Reflexivity

Tommy said to my friends: “You’re funny!” This was after Kelly regaled us with the joke about a man returning to college and learning something about logic. She went on to talk about racial tensions in Kansas:
“Me and Steph went to a KKK rally in Topeka….”
I had to interrupt: “We went to protest the rally!”
Meanwhile, Kay dispensed her wisdom:

Later, at Frances’ pool party, a bunch of hooligans from the old days gathered. Tammy teased Kathy’s kids about horseback riding: “Merry-go-rounds don’t count.” Someone (was it Lori?) sprained her ankle the last time she rode a horse.
How’d you do that?
I was drunk and fell off.
Everyone told me I looked better without the hair. No surprise.
The hours drifted by, filled with easy conversation. When I returned to Kansas City two years ago for my nephew’s funeral, it did not even occur to me that some of my old friends might appear – I had been away for more than two decades, hadn’t everyone else scattered too? Nope, Kay said, I was the only one. I hoped for a chance to tell everyone how much their friendship means to me, the stability I gain from knowing that they are all still there. We were not in a sentimental space, just a casual one – like the old days.
After the long lazy day, five of us scooted off to catch Gay Pride. In the end, it did not matter at all that festivities ended at 10 pm instead of midnight – our arrival at the Liberty Memorial outdoor venue at 9:54 created another adventure. We moved on to
Organizers pitched this as the 30th year, which is a slight exaggeration. When we – me, Bill Todd, Marc Hein, and a very few others – got together in 1988 to plan a Gay and Lesbian Awareness event (GALA), there had not been any pride events in the KC area for several years. We did know they had occurred before, but – as far as I know – had no contact with any former organizers. Maybe some of the original organizers reappeared after I moved away? We held a first GALA event with a measly 200 participants, which grew to 500 the second year. I returned to town for the third year’s event – an estimated 3000 and the first ever parade. Marc insisted I ride in the lead car (some people whom I didn’t know weren’t so happy about that but others agreed).
This was my first experience with the humility necessary to be a public figure. I use this concept deliberately – because I failed, and the lesson has never left.
I had no part in planning that year. My activism had led me to democratic politics and national-level organizing in the lesbian community, I had been fired (literally because of activism) and moved away. Marc and I talked about AIDS and the gay community for most of the ride. He was expert at setting the pace – I felt we us moving so slowly! The route was long…I lost track of time. Suddenly we topped a hill and a huge roar greeted us – we were at Southmoreland Park and a huge crowd spotted us the moment we came into view. I heard them before I saw them. The noise nearly compelled me to stand – in fact, I struggled with the visceral shock: this moment of collective celebration deserved cheering and I was the one in the only position to act as cheerleader. All it would have taken was for me to stand up and wave my arms – to use my body as a sign of triumph.
I could not do it. I was too embarrassed. I felt doubt – was I even supposed to be there? Should it have been someone else in the passenger seat of the lead car? I could not let go of my own ego and allow myself – my Self, in the guise of my Body – to symbolize for all of us that extraordinary historical moment.
This year, like last, there were tens of thousands of people celebrating pride in our community. Most events were at the largest outdoor venue in Kansas City (short of a sports stadium), rife with symbolic value. From those humble single afternoon programs, the event now spans an entire weekend. The estimate was thirty thousand people, of all stripes, religions, races, and ages: a human rainbow.

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George Lakoff’s important book, Moral Politics, describes the root metaphor at the base of conservative and liberal worldviews. “Cognitive studies,” Lakoff explains, have concluded “that moral thinking is imaginative and that it depends fundamentally on metaphorical thinking” (p. 41). The explanatory metaphor for both conservatives and liberals extends a notion of the family/parent to the nation/government. “The resulting moral systems, put together out of the same elements, but in different order, are radically opposed” (p. 35).
One of the interesting challenges of Lakoff’s book (i.e., another finding of cognitive science) is the myth of being conscious of one’s own worldview, and “that all one has to do to find out about people’s views of the world is to ask them” (36). Lakoff describes realizing the myth of transparent belief as “the most fundamental result of cognitive science” (p. 36).

“What people will tell you about their worldview does not necessarily accurately reflect how they reason, how they categorize, how they speak, and how they act” (p. 36).

Lakoff is careful not to tell us what our politics or our morality should be; he is not preaching or giving a prescription. Instead, he is describing the two logics composing the deep split in political thinking between conservatives and liberals in the United States. This is not philosophy; this is description. It is up to us to understand the descriptions and then figure out how to talk and reason based on the reality of these starkly different moralities.

“Our public discourse about the nature of morality and its relation to politics [is] sadly impoverished. We must find a way to talk about alternative moral systems and how they give rise to alternative forms of politics. Journalists – including the most intelligent and insightful of journalists – have been at a loss. They have to rely on existing forms of public discourse, and since those forms are not adequate to the task, even the most thoughtful and honest journalists need help. Public discourse has to be enriched so that the media can do its job better.” (2nd edition, 2002, p. 32)

Lakoff goes much further and deeper than merely slapping labels on certain brands of politics. “Classification in itself,” writes Lakoff, “is relatively boring” (p. 17). What we need – what Lakoff provides – are models. Models do much more than mere categorization, they

• analyze modes of reasoning
• show how modes of reasoning about different issues fit together
• show how different forms of reasoning are related to each in other in such a way that they are all understood to be instances of the same thing (in this case, politics)
• show links between forms of political reasoning and forms of moral reasoning
• show how moral reasoning in politics is ultimately based on models of the family

Lakoff’s hope – and mine in reading his book and trying to understand the basic point – is that by understanding how our minds work, and especially how our words give clues to how our minds work we can address political dilemmas more effectively.

“The same mind that we study for scientific reasons creates moral and political systems of thought and uses them every day. For this reason, the findings of conceptual systems research will eventually come to matter more and more in understanding moral and political life” (p. 17).

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“For better or worse, this is Chicago,” said Ms. Katz, who has held fund-raisers for Mr. Obama at her home.

This is what I have always appreciated about Barack Obama:

“…he’s not looking for how to exclude the people who don’t agree with him. He’s looking for ways to make the tent as large as possible” (Abner J. Mikva, a former congressman and mentor to Mr. Obama).

Both quotes are from Pragmatic Politics, Forged on the South Side. (I have a hat, a cowboy hat adorned with abalone shell, black leather, and a ceramic bird’s skull, which someone once said – circa 1990 – would keep me safe on Chicago’s South Side.)

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On this day in 1945, only three days after the occupation of their city by French troops, the remaining full professors of the University of Freiburg assembled to elect new officers and to restore the customs under which they had operated before 1933, when their faculty, racially purged by the Nazis, elected as rector the philosopher Martin Heidegger. (All details here come from Hugo Ott; see more at the footnote.)1 [a]

This is not a parable or an analogy. It is a story of one episode in which civil authorities and academic governing bodies reckoned with a disastrous crossover between scholarship and politics.
One of the first orders of business for the reassembled professors was the question of what to do about Nazis among their colleagues. They chartered an internal review committee for the purpose, and tried to keep jurisdiction over this process, without success. City authorities were conducting their own reviews, and they designated Heidegger’s house, among others, as a “Party residence” to be requisitioned for use. The university protested, based on the opinion of legal scholar Franz Böhm (an anti-Nazi dismissed from his post during Hitler’s regime) that for “establishing political guilt” one needed “a proper court of law.”
The French occupation authorities had actual jurisdiction over such cases, and they appointed a trio of professors who had been imprisoned under the Nazis to act and speak for the university. These three became the nucleus of the university’s denazification commission, which in due course all but let Heidegger off. Their report in September 1945 acknowledged that he had stirred up the students against “reactionary” professors, that he

played an active part in transforming the university constitution
in line with the “leadership principle” and in introducing the outward
forms of Hitlerism (e.g. the Hitler salute…) into academic life … he
penalized or sacrificed persons who were opposed to the Nazis, and
even contributed directly to National Socialist election propaganda….

But he had been rector only a year before falling out with the party; as his onetime friend Karl Jaspers would later write, “the special brand of National Socialism he concocted for himself had precious little to do with the real thing.”
The report concluded that as “[i]t would be a serious and lamentable loss” for someone as famous as Heidegger to go. He should do a limited amount of teaching, and no administration or examination. The French military government declared Heidegger “disponible,” which was all but harmless.
One professor and member of the commission, Adolf Lampe, dissented. Along with Böhm and another anti-Nazi, Walter Eucken, Lampe began protesting formally. Böhm, the lawyer who had from the start urged a regard for procedure, noted that other academics had already suffered harsher punishments for their connection with the Nazis, and Heidegger should not therefore get off lightly; justice, as Böhm saw it, would have failed if it reached this inequitable conclusion. He wrote in October,

it makes me very bitter to think that one of the principal
intellectual architects of the political betrayal of Germany’s
universities … should merely have been subjected to the stricture of
“disponibilité”, and clearly feels no need at all to answer for the
consequences of his actions.

Observing Heidegger going about his business, agreeing to give lectures and generally enjoying the privileges of academic life again, Lampe concurred: “It must therefore be concluded that Herr Heidegger&emdash;contrary to what is assumed in the report placed before us by our denazification commission&emdash;has not undergone that radical change in his political thinking…. In the absence of such a change we had no business to exonerate Herr Heidegger….”
The French occupation authorities tried to defuse the growing crisis by offering to move Heidegger to the university at Tübingen. But Tübingen would not have him. So with the government unwilling to do much, the case against Heidegger became, Hugo Ott writes, “a purely internal affair” to the University of Freiburg.
Heidegger asked that the faculty consult the philosopher Karl Jaspers for his opinion. Jaspers had fallen out with Heidegger in the 1930s as Heidegger became more evidently enamored of Hitler and Nazism. Jaspers
wrote reluctantly but damningly, arguing

In our present situation the education of the younger generation
needs to be handled with the utmost responsibility and care. Total
academic freedom should be our ultimate goal, but this cannot be
achieved overnight. Heidegger’s mode of thinking, which seems to me to
be fundamentally unfree, dictatorial and uncommunicative, would have a
very damaging effect on students at the present time…. He should be
suspended from teaching duties for several years, after which there
should be a review of the situation based on his subsequent published
work and in the light of changing academic circumstances. The question
that must then be asked is whether the restoration of full academic
freedom is a justifiable risk, bearing in mind that views hostile to
the idea of the university, and potentially damaging to it when
propounded with intellectual distinction, may well be promoted in the
lecture room. Whether or not such a situation arises will depend on
the course of political events and the evolution of our civic spirit.

In sum Jaspers recommended Heidegger be pensioned off and permitted to publish, but not to teach. Full academic freedom required a marked recovery of the body politic, a restored civic spirit, and confidence in the resilience of the young.
In the middle of January, 1946&emdash;nine months after reconstituting itself&emdash;the University Senate largely adopted Jaspers’s views, denying Heidegger permission to teach, and saying he would be “expected to maintain a low profile at public functions and gatherings of the University.”
In December, 1946, the French military government went a bit further, denying Heidegger his pension, but changed its mind about that in May 1947. So the ban on Heidegger’s teaching stayed firm until 1949, when the Faculty of Philosophy persuaded the university Senate to lift it, though not by an overwhelming or unbitter vote, and Heidegger was clear to lecture in 1950-51.
From Ott’s account it appears that throughout the nine months it took to come to a resolution in the Heidegger case, university and government authorities influenced each other and that the opinions of academic experts within the academy&emdash;particularly Jaspers&emdash;carried a great deal of weight outside it. Heidegger’s critics within the university wanted him to pay a price as determined by a set of legitimate procedures. And they&emdash;especially Jaspers&emdash;weighed academic freedom in the balance, carefully enough to believe it merited support for Heidegger’s continued publishing career, but not for his teaching
career until society had recovered to the point where it could sustain the onslaught of his dictatorial mode of thought.

1Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden (London: HarperCollins, 1993); I’m drawing also on Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review Books, 2003) and Hans Otto Lenel, “The Life and Work of Franz Böhm,” European Journal of Law and Economics 3 (1996):301-307. Also, previously on CT.
Steph’s additional notes:

• a) Ott’s book is critiqued by Richard Rorty, who recommends Safranski: Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil.
• b) William Godwin (1756-1836) was the founder of philosophical anarchism. In his An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) he argued that government is a corrupting force in society, perpetuating dependence and ignorance, but that it will be rendered increasingly unnecessary and powerless by the gradual spread of knowledge….
• c) Comments ensue after the cross-posting to Crooked Timbers. John Yoo comes under vigorous attack.

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Change is always resisted. At the cellular level patterns of survival screech to continue unaltered. It is we, the thinking aggregate of living cells composed into consciousnesses with conscience who must impose a break with violence and the talk that spurs it on.

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Obama Barack Obama’s speech on race and friendship.