E. L. Doctorow on the Bush affair with ignorance

The Nation has a fine article by E. L. Doctorow entitled The White Whale.  It is his keynote address to the April 2007  joint meeting in Washington  of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society on the theme of "The Public Good: Knowledge as the Foundation for a Democratic Society."  This theme is at the center of the failure of a significant portion of our society to recognize the bankruptcy of the Bush administration as far as ideas are concerned.  There is a deep side to this and Doctorow is one of the only people I know about who sees it so clearly. Look beyond the break and see what he has understood so well.

The difference between conservatives and progressives has been stated in many ways.  To me they all boil down to this:  The world view of a conservative is constructed using direct cause while that of a progressive uses complex causality.  This has profound consequences in the world of politics.  The reason is that a world view constructed from direct cause has to find a model of the form AGENT--------> Effect,where the arrow depicts the causal event, for everything.  This simple picture becomes a "one size fits all" model for all events in the world around us.  Reality is not like this.  This is a surrogate world constructed to fit a hidden ideology.  It fails often, making the user feel like he must be stupid.  The user then becomes trapped in a need for authorities to interpret for him and to tell him how the model works.  Eventually, the authority sets  up a set of "frames" ala Lakoff and the conservative world view has been created in the mind.

If we understand that the real world never really is simple enough for direct causal explanations to work,  we are faced with recognizing that events happen because they are the result of complex networks of causality that extend over time and space.  There is never a "one size fits all" model and models are always imperfect.  The map is never the territory.  

To operate successfully in the complex real world, it is necessary to realize that causal explanations depend on the context of the event being explained and that that context may be being altered by the event in question so that closed loops of causality can result.

It is therefore the nature of a progressive world view to be continuously seeking knowledge about these complex networks of causal entailment.  Science often has problems because it fails to use a complex causal explanation and the surrogate direct cause explanation falls right into the conservative's framing of the problem.  Global Warming and Evolution are but two places where this is so clearly a problem.

That sets my stage for Doctorow's analysis.  Here's how he starts:

What does it say about the United States today that this fellowship of the arts and sciences and philosophy is called to affirm knowledge as a public good? What have we come to when the self-evident has to be argued as if--500 years into the Enlightenment and 230-some years into the life of this Republic--it is a proposition still to be proven? How does it happen that the modernist project that has endowed mankind with the scientific method, the concept of objective evidence, the culture of factuality responsible for the good and extended life we enjoy in the high-tech world of our freedom, but more important for the history of our species, the means to whatever verified knowledge we have regarding the nature of life and the origins and laws of the universe.... How does it happen for reason to have been so deflected and empirical truth to have become so vulnerable to unreason?

 That is the question that has burned in my mind for some time.  Especially since the outcome of the 2004 election, but clearly it came up many times before that.  How did we get here?  What went wrong?  How do we get out of this?  He asks similar questions:

It will take more than revelations of an inveterately corrupt Administration to dissolve the miasma of otherworldly weirdness hanging over this land, to recover us from our spiritual disarray, to regain our once-clear national sense of ourselves, however illusory, as the last best hope of mankind. What are we become in the hands of this President, with his relentless subversion of our right to know; his unfounded phantasmal justifications for going to war; his signing away of laws passed by a Congress that he doesn't like; his unlawful secret surveillance of citizens' phone records and e-mail; his dicta time and time again in presumption of total executive supremacy over the other two branches of government; his insensitivity to the principle of separation of church and state; his obsessive secrecy; his covert policies of torture and extraordinary rendition, where the courtroom testimony of the tortured on the torture they've endured at our hands is disallowed on the grounds that our torture techniques are classified; his embargoing of past presidential papers, and impeding access to documents of investigatory bodies; his use of the Justice Department to bring indictments or quash them as his party's electoral interests demand.... Knowledge sealed, skewed, sequestered, shouted down, the bearers of knowledge fired or smeared, knowledge edited, sneered at, shredded and, as in the case of the coffins of our dead military brought home at night, no photography allowed, knowledge spirited away in the dark.

 How I wish I could say it that eloquently!  Or do I?  Who would hear me?  Isn't that the problem in this country.  Hey!  There are simple explanations for everything so who needs all those big words and highfaluting ideas?  I live in my own world a good share of the time because I live in a very conservative community.   When I forget and begin to spout off eyes glass over and people try to change the subject.  Talk about politics?  Why?  We know who the good guys and bad guys are.  We know what we have to do about them.  Just so it doesn't cost too much or muck up our ability to fish in our power boats.  Then maybe we need to see if we want to try a different emporer who has even finer clothes.  Or as Doctorow says it:

To take the long view, American politics may be seen as the struggle between the idealistic secular democracy of a fearlessly self-renewing America and our great resident capacity to be in denial of what is intellectually and morally incumbent upon us to pursue.

Melville in Moby-Dick speaks of reality outracing apprehension. Apprehension in the sense not of fear or disquiet but of understanding... reality as too much for us to take in, as, for example, the white whale is too much for the Pequod and its captain. It may be that our new century is an awesomely complex white whale--scientifically in our quantumized wave particles and the manipulable stem cells of our biology, ecologically in our planetary crises of nature, technologically in our humanoid molecular computers, sexually in the rising number of our genders, intellectually in the paradoxes of our texts, and so on.

What is more natural than to rely on the saving powers of simplism? Perhaps with our dismal public conduct, so shot through with piety, we are actually engaged in a genetic engineering venture that will make a slower, dumber, more sluggish whale, one that can be harpooned and flensed, tried and boiled to light our candles. A kind of water wonderworld whale made of racism, nativism, cultural illiteracy, fundamentalist fantasy and the righteous priorities of wealth.

 I find that language downright frightening!  Yet I have complained about my country not nearly so elloquently so many, many times.  Knowledge... do we even recognize it when we see it?  No not the numbers and statistics.  Not even the facts.  those are the building blocks for a worldview constructed using the simplistic direct cause model.

It isn't the number of civilians we planned to kill going into Iraq.  It is that we were aware of the fact that we had to kill them to accomplish our "mission". It is the fact that once the Iraqis understood that we did that they no longer could ever view us as "liberators" again.  Not facts, not numbers, ideas! We were so easily distracted to debate waterboarding and whether or not it was torture.  The very possibility that it might be was enough to damn us forever!  The Nazis never had to debate the use of the ovens in this way.  They knew what they were doing.  Today we debate about things that we should reject out of hand.

The facts and numbers we might get some help from are absent from the dialog.  Do a risk analysis on a list of possible ways you may be harmed.  have the list include terrorism and see what the real danger is in those rather rational terms.  Doctorow ends this way:

To temporize human affairs, to look not up for some applied celestial accreditation but forward, at ground level, in the endless journey to resist any authoritarian restrictions on thought or suppression of knowledge that is the public good--that is the essence of our civil religion.

It is Whitman, our great poet and pragmatic philosopher, who advises us not to be curious about God but to affix our curiosity to our own lives and the earth we live on, and then perhaps as far as we can see into the universe with our telescopes. This was the charge he gave himself, and it is the source of all the attentive love in his poetry. If we accept it as our own and decide something is right after all in a democracy that is given to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, we can hope for the aroused witness, the manifold reportage, the flourishing of knowledge that will restore us to ourselves, awaken the dulled sense of our people to the public interest that is their interest, and vindicate the genius of the humanist sacred text that embraces us all.

 There it is folks.  the simple answer.  The simple answer is that we can cure ourselves with real knowledge.  Not the words of authority, but ideas about who and what we are and even more, what we can become!  I hear that theme in Barack Obama's words.  Maybe he and Doctorow are on the same wavelength?