"So the rest of the evening was spent with cheerfulness, the conversation turning principally on the everlasting subjects, metaphysics and politics; of the first of which man can know nothing, -- and of the last, will not." -- Robert Bage, Hermsprong; or Man as He Is Not
I don't know how common the class called "civics" is, nor what it constitutes in the era of "
public education standards," but I doubt very much that it has any consideration of the basis of society or the nature of humanity. After all, we have already decided that our students is stupid, so why try for something "controversial." Even reporting the debaters and their debate of the last few centuries would
constitute "indoctrination" according to some, because their version of the civic order is presumptive (i.e. it comes from deduction -- a law that must be true at all times of all persons that is received by revelation needs only to be applied to a given population of sinners or saints).
Today, we find it shocking that Machiavelli was considered an atheist because of The Prince, and yet he was. In fact, he was considered the anti-Christ (btw, I love that article). To us, he was merely arguing political economy -- maximum efficiency of power with minimum expense, but some people STILL consider him one of the "pillars of unbelief" -- along with those other shocking figures, Immanuel Kant and Sigmund Freud.
A critical loophole in the liberal assumption is that tolerance is a passive position rather than a positive ideology. In other words, if we must honor all groups to tolerate them, then we must allow the intolerance of groups fervent for an identity with a singular truth. Pluralism as a political philosophy requires the belief that all are welcome so long as they also welcome all. It is a present position, not the absence of one, even if it means that an extension of its desires (toleration, extending honor) is abridged in the process. As the Princeton UP paper points out, fundamentalists have negated talk of civics, and teaching of history, by pointing out that it is intolerant of their position of absolute, deductive and presumptive, truth. Their opponents must agree, and their allies are strengthened by such charges, as they perpetuate an eschatological siege mentality.
We reap the whirlwind when we don't talk about these things, though. I want to point to two silences and how they have shown up with bloody and bloody-minded consequences. The first is the silence on the social contract and how that shows up in a mutant anarchism, and the second is the civic and historic blindness of discussing the 20th century and the subsequent rehabilitation of Nazi/Social Darwinist/Randian thought.
The Silence: Deduction from revelation
Please understand that I am, myself, a Christian, and probably a conservative one. (Such judgments are impossible, really. How long is a piece of string?) I simply note that, as T.S. Eliot said, our perceptions of the truth change and have changed, but that is a function of us as humans, and not of the truth. I think we're rather flawed, and, as Alexander Pope said, "Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends."
Deduction means starting with a rule you believe to be true, applying it to an observation you hold accurate and then coming to a solid conclusion. It's wonderful, and deductive reasoning is way, way better than induction. If you believe, "No man runs faster than 30 mph" and you have an observation that "an automobile can go faster than 30 mph," then when your drunk friend says, "Heck, I can race you in your old Yugo and win," you can be confident in saying, "No, you can't win."
Religious law is logical. Sharia or Levitical, prophets of Zwickau or David Koresh, there is logic involved. It's simply deductive logic. Assume that God reveals a universal (ahistorical and transsubjective) truth to a prophet. Assume that it is applied to a situation (observation) accurately. The result will be a justice that is more satisfying to the people than an inductively derived justice that relies on likelihood (the Scottish Enlightenment, and especially David Hume, would attack probablistic knowledge with vigor).
Revealed truth, being deductive, is a take it or leave it affair. For example, I can agree with the universal truth of the revelation and completely disagree with the ability of a person to apply it or to form a logical conclusion from the application. Most Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims do the same. We are led by the revealed truth of our holy scriptures, but we do not believe that it is easy or simple to apply and conclude without the use of reason. However, for revelation-dependent communities -- Taliban or Branch Davidians -- this discussion and application of reason is the work of Satan. Therefore, there must be silence.
Batman and Chaos
We grew very quiet, as a nation, the last time an ostensibly intelligent person turned killer, and we did the time before that, as well. Crazy people are crazy in mind as well as act; murder is, by itself, proof of a disordered mind. With the latest H. H. Holmes, like our Unibomber (yeah, I use an i), we have an insane person who gestures at a body of beliefs. We cannot blame the beliefs for the acts, nor can we think that the beliefs are more relevant or less because of the acts, but often these Crazy People show us silences that society should not have. They reveal repression. (Note: mental illness is not a joke, nor related to violence. I use "crazy people" as a garish phrase to signal something other than mentally ill.)
Jonathan Nolan gave voice to the intellectual argument for anarchy in The Dark Knight, and a recent killer believes in it. Just as the Unabomber believed in the "Human Experience" Harvard class and what it taught about the lived life's degradation under the assault of technology and the sociological exchanges of modernism limiting our meaning, so this killer allegedly believes in an intellectual core beneath chaos. What impressed film critics about the argument that The Joker made in the movie was that it was somewhat coherent, if unsound.
The Joker, you'll recall, argued that violence, by its nature, whether on the part of the state or against the state, was alike. Destruction was innate and emanating, and all persons were guilty, and his job, he argued, was to make this guilt manifest at the same time that he encouraged the "joke" of destroying the toy-like rules of social control. Inside the new Batman fiction, it's a worthy idea, since the first film had been all about a group of social engineers who selectively reinforced or undermined cities and nations.
You can't export that to personal philosophy, but Nolan had exported the philosophy from some other speakers.
First, we have the belief common to every system out there that we are all sinful (erroneous) and that therefore laws are always temporary restraints. This belief leads to the idea that chaos and anarchy are a form of freedom. Violence will allow us to pull off the shock collars that denature us. In The Dark Knight, the Joker explores this possibility when he puts two boats with explosives up, and the people are supposed to demonstrate their native wickedness by killing. They do not do so, and he simply shrugs. He never really cared about making the point that people are nasty, anyway: he was interested in breaking the measures of control.
This side of the chaos myth is not simply a movie fantasy. Recent findings indicate that people may be sinners, but they're not naturally killers. Altruism is common. Even those who insist everything is for self-benefit see self-sacrifice as part of humanity's wiring. When we learn to tell ourselves, and each other, that it is not normal to have "dog eat dog" or "swim with the sharks," but rather that it is effective, natural, and normal to have self-sacrifice and service, we can answer this question.
The other half of the silence that The Joker, and our recent mass killer, spoke to derived from believing in the social contract. If you believe that people are naturally bastards, and you believe that each man gives up the power to club his neighbor only to save himself from being clubbed, then you will start to think, with Kropotkin, that the people with the clubs will want more rules. As the rules accumulate, each round will introduce a tiny advantage to the people with the power and money. Eventually all the clubs will be nightsticks and all the rules will be regulations on poor people. Therefore, in an advanced and stable society, things must be in an advanced state of screwy, and it has to be time to hit the reset button, and that is done with chaos or anarchy.
How do you get to anarchy? Well, you'll need to break all the nightsticks and laws. It's true that the people who don't want their skulls broken might not want you to do this, but it's for their own good. Only when there is anarchy will it be possible to negotiate a contract without the corruption of the past power, you see?
The Joker claimed to be a dark version of this. He wanted to shatter the rules to get to the free state, but only because then people would pick up their clubs again. It's a cool literary trope for the movie. As I said, it can't be exported. It's an unsound import of incompatible strains of fundamental social question -- the optimistic view that people on their own will negotiate fairly and the pessimistic view that we're beasts held back from the euphoria of our savagery.
Them libbertarnians
Libertarians like to freeze-frame Hobbes and Rousseau at the moment of the first, hypothetical, social contract. Now, for Hobbes and Rousseau this contract was a METAPHOR, but nevermind. Read Thomas Hobbes, and then tell me if you think he was stupid enough to think that four people stood around and made a real contract, standing in a wilderness. Villages and tribes, extended families, trade -- the real social exchange -- was always already present, and the social contract is a metaphor for units of power and coercive force, not mercantile goods.
Despite being monumentally foolish and some of the worst readers in history, libertarians make similar claims to the anarchists. These claims would be impossible to take seriously in any society that taught Civics and included a unit on the rational basis of our society. For libertarians, our society has introduced greater and greater demands on the individual for the social group that the individual did not consent to.
We all sympathize: I didn't consent to the Iraq war. However, their belief is that property is a primary unit of political rights. First, there is ownership of the self, and then there is ownership of goods, and then there is ownership of land. All rights are derived from property, in increasing order. There is no mutual right, no obligatory right, but only a collective duty to the property. Consequently, any sacrifice of property that does not benefit property is evil.
Again, if you start from a Revealed Truth that society is built on money rather than intention or human action, it follows that money should be protected rather than people. "Will your diamonds comfort you in your time," as The Jayhawks sang.
The Silent Nazis
It's as if the whole world has been afraid of the Voldemort of Nazi ideology. In the United States, students think Nazis were "conquer the world, kill the Jews." What did the Nazis believe?
How did the highly educated German people get conned into believing in National Socialism? Well, they had an anti-semitic streak, sure. A good proportion were afraid of the "Bolsheviks." Some were frightened of and appalled by the "homosexuals." All of that explains a degree of enthusiasm, but the Nazis offered more than "We'll beat up the bad people."
It is verbotten to read Mein Kampf, and that's ok with me. Hitler and Himmler took up Nietzsche's philosophy of Man and Superman and Triumph of the Will, but they added to it an idea that is present in Nietzsche only as an aside -- a theory of more and less fit "races." Nietzsche was one of three major anti-Rationalist philosophers who had been students of Hegel's. Each rejected their philosophical father in a different manner. Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx all studied the philosophy of history derived from purely rational bases, and all three rejected it. Nietzsche rejected Hegelian phenomenology first and foremost, and he would not accept any divine guiding the world toward a benevolent civilization. (In Hegel's history, the Spirit of the Age (zeitgeist) was leading people inexorably forward through a dialectic clash of ideas. By this constant improvement and progress, one could suppose a teleological drive and understand that all this were moving toward the purely "civilized" man who would no longer need art or religion, for he would have those things within himself.)
Nietzsche was inveterately antagonistic toward Christianity, and he saw a great Nothing in the skies. His nihilism was not rudderless, though. Given the nothing, and given the lack of soul, there was still struggle, still a sort of dialectic, but it was best seen in Darwin. Imagine, though, a Darwin of the mind. What makes a man is the will, the ability to brave the void and conquer. The most powerful will is the fittest. The superman is the man unfettered. This creature is like unto a god, knowing good and evil as tricks for fools. The superman must rid himself of all the morality that the Jews invented when they were weak (mercy, justice, sharing), and all the ideas that people use to keep the strong at bay.
The Nazis simply took Social Darwinism and Nietzsche for a ride through a racist landscape. They argued that some races were more fit than others, and wars were competition for resources, and so war was good. It demonstrated the superior fitness and the superior will. The Nazi state must rid itself of impurities and guilt and weakening attachments to ethics and serve itself so that it might achieve its racial destiny of conquest by perfection. Mercy was for the weak, and all persons not strong should be put to the sword, etc.
Ayn Rand: Nazism in a Skirt
Ayn Rand was a neo-Nietzschean. Since the 1980's, Nietzsche is supposed to be rehabilitated, but I've never bought it, myself. I've had people try to buffalo me into thinking there's depth in his work, but I haven't seen it yet. I've seen agony in it, but not depth.
Libertarians are both enabled and ennobled by Rand. She tells them that the moral scolding that inhibits them otherwise is itself immoral. She tells them that strength is a virtue. Indeed, she tells them that it's the only virtue, and furthermore that strength has nothing to do with muscles or intelligence. It has to do with "will." Since will is measured by ruthlessness, nothing could be easier than being virtuous in a Randian scheme. The more of a jerk you are, the more will you must have and the greater you must be.
Let's consider that for a minute. In a Randian morality, virtue is selfism, but the way that one demonstrates it to others is not merely being "better than them" in what one does, but in showing the most fearless disdain for the needs and rights of other people. Is there any wonder this system appeals to the adolescent and the Yuppie? Eric Hague's hilarious "Our Daughter Isn't a Selfish Brat: Your Son Just Hasn't Read Atlas Shrugged" is a still a wonderful monument to the ethics of Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand probably did not mean to reinvent Naziism.
However, she came to the United States, where there was fertile soil. William Graham Sumner, of Yale, had already reached the conclusion, in "What Social Classes Owe to Each Other," that they owed nothing at all. You see, the wealthy are good natured. (His argument was different from Bernard de Mandeville's. Mandeville in 1705 would say what David Stockman would say in 1980: private vices by the wealthy are still public virtues, because they trickle down. What? You thought this was new? I can see the Mandeville and Sumner arguing yet when Ryan and Stockman talk budgets. One really thinks the wealthy are better people.) Americans were already disposed to the idea that the rich must have done something right, because there is equal opportunity for all (white, male, healthy) citizens. Even though religion held it back, there was a tendency among "enlightened" business and "modern" science to regard the poor as a problem, a pathogen, and a malady -- as if poverty were an external force imposed upon the healthy body that would work harmoniously except for the drain of the other.
I'm sure you know about the eugenics movements in the U.S. and how they did not stop at World War 2. Eugenics and racism never parted company, either. For that matter, wealth and race have long been near synonyms. If you are not familiar with the Kallikak Family of New Jersey and Henry Goddard's research on how utterly doomed to stupidity the poor are, you can review it here. (The first "OJ treatment" case.)
One of the reasons that F.D.R. might have fought fascism, but the United States did not (until attacked by an old school Imperialist power), is that we did not address the issue in our discourse. We still haven't. We hadn't in the 1950's, when Ayn Rand promised anti-Communism and delivered neo-fascist philosophy, and we haven't today, when Mitt Romney can say that paying the minimum tax required by law is the virtuous thing to do. His class owes nothing to the poor. When Rick Santorum can talk about "blah people" getting money, he can reiterate Goddard and Sumner -- simultaneously suggesting he has no moral responsibility and that a person born wrong is doomed.
How can Paul Ryan fall in love with a dead woman with a Bauhaus haircut? He can because we do not speak of our nation's philosophy.
A suggestion
Talk about what it means to be American. This means talking about the still unresolved balance of federal and state power. It means talking about pluralism as a doorway rather than an attribute of ourselves. It means talking about
"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal...."
does not mean equivalent or the same. Jefferson meant that
no man is born to power, born to be a ruler, born to be a king, and no man is born to serve. (Yes, the hypocrisy only grows the greater, but that's exactly why Samuel Johnson answered with, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?")
We must talk about how safety valves in the process have to mean safeguarding the devices where we can lose our own power and privilege. We must talk about mankind's inherent flaws, not violence. Even inherent evil does not mean savagery.
Let us ensure that there is Civics taught and that it include the phases of the debate, that our children understand that the United States was built on beliefs, not taxes. Perhaps we can inoculate them against the germs of past disasters.