REDUX: Flogging a Dead Horse Ass

About

Papers, Essays, and Miscellanea

Quote of the Day

Today in History

People to See

Blogroll Me!

Yankee Magic

Endorse, Endorse, Endorse

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Flogging a Dead Horse Ass

As you might know, it is the opinion of this writer that what is wrong with the Democratic Party is not simply a matter of weak candidates or muddled messages. Rather, it is clear that the Democratic Party is so thouroghly infused with nihilism, that it is damn near impossible for them to represent themselves as anything other than a party of narrow (and petty) protected interests.

That's why two columns grabbed my eye today. First, there's David Brooks' review of the latest Tom Wolfe novel, 'Moral Suicide,' à la Wolfe:

His latest, "I Am Charlotte Simmons," is about a young woman who leaves Sparta, a small town in North Carolina, and enters an elite university. She finds all the rules of life there are dissolved: the rules of courtship, the rules of decorum and polite conversation.

The social rules have dissolved because the morality that used to undergird them dissolved long ago. Wolfe sprinkles his book with observations about how the word "immoral" now seems obsolete, about how sophisticated people now reject the idea of absolute evil, about a hypermaterialistic neuroscience professor who can use the word "soul" only when it is in quotation marks.

Wolfe describes a society in which we still have vague notions about good and bad, virtue and vice, but the moral substructure that fits all those concepts together has been washed away. Everybody is left swirling about in a chaotic rush of desire and action, without a coherent code to make sense of it all.

Yeah, that sounds vaguely what undergrad life was like. But Brooks wants to make a larger point, and that is

[He's] located one of the paradoxes of the age. Highly educated young people are tutored, taught and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character building. When it comes to this, most universities leave them alone. And they find themselves in a world of unprecedented ambiguity, where it's not clear if you're going out with the person you're having sex with, where it's not clear if anything can be said to be absolutely true.

Pardon the word play, but it seems that t education has become value-free; does that also mean that it has no value? /
In other words, we have constructed this great apparatus to fill their minds - with thousands of Ph.D.'s ready to serve. But when it comes to courage, which is the pre-eminent virtue since without it nothing else lasts, we often leave them with the gnawing sense that they really should develop it, though God knows how.

Ours is a time that lacks philosophy; we have become successful in chruning out thousands of highly-specialized technicians replete with the latest scientific knowledge or humanist paradigm, even as they recieve utterly deficient instruction in what Brooks calls "character", and what Aristotle called "virtue". It was precisely a similar phenomenon which led Socrates to accost and embarass the rich and powerful in the Athenian marketplace. The Sophists, it turned out, had become skilled at language, and, weaving elaborate tapestries of words, had come to make all things seem possible, or at least plausible, but not really founded upon any "true" meaning, and for this Socrates challenged them. His impromptu lectures sought to educate the youth of Athens that possession of (true) knowledge was a virtue. Socrates birthed two great accomplishments: the acceptance that education was a public concern in the polis and he legitimized the fat, ugly, self-righteous, and stubborn, @sshole-cum-public intellectual who was martyred by speaking truth to power. It's no wonder that the Athenians put him to death.

Yet his martyrdom is a direct result of his near-pathological obsession to argue for values -- higher, transcendent, timeless values -- against the petty and parochial values of his fellow citizens. Another way to put is like this: he didn't "get along" with his hubristic neighbors, Hippias or Gorgon (or any of his other interlocutors), because it was the right thing to do, but because the right thing to do was to find and investigate exactly what is meant by "the right thing to do". Socrates was the proto-typical reformer and revolutionary par excellance -- he wanted to find Truth, so as to refashion the minds of men and recreate the polis in its image. As I said, it's no wonder that they put him to death.

Nonetheless, reform and re-birth are perenially potent themes and, as Brendan Miniter reminds confused Democrats, they constitute the American way.

It's time to let Democrats in on a little secret. America is a land of perpetual rebirth and reform--always has been.

(snip)

As Democrats search for an American value they can embrace, they also might want to consider that voters tend believe in American exceptionalism--that this nation is a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world. Put these two ideas together and what Donna Brazile will discover as she mixes with the common folk at Denny's and Applebee's is while Americans may complain about the daily struggle of their lives, they expect hardship on the path to a better life.

(Aside: Let's not interpret an expectation of hardship to mean an endorsement of it. Meghan McArdle is right when she points out that poverty and welfare reform are both conservative and liberal issues, and whose solutions require an admixture of both personal and social development. Back to our regularly scheduled programming)

Americans don't want to make do with less or accept defeat. They want a new beginning, a fresh start, a rebirth. Franklin D. Roosevelt knew he couldn't offer the same old tired solutions to the greatest economic crisis to beset the nation. Instead he offered the New Deal, itself a derivation from his cousin Teddy Roosevelt's Square Deal decades earlier. Bill Clinton similarly understood this and ran for president as a "new Democrat"--a Democrat who would be tough on crime, strong on defense and not a big spender.

What all this means for Democrats now, is that if they want to start winning elections again they need a reform agenda. Schools would be a great place for them to start. Instead of defending the status quo or trying the same old tired solution--more money--Democrats need to spend their time in the political wilderness thinking of what real reforms they can get behind. School choice, vouchers and charter schools are only a few of the options out there. If Democrats come up with something else that works--say, greater local control--for a generation they'll be reaping dividends as the party of education, instead of the party of unions and bureaucrats.

I guess the hippies forgot about that whole "speaking truth to power" bit, huh? I guess this also means that, judging by the current public dialogue on the failings of the American educational system, it would appear that generically, education is of the highest value, whereas specifically, education is, well, secondary to the value of collective bargaining agreements.

It's odd that we should all be talking about values now-a-days. Good, but, well, odd. I say odd because the discussion on "values" and that-to-which-we-assign-value would appear to be the paramount dialogue in any polis, and not just something to yammer on about when multiple choice exit polls run by unqualified professors and their self-selecting minions thrust it into the limelight. Then again, this discussion have become salient because of the current political re-alignment, or perhaps the discussion on values is the cause of the current political re-alignment.

What is clear, however, from both Brooks' and Miniter's comments is that the center-left Democratic Party find themselves in an abyssmal situation. They are a party devoted to progress and social justice, which has become the value-free party of the status-quo; instead of reform and a renewed elaboration of what is valuable, they concentrate on trying to maintain political and social institutions which originated of the Old Economy, in the 1930's Age of Totalitarianism. Once radicals, they are reactionaries. And what's more, they are reacting against affirmative statements of "values" and that-to-which-we-assign-value with cheap psycho-analysis and snobbery. So, exactly what do Democrats stand for? What do they value? What value do they place on things?

The short answer? Nothing.

Don't get me wrong, all political parties are for what is expedient and in their interest. But beyond that, what are they about? One is tempted to conclude that it is much like a "commitment to diversity": wherein value is placed on social disposition, but not on knowledge or action. It's heard in the oft-repeated refrain: "Who are you to tell somebody else what to do/believe/think/feel?"

Relativism and pessimism, the pillairs of Democratic thought, are, in fact, concrete manifestations of the nihilism which informs their worldview. What is this thing called nihilism? Nietzsche tells us,

What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; "why?" finds no answer.

But it is more than just an intellectual position; indeed, if it were just that, there would be some hope for them.

Nihilism as a psychological state will have to be reached, first, when we have sought a "meaning" in all events that is not there: so the seeker eventually becomes discouraged. Nihilism, then, is the recognition of the long waste of strength, the agony of the "in vain," insecurity, the lack of any opportunity to recover and to regain composure-being ashamed in front of oneself, as if one had deceived oneself all too long.-This meaning could have been: the "furfillment" of some highest ethical canon in all events, the moral world order; or the growth of love and harmony in the intercourse of beings; or the gradual approximation of a state of universal happiness; or even the development toward a state of universal annihilation-any goal at least constitutes some meaning. What all these notions have in common is that something is to be achieved through the process-and now one realizes that becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing.- Thus, disappointment regarding an alleged aim of becoming as a cause of nihilism: whether regarding a specific aim or, universalized, the realization that all previous hypotheses about aims that concern the whole "evolution" are inadequate (man no longer the collaborator, let alone the center, of becoming).

Nihilism as a psychological state is reached, secondly, when one has posited a totality, a systematization, indeed any organization in all events, and underneath all events, and a soul that longs to admire and revere has wallowed in the idea of some supreme form of domination and administration (-if the soul be that of a logician, complete consistency and real dialectic are quite sufficient to reconcile it to everything). Some sort of unity, some form of "monism": this faith suffices to give man a deep feeling of standing in the context of, and being dependent on, some whole that is infinitely superior to him, and he sees himself as a mode of the deity.-"The well-being of the universal demands the devotion of the individual"-but behold, there is no such universal! At bottom, man has lost the faith in his own value when no infinitely valuable whole works through him; i.e., he conceived such a whole in order to be able to believe in his own value.

Nihilism as psychological state has yet a third and last form.

Given these two insights, that becoming has no goal and that underneath all becoming there is no grand unity in which the individual could immerse himself completely as in an element of supreme value, an escape remains: to pass sentence on this whole world of becoming as a deception and to invent a world beyond it, a true world. But as soon as man finds out how that world is fabricated solely from psychological needs, and how he has absolutely no right to it, the last form of nihilism comes into being: it includes disbelief in any metaphysical world and forbids itself any belief in a true world.7 Having reached this standpoint, one grants the reality of becoming as the only reality, forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to afterworlds and false divinities -but cannot endure this world though one does not want to deny it.

What has happened, at bottom? The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of "aim," the concept of "unity," or the concept of "truth." Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking: the character of existence is not "true," is false. One simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world. Briefly: the categories "aim," "unity," "being" which we used to project some value into the world-we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.

Which, if you break it down, means that nihilism is the state that is reached when somebody completely and utterly comes to the realization that systems of metaphysics and all of the spiritual, political, social, and intellectual institutions built upon are judged otherworldly and hence, false and to be rejected as such , i.e., God is Dead. (This, more than anything else, explains the Democratic paradigm. Yeah, sure, gross over-generalization, blah, blah, blah...it's noted for the record) Because there is no longer any God, nor are there any metaphysical values to anchor one's self to, there is no one standard of value, therefore, it is wrong to assume that one's standard is right, and another's wrong. To deny the "rightness" of something to make room for others is social disposition masquerading as intellectualism -- cosmopolitanism as creed. Indeed, the only thing that becomes of value in this make-pretend world of social disposition is prestige and status amongst the herd -- and that's why there are year-long waiting lists for pre-school and how Maureen Dowd ends up winning a Pulitzer Prize.

So what is the end result of this, this passage into nihilism? It's not that Democrats are the only ones that passed through that stage, its that they didn't posit new or revive old values for themselves. Science and progress has torn down the old myths and superstitions, but religious people refashioned their faith and their beliefs to accomodate the empirically true (with varying degrees of success). Because, as it turns out, we, each and every one of us, creates values which we live by from moment to moment. It's inevitable. We also create new values or modify existing ones in a kind of meta-valuation. (Secular) Democrats never moved beyond the empirically true, as they are consistently unable to articulate something of value. "Clean Air!" is not a value, it's a good, a universal good, but it is not the star by which to sail by. Nor are their empty and weak appeals to humanitarian morality (after all, how can you tell somebody to be good?) effective, instead, they have to rely on demonizing and psychologizing Republicans in order to keep others from moving into the GOP camp.

Humans are value-positing entities. That's what we do, people. We are the creators of the meaningful world in each and every moment, and in that world, we assign value. Some of us accept the meaningful content in tradition as valuable, others deny it. Some of us accept the teleological visions of a more just world as valuable, and others deny it. Some of us see the revival of traditional values as a backlash against knowledge, and others deny it. Some of us see America as a place of shame, ignorance, and hatred, and others deny it. Some of us see America as exceptional, the Shining City on the Hill, and others deny it.

Unfortunately, Democrats are not in the final category, and thus, they cannot see the Dawn, the revival of values, the Morning in America.

UPDATE: Power Line posts on the results of a Rasmussen poll which asked is "American society generally fair and decent." :

While the survey results are not good news for America (62-26 in favor -- ed.), they are terrible news for Democrats. A majority of Dems are unwilling to say that our society is fair and decent. The split was 46 percent yes; 41 percent no. With a wing of the party that "nuanced," Democrats may well find it difficult to nominate candidates with an optimistic, non-whiney, robustly pro-American message that can appeal to the clear majority of voters who think we're basically an okay place.

Posted on Tuesday, November 16, 2004 at 08:03 AM in Current Affairs, Philosophy | Permalink