Saturday, November 9, 2013
Moral Tribes
BOOKS NOVEMBER 1, 2013
Share You Can't Learn About Morality from Brain Scans
The problem with moral psychology
BY THOMAS NAGEL
Joshua Greene, who teaches psychology at Harvard, is a leading contributor to the recently salient field of empirical moral psychology. This very readable book presents his comprehensive view of the subject, and what we should make of it. The grounds for the empirical hypotheses that he offers about human morality are of three types: psychological experiments, observations of brain activity, and evolutionary theory. The third, in application to the psychological properties of human beings, is necessarily speculative, but the first and second are backed up by contemporary data, including many experiments that Greene and his associates have
carried out themselves.
But Greene does not limit himself to factual claims. He also asks how our moral beliefs and attitudes should be affected by these psychological findings. Greene began his training and research as a doctoral student in philosophy, so he is familiar from the inside with the enterprise of ethical theory conceived not as a part of empirical psychology but as a direct first-order investigation of moral questions, and a quest for systematic answers to them. His book is intended as a radical challenge to the assumptions of that philosophical enterprise. It benefits from his familiarity with the field, even if his grasp of the views that he discusses is not always accurate.
The book is framed as the search for a solution to a global problem that cannot be solved by the kinds of moral standards that command intuitive assent and work well within particular communities. Greene calls this problem the “tragedy of commonsense morality.” In a nutshell, it is the tragedy that moralities that help members of particular communities to cooperate peacefully do not foster a comparable harmony among members of different communities.
Morality evolved to enable cooperation, but this conclusion comes with an important caveat. Biologically speaking, humans were designed for cooperation, but only with some people. Our moral brains evolved for cooperation within groups, and perhaps only within the context of personal relationships. Our moral brains did not evolve for cooperation between groups (at least not all groups).... As with the evolution of faster carnivores, competition is essential for the evolution of cooperation.
The tragedy of commonsense morality is conceived by analogy with the familiar tragedy of the commons, to which commonsense morality does provide a solution. In the tragedy of the commons, the pursuit of private self-interest leads a collection of individuals to a result that is contrary to the interest of all of them (like over-grazing the commons or over-fishing the ocean). If they learn to limit their individual self-interest by agreeing to follow certain rules and sticking to them, the commons will not be destroyed and they will all do well. As Greene puts it, commonsense morality requires that we sometimes put Us ahead of Me; but the same disposition also leads us to put Us ahead of Them. We feel obligations to fellow members of our community but not to outsiders. So the solution to the tragedy of the commons has generated a new tragedy, which we can see wherever the values and the interests of different communities conflict, not only on an international scale but also more locally, within pluralistic societies that contain multiple moral communities.
To solve this problem Greene thinks we need what he calls a “metamorality,” based on a common currency of value that all human beings can acknowledge, even if it conflicts with some of the promptings of the intuitive moralities of common sense. Like others who have based their doubts about commonsense morality on diagnoses of its evolutionary pedigree, Greene thinks that this higher-level moral outlook is to be found in utilitarianism, which he proposes to re-name “deep pragmatism” (lots of luck). Utilitarianism, as propounded by Bentham and Mill, is the principle that we should aim to maximize happiness impartially, and it conflicts with the instinctive commonsense morality of individual rights, and special heightened obligations to those to whom one is related by blood or community. Those intuitive values have their uses as rough guides to action in many ordinary circumstances, but they cannot, in Greene’s view, provide the basis for universally valid standards of conduct.
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Greene’s argument against the objective authority of commonsense morality hinges on Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between fast instinctive thought and slow deliberative thought. As Kahneman shows, these two modes appear in almost every aspect of human life, and we could not survive without both of them. Greene says that they are like the two ways a contemporary camera can operate: by automatic settings or by manual mode. Automatic settings enable you to point and shoot, without thinking about the distance or lighting conditions, whereas manual mode enables you to make adjustments to the focus, the aperture, and the shutter speed after conscious reflection on the specific conditions of the shot. The availability of both of these options makes for either efficiency or flexibility, depending on what is needed.
.Our decision apparatus, according to Greene, is similar. When it comes to moral judgment—deciding whether an act would be right or wrong—we can be fast, automatic, and emotional, or slow, deliberate, and rational. Greene puts the distinction to work in his careful discussion of the trolley problem, a set of gruesome thought experiments that has become a staple of recent moral philosophy, associated in particular with the writings of Philippa Foot, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and Frances Myrna Kamm. As Greene says, the problem boils down to the following question:
When, and why, do the rights of the individual take precedence over the greater good? Every major moral issue—abortion, affirmative action, higher versus lower taxes, killing civilians in war, sending people to fight in war, rationing resources in healthcare, gun control, the death penalty—was in some way about the (real or alleged) rights of some individuals versus the (real or alleged) greater good. The Trolley Problem hit it right on the nose.
In the central case of the trolley problem, we are asked to compare two choices:
• The footbridge dilemma: A runaway trolley is headed for five railway workmen who will be killed if it proceeds on its present course. You are standing on a footbridge spanning the tracks, in between the oncoming trolley and the five people. Standing next to you is a 300-pound man. The only way to save the five people is to push him off the footbridge and onto the tracks below. The man will die as a result, but his body will stop the trolley. (You are only half his size and would not stop the trolley if you yourself jumped in front of it.)
• The switch dilemma: A runaway trolley is headed for five workmen who will be killed if nothing is done. You can save these five people by hitting a switch that will turn the trolley onto a sidetrack. Unfortunately there is a single workman on the sidetrack who will be killed if you hit the switch.
It turns out that most people the world over think that it would be wrong to push the fat man off the footbridge, but that it would be morally permissible to hit the switch—even though the outcomes of the two acts would be the same, one person killed and five saved. Other examples have been invented to refine the search for the determining characteristics that trigger a judgment of wrongness or permissibility, and various principles have been formulated to capture the results, but we need not go into those details here. The basic point for Greene’s purposes is that we have strong moral reactions against certain actions that cause harm but serve the greater good on balance, but not to other actions that produce the same balance of good and harm.
There are two noteworthy differences between the two dilemmas. First, in “switch” there is nothing mysterious about the result; everyone gets the point of choosing the outcome with fewer deaths. As Greene observes, “No one’s ever said, ‘Try to save more lives? Why, that never occurred to me!’ ” But in “footbridge” the choice, however convincing, is mysterious; it seems to call for, but also to defy, explanation. What is it about pushing the fat man in front of the trolley that overrides the value of the five lives that would be saved? To say that it would violate his right to life, or that it would be murder, seems to repeat rather than to explain the judgment.
.Second, the response to “footbridge” has an emotional charge that is missing in the allegedly more rational response to “switch.” You can consult your own visceral reaction to the idea of pushing someone in front of a trolley, as opposed to your feeling about hitting the switch when you know that there is someone on the sidetrack. But Greene and his colleagues have added multiple studies, using brain imaging, to show that when people contemplate footbridge-type cases there is increased activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with emotion, whereas switch-type cases elicit increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with calculation and reasoning. Moreover, people with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, who lack normal emotions, were five times as likely as others to approve of pushing the fat man off the bridge.
Greene offers much more experimental detail and some ingenious psychological proposals about why our gut reactions have the particular subtle contours that they do, but his overall conclusion, following Kahneman, is that we have a dual-process system of moral judgments: automatic settings charged with emotion and deliberative responses that depend on calculation. These two types of response will conflict in some cases, but he thinks both have their uses in the guidance of human behavior. As Greene says, “We wouldn’t want to blindly condemn our moral intuitions with ‘guilt by neural association.’ ” Still, the metaphor of camera settings and the appeal to evolutionary explanations for the automatic settings imply that Greene accords utilitarian values (minimizing the number of deaths) a different status from the kind of prohibition we find in “footbridge.” He believes that although we cannot get rid of our visceral responses and in general should not want to get rid of them, we can distance ourselves from them in a way that we should not distance ourselves from our utilitarian judgments. Utilitarianism, he believes, allows us to transcend our evolutionary heritage. The question then is whether he offers a coherent account of how and why we should give it this authority.
Greene wants to persuade us that moral psychology is more fundamental than moral philosophy. Most moral philosophies, he maintains, are misguided attempts to interpret our moral intuitions in particular cases as apprehensions of the truth about how we ought to live and what we ought to do, with the aim of discovering the underlying principles that determine that truth. In fact, Greene believes, all our intuitions are just manifestations of the operation of our dual-process brains, functioning either instinctively or more reflectively. He endorses one moral position, utilitarianism, not as the truth (he professes to be agnostic on whether there is such a thing as moral truth) but rather as a method of evaluation that we can all understand, and that holds out hope of providing a common currency of value less divisive than the morality of individual rights and communal obligations. “None of us is truly impartial, but everyone feels the pull of impartiality as a moral ideal.”
Utilitarianism, he contends, is not refuted by footbridge-type intuitions that conflict with it, because those intuitions are best understood not as perceptions of intrinsic wrongness, but as gut reactions that have evolved to serve social peace by preventing interpersonal violence. Similar debunking explanations can be given for other commonsense moral intuitions, such as the obligation to favor members of one’s own group over strangers, or the stronger obligation one feels to rescue an identified individual who is drowning in front of you than to contribute to saving the lives of greater numbers of anonymous victims far away. According to Greene, it is understandable in light of evolutionary psychology that we have these intuitions, and for the most part it does no harm to let our conduct be guided by them, but they are not perceptions of moral truth, and they do not discredit the utilitarian response when it tells us to do something different.
Illustration by Agata DudekWhile we cannot get rid of our automatic settings, Greene says we should try to transcend them—and if we do, we cannot expect the universal principles that we adopt to “feel right.” Utilitarianism has counterintuitive consequences, but we arrive at it by recognizing that happiness matters to everyone, and that objectively no one matters more than anyone else, even though subjectively we are each especially important to ourselves. This is an example of what he calls “kicking away the ladder,” or forming moral values that are opposed to the evolutionary forces that originally gave rise to morality.
.Yet Greene cannot seem to make up his mind as to whether utilitarianism trumps individual rights in some more objective sense. When he tries to describe the appropriate place of utilitarianism in our lives, this is what he says:
It’s not reasonable to expect actual humans to put aside nearly everything they love for the sake of the greater good. Speaking for myself, I spend money on my children that would be better spent on distant starving children, and I have no intention of stopping. After all, I’m only human! But I’d rather be a human who knows that he’s a hypocrite, and who tries to be less so, than one who mistakes his species-typical moral limitations for ideal values.
The word “hypocrite” is misused here. A hypocrite is someone who professes beliefs that he does not hold—but so far as I can tell Greene is accusing himself of failing to live in accordance with beliefs that he accepts, beliefs about ideal values.
This implies something that is clearly not a fact of empirical psychology: namely, that there are values by which we should “ideally” govern our lives, and that they are captured by the utilitarian aim of maximizing total happiness, counting everyone’s happiness impartially as of equal value, with no preference for ourselves or our loved ones. Greene even offers an extravagantly philosophical argument in support of this ideal. He asks what you would do if you had the choice of creating a world full of people like us, or a world full of people whose natural motives were completely unselfish and impartial and who cared about everyone, not just their friends and families, as much as they cared about themselves. He assumes that you would choose to create the second species, and that this shows that there is something the matter with us and our species-typical moral responses.
Greene apparently believes that this bizarre creationist thought-experiment allows us to identify ideal values, because it calls forth a faculty of value judgment that is not tainted by our “species-typical moral limitations.” He appears to think that the values that would animate this ideal species apply in some sense to us, even though we are very different. Yet he also believes that it would be unreasonable to expect us to live up to them, and disastrous to insist that we do so.
If it seems absurd to ask real humans to abandon their families, friends, and other passions for the betterment of anonymous strangers, then that can’t be what utilitarianism actually asks of real humans. Trying to do this would be a disaster, and disasters don’t maximize happiness. Humans evolved to live lives defined by relationships with people and communities, and if our goal is to make the world as happy as possible, we must take this defining feature of human nature into account.
Greene is wrestling with an old problem, and his psychological approach does not enable him to solve it. When we want to arrive at standards to govern conduct, our own and that of others, we have to start somewhere, and that means starting from what seems right. When our intuitions are unequivocal, we can simply accept them; but sometimes they are not, and then we are faced with a choice. Should we distrust our intuitions about individual rights when they conflict with the intuition that it is always better to save more lives, or should we abandon utilitarianism because it allows intuitively unacceptable violations of individual rights? Greene says that the intuitive reaction in “footbridge” is analogous to an optical illusion like the Müller-Lyer, in which two equal lines appear to be of different lengths because of a difference of context. The illusion does not go away even when we have measured the lines and found them to be equal. Yet the utilitarian calculation is not really like a physical measurement: it depends on a different form of evaluation, one which Greene describes as a human invention.
.One of the hardest questions for moral theory is whether the values tied to the personal point of view, such as partiality toward oneself and one’s family, and special responsibility for refraining from direct harm to others, should be part of the foundation of morality or should be admitted only to the extent that they can be justified from an impersonal standpoint such as that of impartial utilitarianism. To dismiss our counter-utilitarian attachments and intuitions, as Greene does, as “species-typical moral limitations,” which must be seen as obstacles to the realization of the moral ideal, is to identify ideal morality as something more, or perhaps less, than human.
A more attractive alternative would be to combine some of the values that form a natural part of the personal point of view with universal and impartial values of the kind Greene believes that we are also capable of. A project of this kind would require more subtlety about the different possible interpretations of impartiality than Greene displays: he identifies impartiality with happiness-maximization, and his brief discussions of Kant and Rawls show that he does not really understand their alternative conceptions—though I suspect that even if he did, he would still reject them in favor of utilitarianism.
Rawls’s main objection to utilitarianism is that it fails to make the distinction between persons a fundamental factor in the construction of the moral point of view, so it settles conflicts between the interests of distinct persons by a method of cost-benefit balancing that is identical with the method that is appropriate when there are choices to be made between goods and evils within the life of one individual. Thus in utilitarianism a very severe cost to one person can be outweighed by the sum of small advantages to a sufficiently large number of other people. Rawls, in the tradition of Kant, tried to work out an alternative form of impartial equal consideration for the interpersonal case, based on priorities of urgency which limited such interpersonal trade-offs. There is no space to discuss it here, but this is just one example of how the transcendence of our evolutionary heritage may be more complicated than Greene imagines.
The most difficult problem posed by Greene’s proposals is whether we should give up trying to understand our natural moral intuitions as evidence of a coherent system of individual rights that limit what may be done even in pursuit of the greater good. Should we instead come to regard them as we regard optical illusions, recognizing them as evolutionary products but withholding our assent? Greene’s debunking arguments add an empirical dimension to a venerable utilitarian tradition, but they certainly do not settle the question. It is possible to defend a universal system of individual rights as the expression of a moral point of view that accords to each individual a sphere of autonomy in the conduct of life, free from interference by others, defined in such a way that the same sphere of autonomy can be accorded to everyone without inconsistency. This last condition means that sometimes the distinction between what does and does not count as a crossing of the boundary protected by rights may seem arbitrary—as in the distinction between “footbridge” and “switch,” or between killing someone (strongly prohibited) and failing to save someone from death (permitted, unless it costs you very little). But the moral conception behind a system that embodies such distinctions cannot easily be dismissed as the equivalent of an optical illusion. Most people will regard a morality based entirely on such a system of equal liberty as unacceptable, but it can also be included, along with some requirements of impartial concern for the general welfare, as part of a more complicated morality that reflects the complexity of human nature.
Such disagreements are an inevitable part of the important enterprise of moral invention that Greene, along with many others, is engaged in. Humanity has, we may hope, a long road of moral development ahead of it.
The End of Reading?
by Jonathan Chait
Tina Brown has finally kicked a terrible habit.
tina Brown Declares End of ReadingBy Jonathan Chait
0 178 Share on emailFans of Tina Brown will be relieved to learn that her departure from Newsweek and the Daily Beast was not a setback but yet another shrewd, ahead-of-the-curve discernment of an emerging cultural trend. Who wants to read magazines? Magazines suck:
The British journalist who helmed among the best-known American magazines, bringing equal parts unique style and controversy to her jobs, no longer reads magazines herself.
“The habit has gone,” she said, later speaking to reporters.
People don't want to get their news anymore from a bunch of journalists writing stuff down. They want to hop on a plane to a luxurious conference, gather with affluent movers-and-shakers, and hear the story straight from the mouth of Brown-affiliated luminaries, and then have cocktails. Fortunately, Brown is ahead of that trend, too.
It's not even just traditional journalism that's passé. Brown believes that the whole writing fad is so twentieth century (and, well, every century before that dating from around 5,000 years ago):
And the written word is possibly, slowly going too, [Brown] told the audience during her session.
“I think you can have more satisfaction from live conversations,” she said, adding we were “going back to oral culture where the written word will be less relevant.”
If we're going back to the oral culture, does the shift have to happen all at once? Can we transition through handwritten scrolls or cuneiform tablets first?
Tina Brown has finally kicked a terrible habit.
tina Brown Declares End of ReadingBy Jonathan Chait
0 178 Share on emailFans of Tina Brown will be relieved to learn that her departure from Newsweek and the Daily Beast was not a setback but yet another shrewd, ahead-of-the-curve discernment of an emerging cultural trend. Who wants to read magazines? Magazines suck:
The British journalist who helmed among the best-known American magazines, bringing equal parts unique style and controversy to her jobs, no longer reads magazines herself.
“The habit has gone,” she said, later speaking to reporters.
People don't want to get their news anymore from a bunch of journalists writing stuff down. They want to hop on a plane to a luxurious conference, gather with affluent movers-and-shakers, and hear the story straight from the mouth of Brown-affiliated luminaries, and then have cocktails. Fortunately, Brown is ahead of that trend, too.
It's not even just traditional journalism that's passé. Brown believes that the whole writing fad is so twentieth century (and, well, every century before that dating from around 5,000 years ago):
And the written word is possibly, slowly going too, [Brown] told the audience during her session.
“I think you can have more satisfaction from live conversations,” she said, adding we were “going back to oral culture where the written word will be less relevant.”
If we're going back to the oral culture, does the shift have to happen all at once? Can we transition through handwritten scrolls or cuneiform tablets first?
One Thing After Another
The fact that life is just one darn thing after another doesn't bother me anymore. After 64 years I accept this unalterable fact of life. What's changed is that it seems like more people irritate me than used to. My solution is that I don't engage with these people anymore who irritate me. If I don't engage with you it's because I don't want to engage with you. Sorry.
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Michael Patrick, Lorna Wood and Don Waller like this..View 3 more comments..Michael Dew Don't let 'em get to you!November 6 at 6:56pm · Like..Fred Hudson Moyna--- You're not on the list. At least not yet. :). Linda---Not you either. Lorna---You caught me. No, I'm not sorry. Mike---I'm too much in my own world to let them get to me.November 6 at 7:20pm · Like · 1..Kelley Sanford Sharit well, ok then.November 7 at 1:38am · Like..Tom Tidwell My solution was to become a hermit, Fred Hudson. That solution to ire isn't perfect.November 7 at 2:59pm · Like..
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Michael Patrick, Lorna Wood and Don Waller like this..View 3 more comments..Michael Dew Don't let 'em get to you!November 6 at 6:56pm · Like..Fred Hudson Moyna--- You're not on the list. At least not yet. :). Linda---Not you either. Lorna---You caught me. No, I'm not sorry. Mike---I'm too much in my own world to let them get to me.November 6 at 7:20pm · Like · 1..Kelley Sanford Sharit well, ok then.November 7 at 1:38am · Like..Tom Tidwell My solution was to become a hermit, Fred Hudson. That solution to ire isn't perfect.November 7 at 2:59pm · Like..
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
JFK Assassination Talk
The chatter about the 50th anniversary is incessant online. Books are coming out and conspiracy talk, which hasn't ended for 50 years, gains new life. Until hard facts are presented by somebody, I stick to the conclusion that Oswald did it and he acted alone.
Monday, November 4, 2013
The Case for Being Quiet
by Jeff Shesol
John F. Kennedy, it turns out, thought well of James K. Polk.
The thirty-fifth President’s fondness for the eleventh is one of the lesser revelations, to be sure, in “The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,” published (and possibly lost) last week amid the deluge, the anniversary glut, of Kennedy lit. But the Polk disclosure is, indeed, in its small way a revelation—an insight into Kennedy’s conception of Presidential leadership and, perhaps, into our own, half a century later.
The passing reference to Polk, who held office for a single term, from 1845 to 1849, was recorded by Schlesinger, Jr., in a letter to Schlesinger, Sr., dated August 12, 1962. The father—like the son, a scholar—had asked a group of seventy-five historians to rank the Presidents (excepting, of course, the sitting one) as great, near-great, or various shades of not-so-great, and published the results in the New York Times.
President Kennedy read the article and “expressed surprise,” as Arthur fils, then a White House aide, informed Arthur père, “over Wilson’s high ranking, and also over Theodore Roosevelt’s.” J.F.K. thought Wilson had been responsible for at least two debacles—his Mexican intervention and his failure in the League of Nations fight—and had made a muddled case for America’s entry into the Great War. “As for TR,” Schlesinger wrote his father,
JFK said that he talked a lot but didn’t do very much. He could not see why TR rated above Polk or Truman. What is most interesting is that his criterion is obviously that of concrete achievement rather than political education. People who educate the nation, without achieving all their goals, like Wilson and TR, evidently seem to him to rate under people with a record of practical accomplishment, like Polk and Truman, even if they do little to transform the intellectual climate of the nation.
The irony is how precisely this anticipates one of the critiques of Kennedy’s Presidency: that he talked a lot but accomplished little. This is plain wrong, as Alan Brinkley, Robert Dallek, and many other historians have established. Kennedy’s achievements were institutional (the Peace Corps, the space program) and existential (the narrow escape from nuclear war), and his effect on the public mindset, on everything from religious tolerance to public service, cannot (or at least should not) be understated. Yet there can be little denying that fifty years after his death, J.F.K. is remembered more for what he said than what he did, and that his words—and what the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison called “that ringing, virile voice”—have not only outlived but in some ways outdistanced his other achievements. Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s speechwriter and senior adviser, later reflected that during the postwar period, no other public figure’s “words and phrases [had] become as large a part of our national memory” as J.F.K.’s had.
Of course, Sorensen himself had written a fair number of those words and phrases, but his point stands. Ronald Reagan, whose speechwriters might stake the same claim for their own prose, was only a near-great communicator compared to Kennedy. Reagan’s ideas stubbornly endure, but his phrases—for all their polish—have proved pretty ephemeral. As clarion calls go, “government is the problem” is no “ask not.” (For what it’s worth, J.F.K. has more than three times as many entries in Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations” as Reagan, but perhaps the liberal media has got its mitts on the reference-book industry.)
None of this was inadvertent. Kennedy began his political career as an ineffective speaker (one of his early speechwriters complained that after all had labored over a draft, J.F.K. “would not do it justice” at the podium, draining it of life and rhythm), but he worked assiduously at it for more than a decade: studying recordings of Churchill, consulting a voice coach, and devouring, again and again, a volume of great speeches that Sorensen had given him, marking passages for future use. The power of political oratory was, to Kennedy, self-evident.
Still, he retained a certain skepticism. He liked to quote from “Henry IV, Part I”:
GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man.
But will they come when you do call for them?
A speech, to Kennedy, had no inherent, incantatory power. He never believed, as romantics do, that oratory is alchemy—that if he got the words just right, he could change water into wine. Speech was, instead, an augury, a precursor of action, never a substitute for it, and Kennedy was disinclined (sometimes, as in the case of civil rights, much too disinclined) to say anything until he was ready to do something. Otherwise it was just “talk”—and talking too much, he once cautioned Sorensen, would only bore the public (and, one suspects, Kennedy himself). Kennedy was relieved to learn that Franklin Roosevelt had given few fireside chats. “Words alone are not enough,” Kennedy planned to say that day in Dallas, in a speech he never had the chance to deliver. “If we are strong, our strength will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will be of no help.” Polk could not have said it better himself.
In this (as in remarkably few things), Kennedy seems a relic of a distant age. Our Presidents, like T.R., talk a lot. They talk, they tweet, they offer daily color commentary on international affairs, congressional negotiations, pop-cultural events, and national anniversaries. To choose a recent month at random, in October of 2011 President Obama honored the 1985 Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears and the 2011 N.C.A.A. women’s basketball champion Texas A. & M. Aggies, issued statements on the deaths of Steve Jobs and Muammar Qaddafi, proclaimed Leif Erikson Day and National Character Counts Week, and appeared on “The Tonight Show,” among numerous other examples of talking and not doing.
This is not to pick on our current President. Consider the one I served, Bill Clinton, and compare his “Public Papers” to Kennedy’s at the same point in their Presidencies, one year in. For J.F.K., 1962—not an uneventful year (Ole Miss, John Glenn, the Cuban Missile Crisis)—fills a nine-hundred-and-three-page volume, minus appendices and the index; for W.J.C., 1994 takes up two volumes, for a total of two thousand one hundred and fifty-nine pages.
In fairness, Clinton, like Obama, inhabited a 24/7 news cycle; Kennedy had the benefit of an 8/5 one. Presidents no longer have the luxury of going quiet. For if they do, they create a vacuum their opponents rush to fill—recall the Tea Party Summer of 2010. At the same time, we have strayed farther than we need have from Kennedy’s more restrained, more purposeful use of the bully pulpit. We have allowed the connection between speech and action to attenuate. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., told me in the late nineteen-nineties that political speech had become “a particularly low form of rhetoric.” What he meant was not simply that the quality of writing had diminished since the Kennedy years, though it had; he also meant that the power of Presidential words had declined as their volume increased, cheapening the currency.
Of course, that devaluation is also due to the erosion of faith in the institution of the Presidency (along with the institution of pretty much everything else) in the long wake of November 22, 1963—yet another reason this anniversary has resonance. But “Kennedys don’t cry,” as the family used to say, and neither should we. Let us instead evoke something of the era. Let it not be Kennedy’s clipped cadence, or the “reversible raincoat” sentences (“Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate”), or the cheap resort to the imperative “let.” Let it, instead, be the idea that Presidencies are above all for practical accomplishment, and that words, by and large, ought to be reserved for moments of meaning.
John F. Kennedy, it turns out, thought well of James K. Polk.
The thirty-fifth President’s fondness for the eleventh is one of the lesser revelations, to be sure, in “The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,” published (and possibly lost) last week amid the deluge, the anniversary glut, of Kennedy lit. But the Polk disclosure is, indeed, in its small way a revelation—an insight into Kennedy’s conception of Presidential leadership and, perhaps, into our own, half a century later.
The passing reference to Polk, who held office for a single term, from 1845 to 1849, was recorded by Schlesinger, Jr., in a letter to Schlesinger, Sr., dated August 12, 1962. The father—like the son, a scholar—had asked a group of seventy-five historians to rank the Presidents (excepting, of course, the sitting one) as great, near-great, or various shades of not-so-great, and published the results in the New York Times.
President Kennedy read the article and “expressed surprise,” as Arthur fils, then a White House aide, informed Arthur père, “over Wilson’s high ranking, and also over Theodore Roosevelt’s.” J.F.K. thought Wilson had been responsible for at least two debacles—his Mexican intervention and his failure in the League of Nations fight—and had made a muddled case for America’s entry into the Great War. “As for TR,” Schlesinger wrote his father,
JFK said that he talked a lot but didn’t do very much. He could not see why TR rated above Polk or Truman. What is most interesting is that his criterion is obviously that of concrete achievement rather than political education. People who educate the nation, without achieving all their goals, like Wilson and TR, evidently seem to him to rate under people with a record of practical accomplishment, like Polk and Truman, even if they do little to transform the intellectual climate of the nation.
The irony is how precisely this anticipates one of the critiques of Kennedy’s Presidency: that he talked a lot but accomplished little. This is plain wrong, as Alan Brinkley, Robert Dallek, and many other historians have established. Kennedy’s achievements were institutional (the Peace Corps, the space program) and existential (the narrow escape from nuclear war), and his effect on the public mindset, on everything from religious tolerance to public service, cannot (or at least should not) be understated. Yet there can be little denying that fifty years after his death, J.F.K. is remembered more for what he said than what he did, and that his words—and what the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison called “that ringing, virile voice”—have not only outlived but in some ways outdistanced his other achievements. Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s speechwriter and senior adviser, later reflected that during the postwar period, no other public figure’s “words and phrases [had] become as large a part of our national memory” as J.F.K.’s had.
Of course, Sorensen himself had written a fair number of those words and phrases, but his point stands. Ronald Reagan, whose speechwriters might stake the same claim for their own prose, was only a near-great communicator compared to Kennedy. Reagan’s ideas stubbornly endure, but his phrases—for all their polish—have proved pretty ephemeral. As clarion calls go, “government is the problem” is no “ask not.” (For what it’s worth, J.F.K. has more than three times as many entries in Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations” as Reagan, but perhaps the liberal media has got its mitts on the reference-book industry.)
None of this was inadvertent. Kennedy began his political career as an ineffective speaker (one of his early speechwriters complained that after all had labored over a draft, J.F.K. “would not do it justice” at the podium, draining it of life and rhythm), but he worked assiduously at it for more than a decade: studying recordings of Churchill, consulting a voice coach, and devouring, again and again, a volume of great speeches that Sorensen had given him, marking passages for future use. The power of political oratory was, to Kennedy, self-evident.
Still, he retained a certain skepticism. He liked to quote from “Henry IV, Part I”:
GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man.
But will they come when you do call for them?
A speech, to Kennedy, had no inherent, incantatory power. He never believed, as romantics do, that oratory is alchemy—that if he got the words just right, he could change water into wine. Speech was, instead, an augury, a precursor of action, never a substitute for it, and Kennedy was disinclined (sometimes, as in the case of civil rights, much too disinclined) to say anything until he was ready to do something. Otherwise it was just “talk”—and talking too much, he once cautioned Sorensen, would only bore the public (and, one suspects, Kennedy himself). Kennedy was relieved to learn that Franklin Roosevelt had given few fireside chats. “Words alone are not enough,” Kennedy planned to say that day in Dallas, in a speech he never had the chance to deliver. “If we are strong, our strength will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will be of no help.” Polk could not have said it better himself.
In this (as in remarkably few things), Kennedy seems a relic of a distant age. Our Presidents, like T.R., talk a lot. They talk, they tweet, they offer daily color commentary on international affairs, congressional negotiations, pop-cultural events, and national anniversaries. To choose a recent month at random, in October of 2011 President Obama honored the 1985 Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears and the 2011 N.C.A.A. women’s basketball champion Texas A. & M. Aggies, issued statements on the deaths of Steve Jobs and Muammar Qaddafi, proclaimed Leif Erikson Day and National Character Counts Week, and appeared on “The Tonight Show,” among numerous other examples of talking and not doing.
This is not to pick on our current President. Consider the one I served, Bill Clinton, and compare his “Public Papers” to Kennedy’s at the same point in their Presidencies, one year in. For J.F.K., 1962—not an uneventful year (Ole Miss, John Glenn, the Cuban Missile Crisis)—fills a nine-hundred-and-three-page volume, minus appendices and the index; for W.J.C., 1994 takes up two volumes, for a total of two thousand one hundred and fifty-nine pages.
In fairness, Clinton, like Obama, inhabited a 24/7 news cycle; Kennedy had the benefit of an 8/5 one. Presidents no longer have the luxury of going quiet. For if they do, they create a vacuum their opponents rush to fill—recall the Tea Party Summer of 2010. At the same time, we have strayed farther than we need have from Kennedy’s more restrained, more purposeful use of the bully pulpit. We have allowed the connection between speech and action to attenuate. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., told me in the late nineteen-nineties that political speech had become “a particularly low form of rhetoric.” What he meant was not simply that the quality of writing had diminished since the Kennedy years, though it had; he also meant that the power of Presidential words had declined as their volume increased, cheapening the currency.
Of course, that devaluation is also due to the erosion of faith in the institution of the Presidency (along with the institution of pretty much everything else) in the long wake of November 22, 1963—yet another reason this anniversary has resonance. But “Kennedys don’t cry,” as the family used to say, and neither should we. Let us instead evoke something of the era. Let it not be Kennedy’s clipped cadence, or the “reversible raincoat” sentences (“Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate”), or the cheap resort to the imperative “let.” Let it, instead, be the idea that Presidencies are above all for practical accomplishment, and that words, by and large, ought to be reserved for moments of meaning.
Randian Rand
Monday, Nov 4, 2013 11:22 AM CST
Move over, Ted Cruz: Rand Paul’s wacko public meltdown
The proven plagiarist trashes his “haters” and wishes he could challenge them to a duel. Who’s the wacko-bird now?
By Joan Walsh
Just when Sen. Ted Cruz’s self-promoting extremism seemed to create room for a far-right 2016 rival who wouldn’t scare children (and the donor class), Sen. Rand Paul is blowing his big chance.
Last week the New York Times reported that in the wake of Cruz’s implosion, Paul’s aides had taken to calling Cruz “the chief of the wacko birds,” using John McCain’s memorable epithet for the junior Texas senator. Paul himself, Jonathan Martin reported, “has quietly been reaching out to more establishment forces within the Republican Party, trying to prove to big donors and mainline Republican organizations that he is more than a Tea Party figure or a rerun of his father’s failed candidacies.” And establishment Republicans were beginning to use the word “grown” and “matured” to describe Paul.
That’s not the word they’re using today, on the heels of a crazy appearance on ABC’s “This Week” where he wished he could challenge the journalists who’ve accused him of plagiarism to a duel.
On the one hand, the revelation that he lifted material from several speeches as well as whole pages of his book from other sources, without attribution, isn’t necessarily a 2016 candidacy-ender. What’s most politically self-destructive is Paul’s bizarre reaction to the charges – which really aren’t “charges,” they’re fact. Instead of admitting he or someone on his staff made an error and promising to toughen his standards, he’s attacked Rachel Maddow, who found the first instance of plagiarism, repeatedly and personally.
“This is really about information and attacks coming from haters,” he told ABC’s Latino-focused network Fusion. “The person who’s leading this attack — she’s been spreading hate on me for about three years now.” Ew, “spreading hate on me,” that sounds kind of disgusting, Rachel – really?
And then, in a bizarre, likely candidacy-ending interview with ABC’s “This Week,” he began talking about a duel.
“Yes, there are times when [speeches] have been sloppy or not correct or we’ve made an error,” Paul said. “But the difference is, I take it as an insult and I will not lie down and say people can call me dishonest, misleading or misrepresenting. I have never intentionally done so.”
He went on: “And like I say, if, you know, if dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, you know, it would be a duel challenge. But I can’t do that, because I can’t hold office in Kentucky then.”
“I think I’m being unfairly targeted by a bunch of hacks and haters.”
Paul’s assumption that normal people will hear his reference to fighting a duel and say, “Hell yeah!” betrays his permanent residency on the American fringe. He lives in a world where it’s always the 19th century south, and troubles are best handled with guns and guts, not government. Paul acts like nobody’s ever been either smart enough, or brave enough, to tell the plain truth – and once he does, common sense voters will recognize it and reward him. Instead, they recoil and go, “Huh?”
It reminds me of his first run-in with Rachel Maddow, in May 2010, when he told her he didn’t think the Civil Rights Act should apply to private businesses. He bobbed and he weaved but when Maddow asked point blank, “Do you think that a private business has the right to say ‘we don’t serve black people?’” He answered, “Yes,” and defended their “right” to discriminate as “freedom of speech.” (He also said he thought if he’d been alive back then, he’d have marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) That’s the interview that made Maddow a “hater,” in Paul’s view.
I saw the same thing in his under-covered response to the revelation that his aide Jack Hunter was a neo-confederate racist who’d written a column headlined “John Wilkes Booth was right,” defending the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Paul, of course, came out against assassination – but then he went on to describe Lincoln the way neo-confederates do, as a tyrannical racist hypocrite who fought the Civil War not to end slavery but to consolidate Northern power. He thought he could get away with repudiating the most extreme expression of neo-confederate beliefs while validating their core. And that time, at least, he did.
There’s another problem with Paul’s over the top response to the plagiarism controversy: It suggests that he doesn’t understand the meaning of the term “plagiarism.” He has repeatedly insisted that he credited the original source of his speech material – the movie “Gattaca,” in one instance, and “Stand and Deliver” in another. But he does not seem to get that you can’t lift words directly from Wikipedia and claim them as your own – even though that’s something every sixth-grader knows.
Only a few days after Tailgunner Ted Cruz seemed to be facing a credible Tea Party rival, that rival is melting down. For his part, in the Times piece Cruz was said to be telling GOP donors that Paul can never be elected president “because he can never fully detach himself from the strident libertarianism of his father.” An even bigger problem: Rand Paul can never fully detach himself from himself.
Move over, Ted Cruz: Rand Paul’s wacko public meltdown
The proven plagiarist trashes his “haters” and wishes he could challenge them to a duel. Who’s the wacko-bird now?
By Joan Walsh
Just when Sen. Ted Cruz’s self-promoting extremism seemed to create room for a far-right 2016 rival who wouldn’t scare children (and the donor class), Sen. Rand Paul is blowing his big chance.
Last week the New York Times reported that in the wake of Cruz’s implosion, Paul’s aides had taken to calling Cruz “the chief of the wacko birds,” using John McCain’s memorable epithet for the junior Texas senator. Paul himself, Jonathan Martin reported, “has quietly been reaching out to more establishment forces within the Republican Party, trying to prove to big donors and mainline Republican organizations that he is more than a Tea Party figure or a rerun of his father’s failed candidacies.” And establishment Republicans were beginning to use the word “grown” and “matured” to describe Paul.
That’s not the word they’re using today, on the heels of a crazy appearance on ABC’s “This Week” where he wished he could challenge the journalists who’ve accused him of plagiarism to a duel.
On the one hand, the revelation that he lifted material from several speeches as well as whole pages of his book from other sources, without attribution, isn’t necessarily a 2016 candidacy-ender. What’s most politically self-destructive is Paul’s bizarre reaction to the charges – which really aren’t “charges,” they’re fact. Instead of admitting he or someone on his staff made an error and promising to toughen his standards, he’s attacked Rachel Maddow, who found the first instance of plagiarism, repeatedly and personally.
“This is really about information and attacks coming from haters,” he told ABC’s Latino-focused network Fusion. “The person who’s leading this attack — she’s been spreading hate on me for about three years now.” Ew, “spreading hate on me,” that sounds kind of disgusting, Rachel – really?
And then, in a bizarre, likely candidacy-ending interview with ABC’s “This Week,” he began talking about a duel.
“Yes, there are times when [speeches] have been sloppy or not correct or we’ve made an error,” Paul said. “But the difference is, I take it as an insult and I will not lie down and say people can call me dishonest, misleading or misrepresenting. I have never intentionally done so.”
He went on: “And like I say, if, you know, if dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, you know, it would be a duel challenge. But I can’t do that, because I can’t hold office in Kentucky then.”
“I think I’m being unfairly targeted by a bunch of hacks and haters.”
Paul’s assumption that normal people will hear his reference to fighting a duel and say, “Hell yeah!” betrays his permanent residency on the American fringe. He lives in a world where it’s always the 19th century south, and troubles are best handled with guns and guts, not government. Paul acts like nobody’s ever been either smart enough, or brave enough, to tell the plain truth – and once he does, common sense voters will recognize it and reward him. Instead, they recoil and go, “Huh?”
It reminds me of his first run-in with Rachel Maddow, in May 2010, when he told her he didn’t think the Civil Rights Act should apply to private businesses. He bobbed and he weaved but when Maddow asked point blank, “Do you think that a private business has the right to say ‘we don’t serve black people?’” He answered, “Yes,” and defended their “right” to discriminate as “freedom of speech.” (He also said he thought if he’d been alive back then, he’d have marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) That’s the interview that made Maddow a “hater,” in Paul’s view.
I saw the same thing in his under-covered response to the revelation that his aide Jack Hunter was a neo-confederate racist who’d written a column headlined “John Wilkes Booth was right,” defending the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Paul, of course, came out against assassination – but then he went on to describe Lincoln the way neo-confederates do, as a tyrannical racist hypocrite who fought the Civil War not to end slavery but to consolidate Northern power. He thought he could get away with repudiating the most extreme expression of neo-confederate beliefs while validating their core. And that time, at least, he did.
There’s another problem with Paul’s over the top response to the plagiarism controversy: It suggests that he doesn’t understand the meaning of the term “plagiarism.” He has repeatedly insisted that he credited the original source of his speech material – the movie “Gattaca,” in one instance, and “Stand and Deliver” in another. But he does not seem to get that you can’t lift words directly from Wikipedia and claim them as your own – even though that’s something every sixth-grader knows.
Only a few days after Tailgunner Ted Cruz seemed to be facing a credible Tea Party rival, that rival is melting down. For his part, in the Times piece Cruz was said to be telling GOP donors that Paul can never be elected president “because he can never fully detach himself from the strident libertarianism of his father.” An even bigger problem: Rand Paul can never fully detach himself from himself.
Friday, November 1, 2013
Countdown to 11/22
We countdown to remembering the assassination of a president on November 22, 1963. I'll be making some comments as we go along.
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