“All truths – not only the various kinds of rational truth but also factual truth – are opposed to opinion in their mode of asserting validity. Truth carries within itself an element of coercion, and the frequently tyrannical truthtellers may be caused less by a failing of character than by the strain of habitually living under a kind of compulsion.” – Hannah Arendt (Between Past and Future. 1954, p. 243)

During the period immediately before someone leaves one city and moves to another, they seem to liberate themselves and experiment with abandon during that window of freedom, or fearfully adhere to the tired routines of a forgone order. Having witnessed the Eurocrisis unfold over the past two years from a window in Berlin, I recently thought I would have to move elsewhere due to conflict with the archaic hierarchy of a German university. I naturally rebelled and charged heedlessly into the freedom inherent in a contingent situation – refusing to comply with the hierarchy and arbitrary exercise of power so prevalent in the German university. With the comfortable order of my German life on the brink, I attempted to understand my position in German academia, as well as the European position under German hegemony. In so doing, I came to discover that the latter is not a debate between Keynesianism vs. neoliberal austerity, but a particularly virulent condition of wider academic and German culture: the need for truth.

If a traditional German university is a window into German culture as a whole, then the problem of truth becomes immediately apparent. Imagine riding horseback through the patchwork of political entities in medieval Germany, each with an independent lord holding absolute power over a small slice of territory, beholden only to the good grace of a distant and disinterested central authority. While riding through this landscape, the casual observer cannot help but notice that when moving from one lordship to another, the organization of labor and adherence to a unifying conception of community is entirely dictated by the lord. Some territories have jovial lords who interact with their subjects, interested in seeing smiling faces on their townsfolk and full bellies in the peasantry. Others sit aloof in marble palaces patronizing a small circle of followers and sycophants, while browbeating the remainder into perpetual worship and servitude. In each case, the truth is held by the lord, and the lords themselves are at almost constant war with each other, attempting to extend their vision of truth across the land. Because each professor in a German university effectively governs an entire department, with an army of student assistants, research assistants and post-docs, this medieval image illuminates the culture of a traditional German university. Unsurprisingly, the “market” for those lower but rather well-paid positions is brutal and precarious, and switching between lords becomes an exercise in switching between truths.

Extended to the German dominions themselves, certain truths are self-evident among the mainstream, functioning at the federal level. The law is sacred. The state is sacred. The economy is sacred. The currency is sacred. The four mainstream parties, the Conservatives, the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Greens are surprisingly adept at working togetherafter accepting these truths – at least compared to the polarized American environment. Of course, the Left, emerging from the Communist East and persisting over the years, has been a pariah to the mainstream, while the recent success of the Pirates is just downright baffling. The response to these outsiders is a mixture of aggressive repudiation, particularly towards the Left (You dangerous lunatics want to bring the GDR back!), or sneering contempt (what do these pothead idiots dressed as Pirates want anyway?). In each case, the outsider is considered a threat not only in the traditional understanding of violence and theft, but also because their positions are invalid. Thus, they are simply wrong, false, in error – a threat not simply to order, but to the truth.

Brought to the European level, behind the intractable German position on austerity is not so much an essentialist identity, moralizing about hard work and responsibility, but a feeling of compulsion among the elites driven by “the truth” of the situation. After all, how can a Haushalt spend more than it takes in? What other solution is there but for Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (“the PIIGS”) to “get their houses in order”? What can open market operations by the European Central Bank (ECB) lead to but inflation? These are truths!

Of course, there is no “German Truth” to which all citizens adhere. The political culture is quite vibrant, diverse and filled with plenty of activists who have been at the forefront of anti-fascism as well as movements similar to Occupy. Nevertheless, there is a tendency, particularly among those in positions of power, to possess a form of aggressive self-assurance that they themselves hold the truth in isolation from all others. Because it is the truth, those in inferior positions must comply. Yet, it is precisely this combination, holding the truth in isolation and expecting others to comply, which generates the result any casual observer would expect: the social isolation of that person. This alienating self-assurance manifests itself not only in the lordships of German academia, but also in the acrimonious conflicts over the Eurocrisis. The two best examples of this are probably the two most important Germans in Europe at the moment: Angela Merkel and Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann – the most powerful council member on the board of the European Central Bank (ECB).

Merkel, a consistent advocate of austerity under the folksy belief that national budgets are just like household budgets – something John Maynard Keynes laboriously tried to discredit – finally got what she deserved this summer: isolation. With the replacement of French President Sarkozy by Socialist François Hollande, Italian Prime Minster Mario Monti quickly formed an alliance against Merkel’s dominance and effectively forced her into isolation. The result was a defeat for Merkel’s beliefs and the further extension of European-level credit to troubled countries.

On the other hand, if Merkel is stubborn in her timeless wisdom, Weidmann is as unyielding as a mathematical equation. Following his interview in Der Spiegel, one wonders if this trained economist would like to see Europe in ruins just to prove true whatever macroeconomic paradigm he functions under. Although quite young and only on the job for little over a year, scarcely a month after Merkel’s defeat, Weidmann was likewise isolated on the board of the ECB. The ECB subsequently plans to move forward with open market operations – exactly what Weidmann wanted to avoid.

In the end, it is clear Europe is moving towards a new order, or, more figuratively, moving from one city to another. If “the truth” of the old order is already forgone, we can only hope that the leaders of the transition liberate themselves from its routines. But, if my personal experience with the German university is any indication, or perhaps also that of Monti and his allies, directly challenging the truth tellers of the old city is the only way to move forward to a new one. We can only hope that such a challenge brings the truth out of isolation and into rational public debate.

We can call this first form of political fallibilism, as our sitting President has, self-conscious humility.  Jeff has highlighted what is good and worthy in this practice, especially when compared with strident ideological inflexibility. This argument has also been forcefully put forward in a long-standing controversy about the existence and nature of an “Obama Doctrine.” Some commentators approve of this policy, and others don’t; all agree that the Administration is trying, anyway, to strike a balance between “realism” and “idealism,” between Kissingerian realpolitik and George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda.” In other words, the Administration’s policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and more recently (and more tortuously) in Libya, is all about recognizing political fallibilism, even if not always put expressly in those terms. More recently, over the past weeks, with the circus over the debt ceiling raging, and political leaders competing over who can use the words “imperfect” and “necessary” more often and in closer connection, we’ve seen the “domestic” side of this form of repudiating over-confidence with the uncertainty of political events. Whether at home or abroad, this form of political fallibilism is all about the recoginition of one’s limits. Not just the limits of one’s capacity to act under a certain constellation (such as not having limitless resources, not being able to “dictate” to other nations, or serving as chief executive during a period of divided government). But also, and more importantly, the limits of one’s ability to know the truth about matters that one must act upon. Who are the Libyan rebels? What might a post-Assad Syria look like? How many jobs will be created in the next 6, 9, 12, 18 months under this or that blend of interest rate lowering and/or stimulus spending?.

So far, I suppose, I do no more than provide some contextualization to Jeff’s thoughts, if I have succeeded in doing this much. However, without undercutting this form of political fallibilism, I want to point to a second, and I believe deeper form. To uncover it, we should remember the core convictions of (philosophical) fallibilism, as developed (among others) by the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. While easy to oversimplify, the heart of this epistemological position is not hard to briefly express. Let’s put it thus: it is neither true that there exists some knowledge claim that can be asserted with absolute certainty, nor is it true that every knowledge claim can be reasonably doubted. A fallibilist, in this sense, is someone who believes in the existence—and the importance—of what Plato’s Socrates calls “true opinion,” but also recognizes that both the subject who believes and the object of that belief are caught up in a developmental process: that all truth is historical. This does not commit one to the view that nothing is true, nor must one think that all beliefs are equally fallible. But it does mean seeing the fallibility as endemic to the possibility of knowledge, and not to the psychology of the knower, or the physical conditions of things to be known. One is not saying here, “I might be wrong about this, but…” Rather, one is saying, “I might very well be absolutely right about this, but even if I am, that about which I am right might very well not be what it is right at the moment. I might be right about it relatively soon.”

A classic example of this “structural fallibilism” is the perception of what Aristotle calls “common sensibles,” most infamously, perhaps, color.  The structural and the humble fallibilists both agree that there is no certain knowledge of color as such; while the humble fallibilist attributes this to the subjective conditions of the knowledge—that the senses err, that other minds perceive color differently than we do—the structural fallibilist says that what is actually “out there” to be perceived as color is context-dependent.  So to say, it’s not our “fault” that we will never perfectly perceive what’s “there,” it’s that, in a very real sense, there’s no “there” there.

And here we see, I think, a difference between the two forms. In the quote with which I began, Jeff—rightly, to my mind—underscored the deleterious role of “true belief” in undermining the possibility of the first form of political fallibilism: one cannot be ready to make political compromises (i.e., recognize the limits of one’s ability to act, responsibly) if one refuses from the outset to recognize the limits of one’s knowledge. At the same time, the second form of political fallibilism actually embraces “right opinion,” and calibrates one’s belief in that opinion not against the limited possibility for one to be right, but against the limited possibility for events to allow for being right. In both cases, one acknowledges fallibility.  The difference is that, while in the first instance, this is based on the certainty that one cannot infallibly assert their view, insofar as any view of things can be mistaken, in the second, one is rather certain that the object of their view is itself uncertain.  This is what makes fallibilism in the second sense an anti-skeptical position.

This second form of fallibilism has an analogue in the political arena. In place of the “humility” of the first form—which is still focused on the psychological and physical conditions of the knower who would act in public, the structural form puts before us the possibility of holding contradictory beliefs, while understanding them as bound within separate spheres. Humility-fallibilism leaves you saying something like: “It is my earnest conviction that, but…” Structural fallibilism provides the space to say: “Given that it is my earnest conviction that the United States can never stand by idly as dictators murder their own people in the streets, and that it is my earnest conviction that the United States cannot use military means to ensure that all people, everywhere, can live free of such indiscriminate violence, it is clear that one or the other of these two convictions will be violated when the decision is made to intervene militarily when a dictator decides to use indiscriminate force against unarmed citizens. All the same, I am going to act, confident that I can never know if events will vindicate my decision, but also that I have acted on the best of my knowledge.” Under this scenario, the fallibilist can embrace the uncertainty of political developments as an end, and not merely as a means, of the cultivation of open societies.

I am convinced that the mess in Washington, which may still lead to another world economic crisis, and the resolution of the latest conflict over the debt ceiling, which probably won’t have any positive impact on the American economy and could make matters worse, is primarily a matter of political culture, not economics. I think specifically that the relationship between truth and politics is the root of the problem. Truth is both necessary and fatal for politics. It must be handled with care and in proper balance, and we are becoming unbalanced, driving the present crisis.

Factual truth is the necessary grounds for a sound politics, and philosophical truth cannot substitute for political debate. Hannah Arendt investigated this in her elegant collection Between Past and Future. I have already reflected on these two sides of the problem in earlier posts. I showed how factual truth, as it provides the ground upon which a sound political life develops, is under attack in the age of environmental know-nothingism and birther controversies, a politics based on what we, at Deliberately Considered, have been calling fictoids. And I expressed deep concern about a new wave of political correctness about the way the magic of the market and highly idiosyncratic interpretations of the constitution have been dogmatically asserted as the (philosophic) truth of real Americanism.

The posts by Gary Alan Fine and Richard Alba confirm my concerns.

Fine is sympathetic to the Tea Party politicians, specifically the fresh crop of Republican representatives in the House, and he reminds us that they are smarter and more honestly motivated than many of their critics maintain. I tentatively accept this. As a group they have a clear point of view and know the world from their viewpoint. They are likely no dumber, or smarter, than our other public figures. But still I see a fundamental problem, which Fine perhaps inadvertently points out when he observes: “The fresh crop of Republicans has that most dire of all political virtues: sincerity.”  I think he means this to be a complement, though the use of the word “dire” indicates he may be ambivalent. I am not. Where Fine sees sincerity, I see true belief and the great dangers of true believers in a democracy.

Unlike other members of the political establishment the new crop of Republicans stand on principle. This time around raising the debt ceiling is a serious business. This summer is not a silly season, as Fine observes. The Tea Party faction will not let the debt ceiling continue at its exponential rate of growth. They keep their promises. This year is different.

The more things change, the more they stay the same? (Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?) 1885 political cartoon with caption "To begin with, 'I'll paint the town red'"

But their sincerity and certainty are not political virtues. These self-proclaimed pro-constitution Republicans do not understand the art of compromise, as many have observed. Strange because our founding document was built on compromise, and it has fostered a political system that cannot work without compromise. The Tea Party, though, will not compromise because of their sincere commitment to what they “know” to be true. Compromise between two fallible competing opinions is a virtue. Compromise of a perceived truth is a vice. Thus, the Republicans stand too fast. Bringing the competing parties together becomes almost impossible, and the results are much less likely to be desirable. To the degree to which true believers are defining the agenda of the Grand Old Party, and consequently playing a huge role in the functioning of the American political system, they threaten to make the United States ungovernable.

While Richard Alba in his posts at Deliberately Considered has presented his partisan position (with which I agree), he has also, I think more importantly, defended factual truth.

We stand at a crossroads. There is a principled contest between those who are fighting for a more limited government and those who think that the government plays a key role in the economic and social well-being of the body politic. This is the kind of situation for which democracy, as a very desirable alternative to violent conflict, is made. Yet, for this to happen, there must be some significant agreement about the facts. True belief hides inconvenient facts, both intentionally and unintentionally.

Revealing the facts, as Alba has, becomes an important non partisan contribution. In his first post, he clearly shows that the deficit is a function of both an increase in federal spending and a decrease in federal revenues, and questions the honesty of a Wall Streets editorial on the facts. In his last post, he points to two fundamental facts: the American economy is still by far the strongest in the world and that we face serious problems emanating from persistent economic stagnation and growing social inequality. Alba thinks these facts are more important than the present tempest in a Tea Party cooked pot. But, of course, that is his opinion, a matter of political judgment.

Beyond his opinion, Alba reminds us that it is time that we face facts in American political life. We can’t assert that tax cuts don’t affect deficits. We can’t maintain that a stimulus package killed jobs. We can’t ignore the growing inequality in American society, calling the wealthy “job creators,” and therefore denouncing any move to tax the rich. This is willful Tea Party ignorance, leading to a right-wing American newspeak, crafted for the twenty-first century, apparently designed to mask fundamental economic realities.

The political contest should be about alternative ways of interpreting facts and applying the interpretations. Politics should not be organized around fictions masquerading as facts. The facts should lead not to one clear course of action, but debate among competing ones. I recently came across a piece by Michael Gerson, a conservative columnist at the Washington Post.  He shows how, from different perspectives, the facts that Alba highlights should be politically addressed. Alba and Gerson would draw different conclusions from the facts. This difference is what politics should be about.

A fact-based politics about competing political opinions and judgments, not the politically correct of the new right (or the old left), would make for the sort of politics Arendt envisioned, as a matter of principle. In recent days, we have seen how this is a pressing practical matter. The politics based on the fictoids of true believers is a cultural disaster threatening to fundamentally weaken us. Indeed, as Alba exclaimed: “Watch Out!”

When we substitute a philosophic truth for politics, as I observed in yesterday’s post on the new political correctness, both truth and politics are compromised, and in extreme form, totalitarian culture prevails.  On the other hand, factual truth is the ground upon which a sound politics is based.  As Hannah Arendt underscores, “the politically most relevant truths are factual.”  That Trotsky could be air brushed out of the history of the Bolshevik revolution, contrary to the factual truth that he was a key figure, commander of the Red Army, second only to Lenin, is definitive of the totalitarian condition.  I know we haven’t gotten to this point, but there are worrying tendencies.

Fact denial seems to be the order of the day, from fictoids of varying degrees of absurdity (Obama the Kenyan post-colonial philosopher and the like), to denial of scientific findings: including evolution, climate change and basic economics.  (I can’t get over the fact that it seems to be official Republican Party policy that cutting taxes doesn’t increase deficits.)

The political consequences of denying the truth of facts are linked with the substitution of truth for politics.   In order to make the contrast between the two different types of truth and their relationship with politics clear, Arendt reflects upon the beginning of WWI.   The causes of the war are open to interpretation.  The aggressive intentions of Axis or the Allies can be emphasized, as can the intentional or the unanticipated consequences of political alliances.  The state of capitalism and imperialism in crisis may be understood as being central.  Yet, when it comes to the border of Belgium, it is factually the case that Germany invaded Belgium and not the other way around.  A free politics cannot be based on an imposed interpretation.  There must be an openness to opposing views.  But a free politics also cannot be based on a factual lie, such as the proposition that Belgium’s invasion of Germany opened WWI.

Arendt observes how Trotsky expressed his fealty to the truth of the Communist Party, in The Origins of Totalitarianism.   And, in her classic essay, “Truth and Politics,” she notes his tragic fate:  eliminated from Soviet history books and then assassinated.  The assassination followed the lie.

I am concerned that our politics are more and more becoming involved in this sort of vicious circle.  Fictoids are the least of our problems.  If we politically debate energy and transportation policy with one side denying the facts of climate change, to take the prime example, the debate will not yield consequential compromise and consensus, we will not be able to act effectively. We will be ill prepared to politically respond to the very real economic challenges of the future, and our capacities to address a central global problem will all but disappear.

Other nations free of know nothing politics will be working to adapt to the changes that are forthcoming.  They will have new energy industries and high speed rail systems, while the United States will decay.  But since the United States has the largest economy, by far, our gas guzzling pollution machine could bring the whole world down with us.  It’s time to face facts.

I think the relationship between truth and politics is one of the key challenges of our times.  Get the relationship right and there is a reasonable chance that we will be able to address our problems successfully.  Get it wrong and our chances are slim.  There are many indications that we are getting it wrong, already observed in passing in DC, as we have discussed the problem of fictoids and as we have been noting the general development of the paranoid style of politics, and the threat of theocracy and ideological thinking.  This week we will focus on this issue.

My guide in these matters is Hannah Arendt. She maintains, on the one hand, that there has to be a separation between the pursuit of truth and political power, but on the other hand, politics that are based on factual lies are deeply problematic.

Today’s post will be about the dangers of conflating an interpretive or ideological truth and politics, tomorrow’s post, about the need politics has for factual truth.  We will then continue exploring this issue for the rest of the week.

The Conflation of Truth and Politics

Trotsky once declared, when he was still a loyal Bolshevik, Arendt observes in her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism: “We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right.”  The correct reading of Marxism, the official party theory, forms the policy; the policy enforced confirms the Party’s truth. Truth and politics are conflated and the result is that neither the independent value of truth nor the independent value of politics exists.  This is the true meaning of political correctness.

In Soviet history, this resulted in immense tragedy and suffering.  Thus the dynamic of totalitarian horrors when indeed for a broad population Trostky’s way of being right was the only way of being right.  Atheism, collective farms, grand industrial steel works, and the like were mandated by the truth of Marxism, and the power of the Party confirmed truth.  Because “religion is the opiate of the people,” as Marx declared, Party policy systematically repressed religious institutions and belief.  Because of the scientific validity of the Marxist critique of the political economy of capitalism, private farms were destroyed and collective farms formed.  And when in the Soviet Ukraine moderately successful private farmers resisted, they were identified as class enemies, “Kulaks,” and defeated, leading to mass starvation and a systemically weak agricultural system.  The theory indicated that collectivization defined progress.  The Party State enforced it.  Empirical consequences and mass human suffering were ignored.  Indeed economic planning as a whole was not only concerned with performance, but as much with validation of scientific Marxism.  Grand industrial steel works, such as those of Nowa Huta in Poland outside of Krakow, were as much monuments to socialism, in this case standing as a contrast to the traditionalist city down the block, as they were part of a rational economic plan.  More precisely, the theory revealed how the monument and plan worked together.

The New Political Correctness

We don’t live in the world of such horrors. But when a religious truth forms an official state policy or a social movement, or tries to, the result potentially is quite tragic, revealed in the horrors of religiously inspired terrorism and anti-terrorism, in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran, but also with dangers in Israel as Jewish and democratic state, which we have seen in recent posts. (link and link) And it is for this reason, not only because I am a heathen, that I worry about those who insist that the United States is a Christian country.

I also am alarmed by a kind of ideological free marketism and real Americanism.

Political leaders and activists deny climate change, turn away from economic complexity (tax cuts don’t cause deficits), and refuse to recognize geopolitical challenges (from relations with Europe, to Latin America to China) because they know the truth about the supremacy of the free market as it is tied to a wing of the Republican Party and the Tea Party Movement.

And then there is an absolute certainty that one interpretation of the American constitution, a rather odd one, is what the constitution really means.  And the equal certainty that political opponents, people who disagree with them, are somehow anti-American.

Political correctness is an ascendant problem in the United States, and this politically correct position threatens politics.

Many commentators on the Democratic side (including Jeff) are mesmerized by the fact that most in the Tea Party movement, and the Republican Party at large, seem completely delusional, asserting facts that are not so and assuming ideological positions that distort reality almost as a matter of sport. The problem is not, however, one of simple dichotomies between reason and un-reason, and of truth and fiction, the problem resides in the dynamic that is slowly transforming our political regime.

French philosopher Merleau-Ponty explained this in the epilogue to his Adventures of the Dialectic. At two different moments in that text he uses two phrases in an almost indistinguishable way. At one point, he says, in condemning the Soviet dictatorship, that a different regime is needed, one that makes room for opposition and freedom. Later on, almost as if he were saying the same thing—and he was, in the context of his philosophy—he calls for a regime that welcomes opposition and truth. For Merleau-Ponty, truth is opening, or what he calls hyper-reflection and hyper-dialectics, which means opening to both other perspectives and the unfolding of time. Put straightforwardly: hyper-reflection means that even “reason”—or what he calls “the point of view of reflection”—needs to understand that it has its own blind spots. Therefore, it needs to be opened to contestation. Hyper-dialectics, on the other hand, means that whatever is the case today, may not be the case tomorrow. Therefore, present circumstances should never be expected to remain unchallenged.

In this context, the problem with Republican illusions, and lies that are mostly self-delusions, is not simply that they are wrong and untrue. The problem is that they find no opposition, that Democrats are afraid of confronting them openly and on principle, with positions that would have the potential of revealing other, better sides of the phenomena at stake. Republican illusions and self-delusions almost never have to face the clear opposition of those who would render visible, to them and everybody else, the huge blind spots of their narrow-minded perspectives. This lack of opposition, thus of “truth” in Merleau-Ponty’s sense, allows Republican highly idiosyncratic and ideological positions to become not true, but plausible. And this does not only improve their credibility, but, most importantly, transforms the state of opinion at large.

Somebody could legitimately say that the dynamic I am describing is not really taking place, that there are plenty of places in which the Tea and Republican Parties’ positions get challenged and contested. On the Thursday before the mid-term elections, for example, in the MSNBC program “The Last Word,” four Tea Party leaders were relentlessly challenged in their claim that they were fighting against the “socialistic” taking over of the country. Much more sophisticated critiques could be also found in magazines such as The Nation or The New York Review and even in The New York Times; and, of course, here in the blogosphere.

The problem is that when those challenges take place in the current, highly fragmented media landscape, no one who does not already see things from that critical perspective is watching or reading. The fragmented media do not, indeed cannot, stage for the broad public the play of opposition and freedom, and therefore of opposition and truth. The contestation to radical ideologies has to come from the other relevant political positions struggling for power—and, moreover, only this open contestation can force the media to momentarily “defragment,” so to speak. This is one reason why the two-party system may simply not be plural enough, because it simply fails in delivering the democratic regime’s need for opposition, freedom, and truth.