John G. Messerly's Blog, page 42

What about Hope?

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by Lawrence Rifkin MD

The middle-aged woman in a dark red sweater looked withdrawn and forlorn. I had been answering questions from the audience after presenting a talk called “Humanism As a Source of Inspiration and Meaning.” She raised her forearm just slightly to indicate she had a question. Her question—and my inability to satisfy her with an answer—haunted me for weeks.

“What about hope?” she’d asked.

Undaunted by the aura of hopelessness in her tone, I answered brightly: “The humanist worldview is filled with hope. We may be made of matter, but we decide what matters. It is through meaningful human action that a blank computer screen can become a poem, that slavery can become freedom. We can help others, alleviate suffering, and experience beauty. Humanism is not just the rejection of an idea. Humanism is an affirmation. It is a positive, clear-eyed response to our one world. It is saying ‘yes’, not saying ‘no.’”

“I don’t see how that helps me have hope,” she said, monotone. I went into high gear, and tried a different answer.

“Humanism is about possibilities. Without some grand supernatural plan or destiny, the future is open. Possibility means the door for hope and change and goodness is open. Possibilities can lead to progress, in the world and in our individual lives. It is a positive psychological message. We have choices in how to shape our lives. We can live with caring and compassion. We can invest ourselves in worthy goals. We don’t need anything supernatural for that. The fact that we can try to change ourselves, other people, and the world—and make it a better place through reason and compassion—is a fundamental wonder of being human, and can be celebrated. It is a cause for hope, and wisdom.”

“Okay,” she said. She was polite but unconvinced.

I don’t know what personal trauma, life events, or innate characteristics made the questioner long for hope, but clearly she’s not alone in seeking to satisfy this deep human need. Religion, in part, peddles hope. Hope also wins elections and sells products. The question is—for someone who is currently without hope—are the kinds of secular answers I proffered going to be enough on a personal, emotional, and psychological level?

I realize now that philosophical concepts may be too abstract for some who feel despondent. She needed a personal answer. What about hope for her? Humanism has a solid foundation. We have secular dreams of a better tomorrow, and a track record of positive social change. But do we have answers on a personal level? Do we have a fulfilling substitute for “God loves you” or, for the bereaved, “don’t worry, you’ll meet again someday in heaven”?

So let’s admit straight out: humanism is not about hope. It’s about facing the world as it actually exists and making the best of it. It’s about looking this real world in the eye and, using imagination and initiative, building castles in the sand, not castles in the sky. It’s about finding goodness within the spectrum of what’s real and what’s possible. And in facing such truths, humanists don’t look outside nature for salvation; they don’t seek change through wish fulfillment. This perspective is not a limitation. It’s a motivator. It’s the ground for positive action and results.

There are other approaches as well. A naturalistic, scientific worldview has led to medical marvels such as surgical anesthesia and life-saving antibiotics. In the same manner, properly used psychoactive medications can be thought of in a positive light as one tool among many to help relieve mental suffering and stress, find inner calm and happiness, and help individuals and their families to enjoy better lives.

Reflecting about the woman who asked, “What about hope?” I realize now that what she needed most was not just ideas, but love, broadly understood. She needed to feel loved by a person, family, or community. Conversely, she might find meaning in providing unconditional love to a person, pet, or worthy goal.

Ideas are the groundwork of the humanist lifestance, and are valued. But I now feel that the best response would have been to ask the woman to meet me for coffee afterwards, and then listen to her. To care. To show by action that there is the possibility of finding a person or a community that listens, supports, and tries to help with appropriate suggestions. A community that strives to provide encouragement—not with fairy tales, but with a whole realm of positive, real-world, personal human responses. That is the humanist way.

(Published in the January / February 2012 Humanist. Reprinted with the author’s permission.)

The Time of Our Lives: Human Awareness in the Context of Cosmic Time

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by Lawrence Rifkin MD

I am about to turn 50 years old, a mark of time that perhaps triggered the impetus to try to understand human life in the context of the largest possible backdrop — cosmic time.

Physicists study physical time. Psychologists study the human experience of time. But rarely do we explicitly put these two together, and attempt to understand human awareness directly within the scientific context of linear cosmic time itself.

Linear time doesn’t seem so sexy these days. “Being in the now” and “transcending time” seem to get much of the attention and reverence in culture. But scientific linear time is not prosaic; linear time is full of grandeur and wonder.

It is through linear, historical time that the world can change, and with change can come growth, progress, stages, stories, and possibility. The physicist Lee Smolin wrote that every feature of human organization is negotiable and subject to improvement by the invention of new ways of doing things, whether by Darwinian evolution or the evolution of technologies, economies, and societies. Smolin writes about replacing “the false hope of transcendence to a timeless, absolute perfection with a genuinely hopeful view of an ever expanding realm for human agency, within a cosmos with an open future.”

Time offers us hope and despair, it both creates and destroys, it carries us along helplessly but it also is the arena in which we can transform the possible into the actual.

Linear time, of course, is not all good — things could get worse. Human awareness of death may be the true fall from innocence. As Shakespeare put it, “And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and from hour to hour we rot and rot, and thereby hangs a tale.”

Two findings of science are particularly relevant and astounding. The first is that time is not absolute. Evidence has substantiated Einstein’s special theory of relativity which, in part, says that time can slow down and speed up relative to an object’s speed and gravitational force. How cool is that? As will be discussed further, the idea that matter and time are entwined can change our conception of ourselves in time.

Another awe-inspiring finding of science regarding time is just how unfathomably old the universe is, and how recently in history humans evolved. If the age of the universe were made equivalent to a calendar year, and the Big Bang was on January 1, then life did not evolve on Earth until October 2. Homo sapiens evolved on December 31 at 11:53 pm (about seven minutes before midnight), and all recorded human history occurred in the last 10 seconds before midnight! We are life’s nouveaux riche.

Because of our temporal psychological limitations, we are unable to readily see, experience, or feel evolution, galaxy formation, the slow formation of mountains, or movement of continents. We don’t experience time on nature’s timescale. Our inability and difficulty in readily experiencing time on timescales other than our own is a source of much preventable environmental devastation and can put at risk human survival itself.

There is an assumption that a minute is a minute is a minute, but that is neither true from a physical perspective (Einstein’s relativity) nor from the human experience of time. The experience of time is inexorably linked to both physical time and psychological time. Attention, emotion, memory, mood, dreams, and substances can slow the experience of time down or speed it up. Time “speeds up” as we get older, and is often experienced as going by faster for the elderly than for a child. In a 3 minute duration estimate test, 60 to 70 year olds overestimate the duration by an average of 40 seconds.

Just as matter and energy form a continuum, time can only be fully understood in connection to something. Many physicists feel time itself results from the increasing entropy of the physical universe. That time cannot exist without relation to matter is a scientific hypothesis, potentially falsifiable, but it is a hypothesis that is consistent with what we currently know about time.

Time can thus be envisioned as a time/matter continuum, not as just some separate neutral frame of absolute moments one after the other within which matter plays. Time is not like an underlying ocean on top of which waves of matter move forward. Time is part of the wave itself.

If matter and time are inseparable, then as Brian Swimme put it, the universe is not a place, but a story.

If seen as a time/matter continuum, then time has a story too. And this is no ordinary time in cosmic history. In this era, in at least in one small corner of the universe, mind exists, a form of matter of extraordinary complexity, which can interact with time at a new level, forming a mind/time continuum with astounding emergent experiential natural properties.

In a beautiful essay, Charles Van Doren wrote: “For aeons, time was not the measure but rather the form of human days, years, and lives. Each was an arc having beautiful words that named its parts: morning, noon, and night; spring, summer, fall, and winter; childhood, maturity, and old age…The parts of a human life are not temporal; they cannot be measured with clocks and watches. They are activities and powers, different kinds of things to do and be….Mixed together, they make a life lovely; regimented or required, time itself becomes a prison.”

Our minds may occupy just a small spatial volume in the universe, but mind/time interaction during this historical era of consciousness is pregnant with significance and possibility. Now is the time of awareness and experience. It is the time of progress and evolution. It is the time of your life.

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The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. This essay appeared in Scientific American on March 9, 2014. Reprinted with the author’s permission.

Essays About the Election

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I wish there was a way to convey to readers the difference between informed and uninformed opinions; between legitimate news organizations (The New York Times) who tries to describe a world that corresponds to reality and those (Fox News) whose goal is propaganda; between those who understand and have studied epistemology (the study of the nature and limits of knowledge) and logic and critical thinking and those who never had the opportunity to benefit from such studies; between those who were lucky enough to have studied science and thereby recognize the difference between science and pseudoscience, between scientific experts like Dr. Fauci who graduated first in his class at Cornell Medical School, who has spent a lifetime studying, and who is one of the world’s leading infectious disease experts and ignorant charlatans like Trump; between those who want to help educate them and those who seek only to control them.

But no matter how you say all this you will simply strike others as arrogant. Who are you to say you know more about logic and science and reasoning than I do? The reason you get this response is that people are just so insecure. They believe they have an informed opinion about everything even though it’s obvious that we’re not experts about almost anything. I’m not an expert—in fact, a complete novice—about auto mechanics, playing musical instruments, and a billion other things. But I do know something about logic and critical thinking and I’m scientifically literate.

Anyway, the world is an imperfect place (a definite understatement) and the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis explains so much. In the end, as I’ve said many times over the years to generations of students, most people don’t want to know they want to believe.

Still, I hold out hope that somehow, someway, someday … the future will be better than the past. I hope my grandchildren get to live in such a world.

With this preface out of the way, here are some great op-eds about the US Election that appeared in legitimate publications today.

“Does Joe Biden Really Want This Job?” Frank Bruni, New York Times

“The War on Truth Reaches Its Climax” Paul Krugman, New York Times

“If you can’t think of anything worse than the other side winning, imagine this”

Eric H. Holder Jr. and Michael B. Mukasey, The Washington Post

“What if Trump won’t go? Legal scholar Lawrence Douglas on the “world of hurt” that could follow” Dave Daley, Salon

“A second Trump term would mean severe and irreversible changes in the climate: No joke: It would be disastrous on the scale of millennia” Dave Roberts, Vox

“Be Ready for a Lengthy, Vicious Struggle” Thomas Edsall, New York Times

Does Truth Matter?

Truth, holding a mirror and a serpent (1896). Olin Levi Warner, Library of Congress

The sleep of reason produces monsters. ~ Francisco Goya

In a previous post, I discussed Princeton emeritus professor Harry Frankfurt’s distinction between lies and bullshit. I suggested that the difference between truth and falsity is even more important. Now I’d like to elaborate.

There are many reasons to revere truth: along with beauty and goodness it is one of the great ideas we judge by; it is universally regarded as a virtue; it is something, on this planet at least, that only humans discern; it is necessary to make good decisions about living our lives, and it allows us to predict the future and avoid future dangers. But there’s more.

When I started teaching ethics 30 years ago I learned that truth-telling is one of the only moral imperatives across cultures. Why would that be? Simply put, human communication is pointless unless we assume that others will tell the truth. If I ask you what time it is or for directions to London, I’m assuming you won’t lie. If I assume the opposite, there’s not much point to those questions. Sincere, honest exchange is essential to communication, all the rest just manipulation. Another problem with lies, ignorance, and bullshit is that they undermine our rationality; they leave us slaves to our passions; and they keep us groping in the dark when we try to solve problems. Problems are hard to solve when you start with truth, much more so when you begin with falsehoods. Lies and nonsense will ultimately be our downfall, however temporarily attractive they may be. Why?

If we disregard the truth we’ll undo the project of classical Greece and the Enlightenment when humans realized that reason could improve their world; if we disregard the truth we will remain slaves to the reptilian impulses of our anciently formed brains; if we disregard the truth we’ll destroy our planet’s atmosphere and biosphere and kill ourselves. People suffer when we distort the truth. So it is our choice. Face the truth of our biological and cultural heritage and transcend them, or we will perish. But why is this so hard to understand?

I think that those so careless with their bullying, destruction, ignorance, power, and naked pursuit of self-interest just don’t realize or care how fragile biological and cultural life are. We live within a thin blue line that separates us from the unimaginably cold and dark emptiness of space. Our atmosphere, climate, and ecosystem support life only if we support them. Culture too is extraordinarily fragile. It took 10,000 years to achieve, but we can destroy it in an instant. But even if we survive biologically, imagine living in a post-apocalyptic world. A world in which we have to reinvent physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and computer science. A world where we would have to reconquer fire, reinvent the wheel, rediscover electricity. Where we would have to reconstruct atomic, relativity, evolutionary, gravitational, and quantum theory. A world without engineering, dentistry, or medicine, without art, literature, or music. Think really hard about all that. Thomas Hobbes described such a state of nature like this:

“No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Why then the hubris of ignorant people? They come and go, flickering flames with moth-like lifespans, nonetheless convinced of their importance. For some perspective they might contemplate their own death, or hear the voice of Carl Sagan:

(Note. This post originally appeared on this blog on January 25, 2017.)

America’s crimes against humanity aren’t on the ballot this year — but they should be

An essay today in Salon Magazine titled “America’s crimes against humanity aren’t on the ballot this year — but they should be” made a connection between Harry Frankfurt‘s book, On Bullshit, —the subject of my last post—and the policies of family separation and forced sterilization employed by the Trump regime. It is a worthwhile read. In my next post, I will further explore the importance of truth.

Lying vs. Bullshit

Emeritus professor of philosophy at Princeton Harry Frankfurt‘s book, On Bullshit, was a surprise bestseller a few years ago. Given the public musings about our President, I thought it time to revisit the main idea of the book.

Frankfurt begins by jumping right in: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” Those of us who with relatively educated and well-ordered minds know the pain we experience when forced to listen to the nonsense spewed by so many politicians, generals, clergy, and uninformed citizens.

But what is bullshitting and in what ways it is similar to, and different from, lying? Here are the basics as Frankfurt sees them:

Main Similarities –

1) Both liars and bullshitters (bsers) want you to believe that they are telling the truth.

2) And both want to get away with something.

Major Differences

Liars – 

1) Liars engage in a conscious act of deception.

2) Liars know the truth, but attempt to hide it.

3) Liars spread untruths, but they still accept the distinction between the truth and false.

Bsers

1) Bsers don’t consciously deceive.

2) Bsers just don’t know or care about the truth.

3) Bsers ignore or reject the distinction between truth and falsity altogether.

(Note that what the liar says is necessarily false. If I know that Jupiter is a gaseous planet and claim otherwise, then what I’m saying is false. But if I don’t know anything about Jupiter and then make some claim about it, my bullshit might turn out to be correct.)

To reiterate the main point. Liars know the truth and try to hide it; bsers don’t know or care about the truth and try to hide their lack of commitment to it. Thus bullshitting is more like bluffing or faking. Surprisingly, Frankfurt thinks bullshit is more dangerous than lies because it erodes the very idea of truth. As he puts it:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth … Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off … He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.

As to the cause of so much bullshit, Frankfurt argues:

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.

Brief reflections – I accept the basic distinction between knowing the truth and lying about it; and not knowing or caring about the truth, and then trying to impress people by talking about things you know nothing about.

I’m less convinced that bullshitting is worse than lying. To clarify, consider the following:

1) I am scientifically literate. Therefore I know that biological evolution is true beyond any reasonable doubt. If I lie about this—say because I think that it will make you more likely to contribute to my political or religious cause—then I subvert the truth.

2) I am scientifically illiterate. Thus I don’t know if evolutionary theory is true or false. If I bullshit about this—say because I want you to think that I know what I’m talking about—then I ignore the truth.

In these two cases, I think lying is worse than bullshitting because the liar always subverts the truth whereas the bser might inadvertently tell the truth.

But if the bser not only doesn’t know or care about the truth but rejects the very distinction between the two, if the bullshitter believes that there is no truth, then bullshitting is worse. A world that denies the existence of truth is far worse than one that still accepts the difference between truth and falsity.

What I think is more important than the distinction between lying and bullshitting is the one between truth and falsity. As Frankfurt states in his follow-up book, On Truth: “How could a society which cared too little for truth make sufficiently well-informed decisions concerning the most suitable disposition of its public business?” I think this is correct, but I think there’s a lot more to it.

In my next post, I will further explore why truth matters.

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(Note. This post was originally published on this blog on January 23, 2017.)

A Plea To Voters in the 2020 Election

(This is an unedited reprint of my essay from four years ago, “To My Grandchildren on the Eve of the 2016 American Presidential Election.”)

“The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” ~  Thomas Mann & Norman Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism

I have no illusions that—despite a life dedicated to careful, conscientious, and critical thinking, a lifetime of reading, thinking, teaching, and writing—one can change the minds of those suffering from cognitive closure. If you can’t convince people that biological evolution or global climate change is true—about which there is no reasonable doubt—then good luck convincing them of much else.

But I want my grandchildren to know that I vehemently opposed the candidacy of Donald Trump for the office of the American Presidency in 2016. I want my grandchildren to know that your grandfather was on the side of progress; he was with the women and the young and the immigrants, who disproportionately embrace a better future, not a bitter one.  

And I want you to know that I was a public signee of the Scholars and Writers Against Trump. (To read a roundup of tweets, blog posts, and other mentions of that document click here: https://storify.com/andrewhazlett/scholars-and-writers-against-trump)

I have written multiple posts in the last few months on this issue because Trump represents a unique danger to our political system. Here are a few excerpts from those posts, and here’s to a better and more civilized world.

From my post, “Is America on the Verge of a Civil War?“

… Trump is obviously unqualified for the office of the presidency in every conceivable way—from his personality and moral character, to his psychological instability, to his lack of experience and knowledge of virtually anything relevant to the job. Trump is a poster boy of the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which the ignorant assume they are knowledgeable about things of which they are ignorant. Many of his supporters no doubt suffer from a similar malady.

And while the American Psychiatric Association prohibits its members from offering a psychiatric diagnosis of a public official without their having conducted an exam on that person, I’m not a member so I’ll take my shot. (I have studied abnormal psychology in some detail.) I’d say a cursory glance at Mr. Trump reveals that he suffers severely from a number of psychological maladies including: bi-polar disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and quite probably borderline personality disorder. He also suffers psychologically from the lack of sleep he brags about as well as a poor diet. Among the big 5 personality traits, he would be rated very high on neuroticism and low on emotional stability.  He is undoubtedly a serial sexual predator and there are also plausible but unproven claims that he is a child molester.

Putting such an unstable individual at the helm of the nuclear arsenal is just one unintended consequence (and a particularly scary one) of a broken political system, especially today’s dysfunctional, obstructionist Republican party. The Republican party is, in fact, a Confederate party, a white, racist party whose power is most prominent in the American south. As the basic functions of democratic government are eroding, the ignorant look for a strongman to save them. Needless to say, this does not bode well for the republic or for international peace and prosperity.

And here is an excerpt from the historian Ken Burns‘ 2016 commencement speech at Stanford which I quoted in my post, “Summary of Ken Burns’ 2016 Anti-Commencement Speech at Stanford,”

For 216 years, our elections, though bitterly contested, have featured the philosophies and character of candidates who were clearly qualified. That is not the case this year. One is glaringly not qualified.

So before you do anything with your well-earned degree, you must do everything you can to defeat the retrograde forces that have invaded our democratic process, divided our house, to fight against, no matter your political persuasion, the dictatorial tendencies of the candidate with zero experience in the much maligned but subtle art of governance; who is against lots of things, but doesn’t seem to be for anything, offering only bombastic and contradictory promises, and terrifying Orwellian statements; a person who easily lies, creating an environment where the truth doesn’t seem to matter; who has never demonstrated any interest in anyone or anything but himself and his own enrichment; who insults veterans, threatens a free press, mocks the handicapped, denigrates women, immigrants and all Muslims; a man who took more than a day to remember to disavow a supporter who advocates white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan; an infantile, bullying man who, depending on his mood, is willing to discard old and established alliances, treaties and long-standing relationships.

I feel genuine sorrow for the understandably scared and—they feel—powerless people who have flocked to his campaign in the mistaken belief that—as often happens on TV—a wand can be waved and every complicated problem can be solved with the simplest of solutions. They can’t. It is a political Ponzi scheme. And asking this man to assume the highest office in the land would be like asking a newly minted car driver to fly a 747.

Finally, an echo of my sentiment can be found in this great post by a fellow blogger titled “I don’t know why we’re having this conversation.”

So, in conclusion, I say again to my grandchildren: I want you to know that your grandfather was on the side of progress; he embraced a better future, not a bitter one. He rejected the fascism and destruction of democracy that will follow if Trump and his corrupt minions hold the reigns of power. If Trump is elected the nation as we know it may not survive.

Summary of “Last Exit From Autocracy”

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David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, has penned an article in The Atlantic that is both astute and terrifying—“Last Exit From Autocracy: America survived one Trump term. It wouldn’t survive a second.” It begins,

The most important ballot question in 2020 is not Joe Biden versus Donald Trump, or Democrat versus Republican. The most important question is: Will Trump get away with his corruption—will his crooked and authoritarian tactics succeed?

If the answer is yes, be ready for more. Much more.

Frum’s essay is a model of intellectual rigor and thoughtful analysis. He highlights the founder’s worries about a truly corrupt President, the restraints they put in place to deal with that situation, and how the institutions designed to do so have failed us.

(Frum previously published a cover story in The Atlantic arguing that Trump’s presidency could put the United States on the road to autocracy. “By all early indications,” he wrote, “the Trump presidency will corrode public integrity and the rule of law—and also do untold damage to American global leadership, the Western alliance, and democratic norms around the world. The damage has already begun, and it will not be soon or easily undone. Yet exactly how much damage is allowed to be done is an open question.”)

He then measures the damage done including: attempting to cripple the Postal Service to alter the election’s outcome; refusing to comply with subpoenas from congressional committees;  ignoring ethics guidelines and rules on security clearances; shutting down two counterintelligence investigations of his Russian business links; assigning prison and park police as street enforcers bypassing the National Guard and the FBI; again welcoming Russian help for his election campaign; etc, etc, etc. Some take solace in Trump’s laziness and ignorance but forget that the sycophants that enable and empower him.

Frum continues,

Perhaps the most consequential change Trump has wrought is in the Republican Party’s attitude toward democracy … Republicans in the Trump years have gotten used to competing under rules biased in their favor. They have come to fear that unless the rules favor them, they will lose … and to view any effort to correct those rules as a direct attack on their survival. What I wrote in 2017 has only become more true since: “We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered.”

To better understand how the U.S. system has failed to reign in Trump Frum surveys just a few of Trump’s abuses and how they might worsen in a second term.

First – abuse of the pardon power

Frum writes,

On July 10, 2020, Trump commuted the sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone. As Stone’s own communications showed, he had acted as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks in 2016. Had Stone cooperated with federal investigators, the revelations might have been dangerous to Trump. Instead, Stone lied to Congress and threatened other witnesses. Just as Stone was supposed to go to prison, Trump commuted his sentence. Commutation was more useful to the cover-up than an outright pardon. A commuted person retains his Fifth Amendment right not to testify; a pardoned person loses that right.

Trump’s clemency reminds other guilty Trump associates like Paul Manafort and Ghislaine Maxwell of the benefits of staying silent. Consider that in a second-term Trump might demand that others break the law for him and then protect them when they are caught. He might pardon his relatives or even himself.

Second – abuse of government resources for personal gain

On August 28, 2020, after the president broke with precedent and violated ethical norms by accepting the Republican nomination on White House grounds. Aids reported that he enjoyed the fact that no one could stop him. In addition, no one has stopped Trump from: 1) directing taxpayer dollars to his personal businesses;  2) defying congressional subpoenas looking into whether he was violating tax and banking laws; 3) hiring and promoting his relatives; 4) using government resources for partisan purposes; 5) pressuring and cajoling foreign governments to help his reelection campaign; 6)using his power over the Postal Service to discourage voting that he thinks will hurt him; etc, etc, etc. And what of the institutions designed to stop this corruption?

Trump found it surprisingly easy to use the Justice Department as a shield against curtailment of his own wrongdoing. The Hatch Act forbids most uses of government resources for partisan purposes. By long-standing courtesy, however, enforcement of that law against senior presidential appointees is left to the president. It’s just assumed that the president will want to comply. But what if he does not? The independent federal agency tasked with enforcing the Hatch Act, the Office of Special Counsel, has found nine senior Trump aides in violation of the law, and has recommended that Trump request their resignation. He has ignored that recommendation.

Or consider Trump’s purging of the inspectors general from Cabinet departments and punishment of whistleblowers.

In a second Trump term, the administration would operate ever more opaquely to cover up corruption and breaches in national security. The Justice Department would be debauched ever more radically, becoming Trump’s own law firm and spending taxpayer dollars to defend him against the consequences of his personal wrongdoing. The hyper-politicization of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments would spread to other agencies.

Third – directing public funds to himself and his companies

No president before Trump directed public dollars to his own companies. Congress never outlawed such activity because they didn’t assume it would happen or that if it did the political system would police wrongdoing. But Trump

steals in plain view. He accepts bribes in a hotel located smack in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. His supporters do not object. His party in Congress is acquiescent. This level of corruption in American life is unprecedented. Trump has actually pocketed more from the Republican Party than he has from the U.S. Treasury—money you would imagine that Republicans donated to elect other Republicans and enact their favored policies, not to enrich Trump—yet the party and its candidates continue to book event after event at Trump properties, proving loyalty by allowing themselves to be pillaged. A willingness to line the Trump family’s pockets has become a mark of obeisance and identity…

The result of this Republican complicity in Trump’s personal corruption has been the  Congress refuses to act even when corruption is disclosed. “In the past, a subpoena from Congress was a subpoena from Congress; all of its members shared an interest in seeing it obeyed.” But now “Republicans in the House cheerfully support Trump when he defies subpoenas from Democratic chairs…”

Trump has a lot to hide, both as president and as a businessman. The price of his political and economic survival has been the destruction of oversight by Congress and the discrediting of honest reporting by responsible media. In a second Trump term, radical gerrymandering and ever more extreme voter suppression by Republican governors would become the party’s only path to survival in a country where a majority of the electorate strongly opposes Trump and his party. The GOP would complete its transformation into an avowedly antidemocratic party.

Fourth – inciting political violence

Frum argues that,

Trump has used violence as a political resource … But as his reelection prospects have dimmed in 2020, political violence has become central to Trump’s message. He wants more of it. After video circulated that appeared to show Kyle Rittenhouse shooting and killing two people and wounding a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 25, Trump liked a tweet declaring that “Kyle Rittenhouse is a good example of why I decided to vote for Trump.” “The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order,” Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway said on Fox & Friends on August 27. Two nights later, a 600-vehicle caravan of Trump supporters headed into downtown Portland, Oregon, firing paintball guns and pepper spray, driving toward a confrontation during which one of them was shot dead.

The people whose job it is to regulate political violence are local police, but Trump has urged them to be as tough as needed and that he has their back no matter how “tough” they have to be or civil rights they violate. Of course, Trump’s appeal is founded on racial resentment that has “stimulated white racist terrorism in the United States and the world, from the New Zealand mosque slaughter (whose perpetrator invoked Trump) to the Pittsburgh synagogue murders to mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Gilroy, California. In recent weeks, political violence has caused those deaths in Kenosha and Portland. A second Trump term will only incite more such horror.”

So the man the Founders dreaded became the President and abused the office as they feared he would. His strategy is to use the Electoral College to be reelected against the opposition of the majority of the people. If he can scare enough white people to vote for him, if he can convince them that he is the leader of the people and that those who think differently don’t count as legitimate citizens,  then he may succeed.

As Frum concludes,

Yet that does not mean the authoritarian populist respects his followers. He is exploiting their prejudices for his own benefit, not theirs. Trump uses power to enrich himself and weaken any institution of law or ethics that gets in the way of his self-enrichment. He holds power by inflaming resentments and hatreds. A second term will mean more stealing, more institution-wrecking, more incitement of bigotry.

Voters in 2020 will go to the polls in the midst of a terrible economic recession, with millions out of work because of Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. But the country is facing a democratic recession too, a from-the-top squeeze on the freedom of ordinary people to influence their government. Will the president follow laws or ignore them? Will public money be used for public purposes—or be redirected to profit Trump and his cronies? Will elections be run fairly—or be manipulated by the president’s party to prevent opposing votes from being cast and counted? Will majority rule remain the American way? Or will minority rule become not a freak event but an enduring habit? These questions are on the ballot as Americans go into the voting booth.

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This article appears in the November 2020 print edition with the headline “Last Exit.”

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DAVID FRUM is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy(2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Other recent articles by Frum include:

“The Man Who Pretended Not to Notice”




“It May Be Time to Invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment”





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“What Did You Expect?”

Another good article expressing similar views is the conservative Max Boot’s “How can 42 percent of Americans still support the worst president in our history?”

END OUR NATIONAL CRISIS: The Case Against Donald Trump

BY THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD

I wholeheartedly endorse their statement. 

THE VERDICT

Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II.

Mr. Trump’s ruinous tenure already has gravely damaged the United States at home and around the world. He has abused the power of his office and denied the legitimacy of his political opponents, shattering the norms that have bound the nation together for generations. He has subsumed the public interest to the profitability of his business and political interests. He has shown a breathtaking disregard for the lives and liberties of Americans. He is a man unworthy of the office he holds.

The editorial board does not lightly indict a duly elected president. During Mr. Trump’s term, we have called out his racism and his xenophobia. We have critiqued his vandalism of the postwar consensus, a system of alliances and relationships around the globe that cost a great many lives to establish and maintain. We have, again and again, deplored his divisive rhetoric and his malicious attacks on fellow Americans. Yet when the Senate refused to convict the president for obvious abuses of power and obstruction, we counseled his political opponents to focus their outrage on defeating him at the ballot box.

Nov. 3 can be a turning point. This is an election about the country’s future, and what path its citizens wish to choose.

The resilience of American democracy has been sorely tested by Mr. Trump’s first term. Four more years would be worse.

But even as Americans wait to vote in lines that stretch for blocks through their towns and cities, Mr. Trump is engaged in a full-throated assault on the integrity of that essential democratic process. Breaking with all of his modern predecessors, he has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, suggesting that his victory is the only legitimate outcome, and that if he does not win, he is ready to contest the judgment of the American people in the courts or even on the streets.

(Kathleen Kingsbury, acting editorial page editor, wrote about the editorial board’s verdict on Donald Trump’s presidency in a special edition of our Opinion Today newsletter. You can read it here .)

The enormity and variety of Mr.Trump’s misdeeds can feel overwhelming. Repetition has dulled the sense of outrage, and the accumulation of new outrages leaves little time to dwell on the particulars. This is the moment when Americans must recover that sense of outrage.

It is the purpose of this special section of the Sunday Review to remind readers why Mr. Trump is unfit to lead the nation. It includes a series of essays focused on the Trump administration’s rampant corruption, celebrations of violence, gross negligence with the public’s health and incompetent statecraft. A selection of iconic images highlights the president’s record on issues like climate, immigration, women’s rights and race. And alongside our judgment of Mr. Trump, we are publishing, in their own words, the damning judgments of men and women who had served in his administration.

The urgency of these essays speaks for itself. The repudiation of Mr. Trump is the first step in repairing the damage he has done. But even as we write these words, Mr. Trump is salting the field — and even if he loses, reconstruction will require many years and tears.

Mr. Trump stands without any real rivals as the worst American president in modern history. In 2016, his bitter account of the nation’s ailments struck a chord with many voters. But the lesson of the last four years is that he cannot solve the nation’s pressing problems because he is the nation’s most pressing problem.

He is a racist demagogue presiding over an increasingly diverse country; an isolationist in an interconnected world; a showman forever boasting about things he has never done, and promising to do things he never will.

He has shown no aptitude for building, but he has managed to do a great deal of damage. He is just the man for knocking things down.

As the world runs out of time to confront climate change, Mr. Trump has denied the need for action, abandoned international cooperation and attacked efforts to limit emissions.

He has mounted a cruel crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration without proposing a sensible policy for determining who should be allowed to come to the United States.

Obsessed with reversing the achievements of his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, he has sought to persuade both Congress and the courts to get rid of the Affordable Care Act without proposing any substitute policy to provide Americans with access to affordable health care. During the first three years of his administration, the number of Americans without health insurance increased by 2.3 million — a number that has surely grown again as millions of Americans have lost their jobs this year.

He campaigned as a champion of ordinary workers, but he has governed on behalf of the wealthy. He promised an increase in the federal minimum wage and fresh investment in infrastructure; he delivered a round of tax cuts that mostly benefited rich people. He has indiscriminately erased regulations, and answered the prayers of corporations by suspending enforcement of rules he could not easily erase. Under his leadership, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has stopped trying to protect consumers and the Environmental Protection Agency has stopped trying to protect the environment.

He has strained longstanding alliances while embracing dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whom Mr. Trump treats with a degree of warmth and deference that defies explanation. He walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a strategic agreement among China’s neighbors intended to pressure China to conform to international standards. In its place, Mr. Trump has conducted a tit-for-tat trade war, imposing billions of dollars in tariffs — taxes that are actually paid by Americans — without extracting significant concessions from China.

Mr. Trump’s inadequacies as a leader have been on particularly painful display during the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of working to save lives, Mr. Trump has treated the pandemic as a public relations problem. He lied about the danger, challenged the expertise of public health officials and resisted the implementation of necessary precautions; he is still trying to force the resumption of economic activity without bringing the virus under control.

As the economy pancaked, he signed an initial round of aid for Americans who lost their jobs. Then the stock market rebounded and, even though millions remained out of work, Mr. Trump lost interest in their plight.

In September, he declared that the virus “affects virtually nobody” the day before the death toll from the disease in the United States topped 200,000.

Nine days later, Mr. Trump fell ill.

The foundations of American civil society were crumbling before Mr. Trump rode down the escalator of Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his presidential campaign. But he has intensified the worst tendencies in American politics: Under his leadership, the nation has grown more polarized, more paranoid and meaner.

He has pitted Americans against each other, mastering new broadcast media like Twitter and Facebook to rally his supporters around a virtual bonfire of grievances and to flood the public square with lies, disinformation and propaganda. He is relentless in his denigration of opponents and reluctant to condemn violence by those he regards as allies. At the first presidential debate in September, Mr. Trump was asked to condemn white supremacists. He responded by instructing one violent gang, the Proud Boys, to “stand back and stand by.”

He has undermined faith in government as a vehicle for mediating differences and arriving at compromises. He demands absolute loyalty from government officials, without regard to the public interest. He is openly contemptuous of expertise.

And he has mounted an assault on the rule of law, wielding his authority as an instrument to secure his own power and to punish political opponents. In June, his administration tear-gassed and cleared peaceful protesters from a street in front of the White House so Mr. Trump could pose with a book he does not read in front of a church he does not attend.

The full scope of his misconduct may take decades to come to light. But what is already known is sufficiently shocking:

He has resisted lawful oversight by the other branches of the federal government. The administration routinely defies court orders, and Mr. Trump has repeatedly directed administration officials not to testify before Congress or to provide documents, notably including Mr. Trump’s tax returns.

With the help of Attorney General William Barr, he has shielded loyal aides from justice. In May, the Justice Department said it would drop the prosecution of Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn even though Mr. Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. In July, Mr. Trump commuted the sentence of another former aide, Roger Stone, who was convicted of obstructing a federal investigation of Mr. Trump’s 2016 election campaign. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, rightly condemned the commutation as an act of “unprecedented, historic corruption.”

Last year, Mr. Trump pressured the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation of his main political rival, Joe Biden, and then directed administration officials to obstruct a congressional inquiry of his actions. In December 2019, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Mr. Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors. But Senate Republicans, excepting Mr. Romney, voted to acquit the president, ignoring Mr. Trump’s corruption to press ahead with the project of filling the benches of the federal judiciary with young, conservative lawyers as a firewall against majority rule.

Now, with other Republican leaders, Mr. Trump is mounting an aggressive campaign to reduce the number of Americans who vote and the number of ballots that are counted.

The president, who has long spread baseless charges of widespread voter fraud, has intensified his rhetorical attacks in recent months, especially on ballots submitted by mail. “The Nov 3rd Election result may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED,” he tweeted. The president himself has voted by mail, and there is no evidence to support his claims. But the disinformation campaign serves as a rationale for purging voter rolls, closing polling places, tossing absentee ballots and otherwise impeding Americans from exercising the right to vote.

It is an intolerable assault on the very foundations of the American experiment in government by the people.

Other modern presidents have behaved illegally or made catastrophic decisions. Richard Nixon used the power of the state against his political opponents. Ronald Reagan ignored the spread of AIDS. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying and obstruction of justice. George W. Bush took the nation to war under false pretenses.

Mr. Trump has outstripped decades of presidential wrongdoing in a single term.

Frederick Douglass lamented during another of the nation’s dark hours, the presidency of Andrew Johnson, “We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man, we shall be safe.” But that is not the nature of our democracy. The implicit optimism of American democracy is that the health of the Republic rests on the judgment of the electorate and the integrity of those voters choose.

Mr. Trump is a man of no integrity. He has repeatedly violated his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Now, in this moment of peril, it falls to the American people — even those who would prefer a Republican president — to preserve, protect and defend the United States by voting.

Explore the Other Stories




AS EVIDENCED BY

HIS UNAPOLOGETIC CORRUPTIONBY MICHELLE COTTLE
WHEN SCIENCE IS PUSHED ASIDEBY JENEEN INTERLANDI
HIS DEMAGOGYBY JESSE WEGMAN
HIS FAKE POPULISMBY FARAH STOCKMAN
HIS INCOMPETENT STATESMANSHIPBY SERGE SCHMEMANN



WITH LASTING CONSEQUENCE







WOMEN’S RIGHTS UNDER ATTACKPhotographed on January 19, 2018







IMMIGRATION HALTEDPhotographed on June 26, 2019







BLACK LIVES AT RISKPhotographed on June 6, 2020







A PLANET IN PERILPhotographed on September 29, 2020







AN ECONOMY IN TATTERSPhotographed on April 9, 2020







THE HIGH PRICE OF THE HIGH COURTPhotographed on September 26, 2020







TOO MANY FINGERS ON TOO MANY TRIGGERSPhotographed on April 30, 2020







L.G.B.T.Q. PROTECTIONS DISMANTLEDPhotographed on June 14, 2020


 

Death and Meaning in Life

[image error]Death causes many to doubt life’s meaning. It isn’t surprising that the meaninglessness of life consumes Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, or that death figures prominently in the world’s literature about the meaning of life. Consider these haunting lines from James Baldwin:

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

Something binds the topics of death and meaning. The thought of oblivion arouses even the non-philosophical among us. What is the relationship between death and meaning?Death is variously said to:

render life meaningless;
detract from life’s meaning;
add to life’s meaning;
render life meaningful.

Death has always been inevitable, but the idea that science will eventually conquer death has taken root—achieved through some combination of future technologies like nanotechnology, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Some think the possibility of technological immortality renders human life meaningless, others that life can only attain its full meaning if death is overcome.

But whatever view one takes about the relationship between death and meaning, the two are joined. If we had three arms or six fingers, our analysis of the meaning of life wouldn’t change; but if we didn’t die our analysis would be vastly different. If our concerns with annihilation vanished, a good part of what seems to undermine meaning would disappear. To understand the issue of the meaning of life, we must think about death. Pascal’s words echo across the centuries:

Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.

Can we find meaning in this picture?

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(Note. The post originally appeared on this blog on December 29, 2014.)