The invitation for the end-of-the-year flight was a bit unusual. It had an image that looked familiar, as I have a copy of the painting in my office. Obviously, I thought George Grosz would be on the flight. That made the invitation to fly to Nairobi even more intriguing.
As I approached the gate at the Atlanta airport, I looked up to see who was boarding the flight, and the first two people that I saw were John Locke and Jacques Rousseau. Two of the most prominent figures of the West whose philosophies are in constant battle to this day, had already started arguing. As expected, Locke was arguing for the sovereignty of the individual, while Rousseau could be heard speaking about how the group and the general will were superior to the solitary conscience.
The closer I came to the gate, the clearer my vision was. As Alexis de Tocqueville was giving his boarding card to the agent he could be heard saying to George Grosz who was beside him: “America is Aristotle’s offspring and yet among the civilized countries in the world, America is the one that pays the least attention to philosophy,” to which Grosz replied: “America was born in the age of Francis Bacon, it grew under the double engines of commerce and slavery in the era of our co-traveler John Locke, achieved independence under the tutelage of the Enlightenment, and nowadays it seems that a cabal that has no respect for truth, justice, honor, and virtue is trying to establish new pillars in the society, like those portrayed in my painting titled ‘The Pillars of Society’”.
Upon boarding the plane, I saw that Reinhold Niebuhr was already in deep conversation with Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr. Niebuhr was in awe of Morgenthau’s efforts to save thousands of innocent lives when he served as US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, at the time when horrific genocides were taking place. Morgenthau was expressing admiration for Niebuhr’s book titled The Irony of American History, by stating that it “is the most important book ever written on US foreign policy.”
As I took my seat, my inner question was what would be the topic(s) of conversation during the flight, and who would be the instigator to start the group’s conversation. I didn’t have to wait for long. As we all took our seats, Grosz turns to Rousseau and states: “Hi Jacques, you and I are the rebels in this group,” only to get Rousseau’s immediate answer: “We are all rebels in this group.”
Niebuhr took the floor by asking: “Could we identify a statement by one of America’s founding fathers, that could represent the epitome of the Aristotelian and Machiavellian teachings?” Then, Locke took the floor: “That’s not so difficult. What’s better than Madison’s statement that ‘if men were angels, no government would be necessary’.”
“I would fully agree,” Tocqueville said and continued, “This is the essence of American exceptionalism, realism in balance with a bias toward progress, facts, and a love for liberty and human dignity. On nearly every issue through the ages that seemed to split Europeans apart, whether it is democracy vs. aristocracy, religion vs. science, progress vs. established tradition, Americans seemed to have struck a harmonious balance. American pragmatism reflects politics as competitive partnership among countervailing interests where participation and strive rather than obedience and authoritarianism are the hallmarks.”
“Bravo Alexis!” Locke pronounced and continued: “What Rousseau – our fellow traveler – feared as modern liberty’s greatest weakness that is the reliance on self-interest, turned out to be one of its hidden strengths. Same thing as with Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s fear of relentless change came out to be Aristotle’s glory. America has kept the balance between individualism and voluntarism. The art of associating is reflected in one of America’s most important institutions: businesses. That business spirit is one the republic’s most valuable renewable resources.”
“Listen, my friend,” Rousseau proclaimed: “Your Lockean freedoms secured through an illusional social contract that you have been proposing are nothing but a ruse, a confidence trick by the powerful played on the weak, in order to consolidate their power. Modern humans are enslaved socially, economically, and politically. Human history is a history of domination, oppression, and exploitation by the mega forces of institutionalized greed, organized hatred, and routinised indifference for the weak and vulnerable people.”
“Are you serious?” Locke asked, but it was time for someone else to speak, so Morgenthau took the floor: “The relationship between ideas, culture, and politics that Russeau implies isn’t incremental or linear, but rather interactive and catalytic. That great awakening known as the Enlightenment liberated our political philosophy and through scientific explorations shed light on the world. Ideas are sparks that ignite a fire for truth, justice, virtue, and exceptionalism. However, ideas take root when the soil is right, and the nature of soil changes the way an idea grows. Just look at Locke’s revolutionary ideas in his book Two Treatises of Government. Those ideas were so revolutionary that Locke had to wait for a decade to be published after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The idea of Parliamentary supremacy and ultimately of the sovereignty of the people, had been around since the days of the Magna Carta, however the fulfillment of time had not arrived yet until the time was ripe to impose limits on royal authority, and that was done not as a radical departure from tradition, but rather as an attempt to restore tradition and defeat the forces of tyranny and absolutism. When the Parliament made William (who was Dutch) the King in defiance of the incompetent James and his attempts to impose his will on the people, the world witnessed one of the greatest regime changes without bloodshed. That’s glorified pragmatistic exceptionalism.”
It was time for Niebuhr to intervene: “Mr. Ambassador, your moral compass represents the world’s True North that should be guiding our policies. If it was not for you and your influence on the New York Times that published 145 articles about the Armenian Genocide – while the US State Department was ignoring your pleas – the world might have never known about those massacres and atrocities committed. Unfortunately, as per our earlier discussion, when moral blindness guides a policy, then the collective mind illuminates ignorance, which over time becomes naïve stupidity where virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue. It was that moral enlightenment that you infused in your family which inspired your son Henry Morgenthau Jr. to establish the rules of the game at Bretton Woods and bring financial stability following World War II, since during his tenure as Treasury Secretary from 1934 to 1945, he designed a policy for the Day After by accumulating close to 70% of the world’s gold reserves in the United States. If human foibles represent a painter, then history is our canvas, given our fallen human nature. When that reality of our fallen human nature is ignored as antiquated, defeatist, and psychologically unhealthy, then our consciousness, and especially our group consciousness is distorted. Consequently, we compromise our principles, lose our moral compass, and while people’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, the atmosphere of lies and the exercise of unjust power makes the call for democracy and for moral principles in the exercise of policies necessary.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Rousseau said, and he continued: “Even Locke would accept the argument that the state of nature, or what he calls the state of perfect freedom, is unstable. This by default invites a state of war in which a group may use force to impose their will to power on others. Barbara Tuchman, a Pulitzer Prize winner and the granddaughter of Ambassador Morgenthau said it so well in her famous book titled The Guns of August. However, when you elevate reason above institutionalized injustice and inequality, then the emergence of a new day should be a story of liberation from oppression, corruption, hypocrisy, and intellectual blindness. That was our purpose with Denis Diderot when we cofounded and edited the Encyclopedia which is widely accepted as the most important publication of the French Enlightenment that ushered in the Age of Reason. A disordered society creates disordered souls, and hence the need for a new society that harmonizes the inner life of the soul with all social arrangements. Even my archenemy David Hume could agree with that statement. The corruption that surrounds us cannot be mediated by middlemen whether those are priests or politicians. But let me address our dear friend Reinhold Niebuhr’s point on our fallen nature; I couldn’t agree more with you. As I wrote in my novel Emile or on Education, everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man.”
It was time for Tocqueville to intervene: “I believe that George Grosz’s painting speaks volumes about corrupted minds and mindsets that Rousseau was referring to. However, his vision and advocacy for a civil religion can lead to totalitarianism and a reign of terror – as it happened following the French Revolution – unless you subscribe to their dogmas. The exceptionalism of striking a balance can be manifested in the United States. From the very beginning, the United States found itself with a constitution founded on a permanent clash between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, as well as between federal power and states’ rights, and a sectional split between a commercialized North and a slave-owning South. At the same time, it was also a society delicately balanced between individualism and volunteerism, while its ethos was struggling to find an equilibrium between a culture of money-loving and religious evangelism. America went through the stages of Common Sense Realism, a philosophy which was a fusion between empiricism borrowed from Aristotle and Locke and Platonic moral intuitionism. The Civil War cracked that balance, and a new balance/philosophy was required. The answer came when a Quaker merchant named Johns Hopkins – a fierce supporter of Abraham Lincoln – founded a university in Baltimore. The university’s first president (Daniel Coit Gilman) would declare that the goals of the university should be ‘to make less misery for the poor, less ignorance in the schools, less suffering in the hospitals, less fraud in business, and less folly in politics.’ During the demoralizing despair and the nihilistic spirit epitomized by the likes of Nietzsche, Gilman brought to the university Charles Pierce and William James who would end up creating America’s first homegrown philosophical creed which, more than any other, would translate the dynamic balance of Plato and Aristotle into a conscious way of understanding the world through the lenses of reason, truth, justice, and virtue. Their blending of rationalism and empiricism, of ideas and facts, brought to the forefront an intellectual creed destined to impute its spirit to America’s policies, that was tender-minded enough to show our connection to something outside ourselves, but also tough enough to deal with robust reality. Welcome to Pragmatism a.k.a. Exceptionalism.”
“Well stated Alexis,” Niebuhr said, “But let me clarify something; That pragmatism should recognize the common grace/goodness of the created order and adopt a moral compass in its offsprings along with the sense of life’s possibilities that undergird our existence. In addition, it should recognize the need of developing a self-critical faith as an antidote for zealotry and idolatrous views of self, society, or the state. The combination of our freedom and our capacity for self-transcendence means that humans can conjure up great schemes of good and evil, projects of sheer altruism and gratuitous cruelty. We have the capacity to do theoretical physics as well as to invent weaponry and chemicals to destroy innocent life, our own, and the rest of the ecosystem. Man has always been his most vexing problem, a problem exacerbated by the certitude of those self-serving middlemen who represent themselves as more patriotic than the founding fathers and as better Christians than Christ himself. Hi George, tell us please about them.”
George Grosz took the floor, “First of all, let’s recognize that those corrupt individuals made all their money and fame from the public budget while taking almost no risk. In some instances, they are the epitome of two things: The tragedy of the commons, and of corporate welfarism. My 1959 painting known as The Pillars of Society, borrowed its name from a play by Henrik Ipsen. I wanted to reflect on the German elite who supported Fascism. It represents those corrupt middlemen that you have been talking about. Yes, I recognize that reflects a nightmarish and grotesque picture of those who may be controlling society. They are all portrayed as vicious, selfish, uncaring individuals. The main characters start with the beer-drinking individual who has a swastika on his necktie, and whose head is full of the pageant of war. Take a look at his skull which is open and from it rises a war-horse. To his left stands another gentleman who represents the corrupt media. The pot on his head symbolizes his lack of intelligence. The newspaper in one of his hands is the medium to influence the public (nowadays you can add sports clubs too), while he pretends to desire peaceful solutions. The problem is that he holds a bloodied palm branch in his other hand. On the right-hand side, we have another corrupted person holding a pamphlet full of nonsensical ideology and conspiracies, while his head is exposing a steaming pile of dung. Behind them, there is another middleman, a clergy, who chooses to ignore the crimes committed while he inflames the chaos with his preaching. It’s a picture of a brainless society run by middlemen whose self-interest is so corrupt and amoral that is despicable. A cleansing fire is needed but who can instigate it?”
“This is your ever-eavesdropping captain speaking. As we are getting ready to land in Nairobi, I couldn’t help but address that very last point by Mr. Grosz, so I would like to let you know that upon landing you will be greeted by Oliver Cromwell and Robert Morgenthau, the grandson of Ambassador Morgenthau. I believe that both have a few things to share with you about that cleansing fire. Cromwell had to take radical steps to institutionalize order and parliamentary authority, while Robert Morgenthau contributed like no other in cleansing New York City from corruption, as District Attorney from 1975 to 2009.”
Exceptionalism and The Pillars of Society
Author : John E. Charalambakis
Date : December 28, 2023
The invitation for the end-of-the-year flight was a bit unusual. It had an image that looked familiar, as I have a copy of the painting in my office. Obviously, I thought George Grosz would be on the flight. That made the invitation to fly to Nairobi even more intriguing.
As I approached the gate at the Atlanta airport, I looked up to see who was boarding the flight, and the first two people that I saw were John Locke and Jacques Rousseau. Two of the most prominent figures of the West whose philosophies are in constant battle to this day, had already started arguing. As expected, Locke was arguing for the sovereignty of the individual, while Rousseau could be heard speaking about how the group and the general will were superior to the solitary conscience.
The closer I came to the gate, the clearer my vision was. As Alexis de Tocqueville was giving his boarding card to the agent he could be heard saying to George Grosz who was beside him: “America is Aristotle’s offspring and yet among the civilized countries in the world, America is the one that pays the least attention to philosophy,” to which Grosz replied: “America was born in the age of Francis Bacon, it grew under the double engines of commerce and slavery in the era of our co-traveler John Locke, achieved independence under the tutelage of the Enlightenment, and nowadays it seems that a cabal that has no respect for truth, justice, honor, and virtue is trying to establish new pillars in the society, like those portrayed in my painting titled ‘The Pillars of Society’”.
Upon boarding the plane, I saw that Reinhold Niebuhr was already in deep conversation with Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr. Niebuhr was in awe of Morgenthau’s efforts to save thousands of innocent lives when he served as US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, at the time when horrific genocides were taking place. Morgenthau was expressing admiration for Niebuhr’s book titled The Irony of American History, by stating that it “is the most important book ever written on US foreign policy.”
As I took my seat, my inner question was what would be the topic(s) of conversation during the flight, and who would be the instigator to start the group’s conversation. I didn’t have to wait for long. As we all took our seats, Grosz turns to Rousseau and states: “Hi Jacques, you and I are the rebels in this group,” only to get Rousseau’s immediate answer: “We are all rebels in this group.”
Niebuhr took the floor by asking: “Could we identify a statement by one of America’s founding fathers, that could represent the epitome of the Aristotelian and Machiavellian teachings?” Then, Locke took the floor: “That’s not so difficult. What’s better than Madison’s statement that ‘if men were angels, no government would be necessary’.”
“I would fully agree,” Tocqueville said and continued, “This is the essence of American exceptionalism, realism in balance with a bias toward progress, facts, and a love for liberty and human dignity. On nearly every issue through the ages that seemed to split Europeans apart, whether it is democracy vs. aristocracy, religion vs. science, progress vs. established tradition, Americans seemed to have struck a harmonious balance. American pragmatism reflects politics as competitive partnership among countervailing interests where participation and strive rather than obedience and authoritarianism are the hallmarks.”
“Bravo Alexis!” Locke pronounced and continued: “What Rousseau – our fellow traveler – feared as modern liberty’s greatest weakness that is the reliance on self-interest, turned out to be one of its hidden strengths. Same thing as with Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s fear of relentless change came out to be Aristotle’s glory. America has kept the balance between individualism and voluntarism. The art of associating is reflected in one of America’s most important institutions: businesses. That business spirit is one the republic’s most valuable renewable resources.”
“Listen, my friend,” Rousseau proclaimed: “Your Lockean freedoms secured through an illusional social contract that you have been proposing are nothing but a ruse, a confidence trick by the powerful played on the weak, in order to consolidate their power. Modern humans are enslaved socially, economically, and politically. Human history is a history of domination, oppression, and exploitation by the mega forces of institutionalized greed, organized hatred, and routinised indifference for the weak and vulnerable people.”
“Are you serious?” Locke asked, but it was time for someone else to speak, so Morgenthau took the floor: “The relationship between ideas, culture, and politics that Russeau implies isn’t incremental or linear, but rather interactive and catalytic. That great awakening known as the Enlightenment liberated our political philosophy and through scientific explorations shed light on the world. Ideas are sparks that ignite a fire for truth, justice, virtue, and exceptionalism. However, ideas take root when the soil is right, and the nature of soil changes the way an idea grows. Just look at Locke’s revolutionary ideas in his book Two Treatises of Government. Those ideas were so revolutionary that Locke had to wait for a decade to be published after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The idea of Parliamentary supremacy and ultimately of the sovereignty of the people, had been around since the days of the Magna Carta, however the fulfillment of time had not arrived yet until the time was ripe to impose limits on royal authority, and that was done not as a radical departure from tradition, but rather as an attempt to restore tradition and defeat the forces of tyranny and absolutism. When the Parliament made William (who was Dutch) the King in defiance of the incompetent James and his attempts to impose his will on the people, the world witnessed one of the greatest regime changes without bloodshed. That’s glorified pragmatistic exceptionalism.”
It was time for Niebuhr to intervene: “Mr. Ambassador, your moral compass represents the world’s True North that should be guiding our policies. If it was not for you and your influence on the New York Times that published 145 articles about the Armenian Genocide – while the US State Department was ignoring your pleas – the world might have never known about those massacres and atrocities committed. Unfortunately, as per our earlier discussion, when moral blindness guides a policy, then the collective mind illuminates ignorance, which over time becomes naïve stupidity where virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue. It was that moral enlightenment that you infused in your family which inspired your son Henry Morgenthau Jr. to establish the rules of the game at Bretton Woods and bring financial stability following World War II, since during his tenure as Treasury Secretary from 1934 to 1945, he designed a policy for the Day After by accumulating close to 70% of the world’s gold reserves in the United States. If human foibles represent a painter, then history is our canvas, given our fallen human nature. When that reality of our fallen human nature is ignored as antiquated, defeatist, and psychologically unhealthy, then our consciousness, and especially our group consciousness is distorted. Consequently, we compromise our principles, lose our moral compass, and while people’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, the atmosphere of lies and the exercise of unjust power makes the call for democracy and for moral principles in the exercise of policies necessary.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Rousseau said, and he continued: “Even Locke would accept the argument that the state of nature, or what he calls the state of perfect freedom, is unstable. This by default invites a state of war in which a group may use force to impose their will to power on others. Barbara Tuchman, a Pulitzer Prize winner and the granddaughter of Ambassador Morgenthau said it so well in her famous book titled The Guns of August. However, when you elevate reason above institutionalized injustice and inequality, then the emergence of a new day should be a story of liberation from oppression, corruption, hypocrisy, and intellectual blindness. That was our purpose with Denis Diderot when we cofounded and edited the Encyclopedia which is widely accepted as the most important publication of the French Enlightenment that ushered in the Age of Reason. A disordered society creates disordered souls, and hence the need for a new society that harmonizes the inner life of the soul with all social arrangements. Even my archenemy David Hume could agree with that statement. The corruption that surrounds us cannot be mediated by middlemen whether those are priests or politicians. But let me address our dear friend Reinhold Niebuhr’s point on our fallen nature; I couldn’t agree more with you. As I wrote in my novel Emile or on Education, everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man.”
It was time for Tocqueville to intervene: “I believe that George Grosz’s painting speaks volumes about corrupted minds and mindsets that Rousseau was referring to. However, his vision and advocacy for a civil religion can lead to totalitarianism and a reign of terror – as it happened following the French Revolution – unless you subscribe to their dogmas. The exceptionalism of striking a balance can be manifested in the United States. From the very beginning, the United States found itself with a constitution founded on a permanent clash between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, as well as between federal power and states’ rights, and a sectional split between a commercialized North and a slave-owning South. At the same time, it was also a society delicately balanced between individualism and volunteerism, while its ethos was struggling to find an equilibrium between a culture of money-loving and religious evangelism. America went through the stages of Common Sense Realism, a philosophy which was a fusion between empiricism borrowed from Aristotle and Locke and Platonic moral intuitionism. The Civil War cracked that balance, and a new balance/philosophy was required. The answer came when a Quaker merchant named Johns Hopkins – a fierce supporter of Abraham Lincoln – founded a university in Baltimore. The university’s first president (Daniel Coit Gilman) would declare that the goals of the university should be ‘to make less misery for the poor, less ignorance in the schools, less suffering in the hospitals, less fraud in business, and less folly in politics.’ During the demoralizing despair and the nihilistic spirit epitomized by the likes of Nietzsche, Gilman brought to the university Charles Pierce and William James who would end up creating America’s first homegrown philosophical creed which, more than any other, would translate the dynamic balance of Plato and Aristotle into a conscious way of understanding the world through the lenses of reason, truth, justice, and virtue. Their blending of rationalism and empiricism, of ideas and facts, brought to the forefront an intellectual creed destined to impute its spirit to America’s policies, that was tender-minded enough to show our connection to something outside ourselves, but also tough enough to deal with robust reality. Welcome to Pragmatism a.k.a. Exceptionalism.”
“Well stated Alexis,” Niebuhr said, “But let me clarify something; That pragmatism should recognize the common grace/goodness of the created order and adopt a moral compass in its offsprings along with the sense of life’s possibilities that undergird our existence. In addition, it should recognize the need of developing a self-critical faith as an antidote for zealotry and idolatrous views of self, society, or the state. The combination of our freedom and our capacity for self-transcendence means that humans can conjure up great schemes of good and evil, projects of sheer altruism and gratuitous cruelty. We have the capacity to do theoretical physics as well as to invent weaponry and chemicals to destroy innocent life, our own, and the rest of the ecosystem. Man has always been his most vexing problem, a problem exacerbated by the certitude of those self-serving middlemen who represent themselves as more patriotic than the founding fathers and as better Christians than Christ himself. Hi George, tell us please about them.”
George Grosz took the floor, “First of all, let’s recognize that those corrupt individuals made all their money and fame from the public budget while taking almost no risk. In some instances, they are the epitome of two things: The tragedy of the commons, and of corporate welfarism. My 1959 painting known as The Pillars of Society, borrowed its name from a play by Henrik Ipsen. I wanted to reflect on the German elite who supported Fascism. It represents those corrupt middlemen that you have been talking about. Yes, I recognize that reflects a nightmarish and grotesque picture of those who may be controlling society. They are all portrayed as vicious, selfish, uncaring individuals. The main characters start with the beer-drinking individual who has a swastika on his necktie, and whose head is full of the pageant of war. Take a look at his skull which is open and from it rises a war-horse. To his left stands another gentleman who represents the corrupt media. The pot on his head symbolizes his lack of intelligence. The newspaper in one of his hands is the medium to influence the public (nowadays you can add sports clubs too), while he pretends to desire peaceful solutions. The problem is that he holds a bloodied palm branch in his other hand. On the right-hand side, we have another corrupted person holding a pamphlet full of nonsensical ideology and conspiracies, while his head is exposing a steaming pile of dung. Behind them, there is another middleman, a clergy, who chooses to ignore the crimes committed while he inflames the chaos with his preaching. It’s a picture of a brainless society run by middlemen whose self-interest is so corrupt and amoral that is despicable. A cleansing fire is needed but who can instigate it?”
“This is your ever-eavesdropping captain speaking. As we are getting ready to land in Nairobi, I couldn’t help but address that very last point by Mr. Grosz, so I would like to let you know that upon landing you will be greeted by Oliver Cromwell and Robert Morgenthau, the grandson of Ambassador Morgenthau. I believe that both have a few things to share with you about that cleansing fire. Cromwell had to take radical steps to institutionalize order and parliamentary authority, while Robert Morgenthau contributed like no other in cleansing New York City from corruption, as District Attorney from 1975 to 2009.”
Happy New Year!