Identity Politics Torpedoes Yamamoto

In a First Things article of January 2019, Yoram Hazony has again written on the topic of contemporary Western liberalism and whether the nations under its auspices are thriving or deteriorating.  Hazony sides with those analysts seeing primarily deterioration.  Beyond his cited evidence, one notes that the hypothesis of disintegrating nation-states finds support in the existence of an opioid epidemic, homelessness, and declining longevity in the U.S.; in the existence of the originally rural “yellow vest” protests against higher, allegedly pro-environmental fuel taxes in France; and in the Brexit resistance to a loss of British national sovereignty to Brussels.  (As of January 2019, Brexit seems doomed to failure in its execution, but the resistance is genuine.)

Hazony sides with those analysts seeing primarily deterioration.  Beyond his cited evidence, one notes that the hypothesis of disintegrating nation-states finds support in the existence of an opioid epidemic, homelessness, and declining longevity in the U.S.; in the existence of the originally rural “yellow vest” protests against higher, allegedly pro-environmental fuel taxes in France; and in the Brexit resistance to a loss of British national sovereignty to Brussels.  (As of January 2019, Brexit seems doomed to failure in its execution, but the resistance is genuine.)

What type of government presides over this deterioration?  Humpty Dumpty held that words meant whatever he chose; and, after hearing his interlocutor, Alice, doubt that words could have such an arbitrarily large elasticity, maintained that the only question in the usage of words is “Who is to be master?”  In the case of contemporary Western politics, given the allotment of one adjective and one noun to characterize government, which terminology generates the greatest rhetorical advantage - - “liberal republicanism,” liberal democracy,” “conservative republicanism,” “conservative democracy,” “compassionate capitalism,” “progressive socialism,” or something else?  Hazony finds that the terminology of  “republican government” predominated through the 1960’s (Benjamin Franklin thought, after all, that the Constitutional Convention had approved a Republic), whereas “democratic government” has predominated since the 1960’s (“one man, one vote” seems like political nirvana).

Hazony contrasts the American and British ideas of liberal democracy (in the style of the Enlightenment) and conservative democracy (in the style of Edmund Burke and others).  Enlightenment liberalism is a type of rationalism based on the sufficiency of reason, the existence of perfectly free and equal individuals, and political obligation by individual choice alone.  In contrast, conservative democracy is based on individual freedom, limited executive power in the government, and tradition in the form of historical experience, nationalism, and religion.  One observes that both conservative democracy and liberal democracy emphasize the high status of “free individuals”; but that the idea of freedom varies radically between liberalism (featuring pure reason as the basis for each individual freely to choose his own group for the purpose of identity politics) and conservatism (featuring tradition and history as the basis for each individual freely to recognize his own group for the purpose of national politics).

Jason Willick has examined an example of identity politics in a Wall Street Journal article of 12/29/18.  Identity politics as a type of trench warfare is today embittering Silicon Valley: Fred Yamamoto was born in Palo Alto, California in 1918; was interned after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941; enlisted nevertheless in the U.S. Army in 1943; was killed in battle in France in 1944; and was chosen to provide a name for a Palo Alto middle school in 2018 on the centenary of his birth.  Regrettably for Fred’s memory, however, there was another individual, Isoroku Yamamoto, who both shared a last name with Fred and was the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack.  (Fred was not related to Isoroku except in the theoretical sense that all human individuals have descended from a common ancestor.)  Moreover, Isoroku’s homeland invaded Manchuria in 1937 and perpetrated many atrocities in East Asia, starting when Fred was 19 years old and thousands of miles removed.  Today, pro-Fred and anti-Fred identity politics have enraged the Palo Alto community and left the school board back-pedaling, looking for an alternative school name.  “The objection to the Yamamoto name seems sadly characteristic of America’s balkanized culture.  Complaints of insensitivity and trauma have become distinctive marks of American-ness … [but] Fred Yamamoto’s name lives on as an aspiration to something greater.”  One surmises that a traditional nationalist would say that Fred’s life continues to be an inspiration for an American culture, now sadly interned.

Seasons’ Greetings, 2018

Once upon a time, extending best wishes to others on a holiday was unproblematic, despite any holiday’s being specific to a tradition: There was a limited number of tradition-bearing civilizations in the world, each clinging precariously to survival in a well-separated geographical niche; and it was not thought to be an insurmountable challenge to associate holiday references with their respective traditions or niches.  In England, an early “Merry Christmas” occurred on Christmas Day, 1066, when the coronation of William the Conqueror became so merry, or turbulent, that some nearby houses were burned down.  But, alas, time passes, meat spoils, pepper and spices are required, the Age of Exploration occurs, and now each tradition competes for attention in all geographical niches.  The words “Merry Christmas” have come to be seen, by many, as an expression either of illicit proselytization or of commercial speech.  Given this dichotomy, some maintain, it is far safer to endorse the commercial branch, in which hopes for a new Lego, “hung by the chimney with care,” elide into ambitions for a new Lexus, “parked by the curb while St. Nick was still there.”

In fact, however, it seems that Christians also express a second, parallel, non-economic meaning with the words, “Merry Christmas.”  This non-economic meaning divides into two branches: First, there is an invitation for the Christian faithful to recollect, and to reflect upon, the love, joy, peace, and hope arising from the advent of Jesus of Nazareth into the world at Christmastide.  Second, there is an invitation for the curious to investigate the doctrines embedded in the traditions underlying the historical Christian liturgies.  In practice, the words “Merry Christmas” express meaning not only as a wish for prosperity but also as an invitation for reflection or research.

The commercial interpretation of the words “Merry Christmas” finds some support among the tidings of comfort and joy (news of prosperity and joy) in the old English carol “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.”  The meaning of the title is “May God continue to grant you prosperity, gentlemen.”  Some extra Christmas bounty for the householder and his family would be much appreciated by Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim, et al. in the novel, A Christmas Carol.

The Crachit family members sought to survive at the margins of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Long before, there had been a Roman Revolution (133 - 31 B.C.) in response to wars of conquest, expansion of slavery, dispossession of small landowners, and concentration of land ownership by Roman aristocracy.  Economic anxiety continued during the ensuing Roman Empire with its embedded Christian communities. 

The classical scholar E.R. Dodds studied the ancient Roman Empire from the accession of Marcus Aurelius (161 A.D.) to the death of Constantine I (337 A.D.).  Dodds concluded that this period was a veritable “age of anxiety.”  One infers that this was an age well suited for producing legions of Bob Crachits.  Despite competing mystery religions, Gnosticism, and the Marcionite heresy, an orthodox Christianity was accepted by increasing numbers of anxious individuals within the Roman Empire.  Constantine seems to have accelerated this Christianization after receiving some vision or dream-like instruction to inscribe his army’s shields and battle standards with a “chi-rho” symbol (based on the first two letters of “Christ” in Greek); defeating his competitor, Maxentius, at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (312 A.D.); and becoming a Christian himself.  Some Imperial coins and medallions from the post Milvian-Bridge era display the chi-rho symbol.  Theodosius I (347 - 395 A.D.) largely completed the Christianization of the urban parts of the Empire by rooting out most vestiges of cultural paganism.

Some professional historians find the preceding account of the Christianization of the Roman Empire to be defective, because, in their view, if Constantine had truly and sincerely converted to Christianity, then Theodosius would have been left with nothing more to do.  But Theodosius did find, and terminate, some residual pagan practices and institutions.  Hence, Constantine’s conversion must have been insincere or ineffective, consistent with his purported vision being a later invention by disingenuous clerics. 

Any professional historian is entitled, if he or she so pleases, to a Weltanschauung of mortal antagonism between faith and reason.  In contrast, however, one notes that some philosophers of history, like Hegel, believed that religion is an attainment of consciousness during its progression towards absolute philosophical knowing.  “This incarnation of the divine Being … is the simple content of the absolute religion.”  (See the Phenomenology of Spirit, “The Revealed Religion,” Paragraph 759 of the A.V. Miller translation.)

But an alternative Weltanschauung has long been available in which faith complements reason, as in the “Credo ut intelligam” of Anselm of Canterbury (1033 – 1109 A.D.).  In this alternative approach, the Bible is meant to be a means for eliciting the reader’s response, not for fulfilling the historian’s demand for biographical data (as in the problematic 19th century quest for the historical Jesus).  Are we to evaluate faith and reason based upon the best surviving historical evidence or upon a vast conspiracy theory in which medieval monks falsified or suppressed inconvenient texts so comprehensively that only secular history is credible?  During this holiday season it seems preeminently reasonable to respond positively to the words of the Biblical author Luke, who relates that, at the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, “a great company of the heavenly host [angelic choir] appeared with the angel [who spoke to the shepherds], praising God and saying ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace [not anxiety] to men upon whom his favor rests.’”

God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen … and Ladies and Children Alike!

(The next posting to this blog will occur on February 1, 2019.)

Philosophical Reflections for Election Day, 2018

The U.S. Constitutional Convention adjourned on September 17, 1787, which was the occasion for Benjamin Franklin to say that you, the people, now have “a Republic, if you can keep it.”  Nine states had ratified the Constitution by June 21, 1788, allowing plans for the first Presidential election to proceed.  The last of the thirteen ratifying states did so by May 29, 1790, when a dubious Rhode Island finally voted in favor of ratification.

Suffrage in the United States of America advanced in several steps towards the goal of universal political participation.  Property requirements were attacked early on, even attracting Benjamin Franklin’s satirical denunciation.  The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) to the U.S. Constitution prohibits denial of voting rights based on race.  The Nineteenth Amendment (1920) prohibits denial of voting rights based on sex.  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 enforces previous suffrage amendments.

A judge on the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has recently written that “popular sovereignty isn’t just a theory; it is a duty.”  In other words, the Constitutional system presupposes an enlightened citizenry exercising its rights of suffrage.  However, recent surveys show that 71% of Americans cannot identify the Constitution as the supreme law of the land, and that 10% of U.S. college graduates think that the television personality “Judge Judy” is on the Supreme Court.  

Public ignorance of history and economics ensures that political debate degenerates into an uninhibited quest for unsustainable economic subsidies and social preferences.  It is assumed that this ignorance cannot be remedied by civic-competency tests of any kind, because of past, unhappy experience.  Other remedies for uninformed voting not springing readily to mind, a sudden, widespread outbreak of enlightened voting seems unlikely.

Voters in many states will soon be selecting Senators.  Among other issues for voters’ consideration are, surprisingly, Senatorial candidates’ positions on the right of an accused person to a presumption of innocence absent any corroborating evidence.  Some sitting Senators think that this right, seemingly implied by the due process provisions of the U.S. Constitution, ought to be suspended during confirmation hearings for appointments to the Supreme Court.  Suppressing such a fundamental right would dramatically alter the long-standing legal landscape.  In contrast, as the senior Senator from Maine said in a speech on the Senate floor on October 5, 2018, “certain fundamental legal principles about due process, the presumption of innocence and fairness do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them.  In evaluating any given claim of misconduct, we will be ill served in the long run if we abandon innocence and fairness, tempting though it may be.  We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.”

Among the philosophical questions raised by current attempts to eviscerate due process provisions of the U.S. Constitution are “Who could make such a change?” and, ultimately, “Who is sovereign?”  According to its text, “we the People” ordained and established the U.S. Constitution and its method of amendment.  But what happens if 10% of “us the People” place Judge Judy on the Supreme Court, while 71% of “us the People” cannot identify the Constitution as the nation’s highest law?  Hypothetically speaking, if “we the People” become functionally illiterate or incapacitated, then what serves as the analog of the 25th Amendment (dealing with executive incapacities) for “us the People” as a whole?  Does sovereignty reside in the faction that can most loudly declare an emergency in sovereignty?  On the hypothesis of popular incapacity, it would appear that a Hobbesian state of nature must ensue, with a sovereign emerging from a primordial political soup.

Election day will soon be upon us.  One can only vote in the hope that the results will once again stave off the advent of a political order in which life is ever more “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

The Reputation of Nations

Although nationalism is often defined as a political, social, and economic system dedicated to promoting the interests of a particular people in a definite territory, this definition fails to specify which people and to demarcate which territory.  Which comes first, political theorists seeking to convince the population of some geographic area to subscribe to the theorists’ system and to develop common interests, thereby becoming a nation; or does a certain population, possessed of a well defined culture, recruit a political theorist to draft documents announcing the existence of a nation?  Historically, both routes to nationhood have been observed: Defeated empires may be divided into nations by arbitrarily inventing borders in the hope that the included populations will find commonalities.  (One thinks of the partitioning of some of the Middle Eastern territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire.)  Alternately, rebelling colonies, identifying with a common culture, may declare their independence.  (One thinks of the American Declaration of Independence.)

      According to the doctrine of nationalism, once a nation exists, its leaders aim at gaining and maintaining sovereignty over a homeland, holding it as axiomatic that an ascendant nation should both govern itself and exert hegemony over any other territories that might fall under an implicit or explicit imperial purview.  Nationalism also promotes developing and maintaining a national identity based on factors such as culture, language, religion, politics, and, where applicable, a common ancestry.  In a book to be published before this blog post appears, Yoram Hazony has catalogued some of the successes and failures of nations.

      Some have criticized the very idea of empires and nations: In the nineteenth century, the English historian and Latinist, Sir John Robert Seeley, wrote of the British Empire, "we seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind."  In the twentieth century, George Orwell thought that nationalism supports political extremism in favor of a limited societal group.  Others have thought that competing nation states lead not to a quasi-equilibrium drifting towards social progress, but to a vicious circle of violence based on the fact that national borders do not typically coincide with national cultural identities.  For example, in the twenty-first century the Myanmar government has perceived the Rohingya people as a foreign body threatening the Myanmar nation.  In addition, nationalism has been seen as a driving force for the Trump and Brexit phenomena, as well as for the resistance of Southern and Eastern Europe to the immigration policies of the European Union.

      Although some critics see nationalism as a dangerous trend, the historical successes of nationalism should be noted as well.  Western traditions of limited government and individual liberty were nurtured by the national cohesion existing within each of the nations of England, Scotland, and the Netherlands.  The original American colonies inherited a common language, a legal tradition, and a limited range of religious practices.  The eclipse of these common factors in contemporary American society (e.g., McGuffey’s Readers haven’t been prominent for quite some time) can be seen as a source of the increasingly bitter contention in American politics.

      Thus, we see that there is a necessary trade-off in political theory: Inordinate favoring of a limited societal group is bad, but some favoring of one’s own way of life is required for the national cohesion that has historically preceded eras of limited government and individual liberty.

Split Worlds and Fake News

     On June 8, 1978 the Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave a Harvard graduation speech entitled “A World Split Apart” on the topic of world crises.  This speech kindled a firestorm of critical comment in the Western press.  On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the speech, the National Review has republished, in its June 25, 2018 print edition, Solzhenitsyn’s own reaction to the ensuing Western commentary.  His reaction was written during the autumn of 1978.  In his view, the crises themselves, as well as the critical reception of his speech, underscore “the ancient truth that a kingdom - - in this case, our Earth - - divided against itself cannot stand.”  

     It would seem advisable to meditate upon this speech and its aftermath in order to draw lessons, if possible, for the contemporary phenomenon of “fake news,” which is a neologism used to refer to fabricated news, which has no basis in fact but which is nevertheless presented as being true.  For Solzhenitsyn, the Western commercialized press (journalism or news media generally) presents current events and commentary with an overriding concern to remain within the letter of the law, within conventional bounds of taste that will not damage sales or advertising, and without any journalistic responsibility to the readership or to history.  If Solzhenitsyn could have had access to the vocabulary of 2018 while writing in 1978; then, arguably, he might have substituted “fake news” for the “Western commercialized press.”

     Solzhenitsyn had served with distinction as an artillery officer for the U.S.S.R. in World War II.  However, in February 1945 he reportedly made an unguarded remark critical of Stalin and was sent to a Gulag camp until Stalin’s death in 1953.  He remained in internal exile until Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, whereupon Solzhenitsyn was “rehabilitated” in 1957.  Since Solzhenitsyn’s experience was commonplace, and since Khrushchev was attempting a liberalization of sorts, in 1962 Khrushchev approved the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch about life in a Soviet concentration camp.  However, Khrushchev died in 1964, and by 1974 Solzhenitsyn had been exiled again, this time to West Germany.  In 1976 he moved to Cavendish, Vermont.  He gave his celebrated Harvard speech in 1978, returned to post-Soviet Russia in 1994, and died in 2008.

     In the Harvard speech, Solzhenitsyn noted that the split between world powers coexisted with another, more profound split in ways of life.  Historically speaking, only a short time ago, “the small world of modern Europe was easily seizing colonies all over the globe, … the conquests proved to be short-lived, …  but the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold … [that societal development requires] pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life.”  However, Solzhenitsyn found that the Western states have become an amalgam of welfare state and consumerist society, which do “not in the least open a way to free spiritual development.”  While he agreed, based on his own bitter experience in the U.S.S.R., that a society without an objective legal code is terrifying; he also asserted that “the defense of individual rights … [has rendered] society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals … [and that] life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil,” ranging from immoral movies to the inordinate concern that rooting out terrorism will impinge upon terrorists’ civil rights.  

     Solzhenitsyn found it incomprehensible that “though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime.”  He linked the misuse of freedom for evil with society’s humanistic, but false, presupposition that man is master of the world and is without taint of evil.  He was astonished that those in the West who are most dissatisfied with their society do not rail against a false humanism but rather drift towards socialism.  Noting with approval Shafarevich’s demonstration that socialism “leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind unto death,” Solzhenitsyn told his Harvard audience that “the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive … [characterized as it is] by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.”  This calamity stems, he continued, from an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.  In contrast, Solzhenitsyn was looking for “a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.”

     In his response to the Western critical disapproval of his speech, Solzhenitsyn said that he was surprised, not by the newspapers’ attacks, but by their obtuse nature.  Initially, the press was apoplectic in its denunciation of the speech as the reactionary ravings of an unhinged soul in thrall to Orthodox mysticism, if not indeed of “a mind split apart.”  Others said that Solzhenitsyn was ungrateful for his asylum and that some patriotic American should step forward to grant this Nobel laureate the additional prize of a one-way airline ticket back to the U.S.S.R.  Solzhenitsyn responded that he had been naïve to believe that he had found a society that did not require flattery as a precondition for free speech.  Moreover, he believed that the initial criticism betrayed rank hypocrisy: It was acceptable for him to proclaim, “Live not by lies” while living in the U.S.S.R. but not while living in the West.

     As more readers’ reactions to the speech were printed by what Solzhenitsyn referred to as “the heartland press,” the tone of the discussion became more varied and comprehending.  Among the later responses that Solzhenitsyn collected was the comment that “the Washington Post may smile at the Russian accent of Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s words, but it cannot detract from their universal meaning.”

     If Solzhenitsyn were alive today, then he might well counsel that more attention be paid to what he would regard as the real issues of socialism and spirituality.  Such redirection of attention would ipso facto tend to crowd out the contention over the second-order issue of “fakeness.”  But of course, Solzhenitsyn lived in a print world in which there was some editorial control over the quality of the debate.  In the Internet era, there is no such editorial control; and one is left with the manipulation of sources (alleging fake or non-fake status) rather than the marshaling of arguments (adducing historical evidence) as the basis for what passes as reasoned debate.  Now, more than ever, Solzhenitsyn would flee from the Western world with its appalling “commercial advertising, TV stupor, and intolerable music.”