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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

Thanks Bubba.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?
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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.

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.

…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.

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.

Slocum-

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

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.

Good one, Jay.

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.

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.

“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.

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!

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?

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

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
.

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.

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.
.

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.

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.”

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*.)

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.

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.

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

Yes.

This has been another episode of …
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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.

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.

NYT

not

NYC.
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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.

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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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.

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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I dunno if anyone has posted up this link

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

on the AIDS conspiracy.
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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.

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.

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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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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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

‘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.

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.

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?

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.

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.”

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

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

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.

“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!

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.

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.

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.

#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.

Correction: “thanks” not “apologies”

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

#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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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!