UP@NIGHT

April 26, 2009.  The United States declared a public health emergency today.   Although it appears that no one has died or become seriously ill in the U.S. from a new strain of the swine flu, health officials are taking no chances.  All of the traditional measures to combat epidemics have been set in motion.   Funds will be made available for anti-viral drugs, and time-tested and effective methods for tracking and preventing the spread of disease will be utilized.  The CDC (Center for Disease Control) is reassuring the public, citing its decades of experience in handling epidemics and its recent preparation for pandemics.

However, former Vice President Cheney, through a spokesman, is calling on the CDC to avoid thinking within the box in deciding on measures to halt this attack on our nation.  “We can’t afford not to act with every means available to us,” said his spokesman.   Inside the CDC there is mounting pressure to consult with agents from the CIA to examine how harsh interrogation techniques might be of service.  With fear mounting and pressure growing, expert legal advice is being sought in order to provide the proper “legal cover” for actions that international agreements have outlawed as torture.

“Look,” said a representative from the former VP’s office, “you gotta do what you gotta do.  There are swine out there who, or I should say, that are dangerous.  We need to know what, where, and when.”   The plan seems to be to find the pigs that are harboring the terrorist virus, and apply harsh techniques, torture if you will, in order force them to provide operational intelligence.

There has been some concern that the swine won’t talk.  But everyone should know that swine are among the most intelligent animals, according to experts in covert intelligence.   A spokesperson for the CDC insists that with proper guidance, waterboarding a pig is possible, and it will get the animal to talk, and talk fast.  (He then handed this reporter a copy of Animal Farm.)

Questioned about violating the rights of these animals, a Cheney spokesman said, “What’s the difference?  Whether it’s a human animal or an animal animal.  If it attacks you, or if you believe that it might possibly attack, you go after it.”  There was little response to a question directed to Cheney himself  (as he was walking his dog) by one reporter, “What about all of the innocent pigs, for example, the three little ones, that were just minding their business, trying to build lives for themselves?”  Cheney did say that if we could apply harsh techniques to the virus itself, we would.  But since we don’t have the technical means to do so, as many of the swine as possible gotta be boarded.

Asked to comment, The White House declined, claiming that as an inanimate object it had little to say.   Although a spokesman for the President did say that if the tactics were forward-looking enough, and did not constitute a threat to his domestic agenda, he might be able to get his team behind the CDC.  In any case, no CDC employee will be prosecuted for actions deemed acceptable by agency lawyers.

A spokesperson for the Humane Society claimed to be too upset to return this reporter’s call.

We have all wondered how the financial wizards down on Wall Street managed to help tank the economy.  No doubt creative accounting played a substantial role.   This clip will explain to you, in a straightforward and easily accessible fashion, just how simple creative accounting can be.

America, land of opportunity, where hard work and merit determines who gets ahead.   A nation where a good education, the gateway to success, is available to all.

Not so fast, I’m afraid.   America is actually losing ground in providing access to college.   And disparities in income are responsible.   How bad is the situation?  It seems that, “bright and focused kids from poor families are going to college at the same rate as unfocused or low-scoring kids from families much better off.” This quotation is from a recent piece by Andrew Delbanco, “The Universities in Trouble,” in The New York Review of Books.  It’s worth a read.  Here is an excerpt.

But the public–private partnership that did much to democratize American higher education has been coming apart. In 1976, federal Pell grants for low-income students covered 72 percent of the average cost of attending a four-year state institution; by 2003, Pell grants covered only 38 percent of the cost. Meanwhile, financial aid administered by the states is being allocated more and more on the basis of “merit” rather than need—meaning that scholarships are going increasingly to high-achieving students from high-income families, leaving deserving students from low-income families without the means to pay for college.

In 2002, a federal advisory committee issued a report, aptly entitled “Empty Promises,” which estimated that “more than 400,000 students nationally from families with incomes below $50,000″ met the standards of college admission “and yet were unable to enroll in a four-year college because of financial barriers. More than 160,000 of these students did not attend any college because of these barriers, not even a two-year institution.” Two years later one leading authority pointed out that “the college-going rates of the highest-socioeconomic-status students with the lowest achievement levels is the same level as the poorest students with the highest achievement levels.”[1] In short, bright and focused kids from poor families are going to college at the same rate as unfocused or low-scoring kids from families much better off.

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1. Donald E. Heller quoted in Paul Attewell and Davd E. Lavin, Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations? (Russell Sage Foundation, 2007), p. 199; Donald E. Heller, “A Bold Proposal: Increasing College Access Without Spending More Money,” Crosstalk, Fall 2004; and Brian K. Fitzgerald and Jennifer A. Delaney, “Educational Opportunity in America,” Condition of Access: Higher Education for Lower Income Students, edited by Donald E. Heller (ACE/Praeger, 2002).

Owl look alike, Owl, and Twain

Benjamin Franklin famously declared, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”  Yet it appears that Mark Twain was on target in challenging Franklin’s maxim with George Washington’s response, “I don’t see it.”

Empirical study has confirmed that there is no inherent benefit in being an early riser.  As a matter of fact, night owls, those whose circadian clocks are set so that they are more alert later in the day, are penalized by a folk wisdom (Franklin’s) that is simply false.  This is a more serious issue than you might think.   Imagine, and I am speaking here to you “early risers,” if you were forced by the expectations of friends, bosses, and colleagues to rise by, say, 1:00 AM day after day.   So that to get a good night’s rest, you would have to fall asleep (and stay asleep) by 5:00 in the afternoon.  This parallels what is asked of night owls, that is, to fall asleep and wake up hours before their bodies are ready.  This at minimum leads night owls to work at less than their optimum (and in some leads to an unending battle with sleep deprivation).

Leon Kreitzman does an excellent job summarizing research and insight into differences in sleep patterns in today’s New York Times.   As a night owl, I want to thank him for his efforts.   Here is an excerpt.

“Guest Column: Larks, Owls and Hummingbirds”

This evening/morningness is less a matter of choice than of genetics. Being bright-eyed and raring to go first thing in the morning is not just a case of how much sleep someone has had, nor is it a reflection of willpower. Genes may largely determine it.

It might be envy on my part, but those early-rising larks I have known have often seemed to my bleary early-morning eye to adopt a smug moral superiority based on Benjamin Franklin’s maxim, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” But there is no basis for Franklin’s claim. Catharine Gale and Christopher Martyn of Southampton University followed up a 1973 survey that had included data on sleeping habits. More than 20 years later they found no evidence among the survivors that following Franklin’s advice was associated with any health, socioeconomic or cognitive advantage.

If anything, owls were wealthier than larks, though there was no difference in their health or wisdom. Gale and Martyn wryly offer the thought that “it seems that owls need not worry that their way of life carries adverse consequences. However, those who cite Franklin’s maxim to encourage their children to go to bed early may wish to consider whether their practice is entirely ethical.”

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UPDATE, May 7th, 2009   I recently read about a study that suggested those who slept in the day were more likely to develop a condition that preceded hardening of the arteries.  However, as far as I could tell, the study did not make any distinction between night owls and those who are forced to work at night, but who are actually day people.  If I can locate the research, I will post it.

The last two posts on UP@NIGHT have addressed the issue of torture.  Today we learn, according to a New York Times article, that incompetence and ignorance led the Bush administration down the path of torture.  The article is a must read.  There is an excerpt below.  I will say that it raises as many questions as it answers; for example. how could the moral imagination and understanding of our leaders be so impoverished that they were prepared simply to heed the words of so-called experts, without asking probing questions and paying attention to what could be called common sense?  (I mean, certain actions seem like torture….it doesn’t take a rocket scientist.)  Or how about, are the proposed “harsh” methods really as reliable as other methods?  (Opinions from different camps were called for.  But instead the advice our leaders wanted to hear, “we’ll get quick results,” was all that was needed to give the green light.)

Of course further investigation may reveal that they were not as ignorant as this article suggests.  Time will tell.

In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use (excerpt)

By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: April 21, 2009
WASHINGTON — The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

The New York Times reports the following comments by Cheney in reaction to Obama’s release of the Bush administration memos defending acts of torture:

As the debate escalated, Mr. Cheney weighed in, saying that if the country is to judge the methods used in the interrogations, it should have information about what was obtained from the tough tactics.

“I find it a little bit disturbing” that “they didn’t put out the memos that showed the success of the effort,” Mr. Cheney said on Fox News. “There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity.”  ”Pressure Grows to Investigate Interrogations,”  April 20, 2009,

Leaving aside the fact that experts in the field have consistently challenged the utility of torture, leaving aside the fact that we could have gotten more information through alternative methods of interrogation, and leaving aside the fact that by torturing prisoners we increase the chances that our own soldiers will be tortured, what Cheney’s comments reveal is the poverty of the ethical imagination of the Bush administration.

Yes, there are good arguments to be made for taking into consideration consequences in judging whether acts are ethical.  There is a whole philosophical tradition built around this notion, Utilitarianism.  However, the idea that we can justify torture based on “the success” of the method, which presumably means the successful gathering of intelligence, is precisely what every declaration of human rights, including the Geneva Convention, repudiates.  (As does every form of sophisticated Utilitarianism.)

Imagine if I said, let’s rape prisoners in order to get the information that we need.  No decent human being would tolerate this as a legitimate means of gathering information.  Rape is a basic violation of the dignity and integrity of another human being.   It’s horrific to think that governments might write legal briefs defending rape on the grounds that it produced information that they needed.  Yet, how different is torture from rape?  It too is a basic violation of the dignity and integrity of another human being.  If one thinks about what the act of torture does to another human being (and what it does to the torturer), it can be viewed as a form of rape, just as rape can be understood as a form of torture.  Nevertheless, the Bush administration’s lawyers wrote legal opinions defending acts that time and again have been labeled torture.

So, here is my suggestion in response to Cheney.  When he says, “There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity,” replace the last part of the sentence, “There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of raping human beings.” Now, tell me whether anyone who is even moderately ethical, or anyone who wants to defend the ideals for which this country stands, would be willing to utter such a sentence?  But this is in fact a sentence that follows from Cheney’s crude consequentialism.

Cheney is a clever but hopelessly thoughtless man, who was part of a thoughtless administration.  He still doesn’t understand how much damage he did to this country in his efforts to protect us.   (And let’s not forget, his methods aren’t even good ones in terms of protecting the country.)

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UPDATE, April 22:  Former FBI supervisory agent discusses recent claims about the effectiveness of torture.

“My Tortured Decision” (excerpt)

By ALI SOUFAN,  April 22, 2009, The New York Times

FOR seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned.

One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence….

Obama is to be commended for releasing the memos on torture from Bush administration officials.  He met stiff resistance from those who thought we would be safer if we hid our dirty laundry, which in fact most of the world is already well aware of.  On the other hand, Obama has been rightly challenged for his refusal to support the investigation of those who actually did the torturing.  Yet it can be argued that the release of the documents will, in the end, help to create the political will to go after the Justice Department officials who lent their legal “counsel” to rationalizing torture.  One can only hope that this is Obama’s strategy and that he did not actually mean what he said:  we must let the past go in order to move ahead.  (This could well be Obama’s Achilles heal, that is, he may actually be too future directed.  There is more to be said here, and I hope to say it in future blogs.)

However, Obama’s middle ground—release the memos but let the small fry torturers go in order to sustain morale at the CIA—simply cannot be sustained in the face of today’s newspaper headlines, if they prove true.  What we are talking about here is not a few isolated instances of torture.  We are talking about a veritable house of horrors.  Here is an excerpt from The New York Times:

“Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects”

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: April 19, 2009

C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

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An editorial in  Sunday’s NY Times took a position that I had been willing to support, although uncomfortably, because I wanted to give the administration a chance to act.  Here is an excerpt from this editorial:

At least Mr. Obama is not following Mr. Bush’s example of showy trials for the small fry — like Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib notoriety. But he has an obligation to pursue what is clear evidence of a government policy sanctioning the torture and abuse of prisoners — in violation of international law and the Constitution.

That investigation should start with the lawyers who wrote these sickening memos, including John Yoo, who now teaches law in California; Steven Bradbury, who was job-hunting when we last heard; and Mr. Bybee, who holds the lifetime seat on the federal appeals court that Mr. Bush rewarded him with.

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We should indeed start with these characters.  But we cannot take off the table the possibility that once an investigation begins, those who engaged in clearly defined acts of torture will face prosecution.  For example, if it turns out that same CIA agents were involved in, say, over a 100 episodes of waterboarding of the same individual, it would defy the rule of law to simply turn our backs and repeat the mantra,  he (or she) was only following orders.  There are limits to the “coverage” that so-called legal authorization provides.  Certain acts are beyond the pale even if your superiors appear to authorize them.

Yes, we can not live in the past.  But we cannot use “moving forward” as an excuse to avoid facing criminal acts done in our name.  And quite frankly, I don’t think that we want these individuals working for the CIA.   No one is that irreplaceable.   We can find good people whose boundaries are more properly in place.  There are plenty of them altready in the CIA.

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UPDATE, April 20/21.  The New York Times is running a piece in today’s paper (April 21st) that addresses the issue of whether we can walk away from what has taken place.

“Pressure Grows to Investigate Interrogations”

The article begins:

WASHINGTON — Pressure mounted on President Obama on Monday for more thorough investigation into harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects under the Bush administration, even as he tried to reassure the Central Intelligence Agency that it would not be blamed for following legal advice.

Mr. Obama said it was time to admit “mistakes” and “move forward.” But there were signs that he might not be able to avoid a protracted inquiry into the use of interrogation techniques that the president’s top aides and many critics say crossed the line into torture.

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UPDATE, April 21, 2009.  The New York Times is now reporting that Obama is not closing the door on investigating the actions of the lawyers who defended Bush’s terrorism policies.  He is still opposed to prosecuting CIA operatives.

“Obama Open to Inquiry in Interrogation Abuses”

The article suggests a significant change in the public face that the Obama administration is putting on the prospect of an investigation in just the last 24 hours.  Let’s see how this plays out in the next few weeks (and months).   If a special prosecutor is appointed or if Congress actually gets moving, it’s possible that we could see some sort of action taken against not only Bush’s lawyers, but those who committed the most outrageous acts of torture.  (Although I am not holding my breath.)

Adam Smith, on the left, looks through Brooks, while Hegel, on the right, can only think, “Oy.”

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Poor David Brooks.  You just never know when he is going to get in over his head, and neither does he.  One can only marvel at some of the “out of left” field claims and arguments that he has made, while continuing to present himself as the most reasonable man on the planet.  Don’t get me wrong.  It’s hard to dislike the guy, with his schoolboy enthusiasms and his deferential comments about the brains (specifically, the high SAT scores) of the members of the new administration.  And you have to prefer him to Rush.

But sometimes in his desire to show off and create a splash he goes too far.  Yesterday, April 7, 2009, was just such a day.  Brooks entitled his column in the NY Times, “The End of Philosophy.”  If that wasn’t pretentious enough, he then proceeded to tell us how philosophers have spent 2,500 years barking up the wrong tree because scientists have now discovered connections between morality and emotion.  (As if this is not an old topic, even in Ethics 101.)

Well, I couldn’t resist a quick response, and it appears that neither could hundreds of others.  I am reproducing my comments here (unedited) because it seems that they were recommended by good number of readers, and well, you know, one can never pass up an opportunity to knock David’s books out of his hands, figuratively speaking, that is.  His article, The End of Philosophy, is a wonderful example of what happens when one goes into the water before one knows how to swim, believing that one doesn’t have to learn.  (Just act naturally.)  I recommend it to instructors of philosophy (and writing) as a useful classroom tool.  Don’t do as David does, or else….  I recommended it to everyone else as a rewarding screamer.

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David,

Oy. I think that we need to talk. I am afraid that you are practicing philosophy without a license, which is okay, up to a point. (First rule: do no harm.) What is striking is how consistent you have been over the years in basically holding to a view of morality that Adam Smith and his followers would fine congenial, especially on cooperation. And then presenting from time to time “new insights” that support this position. (The notion that sympathy is the foundation of our moral sensibilities is certainly a feature of this school.) The one place where this School would have let you down in the past (that is, before you discovered emotion) was your desire to believe that Reason (with a capital R) can be depended on for moral guidance. (More on this below.)

I hope that you will not be offended if I say, your piece needs a bit more work. It is not entirely consistent and cogent, for example, in the way that it leans on emotions and then suddenly takes a turn toward “responsibility” at the end, without any sort of explanation for how the latter relates to the former. (And how are we to understand the development of the responsibility?)

But it also contains some rather bizarre claims, for example,

“Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.”

Are you really claiming the babies make moral judgments? Is any sort of emotional response to be understood as a moral judgment? Is the fact that we can’t explain why we think something is wrong always a failure of reason or a failure to appreciate the ways in which habits and judgments get built up over time? (Not all failures in understanding are failures of reason. I am afraid that you suffer a bit from the jilted lover of reason syndrome. You were a believer and now Reason hasn’t lived up to its billing. So, we jump from Reason to Emotion.)

Much to be said here. But this is only a space for quick comments. I have a suggestion. You might want to take a look a classical American Pragmatism, for it tries to grapple with morality in terms of values without relying on a “traditional” notion of reason. (This may be especially interesting to you, since it can be argued that Obama is a philosophical pragmatist, a topic I have written about, if I can engage in a bit of germane self-promotion.)

— Mitchell Aboulafia, NY

[This piece was originally posted on December 14, 2008.   It also appeared in Talking Points Memo on December 17, 2008.  I am reposting it now because of continuing interest.  You can find the original with comments by selecting "December" from the calendar at right.]

Here is a prediction: the culture wars will be left by the wayside as we enter a seemingly new land, the land of the tactically minded chief executive, whose tactics are the tip of a philosophical iceberg.  The executive is Obama and the iceberg is Pragmatism.

Comments regarding Obama’s pragmatism constitute something of a cottage industry. These discussions usually involve contrasting Obama’s pragmatism, for example, in choosing his cabinet, with the ideological approach of Bush and the neo-cons.  Here the term pragmatism is meant to denote political flexibility, comfort with the expedient, and a willingness to compromise.  For critics it is meant to suggest an unprincipled orientation toward questions of great moment. Given Obama’s willingness to label himself a pragmatist, many have been mystified by his commitment to specific values, finding him not only unclassifiable in accepted political categories, but mystifying as a person.  For example, in a recent article in Harpers, “The American Void,” Simon Critchley treats Obama as, well, a void.  He just can’t figure the guy out.   In fact, as I have noted elsewhere (PBS site), there is nothing strange about Obama’s political views for those who are familiar with the American philosophical tradition of Pragmatism or the Social Gospel Movement. Interestingly, Critchley makes much of Obama’s mother being an anthropologist, but what he fails to mention is that Ann Dunham’s thesis director was Alice G. Dewey, John Dewey’s granddaughter.  (John Dewey was perhaps the most famous Pragmatist of the twentieth century.) This is no accident. Obama’s thought and practice can be located in the tradition of American Pragmatism (pragmatism with a capital P) and in the liberal Social Gospel Movement that was influential in Chicago during the early part of the 20th century. The latter is still influential in some Chicago churches and community groups, especially those that would have most engaged Obama’s attention as a community organizer.

One of the few commentators who has begun to tease out the differences between Obama’s pragmatisms is Chris Hayes. He writes in The Nation, “Pragmatism in common usage may mean simply a practical approach to problems and affairs. But it’s also the name of the uniquely American school of philosophy whose doctrine is that truth is pre-eminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief. What unites the two senses of the word is a shared skepticism toward certainties derived from abstractions–one that is welcome and bracing after eight years of a failed, faith-based presidency. . . . And if there’s a silver thread woven into the pragmatist mantle Obama claims, it has its origins in this school of thought. Obama could do worse than to look to John Dewey….For him, the crux of pragmatism, and indeed democracy, was a rejection of the knowability of foreordained truths in favor of ‘variability, initiative, innovation, departure from routine, experimentation.’ ” The Nation, Dec 10, 2008

Hayes is moving in the right direction.  I would take his claims a step further.  There is no understanding of Obama without an understanding of Pragmatism. Take for instance the question of whether one can have principles and still be a pragmatist.  From the vantage point of philosophical Pragmatism, the question is non-starter.  The use of principles to address philosophical and political issues extends back to Plato and Aristotle, and migrates through Kant’s deontological ethics into the twentieth century.  But the Pragmatist wants to bypass this mode of thinking, one that requires us to believe that affirming values requires a principled affirmation of values.  Principles are in fact problematic and counterproductive.  Dewey, for example, railed against Kant during WWI, claiming that the rigidity of his ethics of principled imperatives was reflected in the dictatorial and undemocratic mindset of the German regime.  People who believe in democracy should be suspicious of permanent truths and principles.  As Hannah Arendt argues, debate is at the heart of political life, and Truth (with a capital “T”) kills debate. (Obama’s father was a man of principle to the point of stubbornness.  He had a failed career and a led a troubled life.  It is hard to read Dreams of My Father and not conclude that Obama came away from his “journey” with a lasting distaste for principles. His mother, on the other hand, was the epitome of a Deweyan in her love of experience, experimentation, novelty, change, and belief in the transformational power of education.)

In the “Epilogue” to Dreams of My Father, Obama reports a conversation that he and his sister, Auma, had with Dr. Rukia Odero, a professor of history.  A central question in the discussion: how should Africans adapt to the values that Westerners have brought to Africa?   That Obama chose to report the conversation is telling.  Rukia, I would argue, is meant to give voice to Obama’s views.  She states, “I suspect that we can’t pretend that the contradictions of our situation don’t exist.  All we can do is choose.”  And after discussing the complexities of the issue of female circumcision, she goes on to say, “You cannot have rule of law and then exempt certain members of your clan.  What to do?  Again you choose.  If you make the wrong choice, then you learn from your mistakes.  You see what works.”  (Dreams from My Father, New York: Crown, 2004, p. 434)  “Seeing what works” is indeed the mantra of Pragmatism.  Yet as in existentialism, this doesn’t mean that one doesn’t feel the weight of moral and political decisions.  It means that one can’t appeal to principles in advance to justify one’s decisions or “what works.”

But doesn’t being a pragmatist, in both senses of the term, just make Obama a relativist?  No doubt for the ideologically committed, those who fear a leader without a moral compass, this would be a central concern.  But once again this is to frame the issue in the wrong fashion.  Relativism is a problem for moral absolutists.  Without a lasting commitment to absolutes, there isn’t a problem of relativism.  Instead there is the problem of deciding what values to hold.  To frame the discussion in terms of absolutism versus relativism is already to accept the framework of the religious right, which is what the Republicans have been notoriously successful in doing for two generations.  However, the choice is not between absolutism and relativism.  It is between different values. Commitments to values arise from numerous sources, including thoughtful deliberation and prudential considerations.  And it is in the realm of “prudence” that one finds a symmetry between upper and lower case pragmatism.  For the Pragmatist prudential considerations do not always trump other values, but sometimes they do, because prudence or tactical maneuvering may be required to realize successfully a greater good.  As a matter of fact, a thoughtful political agent doesn’t make dogmatic, read absolutistic, decisions in advance regarding what values and tactics may be the most vital and relevant.

The culture wars have depended on disagreements over specific values and the belief that principles are central to morality.  Or at least this is the way that the religious right has sought to frame the controversy, a perception that neo-cons have used to reinforce their political agendas.  When Obama speaks of being post-ideological, of being a pragmatist, I read him as trying to address logjams over values by avoiding divisive discourses based on principles.  How does one accomplish this?  Well, one way is to sound as if one is not ideological, for example, by showing flexibility on specific moral and political questions.  By so doing Obama is not simply maneuvering. He is not being disingenuous.  He is behaving as if he is a committed Pragmatist, and as such he is seeking to change the ground rules for political discourse.

Obama may very well succeed with a little help from his (several million) friends, and realities on the ground, namely, a serious financial crisis that suddenly has life-long, dogmatic free-marketers running for cover.  He may also succeed because he is attuned to something very basic about the American psyche.  It is no accident that Pragmatism is the most significant philosophy that America has produced.  There is something deeply American about it.  But is it Left, Right, or Center? Once again, this is to ask a misleading question.  Its tent is large enough to contain persons from across the American political spectrum, if one judges political commitments by specific values.  Yet in an American context Obama’s Pragmatism presents a much greater challenge to the ideological Right than to the ideological Left.  How so?  If the conversation is shifted away from absolutes, the Right in America will lose the ground from which it has hurled its most potent missiles.  Some on the Right are beginning to recognize the threat that Obama poses.  Some still believe that they can bring back the days of the culture wars. The latter, however, are predicated on the “principled versus pragmatist” distinction, one that is becoming less consequential with each passing day.  So, I wish the dogmatic Right lots of luck. They will need it.  As for the non-dogmatic Right, if debate is crucial to a thriving democracy, I wish them well, and so does the Pragmatist Obama.

Obama on pragmatism (with a small p) and the dangers of certainty (which relates to philosophical Pragmatism).

….

UPDATE, January 5, 2010:  I discovered through a reader’s comment that this video is no longer available.  I don’t know when it was made  unavailable or why its presence on YouTube constitutes a use violation.  I assume that NBC must have pulled it.   It was a nice clip because it showed the kind of fallibilist sensibility that one finds in Pragmatism.

Aretha Franklin sang it, “Respect,” and the Obama administration is making it a watchword of both foreign and domestic policy.  Obama’s repeated invocation of “respect” isn’t merely a ploy, a tactic.  It is driven by a deep egalitarianism.  It is very Obama, and it’s America at its best.  And it’s worth considering the recent handshake incident at 10 Downing Street in this light.

“Larger Than Life in London” (excerpt)

By A. A. GILL, New York Times, April 4, 2009

IT’S invariably the little things, the unconsidered, off the cuff, in passing, unrehearsed things that snag our attention, and seem to be telling of the bigger things. In the case of Barack Obama’s first visit to London and the Group of 20 conference to save the endangered habitat of bankers and real estate salesmen, it was the handshake with the bobby that seemed to be emblematic. In a forest of waving palms, this handshake meant more.

As the president stepped up to 10 Downing Street, he leant over, made eye contact, said something courteous, and shook the hand of the police officer standing guard. There’s always a police officer there; he is a tourist logo in his ridiculous helmet. He tells you that this is London, and the late 19th century. No one has ever shaken the hand of the policeman before, and like everyone else who has his palm touched by Barack Obama, he was visibly transported and briefly forgot himself. He offered the hand to Gordon Brown, the prime minister, who was scuttling behind.

It was ignored. He was left empty-handed. It isn’t that Mr. Brown snubbed the police officer; he just didn’t see him. To a British politician, a police officer is as invisible as the railings.