“There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason, but for mystery – not for penetrating clear thought, but for the whisperings of the irrational.”-Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time (1952)
The facts are unsettling. Even today, after so much day-to-day evidence of presidential incapacity and malfeasance, millions of Americans continue to regard Donald Trump’s leadership as acceptable or even exemplary. This ironic continuance can never be explained by referencing the ordinary features of American politics (e.g., the electoral college, weak Democratic candidates, steadily expanding Article II (presidential) powers, etc.)
What is needed instead is a more serious consideration of the cultural context from which this flawed president was somehow extracted.
To be sure, in the course of such consideration, there will be ample reasons for citizen bewilderment. Here, as with any other multi-layered political quandary, truth may prove to be counter-intuitive. In these complex matters, elements of explanatory context may point as much to certain persons of education, wealth and privilege as to less fortunate Americans. Significantly, both categories of Trump supporters, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, include people who most dearly seek to “fit in.”
These are the ones who love to chant in mutually reassuring chorus and don (literally and metaphorically) the red hat messaging of Trump-style simplifications.
For those understandably despairing Americans who might worry because they take history seriously, one may draw limited but still-fair comparisons with another fearful era of human governance. Though disturbing, the obvious reference here is the Third Reich. Then, as now, “whisperings” of gainful relationships (both economic and social) masked a virulent formula. In the end, of course, those earlier siren calls were not simply expressed sotto voce, that is, as merely residual “whisperings of the irrational.”
They were declared without apology, unhesitatingly, and – most important of all – safely beyond the range of any purposeful challenges or refutations.
In the end, these siren calls turned out to be the deadliest-ever prescription for national declension and human disappearance.
Then, as now, those in political power relied upon blaming “the usual suspects.”
The United States is not becoming Nazi Germany. But this ought not to be simply an “all or nothing” comparison. Then, as now, an irreversible decline arrived more-or-less indecipherably, in generally hard-to-fathom increments, not as any suddenly jolting or riveting events, and not as any precipitous or conspicuously immobilizing “bolt from the blue.”
While there are plainly vital differences between then and now, there are also very disturbing forms of resemblance.
In the United States, a single core question must remain uppermost: How shall this ominous American presidency best be explained? In part, at least, correct answers should be sought in the paradoxical juxtaposition of privilege with philistinism. For such a seemingly self-contradictory fusion, the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had already coined a specific term, one he hoped could eventually become universal.
This newly-coined German word was Bildungsphilister. When expressed in its most lucid and coherent English translation, it means “educated Philistine.”[1]
In all such delicate maters, precise language and “penetrating clear thought” can help to clarify. Accordingly, Bildungsphilister is a term that could shed useful additional light upon Donald Trump’s uninterrupted support among many of America’s presumptively well-educated and well-to-do. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump several-times commented: “I love the poorly-educated,” but – in the end – a substantial fraction of his voter support arrived from the not-so-poorly-educated. Here, recalling German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers’ indictment regarding “whisperings of the irrational,” one should be reminded of a kindred remark by Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels: “Intellect rots the brain.”
Truth is exculpatory. Uncomfortable truths may be upsetting and bewildering, but they remain truths nonetheless. Apropos of this conclusion, any ascertainable distance between “I love the poorly educated” and “Intellect rots the brain” is not nearly as great as might first appear.
In essence, let us be candid, they mean the same thing.
In prediction, they may have disturbingly similar consequences.
That’s just the way it is.
There remain tangibly meaningful distinctions between German National Socialism and the current US presidential administration, but – at least in some respects – these distinctions express more of a difference in magnitude than in discernible origins. At one obvious level, many American citizens remain willing to abide a president who not only avoids reading absolutely anything, but who simultaneously belittles history, intellection and learning.
What is going on here,?
How shall we explain so little public uneasiness over White House illiteracy?
Recall that for negotiating successfully with North Korea, President Trump had openly advised “attitude, not preparation.”
At any reasonable level of assessment, this advice was caricatural. But the presidential comment was not intended as satire. Not at all.
Now, more “penetrating clear thought” is needed to understand our ongoing Trump-era declension. Do most Americans (even Trump’s avowed political opponents) sufficiently object to a president who has never glanced at the US Constitution, the same allegedly revered document he so solemnly swore “to uphold, protect and defend?” Is it reasonable or persuasive to “uphold protect and defend” a document that one has never even bothered to read?
In the United States, is it reasonable or persuasive for “We the people….” not to be troubled by such a vast intellectual disjuncture?
Key questions should not be skirted any longer. How has the United States managed to arrive at such a portentous and dismal place? What have been the pertinent failures (both particular and aggregated) of American education, most notably in our vaunted universities?
It’s a discomfiting but entirely sensible two-part question, especially as the Trump presidency is assiduously transforming a “merely” self-deceiving country into a finely-lacquered national corpse.
Once upon a time in western philosophy, Plato revealed much higher leadership expectations for his “philosopher-king.” Yet, even if we should no longer plausibly expect anything like a philosopher-king in the White House, ought we not still be entitled to a man or woman who manages to read and think seriously, sometimes, something – anything?
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra warns prophetically: “One should never seek the `higher man’ at the marketplace.” But the generally intellect-free marketplace was where a proudly visceral segment of American society first championed Donald J. Trump. What else should we have expected? In the United States, after all, a society where almost no one takes erudition seriously, Americans are ultimately measured by only one conspicuous standard.
We are what we buy.
There is more, much more. This American president is not “merely” marginal or misguided. Quite literally, he is the diametric opposite of both Plato’s philosopher-king and Nietzsche’s “higher-man.” Unambiguously, at its moral and analytic core, the Trump administration now reveals a thoroughly wretched inversion of what might once have been ennobling in the United States. Even more worrisome, Americans are more rapidly stumbling backwards, further and further, visibly, unsteadily, not in any measurable decipherable increments, but still, in giant or quantum leaps of self-reinforcing harms.
In their totality, these are leaps of unforgivable cowardice, especially in various partisan sectors of the Congress.
Among so many other palpable deficits, America’s current president does not begin to understand that US history deserves a special pride of place. How many Americans have ever paused to remember that the Founding Fathers who framed the second amendment were not expecting or imagining automatic weapons? How many citizens ever really knew that the early American Republic was the religious heir of John Calvin or the philosophical descendant of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes?
How many “successful” US lawyers have ever heard of William Blackstone, the extraordinary English jurist whose learned Commentaries literally formed the common law underpinnings of America’s current legal system?
Is there a single Trump lawyer (personal or institutional) who could conceivably even know (let alone actually read) about Blackstone’s unparalleled juristic contributions?
It’s a silly question. Only one thing really matters. In America, you are what you can buy, not what you can learn or understand.
Erudition has no cash value – no purchasing power.
Human beings are the creators of their machines; not the other way round. Still, there exists today an implicit and grotesque reciprocity between creator and creation, an elaborate and potentially lethal pantomime between the users and the used. Nowhere is this prospective lethality more apparent than among the self-deluded but endlessly loyal supporters of US President Donald Trump. They follow him faithfully only because the wider American society had first been allowed to become an intellectual desert.
Cultural context has its invariant explanatory place.
President Donald Trump’s simplifying cultural context offers millions of Americans an ill-founded kind of reassurance. Metaphorically, it provides then a ubiquitous and useful “solvent,” one capable of dissolving almost anything of any tangible or enlightening consequence. To wit, in higher education, the traditionally revered Western Canon of literature and art is largely being supplanted by far more pleasingly visible emphases on “branding.”
In fairness, this lethal supplantation began long before Trump, but it has absolutely flourished during the current ascendancy of Bildungsphilister.
A few years ago, before my retirement as a Purdue University professor, I asked my students, a class of fifty, what would they choose if offered a degree right away, without having to take further studies or coursework or tests (and correspondingly, without any further opportunities for “higher education”). Forty-seven students enthusiastically accepted the “offer.”
This was not in any way an eccentric or idiosyncratic response. I had very similar or roughly identical responses in three subsequent years.
Soon, even if we should somehow manage to avoid nuclear war and nuclear terrorism – an avoidance not to be taken for granted in the incoherent Trump Era – the swaying of the American vessel could still become unendurably violent. Then, the phantoms of great ships of state once laden with silver and gold may no longer lie forgotten. Then, perhaps, we will finally understand that the circumstances that could send the compositions of Homer, Maimonides, Goethe, Milton, Shakespeare, Freud and Kafka to join the works of properly forgotten poets were neither unique nor transient.
Or perhaps not.
In an 1897 essay titled “On Being Human,” Woodrow Wilson inquired tellingly about the “authenticity “of Americans. “Is it even open to us to choose to be genuine?” he asked. This US president had answered “yes,” but only if citizens could first refuse to cheer the dreadfully injurious “herds” of mass society. Otherwise, as President Wilson already understood, our entire society would be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of broken machinery, more hideous even than the biological decompositions of individual persons.
In every society, as Emerson and the other American Transcendentalists already recognized, the scrupulous care of each individualhuman “soul” is most important. Looking ahead, there likely still can be a “better”American soul[2] (and thereby an improved American politics), but not before we can first acknowledge a prior obligation. This antecedent requirement is a far-reaching national responsibility to finally overcome the lethal barriers of “herd” culture or – per the German philosopher Karl Jaspers’ apt warning – “whisperings of the irrational.”
With some necessary luck, and even after the evident failures of nuclear diplomacy with Russia, Iran and North Korea, the Trump presidency will somehow manage to end without a catastrophic unconventional war. But for the United States, even that presumptively “happy ending” might represent little more than a temporary reprieve. Unless we can finally begin to work much harder at changing this society’s consistently core antipathies to intellect and reason, Americans will have to face periodic and increasingly perilous eras of steep national decline.
As citizens who could once again take deserving
pride in learning and genuine education, Americans would then be ready to
select a more decent, thoughtful and capable US president.
[1] The first language of the author here, Professor Louis René Beres, was German. This is his own straightforward translation.
[2] Sigmund Freud maintained a general antipathy to all things American. In essence, he most objected, according to Bruno Bettelheim, to this country’s “shallow optimism” and its seemingly corollary commitment to a crude form of materialism. America, thought Freud, was very evidently “lacking in soul.” See: Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), especially Chapter X.
