|
In case you hadn't noticed, the Sotomayor hearings were broadcast this last week from somewhere in LookingGlassLand-a place where an all-white committee of Senators questioned a Latina nominee for hours on end, and the all-white-male Republican contingent spent the largest chunk of its time cross-questioning her on whether she was a racist, and if not, how could she prove it to them?
Of course there were problems with this approach. Such as the complete lack of judicial record supporting their accusations. And that's precisely what gave the proceedings their utterly surreal character, leaving us only to wonder if it was more Lewis Carroll or George Orwell. If MSNBC were half as savvy as they think they are, this is the question they'd be asking folks to call in and vote on. But, of course, they've got Pat Buchanan doing commentary for them. So what are the chances of that?
Yes, everyone with half a brain or more knows that it's utterly surreal. But what's lacking, generally is the vocabulary to say anything more precise than that. And that's symptomatic of a very big problem indeed. In fact, at bottom it's the same problem we saw in Sotomayor herself, as she repeatedly told the world that she had no judicial philosophy. (In fact, philosophy gave her hives, and might possibly even send her into anaphylactic shock!) No philosophy for her, nohow.
Pardon me for not believing a word of it, even if Sotomayor herself actually did.
What's the connection here? Simple: At its most basic, ideology means nothing more than how you slice up the world-or at least the human part of it. Who are the players? And what are their relationships? Kings over subjects-with virtually nothing owed by Kings, except to God? Lords over vassals-with a system of mutual, though vastly unequal obligations? Slaveowners and slaves-with slavowners alone defining the limits of absolute power over those who have none? Or citizens with constitutionally-recognized rights and equal protection for all? These are the big-picture examples of how political ideology is political ontology (the branch of philosophy dealing with questions of existence). And it's quite literally impossible to function without one, conscious or not, whether you know it or not.
The right has a very well-developed multi-billion dollar machine in place to constantly articulate its ideology, and apply it to any situations that happen to emerge. The fact that its ideology is almost always contradictory and incoherent is entirely irrelevant. They're busy cranking it out at mass industrial production levels, and if you're busy pointing out contradictions at cottage industry levels, then you're not cranking out your own ideology, and you're definitely not doing it at mass industrial levels. (Or, to put it another way, for the past 40 years, the right has been involved in a Gramscian culture war/war of position, and the left has been AWOL.)
Actually, the Democratic establishment has come up with it's own ideology-the "we don't have an ideology" ideology. Which leaves the rest of us tearing our hair out, screaming "Why the hell not?" Because not having an ideology of your own essentially means accepting the other guys ideology, their way of cutting up the world, and then trying to get your goals achieved playing their game by their rules with their set of cards-which, of course, they have diligently marked back during the Nixon Administration. In fact, it doesn't matter if you're playing 11-dimensional chess. If you let the other guy define everything, the game is hari-kari (see, "Lather," Jefferson Airplane),
|
| Reference Points-Or Grids, If You Will
To understand what's going on here, I'd like to refer to two relatively recent diaries, "Misreading History While Trying To Make It--Achievement Narratives And Obama's Limitations" and "John Legend's Commencement Speech At UPenn Highlights Core Of College Learning"
I reference the first for the light it throws on the divide between the third and fourth levels of consciousness in Keegan's schema of cognitive development. In Kegan's schema, each level is related to the one before by a shift in a consciousness-what was the background/context/subject of consciousness at one level becomes the foreground, content/object of consciousness at the next level. In short, what is taken for granted, and largely unrecognized become subject to inspection, questioning and revision. More specifically, at level three, the self is constructed out of the social roles and relationships of the surrounding society & culture, while at level four, the autonomous self becomes capable of reflecting on, questioning, and altering such roles and relationships, and thus becomes capable of self-authorship. It is only at level four that one becomes truly conscious of the power relationships inherent in the social order that one takes for granted at Level 3.
The second diary references a different framework of cognitive development, which comes out of the Harvard Reading Program, and the work of William Perry. Perry focused on a developmental process he came to understand out of years of working with undergraduates, who had to learn to read in different ways, for different purposes, in order to be effective students. I've contacted the Perry Network, seeking to find out about any research connecting these two approaches, and to my knowledge no one has empirical research related the two frameworks.
However, there appears to be a natural fit whereby the Perry's entire scheme fills out the gap between Kegan's Level 3 and Level 4. Students begin in Perry's scheme with the naïve belief that the world is a certain way, and their teachers are their to teach them about it. This reflects the sort of cut-and-dried socially defined reality as understood by Level 3 consciousness. At the end of Perry's scheme, students are prepared to take their place as members of a knowledge-seeking-and-constructing community. They are capable of critical distance from what they observe, subjecting it different analytical frameworks, and then making decisions about which frameworks are more appropriate and why. This is quite compatible with Kegan's Level 4 description of self-authorship and autonomy.
The Basic Argument
With these reference frames in place, the underlying argument is more easily made: What we're experiencing is a war between two perspectives, the conservative, hierarchy-defending perspective of Level 3, and the progressive, egalitarian perspective of Level 4.
Ironically, however, there's an inversion between the basic nature of these two perspectives and their political manifestations-one described at some length in my diary series The Political Duality of Rep and Dem: It's the conservatives who are much more consciously aware of this war, and much more organized and dedicated to fighting it. They are much more sensitive to context of political struggle, while progressives are much more content to simply want to live in the world that past progressive political struggles have fashioned out of a previously much more traditional and hierarchical past. While progressives inherently desire social peace and tolerance, they have to recognize the continued necessity of struggle, and transcend their reluctance to engage in hegemonic struggle against conservatives. Doing so involves overcoming a dualistic outlook that sees such struggle as diametrically opposed to their vision of social peace-and overcome such dualistic constructs is one of the hallmarks of Level 5 thinking. At Level 5, such dualisms do not disappear, but rather are reconceptualized not as opposites at war with one another, but as polarities that mutually co-create one another.
What this means, in ordinary everyday terms is simply that we have to fight against conservative ideology as a destructive social force in order to preserve a beneficent social order in which individual conservatives, as well as liberals, can ultimately feel secure.
It's not that psycho extremists will ever feel secure, mind you. It's that there will simply be far fewer of them, with virtually no significant political power, while the vast majority of self-identified conservatives will return to a focus on functioning as well as possible in islands of relative cultural stability within the wider ocean of continuing flux. They will find peace in recognizing that although they can never freeze that ocean, they do not have to do so in order to be safe from being engulfed and drowned by it.
A bit more explanation before moving on: Ordinarily, conservatism is rooted in the preservation of the existing, Level 3 order of things. However, conservatism is not simply that, as conservatism is also an anti-egalitarian ideology of privileged elites. Since at least the advent of the Italian Renaissance, Europe has been subject to an onging, sometimes sporadic, but increasingly dynamic process of cultural change that has rendered the Level 3 order of things fluid and unstable, and has created conditions that increasingly demand Level 4 and even Level 5 consciousness, simply in order to successfully make sense of things.
One example of this was the emergence of religious tolerance as one the key principles of modern liberalism following the bloody wars of Reformation. Previously, social stability and peace was assumed to depend on religious homogeneity in any social and political community. Religious tolerance provided an alternative framework, which allowed for stability based on separate spheres between politics and religion. Whatever was morally supported by all religious factions would unproblematically continue as the sort of common morality underlying the system of laws. Whatever was morally disputed would, as best as possible, be kept out of the political sphere, with provisions made to facilitate the continued private observation of such moral differences.
America was the first country founded explicitly on principles of political liberalism. Instead of being justified on top-down theocratic grounds-as provided for by the theory of Divine Right of Kings-American government was justified in terms of the bottom-up Lockean Social Contract theory, a purely secular basis for government, that was perfectly compatible with the separation of church and state that was another key feature of Locke's political philosophy. Because of this, along with (a) the virtual absence of true high-status conservative elites in America, especially after the Revolutionary War, and (b) the profound geographical differences between the relatively modest political and economic elites that did exist in early America, America largely lacked a cohesive national conservative tradition in the European sense.
Consequently, and rather ironically, when such a homegrown "tradition" finally did emerge, in the decades following the Civil War, it was articulated primarily in terms borrowed from so-called "classical liberalism", even as that tradition was being found inadequate in its British birthplace, where the New Liberals, reflecting on the horrors of Dickensian England, sought a broader re-formulation joining individual liberal and broad social welfare-a combination that would fully arrive in America three generations later with FDR's New Deal.
Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch...
So, what were we looking at with the Sotomayor hearings, anyway? To answer that, we have think back back to Sotomayor's "wise Latina" remark, her statement about appeals courts "making policy" and the kind of discourse that these remarks were part of. This takes us back to the John Legend diary. Condensing Perry's 9-stage model of cognitive development observed among undergraduates, these are the highlights:
A. Dualism/Received Knowledge:
There are right/wrong answers, engraved on Golden Tablets in the
sky, known to Authorities.
B. Multiplicity/Subjective Knowledge:
There are conflicting answers; therefore, students must trust their "inner voices", not external Authority.
C. Relativism/Procedural Knowledge:
There are disciplinary reasoning methods:
* Connected knowledge: empathetic (why do you believe X?; what does this poem say to me?)
* vs. Separated knowledge: "objective analysis" (what techniques can I use to analyze this poem?)
D. Commitment/Constructed Knowledge:
Integration of knowledge learned from others with personal experience and reflection.
Regardless of whether Sotomayor ever heard of Perry or not, she surely knew of this developmental journey-which John Legend referred to in his speech-having taken it herself. The language of John Roberts-judges as umpires calling "balls" and "strikes"-is the language of the incoming freshman, of "Dualism/Received Knowledge." It is, in fact, a defendable (if not totally accurate) descriptive ideal for trial court judges. But as anyone who continues their education should learn (if they're paying the least bit of attention), this is not how the world in general works, and it's certainly not how the growth of knowledge works It is only at the beginning of this journey that objective truth seems so fixed, so clearly "out there" in the real world, and so clearly opposed to anything subjective. Leaving this stage behind is the very essence of what a college education is all about. And as the student very clearly understands at the end of the process, when they become part of a disciplinary community, that black-and-white view of the world has to be discarded in order for a more mature, more realistic and more productive understanding to take its place.
Yes, to those who have not yet made the journey, it seems like this is "attacking" "objectivity", but actually it is only attacking a myth of objectivity, a myth that may have served a useful purpose at some point in time, but that no longer does so when it is time to embark on the journey that is a college education.
All this is the implicit backstory behind the related sorts of struggles to construct meaningful legal frameworks that judges, advocates and legal scholars all engage in. Indeed, graduate level study has been shown to relate to the emergence of a greater number of people with Level 5 consciousness, an indication that there probably is yet another developmental framework like Perry's waiting to be discovered, mapping out the substages that people pass through beyond the point where Perry's schema ends.
To hold that people who finish this long and arduous process should continue to be judged according to the mistaken pre-conceptions of your typical incoming college freshmen is ludicrous in the extreme. And yet that is precisely what the Republicans insisted on as the basic discursive pre-conditions and guiding assumptions for the Sotomayor hearings-and the Democrtats did absolutely nothing to challenge them on this fundamental presumption. Heck, they didn't even realize its existence!
Even more remarkably, Sotomayor ended up agreeing with them! When she herself said that she had used "bad" examples or expressions, because they could be misunderstood by others, she was implicitly saying that post-graduate discourse should be bound by the judgments of incoming freshman-or worse. It was, quite frankly, a mind-numbingly stupid thing for her to say, and yet virtually no one seems to have noticed. Why should they? After all, such stupidity commonly goes under another name-it's called "conventional wisdom".
Like I said, brought to you from somewhere in LookingGlassLand. |
