ROGER KIMBALL: Beyond Reason: How Shame and Disgust Shape Law and Society.
It might seem that the meditations of a seventeenth-century French philosopher are pretty distant from the conundrums facing us in the twenty-first century. In some ways, this is true. But Descartes did an enormous amount to define the methods, goals, and ideals of scientific rationalism, a worldview that systematically deprecates the significance of any experience not amenable to rational analysis. Paul Valéry summed up the problem in his brief sketch for an essay on Descartes. Like many moderns, Valéry found himself bewitched by the heroic solipsism of Descartes’ formula, cogito ergo sum. Yet he knew that a corollary of that formula was a world in which “the word ‘knowledge’ is increasingly denied to anything which cannot be translated into figures.” Among other things, this meant that, as Valéry put it, “the truth for modern man, which is exactly related to his freedom of action over nature, seems more and more to be in opposition to everything that our imagination and our feelings would like to be true.” As Valéry understood, we owe our humanity not only to our ability to reason but also to our status as creatures of feeling, imagination, and moral responsibility. In the end, the idea that we are the “masters and possessors of nature” is a risible illusion bred by overweening cleverness. For ultimately, it is nature that masters and possesses us, a fact we deny to our intellectual peril and moral diminishment.
What has all of this to do with the law? For a first answer to that question, let’s broaden the field from hunches to those great underrated human resources, prejudice and the feelings of disgust and moral outrage. On those subjects, I can think of no better place to begin than with Martha Craven Nussbaum, who, among other attainments, is a professor of law, philosophy, classics, and divinity at the University of Chicago. In her book Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law and some related articles, Professor Nussbaum argues that “the law, most of us would agree, should be society’s protection against prejudice.”
Really? I suspect “most of us would agree” that the law ought to be society’s protection against crime. But perhaps Professor Nussbaum thinks that prejudice is itself a crime—though surely not all prejudice. Edmund Burke said that prejudice “renders a man’s virtue his habit.” He meant that if we have a predisposition—a prejudice—toward the right things, they more easily become second nature. Surely Professor Nussbaum would not wish for the law to protect us from that sort of prejudice. And it must be said that she herself is clearly prejudiced against anything she labels “conservative.” I doubt that she believes that the law should be society’s protection against prejudice directed at conservatives.
CBS’S ROBERT COSTA BEGS BILL MAHER TO STOP MOCKING LEFTIES, JUST MOCK REPUBLICANS:
CBS reporter Robert Costa put together a puffball interview for HBO Real Time host Bill Maher on their show Sunday Morning. They let him claim he’s not ideological and didn’t laugh when he said “I speak for the normies. I speak for that vast middle that is tired of the partisanship. I don’t want to hate half the country, and I don’t hate half the country.”
Bill Maher represents the “vast middle,” the “normies”? Conservatives across America would make a face at that. At bottom, Maher is a bit of shock jock, so that when Democrats are in power he’s going to mock them as well, just as he suggested on Friday night that the Democrats “blew it” in all their legal warfare on Trump.
What was amazing in this profile was Costa imploring Maher to lay off mockery of the Left, just shine the spotlight on the right-wingers!
COSTA: You write a lot of throughout this book that the left irritates you, frustrates you at times, but the right often alarms you.
MAHER: Yes. They’re very alarming. They’re extremely alarming. More alarming.
COSTA: What do you say to your critics, though, who say that you should just focus on them, Bill, if they’re more alarming to you than the Left. And why not shine the spotlight on them only?
MAHER: The truth isn’t one-sided like that. The Democrats constantly are,running against Trump with the idea ‘You people out there couldn’t possibly vote for this guy.’ And people are saying, ‘Watch me. Hold my beer. Watch me vote for him again.’
Costa got his start at NRO and the Wall Street Journal, and yet, like fellow Post employee Jennifer Rubinand her former colleague David Weigel, who also began at conservative or libertarian Websites, as the MSM likes say to about a politician who slowly begins to lean further and further hard left, he sure has grown in office!