Author: Michael R D James

Lecturer, researcher, author of "The World Explored, the World Suffered: The Exeter lectures" and "The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action"(Volumes one, two, and three--translated into 8 languages)
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Cosmopolitanism, Globalization, Human Rights and Immigration.

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Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy is systematic. It ranges over all the traditional divisions of philosophy and integrates them into a systematic whole. He brings metaphysical considerations concerning man and the cosmos to bear on ethics, political philosophy epistemology, aesthetics and religion. The resultant product is a Philosophy that rivals Aristotle’s in its scope and reach. Kant had the ability as did Aristotle to see a simple phenomenon woven into an integrated system  of  propositions: touch one strand of the complex and the reverberations would resonate harmoniously and holistically throughout the system producing a sound as beautiful as the sound of pure knowledge.

I have argued elsewhere that Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy provided the ethical foundations for human rights. It can be further argued that Kant’s  article on a universal history provided the blueprint for the organisation which would, after the second world war, become the United Nations, the champion of universal human rights. Kant did not only have ethical arguments for the existence of human rights, he also had arguments that  are difficult to classify  and which enable one to embrace the phenomena of  globalization and immigration, positively, from a philosophical perspective. One of Kant’s basic arguments is that every human being on earth possesses a right to roam the earth and pursue their peaceful activities and the consequence of this cosmopolitan and global right is the right of everyone to expect hospitality wherever they may roam. In an earlier essay I spoke about how Kant  viewed the nation state as pathological(as did a number of other philosophers) during a time in which  it was not yet clear that the European nation state system in Europe would bring actual devastation to the world. Devastation firstly,  in the form of two world wars and a holocaust, and secondly, in the form of threatened catastrophe on a scale never before witnessed or even imagined:  post war nation state alliances and enmities would  for a long period of time  promise  to  outdo the malevolent social engineering  project of the Nazi’s with a nuclear holocaust which would threaten the very existence of the world. That this latter phenomenon did not occur, in my view, may have been attributable to a deep process of globalization, a cosmopolitan  attitude towards and knowledge of the world and its people which Kant expressed in his Philosophy: an attitude moreover, that  can  be defended with logic and sound and systematic argumentation which has philosophical consequences and that  reverberate and resonate over the whole extent of our thought about everything, including the  right we have to roam the earth.

The level of self consciousness of the first trekkers  leaving Africa is unfathomable so we do not know whether, when man encountered man in these sparsely resourced  environments, he did so in a spirit of hospitality or fear. Hobbes envisioned life in this kind of state of nature as being solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Locke, to the contrary,  envisioned life in a state of nature to be relatively peaceful but politically  problematic owing to the absence of law to regulate disagreements. Given the fact that one of the benefits of the nation state was to produce a rule of, and a respect for, the law it would seem that even if these early encounters of man with his fellow men were fearful, the rule of law in a  more modern community would appear to make such a response of fear, otiose.

So, I am genuinely puzzled by the obviously fear based responses of both politicians and large numbers of people to immigration that we are seeing the world over. The first migrants  from Africa took considerable risks  and showed remarkable courage  in their decisions to leave what they knew behind, however, sparse and poorly resourced their environment must have been. These first trekkers were the builders of our first small communities. There is an obvious correlation with their willingness to brave dangers and the subsequent skill and competence they demonstrated in creating and maintaining their small settlements.  There is also an obvious correlation between the asylum seekers we see risking their lives in rubber rafts and our early ancestors. If one examines the statistics in immigration friendly countries, such as the USA of past years, Britain after  the collapse of the British Empire and Sweden in recent times  there is clear statistical  and experiential evidence of the considerable benefits that have accrued to the countries in which immigrants have come to settle. There are of course short term adjustment problems where life as one  knew it may be to some small extent disrupted  for a period of time, but the Chinese are supposed to have wisely claimed (in response to the question why they did not resist  large numbers of immigrant settlers) : “In three generations they will be Chinese, so why bother about the fact that they are not Chinese when they arrive?”  The statistics and general experience in both the USA of the past  and Britain support this claim.

There is no doubt that in Kant’s Philosophy there is an ethical obligation to help people whose lives are in danger. Asylum seekers must be given asylum irrespective of ethnic or religious denomination. The second formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative claims that we have a duty to treat people as ends in themselves and this demands as a consequence not just hospitable behaviour but also justifies the right to asylum that has been universally agreed to by the members of the UN.

Kant would not claim that there is any difference in principle in relation to the freedom of movement of peoples involved in the European project. Treating people as ends in themselves requires that one is hospitable to strangers. The European project is a Kantian project, an Enlightenment pilot-project. Today freedom of movement in Europe, tomorrow freedom of movement on a cosmopolitan scale. The logic of cosmopolitanism requires that the European eventually be hospitable to the non European stranger who appears on  their doorstep.

The Kantian Philosopher believes that this ethical argument is the primary argument for globalization. But has it not historically been the case that commerce has been the driving force of globalization?  It has certainly been a superficial force. To the extent that our self interest has driven commerce, the philosophical  analysis of this phenomenon would suggest that self interested commercialism and the desire to expand ones sphere of self interest over the whole world is not in the spirit of Kantian cosmopolitanism. This commercial spirit on the contrary, was one of the roots of  in imperialism which did not know what to do with the discovery that the mere accumulation of capital as an aim seemed to make the working man superfluous, an entity to be exploited for the end of the accumulation of capital. Hannah Arendt provides compelling arguments which suggest a connection between this anti-humanistic spirit of commercialism and the emergence of totalitarian governments last century.

There  are deep processes of globalization which populism, in its ignorance or  misunderstanding of the systematic arguments of Philosophy, does not understand. Quite simply the populist politicians, whether they be British, European, American or Swedish, do not know what they do not know.  They concentrate upon the divisions or differences between people  rather on the systematic truths which unite them. This is why there is so much discussion about who is telling the truth and who is lying, why there is so much discussion about real and fake news. Real, objective Ethical Truths relate to  cosmopolitan rights and the rights that unite  all occupants of the earth. The shadowy arguments of populist politicians focus on  national and cultural differences and fear of  change, fear of the deep ethical process of globalization. This process of ethical globalization, for them  is not  an ethical matter, it is rather a natural  destructive phenomenon which requires national  defense measures. This fear of something which is not of itself fearful is of course a pathological feat of the imagination which reveals itself in all talk of  building walls or defending borders or expelling aliens. This is the talk of the ignorant prisoners imprisoned deep in Plato’s cave, a deeply disturbing fearful   incoherent babbling which is paradoxically, claiming to know something.

 

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The Meaninglessness of Terror

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So Stockholm is the latest scene of what is beginning to look like a  5 act Shakespearean tale. The whole city  locked down, people staying in hotels, walking home in what at times looked like a Great Trek, major television events cancelled, frenetic social media activity with all manner of response from the sublime to the superfluous(telling asylum seekers to go back to where they came from). And for what? For terrorism whose aim is to disrupt the peace and freedom of people who have absolutely nothing to do with the cause the terrorists claim they are fighting for. The question becomes: what kind of  play are we witnessing, a tragedy, a comedy, a soap opera? Of course there were tragic consequences  of the action in Stockholm but actions are defined by their intentions. If the object of terrorist action are people who have nothing to do with what is going on in the Middle  East this scene is not tragic it is meaningless. Witness the actual consequences (barring the tragic loss of the victims and their families), strangers meeting and spending the evening together in bars or in hospitable homes. What did the terrorists imagine would be the actual consequences? Well I am sure if they imagined people actually coming closer together, societies actually  bonding more tightly together because of  their action, they might well wonder themselves what the point of their action is.

I have written elsewhere in this blog about my amazement at the reaction of the USA(and Russia) to , relatively  speaking a handful of poorly armed terrorists.  This “War on Terrorism” response is trickling down  to all levels in the world. The amount of media time spent on this issue  at all levels is quite disproportionate to its magnitude. This fact indicates that the terrorists actions and speech acts do not meet  Aristotle´s definition of a tragic action which is an action of a certain magnitude. ISIS deliberately waits over 24 hours before taking credit for the acts because we overreact  for approximately 24 hours to  the events which occur. Compare this event to the bus accident with school children this week, a really tragic accident with approximately the same number of casualties(3 children) and compare the amount of attention given. In my mind the cause of both events are equally meaningless, if the cause of the bus accident turns out to be mechanical failure without any negligence involved.

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The Pathological Nation-State and the European Project

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“Things of this world  are in so constant a flux that nothing remains long in the same state.”–(John Locke).  This was written 300 years ago and  could be  an accurate description of our current states of  political affairs. Philosophically, this suggests that Political theory ought to be at the very least a  theory of  social and political change which of course will require some kind of relation to historical knowledge. Historical knowledge manifests our  more significant social and political memories. Such memories and the narratives embodying them are a key not just to the identity of individuals  but also to the identity of peoples.

The Problem of personal identity presupposes continuity of our memory which is firstly, one of the criteria of personal identity along with secondly, the criteria of the continuity of our physical body, and Aristotle would add two further criteria, namely,  the continuity of our social institutions(such as language) and the continuity of our political institutions and processes. Aristotle claimed in this context that  a good man needs a good state to be good and this echoes a Platonic assumption that the personality of the good man requires living in a society with just institutions. In the Republic Socrates attempts to define justice by reference to the harmonious relations of the parts of the soul of a good man. His interlocutors think this psychological or anthropological approach is inadequate and Socrates is forced to appeal to  a Platonic Kallipolis or fully functioning  just state in order for his argument to have any chance of achieving what it set out to do. The Socrates of Plato’s Republic  is well aware, however, of the fragility of even a perfect state and the risk of its degeneration  into the pathological  forms of  a military style Spartan state, and the even worse pathological forms of oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. For each of these forms of state there is a corresponding type of personality. For Plato and Aristotle, in other words, there is a fundamental logical relation between  our descriptions of personal identity and our descriptions of state identity.

Plato  would not have agreed with Churchill in his judgment that Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other kinds, principally because the democracy that Churchill was referring to was a form of government very different to the direct democracy that the Greeks founded and tried to perfect, and in the process, testing the scope and limits of personal freedom to their utmost. The Greeks discovered that direct democracy does not work because there needed to be a representative and  constitutional structure which translates the power of the people into something which benefits everybody, or something which benefits what they referred to as the common good. Aristotle saw clearly that the essential nature of this power of the people embodied a pluralism which logically could not be transformed into the perfect unity which Plato was seeking . The only form of government which could deal with the problems posed by pluralistic forms of life in the State was what Aristotle  called the constitutional form that  evolved naturally from families forming villages and villages forming cities. The idea of a nation state may have been  a pathological idea for Aristotle. He must have been more than surprised when one of his pupils, Alexander the Great embarked on his Empire building project.

Our modern ears are not tuned to the chords of Aristotle’s thought but it is interesting to note that at least three other major Philosophers  of different periods, may have seen the fundamental limitations of the nation state: Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Ricouer. Kant’s  enlightenment ideas on this issue are to be found in his political/historical writings in which he prophetically at the end of the 1700s sketches out the blueprint for a United Nations as a means of dealing with the pathological war like  nature  of  empire builders and nation -like conglomerations. The reasoning we find in these writings follows directly the revolution in ethical theory that his categorical imperative brought about. Maxims of action could be universalised, he argued, thereby reversing a philosophical prejudice in favour of theoretical reasoning that had prevailed since Aristotle’s philosophy had lost  its influence in the  cultures of the world. Kant’s ethical theory  also restored freedom in the social and political worlds and demanded as a consequence respect for  an individuals human rights which we all know is one of the major supporting columns of the United Nations along with a desire for universal peace. As suggested  nations states as such  did not exist during the Kantian period. When they did come into existence they bore all the characteristics of the nation-like conglomerates which Kant found to be pathological formations. Nation states  were largely a creation of the 19th century and  their pathological nature only became evident after the second world war for most of us(Freud saw this much earlier with his eagle eyes).

Hannah Arendt discusses this phenomenon at length in her work “the “Origins of Totalitarianism” but for the purposes of this essay her work on the trial of Eichmann is more pertinent reading. She refers to Eichmann’s personality as “banal”: his speech peppered with clichés and superficial description. He was, she suggests a product of a “scientific” education and a populist culture which believed that it was capable of everything it set its mind to do with a race of supermen at its disposal  determined to put Germany first and make Germany great again. Eichmann referred to Kant in his defense and I suppose this puts him in a league above some of the contemporary populists presently strutting on the world stage. Arendt died in 1975 and was spared the details of the current resurrection of populism but her writings suggest that she would not have been particularly surprised by the phenomenon.

Paul Ricouer died in 2005 and also missed the current American anti-globalisation and British anti-European brand of populism.  He did, however,  witness the problems with the nation state in the context of anti-European movements and he did address this very interesting philosophical question of the  identity of the nation state. He, like Arendt, points to the problems nationalist movements pose for the natural pluralistic diversity of  conglomerations of populations  and suggests that history and tradition in itself is not sufficient to constitute a state. Ricouer was more critical of Kant than Arendt  and would probably have been prepared to accept a Hegelian teleological interpretation of  tradition and history: an interpretation which characterises the flow of history dialectically in terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis: capitalism, communism and humanistic liberalism. More importantly Ricouer  implicitly embraces an Aristotelian model of state identity when he proposes his philosophical response to the globalising forces  of public and political life: forces which  involve commerce, technology, ecology and national security  He too believes that state identity has a similar structure to  an individual’s  personal identity.

Ricouer  claims that the globalisation forces referred to above  in the political system produces fragility. Counteracting   forces  are therefore needed to create a new form of  European political  authority. He suggests that religious institutions, institutions concerned with knowledge and learning , including schools and universities, should engage with this problem by trying to build opinion for a new political authority. He also suggests three mechanisms or models that can be culturally used in this process  of cultural evolution.  Firstly, a model of linguistic hospitality involving the translation of texts and discourse from other European  cultures, secondly  the exchange of cultural memories of norms, perspectives, customs and traditions of other European nations and thirdly a mechanism or model of  secular forgiveness which is seen in the operation of the law in its intention to heal the injured and compensate the victim of selfishness or aggression.   This third  model or mechanism is more than an echo of the Socratic appeal not to return evil for the evil done to one by outsiders.. This category transcends that of individual rights and the law and resembles a Buddhist gift which one can ask for but cannot demand.

Ricouer has also written one of the greatest  books written on Freud, in which he points out the  strength and limitations of psychoanalytic categories in the explanation of cultural phenomena. Freud, who was asked by the League of Nations to write a discourse on War well before the second world war began, reasoned himself into a position in which the discontents of civilisation should adopt a stoical attitude of resignation to the imperfections of their societies. This, according to Freud is the only wise avenue of approach to the question relating to how the individual “bears the burden of existence” and bears the burden of our imperfectly constructed States.

Culture, in Freud’s view is the battleground of two mighty instincts, the life instinct of an individual  which unites people  into families, villages and cities, and the death instinct  which   can only be deciphered at the level of   the  relation between people where forces work  conservatively to repeat the patterns of the past obsessively. These same forces work to  prevent wider and wider associations, sometimes  by destructively  dissolving existing constructed relations on a limited scale, or on a global scale in a world war. The life instinct, Eros, Freud argues , ought  in a perfect world, to triumph over the death instinct, Thanatos. The stoical attitude  appears to be an attitude one adopts whilst one observes the battle of the giants on the cultural scene. Freud  does not presume to even guess the outcome and stands in the shadow of Kant who was absolutely certain on moral grounds that Reason would prevail and a cosmopolitan kingdom of ends would be created as a consequence. Ricoeur stands either in between these two positions or alternately to the right of Kant if one  believes the mechanism of forgiveness to have religious connotations. Freud has been mentioned in this context  in spite of Ricoeurs criticism that the Freudian archaeological theory of mind and society lacks a Hegelian teleological dimension (or Aristotelian dimension:the telos of the common good).

Freudian theory  is particularly valuable in the explanation of pathological phenomena. If the assumption of Plato and Aristotle  relating to the logical identity of personal identity and social or political identity is philosophically defensable then, even if Freudian theory might lack an important teleological dimension this might not be of decisive significance when it comes to the characterisation of pathological phenomena whether it be of a personal or political nature. Take the phenomenon of group identity which Freud wrote a paper about(Group Psychology and the Ego). The stronger the bond of identification with the group, the stronger the reaction to  “outsiders” however minimal the factual differences between the outsiders and the members of the group might be. This reasoning can be used to ground an  objection to the project of globalisation, namely,  that the only alternative to the current concept of the nation state is some kind of world government. Now Kant particularly rejected the concept of world government on the grounds that this would  be tyrannical. If we connect this Kantian point to the Freudian reflection, the consequence would seem to be the kind of middle position suggested by Ricouer  in which a European project dilutes national identity and nationalism on the road  to the global project of further dilution of  the identification mechanisms involved in Euro-politanism. Freud clearly described the pathological consequences of identification mechanisms in relation to the mobilisation of aggression against the Jews, but he  did not see the full consequences of this particular battle between Eros and Thanatos. He died in 1939. Had he been alive he would probably have observed that a German Jew was just as much a German as any non- Jewish German. His analysis of   the leader of the Germans at the time of Hitler’s suicide would have been very cool and technical. Terms such as “pathological  or chronic narcissism”, “paranoia”  “delusional”for him were descriptive and explanatory and embedded in a network of concepts and principles rather than emotionally laden as they seem to be for us when taken out of their medical context. Hannah Arendt points out the banality of the way in which the everyday family German participated  in atrocities  during the day whilst going home in the evening to be fathers to their families. In doing so, she argues, this phenomenon  bears witness to the Freudian battle of  the giants on the cultural stage. The same mechanism, if not same instincts, binding a child to his parents binds a citizen to his leader: one can identify out of love or as a consequence of exposure to aggression.

With all the Freud bashing going on in the name of “science” it is  not so difficult to believe that we have not learned very much about the pathological  mechanisms and phenomena operating at the social and political levels.  If one believes in the logical relation of the individual and the political,  and one understands how Freudian mechanisms are operating at the political level, then the idea of the nation state being  driven into nationalistic isolationist  anti-immigration policies  and thereby manifesting itself as a pathological  obsessive compulsion, becomes understandable. History has taught us about the causes of social and political pathology but the understanding of the mechanisms of the identity  formation of groups need further  philosophical investigation. Until that happens we will not be able to judge whether the counteracting mechanisms of the translation of cultures, the exchange of  cultural memories relating to traditions customs and mores, and the secular concept of forgiveness suggested by Ricoeur, will  heal the wounds inflicted by globalisation upon the pathological nation state.

Until  we understand the mechanisms of political identity we risk embracing the pathological elements of our politics  and blaming all our woes on Globalisation.

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The disintegration of Political Institutions: Populism, Science, Psychology, and Humanistic Liberalism

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Paul Ricoeur refers in his writings on Political Responsibility to an interesting Humanistic/philosophical model to represent  the concepts of power and authority.  Power, he argues, rests with the people, and authority rests with the State. We are asked to conceive of this relation of power and authority as  a triangle. The former, power,  he characterizes as embedded in a base of community life where we live together ,with and for one another, in the midst of  just institutions. The latter, authority, the  parts of the triangle reaching from the base to the apex, he argues, is a hierarchical structure which it is necessary to submit to if the society is to preserve itself in the face of external and internal threats. This structure , he argues, is necessary  for all kinds of states but  as one can readily see, it manifests a paradox in the combining of authority  in the form of legitimate law governed force, and  the power of the will of the people  that has evolved   slowly,  historically and ethically to constitute a culture. Given the nature of the model, the culture, mores, and customs of a society can, unless authority is especially sensitive to the will of the people be plagued by questionable political decisions and attitudes . These decisions and attitudes have a special  holistic characteristic in that the major action of politicians which is being decided upon is the passing of laws.

The figure of a triangle obviously reminds us of  Humanistic Psychology: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs  which makes reference to both personal, social and cultural needs but does not directly reflect economic or political needs. During modern times we have witnessed the unleashing of the economic forces of globalisation which are indifferent to the   force of the ethical imperative that  is suggested in Maslow’s hierarchy.  In this process, global economic needs  have differentiated themselves from  national needs. In this process State economic decisions have become increasingly abstract and are understood only by groups of experts.

Now this differentiation reminds me of the deliberate decision taken by Psychology in 1870 to detach itself from the domain of Philosophy and thereby, as a consequence,  detach itself from the realm of  humanistic and ethical description and explanation.  The decision was motivated by  a  desire to become more scientific  and thereby  advance knowledge of the human condition. Difficult to comprehend abstraction was also the result of this process. Theories of causation lie behind experimental manipulation of supposedly unvarying independent variables and dependent variables which can be quantified and  measured. Probability theory is used in order to attempt to establish whether  the correlations observed and measured  can be  regarded as indications of whether there is a causal relation between the variables. The problem with the experimental method and its accompanying probability theory is that it presupposes a form of the law of induction that things and relations which have not changed in the past will not change in the future. Now, as long as one is dealing with causation between at least one unvarying variable and one dependent variable the inductive method is a defendable assumption. But if one is to use probability theory to support the experimental method another assumption is required in accordance with Bayes´s theorem, which states that the probability of an event occurring is related to the information which one has about it. Now if one has a  covered container with 50 balls, 25 of which are white and 25 of which are black, and we wish to calculate the probability of the event of drawing a white ball  on the first draw, our information about the number of possible events in the system  is  finite and closed and probabilities can be accurately calculated.  But the problem is this: in  Psychological experiments, where we do  have information of all the possible variables affecting possible outcomes, the results of the experiment  very often merely produce knowledge of a relation which  we already had knowledge of via experience or philosophical theory. Indeed, experience itself may be sufficient  for knowledge of the cause-effect relations.  The very best we achieve is a confirmation of what we already know. This, as one can see, is problematic from the point of view of the original motivation for the decision taken by Psychology  to move away from Humanistic Philosophy which was struggling with the larger issue of determining the psychological and situational factors  involved in open systems, i.e. in systems where  agents freely choose what they ought and ought not to do. The real problem with this state of affairs is that we need to advance our knowledge of the human condition if we are going to understand ourselves and our relation to politics.  Isolation from philosophical assumptions of the human condition and the ethical imperative has not produced very much of significance in almost 150 years. If a real comparison of progress in these two respective areas of research were to be made then what has been discovered  in the name of science would then have to be compared with 150 years of philosophical reflection which would include all the philosophical discoveries of  modern academic Aristotelians and Kantians, existentialism,phenomenology, hermeneutics and Analytical Philosophy of different kinds. We could for example ask whether Experimental research  has contributed  to our knowledge of the psychological and situational variables involved in political thinking and decision making. One would have to compare the results of such research with, for example, Paul Ricoeur’s and Hannah Arendt’s political and psychological(anthropological) research and reflections, some of which are presented here. The hypothesis presented here then is :No psychological theory using purely experimental method and results  can compare with the humanistic  method and results of interpretation, hermeneutics and logic in the field of political “science”. What we have in these  experimentally based theories is a fruitless scientific abstraction comparable  to economic abstraction  which is  a privileged domain of small groups of experts.

Ricouer  presented  his philosophical model in a number of sources (principally in  the two articles “Fragility and Responsibility” and “Ethics and Politics”) and it differs significantly from Maslow’s Humanistic Psychological theory even if the latter  carries interesting philosophical and ethical assumptions about the human condition.Paradoxically  it might be the partial reliance on the scientific  causal principle which limits the scope of  Maslow’s theory.

Let us try to see, for example whether a non humanistic approach using an experimental mind set could solve the problem of analysing the concept of civil disobedience in the political framework of “the Law”.

The law can be changed, either  by the government changing the law  or by the government  adding another law to the system. The government has the authority to do these things. However during the last century the will of the people has made itself heard in organised campaigns of demonstration and civil disobedience. The base of the triangle has, that is to say, not submitted to the authority of governmental institutions. It has expressed its power and its discontent with governmental authority. Why? It is often claimed that the laws of science are immutable and immune to change and  the laws of men contingent and changeable.  Yet in the civil rights movements, the anti Vietnam war,  and the CND demonstrations it almost seems as if some immutable unchangeable law was on the side of the demonstrators, as if some timeless knowledge was being expressed by crowds surging through streets flashing their placards for the cameras and chanting.  Kant believed the moral law was immutable and unchangeable and thought it would take man one hundred thousand years to fully understand this law, thus echoing the old Platonic chorus that knowledge is required for the just exercise of power and authority. Not the kind of abstract theoretical knowledge that “scientific” experts claim to possess but the practical knowledge that keeps the society evolving and developing.  This practical knowledge, made explicit in the Enlightenment moral philosophy of Kant,  demands the kind of consciousness that is needed to coordinate the customs , mores and ethical imperatives of the people with their representatives in authority who have the task of translating the power of the people into the power of government. Authority can only use the power of the people on the condition that it maintains its connection with the customs mores and ethical laws of the people. Hannah Arendt argues that in times of turmoil which she defines in terms of confusion, polarization and the growing bitterness of our debates are actually caused by a theoretical failure to come to terms with and understand  the phenomenon of civil disobedience. From the point of view of  the authorities, a crowd of  unruly demonstrators are merely a number of individuals breaking the law and disturbing the peace  whereas from the point of view of the base of the triangle,  the ethically motivated demonstrators,  the issue is rather as it was for Thoreau “let  justice be done even if the world perishes” a view shared by Lincoln in the issue of the civil war over slavery. Aristotle claimed that the good man could only be a good citizen in a good state. Kant acknowledges this trinity of terms(the good man, the good citizen, the good state) necessary to analyse the phenomenon of justice and civil disobedience and points out that even a race of devils  could found a nation if they were intelligent enough thus highlighting the importance of the good citizens relation to the moral law and the laws of the state. We are all conscious of the facts that historical processes take decades to reveal their significance. If we believe we are living in time of turmoil at the moment perhaps we should look back to the past for traces of the process which has led us to our current situation. Arendt in writing about civil disobedience reports the pessimism in the USA during the 1960’s where law writers were  rhetorically claiming that the law is dead and referred  to “the cancerous growth of disobediences” against the background of the claim that law enforcement authorities had been failing for many years to enforce the law especially in relation to drug offences, mugging and burglary.  She maintains with reference  to recent reports that over half the crimes are never reported and that only one in a hundred criminal offenders will ever go to prison. Research studies are not needed, she claims to establish the fact that criminal acts probably have no legal consequences whatsoever. Arendt points out that were the system more successful the court and prison system would collapse. The answer of of the authorities to this situation is to commission a manifold of scientific studies  devoted to discovering the “deeper causes” whilst ignoring the more obvious causes  under their  noses. Add to these reflections on criminal law the frequency of civil disobedience in the post war world   which resulted in  government disrespect for the  group of society that is  intentionally disobedient and the reciprocating disrespect and contempt for political authority  and we have , according to Arendt a recipe  the disintegration of political institutions and thereby a recipe for a popular revolution. Is what we experiencing in the USA today exactly what Hannah Arendt predicted?

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When Humanistic voices fall silent(Philosophy of Education)

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Recent changes to the Swedish Gymnasium School Curriculum indicate that politicians are succumbing to a number of different non-educational agendas  to change what is taught and the way it is taught in schools. In the last  two rounds of changes we saw the disappearance of Philosophy from  2 of the national curricula for the Gymnasium school.

We have also seen a very determined commitment via legislation to the introduce   “scientific” research into schools. This determination is matched by a curious ambiguity as to exactly what constitutes “scientific” research. John Hattie’s work is mentioned in several contexts in the communications of Skolverket(The Swedish  National School Authority) and if this kind of approach to education is what is meant we may be witnessing a paradigm shift of significant seismic proportions in the Swedish schools’ system.

This is all the more interesting in that there is another even more radical  paradigm shift  occurring in the Finnish Educational system. The Finnish authorities are experimenting with  thematic or what they call “phenomenon” teaching. According to Siv Saarukka, a Finnish expert in this field, the Finnish authorities have been very influenced by a work, “The Fifth Discipline” written by a “popular” expert in the management of learning organisations, Peter Senge. This is an amazing revelation from a country that is very near  the top of the Pisa(OECD-inspired) world school system rankings. This surprise ranks with that of the management consultancy report commissioned in England  around 2000 in which  the language used in the report to talk about teachers was no longer humanistic as it had traditionally been for well over a century. The language rather was associated with  a psychology of business which  drew upon the practices of the business world that revolved around  business processes, products and productivity. The final estimate of the damage caused to the English educational system from this report by the consultancy  firm (HayMcBer), has yet to be estimated.  We do know that the report cost the British taxpayer 4 million pounds. “The Fifth Discipline” is a book written very much in the spirit of Hay/McBer’s  report and is as completely devoid of the rigour of academic and philosophical argument  as is  all  “popular” literature of this kind.

Perhaps, in their favour,  the Swedish authorities can be admired for resisting the temptation toward populism which is currently causing problems on a global scale. Science is at least an academic pursuit, it might be argued.   Let us try to put this Swedish strategy into some kind of context.   In the  1920’s,1930’s, and 40’s in England  Europe and the USA, Science spawned the Philosophical movement we call “logical positivism”. Logical positivism suddenly disappeared after the war as a  movement although, to this day there is no doubt the odd positivist tucked away in some academic corridor or other. Logical positivism was very quickly construed by even its supporters as an anti-humanistic movement and English positivists like A J Ayer admitted that the position was untenable under considerable academic pressure.

After the second world war, there were also a number of commentators who felt that it was largely the absence of a sufficiently strong humanistic influence in educational programs which allowed global totalitarian forces to be unleashed earlier in the century. This discussion led to an academic revival of Humanistic Liberalism in English Universities in the 1960’s and 1970’s which began to talk in earnest about Education. Teaching certificates were supplemented with B.ed degrees and many such degrees had Humanistic Philosophy of Education components which viewed Science, Scientific Psychology, and Psycho-metrics as of peripheral concern to educators. During this discussion, out of which the International Baccalaureate program was born, it was acknowledged that the heavy emphasis on Scientific subjects in Europe  at the expense of the Humanistic subjects in the German and Russian educational curricula  were responsible firstly, for  the absence of humanistic attitudes in many of the more disturbing events of the second world war and secondly, perhaps  the absence of humanistic attitudes also played a part in the  intransigence of the   parties involved in the cold war and the threat of a nuclear holocaust. In the light of this, it is also, to say the least, not surprizing to find Sweden wishing to combat populism by trying to make schools more academic but it is surprizing to find Sweden wishing to follow the route that Germany and Russia once followed in the dark days of the last century. It is not being maintained that Science is not an important part of our lives. What is being maintained is that(according to Richard Pring in his essay  “Education as a moral practice”) there are two narratives that define the dialogue that is taking place in the classroom between the teacher and the pupils. The one dialogue is the historical one that has taken place in all subjects, including the sciences, where voices firstly, join each other in a historical chorus over time  and in agreement over important issues and secondly, where voices engage in scholarly yet friendly criticism of important ideas which might be mistaken. The second dialogue is that between the teacher as the representative of these historical voices and the pupils who are deciding whether or not to enter into the cultural arena in which voices of all ages have talked about almost everything it is possible to imagine. The pupil, of course, must be met on common ground but the moral message of this second narrative is to initiate the pupil into the  “Holy”(R S Peters) cultural arena  where it is realized how fragile our civilization is: how it might rest upon this kind of educational dialogue.  When humanistic voices fall silent, ways of life are lost and  tigers and lions enter the arena. To think that Science alone can hinder the fragmentation or atomization of our society  is dangerously naive. Experimentation has its place in those fields which can be neatly divided into  variables which can be measured. But how do we measure a desire to kill Jews? In the same way I suppose as you  measure anything else. The Nazi’s were famous for strictly measuring and keeping meticulous records of their measurements. Is this anything else than distasteful, even if historians will be able to, in their turn, use this documentation for a narrative which very few of us will read with pleasure. Since I have mentioned business and its “populist” character let me consider an epistemological rather than an ethical objection  to Science rampaging  over our educational field. There is a famous business experiment done in a factory  in which management consultants were let loose in an environment where productivity was very low. After much analysis  and  observation it was decided that the lighting was too bright and should be reduced. Expectations ran high in the experimental group and the productivity miraculously increased. A triumph for science and business! Alas it was not too long before productivity went down again and the gurus were called back in. After analysis and observations it was decided that the lighting was too  bright and it  was reduced. Productivity increased! Is this an argument that light is not an independent variable? Mayo tended to explain the result in terms of human association and human variables which are notoriously difficult to manipulate and measure. Experienced humanistic teachers will point to how the two above mentioned pedagogical narratives naturally produce an expectation that the subjects or pupils will curiously follow and appreciate the respective dialogues. I use the term “naturally” because were the teacher to instrumentally use this fact about pupils expectations causally to produce a calculated effect, this will be humanistically an example of doing the right thing for the wrong “reason”.

The National School  Authority also talk of “established practice” as another possible means by which to achieve the sought-for academic environment. No one really knows what this means. If it means what I have referred to above as humanistic practice then it is about time that the National Schools authority came out and clarified the confusion over this issue. It would also greatly enhance the strength of the humanistic voice if Philosophy was returned to its rightful place in every curriculum.

 

 

 

 

 

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Humanistic liberalism and the law(Politics,the ethical imperative, and the law)

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Humanistic liberalism has a view of the law and politics which is Kantian, and to the extent that much Kantian ethics and politics  has an Aristotelian flavour, the views of Aristotle are  also considered carefully by humanists  in spite of the criticisms Aristotle has received on the fronts of slavery and feminism. We have argued in an earlier paper, with Paul Ricoeur, that Politics is fragile and can be efficacious only to the extent that the citizens (which  have been constituted by a state and in turn constitute the state in a relation of mutual implication) care about the Politics of their state. This statement has the following relation to the law: the law is an action of a government(by the people and for the people) which means that as long as a law meets the criteria of justice(an unjust law is no law at all),  the people have the same duty to follow an exterior law as they do to follow an internalised  moral law. Kant argues in his third formulation of the categorical imperative that when citizens and politicians are mutually doing their duty there is a logical(in terms of the ought system of concepts and the practical reasoning that is operating in accordance with the idea of freedom) relation between citizens and their government and Kant calls such a state of affairs a kingdom of ends. Citizens treat the government as an end in itself, as having a value in itself, and the government reciprocates by treating citizens as ends in themselves partly by guaranteeing them the maximum freedom consistent with the principle of equal freedom for all. But although this might be how we ought to think about these matters, this is not in fact how we do think and this, it is argued, suffices to burst the idealistic utopian bubble of the humanistic liberal. I think the answer to this objection is a version of the so called parallel argument strategy which runs as follows: if one ought to think logically but does not, does this entail that the laws of logic which give language its meaning and truth value are to  be discarded? Why, then is it relatively easy to accept the latter argument in relation to the laws of logic but not as easy to accept the former argument relating to the laws of man? Here is an account  by Paul Ricoeur which might help to explain some of the difficulties we have with understanding the logical nature of the laws of men. Ricoeur claims that  at least criminal  law  has an instrumental nature which is anti-humanistic and runs against the flow of  both humanism and liberalism. Criminal law presupposes the legitimacy of physical force and violence(of power) in relation to those who fail to obey the law. The law punishes. After the contemplative weighing of evidence in the tribunal comes the judgment in accordance with the law and thereafter comes the freedom from the punishment or the punishment itself(the instrumental end–the substitute vengeance). Even the contemplative process is merely a  more peaceful substitution for what might happen in the interaction between a partner that has been harmed and a partner seeking vengeance. The latter, if he is a citizen and cares for the state he lives in  hopefully will reject a violent form of vengeance and accept the substitute vengeance offered.

The long process of the regulation of the law involves written laws, a tribunal in which evidence can be presented and weighed and competent independent people whose task it is to regulate the process fairly and pass fair judgment. This process at first sight looks very scientific and though there is classification of actions and arguments which have a logical structure, there is also art, a story being told in the courtroom which is  open to interpretation, and there is also interpretation involved in the process of deciding which law is relevant to the narrated actions as well as which facts are relevant and which parts of the story are facts and which not. Criminal law obviously is a law which resolves conflicts with the motivator of conflicts, namely violence. It is divisive and divides society into the guilty and the not guilty. Many political realists have this model of law in mind when they speak about power and security: we the people shall protect ourselves from all enemies, imagined or real. Paul Ricoeur points out that civil law differs from criminal law in that it is not politically divisive but, on the contrary a region of law which regulates the making and keeping of promises and the exchange of promises, mutually relating partners in a venture or project. The claim that “Promises ought to be kept” is used by  Kant  as an example of a categorical  imperative. It is, that is, the ethical imperative of society manifesting and symbolizing   the global trust the members of a society  have for each other. Should it transpire that someone fails to keep a promise, such a state of affairs undermines the trust that such a commitment entails   and civil law regulates both the possible material damages done to the injured party  and the  metaphysical damage that is done to the moral law.

Paul Ricoeur also discusses a third region of the law relating to the just distribution of benefits and burdens necessary for the Aristotelian flourishing life. Some benefits and burdens are economic but some are more constitutional. Constitutional issues such as education and citizenship  directly involve the ethical imperative. There is, however a third constitutional issue which is very relevant to our current situation and debate, namely, security. The recent executive order to temporarily stop refugees and immigrants from 7 selected predominantly Muslim countries  seems to affect directly  the ethical imperative and freedom  insofar as it is involved in education  and  of course seemingly also raises the the issue of citizen security. The latter  issue appears to be at least theoretically managed by the nation state and the other, the former,  seems to practically  transcend the nation state and be a manifestation of the more important aspect of the globalisation process. Given these  considerations there seem to be at least two relevant issues pertaining to the court decision over the matter  of whether the recent executive order  issued by President Trump was constitutional or not. One is whether there is a real empirical provable threat to the security of American citizens. Here one can wonder  whether the threat is purely hypothetical or alternatively one can wonder whether  the measures taken were disproportionate to the threat. The second relevant issue  concerns the ethical imperative at two political  levels: firstly the level of promises(the signing of the Geneva convention and the Human Rights charter), secondly at the level of education which ideally should be educating citizens to be citizens of the world via  ethical training and  its concentration on the universal truth and justice valued by all men.

So, much more is at issue with this court decision over a hastily crafted executive order than merely power of the President and the powerlessness of refugees, not to mention the powerlessness of those tens of thousands of visa holders who have been promised entrance and are now  in doubt as to whether State promises will be kept.

If the ethical imperative as a part of the deeper more meaningful process of globalisation is operating in the most powerful nation on earth then we should expect a decision which overturns at least  the more unjust parts of the executive order. If the Presidential order stands, the young people of today  have a task similar to that of the  non-white civil rights movements and nuclear disarmament movements of the last century, the task of peaceful civil disobedience in the form of demonstrating for the implementation of the ethical imperatives in all government.

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Origins of Globalization, Totalitarianism, and the Ethical Imperative.

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Hannah Arendt argues that Totalitarianism was unleashed by Imperialism which  in  its turn unleashed the power of a subterranean stream  of globalising forces that  surfaced and began to flow with  a power that the nation-state was unable to harness or control: forces such as the will to colonise, the omnipotent will which felt that there was nothing which could limit its power,  and the mass feeling of powerlessness in the face of  powerful  institutions. Running deeply in a part of this stream is a  paradoxical cross-current: a belief amidst an educated middle class in the actualizing potential of the moral personality and the universal importance of an ethical imperative.

In relation to the above thought consider an interesting Philosophical and Historical perspective which relates to Ernst Cassirer’s work  “The Myth of State”. Cassirer claims that all political theories of the 17th century have a common metaphysical/mathematical background. Metaphysical thought  in the following  century, amidst philosophers, took precedence over theological thought which in its turn was already being undermined by the subterranean stream of Stoical belief in a moral personality  that  surfaced first in the form of the thought of Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence which began with these famous words:

“We hold these truths to be self evident. That all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The above experiential  reflection on the rights and dignity of man  preceded their philosophical/ethical justification through the works of Kant, a few years later, which put the final nail in the coffin of speculative metaphysics of all kinds ,and also provided a philosophical foundation for both human rights and the inevitable philosophical consequences:  the idea of a United Nations and Cosmopolitanism. Further, the Kantian “Copernican revolution” provided a rational, non-experiential foundation for religion and politics and superseded the social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke which originated from the empirical/scientific method: the method of resolving a known whole into less known elements and synthesizing these elements back into a constructed whole again. In this methodical process, an individual’s moral personality mysteriously disappeared especially in the case of Hobbes who claimed that there was a legal bond between subjects and their sovereign which amounted to a pact of submission on all issues related to the sovereigns power and authority.

Cassirer argues that what we were witnessing  during these years of  the Enlightenment was a revival of  Stoic ideas which

“seemed alone equal to the task of providing principles admitted by every nation, every creed, every sect.”

One critical element of this revival was the idea that if a man was forced to give up his personality he would cease to be a moral being, he would become a slave of a Machiavellian Prince or sovereign. Unfortunately Stoic thought did not sufficiently acknowedge the central concept of Freedom. This idea of practical reason had to be  fashioned by Kant  as part of  a middle position between an experiential view and a foundation in Cartesian thought. He favoured a  position with a foundation in action that maintains trust in nonmathematical and non- speculative theorizing.

“Kantian” Actions were, however, subseqently evaluated in terms of theoretical standards and it was these standards that provided the 18th century with its strength, inner unity, and Spirit.  This absolute Hegelian Spirit, unfortunately, resulted in Romanticism and its attempt to poeticize the world in all its aspects in defiance of the political and philosophical ideals of previous Kantian generations. The poetic spirit, in its turn, reduced history to a romantic account of the portraits of great heroes and reduced ethics to reliving the spirit of the Homeric pre-Socratic era. This Romantic focus probably diverted the Kantian stream of emphasis on free ethical action and the dignity of man into subterranean experiential caverns. The Romantic spirit dominated and Carlyle´s historical theory of hero-worship was transformed into race worship in which it was maintained that only the white man possessed the will power to build a  cultural and political life(Gobineau).  The black and yellow races, it was claimed, did not have the energy or the spirit for such work. Thus was born:

“the totalitarianism of race that prepared the way for the late concept of the totalitarian states”(Cassirer, The Myth of the State”).

Romanticism was opposed by Academic Philosophy and Science which,  in its turn attempted to continue the project of Hobbes:  subjecting politics to the scientific method. Psychology,  instead of focusing on the Philosophical idea of action preferred to use a scientifically determined concept of behaviour which was value-neutral and for that very reason could not be used in the debate about the moral personality and the ethical imperative.

According to Arendt, the negative sub-currents of globalization transformed a doctrinal religious prejudice against the Jews into a racial prejudice which manifested itself into the anti-Semitism of the first political parties in Europe in the 1870s. For Gobineau, Kantian ethics and its categorical imperative with its universal condition and assumption of a universal moral personality was a contradiction of the facts: there was, it was argued,  no universal ethical attitude or personality.  Behind such conviction was a scientific and epistemological claim that only the facts would reveal whether such a personality was a reality. If the claim was that such a personality was a universal phenomenon it would suffice to use the scientific method and engage in scientific observation to detect one actual case in which this was not true. One case observed sufficed for the universal theory to collapse.  But all this teaches us is that a scientific and epistemological claim searching for the truth is a very different kind of claim to an ethical judgment relating to the idea of the good which is behind all ethical action. The idea of the good situates us in what modern philosophers call the “ought-system of concepts” in which arguments are constructed in terms of an ought major premise and an ought in the conclusion. We ought to have ethical self-knowledge but the fact that many people do not is still consistent with the major premise that we all ought to develop ethical personalities and the conclusion that an individual ought to develop his moral personality, that, in other words, an individual has a duty to develop their moral personality.

Romanticism and the scientific imperative, together with the dissolution of religious and many other forms of authority, including the authority of institutions,  produced what Freud called the “discontents of civilization” as well as the idea of a global cosmopolitan community that is the world historical equaivalent of a moral personality. Globalization does not mean the creation and maintenance of the commodious life styles promoted by Hobbes and his followers. Globalisation  means many things but amongst these things we find moral and political attitudes that have been on the aims and objectives lists of both Aristotelian and Kantian moral and political Philosophy.

 

 

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Political Realism, Political idealism, Power and Justice: Security versus Human Rights

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Political realism basically takes two forms but both forms deny, for different reasons, that politics is fundamentally  related to ethical categorical reasoning(the basis of justice and human rights) and both forms would claim that instrumental reasoning of different kinds form the preliminary stage of action which is fundamentally to be measured by its consequences. The first form of political instrumentalism or consequentialism is encountered in Machiavelli’s thoughts. Machiavelli in his work “The Prince”  attempts to provide pragmatic guidance for rulers, advice  that is free from “lofty ideals”, and he claims that private morality and public morality are to be separated for a Prince who has the task of governing people. He recommended a kind of “situational governorship” in which , if the circumstances demanded it , one would be wholly justified in deceiving and killing the nobility of a country if they threatened the power of the ruler. This kind of recommendation has led some   commentators to call this work a handbook in the art of criminal government. It is better he argued to be feared and loved than to be merely loved, or even worse, feared and hated.  He adds that it is very difficult to be both feared and loved and that therefore the ruler should satisfy himself with being feared. This recognizably bears the marks of a realpolitik which refuses to think in terms of any kind of political or ethical idealism. Machiavelli believes that  “idealism” means  something which  common sense “associates” with the notion of an “idea” which in the mind of the realist becomes strangely detached from the action which is guided by it. It is almost as if the realist believes that rationally based actions can proceed blindly and instinctively toward some goal or consequence. It is not surprising therefore that Machiavelli believes that it is important for the ruler to have knowledge of the manipulation of instinctively based emotions as well as knowledge of  the Psychology of the people one rules. For example:

“Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”(Machiavelli, The Prince)

And of course it it would be foolish to question a realist about whether the above description is a realistic description of the real situation he finds himself in.For the narcissistic realist that would be a sign that he is  hated  which in turn would require appropriate action on his part, namely punishment of his critic.

Hobbes is a a Political realist but  with different more scientific assumptions  and a scientific  method: the resolutive-compositive method of Galileo which he uses to describe and explain mans political activities. He has in common with Machiavelli a simplistic Psychology which claims that  the basic parts of man from his sensory-motor organs  up to his memory, imagination, and reason  all compose endeavours which are essentially in the service of mans appetites and aversions. Every voluntary action is determined by mans appetites and aversions(Hobbes, Leviathan). This composite  consequence  then entails  a further consequence that man always seeks some power when living in communities  which is determined by the amount by which his capacities, riches ,reputation and friends exceed those of other men.  In simple societies like a state of nature, there are further consequences, the powers of men oppose each other. There is a struggle  for power which can become  violent resulting in a war of all against all because some mens desires are without limit:

“So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death.”

Because the war of all against all cannot produce peace and commodious living Hobbes envisages a conditional justification of distributing ones own personal power to that of a sovereign who assimilates all  the power,  in return for the absolute obedience of  the citizen. The sovereign  provides the conditions necessary for a bourgeois  market driven society in which men continue to strive for power  in an environment which banishes the omnipresence of death  unless related to  the threat of the sanction of the law if their desires are uncontrolled. For Hobbes, a mans value is quantified by his capacities, riches reputation and friends.

This is in stark contrast to the idealistic Kantian concept  of man as an  end in himself irrespective of his capacities, riches, reputation and friends. For Kant man does not have a market value because,  even if we concede that this simplistic picture of man refers to the facts about man and his relation to other men and his society, values cannot logically be deduced from facts. An ought cannot be derived from an is without committing the naturalistic fallacy. This is the major reason why political idealism is  closer to the truth than political realism but in itself is not the whole truth.

The salience of the above post for  the events we are currently experiencing in Syria, the UK(the land of Hobbes) and the USA is  the following. The world is experiencing the consequences of the disconnection of value-laden ideas to action. Political  idealism maintains, for instance that the good intention behind the action, rather than the actions consequences, is “logically” related to to the action which it ontologically defines. If this it is correct, this is  certainly an Aristotelian and Kantian position and it is one of the foundation stones of humanistic liberalism. From this view of action we derive our views of justice and human rights. This view  certainly rests on psychological or anthropological conditions far more complex than we see in either of Hobbes’ or Machiavelli’s theories which are fundamentally individualistic or egocentric in Hobbes’s case and   narcissistic in Machiavelli’s case. These are the theories that allow us  adopt an attitude which allows us to sign and support executive orders affecting a significant proportion of the Muslim world, an executive order  whose major motivation is consequentialist: allowing the most powerful nation in the world to feel safe in the face of, relatively speaking, small numbers of terrorists.

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“An unjust law is no law at all”(St Augustine)

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The above  quote sprang to mind whilst viewing CNN : Zakharia Fareed’s GPS on the  29th January 2017.

A panel of participants were discussing the legal action taken by the ACLU against the temporary anti-immigration decree signed into force by President Trump earlier in the week. A legal representative for the ACLU outlined  the  complex and convincing argument which resulted in a high court judge temporarily mitigating the decrees’ more devastating consequences for some of the groups of people affected.  The point was made that the decree violated  firstly, the constitution, secondly , the right to due process under the law, thirdly, some  legislation relating to discrimination against religious groups, and fourthly, treaties  such as the Geneva convention which have been signed by America and give all refugees the right of asylum in the country. The implication being made was that the decree was an anti-Muslim measure.

Another legal expert countered the ACLU position  with the view that, given the history of judgments from the US court system,  it was highly unlikely  that the action would succeed simply because there had been a history of discriminatory legal judgments against  minority groups including the Chinese which still stand as precedents in the legal system today.  It was also claimed that  President Obama had during his presidency taken up this very  issue of the courts “second guessing” the government on national security issues. The legal expert countering the ACLU expert  claimed that he did not approve of the decree but was basically arguing that the law was the law and with respect to the issue of anti-Muslim discrimination  this would not be the court’s position in view of the fact that some Muslim countries were excluded from the decree.

The next panel participant was a lady  who had been a Middle Eastern correspondent and claimed, that under the temporary anti-immigration decree she would be prevented from entering the USA, as would Fareed if he left and decided to return. Her  argument basically was  that “an unjust law is not a law at all”. She went on to make another  point about White supremacy and made the connection to the Trump government via  the new head of national security Steve Bannon who, it was claimed,  previously edited a right wing  media outlet. She was very articulate and being an ex-debate coach I likened her performance to a speech in a debating competition. I absolutely agree with her that the  problem with the  argument she was attacking was that it was completely ignoring the humanistic element of the  whole issue.(CNN had immediately prior to GPS been showing the crowds of demonstrators at a large number of airports up and down the US). But in defence of the legal expert perhaps his assignment from CNN was merely to respond to the ACLU court action.  In good debating tradition the legal expert that she had attacked was allowed to respond  but in doing so he  completely ignored her major argument that this was a constitutional  and humanistic issue transcending the actual practice and precedent of law. She was admonished for categorising 47% of the voters as white supremacists and also for letting her passions get the better of her reason.

I would like to argue that, from a humanistic liberal point of view ,the Middle East expert had a perfectly legitimate argument which was ignored and which goes all the way back to St Augustine who argued that the actual law must meet criteria of divine or eternal law if it is to be a just law at all. If we move forward into the realm of philosophy from the realm of religion  and apply St Augustine’s quote in this new context , Kant(an enlightenment philosopher)would definitely say that any law which was not in accordance with the moral law, e.g. did not respect people’s  freedom as an end in itself, was not a bona fide law at all.  For Kant, then,  the moral law was intimately connected to freedom and freedom could only be restricted if it encroached upon the freedom of others. He is often accused of being very formal and logical in his characterisation of the moral law but he concretises his first abstract formation of the moral law with the demand that we “act in accordance with the humanity in ourselves and others by never treating anyone solely as a means but always also as an end in themselves”. Philosophers during the Enlightenment and since have also been very quick to point out that no legal law can change the moral law but the moral law has very often in history served as the corrector of unjust laws. Move beyond the enlightenment to the civil rights demonstrations in the US led by Martin Luther King and you will find a concrete example of what I am saying.  Martin Luther King referred to the moral law in his arguments and used St Augustine’s quote.

Earlier during the evening on a CNN report, a senior democrat had used the image of the statue of liberty weeping in connection with the temporary anti-immigration decree. I know the lady statue of justice is blindfolded but when the Middle East expert  was neutralised because of her “passion” it was like hearing the statue of justice   wailing and then witnessing her being gagged, at least in respect of this one very important argument. This for me illustrated the success of the Trump media campaign in “scaring” reporters away from the philosophically important humanistic issues that are involved here. This phenomenon also occurred throughout the election campaign and is continuing. Reference was made to the fact that Fox news was the preferred channel for the Trump team and I am truly sorry if this criticism of CNN drives even one viewer in that direction because, in my opinion CNN is the channel that is succumbing the least of all American channels to all attempts to neutralise the media.

I do not know what the outcome of the court action will be  considering the fact that supreme court justices are  politically appointed, but if the decree stands then we will indeed be faced with the reality of living with an unjust law in this ,the 21st century in the USA. The law and morality will be split apart and only mass demonstrations of the magnitude of the civil rights marches last century will restore the marriage. However, even if that is the case in the meantime there is still the very real issue of the confusion created  at airports because of the lack of communication concerning which groups of people were and which groups of people were not to be screened or allowed entry.

Just a footnote concerning the relation of the President to reality. At the same time as the mass demonstrations were being televised at airports in the US, the President claimed that things were going “very nicely”.  The key philosophical issue here is how to correctly describe and explain the phenomenon we are presented with. I saw no comment on the media about the Presidents statement. This inversion of the good and the bad, the truth and the false  by Trump and his team is a tactic that has wrong-footed the mass media for more than 6 months now and it is time for them to attend to their footwork and live up to the expectations that all have of the 4th estate.

 

 

 

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The Banality of Authoritarian leadership

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The title of this post attempts to echo a comment by Hannah Arendt in her book  on Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. In this work she claims that after examination of all  the interview material with Psychologists and other officials, and after witnessing the events of the trial, one can draw no other conclusion about the personality and character of Eichmann than that he merely was not able to think. This opinion flew in the face of the prevailing discussion which tended toward a religious categorization of what happened in terms of the evil of  Eichmann’s actions and character. The comment “the banality of evil” seemed to many Jews to trivialize what had happened in the holocaust  exactly because they believed strongly that a religious idea of the sacred served as the standard by which to measure a man and his actions. To a Philosopher who characterizes the humanity of a man in terms of his/her ability to think, however, the accusation  has exactly equivalent dramatic value. Someone who fails to think in accordance with the basic categories of morality appears less than human. Popular opinion might even think of such people  as monsters(rather than devils: but are not devils a kind of monster?).

So what is the evidence for  judging that  current political leaders might  have difficulties with the capacity of thought in general but in particular with ethical thought? In an interview on television shown on CNN on the 26th January 2017, it was  argued  by the President of the USA  that he believed that torture should be used on suspected terrorists and the reason he gave for his belief concerning the truth of his claim  is that people in his intelligence agencies have told him that torture works. This was a somewhat surprising admission given an earlier claim  that one of his own newly  chosen cabinet ministers with extensive military experience had provided him with arguments that torture is not a good idea. Other commentators have pointed out that torture  is in fact against the law of  the country  and  a change in the law would be needed  if  it  was to be a possible anti-terrorist strategy. I am not sure whether  it was part of the same argument or a separate section of the interview but the President also seemed to be arguing that there was so much hate in the world that the decision to torture  terrorists would not worsen matters noticeably. One is reminded  here of  the view of every humanist since Buddha that violence breeds more violence, that the policy of an eye for an eye would lead to a world of blind people trying to find their way to their destinations. It appears then that we have at least one current world leader who responds emotionally to  both “sound bites”  and  images of the sizes of inauguration audiences without any thought  or critical capacity. Of course it would be foolish to suggest that this leader is like Eichmann, the mass murderer in all respects or even most respects. The argument is only that there is sufficient resemblance between the banality of Eichmann’s behaviour as recorded in his pre-trial testimony and his witnessed court room behaviour  and the banality of  pre-and post inauguration behaviour of the latest President of the USA. The most obvious difference between Eichmann and Trump is, of course that Eichmann was merely a cog in the Nazi machine being directed by a larger cog higher up the chain. But for those of us who still read books, having ones life run by sound bites and television images  is represented very well by the image of cogs blindly turning other cogs.

Indeed it might be the very banality of  the behaviour and language of morally  confused people that  causes a mist of confusion to descend upon everyone in their vicinity and which allows a popular  “acceptance” of alternative moral  positions.

The danger of relativizing morality is that the next stage in that process is to believe that the law can be manipulated in the same way in which one manipulates  other people. The law becomes another cog in the machine. Not to mention the fact that we have another leader to the East who cares little for International law and who has been characterized as delusional  in relation to his behaviour in  the Ukraine. The President of the USA wishes peaceful relations with  this warmonger and  it is not difficult to see why. The apprentice may be  seeking a master in the arena of the manipulation of nations. He may be seeking to be a larger cog in a larger machine.

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The Open Society and its enemies

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“The Open Society and its enemies” is a two volume work by Karl Popper claiming that Plato, Hegel and Marx were the enemies of open societies. I am not sure that this is fair judgment of Plato’s political ideas since many of these are still used as a standard by which to measure justice in societies today. Plato was definitely not a liberal but many humanistic liberals have sought and found inspiration in his dialogues. It should also be remembered that Plato’s “Republic” is the first systematic attempt to analyse political ideas such as justice and freedom. Since I have, in earlier posts, raised the question of whether humanistic liberalism is in the process of being dismantled by current events in the UK and USA it might be useful to use some of Plato’s ideas to analyse the phenomenon of  Mr Donald Trump in terms of the idea of being an enemy of the open society. The BBC in a short critical presentation compares some of Plato’s criticism of  classical Greek direct democracy with what is currently happening in the USA. According to the BBC’s presentation of Plato, when parents are no longer respected by their children and when teachers become afraid of their students a tyrant from the oligarchs will emerge to tempt the people with promises that he will solve all their problems and deliver a better life. Now one of the reasons why our liberal democracies are representative and not direct democracies is partly to eliminate the phenomenon of the tyrant via  a system of representative democracy which functions in accordance with the classical Greek idea of areté.  Areté means excellence  when referring to action and virtuous when referring to an agent and involved in this idea is the message of the Republic which is that no one can govern in accordance with areté unless one has the appropriate knowledge. The warning bells relating to President Trumps  lack of practical wisdom and competence have been ringing all through his campaign. A stable liberal representative democracy would have heeded the significance of these bells and any  candidate should have been stopped in their  tracks by the collective tonnage of  rational argument in the media and through the collective tonnage of resultant public demonstrations. Now unfortunately the media did not  fulfill its obligations in this respect  and demonstrations only reached significant proportions the day after Trump was inaugurated.

In classical Greece during the time of the philosophers, a man of practical wisdom  could stand in the market place and his arguments be heard and understood. I do not think the media are the only party to blame  for the current chaotic situation because I am sure they will maintain  that the argument that Trump was not qualified for the position of the Presidency was presented adequately to an audience that refused to listen or understand. Plato, suggested in the Republic as a definition of Justice in the State, a principle of specialisation in which he claims that people of  the wealthy class should not interfere with the ruling class and furthermore the wealthy man should never rule  for fear of the corruption of the office through abuse of power in for example, favouring his friends and family. But the real bite of the principle of specialisation relates to areté, the excellence of the rulers political wisdom, and in this respect the medias argument is a poor one  because quite simply the sound bites we heard in the media interviews of Trump never achieved the level of practical wisdom, never were in accordance with areté, the excellence we expect from a President and his interrogators. One of the messages of the Republic was that training and thorough education was of vital importance for the rulers but since Ronald Reagan one must assume that the Republic of the USA no longer believes in that idea. Perhaps the future will see the birth of the concept of the apprentice President.

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Political Responsibility

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Paul Ricoeur, the late French Philosopher, would have been fascinated by the twistings and turnings of current events in two of the bastions of political liberalism: the UK and the USA. His ethically based political theory reaches back to the Greeks and Aristotle, the Enlightenment and Kant, and engages with contemporary theories of Justice as manifested by the debates between Rawls and Nozick, Habermas and Gadamer. Ricoeur’s  primary claim is that Politics is vitally important to the well being of us all, yet it is simultaneously surprisingly fragile. Both of these factors, he argues entails that we owe it to politics to act and vote responsibly. In particular we owe a complex allegiance to our body politic which involves both respecting the status quo which has given us so much, and respecting those that criticize the status quo for its inadequacies to deliver the flourishing lives we all hope for.  Ricoeur analyses political discourse and finds a number of dialectical processes operating. Among them is that between  the utopia we hope for and the values of the ideological factors that constitute the status quo which historically has provided us with so much stability and prosperity. We need to maintain a delicate balance between these two factors in our political acts and political talk. Politics, he argues, is a unique arena which requires the mastery of a unique set of capacities amongst which good judgment and sound reasoning are paramount. Ricoeur refers to a number of  other paradoxes which constitute the fragility of political life including the problem of transference, i.e. the problem of people from other arenas of life bringing the capacities that they use in those arenas, into politics. Two  arenas which immediately spring to mind in relation to this point are the arenas of business with its practices of wheeling and dealing and contractual “interpretations” and the arenas of science with its theoretically oriented practices, manipulation of  variables and experimental reductionism and verification. To appreciate the differences for example between the business world and the political world it suffices to compare the stability and longevity of the institutions of  business (a company or a bank) with the longevity and stability of political institutions like the legislative system or the educational system.Running a country is nothing like running a chain of hotels. Ricoeur’s criticisms of populism would point to the role of facts in the sound reasoning process. Without facts which by definition are true beliefs, reasoning cannot proceed to sound conclusions. Subjecting facts to an “interpretative process” might enable voters to vote for popular people with what they perceive to be unique interpretative and rhetorical abilities but time is going to reveal the consequences of such voting for the political system. Some commentators are arguing that we can forget about the dialectic between  a better more hopeful future and the present status quo. What is at stake is a dismantling of the political status quo in favor of an economic roller coaster ride ending at an unknown destination.

Such is the fragility of the political process and the nature of our responsibility toward it.

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The Dismantling of Humanistic liberalism?

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It must be difficult for both journalists and academics to describe  and explain what has happened in the world over the past 6 months. Two of the bastions of liberalism, the United Kingdom and the USA have both radically changed their political direction. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were not just unexpected because  of a miscalculation of the values of a number of variables. These events were unexpected because a number of variables suddenly became irrelevant and a number of new variables seemingly appeared on our horizons. One of the variables which almost overnight  seemed to become irrelevant, and which had become part of the framework of political expectations in all developed nations since the Age of the Enlightenment, was that of Globalization. Whether it be the global exchange of ideas or of goods and services no expert  or group of experts could have foreseen that these processes would be displaced by populist slogans such as “Make America Great again ” or “Let us take control of our country again” which in their turn led people to  vote for the least likely of a pair of alternatives. The analysis of the reasons for our modern predicament by journalists and the more popularly inclined academics who appear constantly in our media  refer to  an interesting number of factors which possibly could help to describe exactly what has happened, but no systematic attempt has yet been made to explain the phenomena which have recently presented themselves. The ground swell of attitudes and opinions that were leading us toward Globalization, or what Kant referred to as Cosmopolitanism, suddenly were affected by the two seismic events referred to above  and the whole Project of the Enlightenment, namely the moral progress of the world appears to have been stopped in its course. The two world wars and the cold war of the last “terrible century”(Hannah Arendt) failed to permanently alter the agenda of the Enlightenment. Since then we have had over 70 years of Kantian progress which included the formation of the United Nations and the European Union. Humanistic liberalism seemed to have triumphed and the hundred thousand year journey which Kant predicted appeared to be much closer to fulfillment than expected. I do not believe that the phenomena of Brexit and Trump defy analysis  but I do believe that we do not as yet have an analysis of why what happened, happened. The academic and political project of humanistic liberalism has suffered a setback. Some have claimed that  this project is in the process of being dismantled. If this is the case one can well wonder whether this century is merely going to be a continuation in spirit of the previous century.

Michael James