Conversations about truth, illusion, self-deception and authenticity

Illiberalism, disappearing truth and collapsing thirdness form a virulent triumvirate that explains many of the most insidious phenomena of this post-truth age.

Attacks on science are attacks on truths that cannot be colonized by one’s subjectivity. The same is true with the right’s paranoia based assault on competence and expertise. The retort “fake news” suffices as an instantly negates truth, and with that the possibility of critical thought. These days the rule of law, perhaps the cornerstone of democratic, cultural thirdness, seems like a frog in a slowly boiling pot of water.  And then, speaking of dualism, there is what is likely the most dangerous toxin in today’s political surround; the breakdown of bipartisanship. As political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write in their book How Democracies Die, “if one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, it’s that extreme polarization can kill democracy.”

Division intro

Beginning with the battle between Federalists and Republicans, divisions have been endemic to American democracy. What is new, however, is the nature of American division. Where once divisions occurred within political parties, the divide now is between the parties. These days, America is being torn apart by a seemingly irreconcilable partisanship in which neither the red mother nor the blue mother is willing to let go for the good of the child, and the only special interest that is not heavily organized and funded is the common interest.

Interestingly, a number of studies show surprising between-party agreement about policy and ideology. And yet, as Eric Levitz writes in Intelligencer, “these myriad areas of agreement have been no bulwark against hyperpartisanship: Ordinary Republican and Democratic voters … still fear and loathe each other more than at any point in our nation’s modern history.”

The reason for this fear and loathing, Levitz argues, is that as whites, Christians, and rural dwellers find their home in the Republican party, and nonwhites, liberals and urbanites identify as  Democrats, the parties divide less along policy lines than they do along racial, religious and regional identities.

Dualism

Again, these identity based divides may represent be the single greatest threat America’s experiment in liberal democracy. When parties are diverse identity-wise, it is possible to vote across party lines without being perceived as betraying your identity group. However, as University of Maryland political scientist Lilliana Mason points out, when one’s social identities “line up behind one party or the other, … the humiliation of loss is amplified.”

Here, Mason is speaking to the underpinnings of the fear and loathing that is pathognomic of identity politics, and she is also speaking to the dynamic of dualism. This dynamic, which Hoffman (2002) aptly describes as “either I’m crazy or you are”, and which Jessica Benjamin also refers to as complementary, or twoness relations, occurs when the both-and of thirdness collapses into the either or of twoness.  Eric Levitz references this in the political world when he notes that voters feel that the party that is not their own “poses an existential threat to their bedrock ideals”. Bouncing back to the psychoanalytic realm, Britton’s describes the way that difficult patients experience a kind of “psychic atopia” in which they experience  the other as dangerous allergens. This idea is also found in the social psychology construct of “particularized trust”, which as Eric Uslaner  notes, involves the idea that  the more you trust people within your group, the less you trust people not in your group.

Within this dualist, illiberal mindset, xenophobia is ubiquitous, because everything that does not conform to one’s own identity is both foreign and to be feared. Just as Republicans are seen by Democrats as violent racists seeking to hijack the principles most dear to their liberal sense of identity, Democrats are seen by Republicans as elitist pussies seeking to force gay rights and same sex marriage down the throats.

Truth

Returning now to today’s through line, cultural and political dualism, like the dualist structure of illiberal thinking, are caused by the disappearance of truth as a meaningful, thirdness structuring element. This is what George Orwell understood when, anticipating Jessica Benjamin by 70 years, he wrote the words I referenced at the beginning of this talk: “without the protection of truth, we “devolve into either-or, doer – done to”.

A quick look at the nature of ideological disagreement offers a window into the relationship between truth and dualist polarization that characterizes identity politics. When you disagree with someone about an idea, that idea, or truth, occupies a third position outside of the two-ness of your mind and their mind. The tacit agreement that there is a truth worthy of disagreement causes each of you to stand outside of your own subjectivity, reflecting on your mind, their mind and that truth. The idea is, in Coehlo’s (2015) words, a “material presence that interrupts an already constituted pair”, and it creates, in Britton’s (1998) terms, “a third position in mental space …from which the subjective self can be observed having a relationship with an idea”. The agreement that there is a truth there is like the stick that holds the pile together in a game of pick up sticks.

In the world of identity politics, however, there is no lynch stick of truth about which to disagree. Arguments may appear to occur on ideological grounds, but this is essentially a sham, a cover for the real argument, which is about identity. Absent a truth that is worthy of disagreement,  fragile triadic structure collapses into do or be done to dualism, which in the world of identity politics takes the shape of who is right, who is wrong, who is righteous, who is shameful, who is deserving, who is not, who is pure and who is impure, and so on.

And again, the truth – thirdness relationship is bidirectional; just as the absence of truth collapses thirdness, the absence of thirdness disappears truth. An example of the latter may be found in the perplexing phenomena of the Christian right’s embrace of the spectacularly immoral Trump. The reason for this is that group allegiance is more important than the idea, or truth, of moral principle. Trump and his panderers can grift to their heart’s content as long as they build that wall, outlaw abortion and same sex marriage, and take a hard line about immigration. Here again, the point is not policy, it’s that policy statements are dog whistles tell the base “we are with you, and against them. It’s not the economy, stupid – it’s identity.

Fear

The paranoia driven fear and loathing of identity politics highlights another elemental ingredient in this today’s toxic mix: to understand dualism and polarization, you have to appreciate the role of fear.

Fifty thousand years ago two of our ancestors were standing in a clearing. A lion approached. The first guy said “interesting animal, don’t you think?”. The second guy, in a moment of adaptive illiberalism, ran. And, once he got away, he more than likely ran back to the safety of his tribe. We are descended from the second guy.

Illiberalism and tribalism are related, adaptive responses, among other things biologically mediated, to fear. In the face of ANS arousal, thinking simplifies and concretizes. The need for the safety of affiliation increases. While open, dialectical thinking and across group affiliations are healthy if you are living in a relatively safe liberal democracy, in fear based culture the fight or flight nature of Illiberalism and tribalism are healthy norms..  And what is  scary is how mutually reinforcing the fear/illiberalism cycle is. Biologically speaking, ANS arousal leads to the adaptive  dualism of illiberalism and tribalism, Illiberalism and tribalism, in turn, generate more fear, and more fear generates more illiberalism and tribalism. Compromise, negotiation, and, to again borrow from Benjamin, surrender, are seen as synonymous with defeat. Power and  bullying become the winning currency. And critical thinking and intelligent discourse are the equivalent of bringing a goldfish to a gunfight.

In his book “Jason Stanley details the characteristics and underpinnings of fascism. It’s an excellent book, worth reading. In it Stanley offers a thorough review of the characteristics of a fascist government. Here, culled from Jason Stanley (How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them), Hannah Arendt, (How Democracy dies), and others, is a summary of what fascism looks like. Probably there’s nothing on this list you don’t already know, but it is chilling to look at these all at once.

• Fascism relies on an idealized vision of mythical past.

• Fascism aims to create a state of unreality through fake news.

• Fascists rely on conspiracy theories that “offer the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth.”

• Fascists take over not by force, but by an incremental constitutional coup, usurping the rule of law, rewriting the constitution, taking over institutions, etc.

• Truth and fact are neutralized by repeated and obvious lying. Interesting fact: Followers of demagogues see their leader as flouting norms deemed unjust by lying, and so lies are seen as a sign of his strength.

• Fascists are able to come to power because existing parties are under the mistaken belief that they can use the emerging demagogue to advance their own agenda.

• Fascism attacks genuine expertise. In the words of Hannah Arendt, fascist states “replace …first-rate talents…. with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is …the best guarantee of their loyalty.” Interesting quote: Latour calls Trump’s ‘apparatchiks’ the “obscurantist elites”.

• Fascist leaders weaponize racism in order to create a paranoia-based allegiance with the dominant group at the expense of non-dominant groups. Another interesting fact: Hitler considered America a model for Nazi Germany, in large part because of his admiration of America’s racist 1924 immigration act. Another interesting fact: that law is a favorite of Jeff Sessions.

• Fascism promotes the idea that the dominant group is hard working, Christian, and the basis of what is good about the nation. Non-dominant groups, meanwhile, are portrayed as lazy, criminal, and a threat to that nation.

• Fascists prey on sexual anxieties by portraying members of the outgroup as sexual predators who will rape and defile dominant group women while cuckolding dominant group men. A weird and interesting fact: Trump supporters are far more likely to do online searches for erectile dysfunction, hair loss, how to get girls, penis enlargement, penis size, steroids, testosterone and Viagra.

• Authoritarian leaders merge their economic interests with their state power.

• Autocrats subsume the normal operations of government into their cult of personality.”

• For demagogues checks and balances, and the slow process of democracy, feel like a straitjacket.

• Autocrats encourage violence.

• Transgenderism, homosexuality and women’s rights are attacked because they threaten the patriarchal basis of autocratic governments.

• Oh, and one last interesting fact: Hitler believed that the leader should function as the CEO of a company.

Probably there’s nothing on this list you don’t already know, but it is chilling to look at these all at once, because right now we are checking every single one of these boxes.

The concepts of markedness, thirdness and intersubjectivity embody contemporary psychoanalysis’ radical solution to the question of how subjectivity develops and grows. These concepts, in turn, represent a radical alternative to the disappearance of truth, and the consequences of this disappearance; dictatorial subjectivity, lying, illiberalism.

In this way, modern psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity truth differ from other post-modern interpretations, which are legitimately criticized for promoting creating cynicism about meaning and truth. I want talk briefly about the differences between the meaning making subjectivity of contemporary psychoanalysis, and the cynicism engendering subjectivity of other post modern expressions, because I think we can learn from what we get it better. Take, for example literary criticism.

In her recent book “The Death of Truth”, literary critic, Michiko Kakutani lists multiple causes for the same issues we are grappling with here today. Many I mentioned earlier; today’s bankrupt relationship with truth. These include information overload, fake news, the attention deficit related to the internet and the rise of subjectivity. I believe that she frequently makes the classic statisticians error of confusing cause with correlation – funerals aren’t lethal just because lots of people seem to die around the time they occur – but she also describes, accurately, what is happening to truth from multiple perspectives. It is a particularly interesting as a psychoanalyst to examine her literary critic’s perspective on the problems inherent in what she calls “perversely enshrined subjectivity”.

Kakutami is a modernist, and some of her harshest reviews in the New York Times center around her dislike of postmodern fiction. According to Kakutani, postmodernism rejects “the possibility of an objective reality” and, in its deconstructivism and cynicism, “substitutes perspective and positioning for the idea of truth”. In this way, she concludes, postmodernism “(e)nshrine(s) the principle of subjectivity”. In her view, a pejorative form of self absorbed narcissism, in all of its irony and cynicism, is in part responsible for the “Death of Truth”.

There’s a lot wrong with Kakutami’s analysis from a psychoanalytic perspective, starting with pejoratively equating subjectivity with pathological narcissism, or what in the context of what we are talking about today I might call dictatorial subjectivity. I think, however, that appreciating the shortcomings of her perspective entitles us to a rare pat on the back in terms of our relationship with postmodernism. More on this, but first I want to indulge in reading, in its entirety, another quote critical of postmodern fiction. This from David Foster Wallace, in an interview with Larry Mccaffrey.

“For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. “For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat’s-away-let’s-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody’s got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there’s cigarette burn on the couch, and you’re the host and it’s your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back–I mean, what’s wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back–which means we’re going to have to be the parents.”

First off, I wonder whether you hear the parallels between Wallace’s view on literary postmodernism Plato’s view of the end of democracy? The idea that the longer a democracy lasts the more “freedoms multiply”, the more deference to authority “withers”, and the more the structures that create order and discourse erode.

Wallace and Plato are both talking about what happens when the dialectical space created by thirdness collapses into entropically determined dualism. It’s not that the white men haven’t exerted an oppressive influence, a literary manspreading of the kind white men are wont to do. It’s that killing the dead white men yet again has consequences; it leads to a kind of orphaned emptiness. And what Wallace and Plato don’t say explicitly, because it is not their metaphor, though they all but say it, is that this kind of Lacanian parricide, which in the broadest sense is an obliteration of necessary “facts” where “facts” stand for alternative subjectivities, also annihilates the space of discomfiting difference and disagreement that is necessary for the creation and sustenance of meaning.

Civitarese and Ferro (2013) write:

“In the consulting room, (t)he patient arrives with a variously sized bottle of ink (his anxieties and proto-emotions—in the jargon, his beta elements), which he keeps pouring
on to the special kind of blotting paper represented by the field. The field absorbs the ink and becomes thoroughly soaked in it. Analyst and patient dip their pens into this ink to write down the text of the session. What was previously a mere formless blot is transformed into stories, narrations, and
constructions. In this way, what at first had a soiling effect becomes susceptible to thought, narration, and sharing.”

This quote, along with many others in the psychoanalytic literature, points to precisely what contemporary psychoanalytic thinking about subjectivity and intersubjectivity gets right.

Mr. A.’s Trumpian ink did not transform me into his blot. I believe that I, the container, was not subjugated into the shape of the contained, as is the case with modern lying and illiberal thought. Because of the marker, and again I use the word “marker” as the representative of the myriad expressions of the components necessary for the creation of transitional space, of thirdness, of intersubjectivity, Mr. A.’s subjectivity did not become dictatorial, or, as Kakutami puts it, “perversely enshrined”.

Psychoanalysis has, I believe, benefited from post-modern phenomenology in its willingness to move away from analytic positivism, which is, in its worst incarnations, is itself a form of dictatorial subjectivity. At the same time, our post-modern informed theory does not lead to that 3am orphaned emptiness, that cynicism about meaning and truth, in the way that other expressions of postmodernism are wont to do.

I believe that a major reason for this, perhaps the major reason, is that in our translation of postmodernism, “alternative facts” – things like science, news, and opinions we disagree with – are markers. They serve as stakes in the ground against the subjugating spread of our subjectivities. They are reminders that it does matter whether or not there is a cat in that box, even if we must respect the fact that it can be hard to know that truth from within the ever moving and ever refracting lens of our own subjectivities.

It certainly matters to the cat.

The structure of thirdness, however, is fragile. Entropy is powerful and relentless. Under duress, our autonomic nervous systems turns on, and that old evolutionarily essential pull to dualism and illiberalism kicks in. As a result, intersubjective space often collapses, indeed it wants to collapse, into the dualist space in which there is ultimately room for only one subjectivity.

In the relentless, energetically mindful effort necessary to withstand such collapse, I have found it helpful to keep in mind the difference between optimal psychoanalytic structure and what is happening in our truth-impaired culture (which, in fairness to Kakutani, does parallel what she describes in her critique of postmodernism). Just as the loss of thirdness, and with it the rise of dictatorial  subjectivity, is at the core of today’s cynicism and amorality, the creation and sustenance of thirdness is at the heart of today’s psychoanalytic endeavor. To borrow from Wallace’s belief about good fiction, psychoanalysis is, at its best, all about “what it is to be a fucking human being”.

Legal Originalism and the Collapse of Triadic Space
The landmark 2008 supreme court case District  of Columbia v
Heller dealt a severe blow to advocates of gun control. At the
heart of the argument was the following sentence in the
second amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary
to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep
and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”. The losing side argued
that this phrase “right to bear arms” referred to military uses,
as in state militias, an argument that made particular sense
given that the context of the bill of rights was an effort by the
federalists to appease individual states in order to help ratify
the constitution, and the states felt strongly about their right to
arm militias.

However Antonin Scalia, in his majority opinion, argued that
the “right to bear arms” extended well beyond the military
context that most believe the framers had in mind. He based
this conclusion on his judicial philosophy of textual originalism,
which holds that the words of the constitution must be
understood exactly as the framers meant them.
Justice David Souter asked, perhaps astonished at this
interpretation, asked: “In the 18th century, someone going out
to hunt a deer would have thought of themselves as bearing
arms? I mean, is that the way they talk?”
The philosophy of constitutional law is fascinating and complex,
and the not insignificant time I’ve put in to try to wrap my mind
around it the past few months at best elevates me to the ranks of
poser. Nobody knew constitutional law could be so complicated,
right?

At its core, the endeavor of constitutional law is a
remarkable exercise in the challenge of constructing an honest
relationship with truth. In overly broad strokes, constitutional
law is characterized by a debate between contextualism and
literalism, similar to debates found in literary criticism,
linguistics and religion.
On the liberal, contextualist side, there is the philosophy of the
“living constitution”, or “loose constructionists”. This
philosophy is partly pragmatic; as Justice Breyer argued,
constitutions are meant to endure, and so their interpretation
must be more responsive to changing circumstances than the
rather slow and clumsy amendment process. The “living
constitution” philosophy is also philosophical, in that it is based
on the idea that the framers intentionally wrote the constitution
in sweeping generalizations so that there was ample room for
interpretation. As Jefferson himself said, in an 1816 letter to
Samuel Kercheval, “(L)aws and institutions must go hand in
hand with the progress of the human mind….  opinions change
with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance
also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a
man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as
civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their
barbarous ancestors.”

This idea of the constitution as a living document seems
inarguable, at least on the surface. At the same time, however,
the constitution must have some anchored quality, otherwise, as
conservative jurists argue, the constitution can mean anything
one wants.

This concern yields the more conservative, literalist doctrine of
originalism. On the more liberal side of originalism is the
doctrine of original intent, which holds that judges should
attempt to ascertain the meaning of a particular provision of a
state or federal constitution by determining how the provision
was understood at the time it was drafted and ratified. The goal
of original intent, irving Kaufman writes, “is not to venerate
dead framers but to restrain living judges from imposing their
own values”.
And then, on the conservative side of originalism, is textual
originalism, the philosophy embodied by Scalia, his follower
Kavanaugh, and other favorites of the conservative Federalist
Society.  Textual originalism hold that one can discern, through
text itself, the original meaning of the words, and that one
should discard speculation about the framers motivations and
intent. In the words of Scalia himself,  “I don't care if the
framers of the Constitution had some secret meaning in mind
when they adopted its words.”
The originalists solve the problem of the constitution as
responsive to changing times by deferring to the legislative
branch. As Kavanaugh writes, “the textual originalist demands
that the legislature think through myriad hypothetical scenarios
and provide for all of them explicitly rather than rely on courts
to be sensible.”
This, too, seems an inarguably thoughtful position. And when
you put the “living constitution” and the “originalist” positions
together you’d appear to have a nice working dialectic. Though
this seeming reasonableness is of course undermined by how
cumbersome and political the amendment process is.

However, judicial philosophy, and perhaps especially the textual
originalists, could have learned something from the struggles
that gave birth to contemporary psychoanalysis; when it comes
to thinking you know something objectively, lots of luck. As
Judge Easterbrook writes in, of all places, the foreword to Scalia
and Garner’s book. “Words don’t have intrinsic meanings; the
significance of an expression depends on how the interpretive
community alive at the time of the text’s adoption understood
those words. The older the text, the more distant that
interpretive community from our own.” Moreover, words don’t
have meanings independent of the subjectivity of the reader.
Want to bet that a parkland shooting survivor might have a
different interpretation of the phrase “interpret the right to bear
arms right to bear arms” than Scalia, an avid hunter and gun
owner.
This has huge implications for social issues not specifically
spelled out in the Bill of Rights. As the editorial board of the NY
Times notes: The Federalist Society claims to value the so-
called strict construction of the Constitution, but this supposedly
neutral mode of constitutional interpretation lines up
suspiciously well with Republican policy preferences — say,
gutting laws that protect voting rights, or opening the floodgates
to unlimited political spending, or undermining women’s
reproductive freedom, or destroying public-sector labor unions’
ability to stand up for the interests of workers. Judge Kaufman is
even more pointed: “I believe the concern of many modern
intentionalists is quite specific: outrage over the right-of-
privacy cases, especially Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court
decision recognizing a woman’s right to an abortion.

In other words, the very paradigm that intends to deter bias
becomes an invitation to the very biases it is designed to deter.
Absent Lewin’s appreciation of the Gestalt, the textual
originalist falls into the same trap as the objectively knowing
psychoanalyst; without an ongoing appreciation of the mutually
influencing forces of the intersubjective field, a humility about
the impossibility of objective knowing, and a deep respect for
the ubiquity of bias, one is more likely to be affected by the
one’s own assumptions and ideologies.
The philosophy of constitutional law, it follows, can be
understood as a very complex effort to manage and construct a
dialectical, triadic structure with the constitution functioning as
a third, or perhaps more accurately, with the constitution
functioning as a subject that is essential to the creation of a
third. One can argue that optimally there exists transitional
space in between judge and document; to borrow from
Winnicott, there is no constitution without a Supreme court,
and there is no supreme court without a Constitution.
This expansion of intersubjectivity to include not only persons
but things – in this case the “thing” being the constitution –
suggest a look at the work Enrique Pichon Riviere. Pichon
Riviere coined the term “spiral movement” a process in which,
as Samuel Arbiser (2017) describes it,  “(t)he subject forms a
dialectical relationship with the world and transforms things
from things-in-themselves into things-for-themselves. By way
of a continuous praxis, to the extent that he modifies himself
he modifies the world, in a continuously spiral movement.”

I want to focus on two dimensions addressed in this quote. The
first is  Pichon Riviere’s description of a dialectical relationship
between subject and world in which the world, and, it follows,
the intersubjective space, is not only comprised of relationships
between subjects, but also between subjects and things, ideas,
entities. In this sense, the “world” in this dialectic is also applied
to “things”, that is things such as the constitution, as well as
science, the rule of law; to all “alternative facts”. In an idea
evocative of Green’s negative space, the subjective
acknowledgement of these world/things is essential to the
creation of a dialectical relationship, in Pichon Riviere’s terms
the spiral movement,  between subject and world.
Second, Pichon Riviere, born in 1907, and one of the founders
of South American field theory, is describing, much as do all
contemporary field theorists, the way that elements of the
dialect construct one another. Returning to constitutional; law,
when intersubjectivity is operative, the jurist creates the
constitution, and the constitution creates the jurist. Admitting
huge liberal bias on my part, I believe that this optimally
creative process can be seen in Roe v Wade. While there is no
specific mention of a right to an abortion in the text, the court
ruled that the right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of
the 14th Amendment extended to a woman's decision to have
an abortion. In a mutually influencing dialectical spiral the
jurists created the document, finding in it a right not specifically
mentioned, but the document, with its emphasis on rights, also
created the decision of seven of the nine jurists.

In this entropically governed world, the dialectical space of
thirdness, which requires energy, always wants to collapse into
dualist angles of repose. If we think about constitutional law in
terms of the challenge to keep such a triadic, dialectical space
open, we can see more clearly the the many faultlines along
which thirdness, and liberal thinking, can collapse.
The constitution needs to be anchored in some quality of
imutabilability. If the constitution can mean anything, then the
constitution means nothing. But this immutability must also be
relative and even fluid, otherwise the constitution can become
oppressive and dictatorial. The textual originalist position, in
which dictionary meanings rule tyrannically, is particularly
vulnerable to this faultline.  As Judge Frank Easterbrook notes:
“Words don’t have intrinsic meanings; the significance of an
expression depends on how the interpretive community alive at
the time of the text’s adoption under-stood those words.” But
it is ironic that Easterbrook’s words are found in his foreword to
Scalia’s book, because this appreciation of the fluidity of word’s
meaning is not the textualists position. The textualist
philosophy, as emobodied by Scalia’s Heller ruling, evidences a
literalist mindset that is the judicial equivalent of
fundamentalism, and it is an example of how very smart people
can be illiberal thinkers. When such literalism rules, the
constitution becomes, in Ogden’s words a subjugating third. Or
perhaps, more accurately, the third created by the relationship
between judge and document becomes a subjugating third.
On the other side of the coin as the text as a subjugating third,
the jurist can override the text with interpretation, as in Heller
and Scalia. There is a very delicate balance between the
surrender of being changed by the third, and the third being
changed by its subjects, and subjugation by the subject, or
dictatorial subjectity that overrides the nature of the third.
There is a whole lot of nuance in between “Tremendous crime
is coming across”, and Scalia’s interpretation of the right to
bear arms as applying to everyday life, but both of these
represent the subjugation of a third, in this case fact, by virtue
of agaendaed subjectivity.
To sum up, although Justice Ginsberg appears to be adapting an
originalist position as a way to counter the conservative,
originalist leanings of the current court, this court, despite its
protestations of being non ideological, is going to lean hard to
the right. In all likelihood, had the court been dominated by
textual originalists in 1973, Roe vs Wade would have gone the
other way. On the first order, this leaning is a consequence of
political forces; the federalist society, backed by right wing
money, is now the primary mover in vetting potential supreme
court judges. But on a deeper level, this conservative lean is the
structural consequence of the originalist philosophy that is
coming to dominate the court. Specific individual rights, more
recently recognized by society, are not enumerated in the
constitution, and the legislative process is too cumbersome and
conflicted to amend these absences. When the textualists
gravitate, as they do, towards literalist interpretations of the
sort that occur when triadic space has collapsed, and when the
constitution becomes, as a result, a subjugating or subjugated
third, the absence of enumerated rights becomes an invitation
for confabulating personal conservative ideology with
supposedly objective interpretation. The imposition of of a
wave of conservative rulings, whether witting or unwitting, in
inevitable.  This process reflects a breakdown of critical
thinking, an illiberal outbreak of the sort that can occur among
very smart, even brilliant people, when triadic structure has
collapsed.
It’s an error familiar to us psychoanalysts!

“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” These days, when bravado about hand size is what passes for political erudition, it was a welcome delight to hear James Comey and Angus King riffing on the Henry II and Thomas Becket story.

 That narrative is worth a brief review. It is, in interesting ways, more complex than the expected trope of a power-hungry king brutally murdering the good and godly man who stands in his way.

For many years Henry II and Thomas Becket were great friends. Henry was an intelligent ruler who believed in a principled government in which justice would be available to all, and Becket, whom the king appointed as his chancellor, served him well. Henry was a man who downplayed materialism, while Becket reveled in the wealth and power that his position brought him.

When Becket ascended to the post of Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162, however, he underwent a transformation. He became an ascetic –  he is rumored to have been wearing a hair shirt at the time of his murder – and he fought for the power and autonomy of the church in ways that were threatening to Henry’s vision of secular humanism.

More to the point, their battle for power became vindictively personal, and what had been a great friendship dissolved into viciousness. All came to a violent end when 4 knights, responding to Henry’s lament about the meddlesome Becket, murdered him at Canterbury Cathedral.

The complexity of the story reminds us not to reduce our narratives to simple binaries. This reminder applies to the Trump-Comey story as well, where it is worthwhile to look beyond the seductive tropes of good vs evil, and truth vs lies, to the more layered dimensions of the confrontation.

On the surface, the Trump- Comey story is portrayed as a struggle over who is telling the truth? At the risk of being simplistic, one has to be a “nut job” to believe anything other than that  Comey is telling the truth and Trump is lying. Donald Trump is a pathological liar. His acknowledgment that he lies may be one of the few honest things he has ever said. Comey, meanwhile, has a long history of trying, to the best of his ability, to be truthful.

A central theme in today’s America is that we are divided, that we speak different truths, that these truths are equally valid, and that each side does not appreciate the legitimacy of the other. Often this is accurate. Sometimes it is a dodge. Some narratives are simply more true than others, and sometimes the liberal gesture of giving both sides equal legitimacy can be a reflection of our inability to know what is true, or to have the courage to stand for what we really believe. In this case, the two equally valid stories angle is baloney. One of these men is trying to be honest, the other is lying.

But the meaning and relevance of the Trump-Comey story goes much deeper than the simple question of who is telling the truth.

Comey is meddlesome to Trump and his minions for many reasons. The charge of obstruction of justice is serious. What Comey knows about Russian interference in the election is legally dangerous for the Trump team. The story of Russian interference, which Comey refuses to silence, undermines that which, more than anything else, Trump needs to survive; it interferes with his ego’s insatiable and desperate need for inflation. There are many reasons why this meddlesome director had to go.

What Trump and his followers find most meddlesome about Comey, however, runs deeper.

Most of the time the truth is a pretty big place. While we can be confident that Comey’s relationship with what is true is more reliable than Trump’s, it is also certain that Comey’s version of what happened, what was said, and what was intended, is shaped by the lens of his subjectivity. This is not meant as a criticism, more as a reflection on the fluid nature of “truth”. And herein lies the whole point. While the question of whether what Comey is saying is true, or whether it is more true than what Trump is saying, is important, what is more important is that Comey cares to tell the truth, even if the truth he tells is imperfect. Because the truth is imperfectly knowable, what matters is less that we get it right and more that we have the integrity to try, however hard it is, to say true things. Comey is a problem for Trump less because he cares to try to say what is true.

In today’s political universe principles have been suborned by partisanship, “facts” are mutilated in the service of self-interest, and “truth” has been weaponized in the service of greed and power. The creative post-modern take that truth and objectivity are impossible to fully know because they can only be apprehended from within the confines of one’s own subjective mind has been perverted. Instead of post-modernism’s disciplining reminder that while there may be a “there” there, we can never fully know it, now we are led to believe that there is no longer even a “there” there. The only “there” that is there is the one constructed by the needs of our own subjective convenience.

In this regard, it isn’t really accurate to call Trump a liar. Liars know what is true, and they willfully deceive. Liars, in other words, understand that there is a “there”, there. By definition Trump is incapable of lying because he does not admit the existence of a truth that he then hides or distorts by way of deceit. The only world he knows is the one that lies within the bounds of his own self-interested solipsism.

Comey is dangerous to Trump because Comey wants to have a relationship with truth. While one senses that he understands that truth can only be asymptotically approached, he nevertheless finds it meaningful to try to approach it. In this regard, the Comey-Trump showdown  more parallels that between Galileo and the church than it does Henry II and Becket. Galileo was convicted of heresy in 1633 for his understanding that the earth was not the center of the universe. With this meddlesome “fact” he challenged the idea that man, and his god, were the center of the universe. He, like Comey, confronted, through his will to know what was true, the narcissism of his time.

Narcissism, in its essence, involves colonizing truths, facts and objectivities that lie outside one’s self with the subjectivity of one’s own mind. Narcissism suborns reality, or what is true, with self-interested subjectivity, or what we wish to be true. Facts, science, curiosity, open-mindedness – all things that involve a commitment to learning about truth – are narcissism’s kryptonite. Comey, as the embodiment of this kryptonite, is more than meddlesome to Trump. He is a dangerous and potentially lethal threat.

Donald Trump’s recent contribution to the “women don’t make good leaders because they have periods” genre is easy to dismiss given Trump’s cartoonish persona. Still, some of the most progressive among us have wondered, perhaps to our politically correct chagrin, whether there might be some grain of truth here, and even committed feminists have joked about not wanting to make decisions of international consequence at certain points in their cycle. Perhaps Trump’s outburst offers us the opportunity to examine our biases and beliefs when it comes to women’s biologies and their capacity to govern, and to debunk the old trope about women and that time of the month with a sturdier scaffolding than that of doctrinaire political correctness.

All human behavior is influenced by our biological substrate, and our hormonal endowment is a significant part of this substrate. When we buy a car, when we choose a partner, when we vote for or against health care reform, where we stand on the nuclear regulation agreement with Iran; in all of these instances we are being nudged, steered, prodded, and inhibited by the 50 or so hormones in the human body. Many of these (adrenaline, serotonin) are common to both men and women. Some (androgens such as testosterone) are more prominent in men, while others (estrogen and progesterone, the hormones involved in the menstrual cycle) are relatively present in women. For both men and women many of these hormones affect thought, mood and mind.

The key phrase here is “for both men and women”. Androgens were in play when Lyndon Johnson made hawkish decisions about Vietnam because, as David Halberstam tells it, he feared being seen as less of a man then Kennedy. Testosterone was a devil on Bill Clinton’s shoulder during some of the less constructive moments of his presidency. And when Donald Trump said “you could see there was blood coming out of her . . .whatever”, he was presumably in an adrenaline and testosterone juiced state insufficiently modulated by his frontal lobe.

Men, no less than women, have all kinds of stuff coming out of their whatevers.

This frontal lobe piece is important, literally and metaphorically. When men make errors that can seemingly be blamed on an overabundance of testosterone the problem is not solely the hormone. When Johnson said of Ho Chi Min “I didn’t just screw him, I cut his pecker off”, his lack of political decorum wasn’t merely the result of hormonal inebriation, it was also the consequence of a character too brittle and insecure to optimally modulate. When Bill Clinton put government at risk for sex it wasn’t that he had too much testosterone, it was that he lacked the capacity to separate urge from action. (Contrast Clinton with Jimmy Carter, whose admission that he had committed adultery “in his heart” still serves as an iconic example of how one can honor the ubiquity of hormonal impulses without being ruled by them). And Donald Trump’s comments are a pitch perfect example of the very flaw he means to critique in women; his anger spills out as reactive and retaliatory not because he has too much fight or flight adrenaline, but because he lacks the characterological solidity and security to speak from a more regulated and thoughtful place.

For both men and women the impulses that flow from hormones may contribute to failures in clear headedness, but hormones themselves are not the prime culprit. Being civilized is not achieved by siphoning off our estrogen, testosterone and adrenaline, in fact without these oomph and vigor infusing ingredients we would be a pretty pallid and ineffective lot. We are able to be at once civilized and yet still alive when we construct and maintain a dynamic tension between our biological driven-ness and the character-based consciousness that allows us to govern and modulate these urges.

Some of us are indeed more inclined to hormonal insanity than others, but the division is not defined by not gender. It is defined by the way in which we are able to steer our innate biological urgings, as opposed to being steered by them. This is the basis of character.

If men and women are equally vulnerable to the loss of clear-headedness that comes from failing to regulate the at times seismic reverberation of hormonally driven impulses, where does that old “a women can’t be president because of her period actually come from? Why do we imagine that a woman will be too flustered to make a clear and smart decision at certain points in her cycle while we don’t suspect that a man will decide to impulsively bomb Iran the morning after his wife has snubbed him in bed?

This bias survives because truth is shaped by power, and men still have the power. As a result, the conventionally masculine is seen as good, and the conventionally feminine is seen as less good. We confabulate Trump’s insecure bombast with strength and confidence, for example, while we assume that compassion and empathy are associated with weakness. This bias can be found in how we view men and how we view women, and it also can be found in how we view conventionally masculine and feminine qualities, whether possessed by men or women. The game is fixed. As Gloria Steinem noted, if men had periods men would brag about how long they lasted and how much flow they put out.

When we get over our power-based biases about men and women’s qualities, we can see that the notion that women are less capable of governing than men is deeply wrongheaded; BOTH men and women, if they are to be clear, strong minded and persuasive, have to channel the vitality and aliveness that comes with being sexual, aggressive and bodily beings. But BOTH men and women must also have the character to govern these urges, to steer them and not be steered by them. This balancing act, between the primitive and the civilized, is the basis of character and leadership, and it is equally challenging for all human beings.

Last week NFL commissioner Roger Goodell punished Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay with a $500,000 fine and a six month suspension for driving under the influence, possessing unprescribed narcotics, and having $29000 in cash in his car.

The punishment came some seven years after U.S. District judge Henry Hudson sentenced Atlanta Falcon’s quarterback Michael Vick to 23 months in a federal penitentiary for his role running a brutal, violent and for profit dogfighting ring.

No consideration was given to punishing Irsay for his role in running a brutal, violent and highly profitable business that does to human beings what Vick and his codefendents did to dogs.

Obviously Irsay was not on Goodell’s docket for running a person fighting ring. But this cultural moment does allow us an opportunity to examine our response to Michael Vick through a lens now informed by our growing awareness of football’s human cost. And this examination, in turn, exposes some stunning self-deceits in regards to our deeply complex relationship with human violence.

Is it a stretch to equate the dogfighting ring run by Vick and his coconspirators to the business run by Irsay and his 31 co-owners?

We are increasingly aware of the toll football takes on its players. While head injuries have gotten the bulk of the press (former NFL players are at least three times more likely to die from brain related diseases than the general population), the carnage is not confined to the brain; the life expectancy for retired NFL players is about 15 years less than that of the average American male and the decline in quality of life due to disability is well documented and epidemic.

In 2014 the National Football League grossed 25 billion, with a profit of nearly one billion dollars. This profitability results from the business acumen of the owners, and, like NASCAR, MMA, boxing and many other sports, from the paying public’s compulsive fascination with violence.

So how different are dogfighting and football? Sure, in football the participants are human, they are in theory voluntary (“in theory” because it’s not clear that often poor, not yet adult males with partially developed frontal lobes are “choosing” when they opt for potential short term glory and wealth over distant threats to their health and longevity), and they are rarely outright killed in the course of the game. But aren’t both dogfighting and professional football profitable businesses that cash in, at great expense to the participants, on our fascination with violence? Isn’t it curious that we condemn a sport that is brutal to dogs while we (at worst grudgingly) accept one that is brutal to humans?

Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman argues that when faced with complex decisions (including moral dilemmas) we generally get things wrong because we opt for knee-jerk, emotion-based solutions rather than complex and well considered ones. Kahneman, whom Michael Lewis appreciatively called “the king of human error” because of his unsurpassed understanding of the everyday mistakes we make in our thinking, might consider the Vick dogfighting story a case in point. As usually happens in lightening rod cultural moments such as these, moralistic certainty of the kind associated with publicly stoning adulterers (in Vick’s case, widespread, knee-jerk vilification of Vick and dogfighting) obscured harder and more disturbing questions and truths. Considering the Vick narrative in the context of our relationship with the now well-recognized brutality of football, however, exposes these underlying truths. It reveals the degree to which we cloak ourselves in a fabric of hidden, facilitative dishonesties, facilitative because we use them to reassure ourselves of our “goodness” even as we vicariously express our inherently violent, and at best precariously good, human natures.

One of the most frequent, and most powerful, of these dishonesties is racism.

Racism allows us to promote our own goodness and superiority by projecting unacceptable and often darker aspects of our own selves onto a different other. Racism is to malignant self-deception as a dead canary is to the noxious gasses in a coal mine; its presence indicates that we are being self-deluding jerks.

Surprisingly, the Vick dogfighting narrative was rarely seen as racist, perhaps because there was, as there so often is, a caricatured, oversimplified, parsing of good and evil, and such parsing makes it impossible to consider the real human being behind the denigrated caricature. But the story we constructed holds a motherlode of racism. In a piece for ESPN magazine (“What if Michael Vick Were White?”), talk show host and cultural critic Toure Neblett argued that much of the vilification of Vick stemmed from the public’s feelings about a wealthy black man playing a white man’s position in a “badass” black way. In arguing that race and class were inseparable from the story, he noted that there would never have been a Vick dogfighting story if Vick had been born to white, middle class parents.

Toure, as he calls himself, is referencing a subtle mode or racism, the kind recently called out by Attorney General Eric Holder in a speech given in response to the Donald Sterling situation. Holder pointed out that for every overt expression of racism, as was the case with Sterling, there is another equally insidious covert expression. In the Vick case, the public was generally savvy enough to call for his “execution” rather than his lynching (the latter being a more obviously racist form of punishment), but covert examples of racism abounded. Perhaps the clearest example can be seen in the way that the public and the press jumped all over Vick and his codefendents for suggesting that dog fighting had been an accepted part of their culture. These protestations were considered proof that Vick didn’t “get it,” that he was an arrogant (not coincidentally African American) athlete who was unable to learn the proper lessons of repentance and humility.

Why, exactly, was it so outrageous to raise the matter of cultural relativism in this case? Shouldn’t consideration of class and race inject at least a modicum of moral ambiguity here? We’re not talking about ambiguity in terms of criminal guilt; according to our judicial system when you kill someone it doesn’t matter where you came from, and that is probably as it needs to be. Doesn’t there, however, need to be a place among thoughtful people for an appreciation of moral complexity, which requires, among other things, considering states of mind and circumstance?

I believe that dogfighting is cruel and that it should be banned. But I also recognize that this is not a universal belief among some presumably decent people. Dogfighting is still legal in numerous other countries, including Japan and parts of Russia. While bullfighting is beginning to come under fire from animal rights activists, it is a critical part of the cultural heritage in many Latin American countries. Noted anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote about the importance of cock fighting as a Balinese ritual in his book The Interpretation of Cultures. “As much of America surfaces in a ballpark, on a golf link or around a poker table,” he wrote, “much of Bali surfaces around a cock ring.” What’s more, he continues, “every people loves its own form of violence.”

The point here is not to justify dogfighting, but rather to argue that the matter of animals fighting for sport is not an open and shut case of evil. Vick’s plea for a mitigating appreciation of cultural relativism should not have been used as further proof of his moral deviance, it should have led to a more thoughtful consideration of the complexity of his actions. But because all deviations from the norms of white, Western culture were judged to be ignorant, perverse and immoral, this didn’t occur, and instead the story was characterized by the kind of provincial assumptions of cultural superiority that are at the core of both overt and covert racism.

Cultural relativism is not a legitimate defense for cruelty, but the absence of this consideration in Vick’s case should have told us that racism was present, and, as a result, that we were using him as a receptacle for something that we couldn’t stand in ourselves. This realization never happened, however, because we needed him to serve as a kind of anti-avatar, a disavowed symbol of the ubiquitous potential for violence, sadism and brutality that we are loathe to own in our selves.

Our relationship with football is a veritable Petri dish for the kinds of hidden, facilitative dishonesties that allow us to feel good about ourselves even as we indulge our compulsive attraction for violence and brutality while blaming the victim rather than the real perpetrator.

NFL players are responsible for a great deal of off the field brutality. It’s not only the high profile cases such as Ray Rice, Ray Lewis, Aaron Hernandez, Rae Carruth and now Adrian Peterson; since the 2000 season an average of one in 45 NFL players has been arrested every year.

The widespread explanation for this high rate of violence is that football players commit more violent acts because they are inherently more violent people. Maybe this is accurate; professional athletes certainly have more than their share of constitutionally endowed aggression. But couldn’t there be another explanation?

Forty years ago Patty Hearst teamed with her Symbionese Liberation Army kidnappers to rob the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. Photos shocked readers, who learned about Stockholm syndrome; the proclivity of people in violent hostage situations to identify with their captors and become violent themselves. It’s a simple survival mechanism, one that is programmed into our DNA; we survive being the targets of violence by being violent in return.

Perhaps like Patty Hearst and others in hostage situations Michael Vick was doing to dogs the very thing that the NFL was doing to him?

The high level of violent behavior among NFL players may be correlated with their relatively aggressive natures, but it is also, surely, a consequence of their work lives. When you spend your day brutalizing and being brutalized, when your testosterone levels are situationally elevated on a chronic basis, when your autonomic nervous system spends half its life in a state of red alert, won’t you be more violent? Heck, it’s the same principal that dogfighting handlers use with their dogs – treat an animal violently and you will create a more violent animal.

Calling criminally violent football players victims doesn’t mean that they aren’t also perpetrators; the point is not to justify their behavior. The point is that when NFL players commit criminal acts it suits us to demonize them for behaviors similar to those that we idealize in them on Sunday afternoons. If we were to see the players not solely as perpetrators, but also as pawns of a larger host of perpetrators that includes not only the owners but also ourselves the viewers, we would have to acknowledge how much we are like rubberneckers slowing down as we pass a gruesome accident.

Oh, right, we just slowed down because the car in front of us . . .

One final facilitative dishonesty that I’ll mention involves the mental shell game we play in regards to what we deem acceptable violence, and what we deem condemnable.

Sean Payton was banned from coaching for one year for Bountygate. But in what way is professional football not a legitimized bounty program? As JJ. Watt and other stars proclaim in a recent ad for fantasy football, “Unnecessary roughness is a necessity.”

Not only does the general public make arbitrary distinctions when it comes to what is acceptable, the league itself makes the same kinds of arbitrary distinctions about what is inside and what is outside the “law.”

Like racism and victim blaming, this shell game of arbitrary and capricious distinctions regarding acceptable and condemnable violence allows us to vicariously express our darker selves while denying the inconvenient truth of our not so bloodless human potential.

The point is not that dog fighting is ok, or that football is bad, it’s way more complicated than that; there are, as there so often are, simultaneous contradictory truths present. On the one hand dogfighting and football are both for profit forums for brutality and carnage. That’s pretty bad. At the same time football and dogfighting, along with many other forms of institutionalized violence, serve the necessary civilizing function of channeling our fundamentally aggressive human natures. Good? Not exactly, utility does not justify brutality – after all, the same could be said about public stonings for adultery. But it appears that, at least at this point in our cultural evolution, vicarious, institutionalized expressions of violence and aggression are a necessary thing.

In her analysis of Nazi leaders at the Nuremburg trials, Hannah Arendt showed that all of us, even the most boring and pedestrian among us, have the potential to do evil. Moreover, she argued, immorality and crimes against humanity are not solely the responsibility of evil people; they are in large part the responsibility of everyday people who turn a blind eye to evil, and worse, who unthinkingly participate in it.

Because we human beings have in us the ubiquitous potential to break bad, we can’t rely on a naïve trust in our own basic, inherent goodness, or in the assumption that we believe in the right god, to insure our morality. Morality, instead, requires willful, active, ongoing awareness of the myriad unacknowledged, self-serving dishonesties – the moral blind spots – that we use to reassure ourselves of our civility. And evil and immorality grow, much more than we want to admit, not because of the inherently bad eggs among us, but from the unthinking acceptance of the facilitative self-deceits and hypocrisies that we are all prone to engage in.

Ultimately it misses the point to condemn either dogfighting or football; more important are the questions we ask ourselves when we make our judgments. When it comes to the matter of whether or not to watch football, for example, how willing are we to consider the game in the context of our own personal codes of belief? Are we willing to make a choice about whether to watch knowing that an honestly arrived at decision may mean giving up those Sunday afternoons of pleasure and release? I don’t believe that there is a universally moral answer to the question of whether or not to watch, because I believe that all answers, if they are to be to be meaningful, must be personal. But I do know that it is inarguably and universally immoral not to ask the question.