Month: March 2024

It’s Erasmus Who Prevents Me from Believing in Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories range from explaining, on one end of the spectrum, single events like 9/11 or the assassination of JFK, to, on the other end, unlocking the mysteries to all human power structures and dynamics, as evidenced in the intrigues of globalization, finance, secret societies, and even individual power players who may or may not be coordinated in syndicates of some sort. All conspiracy theories, however, share some assumptions about human potential, control, and intentionality that run counter, I’d argue, to a conception of human agency presented by rhetoricians throughout the ages.

Such were my thoughts as I led my class into a foray of De Copia, the Renaissance textbook on rhetoric by Erasmus of Rotterdam. So I’d like to share a meaty quote from our class textbook,  The Rhetorical Tradition, by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, that provocatively summarizes Erasmus’s influence in a kind of dissoi logoi that certainly leaves us uncertain about a lot of things, including the infallibility of human knowledge and agency:

Erasmus is generally regarded as a key figure in the Renaissance, both as one who brought Italian learning north and as one who made major contributions in his own right. Historian Anthony Grafton and literary scholar Lisa Jardine argue that Erasmus attempted to professionalize humanism as a philological discipline. Applied to sacred texts, such analysis could become a means not only to verbal fluency but also to spiritual insight and piety. On the other hand, rhetorician Thomas O. Sloane sees method in the madness of The Praise of Folly. Sloane argues that Erasmus, through the persona of Folly, identifies himself with the Greek Sophists and their method of exploring arguments through contraries, or dissoi logoi. Sloane maintains that Erasmus saw method as leading ultimately to insight into the fallibility of human knowledge, not to a self-evident world system. If every issue has at least two sides, then one must argue for the most probable. Failing that, one must surrender to folly—that is, give up the idea that reason will provide a definitive answer, and decide on the basis of historically determined constraints and personal circumstances. For most people most of the time, this fallibility of human knowledge requires accepting social conventions, including common beliefs, as the delusions necessary to collective life. For some people at exceptional moments, awareness of this fallibility leads to the rejection of conventional wisdom in favor of a quest for spiritual transcendence that will seem mad to the common folk but that is the only possible antidote to human fallibility. 

The quote on Erasmus sums up my critique of the inadequacy of conspiracy thinking. Conspiracy theories are rooted in a belief that there is “a self-evident world system”—evident, that is, if you can uncover it. The knowledge and power of that system are in the hands of the few, but the system is knowable by those who can peel back the obfuscations and train their eyes on what is “really” going on.

My problem with conspiracy theories is the grandeur and control they ascribe to human agency. If there’s a hidden agenda operative somewhere that is the “real cause,” there is as well a belief in human control, capacity, talent, coordination, and the like. There’s the belief that these things not only exist, but that they are determinative (and susceptible to discovery and exposure).

None of this rings true to my own understanding of myself as an agent (one who is relatively intelligent and accomplished) or to groups and individuals I’ve come to know directly and indirectly over the span of the decades of my life. When I look at every accomplishment I’ve achieved, I see as much luck and accident and randomness as I see design and intention and agendas. When I look at my own failings as well as those of others, I see incompetence as a bigger factor, overall, than malevolence. True, there is malevolence—both in me and in others—in certain instances. But I can’t see it as the essential component that a conspiracy designation would suggest it is.

At such times, faced with a continuum where both incompetence and malevolence may be seen as possible keys, I turn to Kenneth Burke, our 20th century Erasmus, to tune the judgment:

The progress of humane enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken.  When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy. (Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, p. 41)

Rule: So much of what’s wrong with the world is the result of simple sloppiness, ignorance, inability—in a word, mistakenness or error or fallibility. Part of my response to conspiracy theorists is, simply, “It’s Occam’s Razor, man.” Don’t over-complicate things. Or: “The banality of evil.” The simplest explanation is best; when things go wrong it’s usually more ridiculous and ordinary than diabolical and architectonic, a point made poignantly by the coiner of the phrase “banality of evil,” Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem. We needed that book to contextualize one of the most evil episodes of recorded human history as partially on the slope of a “comedy of errors”—i.e., in the complicities of bureaucracies and unthinking individuals and institutions—rather than a cosmic epic tragedy of genuine conspiracy intended and pursued by knowing agents.

This is not to say we should let our guard down and naively deny the cautions that conspiracy theorists provide. The system is rigged in all the ways the critics (not all of whom are conspiracy theorists) have long been identifying. Capitalism, racism, sexism, finance, empire—all operate in both conscious and unconscious ways to consolidate power, subjugate masses, and perpetuate entrenched structures. There are bad actors exploiting privilege and pursuing oppression and dominance. These things operate and thrive in all the contemporary socioeconomic and political structures available to us.

Of course. But if we make the move to accept, as our basic condition and salvation, a submergence into uncertainty, we can (1) forgive a portion of the “intentionality” of the rigged systems, and (2) become persuaded that the whole picture is not controlled by any empowered group or human agent. We can, with Erasmus, come closer to “accepting social conventions, including common beliefs, as the delusions necessary to collective life.” Tempered by the humility implicit in such humanism we can group together and build consensuses with assertions that may not provide definitive answers, but yet enable and support better, newer versions of the common good.

Purification of a “Pure Idea” by Excess?

March 14, 2024

Just how far can you succeed with a “pure idea” that is pursued relentlessly—and effectively—against all odds? Maybe only so far, and not—however close it comes—to the end of the line of ultimate success? That, I hope on March 14, 2024, is the eventual moral of the story with Trump. Trump has taken us really, really far into his campaign of winning, but maybe not so far as appearances or our worst fears would have it. 

To those who would demure that Trump is not winning, I would direct your attention to the recent Supreme Court decision on immunity that has supercharged Trump’s delay tactics (likely preventing the trying of the January 6 trial before the election), and Judge Aileen Cannon’s rulings today on Trump’s frivolous motions for dismissal. On their surface, Cannon’s rulings appear to deny Trump, but at a more insidious level, they set up the possibility for a  complete dismissal of the classified documents case—all thirty-plus counts—and without the possibility of appeal. As one insider ominously commented on Trump years ago: “Don’t count him out.” For all his deficiencies, corruption, and failure, Trump’s “pure” method of forging ahead has a way of leaving him on top, at least apparently, and at least for the time being.

The “pure idea” of Trump’s that I would characterize in this blog is his approach to politics, and really to all matters dealing with business, as presented by both him and those who study him. It starts with a kind of distillation of Roy Cohn—in particular, Cohn’s refusal, ever, to admit anything, to give an inch. Added to that is a kind of Norman Vincent Peale optimism, as has been documented elsewhere, in the Trumps’ unbending commitment to the power of positive thinking. Enabling/mixed into this “purity” would be all the pathologies of personality that have been well explained by Mary Trump and others—Trump’s insecurity; his daddy issues; his sense of inferiority—not to mention all the personal failings of low intelligence, lack of discipline, cowardice, mendaciousness, misogyny, racism, and the like.

Put the whole package together, amp it up, enlist a few key enablers—and there you have it: a recipe for a presidential candidate, and more, a recipe for a president. So, we know that part of the answer to the “just-how-far” question is, simply and horrifically, “becoming the most powerful person on earth.” That far. Hence, the descent by so many of us onlookers into Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS)—something, by the way, I’ve suggested should be felt by all right-thinking individuals, not just the Frank Grimeses of the world. Really, how did 2016 happen?

But does Trump’s success go farther? Does it go all the way to “Destroyer of Modern Democracy,” “Destroyer of the ‘American Experiment””?

American democracy has been messy as it has been inspiring. This thing, once assumed by many of us to be so foundational and permanent, does have a history, and the very concept of “history” tells us that a thing that can come into existence may also be a thing that can fall out of existence. America was an offshoot of the Enlightenment, which itself was a moment in time; the idea of America stretched towards a realization of liberal human possibility and actualization. It was all attempted—a rare exception in recorded history—among once discordant immigrants who found ways to live together, more or less, within certain parameters of law and order. But our founders and ancestors may have created something, alas, that might prove to be a temporary, fragile oasis in a larger trajectory of social oppression and injustice (and foolishness and ignorance and greed).

So many have commented on how our institutions and systems of justice, not to mention conventions of social comity, have been stretched to the breaking point under Trump. They’ve bent, bent, bent, and then have been stretched and re-bent. But arguably, they have not yet broken, and if accountability is in the offing, we may return to a more normal kind of routine where the system operates in a groove that is recognizable as fair and within bounds.

Besides raising uncertainties about the future viability of America, my TDS has brought me to question many foundational values I have long have taken for granted as widely shared. The idea of decency—of humility, gentleness, and submissiveness—the beauty as well as the moral impetus of these things—has been dissolved before our very eyes, brushed aside as arbitrary presences or principles that might be or not be, as those in power decide. 

While our energy flags in the relentlessness of the Trump dissolution, we nonetheless have some cause for hope. If accountability does eventually occur, the “just how far” question will stop a bit short, and leave us with a democracy in place. 

But there are also other hopes in the struggle. The coming together of the TDS crowd of critics, teachers, lawyers, journalists, psychologists, and scholars has performed a public service that is awe-inspiring in its scope, dedication, and promise for a better day. We huddle together; we are a bulwark—and conditions, particularly in the all-important area of coms in such conflicts—are favorable for victory.

It’s hard to imagine—either a Trump or a proper TDS response—in a pre-Internet, pre-social media, pre-24-hour-news-cycle world. The ability to bring critics and communities together, in both agonizing grief and incisive analysis—as YouTube, apps, networks, and social media have done—creates both conditions of and solutions to the Trump problem. As for the latter, we can positively luxuriate in insightful critiques of every aspect of the saga of Trump unfolding in real time. So many lawyers have committed themselves to the public service of tracing out the implications and possible remedies available. As have people with significant firsthand experience.

When I read, for instance, Barbara Res’s book, Tower of Lies, I find myself grateful for the guidance, the examples, the connections she enables of past tendencies to present actions. As Trump’s long-serving VP and chief engineer, she brings a record and commentary that not only illuminate the etiology of current behaviors, but that also empower more effective resistance to them. Beyond Res, we need the endless analyses of every daily move provided by legal commentators recording and breaking down the evolving narrative. We must process all this, and to do so, we need the back-breaking, excessive, obsessive attentions of so many in the know from experience as well as education and leadership roles. They have purified and acted upon their TDS with a kind of dedication I find both inspiring and impossible to imagine, were I in their position. My response, typically when faced with such a complex, Byzantine nexus of evil and involved drama and detailed complexity, is to throw up my hands, shake my head, lament, and collapse in a wallowing kind of despair.

Res, Cohen, Kirschner, Weissmann, Popock, Meisales, Katyal, Rubin, and more, are worthy, noble guides, leading us into—and out of—the morass. These storytellers—the talent and dedication they bring to unpacking all that is there to unpack—are our saviors and are owed our deepest gratitude. They create conditions for redemption and for a time when they can back out of the excess they have been compelled to enter into.

All of which brings me to the question part of my title: Can redemption result from the practice of purification by excess? In his essay, “By Ice, Fire, or Decay,” Kenneth Burke discusses “three modes of redemption—redemption by ice, fire, or decay.” The essay is a review of Clifford Odets play, Paradise Lost, which Burke says deals with all three modes, but finally lands on decay: “Like certain ancient heresies, [the play] pictures the ‘good’ arising from the complete excess of the ‘bad,’ as the new growth sprouts from the rotting of the seed” (Philosophy of Literary Form, 431). 

Trump’s unrelenting pursuit of his “pure idea,” fueled by his talent at demagoguery and bullying—and unblemished by any pivot or mitigation—has set in motion a full-blown response of TDS. Taken together, Trump’s prolific Trumpism, and the resulting TDS-imbued Trumpology, both overgrown and tangled in contemporary social media, leave us, collectively, “ripe” for a “complete excess of the ‘bad.’”

Let us lean in. May the ensuing rottenness pass, please, at some point, and put us in a state ready for that new growth.

Return to SSW; Continuation of It All, with Traumas in Full Bloom

March 13, 2024

It’s SSW time again after a month’s break. The world has moved on, and not in all bad ways. That’s the thing about the world: it’s such a tease. We catch glimpses of God, of possibility, like the first sighting of the Grand Canyon at twilight, and we exult that it’s right there, and I’m here, and comfortable, and pretty well set for the near future. I hear reports from friends of good news (as in the phone call of a dear friend finding a new job after a too-long and disruptive process). Spring weather is with us, and not necessarily too early to be mixed in with that larger fear.

But then the apocalypses start flitting around the edges of things.

My abiding apocalypse, of course, is Donald Trump, and the accompanying Trump Derangement Syndrome, my TDS. I embrace the naming of the syndrome, for it properly signifies the extremes and tentacled nature of Trump and his insidious and clumsy and blunt and pathological impacts. Trump has been so studied, defined, vilified, praised, condemned, in every aspect of his being, and with such expertise and thoroughness, that I shouldn’t feel the need to rehash all that’s there. But I do feel the need. It’s been so personal, so devastating, so uprooting of my worldview and values—and hopes for existence, the future, and humanity. I need to work through things, and naming my affliction is the starting point. Now, I need to define and characterize the syndrome as best I can.

I have been reading Barbara Res’s account of the Trump apocalypse, Tower of Lies. It’s a book I need to read slowly, because it’s just so hard to spend that much time with Trump, the young Trump, conquering the world, and in ways so familiar and predictable from what we now know. But Res is a counselor; she takes us through the process of Trump, and in a way to inoculate us from some of the effects. I am attempting a “purification by excess,” which basically is a leaning into the syndrome as a way of getting beyond it. If we get through it, we might encapsulate it, and, mirabile dictu, excise it. Hearing stories of Trump’s veniality, his ignorance, his bullying, his charisma, his powers—all deployed in the building of his real estate empire oddly puts my mind at rest. Seeing the continuities of his approach—in bullying contractors and subordinates, in skating over critical details, in taking credit for the accomplishments of others, in over-simplifying challenges, and on and on—makes Trump oddly more knowable and less toxic. As Judge Kaplan said at the start of the E. Jean Carroll case, in one of his first shut-downs of Trump: “You just can’t help yourself!” It’s true: Trump must be Trump. 

For years, though, I’ve known/felt that Trump, per se, is not the problem. There will always be extreme versions of damaged/damaging people afflicting the world. It’s the followers we need to worry about. It’s always been the followers (the enablers, sycophants, cowards, cultists). Why has he been able to secure such a following? There are just too many to write them off. They vary in many ways, including intelligence and level of education. So, I look at Trump and I marvel at his efficaciousness in … well, let’s call it … rhetoric.

Back to my TDS: one manifestation of it is my current addiction to the MSNBC folk who talk so incessantly about Trump and his tentacles plunging into our social/civic fabric. Their analysis is so varied, deep, and continuous. If I’m about “purification by excess,” I have an easy and ready and omnipresent medium through which I may process my gorging. My phone connects me wherever I am—in the house, in the car, in my office—and my algorithm indulges me in a loop that never loops, but just keeps progressing to the next ten-minute clip. All the lawyering, with motions and legal exegesis and panel commentary—does it educate me, or is it an orgy of TDS porn?

The Res book and the TDS excursions point to, I hope, a post-Trump world, one in which we have replaced—re-established—the guardrails—of civility, of law, of propriety, of the humanistic values towards which civilization has, gasp (dare I say?), been bending? I do take comfort in millennials, Gen Z-ers and even younger ones who have skipped out on the TDS stage of things. I’ve heard from young people who just look on, shake their head, and really just express a desire to move on. They just want a Trump-absent world; they suffer no lures into TDS; they feel no need to “conquer” Trump; they really just don’t want to think about him ever again. With simple sensibleness, they want to focus on the kind of concerns of a better life ahead through gradual improvement as we might achieve though conventional means of education, compassion, empathy, and the like.

I want to exult humility. I suppose that desire is the foundational principle of my TDS. The Holy Spirit, to me, the greatest of the three Gods, is the least assertive, the most humble. The Holy Spirit’s assertions are the quiet feelings of knowing; they are the afterglow of the prior chaos, process, talk, drama, learning, and the like. The Holy Spirit is nothing about self-promotion. The Holy Spirit is the Anti-Trump. Trump’s existence calls into question the vitality and agendas of the Holy Spirit. As such, I have become deranged with the syndrome, and I await the return of that peaceful feeling/knowledge/glow of that time beyond-Trump.

The Res book does help with this outcome. As we experience the building of the empire, with all its crass, ugly, and craven maneuvering, I can envision feeling compassion for the man, in seeing him act in ways that make sense in terms of ambition, vanity, and insecurity—motives, oddly, that are somewhat redemptive. It all make sense, after a fashion, and in coming into focus, the edge is dulled … a bit.