Читать книгу Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd - Ronald Suresh Roberts - Страница 10

I represented an important and mainstream tradition [of] vigorous enforcement of the civil rights laws as passed by Congress.

—Lani Guinier

There is a battle for truth. . . . The political question . . . is truth itself.

—Michel Foucault

The Tough Love Crowd’s solutions to many problems resemble—though they would be alarmed by the comparison—the Maoist creed of self-criticism. The Toughs object to calls for societal reform when in fact what may be necessary is self-reform. And the Toughs are a paradoxical crowd. They present themselves as critics, yet their work is anything but critical. They present themselves as heroes, yet their performance is anything but self-sacrificial. They claim to be outsiders even while they are sustained by the culture’s most powerful institutions. And, crucially, they insist on being counted among the racially progressive. That claim can usefully be challenged. The Toughs disparage passion in the name of various ideals of disinterest, and this locks them, whatever their intentions, into conservative politics. The Toughs’ dispassionate reckonings always omit important moral questions. They are undone by an unexamined belief that partisanship has no place in honest thinking. They believe (or, worse, pretend) that partisanship is an avoidable taint, whereas partisanship is neither avoidable nor a taint.

The Tough Love Crowd’s belief that partisanship is bad is a particular failing for them, since each Tough is partisan in an important sense. Each has a declared concern for the well-being of the dispossessed. Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, Stephen Carter, and Randall Kennedy all declare a concern for African Americans; V. S. Naipaul declares a concern for postcolonial peoples. Another thing the Toughs have in common, however, is that they might loosely be described as conservatives. Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, and Thomas Sowell endorse variants of a self-help ideology that sometimes resembles the politics of the U.S. right wing. Stephen Carter and Randall Kennedy pursue ideals of impersonal intellectual excellence that often resemble the politics of America’s cultural conservatives. Likewise, when V. S. Naipaul tells the harsh truths that he thinks his audience needs to hear for their own good, his truths reflect values that underwrote centuries of European empire building. Consequently, many have argued that the Tough Love Crowd betrays the people it supposedly wants to help.

But what accounts for the Toughs’ harsh stuff? Is it some kind of deep psychic bitterness? Armchair psychoanalysts have suggested, for instance, that Thomas’s Supreme Court performance constitutes a deliberate vendetta against those who opposed him at the confirmation hearings. The New Yorker has speculated that Thomas’s “jurisprudence seems guided to an unusual degree by raw anger” against his confirmation-hearing opponents, and by his refusal to “let bygones be bygones.” It is hard, however, to imagine this sort of analysis being rendered of Scalia or of Rehnquist (and, as the New Yorker itself notes, Scalia and Thomas have voted together more than 85 percent of the time).

Another form of mind gazing claims that Justice Thomas is a “Tom,” craving white approbation. While plausible, this is an unhelpful way to explain how Thomas decides cases. There are lots of ways to be sycophantic to whites, several of which might not so surely incur the scorn of blacks. “Tom” could probably satisfy any desire for white approval at less cost. Indeed, this view of Thomas is a precise mirror image of the Tough Love Crowd’s projection of personal distress across entire peoples. Witness Shelby Steele: “Somewhere inside every black is a certain awe at the power and achievement of the white race.”¹

A further psychological claim—that Thomas places self-advancement above group allegiances—may be harder to dismiss. Opportunism might even genuinely illuminate the earlier stages of Thomas’s career, and his rise to the Court. But opportunism fails to account for his continuing performance as a life-tenured public official. Thomas is now beholden to nobody, yet his course remains the same. Likewise, Carter and Kennedy are now life-tenured law professors, and Naipaul is arguably the single most decorated author in the United Kingdom. Thomas Sowell has been issuing Tough Love publications since at least 1972, long before black neoconservatism was the lucrative affair it has since become. Opportunism is a significant but incomplete explanation of the Tough Love Crowd’s continuing conduct. Moreover, the claim that the Tough Love Crowd is simply self-interested raises unsolvable questions of motive. Since no one can know what really makes them tick, their good faith may, for the purposes of the present argument, be assumed. Far from being naive, this assumption simply acknowledges the complexity of human psychology. The opposite assumption—that the Toughs are deliberately evil—unrealistically credits them with superhuman stamina. As Jean-Paul Sartre has remarked, “Evil is fatiguing, it requires an unmaintainable vigilance.”

In the present account, the Tough Love Crowd’s allegiance to a variety of inherited methods (of judging, writing, investigating) looms large in explaining both how and why their dissent goes wrong. Clarence Thomas’s search for African American well-being is guided by a belief that the requirements of reason are uncontroversial and are superior to passionate political activism. Thomas says that passion blights the civil rights movement and its leaders, who, ignoring rationality and truth, merely “bitch, bitch, bitch, moan and moan and whine.” While Thomas has criticized an allegedly all-powerful “civil rights aristocracy,” he insists that he has done so not primarily because of the civil rights movement’s alleged elitism but rather because the movement is “really out of touch with reality.”²

Stephen Carter, too, consistently conflates politicization with distortion (partisanship with taint), and calls for depoliticized ideals in everything that catches his eye (the Senate confirmation process, judicial decisionmaking, legal practice, law teaching, intellectual life generally, religious practice). Carter’s most recent writing on the judicial confirmation process continues to champion his long-standing view that Supreme Court justices ought to work “without a scintilla of loyalty to movement or cause.” Carter has, moreover, confessed to having produced bad analysis because of having “fallen into [a] trap” of hoping “to describe history with a sort of certainty that natural scientists bring to the task of describing the physical world.” Carter tells us the “essential” truth (his frequent term) about any number of things. And this truth seldom unsettles anything. Carter’s dispassionate inquiry into what really happened in the Watergate litigation begins as a “quasi-scientific” search, yet ends in a view that “conforms to tradition and intuition.” Encouraged by this supposed coincidence of science and intuition, Carter consistently urges factual investigation and dispassionate search, whether in scholarship, judging, or politics.³

Likewise, Shelby Steele, in an insufficiently noticed feature of his work, adopts the language of clinical psychology to separate mere ideas (which are, in his phrase, “a dime a dozen”) from his own views, which represent reality. And the back cover of The Content of Our Character claims that Steele’s is “the perfect voice of reason in a sea of hate.”

Thomas Sowell, meanwhile, has for decades been preaching the disciplinary realities of the marketplace, and the futility of civil rights. Sowell’s book Is Reality Optional? answers—emphatically—that it is not. And Randall Kennedy advocates impersonal intellectual ideals of disinterest coupled with the impersonal testing of competing hypotheses—even concerning the most politically controversial issues. V. S. Naipaul, too, is forever claiming access to a bitter truth that eludes his critics. His earliest recorded piece of journalism is a 1956 article, published in the Trinidad Guardian and entitled “Honesty Needed in West Indian Writing.” Naipaul has since consistently accused postcolonial opponents of turning away from a too overwhelming reality.

Yet the distinctions on which all this truth finding relies are complacent. These distinctions—between reason and passion, appearance and reality, political and apolitical, personal and impersonal, partisanship and disinterest—are entirely unreliable. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), having reviewed the writings and speeches Thomas made while he chaired the EEOC, commented on the “extraordinary series of shifts” in Thomas’s views on numerous issues. Thomas shifted a doyn times on affirmative action, in half as many years (1982–1988). Despite the instability of his views, the LDF noted, “whatever Thomas believes at a given point is to him an obvious, eternal truth.… He insists that whatever he says, even if different than what he said before, is the only possible conclusion any responsible person could come to.”⁴ The other Toughs also espouse unstable dogmas. Carter advocates more religious passion, but less egalitarian passion, in public debate. Thomas Sowell disparages the statistical and economic analysis performed by his opponents but reveres it when performed by himself and his allies. Randall Kennedy debunked impersonal scholarship in 1986, advocated it in 1989. Naipaul trashed Indian village life in 1964 and 1977, celebrated it in 1990. The Toughs’ opinions shift over time and under the pressures of political controversy, but always they claim they speak the simple truth. And Tough truth finding, they assert, is vital in order to navigate the contemporary social landscape.

This search for a social landscape frequently leads the Tough Love Crowd to dignify antiprogressive politics as fact. Stephen Carter’s widely discussed Wall Street Journal op-ed article on affirmative action is a good example. Carter’s piece entirely ignored his own concession, made elsewhere, that meritocracy is a myth. Carter argued instead that “racial preferences” simply have beneficiaries and that this conclusion is “not normative in any sense. It is simply a fact.” But affirmative action (quare, “preferences”) only creates issues of beneficiaries and of innocent victims if it involves lowering the very standards that Carter elsewhere admits are already displaced by various shams like a “star system.” Carter’s preferences, then, are not factual but controversial. Carter subsequently stated that he “never imagined” that simply publishing the article (in the Wall Street Journal) “would itself be a political act.” Even if one here sets aside accusations of bad faith, what remains is such astonishing naivete in a prominent scholar that one wonders which is the harsher criticism—bad faith or stupidity. When the avalanche of correspondence responding to his op-ed piece arrived, it was predictably (to everyone but Carter) split on racial lines. White readers, Carter discloses, were generally appreciative; black readers were generally hostile. The disparate impact of Carter’s column on his audience moved him to confess to “a degree of guilt” since he had not intended to give racist readers comfort⁵. Nevertheless Carter insists that it is unfair to call his Tough stuff anything but loyal dissent. And the usually incisive Henry Louis Gates, Jr., seemed to have this Crowd in mind when he said, on the New York Times op-ed page, “Critique, too, can be a form of caring.”⁶ The immediate context of the Gates article was a criticism of black antisemitism. It is unquestionably vital to condemn those who embrace anti-Jewish bigots—Pat Buchanan, Louis Farrakhan, and Clarence Thomas. Thomas has said that Farrakhan is “a man I have admired for more than a decade.”⁷

Yet this does not mean that every self-styled critique of African America is always and inherently caring. The Toughs offer politically charged pronouncements on a range of issues that are far more debatable than antisemitism. It may indeed be that Judas is defunct in African America, and in the former colonies, but that conclusion requires argument, not assertion.