March 23, 2008
Inference and belief
Douglas Kmiec is a law professor at Pepperdine with resume entries in the Bush 41 and Reagan administrations and a spell as dean of the Catholic University Law School. He has just endorsed Obama on Slate. So far so good. But this post is not about the politics of an endorsement that has a lot of benefit for Obama, nor about Kmiec, whom I don't know and don't know much about beyond the job history summarized above.
It is about the following paragraph in his post, one that he's obviously proud of, but that I think appalling on strictly intellectual (not ideological) grounds. I'm going at it because there is a lot of this stuff around (hence Kmiec's failure to even notice how crazy or irresponsible he sounds), and I would absolutely be just as appalled if the example happened to come from someone saying "As a Liberal Democrat, I believe..." :
As a Republican, I strongly wish to preserve traditional marriage not as a suspicion or denigration of my homosexual friends, but as recognition of the significance of the procreative family as a building block of society. As a Republican, and as a Catholic, I believe life begins at conception, and it is important for every life to be given sustenance and encouragement. As a Republican, I strongly believe that the Supreme Court of the United States must be fully dedicated to the rule of law, and to the employ of a consistent method of interpretation that keeps the Court within its limited judicial role. As a Republican, I believe problems are best resolved closest to their source and that we should never arrogate to a higher level of government that which can be more effectively and efficiently resolved below. As a Republican, and the constitutional lawyer, I believe religious freedom does not mean religious separation or mindless exclusion from the public square.
Why remarkable? Because as far as I can tell, every single inference in it is simply backward. Consider, to illustrate, the third one logically reversed:
[Having studied the law and its institutions carefully] I see the evidence and arguments to favor consistency, a limited role, and adherence to the rule of law for the Supreme Court, therefore I support the party I think will advance this kind of jurisprudence, which is the Republican Party.
Get it? "As an [X, Y, ...], I believe [A, B,...]" isn't just a wrong statement, it's a wrong way of thinking, perhaps of being a responsible person, assuredly of being a commentator who wishes to be considerable, and especially of being an academic.
Kmiec's "as they instruct me, so I think" is the considered, edited, and reflective discourse for publication of a law professor and a serious guy, not something he just blurted out at a party. It can be fairly summarized as advertising that he has chosen not to do his own thinking, but to have his beliefs dictated to him by a church and a political party. If he said this in so many words, I think one could reasonably infer that he is unqualified to be a college professor, because the irreducible core of that job is to examine propositions to ascertain their truth no matter who asserts them, not to be a loudspeaker for any group or institution.
When I interrupt students who offer this kind of thing in class discussion, to ask if they aren't getting it backwards, they almost always agree with me; of course, lots of them seem to have been conditioned to fear that faculty will punish dissent with bad grades, so maybe they're dissembling out of fear. But I've tried the question, "should the arrow of cause point from ideology to positions on issues, or the other way?" on lots of people, and never heard anyone take the former position after thinking about it.
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)
