The American Spectator : Obama and the Nature of Truth

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Obama and the Nature of Truth

By G. Tracy Mehan, III on 5.2.11 @ 6:07AM

What would Lincoln think? Mistake him for Stephen Douglas, probably.

Some people collect coins, others scan the beach with metal detectors. I enjoy trolling footnotes at the back of a book for little gems of insight or historical anecdote.

I was recently rewarded for this eccentricity while reading John D. Mueller's new book, Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element recently published by ISI Books.

Mueller, an economist, former speech writer for Jack Kemp, and now affiliated with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, seeks to restore the full understanding of human economic behavior in light of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas and recover a most important element which Adam Smith, a pantheistic Stoic, seems to have jettisoned: Augustine's theory of personal distribution which explains the difference between a gift and an exchange. This leads Smith to treat self-love as the only essential motive of economic behavior with the consequence "that no one ever shares his wealth with anyone else."

Since I have not yet finished Mueller's provocative book, I will have to leave the reader with this tantalizing morsel until I can review it in greater detail. Nevertheless, one tantalizing footnote, a self-contained nugget of sorts, deserves mention.

In the very last footnote to the very last chapter of Redeeming Economics, John Mueller asserts that "Ironically, the first African American president sided with Stephen Douglas against Abraham Lincoln on the Founders' understanding of the truth." He then cites a passage from the President's 2006 autobiographical book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, page 444, in which he observes:

It's not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of an idea or ideology or theology or "ism," any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single unalterable course, to drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad. The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them.

President Obama continues: "They were suspicious of abstraction and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history theory yielded to fact and necessity."

Contrast this passage with an 1859 letter of Lincoln's that Mueller juxtaposes to Obama's writings:

All honor to Jefferson-to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny [sic] and oppression.

Mueller then argues that "If Obama was right in 2006, Lincoln was wrong in the argument he used so effectively against Douglas and slavery in 1859."

It may be unfair to characterize the President as aligned with the thinking of Stephen Douglas, but he can certainly be criticized for failing to understand the underlying philosophy of the Founders. In a prior post for TAS, I recalled the writings of the great American political thinker, John Courtney Murray, S.J., who strongly defended the American Proposition as grounded in an objective, realist epistemology.

"The sense of the famous phrase ["We hold these truths…"] is simply this: 'There are truths, and we hold them, and we here lay them down as the basis and inspiration of the American project, this constitutional commonwealth'," insisted Murray. Over and against positivists, Marxists and pragmatists, the Founders thought that "the life of man in society under government is founded on truths, on a certain body of objective truth, universal in its import, accessible to the reason of man, definable, defensible."

"If this assertion is denied, the American Proposition is, I think, eviscerated at one stroke," stated Murray.

The error President Obama makes, in the passage cited by Mueller, is to confuse tolerance and the rights of conscience, as embodied in the First Amendment ("articles of peace" and "a great act of political intelligence" according to Murray), with relativism. Clearly religious pluralism was the native condition of America, and the Founders, particularly James Madison, had to deal with it to maintain domestic tranquility and allow the fledgling nation to flourish. But to confuse the prudential and moral claims of tolerance and pluralism with an abandonment of objective moral truth is fatal to American ideals.

"But the American Proposition rests on the more traditional conviction that there are truths; that they can be known; that they must be held; for, if they are not held, assented to, consented to, worked into the texture of institutions, there can be no hope of founding a true City, in which men may dwell in dignity, peace, unity, justice, well-being, freedom," claimed John Courtney Murray.

As the Founders, Lincoln and Fr. Murray all understood, an American's unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are endowed by a Creator and can only be defended from within the impregnable fortress of truth.

It is the Creator who guarantees these liberties as Lincoln, hardly an ardent churchgoer, fully understood when he stated in his Gettysburg Address that this nation is "under God."

About the Author

G. Tracy Mehan, III served at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the administrations of both Presidents Bush. He is a consultant in Arlington, Virginia, and an adjunct professor at George Mason University School of Law.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (18) | Leave a comment

Ken (Old Texican)| 5.2.11 @ 8:15AM

G. Tracy
Well spoken, sir! and thanks for the quotes.
I honestly conclude that this president is determined to break us on the wheel.

I for one shall not be broken.

Petronius| 5.2.11 @ 8:58AM

Real Americans still hold these truths. Our adversaries inflict their beliefs upon us through Federal judges.

Vern Crisler| 5.2.11 @ 10:03AM

The above article contradicts what you said in your previous article of 12/29/2010:

"Father Murray understood that, even in the 1950s, 'the serene, and often naïve, certainties of the eighteenth century have crumbled.' Thus, the 'self-evident' truths of the Declaration of Independence 'may be legitimately questioned.'"

Further,

"Rejecting John Locke's abstract, isolated individualism, Murray believes that natural law 'regards the community as a "given" equally with the person.' Moreover, 'Man is regarded as a member of an order instituted by God, and subject to the laws that make the order an order-laws that derive from the nature of man, which is essentially social as it is individual.'"

----
And as I said back then:

"I submit that this is why Murray did not understand America or its founding. A rejection of Lockean political philosophy and its corollary the American Declaration of Independence is in essence to reject the founding."

To play devil's advocate, I know the founders and Lincoln, but who is J Courtney Murray? They believed in individualism; Murray believes in semi-sociaism. They believed in Locke's natural rights philosophy; Murray rejects it.

Will the real Murray (or Mehan) please stand up....

G. Tracy Mehan, III| 5.2.11 @ 11:01AM

Vern, you are selectively quoting Murray who, while jettisoning the Lockean hyper-individualism, defends the American Proposition on natural law/natural right, i.e, rational, grounds. There is no doubting that many of the Founders, maybe most, were Lockeans. However, Lockean philosophy is not the only justification for the truths we hold.

Vern Crisler| 5.2.11 @ 8:56PM

I am not selectively quoting Murray, nor did Locke teach "hyper-individualism." You can find an interesting discussion by a Catholic of Murray's incoherent views on the founding here:

http://pblosser.blogspot.com/2.....urray.html

Murray was in a tough spot, trying to reconcile the American Liberal tradition with Catholic authoritarianism (e.g., Pope Leo 13).

The Catholic blog writer is not above admitting that the Roman denomination held that an "explicit Catholic political state was the ideal" and that Murray "ignores...or he distorts the evidence" when he tries to reconcile the Roman view with the American view.

Contrary to both Murray and the blog author, however, America doesn't need the Roman natural law tradition. They already worked within the framework of the natural law tradition when they formulated the Declaration and Constitution, so Murray's offer of help, if it's not a patronizing attempt to belittle the framers, is a little late out of the gate.

Al Adab| 5.2.11 @ 11:37AM

The simple fact is, that whether we like it or not, there does exist absolute truth. The Left continues to dissenble and adhere to a moral relativistic view of the world. Sadly that is a false vision. It is only by recognizing greater truths, that nations can govern themselves. We follow relativism at our peril.

Drew| 5.2.11 @ 12:22PM

Here's one "absolute truth" for you folks to suck on:

President Obama was in charge when we got Osama bin Laden. G.W. Bush managed to spend eight years and a couple of trillion dollars "looking" for him - and didn't.

The silence from the AS commentariat on this issue is deafening. But hardly surprising. Stick that in your "moral relativistic" pipe and smoke it.

Al Adab| 5.2.11 @ 12:36PM

Totally unrelated Drew, but yes, we got him. Nice to know that the leads came through waterboarding isn't it?

Margie| 5.3.11 @ 9:19PM

Ziiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnng!

Drunken Sailor| 5.2.11 @ 2:17PM

Your partially right Drew. Our troops got Osama Bin Laden with Obama's permission. About time he got something right. Still trying to figure out why, if they had this intel in Sept, did they wait so long? Politics? Surely not.

Drunken Sailor| 5.2.11 @ 2:29PM

Oh and I almost forgot this Obama "Victory" came about with info obtained by waterboarding. I expect to hear the current administration admit that any minute now.

Still Waiting.

C.K. Amos| 5.2.11 @ 3:56PM

Drew. get psychological and spiritual help. Anger management, too. All immediately.

GWB set in motion the process and continued the funding to the military for just such operations. And GWB stood atop the smoldering rubble at Ground Zero and declared that justice would be served.

As for the AS commentariat: If you mean the contributing writers, the editorial calendar may've already been set and the articles submitted.

If you mean the respondents to the articles, I'll just spit-ball it and guess that you will see the AS commentariat having something to say, when there's an article that demands such response--not this article

Oh, yes: We know that Obama had the sense, however tenuous, to keep Gitmo open so that the intelligence could be gathered to locate bin Laden. Yep, that waterboarding seemed to have worked.

George S| 5.2.11 @ 12:23PM

The excerpt from Obama's book should have been a loud warning bell...

"Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of an idea or ideology or theology or "ism," any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single unalterable course[,]"

What Obama is saying is that there is no rational basis for belief in tradition as it "locks in" future generations (not to mention revolutionaries); rejects absolute truth and goes on to claim that the basis of this belief would lead "[to] drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad." Uh-huhh.

There is the basis for his Hope and Change transformation. Being a progressive Marxist, he dismisses as legitimate the basis of American tradition thereby giving his sense of "intellectual superiority" the cover it needs to dramatically alter the American ideal.

So he rationalizes his own philosophy and transfers it to the Founders:

"They were suspicious of abstraction and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history theory yielded to fact and necessity."

Fact and necessity (whose, by the way?). Not tradition. Makes you want to puke.

JimH| 5.2.11 @ 2:59PM

The phrase ‘We hold these truths...’ goes on to say ‘to be self evident’. Now I believe that all men are created equal in the sense Jefferson meant, but I don’t think it is by any means self evident. I’m not sure if Jefferson really believed it either. The Declaration just was not the place for a full philosophical proof of the proposition. It sort of reminds me of the cartoon where a brilliant mathematician points to a blackboard full of a complex equation and says ‘Thus it is obvious that...’

C.K. Amos| 5.2.11 @ 4:01PM

Could we expect anything else from Obama, the moral agnostic, the moral relatativist, the megalomaniac he is?

WRJonas| 5.2.11 @ 4:17PM

Not all truth is self evident . Jefferson points out specifically " these truths.."
The source for this, is the human conscience . It is "written" on our hearts. Every honest man knows in his heart that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are common to every human being.
That becomes a foundation for further beliefs that these assumptions spring from our heart, not our brain