Barack Obama A Moral Cretin

Abe Greenwald of Commentary (h/t Larwyn) comments on the strange statement of Barack Hussein Obama concerning the mass murder at Fort Hood:

>Barack Obama asked that we not “jump to conclusions” about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who is alleged to have killed 13 Americans at Fort Hood last Thursday. Forget “jump to.” If only President Obama would crawl toward, or flirt with, or even stumble upon a conclusion, I’d be overjoyed. On this you can rely: Obama will never express a conclusive opinion on last Thursday’s massacre.

I happen to have been reading a wonderful book by the University of Chicago philosopher and classicist, Martha C. Nussbaum, entitled The Fragility of Goodness. The book was written in 1986. My philosophy professor at Sarah Lawrence College, Elfie Stock Raymond, was likely an admirer of Nussbaum because I see many parallels between Nussbaum's ideas and Elfie's that we discussed in conferences back in the early to mid 1970s, especially her rejection of Kantian ethics. Reading Nussbaum, 35 years later, I am able to better grasp that position.

The book is about moral complexity as seen through the eyes of Greek tragedians and philosophers, notably Aristotle. The third chapter, that I have been working through, is about Sophocles's Antigone. One of the themes of Greek tragedy is conflict among moral duties, and Antigone is about this, the conflict between Creon's unitary commitment to the good of the polis and Antigone's unitary commitment to her duties toward her dead brother, killed in a war against the same polis. Nussbaum argues that moral richness and complexity are at the heart of Sophocles's and other tragedians' vision, and that they contrast with a much more narrow vision of ethics of Plato, who sees an optimal moral path. The idea of moral optimality is carried forward by Kant. If you read Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem you see that Eichmann used Kant as a moral defense. This is consistent with Nussbaum's argument. Simplistic moral solutions are impoverished (p. 75):

>...the statement of human triumphs through reason turns out to be also a compressed document of reason's limitations, transgressions and conflicts. It suggests that the richer our scheme of values, the harder it will prove to effect a harmony within it. The more open we are to the presence of value, of divinity, in the world, the more surely conflict closes us in. The price of harmonization seems to be impoverishment, the price of richness disharmony. It looks, indeed, like an 'unwritten law' that 'nothing great comes into the life of mortals without disaster'. It is at this point that the men of the Chorus say, appropriately, 'looking on this strange portent, I think on both sides'.

I am waiting to get to Aristotle, but clearly his philosophy emphasizes the importance reconciliation of competing moral virtues.

Perhaps you can see the message for corporate maangement here. So many of our business leaders have had unitary moral codes. In the case of Jeffrey Skilling, the emphasis on creativity or the image of creativity at the expense of all other moral values. In the case of Robert Moses an emphasis on transportation flow at the expense of uprooting hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. In the case of the management theorist Chester Barnard, an emphasis on the moral code of the corporation at the expense of all other moral codes, including filial loyalty. These views are Kantian in that they assume a singular optimal moral solution. Barnard speaks of leadership as the creative reconciliation of moral codes, but his creativity is unitary in nature and so Creonic and Kantian--the simple value of corporate profit maximization is the ultimate good in his view; creativity comes in just to convince employees to forsake their other codes.

Here we have Barack Obama. His problem is not the conflict among virtues or the reconciliation of belief, but rather the bankruptcy of belief. He has no values at all. There is no moral ambiguity in an army officer's turning traitor to his country, murdering 13 people and wounding 30 more. Only an ethical cretin would claim that there is a need to "reserve judgment". What are the alternative moral considerations when one faces mass murder?

Obama's moral sickness reflects a deeper malaise in America. The nation has allowed ignorant ideologues to take control of its education system and its culture. School teachers who can barely read are indoctrinated in education schools as to cretinous, politically correct ideologies of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education. As a result, Americans have increasingly become moral degenerates addicted to failed government solutions and incapable of thinking logically. Barack Obama's cretinous morality is a symptom, not a root cause, of American decline.

The Evil of Banality: American Morals in Decline

Perhaps Americans were never really that moral and American exceptionalism was only a hope. Perhaps John Winthrop's "city on a hill" was a pipe dream. It is true that America was never perfect. But it is also true that there always were Americans like Henry David Thoreau who protested injustice and believed in freedom from the state. Initially, much of the impetus for the "Progressive" reaction to big business was moral indignation at its corruption. But the Progressive response was to establish institutions that were even more corrupt than the trusts and cities at which Americans, mostly rural in the late nineteenth century, were aghast.

By the the 1930s industrialization and the expansion of the state had eroded the Christian moral values of many Americans. In Germany, birthplace of the university, the welfare state led to what Hannah Arendt termed "the banality of evil". Adolph Eichmann, a bureaucrat who oversaw the German extermination of Jews and Gypsies, claimed that he acted in accordance with Kant's categorical imperative in that his "duty", which all men should follow, was to obey orders.

The pattern of moral flexibility molded to the dictates of large organizations has been characteristic of American Progressivism as well as German statism for the two have the same origin. One of the ways that Progressivism leads inevitably to authoritarianism and then totalitarianism is the erosion of moral sense that occurs as people relinquish independence in exchange for security and begin to depend on "their betters" to do their thinking for them. This has a great deal to do with the dependent psychology that urban Americans have developed because they work for large organizations and spend most of their lives obeying their bosses and following orders. The concepts of organizational control and organizational culture are tightly linked to Progressivism. Other-directedness, the psychology of reliance on popular opinion for one's own views, is also a function of government authority, large organizations, and tightly configured belief systems under the control of one's boss, the media and the state. Conformity, other-directedness and ethical decline all reflect the economic structure that the large-scale economy has created.

The argument in favor of scale is that it produces consumerism. But since 1970 the real hourly wage has been stagnant. Thus, the large-scale economy has been an economic and consumerist failure as well as a moral failure.

In his classic work on management Functions of the Executive, Chester Barnard, president of New Jersey Telephone, described his success in changing a telephone operator's moral sense around so that she placidly watched her mother burn to death while on duty. He felt justified in having ingrained in the woman the dominant moral belief that her first duty was to the telephone company and that she could not leave her post even if it meant trying to help her mother as she died in her house across the street. Likewise, the notion of organizational culture advocated by William Ouchi in Theory Z and numerous other management books is one of sacrifice of moral sense in the interest of corporate values. Enron is one example of the end result of a century of corporate brainwashing, Progressive economic policies and government expansion. The only reason that Enron was able to exist was credit expansion by the Federal Reserve Bank that was deposited in the money center banks which in turn knowingly provided Enron with the funding it needed to commit ongoing fraud.

Recently in the small Town of Olive in which I reside, population about 3,500, there has been a series of embezzlements. A woman stole $40,000 from a Mobil Mini Mart in Shokan, NY and used it to reopen the West Shokan General Store. Another woman stole from the Onteora* High School Student fund. Another burnt down a local hotel. In fact, there were two cases of arson involving local hotels in the past few years. I checked out the Kingston Freeman's website for "embezzlement" and found the following:

-An obese New Paltz woman was arrested last week for allegedly stealing $700,000 from a local attorney

-In July, a 55-year-old Kingston woman was convicted of stealing $390,000 from a "professional office".

-In April, a store manager was forced to return $25,000 he embezzled from CRSR Designs.

These crimes were not committed by big business or by government. But in a society where taxation, wealth transfer via monetary expansion and the brokerage of special interests have become the chief avenues of success for such professions as law, the judiciary, investment banking, government employees, hedge fund operators and corporate executives, it is not surprising that moral corruption has seeped into the mainstream of American life.

*Onteora was the Native American name for the Catskills. It means "land of the sky".