Musings Of An Indie WriterScreeds
Sunday, September 26, 2004
A Search For Axioms
September 27, 2002
We begin this tirade with A Tale Of Two Beauties.
Not long ago, two blonde, beautiful, well-known women met at a social event. The first, who is petite, pixie-ish, and has received some bruises for her personal involvements, asked the second, who is tall, extremely slender, and known for an incendiary style, if she would deign to teach the first about politics. The second was somewhat nonplussed by the request. She replied that “I usually wait for someone else to make a statement, and then I pounce.” The first said she had no particular statement to make, that she was just “curious about politics.”
The curious pixie was Anne Heche, star of Six Days, Seven Nights and Psycho, and quondam lover of in-your-face lesbian comedienne Ellen DeGeneres. The incendiary pouncer was Ann Coulter, conservative provocateuse extraordinaire and author of the recent bestseller Slander: Liberal Lies About The American Right.
This encounter is triply notable. First, Miss Heche is obviously not a run-of-the-mill Hollywood celebrity. She evinced a charming humility, in contrast to the overwhelming majority of entertainment celebrities who apparently believe that their fame gives them authority on non-entertainment subjects. Second, Miss Coulter’s surprise at being approached in so self-effacing a fashion by Miss Heche underscores how unusual such an interaction is. Third, and very warming to the cockles of this commentator’s spiny little heart, is Miss Heche’s quite exceptional concession that politics is something one ought to have to learn about, to study, before one assumes the burden of opinions about it.
Miss Heche’s approach is correct, despite being unrecognized by most and unadmitted by many more.
The Randians, following Aristotle, hold that politics is a branch of moral philosophy. My own view is close to that, though I think a great admixture of non-philosophical material, particularly history and economics, is required to make good sense out of it. Probably the best categorization is to view politics as a practical discipline with moral foundations, that deals with social arrangements and their consequences. Alternatively, as R. A. Butler put it, “Politics is the art of the possible.”
But how does one know what is possible when dealing with human societies? From what experiences, axioms, and implications do the bounds on the politically possible arise?
This is a field one can study for a lifetime and never be certain that one has exhausted it.
There are communities of thought that believe that all of politics can be encompassed within a small group of hard-edged principles, and earnestly strive to do just that. There are other communities of thought that hold that in the political realm, there are no fixed principles, that all decisions are weighings of interests and correlations of opposing forces. These communities often don’t get on well.
No surprise there. When your fundamental axioms, the assumptions about which you cannot argue, differ radically from those of your neighbor, you and he will be at loggerheads from the start. That’s where axioms sit in the scheme of things.
There’s no help for it, either. It’s part of the natural order that we can’t be perfectly certain about broad generalities, no matter how obvious they look. One can’t prove any so-called natural law; one can only keep experimenting and compiling confirming data. A single non-confirming datum is enough to blast any theory to flinders. There’s no reason why the propositions of political theorists should be exempt from this rule, which guides the search for objective knowledge in all other venues.
This is the case for intellectual humility. Socrates made it twenty-five hundred years ago, and there has been no refutation.
Still, can you think of any field whose participants are as cocksure as the typical politician, political ideologue, or issue activist? The way they express themselves implies a confidence in their positions that no scientist in any mensurable field would ever allow himself. The way they defend themselves against being called to account for their failures implies a self-regard that verges on psychosis.
I really should be saying “we” here, shouldn’t I?
My greatest concern over our political discourse is its steady loss of civility. Discussion must be civil, or it deteriorates into combat. The greatest support to civil courtesy I know of, which has functioned admirably throughout the ages, is the willingness to admit that you might be wrong.
Take a moment to review recent history. Can you remember any political figure openly and unabashedly saying “I was wrong” about anything? Even when events have proved him wrong in unambiguous terms?
I know of only one case: the late Anwar Sadat’s admission in the mid-Seventies that Egypt’s maintenance of a state of hostilities toward Israel had been an error. Sadat died for acting on the logical implications of that admission. He was assassinated by anti-Israel fanatics. No major statesman has made one like it since.
“Wrong” is the thing no politician wants to admit to having been. “A man will more readily admit to murder than to ignorance,” wrote Alexander Rose in Pay The Two Dollars. With politicians the tendency is far stronger, for when an officeholder is wrong, the consequences of the error fall, not on his shoulders, but on ours.
It’s about our axioms, friends. We can all reason, even those of us for whom it’s not a preferred activity. If our axioms are wrong, our reasoning will go astray. But we can’t prove our axioms. All we can do is try them out, and observe the results.
To this pundit, this exculpates the man who erred, provided he recognizes his error and arranges not to repeat it. But also to this pundit, it lays the heaviest of moral burdens on the politician who acts as if his theories are beyond all question. By eschewing intellectual humility and declaring his search to be over, he takes upon himself the entire odium for failure—and should be held to account for it.
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