My friend Barbara, in Berlin, just sent me a clipping from N-TV, a German news channel similar to CNN (and, if I am not mistaken, CNN owns half of it.) It is a report of the claim by the Russian governor of the oblast (province) of Kaliningrad that its most prominent historical figure, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, is responsible for the war in Ukraine.
Kaliningrad was once the capital of East Prussia when it was part of Germany and was known as Königsberg. In 1945, it was ceded to Russia, its German citizens driven out, and russified. Kant's grave remains a major tourist site, in recognition of his contribution to the history of philosophy. One of the first thing students of modern philosophy learn, (in contrast, I mean, with those who focus on the works of the ancients like Plato and Aristotle) is that one can be either a Kantian or a Utilitarian. A Utilitarian argues that the right thing to do, morally, is whatever leads to the greatest good for the greatest number or people. In contrast, a follower of Kant shares his view that the majority can often be mistaken, and believes that the greatest good is what is established to be good in principle, which is something we can come to understand by the use of reason. He argues that you should want to have happen to others only that which you would want to have happen to yourself, and that you should always see other human beings as ends, and never as a means to an end. Majority rule derives from utilitarian ethics; rule of law limited to agreed upon basic rights - constitutional rights, for example, regardless of the will of the majority - has a Kantian ethical orientation.
So much for the Philosophy 101 lesson. Here's what the N-TV article is about:
Anton Alichanow, the governor of Kaliningrad Oblast (province), made the pronouncement three days ago (last Friday, as the Moscow Times confirms,) that Kant was a moral relativist whose works have enabled the West to take a relativist ethical stance which allows it to violate all the agreements it has made with Russia, a culture which Alichanow insists is "based in values (sic!)." Russia is therefore provided with a justification to step in and correct the situation (Go get'em, Putin. Go get those corrupt Nazis).Like any wild theory, you can find a grain of truth in what he is saying. The Americans, after the war, stopped (more accurately: slowed down) the active pursuit of Nazis and turned its focus onto making friends with the Germans, allowing Nazis to get away scot free in many cases, in order to form a strong anti-communist front, while Russia could claim the mantle of being ongoing fighters of fascism. That anti-fascist claim was then extended to the Soviet-run East Germany, which claimed that all the ex-Nazis had fled to the West, a grossly oversimplified view of things, and quite inaccurate. Today this view of the former Soviet world of good guys fighting the nazi bad guys of the west has come alive in Putin's justification for his "military incursion" - and call it a war and you go to jail.
Alichanow is enabling the Putin justification for invading his neighbor in precisely the same way Trump's enablers support his claim that January 6th was not a coup attempt but a simple case of angry citizens expressing their displeasure about the 2020 election. I repeat. In Russia you can go to jail for calling an invasion an invasion. Give that a moment of thought next time somebody asks about the power of words.
You don't need to take an advanced course in philosophy to recognize that Alichanow's claim is not only false; it is the exact opposite of the truth. Alichanow is a vivid example of the Big Brother mentality in George Orwell's 1984, whose main character, Winston Smith, works for the Ministry of Truth. The dystopian world has been taken over by authoritarians intent on complete mind-control. They have persuaded the world that "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength."
After hearing Trump call for Russia to attack any NATO country that is behind in paying its NATO dues, and after watching Tucker Carlson sit and be instructed by a half-hour lecture on a butchered version of history by Vladimir Putin, I wrote Barbara that I was ready to leave the planet as soon as I could locate my keys. She wrote back that she wanted to come along.
I remember so vividly the first lessons I got in political theory as a teenager. I was working part-time after school in a shoe store owned by a man who had ideas that challenged the ones I was coming up with. My ideas reflected the Republican views of my father; Mr. Campbell's were the views of a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. According to my father, Republicans were people who worked hard and lived an honest life, while Democrats were corrupt inner-city politicos who made crooked deals that enabled them to hold onto power. According to Mr. Campbell, Republicans believed the only people you could trust were those who put their self interest first. Do-gooders inevitably got corrupted. The best form of government was minimal government and we should take our lead from the marketplace. Democrats were concerned with things like social equity and community welfare and preventing the poor from falling through the cracks. Those conversations in the back of the store when there were no customers and all the shoe boxes had been reshelved gave me a democratic political orientation I hold to this day, some seven decades later, give or take. Sorry, Dad. I'm going my own way.
I respected my father and it hurt a little to find myself pulling away from him. The alienation only increased over time for reasons other than political ones and many years passed before we could find our way back to relating to each other. We did, fortunately. He lived to 84, and there was time for us to mend fences. The advantage of a long life is that one can do that with a bit of effort. I have done the same with others I have had serious differences with, especially over religion and politics. I still have a positive orientation to life, still believe one can find common ground when working with others of good will.
My problem these days, however, is that this condition seems to be getting more elusive by the day, harder and harder to find. How are Israelis and Palestinians who are willing to share their corner of the Middle East to deal with Jews who believe God intended for them to have the whole thing and with Palestinians who believe killing every Jew in sight is God's will? How are we to "negotiate" with Putin who insists he is not an aggressor in Ukraine but a savior of ancient Russian territory from Nazis led by a Jewish man named Zelenskyy?
Finding common ground will always remain the most noble of political goals, I think. Anybody interested in making the world a better place must necessarily work to find compromise, if not complete agreement. But there are times, such as when perpetrators of violence try to run you down, when you have to fight. Even Gandhi recognized that Hitler was not a man to be reasoned with.
I can of course be wrong about this, but I am persuaded that we are making a terrible mistake in loading Donald Trump down with all the wrongs of American political life at the moment. I think of him, despite his crimes and lies and conspiracy theories, as more of a clown than an American fascist. The latest one, in which the Trump enablers are attributing Taylor Swift's influence to a conspiracy by the NFL rather than her simple desire to show her support for Democrats, is only the latest of many times when you don't know whether to laugh or cry. Another is the evidence that when the Democrats finally put together a plan for dealing with the immigration problem even better than the one Republicans might come up with, Trump puts the breaks on, because a success this big would be seen as a Biden success and Trump would rather sabotage it than let Biden get that credit in an election year. Is it possible to get clearer evidence that Trump is willing to keep the agony of the immigration problem alive if it leads to his personal advantage? Is it possible to get clearer evidence that his motives are self-serving than when his lawyers claim that he has the right to kill his political enemies and get away with it unless he is first impeached - especially when we know that the cards for impeachment are stacked in his favor? The evidence piles up - and still the Enablers enable. Still the right-wing politicians stand idly by. Still the supporters ignore the evidence.
It's easy at times to draw parallels with Hitler and Mussolini, and Orban and Duterte and Erdogan and Kim Jong Un and Putin and Xi Jinping and all his other authoritarian models of strength and power - he draws them for you, in fact!. But I think the focus should be on the people who make the wheels go round, the "Enablers." The apologists, the Republican Congresspeople who value their jobs more than their party and their party more than American democracy. Just as the child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church showed, it wasn't that handful of sexually frustrated priests who were the problem, but the Bishops who shuffled their troubled souls around, enabling them to go on abusing kids in a new location rather than exposing their crimes because it could damage the image of the church to do so. It was the Enablers. Capital E. Wrong-headed thinkers.
The outrages perpetrated by Donald Trump have increased, seemingly at a geometric rate, from the merely unkind - the way he mocked a New York Times reporter with a disability - to cuddling up to Putin in his call for him to attack NATO allies in arrears, a potentially catastrophic international move, if he gets to carry it out. But still, despite it all, we are faced with polls which suggest that Americans could actually put this guy back in charge of the executive branch of government. Few things blow the mind as effectively.
Debates over the proper size and heft of government is one thing. Talking with people who are likely to vote for Trump and use the excuse that Biden is too old, is another. Not the same level of discourse. Not the politics I first encountered as a teenager.
And there is an additional wrinkle in the fabric. Yesterday's New York Times carried two opinion pieces, one by Maureen Dowd, the other by Ross Douthat, that pushed the view that Biden really is too old to hold the office. Which prompts me to ask, are they too Enablers? Or are they doing their job in a principled way, asking tough questions which are deeply unwelcome at the moment? I honestly don't know and would like some more honest debate by people making arguments on the basis of evidence, and not on gotcha ideology.
How did we get here? How did we get this close to discarding this wonderful two-and-a-half-centuries long attempt to establish a "more perfect democracy"? We could well do that in November, toss out a system of checks and balances and replace it with a one-man show run by a craven narcissist. Reject constitutional (Kantian) principles - not for the will of a misguided majority, but for a minority of self-serving politicians - and their Enablers.
What happened to that excellent world of civil debate and passionate argumentation where we could hope to find common ground? Where people of good will could agree to disagree and trust that we could live with our differences? How did we enable liars and conspiracy theorists to take control of our lives and reduce us to these least worthy versions of ourselves?
God, we've got to fix this.
