BOOK REVIEW
James R. Fisher, Jr.,
Ph.D.
© December 19, 2018
Scholarship is simply
the unceasing effort to bring order into the confusion of Tradition. By
searching out, by comparing and weighing, by organizing facts, the scholar
tries to hold in check the perpetual tendency of mankind to get things wrong,
to mix up names and facts and ideas, to blur the outlines of its own beliefs.
Jacques Barzun, The Scholar is an
Institution, 1947
MORAL CLARITY IN OBFUSCATING TIMES
A review of Susan Neiman’s book “Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists” (2008), which appeared in the Peripatetic Philosopher (December 18, 2018), indicates just how muddy the waters can become when dealing with the matter of a “moral compass” in the morality of our times.
DO WE EVER ESCAPE OUR FIRST TRAUMA?
Susan Neiman dropped out of high school where she was a student in Atlanta, Georgia to join the anti-Vietnam War movement. She eventually went back to school and took a Ph.D. at Harvard University in analytical philosophy.
Once the radical disposition takes hold of a person, especially at an early age, it can remain part of that person’s predisposition despite an education to the contrary. So, if the reader is expecting a measured narrative to “Moral Clarity,” this treatment is unlikely to satisfy as the treatment is decidedly subjective and gratuitously persuasive in an effort to appeal to a broad audience.
WHAT IS MORAL CLARITY?
Moral clarity is an apparent catchphrase popularized by the American political conservative movement in the 1980s. Former Secretary of Education for President Ronald Reagan and the Czar on Drugs for President George W. Bush, William Bennett captures this moment with “We Fight for Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism” (2003).
The notion of “moral clarity,” then, was to divide the world into good and evil reproaching rogues’ states with the conservative American rallying cry, “my country right or wrong!”
People in opposition to this mindset, such as philosopher Susan Neiman, find the phrase dangerous and the idea “moral clarity” as if an oxymoron. Therefore, the title of this book to the unsuspecting Republican or conservative reader is equivalent to a pun to his or her “moral clarity” sensitivity.
So, if the reader is expecting measured scholarship to be on display, don’t be surprised to read: “President George W. Bush is the worst president in American history.”
Such absolute contempt for a sitting president, while perhaps justified regarding certain presidential faux pas, it must be viewed suspect and rather arbitrary for a trained scholar.
Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James believes that through scholarship:
“Our critical sensitivities grow both more acute and less fanatical. We sympathize with men’s mistakes even in the act of penetrating them; we feel the pathos of lost causes and misguided epochs even while we applaud what overcame them . . . The feeling for a good human job anywhere, the admiration of the really admirable, the disesteem of what is cheap and trashy and impermanent – this is what we call the critical sense, the sense for ideal values. It is the better part of what men know as wisdom.”
If this is so, would it not be counterproductive to summarily rebuke a person much less a President of the United States with such a broad brush? Could this simply be an echo of the mind of a teenage high school dropout who once ran off in protest of the Vietnam War?
On the other hand, the author demonstrates moral clarity quite dramatically in referencing the biblical struggles of Abraham and Job in moral crisis vis-à-vis God.
Millennials are reported to be neither especially religious nor necessarily familiar with the lessons provided in the Old and New Testament of the Bible. This is not meant as criticism but to note the changing moral consciousness of America’s youth if not the youth of the world.
Young people today don’t pay much attention to the infighting polarity and political shenanigans of politicians or theologians as these professions are largely dominated by old men.
Professor Neiman frames her argument in terms of the “Age of the Enlightenment,” also known as “The Age of Reason.” The Enlightenment dominated the long eighteenth century (1695 – 1815) with such luminaries as Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Smith, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Diderot and Kant. Ideas generated by these men influenced such notable society changes as the American Revolution (1776) and the French Revolution (1789).
Emmanuel Kant’s moral theory of categorical imperative was a significant improvement on the “Golden Rule” with the suggestion that all rational people across the globe no matter their desires or interests would follow this imperative as if a Universal Law. It was the equivalent of a fabricated “moral compass.”
Kant, who never traveled further than forty miles from his home, constructed a philosophical system based on reason and universalism that has never been surpassed. In fact, it has dominated the liberal agenda of the United States since the 1970s.
More recently, Richard Dawkins introduced the interesting idea of the memes in “The Selfish Gene” (1976), which is comparable to the connective tissue of our mental framework. A meme, according to Dawkins, is any bit of information that can spread from one human mind to another. Memes share many traits with genes. They can reproduce by copying themselves from one mind to another. This was the “moral centered” message of the teachings of Jesus, who had no interest in departing from his cultural Judaism.
As you read this review, whatever your predilection, memes are entering your brain and copied into your mind. They then undergo a form of natural selection with some dying and others flourishing. For author Neiman, this process is kept alive through the works of The Enlightenment.
This reviewer suggests a more recent reference to be more enabling.
THE 1830s and BEYOND
As wondrous as the Enlightenment may have been in creating memes, it was the nineteenth century from 1815 through the twentieth century that established the morality of the times, one without a “moral compass,” an epoch essentially absent from this book.
In 1815, Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo with “The Age of Romanticism” to follow, which we are still experiencing in the 21st century.
In 1833, Tocqueville came to America and wrote his two-volume “Democracy in America” (1835-1840), a classic still insightful today.
The nineteenth century was the time of Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, Melville and Lincoln. It was the age of avant-garde art as an expression of love. Art and love celebrated the individual at war with society.
Love in Romanticism was not about sex; nor was it cheerful or elegant, but one of passion and tragedy. The Age of Romanticism was the time of Hugo and Byron, Delacroix and Berlioz, George Sand and Liszt, Balzac and Stendhal, Dumas and Flaubert, William and Henry James.
In music as in literature and poetry, the arts tended to be snobbish or apologetic pursuing excellence at any cost.
The age marked the rise of the bourgeoisie or middle class as capitalism expanded beyond the merchant class to include all professions marching to the tempo of political philosophy.
It was also the time of Marx and Engels who came on stage to thwart capitalism and to launch international communism with the publication of The Communist Manifesto (1848).
Author Neiman is right, “Morality is concerned with goodness, politics with power.” Capitalism, then as now, was much closer to the candle of both. But alas, it was without a “moral center.”
Conservative goodness in a capitalistic political climate proved ideal for the morality of industrial progress through soaring inventions from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century with the steam engine, spindle and power loom, locomotive, cotton gin, metal industries, the camera and plate, anesthesia, telegraph, telephone, typewriter, photograph, motion picture, radio, electric light, internal combustion engine, automobile, airplane, and the assembly line for manufacturing while people as persons ceased to exist on a wide scale.
The 1830s and Beyond was a period of rebellion against Classicism with a focus on the new frontiers of Nature. The central focus was on the imagination, taking the initiative, individualism, idealism and inspirational pursuits beyond the pale of convention, pursuits governed by reckless abandon, a preoccupation that hasn’t diminished to this day.
It was a time of revolution, democracy and republicanism flanked by religion of the sublime, the transcendental and the ridiculous. It was also a time when psychology left mysticism to become respectable.
Romanticism valued longer life spans, rising standards of living, while still valuing the past but seeking new wealth, stability and a sense of progress at all cost, the memes and mindset of today.
ANALYTICS IS NOT ENOUGH
We are seemingly obsessed with analytics today. They have depersonalized athletics, commerce, banking, education, personal relationships, employment, the arts, so why not philosophy?
Dr. Susan Neiman's analytical philosopher is the conceptual study of language to uncover underlying logical structures and forms. It is the mathematical empiricism dating from the late 19th century to the late 20th century with the likes of Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) and G. E. Moore (1873 – 1958) carrying on the empiricisms of John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume and John Stuart Mill. Advocates of analytical philosophy consider themselves “realists” with an alternative nudge to “idealism.”
Russell and Moore defended their realism as a quasi-Platonic compared to traditional realism. They favored the realistic philosophy of common sense, and to a lesser degree the application of mathematics to realize that end.
It would have been useful if author Neiman had provided a more substantive view of analytical philosophy since the book's format clearly attracts the general reader as well as the seasoned academic.
THOSE TERRIBLE CONSERVATIVES!
You learn when you are a writer of ideas that the collective conscience of society is essentially skin deep. Now, once that metaphorical skin has been pricked, chances are the mind shuts down to rely on comfortable biases. Therefore, it is one thing to sing to the choir of likeminded souls, but quite another if the intent is to speak with moral clarity to the many. Is it too presumptuous to expect a bridge of tolerance to stretch across the great divide of opposing views with a measured narrative to facilitate common understanding? Neiman writes:
“Conservatives play with two metaphysical strands they can pluck at will: When what they call realism becomes too grim, they can always call it idealism.”
Now, the irony of that declaration is that liberals call alternative idealism the new realism. If the intent is obfuscation rather than moral clarity, then this is quite effective.
The author states that conservative reality is material reality (capitalism) whereas the left, she concedes, with some disappointment is “empty handed” (socialism) with no reality at all:
“Stuck between traditional conservative appeals to the hard facts of reality and the absolute idealism of a government prepared to ignore the empirical world, it (the left) has no metaphysics to offer at all.”
In other words, liberal realism has proven pusillanimous in replacing traditional pragmatism, something that William James advocated a century ago. James writes:
Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist . . . A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the cooperation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. (The Will to Believe, 1896)
While author Neiman would not disagree, she retreats to the sentiments of Socrates: This thing called justice – do we really know what it means?
Obviously, we don't. The problem of idealism and realism is that liberals and conservatives are equally ambivalent when it comes to matters of justice. Sad.
IDENTITY POLITICS, IDENTITY PHILOSOPHY
With Donald Trump in the White House preaching ubiquitous nationalism to the right without apology ("Make America Great Again!"), one can imagine author Neiman sputtering contemptuously that President Trump is “America’s worst president in American history.” Meanwhile, she asserts:
“Identity politics tends to stop thought; it confuses grand passions with minor irritations; and it mocks broader goals as mere rhetoric.”
Incidentally, conservative scholar Francis Fukuyama’s latest book is titled “Identity” (2018) where he attempts to get inside the impasse that finds us building walls rather than bridges between our competing interests. To Neiman, Fukuyama is close to Faust.
One wonders why author Neiman fails to see that "identity politics" also applies to “identity philosophy.” Alas, how insular the prison of our minds.
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