Posted By BillHeise on October 24, 2009

I voted for Obama in the last election. I would do it again. But I voted for him despite my recognition of some of his weaknesses. The chief of these is that he is an academic liberal (as opposed to a NASCAR-watching farmer or an entrepreneur working in “flyover country”). This means he tends to have two incompatible things going on in his mind.

Incompatible Goals

First, he tends to draw people into distinct groups along the lines of Hegel. This leads to an us-or-them mentality. Some people are slaves; others are masters (so Hegel). Some people at the center of the universe, and others are at the margins (so Nietzsche). But this goes back farther than Hegel and Nietzsche. It is omnipresent in any system in which people operate under the auspices of reason.

In America today, we have a situation like this. On the right, we have Rush Limbaugh on the radio, columnists like Ann Coulter, and Fox News. On the Left, we have a preponderance of academics, columnists like Thomas Freedman, and on television we have MSNBC.

Obama’s attempt to demonize Fox News tells me that he is too committed to his liberal point of view, despite his promises in the campaign to work across the aisle. He is not taking his opposition seriously. The same promise was made and broken by George W. Bush. So I don’t really think that broken promises matter in the end. But this does not mean that it won’t hurt Obama, just as it hurt George W. Bush, and for many of the same reasons.

As an academic liberal, he tends to feel that perfection is more possible within the world than it actually is. The academic mindset feels the need to expand our minds from our closed, provincial point of view to a more open point of view in which we embrace all cultures, not just our own. Nothing wrong with that, but this belief may not be borne out in reality.

The Fight for the Middle

The practical solution to this problem would be to meet in the middle. But in actual practice, people on the left think that conservatives should compromise their position, while people on the right think that people should compromise their position. In the end, there is no middle on which these two incompatible views of the world can meet. Each thinks the other party is not flexible enough. The other party is set in its ways. Not us, them.

This is where enemies come into the idealist’s picture of the world. If there’s nothing wrong with my view of the world, it must be the other guy’s fault. So from the left, we get people demonizing people on the right. From the right, we get people demonizing people on the left. The middle ground has been lost in this debate.

But the solution is not to go to the middle. The existence of the middle is something that has been proposed by idealism. And it may not be real. Nietzsche can say that only people on the margins have insight into the world, but  who can say where the margins are. The whole puzzle is set up to have parties on one side of the barrier demonize parties on the other side, but no one questions the configuration of the problem itself.

The Fight for the Truth

The solution is not to focus on the margins or the middle. It is to focus on the truth. In our cultural model, some cultures are worse than others. Some torture; others allow people their freedom. We want to maximize our embrace of the true forms of government, rather than embracing all forms of government, good and bad.

And this is exactly what people do. But this, too, is not without its problems. Rush Limbaugh says that he is focused on the truth, and so does Senator (and former radio talk show host) Al Franken. The problem is that there is no one truth that we can go to resolve these questions. There never will be. The best we can do is to demonize the other faction.

Middles, Margins, and Truths in Philosophical Systems

This picture of the playing field of ideas is rife in philosophy. Roger Scruton is a noted conservative philosopher. He wrote in his book The Meaning of Conservatism that we need to play the game within the rules. He’s right is a sense, but his view doesn’t give enough room for those who delight in breaking the rules, forming new (and they would argue better) games.

Such rule-breakers are thinkers who realized that the boundaries of the game are not set in stone. However, the breaking of rules for its own sake tends to be a pointless activity without some goal. It is, of course, possible to get the ball and throw it into the stands rather than running it down to the goal at the end of the stadium, but this does not mean that one behavior is better than another. It simply means that there are differences in the universe of free choice.

If we take away free choice, we can order our universe in any way we want to. This has been tried by Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao (hero to Obama advisor Anita Dunn) with mixed results at best. The Chinese gotten over their obsession with Chairman Mao. The Russians are flirting with Stalin nostalgia. The Chinese economy is doing well; the Russian not so much. Obama and his circle are still trapped in the academic-idealist paradigm.

The same structure that holds the academic and idealistic view of the world together holds Obama’s view of government together. All we have to do is to give up our parochial and narrow governmental structures for a more perfect world government. The problem is not that perfect government is not possible. It is simply that those evil (choose one: a) Republicans b) Democrats) are standing in the way.

The Fall of the Medieval Church

This is akin to what the papacy attempted to do in the high Middle Ages. The popes inherited a system in which power was distributed through various states. Kings had the power to invest bishops, rather than a centralized papacy. This meant that quite often bishops were being appointed who had little or no knowledge of the Bible and had not the Latin to read it.

The papacy went to war with the nations (including France, England, and the Holy Roman Empire) for control of the right to invest bishops. This is known as the Investiture Struggle. The papacy ended up winning that struggle.

My experience studying the Middle Ages is that, as soon as the papacy tried to strengthen the centralized government, the forces arrayed against them became greater as well.The French embraced the notion of a worldly government, as opposed to the spiritual power of the papacy. The Germans also went to war with the papacy, and ultimately their unhappiness with the papacy grew into open revolt (the Reformation). The English gave us thinkers like William of Ockam and ultimately followed suit with their own Reformation. So the power center from which the papacy operated was reduced to a narrow band, just as Boniface VIII decreed that the nations had no power to invest bishops (Unam Sanctum). The Pope could say anything he wanted. The reality was that his words had no bearing on the actual situation he faced.

The Smartest Guys in the Room

It’s not that the popes weren’t right to strengthen the loose configuration of states into a stronger centralized government. They solved the problem of having bishops who did not know the Bible. But the goal of medieval thought was to perfect the failing state. In such a system there has to be a scapegoat because the world cannot be perfected.

Both the American system and the papal system which aggregated the Church’s dissipated power in the Middle Ages are systems in which the smartest people are in charge. On the whole, this has a good effect on the world. Dante was an educated man, not a peasant; and he managed to give us a picture of the world that a lesser man could never have conceived of. Dante emerged from this clash, in which he was tossed about and exiled from the city, to write the greatest masterpiece of Middle Ages: The Divine Comedy. This, most of us agree, was a good thing.

Moreover, his city, Florence, was between two superpowers: the world of the papacy in the south and the world of France and the Holy Roman Empire to the north. From the clash between these two forces, the modern world emerged in Florence, not by individuals taking sides in that debate, but by the inability of reason to resolve these two conflicting claims. We recognize this still is progress today, and we would not want to go back to a less rational state.

But there deleterious effects of having rational men in charge. The problem with smart people is that they do not recognize the limits of reason. Rather than facing their own insignificance in the world, they tend to point fingers at others and say that if not for them I could perfect the world.

This is what Obama is doing with Fox News. It won’t work. I hope that Obama will realize this before he destroys his shrinking coalition even further.

Categories: In the News, Philosophy
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