Once in a Blue Moon, Politics...

A few weeks ago, I wrote a critical essay about the economic policies of the Obama administration. I never posted it, and I’m not sure I ever will. If anyone is really interested, I'll email it to you. This blog hasn’t been about politics, and I’ve only posted a political essay once so far. This is the second. Part of the reason that I don’t have much to say politically is that I'd rather just spend my time wondering at the strangeness of China right now. The other part is that traditional notions of political “issues” do not interest me. More on that at the end.

I’m doing a bit of not-so-light reading. I’ve finally been working my way through The Gulag Archipelago. It is a book best taken in small doses. Last week, I came across a passage that stood out. Then this week, I happened to read from a speech by Sonia Sotomayor, current nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. The back to back reading of these two things struck me forcefully. Below are two excerpts:


First, from Solzhenitsyn

It turns out that in that terrible year (1937) Andrei… Vyshinsky (prosecutor of Stalin’s show trials), availing himself of the most flexible dialectics…, pointed out in a report which became famous in certain circles that it is never possible for mortal men to establish absolute truth, but relative truth only. He then proceeded to a further step, which jurists of the last two thousand years had not been willing to take: that the truth established by interrogation and trial could not be absolute, but only, so to speak, relative. Therefore, when we sign a sentence ordering someone to be shot we can never be absolutely certain, buy only approximately, in view of certain hypotheses, and in a certain sense, that we are punishing a guilty person. Thence arose the most practical conclusion: that it was always useless to seek absolute evidence—for evidence is always relative—or unchallengeable witnesses—for they can say different things and different times. The proofs of guilt were relative, approximate, and the interrogator could find them, even when there was no evidence and no witness, without leaving his office, “basing his conclusions not only on his own intellect but also on his party sensitivity, his “moral forces”…”and on his character”

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn – The Gulag Archipelago, Chapter 3


And now, from Sotomayor

I accept the proposition that, as Judge Resnik describes it, "to judge is an exercise of power" and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School, states "there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives - no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging," I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that--it's an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others. Not all women or people of color, in all or some circumstances or indeed in any particular case or circumstance but enough people of color in enough cases, will make a difference in the process of judging….

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences…our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases… I [am not] so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life…

I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate. There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering.

Sonia Sotomayor - University of California, Berkley – 2001

There is a definite symmetry of language between these two excerpts. First, of course, is the assertion of relativity as a legitimate standard of judicial truth. The Stalinists openly embraced the concept. Sotomayor, at least, admits that there is a danger to relative morality, but only after having rationalized judging the law by it. The parallels deepen with the emphasis on what Solzhenitsyn calls "character" and "moral forces" (expressed by Sotomayor as the experience of being a Latina woman). In both cases, these are held up as being not only sources of authority for making judgments, but as literally being determinants in the making of correct decisions by those that possess them. Relevant to this, her use of the word "aspiration" is worrisome. For her, the word does not convey that one should long for a greater truth and strive for it. Rather, she uses it as a dismissive, an expression of the futility of even trying to find that great truth. By clear implication, she then substitutes something else as a standard of truth. To paraphrase what Solzhenitsyn called "party sensitivities", she is basing her decisions on gender and cultural sensitivities.

Relative truth does have its place in this world. In our human weakness, we will sometimes rely on it because, lacking the knowledge of gods, it is the best we can do. When a relative truth is expressed in the spirit of being our best human effort to interpolate absolute truth from limited information, it becomes a form of humility, an admission of our limitations, and a guard against the hubris of misplaced certainty. However, that is not the sort of relativity that is expressed in either of these passages. For both Stalin's interrogators and Judge Sotomayor, relativive truth is treated not as a best effort to reach to a fundamental truth, but rather as a window of opportunity to rationalize a desired outcome.

I am not suggesting that Sotomayor is a malevolent person, and there is absolutely nothing in her speech that suggest an affinity for Soviet-style convicting of the innocent by purely relative standards. However, there is no denying that her way of reasoning has been used by malevolent people. The deeper these ways of thinking take root, the more subjective the law becomes, and the less protection any of us have from those who will use the law to evil purposes.

As I have said before, traditional notions of politics do not interest me. My intellectual obsessions have always been questions about truth, and how we find it. As a culture, we are losing our ability to seek truth. Good people are becoming blind to the consequences of ethical relativity. We are becoming more and more willing to invent our own truths, and we are losing both our capacity, and our will, to ask and answer difficult moral questions. Politically speaking, neither side is immune. However, let me ask, what was the wellspring of this phenomena? It came out of the Marxist conceit that truth is only the self-serving invention of the ruling classes, and the postmodern truth-is-whatever-you-want-it-to-be fantasies of modern academia. And politically speaking, which side has the fundamental ties with these philosophies? The answer to that question is why, while I may never feel myself fully at home with the political Right, I am most certainly do find myself at total alienation from the political Left.

Truth, and the constant search for what it really is, is all that matters. Truth is not an opinion, it is not a feeling, and it is not a perspective. And when we don't know it, we can’t just take its absence as license to substitute it with our own. For even when we cannot find truth, we must hold to the sure knowledge that truth is out there, and it will stay there until we find it.

And then we must seek to find it.