If Wright is wrong, then wrong is right: the Victor Davis Hanson guide to moral absolutes

by John Holbo on March 20, 2008

I have to say: Victor Davis Hanson should probably stop trying to write about the difference between right and wrong. (I know, I know. But this one is unusually terrible.) In response to the Obama speech, he objects that ‘racism is a universal wrong’. Furthermore, because there should be an “absolute sense of wrong and right that transcends situational ethics, context, and individual particulars”, it is not acceptable to attempt to mitigate charges of racism by pointing out parallel wrongs committed by others, or by adducing facts about the background of the racist; or by arguing that the racist has done good things, which ought to be weighed in the balance. Last but not least, it is apparently necessary to ‘disown’ all racists, regardless of prior personal attachment or loyalty.

Now, to note only the most obvious, flagrantly salient consequence of this rigorous refusal of ‘situational ethics’: Hanson has just provided an argument that Wright was absolutely right to damn America (right?) And the fact that Hanson is not saying so himself therefore gives me a chance to pull a serious face and say I am very sorry to see him falling prey to moral relativism and, if I may say so, kneejerk victimology. It must be all the rap music.

Seriously, what it shows is that conservatives see they have a pressing situational need to move some goalposts. But they aren’t sure where. So they are running in all directions, carrying goalposts. The Corner has been a hoot for 48 hours. (To be fair, there are a few voices, urging that the posts be put back where they are supposed to go. That adds to the comedy, when people run into each other, carrying goalposts.)

I am one of the many who is very, very impressed with the speech. My support for Obama has gone up significantly. All I really have to add is just reiteration of what others have said: how effective Obama was at saying things that were, basically, plain good sense. The only trick to it – but what a trick – is to speak generous good sense, in a curiously mild manner. His ability to say what people of good will already all think, but say it in a way that makes them sit up and say, ‘but of course’, is what liberals have been needing. Not that conservatives can’t be good willed, but that just goes to show there was nothing liberal about the speech.

Now what do I mean by that? Let me explain with reference to Goldberg’s column-length response (which he could have titled “The Audacity of Hopelessness”, but for some reason did not.)

He begins by agreeing with the basic values implied by the Obama speech, while tossing cold water in the form of hints that, of course, to a conservative the good bits are old hat. It is just refreshing to hear such stuff from a liberal. (This is what I mean about colliding goalposts. What Hanson pretends to see as moral apocalypse is the same stuff Goldberg pretends to see as conservative.) But then he moves on to his objections:

By “investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations.” The path for blacks, Obama insists, requires “binding our particular grievances — for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs — to the larger aspirations of all Americans — the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who’s been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.”

Meanwhile, the “real culprits” for our problems are: “a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.”

Sigh. Here we go again.

For all the wonderful rhetoric and tantalizing promise of Obama and his speech, there’s not much that is actually new here. This was largely a restatement of Jeremiah Wright’s indictment of America, delivered in University of Chicago parlance instead of South Side Chicago diatribe.

But that is precisely the important point. Obama managed to make what was, in a sense, just a mild-mannered restatement of the roots of Wright’s outrage sound to Goldberg like “wonderful stuff”. This just goes to show that … well, what is so bad about peace, love and understanding, come to think of it? (Are they too ‘situational’?) Justice and equality are not alien to the political traditions of this country. Goldberg doesn’t actually come out and say that he is opposed to fighting corruption, or that he is in favor or policies that privilege the rich over the poor. He doesn’t even go so far as to deny that it is true that existing policies do this. He doesn’t say he is against good schools, or opposed to civil rights, or opposed to fairness in the criminal justice system, per se. He just says ‘sigh’. “My hope for something better proved too audacious in the end.” He was hoping for hopelessness, but it was too much to hope for.

Goldberg would shift the debate onto policy. Hope is not a plan. But ‘sigh’ is not a policy. Can anything be done about anything, or is there nothing to be done? Obviously Obama proposes policies. He has hopes and plans. But he didn’t put much policy in the speech. Not that sort of speech. Being in favor of justice is not a policy proposal. Goldberg is, absurdly, clamoring to insist it can’t work, even though it is ‘wonderful’ in spirit, when there isn’t any ‘it’. Not yet. There’s just good spirit. So Goldberg has shifted the debate to policy and committed in advance to hold Obama to no yards in a game of ‘nothing proposed in this good spirit could possibly work, policy-wise.’

If conservatives really want to applaud the Obama spirit as ‘wonderful’, as what they already thought first themselves; if they just want to pick on the practicality – here Goldberg plants his goalposts – Obama can win that game. Here is Goldberg again, saying the same thing: the speech is just “intellectual bullying to get your way on programs and policies you can’t sell on the merits.” This is spin, but not the sort that will work. It invites debating programs and policies on the merits, while granting the desirability of the goals. This is, to put it mildly, the last debate conservatives want to be having.

It isn’t exactly an accident, after all, that Goldberg just finished writing a book called Liberal Fascism. Conservatives have, to date, done a good job of shutting down debate long before the mild-mannered policy stage. You shut it down with stock, alarmist insistence that there is something morally awful, philosophically un-American, about the will behind proposals and observations that are, apparently, reasonable. (Give Hanson points for sticking with the playbook.) If Obama can just talk through the noise machine racket – and he can, if even the author of Liberal Fascism doesn’t have the heart to pretend to think he’s a fascist, even in the aftermath if this Wright business – Obama’s also the guy to talk policy at the next stage. That’s a winning combination.

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{ 162 comments }

1

sd 03.20.08 at 4:58 pm

John wrote:

“His ability to say what people of good will already all think, but say it in a way that makes them sit up and say, ‘but of course’, is what liberals have been needing. Not that conservatives can’t be good willed, but that just goes to show there was nothing liberal about the speech.”

But of course there’s something liberal about the speech. Obama does two things in the speech – he lays out the problem and he proposes (at least at a high level) what to do about it.

The uglier stuff at The Corner is an objection to his laying out the problem, as if acknowledging an ugly realty is tantamount to delighting in it.

But you can admire Obama’s explanation of the state of race without buying into his (conventionally liberal) solutions. As a conservative (who, I hope doesn’t model the kneejerk culture war footing of most of the Cornerites), I came away from the speech liking Obama more but probably marginally less likely to vote for him. If he wins I’ll feel proud of my President, but suspect I’ll disagree with him on most policy decisions. This is, BTW, how I view my many liberal friends – as good people who I am blessed to know but who are simply wrong on the issues of policy.

There’s nothing fundamentally inconsistent about that, and much of the uglier side of our politics is a collective inability to see ideological opponents in such terms – as fundamentally decent people who interpret the “data” of the world differently.

That’s not to say that there aren’t bad actors in our politics (VDH et. al.), but only that not every angel is on my side and not every devil on yours.

2

Edward 03.20.08 at 4:59 pm

But ‘sigh’ is not a policy.

A sigh is just a sigh.

3

Questioner 03.20.08 at 5:16 pm

I think you were overly harsh on VDH. I don’t think he’s saying that there is no such thing as mitigating circumstances, but rather that regardless of its causes, racism is wrong. Insofar as Obama didn’t say that Wright’s racism was wrong (this is assuming, of course, that Wright is a racist (which seems plausible to me) and that Obama didn’t condemn it (which seems less plausible)), then Obama shows a failure of moral judgment. This does not mean that certain instances of racism aren’t worse than others, or that we cannot point to factors that help to explain someone’s racism; only that explaining someone’s racism doesn’t make it morally permissible.

4

John Holbo 03.20.08 at 5:20 pm

“I don’t think he’s saying that there is no such thing as mitigating circumstances.”

I think that he probably doesn’t really think that. So he couldn’t really mean it. But he pretty clearly said it, I think.

5

Questioner 03.20.08 at 5:23 pm

I think the closest he comes to saying it is in this passage:

“When he failed to “disown” Rev. Wright, and then brought in parallels of things purportedly as bad, or offered excuses that Wright had done good things to balance the bad, or that there were certain mitigating circumstances that explain his hatred, then the universal wrong of Wright’s racism and lying disappears and with it any ethical standard by which we have moral authority to condemn such vitriol.”

What VDH is condemning is that Obama brought up mitigating circumstances that explained Wright’s racism without also clearly condemning it.

6

Josh R. 03.20.08 at 5:32 pm

Can anything be done about anything, or is there nothing to be done?

If I read the brief snippet where Goldberg defines the Totalitarian Temptation in his book –to paraphrase, the temptation being a utopian belief that you can make a better world–then no, nothing can be done, cause then you’d just be walking down the road to totalitarianism, vegetarianism, Whole Foodism, and other such isms of undeniable horror.

7

Questioner 03.20.08 at 5:37 pm

In response to josh r., I don’t think that’s what Goldberg says, or at the very least not what he means. I think what he means is that one should not have a utopia even as one’s aim, because having that as an aim will cause a lot more problems than having mere improvement of society as one’s aim. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all that.

8

RICKM 03.20.08 at 5:45 pm

questioner-

Find me some evidence that what you paraphrased represents what Goldberg meant.

Goldberg describes all methods of utilizing the state as “Fascist.” For example, Goldberg calls the New Deal Fascist because it expanded the role of the state–not because Goldberg thinks the New Deal was an attempt to realize a utopia.

9

Adam Kotsko 03.20.08 at 5:49 pm

I’m unclear on what Jeremiah Wright said that is supposed to be even incorrect, much less racist.

10

RICKM 03.20.08 at 5:55 pm

Adam,

Well, I think this is incorrect: “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”

As for racism, the Anti-Defamation League, according to wikipedia, found no evidence of anti-semitism by Wrigth.

11

Andrew Edwards 03.20.08 at 6:02 pm

What VDH is condemning is that Obama brought up mitigating circumstances that explained Wright’s racism without also clearly condemning it.

From Obama’s speech:

“I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy….

“Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive….
“Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not.”

“Condemn”, “wrong”, “inexcusable”. What more is VDH looking for?

12

Questioner 03.20.08 at 6:02 pm

rickm,

Well, I doubt very much that you’re going to find evidence for your claim that Goldberg “describes all methods of utilizing the state as “Fascist”. I doubt he thinks use of the military is intrinsically fascist. As for the evidence for my claim, I’ll look for some, but I haven’t read Goldberg’s book, just some of his posts on his “liberal fascism” blog, so my paraphrase was based on a general impression.

13

Russell Arben Fox 03.20.08 at 6:02 pm

John,

Goldberg would shift the debate onto policy. Hope is not a plan. But ‘sigh’ is not a policy. Can anything be done about anything, or is there nothing to be done? Obviously Obama proposes policies. He has hopes and plans. But he didn’t put much policy in the speech. Not that sort of speech. Being in favor of justice is not a policy proposal. Goldberg is, absurdly, clamoring to insist it can’t work, even though it is ‘wonderful’ in spirit, when there isn’t any ‘it’. Not yet. There’s just good spirit. So Goldberg has shifted the debate to policy and committed in advance to hold Obama to no yards in a game of ‘nothing proposed in this good spirit could possibly work, policy-wise.’

This is a great observation, John. There is a real sense amongst certain conservatives that there is something suspicious, something wrong about hope (perhaps because the polls indicate that what most Americans hope for is closer, insofar as socio-economic matters go, at least, to what liberals are offering?). They want to focus solely on policies, but policies only as they define them, rather than allowing that policies are supposed to arise from ideas and, well, hopes.

As for VDH, as I said over at Ross’s blog, I would like to dismiss Hanson’s comments as facile and politically pointless, but in the latter case, unfortunately I can’t. He does have a political point when it comes to “absolute standards,” or at least a point he can sell politically. He’s wrong; the language of Obama’s speech wasn’t nothing more than “self-serving relativism,” because the capacity to make judgments, even strong moral judgments, isn’t so crucially dependent upon the maintenance of “an absolute sense of wrong and right that transcends…[all] individual particulars”–at least not when what we’re talking about is words rather than actions. But still, there’s something there, something about the way highly educated people–even apparently sincerely religious, highly educated people like Obama–talk about community and morality and tradition, a way that smacks of elitism to many of exactly those white rural and working-class voters he wants to win over to his cause of “unity.” (More about this point here.) I’m doubtful that Pennsylvania is going to be such a sure marker of the success or failure of his speech as Hanson assumes it will be, but he may be right that, through this speech, Obama has clarified an argument which the Republican machine will be able to use against him.

14

Andrew Edwards 03.20.08 at 6:04 pm

Incidentally, I’m kind of curious how many times Wright has said “America is great” or “we should all get along” or whatever. Could you conceivably run an anti-smear campaign, where you quote his best statements out of context in a series of YouTube videos?

15

Russell Arben Fox 03.20.08 at 6:05 pm

Adam,

I’m unclear on what Jeremiah Wright said that is supposed to be even incorrect, much less racist.

Why, he dared to complicate and be ambivalent about the middle-class American dream! What greater thought-crime can there be?

16

Matt 03.20.08 at 6:10 pm

There’s also a pretty funny irony about someone saying that we should apply absolute standards in the condemnation of racism, and that we cannot associate with racists, and then writing from the National Review.

17

Questioner 03.20.08 at 6:11 pm

Okay, some evidence:

Goldberg approves (http://liberalfascism.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGU1YmZlZmJkMTE2MjU5YWFmOGEyOTJiMDg0MzlmMzI) of the review of his book by Bruce Thornton, a line of which reads that Goldberg: “recovers the true roots of progressive/liberal politics — in the deification of the state as the instrument of utopian aspirations, the same dynamic of 20th century fascism”.

See also this (http://liberalfascism.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDI0Zjk4NjJlYmFkNzNhZTU4NGMxZTI5MDI5ZDA1MmU), and this eulogy (http://liberalfascism.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjRjYWRhNGVmMDVmMWExNmYxMDVjYmZkNzE1MTcyMTc) for The Public Interest: “humble domestic policy journal which argued, time and again, that everything was more complicated than it seems, that unintended consequences was a “law” of social policymaking and that Romantic and utopian impulses invariably led to folly. In every way, shape and form this is the opposite of a fascistic political orientation.”

I wish I knew how to use HTML tags.

18

Questioner 03.20.08 at 6:12 pm

I agree with andrew edwards that Obama did condemn Wright’s remarks. I also wonder what more he’s looking for.

19

Steve LaBonne 03.20.08 at 6:19 pm

You don’t understand. It doesn’t matter how many times a Dem apologizes for whatever crap they decide to harp on, the wingnuts will ALWAYS want more. Too many Democrats are not smart enough to understand how that game works.

I won’t even bother with the gall of the likes of VDH to be lecturing ANYBODY about “standards”. Still less about racism.

20

Righteous Bubba 03.20.08 at 6:46 pm

21

Questioner 03.20.08 at 6:55 pm

Thanks Bubba.

22

Dhez 03.20.08 at 6:55 pm

23

Odm 03.20.08 at 7:06 pm

By claiming that racism is absolutely wrong, VDH fails to see the distinction between racial hatred and racial resentment. According to Obama, Rev. Wright has no hate for white people, and Wright himself says he loves his enemies within his controversial sermon. Wright’s crime according to VDH is that he criticized institutionalized racism in an inflammatory manner. According to Obama, Wright is wrong because resentment of other races is the ultimate cause of institutionalized racism.

24

Geoff 03.20.08 at 7:16 pm

Obama’s speech was really impressive to me because he was able to distance himself from the more controversial (and, I would argue, over the top) aspects of Wright’s message without throwing the guy under the bus, and without giving in on the substantive issues that Wright brought up. Look, race matters in this country. It’s refreshing to have a candidate that is willing to talk about the issues that black Americans face because they have been off the agenda for way too long. What Obama’s speech proves is the power of empathy: he was able to show understanding for all positions in America’s debate over racial issues. He showed in his speech that America can have a leader that addresses racial issues in a way that is substantive yet not divisive, and the he is the guy. My appreciation for him has gone up a good deal since seeing it. The debate that is going in within the democratic party about who has it worse, white women or black men, is extremely harmful for the party and the country. Progress on both fronts is possible with Obama as president.

25

roger 03.20.08 at 7:16 pm

One of those odd changes in the conservative theology concerns race. It used to be a maxim with conservatives that all social engineering would fail, because it was based on the premise that humans were perfectable. The argument was that human nature is resistant.
But the new conservative message is that humans are amazingly perfectable. After a mere thirty years of legislation and non-racist standards of decorum in the media, racism has been totally wiped out in America – except, of course, for the real problem, the racism blacks hold, alas, against whites. Of course, this suggests that social engineering must be great! However, luckily, Bush era conservatism also holds strictly to the rule that it is all right to be schizophrenically contradictory – for instance, to present oneself as the liberator and true representative of the Iraqi people, whilst advocating nuking all Muslims – so it isn’t like this is going to give the NRO gang any pause.

26

Bruce Baugh 03.20.08 at 7:21 pm

Russell: There is a real sense amongst certain conservatives that there is something suspicious, something wrong about hope (perhaps because the polls indicate that what most Americans hope for is closer, insofar as socio-economic matters go, at least, to what liberals are offering?). They want to focus solely on policies, but policies only as they define them, rather than allowing that policies are supposed to arise from ideas and, well, hopes. is altogether too true. I am concerned at seeing a similar spirit infect people I otherwise admire in the spectrum from liberal to leftist, who seem to have concluded that since the conservative movement uses emotional manipulation to bad ends, it’s just wrong to ever have strong emotions about one’s policies and people, and most particularly to feel hope or pleasure about them. I continue to think it’s crucial to want better than one has, as long as we keep sharpening our sense of where the best and good lie.

27

Slocum 03.20.08 at 7:24 pm

Well, I think this is incorrect: “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”

Yes. It’s also ‘incorrect’ to say that the government gives black people drugs so that it can then arrest them and throw them in prison. But these are not just ‘incorrect’, they are vile, bigoted, crazy slanders.

I would not give a second chance to a presidential candidate who was revealed to have have spent twenty years raising his children in a community of white supremacists whose leader spewed similar vitriol and conspiracy theories (and whose congregation considered such speech unremarkable). Especially if the candidate adopted the leader as his ‘spiritual mentor’. So why should I accept this from Obama?

28

Angry African on the Loose 03.20.08 at 7:30 pm

So I guess no one will vote for Mac either? Seeing that he likes Reagan. And Reagan increased taxes, pulled out of a war wihtout any warning (starts with an L) and didn’t condemn Apartheid clear enough. Looks like Hillary will win. But ask her if she is ready to be the President: URL REMOVED FOR REPEATED LINK TRAWLING

29

Adam Kotsko 03.20.08 at 7:36 pm

Given that every generation of blacks in America has faced either enslavement or what amounts to random terrorist attacks from whites, can you blame certain blacks for finding “conspiracy theory” stuff about crack and HIV plausible? Especially when most of the white terrorism is swept under the historical rug — the majority of whites simply don’t know how bad it was, because the textbooks are so whitewashed.

I felt that one of the main messages in Obama’s speech was, “Black resentment is based in reality, white resentment is based in fantasy (or based in misrecognizing the real cause of their problems).” Even many of the conspiracy theories of the black community conform to this rubric.

30

Russell Arben Fox 03.20.08 at 7:38 pm

Bruce,

I am concerned at seeing a similar spirit infect people I otherwise admire in the spectrum from liberal to leftist, who seem to have concluded that since the conservative movement uses emotional manipulation to bad ends, it’s just wrong to ever have strong emotions about one’s policies and people, and most particularly to feel hope or pleasure about them.

A good observation, and one that needs to be heeded, especially since much of what is dismissed as “emotional manipulation” by some progressives, liberals, and leftists really comes down to their annoyance with religion, patriotism, and other affective concerns which are pretty central to the lives of many white and black working- and middle-class people. Obama is doing, I think, a very audacious thing: pouring on the “hope” and the “spirit” in his campaign, in very patriotic and even evangelical terms, without–at least not that I’ve been able to tell–compromising his critical intelligence or his expectations for his listeners. If he can pull it off, it’ll potentially signal something very remarkable.

31

Bill Gardner 03.20.08 at 8:12 pm

Slocum,
I am confident that HIV was not invented in a government laboratory, etc. And therefore it is unfortunate that this was, and possibly still is, a widely held belief in the Black community. It’s a slander, then, but not, I think, a “vile, bigoted, crazy” slander. Given Tuskegee, it wasn’t crazy.

32

someguy 03.20.08 at 8:15 pm

“It invites debating programs and policies on the merits, while granting the desirability of the goals. This is, to put it mildly, the last debate conservatives want to be having.”

Really? Why not? I think Goldberg is smart to shift the focus onto those grounds.

Do you really think school choice is such a losing proposition? So bad, that the last thing conservatives would want to do is debate about it?

In that same speech Obama concedes that is plausible that welfare policies were counter productive. A key conservative talking point.

“A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened.”

It is plausible that welfare policies were/are counter productive but the last thing conservatives want is a debate about welfare policies?

Because the last time there was a debate about welfare policies conservatives got stomped?

Oh wait, right, at the very least, welfare reform was 1/2 a victory for conservatives.

I am not saying it is a debate conservatives would absolutely win. But it would certainly be a decent contest.

Obama’s version of hope is pretty much the standard liberal list of remedies. A fairly compelling package or it wouldn’t exist in the political marketplace. But hardly invincible.

They would certainly have a much better chance than they would debating against hope.

33

Grand Moff Texan 03.20.08 at 8:45 pm

Furthermore, because there should be an “absolute sense of wrong and right that transcends situational ethics, context, and individual particulars”

Uh, outside context and particulars, there is no such thing as “right” or “wrong,” in the same way that there is no abstract essence of “art” that one may appreciate without an actual piece of fucking art in the room.

Who is that idiot?
.

34

abb1 03.20.08 at 8:50 pm

How is it a slander? It’s certainly not impossible that it was invented in a government laboratory. It’s merely a far-fetched conspiracy theory.

Also, I don’t quite understand this uncompromising attitude towards racism. Racism is one of the most common human emotions; most people are racists, one has to make a deliberate effort not to be a racist. Racism is pretty much like greed or lust.

I think it’s just fine, you can be a racist all you want – just keep it to yourself, follow the law and you’re a OK guy.

35

fred lapides 03.20.08 at 8:53 pm

Read speeches and bio of Malcolm X…he is “Wright” for a long time and then he changes and seeks reconciliation. What I noted in watching the Wright videos was the audience responding positively to the charismatic hate monger. He can not renounce Wright? Why not? Did voters for Hitler have to stick with him no matter what? In fact, a mother or grandmother is kin, related; a preacher can be tossed aside if what he says and preaches is intolerable.

I admire Obama and believe he would be A great president, but I suspect he is in for trouble with this Wright thing as the election gets fully underway.

36

RICKM 03.20.08 at 9:06 pm

So now Wright is Hitler!

Again, aside from the HIV claim, I haven’t heard Wright say anything offensive, racist, or just plain wrong. But he’s an outspoken black preacher, so I can see why the right is up in arms about his statements.

37

Slocum 03.20.08 at 9:13 pm

How is it a slander?

How is it slander to accuse those in power (rich white people, Wright points out) of inventing the AIDs virus in order propagate genocide against black people?!?

It’s certainly not impossible that it was invented in a government laboratory. It’s merely a far-fetched conspiracy theory.

Extremely far-fetched. With no supporting evidence whatsoever.

Also, I don’t quite understand this uncompromising attitude towards racism.

OK — set aside the racial angle. I would also not support a candidate whose spiritual advisor turned out to be a ‘9-11 truther’ who preached that 9-11 was an inside job.

38

Adam Kotsko 03.20.08 at 9:25 pm

Right-wingers constantly curry the support of crazy apocalyptic preachers who think that events in the Middle East will trip some kind of magical heavenly code to bring about the end of the world — it’s an absolutely pervasive element of the Republican coalition. This preacher has a couple conspiracy-theory beliefs — given plausibility, mind you, by the actual historical oppression of African Americans — and suddenly OMG OMG CRAZY!@!!! Billy Graham and many mainstream evangelical leaders believe nutty stuff, but no one would blink if Obama had regarded Billy Graham as a spiritual advisor.

I can already anticipate the answer that a double standard doesn’t make Wright less dangerous or something — but he factually is much, much less dangerous than the people conservatives are in bed with constantly.

39

abb1 03.20.08 at 9:29 pm

…rich white people, Wright points out…

The quote I found:

“The government is a lie. The government lied about inventing the HIV virus, as a means of genocide against people of color. Governments lie. The government lied about a connection between Al Qaeda and 9-11. The government lied about weapons about weapons of mass destruction, and if the government does not find the W.M.D.’s, they gonna do just like the L. A. P. D. and plant, them, some weapons of mass destruction.”

I don’t see any “rich white people” here. “Governments lie.” They certainly do. They are also extremely powerful and often quite ruthless. Thus the conspiracy theories. A preacher employing excessive, even grotesque rhetoric – yeah, that’s unheard of.

40

Adam Kotsko 03.20.08 at 9:30 pm

An example: Billy Graham supported Kim Il-Sung and exchanged gifts with Kim Jong-Il. Weirdly, this has never been a problem for any of the many presidents who have used him as a spiritual advisor.

41

cw 03.20.08 at 9:47 pm

slocum, I find that a little puzzling. Have you ever had a spiritual advisor, or perhaps a professional mentor? Perhaps someone who imparted a great deal of knowledge and wisdom upon you and supported your human or professional development in invaluable ways, but who happened, among all of his/her other wisdom & beliefs, to buy into something you found a little crazy (say, the moon landing was faked or the CIA assassinated JFK). You’d really cut that person off? You wouldn’t just agree to disagree while maintaining a fruitful relationship? Perhaps with the hope that you can influence said person’s views?

And how is it that the American populace equates a minister with a church? I thought we had an atypically high rate of church-going in this country. Has no one considered that maybe the Obamas had friends at that church that they were reluctant to leave behind? That this particular church met their philosophical/theological point of view better than others in the area? (In my own church, most of the members disagree vehemently with some matter or other of relative theological significance. We embrace that diversity; we don’t expect them to leave. Isn’t that a little bit like expecting those who find Bush’s (or Clinton’s) policies to be at least as abhorrent as Wright’s comments?) That its mission work fit their values better than others they had to choose from? That it offered ties to their community not available at other churches?

Obama made the outrageous observation that people are complicated and flawed. And that it is a greater defect of character to fixate on denouncing every person whose imperfections come to light than to try to understand them and respond with rational and civil disagreement.

42

Slocum 03.20.08 at 10:25 pm

I don’t see any “rich white people” here.

No, not in the same paragraph, but Wright has said, for example, “Barack knows what it means living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people…”

Wright preaches the country is controlled by rich white people. Wright preaches that the government (also presumably controlled by rich white people) invented AIDs and spread it in the black community to carry out genocide. How many millions of people–poor black Africans in particular–have, by Wright’s reckoning, have died of AIDS (which is to say were murdered by the people who control the U.S. government)?

I don’t find that a ‘little crazy’ — I find that as bigoted and vile as the Jewish blood libel. But I’m white and fairly well off (though certainly not as wealthy as Obama). I have friends in positions of authority and even elected office. I take that crap personally.

Right-wingers constantly curry the support of crazy apocalyptic preachers…

And do progressives typically give them a pass on this? And this is not simply ‘currying support’. Wright and Obama have been very close for a long time. Wright had a position in Obama’s campaign and was scheduled to introduce him at his announcement until the first hints of controversy arose.

Have you ever had a spiritual advisor, or perhaps a professional mentor? Perhaps someone who imparted a great deal of knowledge and wisdom upon you and supported your human or professional development in invaluable ways, but who happened, among all of his/her other wisdom & beliefs, to buy into something you found a little crazy. You’d really cut that person off?

A little crazy, yes (a belief there might be something to the paranormal for example — a little nutty to my way of thinking, but harmless). But something remotely similar to a conspiracy theory that held that powerful people of one race had created and spreading a disease to destroy another race? Would I cut such a person off? Absolutely.

And how is it that the American populace equates a minister with a church?

I do to the extent that these views were obviously acceptable at TUCC rather than a firing offense (which they would have been, without any doubt, at any church I’ve been familiar with).

Has no one considered that maybe the Obamas had friends at that church that they were reluctant to leave behind?

Would you accept that explanation from a candidate who was a member of a white supremacist church?

43

RICKM 03.20.08 at 10:37 pm

Slocum-

So I guess your argument would bar you from supporting John McCain? Hillary it is then!

44

Adam Kotsko 03.20.08 at 10:45 pm

Wright preaches the country is controlled by rich white people.

Weirdly, it actually is.

45

abb1 03.20.08 at 11:00 pm

Slocum, I think it is indeed similar to the blood libel except that it’s a prejudice in a weak minority group against the dominant power. Compare to prejudices towards the ‘goyim’ held (in the past) by many of the Jews in Christian countries – very, very common. Nobody blames them – they were an oppressed minority, they had a good excuse. Same here.

46

Jay B. 03.20.08 at 11:00 pm

No, not in the same paragraph, but Wright has said, for example, “Barack knows what it means living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people…”

Wow. That’s outrageous! The nerve of that guy, thinking that the US is run by rich white people, when EVERYONE knows it’s run by rich white men. Whatta loon!

47

Russell Arben Fox 03.20.08 at 11:05 pm

Good one, Jay.

48

CK 03.20.08 at 11:14 pm

Not to sidetrack too much, but incidentally I found it striking how un-shocking Wright’s “God damn America” comment becomes when placed in context: “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”

Wouldn’t this sentiment have to be shared by any consistent traditional Christian? The belief that God does “damn” sinners, and that putting other gods before Him is the highest sin, is a thoroughly moderate one in the context of traditional doctrine.

Seems harsh to me, but then, Christianity historically is.

It’s also worth underlining the “for as long as” part–which means he’s not as pessimistic about the capacity for change as Obama suggested.

49

Bruce Baugh 03.20.08 at 11:16 pm

The idea that the government created AIDS to use against black people would be a lot like the blood libel if black people dominated all the social and economic institutions of the country, had used white people against their will or knowledge in large-scale medical experimentation, subjected white people to both official and unofficial discrimination in education, housing, employment, and the like, held whites as slaves for generations and in subsequent generations engaged in driving the entire white population of towns out so as to seize their goods, subjected white vices to disproportionately harsh treatment….

Which is to say, it’s not at all the same thing.

The blood libel is one more justification for non-Jewish authorities to abuse Jewish people and communities in law, and for non-Jewish populations at large to do so with or without sanction of law. The government AIDS myth is the response of a discriminated-against minority who really have been used as involuntary guinea pigs and subjected to calculated efforts to destroy their social and political institutions to one more mysterious ailment the government and many social leaders seem more interested in using as justification for more abuse than trying to treat.

50

dawud 03.20.08 at 11:19 pm

And as a white, not completely comfortable (North) American, may I say that I don’t find a whole lot objectionable in Rev. Wright’s speech? “God damn America” is offensive, but put it in context, it’s certainly no worse than Falwell’s comment that “homosexuals, liberals [et al] brought this [9/11]
upon us” after 9/11, nor Rod Parsley and John Hagee’s comments over the last few weeks, hating on muslims, Americans who don’t agree with them, etc.

I would have to agree with AdamK and JayB above, it does seem that America is run by rich white people, and there does seem to be cause for poor black people to be angry – but I guess you’re not supposed to mention that.

I also find the right-wing meme:
[Google Results 1 – 20 of about 357 for “obama threw his grandmother under the bus”.] to be ridiculously offensive. As Jon Stewart pointed out, Obama invited us to speak about race in America “as if we were adults” – and those who can’t attack his substantive statements are trying to insinuate he hates his grandma.

And Americans wonder why much of the world thinks they’ve got their heads in the sand?

51

voyou 03.20.08 at 11:32 pm

How many millions of people—poor black Africans in particular—have, by Wright’s reckoning, have died of AIDS (which is to say were murdered by the people who control the U.S. government)?

I don’t find that a ‘little crazy’—I find that as bigoted and vile as the Jewish blood libel.

Well, there is the little difference that powerful white people actually have, frequently, attempted to kill (and succeeded in killing) large numbers of black people. So, the US government might not have used the particular method Wright suggests, namely inventing and spreading AIDS, but they’ve don’t more-or-less morally equivalent things (indeed, the Bush administration actually does promote the spread of AIDS in Africa by denying funding to organizations that don’t emphasize abstinence over condom use).

So, Wright is making a generally claim about the murderousness of a racist system, which is true, and using a specific example (the US government spreading HIV) which is false. This would only be analogous to the blood libel if you thought that the problem with the blood libel was that it got the details wrong about whose blood specifically the Jews drank.

52

jj 03.20.08 at 11:42 pm

First of all, Wright was preaching to the choir, so how could anything he said be construed as “divisive”? It becomes divisive only when someone rips away the context and peddles the text to an unintended and hostile audience. Would Wright “damn the United States” to a congregation of WASPs (those goddammed Anglo-Saxicans) in Skokie? Should O’Bama reject O’Wright in a nationally televised speech to an electorate which includes the people who are expected to support him in his presidential pursuit? It’s all political posturing, for the benefit of whichever audience is addressed, black, white, Republican or Democratic.

Finally, you don’t give whites adequate credit for their own paranoia. Whites are as much of a minority in the rest of the world as blacks are in the US. European Jews are as much a minority in the Middle East as they were in Europe.

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Keith M Ellis 03.21.08 at 12:14 am

“Uh, outside context and particulars, there is no such thing as ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ in the same way that there is no abstract essence of “art” that one may appreciate without an actual piece of fucking art in the room.

Who is that idiot?”

Hey, look, grand moff texan just implicitly called, say, Plato an “idiot” and thus claimed that Plato and Victor Davis Hanson are either equally genius or idiotic in asserting the reality of categorical abstractions.

As I am in no way willing to judge the likes of Victor Davis Hanson comparablly insightful with Plato on this important subject for this agreement, I am forced to conclude that it is grand moff texan who is likely a little intellectually challenged.

“There is a real sense amongst certain conservatives that there is something suspicious, something wrong about hope…”

This is certainly true for people like Horowitz and others who were fervent leftist idealists. But I think it’s a general trait of conservatives. They are cynical, consider it realism, and count it as a virtue. But it’s not. Realism is a virtue; but what they never understood, back when they were young and perhaps tried to understand progressivism/liberalism, is that leftism is not antithetical to realism or pragmatism.

I see a relationship with conservatives in this sense with religious unbelievers or a certain type. For these unbelievers, being a believer and praying and whatnot is childishly foolish. Once they, too, were childish and foolish, but then they grew up and understood the world for what it is in its relentless, unsympathetic ways. Those folk can’t imagine a believer who doesn’t pray to God for hugs and puppies. It’s naive belief and constant disappointment (or constantly adjusting delusion) or this bitter, cynical unbelief. There’s nothing else.

And, of course, there is. I don’t say this as a believer, myself. I’m not. But I find it remarkable how many outspoken unbelievers are really just reacting to the fact that the universe turned out to be more unpleasant than they wished and they are motivated, in consequence, by this maladjusted contempt and resentment of the believers.

Conservatives of this type—and there are a lot of them—see leftists as nothing but starry-eyed idealistic children who think that by clapping their hands really, really hard, Tinkerbell will live and there will be no more wars, and there will be universal health care and social justice.

But that certainly doesn’t describe me; it’s never described me. I was never an idealist of this type, even as a child. I’ve always thought of myself as more of a pragmatist or realist (in method and outlook; I did have to work through being labeled an idealist by my conservative father).

I don’t really think that for this type of conservative, it’s about the real world and policies, even though they think those are their exclusive provinces. It’s simply psychological: they are punishing others as proxies for the way they’d like to punish themselves for putting themselves at emotional risk, and (in their view) subsequently hurting themselves, by hoping for anything good. It’s a perverse and sad emotional maladjustment played out in political abstractions and group affiliation.

It’s also just an opportunity to play the “older/wiser” card. “The world is a hard place, people are unreliable and venal—only a fool ignores these fundamental truths.” The thing is, though, is that these aren’t really hard-won understandings. These things are true in exactly the same way as it’s true that gravity is unforgiving and people die every day from falling. What is foolish is not to see this as it is, from a young age. It’s not a great achievement to only begin to understand that bad things happen in the world in middle-age.

In this sense, I suppose, conservatism is the little of what counts as wisdom for fools. If having learned not to run with scissors counts as one’s great life-wisdom, perhaps one should be forgiven for concluding that doing nothing is safest. That’s certainly the best course of action for them—those who are so insensitive to life’s complexities and risks.

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Daniel Rosa 03.21.08 at 12:15 am

It’s probably pointless to argue with conservatives about what Wright did or did not say. This isn’t a discussion engaged in good faith: many conservatives seek a reason to diss Obama, and Wright has provided them with what they believe is a pretty good reason.

55

roger 03.21.08 at 1:43 am

Ellis, perhaps you ought to go back to your Plato. Plato absolutist views are tempered enough to be unrecognizable in VDH’S terms – for instance, he advises the governors in the Republic to lie. As in not telling the truth.

Malcolm Schofield, in an essay in the Cambridge Companion to Plato, makes the nice point that:

“It was Augustine, not Plato, who was the first notable chapion of what we might call the absolutist position on the morality of lying: holding that all lying is wrong, and forbidden by God as sinful. Indeed, Augustine represents a watershed between antiquity and modernity in the history of the moral philosophy of lying. “

Of course, Plato lived in a slave supported republic, I imagine, when VDH finds this out, he will condemn him absolutely… Ooops! That would be politically correct, defined by conservatives as not understanding that outside context and particulars, there is no such thing as ‘right’ or “wrong.” Absolutism only counts, of course, when it comes to the true horror of black racism. That presidents in the U.S., from George Washington to George Bush, grew up in an America in which the very laws were racist, doesn’t count – cause it wasn’t black racism . As we know, that is the cause of every ill!

56

Steve LaBonne 03.21.08 at 3:15 am

Hate monger my fucking ass. Wright clearly can be intemperate, and ignorant (as in the stupid black-talk-radio HIV crap). I expect ministers to say crazy shit, by the way; after all they make a living talking to / about their imaginary friend in the sky.

But there is something wrong with you if you see “hate” in his remarks; if wanting to empower black people suggests to you an inevitable connection with putting down white people, or if you think bashing US society as presently constituted = bashing white people, then that’s a problem in YOUR psyche, not Wright’s.

I hear only demands for EQUALITY and the end of white privilege, and I personally have a problem with anybody who has a problem with that. And I close with the obligatory reminder that TUCC not only has white members and white associate pastors, but has maintained its connection with, and indeed actively supports at a more than token level, the overwhelmingly white UCC. (For which I have something of a soft spot; its HQ are here in Cleveland because it deliberately chose to locate in a troubled inner city- I respect people who put their money where their mouth is.)

Fuck the ignorant superpatriotism that disfigures this benighted country. If I feel like saying “God damn America”- and I often do these days- then I damn well will. Any wingnut who doesn’t like it can kiss my ass.

57

Sortition 03.21.08 at 4:18 am

I am one of the many who is very, very impressed with the speech. My support for Obama has gone up significantly.

Looking at the tracking polls, it seems that those many who were very, very impressed were, just like you, already in the Obama camp.

All I really have to add is just reiteration of what others have said: how effective Obama was at saying things that were, basically, plain good sense.

I don’t think so. How about this part of the speech?:

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – […] a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

Muslim baiting and support for occupation is plain good sense?

58

engels 03.21.08 at 4:48 am

“God damn America” is offensive

Depends who you ask. In some parts of Iraq, “God bless America” might not go down too well either, I’ve heard….

59

engels 03.21.08 at 4:58 am

CK’s point is better though: once you look at what he was actually saying it doesn’t sound offensive at all.

60

brooksfoe 03.21.08 at 5:08 am

It’s also ‘incorrect’ to say that the government gives black people drugs so that it can then arrest them and throw them in prison. But these are not just ‘incorrect’, they are vile, bigoted, crazy slanders. – slocum

No, they’re not bigoted, unless you consider opposition to the US government “bigoted”. By that standard, obviously, most of American conservatism is “bigoted”.

61

John Holbo 03.21.08 at 5:11 am

Upstream, a couple bits from questioner: “I don’t think that’s what Goldberg says, or at the very least not what he means. I think what he means is that one should not have a utopia even as one’s aim, because having that as an aim will cause a lot more problems than having mere improvement of society as one’s aim. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all that.”

And, further on, re: “Public Interest”: “everything was more complicated than it seems, that unintended consequences was a “law” of social policymaking and that Romantic and utopian impulses invariably led to folly. In every way, shape and form this is the opposite of a fascistic political orientation.”

The conservative objection to New Deal-type/liberal stuff has always been that it is philosophically objectionable. On a couple levels. There are some stock, quick rhetorical moves to establish this: neglect of the law of unintended consequences. And hints that the whole thing is spiritually dangerous, a slippery slope aimed at something un-American. But if Goldberg admits that the spirit of the Obama speech is ‘wonderful’, then all this goes away. Obama isn’t naive about the difficulty of crafting good policy. And Goldberg admits he is aiming at something truly admirable (not crypto-fascist.)

In short, the argument used to be: the spirit is all wrong, ergo the policy must be flawed.

Now the argument is: the spirit is wonderful, but we already decided these policiies are flawed. Why are we talking about this? Sigh.

That’s why I think Obama can win the argument. Obama’s habit of just sensibly gesturing at the arguments on the other side neuters the other side’s rhetoric. Because conservatives only ever gestured to their own philosophy, in any case. So it is not as though there is anything left that Obama is missing, except the anger.

62

SG 03.21.08 at 5:18 am

Slocum, until 1997 the US had not signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, i.e. it had a deliberate intention of killing millions with biological or chemical agents. It had (as others have pointed out) a history of using deadly biological agents on black people, and further back in history of killing and/or enslaving millions of black people. When Wright made his speech the US was in the process of killing about a million non-white muslims.

So accusing the US of inventing HIV to kill blacks may be factually wrong, but it’s hardly out of whack with the spirit of the national enterprise. Bigoted and evil it is not, just slightly more paranoid than necessary.

63

Keith M Ellis 03.21.08 at 5:40 am

“Ellis, perhaps you ought to go back to your Plato.”

It’s not clear to me why you would try to understand my comment, and the one to which I was responding, in the context of arguments about the moral necessity, or lack thereof, of being truthful. GMT was asserting that it was obviously true that “right” and “wrong” cannot be discussed, does not exist, outside of any particular example of a right or wrong act—he compares the contrary assertion to a contrary assertion of the existence of “Art”, independent of an example of piece of artwork.

GMT was attacking the reasonableness of asserting absolute morality and the independent existence of abstractions; I choose to primarily focus on the most literal reading of his claim and point out that a number of notable non-idiots have asserted that not only do abstractions exist independently from examples, they are the only truth there really is.

I don’t agree with those who hold those beliefs, but I’m certainly not going to call them “idiots”. Nor will I call “idiotic” the belief in moral absolutism. Neither of these philosophical viewpoints (materialism, relativism) are asserted by the majority of the world’s religions and philosophical traditions—they’re not even decided within our own philosophical tradition, the impressions of many notwithstanding.

I also, by the way, wasn’t defending Hanson’s arguments on its own merits, though you clearly seem to be assuming I was. I also agree with you, quite strongly, that this contemporary conservative tendency to take absolutist positions on the wrongness of racism is really just a convenient way in which they can bring white resentment to the table on equal footing with what black Americans have suffered. I think this is not only annoying, it’s an obscenity. Whites Americans who complain about being targets of racism inspire within me the desire to do them violence; I think Obama is far too understanding. Or, rather, I can bring myself to empathize with the complaints of certain lower-class and lower middle-class white Americans who feel socially insecure…but pundits of Hanson’s sort who manipulate, cynically or no, these resentments in ways in which accentuate the racial divide in the US and to the detriment of the racial minorities who have borne 99% of the brunt of racism make me ill from repulsion and fury. I’m no friend of Hanson’s.

But I’m not going to sit idly by while someone tosses around smug little assertions like those from grand moff texan, either.

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gwangung 03.21.08 at 5:42 am

Accusing the US of inventing HIV to kill blacks is crazy. It’s as crazy as trying to subvert and destroy science education in the US, and trying to instill religious dogma in textbooks.

Oh. Wait…

65

engels 03.21.08 at 5:47 am

As a white man and an atheist, let me just say that on the basis of what I have read on this thread Reverend Wright’s view of the world sounds a lot more sane to me than Slocum’s.

66

abb1 03.21.08 at 9:09 am

In short, the argument used to be: the spirit is all wrong, ergo the policy must be flawed.

Now the argument is: the spirit is wonderful, but we already decided these policiies are flawed. Why are we talking about this? Sigh.

Perhaps it has something to do with the demise of the communist ideology. There’s no need to fight the idea anymore, it’s not dangerous and they can now happily appropriate the liberal take on it: ‘yeah, sure, beautiful idea, unfortunately it doesn’t work, forget it’.

67

Nell 03.21.08 at 10:08 am

ck in 49: [Rev. Wright:] “God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.” …
It’s also worth underlining the “for as long as” part—which means he’s not as pessimistic about the capacity for change as Obama suggested.

Especially since the passage is part of a sermon whose entire point is that governments change, but God does not. You can see the quotation in its context here.

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Slocum 03.21.08 at 11:58 am

engels: As a white man and an atheist, let me just say that on the basis of what I have read on this thread Reverend Wright’s view of the world sounds a lot more sane to me than Slocum’s.

Yes, and others here obviously share your view. I guess we can conclude that for those who think the “AIDs designed in government labs for genocide against black people” theory is not that crazy or offensive — Obama has their votes sewn up.

I kind of suspect swing voters in American elections tend to take my perspective more than yours. But we’ll see.

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Russell Arben Fox 03.21.08 at 12:58 pm

John (#62),

Obama’s habit of just sensibly gesturing at the arguments on the other side neuters the other side’s rhetoric. Because conservatives only ever gestured to their own philosophy, in any case. So it is not as though there is anything left that Obama is missing, except the anger.

This is another fine point, though I guess we can look at 2008–assuming Obama gets the Democratic nomination–as a test case for it. There still are, amongst all the determined Republicans and party activists and others out there, a fair number of really committed conservatives. But those who are truly committed are, so far as I can tell, generally only on board with part of the Republican platform, because taken as a whole, it’s not so much a “conservative” document as one that just occasionally, inconsistently, gestures at various (often mutually contradictory) conservative ideas. Depending on what dominates public opinion in any given election year, that mix has nonetheless been enough to appeal to a wide swath of working and middle-class white voters, for various relgious/cultural/class reasons. Now what happens when you get a candidate who calls the Republicans bluff: who refuses to moderate his (already fairly moderate) liberal ideas, but treats those religious/cultural/class concerns with some real respect? Taking this speech as a test case, it clear this approach won’t win over all those voters–it still smacks of an elitism they (rightly?) find distasteful. But, as I argued before, it may be enough to draw is some of them. They wouldn’t be “Reagan Democrats”; the issues in play are, and therefore their motivations would be, very different. But maybe they’ll show up, all the same. Such a result would certainly make for a better win than Clinton’s difference-splitting 51-49-style victories.

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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 2:04 pm

Hey, look, grand moff texan just implicitly called, say, Plato an “idiot”

Would you like me to do it explicitly?

It would save us a lot of time talking about the essence of “table.”
.

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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 2:08 pm

GMT was asserting that it was obviously true that “right” and “wrong” cannot be discussed, does not exist, outside of any particular example of a right or wrong act—he compares the contrary assertion to a contrary assertion of the existence of “Art”, independent of an example of piece of artwork.

Because I was talking about manifestations of opinions, yes. That’s why I chose “art” instead of “geometry.” Saying that I dismissed the possibility of abstractions is just, well, stupid.

Abstractions and ethics are not the same thing. Asking for a sense of right and wrong without examples is incoherent.
.

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CK 03.21.08 at 2:23 pm

Judging by the grand moff texan’s sophisticated argumentative techniques (lacing reasonable disagreement with condescending accusations of idiocy and stupidity), I’m going to charitably assume that the texan is a first year undergraduate philosophy student. If that’s the case, the moff will either a) like so many of us did as undergraduate students, develop more nuanced views with increased experience and knowledge or b) drop such studies altogether and get an engineering degree.

In the meantime, the moff is probably not yet ready to have a grown up disagreement about such things, so it’s best for us, and the last 2000 years of philosophical inquiry and debate about ethical matters, to simply defer to his definitive judgment.

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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 2:26 pm

ps. I long ago decided that Plato was an idiot after reading Socrates’ dialogue with Meno’s slave. In the dialogue, Socrates simply asks leading questions, blank demonstrative sentences with tacked-on interrogatives, so that Plato can pretend that knowledge of geometry was innate.

Socrates: It is no easy matter, but still I am willing to try my best for your sake. Just call one of your own troop of attendants there, [82b] whichever one you please, that he may serve for my demonstration.

Meno: Certainly. You, I say, come here.

Socrates: He is a Greek, I suppose, and speaks Greek?

Meno: Oh yes, to be sure–born in the house.

Socrates: Now observe closely whether he strikes you as recollecting or as learning from me.

Meno: I will.

Socrates: Tell me, boy, do you know that a square figure is like this?7

Boy: I do.

Socrates: Now, a square figure has these lines, four in number, all equal?

Boy: Certainly.

Socrates: And these, drawn through the middle,8 are equal too, are they not?

Boy: Yes.

Socrates: And a figure of this sort may be larger or smaller?

Boy: To be sure.

Socrates: Now if this side were two feet and that also two, how many feet would the whole be? Or let me put it thus: if one way it were two feet, and only one foot the other, of course the space would be two feet taken once ?

Boy: Yes.

Socrates: But as it is two feet also on that side, it must be twice two feet?

Boy: It is.

Socrates: Then the space is twice two feet?

Boy: Yes.

Socrates: Well, how many are twice two feet? Count and tell me.

Boy: Four, Socrates.

Socrates: And might there not be another figure twice the size of this, but of the same sort, with all its sides equal like this one?

Boy: Yes.

Socrates: Then how many feet will it be?

Boy: Eight.

Socrates: Come now, try and tell me how long will each side [82e] of that figure be. This one is two feet long: what will be the side of the other, which is double in size?

Boy: Clearly, Socrates, double.

Socrates: Do you observe, Meno, that I am not teaching the boy anything, but merely asking him each time? And now he supposes that he knows about the line required to make a figure of eight square feet; or do you not think he does?

Even as rhetoric, it’s weak. As logic, it’s a joke.

But I guess it’s the same issue here. One can insist on the independent existence of abstractions. Insisting on the independent existence of ethics is merely a cheap way to avoid the hard work of making a concrete case. One projects one’s preferences into a safely non-falsifiable sphere in order to pretend that they have become ‘absolute’ merely by becoming vague and intangible.

So, having explained myself more than should have been necessary, all that seems to be left of Keith Ellis’ objection is an argument from authority.
.

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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 2:27 pm

I’m going to charitably assume that the texan is a first year undergraduate philosophy student.

And what should I assume from your error? I mean, if you’re that far off, why should I be interested in your opinion?
.

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John Holbo 03.21.08 at 2:49 pm

I have to say: I’m rather fond of the “Meno”.

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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 2:51 pm

Whoops!

My apologies, ck. I did not realize that you were posting from the seventeenth century:

the last 2000 years of philosophical inquiry

Plato, d. 347 BCE.

Please enjoy the Enlightenment. The ramblings of Greek trust-fund babies and pederasts will soon seem less important.
.

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gwangung 03.21.08 at 2:57 pm

I guess we can conclude that for those who think the “AIDs designed in government labs for genocide against black people” theory is not that crazy or offensive—Obama has their votes sewn up.

Please remember that Tuskegee didn’t end until 1972, well within living memory for a lot of American voters, and only a decade and a half before HIV really hit the public. Also, given the fact that biology education has been eviserated in this country, I’m not certain we should be surprised that the “HIV is black genocide” idea has propogated so well.

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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 3:07 pm

Also current in African American circles is a story, which I’ve never been able to verify, concerning experiments by infant formula companies in the mid-twentieth century.

The story goes that companies solicited infant test subjects by advertising in African American communities that the infants would be given some new scientific wonder food. In reality, test groups were selectively starved of specific nutrients in order to determine the cheapest necessary formulation, resulting in various developmental abnormalities in the infant subjects.

I have no idea if there is any factual basis for this. For all I know, it’s just some weird riff on the blood libel.
.

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Thers 03.21.08 at 3:50 pm

I don’t think that’s what Goldberg says, or at the very least not what he means. I think what he means is that one should not have a utopia even as one’s aim, because having that as an aim will cause a lot more problems than having mere improvement of society as one’s aim. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all that.

Goldberg is that does say this. It’s in his definition of what “fascism” is.

What’s so irritating about Goldberg is that he wants to insult and claim injury for anyone saying that’s what he wants to do. There is a reason you know that his book isn’t called “Watch Out for Utopias.”

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Slocum 03.21.08 at 3:56 pm

Please remember that Tuskegee didn’t end until 1972, well within living memory for a lot of American voters, and only a decade and a half before HIV really hit the public.

Yes, well, ‘the government’ obviously didn’t invent syphilis nor was anyone intentionally infected. And then there’s this:

http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA34A.htm

And a brief discussion here:

http://www.mail-archive.com/tips@acsun.frostburg.edu/msg14020.html

So, no — Tuskegee simply does not make the idea of U.S. government labs creating the AIDS virus (and then some other government agency initiating a program to spread it) in order to kill vast numbers of black people remotely plausible.

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Questioner 03.21.08 at 4:07 pm

In #62, John Holbo wrote: “In short, the argument used to be: the spirit is all wrong, ergo the policy must be flawed.

Now the argument is: the spirit is wonderful, but we already decided these policiies are flawed. Why are we talking about this? Sigh.”

I don’t see what’s wrong with this position (other than the fact that the policies are not flawed).

To elaborate, why can’t Goldberg say: “some set of policies S were supported in the past by utopian underpinnings. Not surprisingly (at least, not surprising to the conservative) those policies turned out to do more harm than good. Now, those same policies are picked up by someone who isn’t moved by utopian impulses, but simply by impulses to improve things. Okay, great. Unfortunately, the ideological origin of the policies is what made them bad, not who picked them up later.” (And by the way, the conservative doesn’t have to think that any policy undertaken out of the spirit to improve matters must be good; there are objective criteria one can use to assess policies. And yes, I’m sure Goldberg contradicts his own dictum right and left. To use Peter Railton’s language, I’m talking about Goldberg*.)

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lemuel pitkin 03.21.08 at 4:17 pm

In other important news, there was a mentally disturbed guy on my train home last night telling random strangers to get a job and that it was all their mothers’ fault.

83

John Holbo 03.21.08 at 4:23 pm

“I don’t see what’s wrong with this position (other than the fact that the policies are not flawed).”

Well, you get to pretend to have argued against policies, without ever having offered an argument that you are (now) willing to stand behind.

“And by the way, the conservative doesn’t have to think that any policy undertaken out of the spirit to improve matters must be good;”

I was seizing more on the consideration that the conservative can hardly say that any policy undertaken out of the spirit of improvement is necessarily bad.

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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 4:24 pm

Yes, well, ‘the government’ obviously didn’t invent syphilis nor was anyone intentionally infected.

Please use a condom with that straw man.
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Keith M Ellis 03.21.08 at 4:26 pm

What can one say to someone who confidentially dismisses Plato himself as an idiot and the Meno as stupid? Or quibbles with ck’s rounding out the history of western philosophy to 2,000 years? Or invokes pederasty in a criticism of all of classic Greek philosophy? Maybe it’s best one just look away.

In any case, it’s not really fair to digress and start beating him up about his opinions on Plato. The point here is that his follow-up comment #72 just demonstrates that he’s not competent to be discussing the matter of what is stupid or idiotic to believe about even the most basic questions in moral philosophy or epistemology. He doesn’t have a clue—he’s making idiosyncratic distinctions that he thinks are self-evident as assumptions in what probably amounts to a “belief” that’s arisen cumulatively from a bunch of half-assed idle considerations, perhaps a few conversations, and probably a cohort lay opinion on the nature of morality and ethics. If something, merely at a first glance, apparently contradicts this “belief” of his? It must be “idiotic”.

Really, I had expected his argument to be something more developed and from received wisdom—similar to, say, someone confidently invoking the intentionalist fallacy as the last word on aesthetics of authorship. But his claims about the idiocy of Hanson isn’t even that well grounded or coherent. It’s just ignorant bullshit.

Does this matter? I think it does. It’s a nice example of the toxicity of the smug, snarky, aggressively counter-productive discourse that infests the web. A contradictory form could have appeared on a right-wing website—one asserting the idiocy of denying an independent, absolute morality—with the same smug, self-congratulatory tone that says nothing more than “everyone else are idiots, amirite?” and which is based upon what is usually a completely inaccurate sense of personal competency in the matter at hand.

In fact, this particular example—in each of grand moff texan’s comments—demonstrates a mirror-world twin of the sophomorism of Objectivism. These are all people discussing philosophy with no competency whatsoever who believe of themselves exactly the opposite. Objectivists are perpetual college sophomores with nothing more than one or two survey-type philosophy courses (and that’s a generous estimate; more likely it’s zero) who think that they can authoritatively evaluate any philosopher and any philosophical idea at the drop of a hat, with little or no familiarity, with great self-assurance, and with extreme smug condescension. GMT’s comment on the Meno is a superb example.

It matters here, I think, because GMT is probably using the time spent reading and commenting here at Crooked Timber, an academic blog, as a source for furthering his collection of shiny geegaws with which he adorns his superficial comprehension of, well, everything. And I think shaming is an efficient corrective.

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cw 03.21.08 at 4:34 pm

Are you seriously trying to minimize the govt’s culpability for Tuskeegee? How much less evil would you consider your doctor to be if she merely withheld treatment for a horrifying & eminently treatable disease without your knowledge & consent than if she infected you as well? Your prolonged & excruciating end is the same either way. And if your family then acquired AIDS (now that science has demonstrated the ability to create biological weapons), they would be not just irrational, but completely reprehensible for suspecting her of even greater moral depravity to them than she showed you? Why? because criminals never commit worse crimes than the ones for which they’ve been busted?
How exactly to the Tuskeegee doctors get off lighter than Obama with you?

87

Questioner 03.21.08 at 4:34 pm

While I very much enjoyed Ellis’s response to GMT, I have a different response to him: one can endorse a false conclusion and still be overall smart; one can use faulty reasoning and still be overall smart; if a bunch of very smart people all agree, or almost all agree, that someone P is extremely smart, that is some evidence for thinking that P is smart; if a bunch of very smart people agree that P is smart, and if you read lots of what P says and conclude that P is not smart, you might want to reread P’s stuff carefully at least once; finally, if P says a lot of stuff that appears foolish to you, but happened to write 2400 years ago, you might want to take P’s context into account.

I take all of the above to be obvious. If someone misses it, I don’t think he is stupid, but I do think he did something rather boneheaded.

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Questioner 03.21.08 at 4:37 pm

“Well, you get to pretend to have argued against policies, without ever having offered an argument that you are (now) willing to stand behind.”

But I’m sure Goldberg has argued against those policies ad nauseum. If so, then a sigh seems fine (it indicates his exhaustion at having to go over these arguments yet again). Of course, a sigh is inappropriate if Obama has forwarded a new policy, but I don’t think he has, at least not in that speech.

“I was seizing more on the consideration that the conservative can hardly say that any policy undertaken out of the spirit of improvement is necessarily bad.”

That’s clearly true, but if the policy originally was endorsed out of a spirit of utopianism, and if Goldberg is convinced that that initial endorsement is what deformed the policy, then the fact that that same policy is now endorsed out of a desire for improvement doesn’t make it much more palatable than before.

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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 4:41 pm

What can one say to someone who confidentially dismisses Plato himself as an idiot and the Meno as stupid?

Since you don’t seem to be able to answer the question, I’ll try for you.

Is it possible that you’re on the internet? Having read the thread, which began with a post the very title of which mocks VDH’s juvenile sense of absolutes, where is it that I have managed to limbo under a bar that was set so low? I would have thought that your content-free characterizations would have been evidence enough to anyone that there are no standards of admission here. You keep claiming that I have inadvertently proved something about myself, if only because you can’t argue it.

Yes, I understand that there is a school of ethics that claims a basis in things beyond human comprehension, which is nice, because it will save a lot of time.

In the meantime, I don’t see why I should show Plato any greater reverence than the mumblings of an Indonesian shaman who thinks he can transform himself into a parakeet. I’m not saying any of these figures are insignificant, I’m just saying that they’re all bone-in-the-nose savages to me. If that hurts your Time Life Books™ sensibilities, then you are going to be a lot of fun.
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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 4:42 pm

If someone misses it, I don’t think he is stupid, but I do think he did something rather boneheaded.

Can we compromise and call him autistic?
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91

Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 4:44 pm

Are you seriously trying to minimize the govt’s culpability for Tuskeegee?

Yes.

This has been another episode of …
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CK 03.21.08 at 4:46 pm

“Plato, d. 347 BCE.”

I was rounding to the nearest millennium, silly!

On the issue of moral absolutism–this is a serious, unresolved philosophical dilemma. True, absolute moral rules do, time and again, fail the test of intuition in individual cases. Nevertheless every attempt to construct an ethical theory that avoids them can be reasonably charged with either (a) tacitly assuming a moral absolute or (b) failing to justify its claims to morally obligate. I say reasonably charged, so a case can be made that the charges are false, but it remains a live issue.

(I find it shocking that no one has yet decisively answered Kant’s preemptive reply to the consequentialist: that a hypothetical moral imperative is moral only if ultimately grounded in a categorical one. Instead the deontologiststs and consequentialists ignore or talk past one another.)

To call moral absolutists idiots is also to take far too lightly a very serious practical ethical dilemma. Most of our cherished “enlightened” political values (liberalism, democracy, human rights, international law) have a historical basis in moral absolutes–so their rejection poses a threat to such values. (Of the “you’re not wearing a fancy uniform so we don’t have any moral obligation to recognize your humanity” variety. That’s excellent company to keep!)

Roger,

I don’t think the case of “noble lies” counts against Plato’s commitment to moral absolutes. That he doesn’t hold lying to be absolutely immoral is consistent with holding other moral absolutes. In fact, I think he would argue lying is acceptable in this case precisely because it’s an absolute good for the soul and state to be ruled by knowledge (which is not the same as by honesty).

93

engels 03.21.08 at 4:48 pm

I guess we can conclude that for those who think the “AIDs designed in government labs for genocide against black people” theory is not that crazy or offensive

No, just less crazy and offensive than a lot of other stuff I hear every day, often from rightwingers and ‘moderate’ liberals on this site, and certainly less crazy and offensive than your view that it is rational to judge a man who has been preaching for 36 years by extracting the single most disagreeable mistaken statement you can find in all of that and focusing on it obsessively.

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engels 03.21.08 at 4:56 pm

Also pretty crazy if I may say so is your admission (#42) that you take any allegations of wrongdoing against the US government as a personal insult…

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Gatherdust 03.21.08 at 5:02 pm

Others have already said this but it really bears repeating since slocum insists on both denying the obvious and then coughing up this baloney about being shocked, shocked I tell you regarding Rev. Wright’s words. I can’t see how Rev. Wright has said anything that remotely warrants an apology. Wright certainly hasn’t expressed anything that is racist. His sermons certainly sip from the cup of hyperbole but the characterizations of Wright’s anger as racist, un-American, America-hating, and treasonous are themselves substantively hyperbolic bullshit.

If I was to fault Obama for anything in his speech it would be his denial that white racism is endemic. Then again, after reading some of the comments here, I wonder if the next move on the right is to deny that white racism ever really existed let alone was something that could warrant an objection. Hopefully, the objections and outrage directed at Wright and Obama represent the last gasp of white racism.

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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 5:05 pm

I know you were, ck. Obviously I don’t think you’re in the 17th century since I was able to read what you wrote. Seventeenth-century paleography is a real bitch. Unfortunately for me, early 14th-century monastic hands aren’t much better.

But, since I’m a medievalist, I have to mock the idea that there have been 2,000 years of sustained intellectual inquiry in the Western tradition, especially because my guys are the ones who were supposed to have been wrong about it all for 1,000 years.

I appreciate your laying out for me the issue as you see it. But, since I study people who justify their actions in terms of a theology that has been disowned even by its own descendants, I see “ethics” as a class of rhetoric, a narrative we deploy in order to exploit social predispositions in order to justify what we may have done for completely different reasons (a sort of full-contact calumny). I understand why you call the issue a “serious, unresolved philosophical dilemma,” but is it possible that this is the reason why?

Take VDH. His invocation of Invisible Super Real Ethics floating through the aether seems to me to be a way of avoiding what Obama actually said. Obama answered the “questions,” which only grew legs in the media after William Kristol lied in the NYC. VDH needs an excuse to keep asking questions that have already been answered because it’s the only poo he has to fling.

Can you see why I don’t take the ethics discussion seriously? That’s not ethics, that’s polemics.

VDH is being evasive and wants to dress up his intellectual cowardice in a bunch of pretty syllables. I would expect professional intellectuals (of any discipline) to know better, and John Holbo clearly does.

Likewise, when Goldberg writes:

This was largely a restatement of Jeremiah Wright’s indictment of America, delivered in University of Chicago parlance instead of South Side Chicago diatribe.

He is simply changing the subject to tone, whining in order to walk away from a debate he can’t handle. Here, he invokes American conservative anti-intellectualism so that he can turn back to the white-flight/white fright specters of South Side Chicago.
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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 5:10 pm

NYT

not

NYC.
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98

CK 03.21.08 at 5:32 pm

“So, no—Tuskegee simply does not make the idea of U.S. government labs creating the AIDS virus (and then some other government agency initiating a program to spread it) in order to kill vast numbers of black people remotely plausible.”

Slocum, could you clarify this point? I’m guessing your view is something like this: given the ineffectiveness and side effects of the treatments of they day, the experiment did not amount to knowingly letting the patients die. So they weren’t morally responsible for passively killing the subjects in the study, even if they should have been more stringent about procedures of informed consent.

So: without a precedent of either direct or indirect attempts to kill black people en masse, the theory that the U.S. government would try to do so is not even remotely plausible.

Assuming that’s your position, I’m not sure that conclusion follows. Why can’t a long history of profound state and cultural abuses and state tolerance for cultural abuses count as general reasons for finding it plausible?

This is a strained analogy, but would a Jewish German in the very early 20th century have no plausible reason to believe a similar conspiracy theory about their own government–until after the holocaust? Aren’t (remotely) plausible grounds for belief in a government conspiracy to commit genocide nothing more than: the existence of the motive and the means?

Texan,

Your position seems to be at least related to the Thrasymachian skeptical position that the language of “justice” has no real meaning except as an instrument of power. So it’s a position that Plato is not completely ignorant of and one that he has at least in principle given some consideration.

To entirely reduce ethical discourse to rhetoric is, in itself, a profoundly controversial move–so it doesn’t extricate you from the philosophical debate. There is, first of all, the question of whether or not that’s simply a false claim–either in the Thrasymachian version or the (is it Foucauldian?) version you’ve employed–er, I mean, deployed. That ethical language can be used merely rhetorically or polemically–even if, hypothetically, it is _always_ used in such a way–does not show that its claims are true or false.

Secondly, it still leaves you in a position that requires explanation–or it places one in a paradoxical ethical position. Assuming ethical discourse is simply a rhetorical device: how can you justify any ethical position–e.g., the ethical position you take on the Wright/Obama issue or toward the responses people have made to it? If you admit that you cannot do so, then why try to persuade anyone to your position.

99

Questioner 03.21.08 at 5:36 pm

Medieval theology has been disowned even by its own descendants? Tell that to Katherin Rogers. Or Eleonore Stump. And the list can be expanded (Scott MacDonald, the late Norman Kretzmann, etc.).

Regardless, even if you were right that medieval theology is no longer defended by anyone today, even those who consider themselves orthodox Christians (or Muslims, or Jews), your conclusion that therefore ethical theory and invocations are mere rhetoric wouldn’t follow.

Of course, I’m guessing you take the norms of logic and argumentation to be mere social corralling of intellectual predispositions or some such (and of course, I’m sure you don’t care to provide evidence for that conclusion, because the need to justify conclusions must itself just be a base desire with no normative authority, right?), so arguing with would would not be fun.

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Steve 03.21.08 at 5:46 pm

http://www.mail-archive.com/tips@acsun.frostburg.edu/msg14020.html

So, no—Tuskegee simply does not make the idea of U.S. government labs creating the AIDS virus (and then some other government agency initiating a program to spread it) in order to kill vast numbers of black people remotely plausible.

As an older physician let me note that patients diagnosed with tertiary syphilis in the 50’s and 60’s were treated. There was no question of holding treatment back. If nothing else thee would always be the possibility of passing it on if nothing else. Most of the article is concerned with treatment in the 1930’s which was pretty awful but that has never been the question. Wy did a group of black men not get treated when a treatment became available?

I do thank you for this reference. I will add it to my list of poorly written papers/studies to demonstrate to my medical students how to read articles.

Steve

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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 5:56 pm

ck: thanks again

Your position seems to be at least related to the Thrasymachian skeptical position that the language of “justice” has no real meaning except as an instrument of power.

Not necessarily, since I said “may have done.” I simply refuse to assume that participants in an ethical debate are necessarily honest. One need not be a skeptic (in the colloquial sense) in order to say “might makes right,” so I’ll see your Thrasymachus and raise you a Melian Dialogue.

So it’s a position that Plato is not completely ignorant of and one that he has at least in principle given some consideration.

Of course! But it will come as no surprise to you that a historian sees ethics as historically situated. Historians have been credited (and blamed) with historicizing and ‘relativizing’ ethical standards by showing that they change over time and/or were not actually observed at the time they supposedly were. So, for me, Plato isn’t so much a source as a highly localized example.

And, I would like to point out that I did not call Plato an idiot, I was challenged for calling him an idiot by implication. Throwing out Meno’s slave, a favorite of mine, was merely a way to disappoint an attempt at intimidation. O, we dursn’t insult the ancients! We simply dursn’t!

To entirely reduce ethical discourse to rhetoric is, in itself, a profoundly controversial move—so it doesn’t extricate you from the philosophical debate.

Of course not. But, if ethical standards vary historically, and if we cannot know if the participants in ethical debates are honest participants, what is the value of ethical discourse?

You’ll note that we’re talking about a controversy in a presidential election. Why, then, should it be unusual to assume that the “ethical” objections of VDH are anything other than polemical? This is not a debate amongst philosophy faculty, this is ideological warfare.

That ethical language can be used merely rhetorically or polemically—even if, hypothetically, it is always used in such a way—does not show that its claims are true or false.

Again we agree. So: how can we tell which is which?

Secondly, it still leaves you in a position that requires explanation—or it places one in a paradoxical ethical position. Assuming ethical discourse is simply a rhetorical device: how can you justify any ethical position—e.g., the ethical position you take on the Wright/Obama issue or toward the responses people have made to it? If you admit that you cannot do so, then why try to persuade anyone to your position.

Why should I try? People will align for their own reasons with different candidates. Some, who were never going to vote for Obama, will point to this as a faux justification. Others aren’t willing to accept any criticism of their candidate.

Early Christians understood the problem of authenticity, and emphasized the essential nature of “metanoia” in contrition, because anyone can deploy the rhetoric of contrition. The blogsphere understands this problem, having coined the phrase “concern trolls.”

So, if I see ethical standards as fluid and the participants in ethical debates as not necessarily honest, if there are no specific examples in which we are to find ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ what are we talking about, if anything? This is what I meant by “incoherent.”
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lemuel pitkin 03.21.08 at 5:59 pm

I see “ethics” as a class of rhetoric, a narrative we deploy in order to exploit social predispositions in order to justify what we may have done for completely different reasons

I was with you until now, Grand Moff, but this just won’t do.

All of us — except a few sociopaths — falsify this claim every day, whenever we attempt to act ethically. You might say that we’re just fooling ourselves about our real motives, but that’s irrelevant; the question “what ought I to do?” is incompatible with the view that ethics is just rhetoric. So anyone who asks that question — again, pretty much everyone — must take the view that there is indeed such a thing as ethics as distinct from rhetoric.

By implying that rejection of Platonism leads to rejection of any kind of positive ethics, you are unintentionally making the case for Plato.

103

CK 03.21.08 at 6:01 pm

On a less related point, I think this post should have been titled:

If Moral Absolutes are Wrong, then I don’t Want to be Wright.

Holbo, it’s yours, free of charge.

104

Donald Johnson 03.21.08 at 6:01 pm

Engels, I thought that #42 made fascinating reading–I bet it’s a pretty common attitude in some circles. I wonder what rich powerful white people think when they’re accused of supporting state terror overseas, another thing that’s in Wright’s sermons? And that accusation is true.

I think Obama’s long association with Wright is the best thing about his candidacy. Wright has said stupid things, but nothing as stupid or offensive as slocum’s attempt to downplay Tuskegee. With most of the white critics of Wright, you just have to sit back and let them talk and they’ll probably say something far worse than anything Wright is guilty of.

To #98–Tuskegee was continued long after the point when there were effective treatments. Don’t let him off the hook.

And to sortition in # 58–Yeah, that part of the speech nearly ruined it for me. It’s clear Obama isn’t a saint–he’s willing to lie about the root causes of the I/P conflict. Still, he’s better than most politicians.

105

Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 6:01 pm

Medieval theology has been disowned even by its own descendants? Tell that to Katherin Rogers. Or Eleonore Stump.

Uh, no. You can tell them that, and I’ll stand over here.

Yes, the list can be expanded, but it’s not going to make Trent and Vatican II go away. The fact is that the medieval Roman Church doesn’t exist anymore.

iRegardless, even if you were right that medieval theology is no longer defended by anyone today, even those who consider themselves orthodox Christians (or Muslims, or Jews), your conclusion that therefore ethical theory and invocations are mere rhetoric wouldn’t follow.

That wasn’t an argument, that was a confession of professional perspective. Since I study justifications that are absurd (“of course we’re in the right! A half-eaten bird flew away! It’s a miracle!”), I don’t take justifications at face value but instead look to see what they’re after.
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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 6:07 pm

the question “what ought I to do?” is incompatible with the view that ethics is just rhetoric.

Not if, as you point out, we’re fooling ourselves, too. And where does the question of “ought” come up except in the context of social standards? You wouldn’t ask yourself if you “ought” or “ought not” rescue your niece from drowning, but I recall reading a debate on this very issue from pre-modern China. I seem to recall that saving her involved touching her, which was lewd, and therefore wrong. There is nothing universal in this, it has to be taught. And, in the case of sociopaths (and I have been unfortunate enough to know a few), as you point out, there’s nothing universal about even asking the question.

So, while you may object to the word “rhetoric,” it’s very clear what creates the space in which “ought” has any meaning.
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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 6:20 pm

I dunno if anyone has posted up this link

http://www.slate.com/id/2186860/

on the AIDS conspiracy.
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lemuel pitkin 03.21.08 at 6:25 pm

Not if, as you point out, we’re fooling ourselves, too.

You misunderstand. *You* can believe I’m fooling myself when I ask what I should do, but *I* can’t believe that. It’s just logically impossible.

You want to look at ethics from outer space, in which case, sure, tehre are lots of incompatible sysstems that people adopt for historical or political reasons. But we don’t live in outer space; we all, in our own lives, regard ourselves as making ethical decisions.

I am quite sure that you, Grand Moff, tip waitresses, are kind to children, care for sick firends and relatives, and so on. In choosing to do those things, *you are adopting the hypothesis that ethical obligations are real*, whatever you might say here.

109

roger 03.21.08 at 6:30 pm

Tuskegee is just one of a number of instances of vile abuse – the cincinatti experiments on the effect of radiation on black men is another – but concentrating on it rather obscures Obama’s other points. One of them is that racism, after wwii, effectively cut black families off from the base of middle class prosperity by denying black gis the same housing loans to the same neighborhoods as whites. This was as crucial to immiserating black familiies in the North as the Jim Crow laws were to immiserating black families in the South. Slocum’s moral test for presidents does point to the fact that either he dislikes, very much, the shocking behavior of most of our post war presidents, who did not condemn this, or that he’s being the rightwing concern troll racism, which is a shame – slocum used to be, at least, forthright.

Now, it would be significant if slocum had any smidgen of evidence that Obama thinks the same thing on, say, HIV as Wright. He doesn’t. On the other hand, looking for crazy medical theories, we do have McCain’s endorsement of the autism-vaccine connection, so slocum might want to concern troll that – although doubtless he will do no such thing. McCain is white – and thus, a victim, a victim of two hundred years of horrible, horrible black racism! As a consolation prize for being such a horrible victim, perhaps we should let him steal the election, a la Bush, 2000. It would make him feel so much better.

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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 6:36 pm

You can believe I’m fooling myself when I ask what I should do, but I can’t believe that. It’s just logically impossible.

Yes, but you can realize later that you were just fooling yourself, yes? The whole idea of what we ought to be doing is an extension of whatever we have been told it means to be a good man/woman, which is why classical ethics is so full of naturalistic fallacies. Ethics is not like phosphorylating ATP, it is not a biological function.

We can also move from one ethical system to another during our lives, so the view from outerspace is not exactly irrelevant or obscure.

Thank you, lp, for assuming that I am such an ethical person, but I assure you that, on occasion, I have stiffed waitresses (for sucking), scowled at children, hoped that someone else would take care of it, etc. And, had I undergone a conversion to “Objectivism,” those acts would suddenly have become pious.

Alternately, I might have done any of those things and then racked my brain to find some excuse for my behavior. Or, someone might have taken pity on my guilty demeanor and provided a rationalization for me by way of consolation. And, they might do so without believing a single fucking word they say.

Happens all the time.

So, far from being the epistemological nihilist of Questioner’s convenience, I see a bunch of justificative rhetoric, not necessarily among Objectivists, but in everyday life. Some honest, some not. Some coherent, some not. When can I see this “ethics” thingy, all by itself, untainted by all these specifics? Alternately, how can I even talk about it without same?

Ethics is how we talk about what people do. It isn’t physics, it’s aesthetics. That’s why I compared it to art.
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lemuel pitkin 03.21.08 at 7:04 pm

Ethics is how we talk about what people do.

No it isn’t. It’s how we talk about what we should do.

It’s like free will. You can be as determinist as you like regarding other people, but you can’t be as regards yourself, simply becuase you actually do experience yourslef making decisions. (The exception here is schizophrenics.)

But since I don’t seem to be getting through to you here, let me point out there’s a practical side to this. Many people care quite a bit about the difference between right and wrong, and want guidance on where it lies. If the result of liberal politics and historical study is to conclude there is no difference, then we’re ceding the debate to the obscurantists and opportunists.

We were talking about Tuskegee. Some people think it’s fine to make peeople unwitting test subjects by denying them medical treatment. Others think it’s wrong, and that it’s incumbent on us to prevent such things. You say in effect, “Right, wrong? Those are just words. Racists and anti-racists are equally dishonest and self-interested.” Which side does that put you on?

It’s not true that justice is just a cover for the interests of the powerful; but the belief that it is serves those interests very well.

112

abb1 03.21.08 at 7:13 pm

…looking for crazy medical theories…

To be fair, slocum’s objection is not to crazy medical theories, but to baseless accusations of genocide. He has a point, just, I think, not as strong as he makes it sound.

113

Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 7:18 pm

You can be as determinist as you like regarding other people, but you can’t be as regards yourself, simply becuase you actually do experience yourslef making decisions.

Early Christians were schizophrenics?

I’m sorry if you find this frustrating, but I think we differ in how conscious and linear people’s thinking about their own experience is and how much we assume other people at other times thought and felt like us. In Late Antiquity (and it wasn’t just Christians), behavior was thought to be at the mercy of spirits just as we think our health is at the mercy of microbes, and I’m not talking about freak-out possessions, I mean in the tiniest details of life. This in itself can be a justification (i.e., “the Devil made me do it”), but it doesn’t mean that “you actually do experience yourslef making decisions”.

As for Tuskegee, I’m not convinced that “Some people think it’s fine to make peeople unwitting test subjects by denying them medical treatment.” I think that some people are willing to say so, but only in order to blunt the political usefulness of that datum to their ideological enemies. Again, inner experience and the willingness of external display are slippery, and not just in sociopaths.

This is what I meant by authenticity.

I am not on anyone’s side when it comes to race because the phenotypical cues we use to define “race” are a microscopic part of our genotypic makeup. I am on the side of being coherent. Racial identity is a fetishization of tiny details. We decide to make it important. You might distinguish between healthy and unhealthy racial pride, but for me it’s just as baseless as monks wrestling with spirits in Alexandria. I will study it, but it ain’t part of my thinking.

We say that justice is done when we are satisfied with the results. There are few guilty people in jail, just ask them. Which ones are lying? Which ones have managed to convince themselves?
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mq 03.21.08 at 7:22 pm

Many people care quite a bit about the difference between right and wrong, and want guidance on where it lies.

I’m wondering whether there’s any way to accept the first part of this statement and not the second. Can one care about morality, but not believe objective external guidance on it is available? It’s practical knowledge. I learn things from observing moral people, but rarely much from getting lectured on the abstract principles of morality.

Of course, some would question whether any real distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that can be made.

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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 7:23 pm

Ooops! I left out the most important part!

This:

No it isn’t. It’s how we talk about what we should do.

is a great way to say what I was trying to say, and maps even better onto aesthetics.
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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 7:27 pm

It’s practical knowledge. I learn things from observing moral people, but rarely much from getting lectured on the abstract principles of morality.

Is there an anthropologist in the house? I am vaguely familiar with an anthropologist’s metaphor of social habit being an extrinsic system of organization, analogous to intrinsic biological organization, but can’t recall the author’s name.
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Slocum 03.21.08 at 8:16 pm

Slocum, could you clarify this point? I’m guessing your view is something like this: given the ineffectiveness and side effects of the treatments of they day, the experiment did not amount to knowingly letting the patients die. So they weren’t morally responsible for passively killing the subjects in the study, even if they should have been more stringent about procedures of informed consent.

It sounds to me like the patients who were not treated were ones who’d had the disease for long enough that they were neither contagious nor symptomatic such that, at the time, in the 1930s, it wasn’t clear whether the nasty pre-antibiotic treatments were worth the risk. I don’t doubt there was racism involved (this was Alabama in the 1930s), and when penicillin became the standard treatment for late-term syphilis (in the 50’s or 60’s), these men certainly should have been treated. But by no stretch of the imagination was this an American version of one of Mengele’s Auschwitz experiments (though obviously it has been widely portrayed that way). In my view.

Bottom line — it’s not surprising to me that there are radical, left-wing, Afro-centric churches like TUCC out there spreading these kinds of conspiracy theories. But it is surprising to me that this turns out to be Obama’s background. I simply don’t want a president who felt comfortable in that environment for so long, who was comfortable raising his kids there, and whose relationship was so close to to a man I regard as bigoted nut-case.

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cw 03.21.08 at 8:26 pm

slocum, you continue to miss the point. You apply a zero-tolerance ethical standard to Barack Obama for continuing to attend a church where a preacher made 3 politically incorrect soundbites over the course of his entire career (or even if he made a thousand outright racist rants).
In the same breath, you excuse Tuskeegee because it fails to rise to the level of Mengele.
The whole point of this post is to demonstrate that the absolute moral standard of the 1st requires an absolute condemnation of the American government for any number of things ranging from bigoted, nutty statements to actual crimes. Whether or not Tuskeegee was as bad as Auschwitz, surely you can have to see that it was worse than having a bigoted nut-case as a spiritual advisor?
In any event, you might consider taking more care in throwing around words like bigoted or nut-case.

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Uncle Kvetch 03.21.08 at 8:57 pm

Meanwhile, our presumptive Republican nominee sought out, and enthusiastically welcomed, the endorsement of a preacher who believes that Hurricane Katrina was God’s way of expressing his displeasure with the city of New Orleans for its hosting of a gay pride parade. For reasons I can’t fully fathom, this has received far less attention than Rev. Wright’s sermons. Maybe rich white people are the only true victims of bigotry we have left.

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Grand Moff Texan 03.21.08 at 8:58 pm

In the same breath, you excuse Tuskeegee because it fails to rise to the level of Mengele.

Yes, but Obama is black.

Race is a stupid concept, making people do stupid things.
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Roy Belmont 03.21.08 at 9:17 pm

It’s a given that Wright’s out to lunch on HIV as a manipulated intentional weaponized affliction. Just good old common sense. It’s an absurd idea, go away.
Of course there was an awful lot of common sense that said the idea that crack cocaine hit the urban ghettos of the US manipulatively and intentionally, with government sponsorship, was equally deranged and paranoiac. Until Gary Webb showed up, and Freeway Ricky Ross pointed out the Nicaraguans and DEA-sponsored pipelines that were feeding all that rock into the hood. Point being it was, they did, it’s real. But if you’re not working with that as true, if you’re still clinging to whitebread common sense, it’s inevitable you’ll be offended by the absurdity of HIV being anything other than bad luck for the afflicted demographics – blacks and gays, the nearest thing there was to untermenschen in late 20th c. America.
Experiments in social control through disease. Not unique to the Nazis, not originating in Germany in 1934. Not unprecedented, not absurd or impossible, just dark and scary. To get anything like convincing evidence it’s a bogus claim you’d have to have a tight full-spectrum picture of the workings of the powers behind the various thrones of the American empire. And good luck with that.
Lenin has a nicely clear and simple compare/contrast post on Rev. Wright’s bitter polemics v. the gloriously salvational John Hagee’s here.
Hagee’s views and statements, aside from being violently unChristian, are orders of magnitude more offensive, immoral, and viciously insane than Wright’s. But he’s white, and he’s a Zionist, so he gets a pass. If there’s another explanation for that disparity I can’t for the life of me think what it might be.

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Keith M Ellis 03.22.08 at 3:10 am

I suppose forcing grand moff texan to substantially defend his view is something. It’s not like it’s anything we haven’t read before, a million times, but it’s something. Of course, the funny thing is that no one here (so far) is actually a moral absolutist—does grand moff texan really need to make an argument that moral absolutism is suspect? Of course not.

Which reveals this to a be hand-waving distraction from the real issue. He’s not defended his assertion that anyone who is a moral absolutist is an “idiot”. He said so very simply, very, um, absolutely. And I’ve explained, in detail, that my complaint was with this sort of reckless and smug know-nothingness. Assuming gmt is actually an academic, a working medievalist, then it’s even more depressing.

I choose Plato as a counter-example mostly because of gmt’s complaint being built upon a criticism of abstraction as applied to ethics. But I chould have chosen a contemporary, or someone from the Eastern tradition, or a medieval European. (I will say, though, that gmt’s criticism of the Meno exhibits a very shallow, glancing acquaintance with Plato. Ooh, Socrates asks leading questions. What a novel criticism! GMT apparently doesn’t realize that the problem of the implications of deductive and mathematically inductive reasoning is an active question in epistemology and analytical philosophy.)

What concerns me most is our reaction to comments like gmt’s. When provocative comments of rhetorical excess appear on sites we disagree with and making arguments we disagree with, we see it as a symptom of a disease affecting the opposition. We take them at face value, as I did gmt’s, and can only conclude that the commenter is himself an idiot for so sweepingly calling everyone who disagrees with him an idiot about something that is an open and hotly-contested question. But when it’s on a friendly site and we agree? We chuckle and/or pass it by.

This particular example is really striking to me because there are so many cultural conservative who react to any sort of moral relativism in precisely the same rhetorical tone and extreme as gmt, only taking the opposing position. Only “idiots” are moral relativists. Moral relativism is so stupid, so prima facie idiocy, that anyone who believes it is moronic. It’s a staple of right-wing sites.

There is so much bad-faith argument on the Internet. Almost all of it. How can anyone discuss anything at all when people are so quick to call each other idiots for mere disagreement on ideas that people have been disagreeing upon since forever? And when people do, as gmt has done, things like throwing rhetorical bomb after rhetorical bomb into the discussion. GMT doesn’t like Meno and so, whenever given the opportunity, he disses it gleefully. He’s a provocateur in the worst sense.

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JP Stormcrow 03.22.08 at 3:15 am

118: it’s not surprising to me that there are radical, left-wing, Afro-centric churches like TUCC out there spreading these kinds of conspiracy theories.

If you are going to insist on this characterization, to be fair you need to test it against the body of work and worship at TUCC.You can do that at this YouTube channel. I think you should start with the ones that Fox* and ABC et al took the soundbites from.

*Fox has truly descended to a new low this week (I’d say they’ve “Jumped The Halibut”). Not just with Wright but several of the other “stories” that they kept harping on, racism in action at the institutional level. So much so that even Chris Wallace noticed.

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geo 03.22.08 at 3:26 am

112: It’s like free will. You can be as determinist as you like regarding other people, but you can’t be as regards yourself

But surely Helvetius and Holbach, Hobbes and Hume, Bentham and Mill, Wells and Shaw, Dewey and Rorty, Ayer and Ryle, and any number of other firm disbelievers in free will did what you say is impossible? “Free”=”uncoerced” is very different from “free”=”uncaused.”

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SG 03.22.08 at 3:38 am

slocum, you’re way off the mark here. Tuskegee was a medical experiment – doctors withheld treatment so they could effectively study the natural history of a nasty disease. Tuskegee plays a very strong role in informing the development of modern ethics for medical researchers.

In the same way that modern Aborigines in Australia see all child protection services as genocidal, so it’s possible for black Americans to suspect their government of infinite malice in medical matters. They may be wrong and it may seem crazy to you, but that doesn’t mean it’s implausible to them.

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SG 03.22.08 at 3:41 am

sorry, obviously 126 should say “SOME modern Aborigines”. Important word to let slip, that one…

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Donald Johnson 03.22.08 at 3:47 am

“What concerns me most is our reaction to comments like gmt’s. When provocative comments of rhetorical excess appear on sites we disagree with and making arguments we disagree with, we see it as a symptom of a disease affecting the opposition. We take them at face value, as I did gmt’s, and can only conclude that the commenter is himself an idiot for so sweepingly calling everyone who disagrees with him an idiot about something that is an open and hotly-contested question. But when it’s on a friendly site and we agree? We chuckle and/or pass it by.”

Who’s this “we” you’re talking about? I’m on your side and against gmt, I think, but I also know my limits (or some of them), and arguing about deep philosophical issues with people who might know what they’re talking about is well beyond them.
I’ve gotten used to finding that I often agree with people on political issues, while not agreeing on deeper philosophical questions.

And what’s with this vast generalization of yours about arguments on the internet? Is the internet so different from the rest of life when it comes to the prevalence of bad faith arguments? When it comes to political issues, I’d say not.

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dawud 03.22.08 at 4:36 am

I would say it’s beside the point as to whether conspiracy theories held by blacks are true or not, that’s a red herring. Is it difficult to see why they hold them? That a systematically disenfranchised people believe that the power system is rigged against them is a pretty natural belief if that’s what’s happened for 400 years; and releasing the chokehold held on them won’t convince the black population as a whole that menace isn’t meant, only good intentions will do that.

Demanding that Obama distance himself from Wright while not expecting the same from McCain to distance himself from Hagee
or Rod Parsley <url=

or for that matter, Clinton from Doug Coe

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dawud 03.22.08 at 6:10 am

my previous message was poorly edited, and this should replace it:
I would say it’s beside the point as to whether conspiracy theories held by blacks are true or not, that’s a red herring. Is it difficult to see why they hold them? That a systematically disenfranchised people believe that the power system is rigged against them is a pretty natural belief if that’s what’s happened for 400 years; and releasing the chokehold held on them won’t convince the black population as a whole that menace isn’t meant, only good intentions will do that.

Demanding that Obama distance himself from Wright while not expecting the same from McCain to distance himself from
or his ‘spiritual guide’ Rod Parsley, who calls for “eliminating the false religion, Islam.”

or for that matter, Clinton from Doug Coe

I have no matter in calling for moral standards, and certainly think it’s fine to call Obama to question as to whether he believes what his minister says, but when he spends days doing so, and the same people who call for his blood as a hate-filled racist ignore those hate-filled racists that they associate with… it makes moral standards seem less solid.

‘Qui custode ipsos custodes?’ – Who will watch the watchers? – that’s the question that might be asked of a media (F|O|X) that claims to guard the democratic process but sleeps on the henhouse.

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abb1 03.22.08 at 11:17 am

130: I would say it’s beside the point as to whether conspiracy theories held by blacks are true or not…

Surely it’s not entirely beside the point?

131

lemuel pitkin 03.22.08 at 3:13 pm

Race is a stupid concept, making people do stupid things.

Grand Moff, please to stop being an idiot.

“Race” motivated the Tuskegee experiments, as well as Jim Crow, lynchings, a good part of our current insane criminal-justice policies, etc. “Race” also motivated most of the most successful opposition to those things.

Of course races have no biological existence; of course in the future (“under Socialism,” as some of us still say) we won’t amke use of ther ace conept.

But to say that anyone who talks about race *today* is being stupid is to buy into the same crap as the right-wing libertarians who think that if we expunge race from our official discourse, the whole problem will go away.

Your above it all, both-sides-are-equally wrong pose is really tiresome, not to mention politically unhelpful.

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lemuel pitkin 03.22.08 at 3:21 pm

surely Helvetius and Holbach, Hobbes and Hume, Bentham and Mill, Wells and Shaw, Dewey and Rorty, Ayer and Ryle, and any number of other firm disbelievers in free will did what you say is impossible?

I haven’t read all those guys. I *have* read kant, who makes exactly the same argument I did. Which is that we make decisions, and experience ourselves doing so. But one can make a decision only on the hypothesis that one has a choice. So on a practical level, you may *say* you don’t believe in free will, but your actions indicate clearly that you do.

Now, Grand Moff says that in late antiquity (many? most?) people did *not* experience themselves making decisions, but actually thought of their own actions as being beyond their control. Somebody who thinks that way today is, quite precisely, schizophrenic, and GMT’s description of people thinking of themselves not as having a unitary self but as being the locus of various demons or spirits doesn’t sound unlike the sort of thing schizophrenics say.

It’s a very interesting question and it may well be that the idea of a unitary, active self is specific to certain times and places. But it certainly is held by all of us. I’m 100% sure that everyone participating in this discussion here has, many times in the past 24 hours, thought “what should I do now?” or “which of these options should I pick?” or “what I am trying to accomplish?”, etc., all of which indicate a belief in free will, regardless of what you write in comments here.

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lemuel pitkin 03.22.08 at 3:26 pm

When provocative comments of rhetorical excess appear on sites we disagree with and making arguments we disagree with, we see it as a symptom of a disease affecting the opposition. We take them at face value, as I did gmt’s, and can only conclude that the commenter is himself an idiot for so sweepingly calling everyone who disagrees with him an idiot about something that is an open and hotly-contested question. But when it’s on a friendly site and we agree? We chuckle and/or pass it by.

Speak for yourself.

Personally, I try hard to only ever engage with people whose intelligence I respect, who I believe to be arguing in good faith, and who I think I share some basic commitments with. People who are really “on the other side,” I don’t argue with. What would be the point?

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novakant 03.22.08 at 3:31 pm

I also know my limits (or some of them), and arguing about deep philosophical issues with people who might know what they’re talking about is well beyond them.

Rest assured Donald, metaethics isn’t Grand Moff Texan’s strong suit.

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LC 03.22.08 at 7:24 pm

Re #123: I started to write a long comment but hit some wrong keys by mistake and eliminated it. So, I will say more briefly that one of the attractions of the internet for the people whom you are decrying is precisely that it allows them to say things most of them could never say in print because the standards of discourse and argument in print, especially academic argument in print, are different. Could GMT ever say in a scholarly journal that classical Greek philosophy is “the rambling of trust-fund babies and pederasts”? No. He can say it here, however, so he does.

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Scott Hughes 03.22.08 at 7:45 pm

I also don’t think I’ve read anything that Wright said that is racist.

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geo 03.22.08 at 9:17 pm

134: one can make a decision only on the hypothesis that one has a choice. So on a practical level, you may say you don’t believe in free will, but your actions indicate clearly that you do

I still disagree, Lemuel (as do all the philosophers I mentioned, who presumably chose their words carefully and didn’t overlook the kind of obvious, flat-out, no-brainer contradiction that you keep accusing them of). To choose is an act; acts have causes; and to say that the cause is “my free will” is only to fudge the question, “yes, but what caused your free will to incline in the direction it did?”, just as to call God an “uncaused cause” is to fudge the question “yes, but what caused God?”

It’s difficult, I know, and counterintuitive. I don’t remember offhand who’s good at explaining the use and limits of the notion of freedom of the will — probably Rorty or Owen Flanagan or even William James, who wrote famously about “the necessity for choice” and all that, but still referred to free will as, philosophically speaking, a “fifth wheel to the coach.”

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geo 03.22.08 at 9:18 pm

Sorry, that’s 133, not 134.

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lemuel pitkin 03.23.08 at 2:54 am

William James — hey, I’ve read William James! And I think he agrees with me.

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Roy Belmont 03.23.08 at 5:53 am

133/139:
The “uncaused cause” is no fudgier than contemporary theories about the origin of the universe. All this stuff just suddenly exploded into being, all by itself, out of nowhere and nothing it just happened into being, causelessly, or else it was transmuted from stuff that was already there, all along, the whole time.
Eternal stuff, or magic stuff, take your pick.
Anthropocentrists have less trouble with eternal stuff than with eternal beings, for obvious reasons.
Geo’s reply and Lemuel Pitkin’s example both rest on an assumption of linear time as a universal, a phenomenon all beings and all places are always subject to. This is anthropocentric and sketchy at its base. Time is a subjective human experience of something we don’t have enough perspective to comprehend. And without linear time the arguments around free will dissipate.

141

abb1 03.23.08 at 10:14 am

There’s no free will, of course. That’s fairly obvious. But one should be grateful for the illusion.

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novakant 03.23.08 at 12:19 pm

Well, I’m glad abb1 has all of this figured out for us we can file the topic –
I guess these people are mostly just a bunch of idiots wasting their time, then.

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abb1 03.23.08 at 5:03 pm

Those people do what they are destined to do, according to a bunch of chemical, kinematic and electromagnetic processes that vitalize their brains that control the rest of their bodies.

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geo 03.23.08 at 5:11 pm

141: the arguments around free will dissipate

That’s just what Rorty and all us Rortian pragmatists think they should do.

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CK dexter 03.23.08 at 7:14 pm

“I guess these people are mostly just a bunch of idiots wasting their time, then.”

“Idiots,” certainly not. “Wasting their time”–quite possibly. In part, because because the “moral responsibility doesn’t require free will” argument gives our deepest ethical prejudice a much more repectable crutch to lean on.

In part, because the free will and moral responsibility have the deepest instincts of the public (and possibly the species–input natural selection theory of morals here) on their side, so it’s one of those living-dead zombie topics that are here to stay. (Such as, oh, I don’t know, philosophical arguments for the existence of God.)

No worries: humanity will continue to believe in the existence of ‘evil-doers’ for a long time to come, with or without the help of philosophers of mind.

Happy Easter!

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Roy Belmont 03.23.08 at 7:20 pm

So then what happens with all those rules and punishment protocols? No free will, no blame. Punishment that isn’t behavior-modifying is then just an exercise in cathartic sadism.
My real point is there’s something else going on, where the real answer is yes, you have free will, but no, it’s within a completely closed and pre-determined system, or set of systems. Our languages, maybe even our brains, prohibit an exact and accurate statement of the problem, so no accurate exact answer results. This has a lot to do with our allegiance to a perceived reality of linear time. Once you get outside that a whole bunch of things shift.

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Statistician from CA 03.23.08 at 7:33 pm

I have read the entire thread, but I fear that I am not competent to discuss most of it. However, I have lived with, and love dearly, a conspiracy theorist who comes out with the damnedest things occasionally, and so I thought perhaps I could shed some light on that aspect of Wright’s sermons.

I think it begins with acknowledging that people who believe in one or more conspiracy theories are just like you and me, but with a belief we consider aberrant. They’re generally good people, the sort you can say “hello” to in church every Sunday without a second thought.

So why hold a belief in a certain conspiracy?

Well, one reason can be because the person has had personal experience with actual events that make a certain conspiracy more plausible. Most of us tend to take personal experience as being “more believable” than what others report. If you—personally—have been given second-rate health care, sent away from a clinic, or refused an experimental treatment, the experience of racism in heath care is very real to you. You may personally know the effects of discrimination in government systems. It can become easy to believe that the government might take the next logical step and infect people with a disease to study them.

Which leads to my next point, which is that the conspiracy theorists I know tend to point to something the government has admitted and say “Look, they admitted to X, what more, worse things must they have done?” In their understanding of the world, people usually admit to the least bad thing they’ve done to get other people off their back. Whether or not this is true is hard to determine; I think many of us believe that generally the most egregious offences are discovered, precisely because of their egregiousness.

Lastly, the conspiracy theorists I know tend to take the idea “one bad apple spoils the barrel” to what I would consider an extreme, where they assume that by the time they discover one bad apple in the barrel, the rest must already be bad. As a quality assurance mechanism, this is possibly a good assumption; as a method for dealing with social institutions, it’s probably flawed. But yet, it is true that interacting with people who make questionable decisions would appear to lead to others making questionable decisions; these things seem to percolate through social networks and bureaucracies. But the conspiracy theorist takes one proven conspiracy, and says that things like this must be happening all over. He sees the CIA selling drugs (or allowing drugs to be sold? I’m a little foggy on the actual facts here) and says “well, obviously the health system must be doing something similar”.

In all these cases, however, what would appear to give rise to the conspiracy belief is the experience of other situations like it. The belief that blacks were deliberately infected with HIV would not exist without a credible reason to believe that blacks were treated in similar ways before (I say “a credible reason to believe” because it is not always necessary that the person have experienced it him or herself; if my friend Sue tells me that she was denied a raise, and she has good reason to believe that it was because she was female, I am likely to believe her without having experienced the denial myself).

The problem with a conspiracy theorist is, in my experience, not that they have good reason for believing their particular conspiracy, but that they may refuse to accept reasons not to believe it; that is, they do not agree with me on the weighting of different facts. For example, Wright may not believe a white scholar who tells him that there is no evidence that blacks were deliberately infected nearly so much as he may believe all of the reasons (of which I’m sure he has some) to believe that they were.

The more pervasive problem with discussion about biases, IMO, is that there may be an underlying reason to continue the belief which is self-serving; I.E., it may be easier for Sue to believe that she was denied a raise because she was female than because she didn’t do a good job. This is the sort of thing which is incredibly hard to unweave. For one thing, it’s almost impossible to prove that she does not want to believe it because it would be easier, and for another, it’s the sort of thing that—because I, at least, don’t want to admit that kind of belief to myself—we try to deny even if it is true. Furthermore, in the case of biases, both sides may have opposing biases; I may believe her male manager is biased when he says she does not do a good job, but I may also believe that Sue is biased when she says she does an excellent job. Who is right? It can be extremely hard to tell; both may be objectively wrong. I’m glad I’m not a civil rights lawyer or judge.

I don’t pretend to understand why any of these things happen. I just say that I have observed them occurring with people I personally know, and that I believe they may occur in others. I also want to say, just as a caveat, that I don’t agree with Wright’s statements; I believe there is objective proof that HIV was not deliberately given to blacks. But I hope maybe I can shed some light on why he believes it was.

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abb1 03.23.08 at 7:43 pm

Your friend Sue’s allegation is a matter judgment, while the HIV allegation is a matter of fact.

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Statistician from CA 03.23.08 at 7:50 pm

An addendum:

I think too often we conflate what people believe in privately and what they encourage others to believe in, or use as supporting premises for a public argument. I feel that it is important that we use a higher standard of proof when reasoning for public discourse, and that the standard should be set higher when we are speaking with more authority.

To return to my earlier example, I might use Sue’s lack of a raise as an example of why my friend, with whom I am on equal footing, should believe sexism exists. I would hesitate before using it (without further proof, anyway) as an example to a class of eleven-year-olds (not that I teach middle school, mind you, for which I give thanks), and I would certainly hesitate before using it as part of a legal brief (again, not a lawyer; thank God).

It is here that I think Wright fails my test of worthiness to be a pastor. I consider pastors as people who, when speaking from the pulpit, are heard by their congregation as the voice of God’s church on earth. I think they are certainly heard as people who have authority, and I think, whether it is merited or not, people tend to take pronouncements outside their field of expertise (which one assumes is theology, not the inner workings of government) as having more credibility than they perhaps merit. I think it is too easy for people to forget that pastors are merely human (which I took as one of the points of Obama’s speech) and that pastors have a responsibility as a result to be more careful when giving sermons.

And yet, I’ve certainly known “political” pastors who said things from the pulpit that not their entire congregations agreed with, and in churches where it was understood that you waited until the service was finished before you started yelling at him. I don’t know how many of Wright’s congregation debated him during coffee hour (do they have coffee hour? I’m a Lutheran; we joke that coffee is our 3rd sacrament). In those churches, it was understood that the pastor would make remarks that were sometimes quite inflammatory with the intention of opening up debate rather than closing it. I don’t know what the tradition is in Obama’s church, and I’m not prepared to drive all the way there to find out.

I’m willing to cut Wright some slack for being first human and second the pastor of a church with an unknown tradition, but I think he probably overstepped his bounds of authority, and certainly has gotten served notice that he should be much, much more careful in the future. It’s if he keeps employing this kind of rhetoric that I would worry.

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Statistician from CA 03.23.08 at 7:54 pm

And yes, the example of Sue is not on the same factual grounds as Wright’s statements, at all. I wanted an example for which the relevant points I was trying to point out were easier to see and which was not nearly so emotionally charged, but was in the same sort of scope of biases. It would appear that I failed; my apologies.

My point was simply that we all make judgements about whether or not someone is lying, and to what extent, based on a whole host of factors, and that we may not agree on our judgements. Furthermore, I wanted to point out that this is especially troublesome when biases like race and sex come into play.

Hopefully that makes it clear(er)?

(ooh, just figured out where the preview appears. Sorry. First time posting.)

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lemuel pitkin 03.23.08 at 10:46 pm

Time is a subjective human experience of something we don’t have enough perspective to comprehend. And without linear time the arguments around free will dissipate.

Indeed, this only strengthens my point.

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abb1 03.23.08 at 11:07 pm

the example of Sue is not on the same factual grounds as Wright’s statements, at all. I wanted an example for which the relevant points I was trying to point out were easier to see and which was not nearly so emotionally charged, but was in the same sort of scope of biases.

But that’s a critical difference, I think. If Mr. Wright was only making claims similar to Sue’s (i.e.: the government is biased against the blacks) that wouldn’t be anywhere near as controversial as his unsubstantiated factual claims.

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geo 03.24.08 at 2:37 am

#147:No free will, no blame.

Depends on what “blame” means. For the last 2000 years, many if not most people in the West have believed that “sin,” ie, freely chosen and unrepented evil actions, merited eternal punishment. This, I suspect, was the first if not the strongest impetus to discredit the notion of free will. With gradually increasing insight into the degree to which our behavior is influenced by our physiology, our upbringing, our environment, and other non-metaphysical causes, it became obvious that the threat of infinite punishment is indefensible, even pathological.

But that doesn’t mean all punishment is indefensible. It is, as you say, behavior-modifying — a clumsy and coarse form of individual and social discipline, but sometimes better than nothing. As always (or at least as usual), everything depends on the circumstances.

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LC 03.24.08 at 3:33 am

Re linear time (#147)

McTaggart said: Time is unreal; Moore said: I have had my breakfast.
(Apologies to (the late) Iris Murdoch, from whom this is taken.)

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LC 03.24.08 at 3:36 am

Correction: “thanks” not “apologies”

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dawud 03.24.08 at 8:18 am

abb1, you’re saying that it really matters whether what Wright says is factually true, but there are substantive statements that may be well recognized, but not a verifiable truth – such as ‘[9/11 or JFK’s assassination are] America’s chickens coming home to roost’ – such comments are only true to those who recognize the relationship between violence done by America overseas and violence done in return… and Malcolm X, Rev. Wright, and ambassador Peck are not the only Americans who think so…

check this out at youtube

for instance, one could ask about Falwell’s comments about 9/11 being blamed on gays and liberals or Hurricane Katrina on gay pride parades and abortion, or Hagee’s comments on muslims…

but that the drumbeat and focus remains only on Obama and Wright spells out to me that white hatred and xenophobia are ignored, and that only blacks have something to explain, apologise for, or should be ashamed of.

I’m not black, I don’t agree with everything Rev. Wright said (I wouldn’t say “God damn America” as I love the country that many friends and family live in, but qualified by thinking it’s not as noble as some may wish it to be) – and yet don’t think that he’s the only one at fault.

Let’s elevate internet discussion by avoiding wasting time with the kind of insults that teenagers (or 24-hour-news-network hosts) throw around – couldn’t we hear some acknowledgement from some of the vehement haters around that Rev. Wright and other critics may have a point?

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abb1 03.24.08 at 9:36 am

Dawud, sure, Wright has plenty of points, very good points. But one doesn’t have to defend every word he says.

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Will 03.25.08 at 2:07 am

Can you please remove me from your blog? I don’t want to post here any more. Thanks. I’ll check that it’s been done in a couple of days. Respectfully,
Will

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Roy Belmont 03.25.08 at 2:41 am

#154:
It purports to be behavior-modifying, but all too often is, as indicated, cathartic sadism. The extent to which people will go to justify that which gratifies them, even when it’s provably and obviously harmful and counterproductive to the goals and intentions they use to justify it, probably ties to the extent of gratification. Which gives, accurately I feel, a cast to most modern justice systems that’s less Olympian and more like one of those early Hollywood jungle movies. Pounding drums, chaotic native chants, lots of spears and animal skins.
It doesn’t mean all punishment is indefensible, just most of it most of the time.
People who were punished severely as children are way more likely to favor severe punishment as adults, because they know deep down that’s the way the world really is, and how it should be.
Blame would be an accusation of responsibility, of failed choosing, the burden of wrongness. Absent free will there’s a metaphysical aspect to that, as though people are chosen to act out the wills and failings of the gods, helplessly. Without free will it all becomes the fault of the gods, or the elementary particles.
This is seriously counterintuitive, but then so’re muons and gluons.
I don’t believe linear time is universal, or even much more than a tightly-fit illusion we pass through, but I am in no sense arguing that our lives as experienced run in anything other than a flat straight line directly from somewhere around birth to somewhere around death. Only the ultimate descriptions of what that is won’t have linear time at its core.
All functional moral/ethical systems are jury-rigged, and most all of them have pretty nebulous, or outright fictional goals as stated.
This makes talking about things like free will and predetermination depend, as you say, on establishing context.
In the context of day to day necessity there’s no real difference between the jungle war dance and the Supreme Court in session. In the larger context, of truth and essence, the Supreme Court at least some of the time gets a little closer to what’s fundamentally real about human existence. Or did for much of its history.
Just like in the physical sciences we move toward more fundamental understandings, sometimes in leaps that turn everything around, and explode the consensus.

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geo 03.25.08 at 3:21 am

That’s a wise and eloquent comment, Roy, at least what I understand of it. Care to say anything more about non-linear time?

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CK Dexter 03.25.08 at 9:24 pm

[160]

Wow, did Will just post a reply for the sole purpose of asking that it be removed? How odd.

Incidentally, Will’s link leads to an absolutely delightful blog post about how all Hillary supporters are intelligent and all Obama supporters are incapable of logical reasoning.

I think we should all head over to his blog and post some requests for him to retract our posts!

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jj 03.26.08 at 12:44 am

No, what he actually said was that the Clintons have the experience to counter the rightwing smear machine and defeat McCain in the general election, while Obama does not. In fact, the Republicans may well be setting him up, with crossover votes and clandestine campaign financing, just to improve their odds during the general election. Racism runs through the American cultural terrain like the Mississippi River, and all of its tributaries.

Hang in there, Will. It ain’t over til the Fat Lady sings.

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