Samir Chopra's Blog, page 35

Peter Thiel Should Attempt the Anatomically Impossible

A few years ago, I made note of Peter Thiel’s showboating program to give young folks a cool hundred grand if they dropped out of college to pursue their dreams. This scheme, cooked up by a Stanford graduate, a venture capitalist and hedge-fund manager, was in transparent alignment with various neoliberal schemes cooked up to denigrate and weaken and ultimately destroy higher education by the simplest of strategies: under the guise of reform, simply gut the system in question–all the better to pick at its scraps. (c.f. charter schools, which aim to reform the public school system by getting rid of it.) From that stance, a straight line can be drawn to Thiel’s donation of 1.25 million dollars to the Donald Trump campaign; one of the hallmarks of fascism, after all, is disdain for education. Or rather, for anything that could possibly generate critical inquiry of any sort. As the New York Times’ source said, “the investor feels the country needs fixing, and Mr. Trump can do it.” That’s certainly one way to ‘fix’ a problem; you get rid of the entity afflicted by the problem. In this case, the American republic.

We should keep Thiel in mind whenever we evaluate an anti-public education stance. The undermining of public education is not an innocent bid to ‘restore’ quality; it is a malignant bid to replace public education with a horde of shrieking rent-seekers: the armies of educational consultants and charter operators lurk among them. Folks like Thiel are common in the business world; they attain success in one narrow field, and then they imagine that the tool they have acquired–the corporate vision, with its particular incentive schemes, its understanding of human relations and their monetizations–can then be successfully exported to all domains. In Thiel’s case, first it was public education, then it was the country. Soon he will have a scheme for curing cancer and for bringing peace to our troubled world. Corporate ‘leaders’ and ‘innovators’ imagine they are sneering at the conventional niceties which up prop hidebound domains of human endeavor and infusing them with radically new paradigms–in the form of their own conventionally acquired, cliché ridden, wisdom. Unsurprisingly most of these corporate-to-country-to-world schemes are cooked up by the graduates of private schools, which have provided a comfortable insulating layer from the realities of most folks’ lives.

Thiel embodies the worst kind of educated philistine, the kind Nietzsche worried about and warned against: they possess education in the formal sense–Thiel does have a pair of degrees in engineering and law–but they show little cultural or intellectual sophistication, and their thin patina of education equips them with a dangerous assurance that they could clean up any mess, solve any problem, so long as quaint notions such as the collective interest or social constraints like civil liberties were shoved out of their way. They have grown up imagining they have bent the world to their will; they now seek new territories to conquer. As part of a fascist brigade, if necessary.

Jon Meacham On Misunderstanding Darwin And The George Bush ‘Legacy’

During the 1988 election season’s presidential debates, George H. W. Bush described his opponent, Michael Dukakis, as ‘a card-carrying member of the ACLU.’ This was supposed to be a zinger, a devastating put-down line that would show up his opponent as a radical, a wanna-be hippie, an out-of-touch member of the East Coast elite, an un-American, unrepentant, defender of–civil liberties. You know, those things enumerated in the Bill of Rights and enshrined in the American Constitution, which every patriot, suitably armed with his Second Amendment-protected guns, is sworn to protecting against the ravages of commies and pinkos and terrorists everywhere. The line worked; it went down famously with the Republican ‘faithful’ and the ‘base.’ The continued strategy of painting Dukakis as an effete pointyhead disconnected from broader American realities worked; Republican pollsters knew their party, and the folks who voted them in power.

We should keep this in mind every time we come across an instance of the ludicrous ‘Republicans were so much better, so much more moderate and balanced in the good old days’ line. The latest deposit of this bovine excreta may be found in Jon Meacham‘s ‘Nostalgia for The Grace of George H. W. Bush‘ the tagline for which reads: “The Journey from Bush to Trump disproves Darwin.”

That tagline gives the game away. The journey from Bush to Trump does not ‘disprove Darwin.’ Rather, it does the exact opposite. The journey from Bush to Trump shows that the American political environment furnished adaptive niches for political creatures like racists; their traits were suited for flourishing in it. That environment was set up by Republicans, their base and their party; it was sustained by the actions of supposedly genteel folks like the Bushes and the Reagans. They fostered racism and chauvinism and xenophobia and, surprise!, a ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ view of society in which the poor and the unfortunate and the systematically oppressed and disenfranchised were to be kicked to the curb by those in power. And God help those who, like the ACLU, spoke up on their behalf.

This environment was fertile breeding ground for those possessed of the traits with which to exploit it. Enter Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump. The line of progression is clear and visible; it is clear too which political creatures’ offspring flourished in the environment created and sustained by the Republican Party. Along the way, American committed mass murder in Iraq; it tortured; it refused to punish those who had committed those supposedly un-American crimes. It should not be surprised that Donald Trump has shown up on its doorsteps demanding to be let in; he’s been on the inside, and he’s seen what works.

Meacham’s invocation of Darwin here shows two things: 1) He does not understand Darwin and 2) He has not been paying attention the last twenty-eight years. The former might be forgivable; after all, many people don’t. The latter is not. Meacham thinks he is offering a diagnosis; unfortunately, he is part of the problem.

Nikolai Berdayev On Philosophy’s Therapeutic Function

In Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography (Macmillan, 1950) Nikolai Berdayev writes:

It has been said that ‘green is the tree of life and grey the theory of life.’ Paradoxical though it may seem, I am inclined to think that the reverse is true: ‘grey is the tree of life and green the theory thereof.’…What is known as ‘life,’ however, is as often as not an embodiment of the commonplace and consists of nothing but the cares of workaday existence. ‘Theory’ on the other hand, may be understood as creative vision, as the Greek theoria, which raises us above the habits of daily life. Philosophy, ‘the green theory of life,’ is free of anguish and boredom. I became a philosopher and a servant of ‘theory’ that I might renounce and be relieved of this unspeakable anguish. Philosophical thinking had always freed me from life’s ugliness and corruption. To ‘being’ I have always opposed ‘creativity,’ that is to say, not ‘life,’ but the breaking through and flight from ‘life’ into ‘existence,’ from the finite into the infinite and transcendent.

In making note here of Adorno and Horkheimer’s commentary on the ideological convergence of art and science, I had pointed out how a realistic art serves a conservative and reactionary function: it merely faithfully reproduces ‘workaday existence.’ So do the injunctions that bid us concentrate on life and praxis and disdain theory: they confine our attention to the here and now, they bid us not look away at alternative possibilities and fantasies and imagined reconfigurations of the existent–all of which might have political import. The suggestion or claim that life is colorful while theory is pallid now stands exposed as an ideological maneuver too, one that makes us disdain the pleasurable indulgences of theoretical speculation, daydreams about how what is may morph into the what may be.

Berdayev makes note of the therapeutic function of philosophy in this context: it relieves us from the ‘anguish’ of ‘workaday existence’: ‘the longing for another world, for what which is beyond the boundaries of this finite world of ours.’ (We should hear echoes of Tolstoy‘s complaint in A Confession that his perplexity–which ended in his choosing faith–arose from his attempts to reconcile ‘the finite with the infinite.’)  Theory and philosophy accomplish this function because they embody ‘creativity,’ a departure from the here and now. It is this movement that for Berdayev has true vitality, the kind that can promise deliverance and exhilaration. Perhaps akin to the kind I made note of here in another post on the inspirational effect of two paragraphs by J. D. Mabbott--which introduced me to the work of the philosopher in terms of the exalted view it provided of the everyday world. In making these observations we should keep in mind, of course, Nietzsche’s contempt for philosophical speculation that breeds contempt for this life, this now, in favor of an afterlife and a hereafter. Keeping these two views in a creative tension of sorts may be the most fruitful, if not the most difficult, intellectual maneuver of all. We shouldn’t expect any less.

Horkheimer And Adorno On The ‘Convergence’ Of Art And Science

In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (University of Stanford Press, Cultural Memory in the Present Series, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, p. 13, 2002) Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno write:

The prevailing antithesis between art and science, which rends the two apart as areas of culture in order to make them jointly manageable as areas of cultures, finally causes them, through their internal tendencies as exact opposites, to converge. Science in its neopositivist interpretation, becomes aestheticism, a system of isolated signs devoid of any intention transcending the system; it becomes the game which mathematicians have long since proudly declared their activity to be.  Meanwhile, art as integral replication has pledged itself to positivist science, even in its specific techniques. it becomes indeed, the world over again, an ideological doubling, a complicated reproduction.

Physics and mathematics are often said to find a merger of sorts in string theory, whose speculations dabble in dimensions galore and disdain empirical confirmation. Here, physicists may be found approaching registers of speech only thought to be found in ‘pure’ mathematicians; their work appears to be exclusively concerned with, and expressed through, sign and symbol; the beauty of their creations could be assessed as works of theoretical art. Within such an evaluative dimension might lie string theory’s most coveted prize, once it has disdained the grubby business of verification and correspondence. The arc nears completion here. Elsewhere, art is condemned to realist reproduction, censured for flights of irresponsible fancy. It is asked to leave behind its critical and absurdist and skeptical being in favor of one more firmly anchored in the here and now, all the better to clone it, and faithfully and apologetically do its bit for its continued propagation; art is informed of the need to be reactionary. Such critiques might sound old-fashioned to the worldly-wise in the twenty-first century, but they are never too far from the surface when worries about self-indulgent or narcissistic or navel-gazing art are periodically expressed.

As can be seen, the situation that Horkheimer and Adorno described is as present today as it was when their words were originally penned. Realist art and aestheticist science still converge; the former is urged to stick to the sensible and the apprehensible; the latter seeks to move away from tedious correspondence and to go on flights of symbolic fantasy.  Horkheimer and Adorno urged this observation upon us to make us notice its ideological import: science becomes exclusively positivist, unconcerned with intervention; art becomes implicated in the ‘realities’ it seeks to depict. The standpoint of critique is  lost; science and art are enlisted as allies through various understandings that are not normatively neutral. This ideological maneuver is especially acute because science aspires to epistemic hegemony via its apparent commitment to realism and art aspires to radical critique through its lack of fidelity to that same standpoint. The ‘real’ aspires to fantasy; the fantastic is instructed to conform to the ‘real.’ Both are defanged and removed from the realm of critical theory and its interjections into the world of politics and society.

Donald Trump’s ‘Hot-Mic’ And Men Talking About Sex

A friend offers the following reaction to the latest ‘sensational’ disclosures about Donald Trump’s misogyny:

To all the guys on my feed posting their shock and outrage over Trump’s hot-mic comments about women: give me a break. “How could America possibly elect someone who talks like this about women??” you ask. Do you honestly think we haven’t elected guys who talk like this about women before? Do you think Bill Clinton never talked like this? George W Bush? Come on. This is quintessential Americana, right here. Boys talk like this about girls in ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, for pete’s sake. Men have talked about women like this for EVER. And you’re so shocked that **Donald Trump** talks this way? One of you posting your shock once forcibly blocked my entrance to a restroom and shoved your tongue in my mouth, some years ago. I bet you don’t even remember, because it was a total non-event or you felt like, because you liked me, it was OK. This is normal, every day behavior. Yes, it sucks, but please don’t pretend this is your first time experiencing this reality. Your b.s. outrage is an insult to those of us who have been aware of this reality since we were children.

Indeed. Men talk like this about women all the time. Many conversations like this take place when men get together to talk about women, about sex, and about their sexual ‘conquests.’ The distinctions that many are seeking to draw between sexual assault and sexual ‘conquest’–which, supposedly, makes these conversations worse than normal ‘locker room banter’–is easily blurred precisely because for so many men this line is blurred in their ‘locker room banter’ about sex and their sexual partners:

[M]en, when talking about sex, cannot drop the language of conquest and domination, of conflating sex and violence (‘Dude, I fucked the shit out of her’ or ‘I was banging her all night’) [they] imagine sex to be a variant of rough-and-tumble sport (‘scoring touchdowns’), [and] associate weakness with womanhood (‘Don’t be a pussy’ ‘Man up’ ‘Put your pants on’).

Men have been used to talking like that about women for a very long time. It’s how they’ve learned to talk about sex and women in the company of men. In general, when men brag to other men about their sexual conquests, they do not describe how they generated intimacy–physical or otherwise–with conversation; rather, they speak of how they ‘overcame’ the barriers that the woman had put up between herself–as a sexual target to be attained–and sex. In these circumstances, getting a little pushy goes with the territory; don’t you have to get women drunk before you can have sex with them? And if a women doesn’t resist your advances, then men can talk about what a ‘whore’ and a ‘slut’ and a ‘dirty bitch who really wanted it’ she was as she got ‘down and dirty.’

To this toxic mix, add a little entitlement and arrogance and you get the Trump conversation. Indeed, with probability one, hot mics would reveal conversations like this in most public figures’ portfolios. It is not just ‘deplorables‘ who ‘talk like that.’

On The Dissolution Of A Personal Boundary

One of my favorite pastimes when visiting my in-laws in Ohio is to borrow one of the family cars and head to the local cinema to catch a matinée show; it’s how I catch up on the big-screen action I miss out on here in the Big Apple. The tickets are cheaper; the audiences are quieter; and there are enthusiastic babysitters to be called upon. Thanks to these various facilitations, a couple of winters ago, I was able to view Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar in its appropriate environment (i.e., not at home on a much smaller screen.)

I returned home just a tad deflated. Interstellar had been a dud: overly portentous, tedious at times, and much too enamored of its special effects. That was bad enough, but I had also noticed something peculiar about my viewing experience. A crucial component of my regular movie-watching at home had not been present: my regular partner in those adventures, my wife. I realized that built into my watching of a movie at home was her presence: when watching a scene on the screen, part of my reaction to it was caught up inextricably in a conscious and subconscious sensing of hers, whether horror, amusement, incredulity, and of course, sometimes, tears. (Sometimes my wife’s reactions are audible ones; sometimes, even as my eyes are exclusively trained on the screen, I find my thoughts turn to speculation about how she is responding to the same scene.)

That afternoon, as I had watched Interstellar alone, I found that my affective response to its offerings was curiously denuded; I felt as if they were lacking that part which was a sympathetic interaction with what would have been my wife’s responses to the movie. Somehow, over the years that my wife and I had been watching movies together, my responses to the movie-watching experience had started to include an interplay with hers. To watch a movie without my wife present was now to experience a peculiar sort of incompleteness in it. (There is also the small matter of how, once the movie was over, I was not able to engage in any kind of discussion with her about our respective takes on it.)

Such ‘boundary melting’ can be, depending on your perspective, frightening or exhilarating. Therapists ask us to be cognizant of the limits of our selves, to not let ourselves become subsumed in those of others; we worry incessantly about our ‘personal spaces;’ and of course, many couples are asked to ‘de-couple’ by counselors in an effort to get their personal relationships back on track. And yet, as the glories of truly rewarding sexual encounters remind us, the dissolution of our selves’ boundaries can be one of those rare moments during which non-mystics can have a quasi-religious experience.

A crucial aspect of the movie-watching experience at home was communication of a very particular kind, one that enriched my bare interaction with the director’s offering. That should be unsurprising, given that what we call our self arises precisely from a kind of inner communication within us.

John David Mabbott And Two Influential Paragraphs

In the summer of 1992, I had begun to consider the possibility of returning to graduate school–this time for a new program in study in an unfamiliar field: philosophy. I had no previous academic exposure to philosophy so I would have to begin at the ‘bottom’: by taking classes as a non-matriculate student, and then on the basis of the grades secured in those, seeking admission in a graduate program. I was not entirely decided on this course of action; much uncertainty, a reduced income, and possible unemployment lay ahead.

That same summer I traveled home to India, met my mother, told her of my plans and was gratified to find out she approved. While in India, I went rummaging through my father’s book collection and brought back a few tomes to adorn my shelves. Among them was J. D. Mabbott‘s The State and the Citizen: An Introduction to Political Philosophy. An inscription on the book’s frontispiece–in my father’s distinctive handwriting–informed me my father had bought the book in 1962 at a bookstore in Bombay. In the first section ‘From Hobbes to Hegel,’ in the first chapter ‘The Use of Authorities,’ on page 9 I came across the following passage:

The philosopher does not discover new facts. His concern is our everyday view with its common landmarks, duty, obedience, law, desire. He does not set out, as the scientist does, grasping his compass, towards lands no man has trod, nor return thence bearing strange treasures and stranger tales. He is rather to be pictured ascending the tower of some great cathedral such as was St. Stephen’s, Vienna. As he goes up the spiral stairway, the common and particular details of life, the men and tramcars, shrink to invisibility and the big landmarks shake themselves clear. Little windows open at his elbow with widening views. There is conscience; over there is duty; there is conscience again looking quite different from this new level; now he is high enough to see law and liberty from one window. And ever there haunts the vision of the summit, where there is a little room with windows all round, where he may recover his breath and see the view as a whole, and the Schottenkirche and the Palace of Justice in their true relative proportions, and where that gargoyle (determinism, was it?) which loomed in on him so menacingly at one stage in his ascent shall have shrunk to the speck that it is.

We shall be told that no one reaches the top. A philosopher who ceases to climb does so only because he gets tired; and he remains crouched against some staircase window, commanding but a dusty and one-sided view at best, obstinately proclaiming to the crowds below who do not listen, that he is at the summit and can see the whole city. That may be so. Yet the climb itself is not without merit for those whose heads can stand the height and the circling of the rising spiral; and, even at the lowest windows, one is above the smoke and can see proportions more clearly so that men and tramcars can never look quite the same again.

Once I was done reading that passage, I knew my decision to study philosophy was the correct one. I was exhilarated; I felt new adventures, new journeys, novel sights and experiences lay ahead. I had felt, just by Mabbott’s description of the philosopher’s elevation, elevated myself. No description of any academic field I had ever read before had ever captivated me so. I wanted more; I couldn’t wait to start studying philosophy seriously.

John David Mabbott remains an obscure philosopher to this day. I’ve never read anything else by him, or seen a citation to him anywhere in any philosophical text I’ve read. But without exaggeration, these two paragraphs of his rank among the most influential pieces of writing I’ve ever read.  And of course, my father, by buying his book, had made it possible for me to encounter them. Many thanks to the both of them.

Note: Needless to say, I still own The State and the Citizen–it’s falling apart but I won’t let go.

The Phenomenology Of Encounters With Notification Icons

It’s 630 AM or so; you’re awake, busy getting your cup of coffee ready. (Perhaps you’re up earlier like the truly virtuous or the overworked, which in our society comes to the same thing.) Your coffee made, you fire up your smartphone, laptop, tablet, or desktop, and settle down for the morning service at the altar.  Your eyes light up, your antennae tingle in pleasurable anticipation: Facebook’s blue top ribbon features a tiny red square–which squats over the globe like a ginormous social media network–with a number inscribed in it; single figures is good, double figures is better. You look at Twitter: the Liberty Bell–sorry, the notifications icon–bears the weight of a similar number. Yet again: single figures good, double figures better. You look at GMail: your heart races, for that distinctive bold lettering in your inbox is present, standing out in stark contrast from the pallid type below; and there is a number here too, in parentheses after ‘Inbox’: single figures good, double figures better.

That’s what happens on a good day. (On a really good day, Facebook will have three red circles for you.) On a bad day, the Facebook globe is heartbreakingly red-less and banal; Twitter’s Liberty Bell is mute; and GMail’s Inbox is not bold, not at all. You reel back from the screen(s) in disappointment; your mood crashes and burns; the world seems empty and uninviting and cold and dark. Impatience, frustration, anxiety come rushing in through the portals you have now left open, suffusing your being, residing there till dislodged by the right kind of sensory input from those same screens: the appropriate colors, typefaces, and numbers need to make an appearance to calm and sooth your restless self. We get to work; all the while keeping an eye open and an ear cocked: a number appears on a visible tab, and we switch contexts and screens to check, immediately. An envelope appears on the corner of our screens; mail is here; we must tear open that envelope. Sounds too, intrude; cheeps, dings, and rings issue from our machines to inform us that relief is here. The silence of our devices can be deafening.

Our mood rises and falls in sync.

As is evident, our interactions with the human-computer interfaces of our communications systems have a rich phenomenology: expectations, desires, hopes rush towards with colors and shapes and numbers; their encounters produce mood changes and affective responses. The clever designer shapes the iconography of the interface with care to produce these in the right way, to achieve the desired results: your interaction with the system must never be affectively neutral; it must have some emotional content. We are manipulated by these responses; we behave accordingly.

Machine learning experts speak of training the machines; let us not forget that our machines train us too. By the ‘face’ they present to us, by the sounds they make, by the ‘expressions’ visible on them. As we continue to interact with them, we become different people, changed much like we are by our encounters with other people, those other providers and provokers of emotional responses.

Justin Caouette On Rational And Emotional Forgiveness

Over at The Philosopher’s Take Justin Caouette wonders if there is a distinction between two kinds of forgiveness, ‘cognitive’ and ‘rational’:

Cognitive forgiveness deals with understanding the act that was done to you. So, let’s say your good friend punched you in the face when you walked into his house. After the incident and after talking about it with him you realized that he thought you were the thief that tried to break into his house the week before. You now “understand” why he did what he did and you may forgive him for it after he has apologized and told you why he decided to throw the punch….you…cognitively forgave him by understanding why he did what he did…Emotional forgiveness seems to be a more difficult form of forgiveness that is much less attainable….Following the punch in the face you get angry. Even after you’ve come to a rational understanding of why he did it you may still carry the anger or disappointment in his inability to see the difference between you and the thief….it does seem possible to rationally forgive but still be emotionally hurt, in turn, not forgiving.

And then goes on to ask some questions among which are the following:

Can you forgive in one sense and not the other? Or, are these two forms of forgiveness necessarily linked in a way that doesn’t allow us to forgive in one sense but not the other? Is one form of forgiving more important [than] the other? What does it mean to fully forgive someone? Does it mean that the relationship goes back to the way things were? And, if so, do any of us really forgive anyone?

Caouette is right to surmise that “these two forms of forgiveness necessarily linked in a way that doesn’t allow us to forgive in one sense but not the other.” To ‘understand’ and make comprehensible the rationale behind an insult–physical or otherwise–directed at one self is to undergo an emotional experience as well. The phenomenology of forgiveness involves a kind of ‘lifting’ of a burden of sorts which is colored with an emotional response.  To consider Caouette’s example again, he assumes too quickly that the subject in question has attained a ‘rational understanding’ of why he suffered the punch. Rather, I would suggest that if he is still carrying the anger and disappointment of the injury around as a kind of emotional baggage, then he has not come to the supposed rational understanding either. That rational understanding, that fitting of your assailant’s actions into cognitive space of reasons so that it is made comprehensible, less malevolent, will only proceed if facilitated by the right kind of emotional scaffolding. Or, the space of reasons is not purely cognitive; it is emotional too. When we tell our friend that we ‘understand,’ that it’s ‘OK,’ we are not merely signaling a cognitive response, we are indicating we have felt emotional relief too and that we are now, unburdened, ready to move on.

In an older post on a related topic, I had made note of Doris McIlwain‘s remark that ‘friendship and love are not fully rational enterprises‘ as follows:

McIlwain’s broader point is about how reason and emotion can, may, and should work together to animate our–not ‘fully rational’–responses to this world’s offerings. And so it applies too, to our reactions to the words we read and write, the art we make and appreciate, the food we make and provide. We feel affinities to, and repulsions from, peculiar and particular passages of text and authorial maneuvers and locutions; we come to a halt before an artwork, and circle back, puzzled, not quite sure why it draws us toward it–or why it makes us reach for a hammer; we read a poem and know not why it, and not others ‘just like it’ speak to us and hold us; we bite into a morsel, and pause, curiously aware that we are experiencing much more than just plain ‘ol sweet, savory or spicy (‘comfort food’ wouldn’t be called that if it didn’t.) Small wonder our efforts to systematize  the critiques and responses we offer to these experiences are destined to flirt with an incoherence of sorts.

From these considerations it follows that one form of forgiving cannot be prioritized over the other; the two are inseparable and proceed together.  To ‘fully’  forgive someone does not entail the relationship ‘goes back to the way things were’–that isn’t possible or desirable. Rather it suggests that we are able to now perceive the act calling for forgiveness in a broader context that eliminates the earlier shadings and construals we placed on it. Sometimes we may never forget or forgive fully but we can still hope for a diminution of the visceral emotions associated with it, in part because our continued growth as a person may result in alternative rational responses to the event in question. (There are some colorful metaphors here to play with: a drop of ink in a glass of water can never be removed, but adding more water can render the glass clear again; that is, positive history can act to cover up an old emotional wound.)

This intertwining of the rational and the emotional has been noted before, and indeed, we may read the Buddha as suggesting that we need to bring the two in harmony in our actions and thoughts. The separation of the two is useful for analytical purposes, but it should not lead us to imagine that such separation is present in the moral subject.

Donald Trump Is An American Hero For Not Paying Taxes

That loud sound you heard last night was not your usual, run-of-the-mill thing that goes bump in the night. That was The New York Times dropping the explosive–just explosive!–scoop on the American citizenry that Donald Trump’s tax returns, a copy of which the Times managed to obtain courtesy an anonymous benefactor, reveal that he might not have paid taxes for twenty years (if the ‘size’ of his ‘enormous’ deduction for business losses incurred is any indication.) The consensus reaction appears to be that this is the torpedo that will finally send the H. M. S Trump to the bottom of the political ocean, even as the skipper’s orange toupee continues to defiantly flutter from the bridge.

I’m afraid such reactions are entirely unwarranted and redolent of the same absurd misplaced optimism that has resulted in the American nation not taking the Trump candidacy seriously. Trump is not an American villain for not paying taxes; he is a hero. Not paying taxes is as American as apple pie; the trickster and the joker who does not pay taxes might not have featured in a Bob Dylan song, but that kind of conman is a folk hero nevertheless. He really sticks it to the Man (in this case, the rest of his fellow social travellers.)

Consider that the Republican Party, a serious player on the American political landscape, has ensured its political longevity by ensuring that–besides racist dog whistles–it keeps a generous supply of tax-cutting promises stashed away in its grab-bag of vote-for-me tricks. Every four years–or rather three, because the election season begins earlier every year–we are reliably assured that a Republican candidate will hit the hustings with this old wine in its newest bottle and be greeted with hosannas praising his sagacity and love for the American people.

Consider that this nation’s finest tax schools offer specialized courses of post-graduate study in American tax law, which are geared to producing tax attorneys who can aid their clients reduce their tax ‘burden.’ (Oh, the crushing inhumanity of living in a social space and paying your share to instantiate the virtue of reciprocity!) These attorneys go on to highly paid positions at Big Law tax firms where they will be asked to prepare ‘tax vehicles’ for their corporate clients. The task here is simple–and can be understood as what computer scientists like to call a ‘constraint satisfaction’ problem: this is the US tax code, these are the details of how we do business; tell us how we can pay the least tax possible. (Splurging on a tax accountant who will save you the big bucks by devising one devious deduction after another is widely regarded as the smartest expenditures a household can indulge in.) This maneuvering through legal loopholes is what the tax attorney is paid big bucks for; it is a talent valued highly by the corporate world.

Trump is not an outlier; he is the corporate norm. Little folks dream about not paying taxes and elect the big fellas who say they won’t have to anymore. The true heroes just find a way–by any means necessary, including the legal ones–to not pay taxes. It’s the American thing to do; we’re not Scandinavia, fer crying out loud.