Month: November 2016

With the election of Donald Trump and his various appointments of hard line right wingers, people like Rebecca Schuman are wondering if the dark days of the McCarthy era might make a comeback. According to my research, it’s absolutely impossible.

Because McCarthyism never went away.

In 2005, Russell Jacoby listed some of the organizations keeping watch on professors: Campus Watch, Academic Bias, and Students for Academic Freedom were a few. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, founded in 1995, has long scrutinized universities. It has occasionally listed individual professors to watch out for, such as some who criticized George Bush’s Iraq War. And in 2006, the Bruin Alumni Association went so far as to name little yours truly, not to the actual “Dirty Thirty” left-wing faculty faculty members it claimed to expose at UCLA, but to what could be called the Dirty JV–people who expressed left-wing views, but were somehow not as obnoxious as the Thirty themselves.

So McCarthyism hasn’t gone away. But it hasn’t recently had much of a hearing. ACTA retracted its list after an outcry that it was McCarthyistic, and the Bruin Alumni Association vanished with speed. The National Association of Scholars, yet another right wing watch group (but with more scholarly respectability) now couples general denunciations of newer (post-1968) trends in the humanities with a strangely intense commitment to fossil fuels. Most of the others have been crying in the wilderness, waiting for an opportunity.

Do they have one now?

Today’s situation shows two big differences with the McCarthy era. First, Marxism was not merely a set of ideas, or even a set of ideas that (in Marx’s words) had “gripped the masses” in various countries. It was, and presented itself as, the ideology of a large and disciplined group already in control of several national governments. This, of course, was false; even in those days, there were plenty of Marxists who were not followers of the Moscow line. But a very powerful apparatus said otherwise: that all true Marxists follow Soviet principles.

The idea that there was a single mass movement of Marxists was thus put forth by Marxists themselves. The current chaos in the Muslim world, with for example Sunni and Shia Muslims fighting one another far more bitterly than the Brezhnevites ever fought the Maoists, does not exhibit that sort of frightening unity.

Second, Karl Marx was steeped in the Western philosophical tradition. Indeed, as he himself argued, there is no way out of Hegel except through him—and  as many (including me) have argued, no way out of Kant except through Hegel. So Western philosophy either has to pass through Marx or stay with Kantian or pre-Kantian modes of philosophy (as American philosophers so often do).

Of course, the fact is that Islamic philosophy, like Marxism, is absolutely integral to the western philosophical tradition. The great Islamic philosophers are just as much forbears of contemporary European thought as Augustine and Maimonides. If the neo-McCarthyites ever figure this out, they will have a new brush with which to tar us all.

In any case, they’re coming. In a future post, I’ll tell you what to watch for.

 

In a recent seminar, I was asked what Hegel would think of Donald Trump. I was stumped at the time: how could Hegel, the greatest apostle rationality ever had, even begin to make sense of a man who, having been elected through resentment of the urban elite, went to one of America’s most expensive restaurants one week later, received a standing ovation from its wealthy patrons, told them he was going to lower their taxes, and allowed himself to be filmed doing it?

But in two early essays, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (DF), and Faith and Knowledge (FK; all paginations to Cerf and Harris translations), Hegel provides a clue. Discussing Fichte, he claims that each rational being exists for Fichte in a two-fold way: as free and rational, and as mere matter to be manipulated. This dichotomy is absolute: each side of it is precisely what the other side is not, and it cannot be transgressed (DF 144) Because of the absoluteness of this dichotomy, society must be founded on one principle or the other: the individual must be either mere matter or a free being of infinite worth.

The former case, Hegel goes on, locates reason not in the individual but above her, in the state. As FK puts it, “individuality [then] finds itself under absolute tyranny” (FK 183). The individual sinks under a mass of laws and regulations, each rationally enacted for the greater good of the whole. Such a state, Hegel tells us, is a “machine” (DF 148-9). He seems to have produced a small sketch of the Soviet Union, 115 years before its birth.

The other case will be more familiar to Americans. Seeing each individual as a free being of infinite worth, society grants her the right to determine her own life, no matter how childish, ignorant, ill, or depraved she may be. The only reason for doing anything in this kind of social order is the individual’s personal arbitrary insight, and the only consideration that justifies anything is that someone chose it:

Everything depends on reckoning out a verdict on the preferability of one duty to another and choosing among these conditioned duties according to one’s best insight…In this way self-determination passes over into the contingency of insight and, with that, into unawareness of what it is that decides a contingent insight. (DF151)

The references to preferences and choosing sound uncannily like rational choice theory, in which individuals rank their preferences and choose among them as they deem best; but here, as in Cold War philosophy, it has been elevated into the basic principle of the social order. Because each individual’s choices are absolute, such a society is incapable of uniting for a sustained attack on any social problem. Because  children are individuals, and so free to determine their lives, it is unable even to educate its young, who are allowed to choose what they will learn. Its leaders, secure in their own well-paid individuality, grow sleeker and more self-satisfied as the chaos proliferates, and strut their good conscience in the slogans of the moment.

Sound like anybody? In a previous post, I argued that Donald Trump operates by the maxims of rational choice theory, elevated into the philosophy that I call Cold War philosophy. Now it seems that such philosophy provides a middle term between Hegel, the apostle of reason, and Trump, the apostle of—Trump.

One pillar of Cold War philosophy is the use of rational choice theory as a fundamental account of human rationality—the equivalent, in weird ways, of Kantian critique. Do I choose to repeal rational choice theory? I do. But no repeal without replacement. So with what might I choose to replace rational choice?

According to rational choice theory, the chooser first establishes a set of feasible alternatives, sequences of events that can be triggered by her action. She ranks them according to how they contribute to her overall utility, and then opts for the highest.

She is thus dissociated from the alternatives themselves. She makes them into alternatives in the first place (by evaluating their “feasibility”), and can then choose or not choose any of them. She can even choose none of them and walk away from the game altogether, because a game is —only a game. A choice is “rational,” then, in the context of a game, i.e. when you are able not to choose any or all of the alternatives.

Some choices are indeed game-ish. I leave the drugstore with the toothpaste I chose to buy, and the voting booth having chosen for whom to vote. But viewing choice in terms of games also has limits. Some impressive philosophers thought that it presupposed an abrogation of causality that cannot be explained without heavy metaphysics (Kant) or theology (Augustine, Descartes).  Moreover, our important decisions are sometimes not made that way.

This leads some people to say that they are not made at all. I saw a movie about Le Chambon-sur-Lignane, the French village that over the course of the Nazi occupation managed to hide more Jews than there were people in the village. An elderly couple was asked how they decided to do this, and the wife said, shockingly for me: “on n’a jamais vraiment décidé:” “we never really ‘decided.’” She went on to say that, as French Protestants, they knew what it was to be persecuted.

My Hollywood friend Bernie Gordon had more movie credits restored to his name after the blacklist ended than even Dalton Trumbo. He tried to explain why he decided not to name names, which would have saved him, and he too said there was no such decision: It just wasn’t something I was going to do (paraphrased).

These people did not make rational choice decisions. They did not first formulate various alternatives and then opt for one. They simply did what they had to do, once it was clear what that was. Doing that was somehow necessary for them: the old couple had to be French Protestants; Bernie Gordon had to be Bernie Gordon. They were not obliged to do so; they simply could not do otherwise. It’s not that they identified with one of the alternatives before them; they were identified as one of the alternatives.

Here then is another view of choice: that it is the recognition of necessity. The “moment of decision” is when you realize that this is what you have to do, whether there are feasible alternatives to it or not. The “decision” was made before you were aware of it.

This view of choice has an impressive philosophical pedigree: start with Hegel, Spinoza, and Aristotle. It has also attracted notice from neuroscience, especially via the Libet experiments, which are said to show that decisions are made before we are aware of them. There have been numerous attempts to rescue freedom, in the rational choice sense, from Libet’s work. The rescues are sometimes successful: I bought Crest instead of Colgate just the other day. But I do not see how Bernie Gordon could have chosen to name names and still be Bernie Gordon. Neither did he. And those decisions, the ones that bear on who we really are, are the important ones.

So I want to repeal the view that the kind of choice involved in rational choice theory is the only kind, and replace it with a pluralistic theory of different types of choices.  I choose to have a choice among theories of choice

But I would like, someday, to get rid of the rational choice model altogether. I’m worried about the metaphysical lifting it requires—and the political downfalls it brings.

Most people I know are horrified to see elected as their President someone of the unabashed mendacity, racism, xenophobia and misogyny of Donald Trump. How could the mentality that produced him exist in this country at all, let alone be so strong?

One common answer is that America contains a realm of rural and uneducated whites, which we didn’t even know was out there. We thought the racists and misogynists were not a powerful realm, merely a moribund fringe. But now it seems that the country contains two very different and very powerful mentalities. Trump represents an invasion from that other realm. Though he himself has a privileged background, his values are from the far backwoods.

But Trump’s very existence suggests that the line between these realms may be fuzzy. Even the most educated of  precincts— academia itself —has more than its share of race baiters and  p***y grabbers (as we philosophers know all too well). But such people, we like to think, don’t belong here. They are, like Trump, invaders from some Other and darker place.

This, alas, is false. The line between Us, the civilized academicians and Them, the unwashed outsiders, is not only fuzzy. If you go down one level–i.e., look not at the explicit racism and misogyny but at the underlying mentality that enables them– it doesn’t exist at all.

Cold War philosophy has (so far) had two main stages. The first, treated in Philosophy Scare, saw rational choice theory imported into philosophy, elevating a highly mathematized but at bottom empirical theory of market and voting behavior into a universal philosophy applicable to the human mind itself (think early Rawls). The second phase, which came later, saw this happen with game theory (think David Lewis). Game theory, too, was elevated into a set of universal doctrines which could not be established empirically and  so counted as philosophical: as Cold War philosophy.

In her new book, Prisoners of Reason (Cambridge 2016), S.M. Amadae asks the crucial question:

How did strategic rationality, which typically assumes consequentialism (only outcomes matter), realism (values exist prior to social relations) and hyper-individualism (“other-regarding” signifies viewing others as strategic maximizers like oneself) come to be the only approach to coherent  action available to individuals throughout their lives? (p. 147)

Amadae’s  question implies that game theory, when elevated into universality (into “the only approach to coherent action”) retains three of its original traits. First, if only outcomes matter then any means are acceptable—even, as Amadae shows elsewhere, promise breaking and lying. Second, the gifts of sociability—trust, fellowship, security of possession and so forth—have no value: value arises only from presocial desires (“preferences”), meaning that anything can be desired irrespective of its social consequences. Third, all human beings, in their social relations, seek only to maximize their own interest: the only reason for engaging with another human being is to persuade or coerce that person to help me achieve my interests—in other words, to dominate that person.

These three principles underlie much of American philosophy and social science today. One place they are explicitly taught, as universal and so philosophical truths, is business schools. They are also the basic principles by which Donald Trump, who went to Wharton, operates. He lies freely, as if he sees nothing wrong in it, and already seems about to break many of his campaign promises. The things he values—mainly, his own ego and p***y—shape his social relations, without being shaped by them in turn—so they preexist them. And his only interpersonal concern, as Josh Marshall has repeatedly noted at Talking Points Memo (http://talkingpointsmemo.com), is to dominate those around him.

In short, my fellow academics, on this level Donald Trump is not one of Them; he is one of Us.

I wrote my first book on McCarthyism and philosophy,  Time in the Ditch (2001) because I thought the victims of the postwar Reds Scare should be memorialized, and its ongoing effects identified.  But wasn’t one book on the topic enough? How did I come to write The Philosophy Scare?

Time in the Ditch assembled such evidence as was then available concerning political pressures on philosophy during the McCarthy Era, and suggested that philosophers needed, in its words, to “break their strange silence” about what had happened. It was therefore not a definitive treatment; it aimed merely to provoke discussion. There was some of that, most notably among philosophers of science. When it died down, I got back to my real work, which is that of an historian of philosophy who takes seriously the fact that philosophy went somewhere new and different after Kant—not just to the gutted a priori of the logical positivists.

But around ten years ago, something happened. I was in my office at UCLA,  enduring another lonely office hour. Office hours make it impossible for me to do serious work, because someone may always come in; but no one ever does, unless it is just before a major assignment is due. So you’re all by yourself. What to do?

I was, of course, surfing the Web. The California sun was shining in my windows, the UCLA Marching Band was practicing down in Sunset Canyon, and all was peaceful, though rather loud. Until I got to a web page about the history of UCLA. It had a few paragraphs about UCLA’s first chancellor, who took office in 1952 but is, I learned, kind of a secret: he is not commemorated anywhere on campus because he basically fled office seven years later just ahead of a football scandal. His name almost knocked me out of my chair: Raymond B. Allen.

I knew about Allen, or thought I did—I had written about him in Time and the Ditch. He was academic America’s leading Red hunter during he early Cold War. As president of the University of Washington in 1948-49, he orchestrated the firing of several Communist professors, most prominently philosopher Herbert Philips. A year or two after that, Allen left the University to become the director of a Cold War think tank. I had always assumed this meant that he had been hounded out of academia by professors irate at his high-handed violations of academic freedom. Not so: at his last faculty meeting at Washington, they  had given him a standing ovation. He spent only about six months at the think tank before assuming the chancellorship of UCLA.

The question was too obvious to ignore: Was there any connection between Allen’s fame as a Red hunter and his becoming the first chancellor of UCLA?

My next stop was the UCLA Archives.