Author: Ophelia Benson

David Remnick’s account of Clinton’s trip to Africa is a good read, with some interesting truth-related points along the way.

“The Republicans are brilliant at creating bogus issues, cartoon cutouts,” he said, “and the press, even if it doesn’t agree with them, brings it along…This deal with Iraq makes me want to throw up,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of being told that if you voted for authorization you voted for the war. It was a mistake, and I would have made it, too. And Congress made it once before, at the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.” The blame was with the White House: “The Administration did not shoot straight on the nuclear issue or on Saddam’s supposed ties to Al Qaeda prior to 9/11.”

Garbage in garbage out. If people are given bad information they may vote to authorize a war when they wouldn’t have so voted if they’d had better information. Fiddling with intelligence reports does make a difference.

Clinton said that he had read Ron Suskind’s article in the Times Magazine in which an unnamed Bush aide says, mockingly, that journalists and Democrats languish in a “reality-based community” while the White House, as the vanguard of an American empire, creates its own realities. “That’s an amazing paradigm,” Clinton said. “We ought to run on that.”

Yes. They won’t though. Too busy being folksier than thou. Picking on the anti-reality crowd might not play well with The Folk; better not.

Remnick ‘asked Clinton if he thought intellect was an essential part of being President…’

“I keep reading that Bush is incurious, but when he talks to me he asks a lot of questions,” Clinton went on. “So I can’t give him a bad grade on curiosity…I’ve never been worried about his intellect so much as his ideological bent…But the thing that bothers me about having an ideology as opposed to a philosophy is that, if you have an ideology, then the outcome is dictated before the facts are in, before the arguments are heard. And that, I think, can cause problems.”

Yes.

Like weird double standards for instance.

Rahm Emanuel told me that this was too harsh an interpretation, that the attack on the Clintons in the nineties was so severe and baseless, in his view, that a moment of anger over dinner was nothing. He mentioned a recent report in the Chicago Tribune which revealed that the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, began his career in Congress with a net worth of three hundred thousand dollars and now has assets of six million, owing largely to an almost fantastical increase in the value of land near a highway project that he helped push through Congress. “The Speaker came in with three hundred thousand dollars and now has six million in real estate and no one asks a question? Your question is ‘Why is Clinton so angry?’ My question is ‘Why are you so stupid?’”

Fair point, it seems to me.

I read a bit of Keith Ward this morning, looking for some sophisticated theological arguments, since we keep being told there are some and we don’t respect them enough. Various thoughts occurred to me as I read. On pages 13-14 of God, Chance and Necessity, for instance, Ward says ‘The argument of this book, then, is that a theistic interpretation of evolution and of the findings of the natural sciences is by far the most reasonable…and that it is the postulate of God, with its corollary of purpose and value, that can best provide an explanation for why the universe is as it is.’

That’s just the introduction, not the argument itself, but all the same, it prompts me immediately to notice that the meaning even of that summary sentence depends heavily on what Ward means by ‘best’ and ‘explanation’. It strikes me that by ‘best’ he means ‘one I like best’ – one he finds comforting, familiar, unfrightening, nonalien.

And then, as always, it also strikes me how easy, and empty, that word ‘God’ is in that usage. You could say that about anything and everything; it’s just as explanatory, just as comfortable, and just as empty. You find a beautiful garden, a painting, a building, a statue; how do you explain this? ‘A genius.’ Okay – but which one; where; when; in what context; why; in short, tell us more. Just saying ‘a genius’ doesn’t say anything, because we already know that much; we want to know the details. The same applies to ‘God’ as the explanation for why the universe is as it is. What is ‘God’ there? The thing that caused the universe to be as it is. Well – we sort of know that something caused the universe to be as it is (unless we think it was uncaused, which is tricky), but what? Just saying ‘God’ amounts to the same thing as saying ‘don’t know’, except with all sorts of smuggled (and unwarranted) baggage. Theists claim the ‘God’ answer is explanatory but it isn’t because it argues backward, so it’s really just repeating the question – looky here, look at this, it’s special, so something special made it, and of course that something special=god, so there’s your explanation. No. Just pointing at an explanandum – where did this come from? – doesn’t provide its own answer. Of course ‘god’ is a better explanation in many senses of ‘better’ – it’s more appealing, more intuitive, more human-like – but it’s not better in the sense of being a real answer; it’s more of a disguised non-answer.

And then – when there is no explanation, or no explanation that we can get at, yet and perhaps ever – then providing one by supplying a name – God, or A Q Genius – is not better than saying ‘don’t know’. So the argument is spurious. Saying that god is a better explanation for the universe than (say) naturalism plus don’t know, is absurdly deceptive. It reassuringly soothingly says yes there is an answer when in fact there may not be – we may just not know.

And the god answer is just too generic – hence, again, too easy. It’s like seeing a poem and saying ‘a poet did this!’ A crime scene: ‘a criminal!’ It’s generic, it’s circular, it answers the question with the content of the question: ‘this is big, great, impressive, so who made it?’ ‘someone that can make things that are big, great, impressive.’ Er – that doesn’t answer.

The Archive

The Interrogations Archive

There is sophistication and then there is sophistication.

In this age of terror fueled by the ideology of Islamic extremism, some old insights of the liberal historiography of the roots and nature of Nazism remain relevant. In works published in the 1960s and 1970s, two of Nazism’s preeminent historians…made a similar point about the political significance of ideological fanaticism…This underestimation, the refusal or inability to understand that Hitler meant what he said was thought to be a mark of political sophistication in the 1930s…The great classic of the postwar years which did take Nazi ideology seriously, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, took specific issue with this liberal and left-wing reductionism. Arendt…redefined the meaning of political sophistication so that it came to mean a willingness to pay very close attention to the ravings and rantings of political fanatics. In so doing, she implicitly reversed the meaning of sophistication and naïveté.

I’ve been there. No doubt most of us have. It’s the old ‘behind the mask’ thing, the old appearance and reality thing. Ideas are just the frosting, just the superstructure, just the defense mechanism, just the wishful thinking, just the presentation of self; the reality, underneath, is money or sex or power or status. Sometimes that’s true, of course; there are oceans of pious platitudes offered up to veil the greed or self-aggrandizement or strategy that is really at work. But that doesn’t mean it’s always true, nor that the safest bet is to assume that it’s always true. Some ideas are a lot more dangerous than mere self-interest or lust.

It remains difficult for political and intellectual elites in liberal democracies to give fanaticism the causal impact it deserves…The traditions of liberal historiography of the Nazi era have powerfully addressed the problem of underestimation. Frank and frequent talk about what the radical Islamists are saying should not be primarily the preoccupation of right of center politicians and journalists…[I]n order that the history of radical Islam not again be the history of its underestimation, liberals should foster a kind of political sophistication that rests on the lessons of this most famous previous case of underestimation of political fanaticism.

It’s not all that sophisticated to fall asleep at the switch.