The Epistemological Presidency

For those who don’t recall their sophomore philosophy class, epistemology concerns the question of how we know what’s what. That is, can we believe the evidence of our senses? How do we tell fact from fiction, belief from knowledge, information from supposition? Without consensus on this problem, all further reasoning about ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics is moot,

Ordinarily, this issue would be distant from day to day civic concerns, but the Trump administration is a special case. From the first day of his campaign, observers noticed the candidate’s remarks had only a passing acquaintance with the agreed upon facts of everyday life.

Falsehood is not unusual in the political realm, but it has now been elevated to a daily torrent of bunk. Those who keep count say the tally since inaugural day has topped four thousand untruths and is now averaging seven official lies a day. It keeps the fact checkers working overtime.

Generally, the lies we encounter are subtle and venial, these are bald-faced whoppers. In fact, Trump and his minions make it a habit to refute the notion of objective reality and to suggest whatever they claim today is self-evidently true and everything else is fake news, or as Kellyanne Conway memorably put it — “alternative facts.”

Now, Trump’s least trustworthy mouthpiece, Rudy Giuliani, has gone Kellyanne one better, expressing the governing ethos of this administration with lunatic pith — “Truth isn’t truth.” His clarification only made it worse. If two people describe an event differently, (he said, she said), each has his own truth, so there isn’t only one true truth.

Perhaps we are meant to believe we are in the land of quantum physics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty, Schroedinger’s cat, and the multiverse, but for more traditional-minded folks this sounds a lot like the patter of the bunco artist. Most of us tend to believe there is an objective reality, not a world where wishful thinking makes things so. In short, we operate on this side of the looking glass.

Philosophers generally do too. Francis Bacon began his essay “Of Truth,” by alluding to the Bible. “‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer.” But Bacon goes on to say that there is an answer. There is truth, and there are lies. He notes that poets lie to give pleasure and merchants to gain an advantage, but in civil life to lie debases man’s nature, as an alloy debases a pure gold or silver coin. “These winding and crooked courses are the goings of a serpent.”

Montaigne, a wittier commentator than Bacon, thought the trouble with lies was their endlessness. “If falsehood had, like truth, but one face only, we should be upon better terms; for we should then take for certain the contrary to what the liar says: but the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand forms, and a field indefinite, without bound or limit.” This is Trump incarnate, described over 400 years ago.

In the novel, “Alas, Babylon,” the protagonist can hardly bear to lie because his father, a judge, only punished him with an old-fashioned whipping once, but it was memorable. “He implanted the virtue of truth through the seat of his pants,” for the sin of telling a lie. And the judge explained his severity to his son. “Lying is the worse crime. It is the indispensable accomplice of all others.”

It make sense that a judge should feel so strongly about the matter. Courts are finders of fact, and layers of blame. Their business is to decide who speaks the truth when “he says” and “she says,” not to suppose that each person is entitled to his own truth.

In the worst case, prior to the Trump administration, of an untrustworthy president and his minions, Richard Nixon and those who abetted him eventually found themselves in legal jeopardy. By the time the dust settled, forty-eight men were found guilty of crimes, not counting the unindicted co-conspirator.

They were in contempt of court, committed perjury by lying under oath, committed burglary, and obstruction of justice. One was an Attorney General of the United States, one a former Attorney General, others had worked for the CIA and the FBI, three were White House Counsels, like Trump’s man Don McGahn.

He has apparently learned the lesson of Watergate, even if no one around him has. He has spent thirty hours testifying to the Special Counsel’s investigators, truthfully presumably. He no doubt doesn’t want to end as half a dozen Nixon attorneys did — disgraced, disbarred, and/or serving prison terms.

What is truth? In cases like this, it’s what keeps you from being indicted, convicted, incarcerated or impeached. Nixon found out the hard way that, “If the president does it, it isn’t illegal,” isn’t true. It’s a lie. And the price for lying to the wrong people is high.

Don’t Ever Take Sides Against The Family

On a single day in August, the conviction on eight counts each of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen marked a watershed moment for the Trump administration. As Winston Churchill said in another fraught time for democratic government, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Cohen’s conviction on two counts of campaign finance violations was for paying hush money to Trump sexual partners. And in confessing to the crime Cohen said he had been directed to do it by Trump. That means they were acting in order to illegally influence a presidential election, and that makes the President an unindicted co-conspirator. Cohen has also offered to cooperate with the Mueller probe in detailing other presidential crimes to which he was a witness.

A very interesting question now is what is preventing Manafort, and all the other shady characters in Trump’s orbit with similar knowledge of presidential crimes and the hijacking of an American election, from cooperating fully with the Special Counsel in hopes of a reduced sentence.

Among the explanations offered are loyalty to a man not known for returning the favor. Alternatively, some believe Manafort and others may be holding out for pardons, but that also relies on Trump acting in a way that might put him in greater jeopardy, not less. He is already at risk of being charged with obstructing justice for impeding the investigation into Russian meddling. Pardons could be viewed as unpardonable, even by some of his slavish supporters in Congress.

I want to offer a modest proposal for an alternative reason why Manafort and some others may be reluctant to tell all they know. Some have argued that those with dirt on Trump may fear the President’s vengeance, but it isn’t clear that enduring Trump’s wrath would be worse than serving a long prison sentence.

However, it is possible that spilling the beans on Trump could also implicate people far scarier than Trump. It may be far-fetched, but Manafort and others could fear the consequences of ratting out and exposing to legal or governmental attention not Trump so much as Russian oligarchs, Russian mobsters, and even the Russian capo di tutti capi, boss of all the bosses, Vladimir Putin.

Manafort moved in dark and dangerous circles, and the criminal attempt to steal an election for Trump, as has been amply shown by the intelligence community and Mueller’s indictments, can be traced back to Putin’s Russia, his cybercrimes apparatus, and his oligarchic henchmen.

If Manafort or others witting of the details of the plot began to sing, Trump might tweet angrily. But those who offend Putin experience more unpleasant chastisement. What do these people do when crossed? Well, being poisoned with a nerve agent comes to mind. Other critics have simply disappeared.

Putin’s thugs have even shot down a commercial airliner killing 298 persons by accident. They thought it was an enemy plane. But they were unrepentant. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” Lenin is said to have remarked concerning the Red Terror that killed an estimated 500,000.

This in nastiness on a whole different scale from the chicanery of a crooked New York landlord, philanderer, and fake TV businessman. If you were Manafort, or Trump, you too might prefer some restful jail time or impeachment to angering these particular partners in crime. As Fredo learned the hard way, don’t ever take sides against the family.

Maybe it isn’t the American public or his base Trump’s talking to when he keeps braying, “No collusion. No collusion.” He may really be saying, “ I won’t tell. Don’t nerve gas me, please.”

Fragility

Many years ago, at the peak of the Cold War standoff, I read “Alas, Babylon” which begins with World War III and ends as a Fenimore Cooper tale of frontier survival in a small river town in Florida. It is, in effect, an apocalyptic pastoral.

At the end of the first day of the war, which is effectively the last day as well, a thermonuclear weapon obliterates the nearest large city, Orlando, which is the source of the town’s power. I have never forgotten this sentence. “Thus, the lights went out, and in that moment civilization in Fort Repose retreated a hundred years.

We all imagine we are self-sufficient and relatively safe day by day, but in fact we survive due to an elaborate web of connections and systems that have to keep working and may not be as robust as we imagine.

Every once in a while we are awaked to the gossamer nature of the web we depend on and the fragility of our reality. When a bridge collapses, when a hurricane turns ot the lights, the refrigeration, the heat and air conditioning, the communications we rely on.

On a personal scale, when the water doesn’t come out of the tap, the sewage doesn’t disappear down the pipe, the computers are down at the bank, the lights go out, the fuel trucks don’t arrive or the shipments of produce, we find we are not self-sufficient, but dependent from one moment to the next — if not on the kindness of strangers, then surely on their competency.

The supply chain that brings us food, clothing, fuel, medicine, soap, toilet paper is global. We communicate thanks to cables, cell towers, satellites. We survive thanks to roads, ports, bridges, engineers, technicians, utility and public service employees.

The government that survivalists and libertarians love to hate keeps us from being invaded by foreign enemies, comes when we call to stop a thief, put out a fire, or rush a child or grandmother to the hospital, provides water and sewer service and protects us from being poisoned by our food, medicines, water and air.

None of he overlapping systems we rely on are infallible or foolproof. The lights do go out, as in Puerto Rico. The water can be made toxic as in Flint, Michigan. Insufficiently vetted foods and medicines can kill us. Rules governing markets and banking can be too weak to prevent the rapacious from crashing the economy. Insufficient attention may allow elections to be hacked or terrorists to attack. And when that happens we don’t say “C’est la vie, I guess we aren’t as safe as we suppose.” Instead, we feel betrayed.

Free market economists argue that individual self-interest makes the world go ‘round, but even Adam Smith knew there had to be rules of the road and that the good enlightenment virtues of caution, care, probity, cooperation, law and order were needed to curb the worst excesses of the selfish, the vicious and the unscrupulous.

The vast majestic clockwork that makes modern life possible can be disrupted by sand in the gears. Around the world can be seen the results of insufficient appreciation of the virtues embodied in the old-fashioned but not out of fashion idea of the commonweal. In places where the few exploit the many and the machine of civilization no longer functions — failed states, kleptocracies, tyrannies, banana republics — life is poor, nasty, brutish short, and man is a wolf to man.

It can happen here. It is happening here, Detention camps. Public and private debt out of control. Government services financed by borrowing rather than taxing. Great corporations profiting from stealing our identify or corrupting our elections, Congressmen and cabinet offices casually engaging in insider trading, instead of making economic crimes harder to pull off. Billionaires who imperil their own freedom, the country’s security and the stability of the system that enriched them only to pile their loot a little higher.

An international system of trade, treaties, defense and environmental protection is blithely abandoned. Regulations to protect the citizenry scuttled in favor of self-aggrandizement for campaign donors. Life-saving medical care and pharmaceuticals priced out of reach for many. Education dumbed down or made unaffordable. Guardrails to prevent another market catastrophe dismantled. Norms violated. The Constitution gamed. The courts subverted. The government sold to the highest bidder.

None of this is done as a result of careful analysis, cautious long-range planning, a calculation of the consequences, or a regard for the public interest. It is done out of self-interest, to curry favor, to pick winners, to cash in, to get even, to satisfy a whim, to engineer a self-fulfilling prophecy, to conform with an ideological doctrine, or to win the next election.

Increasingly, it appears that those in positions of power are not statesmen, patriots, or public servants. They are con artists, cranks, and egomaniacs. Some are akin to the barbarians who let Rome descend into ruin because they couldn’t be bothered to learn how to maintain the aqueducts, the roads, the intellectual and physical infrastructure on which the empire depended. This institutional knowledge is what the mockers now scorn as the deep state or the bureaucracy.

Closer to home than Rome, those in charge also recall Tom and Daisy from the Roaring Twenties that ended in a crash not a whimper, “careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness…and let other people clean up the mess they made.”

But some things took so long to build, are so intricately made, and run in part on expertise and trust, that once broken they can not easily be mended. And when our civilization is broken, will our heirs stand amid the ruins and lament our letting it happen in words like these from two millennia ago? “Alas, alas, that great city of Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.”