R. Joseph Hoffmann's Blog: Khartoum, page 12

为心爱的女孩

To love
a woman's soul
is to love one woman
forever.

It is not struggle.
It is the end
of struggle.

To love
a woman's body
is to be
forever dissatisfied.

The soul seeks
only its own image
and is made
miserable by illusion.

The Purgatorial Verse Form

“Thus you may understand that love alone
is the true seed of every merit in you,
and of all acts for which you must atone.”
― Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio


Nor can I give you sun or warmth
or anything good for you.
It is a cold house: no hearth
flames and beckons. And the few
who understand, will surely blame
my shutting out the clear hypocrisy
of time. There is a name
for this; it is what we feel and see.
The usual frost and fog, perhaps,
or maybe it comes from high above
the regions known to us from maps.
I cannot call it love.

Nor can I live for you, now or then:
I am too bound to lose
the way from what has been
to what I cannot choose.
Passion alone cannot cut through
the layers of this pretense--
Sorrow, yes, but my "Although"
destroys each act of penitence.
Feeling is beggared by any future
and changes as the seasons move
between us; it is simply nature.
I cannot call it love.

The Winnow

You circle quickly around me. The rain
is heavy and there is someone behind
chittering on about my brain.
You hold the umbrella defiantly above me,
leaving him on the outskirts,
so that our arms intrude and touch
in a way bad weather makes permissible.
The umbrella is a roof, a hearth, a bed.
Hereunder is midnight; we are lying awake
exhibiting our needs without speaking.
We walk on, slowing a little,
and for a while we are enclosed
and moving sweetly within ourselves
while crowds move around us.
You do not mind walking farther;
you do not mind the rain--nothing
tonight is inconvenient; you'd rather
stand apart in our secure parenthesis
while a paragraph of people pass us by.

But how long does bad weather give us
shelter from the loneliness of love?
Before long, the feeble roof collapses,
the pace quickens to the next crossing,
the weight of the paragraph loses us in its
ordinary clutter, deploring the dank night,
and the discovery of feeling disappears
into the damp incoherence of the crowd.

Paradise Lost

A Ghazal of Hafiz-I Shirazi

My soul is buried in the mask of my own flesh
I will exult when it is stripped away from my face.

A caged bird unjustly jailed, whose voice is heavenly,
meant to be a singing bird in heaven's garden. I will fly there

where I once was. Why I fell to ground I cannot remember--
Alas, I cannot fathom this fall.

Oh, how can I reach the heights of God's paradise,
locked in this clay prison of a body?

Ah, but soon you will sense the joy rising in the beating of my heart.
Do not wonder that it is the musky scent of a marking stag from Hotan ,

and you will be blinded at the flaming of my beautifully made garment,
at the purifying fires that lick and consume my body

That come to take Hafiz’s life.
____________________________

On the poetic form of the ḡazal (ghazal, غزل) see the Encyclopaedia Iranica article here: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles...

La Petite Souris

For 沈之竹




I have set traps and probably killed
your grandmother
in a bed of sweet black glue.
And once in June, cleaning
the cottage sink,
I plunged the drain
and your cousin shot out in pieces.
I can still feel his wet membranes
between my fingers and thinking,
Foolish sodden mouse crawling
for safety into a drain full of borax
and acid--in Maine. What did you expect--
small meals on a tray? A gymnasium?
When I heard your scamper and saw
your droppings I thought
Not again, not another mouse.
I thought you were dead, all dead.
But you would not be still,
not for cheese, or dollops of peanut butter
on wooden platforms, or small tunnels
with poison waiting instead of light. No,
you came like a tiny bright fire into my
nighttime twists, leaving trap intact,
the cheese missing, the sugar cube untouched,
the trigger triggered. And how I listened,
so tightly--that if I had heard snap
or clack I would have sprung myself
from my bed and lain your tiny form
in my hand, and stroked your mouse head
with an implausible forefinger
and said Breathe and keep the light
in your eyes my enemy, for I am
your saviour and understand this minute.

Animal

When he awoke he could hardly move--
and what he had done he did for love.
His eyes were bigger than his stomach
and even for a big bad wolf
he had eaten much too much too much.
The grandmother wasn't meant for food
but he had to clear the way for Hood
so he did what a clever wolf calls good.

They would live together for ill or gain--
though the broad moonlight affect his brain:
he and the girl who'd never been kissed--
the maiden who would not be missed --
and no one would ever, ever know.
(That's why the woodsman had to go.
And the crazy mother was on the list.)

He would hunt for her and gather berries.
She would make pig soup and pickle cherries
and bide breathlessly for his return
while waiting for her roast to burn,
Then nuzzle him, chase him into bed.
and stroke his mane and pat his head.

But Riding Hood was soon to wisen:
Granny was not visiting her cousin...
and the reason mum did not come looking
had naught to do with what was cooking
but that mother had become a snack
and once gobbled up would not be back.

Tired of the nuzzling and her
cooking
he ate everything except one stocking.
But what a mess, he thought, and worried:
So many bones, things to be buried.
What a mess and no one to clean it,
and no good saying he didn't mean it.
Blood and bedclothes everywhere.
Oh dear. He sobbed. Oh dear dear dear.
I don't think I can eat for a year
And the bed's half cold without her near.

To Lesbia

Had I married you, O Sappho,
on our one unhappy night
you would have told me
the sweet lubricious stories
you taught your girls as rhetoric.
I would not make you come
but you would hiss, "Never mind,
Demetrios: we work differently
and I see you glancing
at the flat chested boys anyway.
But I like the hair on your arms,
blond, not thick like a Greek
--and sometimes when your broad chest
covers me I wish it were breasts.
Oh I love you Demetrios, the coward,
the hypocrite. I want you to fill me
with ducklings and hatch them
yourself. Make them islanders like you,
not like the Syrian boys who trail me
down the alleyways of Lesbos."
But my Sappho doesn't understand,
I don't love the slim-chested boys--
only that I see the way they circle her,
offer her a ride, move their thighs in emulation
as she drifts by with her fawning girls.
There is so much ambiguity in poetry
and it will never be clear or true.

Donald Trump: A Test Case in Virtue Ethics

(The full version of this article is available at https://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com...

The current discussion of the 45th president of the United States is heavily focused on the question of character.

In dealing with Mr. Trump, the words that have become familiar are lying, deceit, self-interest, arrogance, bullying, cowardice, ignorance, and injustice. This partial list is enough to show the principle that from a comparatively narrow range of virtue-terms, a much broader range of vices or deficiencies can be educed. Of course sociologists, psychologists, and linguists have their own methods for exploring the behavioral aspects of Mr Trump’s performance. There is a growing sense that the President’s actions are “abnormal” and out of the range of simple political analysis. In an article for New York Magazine (10 February 2017) the journalist Andrew Sullivan writes, “There is the obvious question of the president’s mental and psychological health. I know we’re not supposed to bring this up — but it is staring us brutally in the face. I keep asking myself this simple question: If you came across someone in your everyday life who repeatedly said fantastically and demonstrably untrue things, what would you think of him?”

But if in fact Mr Trump’s behaviour is explained as a psychological condition involving delusion, then an analysis based on virtue ethics would be moot since the discussion of virtue is closely connected to the idea of rational choice. A liar is someone who knows the truth, accepts reality as it is, and for various purposes chooses to distort it. A deluded person simply does not know the truth and what he says is not false representation but wrong representation. Because Mr Trump’s rhetoric suggests a desire to misrepresent and alter facts, his language and actions will be regarded as deliberate and rational rather than as signs of an underlying pathology.

A virtue ethical- analysis of these activities is thus defensible for the following reasons:

A. Typicality. Virtue analysis requires more than a snapshot of action. It demands patterns established over time; the longer the period of time the more informative the analysis is likely to be. A typically virtuous woman or man may respond atypically given the presence of overwhelming coercion or mental and physical-emotive states that affect decisions and outcomes. As in the case of mental imbalance, in such exigencies the element of free choice is impaired. The “Sophie’s Choice”-dilemma is often used in philosophy classes to illustrate this problem, whereby a mother is compelled by Nazi guards to choose one of her children to live, the other to be exterminated (William Styron, Sophie’s Choice, NY: Vintage International Edition, 1992). Impairment of free choice is tantamount to impairment of mental processes with respect to virtuous action. In ordinary life however, we assume that certain basic conditions will obtain “in most cases,” so that the conduct of the agent can be regarded as habitual.

The virtue-ethics analysis also requires the agent to be of a certain age and level of maturity so that choices can be rationally and consciously made. Virtue ethicists normally pay attention for example to whether a decision to act in a certain way is being made by an adolescent or an adult, on the premise that children and adolescents are at an exploratory level and as such inclined to “mess things up” (Hursthouse) as to get things right. Aristotle makes the same distinction in talking about the relationship between age and reason, marking off the ages of 7 through puberty as subrational. A child cannot be morally responsible because a child is not rational and depends on adults for guidance (III.12.1119b13-15).

***

In the case of Donald Trump, his actions can be judged over a decades-long period, have been consistent in nature, observed and evaluated, and thus can be used to assess that behaviour on the spectrum of deficiency-moderation-excess. When for example the president demeans his critics with names like “Pocahontas,” or “Crooked Hillary,” when he deliberately misstates statistics concerning crime rates, election fraud, threats from foreign nations, crowd size, or or the veracity of news coverage, these actions express tendencies which exhibit not merely a desire to misstate facts but habituation to dishonesty and a contempt for moderation. In Aristotelian terms, Trump is an example of the akratic man who, through constant disregard for moderation, exhibits an emotional rather than a rational approach to decision-making . Moreover, as Amelie Rorty says, akrasis is not merely a lack of judgement by an agent but a lack of mastery which is embedded in character—technically the vice of incontinence.

B. Affect. From the time of Aristotle the question of the sociality of virtue has been significant. This means that an agent acting in isolation (if that condition can be imagined; perhaps Hayy ibn Yaqẓān on his desert island) rather than interactively with other persons or groups, is not a good exemplar for virtue. Indeed in some ethical systems the absence of affect would be enough to disqualify such an agent from any role in an ethical analysis. While self-harm is always possible, suicide being the most extravagant example, it stretches the valence of the concept to call such behaviour unvirtuous.

By the same token, men and women since ancient times who are placed in positions of great responsibility—Pericles in Athens, Caesar in Gaul, Lincoln in a divided America—are in a special position with respect to virtue because their actions and choices cannot be merely private and self-referring. A leader’s actions will affect the lives of others; those actions will say something both about the character of the leader and the character of the state. Indeed, Plato’s discussion of virtue hinges on the idea that the state (the good city) will exhibit the virtues: “Clearly, then, it will be wise, brave, temperate [literally: healthy-minded], and just.” (427e; see also 435b). And in his declaration that we are fundamentally political animals (ζῷον πολιτικόν) as well as rational actors (λόγον ἔχον). Aristotle sees a syzygy, a yoking together, of the individually virtuous person and the harmonious state rather than a cause-effect relationship.

The relationship between acting rationally for the common good so as to create good in the city has been fundamental not just to political theory but also to public discourse: the art of expression (rhetoric) and of persuasion (argument, oratory, and exhortation) traditionally have been seen as the way in which the leader “activates” his own virtue on behalf of the common good, an outward expression of his nature. This means that appeals to passion, fear, hatred, and self-interest–which depend on exciting the crowd and encouraging emotive states or irrational behavior are contrary to the larger good, and hence unvirtuous.

C. Fear-Baiting the Populace

It is a matter of record going back over decades that Mr Trump relies on appeal to passion and emotion, and especially to fear, in his public utterances. The most famous instance was his tenacious campaign between 2009 and 2012 to encourage American citizens to believe the then-president of the United States was constitutionally unqualified to hold the office because he was born in Kenya. (D. Remnick, “Trump, Birtherism, and Race-Baiting,” April 27, 2011.) A related effort sought to convince Americans that Barack Obama was a Muslim (despite there being no religious test for the presidency), and his more aggressive policies toward the Muslim world since taking office, especially his executive order banning citizens from seven Muslim nations from entering the United States on the basis of the alleged danger they posed to the nation.

Trump is also known to appeal to the interests of the so-called CPAC and “Second Amendment Patriots” and the hierarchy of the National Rifle Association by inducing fear that gun-control advocates are privately plotting to seize their guns, going so far as to suggest that the Paris attacks of November 2015 could have been prevented by less stringent controls on firearms in France. And, finally, his speeches have targeted laws protecting various minorities and vulnerable groups: gay and lesbian activists, women seeking to retain reproductive freedom, and African American, Latino and Hispanic Americans. The effect of any one of these public antipathies would not say much about the character of an agent. Cumulatively however, a pattern emerges that suggests deficiency in what virtue-ethics would term “honor.” Virtue defined as the impact of the public utterances of a leader, judged from the standpoint of the effects of his rhetoric on the general population, especially upon its harmony and cohesion as a people attentive to the values of a just society.

D. Unvirtuous Behaviour and Counter-Evidentiary Thinking.

(a) Donald Trump was elected president of the United States on November 8, 2016 in one of the most acrimonious contests in American history. Analysts were quick to point out that he did this through employing unconventional tools and that his language during the campaign, and even after he was sworn into office on January 20, 2017, was “not the kind of thing” the American people were used to hearing from politicians. This unbridled and raw directness was seen by many of his followers to be a new kind of honesty or “straight talk” that did not obey the conventions of politics (Lakoff). His most ardent supporters were not especially bothered by rudeness, exaggeration, and (to use the term that came to be used mockingly of his falsehoods) his “alternate facts.”

(b) Incivility and exaggeration had two purposes: to incapacitate opposing speakers and their viewpoints and to “catastrophize” or “glamourize” information irrespective of its grounding in fact and evidence. Among these techniques, Mr Trump liberally used ad hominem attacks–insult, impugnment, and ridicule to discredit opponents. Thus, his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton became “Crooked Hilary,” a key spokesman for the opposition party, Senator Elizabeth Warren, was christened Pocahontas; a variety of other opponents and critics were labeled, little, weak, dull, and wishy-washy and ineffective. Outsiders likewise were labeled dangerous, criminals, murderers, terrorists, social freeloaders and welfare thieves. Sometimes all of these things were enveloped in the term “loser,” in distinction to Trump’s portrayal of himself as a successful businessman, a “winner” in the wealth-conscious American context.

Conversely, no attention was given to the views of his opponents or to the contribution made to business, industry, agriculture, and education by ethnic and linguistic minorities. The technique used by Trump in relation to the latter has been labeled “race baiting,” a deliberate attempt to pit social and economic groups against each other in order to promote disharmony and crisis. The political purpose, openly espoused by his advisor Steven Bannon, to sow discord in order to make the prospect of “strong government” and demagogic solutions more appealing.

(c) Trump conveyed the notion in the campaign and in his sepulchral Inauguration speech that the nation too, was beginning to take on the worst traits of his individual and social enemies, especially the alleged weaknesses of the then current administration: The United States was becoming a “loser” nation. No one respected America any longer. Its streets were rife with death and crime. Subject to excessive oversight and restraint, police forces had lost respect. War could not be fought and won because the country had become soft; consequently safety lay in strong-arm solutions to the puny and overcautious measures of the administration of Barack Obama. Generals could be trusted because they knew about winning; politicians only when they agreed with him; intellectuals, especially scientists, never.

Similarly, the news media, often suspected of left- leaning sympathies, were seen as not only unreliable but actively engaged in producing “fake news” to undermine his administration. Trump labeled the press the “enemy of the American people” in a Twitter feed of 19 February 2017. Evidence-based thinking–the kind of thinking typical of the intelligence community– was considered weak, slow, and inferior to the successful intuitive thinking that Trump claimed to be capable of in his “very good brain” though it later emerged thbatTrump had lied about his educational achievements and academic standing as an undergraduate

The fallacy-laden approach to problem-solving and problem assessment, seen primarily in gross oversimplification of complex issues and a trivializing of risks, opposition, and counter-arguments, was implicitly an appeal to wishful-thinking, which was based on a belief that his followers relied on shortcutting rather than formal reasoning in making decisions. Mr Trump made no effort to educate himself or his constituents on the complexity of the issues he had made his agenda: before his tenure as president began he resisted intelligence briefings, sidelined key advisors, routinely shrugged off warnings and criticism, and continued to maintain that his own powers of analysis were enough to see him through even the most complex military decisions and operations.

(d) Trump’s race-baiting was one part of a more general pattern of conspiratorial and evidence-free thinking designed to create anxiety across the country. Thus, in his rhetorical framing, the war against “radical Islamic extremism” had failed, despite evidence it was making steady progress. Despite the evidence of statistics, “thousands of terrorists were flooding across the borders every day.” The country was in “terrible economic shape” the “worst economy ever” because there had been a war on wealth and small business. Violent crime was out of control, but he would soon “liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens their communities”

Promising a restoration of obsolete or diminishing industries like mining and petroleum, Trump blamed “illegal aliens” and job-outsourcing for America’s economic woes, promised to build a wall to keep Mexican and other Latino and Hispanic workers out; to deport millions of undocumented workers; and to bring overtaxed industries back to the United States. In exchange for returning manufacturing to America, industries would be offered tax breaks and an array of incentives–capped with deregulation of big business and corporations. Companies that insisted on investing or relocating abroad would be punished with high tariffs on the import of their goods. Certain countries like China would be called out as currency manipulators and their goods slapped with import duties. Banks would lend more freely. The middle class would receive tax cuts, the economic top-tier bigger ones. It would again be the free choice of a family or a corporation to go bankrupt, not overseers in Washington and New York limiting credit and restricting lending.

Despite the fact that economists savaged the incoherence of his proposals, Trump was unmoved by evidence, argument and history in repeating these tropes to his supporters. Having accepted his word as president, not merely a candidate, listeners were asked to choose between the authority of the leader and well researched and documented sources that often showed his pronouncements to be exaggerated or false. This ad auctoritatem approach created a dissonance especially among non-elite or less educated listeners, who found it difficult to accommodate ambiguity and disagreement in favor of the moral and practical simplicity of the leader’s descriptions and solutions. In addition, the president had an advantage the evidence – and research- based media did not, the ability to offer policy solutions to the problems he described.

(e) As with the economy and society, Trump was dismissive of headways in education and science, especially with respect to the environment and school reform. Proponents of the theory of global warming were derided as alarmists if not outright liars, though it was never clear what the advantage to scientists in creating the clamor might have been. Calling global warming a hoax, Trump promised to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency and to renegotiate environmental treaties signed during previous administrations. In one famous screed, he accused China of “inventing” the science behind green house gas emissions and global warming and spreading the fear to other nations. In this area as in others, Trump’s non-evidentiary thinking turned towards the denial of fact and the further claim that only his facts could be relied on: the intelligentsia were in the habit of misleading ordinary people and inventing crises that simple common sense could avert.

(f) In education, Trump favoured competition between religious schools and public schools, with vouchers being given to parents who wished to opt out of public school. His initial solution was to appoint a dramatically unqualified woman to head the Department of Education, with the specific task of offering parents more choice in the kind of education they wanted for their children.

In matters of medical science and health, he opposed abortion rights and with the help of organized conservative religious groups championed the cause of the anti-choice cartels, mostly religiously-based and financed, and called for an end to government funding for Planned Parenthood. Famously, he stood on the side of the conservative members of his party to defund the so-called Affordable Care Act which by the time of the 2016 campaign had provided health insurance to (2016) 30,000,000citizens. Over 50 attempts to repeal the law had been attempted between 2010 and 2016.

(g) Finally in the field of national security, Trump insisted on “naming” the problem “Radical Islamic Terrorism,” rather than religious extremism. Although there had been no large scale attack on the United States since 11 September 2001, and none specifically involving recent Muslim immigrants nesting among the population, Trump convinced his supporters that the United States was being careless; that the intelligence services were not doing enough; and that the only way to deal with potential risk was to ban Muslims from entering the United States until “extreme” vetting could be carried out. In February 2017, he issued a travel ban on Muslims from seven so-called state sponsors of terrorism, based on an outdated list from 1996, scarcely reviewed or revised since, identifying a number of countries that stood accused of terrorist or terror-related sponsorship in the Clinton administration.

The ban was reviewed and stayed in district and appellate courts and at the time of this writing is still enmeshed in judicial challenges. The appellate courts’ fundamental objection was that Trump and his advisors had provided no evidence that citizens of the proscribed countries had any relation to terror activities inside the United States.

The terms weakness and strength are especially relevant to the catastrophizing that Trump used to persuade his supporters that “aliens” (foreign “others”) must be walled out or outlawed at the ports and airports.

Fear as Unvirtue

In classical virtue theory, fear is at the opposite end of the scale to courage, “a deficiency of bravery.” Hence to inculcate fear in the polis is incrementally non-virtuous, even if the leader professes to be courageous himself. Anyone who reads the speeches of Pericles, Demosthenes, Arrian’s account of Alexander the Great at Opis, or the process against Cataline can see the significant rhetorical connection between bravery, honesty and honour and their role in developing the character of the polis.

In modern times, Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Barack Obama have used exhortation to encourage and inspire the polis in times of distress as have political and social leader like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. The basic premise of their rhetoric is that to instill courage in the population is to regenerate the virtuous nature of a country. Fear is not only a lack of courage but an incentive to do the wrong thing in time of peril. Plato had said, “So the unwise person has a faulty conception of what is good for him. A person is courageous just in case his spirited attitudes do not change in the face of pains and pleasures but stay in agreement with what is rationally recognized as fearsome and not” (442bc).

Trump is exceptional in using fear to create insecurity along racial and personal levels: the blanket excoriation of Islam as violent, or certain categories of foreigners as “criminals” and “rapists,” or the arbitrary demarcation of insiders and outsiders—that is, foreigners who have achieved a certain status as guests and workers and those who have no such privilege, the latter being regarded as dangerous trespassers. The appeal itself is designed to lessen cohesion and to encourage disharmony – the key mark of an unvirtuous city. Peace of mind and happiness (unity and harmony) according to Plato are the marks of the good polis, just as they are of the just person (Republic 369 a-b).

The End of Virtue: Donald Trump as an Ethics-Subversive Leader

Based on actions and words going back several decades, but with special reference to his political activities in the last fifteen years and recent performance, I suggest that Donald Trump can be profitably used as an adverse example in discussions of virtue theory. This can be done specifically with respect to particular actions he has undertaken as president and as a presidential candidate and, by analogy, with reference to the language and public actions of past American presidents.

The main features of Trump’s subversion of virtue through political practice can be summarized as follows. Please note, this subversion is being laid out in terms of deficiency or “vice,” in keeping with the traditional language of virtue theory:

(a) Trump lacks a deep sense of justice. Trump has followed a profit-model that values wealthy and especially white Americans while marginalizing black and brown Americans, poorer Americans, sexual minorities, women, and those with physical or mental disability. The policies he has so far put into place reinforce his commitment to privilege, whilst garnering support through appeals to lower income and low information voters, white supremacists, and a variety of populist, nativist, “hard-right,” and fringe groups (his “base”).

(b) Trump lacks a deep concept of happiness. Trump is the first president in American history to pay no attention to human values and virtue-formation as a higher level of satisfaction than the accumulation of profit. To be clear, past presidents have worried about the state of economy, the level of employment, downticks in trade or manufacturing and fluctuations in wages and purchasing power. In every case the appeal has been to improving the lot of the neediest. Trump however is the first president to equate human satisfaction with wealth. In addition to constant references to his personal wealth, he has surrounded himself with plutocrats in almost every department of government, has failed to divest control of his companies, and also failed to disclose his income tax returns. By analogy, if one looks at Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 Inaugural address, we find this
,

Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.
The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit. Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing.

(c) Trump is deficient in honesty. In his actions and public utterances Trump condones the irrational, the fantastic, the exaggerated and the improbable in ways that approach adolescent thinking. He has shown contempt for science, intellectual pursuits, traditions of religious wisdom, the arts, and literature. His intellectual diet of fringe news, newspapers, stock market reports and conspiracy-theories (and those who share his passion for the fantastic) suggests an addiction to non-evidentiary thinking. At a personal level this deficiency shows itself in unfairness and often contempt towards factual research, correction, and vital information. Moreover, he often does not regard his statements as falsifiable, a feature of a cognitive disorder described by Robert Lahy as the “inability to disconfirm.” Trump has been slanderous towards political enemies, the press, the judiciary system, the American intelligence community, and “hard evidence” concerning failed policies and executive decisions.

(d) Trump is deficient in compassion: “Mercy” in the classical system was an adjunct of justice and often was exhibited in how character displayed itself as “valour” after military victory. Often it was seen as an undeserved act of generosity towards an opponent, or a willingness to forego certain rights that fell to a victor following a conquest, consonant with the lex talionis. The paradigm in classical times was the “Clemency of Scipio,” an episode recounted by Livy of the Roman general Scipio Africanus who, following a victory in Spain, refused a generous ransom for a young female prisoner, returning her to her fiance Allucius. However in its Christianized form, mercy has less to do with displays of generosity than with the belief that (on the pretext that God forgives those who forgive others: Matthew 6.12, mercy itself symbolizes our commitment to “suffering humanity,” a principle that can also be traced back to Confucius and the primum non nocere (above all, do no harm) axiom of ancient Greece. Trump has consistently shown a lack of charity to immigrants, the economically disadvantaged, refugees and domestic minorities. His appeals to fear have essentially pitted group against group and majorities against minorities, creating a kind of tribalism in which those who have achieved success have no moral or fiscal responsibility for those who cannot help themselves. Trump is the first United States President to enshrine callousness into policy though it has roots in the austere Calvinist theology of Election of the seventeenth century

(e) Trump is deficient in Bravery. In what we called above “fear-mongering” Trump has displayed a weakness that has been the subject of philosophical discussion since the time of Socrates, but flourishes especially in the language of Aristotle: “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.” In his usage Aristotle sees courage or bravery not in military terms (that is, he does not identify it with military strength or power, which in itself is morally neutral) but is terms of individual willingness to show bravery in the face of “hardship, agony, despair” and adverse circumstances. A strong military may provide security, but not courage, and a country that would use its military power or technology rashly might do so for unvirtuous reasons. Trump’s junta-like approach to security, surrounded by generals as decision-makers, shows a deficiency of courage and a marked tendency to encourage fear in the population, confuting the defensive role of the polis with bravery. The classical models of the dilemma between heroism and strength was epitomized in the Odyssey by the characters of Hector and Achilles: Hector leads with a mature sense that gives his men reason to respect him, illustrating the unity of the virtues of honour and bravery. Achilles fights out of rage, because he is rash, and inspires fear (VI.21-24). Achilles is thus the paradigm of risk, impetuousness, and revenge in classical thought.

(f) Trump is deficient in moderation. Rosalind Hursthouse observes that

A virtue such as honesty or generosity is not just a tendency to do what is honest or generous, nor is it to be helpfully specified as a “desirable” or “morally valuable” character trait. It is, indeed a character trait—that is, a disposition which is well entrenched in its possessor, something that, as we say “goes all the way down,” unlike a habit such as being a tea-drinker—but the disposition in question, far from being a single track disposition to do honest actions, or even honest actions for certain reasons, is multi-track. It is concerned with many other actions as well, with emotions and emotional reactions, choices, values, desires, perceptions, attitudes, interests, expectations and sensibilities. To possess a virtue is to be a certain sort of person with a certain complex mindset. Hence the extreme recklessness of attributing a virtue on the basis of a single action.

Judged strictly on the basis of habitual performance, Trump is the model of Aristotle’s akratic man, deficient in self-control, moderation, justice, honor, courage and temperance with an inability to control impulse–arrogant in victory, dishonorable and and petulant when thwarted or defeated.

A Window in Maine

You will know what it is when an ice-spear
falls from the rafter and pierces the snow;
and at noon when the sun turns it
clear, turns it from spear to spindle,
glistening its death, and you will know
how love clings to the roof for as long
as it can, even to the undersides and edges,
as long as it can, before it slips and falls
and becomes so pure, rare
and luminous that it cannot bear
the intensity of its own slow failure.

Love's Furrow

Love is a seed
you had forgot
you planted,
though you tend
the plot.

You have no choice
or voice
to make it grow.

Somehow it does.
It grows
within us.

And on an April day
its tonsured head
pushes green
against the dead
winter ground and says
I live.
Feed me lest I die.