Archives for January 2019

Trending for the moment yet stimulating for nigh three-quarters of a hundred years is the following question: would you or would you not—if given the hypothetical chance—murder baby Hitler at the time of his birth? Would you kill in the crib this infant of a tyrant, this future executioner who hasn’t yet a hair on his head?

Persistent as it is disquieting, the “baby Hitler” question is one that won’t soon remit. It’s one to which we—and by “we” I mean those of us inclined toward a counterfactual, philosophical point of view—often return. Fruitless though its pursuit may be, it tempts us. It calls seductively yet it always frustrates at the end. Here, we succumb to its temptation and offer a response.  

The question isn’t the least bit novel, yet it remains acutely controversial. For this there’s good reason. It’s evocative and distressing. It’s startling even to those who don’t easily startle. It forces the usually insensitive historian, the comfortable armchair philosopher first to shiver and then deeply to think. She’s made carefully to weigh her options, to place on the scale her moral judgments, and ultimately to decide. On the one end, she weighs infanticide; on the other, genocide. The former is a literally small tragedy—no greater than at most ten pounds and a few ounces. Added to that weight is the potentiality for a benevolent and meaningful adult life that sits unrecognized far-off and way ahead. The latter is a quite different and more harrowing beast. It’s an historical footprint that’s immeasurably large. It’s the decimation of a people, the near-eradication of a religion, and the full-fledged Holocaust of Jews, Gypsies, outcasts—of us all.

To satiate your intellectual appetite in this course of thought, I set before you the odd scenario and again ask, if indeed you were to awaken tomorrow morning to find yourself so godly as to be completely unencumbered by the restraints of space and time, would you not travel back and “off” that now infant, now infamous Fuhrer? If temporality were to be suspended and time rendered naught, and if the grand and awesome beauty of physics were to be considered a mere smudge on the possible sways of life, would you not hasten back in time to the first decade of the most sanguinary century of which our human race has yet been a part? Once there, would you not leap at the reverberative chance to murder the child who’d become the man who’d be responsible for the lion’s share of the twentieth-century’s death? Would you not carry out with a sense of divine sanction, with a feeling of human obligation, and with a drive of personal zeal this truly historic coup?

The fin de siècle beckons; the infant Adolf Hitler awaits. Likely, as are all boys to whom a doting German-Austrian mother tends, our little Adolf is being swaddled near the close of day. Klara Hitler—a woman whose surname both obscures and defines her first—probably holds and pacifies the child whose own first name will never again be used. In a dark Austrian bedchamber, she lulls to sleep the newest member of her growing family of Hitlers. Infantile, knowing not his left hand from his right, baby Adolf is enjoying the attention of Klara and her gentle, maternal touch. It’s the kind of incipient feminine influence, so necessary to a well-developed boy, that did the later Hitler no good.

Little does she know, a hateful and odious manner of thinking will soon envelop and define the boy. The seeds of a Pan-Germanic, sadistic, racist, fascist, Aryan, millenarian view are beginning to germinate in his young bones. Out of Klara’s arms he’ll soon jump, first to the art schools of Vienna and then to the trenches at Ypres. He’ll fail in his pursuit at becoming an aesthete. Artists, though doubtless of a passionate type, are seldom if ever so pugnacious.

His success will be in having been forged into a soldier. For the remainder of his life, he won’t deviate from this line of work. He’ll fight intrepidly for his adopted Bavaria. He’ll become disillusioned by and exasperated of a post-bellum world—one in which he sees no peace if there’s to be no German pride. He’ll perceive as a gratuitous “slap-in-the-face” the Allied Powers’ imposition of a slew of reparations. France and especially Britain have saddled on his once proud, now vanquished German people an insurmountable debt. It’s at once crippling and insulting. Determined not to stand for it, he’ll get to work as a small-time orator on the public scene. He’ll refine his political vent and better formulate his own Nationalist-Socialist creed. This frightful new Demosthenes of the Deutschland will learn to polish his eloquence, captivate an audience, and saturate his rhetoric to an acidic degree. He’ll learn to put into words the feelings he could never hope to exude in his art.

What he’ll further go on to do need not be retold here; the corpses speak for themselves. The answer, then, to our introductory question seems self-evident. If the price to be paid for the preservation of millions of Jewish lives, hundreds of thousands of euthanized children, millions of butchered German youth is but one single Austrian infant boy named Adolf Hitler, the answer appears simple. Kill the damned boy and save the innumerable and innocent many.

This is the position (again, to kill rather than not to kill baby Hitler) to which most people, upon first considering this macabre thought experiment, cleave. Viscerally, it feels the more justified of the two. So too, as it turns out, is it the more retributive. The baby deserves to die, those staking this position attest, and perhaps even to suffer in the process as well. Yet ultimately, this desire to see baby Hitler killed isn’t a blind conviction nor an unprepossessingly morbid fascination with infanticide and death. Rather, in the best of cases, it’s the sober decision of the utilitarian. She wishes to see to it that all others, who would’ve otherwise become ash if adult Hitler had his way, might live. In a word, kill the one in order to save the many.

This is the ethical school of thought for whose formulation we have the inimitable Jeremy Bentham and the liberal John Stuart Mill to thank. The latter certainly improved upon the former’s work, but both constructed their respective philosophies on common ground. They wanted, in essence, to pursue the maximization of happiness, the augmentation of pleasure, the diminution of pain. The means by which this maximally “hedonistic” or “felicific”, to use Bentham’s terms, outcome came about mattered not. The end was to be more highly esteemed than its antecedent means. Such an end was to be judged morally right or wrong, palatable or repulsive, based on the consequences that it produced.

The consequentialist, to give this eager killer of baby Hitler her proper name, stands athwart the deontologists. More than merely recondite names, the two schools have debated each other for the better part of two hundred years. The victor, as the contest stands today, is yet to be declared. Though it should be said that no one holds their breath for the crowning of the philosophical champion in this toilsome, ponderous fights of academic distinction.

To put it in as succinct a manner as is possible, the deontologist is duty-bound. She’s a moralist in whose unwavering opinion the joined senses of duty and fidelity are prioritized above all. Quiet and resolute where the consequentialist is possibly vagarious and ever-changing, the deontologist regards as inviolate the established moral precepts to which she’s bound. In the halls of her hagiography stands alone the sage of Konigsberg, the great Immanuel Kant. It’s at his pedestal she bows in intellectual deference, recognizing the unique mark on humanity he left. Transcendental idealism, metaphysics, critiques of pure and practical reason, and pie-in-the-sky wishes for perpetual peace—of all these exhausting cognitive feats, Kant’s grand masterpiece is his deontological thought.

So grand, indeed, that we continue to esteem it even to this day. Applying it to the question at hand, the proud Kantian, the dutiful deontologist would rebuke the consequentialist’s position that baby Hitler need be killed. After all, she who subscribes to Kant is admonished to move about this world as though the maxim of her action were to become, by her very will, a universal law. This, in so many words, is the philosopher’s bitingly persuasive “categorical imperative”—the perhaps overly-syllabic idea for which he’s so deservedly loved. The idea would encapsulate the entirety of his noble ethical pursuit. A law that might enable the infanticide of baby Hitler would, perforce, permit the murder of any child who might be suspected of transgressions later on in life. Any child so ill-fated wouldn’t have a passing chance. It would be as if he were, before acquiring the ability to speak, completely predestined to an abruptly premature end.

In most cases, when comparing Kant’s argument with that shared by Bentham and Mill, the former is the more compelling. That said, the case of baby Hitler gives the confident Kantian an unusual pause. The problem involving Hitler is one that’s altogether different. It strains the tendency to deem victorious Kant in all philosophical debates. Hitler was, after all, a uniquely bad boy. Yet still, even as I come closest to siding rather with the British empiricists than the German idealist sage, I can’t force myself to deviate from Kant.

Infanticide mustn’t be allowed. Indeed, it’s prohibition ought to become, if we want the best and most humane of worlds, a universal law. In need of further convincing? Ask yourself, would you permit the murder of your own newborn child whom you carry in your arms? Would you offer him to death if informed by a time-traveler that the baby suckling at your breast would be the devil of his age? Surely you’d be startled (while second-guessing the parenting books you’d read), but I hazard to guess you’d refuse this hitman speaking prophecies of the future. You’d set a course toward the prevention of such an end and hope to improve upon this portentous lot.

We’re thus left with the uncomfortable resolution that baby Hitler will live. What, then, are we left to do? Are we idly to sit by and let history repeat itself to the tune of millions of dead Jews? If we can intervene in his life or death, surely we’re permitted to do more. The best course at this point would be for us to remove from his home this infant Hitler and change the conditions in which he was reared. After all, a man is only slightly more than the sum total of his parts, and it’s his past experiences that most fully build him into the person he becomes. As such, we blame not “Hitler” exclusively, but the constituent parts that made him into the demon he became. He, like every other vile killer that history has been so unfriendly to produce, is a man constructed by the circumstances in which he lived, the influences to which he was exposed. Change those two things, and you obviate atrocity.

Thus, baby Hitler must live. So too must baby Napoleon and for that matter, baby Nero and baby Caligula as well. It’s useful to remember that before this thought experiment was asked exclusively of baby Hitler, it was applied to all the aforementioned kings. In the case of all, if given the chance to kill them in their infancy, the impulse is to do just that. But we must, in our hasty time-travel, stop and think. The moral route is to drop the dagger, to pick up the pacifier, and to change whatever circumstances you can.

When it isn’t outright anomalous to hear spoken by a Democrat the necessities of thrift and the exorbitances of cost, such language strikes the average, even apolitical ear as a glib amusement. However, not everyone is so easily entertained. Really, among those still intent on listening, I think only few would consider themselves genuinely amused at hearing this sort of talk. Fewer still would be brought all the way to the edge of laughter or somewhere happily beyond.

Instead, rather solemn and impatient are the countless, overwhelmingly conservative faces that find in this newly “prudent” and financially revamped Democratic Party little humor and nothing at which to laugh. Those observers from the right know the Party for what it is and they clearly see what’s developing before their eyes: a display of the other side’s insincerity, of its speaking of but not living out a frugal ideal. They are, in their response, forgivably mirthless.

Not known to take warmly to the dirty marriage of the words “fiscal” and “responsibility”, Democrats are usually and, for that matter, quite shamelessly content in spending your money beyond their or anyone else’s conceivable means. Thus, the political becomes the prodigal and the public servant empties the country’s wallet like a king. To them, debt is more than merely fashionable or useful for a short time. It’s enduring, vital, and omnipresent.

The following aptly sums up the general consensus when it comes to economics on the left: taxes should be high and complaints low; future bills should be ignored and modern welfare embraced; free markets should be fettered and subsidies ingrained; government should be munificent and income redistribution within easy reach. Deficit spending is no temporary crutch, upon which one relies for a short-while as Keynes might’ve hoped. Rather, it’s a perennial pair of stilts upon which one balances and from which one hopes not to stumble and fall. The stilts, it might be said, tend to grow taller. One is then led not by his volition, but by a wobbling, ponderous stride. Above all, though, enjoined on each adherent to this philosophy is this: one ought not to ask at the checkout isle exactly what was the cost. To do so would be to spoil the decades-long shopping spree.

And so, fiscally “irresponsible” feels as though it’s too weak a word when attempting a description of the Democratic Party’s spending habits. Profligacy, then, might be better suited to its fundamental creed (however unavoidably pejorative the word might appear to be). But disparagement isn’t my chief, nor even my secondary aim. In the above, hasty, and perhaps for that reason unfair description of the manner in which the Democratic party conducts its business, I simply wanted to point out the exiguous degree to which the party normally concerns itself with cost.

But, normality, or something at least approximate to it, has become a nearly mythic idea. We’ve heard talk of it, but cast aside those whispers as the illusory, bygone ramblings of old. We expect it not to arise again in our life and so we sally forth. Now, as the tempestuous debate over border security funding stretches on toward its third week, one must ask how it is that Democrats care so passionately about cost when they never seem to have before.

Doubtless, the $5.7 billion with which the president plans to “build his wall” is a quite large bundle of cash. And, as in all cases of government expenditures on so grand a scale, one ought to examine fully the manner by which it’s spent. Such scrutiny ought to always be applied to ventures such as these, whether you’re an immigration dove or hawk. That said, unlike numerous other government checks, whose ultimate products we seldom see, this one will be tangibly, incontrovertibly, and publicly known. The southern border, forever so pervious, will at long last have become a veritable barrier. What was illusory will have become forged in steel. What was yearned for will have become effectuated and built. Beyond the curvaceous, thoughtless natural flow of the Rio Grande from the American southwest to the Mexican Gulf, our nation will have become unequivocally defined. It will have become finally concrete.

Perhaps it’s for that very reason the Democrats in Congress have become so manifestly loath to sign onto the now three-weeks idle government funding bill. The contentious part of the bill is, of course, the $5.7 billion worth of funding for the proposed border wall (for whose final construction, most analysts shyly agree, the actual cost will soar in excess of $10 billion). But Democrats aren’t arguing against this inflated though not inconceivable number. They think that $5.7 billion is far too high a cost.

And a fiscal conservative (doubling as an immigration dove) might even agree. But just as the Democrats state their case for the wall’s excess and its fiscal inanity, they’ve consolidated the new, progressive liberal agenda on which they’ll be running from here on out. In brief, it enumerates among its top priorities a “Green New Deal” to combat the ravages of climate change, a universal health insurance program by the name of Medicare for all, and universities gratis—a “free” national college tuition measure through whose endowment every person might obtain a degree. Henceforth, the phrase “fiscal responsibility” won’t even have a place in the most archaic of political dictionaries. This tripartite platform of healthcare, education, and the environment, is laughably economically untenable. And if $5.7 billion sounded like a discomfortingly large sum of cash, just imagine the cost of putting into action this bloated, chimerical agenda.

In comparison with what “free” healthcare and education and an overhauled energy program would cost, $5.7 billion is hardly a drop in the pale. It’s a penny in the purse of a Democratic Party indefatigably eager to spend beyond its means. It’s clear, on the final score, that the Party is indeed “pound foolish” and is only pretending (by rebuffing the president’s spending bill) to be “penny wise”. Rather, it’s pound foolish and penny unwise.

In the busy agora of ideas that is our internet, the dizzying stoa and gathering-place of our unnaturally electronic lives, Jordan Peterson has emerged as the Socrates of our modern day.

The comparison is bold, but it’s apt. Of this, I’m convinced. Just like that meddling ancient Greek, to whom we owe an ironic tradition, an eponymous dialogue, and an abstruse Platonic ideal, Peterson is the consummate gadfly. He’s the thinker we’ve come simultaneously to love and to hate, to adore and to censure at once. He pokes his thumbs into notions preconceived, into taboos untouched, and fears not the return of their imminent blow. He transgresses the progressives and startles the conservative types. He ruffles feathers wherever they may be found—right, left, center, and around the world. All this he does in a verbally mesmerizing, an argumentatively compelling way that one can’t hope to ignore. No button turned to mute will silence the growing drumbeat of his thought. Increasingly and now rhythmically, we march in line with his tune. Let us decipher his song.

He courts this, our self-professed “rational” society with an acumen that intimidates those we perhaps wrongly consider to be the most learned among us. Add to this a decades-long clinical and professorial experience in the field of psychology and, with it, an accumulation of data and hard science, and he’s become an insuperable, intellectual force. He can now wield his science as Achilles—a second, less philosophical but equally famous Greek—did his heavenly-rendered sword and is apt to do some real damage to the power-hungry and doctrinaire. His aim, should it prove straight, is to puncture cant and let bleed out all the uncomfortable, vitalizing, and regenerative truths that are immured inside this decadent society’s core.

Like Socrates before him, Peterson is committed to a path whose end may be truth, but no such venturesome philosopher can ever be sure of such unambiguous ground. Forever will that remain a territory incompletely known. One can only plant flags where they’re least likely to be moved by the changing of the winds. He therefore digs, as any man seeking roots in first principles might, to the bedrock upon which a system of thought, of argument, and of progress might be built. From that point, the general discourse might in time improve, the subtlety of thought might refine. A wiser, more just, more pious and veracious civilization might then stretch its neck and reach to the skies. We might even hope to elevate humanity along the way. Socrates, in his tireless pursuit of those very same things, wanted to build a tower equally grand.

Towers, though, are built not of one but of many hands. From every corner of the web, Peterson’s videos, lectures, and debates are grasped and heard by millions of such hands and ears with relish. Millions of others think them intangible, disreputable, and just plain gross. This second, often more vocal group receives these videos and lectures with a kind of increasingly hardened animosity and distaste. They think him a deliberate inventor of invective, a genteel misogynist in the garb of a psychologist. More predictably, perhaps, they’ve set upon calling him an outright fascist—the emptiest of all epithets that might still have a dying currency in our day.  

But all hold him in one or another light. Of these multiple millions of viewers, and haters, and disciples, and trolls, not one among them can claim him or herself apathetic to Peterson’s views. After having imbibed his ideas and soaked in the torrent of his wisdom, if only for a brief while, one becomes intoxicated and driven to respond. Thus, of Jordan Peterson, our new Socratic sage of the internet, our new Canadian-Athenian thought leader setting the world ablaze, all hold an opinion, be it jaundiced or friendly, cold or warm.

Above all, regardless of the side of the fence upon which you land, you won’t convince a single soul if you deny being stimulated by what the good professor has it in his head to say. In this way, he can be described not only as eloquent—which melodiously and inarguably he is—but piquant as well. An otherwise inert mind will be forced to react to his expositions on God. A complacent atheist will be made to rethink just what a religious archetype implies. A couch-dwelling, welfare-collecting bum will be thrust to his feet after hearing his twelve rules for life. The flame will be lit for you further to inquire. You’ll want to delve much deeper into the startling profundity of his unconventional and, for that reason, controversial mind.

To everyone of an intellectual bent, Peterson, like Socrates, offers something—and many hours and dialogues of it. Seemingly endless are the minutes available of him speaking in front of students, leftists, opponents, and academics—or some combination of the four. Always panoptic if not overtly Socratic, Peterson has in store a great many of the answers we seek. Perhaps this is one of the few places where he and Socrates diverge. Trained in psychology but seemingly learned in every field, Peterson has a way of circumventing dialectic and cutting rather closely to the truth. Socrates is known to have rather obscured than illuminated whenever given the chance.  

At this point, you’ll doubtless agree that Peterson—our modern and belated successor to Socrates—has infiltrated our internet-obsessed minds. More than that, he’s permeated our conversation and provoked us into unprecedented thought, and he’s accomplished this from every side. No friend of the left, yet no lackey of the right, he straddles two divergent political worlds. One foot on each, he stands astride a growing chasm whose mouth widens by the day. Upon witnessing and feeling this, one can’t help but be despondent. Nevertheless, there is a hope that Peterson can help arouse us to rationality, sincerity, intellectual honesty, decency, and strength. Unity, though, is likely beyond his or our reach. Yet we’re all unified in our veneration of Socrates and the knowledge that he lived. So too are we brought together around this most recent gadfly to appear on the philosophical stage. Jordan Peterson: our twenty-first century, internet-age, veritable Socrates.