Trump and incommensurability
Dismayed by the recently announced list of “scholars and writers” supporting Trump for President, I sat down this morning to write a brief post explaining why I think supporting Trump is a very bad decision. But where to begin?
And then I thought: You all know who Trump is. You know that he’s a preening, vaunting, compulsively dishonest ignoramus with a mean streak a mile wide, whose only criterion for evaluating other human beings is: Do they like me? You are intelligent and well-informed. You can be under no illusions in these matters. And yet you not only will vote for Trump, you are warmly encouraging others to do the same.
Long ago Thomas Kuhn introduced into the history of science the concept of incommensurability: theories whose premises are so radically divergent that adherents of one theory simply cannot speak coherently and usefully with adherents of another. Alasdair MacIntyre would later, in After Virtue, apply this concept to debates in moral philosophy: “Every one of the arguments is logically valid or can be easily expanded so as to be made so; the conclusions do indeed follow from the premises. But the rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against another…. It is precisely because there is in our society no established way of deciding between these claims that moral argument appears to be necessarily interminable.”
If an intelligent and well-informed person is not only voting for Trump but also advocating for him as someone who can “restore the promise of America,” then it is clear that our premises about politics — about what politics does, what politics is for — are so radically different as to be incommensurable. (Ditto our notions of what “the promise of America” is.) It was MacIntyre’s hope in After Virtue and the books that succeeded it to find a way around or through the impasse of incommensurability in moral philosophy. Until someone can do the same for the politics of this current election, there is no possibility of my even having a meaningful conversation with the people who signed that document. And as another philosopher has sagely counseled, What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
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A Tradinista! Manifesto
I’m interested in how points 11 and 12 are related. If you “uphold the value of the indissoluble marriage of one man and one woman, ordered towards the generation of offspring, which is the foundation of society,” but you also believe that “homophobia … and similar forms of oppression must be eradicated,” that could land you in contradictions, depending on how you define “homophobia.” There are, after all, a good many people who would say that a commitment to “the indissoluble marriage of one man and one woman, ordered towards the generation of offspring, [as] the foundation of society” is homophobic.
It has been hard not to notice that whereas John Paul II spoke of “the culture of death” and Benedict XVI of “the dictatorship of relativism,” Francis instead condemns “the throwaway culture.” His enemy is the same as his predecessors’, but he pays more attention to the economic and material realities that ensnare us in vice. In doing so, he avoids the suggestion that sin stems from a simple lack of personal virtue or mistaken idea left us by Ockham. If thinking he is correct to do so places one on the left, I am there alongside not a few other young Catholics. When it comes to the tradinistas, I think I’m not a contra.
Bryant has seen many familiar faces on the embalming table. He embalmed his mother, honoring one of her more difficult requests. ‘She didn’t want anybody else but me to do it. So my mother can say at least I minded her one time,’ he says. He’s embalmed his father, brother, aunts, uncles, nephews, and classmates from grade school. When one heavy-drinking friend turned up at the funeral home, Bryant tsk-tsked at the body. 'I told him, “Man, I tried to tell you this was going to catch up with you.”’
The search for a stable definition of melancholy is itself melancholic, because the emotion is inscrutable, unknowable, shading into so many differing and conflicting emotions. It is the melancholic mind—ever probing into an idea that can never be fully known—that produces something akin to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy—a book that stretches over a thousand pages in search of a definition without ever reaching it, a quixotic futility that enacts rather than defines melancholy. The only way to approach it is as an inexhaustible void, pointless and unproductive.
The right to vote should be restricted to those with knowledge – Jason Brennan | Aeon Ideas
The right to vote should be restricted to those with knowledge – Jason Brennan | Aeon Ideas
Until you would-be epistocrats grasp the nettle and tell me who’s in the epistocracy, who’s out, and who decides I’m not listening.
Scholars & Writers for Trump - American Greatness
Scholars & Writers for Trump - American Greatness
- Some of the signatories really surprise me.
- Some don’t.
- I’m not saying which are which.
- If they had claimed, say, that “Trump will do far less damage to the American social and political order than HRC,” I’d have replied that I very much doubt that, but I can at least understand why you think so.
- But they say “We believe that Donald Trump is the candidate most likely to restore the promise of America,” which very few of them can possibly believe.
- I suspect then, that while they actually think that “Trump will do far less damage to the American social and political order than HRC,” they also know that saying so won’t serve to rally the troops to the Trumpian flag and produce the defeat of HRC.
- The substance of the “Statement of Support,” then, is what Socrates in Plato’s Republic calls a “noble lie.”
- I don’t see anything noble about it.
UPDATE: I am hearing from several sources who insist that most of the signatories here really do believe that Donald Trump — Donald. Trump — will indeed do mighty deeds that will at least help “restore the promise of America.” So I stand corrected, I guess? I certainly stand dumbfounded.
P. D. James — one of my favorite faces. I look at her and think It would not be possible to keep anything hidden from that woman.