As promised, after affirming prudence as a moral virtue in light of the current crisis, I now muddy the Aristotelian waters by treating reason as a moral virtue – thus breaking down the pagan dualism by which Aristotle separated “intellectual virtue” from “moral virtue.”
I hope you did the reading assignment. The president appears to have turned over foreign policy to a complete amateur, who proceeded to expertly manipulate an ignorant and willfully gullible media into saying pretty much whatever the administration wanted it to say. And then the amateur openly bragged about the national media’s ignorance and slavery, in the national media, and the fallout from all this has been essentially zero.
It would appear from this evidence not only that our national institutions are as strongly fortified against any influence from reason as they have been at any time, but that they have been so for a while. As with the idolatry of money (discussed previously), so with the idolatry of cheap rhetoric and hollow authority – Donald Trump did not create the problem, but only recognized and exploited the opportunities for mischief that the problem created. Which, of course, exacerbates the problem further.
Perhaps I’m late in recognizing the extent of the problem. If so, I repent. I am more ready to accept blame here than I was in the area of recognizing white racism. I do think the new white racism is substantially different from the old, and thus that the waning of white racism in the past few decades was real and not merely apparent. Here, on the other hand, it would appear the problem has always been worse than I recognized.
The failure here is on the part of journalists and other professionals whose job it is to care more about truth than about pageview data – even if that means risking business failure. The administration is very blameworthy for having been so dishonest, but those whose job it was not to be their slaves and puppets are even more so. Systematic reform begins with them.
Every society needs a teaching class, a class of people who are especially gifted and called to educate the public. Maintaining a teaching class without giving that class unaccountable power is of course a perennial problem, but not an insurmountable one.
The real challenge we face today is the loss of a professional sense of vocation (in the original sense) among our teaching classes. Where are the journalists who feel responsible to find out the truth and report it, clicks be damned, because that is what their profession exists to do?
Just as Trump has demonstrated that money is not in fact the source of all power in politics, he is also demonstrating that everyone (except Trump, of course) loses in an environment where truth is whatever gets clicks. That he has demonstrated this so clearly and irrefutably is a source of discouragement about the short term, and of possible encouragement about the long term. An enormous amount of damage will be done in the short term, and I’m not dismissing the importance of that. But let’s not make things worse by panicking, either.
Remember Herb Stein’s Iron Law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.