Whose Obamamania?

By SusanNeiman - Jul 27th, 2008 at 2:26 am EDT

Talk of Obamania ruled Europe this week – other people’s Obamania.  With a gesture that ranged from a wink to a sneer, most anyone you met volunteered the view that Obama’s visit caused unprecedented frenzy.  But aside from two Harvard-educated friends in Paris, it’s been hard to find a European who confessed to excitement – not just about the visit, but the prospect of his presidency.  It is true, as Time reported Thursday, that this week’s German newsweekly Der Spiegel featured Obama on its cover, topped by the headline “Germany meets the superstar” – but the cover was satire, and nasty satire at that. You don’t need much German to tell that the editors managed to find the ugliest shot of Obama ever taken.   Forget the New Yorker cartoon; this cover is really offensive.   It caught the Senator at a moment that might be exhaustion, but looks like self-conceited smirking – and will undoubtedly be used as such by McCain supporters hoping to revive stale charges of elitism.  The new McCain campaign ad could have been used by former British prime minister Malcolm Rifkind, who told BBC that “there won’t be too many stars in European eyes” about Obama.  “I warn against hope,” said more than one director of a continental think-tank.  Under the title “Short-Term Relationship” Joe Joffe used The New Republic to sniff at other Germans’ “infatuation”.  And another senior German editor told the cameras that “While the German media has finally gathered he isn’t Jesus Christ, the realization has yet to reach the ordinary German citizen.”  Finally?  When the March Spiegel cover featured Obama, the headline read “The Messiah Factor”.  Must one add that this cover, too, was never meant to be taken at face value?

Europeans will be as relieved to see the backs of the Bush administration as 72% of Americans, and most of the rest of the world, but their attitudes towards the Democratic candidate are far from being the same as the ones he arouses at home.   Obama can make Europeans uncomfortable.  In Germany this is more understandable than elsewhere:  politicians who can get large crowds shouting recall images that nobody wants to see repeated.  But genuine worries about demagoguery are not all that’s at issue here; the mocking undertone that accompanies most descriptions of him signifies a transatlantic divide that has yet to be crossed.  George W. Bush made matters far worse than they ever were, but the neo-cons who advised him were right about one thing:  Europe is gripped by the kind of world-weariness that resists American dreams.

Not every European shows scorn for the Obama phenomenon.  Karsten Voigt, the astute coordinator of the German Foreign Ministry’s America policies, thinks America is attempting a “complete renewal of its own political culture”.  But then, Voigt told me last week, he considers himself a Kantian – at least with one eye.  Very few Germans do. Robert Kagan once claimed that Americans are hard-headed Hobbesian realists, while Europeans are Kantian idealists, but he got the matter backwards. European institutions may be closer to those imagined by the Enlightenment, but its spirit crossed the Atlantic long ago. The whole-hearted enthusiasm of audiences back home is an American thing.  They wouldn’t understand.

Berlin, in particular, is having a very post-heroic moment.  Its relation to its past can signal insouciance; take the awkward turquoise building where visitors from the West used to part from loved ones at the Friedrichstrasse border.  Dubbed “Palace of Tears” by East Berliners, it symbolized local talent for black humor, and raw energy, when it was turned into a disco after reunification. Now surrounded by cranes at work on yet another office building, the Palace of Tears has no function at all, nor anyone to complain about it.

So when Obama reminded Berliners of their greater moments – the airlift, the destruction of the wall – he was risking more scoffing.   There was plenty of speculation about which German sentence he would memorize to one-up Kennedy’s famous speech.  In fact, what he did was far more original:  he studied a speech given by Ernst Reuter, Berlin’s beleaguered mayor during the airlift, and used it to counterpoint his own deepest world-view.   When Reuter called “People of the World, Look at Berlin!” he was calling for help.  When Obama echoed him, he was using the city as a model – for all the other possibilities that Berliners, and the rest of us, are slow to acknowledge.

This was no feel-good speech about working together that could have been given by anyone, including John McCain.  (Without mentioning his opponent by name, Obama recalled not just the heroic moments of the Cold War, but the fact that it’s over, and Russia is no longer an enemy.)   Obama was doing more than flattering his hosts about their achievements, or reminding them of the happier days of transatlantic partnerships.  He was using them to remind us all that we need not resign ourselves to the way things are now.  What better place to remember than in the heart of Berlin?

“No one could live long in Berlin without being completely disabused of illusions,” said Ronald Reagan, before going on to suggest that Gorbatschow tear down the wall in front of Brandenburg Gate.  Anyone who thinks Obama’s call to remake the world was innocent forgets what it looked like that day in 1987.  I live in Berlin, and I remember:  the eyeballs rolled upward.  The jaded sighs. The not quite concealed contempt of Reagan’s hosts, for most saw his remarks as a tiresome bit of American naivete.   They’d made their peace with a structure they thought would last forever – like the barrier between rich and poor nations whose existence, Obama concluded Thursday, is the greatest challenge of the present century.   Riffing on the Berlin airlift is a reminder that you needn’t drop a bomb to be a hero – and that American influence lasts best when we don’t.

Obama’s recent speech on patriotism rightly emphasized “the extraordinary nature of America”, where loyalty is less about particular places than particular ideas: above all the idea that we are not constrained by accidents of birth.  Nothing quite like this is open to Europeans.   German philosopher Jürgen Habermas proposed that Germans cultivate what he calls constitutional patriotism, but neither the estimable Habermas nor any of his countryfolk has found the language to inspire it.  We are lucky that our great national philosophers – for  so many  Founding Fathers were known in their day – could write words that continue to ring.   Obama’s words on Thursday gave Europeans a chance to hear the difference between optimism and idealism.  Optimists refuse to acknowledge reality; idealists remind us that it isn’t fixed.  And despite predictable media references to other people’s Obamania on Friday, ordinary Berliners were unusually earnest – and quietly, happily impressed.

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Disagreeing About What These Fine Words Mean

By StevenLukes - Jul 24th, 2008 at 8:38 pm EDT

Also listed in: Author Roundtable: Moral Clarity

There is a certain level of abstraction at which we can all agree. We all seem to agree that we want ‘idealism’ in our politics-in the double sense of taking ideals seriously and acknowledging the people are motivated by ideas and ideals, sometimes in ways that override their material interests. We agree that the ideals we favor should be based on ‘reason’, that in pursuing them we should be ‘grown-up’ and that we should be ‘realistic’ without being ‘cynical.’ The disagreements begin when you move down a level and ask what these fine words mean and what follows practically-for instance on the current political scene.

I agree with Todd and Susan that the last eight years have seen an appalling retreat from reason in the United States. David Harvey once remarked that a citizen who had been away for a while commented, on returning, that it seemed as though the country had been sprinkled with idiot dust. Just consider the advances made by the advocates of creationism and intelligent design and the prevalence of home schooling in ‘faith-based’ nonsense, the long-delayed half-acknowledgement of global warming and the shocking manipulations and doctoring of ‘intelligence’ to further and justify preconceived war aims. There is a useful and specific cataloguing and denunciation of all this retreat from the constraints of knowledge in E.L. Doctorow’s fine article ‘The White Whale’ in The Nation of June 26. But I share John’s hesitation at any suggestion that ‘reason’ finds its natural home on ‘the left.’ Todd did not go that far but we should avoid any temptation to think it. ‘The Left’ names a family of ideas and movements that, indeed, sprang from the Enlightenment. One key feature that distinguishes it from the center and the right is a universalizing commitment to equality, but its very existence, indeed its very name, implies political pluralism. It exists within a political space that should encompass live alternatives and disaster has followed whenever the left has come to occupy all of it. The triple tragedy of current US politics is the massive shift of the entire spectrum to the right over the last decades (just look at the Supreme Court), the intellectual and moral poverty of current right-wing thinking, as outlined by Todd and the lack of intellectual and moral courage and vigor on the left, as portrayed by Susan.

About realism and cynicism: I think that arcargentier has raised a very central issue. He or she wants us to address people’s idealism, treat them as reasoning beings and pursue a ‘politics where it is not acceptable to say one thing and mean another, or to believe another.’ But this is altogether to sidestep what I called the problem of dirty hands. Is it cynical or is it realistic to observe that politicians must get their hands dirty (on our behalf)? We can hope that they will keep them as clean as possible, of course. (The FDR story is great because it suggests that we all have a role in this hygienic enterprise).We pay them and elect them, I would say, to do just this and it is not grown up to then complain that they have given us false hopes. The world, not least the political world, is full of dangers and pitfalls and wearing your heart on your sleeve is, to say the least, unwise. I redirect your attention to the question I asked about Obama and the Supreme Court decision over child rapists. Would you have preferred him to do what Dukakis did? I grant that he needn’t have sided with the conservative minority on the court. Perhaps there were other options. Perhaps, I concede, he really did, as Annalise thinks, honestly, support their view. But suppose (as I would hope) he didn’t. Isn’t this a case where the politician faces the Machiavellian dilemma?

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Yes, the Left is the Party of Reason

By SusanNeiman - Jul 24th, 2008 at 10:39 am EDT

Also listed in: Author Roundtable: Moral Clarity

The left was, traditionally, the party of reason - that was, after all, the point of Enlightenment insistence on reason over blind faith, on the one hand, and the weight of tradition, on the other. One of the worst things that has happened in recent years is that the right has claimed that role; see books like Weaver’s “Ideas Have Consequences” and any number of spin-offs (down to Rush Limbaugh, who quotes this.) We may find this nauseating, but this rhetoric gets its fuel from its opposition to a left wing tradition that, as I argued in the book, goes back to Marx, and later to Foucault: that ideas are superstructure (or some post-Marxist version thereof).

So what we’ve had, in recent decades, is a right that does not really offer serious intellectual sustenance (however often they refer to Plato at the University of Chicago; just check out neo-con star Robert Kagan, who won’t even acknowledge that he changes his fundamental position every time he writes a new book.) I can’t tell whether it’s a lack of integrity or intelligence; but if that is the best of neocon thinking, well, it would be nice to think they were in for trouble.

The problem is that they haven’t been, because the left’s metaphysics, or lack thereof, has undercut its ability to defend the importance of its own intelligence. It uses and displays it often, to be sure. But until it is clear and unembarassed about the power of ideas, it cannot be the party of reason with the conviction that honorific needs to carry.

So yes, John, I am after bigger game. And I’m not so full of hubris as to think I’ve actually bagged it. But I do intend to lay out at least part of a philosophical foundation of a reinvented left - with the hope that dialogues such as this one will keep filling it out. And you are right, I need to answer your questions more seriously, but it’s 1 am here in Berlin and I have promised to explain Obama’s visit to the Germans tomorrow, so forgive me for not doing so immediately. Just this much for tonight: “Patronizing” is a serious criticism, and it’s something I definitely want to avoid - that’s my problem, for example, with Tom Frank’s approach. And I agree with Todd that there are serious arguments for a number of positions in the conservative camp - on capital punishment and abortion (though the juxtaposition is always bizarre, isn’t it?) - and any number of positions that I think the left has been wrong to dismiss out of hand. Still, I think Todd’s basic point is right here, and if you’ve ever tried to organize a conference or symposium or what have you and wanted to include intelligent dialogue with conservatives, it’s remarkable how hard it is to find one who’s willing to have it out. It could be different, of course. But is it an accident that it always turns out that way (and in every country I know)?

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Rape and Proportionality

By AnnaliseAcorn - Jul 23rd, 2008 at 12:53 pm EDT

Also listed in: Author Roundtable: Moral Clarity

I’m troubled by the way Steven has framed the question here. I don’t think there is any possibility that Obama “believes that rape of a child warrants the death penalty.” What he I think he believes is that the law should not preempt the possibility of the death penalty for the most egregious and horrific cases of child rape. As far as I can see it – Obama’s position is not too different from Susan’s on the issue of the death penalty. He’s opposed to it except when the crime is off-the-scale in terms of its heinousness.

Susan writes in her response to my first post: “There are cases of murders so heinous that I myself lean towards execution; I think it was in Indonesia, I read recently, that a man killed forty-two women because he believed doing so would increase his magical powers. What’s the point of letting someone like that live - even in the wretched lifetime solitary confinement that is the least he deserves? The only point is this one: to remind us of our humility and humanity, of the fact that we should not be lords of life and death.”

Obama may not agree with Susan on this last point. But, up to that point, their views don’t look too different to me. Susan is saying that the bottom line concern in the most horrific of cases is not protection of the life of the offender but keeping our own hands clean. It’s better to choose to be a society that simply doesn’t aim directly at the destruction of life. I agree. And to my mind this is the best argument there is against capital punishment once we get down to these Charles Ng type of unspeakably horrible cases. I’d also say that it’s a pretty Kantian argument though Kant himself didn’t oppose the death penalty.

But let me address the question of proportionality raised by Steven and Susan. Can child rape ever be the sort of off-the-scale heinous crime where the death penalty would be proportionate? I think it can be. Proportionality is all about counting – so first let’s think about numbers – like Abraham did in his negotiations with God. What if we had a case like the one Susan mentions where a guy brutally rapes 42 children (I’d say to increase his magical powers but that might raise the question of delusions and the insanity defense.)  How about 84 children violently and repeatedly raped by one man? True no lives were taken; but given the extent of the harm and the horror of the criminality can you really say that the problem here is that death is too much, that the punishment is worse than the crime?

Now I myself might still want to say along with Susan – no we cannot make ourselves lords of life and death. But I would not say – look – this guy doesn’t deserve to die because he’s only guilt of rape not murder.

As to Steven’s second point about the unreliability of child witnesses I guess I would say that any case which turned on the testimony of the child or children would simply not be in the running as one the kind of atrociously egregious case I think Obama is talking about.

But I want to address the further question of where Susan’s stands on consequences and intentions. I said that I think her book defends a morality that is not focused on consequences. Steven argues that I’m wrong here. He writes: “I think she holds, as I do, that a grown-up morality must be so focused.” Now obviously we need to hear from Susan on this. But my interpretation of her which I’m drawing mostly from her discussion of Kant’s final essay on lying in her chapter 7 on Reason is that she is on board with Kant’s categorical imperative but she thinks it needs to be (and that he intended it to be) sensitive to context. So the task of universalizing is done in all the circumstances of the case and this necessarily directs one’s moral analysis to consequences. This to me results in a morality that is not blind to consequences but is nevertheless not focused on them either. Choices about action should be guided by ones best efforts at the thought experiment of universalizing, not by ones best guess about what the consequences of the action will be.

This leads us directly to Susan’s discussion of intentions in her chapter on Evil. Ironically, I’d say it is precisely focus on consequences that can put us on that road to hell that’s paved with good intentions. Susan’s rejection of good intentions as redeemers of action is explicated in the context of Nazis. She writes: “even the most abominable actions were accompanied with the insistence on honorable intentions. One Wehrmacht soldier…was proud of the fact that he shot only children: “My comrade shot the mothers, and I saw that the children couldn’t’ survive without them.”

But aren’t the intentions and consequences blurred together here? The person has a twisted idea that the act is going to have good consequences and they spin that into a justification that sort of looks like an intention. The intentions are self-proclaimed as good because the person is thinking that the ends justify the means. But to disqualify this kind of intention as redeeming of action isn’t the same as saying that we don’t look to intentions in assessing the morality of action. Is it?

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Intentions, Actions, and Consequences

By StevenLukes - Jul 23rd, 2008 at 9:53 am EDT

Also listed in: Author Roundtable: Moral Clarity

Which would be worse: that (1) Obama really believes that the rape of a child warrants the death penalty or (2) that he only says he does for tactical reasons? Annalise and I really do disagree about how to answer this question. I have no hesitation in viewing (1) as decidedly worse than (2) and here is why.

For reasons I spelt out in an earlier post I think that the death penalty is even less justifiable for child rape than for murder. Let me repeat them. Such executions are disproportionate; the victim is still alive. They have been rejected by the Supreme Court and by the entire civilized world. The only state in which such executions have taken place is Louisiana and the only states that have been prepared to include this possibility in their laws are Georgia, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas—states hardly known for their solicitude for defendants’ rights. The death penalty is too final. And such cases rely on the testimony of small children who are vulnerable to pressure and they constitute an invitation to over-aggressive District Attorneys eager for headlines. I said that Obama’s position on this issue was his most troubling and that is so whether it is a sincere belief or merely tactical. But it is more troubling if it is a sincere belief because of what it would signal about his value priorities and thus about the moral principles that would guide his judgments as President. It would suggest that his liberalism, and in particular his views about fairness and defendants’ rights, had a serious flaw at its very center.

If it is tactical it would be troubling but less so, in part because, as Annalise says, the matter is not anyway within the President’s powers to affect. But there is good reason to think that this may well have been a tactically wise move on Obama’s part. By siding at a press conference after the Supreme Court decision with the conservative minority—Justices Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas—Obama may well have exhibited a political survival instinct for which we should all be thankful. The death penalty is not, as Annalise puts it, a ‘costless issue.’  It is an inflammatory and potentially lethal issue in US politics. As the Wall Street Journal observed, Obama by saying what he did may have ‘side-stepped a Michael Dukakis moment. In an infamous presidential debate, the 1988 Democratic nominee was asked if he believed the death penalty would be appropriate if his own wife was raped and murdered. “No, I don’t, and I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life,” Dukakis said. His response caused his poll numbers to drop overnight, and it is believed to have contributed to his landslide defeat against George H.W. Bush.’

Annalise thinks that what counts here is whether or not Obama is honest. Of course I hope that, as a matter of character, he is, but, as Susan argues in her book, intentions are not decisive in deciding whether actions are good (and, by the way, I do not read her book as ‘defending a morality that isn’t focused on consequences.’ I think she holds, as I do, that a grown-up morality must be so focused). We can all admire Dukakis for being honest, but, if the Wall Street Journal is right, shouldn’t we rejoice if, when commenting on the Supreme Court’s decision, Obama was not?

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Is the Left the Party of Reason?

By ToddGitlin - Jul 22nd, 2008 at 6:11 pm EDT

Also listed in: Author Roundtable: Moral Clarity

John D wrote about Moral Clarity:

I don’t quite see why the author’s approach to moral reasoning is necessarily “Left” or “liberal” or “progressive.” After eight years of determined anti-intellectualism (indeed, anti-rationalism) on the right, we might be forgiven for thinking conservatives are against thought itself. But is that true, on a longer view? The author seems to be arguing that a thoughtful approach to moral questions is necessarily “left,” that intellectual integrity has — by definition –no home on the right. This strikes me as 1) wrong and 2) patronizing….

I think, rather, it’s mostly right and not patronizing.  It’s true that there are rational conservatives of several sorts.  A James Q. Wilson makes moral arguments and logic-and-evidence based deductions from them about, for example, crime. Burke makes serious arguments about the virtues of tradition (and is vulnerable to the charge of selectivity about tradition).  Hayek and others make strong arguments against command economies.  But the sort of “conservatives” who play a part in actually existing politics–William Kristol the pundit, Phil Gramm the economist, Shelby Steele the race expert–are for the most part hucksters; and of course Bush, Cheney, Addington & Co. and others are worse.  One can argue the merits of certain policies undertaken by self-professed conservatives–in a recent book John Patrick Diggins, for example, defends Reagan’s Cold War politics directly vis-a-vis the USSR (he scants the horrors ofCentral American policies) and his argument is reasonable; arguable; far from crazy.  But there is no intellectually serious defense of Bush’s Iraq war or his rant against the “axis of evil” or his tax cuts or his climate change or evolution denial.  None.

I know this is not the sort of thing Ivy League professors are supposed to say out loud, but I am trying to state it clearly in a such a way as to admit that there are non-negligible arguments in behalf of capital punishment for child rapists, say, or against certain late-term abortions.  Yet I don’t want to cede the high intellectual ground.  The country is in the wretched position it’s in in no small part because we have been governed by brainless, ignorant demagogues for eight years.  To be more rational is not only a necessary condition for “progressivism” but a considerable way toward sufficiency.

Do you disagree, John?

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Which is Worse?

By AnnaliseAcorn - Jul 22nd, 2008 at 6:02 pm EDT

Also listed in: Author Roundtable: Moral Clarity

So which is worse: a guy who believes that the most egregious cases of rape of a child could warrant the death penalty or a guy who in conscience is against the death penalty but is prepared to say that he’s for it to get votes? Which, if either, move might disqualify someone as a “grownup idealist.” To me the answer is obvious. The first position is a moral stand – right or wrong – that a credible idealist might still take.  It may be a judgment that people find abhorrent but it’s an honest stance. So I’m perplexed by Steven’s view that it would be better if he were just pandering here to get votes. That, it would seem to me, would not just be instrumental and dishonest – it would be those things about a deeply moral issue.  (Contrast McCain’s humming, hawing, and handwringing over the issue of insurance coverage for Viagra vs. Birth Control Pills. There I’d say to anybody – for pity’s sake – take a strategic position – you don’t’ have to mean it.) But the execution of child rapists just isn’t the place to get Machiavellian if you want to keep your credibility as an exemplar of moral clarity.

On the other hand, if you’re a Machiavellian through and through this might be just the sort of issue to take a disingenuous but potentially vote-winning stance on – not because of the substance of the issue – but because, given the court’s ruling, any President’s views on the matter can have no impact. It’s an issue he can’t do anything about even if he is elected. His hands are tied constitutionally so he can spout off whatever he thinks will win undecided votes knowing that he’ll never be called upon, or even able, to follow through. Does this allay Steven’s concerns? It’s a costless issue to lie about because there won’t be any consequences – at least not for any child rapists. But Susan’s book is fundamentally about defending a morality that isn’t focused on consequences. (btw- in response to Steven – yesterday when I said – Obama was saying in effect “I don’t care about the consequences” I meant the consequences for his campaign – the potential loss of voters who oppose the death penalty.)

It seems to me that Susan’s notion of a grownup idealist is not just about having wisdom in making the kind of judgments of degrees of dirt on ones hands. It seems to me that an ideal of moral clarity based in enlightenment values has to rule out certain moves – and I’d say that making false claims about deeply moral issues as a means to getting elected has to be out of bounds in terms of the standards of integrity we’re talking about.

Susan talks about Kant’s moral imperative and in particular Kant’s discussion of lying. In her chapter on Evil she tells us: “Not every lie is wrong, and very few are evil.” But she also explicates Kant’s moral imperative using the example of the lie. The person trying to determine whether or not to tell a lie (and somebody who says they support the death penalty when they don’t is lying) is supposed to do the thought experiment of universalizing.

But Susan explains that Kant’s analysis involves nuance. You don’t just say – would it be OK if everyone lied all the time – Nope – therefore nobody can lie ever. She says that “Far from arguing that lying is always forbidden” Kant “leaves everything up to the judgment of the” individual. And further “Universal does not mean one rule for all situations: whether that general rule fits this situation depends on all the particulars of  the situation itself.  The demand to universalize is just the demand that whatever the particulars of a situation turn out to be, the right action cannot be different for you and  your friends than for anyone else in similar circumstances.  The Categorical Imperative is not an attack on nuance but an attack on exceptionalism.”

So assume Obama’s lying to get votes. Is there a way for him to justify that without relying on exceptionalism?  I don’t think so.  So I’d way rather believe that he’s being honest. And I actually do believe that he is.

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Is Obama a Grown-Up Idealist?

By StevenLukes - Jul 22nd, 2008 at 5:15 pm EDT

Also listed in: Author Roundtable: Moral Clarity

These comments are thought-provoking. It is helpful, I think, to discuss what moral clarity involves in relation to Obama and our attitudes to him.

First, an ad feminem response to Annalise. I don’t think that taking a stand for capital punishment in the way she recommends – saying ‘Look, I don’t care what the consequences of this may be – there are just some things that are too horrific to tolerate’–represents a moment of moral clarity. I have no idea whether that was Obama’s view (I very much hope it wasn’t). Not to care about consequences is what Weber thought characterizes an ‘ethic of conviction’ as opposed to an ‘ethic of responsibiltiy’ (hardly, I agree, an impartially named distinction). The consequences of child rape and of executing child rapists are, from the latter perspective, at the very heart of the issue, as I tried to suggest, and I don’t see how not considering them can constitute moral clarity—or, at any rate, the kind of moral clarity we should seek. (Sometimes, after all, things can be all too clear, because of what we don’t consider).

Next, what about the question, addressed by Susan, of whether we can know enough about Obama to judge that he is a ‘grown-up idealist’. She thinks that can know enough about politicians to judge whether they are ‘reasonably authentic.’ I am not as convinced as you, Susan, that we can. We both like the fact that he writes so well, but I think we should discount this admirable prejudice of ours. What you write about Hilary only reinforces my doubt. I simply don’t know whether she lost because most people judged her to be ‘inauthentic,’ and nor do you.  Perhaps she lost because of the superior political skills of her opponent and because her public persona was less attractive and persuasive than his. (And is it unfair to remind you of the rather persuasive pages in your book where you argue that we should ‘hesitate to locate the goodness of an action in the goodness of the intentions that led to it’?)

But this raises a more uncomfortable question about what it is to be ‘grown-up’ in politics. Is it mere cynicism to ask: Do we not want and need our politicians to be adept at tactics and strategy, at cutting corners and making deals, at seizing opportunities and taking risks, including moral risks? And doesn’t this involve, to some indeterminate extent, what Heth calls ‘tacking and trimming’ and I called dirtying one’s hands. Heth writes Shame on Obama for giving us false hope. But wasn’t Weber right that being grown-up politically involves not having such illusory hopes? Machiavelli wrote that the Prince must learn how not to be good. The question is where, in present-day political life, the limits lie to the truth of this maxim: when and where to violate one’s own moral principles. We can already see it at work in the course of the campaign and there will be much more of this ahead. We can all see how flagrantly and shamelessly the Bush Administration has taken if over the last eight years, but there is, I fear, a danger that many people will (as may have happened when Carter succeeded Nixon) hope for conviction rather than responsibility in their President.

It is really encouraging to hear from you, Susan, about the critical community organizers Obama is setting up to be ‘critical.’  I would like to know more about this.

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What Sense Are We To Make of Obama?

By StevenLukes - Jul 21st, 2008 at 4:57 pm EDT

Also listed in: Author Roundtable: Moral Clarity

I too find much to applaud in Susan Neiman’s attempt to spell out the values of the Enlightenment (though I have qualms about including ‘reverence’ among them) and to describe Enlightenment heroes and heroines. I am, needless to say, also sympathetic to her plea for ‘grown-up idealism’ in the spirit of Kant and her call for the recapturing of moral language, including that of good and evil, from the thinkers and leaders of the right. She is right to argue in her book that morality does not have to be based in religion and to assert here that progressives should not equate religion with fanaticism. I agree too with her claim that people are very often driven by ‘non-materialistic’ motives; she is right, against Thomas Frank, to object to the thesis that those who vote and act against their material interests (like, for instance, us leftists) have been ‘bamboozled.’

But how does all this play out in relation to current politics and, in particular, to the question of the hour: What sense are we to make of Obama? She says that he ‘represents an alternative to both cynical realism and fanatical persuasion.’ That sounds plausible enough. But, more specifically, is he a ‘grown-up idealist’—does he, indeed, come ‘closer to being grown-up idealist than any other politician in recent memory’? Does he, in short, combine a sense of ‘the way things are’ with a focus on the way they ought to be?

First, how can we know? Most of the available evidence is pre-cooked, even including his two fine and doubtless self-authored books. All his appearances, public and, in the age of the blogosphere, private are carefully stage-managed and monitored by advisers and communications experts. Moreover this is an electoral campaign in which everything that is communicated is targeted, with increasing refinement, to potentially persuadable audiences. We have his life-story and his political career to interpret and we can hope that her assessment is on the mark. But, with a little more caution, I would, while recognizing his remarkable oratorical powers and political skills, prefer to go with Gary Younge’s observation that ‘a huge number’ of people ‘feel they have found a liberal change agent.’

Second, and more importantly, what is it, after all, to be ‘grown-up’ in politics? Max Weber once wrote that ‘the ultimately possible towards life are irreconcilable’, that the politician worth his salt must take a stand for what really matters to him and that sometimes, as Machiavelli saw, doing so will involve engaging in morally dubious actions. Not to see this, Weber wrote is to be ‘a political infant.’ In saying these things, Weber seems have gone beyond what Susan wants to say. Or did he? In the last chapter of her book, she writes that ‘negotiating small differences is part of being grownup; no-one can tell you in advance where to put your foot down.’

Obama has, it would seem, judged that rejecting public finance, supporting faith-based initiatives and his votes on FISA, handguns and executing child rapists are all small differences to be negotiated in order to win. Perhaps he is right. Political skill consists in getting such judgments right. It involves judging just how dirty your hands have to get or, in Susan’s own words, knowing how may tacks one can take without changing course substantially.

Of all those tacks taken so far, I find the vote on executing child rapists the most troubling. Such executions are even more objectionable than the death penalty for murder. They are disproportionate; the victim is still alive. They have been rejected by the Supreme Court and by the entire civilized world. The only state in which such executions have taken place is Louisiana and the only states that have been prepared to include this possibility in their laws are Georgia, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas—states hardly known for their solicitude for defendants’ rights. The death penalty is too final. And such cases rely on the testimony of small children who are vulnerable to pressure and they constitute an invitation to over-aggressive District Attorneys eager for headlines. But perhaps Obama calculates that this is a necessary tack to gain needed votes. I only hope that it is such a calculation and not a stand for what really matters to him.

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Sodom and Gomorrah

By AnnaliseAcorn - Jul 21st, 2008 at 1:41 pm EDT

Also listed in: Author Roundtable: Moral Clarity

I heartily agree with Todd on the “beautifully balanced sentences.” Susan’s style is spellbinding. She has a penetrating philosophical wit that is grounded in shrewd perception coupled with astounding conceptual agility. In her texts one can discover the purest pleasures of reading – she challenges and delights at every turn.

But let me be start off with a challenge of my own that arises out of Susan’s link today between her ideas in the book and contemporary political issues. The book begins this way: “Sodom and Gomorrah are places good as any to reflect on goodness and evil, but the reason may surprise you.” She goes on to tell the real story. Contrary to popular belief, God didn’t want to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for reasons that some fundamentalist today might think he ought to fry San Francisco.

Homosexuality, according to Susan, had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was “the local demand to drag out and gang rape two strangers whom the good-hearted Lot had offered to shelter.” Along with Abraham, she takes the view that it is the “collateral damage,” the destruction of the innocent people of Sodom and Gomorrah who did not take part in its crimes that poses a moral problem for God. The rapists had it coming. But what about the ones who didn’t rape anyone and who deplored the rapists actions? The point of the story to the book is to set up the Abraham at Sodom and Gomorrah (as opposed to the Abraham at Mount Moriah who blindly obeys God’s command to sacrifice Isaac) as a model of moral clarity – someone who will stand up to even the highest authority and risk his life for what he knows is right. At end of her telling of the story, however, there is, I think, little doubt that Susan is on board with the view that those who were guilty of gang rape of the guests did “merit annihilation.”

If it is not too unfair of a question, why then is Susan disappointed about Obama’s coming down in favor of capital punishment for child rapists? If guilty Sodomites merited annihilation for raping their guests, why don’t the most heinous child rapists of today? This is not the place for an extended debate about capital punishment. But I think the point has further relevance – that is to the account of universalism at the heart of Susan’s brilliant defense of the Enlightenment. Can it be that capital punishment was right back in the days of Sodom but wrong now? Is it OK for God but not OK for our ever so fallible courts? Is it still the “collateral damage” that makes capital punishment wrong? Is the trouble with Obama’s support of capital punishment for unspeakable crimes that it is actually morally wrong, or is it just politically unwise in as much as it may alienate progressive voters who oppose the death penalty?

I find the question intriguing because to me it goes to this shift we’ve seen in the last few weeks where commentators are saying to supporters of Obama – “Ah ha! He’s just a politician after all.” I actually liked it that Obama voiced support for capital punishment in such cases. It didn’t look to me like a flip flop toward the center. It looked like… well… a moment of moral clarity. He seemed to be saying, “Look, I don’t care what the consequences of this may be – there are just some things that are too horrific to tolerate.” Or to use Susan’s description of the gang rape in Sodom, there are some transgressions that are “beyond every pale.”

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Idealism and Realism

By ToddGitlin - Jul 21st, 2008 at 10:26 am EDT

Also listed in: Author Roundtable: Moral Clarity

If I may be forgiven for quoting myself, let me start with some observations about Moral Clarity—the book, not the concept—that I put in a blurb:

In Moral Clarity, Susan Neiman gives us a flesh-and-blood Enlightenment—a living culture of vivid debate about justice, heroism, and our moral nature, about the ends and means of reverence no less than of reason.  With much learning lightly worn, and in beautifully balanced sentences, to boot, she ushers the giants of philosophy into our lives to talk to each another about nothing less urgent than what we owe one another.  Against all the postmodernist caricatures and atheist rants, this is a tour de force in lapidary prose, a witty, profound, and powerful successor to her breakthrough book, Evil in Modern Thought.

Actually, I want to start with a matter of style–those beautifully balanced sentences.  This may seem an odd way to start talking about moral clarity, the concept.  But Susan’s style has a great deal to do with the way in which she engages the reader, and this, in turn, has a great deal to do with making her book not only exciting but a compelling invitation to clear thought.  The conventional prose style for philosophers, when they are clear enough to be said to have a style at all, is to state a proposition, justify it, and proceed to the next proposition. The writing proceeds methodically, step by step.  Susan’s style is often quite different.  It is not linear.  It leaps.  It traces arabesques.  It takes off on one foot and lands on the other.  From sentence to sentence, you are invited to take part in a thinking process that is full of surprises.  “Moral language” might seem a tedious business, a sort of Sunday morning sentence to stiff collars and crinolines, but in her hands it is an adventure.

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Moral Clarity: Ideal and Real

By SusanNeiman - Jul 21st, 2008 at 12:21 am EDT

Also listed in: Author Roundtable: Moral Clarity

My thanks to all of you for taking time out of your summer to think about this book.  Julian has asked me to begin by relating some of the arguments of Moral Clarity to current political discussions.

In the past few years, words like realism and idealism and materialism have been thrown around in the media so often that philosophers are more inclined to wince than to set matters straight. But these are not merely technical questions, and getting them right is crucial.  Take Gary Younge’s recent essay in The Nation, which makes some excellent points about the power of symbols.  Yet his argument is weakened by dividing observers of Obama’s candidacy into “materialists” and “dreamers”; materialists, he writes, are those who argue that Obama is just a mainstream Democrat who will change nothing that matters, while dreamers are those who believe his nomination marks a paradigm shift in the political world.  By calling them dreamers from the outset, Younge undermines their power, and thereby his own main point:  that symbols and imagination and ideas can transform lives.

Why did he choose the moony word dreamer?  Has the word idealist been hopelessly contaminated by the neo-cons?  One astonishing turn in contemporary American political discourse is the description of the Iraq war as an idealistic enterprise, born from an excess of zeal.  From there it’s a short step to calling anyone who believes in using bombs to realize their convictions an idealist, as if the only problem with such people was the absence of caution.  So John Judis in this week’s The New Republic:  “McCain began his career in Washington as a realist who, because of Vietnam, was reluctant to sanction the use of military force.”  As a result of American success in the Gulf war, Judis argues, McCain underwent a “conversion to neoconservative faith”. One outrageous implication of this argument is the suggestion that the only reason to object to the war in Vietnam was the fact that the US lost it – but the abuse of words like realist and idealist is so widespread that claims like this don’t even raise eyebrows.

You needn’t buy Naomi Klein’s new-old Marxist view of human motivation to suspect the invasion of Iraq was not as high-minded as conventional wisdom now holds.  Empirical studies of fundamentalist terrorism, by contrast, really do confirm that suicide bombers are seldom driven by poverty or fairytales, but by deep commitments to ideals they can’t find in contemporary consumer culture.  But let’s give both neo-cons and jihadis the benefit of the doubt:  people who are willing to kill (and especially to die) for a principle are acting on idealist impulses that express a nobility lacking in materialist world-views. Contemporary Western culture offers nearly infinite goodies and distractions. With enough questions about what kind of flour (whole wheat? gluten-free?) or which diet (low-fat? high-fibre?) the main point is obscured: we don’t want, in the end, to live on bread alone.

So are we choosing opium?  Sometimes.  Turning attention from earthly to heavenly matters is one way to distract from facts on the ground, and politicians willing to exploit religion for their own cynical ends are hardly new.  But to suggest, like Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, that anybody who doesn’t vote their stomach has been bamboozled, is to accept a simple materialist view of the world:  ideas are at best illusions, and only stuff things are made of is real.

Obama’s candidacy is historic not only because he is the first African-American with a real chance at the presidency – and I’m one of those who finds this fact profoundly important.  He has galvanized people throughout the world because, five minutes before the abysmal midnight we seemed to be headed for, he represents an alternative to both cynical realism and fanatical persuasion.  For years, in the classroom, I used the word “grown-up idealist” to describe Immanuel Kant’s philosophy.  Barack Obama comes closer to being a grown-up idealist than any politician in recent memory.   This is a metaphysical claim, but not an obscure one:  a realist is someone whose attention is restricted to what’s true, that is, the way things are. An idealist is someone who focuses on what should be true, that is, the way things ought to be. Grown-up idealists pay attention to both. While never losing sight of the facts on the ground, they don’t believe the world as it’s given to us exhausts reality as a whole.

As Obama points out often, idealism is a particularly American perspective. When the Founders wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” they were not only not self-evident; they weren’t even true. Americans have gone a long way toward making them true because we’ve shown, time and again, that despite slavery and sexism and economic inequality, we believe they should be true.

Consider what you mean when you tell someone: be realistic. It’s another way to say: lower your expectations. It’s also connected with a view of maturity:  growing up is a process of becoming resigned.   We’ve all been told that the best part of life is that cusp between adolescence and adulthood. It surely isn’t true; most studies show that people tend to get happier as they get older, work out their own identities, and measure their strengths and weaknesses. Since few of us would actually choose to be 16 or 22 again, the only reason to promote the message is to prepare young people to demand less from their lives.   Obama caught the world’s attention with a message to demand more - and not just for the young.  For years, we thought the best we could leave to our children was a world that hadn’t self-destructed. Now we’ve begun to imagine that we might leave them a world that’s a little better than the one we were given.

Can we distinguish grown-up idealists from other kinds?  Being willing to live rather than die for your ideals is one sure clue.  We valorize heroes whose end is tragic, and suspect those who live and prosper.  This is not just a modern phenomenon:  for two and a half millennia, most readers have found fault with the wily Odysseus.  There’s no dearth of faults to find there; the man portrayed by Homer was a hero, not a saint. Yet looking at the centuries of criticism from Pindar and Euripedes to Adorno and Horkheimer, it’s hard to avoid concluding that readers resent Odysseus because he came out alive.

Moral Clarity emphasizes the need for Enlightenment heroes – men and women whose principles are shown not by romantic gestures, but by steady, thoughtful paths that are sometimes torn, compromised, and even mistaken.  Odysseus is the hero of the first modern epic because he is all those things, and more.  Can he serve as a model – among other things, for structuring the conversations taking place about Barack Obama? In June, the Economist described him as “the inspirational but sometimes vaporous young visionary.” Just one month later, critics across the globe have been quick to call him a politician like any other - with varying degrees of rage and relief.

As someone who supported Obama before he declared he was running (and heard no end of good-natured condescension from friends who thought I was dreaming), I’m far from happy with some of his recent moves.  Supporting faith-based initiatives, rightly conducted, is fine by me; I argue in Moral Clarity that confusing religion with fanaticism is one of the stupidest things progressives can do.  But like many, I was disappointed by the FISA vote, and even more by the positions Obama took on controlling handguns and executing rapists.  To win the election he needs more votes than all the people who share my views on these questions can deliver.  He even needs the support of people without integrity – all those people who bet on Hillary not from conviction but because she was front-runner, and are now desperate to climb on the bandwagon.  I’ll be at his speech in Berlin on Thursday, and I’ll listen very closely while I cheer.  How many tacks can he take without changing course substantially?

I look forward to all your responses!