“The university is the temple of intellect, and I am its high priest.”-Miguel de Unamuno, speaking against irrationalism as rector of the University of Salamanca (Spain), 12 October 1936
Amid Donald J. Trump’s multiple defilements, only one seems to have been entirely forgotten. This was the former president’s melding of his own “brand name” with the lofty idea of a university,[1] an idea that 20th century Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno held to be “sacred.” Ironically, at a time when Americans needed credible reassurance that the unending human struggle against anti-reason could expect support from their country’s leading universities,[2] Mr. Trump could envision only one more crass opportunity for crude commerce and personal profit.[3]
Even now, even after a defeated Trump has been convincingly associated with a litany of serious crimes (the most egregious being the January 6, 2021 US Capitol insurrection), this former president’s most sustained infraction was his announced war on intellect. Trump’s 2016 campaign assertion, “I love the poorly educated,” especially when complemented by his proud preference for “attitude” over “preparation,”[4] remains conspicuous and worrisome.
Significantly, this calculated statement represented little more than a recycled version of Joseph Goebbels’ Nuremberg rally mantra back in 1934 Germany: “Intellect rots the brain.”[5]
For Donald Trump, and from the start, hyperbole and simplification became useful and ready-to-use substitutes for dialectical thinking.[6] All too often, and by any reasonable standard, this president’s disjointed stream-of-conscious observations on personal meetings or planned policies were limited to monosyllabic grunts or visceral spasms of “amazing,” “fantastic,” “incredible,” etc. On several noteworthy occasions, Americans were instructed: “Barbed wire can be very beautiful.” Lest we forget, Trump’s regularly recurrent observation about his signature border wall was that “it will have a beautiful door.” And all this from one who previously declared: (1) nuclear weapons could be used against hurricanes; and (2) “the Moon is part of Mars.”
There is more. Donald Trump was effectively addicted to rancor and acrimony, to “sworn” enemies of Reason.For him, always, crudely ad hominem attacks represent a calculated way to ward off any daunting challenges of intellectual complexity. Similar observations may be made about his seemingly endless resort to barren clichés and empty phrases.
“This is a nation of laws….” Trump once managed to declare from variously prepared scripts, but that contrived reassurance never had any anchorage in tangible policy. For the most part, during his tenure, matters of national and international law were casually disregarded.[7] Confronted by a president whose highest notion of refined legal reasoning was the argumentum ad baculum – that is, an overtly aggressive and illegitimate reliance upon defamation/intimidation – the American people lost all sight of any long-term legal consequences.[8]
Now, long and short-term, these consequences (both domestic and international) are proving themselves intolerable.
Donald Trump is no legal scholar. Still, international law remains an integral part of the law of the United States. This critically vital incorporation is codified at Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution (the “Supremacy Clause”) and at several corresponding U.S. Supreme Court decisions (principally, the Paquete Habana, 1900).
In fashioning of US national policies, reason-based intellect should never be taken as evidence of presidential liability. Yet, as the cameras pan around the audience de jour at Trump’s fearfully adrenalized “rallies,” both during and after his presidency, it is hard to imagine even a scintilla of crowd interest in logic, law or lucidity. In the fashion of other wrongly bedazzled audiences in 20th century history, this is not a crowd that wanted its “great leader” to be learned, law-minded or in any way well-read.
This same portentous conclusion applies to present-day Trump faithful and all proponents of anti-reason.[9]
In the end, all Americans ought finally to understand that Mr. Trump himself was not and is not the underlying “pathology.” This once-unimaginable presidency was merely the most visible symptom of a more grievously systemic disorder. This much broader illness is an American society (universities included) that persistently and wittingly turns its collective back on Reason. Within this despairingly lethal society, reason-backed citizen arguments increasingly count for nothing.
“The crowd,” observed 19th century Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, “is untruth.” Obligingly, even today, Mr. Trump’s undaunted minions insist upon chanting gibberish in chorus. Even for those who have had just a minimal acquaintance with modern history, the dark tenor of any such ritualistic chanting should be palpably familiar[10] and sinister. It’s the same chanting that brought this writer and his family to the United States from Europe shortly after the War.[11]
Truth is exculpatory. The Trump Era was not by any means a normal or sustainable American presidency, not by any reasonable standards of assessment or comparison. Now, Americans must inquire, audibly, no longer in trepidation or sotto voce: “Was this in any way excusable and somehow repeatable American presidency?
Former president Donald Trump cherishes chaos in national and international politics, an anti-Reason affection that is impossible to reconcile with the most rudimentary legal expectations of legitimate governance. The Founding Fathers of the United States did not generally believe in democracy. Most had even agreed with Alexander Hamilton’s trenchant observation that “the people are a great beast.” Thomas Jefferson, arguably the most democratic of the Founders, tied any residual hopes for a durable democracy to a proper system of citizen education. In his Notes on Virginia, however, the future third president described “the people” as “rubbish” from which a small number of gifted individuals could be “raked” once each year.
When Sophocles, an early Greek tragedian, held “despicable” any king who would place his own personal popularity ahead of national well-being, he also (in common with Aeschylus and Euripides) lamented that corrupt leadership would inevitably spawn a corrupt commonwealth. Hence, when King Oedipus discovers his own “tragic flaw,” the Chorus recognizes distressingly causal connections to famine and disorder then prevailing in Thebes. Much later, when an American president named Trump remained focused on his own personal popularity, and not on national security and well-being, citizens faced similar connections.
Looking back, at least on its face, Trump University was less defiling than its namesake’s multiple derelictions in law, civil liberties, war avoidance and human rights.[12] Nonetheless, in the longer term, this “university’s” open disregard for any American “life of the mind”[13] set an egregious example of leadership contrivance. By itself, Trump University’s direct harms were limited “only” to those who bought into the illusion of a real university (some of its supporters even called it an “Ivy League university”), but its most enduring and significant harms will prove vastly more difficult to extirpate.
Going forward, to suitably combat such corrosive national harms, it should become the special responsibility of university professors and students (among assorted others) to maintain their casually venerated institutions as genuine exemplars of Intellect and Reason.[14] In essence, even if our universities can no longer be taken seriously as “temples of intellect,” they can at least stand for something more deeply faithful to both human virtue[15] and scientific truth.[16]
[1] Recall, in this connection, Plato’s classic argument in The Republic that the Idea or “Form” is more meaningfully real than any of its tangible manifestations.
[2] See Karl Jaspers’ clarifying tour de force, Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952).
[3] On the law-based closures of this “university,” see, inter alia: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/federal-court-approves-25-million-trump-university-settlement-n845181
[4] This preference was expressed most explicitly in Trump’s pre-Singapore Summit rhetoric on his then-upcoming meeting with North Korean President Kim Jong Un. See, Louis René Beres: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2018/05/north-korea-nuclear-diplomacy-and-international-law/
[5] See, Louis René Beres: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/11/louis-rene-beres-dominating-the-street/
[6] Dialectical thinking likely originated in Fifth Century BCE Athens, as Zeno, author of the Paradoxes, has been acknowledged by Aristotle as its inventor. In the middle dialogues of Plato, dialectic emerges as the supreme form of philosophic/analytic method. The dialectician, says Plato, is the special one who knows how to ask and then answer vital questions.
[7] William Blackstone, the jurist upon whose work the United States bases its own system of law, remarks at Book 4 of his Commentaries on the Law of England: “The law of nations (international law) is always binding upon all individuals and all states. Each state is expected, perpetually, to aid and enforce the law of nations as part of the common law, by inflicting an adequate punishment upon the offenses against that universal law.”
[8] Regarding such consequences, the peremptory rights assured by the American Declaration and Constitution can never be lawfully confined to citizens of the United States. This is because both documents were conceived by their authors as indisputable codifications of a pre-existing Natural Law. Though generally unrecognized, the United States was expressly founded upon the Natural Rights philosophies of the 18th century Enlightenment, especially Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu and Rousseau. Thomas Jefferson was well acquainted with the classical writings of political philosophy from Plato to Diderot. In those early days of the Republic. an American president could not only read serious books, but could sometimes also write them.
[9] Spanish 20th century thinker Jose Ortega y’Gasset remarks presciently in The Revolt of the Masses (1932): “The mass man has no use for reason. He learns only in his own flesh.”
[10] See, by this author: Louis René Beres, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/05/louis-beres-america-rise-and-fall/
[11] See, by this author, Louis René Beres, at The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/01/opinion/the-swiss-had-their-villains-and-their-heroes.html
[12] See, by this author, Louis René Beres: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/04/the-trump-presidency-a-breathtaking-assault-on-law-justice-and-security/
[13] See, in this regard, Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America (1965). See also: Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (1959).
[14] Seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal remarks prophetically in Pensées: “All our dignity consists in thought…It is upon this that we must depend…Let us labor then to think well: this is the foundation of morality.” Similar reasoning characterizes the writings of Baruch Spinoza, Pascal’s 17th-century contemporary. In Book II of his Ethics Spinoza considers the human mind, or the intellectual attributes, and – drawing further upon René Descartes – strives to define an essential theory of learning and knowledge.
[15] “There is no longer a virtuous nation,” warned the poet William Butler Yeats, “and the best of us live by candlelight.”
[16] These mutually-reinforcing goals bring to mind a question posed originally by Honoré de Balzac about the “human comedy:” “Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts or empty skulls?”
