President Trump is Doing the Truth

Why undergo the aesthetic torture of immersing oneself in the literary works of the world's worst tyrants? Well, it reminds me of the old gag by Lao Tsu:  What is a good man but a bad man's teacher? What is a bad man but a good man's job?

Still, I'm glad Daniel Kalder took the job. He went through the complete works of the Big Five -- Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao -- and then of more minor literary figures such as Castro, Kim Jong-Il, and Saddam, followed by an exploration of some really weird and obscure ones that we don't need to discuss.  

Yes, you can learn a lot by reading, say, the Federalist Papers.  Those guys thought that certain pneumo-political truths were axiomatic or self-evident.  

I would agree, but with two qualifications:  first, echoing something Schuon wrote, two conditions are necessary to reason properly about such matters, one external and concrete, the other internal or psychic.  First is "the value or extent of the available information."   But even if you have the necessary information, it isn't sufficient.  Rather, the sufficient condition is "the acuity and profundity of the intelligence" that is doing the reasoning.   

There is something we might call "pure intelligence," what the science of intelligence calls "G."   Nevertheless, all the G in the world is rendered ineffectual by bad information.  Worse yet is if high G is mingled with low character.  

It seems to me that this is the world explored by Kalder.  You might say that intellectuals ruin everything.  Does this make us anti-intellectual?  Hardly.  Then again, there is something about intellectualism per se that troubles us, meaning me.  It, for example, is the subject of The World Beyond Your Head. The title itself says it all, because the first and last temptation of the intellectual is to compare the world to the world inside his head and to find the former wanting.

Abstract and concrete, word and flesh.  Remind me to return to these.

Another surprisingly relevant book is The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture.  I can't recommend the book, because it's simultaneously rambling and tangential and slightly obsessive.  Nevertheless, there are some key points that I would say carry over directly into Christianity, and why wouldn't they?

Indeed, one thinks of Jesus' rhetorical question to the cynical Pilate:  What is truth?

Well?   Pilate is like an Obama -- or any other leftist -- for whom truth is whatever results in political power.  But what about the typical intellectual?  What is an intellectual?  An intellectual is someone who trucks in ideas.  Okay, what is an idea?

That is where the trouble enters.  "There are two kinds of literary works that address themselves to ultimate issues -- those that are the product of reason; and those that are known by way of revelation" (Hazony).

Now, right away your typical intellectual is likely to discard and ridicule #2 (revelation).  Which is unfortunate, because it directly contravenes Schuon's conditions for effective reasoning, one of which is the quality of available information.  And it turns out that revelation is of quite high quality.  I mean, at the very least it consists of the collective wisdom of man, rooted in experience, AKA what works.

Jews have had a pretty rough time of it over the past few thousand years.  For some reason, they make the best demons.  However, you will have noticed that they do indeed exist -- unlike all of their ancient competitors, from Babylonians to Mesopotamians to Romans and all the rest.

Anyway, what is the Jewish conception of truth? Turns out it is quite concrete, to such an extent that it is often more "done" than thought.  The typical intellectual likely doesn't think of truth as action, but there you go:

the biblical authors don't subscribe to a metaphysical picture in which word and object are independent from one another because they don't see the world and the mind of the observer as independent from one another. They recognize the object as understood as the only reality, and hold that true speech (or true things) is that which can be relied upon in the face of hardship and changing circumstance. In fact, this is what is meant by God's word.

So, something that is true can be relied upon;  you can bank on it. Call it "faith" if you like.  And note that faith is not opposed to reason.  Here is Hazony's bottom line on biblical truth: it

is not in the first instance a quality of that which is said, but of objects.... the truth of that which is said is dependent on, and perhaps identical to, that truth which is a quality of objects.

Which lines up perfectly with the Thomistic view that we begin with objects for the simple reason that they object -- in other words, that they have their own reality in defiance of our abstractions.  Maybe you're a Marxist who thinks history is scientifically determined.  Well, history has other ideas.  Or maybe you think a baby is "the mother's body," or a federal minimum wage reduces poverty, or men and women are identical.  In each case, the world objects to the subject.  Or, subjects and subjectivity are subordinate to objects and objectivity:

true and false are not properties of things that are spoken at all. Instead they are properties of objects and persons.

The Bible calls things "true" that are trustworthy:  "things that are reliable, steadfast, and faithful... that can be relied upon to hold firm under conditions of stress."

Maybe a weird thought in this context, but it occurs to me that I regard our president this way, as someone who -- unlike any past Republican politician -- "can be relied upon to hold firm under conditions of stress."  To paraphrase Andrew Breitbart, he walks toward the fire and doesn't worry about what they call him.

Now, why might President Trump be this way? Well, unlike Obama -- or, for that matter, Lenin or any other Deep Thinkers discussed by Kalder -- he is not an intellectual. Thank God!

Surely you're not comparing Obama to these tyrants? Yes, actually I am, in the sense that they all value their abstract thoughts over the concrete world. I can't tell you how many times I wrote in the margin, "cf. Obama."

Or, look at it this way: the media obsess over things Trump says, as if they are real, while systematically ignoring things he has actually accomplished, as if they aren't. Hazony cites numerous examples of how truth and falsity in the Bible "appear with reference to actions that are performed by men or God. In these cases we find that someone is to 'do truth' to or for someone else, or else that an action is described as being performed 'in truth.'"

Remarkably, as far as I am concerned, President Trump is doing more truth than any politician in my lifetime.  But don't believe me. I'm just another intellectual.  Believe reality.