“At
the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of
existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human
life”
----Associate Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy
“In
this sentence,” observed The
New York Times columnist David
Brooks, “which became famous as the 'mystery of life'
passage, there is no sense that individuals are embedded in a social
order. There is no acknowledgment of the parts of ourselves that we
don't choose but inherit—family, race, social roles, historical
legacies of oppression, our bodies, the habits that are handed down
to us by our common culture.
“There's
no we.” (1)
Kennedy
is hardly the first to posit such foolishness. One has only to watch
old man Walton tell his son John-Boy that he isn't a Writer
until someone else says he is.
One doesn't need, although the exercise would be very useful, to
consult Marx to find the truth. We are all, in our very origins,
products of social—in this case sexual—intercourse.
The
folly expressed here by the now retiring Justice of our Supreme Court
is, perhaps, the most succinct expression of the ideological idiocy
in the grip of which the modern conservative movement finds itself.
And it is hardly confined to this country. One recalls former
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's inane observation that
there is no such thing as society.
The
West has a long familiarity with this foolishness dating back at
least to the dawn of the 'romantic' movement. One may recall here
the opening sentence of Rousseau's “Social Contract”:
“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” he
openly declared. He was wrong, as Marx correctly pointed out, on
both counts. Indeed, man is born completely helpless and dependent
and, as Jefferson declared in 1776, that in order to secure the
rights of man “governments are instituted among men”....In sum,
to be outside society is to be nowhere. If any personal 'autonomy'
is to be realized in anyone's life, it will and must be held by the
social web supporting it. It is a point painfully obvious, putting
to lie everything written by Ayn Rand and her disciples.
The
muddleheadedness that began with Rousseau's philosophical error
echoes down through time finding new life in the nonsense that now
permeates modern conservative thought. One can forgive Rousseau,
idolizing he did the newly discovered native tribes of the Americas.
Indeed, Marx himself did much the same thing, as did Daniel Defoe
with his Robinson Caruso.
But the modern conservative movement reviling as it does all
pre-capitalist or post-capitalist economic formulations has no such
excuse.
Here, as Brooks rightly points out, “professor Kennedy gives us a homework assignment that almost none of
us can actually fulfill. Each of us has to define our own 'concept of
existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human
life.
“Wow!” Exclaims Brooks, “That requires a
lot of background reading. If your name is Aristotle or Nietzsche,
maybe you can do it, but for the rest of us it's going to be tough.
We're busy!
“You wind up with a society in which the schools,
the public culture, even the parents say: 'It's not our job to
instill a shared morality and worldview...That's something you have
to do on your own”(2)
One ends up with no shared sense of morality, no common
misunderstandings about how the world is organized, no hymn book, if
you will, from which we all can sing. Instead, Conservatism posits
man as an entirely autonomous, self-actuating, economic 'monads' (in
Brooks' parlance) in which society is shattered into 350 million
automatons and scattered to the wind.
That is, nothing at all except the idiot-logical
imperative to strip the culture of all meaning. To stand the
individual naked before his capitalist overlord, to give person-hood
to money itself.
It is a small step from the nonsense of these
philosophic tenets to the callous disregard of legal precedent that
characterizes so much of Kennedy's legal legacy. Give corporations
person-hood if not outright citizenship; unfetter capital and the
individuals from all bonds of social responsibility. With his
fellow-travelers he has worked assiduously to overturn altogether too
much of long established law...from gun laws to campaign financing,
to the unconstitutional interventions in the 2000 election—being
the 5th vote on the court and in effect appointing a
president of the United States.
It is good to see him gone. He has done nothing but
vandalize the constitution. The ignorance caused by imposing the
idiot-logical imperative leads to selective reading of law and
Constitution. The imperative requires that one diminish or overlook
entirely the “General Welfare” clause of the preamble, the “Equal
Protection” clause of the 14th amendment, the
“Interstate Commerce Clause” and its imperative to regulate;
perhaps, in the end, with “Citizen United”, silencing “We
The People” in whose name the republic was founded in the first
place. That he was appointed (by Reagan) to the Supreme court is a
tragedy; that he wasn't impeached in the wake of Bush v. Gore is
a calamity the likes of which has only been recently super-ceded by
the elevation of the Russian Agent to the White House.
This is what happens when you put a career jurist on the
highest bench. This is what happens when you choose a justice based
on ideology rather than experience. This is what happens when you
continually look to cesspools of legal training like Yale, the
University of Chicago, and Harvard Law. This is what happens when
you place a known Rescumlican on the bench. Welcome to the emerging
Dictatorship of Capital. That is your legacy Mr. Kennedy.
“'An
Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh'
Impeach
and Imprison.
____________
- Brooks, David. “Kennedy and Privatizing Meaning” The New York Times. Friday, June 29, 2018. Page A25
- Ibid.
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