“There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason, but for mystery – not for penetrating clear thought, but for the whisperings of the irrational.”
Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time (1952)
Irony abounds. Even today, even after so much day-to-day evidence of presidential incapacity and malfeasance, millions of Americans continue to regard Donald Trump as an exemplary leader. This enduring preference can never be adequately explained by the ordinary structural features of American politics – for example, the electoral college, weak Democratic candidates, steadily expanding Article II (presidential) powers, etc.
What is needed instead is careful consideration of the wider cultural context from which this dissembling and disabling president was drawn.
There will, of course, be ample reasons for bewilderment. In any such multi-layered political matters, truth may prove counter-intuitive. In all these fiercely complex matters, explanatory context may pertain as much to educated persons of wealth and privilege as to millions of tangibly less fortunate Americans. Significantly, both categories include people who dearly love to chant in chorus and don the bright red hat messaging of demeaning Trump simplifications.
For those Americans who would take history seriously, one may draw certain limited but still fair comparisons with demographic beginnings of the Third Reich. Then, as now, the “whisperings” of a mutually gainful relationship (both economic and social) masked a virulent and uncontrollable formula. In the end, these earlier seductive siren calls turned out to be nothing less than the deadliest-ever prescription for insufferable declension and long-term despair.
Then, as now, those in power had relied cleverly upon blaming “all of the usual suspects;” that is, mercilessly exploiting the most evidently fragile and vulnerable scapegoats.
Then, as now, collective national decline arrived more-or-less indecipherably, often in hard-to-fathom increments, not as suddenly jolting or riveting events, and not as any precipitous or fearfully immobilizing “bolt from the blue.”
How shall this ominous precedent be explained? In part, helpfully correct answers must be sought in the ironic juxtaposition of privilege with philistinism. For such a seemingly self-contradictory fusion, the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had coined a specific term, one he foresaw could become more widely generic or even universal. This precisely suggestive German word was Bildungsphilister, or, when expressed in its most lucid and coherent English translation, “educated Philistine.” [1]
Language can clarify. Bildungsphilister is a term that could shed some additional light upon Donald Trump’s continuing support among so many of America’s presumptively well-educated. During the presidential campaign, Trump had several-times commented: “I love the poorly-educated,” but – in the end – a substantial fraction of his voter support actually arrived from the not-so-poorly-educated. Again recalling German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers’ indictment regarding “whisperings of the irrational,” one should soberly be reminded of an essentially kindred remark by Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels: “Intellect rots the brain.”
Truth is exculpatory. Uncomfortable truths must nonetheless be accepted. The conceptual distance between “I love the poorly educated” and “Intellect rots the brain” is not nearly as great as might first appear.
That’s just the way it is.
To be sure, there remain huge and meaningful distinctions between German National Socialism and the current US administration in Washington, but they express more a difference of great magnitude than of discernibly core origins. At one particularly obvious level, many American citizens remain willing to abide a president who not only avoids reading (literally anything), but who openly belittles both history and learning.
For negotiating successfully with North Korea, President Trump seriously advised that he would need only “attitude, not preparation.”
This caricatural advice was not intended as satire.
There is still more to explaining this national Trump declension. Do most Americans (even Trump’s political opponents) object to a president who has never read the US Constitution, the same revered document which he so solemnly swore “to uphold, protect and defend?”
Key questions cannot be skirted any longer. How has the United States managed to arrive at such a fearful and dismal place? What have been the particular and aggregated failures of American education, most notably in the universities? It’s a discomfiting but reasonable two-part question, especially as the Trump presidency is now busily transforming a self-deceiving country into a finely- lacquered national corpse.
Once upon a time in western philosophy, Plato revealed higher expectations for his “philosopher-king.” Yet, even if we should no longer plausibly expect a philosopher-king in the White House, ought we not still be entitled to a man or woman who manages to read and think seriously? At least sometimes?
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra warns prophetically: “One should never seek the `higher man’ at the marketplace.” But the marketplace was where a proudly anti-intellectual segment of America championed Donald J. Trump. What else should we possibly have expected? In the United States, we are measured by what we can buy.
This American president is not merely marginal or misguided. Quite literally, he is the diametric opposite of Plato’s philosopher-king and of Nietzsche’s higher-man. Incontestably, the Trump administration now reveals a wretched institutionalized inversion of whatever else might once have been ennobling in America. Even more worrisome, we are rapidly moving further and further backwards, visibly, steadily, not only in sustainable increments, but in starkly quantum leaps of reinforcing harms.
Donald Trump is no Thomas Jefferson.
Among so many other intellectual deficits, America’s current president does not understand that US history deserves its special pride of place. How many Americans have ever paused to recall that the Founding Fathers who framed the second amendment were not expecting or imagining automatic weapons? How many Americans can remember today that the early Republic was the religious heir of John Calvin and the philosophical descendant of both John Locke and Thomas Hobbes? How many US lawyers have ever heard of William Blackstone, the English jurist whose exquisitely learned Commentaries formed the common law underpinnings of America’s legal system?
Human beings are the creators of their machines; not the other way round. Still, there exists today an implicit and grotesque reciprocity between creator and creation, an elaborate and potentially lethal pantomime between the users and the used. Nowhere is this prospective lethality more apparent than among the deluded but endlessly loyal supporters of President Donald Trump. They follow him faithfully only because the wider American society had first been allowed to become an intellectual desert.
. Trump’s simplifying context offers millions of Americans an ill-founded kind of reassurance. Metaphorically, it provides a ubiquitous and tactically useful “solvent,” one capable of dissolving almost anything of tangible consequence. In higher education, the traditionally revered Western Canon of literature and art has largely been supplanted by the more pleasingly visible emphases on “branding.”
A few years ago, before my retirement as a Purdue University professor, I asked my students, a class of fifty, what would they choose if offered a degree right away, without ever having to take any further studies or coursework or tests (and therefore, without any further opportunities for “higher education”). Forty-seven students enthusiastically accepted the “offer.”
I don’t this was in any way an eccentric or idiosyncratic response.
Soon, even if we should somehow manage to avoid nuclear war and nuclear terrorism – an avoidance not to be taken for granted in the Trump Era – the swaying of the American ship will become so violent that even the hardiest lamps will be overturned. Then, the phantoms of great ships of state, once laden with silver and gold, may no longer lie forgotten. Then, perhaps, we will finally understand that circumstances that could send the compositions of Homer, Maimonides, Goethe, Milton, Shakespeare, Freud and Kafka to join the works of forgotten poets were neither stirringly unique nor happily transient.
In an 1897 essay titled “On Being Human,” Woodrow Wilson inquired tellingly about the “authenticity “of Americans. “Is it even open to us to choose to be genuine?” he asked. This earlier US president answered “yes,” but only if Americans could first refuse to join the manifestly injurious “herds” of mass society. Otherwise, as Wilson already understood, our entire society would be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of broken machinery, more hideous even than the palpable decompositions of individual persons.
In every society, as Emerson and the other American Transcendentalists had already recognized, the scrupulous care of each individual “soul” is most important. There likely can be a “better” American soul,[2] and thereby a correspondingly improved American politics, but not before we can first acknowledge a prior obligation. This antecedent requirement is a national responsibility to meaningfully overcome the grave barriers of mass, crowd or “herd” culture.
With some luck, even after the latest evident failure of diplomacy with North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un, the Trump presidency will manage to end without a catastrophic nuclear war. But for the United States, even that “happy ending” might represent little more than a temporary reprieve. Unless we finally begin to work much harder at changing this society’s consistently degrading antipathies to intellect and reason, we will have to face periodic and increasingly perilous eras of national decline.
As Americans who could once again take pride in genuine learning and education, we would then be much better prepared to select a decent, thoughtful and capable US president.
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[1] The first language of the author here, Professor Louis René Beres, was German. This is his straightforward and uncontroversial translation.
[2] Sigmund Freud maintained a general antipathy to all things American. In essence, he most objected, according to Bruno Bettelheim, to this country’s “shallow optimism” and its seemingly corollary commitment to a crude form of materialism. America, thought Freud, was very evidently “lacking in soul.” See: Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), especially Chapter X.