True Lies

Immanuel Kant is a philosopher who is easily parodied as the one who thought people should tell the truth in all circumstances, no matter what, because only in that way would a person be treating himself and those he was talking to as full human beings. You should even reveal the whereabouts of a friend to the murderer who comes to your door asking where your friend is. Kant had obviously never heard of the Gestapo.

Not so fast. Kant's depiction of moral life makes sense if we compare his description of true lies—lies that are truly lies—with something else that is closely akin to true lies: white lies, the kinds of things people do all the time and which are regarded as necessary evasions that help move life along without doing great damage to our stature as moral beings. Consider the following examples of white lies that are drawn not from fiction but from social transactions in which I was myself involved.

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Opinions on the Current Demonstrations

Opinion is a burden. If I have an opinion about something, whether a Presidential candidate, or when is the right time to reopen the economy, or whether the protesters in the street are correct even though looting is going on under the cover of protest, then I am responsible for saying why that is plausible to me or even just feel the emotion that goes along with the opinion and so attest to the validity of that insight even if I cannot explain it. Time can tell whether my opinion was correct or not and so an opinion is a forecast, as when one says bad people receive their just deserts, even if proof or refutation is never unambiguous. I am rooting for the future to be one way or another, to support or negate my opinion, and so I am always, as an opinionator, making a gamble on the future and that can render me tense, because I could be wrong about the future, while to be liberated from opinion means that I do not have to worry about the future. I can just watch it play out, proceed as it will, me a bystander rather than a participant. Being without opinions is therefore to no longer carry everywhere Kant’s burden of responsibility, life one set of obligations after another, even if there are also judgments of taste that people also make, but those have no cost, in that whether you prefer Schiller to Lessing makes no difference unless you mix with a set of people who think taste has a moral gravity. Rather, to be without opinion is to leave to history and, more directly, the knowledge of experts, how to proceed from here. They will know when to open up the economy if anyone knows because it is a technical matter rather than a moral one or open to everyday reason, and the unfolding statistics will tell if they are wrong or right. As a citizen, I am entitled to my opinions, but they are relevant only at election time or when a profound change of group opinion takes place, as happens when people may, now, at this moment, come to think that occasional instances of police brutality are not to be swept aside but are perhaps part of the continued subjugation of black people.

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The Essential Forces

What is the fundamental process that governs social or physical existence? This is a very old sounding question in that the Greeks wondered which of the four elements predominated in the makeup of the world. Was it air, fire, earth or wind? And, later on in the ancient world, there was a search for the greatest good, the most perfect emotion. Was it stoicism or cynicism or pleasure? Far from being put away, this same question crops up in modern thought. When I was a graduate student, people discussed whether Hobbes had found out the true secret of social life, that the fundamental force was violence; that was what guaranteed social order and so economic forces and other social forces paled in comparison with the ability of violence to dominate the scene. Hobbes had discovered not invented a solution, never mind that Hobbes thought reason rather than violence governed human interaction or that violence is useful under certain conditions but that under other circumstances money and prestige are more important motivators. People die for their country for a reason and arms merchants are motivated by greed. Violence is useful only when there is anarchy in the air or when there is foreign invasion or there is a crime of passion.

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Living in the Past

A number of old fogies, including me, were lined up in front of the steam tables at a Chicago cafeteria (“Mannie’s”, for those of you in the know) a few days ago when the first guy on the line, an old, thin, stooped, Black dude with very few teeth, started inquiring about what was in stuffed derma and what was the difference between corned beef and pastrami, apologizing to the rest of us for making us wait, we returning the good humor by remarking that we were all old and retired and so had nothing else to do but kill time. I, on the other hand, was listening with my inner ear to the counterman, wondering whether he would say something condescending or dismissive to the old black man. Would he act as if the customer should have known what the different products were? Would he be annoyed that the oldster was holding up the line? No, he just described the cuisine in a chatty and goodhumored manner. I, however, was looking to hear something from fifty years ago, which would then have been seen as an expression of prejudice and would today be called an example of “microaggression”. That places me. I am still conscious of the feelings I had at the time of the Civil Rights Movement and so the lack of hostility by the counterman was a sign of how far we had all come even if I could not get over noticing how far we had come.

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Three Kinds of Knowledge

I used to tell my students that I would carefully label the three kinds of knowledge I would offer them so that they could make up their own minds about how much they could trust to what I said. The first kind of knowledge I would offer would be consensus knowledge, which is what all experts in a field would attest to. An example of that in sociology is the general belief among sociologists that immigrant groups assimilate into American society within two to five generations of arriving on these shores. That is different from what happens in Indonesia, for example, where three separate groups-- the original Polynesians, the Muslims and the Chinese-- have coexisted in a three tiered caste system for hundreds and hundreds of years. The second kind of knowledge I would offer is where there is a strong difference of opinion, contending sides, in an intellectual debate. That kind of knowledge is represented by the debate over what are the causes of continued poverty in the Black community. There is one school of thought that poverty is the result of cultural forces. Poor people got that way because of historical conditions but by this time have internalized dysfunctional relationships and so poor people are overcome by anger, poor child raising habits, inadequate family life, and other cultural forces that make it difficult for people to compete in a market economy or simply to hold down jobs. The alternative hypothesis is that the continuing social structures which engulf people are the forces that keep people from prospering. There are not enough men in Black urban areas to go around so as to provide young women with partners to set up stable families. That is because young men who might otherwise settle down are either dead or in prison. The two theories converge in that one can be a precursor of the other but they are still distinct in that the causal factors are independent of one another. The third kind of knowledge, I offered, was my own educated judgment, something not shared by other sociologists, but a point for which I thought I could make a good case. An example of that was when I argued that the reason Black poverty from the Sixties on was not better dealt with was that LBJ’s War on Poverty did not deal with male unemployment but rather with providing benefits for women who had to raise children without the benefit of a spouse. During the New Deal, there had been work programs for Appalachian white youth. There were no such programs for Black male youth a generation later. Some sociologists have caught up with this view in recent years.

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Wendy Brown's "Neoliberalism"

Political theory in the Twenty-First Century is very old fashioned because it engages in the kind of theorizing that took place in the Nineteenth Century, when Marxism was in vogue. That means that Wendy Brown, among others, is still mired in the attempt to separate illusion from reality, the ruling classes and the working class engaged in a dialogue whereby the ruling class is trying to foist upon the workers and the poor a distorted view of their real economic condition. For Marx, that meant that religion served as an opiate of the people. Racist ideology and a moronic popular culture would also serve as ways to keep the poor, the working class, and even part of the middle class, from recognizing the true root of the evils that befell them, which was a social structure controlled, as the contemporary argot has it, by the upper one-percent of the population.  Ideology and cultural superstructure keep the exploitative economic and social system in place. 

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The High Victorian and The Late Victorian

The Victorian period shares the characteristics that mark other cultural periods. It lasts about fifty years, in its case from the accession of Victoria to the throne in 1840 to the performance in London in 1893 of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome”, so different in texture from the melodrama and sanctimonious morality of Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray”, which had appeared earlier in the year, and so illustrates another characteristic of periods, which is that periods come to abrupt ends and beginnings. (Queen Victoria herself lingered on until 1901.) A cultural period also has a set of themes that are unifying among the various arts of literature and painting and drama, which in the case of the Victorian means the fate of the individual in the complex world of the city and in the midst of an industrialized landscape, every person both ambitious to make their own way and also alienated from what seems emotionally unsatisfying about generally accepted customs and overly rigorous laws, as that is exemplified by both Oliver Twist and Jean Valjean. A cultural period is also international in scope in that all the nations of Europe and North America are part of it even if it is known in France as the era of Pre-Impressionism and Impressionism in honor of the central role of painting in French culture during those years. A cultural period is also dominated by certain cultural forms, and in the Victorian that means the novel and grand opera, both of which are sprawling affairs, employing plots and subplots wherein often outrageously individual characters play out their lives against the background of a richly imagined society. Think of “Great Expectations”, “The Count of Monte Cristo”, and “Rigoletto”. 

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Language and Reason

There are two extreme ways by which to understand the relation of language to reality. One is to think of language as a representation of reality and in that case, as Bertram Russell put it, a well formed, which means grammatical, proposition is always either true or false because it cannot but be an assertion about reality. That allows for a lot of badly formed propositions, those to be regarded as not much more than nonsense, of no use to the speakers. A professor of mine, a pragmatist, took this view, when he held that what most literary critics were doing when they talked about symbols or what sociologists were doing when they spoke about norms, was just mumbo-jumbo, sounds without meaning, because they could not give clear definitions of their basic terms. Most exercises in language should simply be dismissed as nonsense, however sincere the speakers. It should be remembered that even Aristotle, who supposed that most argument was rhetorical in that it was aimed at winning over people to a leader by persuading them in ways that would appeal to them, still imagined that those forms of persuasion were made up mostly of deformed or short circuited logic, a leap of inference required to get from one place to another. Even tyrants sounded somewhat logical.

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Death is Unjust

Death is supposed to be just. It is part of life and therefore not to be feared. That is why the quote from Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for everything: a time to live and a time to die”, is interpreted to mean that thee is a balance in life so that what is made has to be unmade, when what Ecclesiastes is saying is simply that sometimes one thing happens and sometimes another and that there is no use getting all that bothered about it. The mistaken conception is brought closer to our own era when William Hazlitt wrote in 1815 that when people died they were prepared to die. Maybe he thought that because the people he knew who had died had suffered from long term debilitating illnesses which left them with ever less energy and concentration so that death was both a blessing and the continuation of a downward spiral which was inevitable, making a person into a different person from the one they had been when they had been actively engaged with life.  

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Foreground and Background

One aspect of our existential situation is that people are sometimes involved in their own histories and sometimes they are not. Sometimes we are actors in our lives and our circumstances as when we take on a new job or act as a Good Samaritan and sometimes we are bystanders, as when we experience technological unemployment or notice what is happening in a Presidential race. Sometimes we shift our focus, and so we are drafted into the Army because of Pearl Harbor and yet the story of ourselves as soldiers is so profound that the war is a story of all those G. I.’s. who make up the Greatest Generation, each one of them to be immortalized as the doers who brought World War II to its righteous conclusion. This alternative between being at the heart of a story or on the periphery of a story is such a fundamental feature of human existence that we are not aware of the importance and pervasiveness of the distinction even as It is a distinction that we cannot do without if we want to grasp what happens in life and what life itself consists of, just as we can not easily grasp what it would be to be a creature in heaven that had no physical being, just a spiritual being, and so not subject to respiration or the feel of the breeze on our cheeks. A good way to get some sense of this distinct characterization of every human being as caught up, somehow, in his or her history, is to treat it as a version of what can be more readily understood in art as the distinction between foreground and background, which is not just a convention of art but a characteristic of life recognized by art with perhaps greater accuracy than is true in literature or philosophy. 

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Writing History and Living History

There is something profoundly different in these two things: the activity of writing history and the activity of living within history. Sorting out the differences between the two sheds light on the more abstract issue of the difference between living in the mind and living in existence, which is a question as old as philosophy, what with Socrates having maintained that the demands of the two were quite different: mind requiring unrelenting criticism, even if it earns scorn from those not engaged in the pursuits of the mind, while life itself required obedience, even to the drinking of hemlock. Let’s bring the dispute up to date.

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Truth in Politics

During the late Nineteenth Century, Gottlob Frege said that every sentence was a proposition in that a truth value could be attached to it. That meant that every sentence (except those that were obviously just for emphasis, like “Ugh!”) was either objectively true or not. The blue unicorn is there behind you or he isn’t. One can quibble about whether this is only true of sentences with Western grammatical constructions, but the point is telling about English and associated languages. It is not far from that to Bertrand Russell’s theory of definite description, which said, at the turn into the Twentieth Century, that every sentence says about its object that the object exists. The blue unicorn exists even if only as a figment of your imagination. That is perhaps the high point of the philosophical view that language could be reduced to the same thing as science: a set of assertions that could be put to the test of their truth because what else was there? All statements were either true or nonsense. There is no place in that sense of language for metaphor or symbol.

The way around this is to notice that while it may be the case that, strictly speaking, sentences are true or not, that often is not what people find interesting about them. If I hear gossip, I care less about whether it is true or not than about the images it puts in my mind to contemplate. Yes, I might wonder if the rumor that JFK had an affair with Marilyn Monroe is really true, but it is the contemplation of that rumor which is intriguing, and so I remember her singing a sexy version of “Happy Birthday” to Jack at a birthday party given for him. Language, in fact, has many ways of qualifying a truth claim so that it is a sort of truth where the truth of the matter is not really central. Look at some contemporary political examples of the ways language can evade or easily satisfy the demands of truth.

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Pragmatic Morals

There are three major theories that are used in the contemporary world to explain how to decide what a person should do when confronted with a moral dilemma such as that presented by abortion. The first is the theory of obligation that is identified with Immanuel Kant and it is the theory that people often identify as containing the essence of all moral argument. The second is the Utilitarian theory identified with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The third is the pragmatic theory, which has John Dewey and Richard Rorty as its standard bearers. That is to put aside the outlier moral theory of C. E. Moore, who identified moral taste as somewhat the equivalent of aesthetic taste, or the ancient theories that tried to assess moral life as the exercise of an emotion, a singular one serving as the greatest good, as in the case of Epictetus, who saw the best course in life as the cultivation of resignation, or morality consisting of the long list of emotions that Aristotle dazzlingly reduced to a formula whereby the Golden Mean between two extreme emotions was the right emotion for people to pursue. The three major theories of the modern world do not provide a way to choose between them but they do provide distinct forms of reasoning for people to choose between.

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