Jay Trott

Peregrinations

June 1, 2009

The oldest prejudice

We remember being somewhat startled at a dinner party twenty years ago to hear a prominent New York City intellectual make a comment about the Palestinian Issue that purported a love of justice but hinted at something else: good, old-fashioned blue blood anti-Semitism.

Startled, disoriented—choose what adjective you will. We were raised in an age when anti-Semitism was unthinkable, the West having been shamed by the atrocities of Hitler into an almost sentimental view of the Jews, as seen in the popular film Exodus, which celebrated the desire to make atonement by providing them with a state of their own.

As soon as the words left his lips, the thought occurred to us that the unthinkable was becoming thinkable again. The ancient prejudice would return as the memory of the World War II faded. It would not make its way back through the usual suspects—the Klansman and other white supremacists. No, it would return through the intelligentsia.

And lo, it has come to pass. Whether the Palestinian Issue is passion or pretext, anti-Semitism has crept back into Western discourse clothed in a love of justice but just as raw and unseemly as ever. Israel, victim of the irrational hatred of her Arab neighbors, has somehow been made the cause of her own opprobrium.

It is tempting to think of the situation in the Middle East as a soteriological drama, the never-ending echo of Abraham’s ancient sin, this time with the potential for apocalyptic consequences—perhaps because the Arabs are fond of saying so themselves, explicitly identifying with the outcast Ishmael even as they grow fat and luxurious on oil money.

But what is not speculative is the fact of anti-Semitism, the oldest prejudice. It is easy to forget, because of the brief purifying effects of the Holocaust, that anti-Semitism is a habit long-ingrained in the Middle East and at least as old as Rome in the West. Indeed, open anti-Semitism was common in the West, and in the most exalted circles. It is not quite so open now, but there seems little doubt that those days are coming again.

What is anti-Semitism, and why is it so devilishly persistent? We have heard the Christ-killers argument, but it cannot account for the visceral hatred of the Arabs, who do not claim Christ as their king—or of our Western intellectuals, who have no more religion in them than a butler could squeeze out a napkin (to borrow a phrase).

We suspect that the correct explanation is found in the Bible itself: simple envy. Jacob fled to his uncle Laban after cheating his brother out of his father’s blessing. Laban put him in charge of his flocks and rewarded him with less valuable livestock, but Jacob used selective breeding to make his own flock a rival in quantity and quality to his uncle’s.

Now exactly how this was accomplished is almost irrelevant. Knowing many Jews, we are tempted to think that Jacob had a natural talent for science and business; but the way the story is told leaves it open to the interpretation that God blessed Jacob’s efforts by supernatural means, directly intervening for the sake of his chosen tribe.

Or it could be that both things are true—that Jacob’s ingenuity is a sign of God’s blessing. But it doesn’t really matter. For our purposes, the most pertinent fact is the growing anger and dismay of Laban at the success of his own nephew and trusted husbandman. Jacob succeeded against all odds, and Laban found this infuriating.

All men fear death, which is why they are inclined to seek identity in money and power. The success of Jacob did not threaten Laban directly, since Jacob was loyal to Laban and had no intention of defrauding him. Jacob’s good will is seen in his willingness to countenance the trick Laban played on him with his daughters.

But Jacob’s success threatened Laban’s self-esteem—his self-image as a rich and powerful man. Jacob did not cheat his uncle materially, but he was perceived as cheating him because his ingenuity and resourcefulness became evident to all. He was perceived of cheating him out of honor and precedence in the world.

The story may be just a tall tale, as our enlightened ones inform us, and yet it is uncanny in its power to show us ourselves and the world we live in. The Jews, a tiny minority in the Middle East and in Western societies, are wildly over-represented at the very highest levels of science, finance, academia, medicine, industry, the arts.

God’s chosen people? Such things are mysteries. But there is nothing mysterious about the creeping anti-Semitism of the blue bloods. They are Labans, made spiteful by intimations of their own nothingness.

May 21, 2009

The Idealist paradox

The passage of decades has diminished many things but not the wonder of seeing Hegel refer to Idealism as a manifestation of the “unhappy consciousness” in the midst of a long and otherwise rather tedious exposition.

It reminded us that Plato based his proof of the existence of “the good” on unhappiness. Why would men be unhappy, according to Plato, if the good of happiness did not exist and they were not conscious of it? But unhappiness is not the good and can never be the ground of the good. In itself, it is nothing more than a force of resistance.

Plato tried to obtain knowledge of the good by totalizing this force of resistance, which he called “intellect.” Only pure intellect was good, according to him; embodied existence is an obstacle to happiness because it yokes intellect unequally to matter. The dark side of Idealism, then, is that it embraces negativity and resistance in order to justify its desire for radical transformation.

Meanwhile Idealism thrives on the hope of obtaining a transcendent state of being; but a hope that is rooted in unhappiness feeds on unhappiness, perpetually renewing its discontent. The transcendent cannot come into being by its very nature. It is literally nothing from the human point of view. Idealists attempt to make it seem like something by clinging to resistance, but this only increases their frustration over time.

The combustible combination of negativity and deferred hope leads to the great paradox of Idealism: the counterintuitive anger it is often seen to produce. Idealism seeks a liberal identity, clothing itself in brotherhood and justice, but it can lead to illiberal attitudes because of its inability to resolve its own central dilemma. The more it feeds on resistance and nothingness, the more angry and discontented it becomes.

This anger is seen in its eagerness to demonize its foes, who are perceived as an obstacle to happiness. All descriptions of transcendent states of being that are rooted in resistance are totalitarian in nature. To use Plato again, the mixture of intellect and matter must be negated in order to obtain pure intellect; but this need to negate matter in order to glorify intellect produces an antimony to matter, which becomes an object of wrath and indignation.

An example among modern Idealists is the antimony to private property seen in Marx and his followers (which he shared with Plato). Private property is perceived as an obstacle to the happiness of the people’s republic; therefore property owners must be demonized and reviled, regardless of whether they obtained their property through honest means or how they make use of their property to treat others.

The great paradox of Idealism and its lofty rhetoric, then, is that it tends to lead to a passion for negation as well as a somewhat irrational anger toward those who do not share its totalitarian notions of value.

May 17, 2009

Fool’s gold

The word “conservative” has been linked to capitalism in the modern age because capitalism is the economic status quo. But Aristotelian conservatives are not obliged to bow to the golden calf or its ratio of supply and demand.

This ratio has nothing to do with the golden mean, as some imply. Aristotle used the concept of the golden mean as a means of describing what is good. According to him, being is a purely active ratio of intellectual and material causes, intellect being good and matter having no value in itself.

This notion of a purely active ratio that incorporates the goodness of intellect enabled him to claim that nature is good and to offer the goodness of nature as an alternative to the nothingness caused by Idealism, which equated the good with pure intellect.

It also enabled him to develop an entire ethical, aesthetic and political value system based on the concept of the golden mean. All existence is comprised of opposites, in this view; happiness depends upon identifying a salubrious middle way that avoids the extremes.

The ratio of supply and demand is not a golden mean, however. Its middle term is price. As far as Aristotle was concerned, “money is sterile.” His concept of value is rooted in life and in the goodness of nature. Money is unnatural because it cannot produce any living thing or value.

Second, the golden mean is “good” in part because it is fixed—fully determined by the nature of the opposing forces—and hence resistant to mutability. Price, however, is in constant flux, since supply and demand are always changing. It's value is also subjective. It is “good” for the consumer only when it is low, and “good” for the suppliers when it is high.

We realize that criticizing capitalism is a little like criticizing air. It's the natural economic system that came into being under modern conditions when the market was left to its own devices. We agree that the only alternative is a managed economy, which devalues individual incentive and brings a loss of liberty. Finally, we freely acknowledge that capitalism has been a dynamic generator of wealth.

But Aristotelian conservatism does not glorify material prosperity. That’s materialism. Instead it holds up life as its standard of value and concerns itself with spiritual matters. In this higher role, it is free to stand apart from capitalism and make an objective accounting of its merits and deficiencies.

May 5, 2009

Aristotelian conservatism

There is a type of conservatism that is rooted in the value of life. For a variety of reasons, it can be described as “Aristotelian,” although it does not depend upon the characterization of the good as pure act or a ratio of intellectual and material causes.

No, it is Aristotelian in the sense that it preserves the equation of the good with life. Science in the modern era devalued life by depicting it as a trifle, a simple thing that spontaneously generated in a warm pond somewhere in the dark mists of time.

Advances in our understanding of life reveal that this description was simplistic. From the information discovered in genetic coding, to the complexity of the cell, to the balances and redundancies found in the human body, to such organs as the brain, eyes and ears—life is now known to be astonishingly complex.

Aristotelian conservatism, then, is first and foremost a reaffirmation of the value of life. Just as Aristotle identified life as the first quality of Supreme Being, so science has now demonstrated that life is not a bauble. It is the highest value known to man.

Also affirmed is the excellence of nature. In the modernist view, nature is a thing of little or no intrinsic value, coming into being of its own accord and hampered by nothingness. In reality, however, nature is “very good,” both functionally and aesthetically, from the orderliness of the universe and our solar system, to the fine tuning of the cosmological constants that is necessary to life, to the excellence and variety of the species, to the interrelations of the ecosystem, to its sheer physical beauty.

Aristotelian conservatism rejects the worship of science that characterizes the modern era. The initiative to build a foundation for progress and happiness upon science that began with Bacon and Descartes led to materialism in the end by focusing on matter and not spirit. Its foremost proponents now insist that life is meaningless and free will a delusion.

But just as science has proven incapable of reducing life to matter and material processes, so Aristotelian conservatism resists scientism by making life its highest value. This resistance provides the freedom needed to go beyond materialism and investigate concepts of value that restore graciousness to being

April 29, 2009

The Politics of Hope

There are two kinds of people in the world (we mean among those of good will): idealists and realists.

Realists are they way they are because they like things the way they are. They tend to be in love with nature. They tend to be patriotic. They are deeply skeptical of schemes for reforming existence, partly because they are not especially unhappy with the status quo, but also because they view the status quo as something that has come into being naturally, mimetically, reflecting the reality of existence.

Idealists, meanwhile, are typically unhappy in varying degrees with existence. Their disaffection causes them to be deeply skeptical of the status quo, which they tend to regard as an artificial construct. It also causes them to long for a qualitative leap in being—and to be willing to negate that which already exists in order to obtain this leap.

The politics of hope has the latter group in view. All politicians make promises, and all of those promises have something to do with making things better; but promises based on hope appeal specifically to the idealist mindset because hope is undefined. Hope is that happiness which is longed for but has not yet taken definite shape in the mind.

In short, hope is what is left over for the idealist after he has negated the status quo in his mind. This negation produces nothingness, which cannot provide happiness in itself; but he can cling to hope. For reasons that are not entirely clear, hope is a real power in consciousness and can fill the void caused by strong disaffection.

The politics of hope is a strategy for exploiting this mysterious power. And since hope is the substance of a happiness that has not yet taken definite form, the strategy is most effective when it remains somewhat vague and emphasizes hope per se.

“A chicken in every pot,” for example, is a very definite kind of hope but also very limited, while “freedom from want” is indefinite and hence a far more potent political formulation. It leaves the disaffected voter free to imagine almost anything (or better yet, nothing at all) as he basks in the rolling benevolence of the phrase.

The politics of hope has become an explicit strategy in recent elections. The “man from Hope” was the first instance in memory of a politician making an appeal to hope for its own sake. More recently, there was a twinned promise of “hope and change.” Bumper stickers appeared showing nothing more than the candidate’s face and the word “hope,” as if he were its incarnation.

The natural limitation of hope is limitation itself. Politicians exploit hope by feeding the idealist’s natural resistance to the unhappiness of existence. Once elected, however, they must give a definite form to their presidency. They must bring a new status quo into being, at which point it becomes evident that they cannot provide the happiness that was promised.

Idealists, then, are the true victims of the politics of hope. Government cannot make men happy, buy politicians are happy to exploit their unhappiness and disaffection in order to obtain power.

April 20, 2009

The Fourth Estate

Can an ideological press damage the Republic?

The unspoken premise of the First Amendment is that a free press abets republicanism. In the context of the Revolution, “the press” consisted of a few hardy souls who risked life and livelihood to call attention to abuses of power. The amendment gains sonority from their relative powerlessness, in addition to the philosophical notion that a free press is necessary to informed self-rule.

Today, those power relations look very different. The press is still called the “fourth estate,” after Burke’s witticism, but in fact it is at least the second estate in terms of political power and influence, well ahead of church and commoners, and may even stand ahead of the government itself.

The Amendment implies resistance of the press to the status quo—otherwise there would be no need to protect it. And indeed, resistance seems inherent in the economics of a free press. A “story” is needed to sell papers, but stories justifying the status quo are not very exciting. Resistance is a much better way to titillate consumers.

Then, too, there is the perpetual dissatisfaction of human nature with its condition. Stories built upon resistance exploit this unhappiness by giving the impression that old power structures are crumbling and something fresh and new is possible. Enter the Man in the White Hat of modern journalism, not simply reporter but crusader.

Today, however, the power relations implied in the Amendment have been inverted. Politicians must kowtow to the press. It is not the press that cowers in fear of an imperial power, as in the time of Jefferson and Franklin; it is the careerist who knows he must please the press in order to succeed.

For example, no candidate dared to seem even mildly skeptical of the theory of anthropogenic global warming in the presidential debates. They knew they would make themselves targets of relentless, shrill opposition and very likely forfeit a couple of points in the general election.

But does the First Amendment still protect republicanism when the press has power to dictate the terms of policy debate? Or has the press itself become a threat to the republic by marrying power to resistance?