The Wisdom of the Irish

If only more countries could have heads of state as wise and knowledgeable as Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins:

Teaching philosophy in schools, and promoting it in society, is urgently needed to enable citizens “to discriminate between truthful language and illusory rhetoric”, President Michael D Higgins has said. 

Speaking at a function at Áras an Uachtaráin to mark World Philosophy Day, which fell this week, the President expressed concern about an “an anti-intellectualism that has fed a populism among the insecure and the excluded”. 

Amid claims that we have entered a “post-truth” society, he asked how we might together and individually contribute to a “reflective atmosphere in the classrooms, in our media, in our public space”. 

“The dissemination, at all levels of society, of the tools, language and methods of philosophical enquiry can, I believe, provide a meaningful component in any concerted attempt at offering a long-term and holistic response to our current predicament.”  

[…] 

“The teaching of philosophy is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal to empower children into acting as free and responsible subjects in an ever more complex, interconnected and uncertain world,” Mr Higgins said. 

“A new politics of fear, resentment and prejudice against those who are not ‘like us’ requires the capacity to critique, which an early exposure to the themes and methods of philosophy can bring.”

(From: “Teach philosophy to heal our ‘post-truth’ society, says President Higgins,” The Irish Times [2016-11-19].)

Also recently in Ireland, Irish Senator Aodhán Ó Ríordáin spoke out with appropriate moral indignation against the Trump victory in last week’s U.S. election (despite receiving 1.6 million fewer votes than Clinton according to the most recent tally). His speech on November 10th was excellent. Watch it!

Erin go bragh!

The soul of a tyrant

Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen draws upon the Epic of Gilgamesh and Plato's Republic to diagnose Donald Trump as "a walking, talking example of the tyrannical soul."

Indeed.

Trump confirmed (yet again) his malignant nature in tonight's debate when he threatened to imprison Hillary Clinton should he be elected president. That is an attack on the very heart of liberal democracy.

November 8th cannot come soon enough.

On the radicalization of the U.S. Republican Party

Following up on the topic of my previous post, I thought that I should mention that Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann have an excellent article in today’s Vox: “The Republicans waged a 3-decade war on government. They got Trump.” The article refers back to the authors’ 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, and their related Washington Post article, “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem.” Here is the key passage from their 2012 argument:

The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

As Ornstein and Mann point out in the Vox article, the nomination of Trump – and the collapse of any serious opposition to that nomination amongst the party’s elites – vindicates their earlier thesis.

In the end, the exploitation of anti-government sentiment by Republican leaders, and the active efforts on their part to make all government look corrupt and illegitimate, reached its logical conclusion. The Republican political establishment looked no less corrupt, weak, and illegitimate than the Democratic one, and the appeal of a rank outsider became greater.

It’s grim reading. And it underscores how vital it is that Trump be defeated in November. Even if that happens, though, Ornstein and Mann are skeptical that the Republican Party can become a constructive force in American politics for the foreseeable future.