Chambers and Trilling
At TNR.com, Damon Linklater writes an interesting review of Michael Kimmage’s book on Whitaker Chambers and Lionel Trilling, two thinkers whose mid-20th Century rejection of their early communism influenced the current American ideological marketplace. Linklater writes:
Until the mid-1950s, American conservatism was less a coherent ideology than an irritably reactionary mood: reflexively hostile to the federal government, staunchly isolationist, explicitly anti-modern, proudly agrarian, and incapable of distinguishing between communism and New Deal liberalism, which were treated as twin forms of modern tyranny. Thanks in no small part to Chambers—whose religiously inspired turn to anti-communism became a significant influence upon conservative ideology owing to his classic memoir Witness, his friendship with William F. Buckley, Jr., and his essays for National Review—mainstream conservatism eventually came to support the use of American power in the world and to accept the legitimacy of a strong (if strictly limited) role for the federal government in American life.
Adding to the noise
Demagoguery in modern politics
In reaction to the Supreme Court’s landmark decision Citizens United v. The Federal Election Commission, Jake offered a nice analysis of the role of the 30-second ad in politics and mass decision-making.
I’d like to add to his excellent analysis a few reflections of my own, which I hope will complement his approach.
Jake’s concern is whether protecting television and radio ads as political speech will vitiate what it means to engage in democratic deliberation. Telling someone that X candidate is a danger to America’s prosperity through a rapid-fire advertisement likely to pelt the viewer with negative images seems more like manipulation that discussion.
But is the problem incendiary political speech or the avenues of dissemination? Read more
Oh, I don’t know, I like all of them
I’ve always wondered what would happen if candidates for public office were asked about political philosophy. One of the more memorable examples of this occurred in 1999, during the Republican presidential primary debate in Iowa. Candidates George W. Bush, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer, Alan Keyes, and Steve Forbes were asked the following question: “With which political philosopher or thinker do you identify the most, and why?”
Bush, answering third, simply replied, “Christ. Because he changed my life.” Not to be outdone, Bauer and Hatch picked Jesus Christ as well (actually, Hatch referenced Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan too). Only Forbes, the publisher, picked an actual philosopher - John Locke.
So… who would you pick? Should politicians be expected to know at least a few political philosophers? Is naming a particular philosopher (say, Mill, Hobbes, or Rawls) a dangerous move? After all, most figures in the field are either bait for criticism or so unknown as to turn off the average voter. Either way, it’s a fun stumper question!
-Colin
Hobbes and religion … in Hebrew
A collection of scholars weigh in on an odd, but interesting event: the first full publication of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan in Hebrew. While the first two parts (dealing with philosophy and politics) have long been available, the third and fourth (which deal with religion) had not yet been translated and published in the Hebrew language.
Among others, Yoram Hazony laments the suppression of the “Hebraic” side of Hobbes, and philosopher Stephen Darwall lavishes the following praise:
Thomas Hobbes is our greatest political philosopher. Why greatest? Others philosophized in the service of sounder political ideas, like democracy and human rights, but no one else has had Hobbes’s systematic mastery, rigor and originality.
Hobbes’s “state of nature” and authoritarianism have stood the test of time, but his theological thought is largely ignored today (the latter half of “Leviathan” is rarely assigned in class). It is a bit of a slow read. Perhaps we need a translation of our own, into modern English…
-Colin
In defense of reading Heidegger
Or “Yes, chapters 1-2 of Introduction to Metaphysics are still due Monday.”
Sam had the first TPP cut at the now strangely vogue question of Heidegger’s worth as a philosopher given his Nazi politics.
Judgment against Heidegger is easy. It is indisputable that he came to the defense of the world’s worst regime that presided over the world’s worst tragedy. However, the principle that we should therefore disregard his thought is flawed.
Philosophy, especially great philosophy, is valuable because it challenges conventional thinking, because it asks the reader to look beyond current values. It’s probably irresistible for many readers to condemn the actions of a particular philosopher. But by insisting that we not adequately come to terms with those authors’ ideas, we condemn ourselves to perpetuating conventional thinking.
It’s almost too easy to condemn writers who came to the defense of National Socialism. However, there are a host of other writers whose thought itself is deeply troubling (read: challenging). Nietzsche is an interesting case study. It is not true that Nietzsche defended some form of proto-Nazism. (He explicitly rejected German nationalism and anti-semitism; it was only at the hands of his profiteering sister that Nietzsche became associated with either). However, it certainly is true that his thought is anti-egalitarian, dangerous to the state, etc etc. There persists urban legends of professors that removed Nietzsche from syllibi after Leopold and Loeb. If a wide range of the public read Nietzsche and took him seriously, civilization itself might well be endangered.
Nietzsche would be joined by thinkers such as Machiavelli (cloak and dagger authoritarianism), Plato (strict ordering of the classes by intellect, opponent of democracy), and others as thinkers whose thoughts would be dangerously out of fashion today. But those thinkers remain solidly in the pantheon of the world’s greatest and most-read philosophers. Indeed, the value of their thought is that they articulate powerful critiques of modern values.
But you don’t see the same anti-Nietzsche screeds. And, interestingly, it was Nietzsche’s thought that is politically disturbing — he had no impact on politics (and little impact even the academy) during his lifetime. None of the popular anti-Heideggerians have a coherent critique of the man’s writing or ideas — just his actions. If Heidegger’s opponents could construct a coherent argument for how his thought leads unavoidably to genocide, there would be a much better argument. But, for students serious about philosophy, Heidegger would then be a figure to be engaged and refuted. It’s the role of the philosopher to identify and discredit demagoguery — not to ignore it, leaving dangerous thought to be taken up by future generations.
-John
When bad people say good things
The immoral mind at work
Over at The New Republic, resident philosopher Damon Linker tackles an important question: can evil people say intelligent things?
The case in question is a recent screed against watershed philosopher-cum-Nazi Martin Heidegger. According to Linker, the essay in question makes the mistake of conflating worthwhile ideas with disdainful politics:
But moral disgust does not relieve a reader–let alone a critic–of the burden of intellectual engagement.
[. . .]
Yet even if distinguishing between Heidegger’s philosophy and his politics were as impossible as Romano (and Faye) would have us believe, that still would not justify excluding Heidegger’s thought from serious reflection, study, and a place in the university. On the contrary, it would serve as an additional reason to wrestle with the challenge it poses.
To some extent, the debate is academic. Heidegger is unlikely to become “the butt of jokes, not the subject of dissertations,” as stated by the essay to which Linker reacts. He’ll probably stick around as a fraught figure, studied seriously by philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic, and criticized by some subset of the same group as well as the educated public. The status quo will hold.
What’s really at stake is whether a consummately evil life (one more evil than Heidegger’s, for example) can produce something worth reading and studying. We can debate about whether Heidegger clears the bar, but only after we determine if there’s a bar at all.
My ancient Greek wedding
Does the history of ancient Greece tell us anything about the modern debate regarding gay marriage? No.
Emily Wilson has a book review of James Davidson’s Greek Love, a new exploration of the varieties of homosexuality in ancient Greece. I have not read the book itself (which sounds worthwhile), but the review reveals some confusion that may be typical of Liberal commentators on this issue.
Before going further, let me state for the record that I am in favor of full marriage rights for all, or the abolition of state-sanctioned marriage altogether. Good.
Wilson writes:
In short, there was no single “traditional” way to conduct same-sex relationships in ancient Greece. This fact in itself might make us leery of any claims about what a “normal” or “traditional” domestic setup might look like. Any claim about “the way things have always been” is liable to be false.
But this itself is simply false, as her own reading reveals! Davidson’s history reveals that there are indeed normalized views of love — his work shows only that there are many, many versions of tradition across Greece. There was indeed no normalized “Greek” view of homosexuality, but there certainly were customs and traditions in each city state that were no doubt powerfully prescriptive to their populations.
Wilson argues contra Foucault that “it really does not matter whether any Greeks thought of themselves as ‘gay.’” While this is surely true, in the modern context it certainly does, and the inevitability of this distinction forms the basis of the best arguments for gay marriage. WIlson has revealed only that it would be possible to think about homosexuality differently than we do now. Given that, her conclusion makes less sense:
Whatever public legitimacy was, or was not, granted to same-sex relationships in any previous culture, it would still be entirely unjust, within the terms of our own society, to deny homosexual couples the legal status available to heterosexual relationships.
Wilson is walking the fine line trodden by many historians and sociologists. Wilson’s conclusion is an explicit value judgment which is grounded in her own time and place and, of course, her Liberal values. However, the sweep of history reveals in no way that gay marriage should be justified, or even that it has been — that argument, which again I agree with, should be rooted in universal values. Davidson’s excellent history should be left to stand on its own, without a modern political agenda which it cannot support.
-John
Are guns covered in the public option?
Is violence the antithesis of democratic government–or at the heart of it?
Writing about the sudden presence of guns outside healthcare town halls, E.J. Dionne suggests there’s a deeper problem at stake:
There is a philosophical issue here that gets buried under the fear that so many politicians and media-types have of seeming to be out of touch with the so-called American heartland.
The simple fact is that an armed citizenry is not the basis for our freedoms. Our freedoms rest on a moral consensus, enshrined in law, that in a democratic republic we work out our differences through reasoned, and sometimes raucous, argument. Free elections and open debate are not rooted in violence or the threat of violence. They are precisely the alternative to violence, and guns have no place in them.
Dionne’s portrayal of democratic governance is both right and wrong. Read more
Rebuilding Athens
How much more democratic should we be?
A new Washington Monthly editorial by Paul Glastris argues that maybe the Athenian model of direct democracy wasn’t as bad as our Founding Fathers thought. Democracy has actually had a pretty bad rap until until relatively recently in human history, but a new book by Stanford classicist Josiah Ober suggests that Athens may have thrived — rather than suffered — thanks to its embrace of real citizen rule. Read more
Evaluating democracy promotion
Michael Gerson writes about the trials and travails of democracy promotion in the Middle East in today’s Washington Post. On the seeming retreat of democracy during 2006, Gerson notes:
Some American conservatives found Burkean lessons in the fading freedom agenda, asserting that democracy is a fragile flower that grows only in a rich cultural soil tended by Jeffersons and Hamiltons. Many liberals seemed relieved that President Bush didn’t seem right after all, though this involved global setbacks for political liberalism. It may seem strange that anyone should feel a thrill of vindication when the ideals of their nation appear to falter. But let us judge not, that we be not judged.
The “Burkean lessons” refer to Edmund Burke, regarded as one of the great intellectual forebears of conservatism. Gerson treats Burke’s views on democracy as questions about feasibility, rather than moral ones. Yet for Burke, the critical question was more likely whether cultivation of democracy in a poor soil is simply wrong.
Burke saw attempts to radically change society and government, particularly through violence, as misguided. Societies should evolve organically and by drawing on their own rich tradition. You can’t transplant Hamiltons and Jeffersons to Iraq. They have to be there already, as well established landmarks in the cultural firmament.
It seems the key questions for democracy promotion in modern societies are:
(1) Do we have an obligation to promote democracy abroad?
(2) If yes, is it appropriate to use force?
(3) Is it possible to promote democracy successfully in all countries?
The truth is that liberals and conservatives probably agree to a large extent about these three questions.
–Sam
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