark him as a sophist.

Just in case I didn't make it clear earlier: not everything is relative

FoDoM or FUBAR?

FoDoM is the acronym that I came up with for "Friends of Dennis (Daugaard) and Mike (Rounds)." I'm not a friend of either man, but I was getting ready to teach a unit about Aristotle's concept of friendship and Daugaard's disdain for philosophy came to mind. That led to musings summarized below.

Aristotle breaks friendship down into three categories:

In Book VIII of his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle categorizes three different types of friendship: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure, and friendships of the good. Friendships of utility are those where people are on cordial terms primarily because each person benefits from the other in some way. Business partnerships, relationships among co-workers, and classmate connections are examples. Friendships of pleasure are those where individuals seek out each other’s company because of the joy it brings. Passionate love affairs, people associating with each other due to belonging to the same hobby organization, and fishing buddies fall into this category. Most important of all are friendships of the good. These are friendships based upon mutual respect, admiration for each other’s virtues, and a strong desire to aid and assist the other person because one recognizes their essential goodness.

When it comes to education, the past and current governors' collective efforts have produced little utility, pleasure, or good. Rounds created and Daugaard exploited a situation in education funding that, at best, brings to mind another acronym FUBAR. If one goes beyond funding, HB 1234, which was thankfully repealed, epitomizes the concept of FUBAR in the legislative and executive branch.

I have to do more reading to be certain, but it strikes me that Aristotle would consider those who vote for a candidate friends of utility. The candidate gets the votes he or she desires and voters get the policies they desire. I'm sure some contributing FoDoM gained utility from their friendship with Daugaard and Rounds. The FoDoM who are hunting or drinking or golfing or whatever friends of pleasure one might be doing also likely gained something from their friendship. As for the rest of us, I'm hard pressed to think of any utility or pleasure arising from the Rounds or Daugaard tenures.

More importantly, government should be about protecting the good. The idea that these two men as governors actually protected the good or created enough utility to justify their re-elections or elevation to the United States Senate is, to continue using an apt acronym, FUBAR.

Maybe This Will Help Governor Daugaard Appreciate Philosophy

Governor Daugaard strikes me as a fan of banal programming like Full House. Michelle Foucault is a new Tumblr that combines pictures of Michelle Tanner, a character on the sitcom, with quotations from French philosopher Michel Foucault.

The Onion's AV Club sums up the site:

The work of multi-hyphenate artist Buzz Slutsky, Michelle Foucault expertly juxtaposes the 20th-century theorist’s insights into the imposed will of the hegemony with that grim specter of the societal norm, the Olsen Twins. The effect is a jarring, if hilarious, combination of the cute with the dire warnings of a society that embraces its own subjugation.

Here are three of my favorites.

Maybe Republican United States Senate candidate and former governor Mike Rounds will appreciate the Tumblr as well. Focault was French and Rounds likes photos from France.

Quotation Of The Day: We Live In A Pink Police State Edition

James Poulos, an underappreciated public intellectual and social commentator, makes that case that most of dichotomies that we use to discuss politics and government such as public and private or liberal and conservative no longer apply because we live in a "pink police state" that equates justice and health. His analysis also illustrates that every bogeyman buzzword is likely obsolete

. . . .in the new regime, two separate logics and cultures rule two separate, but co-dependent, realms of life. This state of affairs transcends “partisan ideologies” as we know them. The shared neoconservative and neoliberal affinity for enforced health and safety, and their shared fear and loathing of the realm of illness and unquantified risk, plainly shows that one need not identify as a Democrat, liberal, or Progressive in order to champion the new officialdom. The issue is not, as it was with the military-industrial complex, what the elites think policy should be; it is what the elites instinctively think politics is.

Sticking with this line of inquiry allows us to get beyond the many interesting but contending and partial definitions of the relevant elite in America—the “new class,” the “ruling class,” the “country club,” the “crony capitalists,” the “1 percent,” the “east-coast power corridor,” and so on. These are all manifestations or avatars of the only elite that, analytically speaking, suffices as a unit of analysis, because only this analysis indicates what everyone is struggling to surmise, namely, the character of the new American regime.

The new regime is not totalitarian, fascist, socialist, capitalist, conservative, or liberal, according to the accepted and common definitions of those terms. It is not even adequately described as corporatist, although corporatism is very much at home within it. The “pink police state” is not a police state in the sense that George Orwell would be familiar with, but one in which a militarized, national policing apparatus is woven into the fabric of trillions of transactions online and off. Nor is it a “pinko commie” regime in the sense of enforcing “political correctness” out of total allegiance to Party; rather, it enforces the restrictions and permissions doled out by its sense of “clean living.” To invoke Michel Foucault again, ours is an age when governance is inseparable from hygiene in the minds of the elite that rules over both the private and public sector. To them, everything is theoretically a health issue.

Are You Human?: A Little Reminder That Being Alive Means Being Flawed

I think I'll play this on the first day of school for my "Oh my God if I don't get an A I'll never get into the right college and die an old cat person in a house featured on Hoarders!" students.

Quotation Of The Day: Physicist Explains Why Governor Daugaard Is Wrong About Usefulness Of Philosophy

Sean Carroll concludes his post "Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy" with the following:

The point, I take it, is to understand how nature works. Part of that is knowing how to do calculations, but another part is asking deep questions about what it all means. That’s what got me interested in science, anyway. And part of that task is understanding the foundational aspects of our physical picture of the world, digging deeply into issues that go well beyond merely being able to calculate things. It’s a shame that so many physicists don’t see how good philosophy of science can contribute to this quest. The universe is much bigger than we are and stranger than we tend to imagine, and I for one welcome all the help we can get in trying to figure it out.

Governors should also stop saying silly things about philosophy. Those who wish to be reminded of Daugaard's condescending attitude toward philosophical inquiry should read this Madville Times post. An earlier quotation of the day illustrating Daugaard's lack of critical analysis is here.

Tweet Of The Day: The Distinction Contemporary Education Misses Edition

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
— Immanuel Kant (@KantQuotes) June 27, 2014

The David Brat Victory Has Produced Good Results

The Brat victory and some reactions to it have led to this Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry column "It's Urgent To Put The Liberal Arts Back At The Center Of Education" in  Forbes. Contra South Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard, Gobry asserts that education ought not exist solely to crate workers:

Nobody stops to ask what education is for, because the answer is implicitly accepted by all: an education is for getting a job. It is, in other words, for being a cog in the giant machine of post-industrial capitalism. It is, in other words, for the opposite thing that our forefathers wanted for us. I do not use these words lightly, but it is against–in the sense that a headwind is against a ship–the very foundations of our liberty and our civilization.

Before reaching this conclusion, Gorby runs through a brief primer on a liberal education and virtue. Did I mention this post was on the Forbes website?

Back to David Brat, apparently he wrote an academic paper asserting that the state retains a legitimate monopoly on violence. At the National Review Charles Cooke runs down the outraged reactions (PNR is off to other duties this week, so it falls to me to be the member of the South Dakota blogosphere who posts an NRO quotation .)

“Unusual” and “eye-opening” was the New York Daily News’s petty verdict. In the Wall Street Journal, Reid Epstein insinuated darkly that the claim cast Brat as a modern-day fascist. And, for his part, Politico’s Ben White suggested that the candidate’s remarks “on Neitzsche and the government monopoly on violence don’t make a whole lot of sense.” As is its wont, the progressive blogosphere lost its collective marbles too: One contributor sardonically described Brat’s claim as a “doozy,” while another contended that such opinions were sufficient for “one to question his, shall we say, cognitive coherence.”

Cooke then goes on to take these reporters to task for not understanding a relatively basic concept enunciated by Max Weber. Cooke also rightly faults both ends of the political spectrum for using language imprecisely:

To refuse to subordinate language to politics is the first and most important duty of the free man. Alas, both Left and Right too often lean toward imprecision and pretense when it suits their ends, shooting sharpened daggers at plain-speaking sorts who dare to express the less pleasant truths of our society in harsh and unlovely language. The Left reacts with particular exasperation when one observes that taxation is forced confiscation of property; the Right when one points out that firearms are lethal weapons whose purpose is to kill.

Brat's candidacy has brought about a column discussing the nature of government and a column explaining that education ought to create citizens not workers. Apparently, he also defeated an arrogant ass. If only he could just get rid of that Ayn Rand fetish.

What's The Difference Between A Politician And A Jerk?

Based on this Eric Schwitzgebel unified theory of jerkitude, probably not much.

I submit that the unifying core, the essence of jerkitude in the moral sense, is this: the jerk culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or idiots to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic peers. This failure has both an intellectual dimension and an emotional dimension, and it has these two dimensions on both sides of the relationship. The jerk himself is both intellectually and emotionally defective, and what he defectively fails to appreciate is both the intellectual and emotional perspectives of the people around him. He can’t appreciate how he might be wrong and others right about some matter of fact; and what other people want or value doesn’t register as of interest to him, except derivatively upon his own interests. The bumpkin ignorance captured in the earlier use of ‘jerk’ has changed into a type of moral ignorance.

Some related traits are already well-known in psychology and philosophy – the ‘dark triad’ of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy, and James’s conception of the asshole, already mentioned. But my conception of the jerk differs from all of these. The asshole, James says, is someone who allows himself to enjoy special advantages out of an entrenched sense of entitlement. That is one important dimension of jerkitude, but not the whole story. The callous psychopath, though cousin to the jerk, has an impulsivity and love of risk-taking that need be no part of the jerk’s character. Neither does the jerk have to be as thoroughly self-involved as the narcissist or as self-consciously cynical as the Machiavellian, though narcissism and Machiavellianism are common enough jerkish attributes. My conception of the ‘jerk’ also has a conceptual unity that is, I think, both theoretically appealing in the abstract and fruitful in helping explain some of the peculiar features of this type of animal, as we will see.

Eric Cantor, Mosul, And The February 5, 1973 Issue Of Newsweek

Two events occurred yesterday that should keep the entire blogsophere and cable talking heads busy for a long time. First, Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, fell to insurgents. Second Eric Cantor, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives.was defeated in a Republican primary.

If I grudgingly give in to my cynical nature, the former event makes me glad we have eliminated cable from our household because I will not have to listen to Lindsey Graham and other neocons advocate unrealistic, bellicose responses. The latter event will give me further reason to believe that the Tea Party has an Ayn Rand fetish that borders on obscene. If, after reading these compiled analyses and this comment section about another subject of controversy, I give my cynicism free rein, I might conclude that some on the far right will accept that humans cause global warming if those humans happen to be undocumented aliens living within the United States.

Today, however, I will hold on to the few remaining better angels in my nature and muse that that yesterday's big stories may cause us to miss something equally important. For evidence, I offer the February 5, 1973 issue of Newsweek.

As the cover would indicate, the issue devotes 9 of its 92 pages to the Viet Nam War's end. Lyndon Johnson's death and funeral earn 8 pages. The Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision rates 2 pages of coverage. The combined Agnew/Nixon scandals receive about 1 1/2 pages. In one week, America saw the end of one battle in the cultural war, the beginning of a new one, and the end of the New Deal era while the 20th Century's largest political scandal simmered. It was not a slow news cycle.

Given those historic events, readers should be forgiven if they missed an italicized, funny sounding word on the last line of page 61, jihad. That concept,or a complete perversion of that concepts, and American reaction to it have dominated American foreign policy, cost untold losses of blood and treasure, and given rise to an Orwellian national security state.

Perhaps yesterday's events aren't hiding a word or event that will dominate public discourse decades from now, but the February 5, 1973 issue of Newsweek ought to serve as reminders that historic events often hide the seeds of events that dominate the next generation's political and cultural zeitgeist.

My Teaching Goal For The Next Four Years: A Minor Musing On The Moral Question Facing Teachers

A while back, PNR posted this quotation:

For the conservative, people are an asset — in the coldest economic terms, a potentially productive unit of labor. For the progressive, people are a liability — a mouth to be fed, a problem in need of a solution. Understanding that difference of perspective renders understandable the sometimes wildly different views that conservatives and progressives have about things like employment policy. For the conservative, the value of a job is what the worker produces; for the progressive, the value of a job is what the worker is paid.

At the time it struck me that conservatives and liberals are my cats at different times of the day. To them, I'm a unit of labor necessary to provide food, clean the litter box, and scratch behind their ears. I'm also a problem that needs to be solved when they try to wake me up to get kitty treats every morning.

I also wondered whether how self-proclaimed Christian conservatives squared the analysis in the quotation with the belief that humans are created in God's image. I shrugged off that question, mused that I believe that Kant's idea that humans should be treated as ends unto themselves rather than means to an end is superior to utilitarianism, and went on with my day.

That quotation came back to me yesterday as I was sitting in an in-service-- professional development a really boring training session over the Charolette Danielson model for teacher evaluation. Danielson and the Common Core, for that matter, view teachers as a unit of labor whose sole purpose is to produce other units of labor. As one of my colleagues said, there's no idea of what it means to become an educated person in any of this model.

As I sat there, I came to the distinct conclusion that the real moral question that education has created for teachers is rather simple: How does one teach within these models or under the Core without producing students who chant mindless aphorisms such as "Four legs good, two legs bad" or "I must work harder."

A Minor Musing About Government

PNR waxes philosophic while analyzing the Stace Nelson candidacy:

I think we in this country have, for the most part, made a god out of the government as if they can solve every problem - all they need is the right bureaucracy, the right law, the right regulation, the right court decision, and everything will be good and right and true.  This idolatry of the state goes back to the kings and potentates of the ancient near east at least, and their claims of divinity.  It changed only slightly in the middle ages of Europe with its notions of divine right.  And it blossomed into the modern era in the French Revolution which, quite literally, did seek to make a religion out of the state in direct opposition to the church.  Most of what ails us in this country springs from this idolatry.

Certainly a large number of America's self-professed Christians have not taken to heart Psalm 20:7

Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.

I hold little hope that government will solve most or any of our problems. I do not, however, see the worship of government to be a deeper root cause of the problems facing the nation than the worship of any other false god.

The nation can no longer seriously debate about whether it is a republic or a democracy. (Whether that debate was ever necessary is a question for a different post.) The current political divisions are not about the size of or the nature of a good government. Rather, these debates seem to be about which plutocratic element gets the lion's share of the spoils. If there were no government, I'm quite certain the plutocrats would discover ways to preserve their ability to protect their frequently inherited wealth and ensure that fruits of others' labor flow to the plutocrats' coffers.

For every Tower of Babel, there is a Golden Calf (my choice for the chief god in the pantheon of ills) and an image of Baal. Further, we humans each have our share of foibles, hubris chief among them. It may or may not take a village to raise a child, but it certainly takes a pantheon of false gods to explain the problems facing the county.

Quite frankly, the current situation shows Madison's observations in Federalist 51 correct:

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Shakespeare has Cassius tell Brutus that the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves The largest fault might lie in the fact that we've run out of ideas for auxiliary precautions.