Rational Philosophy

UN Ambassador Andrew Young

I am sure that many have cried at some point since 11pm last night. My own tears caught me by surprise. I was emptying the dishwasher this morning as I listened to NPR. Ambassador Andrew Young, the first black ambassador to the UN, (who witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr) was speaking in calm, measured praise of Obama and the weight of the history of Obama’s accomplishment. I’m not black, but in the upsurge of emotion that brought my tears I felt suddenly, immediately aware of what this moment meant historically in a country with such a poor record of racial discrimination, both overt and covert — it was a mixture of relief and joy.

This joy is in part the very pure philosophical joy of a good thing happening, a thing that will change the future. In Andrew Young’s words: “a victory of grace over greed, of vision over violence.”

Can change really happen and if so how?  This is the country that twice elected George W. Bush. Many who voted-in perhaps the worst president in the nation’s history, twice, must have decided to vote for Obama over McCain. So are we a conservative nation simply disillusioned by a lousy president, or are we a nation newly and differently inspired, a changed nation?

Barack Obama Victor

I can’t know the answer. I can only give an opinion based on what I see and hear.  Obama and his campaign team have wrought change by reaching out and engaging people with new ideas. These ideas have rubbed up against old, automated, reactive ways of thinking. Obama has spent the last couple of years asking people why we should see the intractable problems of the country as hopelessly intractable. He’s also stood and overtly and covertly challenged people to find him wanting because of the color of his skin, or the unamericanness of his name, or the power of his rational intellect.

Many failed to meet this challenge. After all 47% of America voted for McCain, or against Obama. That’s tens of millions of people who have proven themselves insusceptible to a force for powerful, positive change.

The world is now a different place. Obama’s skill and insight in his campaign promise great things for his presidency. Thank you, Barack.

“False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil,” Socrates

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, a lie is 1. A false statement deliberately presented as being true, or 2. Something meant to deceive or give a wrong impression. This, ironically, makes lies a lot more concrete than the truth, philosophically speaking, which is a much harder quantity to pin down.

McCain Campaign Lies

Why has John McCain, the self-annointed “straight talker,” resorted to lying? It’s a simple question and one that’s impossible to answer without some inside information. But if we’re to have any hope of understanding McCain and guessing his future actions it’s worth trying to figure it out.

If you’re interested in knowing what McCain is accused of lying about, the Democratic Party has established “Count the Lies” a chronicle of “independent, nonpartisan” fact checks “debunking John McCain’s lies and distortions.” Even some conservatives have tutted at McCain’s recent stoops. Even Karl Rove (!!), as reported in the Christian Science Monitor, of all places, has said that “McCain has gone, in some of his ads, similarly one step too far in sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100 percent truth test.” If you’re a Republican presidential candidate and Karl Rove is accusing you of distorting the truth, you know you’re a big fat liar… or a pawn in another one of Rove’s despicable schemes.

John McCain with President Bush

(This is a bit of a digression, but the Salon published a very interesting piece back in January asking why in all of the election coverage of John McCain’s losing primary bid in 2000 no journalist had mentioned who it was that smeared John McCain so successfully that he lost. The answer, of course, George Bush and Karl Rove…)

Perhaps we can find in our children the unadulterated origin of the impulse to lie. My son, now 4-years old, has just begun to lie. His reasons are transparent: He lies either to get something he wants (usually cookies, candy, or toys), or to avoid something he doesn’t want (typically to take responsibility for a transgression). McCain’s lies seem to fall squarely in the first category. As a “maverick, outsider” it suited him to talk straight. But as an establishment insider, it’s much more effective for him to lie. He’s always wanted power and success, and now that lying seems to offer the best path to victory, he’s adopted it with the same zeal he once reserved for honesty. The tactic is all the more successful because, in Obama, he seems to be up against a candidate who has some genuine integrity — a terrible handicap against smear tactics.

What does this tell us about the kind of president McCain would make?

Politicians the world over resort to lies, many of them relatively successful leaders. Lying in itself isn’t a guarantee of poor government and lousy leadership. Although Bush has overused and abused this privilege, the security of a country, for instance, relies to some extent on the ability of its government to keep secrets from its enemies, which also means keeping secrets from its people.

In order to understand the degree of concern we should have about McCain’s lies, we really need to consider what his goals will be as president. We can then assume that he will lie to achieve them.

And given that McCain has dropped most if not all of his firmly held political beliefs in order to gain the highest office, one can only assume that his primary goal as president will be to consolidate his power and popularity — in other words, he’ll lie in order to keep the conservative political base as happy as possible. That’s a scary thought.

Footnote - What about Palin?

What about Palin? She’s a big fat liar, too, and a scary character in her own right. The Times has an extensive piece on her political MO. Not a pretty picture. Here’s a quote from Laura Chase who was Palin’s campaign manager during her first bid for mayor:

“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she says, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”

Related posts from around the web:

McCain Lies Again - But McCain is still airing ads telling the same lie. He has also still not retracted his lie on The View when he point blank said that Palin has refused all earmarks as governor. I cannot remember a candidate for president telling such …

Romney: McCain Lies - So Rove has declared McCain’s campaign overly harsh and Romney has declared it deceitful. I honestly have no idea how that sort of criticism from those people is possible to recover from.

Obama Campaign Launches Ad Hitting McCain’s Lies As “Dishonorable” - We’ve been waiting for it, and here it is: The Obama campaign launches its first ad hitting McCain for his lying and his mendacious adver-sleazements and slamming his campaign as “disgraceful” and “dishonorable”: …

McCain Lies About Obama’s Health Plan- JUST THE FACTS! - In our ongoing efforts to expose Senator McCain’s lies about Senator Obama’s policies, we need to look at the McCain campaigns lies and then provide some “straight talk” about the facts. McCain claimed that Obama’s health care plan …

On avoiding work and making false distinctions.

After I swam this morning, I got into a locker room discussion about the supreme wastefulness and poor management of the NY City Transit system. (Coincidentally, the subject of a recent post.) There we were, a former Transit employee (me), a current Transit employee, and a contractor to the Transit Authority, quickly finding common ground on the subjects of inefficiency and ineptness. The discussion began when the current transit employee joked that his job required him just to show up.

Barack Obama showed up when Ted Kennedy couldn’t (because of his brain tumor) to make the commencement address at Wesleyan University. Obama took the opportunity to urge the graduating class to consider the call of public service. William Kristol chastises Obama for omitting from his list of worthy public services that the Weslyan grads might consider a career in the armed forces .

Um, William, who in his right mind would encourage young people to join the armed forces right now? And particularly Obama, who opposed the war, and who wants out of the war, and who probably believes that drawing down on military spending is a good long term goal.

The report of another commencement address underscores the weakness of Kristol’s unconvincing piece. We read that President Bush gave the commencement address at Furman University in South Carolina. Bush also called for students to consider public service… and also left out the military from his list.

At the pinnacle of his rhetorical powers, Bush exhorted the Furman graduating class to adopt a “culture of responsibility” avoiding the inevitably un-fulfilling temptations of “alcohol, drugs and promiscuity.” (A bit late for that advice probably, Mr. President.)

And, speaking of alcohol, whenever I read Stanley Fish’s column it makes me want to tackle a shaker of Martinis. There’s something so depressingly negative about Fish’s way of thinking. He’s the worst kind of academic, it seems, seeking out reasons to accept the inevitability of problems rather than find ways to see past them.

This week Fish writes about “norms and deviations.” In a nutshell he argues that any group can be defined as a deviation from a norm, and that that group can legitimately claim that the norm is artificially determined. Deaf people, once defined as disabled, now seeks recognition as a community that rejects the term disabled. Fish rattles through the spectrum of differences from sex distinctions to the distinction between serial killers and non-serial killers. He concludes, rather smugly, that there’s no better way of looking at the endless recursive meaninglessness of these situations than to accept its endlessness and meaninglessness.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to do any work in rebutting Mr. Fish — someone else had already done it for me. A poster called malnicore added this comment, which cannot be improved upon (or, maybe it can, but I’m not going to try):

Oddly, I now notice that malnicore’s last sentence echoes Bush’s call to release ourselves from any attachment to “alcohol, drugs and promiscuity.” To which list he might usefully have added “abuse of power.”

On Hillary Clinton’s unerring sense of footinmouthity.

Capitalizing on the tragedy of her inability to be sensitive, Hillary Clinton has once again demonstrated her supreme political aptitude for footinmouthity. Stricken with a malignant brain tumor she is not, but Hillary needs no excuse to usurp Teddy Kennedy’s tragedy and achieve her outrageous best. Is it her fault that Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June of the year of his foreshortened primary bid? Of course it isn’t. Then why are people so bent out of shape that she would attempt to make political capital out of it…?

Jeez. Anyone would think you’d never seen a man shot before.

And now, with rumors that her fellow liability, Bill, is agitating for her to be Obama’s VP, one wonders how she’ll outdo Dick Cheney (remember him?) who managed to shoot his old friend in the head with a shotgun…

Exploring the idea of rightness and wrongness in intent and deed.

NY Times Op-Ed contributers Nathan Thrall and Jesse James Wilkins serve up an interesting history of President JFK’s face-off with Nikita Khrushchev. If we accept their account, JFK fared poorly in the exchange because Khrushchev went on the offensive and handily routed the ill-prepared young president in their one-on-one meetings. Thrall and Wilkins indicate that it was during these meetings that Khrushchev formed a critical impression of JFK as an immature and weak leader, an impression that in part lead to his subsequent decisions to build the Berlin wall and establish a missile base in Cuba.

We’re being drawn to review this period of history because Obama has often quoted Kennedy’s view on negotiating with hostile powers, as expressed in his inaugural address: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” The question being asked — if Obama, also young and arguably less tested than Kennedy, is so taken with Kennedy’s philosophy, would he make the same mistake?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg will testify in court during the hearing of the city’s lawsuit against a Georgia gun-shop. The city claims that guns sold in the south too easily make their way into the hands of bad actors (no pun intended) who then use them to inflict harm in New York City. It’s clear from the story that this particular gun shop owner — Jay Wallace — isn’t prepared to give up without a fight and has fashioned his case quite cleverly to present himself as David against Bloomberg’s Goliath.

And in the high stakes world of Internet search engines and on-line advertising (ten years ago, who would have thunk it?) Google is set to defend a proposed deal that would have Yahoo! license and use Google’s superior ad technology. (The backdrop being that Yahoo! has resisted Microsoft’s attempts to buy it — this deal with Google would add about $1 billion a year to Yahoo!’s coffers.) There are rumblings that Google’s deal with Yahoo! would be anti-competitive and fall foul of anti-trust legislation. Google claims to have found a way to fashion the deal so that it won’t. (Coincidentally, or perhaps not at all coincidentally, as a Google Ad Sense and Ad Words participant I just received an e-mail from Google telling me that they now place ads from qualified third-parties. Effectively, they’ve started to do for others what they propose that Yahoo! will do for them… Smart strategy for avoiding anti-trust accusations.)

These three stories present internal conflicts for me, and perhaps some intrinsic philosophical conflicts between ideals and reality.

I want to believe that John F. Kennedy was the better man, the better person, I believe he had more good intent that Khrushchev. But in the wiles and wills of international political maneuvering, Khrushchev had him beat hands down. I want to believe that Obama wouldn’t make the same mistake if he sat down with Kim Yung Il or Assad, but I realize that part of Obama’s charm is that he’s not cunning. (I do hope he’s smart enough and strong enough not to sit down until he’s sure that the right ground has been prepared.) I believe that Obama is a better person than Clinton or McCain; hence, my desire to believe he’s better able to run the country.
I want to believe that Bloomberg is fighting the right fight against those who sell guns. I like Bloomberg. He seems to have all around good intentions. But in this situation, maybe he’s misjudged. Maybe Jay Wallace isn’t the right guy to go after, or maybe Jay Wallace is just better at crafting a sympathetic image.

And even though Google has become such an all-dominant behemoth, I can’t help having a soft spot for a company that has the motto — “Do no evil…” I’m rooting for them against the anti-trust watchdogs.

Sadly, life isn’t fair. Bad people do win.

His fellow Greeks trumped up charges against Socrates and he went on his way with a draught of hemlock. His dying words? “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?” Now, show me a better man.

On the importance and unimportance of naming things.

A new kind of ant has descended on the coastal belt outside Houston. The ant beats out other pests for food, is a prodigious reproducer, and has no known enemies (except the homeowners and exterminators who live on the coastal belt outside Houston). But there’s one thing this new ant lacks that other ants have — a bone fide name. (Locals call them running ants, but there’s as yet no official scientific name.)

But, when it comes down to it, whether those hordes of tiny insects have a name or not must seem irrelevant when they’re infesting your yard.

David Brooks picked up on the idea that Obama, obliquely criticized by Bush’s speech in Israel to the Knesset, may not have intended to espouse a philosophy of appeasing terrorists. To his credit, Brooks contacted Obama and asked him to explain more about his foreign policy ideas, and, in particular, his ideas about handling the likes of Hezbollah.

That’s where the credit ends. Brooks sounds a little like Bush in his instinctive response to Obama’s remarks. And just as ill informed and naive about the history of diplomacy. As I wrote yesterday, when it comes to achieving peace, there’s no progress without communication of some sort or another.

“Does Obama believe that even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy?” Brooks asks. “Is Obama naïve enough to think that an extremist ideological organization like Hezbollah can be mollified with a less corrupt patronage system and some electoral reform?” (I’ve inverted the sequence of these two quotes.)

Through the seventies, eighties, and nineties, when the Provisional IRA (the IRA) carried out apparently endless campaigns of violence against other Irish citizens, the British army, and British citizens, there seemed to be no way to reach a peaceable conclusion. For a very long time, the British trotted out the line that they wouldn’t have anything to do with terrorists. And what happened in the end? In 2005, after much discussion and compromise on both sides, the IRA renounced violence. The political wing of the IRA has been integrated into Irish politics.

Is Obama naive, or are those who refuse to talk naive?

And although the courts in California have decided that gays can wed, anti-gay wedders society (epitomized by Randy Thomasson, head of Campaign for Children and Families) now seek an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

What do these three stories have in common? you may be wondering. Well, it strikes me that from a philosophical perspective these three stories pivot on the naming of something.

• The new ants have no name. This somehow makes them seem more threatening.
• Bush and others, having slapped a terrorist sticker on an organization, want to use this label to rule out anything that might be seen as legitimizing that group’s concerns.
• And the brouhaha over gay marriage seems to be more about nomenclature than practicalities. Not that there aren’t practicalities to be debated, there are, of course, but the emotion seems to derive from whether the label “marriage” can be applied to a same sex union.

But here we have the really difficult question, do names matter, philosophically speaking. Psychologically, they clearly do. But if we can narrow a concept and label it have we achieved anything more or less than narrowing a concept and labeling it?

There are two answers: Without names or labels for concepts we can’t discuss anything, we can’t communicate. But without qualifications to those names and labels, and careful use, we risk encamping behind words that evoke emotion but not reason.

On the disjunct between power and wisdom.

I keep coming back to Plato’s words, not because they are perfectly rendered, but because they capture the essence of the idea that power and wisdom seldom coincide:

“There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.” - Plato

And then there’s Thomas Jefferson, not generally recognized as a philosopher, but clearly a man who lived and breathed the search for truth:

“I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.” - Thomas Jefferson

As we watch the candidates campaign for the presidency I’m most saddened and depressed by how far we remain from Plato’s ideal of power coupled with wisdom. The deeper into the race we get, the more conniving and unwise the rhetoric becomes. (Clinton’s racial politics and her unwise and insincere politics of pandering on the gas tax; McCain’s hard swerve to the right.) The competitive, beauty pageant, micro-focused format of modern politics works against the ideal, of course. Obama seems to be sincere in his desire to break the mold, but he has a long hard road ahead of him and he’s already begun to falter with snipes against Hillary and rash policy promises.

I keep being drawn to stories of good being done by those who’ve quickly made a lot of money and therefore accrued a lot of power while still remembering what it’s like to be one of the have-nots. The Times has a piece on Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, who is one such newly moneyed philanthropist. Newmark, who’s been slow to capitalize on the extraordinary success of his Craigslist idea, even says this about relative wealth: “We know these guys in Google and the eBay guys, and they are not any happier than anyone else. A lot of money is a burden.”

The purist in me reviles against the idea that people who’ve been successful in business should be holding sway with social and philanthropic programs. But why not? Presumably, we’d be able to intervene if one of them turned out to be a nut-job who was out to achieve dubious ends.

Philosophically speaking, if someone has made a lot of money and chooses to spend his or her time and money dedicated to things other than making himself or herself wealthier, it’s more than likely that they’ll be aimed at making positive impact. The concept of philanthropy requires a focus on others over self. A persistent focus on self will tend to have a much less expansive outlook.

Whereas the desire for political power involves a composite desire to achieve sway over others and to be seen to effect change. The desire for political power doesn’t intrinsically have anything to do with effecting positive social change. It should, but it doesn’t.

This points to an intriguing development in the tensions between power and wisdom. Perhaps we will see a period in which politicians are shamed into behaving more responsibly and sincerely by the wealthy philanthropists. Why shouldn’t social improvement occur outside the mainstream political spectrum? And if they do, why shouldn’t this result in more pressure on politicians to focus on doing a job that serves the people rather than serving themselves?

Power rests where it lands. Wisdom, too.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the genetic ancestry of the duck-billed platypus, the beating of suspects by police in Philadelphia, and the race tensions in the Democratic primary contest.

The duck-billed platypus has a bill, webbed feet, lays eggs, but has fur and nurses its young. And now that an international team of scientists has decoded the duck-bills genome its uniquely ambivalent classification — part reptile, part mammal — has become a little less mysterious. The team found that the duck-bill’s genetic line split off from the other primary line over 166 million years ago. It has many genes in common with other mammals, but has retained many reptilian genes.

In Philadelphia, police and city officials have hurried to stress that the beating of restrained suspects caught on tape by television news reporters wasn’t racially motivated. The police officers were mostly white, the suspects black. (One presumes that this means they would have beaten white suspects, too.)

And in the contest for the Democratic nomination Hillary Clinton has again hinted that her success with white voters makes her a better matched against the Republicans.

We live in the confines of our prejudices. Prejudice rests on the fear that our identity of self isn’t supreme.

Philadelphia city officials probably believe they act out of a different fear when claiming that race wasn’t a factor in the beatings. One presumes that they fear the incident will fuel racial tensions. Asserting that race wasn’t a factor allows them to feel that they’re acting to diffuse the tension. But asserting that race is not a factor before that aspect of the beatings has been thoroughly investigated seems to work counter to that aim.

Hillary Clinton fears losing more than she fears anything else, even betraying her bigotry. However latent and denied it is, bigotry does seem to underpin Clinton’s use of the difference of her race from Obama’s as a tool to further her campaign.

The duck-billed platypus, amalgam of reptile and mammal, can stand as an emblem of the possibility of living without prejudice. Rather than spending so much time parsing our differences, how much better would the world be if we could acknowledge that the world is just as diverse and bizarre as we can accept it to be.

On the Supreme Court’s upholding of ID needs for voters, Barack Obama’s tussle with Wright’s preaching, and a couple of proposed field trips.

Upholding the Indiana state requirement for voters to show a picture ID, the Supreme Court majority concluded that this requirement wasn’t unduly burdensome on any class of voters. Indiana provides picture IDs at no cost for the poor and allows someone to vote without an ID if they subsequently show one within 10 days. (Souter, in his dissent, said the requirement could pose a non-trivial burden on many.)

After reading today that Obama attended Jeremiah Wright’s church for twenty years, I felt prompted to give some more thought to the controversy stirred up by Wright’s divisive and outspoken views. His critics would have Obama explain why he cannot be associated with Wright’s views when he sat through his sermons for twenty years.

Condoleezza Rice and the Bush administration have criticized President Jimmy Carter for meeting with Hamas and the Syrian leadership. Carter writes an elegant response to these criticisms in an op-ed today. What he says, effectively, is that avoiding discourse works far less well than engaging in discourse.

I don’t know whether Obama ever engaged Wright directly on his views. But just sitting through those sermons must have forced Obama into having to engage with the ideas being expressed, not to agree with them necessarily, but to acknowledge their presence in the world. If he’d got up and walked out and never come back he might have made a statement, but he would have missed out on years of study of Wright’s perspective — and Wright’s perspective is not unique. If the country’s leaders don’t engage with it, we won’t made progress against racism.

But while the furore continues the burden remains with Obama to define his identity. Much better for him to do this by being what he is (as he did in his eloquent speech on racism) rather than defend what he’s not.

(Ironically, sitting through endless speeches one disagrees with figures prominently in the job description for a law maker. Obama seems to have that qualification in spades.)

How does a Supreme Court judge begin to determine whether the acquisition of a picture ID constitutes a reasonable burden for a poor would-be voter in Indiana?

The ID may be free, but where are the administrative offices from where the IDs would be attained? How far from where people live? How convenient for public transportation? How long is the wait once they get there? What fears may large numbers of poor people have about applying for a picture ID?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they seem to be the kinds of questions one would need to answer before deciding whether the burden would be reasonable.

I suggest a field trip: Take the Supreme Court justices to Indiana. Let them go along with a couple of poor people to get their IDs, then decide.

I’d suggest the same for Obama’s critics. Have them attend a sermon at his church. Then ask them when they come out whether they’ve been swayed by Wright’s opinions.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On Barack Obama’s elitism and George Bush’s subversion of elitism.

Elitism (American Heritage Dictionary): “The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.”

It’s interesting that the definition of elitism doesn’t capture the idea of the criticism leveled at Barack Obama. Obama’s not accused of believing that certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment, but that some people are less enlightened, less inclined to see things as they really are. Specifically, in now infamous remarks in San Francisco, he has implied that working-class voters cling to religion and the right to bear arms out of a displaced resentment of their economic plight.

It seems important to distinguish Obama’s brand of elitism from the elitism that would favor the rights and privileges of a privileged group over those of the masses. One couldn’t say that Obama sets the concerns of the smart or wealthy over those of the average American. Obama’s elitism rests on the concept of “knowing better.”

But hasn’t Obama pursued political office and now higher office because he believes he has the insight, vision and personal resources to improve people’s lives? Without wanting to split hairs, anyone who seeks to put himself into a position of authority or power for the right reasons must be, to some degree and in this sense, an elitist.

George Bush (son of a president, connected, wealthy, ivy league educated) subverts elitism by presenting himself as a common man, at one in his world-view with working class Americans (and we have been given no reason to doubt the presentation). His unsophisticated approach to leadership and analysis seems to win him adherents with those who want to see the world as a place of simple absolutes — good against evil, right and against wrong, oppression versus freedom, free market versus regulation.

Two urgent questions arise:

1. What makes someone elitist (in the sense of “knowing better”)?

2. Do we went to be governed by an elitist or by someone who sees the world more concretely?

For conscious creatures, such as we are, the world has two distinct aspects — the concrete and the conceptual. Everyone understands and feels the weight of both aspects. But the degree to which we feel them differs from one person to another. Some people, such as Bush, tend to feel more comfortable with the physical, tangible aspect, and distrust concepts that require complex abstraction and sophisticated thinking. Other people (like Obama) tend to feel more comfortable and sure-footed with the conceptual aspect.

Plato and Aristotle may have approved of Obama’s unfortunate remarks, but as much as us elitists might want to impose our concepts on others, leadership and government can’t be successfully executed without an appreciation and respect for both. Too much of one or the other results in missteps.

Bush has screwed up because he’s eschewed the sophisticated analysis needed to anticipate problems and develop nuanced solutions. Obama, it seems, if he’s to be elected, will need to be careful to engage more with the tangibles of life and living, and, when necessary, keep his conceptual view of the world in perspective.

An elitist has the capacity to govern well if he or she can stay in touch with and not disdain or devalue the concrete aspects of life. A non-elitist can only govern well if he or she does not disdain or devalue the conceptual aspects of life. The flaws of a lop-sided approach to government have been only too clearly demonstrated over the past eight years.