Author: Ophelia Benson

This New York Times article by Ron Suskind about Bush’s ‘faith-based’ certainty got a lot of attention and comment, I gather, but I was away from my desk at the time – away from my desk, from radio and newspapers, from telephones and people, tables and chairs, bread and butter – no, I exaggerate. I was still in civilization. But I was mostly too busy running around and looking at things to pay attention to things like the New York Times magazine or comments on same, so I missed the reaction. But it is a very interesting article. I would like to think it’s a little exaggerated, a little animus-driven – but I’m not sure I can manage it. It’s all much too plausible.

There are a lot of points worth commenting on, but I’ll just mention a couple for now.

Some officials, elected or otherwise, with whom I have spoken with left meetings in the Oval Office concerned that the president was struggling with the demands of the job. Others focused on Bush’s substantial interpersonal gifts as a compensation for his perceived lack of broader capabilities. Still others, like Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a Democrat, are worried about something other than his native intelligence. ”He’s plenty smart enough to do the job,” Levin said. ”It’s his lack of curiosity about complex issues which troubles me.”

That’s not the first time I’ve heard those two observations made together. It’s not that Bush is not smart, goes the line, it’s that he’s not curious. But I think that’s an almost meaningless thing to say in this context. It’s like saying it’s not that Bush flies, it’s just that he moves through the air by flapping his wings. It’s not that Bush eats, it’s that he puts food in his mouth and chews it and swallows it. Look – if Bush is in that job and thinks he doesn’t need to be ‘curious’ about complex issues – then that’s not smart. To put it mildly. That’s all there is to it. It just is not smart to think that ignorance is okay for someone who chose to go for the job of being the most powerful single human on the planet. That observation is essentially the point of the whole article – that Bush doesn’t give a shit what the facts are or what the evidence is, because he has ‘faith’ in a supernatural being instead. He apparently shocks and scares a lot of people with the extent to which he simply does not care if the facts indicate he’s doing the wrong thing. He has instinct, he has intuition, he has faith, he prays, so who cares about facts. So – he’s not plenty smart enough to do the job, is he. Surely not. Surely that’s a pretty good description of someone who is in no sense smart enough to do the job. (Which of course is unfortunate, since he’s doing it.)

And then there’s the famous bit about ‘reality-based’ people and then the other kind.

I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Well…who knows, maybe there’s no need to take that too seriously. Maybe the aide was just yanking Suskind’s chain, or flattering himself, or both those plus having a laugh. But then again…

And of course again it’s so stupid. If he does mean it, it’s so stupid. What can he think he means, ‘we create our own reality’? Of course they create some reality, that’s obvious enough. They change the tax code, they invade Iraq, they appoint Supreme Court justices and other judges. They make things happen. But since when does that equate to creating ‘reality’? Hey, guess what, aide, reality’s a big thing, there’s a lot of it out there, and a fair bit of it is actually created by people other than you and your team. However powerful you all are, and you are plenty powerful, nobody denies it, you aren’t in a position to create reality full stop. You are of course in a position to influence the way other people create some more pieces of reality – which is one big reason it would be advisable for you to do it with plenty of respect for things like facts and evidence and careful thought, as opposed to stupid shortcuts like prayer and ‘faith’ and ‘instinct’ and brainless certainty. Shortcuts to nowhere, those are – if not worse. As a Bush fan hinted to Suskind:

A regent I spoke to later and who asked not to be identified told me: ”I’m happy he’s certain of victory and that he’s ready to burst forth into his second term, but it all makes me a little nervous. There are a lot of big things that he’s planning to do domestically, and who knows what countries we might invade or what might happen in Iraq. But when it gets complex, he seems to turn to prayer or God rather than digging in and thinking things through. What’s that line? — the devil’s in the details. If you don’t go after that devil, he’ll come after you.”

Yeah, and the rest of us, too.

Lotta proofreading done today. So I’ll give myself a little dessert, and link to a few miscellaneous items I’ve been meaning to link to for a week or so.

There is Julian in the Guardian on ‘dating’ for instance. It’s funny, I’m an American, but I’ve always hated that word. It just sounds like such a silly, stilted, unreal, arbitrary activity – ‘dating’.

Although I find US-bashing a tiresome game, I do object to one lamentable feature of the American way of life that has insidiously infected our indigenous culture: dating. When I grew up, no one talked about dating, let alone did it. You “went out” with someone or, if you wanted to be cool, were “seeing” someone. But it is not the word I object to. It’s the ethos.

Yeah. I object to the word too though. I think the word is probably part of the ethos. It seems to turn interactions between potential lovers into something bizarre, formalized, unlike more ordinary (or as one might say, ‘quotidian’) interactions between friends, colleagues, acquaintances, people on the bus and in the shops.

Then there are a few more of Julian’s columns – one on the use of making mistakes and one on the difference between Aristotle and self-help. And one on speech as act and the implications of speech-acts for freedom of speech. It’s relevant to what we’ve been discussing lately about Theo van Gogh and Rohan Jayasekera.

And speaking of that discussion, there is a post about Jayasekera and his article at Index on Censorship (not to mention his position at same) on Harry’s Place by Juan Golblado, a reader of ours who commented on the subject here too. There is a lot worth reading at Harry’s Place right now. Well there always is – and especially at the moment I want to point to a number of particular items. Maybe I will just mention one or two. There’s a brief but sharp comment on Livingstone and Qaradawi. There’s an amusing dissent from Johann Hari’s defense of Chavs. There’s a post by Harry on Jayasekera’s reply to his critics. And there’s a post on a book I read and recommended here a year or so ago, Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.

Hmm. That’s only some of the things I wanted to link to. Well – more later. There are still about forty pages left…

It was a worm, that’s what. A damn worm. That’s why B&W has been a little quiet for the past few days, and why I wrote a despairing valedictory N&C on Saturday which I later replaced with an incomprehensible one – it’s because I spent three days wrestling with the worm Orobouros. Only I didn’t know that was what I was wrestling with. But my invaluable colleague was able to figure it out and find out how to fix it, so now B&W will be normally noisy again. After today. I have a lot of proofreading to do today (but I may make noise anyway by way of recreation), and then after that – well I have a lot of other work, to be sure, but I’ll make noise anyway, because I always do.

Okay, here I am doing my best. Brushing the sweat out of my eyes, swatting at mosquitoes, worrying about frostbite, avoiding hidden cravasses, catching bullets in my teeth, eating old bread with maggots and weevils and turnip crumbs in it, being charged by cranky lions and rhinos and people who sell insurance. Here’s one item I was thinking about before the virus pounced and turned my computer into an evil demon. Mark Bauerlein has an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed – but even though it’s interesting I have some disagreements with it. It’s about the familiar subject of lefty groupthink in (US) universities. One problem is that he says campuses, colleges, academics, rather than specifying ‘certain branches’ of same. He does mention the humanities and social sciences a couple of times at the beginning of the piece, but then goes on to talk about academics in general as if forgetting that stipulation. People so often do when they talk about this subject. But though I don’t think I’ve seen any figures on this, I have a hard time believing that Business Schools, Law schools, Engineering, Dentistry, Medicine, and all the sciences, are overwhelmingly on the left. I don’t have a hard time believing it about the humanities and social sciences, but I do about the rest. Am I wrong? Are US medical schools and B-schools full of ardent lefties who change drastically the minute they get out? I don’t know for certain that they’re not, but I am skeptical. Yet Bauerlein’s article doesn’t really deal with that aspect.

But there’s also a more general (and more interesting) point, I think.

Conservatives and liberals square off in public, but on campuses, conservative opinion doesn’t qualify as respectable inquiry. You won’t often find vouchers discussed in education schools or patriotism argued in American studies…The ordinary evolution of opinion — expounding your beliefs in conversation, testing them in debate, reading books that confirm or refute them — is lacking, and what should remain arguable settles into surety. With so many in harmony, and with those who agree joined also in a guild membership, liberal beliefs become academic manners. It’s social life in a professional world, and its patterns are worth describing…Apart from the ill-mannered righteousness, academics with too much confidence in their audience utter debatable propositions as received wisdom. An assertion of the genocidal motives of early English settlers is put forward not for discussion but for approval…The final social pattern is the Law of Group Polarization. That lawas Cass R. Sunstein, a professor of political science and of jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, has describedpredicts that when like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs…Groupthink is an anti-intellectual condition, ironically seductive in that the more one feels at ease with compatriots, the more one’s mind narrows.

I don’t disagree with his overall point. There is a lot of groupthink and Law of Group Polarization around, and very irritating it can be, too. And not only irritating but also an impediment to clear or critical thinking. But I do somewhat disagree with the way the point is framed, or with what is left out of account.

It all has to do with what is defined as political and what isn’t, what is considered (or defined as) debatable and what isn’t. What Bauerlein is talking about in the article (though in fact he doesn’t mention many specific examples) is the contemporary right-on consensus. Fair enough, but the thing is, today’s right-on consensus may well turn out to be tomorrow’s consensus that even the most ferocious Limbaughites wouldn’t seriously question, or consider debatable. It may (parts of it may) go from being classifiable as ‘liberal’ to being just basic decency. Attitudes about such things do change over time – sometimes for the worse instead of the better, as with the rise of Islamism over the past quarter century – and some attitudes or beliefs or views do become much less debatable (realistically debatable, though anyone can always play at debating them for the exercise or shock value) than they once were.

That being the case, I think it may be a little misleading to call these disputes political only. I’m not sure they are, not all of them. I think many of them are about morality rather than politics; or they’re about both at once. But surely there are things that just aren’t debatable, or ought not to be, and if so, aren’t they moral rather than political? General agreement on moral issues – some moral issues – is looked on much more favourably than is general agreement on political issues. Politics is supposed to be dual (though it’s not supposed to be more than that, which is interesting); it’s supposed to be balanced and fair and not too top-heavy on either side. But that’s not as true of morality. Very few people wring their hands over the dreary consensus that murder is considered a bad thing (except by tv and movie directors, one might add). Do we want university faculties to have a good showing by people who think the Holocaust was a good idea and should be tried again? Or that thieves should have their hands cut off? Or that slavery is good for the economy and should be restored? Or that suspects in criminal cases should be routinely tortured? Or that people should be executed for stealing a chicken or a shirt? No, not in this part of the world. But people once did think that, and in some places still do. Yet people don’t often write articles for the Chronicle wishing universities had a lot more people who thought that way.

What is political and what isn’t is surely a temporary matter. X is political right now because it is indeed still under debate, and because we’ve decided to think of it that way (or the mass media have), but that doesn’t mean it always will be or that it always has been. And it’s possible that some items don’t really need a ‘balanced’ debate. If they did – if every single issue one can think of would benefit from discussion from all points of view – then why don’t we spend a lot of time listening to advocates of slavery, genocide, capital punishment for petty theft? Isn’t it because we don’t really think there is much to say on the contrarian side?

I think this problem is related to the problem of the tension between democracy and human rights, which we’ve talked about before (sometimes causing fireworks in the process). There are some issues that are political, and subject to democratic decision, and up for grabs; but there are others that are not, or should not be, and that have been placed partly outside the political process, by such devices as Constitutions and Bills of Rights and Universal Declarations of Human Rights. No – there isn’t really an interesting exchange of views to be had on the benefits of keeping women as permanently powerless and unequal and abused, for example, or on the desirability of child labour. Some things, yes, other things, not really. I think discussions like these don’t usually look at that aspect (if it is one), so they give a somewhat oversimplified view.

Update: Mark Bauerlein tells me there was an article in the Chronicle a few months ago about a survey of US academics’ political self-identification. Those who considered themselves Left or Center Left outnumbered those Right or Center Right by almost 3 to 1, so that’s one answer to my objection about Business schools and the rest.

Well perhaps not as bad as I thought.

I can’t just delete now because of the RSS feed.

And look what I just found! What a lovely surprise. I can pretend I’m still there.