what does it mean for a truth to be "self-evident?" what are some self-evident truths?
Photograph Source: Carnaval.com Studios – CC Past ii.0
What Donald Trump says matters because of the function he holds and because of the cult-like following he has. Just admittedly none of it, null, is worth being taken seriously on the merits.
This is not to say that everything he says is false or that it is always more noxious than what the rival duopoly party'south leaders and the "moderates" who tow their line say. Quite to the opposite, in words, though not in deeds, Trump is less of a Cold War monger than they and their media flacks – peculiarly with regard to Russia, China is another story — and that is all to his credit or would be if he acted accordingly, which he seldom does.
My bespeak is merely that what Trump says is no more worth taking seriously than the jibber jabber of a poorly socialized male adolescent acting out.
With apologies to our "founding fathers" (not a female parent amid them), I would say that I hold that truth to be self-evident.
Putting my bespeak this way is, of course, a rhetorical flourish, but information technology is more than that also; not a whole lot more, however. The sense in which that truth is self-axiomatic is a good deal less momentous than philosophers and others who take notions of self-evident truths seriously might suppose.
This being the instance, and with a reckoning on Trump and Trumpism still some hundred days off, now is a expert time to reflect on self-evident truths, and on what claims for cocky-evidence portend.
***
Our political scene would now be in a meliorate place, and poised to motion into a amend identify still, if, in addition to the lx per centum or and so of Americans whose heads are more or less screwed on right, some substantial percentage of the others, the ones not totally insufficient of the sense they were born with, would appreciate the self-evident nature of the worthlessness of everything Trump claims.
Then the number of likely Trump voters could reach some anxiety-proof level – say, effectually ten or fifteen percent. That would exist near as good every bit his poll numbers tin can get, inasmuch as, like the poor, according to Jesus, the vile and the non-compos mentis volition always exist with us.
So far, neither Trump's imbecility, nor his contributions to impending, irreversible ecological catastrophes, nor the countless ways he has undermined the rule of constabulary and and so much else that is even so decent in American life – including longstanding constraints on the prevailing culture'southward racism, nativism, misogyny, homophobia, and religious bigotry – have led the forty percent or so of Americans who continue to put their own and their families' and their friends' lives and well-being in jeopardy for that mountebank'due south sake to defect from the vaunted "Trump base."
Lately, however, as he heaps misery and decease upon his marks, courting economical catastrophe in the process, desertions are finally beginning to accumulate.
It is therefore not out of the question that, fifty-fifty within the bowels of the Trump demographic, the worthlessness of what Trump says will, at terminal, become widely best-selling for the self-evident truth that it plainly is.
Of course, with opposition to Trump and the "ism" bearing his name led by Joe Biden, a centrist doofus, and with a still unreconstructed, Common cold War mongering, Wall Street and military-industrial-national security state friendly Autonomous Party calling the shots, 1 can never be entirely certain — just, at least for now, reasons to be hopeful outweigh reasons to despair.
It is therefore reasonable to promise that Trump volition soon exist toast, and that Trumpism will suffer a accident from which it volition never recover.
Cheers mainly to the oodles of cash at their disposal, and the hard work of their media flacks, corporate Democrats go on to dominate the "resistance." Only they are on the losing side of a subdued just very real intraparty war of attrition, and although modify is coming more slowly than one would hope, information technology is, despite all obstacles, patently on the style.
Nosotros can therefore also hope for more than Trump's and Trumpism'southward demise. We can hope as well that, at the national and also at state and local levels, that energized progressives, running as Democrats for want of a viable alternative, will exist numerous and assuming enough to transform the Democratic Party beyond recognition, turning information technology into something more than a bottom evil, proficient only for keeping Republicans at bay.
Seeing Trump every bit more than just wrong or incorrect-headed but as a promoter of claims that, on their claim, are self-evidently non worth being taken seriously tin can help make that happen.
In this context, beingness self-evident and existence glaringly obvious are more or less the same matter. But the term as well has more recondite connotations that tin can matter – not directly, only ironically, in ways that merit consideration.
***
Thus, there is some adept that tin come from reflecting briefly on the Jeffersonian or civics lesson kind of self-evident truths, the kind that most naturally annals in the consciousness of the American public, thanks to the fact that every pupil who has ever done hard time in any elementary or middle school in the United States knows (or has at to the lowest degree been told), that in the Preamble to the Annunciation of Independence, the most sacred text in the American catechism, Thomas Jefferson alleged: "We hold these truths to exist cocky-evident, that all men (sic) are created equal, that they are endowed, by their creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Freedom, and the pursuit of Happiness."
Jefferson then went on to maintain, amongst other things, that legitimate governments are based on the consent of the governed, and that the proper office of government is and ought to exist to secure individuals' rights. He as well maintained that "whenever whatever Course of Regime becomes subversive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to modify or abolish information technology."
No doubt, he considered these "truths" self-evident too. At that place is no reason to think that whatsoever of the Announcement's signatories disagreed.
Those contentions of his have become core tenets of the American "civil religion," expressed in public symbols and ceremonies, and in places associated with "sacred" moments of American history.
The word "un-American" has been much used over the years — for rhetorical effect and to serve various, generally nefarious, political purposes. But insofar equally those words actually mean something substantive, it would be that violations of the letter or the spirit of the claims Jefferson made in the Annunciation's Preamble violate what we would exercise well to think of equally "the American creed."
Leaving aside the kinds of questions that philosophers might raise virtually the merits of Jefferson'southward self-evident truths, and near what, if anything, it ways to call them "truths" at all, one tin can only marvel at his insistence on their "self-axiomatic" nature.
After all, as Jefferson knew well, they have not been axiomatic in any sense, much less self-evident, to nearly everyone everywhere from time immemorial. In 1776, his contentions would not fifty-fifty accept been comprehensible to many of the people living close by the building we now call "Independence Hall," or indeed to anyone not attuned to ideas current in tiny intellectual circles in Britain, Western Europe and the American colonies of the bully European powers.
If Jefferson'southward idea was at all similar the thought that nosotros demand in our politics now – if he thought, in other words, that the claims he prepare down in the Preamble are so obvious that no reasonable person could possibly deny them — then either he was plainly (self-patently?) wrong or else he idea that near everyone, everywhere, at all times, failed to encounter a standard of reasonableness that he considered incontestable.
Could he and his co-thinkers take been that dismissive of everyone else? What virtually their vaunted optimism nearly human nature and the prospects for homo perfectibility? Simply a fool would put much stock in the promise of persons also benighted to acknowledge self-axiomatic truths.
Peradventure Jefferson and the others, and Enlightened thinkers generally, were non almost every bit sanguine about human being nature equally the standard narratives used to claim they were. In scholarly circles, that accept on the Enlightenment has been in disrepute for quite a while. Perhaps the formerly standard view really was wrong-headed. Only did Jefferson or others in his cohort know, as it were, how deep their pessimism ran? Not very likely.
To exist sure, history is total of examples of ideas that are now considered obviously true beingness taken for obviously false, and vice versa. Only not all mistakes are created equal; those that no reasonable person could possibly concord are in a category all by themselves.
Thus, it would be fair to say that when Jefferson called the positions he advanced "self-evident," he was not describing how they are experienced psychologically, but how they ought to be regarded ideologically.
Why, then, would he employ words that suggest a degree of certainty – indeed, of infallibility – that he and his co-thinkers would associate with the purported certainties of Cartesian metaphysics?
Peradventure he was existence disingenuous. I don't think so, notwithstanding; not entirely. I don't recall he was trying to be ironic either, though that is what he ended upward being.
René Descartes' (1596-1650), the "founder" of modern Western philosophy co-ordinate to standard accounts, set out to ground noesis claims, arising out of the theology and physics of his time, on foundations that not fifty-fifty the most radical skeptics could reasonably deny.
Thus, he set out to defend the thought that God, a perfect being, exists; and that God guarantees the veracity of "articulate and distinct ideas," past which he meant ideas of the spatial backdrop that were, on his construal, the basis of the new (Galilean) science of nature. He thought that demonstrating this is tantamount to showing that the physics he wanted to defend rests on foundations that are immune from skeptical assault.
The argument he advanced rests on a truth that is as self-evident, according to the literal significant of those words, equally can exist, an existence claim about which it is logically impossible to be incorrect — that whenever "I call back" (whenever, as Descartes would say, "je pense" or "cogito"), whenever "I" engage in whatsoever mental activity any (doubting included), then not even the most farthermost skeptics, the nigh determined doubter, not even an all-powerful demon hellbent on deceit, non even God Himself (that God is a "He" went without maxim), could make information technology the case that the I's thinking was non real, not anyway as long every bit logic applies; information technology is logically impossible to be incorrect about that.
This is the betoken of Descartes' cogito argument (cogito, ergo sum; je pense, donc je suis; I recall, therefore I am), the argument that everybody who knows anything nigh Descartes has at least heard nearly.
It required rational intuition for him to go from "there is thinking" to the conclusion that he (the "I" of the argument) is "a thinking thing"; that this is what he –"I' — substantially is. In Descartes' view, these farther steps are likewise undeniable – non because to deny them would exist illogical, but because rational intuitions are self-confirming. In this sense, "I exist" ("je suis," "sum") is a self-evident truth.
It demand hardly be said that Jefferson's self-evident truths are not like that – except in one sense. They too are foundational. In their own ways, they each model themselves on Euclidian geometry – where axioms, assertions deemed in no need of further justification, are taken every bit given, equally "self-evident," and, in that office, function equally bases from which farther claims ("theorems") can exist derived.
For some twenty-five hundred years, those theorems, the system built upon Euclid'due south axioms, seemed obviously truthful – and therefore, in that sense, self-evident – to everyone who paid them listen. Information technology has been known, yet, since the late nineteenth century that not-Euclidean geometries are conceivable. Thank you to Albert Einstein and others, we know too that while physical space is, so to speak, Euclidean enough for about purposes, it is ultimately not Euclidean at all.
Thus, fifty-fifty truths that are ostensibly self-evident – non in the Cartesian sense, co-ordinate to which, as a thing of logic, they cannot be faux, just in the sense of Euclidean geometry – are corrigible.
Corrigible, but nevertheless more indubitable than Jefferson's or any other ideologically-driven "axiomatic" foundations for the credal bases of a civil religion or indeed of whatever account of platonic social and political institutional arrangements.
No matter how defensible they may exist, the "truths" Jefferson deemed self-evident are more than than just corrigible; they are eminently contestable. Indeed, in both theory and practice, they are contested all the time.
The sense in which it is self-evident that Trump'south views are without merit is more enervating than that. We could say that information technology falls somewhere in between Jefferson and Descartes.
Information technology is logically possible to be wrong nigh the merits of Trump's views; indeed, there are alarmingly many Americans who still manage to find merit in the Donald's nonsense.
Just his views are so glaringly and, in that sense, cocky-obviously without whatever merit whatsoever that the phenomenon is, if not of clinical interests merely, and so very nearly and so.
***
Withal, liberal corporate media don't become it. It is as if they cannot go along themselves from treating Trump'due south views with respect.
To be sure, MSNBC and CNN and NPR and the residue are 2nd to none in disparaging Trump and all things Trumpian; in that, they are every bit gung ho as any news or stance outlet to their left. Merely they nevertheless take Trump'south views seriously, non just in the means that news organizations must, just as if what they say actually deserve more than sheer antipathy.
Treating Trumpian nonsense with respect is inherent in their business model and in their notion of journalistic ethics. It was the same iv years ago, when they opposed Trump – and favored Hillary Clinton — with all their heart, soul, and might but still gave him oodles of free publicity, causing his nonsense to take root inside mainstream public discourse.
Information technology may not be quite the case that any publicity is proficient publicity, even when its tenor is negative as can exist, but that venerable aphorism did prove true in 2016. It could prove true once more, even now, with Trump mentally decomposing in fully public view.
Unlike four years ago, it now requires a practiced deal more than just willful blindness not to see how glaringly unfit Trump is and always has been for the office he holds, and for virtually everything else, just until now this seems inappreciably to have mattered.
The mistake lies non just with Play tricks News and other rightwing media. MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the other glories of the corporate media universe are culpable too, for treating Trump's views equally if they were worthy of rational consideration, when they self-evidently (obviously) are not.
Past endorsing hissy fits over words hurtful to sensitive souls, they are culpable too for promoting an ill-informed, indeed infantile, worldview that unintentionally, but inexorably, reinforces Trump's own efforts to utilize media to distract attention away from what people need to know and hash out.
Not long ago, children were taught that sticks and stones could break their basic, merely that names could never injure them. That was wise communication.
Now they are taught that words tin hurt, as indeed they sometimes can, and therefore that information technology is equally advisable to constabulary them equally information technology is to police what people do with sticks and stones. This is not wise at all; it is silliness on stilts, made all the worse by the times we are in.
This silliness encourages the right to go subsequently what they have taken to calling "political correctness," a term that once had an intelligible, though not particularly commendable, meaning in Communist Party and other old left circles, but past which they hateful something like goody-goody prissiness in the service of socially liberal "agendas." This is bad enough.
The bigger trouble, though, is, as already noted, that by focusing on words that tin can hurt simply feelings, different the sticks and stones – and guns — of Trump-besotted hooligans, they are deflecting attending away from serious and pressing political problems. These would include: among others:
one) how to brand sure that the coming election volition be no less complimentary and off-white than normal, by disappointment Republican voter suppression efforts and machinations intended to delegitimate the outcome.
2) how to keep Biden from making some sort of bargain with Trump that would effectively render him immune from being called to account for the countless actionable crimes he will have committed by the fourth dimension his term expires.
Forgiving Bush-era war criminals for the sake of "moving forward" was, after all, the Original Sin of the Obama assistants; and Biden was simply as much a part of that crime against justice as Attorney General Eric Holder and Obama himself.
3) how to keep Trump and his minions from refusing to accept the election's outcome, encouraging civil unrest instead, putting lives and property in jeopardy, even to the point of putting the democracy'due south very beingness in jeopardy, just as information technology was more than than a century and a half ago, during the Civil War.
For what it is worth, by talking up a storm about that prospect, Trump himself is doing more to forbid such an eventuality than all the Democrats and Democratic media in the world. As is his wont, Trump is being, despite himself, his own worst enemy.
4) how to prevent Trump from starting a war, much as Bill Clinton did when her felt politically imperiled, only this time at far greater risk – in large part considering the most likely pretext now would come up if Israel succeeds in provoking Iran into doing something, anything, that would drag the Usa into an unwinnable and obviously pointless state of war confronting that state.
The Israelis have been working hard at information technology, at present that it has dawned on the felonious Bibster, Benjamin Netanyahu, that his human being in DC, Jared, son of his one-time friend and fellow felon Charles Kushner, and son-in-law of the Donald himself, is well-nigh to become yesterday's dejeuner.
The list goes on, only why bother with issues like these when there are ostensibly momentous infantile concerns at hand: for instance, whether for Trump, "jew" is or ever was a verb, like "gyp" nonetheless is even in "PC" circles; or whether Trump has always used the "n-word," a slur so horrifyingly ungodly that like the proper noun of God (sorry, Thousand-d) Himself in orthodox Jewish circles, it can merely exist referred to indirectly (as, in Hebrew, ha shem, the proper noun), but never actually uttered, even in liturgical contexts, where some other, more than sacred only however indirect, reference (Adonai) is used.
That corporate media abide past these and so many other verbal prohibitions, without fifty-fifty a hint of irony, only shows how insecure and degraded the ambient political culture has become.
But then what would 1 expect from media in which for anyone not interested in seeing how long it takes Rachel Maddow to make some inane point with the persistence of a kindergarten teacher – for me, that got old years agone – or what Joy Reid'south latest hairdo will be, information technology changes daily, the most palatable MSNBC and CNN commenters and news presenters, with very few exceptions, are erstwhile Bush functionaries; and the most constructive anti-Trump publicists are anti-Trump Republicans, similar the ones in the Lincoln Project, who understand that the mode to heave voter enthusiasm and therefore turnout is to go on equally if Biden and Pelosi and Schumer and the others don't exist, past making information technology all most Trump.
Could anything, except perchance the worthlessness of Trump'south words, be more (colloquially) self-evident than that?
Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/24/we-hold-these-truths-to-be-self-evident/
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