It’s too early in the morning for me to be writing about important things, but once the rest of the world wakes up, I’ll probably be overtaken by daily business. Since a thunderstorm woke me (arousing fears of another basement flood), I’ll put my pre-dawn consciousness to work trying to answer the Tutor’s fierce challenge (in the best sense) to my integrity.
The question, if I understand it well, involves how a postmodernist (and I seem to be shackled with that category description, however uninterested I am in it) dares speak of truth and justice, or of truth and lie in a moral sense, to paraphrase the fool-prophet from whose shadowlight philosophy has yet to distinguish itself.
“What is the final cause of postmodern discourse? Moral evasion.” Yes, possibly so; when one can appeal to no Final Absolute to resolve the vexed problems about good and evil, power and weakness, truth and lie, one can readily use a heightened awareness of ambiguity and complexity for the end of distancing oneself from the tenor of one’s words and actions. “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is,” after all; so many microtones of possibility that it’s hard to come to rest on any given assessment. Like Zeno’s arrow, the crass postmodern can never reach the target of moral evaluation.
The final cause of postmodern discourse need not be exhausted by evasion, though. The opposite polarity finds justification in postmodern discourses as well (and the Tutor acknowledges such). While the crass postmodern shrugs and says, “Evasion happens,” the earnest postmodern declines the moral shortcuts of projecting local prejudice onto the transcendent horizon of absolute moral values in order to justify drawing and quartering strange, unwelcome sojourners. This orchestration of postmodern discourse persists not to eradicate responsibility, but to radicalize it (cue the echoes of the ghosts of existentialisms past — phantasms because in their individualism (or nihilism), they sentenced their own projects to death, and cut themselves off from the heritage that could pick up, sustain, and transform their insights). The postmodern flanking maneuver demystifies the supposedly-disinterested appeal to Higher Authority and cuts off the cadences that might prematurely allow a Rove, Rice, or Bush to displace accountability away from their own discernments and judgments.
So, I name Clinton and Bush “liars” not because I have access to some metaphysical authority by which I (and I particularly) can adjudicate truth from lie — but because everyone must stand for something (even if it be no more than a Brand, or self-indulgence, or Folly). If these men publicly claim adherence to a discourse of power made perfect in weakness, of resolute truth making its vulnerable way in a world of lies, of peace that passes human comprehension, then in the name of that discourse I charge them with misrepresenting their actions and their rationales for their actions.
I may be wrong; Clinton may honestly have thought that he and Monica weren’t engaging in sexual relations, and Bush may have thought that Saddam and Osama were conspiring to unleash terroristic mayhem on the civilized world by transporting yellowcake uranium from Africa to Iraq (and that when his State Department and CIA advisors indicated that this wasn’t the case, and then turned out to be right, it was their fault he didn’t believe them in the first place). Maybe — though that concession churns my viscera. If they acted from integrity, from their love of a truth that escapes capture and manipulation, and I’m answerable for my accusation now, to my sisters and brothers, and ultimately, to my Judge, who will discern my failings not by any standard that Bill Bennett can compile into a best-seller or GWB can cite as his favorite philosophy, but by a truth whose transcendence obscures it from mortal audition.
Does that exculpate apologetic statesmen of a compromising kind or academic theologians with postmodern proclivities? No; truth brooks no evasion, whether by cheap qualifying or orotund asseveration of absolute authority. My characterization of truth and lies rests on the consistency of the speakers’ claims day-to-day with their lives, with their professed ideals, with the trust the claim from their loved ones and their constituents. I am unconvinced that either Clinton or Bush can provide convincing rebuttal to the charge that they knowingly misrepresented themselves and their actions.
Does that falsify my postmodern credentials (not that I care for any)? Show me how; but before you devote any energy to the task, decide whether it’s worth stripping me of rags for which I care not, in order to indict me for falling short of a consistency to which neither I nor the God to whom I bow, holds me.
Posted by AKMA at July 15, 2003 06:02 AM | TrackBackLovely. The only - dare I name it? "false" note lies in your rhetorical and somewhat disingenuous denial of your own concern for a place at the postmodern table.
Also, I'm sure you're too aware that there are many among us who would deny the nature of that "truth whose transcendence obscures it from mortal audition." While I have a somewhat high noise to signal ratio and am not favored with a direct connection, I have known several people whose simplicity and clarity seem to provide them that ability to hear divine truth and to share what they are hearing. So I'd have to say in the absence of your own direct experience that you've contrived a marvelous metaphor, and I thank you for it because the metaphor does postulate a moral boundary, albeit one that is just over the event horizon of human experience. And in my opinion that's better than "nothing."
And don't get me started on the moral equivalency of lying about a blow-job and lying about material facts that misleads the polity, takes us into war, and is the proximate cause of the deaths of thousands. There certainly is none, for if there were your modest lie regarding your own concern for postmodern identification would put you in the same circle of hell as Bush the Butcher of Baghdad.
Posted by: fp at July 15, 2003 07:28 AMThanks for a piece which explains things I've long wanted to say far better than I've been able to say them. Final Absolutes are convenient for those who like to project their views on them, but in practice I think we all live in richer contexts.
Posted by: Simon St.Laurent at July 15, 2003 09:28 AMPhilosophical sophistry being the ageless interminable tail chase that it has always been, I'm more inclined to go with the ("churns my viscera") gut as well. The Final Absolute is not going to ultimately derive from semantic or logical convolutions, but from the inherent wordless universal insight (Holy Spirit?) of a man who is actually honest with himself.
Posted by: Stan at July 15, 2003 11:47 AMYou are quite lucid for early in the morning, and thank you for the excellent discussion of truth and lies from a postmodern perspective. Frank already said much the same as I would, but I'd like to continue from the idea that moral truth is "just over the event horizon of human experience". I haven't met many people who can speak from "trancsendant experience", but I have read about it. Perhaps I have even had a few of my own, but I have nothing coherent to say about this. I rest my faith on the conviction that "The Final Absolute is not going to ultimately derive from semantic or logical convolutions, but from the inherent wordless universal insight (Holy Spirit?) of a man who is actually honest with himself." (as Stan said)
That said, I still think there is a big difference in the two cases. I think it's a stretch to say Clinton represented himself as having any great degree of sexual fidelity to us (represented, that is) or to even to his wife. The political press is quick to point out that until very recently this sort of thing was considered completely off-limits and just would not be reported on. It is the political right that keeps bringing these issues up, hypocritically I might add. The only mistake Clinton made was trying to deny it by careful parsing of words. I would respect him much more if he just said it was none of your damn business.
The Republicans, on the other hand, have a history of lying on important national policy issues (not to mention all the political dirty tricks). It's the Iran/Contra affair that was treasonous and deserved an impeachment. How ironic that Reagon now suffers from Alziemer's after using the "I can't recall" defense going back to the '60s and the SAG connections with organized crime. The current case is a clear-cut example of high level people acting under no more restraint than "what we can get away with". The sad part is that they seem to be getting away with it.
Posted by: Gerry at July 15, 2003 01:37 PMDo we need transcendent criteria for all our judgements? Sometimes a lie is simply a lie.
Posted by: Curtiss Leung at July 15, 2003 05:05 PMTo address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
Posted by: Melchior at January 13, 2004 12:16 PMThe most basic duality that exists with variables is how the programmer sees them in a totally different way than the computer does. When you're typing away in Project Builder, your variables are normal words smashed together, like software titles from the 80s. You deal with them on this level, moving them around and passing them back and forth.
Posted by: Garnett at January 13, 2004 12:17 PMBut some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.
Posted by: Harman at January 13, 2004 12:17 PM