The New Techno-Nationalism: Power, Ideology, and the Eclipse of Ethics

 

The New Techno-Nationalism: Power, Ideology, and the Eclipse of Ethics  

I. Introduction: A New Power Alignment

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, marking his controversial return to the White House. The ceremony, held inside the US Capitol rotunda, became a showcase of America's new power brokers. In the front row, a who's who of Silicon Valley sat shoulder to shoulder: Elon Musk, fresh from pumping over $275 million into Trump's victory[3] and poised to assume an unprecedented role in the administration; Mark Zuckerberg, who had just gutted Meta's fact-checking system at Trump's behest[2]; Jeff Bezos, and other tech titans, their combined net worth exceeding an astonishing $1 trillion.[1]

 The irony of this scene was palpable. Trump, who has long positioned himself as a populist champion of the "forgotten" rural Americans struggling with stagnant wages and rising living costs, surrounded himself with the ultra-elite oligarchs of the tech world. Yet this alliance was no mere marriage of convenience – it represented a deeper convergence between Silicon Valley's gospel of technological progress and nationalist politics, where self-appointed prophets of innovation found common cause with MAGA's vision of American renewal. The stark contrast between Trump's rhetoric of being the voice of the common people and the reality of his billionaire-studded inauguration highlights the bizarre nature of his populist claims – claims that somehow survived even as Musk doled out million-dollar daily "prizes" to voters in swing states through his PAC, a brazen scheme that distributed $17 million by election day.[4]

This gathering of tech moguls at the inauguration reflects a broader shift in our cultural values and the figures we choose to lionize. Nothing illustrates this transformation more clearly than examining who our leading biographers deem worthy of chronicling. When Walter Isaacson, perhaps America's preeminent biographer, looks to history, he finds subjects of profound humanistic impact: Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein – figures who not only innovated but wrestled deeply with the moral implications of their work, contributing to human understanding far beyond their specific fields.[5]

Yet when Isaacson surveys our present era for subjects of similar stature, he finds science and tech titans and venture capitalists: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna. These figures are celebrated not merely as innovators but as champions of American technological supremacy in an era of intensifying competition with China. This absence of contemporary figures whose impact transcends biotech, AI, and market disruption speaks volumes about our cultural priorities. That his collection marketed as the "genius biographies" places Jobs alongside Einstein, Franklin, and da Vinci reveals how thoroughly we've narrowed our vision of meaningful achievement. Where are today's philosophers? Poets? Composers and artists? Our culture seems to have lost interest in contributions that don't translate directly to big Tech and market capitalization.

II. The Origins of Techno-Futurism

The ideology that enables tech leaders to position themselves as humanity's rightful shepherds emerges from a peculiar fusion of science fiction and technical capability. This marriage of imagination and engineering has deep roots in humanity's eternal quest for transcendence. The term "transhumanism" first appeared in translations of Dante's Paradiso, describing the soul's journey toward divine life beyond mortal constraints.[6] When biologist Julian Huxley appropriated the term in 1957, he secularized this religious impulse, recasting transcendence as a scientific project.[7]

This secularization reached its apotheosis in Ray Kurzweil's vision of the "Singularity"—a predicted moment in 2045 when humans will achieve "digital immortality" by uploading their consciousness to computers.[8] As director of engineering at Google, Kurzweil transformed ancient dreams of eternal life into concrete research and development priorities. His prediction that "the human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems ... and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality" exemplifies how religious promises of salvation get reframed as technological inevitabilities.[ibid.]

Today's tech leaders each offer their own variations on this technological salvation narrative. Elon Musk frames his Mars colonization project through Asimov's Foundation series, positioning himself as humanity's savior from a dying Earth. Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse, inspired by Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, promises digital transcendence through virtual worlds, seemingly blind to that novel's dystopian warnings. Jeff Bezos draws directly from Star Trek and physicist Gerard O'Neill's space colony designs, envisioning millions living in cylindrical tubes among the stars.[9]

 

This fusion of scientific capability and science fiction imagination becomes institutionalized in elite technical education. At MIT's Media Lab, known as the 'Future Factory,' where Dr. Joy Buolamwini studied, students engage in courses that bridge speculative fiction and engineering practice. In one particular course, Science Fabrication, students were assigned science fiction novels and stories, and then challenged to imagine something futuristic to build—no matter how unrealistic it might initially seem—and attempt to create it within just six weeks.[10] Whether or not these inventions fully materialized, the nature of these assignments reveals a pedagogical commitment to balancing utopian imagination with engineering constraints. This approach treats AI as a fertile blend of futuristic imagination and contemporary technical knowledge, fostering a mindset where fictional possibilities shape technological development.

The result is a powerful ideology that can accommodate both utopian and catastrophic visions. Ray Kurzweil promises technological immortality while British philosopher Nick Bostrom warns of existential risks from artificial intelligence—yet both narratives serve to justify concentrated power and resources in the hands of tech leaders. As Buolamwini observes, investment in AI safety research is dramatically higher when framed in terms of existential risks than when addressing immediate harms like algorithmic bias or systemic discrimination.[11] Recent funding patterns support this observation: while organizations focused on existential AI risks receive multi-million dollar grants, initiatives addressing immediate concerns like algorithmic bias and discrimination typically receive far more modest support—often in the range of hundreds of thousands rather than millions of dollars.[12]

Meanwhile, immediate problems multiply. Beyond familiar concerns about job displacement, privacy violations, and algorithmic bias, new evidence reveals how AI's physical infrastructure strains power grids and depletes water resources.[13] The "apprentice gap" Buolamwini identifies—the elimination of entry-level positions through which expertise traditionally developed—threatens to create "the age of the last experts."[ibid.] Yet these concrete issues receive far less attention and funding than speculative future scenarios.

This techno-futurist ideology gains additional force by filling the void left by declining traditional religion. As tech leaders position themselves as prophets of a technological salvation, resistance to oversight becomes recast as heroic defiance of small-minded bureaucracy. The result is an ideology that simultaneously promises transcendence while demanding autonomy from democratic accountability—a powerful combination that would soon find expression in competing national projects.

III. Western Technological Theodicy

This techno-futurist framework meshes seamlessly with what effectively constitutes a technological theodicy—a system for justifying present suffering by appeal to future salvation. The pattern is familiar: just as Leibniz once offered a rational theodicy arguing that, due to God's ordering of the Universe, we live in "the best of all possible worlds,"[14] and Voltaire's satirical novella Candide mocked this rationalistic optimism through Dr. Pangloss's comical insistence that all suffering serves some greater good,[15] today's tech leaders offer their own, darker theodicy. While Pangloss merely glossed over suffering with jovial rationalization, tech leaders actively justify the negative consequences of their innovations—massive labor displacement, fragmenting of social cohesion, addiction-optimized platforms degrading mental health—as necessary sacrifices for their vision of technological transcendence.

The degraded character of this contemporary theodicy is illuminated by Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. In the play, the ironically named Lucky—a slave to the wealthy Pozzo—delivers a rambling monologue that preserves the form of traditional theodicy while descending into nihilistic incoherence. His litany of modern comforts ("penicillin, flying, gliding, floating, tennis games, golf") mixed with assertions about a God who "loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown" while some are "plunged in torment plunged in fire" offers a prescient parallel to today's techno-optimist rhetoric.[16]

This parallel becomes especially striking when we examine how tech leaders and their followers discuss innovation. "There is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology," declares Marc Andreessen in his "Techno-Optimist Manifesto,"[17] expressing what amounts to a contemporary version of Pangloss's optimism, but with none of its innocence and all of its blindness to human cost. Like Lucky celebrating the modern conveniences that fail to address his fundamental condition of servitude, tech enthusiasts catalog endless innovations while accepting their own diminishing agency in an increasingly technocratic system.

A hollowed-out version of Emersonian ideals of individual authenticity and self-reliance, reduced to the throwing off of all constraints and naked assertion of power, now legitimates both tech leaders' rejection of oversight and political strongmen who break democratic norms in the name of authentic leadership. The strongman validates the tech leaders' claims to prophetic vision and innovative genius—as when Trump celebrated Musk as a 'super genius' and 'new star' in his victory speech[24]—while they in turn provide both technological capability and cultural capital to legitimate his authority. This symbiosis has evolved into an unprecedented integration of tech power into governance: from Musk's secret communications with Putin about geopolitical matters[25], to his presence during crucial diplomatic calls[26], to his leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with its sweeping access to sensitive government systems[27]. This fusion of tech and state power reached new heights when Musk, acting as both presidential advisor and DOGE director, announced plans to shut down USAID—with his team forcing access to secure systems and threatening federal officials who resisted, even as legal experts questioned the constitutional authority for such actions[28].

IV. Chinese Technological Theodicy

Where Western technological theodicy has degraded into nihilistic celebration of unconstrained innovation and raw power, Chinese theodicy presents a fundamentally different vision—one that transforms present suffering into meaningful sacrifice through a positive moral framework. Rather than explaining away hardships through appeals to market innovation or mysterious technological destiny, it provides clear state-sanctioned moral principles for understanding how individual sacrifice serves the collective good.

This theodicy gains force by combining traditional Confucian values with modern state technological ambitions, framed through official party doctrine and state-guided sci-fi stories and blockbuster movies that have taken off in China. The virtue of ren (仁)—humaneness or benevolence toward others—provides a moral foundation for self-sacrifice.[16] The 21st century revival of Confucianism, encouraged by Xi, is brought into alignment with official moral and political precepts and doctrines of the State.[17,18] These are then propagated through increasingly popular and nationalistic science fiction such as the blockbuster movie series The Wandering Earth (2019) and The Wandering Earth II: The Prequel (2023).[19,20]

 

In particular, Xi's signature slogan and ideology, the "Chinese Dream," emphasizes China's rise to "fully developed" superpower status by 2049—a date that will mark one century since the founding of the PRC.[21] By then, according to official doctrine, China will be at the forefront of technology, with a united and prosperous citizenry and a state functioning for the good of not only all citizens, but all nations and humanity writ large.

 

The latter altruistic face of rising China brings us to another key doctrine in current official Chinese thought, viz. that of "Human Community with a Shared Future"—first articulated by Hu Jintao and refined by Xi in recent years. It has been incorporated into the constitution twice—first under Jintao in 2012, and again by Xi in 2018. This doctrine and its core principles provide an underlying leitmotif in the stories and movies under discussion. In 2018, it was added to the Constitution of the People's Republic of China as a core value of international relations. It was articulated negatively and positively. Negatively, China claims to be opposed to imperialism, hegemonism, and colonialism (the US and collective West are implicated in those). Positively, it is committed to unity and harmony among all the peoples of the world. As The China Media Project points out in an article on the doctrine: "The phrase 'community of common destiny for mankind'... incorporates traditional elements of Chinese foreign policy that prioritize a [Chinese] state-centered approach to human rights, while subordinating individual rights to the basic question of national interest.[emph. added]"[22]

In "The Wandering Earth," this idealistic doctrine manifests powerfully when the hero Liu Peiqiang, after seventeen years away from his family on a space station mission, must choose between reuniting with them or sacrificing himself to save humanity.[19] His final apology to his son for breaking his promise to return, before undertaking the suicide mission that will save Earth, exemplifies how personal loss becomes meaningful through service to collective purpose.

Unlike the market-driven development of science fiction in the West, China's state actively shapes the genre's themes and purposes. As Neil Gaiman recounts, after Chinese officials learned that American tech innovators were often inspired by childhood exposure to sci-fi, the state implemented strategic support and oversight of the genre. A state official explained to Gaiman: "The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine."[19]

V. Competing Theodicies, Common Functions

These distinct theodicies reflect deep cultural and political differences while serving similarly powerful legitimating functions. Where Chinese theodicy provides a collective moral framework through state guidance, Western theodicy draws power from deeply rooted American ideals of individual authenticity and achievement. Tech leaders cast themselves as Emersonian heroes who have moved beyond mere resistance to oversight to actively seeking and wielding political power, all while claiming to serve innovation. Though this framework shows signs of degradation into nihilistic celebration of power, it maintains cultural resonance through its appeal to American dreams of individual achievement and expressive individualism.

The fusion of tech and political theodicies in the West creates new pathways for concentrated power. When tech leaders and political strongmen mutually reinforce each other's authority—as exemplified by Musk's unprecedented appointment as a 'special government employee' with direct involvement in federal operations[28]—they transform challenges to their authority into opposition to authentic leadership and innovation itself. Understanding these legitimating mechanisms and their evolving manifestations becomes crucial as the boundaries between tech power and state authority grow increasingly fluid.

VI. Conclusion

The scene that opened our analysis—tech billionaires gathered at Trump's 2025 inauguration—now reveals itself as a watershed moment in the transformation of American power. What appeared as a surprising political realignment can be understood as the natural outcome of how technological authority has come to be legitimated and exercised. The fusion of tech sector autonomy with nationalist mission creates an especially powerful mechanism for concentrating control while evading accountability.

This consolidation of power gains momentum through its dual character—simultaneously promising salvation and warning of existential threat. Each technological milestone, whether China's DeepSeek or America's latest corporate breakthrough, amplifies both messianic visions of transcendence and dire warnings about strategic vulnerability.[23] The pattern mirrors the Cold War arms race, where the imperative to maintain advantage overwhelmed ethical concerns about nuclear proliferation and mutual assured destruction.

The doctrine of perpetual research and development serves as the practical mechanism through which this ideology maintains power. By positioning technological advancement as humanity's supreme obligation to future generations, tech leaders transform their pursuit of autonomy from democratic oversight into a moral imperative. Their followers—whether American MAGA supporters celebrating tech "mavericks" or Chinese nationals proud of their country's technological ascent—internalize justifications for their own diminishing agency in an increasingly technocratic system.

The degradation of theodicy from Leibniz through Voltaire to Beckett's Lucky finds its contemporary echo in how tech discourse has devolved from philosophical argument to naked assertion of power. When Peter Thiel declares that "freedom and democracy are incompatible," or Marc Andreessen insists that "there is no material problem that cannot be solved with more technology," they no longer bother with reasoned justification. Like Lucky's rambling celebration of modern conveniences that fail to address his fundamental condition, today's tech enthusiasm catalogs endless innovations while accepting the concentration of unprecedented power in unaccountable hands.

This matters because the technologies being developed—from artificial intelligence to brain-computer interfaces—have the potential to reshape the human condition in fundamental ways. The sidelining of ethical oversight through appeals to competition, progress, or national destiny threatens to leave crucial decisions about humanity's future in the hands of those whose power derives from avoiding democratic accountability. Breaking this cycle requires more than just new regulations or policies—it demands reconsidering how we understand technology's role in human flourishing and who gets to make decisions about its development.

The alternative is to continue down a path where technological development becomes ever more divorced from ethical consideration, driven by competition dynamics that serve primarily to concentrate power while manufacturing consent for that concentration. The inauguration scene that opened this analysis may then come to mark not just a moment of transformation but a point of no return—when the convergence of tech power and nationalist politics created a framework for governance beyond democratic control.

Endnotes:

1. "Net Worth of Trump Inauguration Attendees Tops $1 Trillion with World's Richest in the Crowd," Sky News, January 21, 2025.
2. Kelvin Chan et al., "Meta Eliminates Fact-checking in Latest Bow to Trump," Associated Press, January 7, 2025.
3. "Elon Musk Spends $277 Million to Back Trump and Republican Candidates," CBS News, December 6, 2024.
4. "Judge Denies Philadelphia DA's Request to Block Elon Musk's $1 Million Giveaway," ABC News, November 4, 2024.
5. Meghan O'Gieblyn, "God in the Machine: My Strange Journey into Transhumanism," The Guardian, April 18, 2017.
6. Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine: Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957).
7. Raymond Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).
8. Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
9. Sigal Samuel, "The Broligarchs Have a Vision for the New Trump Term," Vox, January 20, 2025.
10. Joy Buolamwini, Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines (New York: Random House, 2023).
11. "Joy Buolamwini and Sam Altman: Unmasking the Future of AI," Commonwealth Club World Affairs, November 2023, YouTube video.
12. Karen Hao, "AI Is Taking Water from the Desert," The Atlantic, March 1, 2024.
13. G.W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil (La Salle: Open Court Publishing, 1985).
14. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (New York: Grove Press, 1994).
15. Marc Andreessen, "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," a16z (blog), October 2023.
16. Mario Poceski, Introducing Chinese Religions (New York: Routledge, 2009).
17. "How Xi Jinping is Going Back to Confucius to Define China's Future," South China Morning Post, November 24, 2024.
18. Zhao Shengnan, "Xi Cites Confucius as Positive Example for Modern Nation," China Daily, September 25, 2014
19. Pan and Xu, "What the Sci-fi Blockbuster Wandering Earth II Can Teach Us About China's Global and Local Aspirations," The Conversation, February 12, 2023.
20. Alexandra Grace Casale, "Sci-Fi, AI and the New Chinese Dream," Cognitive Business News, September 24, 2020.
21. Shannon Tiezzi, "Why 2020 Is a Make-or-Break Year for China," The Diplomat, February 13, 2015.
22. "Community of Common Destiny for Mankind," China Media Project, accessed January 31, 2025.
23. "DeepSeek Forces a Global Technology Reckoning," New York Times, January 27, 2025.
24. Siladitya Ray, "Trump Hails 'Super Genius' Elon Musk In Victory Speech—Ahead Of Likely Election Win," Forbes, November 6, 2024.
25. Thomas Grove et al., "Elon Musk's Secret Conversations With Vladimir Putin," Wall Street Journal, October 25, 2024.
26. Maggie Haberman, "Trump Put Musk on Phone With Zelensky During Call," New York Times, November 8, 2024.
27. Fatima Hussein, "Elon Musk's DOGE Commission Gains Access to Sensitive Treasury Payment Systems," Associated Press, February 1, 2025.
28. Chris Megerian, "Musk is a 'Special Government Employee,' the White House Confirms," Associated Press, February 3, 2025.

Hannah Arendt on Truths, Facts and Lying in Politics

Note: This OP was posted on Dissident Politics, where it can be read along with responses and comments of readers: https://dispol.blogspot.com/2022/06/hannah-arendt-truth-facts-and-lying-in.html

 

In 1967, Hannah Arendt published an essay entitled Truth and Politics in The New Yorker (it later appeared with revisions in the book, Between The Past and The Future). Though originally written as a response to critics she felt had lied about her coverage of the Eichmann trials,  the thinking  catalyzed by these concerns led to ideas and insights of much more general import, and well worth evaluating today in an age where distinctions between facts, conspiracy theories and lies seem to swirl around us in a miasma of misinformation, shaping everything from policy and elections in gov't to media/social media to everyday interactions in our dangerously conflicted society. As we try to understand a world in which lies and truths appear to be interchangeable  categories ("alternative facts"), and where the most egregious lying imaginable in the public realm has the potential to wreck our system of government, possibly once and for all, the topic of the essay could not be more important. It is among Arendt's most thought-provoking essays from her late period, whether one agrees or takes exception to the conclusions she reaches. Here I summarize some of the main theses in the piece concisely and in the context of our own political situation in the US.

Arendt begins by stating that not all truths are alike in their nature and status. We may speak of scientific truths, moral truths,  religious truths, historical truths, psychological truths, and-- most importantly for this essay-- factual truths. She divides these various types of truth up into 2 categories: "factual truths" and "rational truths." The definitions are useful descriptions or heuristics rather than epistemic claims. AS Arendt puts it, "I shall use this distinction for the sake of convenience [emph added] without discussing its intrinsic legitimacy."(Truth and Politics: p. 2) The purpose of this convenient distinction is to compare and contrast the outcomes when rational truths vs. factual truths come into conflict with political authorities and power structures.

Rational truths include the accepted truths of mathematics, science, philosophy and religion, among others.. Factual truths are derived from observation and experience (e.g. historical records, eyewitness accounts,  etc.). The first claim she makes is that while rational truths and factual truths can both be lost or wiped out when they bump up against political powers, factual truths (i.e. knowledge of actual events, people, and actions such as those journalists cover) are far more vulnerable to erasure at the hands of political authorities than rational truths.

One can imagine, for example,  knowledge of basic arithmetic being lost, or for some reason  banned by fanatical anti-mathematical clerics or something. All the text books would be burned, like in Bradburry's  Farenheit 451. Yet it is certainly not impossible that later generations would devise systems like addition and subtraction for themselves based on their own rational capacities.  At more abstract levels the likelihood or reestablishing rational truths gets slimmer but is still possible. Imagine General Relativity, Copernican Heliocentrism, or Euclidean geometry being banned for whatever reason (as the Church banned Heliocentrism in the 17th C). Perhaps such knowledge would eventually perish like so many books reduced to dust. And yet, Arendt claims, it is at least imaginable that some of these truths would emerge from later inquiries because they are based on reasoning and ideas rather than fleeting and unique events in history that must be witnessed and recorded to exist at all.  Factual Truths (e.g. Stalin and Hitler made a pact in 1939; Nixon bombed Cambodia illegally during Vietnam; Trump lost the 2020 election and no investigation has since uncovered "fraud" as he and others claim occurred) are MUCH easier to stamp out, to obliterate from public discourse when they inconvenience those in power. They are based on records rather than reasoning. The question that arises here is "How are factual truths obliterated in modern societies?" According to Arendt, it happens by means of what she calls *organized lying.* The facts are "lied away," as she puts it. 

We are often prone to thinking that the biggest threat to facts is false belief/crackpot theory/bullshit and the like. But the biggest threat comes not from merely false belief but deliberate falsehood/lying.While the opposite of a true mathematical result is an "error," and the opposite of a presumed scientific truth is a "falsehood," the opposite of factual truths on the public record  is a "lie." This doesn't mean there are no innocent mistakes in the recording of facts, by, for example, journalists. But these failed efforts to record actualities accurately--errata-- are not fundamentally *opposed* to factual truths. Indeed they are accidents that occur while acting as a "truth-teller" or chronicler of facts. So unlike other domains of truth, the opposite of factual truth is the lie, and in particular "organized lying." What, then,  is the main danger of lying in politics?

 

 Often we fear that the danger of lies is that they can come to replace factual truth, or provide a substitute for the public record, which serves as an orienting consensus in an otherwise diverse society. The fear, these days, is expressed in terms of some "alternative facts" coming to replace actualities. This is not the ultimate threat, thinks Arendt.  There is a point beyond which lying becomes incompatible with social stability and common understandings necessary for survival and shared life. You can only get so far in establishing "alternate accounts" of the facts without utterly destabilizing the fabric of reality itself. Taken far enough, the content of lies (be it conspiracy theories or arbitrary misstatements that attack facts) result not in a substitute for the shared public realm of acknowledged facts, but in confusion, disorientation and conflict over what is real-- and over what is really happening. Thus the ultimate threat isn't the content of the lying itself (though this obviously has proximate importance) but rather it is the coordinated and concerted effort to undermine or obliterate facts that threaten those in power for one reason or another. Publicly acknowledged and shared factual truth constitutes a minimal basis for any overlapping consensus within which we can communicate at all. It is one of the main ingredients in the very fabric of social existence, and it can't be replaced by lies. The fantasies of organized lying  and factual truths can't function in equivalent ways. One reflects a reasonably accurate grasp of realities we cannot escape--i.e. the social, historical realities within which we must exist and act-- while the fantastic lies have no ground at all. Once the ground of truth is lost, just about anything goes. As Arendt puts it famously elsewhere, the result is that "Nothing is true and everything is possible." In Truth and Politics, she writes that, "[truth] is limited to those things that men cannot change at will...[adding] Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground we walk on and the sky that stretches above us."(T&P:p. 19)

Factual truths, then, function to check arbitrary power from destroying our access to shared reality. This leads to a discussion of the importance of those public institutions "established and supported by the powers that be, in which contrary to all political rules, truth and truthfulness have always constituted the highest criterion of speech and endeavor."(T&P:17) In this connection, she mentions the importance in modern open societies of the independent judiciary, research centers and universities, government archives, et al. What all such domains share is a commitment to impartiality.  "Whether these places of higher learning are in private or public hands"  she writes,  "is of no great importance; not only their integrity but their very existence depends on the good will of the government anyway...Very unwelcome truths have emerged from the universities, and very unwelcome judgments have been handed down from the bench time and time again." (T&P: p. 17). But we must not take these "refuges of truth" for granted, as they are, along with the free press, vulnerable to the whims of political power-- even in "open societies" ruled by constitutions. Without real journalism, as opposed to what we call "fake news,"  she remarks, "we should never find our bearings in an ever-changing world and, in the most literal sense, we would never know where we are." This is the desired outcome of organized lying. So political lying typically targets not just recorded truths in the public realm, but the institutions in which disinterested studies and impartial determinations are made. Universities, the free press and independent judiciaries are often the first casualties of organized political lying campaigns. Over the past decade, we've seen a disturbing trend along just such lines in Hungary, Poland and a few other countries in Europe. Trump's effort to "drain the swamp" is largely tantamount to erasing the institutional memory-system of our "bloated government departments." Attempts to neutralize agencies like the EPA by staffing it with opponents of environmentalism also belie the desire to "lie away" even important scientific truths we face in the age of global warming. The list goes on and on. Organized lying depends on the dismantling of as many centers of relatively impartial inquiry as possible, and again this reveals the true goal not as one of "replacing" a world anchored by generally accurate public understandings, but destroying that world in service to the caprice of the will to domination, and not the will to truth.  The manipulation of social reality allows those in power to get away with almost anything, and then make up rationalizations as they go along.

Take the example of "memory laws" in which history is turned into official doctrine. In Turkey, one can't say there was an Armenian Genocide. In Poland, one can't say there were collaborators in WW2. In China, Tiananmen Square never happened, and surviving witnesses are carefully monitored to this day. (Louissa Lim's book, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited,  describes that sad affair). Thus, lying in politics relies heavily on creating "public enemies." Recall Trump said the NY Times is "an enemy of the people"-- and though many laughed at the time, he soon stopped taking any questions he didn't like in press conferences, saying only  three words instead, "That's fake news." Perhaps the most concise statement he made along these Arendtian lines is when he told an audience, "What you're seeing is not what's  happening." https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/07/24/donald-trump-what-youre-seeing-not-whats-happening-tapper-sot-vpx.cnn  So we see in modern authoritarian politics, as with the totalitarian states of the 20th century, an attempt not to replace truth with some other stable "alternate reality" as some fear, but to make it seem that factual truths are really just so many "opinions." You think Trump lost, but I have a "different opinion"--  an "alternative account." That's the sort of attitude toward facts operative in the domain of organized lying.. Of course, there are areas in which citizens disagree because they hold different opinions-- a hallmark of free society. But these are opinions ABOUT agreed facts, not just opinions about other  opinions of opinions, ad infinitum with no bottom line or basis for mediation. If the distinction between these is lost or blurred, the results are disastrous. We already see a world in which people who live in the same cities seem to be denizens of utterly different universes as far as their basic beliefs about the world and reality are concerned. Some of us are able to remember that not so long ago this was simply not the case.

Once factual truths are leveled out and treated like mere opinions, there is no longer a possibility for shared understandings of reality to serve as a legitimate basis for debating and discussing policies as responses to situations and problems that are agreed upon on the basis of public records, journalism, social science etc. Suppose we are debating responses to urban crime or unemployment. We can only disagree meaningfully and offer our opinions on the topic if we at least agree on statements of crime rates or unemployment. In some political speeches these are almost completely fudged in order to achieve some political goal which treats such facts as mere obstacles to power.  Then the description of society and its problems and needed policies no longer rests on shared knowledge but becomes malleable in the hands of those who fabricate and deceive in order to impose their will on society with impunity. This , for Arendt,  is the heart of the fascist project. She writes:

"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that lies will now be accepted as truths, and truths defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world-- and the categories of truth vs. falsehoods is among the mental means to this end-- is being destroyed." (TP: p. 16)

So the goal is to render populations susceptible to the arbitrary refashioning of the public stock of knowledge on which political acts and decisions are based. Power determines alleged facticity, and the possibility of critique, dissent or simply holding authorities to accounts based on accurate knowledge is short-circuited. Facts then become radically free . That is, the usual constraints of accuracy are entirely loosened so that authorities can say things one day and contradict them, or say they never said them at all the next day. They can rewrite history to subserve their own ends. They can categorize whole groups as "criminals," "traitors," or "public enemies" with no burden of objective evidence at all.

An example of this from the 1/6 hearings is found in an interview with former AG Barr. He recalls conversations with Trump in which the latter would say things like, "I have evidence from Pennsylvania, you have to do something about that." Barr would say, "We investigated that claim, Sir, it doesn't check, it's simply not true." Barr recalls that Trump seemed "totally unconcerned with the facts" as he would effortlessly switch to some other allegation as if he had not registered the FACT that the first claim was being dismissed as false. He would say something like "Well what about the evidence I gave you from Georgia?" Barr went on to say, "I thought, 'boy, he's really detached from reality if he believes this stuff.'" I'm not sure Barr understood that what he was so surprised to see was no different from the way Trump had dismissed photographic evidence regarding the size of the crowd at his inauguration in 2017, when he insisted it was "the biggest crowd ever...bigger than Obama's inaugural" etc. The press treated that like it was merely some character flaw, a narcissistic personality disorder, etc. Even if that part is true, it is less important for Arendt than the real goal of such unremitting lying on all matters great and small. The real aim is to eradicate the distinction between facts and lies. After a while, GOP stalwarts asked about Trump's endless stream of obvious lies just submitted to their validity. They accepted the lies by adopting a blase attitude towards them, thus according the fact/lie distinction little importance. In such a blase mode it was no longer difficult let the lies stand simply by NOT refuting or denying them. I remember Pence being asked about some obvious lies and accusatory statements made by Trump in a speech in an interview. Asked if he agreed with the content of the lies, Pence simply said, "I think it's just Trump being Trump." This elides the entire fact/lie distinction by stating a banal truism, a tautology to be precise. Soon enough, "It's just Trump being Trump" or similar stock phrases became the common currency of his enablers. Barr was surely among them. Did none of these people realize that they too had become "detached from reality" (as Barr put it recently)  simply by accepting this discourse of lies as legitimate? 

Arendt thinks that to some extent, those implicated in organized lying like this are self-deceived. This is not to say they deeply and sincerely believe any of these things. No, these aren't held as deep convictions. Rather, the perpetrators don't really care about the truth/lie distinction except in cases where they must cover their asses. (And if they take all of this a bridge to far, they may well fail even to do that and be caught off guard). As long as  they can get away with it, they focus not on the true/false distinction but the distinction between gaining and losing power and the ability to dominate others. To a large extent, they stop questioning themselves about what is true and false, except in cases where their own power hangs in the balance. Otherwise, while delivering a speech or message, they likely do not notice that they are lying. It has become a default mode of operating in most situations. Arendt likens this mentality to "Madison Avenue Advertising" culture. Here we can think of politicians who "believe their own propaganda" or "get high on their own supply." Apparently, for example, Rumsfeld and others in the Bush Administration really believed US invaders and occupiers would be "greeted as liberators." The poor planning that resulted landed them in a quagmire. They bought their own lies. It seems Putin similarly somehow believed his own propaganda about Ukranians embracing Russian invaders as liberators-- and planned a victory statement for Feb. 28, a mere 4 days after "special military operations" began. This self-deception-- which can be ones' undoing-- is an occupational hazard faced by the authoritarian or fascist leader accustomed to the flattery of yes-men rather than quality information.

Here I have only summarized a few of the arguments advanced by Arendt because they are especially relevant to our situation today. But for the sake of clarity, Arendt does recognize that the truth is much more than just a collection of recorded facts. The latter are the indispensable basis for other forms such as scientific and philosophical truths. When organized lying becomes pervasive,  telling the truth or reporting facts becomes a form of political action, says Arendt. The journalist who digs for truth in Russia or China may well end up on a hit-list and become a dissident or honored hero, where in a society that takes free press for granted, it seems that simply reporting facts is apolitical. But Arendt is also aware that the truths we live by also include principles, values, norms and stories that lend meaning to these facts. Storytellers, historians, philosophers, religious figures and others have always played an important role in establishing moral, social and political understandings such as those encoded in laws and principles undergirding society, culture, law and the political domain. The values, for example, of liberty and equality, are not recorded facts. But they have been part of the commonly understood "World" inhabited by those of us who live in liberal or social democracies. I did not think it was as important to discuss her thoughts on how such "rational truths"  function, since the prerequisite for them is still, as she said, the kind of knowledge we need simply to "literally know where we are." And it appears such knowledge is now endangered here.

References/related reading:

 

 -Hannah Arendt:  Truth and Politics  (Between The Past and The Future: Penguin press  1977 Ch.7 Truth and Politcs pp. 223-260 or available as free stand-alone essay online)

-Frederica Merenda:  Reading Arendt to Rethink Truth  ( Democracy and Fake News Routledge, 2021 article by Frederica  Merenda page 19-30)

Possible Questions:

-Do you agree with Arendt's claim that the ultimate goal of political lying is NOT to replace one stable truth with some alternative to it, but rather to destroy the distinction between factual truths and mere opinions so that those in power can stipulate what counts as true with no regard to consistency or stability at all? 

-If Arendt's account is correct, it would seem to follow that the relatively accountable and honest institutions she mentions  (free press, universities, various governmental departments that collect and disseminate information etc.) are of vital importance. But she doesn't not make any suggestions in this essay regarding how to safeguard the integrity of such institutions. Do you have any ideas about how to do that in the face of a politically motivated all-out assault on factual truth?

Democrats and Republicans for a Pro-Democracy Coalition?

The NY Times published an op-ed piece by former Republican Governor, Christine Todd Whitman and Miles Taylor (a former Trump employee who published an anonymous critical article about Trump while working for him). They suggest a strategy that may sound familiar to those who remember the Lincoln Project and similar groups of Never-Trump Repubs that threw their lot in with the Dems to elect Biden last year. Their idea is simple: the best we to make sure the House does not end up in the hands of Trump loyalists next year is for moderate, center-right Repubs to become part of a pro-democracy coalition  with the singular goal of s defeatingTrump-loyalists who have made embracing The Big Lie  about Trump's "stolen election" a litmus test for GOP races. In the abstract, the idea sounds promising as a strategy to minimize chances of a pro-Trump GOP ascendancy. But we've seen this movie before in the form of the Lincoln Project and other similar ones that spent millions on ads, but didn't seem to have much of an effect on Republicans. As a matter of fact, 92% of them voted Trump, an increase from the 2016 election. The Lincoln Project says that it had more impact on undecided independents, but I haven't seen any evidence of this. Meanwhile, the fragile Dem coalition is already having a hard time maintaining unity among moderates conservatives (e.g. blue dog types) and progressives like "the squad."

The article generated close to 3,000 comments at the NYT, an unusually high number there. Readers' responses range from enthusiastic support to firm rejections of such a coalition. Some think we should throw out all purity tests and build bridges wherever we can to contain and ultimately defeat the pro-Trump GOP. Others point out how much trouble we already have on our hands trying to deal with the so-called "moderate" dems, esp. Manchin and Sinema on the one hand, and the no-compromise Justice Democrats https://justicedemocrats.com/  like AOC and "the squad"  on the other. I tilt towards being a single-issue voter right now, because the issue is, I believe, defeating Trumpism, which amounts to rejecting an autocrat with a tight grip on a party willing to abandon constitutional principles in order to win elections. In other words, as many, including Whitman and Taylor have warned, we stand to lose democratic governance with free and fair elections if we can't defeat the Trumpists. This does seem like a once in a lifetime emergency, and if it were possible to unite people around this idea I would support it. But unfortunately, many people do not share this fear, or at least not enough so to overlook intra-party differences within the Dem party, as made evident by the disputes between Dems who have failed to pass Biden's signature bill in any form thus far. Such a failure, if not remedied, could result in losses in 2022.

I'm posting the article here, and hope it will stimulate thoughtful debate on the idea of a broad anti-Trumpist (or put positively, pro-democracy) coalition. Also, here's a link to the NYT article for those interested in the many and diverse opinions expressed in their comments section today: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/opinion/2022-house-senate-trump.html

 

Guest Essay

We Are Republicans. There’s Only One Way to Save Our Party From Pro-Trump Extremists.

Oct. 11, 2021

 

By Miles Taylor and Christine Todd Whitman

Mr. Taylor served at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff, and was the anonymous author of a 2018 guest essay for The Times criticizing President Donald Trump’s leadership. Ms. Whitman was the Republican governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001.

 

After Donald Trump’s defeat, there was a measure of hope among Republicans who opposed him that control of the party would be up for grabs, and that conservative pragmatists could take it back. But it’s become obvious that political extremists maintain a viselike grip on the national and state parties and the process for fielding and championing House and Senate candidates in next year’s elections.

Rational Republicans are losing the party civil war. And the only near-term way to battle pro-Trump extremists is for all of us to team up on key races and overarching political goals with our longtime political opponents: the Democrats.

This year we joined more than 150 conservatives — including former governors, senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and party leaders — in calling for the Republican Party to divorce itself from Trumpism or else lose our support, perhaps with us forming a new political party. Rather than return to founding ideals, Republican leaders in the House and in many states have now turned belief in conspiracy theories and lies about stolen elections into a litmus test for membership and running for office.

Starting a new center-right party may prove to be the last resort if Trump-backed candidates continue to win Republican primaries. We and our allies have debated the option of starting a new party for months and will continue to explore its viability in the long run. Unfortunately, history is littered with examples of failed attempts at breaking the two-party system, and in most states today the laws do not lend themselves easily to the creation and success of third parties.

So for now, the best hope for the rational remnants of the Republican Party is for us to form an alliance with Democrats to defend American institutions, defeat far-right candidates, and elect honorable representatives next year — including a strong contingent of moderate Democrats.

It’s a strategy that has worked. Mr. Trump lost re-election in large part because Republicans nationwide defected, with 7 percent who voted for him in 2016 flipping to support Joe Biden, a margin big enough to have made some difference in key swing states.

Even still, we don’t take this position lightly. Many of us have spent years battling the left over government’s role in society, and we will continue to have disagreements on fundamental issues like infrastructure spending, taxes and national security. Similarly, some Democrats will be wary of any pact with the political right.

But we agree on something more foundational — democracy. We cannot tolerate the continued hijacking of a major U.S. political party by those who seek to tear down our Republic’s guardrails or who are willing to put one man’s interests ahead of the country. We cannot tolerate Republican leaders — in 2022 or in the presidential election in 2024 — refusing to accept the results of elections or undermining the certification of those results should they lose.

To that end, concerned conservatives must join forces with Democrats on the most essential near-term imperative: blocking Republican leaders from regaining control of the House of Representatives. Some of us have worked in the past with the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, but as long as he embraces Mr. Trump’s lies, he cannot be trusted to lead the chamber, especially in the run-up to the next presidential election.

And while many of us support and respect the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, it is far from clear that he can keep Mr. Trump’s allies at bay, which is why the Senate may be safer remaining as a divided body rather than under Republican control.

For these reasons, we will endorse and support bipartisan-oriented moderate Democrats in difficult races, like Representatives Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, where they will undoubtedly be challenged by Trump-backed candidates. And we will defend a small nucleus of courageous Republicans, such as Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Peter Meijer and others who are unafraid to speak the truth.

 

In addition to these leaders, this week we are coming together around a political idea — the Renew America Movement — and will release a slate of nearly two dozen Democratic, independent and Republican candidates we will support in 2022.

These “renewers” must be protected and elected if we want to restore a common-sense coalition in Washington. But merely holding the line will be insufficient. To defeat the extremist insurgency in our political system and pressure the Republican Party to reform, voters and candidates must be willing to form nontraditional alliances.

For disaffected Republicans, this means an openness to backing centrist Democrats. It will be difficult for lifelong Republicans to do this — akin to rooting for the other team out of fear that your own is ruining the sport entirely — but democracy is not a game, which is why when push comes to shove, patriotic conservatives should put country over party.

One of those races is in Pennsylvania, where a bevy of pro-Trump candidates are vying to replace the departing Republican senator, Pat Toomey. The only prominent moderate in the primary, Craig Snyder, recently bowed out, and if no one takes his place, it will increase the urgency for Republican voters to stand behind a Democrat, such as Representative Conor Lamb, a centrist who is running for the seat

 

For Democrats, this similarly means being open to conceding that there are certain races where progressives simply cannot win and acknowledging that it makes more sense to throw their lot in with a center-right candidate who can take out a more radical conservative.

Utah is a prime example, where the best hope of defeating Senator Mike Lee, a Republican who defended Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede the election, is not a Democrat but an independent and former Republican, Evan McMullin, a member of our group, who announced last week that he was entering the race.

We need more candidates like him prepared to challenge politicians who have sought to subvert our Constitution from the comfort of their “safe” seats in Congress, and we are encouraged to note that additional independent-minded leaders are considering entering the fray in places like Texas, Arizona and North Carolina, targeting seats that Trumpist Republicans think are secure.

More broadly, this experiment in “coalition campaigning” — uniting concerned conservatives and patriotic progressives — could remake American politics and serve as an antidote to hyper-partisanship and federal gridlock.

To work, it will require trust building between both camps, especially while they are fighting side by side in the toughest races around the country by learning to collaborate on voter outreach, sharing sensitive polling data, and synchronizing campaign messaging.

A compact between the center-right and the left may seem like an unnatural fit, but in the battle for the soul of America’s political system, we cannot retreat to our ideological corners.

A great deal depends on our willingness to consider new paths of political reform. From the halls of Congress to our own communities, the fate of our Republic might well rest on forming alliances with those we least expected to.

 

 

 

 

 

Rhetoric, Republicanism and Democracy

 Plato had little praise for rhetoric and oratory. He also had little praise for democracy.  The 2 were, for him, essentially linked. Most of his early dialogues, and indeed The Republic, feature Plato's Socrates showing the Sophists (who were largely focused on Rhetoric and oratory) that their teachings lead to impasse, contradiction and folly. It's true that in one dialogue, The Phaedrus, he has Socrates leave open the possibility of a productive and ethical rhetoric directed towards the apprehension of truth. But more generally, he sees rhetorical arguments as a form of flattery, a way of appealing to irrational elements in an audience to exercise influence on others. Dialectic vs. Rhetoric thus aligns with the Philosophy/Sophistry and Reason/Emotion dichotomies in Plato. Real philosophers are lovers of truth and wisdom; Sophists are only "philodoxers," or lovers of doxa-- i.e. opinion. They also love to influence opinions without necessarily getting closer to truth.

Sophists were professional traveling teachers that had emerged largely to meet needs of litigants. As such, many of them were less committed to finding truth than winning arguments. Some (e.g. Protagoras) denied objective truth altogether, though Plato may exaggerate according to more recent scholars. But he is responding to this aspect of sophists, and seems to assume that all or most rhetoric instantiates these perceived deficits. But Plato also thinks only philosophical elites need to worry about public life  and significant speech in politics. Both in Republic and Laws, there's really little, if any room for most people in the polis to exert any influence over the polity.

In a democracy, or even a mixed constitution that gives citizens a role in public life and governance, rhetoric and oratory are valuable skills if placed within the context of shared civic virtues and constitutional principles. Hence Aristotle, who favored a mixed constitution not too different from Republicanism, is much more supportive of rhetoric as an integral part of public life. Since the kind of polis he endorses leaves room for all citizens (free members of the polis) to play some role in public life, it is important that citizens refine their communicative abilities so that they may discuss and argue cogently and persuasively about policies, laws etc. In a top-down society-- whether headed by philosopher kings or tyrants-- there is little room for argument and persuasion. Coercion and rule by decree is preeminent. So, we can see how the need to communicate well becomes more important when people are given a greater voice. This underlies the rise of rhetoric in those societies in Greece and Rome that invested citizens with not only the right but the obligation to participate in civic debate and policy formation. The rise of trial by jury of fellow citizens, as opposed to authoritarian courts, also made effective argument important in these societies.

For Aristotle governmental, educational (Paideia) legal, philosophical and political communication should be enacted with excellence (arete). He lays out 3 key elements in his rhetoric: ethos, logos and pathos.

Appeal to ethos is the speaker's  appeal to that which is likely to result in the audience conferring trustworthiness and credibility onto that speaker. For example, if one says, "I speak from years of experience as a professor of medicine," this invites the audience to attribute credibility to that speaker.  In cultural and political context, credibility may have less to do with credentials than values and beliefs shared by the speaker and audience. Thus an appeal to religious norms and values when addressing a congregation, or widespread patriotic ideals when addressing a nation show that gaining respect has much to do with ethos in the sense of shared ways of life.

Logos is the element of rationality associated with dialectic or logic. It includes such things as ability to gather relevant info, and finding and presenting good evidence for your claims via well reasoned arguments. Rhetoric without logos can degenerate into baseless propaganda or invective. But any genuine Rhetoric, on the classical model, must be grounded in empirical facts and carefully structured inferences.

Appeal to pathos to the emotions of those you address is crucial if we want to motivate the audience to not just believe an argument but take action based on it. A classic example would be appealing to emotions associated with patriotism, and fear of insecurity in order to motivate people to fight in a (presumably just) war. We also see appeal to pathos in more peaceful campaigns such as the Space Race of the 1950s and 60s that led to the moon landings. More troubling, appeals to resentments and xenophobia may fuel, say, anti-immigration invective which can lead to scapegoating (not that we should assume all immigration should be tolerated as legal; rather the issue here is the possibility of dehumanizing and villainizing out-groups) .

Aristotle and the Romans who expanded on his Rhetoric, viewed appeals to ethos, logos and pathos as something akin to the 3 legs that support a stool. All are equally important. Attention to logos makes what used to be called the "pathetic fallacy" (arguments that rely almost solely on emotions) much less likely. Of course, manipulative speakers may violate the precept of appealing strongly to logos-- but that is not in keeping with classical rhetoric. Ethos is important in a complex society. We don't all know the intricacies of, say, medicine, engineering or physics, and so when speakers appear on, say, TV with their titles and academic affiliations we usually attribute basic credibility to them in a way that we would not if they were just ordinary people with no training or credentials in the domain about which they speak (medicine, cybersecurity or whatever else). Though we are currently seeing decreased trust in putative experts and increased populism, this is still only a matter of degree. We don't ask strangers if a certain pill has any side effects or poses a risk to the body; we look for some type of expertise.

Roman Rhetoric emphasized  the importance of having other people on board with you-- recognizing their importance as fellow citizens (egalitarian bent here, though this won't extend to non-citizens). Another non-elitist aspect is the belief that you can be taught to speak well and govern, that rhetoric is not necessarily an innate talent. Thus a myriad of handbooks on rhetoric and oratory emerged in Republican Rome. Cicero and later Quintillian made important contributions to the field.

The Roman systems divide rhetoric up into 3 branches. 1. Judicial or Forensic  rhetoric appeals mostly to reason in order to judge things that happened in the past. Establishing the guilt or innocence of an accused person is an obvious example of forensic rhetoric. 2. Epideictic or  Demonstrative rhetoric appeals mainly to pathos/passions often in order to make a speech of praise or condemnation. Speeches at weddings, funerals, graduation ceremonies, et al., all concern appeal to the sentiments of the audience. A formal denunciation of a traitor or criminal relies equally on moving the audience. Still, logos must be operative or else we can fall into mere flattery or ad hominem (mere insult). There should be logical reasons based on empirical facts when we speak of a criminal or traitor. 3. Deliberative rhetoric is aimed at influencing actions to be taken such as whether members of the audience will vote X or Y in an election. The interest here is in future outcomes, and the means by which they can be influenced by speech and argument. Again, we can see that in authoritarian systems, this is much less important than Republican and Democratic systems in which citizens have input. So in Republican Rome many handbooks and pedagogical systems for constructing variations and combinations of these 3 branches emerge, which in turn rest on the principle of showing roughly equal concern for appeals to ethos, logos and pathos.

This very short history of Classical Rhetoric should indicate why rhetorical practice is important to thriving democracies and free republics. Rhetoric ultimately rests on some (varying) degree of free speech in public life, which has been rather rare historically. In order to use such freedom of speech with care and skill, we should take some kind of interest in evaluating and making arguments based on the categories of logic ( logos), trustworthines/credibility (ethos) and awareness of emotional factors at play (pathos). Once we learn to analyze the contents of free speech in this way, we are less easily manipulated by others and more capable of expressing ourselves effectively. But does any of this insure that free speech will be used ethically?

No. This is not possible. Rhetoric can be used for good and ill. Free speech always leaves open the possibility that those who use it may do so in ways that are injurious or destructive. This is why both Aristotle and Cicero emphasized that Rhetoric was just one element of a good education. It's proper use depends, for them, on the cultivation of virtues consistent with shared political values such as those enshrined in constitutions. Civic virtues, as the founders of the US liked to say, are necessary to any government that grants a wide range of liberties to citizens. It would be necessary to write another post to explore various paradigms of virtue ethics (which is currently very topical in contemporary ethics and political theory). But clearly, the idea was always that rhetoric be bounded or even constrained by widely shared societal norms and values. When these begin to break down or become fragmented, as in our own time, it is most important to carefully examine the content of speech and journalism for exaggerated appeal to contentious (widely unshared) premises, beliefs, values and norms. An awareness of rhetorical methods, strategies and tropes can help the citizen to be less vulnerable to the machinations of propagandists, ideologues and demagogues. Hopefully, in time we will be able to employ rhetoric constructively within the context of widespread societal values and goals-- in other words within the context of a widely shared political vision of what kind of people we as a nation want to be. For as it says in Proverbs, "Where there is no vision the people shall perish."
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Sources/Further Reading:

Aristotle:

The Art of Rhetoric: Penguin Classics, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred

The Nicomoachean Ethics: Oxford World Classics, trans. David Ross

Cicero:

De Inventione- available free via Internet Archive--  https://archive.org/details/cicerodeoratore01ciceuoft

De Oratore-  at  Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/ciceroonoratoryo00cice  and good wikipedia summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Oratore

Edward P.J. Corbett and Rosa A. Eberly:

The Elements of Reasoning (2nd Ed.)-- a short but comprehensive and useful overview of both classical and modern rhetoric with lots of examples from contemporary media and politics..

Must We Contemplate Death to Live Authentically?

Below is one answer to the question posed above. It was written by philosophically inclined psychiatrist, Warren  Ward, and published earlier this year in Aeon.  https://aeon.co/  Ward, citing Heidegger, Tibetan Buddhism and the teachings of the historical Buddha, takes up the position  that Western people tend to take life for granted because they lack an awareness of the inevitability of death. Scientific materialism and reductionism treat human beings as living things to be analyzed like any others (say, cells, plants, etc.) despite the fact that we seem to be uniquely aware of finitude or the knowledge that we will one day no longer exist. This awareness is not all that sets us apart from inanimate and (most) animate objects of scientific inquiry, but it is the focus here since the claim is that by putting this awareness of inevitable death on the "back burner," we block out the wonderment of life itself which is fleeting and precious and not to be taken for granted, but appreciated. Such appreciation, it is claimed, can only occur against the backdrop of coming to peace with the fact of inevitable death without succumbing to a sense of futility or despair.  But in the process of doing so, it is necessary (on this view) to experience"angst" or "dread"  as you confront the fact that the the very person that you are will have to die. This is not an abstraction of the form, "all men are mortals; I am a man; therefore I am mortal."  Rather what is stressed is the concrete emotional resonance that comes with knowing in your guts, that you must die at some unknown point in the future. This personal grasp of your own inevitable death is the sort of thing that makes the stomach drop. But the  angst impresses on you the significance of the limited time you have,  which then allows you to really consider your possibilities and "projects" while alive. Without this process of confronting death, existentialists and some Buddhists hold, we cannot live "authentically" or without self-deception. Thus we cannot achieve our potentialities and find individual meaning in life. Rather we sink to the level of "inauthenticity" (e.g. conformity, idle and shallow talk, blending in with the crowd, etc.). This is the theme of this short but representative article on that position.

There are, however, other thinkers who have endorsed a very different approach to achieving the same end (a full and meaningful individual life lived without self-deception). In the early modern period, Spinoza comes to mind. He writes:

The free person thinks least of all of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691183848/think-least-of-death

 Spinoza's overall philosophy includes the claim that Nature is deterministic right down to our own thoughts and feelings, and that it is Abrahamic and other "supernatural" religions that constitute the denial of life as it really is. Without going into his complex theories of nature and ethics, he thinks that human life is thoroughly natural, and can be understood in terms of rational and law-like relationships. It might help here to think of Einstein's sense of wonder at the universe combined with his concern for ethics in human society. Einstein said that if he had a religion it was that of Spinoza, who says that Nature and God are one and the same. There is no personal creator-god, no god with whom to communicate or ask for boons or mercy, etc. However, the ability to understand the wonders of nature-- not least of all ourselves, our emotions and desires-- confers a sense of profound awe and holds out the possibility that we may learn the "laws of the mind" and in ceasing to fight them, find freedom in the release from ignorance-born passions (e.g. to obtain prestige, wealth and power or the favor of an invented God and his earthly representatives).  So it is clear that not only must each of us die, but that there is no afterlife, according to Spinoza.  Yet it is also clear that living with the existentialist's "dread" and "angst" is, for
Spinoza, a dead end (no pun ). What is needed to appreciate and experience the fullness of life is the joyful and inspired study of life, of the causes of happiness, misery, apathy, and all the myriad of emotional states that Spinoza (who profoundly inspired Nietzsche, Freud and Einstein) was one of the first to examine closely. 

There are other positions that fall between the extremes of claiming the necessity of cultivating a clear awareness of inevitable death on the one hand, and concentrating rather on reaching a deep understanding of human life  (while knowing it is transient and without an otherworldly sequel).  But here I wanted to set up the bookends of the ongoing debate about the value of contemplating death. Is it a morbid dead end? Is it the sine qua non of living well? Something in between? Following is the case for the latter view of being aware of the fragility of life and inevitability of death in order to be truly and 'authentically' alive in the ongoing present.

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Sooner of Later We All Face Death. Will a Sense of Meaning Help Us?

by Warren Ward (fr. Aeon Magazine)

‘Despite all our medical advances,’ my friend Jason used to quip, ‘the mortality rate has remained constant – one per person.’

Jason and I studied medicine together back in the 1980s. Along with everyone else in our course, we spent six long years memorising everything that could go wrong with the human body. We diligently worked our way through a textbook called Pathologic Basis of Disease that described, in detail, every single ailment that could befall a human being. It’s no wonder medical students become hypochondriacal, attributing sinister causes to any lump, bump or rash they find on their own person.

Jason’s oft-repeated observation reminded me that death (and disease) are unavoidable aspects of life. It sometimes seems, though, that we’ve developed a delusional denial of this in the West. We pour billions into prolonging life with increasingly expensive medical and surgical interventions, most of them employed in our final, decrepit years. From a big-picture perspective, this seems a futile waste of our precious health-dollars.

Don’t get me wrong. If I get struck down with cancer, heart disease or any of the myriad life-threatening ailments I learnt about in medicine, I want all the futile and expensive treatments I can get my hands on. I value my life. In fact, like most humans, I value staying alive above pretty much everything else. But also, like most, I tend to not really value my life unless I’m faced with the imminent possibility of it being taken away from me.

Another old friend of mine, Ross, was studying philosophy while I studied medicine. At the time, he wrote an essay called ‘Death the Teacher’ that had a profound effect on me. It argued that the best thing we could do to appreciate life was to keep the inevitability of our death always at the forefront of our minds.

When the Australian palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware interviewed scores of people in the last 12 weeks of their lives, she asked them their greatest regrets. The most frequent, published in her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying (2011), were:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me;
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard;
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings;
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends; and
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

The relationship between death-awareness and leading a fulfilling life was a central concern of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose work inspired Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialist thinkers. Heidegger lamented that too many people wasted their lives running with the ‘herd’ rather than being true to themselves. But Heidegger actually struggled to live up to his own ideals; in 1933, he joined the Nazi Party, hoping it would advance his career.

Despite his shortcomings as a man, Heidegger’s ideas would go on to influence a wide range of philosophers, artists, theologians and other thinkers. Heidegger believed that Aristotle’s notion of Being – which had run as a thread through Western thinking for more than 2,000 years, and been instrumental in the development of scientific thinking – was flawed at a most fundamental level. Whereas Aristotle saw all of existence, including human beings, as things we could classify and analyse to increase our understanding of the world, in Being and Time (1927) Heidegger argued that, before we start classifying Being, we should first ask the question: ‘Who or what is doing all this questioning?’

Heidegger pointed out that we who are asking questions about Being are qualitatively different to the rest of existence: the rocks, oceans, trees, birds and insects that we are asking about. He invented a special word for this Being that asks, looks and cares. He called it Dasein, which loosely translates as ‘being there’. He coined the term Dasein because he believed that we had become immune to words such as ‘person’, ‘human’ and ‘human being’, losing our sense of wonder about our own consciousness.

Heidegger’s philosophy remains attractive to many today who see how science struggles to explain the experience of being a moral, caring person aware that his precious, mysterious, beautiful life will, one day, come to an end. According to Heidegger, this awareness of our own inevitable demise makes us, unlike the rocks and trees, hunger to make our life worthwhile, to give it meaning, purpose and value.

While Western medical science, which is based on Aristotelian thinking, sees the human body as a material thing that can be understood by examining it and breaking it down to its constituent parts like any other piece of matter, Heidegger’s ontology puts human experience at the centre of our understanding of the world.

Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with melanoma. As a doctor, I knew how aggressive and rapidly fatal this cancer could be. Fortunately for me, the surgery seemed to achieve a cure (touch wood). But I was also fortunate in another sense. I became aware, in a way I never had before, that I was going to die – if not from melanoma, then from something else, eventually. I have been much happier since then. For me, this realisation, this acceptance, this awareness that I am going to die is at least as important to my wellbeing as all the advances of medicine, because it reminds me to live my life to the full every day. I don’t want to experience the regret that Ware heard about more than any other, of not living ‘a life true to myself’.

Most Eastern philosophical traditions appreciate the importance of death-awareness for a well-lived life. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, for example, is a central text of Tibetan culture. The Tibetans spend a lot of time living with death, if that isn’t an oxymoron.

The East’s greatest philosopher, Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, realised the importance of keeping the end in sight. He saw desire as the cause of all suffering, and counselled us not to get too attached to worldly pleasures but, rather, to focus on more important things such as loving others, developing equanimity of mind, and staying in the present.

The last thing the Buddha said to his followers was: ‘Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!’ As a doctor, I am reminded every day of the fragility of the human body, how closely mortality lurks just around the corner. As a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, however, I am also reminded how empty life can be if we have no sense of meaning or purpose. An awareness of our mortality, of our precious finitude, can, paradoxically, move us to seek – and, if necessary, create – the meaning that we so desperately crave.

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Thoughts in Response to Ward: 

 

There was a time I was largely in agreement with the position Ward takes, and I still think there is something to it (I'll explain below just what I have in mind). But the sociological and anthropological presuppositions in play seem to be unduly biased against "Western" cultures, while glossing over the basic historical facts of cultures in both the East and West, and in most other places and times. As a rule, the history of civilizations and cultures reveals the extraordinary power of a belief in the continuation of life in some way, shape or form. Far from "accepting finitude" all sorts of belief systems regarding the infinity of the spirit world, the world of souls, ghosts, gods, demons, rewards, punishments, rebirths or their cessation as a result of nirvanic consciousness, all these seem to animate most people at most times in human history. Not just this, but only a tiny fraction of, for example, Buddhists, have interpreted their religion in sophisticated philosophical terms that come anywhere close to matching the approach recommended by Ward in his article. Most people have been drawn to religion, "holy men" and gurus to find a way out of pain and suffering hopefully in this life, but certainly in the "next" if possible. People in many faiths collect relics of allegedly powerful wise persons or saints, prostrate themselves before whichever gods or deities they have been taught to regard as protectors and benefactors, etc. And this brings me back to Spinoza who relegated all such supernaturalism to the realm of denying life on its own terms and replacing what is real with fantasy.

Now, there are non-religious (agnostic and atheistic) versions of the thesis that we must come to terms with the inevitability of death to live well (e.g. Sartre). But I think it is fair to set such versions of the thesis apart from Buddhism, Hinduism, Christian Existentialism (e.g. Kierkegaard, and possibly Heidegger who wanted and received a Catholic burial)  theistic mysticism etc. If we take away the Buddhist's prayer wheel, the deities, the conviction of rebirth (Buddhists), reincarnation (Hindus), heavens and hells and other conceptions of the afterlife-- what then are the inner-resources of the person who would acknowledge the finality of death? Not the death of one of many forms of life, but finality as far as we know? Would this create a sense of Heideggerian "dread" that would alone show the way to an honest and purposeful life (authenticity)? Why? Why not? 

I think the Western "denial of death"  is not completely different from the denial of final death found in religious cultures elsewhere. Unlike Spinoza, I can't say with certainty whether or not human death is the final end or whether there is some kind of afterlife we don't know very much about. That is, I'm agnostic on the metaphysics here. However, I think that dogmatic certainty regarding doctrines of afterlife whether Abrahamic, Indian, African, Egyptian, Chinese or whatever else, is very different from accepting even the *possibility* that all we are, have been and will be could end once and for all. That conscious experience itself, of any kind, is finite. 

Still, I said there is something the view of Ward, following Heidegger and others gets right in my view. I do think that the recognition that our opportunities must be grasped now, in this life or not at all, is an important component of living a mature and realistic life. We needn't become morbidly preoccupied with death, nor cultivate "dread and angst" per Heidegger. Rather, the lesson of death is with us each and every day. Just as life itself is temporary, so are our most valued moments whether with ourselves, nature and/or others. Even within the lifespan, it is inevitable that relationships we cherish will fade away, that loved ones will die, and so finitude is built into life from childhood to our own deaths. When experiencing something of great value such as love, human connection or the magnificent beauty of nature, it is not uncommon to have a flash of awareness that these experiences are mysterious, and transient. They come and surely they will go, as will we. How much more reason to seek them out while we can do we reauire? Not in a maniacal or pleasure-hungry way, but with an open mind and willing heart-- an affirmation that those things we most cherish needn't exist forever or lead to some afterlife to make the game worth the candle. I used to call this "humanism" but that word has become just another way of arguing about the existence of God, which is not what I mean at all. If anything, I have come to value living with uncertainty, without needing to convince others of this/that metaphysical position; but again, knowing that there's no reason to expect that conscious life continues, and that if not, that does not diminish the value of our living opportunities and experiences here and now.