Читать книгу Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd - Ronald Suresh Roberts - Страница 13

Professionalism works, in the Tough Love fact trick, like one view of the societal function of religion. A familiar line of thought argues that religion is the opium of the masses—that despite its supposed concern for the well-being of people, religion distracts the faithful, making them pay too much attention to abstractions and afterlife, too little attention to worldly injustice. People are taught to turn the other cheek. Political energies are consumed in private rapture rather than public protest. And the status quo stays unscathed. Whether this picture of religion is accurate or not, there is now a more powerful opiate: reality, today disclosed by professionals, not priests. The Toughs are prominent peddlers of this new thing.

And their new opium gets a great press. Every day newspaper commentary on political events contrasts blundering idealism with savvy realism. Competent academics, politicians, writers, and judges face facts. Idle dreamers ignore reality. One Tough reality we all ought apparently to face is the ameritocracy of American meritocracy. The Toughs themselves emphasize that American meritocracy is, and probably always will be, “a sham arrangement” or a “star system,” removed from measurable performance indicators.²⁶ Yet, despite their own concession that ameritocracy is certainly prevailing and probably permanent, the Tough Love Crowd urges us to drop such issues and, like the Nike sportswear slogan, Just Do It. This might be brilliant parental advice, but Clarence Thomas is not my mother. Supreme Court justices, lawyers, writers, and intellectuals exercise public power in various ways that people’s parents generally cannot. Moreover, Tough Love reality is itself only a list of incorrect or fallible hunches. Tough truth frequently turns out to be bad parental advice. For instance, on the meritocracy question, Carter says that to debate performance criteria is futile because “committed professionals” are too busy meeting self-evident demands to “spend time quibbling” over things like “the standards . . . for law firm partnership.”²⁷ Yet Carter, from his academic vantage point, understates the degree to which there currently is quibbling over precisely the things that he would set beyond debate. Law firms are, today, very much occupied by questions like: Should a part-time arrangement for parent-professionals—the so-called mommy track—necessarily be a downward climb? What exactly are technical legal skills? Is the distracted Ivy League genius really more skillful than the reliable second-tier drone? Are drafting skills more important than client rapport? Are any of these as important as political connections? Moreover, several Wall Street law firms continue to make deliberate tradeoffs against increased profits and in favor of what Carter would, apparently, call an unprofessional collegiality. In this setting, it is the failure to stop and think about a firm’s manner of measuring performance that is, today, a hallmark of professional incompetence. In the laudable drive to be good lawyers, writers, economists, or judges, the Toughs neglect the fact that the best professionals are those who effectively question and reshape the very idea of what it means to be a good professional. The best are those who, in the journalese of the business press, “change the rules of the game,” whatever their field of expertise.

Rather than pursue this kind of vibrant and transformative excellence, Carter is contentedly “seduced by the standards under which my white professional world judges achievement.” Despite the numerous and controversial questions around what “professionalism” means, Carter urges that “the disciplining rules that define the profession itself [are not] in any comprehensible sense, ideological” (emphasis added). Carter’s static and romanticized picture of legal and other professionals is hardly undebatable truth. And Carter’s unawareness that politics defines professionalism is, on its own merits, entirely unattractive.²⁸

Always, despite the Tough Love Crowd’s faith in apolitical ideals, the political and professional reality that they would map for us is inherently far from objective. Was Lani Guinier really scary? Was Ronald Reagan really not? Old certainties about justice, rationality, and family values have given way to energetic debate over questions like, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Whose Family? Which Values?²⁹

In such a context, people who care about professional standards, justice, rationality, and family values ought not to let hostile interpretation sit like unchallengeable fact. We ought to be relentlessly skeptical. This call for skepticism is not just a piece of useful advice, but rather an ethical obligation. If we countenance “painful” facts, we may have committed secular sin. The media, the courts, the academic institutions, and the literary establishment actively construct society’s “regime of truth.”³⁰ And the Tough Love Crowd neglects the fact that this regime of truth is the site of political struggle, not a preexisting order to be unveiled.

The question of whether, for instance, Anita Hill’s disclosures in the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings were credible or not is not likely to be settled by a thing called fact. “Credibility” hinges on numerous irrational factors, including cultural assumptions about the reliability (or lack thereof) of black women. It is thus interesting to watch the various attempts to treat the confirmation hearings as a subject of factual investigation, an approach to the Hill-Thomas affair specifically advocated by Stephen Carter. Thomas Sowell affirms that David Brock’s book, The Real Anita Hill, offered only “facts and careful analysis.”³¹ Brock’s assessment of Hill’s testimony hinged on attacking the credibility of her story in various of its details. Ironically, Brock’s own factual inaccuracies were promptly exposed by his ideological opponents.³² The credibility of Brock’s text quickly became the issue. Brock’s believers probably dismiss his occasional inaccuracies as mere blemishes that do not cast doubt on the believability of his narrative as a whole. Yet this is precisely the defense that Anita Hill’s supporters offer when confronted with the sort of minor inaccuracies that Brock makes it his business to assemble. Professional investigation has thus settled very little. Yet Brock’s truth continues to play a remarkably direct role in the political process, for instance, assisting a delay in the Senate’s confirmation of a Clinton nominee.³³

Take, next, a far more objective issue: Did Clinton live up to his campaign pledge to cut the White House Staff by 25 percent? It’s almost impossible to frame an easier or more verifiable political question. The answer to this clear-cut empirical question appeared in the New York Times, and the headline speaks for itself: “Clinton Says He’s Met Pledge to Cut Staff by 25%: Republicans Accuse the President of Gimmickry.”³⁴

Clearly, then, the investigative approach to politics will be inconclusive because the investigator’s own values will inevitably shape her curiosities and influence her conclusions, while her audience may have different values. For identical reasons, the facts supplied by an investigator will not command the kind of universal agreement possible with uncontroversial facts like the opening hours of a supermarket or the operating hours of an abortion clinic. The attraction of facts is that, where available, they are universally binding. They are thought to provide everyone with reasons for belief and for action, regardless of strong differences on questions of value. Whether one’s intention is to use the facilities of a Florida abortion clinic or to kill the person in charge, the fact that the clinic’s operating hours are nine to five is useful information. But such facts are rarely if ever the subject of political or intellectual controversy. Even the most fact-resembling political controversies are inseparable from questions of value and from the vagaries of impressions and appearances. Think of John Sununu, John Tower. Think especially of Ronald Reagan’s eight teflon years, and of the disgraced Oliver North’s bid to become a Virginia senator. Somehow William Kennedy Smith was not guilty of rape, and David Gergen was never really a Republican.

As people concerned with helping the less well off, we ought to recognize the limitedness of political fact and face the choices this predicament presents, choices about which values we wish to pursue. When the Toughs declare their own dissenting “truths,” they are dealing in the currency of values. And doling out counterfeit fact.