The Paradox of the Enlightenment

At the core of Immanuel Kant's great attack on his philosophical predecessors, from Descartes to Berkeley and Hume, is the great Paradox of the Enlightenment.

Here we had the most stunning development in human thought, Newtonian mechanics, that showed how us how the world worked.  Yet against that we have Descartes saying that "I" can't be sure of the external world, Berkeley saying that the exterior world is an illusion, and Hume saying we can't be sure about cause and effect.

Just when Newton has reduced the operation of the external world to a few equations that allowed, e.g., artillery officers to predict where artillery shells would land, the philosophers said: Don't get cocky, kid.

One of the places in in Critique of Pure Reason where Kant really concentrates his fire on his predecessors is in the "paralogisms," i.e. the logical mistakes of his predecessors.

In the Fourth Paralogism, Kant takes on the doubtful existence of outer reality, the real world.  In the first edition, Kant put the paralogism this way.  Things that can only be inferred from perceptions are doubtful.  All outer appearances are inferred.  Therefore "objects of outer sense" are doubtful.

In the second edition, Kant takes a different tack in a rather confused paragraph (B409) that already assumes the error.  He seems to be arguing against this syllogism:  I am distinguished from things outside me.  Other things are those that I think of as distinguished from me.  Therefore I exist as a thinking being.  Or maybe not.

But Kant drills a hole in this argument before he makes it, for by the second edition he can't be bothered too much about making the arguments of his predecessors.  His point is the Great Argument of his entire critique.  If I am confident that the "I" exists, then how could I know it without experience of the outside world?  For against Descartes, Kant argues that we cannot have any knowledge of ourselves apart from our moment to moment experience of self-consciousness as we deal with and process data given to our senses, and try to make sense of it.

Kant's "I" is a component in the human machinery that receives sense impressions, combines them with forms of intuition, gathers the sense impressions and intuitions with the categories of the understanding and creates, using the "I" of apperception (self-consciousness), a unified object of appearance, a judgment about the outside world.  And don't forget that this object in the outside world can only be known as an appearance, not as a thing-in-itself.

If you think about the world like Kant, then all the mind games about mental substances and material substances, the indubitable I and the dubitable outside world, all these things fall away, because they are all integrated together into what we would now call an OODA loop.

Notice that if you subtract the "I" of self-consciousness from Kant's machinery, then you still have a working model of existence in the real world, but one that applies to the "lower" animals.  As far as we know, they get their sense impressions and unify them with intuitions and categories of the understanding.  What they do not do is then apply reason to their unified understanding to get to judgment.  Their judgment is hard-wired rather than flexible.  So they operate in the real world without an I at all, but instead, as we highly advanced humans suppose, in an egoless flow of consciousness.

Since Kant's time, of course, the Paradox of the Enlightenment has increased and deepened.  For now we may know much more about the sensible world, and even in the interior mental world, yet we know less and less "what it's all about."

Obama: Breakthrough or Bridge Too Far?

Let us suppose that Mitt Romney wins by 3-5 percent next Tuesday and gets a Republican Senate.  For President Obama and his left-liberal supporters, will it all have been worth it?

As John Podhoretz opines, you have to hand it to the president.  When he had the power he rammed through as much of his left-wing agenda as he could cram through Congress.  And as we know, it is easy to create new spending, and almost impossible to roll it back.

In his first 16 months as president, from his inauguration through the signing into law of ObamaCare, Obama arguably altered the trajectory of the United States in a manner that neither Mitt Romney (should he become president) or the president who succeeds Obama after his second term concludes in 2017 will find easy to redirect — if he or she even wishes to.

It starts with the big numbers, the $700 billion of TARP.  After that, the $800 billion of stimulus and supposed $1 trillion of Obamacare is just more of the same.

That TARP program utterly changed the terms of the Washington debate about the economic crisis and the nature of the government’s role, especially since its colossal size barely slowed its rapid adoption into law. The voices raised against it were basically dismissed as being on the fringe. The system needed an expression of confidence and an explosion of liquidity.

 So the question is whether the Obama interlude is a replay of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society when liberals seized an opportunity to enlarge government power and reach by handing out "free stuff" in a way that could not be reversed.

My guess is both Yes and No.  Yes, Obama has put government deeper into health care, and that will not change.  Paradoxically, his Obamacare was designed in part to try to put a lid on Medicare, the government's biggest problem, by instituting back-door rationing.  So Obama would hasten the time when the whole government machine shudders to a halt.  If the Romneys roll back Obamacare and reform Medicare they might actually make the entitlement program last another ten extra years.

But the basic problem is that people will not give up on their entitlements until the whole system crashes, as I wrote about yesterday.  When it comes to their Medicare, people are like the members of the NRA.  Like the NRA member's proverbial gun, you can get my Medicare from my cold dead hand.

People will only give up on their entitlements when the government goes broke, wrecks the currency, and defaults on the debt.  And maybe not even then.

That is America's real problem.

The Medicare Amendment Conservatives

When do we fix Medicare?  If you ask today's seniors, people like me, it is after we are gone.



After all, we paid in all our lives, right?



If you listen to Americans, you can see that there is no way we will reform the entitlements until after we crash.



Here's a retiree in South Florida.  He doesn't like the idea that today's Medicare won't be available to his descendants.

"I've got four children and 12 grandchildren," said Mr. Yordon, who planned to vote for Mr. Obama. "I can't believe the one item of most consequence to me would become a voucher" for them.



Dealing with private insurance companies for cars and homes, he said, was tough enough. Navigating the private health-insurance market at his age would be impossible, he said: "I just can't believe that that would work."

Er, Mr. Yordon, here's an idea.  Why not get your kids to help you navigate the insurance market as you get older.  That's what most people do.



What about this 91-year-old senior?

"I would like them to leave Medicare alone," she said. She has been in the hospital four times in the past five years, twice for surgeries to remove cholesterol from arteries in her legs. "I was very satisfied" with Medicare, she said.

I've been reading a book about the four great price revolutions of the last millennium, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History by David Hackett Fischer.  The great price waves have always featured governments spending beyond their means and seeming helpless to "do anything" about it until history decided for them in famine and revolution.  Fischer pontificates about the selfish aristocrats of the 18th century that wouldn't surrender their privileges.  Well what would you expect a left-wing academic to say.



Today's inflationary prices are different, of course.  But you still have the aristocrats, the supporters of the regime, and their privileges.  Only this time it's the union government workers, the entitlement beneficiaries, the tenured professors who are sitting on their hands refusing to give up any of their benefits.  Yes, for the feudatories of the regime, you can talk about the douceur de la vie.



Really, why would we expect any of these chaps, from Medicare beneficiaries in their 80s or retired policemen in their 50s, to agree to a reduction in their loot?  Nobody in history ever did before, not until the tumbrils started to roll.



Today's entitlement beneficiaries are like Charlton Heston and the Second Amendment conservatives.  You can take my Medicare out of my cold, dead hand, they say.

Is America Ready?

For years before the epochal year of 2008 pompous MSMers would wonder out loud: "Is America ready for a black president?"



Still, it took me aback when a faculty-wife friend expressed her satisfaction at electing the first black president.  Really?  Aren't we educated people supposed to be above all that?



Of course, I voted for Obama too.  I voted for him to shut the Democrats up on the Bush-the-warmonger front.  Anyone can flatter their base with nonsense about warmongering and Bush lied and "the wrong war" and Guantanamo.  The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and most of the Bush-era protocols have survived the anti-war Obama's first four years.



So now we have the ultimate question: Is America ready to fire its first black president for cause?  It's a big issue, bigger than you might think.



My old pal, the Greek philosopher George Maroutsos, used to opine about Greek politics after the Greek colonels like this.  It's important, he would say, for the conservative party in Greece to get voted out and surrender power to the liberal party.  But what comes next is just as important.  It is important for the liberal party to get voted out and surrender power to the conservative party.  Only then will both parties begin to trust that the other party will not surrender to temptation and stage a coup to stay in power.



So the same principle must apply to America's first black president.  It's a wonderful thing to elect America's first black president.  But it is even more wonderful to evaluate the performance of America's first black president and come to the decision, without any consideration of his race, that his performance is below par, and that it is regretfully necessary to terminate his service to the nation.



Actually, the question of President Obama has nothing to do with his race, except that a white guy with his experience could never have been elected president.  No, the question about President Obama is his ideas.  And also the deep questions about his leadership qualities.



Today, in 2012, the great question is different.  It is this: Is America ready for a Mormon president?  Somehow I can't find any breathless articles from MSMers wondering about that.



I wonder why?  After all, back in the day, Mormons were on the receiving end of some pretty nasty discrimination and political violence.  And even today, nice liberal women wonder if it is "ethical" for them to visit Utah.

Are the President's Men Crazy?

The polls tell us that the independents are breaking strongly for Romney:

In the last three releases of the tracking poll conducted by The Washington Post and ABC News, Obama has trailed former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney among independent voters by between 16 and 20 percentage points.

So what are the Obamis doing?  They are doubling down on motivating their base:

Obama isn't just going for a win. He’s shooting for a “realignment.” Obama is trying to shape a new kind of electorate, creating a long-term Democratic majority that would allow him and his successors to stop catering to the center and finally govern decisively from the left.

Let us give them the respect they deserve.  They don't want to win with the center ground.  That would not give them a mandate for their left-wing vision.  They want to win a left-wing mandate or nothing at all.



Maybe that's a grand and visionary idea.  Or maybe it is delusional.  In our lifetimes, whenever a presidential candidate has tried to go for a purely ideological win he has lost big time: think Goldwater and McGovern.  And you would think that for liberals this would be especially foolish.  If 40 percent of Americans call themselves conservatives and 20 percent liberals, how in the world can liberals hope to win on a straight ideological pitch?



Especially when you consider that Romney is pitching himself directly at the non-ideological middle ground.



My guess right now, given the partisan move reported by Gallup and Rasmussen from the +7 Democratic advantage of 2008 to an even-steven alignment or even a +1 Republican score in the last month, is that you have to think we are heading for a landslide, a 10 point victory for Romney.  If the current Romney 49-46 lead improves in the next few days as the Benghazi cover-up gets more play the 3 point Romney lead could increase to 5 points, and if the undecideds break for challenger Romney, as you would expect, then you are close to 10 points, 55-45 Romney over Obama.



Suppose the key to the election is not what the Obamis imagine is the "'demographically ascendent' left" but the 78-year-old lady from Iowa that voted for Obama in 2008.

"Obama gave us this 'no red, no blue state' America," said McAreavy, 78.



"I was fooled, I kick myself everyday," she said. "I said: 'In four years I'll get you buddy -- and I'm going to.'"

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  How many people in America are thinking just like that this month?  There were millions of Americans that thought that, in voting for Obama, they had put the race thing to bed.



Today they are kicking themselves, and they are saying:  Hey, pal.  Don't call me a racist; I voted for Obama in 2008.  And just to prove I'm not a racist, I am voting against him in 2012.



The problem about making a big bet on anything is that if you lose you are really out of pocket.  And Obama is not just playing with his money.  He is playing with the hopes of every Democratic partisan and elected official up and down the ballot.  If he loses then he is not just going into the wilderness himself.  He is sending his entire coalition into the political wilderness.



Oh well.  Maybe the Dems will come back like the Republicans came back after 1964.

Obama and the Liberal Bubble

We've had the real-estate bubble and now eager trend-spotters are tracking the higher-education bubble.  Nothing remarkable about either one, of course.  In the real-estate bubble we had government cheap credit chasing real-estate prices chasing more government-sponsored cheap credit.  In the higher-ed bubble we had something completely different.  We had government grants and student loans chasing higher tuition rates chasing higher grants and loans.

Walter Russell Mead has a piece today about the decline of liberalism, epitomized by the disaster of Illinois state finances.

Three states form the base of Democratic political power in the United States: California, New York and Illinois. All three states are locked in an accelerating economic, demographic and social decline; all three hope that they can stave off looming disaster at home by exporting the policies that have ruined them to the rest of the country.

He writes about the "misery and ruin that well-intentioned liberals combined with aggressive public sector labor unions inflict on the poor they ostensibly want to serve."

I think it is time to start talking about the end of the liberal bubble.  And, in a proof that God has a sense of humor, He sends us Barack Obama as the poster boy of everything that is inflated and bubbl-icious about liberalism.

The liberal bubble was borne aloft on three liberal conceits.  The first was the Enlightenment conceit that we can learn everything we need about the world from science and reason.  Thus you could create rational, scientific government programs to solve the problems of the world with a centralized administrative government bureaucracy supported by credentialed academic experts.

The second conceit was the idea that liberals were the heavy lifters in the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.  There's no doubt that liberals did work hard to push civil rights, particularly given the fact that the opponents of civil rights were in their own party.  But I would argue that the self-congratulations have been rather overdone.  For instance, why was it necessary to brand Barry Goldwater as a racist?  Here was a man that desegregated the Arizona Air National Guard before it was popular.  Why did he vote against the Civil Rights Act 1964?  Because he was a libertarian and thought the act gave the government too much power.

The third conceit was the liberal crusade against the Vietnam War and against the Cold War in general. Liberals conflated their opposition to the war with a distaste for the nation state and patriotism.  They lived above all that, working for Peace.

Liberal faith in their conceits led them to think that they were more than a ruling class with the normal vices of a ruling class, but something special. If they believed in God they would be anchoring their faith in their own superiority in divine guidance.  As it was they just believed that they were the culmination of human progress and enlightenment.  And they still do.

The ancient Greeks had a word for this sort of thing.  They called it: hubris.

Liberal hubris after the civil rights revolution led them into the racism of quotas, affirmative action, and diversity, and so they led African Americans into a hell-hole of black racism.  The fact is that we all like our own kind best, and we need the constant encouragement of moral leaders to remind us to be fair and honorable to the "other."  Liberals bang on endlessly about this.  Pity they didn't apply it to themselves and their clients.

Liberal hubris after the Great Society programs for health care and the war on poverty prevented them from being honest with themselves about the failures of centralized administrative government, and so, again and again, they reinforced failure and called their critics racists and mean-spirited.

Liberal hubris about Vietnam and the Cold War has led to the disaster of the Arab Spring and Benghazi.  That's because liberals believe in the Marxist idea of neo-colonialism, that the West oppresses and exploits the developing nations of the world.  The grain of truth in their analysis is that, of course, modern western capitalism has swept across the world like a divine wind, destroying all the old traditional agricultural cultures.  But there was never a cunning plan to reduce the rest of the world to peonage.

The French philosopher-statesman Luc Ferry writes in A Brief History of Thought that we need to get beyond the Enlightenment and its rational faith, beyond Nietzsche and his deconstruction of the idols, beyond the materialism that many profess for others but not for themselves.  We have to admit that, after we have thrown away all the gods and the modern idols there is still an irreducible core of something: e.g., the disgust of seeing someone lynched.  I would call it our irreducible human sociability.  It is something beyond material, something beyond advantage: call it self-consciousness.

I would call that something "modern conservatism."  But first we have to deal with the decline and collapse of liberalism, epitomized by President Obama, who Peggy Noonan describes as "a president who is at once over his head, out of his depth and wholly unaware of the fact."

America's big problem is that the same can be said of liberals in general.

President's Plan Still Doesn't Get It

Finally, with two weeks to go before the election, the president has come out with his "plan."  It is, of course, no plan but just more of the same.  Larry Kudlow:

But before getting into the details of this little plan, my basic conclusion is this: Mr. Obama wants to slash defense spending, raise all other spending, and hike taxes to finance the largest government size he can possibly get.

 National Review editors:

Obama’s second term is to be a more or less precise repeat of his first term. In fact, the sixth item on his seven-point list merely touts Obamacare, which, if memory serves, already has been passed. He also wants to add six-figure numbers to the headcounts of the public-sector unions that finance and staff his campaign. And build batteries.

But you can see why the president wants to do this.  For over a century politicians have won elections by promising "free stuff" to their supporters.  Nothing remarkable here.  That's what the Frankish kings promised their soldiers as they plundered Saxony 1,200 years ago, and that's what the politicians promised the working class 100 years ago.  That's what today's politicians promise their welfare state clients.  That's what Obamacare is all about.



The great achievement of religion, they say, is that it curbs the freeloaders, the people who want their "free stuff" but don't want to offer anything in return. It organizes the believers into a community where the freeloaders get named and shamed.  The beauty of capitalism is that it puts the freeloaders to work without the naming and shaming, because the only way you can earn your bread in the market economy is by serving others.



The great gift that President Obama has given to America is that he has made the "free stuff" argument so blatantly that the "economically conservative socially liberal" moderates have taken fright.  Let the rich pay a little more and the rest of us can all get our "free stuff."  Not on my dime, says the affluent suburbanite.



When the economy was roaring then you could win elections by scaring college-educated women in the affluent suburbs about social conservatives and abortion.  No longer.  Today college-educated women are scared about being able to afford college for their daughters.  No doubt that's why Mitt Romney has been playing a benevolent uncle in the presidential debates.



But don't worry, girls and boys.  Abortion will be back.  In A Brief History of Thought French secularist Luc Ferry tells us why, in his notion of immanent transcendence.  Mere material gain, in the market or from the government, is not enough.  We are not just materialist drones.



Imagine you are witnessing a lynching, Ferry writes.  You just "know" it is wrong, and you would want to save the victim.  Same thing with slavery.  Same thing, we conservatives would say, with babies.  It is not a question of "choice."  It is a question of "life."



But first we need to get the economy back on track.  According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.