heavy philosophical shit

It’s Not The Heat, It’s The Stupidity

“You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.”

-The Fourth Doctor

In the wake of… all this… it’s really for the best that the Republican Party cancelled its Jacksonville convention over coronavirus, given that the whole purpose of moving it from North Carolina was that the Governor there wouldn’t let Trump have a big crowd for his acceptance speech. For one thing, for somebody who spends a lot of his time in Florida, you would think that Viceroy Trump would know what the weather conditions are like in August. I’m pretty sure a lot of people told him that if the only way to minimize coronavirus was to be stuck outside in Florida, around hurricane season, in deep August, they would just as well not go at all, which may be why most of these shindigs happen in places with indoor air conditioning.

But as we leave the first week of August 2020, we have to acknowledge the real environmental threat to our survival. It’s not climate change. Yet. It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.

I have to admit, since Donald Trump ran for office, I’ve gotten a lot more hard and cynical myself. For instance, I used to have more sympathy for stupid people.

By stupid, I mean subnormal intelligence, “slow” or just having average intelligence without having exposed yourself to much knowledge. I grew up watching movies like Forrest Gump where stupid people were assumed to have some kind of special wisdom compensating for their lack of smarts. Even the stupid people with criminal records (like Michael Clark Duncan in The Green Mile or Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade) were shown as being ultimately good at heart.

Well, fuck that.

I had done an earlier bit where I described a certain “anti-conceptual mentality” by using direct quotes from Ayn Rand’s philosophical works to describe what is often called willful ignorance. I said: “When Ayn Rand refers to this (very Randian) term, “anti-conceptual mentality”, she is describing a self-created moron. Such a person is not of medically subnormal intelligence (what used to be called ‘retarded’) but a person of at least average intelligence who deliberately does not apply it, for whom everything is an unexamined given because examination would mean taking a risk he is not willing to pursue, and thus he is almost entirely a collection of second-hand, superficial thoughts.”

See, while Ayn Rand as a person has more issues than TIME Magazine, I still call myself an Objectivist (if I have to call myself anything) because I still find the philosophy to be a practical guide to life whatever one’s opinions of Rand. Briefly: Reality exists, independently of human consciousness, perceptions, or political consensus. At the same time, the human mind and perceptions are sufficient to grasp reality as it is, and in fact they have to be, because there is no supernatural force outside consciousness that will give you a perfect understanding of an object without effort. And in practical terms, what this means is that we cannot separate morality from intellect. The only way we will be able to know the right thing to do is if we can learn things in general.

This was something that Rand herself stressed in emphasizing an “objectivist” morality over an “altruist” morality that disdained self-interest and reason over serving others and faith in non-reason, such as an organized religion, “feelings” or a “Higher Power.” And if this seems counterintutive to most people, it’s because most philosophies, even secular ones, place intellect at odds with morality.

There are plenty of takedowns of Rand if you want to look for them, and while I disagree with a lot of her personal conclusions, I don’t think most critiques address this challenge she places to other philosophies. Indeed I would say that this country in particular is very bad at placing reason and facts over opinion and feelings, and it’s largely because of that anti-rational mentality. And it’s largely because of that that we are so screwed by many factors, including a political culture that allowed just enough people in just enough states to elect Donald Trump.

This leads to a point that is implicit in Rand’s work but that I don’t think she ever actually spelled out in these words: If one has at least normal intelligence, ignorance is a choice. Stupidity is a choice. And since stupid decisions often lead to destructive consequences, stupidity is a moral choice. It’s like drunk driving. You might not be “in your right mind” when you’re drunk, but you’re still legally responsible for being DUI and any acts you commit DUI because you made the sober decision to do something reckless in the first place.

To quote again from my other post: “The anti-conceptual mentality avoids going outside his prejudices because his intuition tells him he would no longer be able to do what he wants to do. Therefore he avoids not only abstract reasoning but intuition and introspection. As the phrase goes, “if you don’t know why hitting children with tear gas is wrong, I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

I go over all this because it’s not enough to bag on the various people of mediocre or subnormal intelligence (like the various Facebook Trumpniks who commit at least three typos per paragraph) but to address the numerous people who do have brains and who might even have some conceptual ability but still choose not to consider the real consequences of serving Trump. They can do this because again, we as a culture place reason at odds with morality, and are expected to sacrifice the former to the latter. If one does not practice critical thinking even with one’s own premises, one is not practicing rationality but rationalization. Yes, that includes a lot of “Randroids” who attach to Rand’s pro-capitalist and anti-socialist teachings and use them to advocate for Republicans simply because they can mouth the right words. Even in Reagan’s day, Rand herself was not a fan: “A few months before her death, Rand told an audience of her fans, no doubt to the surprise of many, that she didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter, whom she regarded as a small-town power luster. “There is a limit,” she told them, “to the notion of voting for the lesser of two evils.”

“Rand did welcome Reagan’s strong language toward Soviet Russia and his promises to cut spending and taxes. But she warned that his invitation of the so-called Moral Majority to the halls of power would be a long-range disaster. By tying the (supposed) advocacy of freedom and capitalism to, in Rand’s words, the anti-intellectuality of “militant mystics,” who proclaim that aborting an embryo is murder and creationism is science, Reagan’s presidency would discredit the intellectual case for freedom and capitalism and embolden the anti-intellectual, authoritarian mentalities in the country.”

The chain should become clear upon reflection: Reason is the source of morality, because to determine “right” from “wrong” we must be able to distinguish from other categories besides right and wrong. Morality cannot be the source of reason because that begs the question of what is Right in the first place, and if one cannot answer that question for oneself, it creates a situation where authority figures define your terms, and thus your thinking, for you.

A naive simpleton in power is far more dangerous than an evil pragmatist because you could expect the pragmatist to examine his own practical limits and work within them. The simpleton only operates on a moral code which was handed down to him by someone else and which he has not tested by circumstances. If unethical people work with him and they know how to push his buttons, they can get him to perform atrocities. This is what happened with George W. Bush in Iraq.

In the last couple decades, comicbook writers have gone into scenarios where Lex Luthor or Norman Osborn would run for president and win, and while they’d inevitably over-reach and get taken down, even they acknowledged some limits. When Lex became president in the DC Universe, he actually severed his ties to Lexcorp. So if you want to consider where our political culture is, consider that Donald Trump and his various people literally have less ethics than a comicbook supervillain.

Needless to say, when you have a real person who is both less intellectual than Forrest Gump and more evil than Lex Luthor, the damage he can do is that much greater than a person can accomplish with stupidity or evil alone.

This is the issue with being an intellectual who places morality at odds with intellect. If you’re a Rod Dreher, and you’re a traditional conservative, and you have a brain, and you read history, and you know, for instance, that the decades-long oppression of Francisco Franco in Spain (in the name of ‘traditional Christianity’) led to a backlash after Franco’s death that made Catholicism less popular and socialism and secularism that much more popular, you can look at the situation here. You have led yourself to the conclusion that your culture is under siege. Your morality tells you to hate the people who hate Christianity. Your intellect tells you that Trump is a grifter and a deceiver. But Trump tells you, “These people, they’re not really after me. They’re after YOU. I’m just in the way.” And it doesn’t matter that you know how many times Trump has lied, it doesn’t matter how many times he’s been proven false, how many times Trump has failed, he’s telling you what you want to hear. He’s reaffirming what you already believe. He knows what your priorities are, and he knows how to push the right button to completely bypass your intellect. And so you march in line and follow The Leader no matter what, cause you’re convinced that once They take him out, you’re next.

The punchline, of course, is that while secular liberal culture may not have any affinity with traditional religious culture, it was not nearly so hostile to the latter as the other way around, and the secular majority didn’t have good reason to oppose the religious culture until it actively supported a politics that undermined our national security for the sake of Russia and China, undermined our economy and ended up killing 150,000 Americans and counting, cause apparently wearing a Goddamn five dollar mask is gonna get you kicked out of the Real American Patriot He-Man Woman Haters’ Club.

The result that “good Christians” fear so much has become that much more likely, probably inevitable, because of the actions they told themselves would prevent it.

The execution of stupidity as philosophy was made clear again by the now-famous interview that HBO aired for Axios between reporter Jonathan Swan and Donald Trump. Other people have described the event at least as well as I could, and it’s not like Swan’s interview told us anything we didn’t know, but there are a couple of details that matter in terms of this topic.

The first question Swan asked was where he brought up Trump’s adherence to the power of positive thinking, “the mantra that if you believe something, if you can visualize it, then it will happen.” Now Trump did say this is only true to a certain extent, and that he also has to consider the downside (which he does, in a way that causes therapists to ponder). But Swan asks if that mindset is suitable to handling the worst pandemic we’ve seen in a century. And of course, Trump just accentuates the positive, with a bunch of generalities. Swan presses that communication needs to be based in reality, and wishful thinking is insufficient.

And then there was the point where Trump defends his record on coronavirus by throwing Swan a sheaf of bar graphs and Swan looks confused, and then says, “Oh! You’re doing death as a proportion of cases, I’m talking about death as a proportion of population, and that’s where the US is really bad.” And Trump just gives him this blank, pleading stare, and goes, “You can’t DO that.” Which means, “You’re not following my terms of argument when even I don’t know what they are.”

Which goes to another point of Onkar Ghate’s article: “Closely connected to this disdain for the truth is a complete amoralism. “The normal pattern of self-appraisal,” Rand observes, “requires reference to some abstract value or virtue,” such as “I am good because I am rational” or “I am good because I am honest.” But the entire realm of abstract principles and standards is unknown to an anti-intellectual mentality. The phenomenon of judging himself by such standards, therefore, is alien. Instead, Rand argues, the “implicit pattern of all his estimates is: ‘It’s good because I like it’ — ‘It’s right because I did it’ — ‘It’s true because I want it to be true.’”

When you have no standard of judgment other than “it’s good because I like it” and no means of verifying results other than “it will be true because I wish it to be true” you get the coronavirus “policy” that is on track to kill a quarter-million people in this country by the end of the year.

Which is why Swan’s interview got so much attention from the rest of the Mainstream Media, and why it is both ultimately revelatory and ultimately meaningless. It is ultimately revelatory in that it makes clear that this country’s coronavirus policy is screwed because of the evil simpleton in charge, and it is ultimately meaningless because the reason things are screwed is because the evil simpleton in charge of coronavirus policy is not the only one who follows the philosophy of wishful thinking and anti-reason, and if he didn’t have that support base, he would have been removed by impeachment if not one of his numerous other scandals.

The problem there being that even if Trump is effectively an unaccountable King now, he still has to have a formal election before he can really rewrite the system to cement his power, but he not only needs to be re-elected to do that, he needs at least a Senate to do that, and if he doesn’t get a handle on coronavirus, both the White House and Senate are in danger due to the simple fact that the virus is ravaging the voter base in Trump states later than it did in “blue” states that the Trump Organization wrote off. Trump may be telling voters to believe him over their lying eyes, but if you’re dead, it doesn’t matter if you believe Trump or not, you can’t vote. (Remember, Illinois is a blue state.)

The real irony is that people like Ayn Rand (and me) are thought of as “Social Darwinists” because we don’t agree with liberal altruism, but that in itself is a misnomer embraced by the kind of “scientific” racists who don’t agree with species evolution. In actual Darwinism, “survival of the fittest” doesn’t mean “survival of the most fascist”, it means “survival of the species best adapted to its environment.” And since human development and civilization are more mental and social as opposed to matters of physical evolution, “social Darwinism” would really mean a process in which individuals and culture become better adapted to a changing environment. “Social Darwinists” like the current Republicans don’t believe in that Darwinism any more than the Theory of Evolution, and the end result will be that the liberal-socialist triumph they fear so much will become that much more likely. Yes, hundreds of thousands will have to die to achieve that result, but if Republicans don’t care about those people, you’d think they would care about “traditional values” and their own political careers. And if they did, you’d think that they could adapt.

An Anti-Conceptual Mentality

This is another piece composed mostly of someone else’s quotes. The following are examples of Ayn Rand’s description of the “anti-conceptual mentality.” They are all taken from the Ayn Rand Lexicon http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/anti-conceptual_mentality.html and refer to articles and books available through that site.

“The main characteristic of this mentality is a special kind of passivity: not passivity as such and not across-the-board, but passivity beyond a certain limit—i.e., passivity in regard to the process of conceptualization and, therefore, in regard to fundamental principles. It is a mentality which decided, at a certain point of development, that it knows enough and does not care to look further. What does it accept as “enough”? The immediately given, directly perceivable concretes of its background…
“To grasp and deal with such concretes, a human being needs a certain degree of conceptual development, a process which the brain of an animal cannot perform. But after the initial feat of learning to speak, a child can counterfeit this process, by memorization and imitation. The anti-conceptual mentality stops on this level of development—on the first levels of abstractions, which identify perceptual material consisting predominantly of physical objects—and does not choose to take the next, crucial, fully volitional step: the higher levels of abstraction from abstractions, which cannot be learned by imitation. (See my book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology)…
“The anti-conceptual mentality takes most things as irreducible primaries and regards them as “self-evident.” It treats concepts as if they were (memorized) percepts; it treats abstractions as if they were perceptual concretes. To such a mentality, everything is the given: the passage of time, the four seasons, the institution of marriage, the weather, the breeding of children, a flood, a fire, an earthquake, a revolution, a book are phenomena of the same order. The distinction between the metaphysical and the man-made is not merely unknown to this mentality, it is incommunicable.”

“[This type of mentality] has learned to speak, but has never grasped the process of conceptualization. Concepts, to him, are merely some sort of code signals employed by other people for some inexplicable reason, signals that have no relation to reality or to himself. He treats concepts as if they were percepts, and their meaning changes with any change of circumstances. Whatever he learns or happens to retain is treated, in his mind, as if it had always been there, as if it were an item of direct awareness, with no memory of how he acquired it—as a random store of unprocessed material that comes and goes at the mercy of chance … He does not seek knowledge—he “exposes himself” to “experience,” hoping, in effect, that it will push something into his mind; if nothing happens, he feels with self-righteous rancor that there is nothing he can do about it. Mental action, i.e., mental effort—any sort of processing, identifying, organizing, integrating, critical evaluation or control of his mental content—is an alien realm. ”

“This mentality is not the product of ignorance (nor is it caused by lack of intelligence): it is self-made, i.e., self-arrested.
“In the brain of an anti-conceptual person, the process of integration is largely replaced by a process of association. What his subconscious stores and automatizes is not ideas, but an indiscriminate accumulation of sundry concretes, random facts, and unidentified feelings, piled into unlabeled mental file folders. This works, up to a certain point—i.e., so long as such a person deals with other persons whose folders are stuffed similarly, and thus no search through the entire filing system is ever required. Within such limits, the person can be active and willing to work hard…
“A person of this mentality may uphold some abstract principles or profess some intellectual convictions (without remembering where or how he picked them up). But if one asks him what he means by a given idea, he will not be able to answer. If one asks him the reasons of his convictions, one will discover that his convictions are a thin, fragile film floating over a vacuum, like an oil slick in empty space—and one will be shocked by the number of questions it had never occurred to him to ask.”

“He seems able to understand a discussion or a rational argument, sometimes even on an abstract, theoretical level. He is able to participate, to agree or disagree after what appears to be a critical examination of the issue. But the next time one meets him, the conclusions he reached are gone from his mind, as if the discussion had never occurred even though he remembers it: he remembers the event, i.e., a discussion, not its intellectual content.
“It is beside the point to accuse him of hypocrisy or lying (though some part of both is necessarily involved). His problem is much worse than that: he was sincere, he meant what he said in and for that moment. But it ended with that moment. Nothing happens in his mind to an idea he accepts or rejects; there is no processing, no integration, no application to himself, his actions or his concerns; he is unable to use it or even to retain it. Ideas, i.e., abstractions, have no reality to him; abstractions involve the past and the future, as well as the present; nothing is fully real to him except the present. Concepts, in his mind, become percepts—percepts of people uttering sounds; and percepts end when the stimuli vanish. When he uses words, his mental operations are closer to those of a parrot than of a human being. In the strict sense of the word, he has not learned to speak.
“But there is one constant in his mental flux. The subconscious is an integrating mechanism; when left without conscious control, it goes on integrating on its own—and, like an automatic blender, his subconscious squeezes its clutter of trash to produce a single basic emotion: fear.”

“It is the fundamentals of philosophy (particularly, of ethics) that an anti-conceptual person dreads above all else. To understand and to apply them requires a long conceptual chain, which he has made his mind incapable of holding beyond the first, rudimentary links. If his professed beliefs—i.e., the rules and slogans of his group—are challenged, he feels his consciousness dissolving in fog. Hence, his fear of outsiders. The word “outsiders,” to him, means the whole wide world beyond the confines of his village or town or gang—the world of all those people who do not live by his “rules.” He does not know why he feels that outsiders are a deadly threat to him and why they fill him with helpless terror. The threat is not existential, but psycho-epistemological: to deal with them requires that he rise above his “rules” to the level of abstract principles. He would die rather than attempt it. (My emphasis)
“Protection from outsiders” is the benefit he seeks in clinging to his group. What the group demands in return is obedience to its rules, which he is eager to obey: those rules are his protection—from the dreaded realm of abstract thought.”

“Racism is an obvious manifestation of the anti-conceptual mentality. So is xenophobia—the fear or hatred of foreigners (“outsiders”). So is any caste system, which prescribes a man’s status (i.e., assigns him to a tribe) according to his birth; a caste system is perpetuated by a special kind of snobbishness (i.e., group loyalty) not merely among the aristocrats, but, perhaps more fiercely, among the commoners or even the serfs, who like to “know their place” and to guard it jealously against the outsiders from above or from below. So is guild socialism. So is any kind of ancestor worship or of family “solidarity” (the family including uncles, aunts and third cousins). So is any criminal gang.
“Tribalism … is the best name to give to all the group manifestations of the anti-conceptual mentality.”

To review: When Ayn Rand refers to this (very Randian) term, “anti-conceptual mentality”, she is describing a self-created moron. Such a person is not of medically subnormal intelligence (what used to be called ‘retarded’) but a person of at least average intelligence who deliberately does not apply it, for whom everything is an unexamined given because examination would mean taking a risk he is not willing to pursue, and thus he is almost entirely a collection of second-hand, superficial thoughts.

To say that such a person lies is actually beside the point; for lying to be meaningful to him, he would have to have some concept of truth outside what he needs at the immediate moment.

While such a mentality is not necessarily malign, it again must be distinguished from a Forrest Gump or real person with subnormal intelligence. Forrest Gump lacked abstract reasoning powers but had an intuitive morality. He tried to do the right thing to the extent that he knew how. The anti-conceptual mentality avoids going outside his prejudices because his intuition tells him he would no longer be able to do what he wants to do. Therefore he avoids not only abstract reasoning but intuition and introspection. As the phrase goes, “if you don’t know why hitting children with tear gas is wrong, I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

It is thus almost inevitable, given a certain environment, that an anti-conceptual mentality turns to negative impulses, not only racism but various other forms of hate and negative group loyalty based on “Us vs. Them”. Indeed, Rand in her day identified a mindset that is now frequently examined by liberal commentators of the recent political scene: tribalism.

Why am I invoking this particular set of quotes?
No reason.

So Much For First Principles

Nothing in democratic politics is given — or rather, the things we consider given at any moment enjoy this status for no more exalted reason than that public opinion (expressed primarily through elections) favors treating it as such. But the settlement or consensus in its favor is always temporary and contingent. The contestation of politics, the struggle over power and ideas, over the Constitution and the law and who we are as a political community, never ends. It’s always possible for a settlement or consensus at one moment of history to be rethought, overturned, or reversed. Rights granted can later be rescinded — and there’s no way to prevent that from happening beyond continuing the fight, day after day.

-Damon Linker, The Week

It’s time for me to introduce another of my personal axioms. The first was: “It is possible for two different things to be true at the same time.” The second was: “Every new president somehow lowers the bar.” The third is: There are no a priori concepts.

A priori (Latin for ‘from the prior’) is a phrase that is frequently invoked in philosophy but was popularized by Immanuel Kant in the 1781 Critique of Pure Reason. Without getting way too technical and over-involved (like Kant), the author was writing in reaction to contemporary philosophy, the one extreme being radical empiricism (example: David Hume) and the other being rationalism divorced from experience (ex: Bishop George Berkeley). While Kant asserted the reality of the material world and “experience”, philosophers ultimately count him as an idealist who distinguished knowledge gained after experience (knowledge a posteriori) from knowledge a priori, universal truths existing prior to experience of phenomena. “But although all our cognition commences with experience, yet it does not on that account all arise from experience.” Philosophers ever since have been gnawing over the merits of Kant’s work, so I don’t think people will assume that it’s easy for me to blast his thesis to bits. It seems, however, that problems can easily be deduced. For instance, in asserting “that certain cognitions even abandon the field of all possible experiences”, Kant cited as primary examples the concepts of God, Free Will and Immortality. But for these three to be truly independent and transcendent of culture and experience, they would have to be common elements in all philosophy, not just the heritage of Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian culture. In Eastern philosophy by contrast, a Supreme Being exists in Hinduism but is not necessarily inherent in Buddhism, Free Will implies a concept of self that both Hinduism and Buddhism are opposed to, and Immortality exists only in a concept of samsara, or cyclical existence and reincarnation, in which the individual comes to see the phenomenal world as futility and ultimately seeks to end the cycle rather than preserve it.

What does this have to do with anything at all?

Because in the realm of politics, Americans, specifically liberals, are acting as though certain elements of the political debate are a priori assumptions and not to be questioned. But in the above example, Kant declared that Western philosophy pointed to theism because theism was at the basis of philosophy. But if one goes outside that philosophical perspective, it becomes clear that not everyone holds those beliefs as the given.

I bring this up due to a couple of subjects.

The Atlantic magazine recently hired National Review columnist Kevin Williamson, which is in line with other controversial decisions from center-left media (like The New York Times) hiring right-wing columnists like Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens for the sake of “perspective.” The very fact of these selections is a tacit admission that the readers of such media are only getting one side of the debate. But the ink wasn’t dry on Williamson’s first Atlantic piece before liberals brought up remarks he made on a conservative podcast where he said: “And someone challenged me on my views on abortion, saying, ‘If you really thought it was a crime, you would support things like life in prison, no parole, for treating it as a homicide.’ And I do support that. In fact, as I wrote, what I had in mind was hanging.” This was known at the time, yet Williamson got hired by The Atlantic, and Thursday April 5, Williamson got fired, editor Jeffrey Goldberg declaring: “The language he used in this podcast—and in my conversations with him in recent days—made it clear that the original tweet did, in fact, represent his carefully considered views. The tweet was not merely an impulsive, decontextualized, heat-of-the-moment post, as Kevin had explained it.” (As of the 5th, Williamson’s one column is still up on the Atlantic website, where he was still listed as a staff writer.)

It was in fact another Atlantic piece that pointed to a National Review article of March 2016 where Williamson said in regard to White Working Class Trump Voters: “There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. … The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.” So I’m a bit surprised that anybody there is surprised at what they were getting.

As Reason Magazine’s Katherine Mangu-Ward says, “the underlying logic of Williamson’s position is a view shared by roughly half or at least 40 percent of Americans.” It is a position one can argue with, but the opposite (pro-abortion rights) position is not necessarily the accepted wisdom, unless you are a liberal. Mangu-Ward continues: “I have personally been the beneficiary of this doublethink on ideological diversity for years. When institutions recognize the need to have a nonliberal somewhere in their midst, they look across the landscape and discover that the closest thing to conservatism that they can tolerate is a relatively mild-mannered, young(ish), female, pro-choice libertarian. Which is to say, not a conservative at all.”

More broadly, this is part of why the abortion debate can’t be simply resolved by an appeal to logic or first principles, because the first principles of each side are radically different, as are their implications, depending on how far you want to go. As I grow older and the fragility of life becomes more obvious to me, I am more inclined towards the Catholic position, which is pro-life on both abortion AND the death penalty. Nevertheless, I have to define myself as pro-choice, because if we actually defined abortion as murder, Williamson’s posture would be less of a posture and more of a possibility.

See, Kant’s other famous idea was the thought experiment called the categorical imperative. Having eliminated the possibility of deriving truth from empirical data (or rather, asserting that it only applied to the ‘phenomenal realm’), Kant sought a device by which one could determine the morality of an action in a given situation. He defined this categorical imperative in action thus: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Translated, Kant is expecting the individual to take responsibility for every choice as an example of a universal principle.

When challenged on this by the Frenchman Benjamin Constant, who said that if lying goes against the categorical imperative, this would mean that there is a duty not to lie to a murderer seeking a target, Kant replied that (while one might simply withhold any statement and keep silent) it is nevertheless a greater duty to be truthful to the murderer than to protect a potential target: “Although in telling a certain lie, I do not actually do anyone a wrong, I formally but not materially violate the principle of right with respect to all unavoidably necessary utterances. And this is much worse than to do injustice to any particular person, because such a deed against an individual does not always presuppose the existence of a principle in the subject which produces such an act.”

This gets to the real issue with Kantian idealism. With the categorical imperative, and in a much broader respect with the Critique of Pure Reason and subsequent work, Kant was trying to act against the philosophy of “consequentialism”, and define a universal moral law that was not undermined by “self-love” or ulterior motives. Yet, to apply the categorical imperative, one has to apply consequences on the most abstract level, and limit one’s action on the principle that a particular action sets a universal example. To Kant, to lie in any circumstance is to justify lying in all circumstances, and thus the abstract consequence of violating philosophy is used to dismiss the practical consequence of making that maxim a universal.

Most people, of course, don’t think like this. Unless you’re in politics.

This in a roundabout way gets to the other topic I am thinking about.

One of the reasons that gun crime remains an issue is that every time a firearms massacre occurs, liberals can’t get the “common-sense gun safety” legislation they want, because even when it is common-sense and supported by the public (national background checks, for instance), it gets shot down in the Congress and state legislatures. This is mostly because of the NRA and its commercial priorities, but the NRA itself is representing a larger gun culture, and I would say that a huge reason for their success in resisting political pressure is that they are as inflexible in compromising gun rights as Planned Parenthood and liberal organizations are in resisting compromise on abortion rights. Just as pro-choice people resist conservative attempts to restrict abortion access as a transparent ploy towards ending abortion rights altogether, the gun lobby presents any gun control legislation as a slippery slope towards total gun prohibition.

At this point, liberals might object. We’ve established that there really are some conservatives who not only want to ban abortion but want to prosecute it as murder. But surely being anti-gun isn’t the same thing. The argument being proffered by liberals is that they aren’t trying to end gun rights, just establish proper security procedures. “Nobody’s saying we need to get rid of the Second Amendment.”

Except, some people are.

On March 27, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens attracted headlines with a New York Times column in which he stated that the only solution to gun violence was the repeal of the Second Amendment. Stevens points out that the Second Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights because of a fear that a national standing army would threaten the security of the separate states, thus the default assumption that defense was a matter for state militia. But to Stevens, “that concern is a relic of the 18^th century.” Stevens states that his concern stems from the 2008 Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v. Heller, in which he was one of four dissenters, and which he asserts “has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power.” Removing the Second Amendment, Stevens says, “would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States – unlike every other market in the world.” Blanking out of course, that by Stevens’ own argument, we’d had the Second since the signing of the Constitution, and the prior standard of its interpretation before Heller was more to his liking, and it would be much easier and more practical to appoint more justices who agreed with him than it would be to go through the whole process of amending the Constitution.

Keep in mind, when Antonin Scalia wrote his opinion in Heller, he specifically stated: “Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those ‘in common use at the time’ finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.”

Not to mention, liberals have never fussed about applying the First Amendment towards a general category of individual freedom of expression that applies far beyond 18th-century artefacts like “the press.”

All Heller did was to knock away the specious rationale that the Constitution says anything about a “collective right” that is inherent in the government and not the people. Liberals wail that Scalia’s opinion arbitrarily blew away the previous consensus on what the American legal standard of gun ownership is supposed to be, eliding the point that said standard was a precedent that did not date back to the founding documents, and is most strongly based in US vs. Miller.

Nevertheless, Stevens’ piece is worthwhile in that someone is at least approaching the matter honestly. The main fact in Stevens’ opinion was that we haven’t actually needed state militia units since the Civil War, and their domestic security purpose is effectively taken over by the National Guard. But that gets to the general point that much of the government’s “rules as written” (the Constitution) have little to do with how the US government works in practice. Challenging the Second Amendment simply forces us to admit that the government hasn’t operated according to its original principles for quite some time, but it doesn’t answer the question as to whether that is really a good thing.

For example, the Third Amendment says that the government is not allowed to quarter troops in private homes. “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” We haven’t even needed to consider this, because since the constitutional government was founded, the government has always provided for troops and had the money to do so, thus the option has never been necessary. That being the case, why do we still need the Third Amendment?

Because, we all know that if we didn’t have the Third Amendment, Republicans would force wealthy Democrats to quarter troops on their property so they could raid the defense budget for their personal vacations.

This is why it doesn’t help liberals to say that “the Constitution is a living document.” Because if “conservatives” press their current advantage, and get multiple justices on the Supreme Court, they could repeal Roe v. Wade, or Brown v. Board of Education. And at that point, asserting that the Constitution is a “living document” won’t sound quite so cute.

So this is what I’m getting at: First, Immanuel Kant sucks. But that’s not directly relevant. Secondly, we do not all share the same first principles, which is made clear by American political history in general and the current trend of politics in particular. Third, even beyond first principles, the real reason that liberals and conservatives can’t trust each other these days is that they both assume the worst of each other when they get into power. Which is eminently justified.