How America Lost Its Mind

[DWill]

I just got around to reading Kurt Andersen's September Atlantic essay, "How America Lost its Mind." Has anyone else read it, or does anyone want to? The piece generated lots of letters in the next issue of the magazine. Andersen attempts to provide a wider contextual view of how we came to be led by President Donald Trump. The reasons go back a ways.

Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts--cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological--have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and truthiness and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the past several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks, which Donald Trump slid down right to the White House.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... nd/534231/

[Robert Tulip]

Hello DWill, thank you very much for sharing this thought provoking essay. I have read it and thought it provided an excellent study of sources of social polarisation in modern America. I think the key issue is the status of reason and logic. This topic creates severe dilemmas, less in the pure logic that Kant called antinomies than in the politics of reason.

For philosophy, logic refutes relativism through the simple claims that a statement cannot be true and false, and that a thing is what it is and not something else. But for politics, something true for me can be false for you, and things are not what they seem, producing an inevitable pluralistic relativism as a basis of mutual respect. As well, there is an intimate association between logic and political power, with leaders trying to present an image of confidence and rationality, even where these are not justified.

I think Anderson rightly fingers the Vietnam War as the key event that destroyed America’s confidence in the rationality of the state. Looking at the counterfactual, if the US had allowed communists to take power in Vietnam and provided constructive help and advice, we could imagine that America’s reputation and Vietnam’s wealth would be far higher than they are.

On that scenario, the US could have done a better job of persuading people of the merits of capitalism. But using war as a tool for this objective was fairly shortsighted. It gets back to the dominant value system seeing communism as so irrational that it must be fought at every point. I have sympathy for that attitude, based on reading anti-communist economists and historians, but the practical politics is another matter. America needs a good dose of psychoanalysis to explain why it does things that are so crazy, and what are the unconscious factors that allow fantasy to take power in government. I see the dream of infinite westward expansion as a core myth, and what an irony it is that this myth was so aggressively prosecuted by General Westmoreland in Vietnam.

So the big underlying problem here is the status of reason in society. Two philosophers I have found most interesting on this problem are Martin Heidegger and Carlos Castaneda. Both have severely trashed reputations among rationalists. Heidegger was the most famous German philosopher of the 1920s, but then he joined the Nazis. Castaneda is widely seen as a shamanistic fantasist and fraud.

Heidegger founded existentialism by seeing the mood of angst as the primary revealer of being in the world, in a way that deconstructed traditional reason with its myth of the isolated individual as the source of truth. But then it seemed that his doubts about reason opened him to the severe problem of accepting a completely irrational political leader who plunged the world into war.

Castaneda directly attacked the western concept of reason and the myth that there is no meaning outside science, saying American pioneer culture imagined it was rational but ignored the big picture of the complexity of nature seen in indigenous wisdom traditions.

These are just two examples of widely accepted arguments for scepticism about the rationality of American social values and prevailing assumptions about logic. However both of these critics have themselves been widely criticised.

While not myself wanting to advance a relativistic anthropology, I do think it is important to critique the pretensions of western philosophy. For example, Aristotle is revered as the founder of logic, but he mentored Alexander the Great who was one of the top conquistadors of history. So logic became a machine for colonialism, an instrument of control, and that is exactly why the ancient Greeks were revered by Victorian England in its myth of classics.

Logic is a source of power and progress and production, but these socioeconomic values can be contested by looking at what logic ignores, for example in the way the logic of economic growth ignores the externality of cooking the planet. When people see such dangerous externalities as global warming it causes them to question the entire basis of reason that justifies modern economic and social structures and values.

[DWill]

Hello DWill, thank you very much for sharing this thought provoking essay. I have read it and thought it provided an excellent study of sources of social polarisation in modern America. I think the key issue is the status of reason and logic. This topic creates severe dilemmas, less in the pure logic that Kant called antinomies than in the politics of reason.

Thank you for your more than thoughtful reaction to the essay. Even though Andersen makes no secret of his alarm regarding DT, I give him points for not rounding up the usual suspects in tracing how someone who plays so fast and loose with objective truth came to lead the U. S. I was coming into awareness in the late 60s, and as a mostly serious-minded young person, I was uncomfortable with the extremeness of the shift from the shared objectivity counseled by our elders to a menu of subjectivities favored by the counterculture (even though I wouldn't have been able to state the matter that way at the time). At the same time, I was attracted to the freedom from authoritarian restraints. Andersen pins blame on the leftist counterculture, however, along with the establishment figures who were their champions, for overthrowing reason as a litmus test. Over time, the manufacturing of fantastical claims, such as most conspiracy theories, shifted to the right, and now defines that side of the spectrum much more than it does the left. Our polarization may be more extreme simply because the right feels licensed to plunge deeper into the rabbit hole. That may sound like a partisan argument, but remember that I admit the seesaw once tilted the other way.

For philosophy, logic refutes relativism through the simple claims that a statement cannot be true and false, and that a thing is what it is and not something else. But for politics, something true for me can be false for you, and things are not what they seem, producing an inevitable pluralistic relativism as a basis of mutual respect. As well, there is an intimate association between logic and political power, with leaders trying to present an image of confidence and rationality, even where these are not justified.

Great point. There is a strong relationship between pluralism and relativism, in a certain sense. What the flag most symbolizes to me may not align with what it most symbolizes to another, to suggest an example. It is to be hoped, though, that around the very basis for assessing reality, there remains an agreement that reason and evidence prevail. But as we know, political emotion colors all of our supposedly reasoned judgments. That doesn't, however, make them lacking in all reason. We even have evidence from neuroscience that emotion is not extraneous to reasoning but essential to it. It doesn't seem that today there is much belief in a simple truism: reasonable people can disagree.

I think Anderson rightly fingers the Vietnam War as the key event that destroyed America’s confidence in the rationality of the state. Looking at the counterfactual, if the US had allowed communists to take power in Vietnam and provided constructive help and advice, we could imagine that America’s reputation and Vietnam’s wealth would be far higher than they are.

On that scenario, the US could have done a better job of persuading people of the merits of capitalism. But using war as a tool for this objective was fairly shortsighted. It gets back to the dominant value system seeing communism as so irrational that it must be fought at every point. I have sympathy for that attitude, based on reading anti-communist economists and historians, but the practical politics is another matter. America needs a good dose of psychoanalysis to explain why it does things that are so crazy, and what are the unconscious factors that allow fantasy to take power in government. I see the dream of infinite westward expansion as a core myth, and what an irony it is that this myth was so aggressively prosecuted by General Westmoreland in Vietnam.

It looks as though capitalism's benefits can accrue to communist countries, at least if we consider the core function of capitalism to be wealth generation. But I suppose I'm not economically literate enough to know whether China manages capital in ways fundamentally different from those in the West (Harry, help?) I don't, though, see the political blunders of Vietnam as themselves symptoms of the same type as what Andersen is elucidating. France made the same mistakes, just as other regimes have made similar mistakes stemming from hubris and illusion. The best and the brightest were actually trying to apply analysis to the situation in Vietnam. It didn't prevent them from being tragically wrong, but it's not the same as abandoning all real analysis. It's not what gets you young (or old) earth creationists, "birthers," moon-landing deniers, Holocaust deniers, people who believe millions voted illegally in 2017, people who are sure the U.S. govt. was behind 9/11, and the list goes on.

Castaneda directly attacked the western concept of reason and the myth that there is no meaning outside science, saying American pioneer culture imagined it was rational but ignored the big picture of the complexity of nature seen in indigenous wisdom traditions.

These are just two examples of widely accepted arguments for scepticism about the rationality of American social values and prevailing assumptions about logic. However both of these critics have themselves been widely criticised.

While not myself wanting to advance a relativistic anthropology, I do think it is important to critique the pretensions of western philosophy. For example, Aristotle is revered as the founder of logic, but he mentored Alexander the Great who was one of the top conquistadors of history. So logic became a machine for colonialism, an instrument of control, and that is exactly why the ancient Greeks were revered by Victorian England in its myth of classics.

Logic is a source of power and progress and production, but these socioeconomic values can be contested by looking at what logic ignores, for example in the way the logic of economic growth ignores the externality of cooking the planet. When people see such dangerous externalities as global warming it causes them to question the entire basis of reason that justifies modern economic and social structures and values.

I think there has always been an ivory tower mentality, very carefully cultivated and distilled to precepts, and the mentality more suited to the secular world. Alexander may have been an apt pupil of Aristotle, but it wasn't primarily logic that he was demonstrating in conquering much of the known world, except that he needed to have a keen sense of strategy and "good management style." The more primitive organs of the brain have to have their say in the competitive struggle for dominance. It's the more primitive parts that prevail in the march to affluence as well, which is not a gesture of disrespect on my part for so-called lower functions. The main problem with the externalities that harm the environment as we become ever wealthier is that it's difficult to see the origins of those externalities as bad, or at least to feel that they're bad. If I get a new car, I can give the old one to my kid. I can fly the family to a distant state, see relatives, live it up. I can add a bathroom to my house. I stimulate the economy and help other people. What's bad about that? Nothing, it's powerfully incentivizing and so just about impossible to curtail; but it releases carbon and other pollution and depletes resources.