"Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes": How Loyalty Relativizes Virtue

The release of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in 2005 divided conservative fans of the series. I knew many who were frustrated by a conversation between Darth Vader (Hayden Christensen) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor). In it, Obi-Wan warns Vader about the path that he is on:

OBI-WAN: You have allowed this Dark Lord to twist your mind until now . . . until now you have become the very thing you swore to destroy.

ANAKIN: Don't lecture me, Obi-Wan. I see through the lies of the Jedi. I do not fear the dark side as you do. I have brought peace, justice, freedom, and security to my new Empire.

OBI-WAN: Your new Empire?

ANAKIN: Don't make me kill you.

OBI-WAN: Anakin, my allegiance is to the Republic ... to democracy.

ANAKIN: If you're not with me, you're my enemy.

OBI-WAN: Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes. I will do what I must.

Many objected to Obi-Wan's identification of the Sith with absolutes. I push back on that interpretation because Obi-Wan defends the Republic; the "absolutes" that he accuses Vader of using are deployed to dividing the world neatly between his supporters and his enemies, irrespective of other commitments. Such relativistic reduction of all other distinctions into a test of loyalty revealed the extent to which Vader's pride had consumed all of his other cares and values.

I fear that the same is true of President Trump and worry that so many of his supporters similarly see the world divided between those who are good and loyal to him, in contrast to those who are evil and disloyal.

The way in which Trump's presidency has relavitized all other values around himself leads me to think that Conor Friedersdorf was on to something important in his comments on Hillsdale College. Hillsdale President Larry Arnn  responded to Friedersdorf in the National Review, suggesting that the piece was a form of "concern trolling." I and many other Hillsdale alumni came to a different conclusion than Arnn, but his comments are worth considering as they underscore precisely the kind of doublespeak necessary for those who want to defend Trump on the basis of virtue.

In comments that seem likely to surprise many donors, Arnn insists that "it is not my business to represent the political views of the college on the questions of today. Indeed, the college itself has no such views." This is surprising to me, and probably many college donors and students. Hillsdale has taken public positions on political questions throughout Arnn's tenure as president, such as through its advertisement on the Rush Limbaugh show. It also does so in its official "Aims", which state that "the College values the merit of each unique individual, rather than succumbing to the dehumanizing, discriminatory trend of so-called 'social justice' and 'multicultural diversity,' which judges individuals not as individuals, but as members of a group and which pits one group against other competing groups in divisive power struggles." Opposition to social justice and multicultural diversity, as well as the rejection of other social structures as meaningful parts of human identity, are significant political claims that are immediately relevant to how one understands contemporary issues. (As an aside: This statement surprised me given its anti-Burkean description of society; I first read Burke at Hillsdale, where he is generally held in high regard).

Arnn also insisted that his support for the Trump administration had nothing to do with cultivating relationships with Hillsdale's donors, but he qualifies this in a telling way: "The fact is, people do not tend to give money to an undergraduate college to affect near- or intermediate-term politics." That may be true, but Hillsdale is not any undergraduate college. It pitches itself as an institution that is aimed at shaping national politics, and even Arnn left open the possibility that donors might hope to see long-term results from their gifts. On Hillsdale's main donor page the college explains its need for financial gifts:

At Hillsdale, we rely on the generosity of people who believe in the power of a truly independent education—one that isn’t constrained by the rules and regulations that go with government funding. Whether you choose to support Hillsdale in our mission to educate twenty-first-century leaders of character and integrity or for the ways in which we seek to elevate the civic conversation through Imprimis, our online courses, our Barney Charter School Initiative, or at our Kirby Center, your tax-deductible gift is an investment in the future of America.

In other words, donors are invited to support a publication to elevate civic conversations and a regulation-free education that is designed to create a particular kind of leader; such donations are "an investment in the future of America." One might forgive donors if they concluded that their donations would affect politics.

Arnn did seem to address this issue more directly when describing the difference between political action and the education of college students: "...it is alleged that, because I support Donald Trump politically, I am eroding the moral standards of the college and of its students. This is silly. What one teaches the young about morality is a very different thing from choosing whom to support for president of the United States. For the young, a whole life is before them, and it is right and possible to encourage them to build all of the virtues in themselves. The first step is for them to learn what those virtues are. We teach that. The choice for president is by contrast sharply circumscribed: One opts for the best of two people."

If I am reading him correctly, Arnn suggests that because college students are young, it is appropriate to encourage them to be virtuous. When it comes to the political action of choosing a President, however, he considers that a binary choice and does not require that a voter choose based on virtue. He may be right--Machiavelli proposed a similar division between what was morally proper for the individual and what was politically appropriate for those with political power. Nevertheless, many advocates of the classical virtues that Arnn champions concluded that it was essential to vote for a virtuous candidate, whether or not that person was likely to be elected. For over 8 million voters in 2016, that meant voting for a third-party candidate. Arnn's assumption of a binary choice suggests that he did not consider that option serious. The tension between his idealistic advice for college students and his utilitarian approach to practical politics is striking.

Friedersdorf's essay focused on precisely this tension when he identified the distance between Vice President Mike Pence's high-minded rhetoric, and the actual behavior of the President that Pence and Arnn support. To quote from Pence's commencement address (which was written by Stephen Ford, Hillsdale '08 '10):

You know, it seems, at times, that we live in an age of grim relativism.  But here, this class has seen the power of unchanging truth to change lives.  You’ve learned that character is destiny, that it’s essential for self-government, and that right conduct is its own reward.

And it seems we live in a time where too many disregard that wisdom of the past that Dr. Arnn spoke about so eloquently.  But here, you’ve been grounded in the traditions and teachings that are our greatest inheritance in America, and the teachings and traditions that will always be the surest foundation of a boundless American future.

I actually agree with much of this--character is essential for self-government, doing the right thing is its own reward (it certainly isn't consistently rewarded by others), and there is a tendency right now to disregard the wisdom of the past. The tension Friedersdorf noted, however, is that the current President is publicly demonstrating his lack of character, inability to exercise self-control,  unwillingness to do the right thing if there is any cost to doing so, and ignorance of both wisdom and the past. Trump is precisely the kind of narcissistic demagogue that the US Constitution was designed to keep out of high office according to the Federalist papers. The graduates of Hillsdale know this because they have read them.

Trump's lead attorney in the Russia probe underscored that "we live in an age of grim relativism" while on "Meet the Press" last weekend. Here is the exchange:

RUDY GIULIANI: And when you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth. He didn’t have a, a conversation --

CHUCK TODD: Truth is truth. I don’t mean to go like --

RUDY GIULIANI: No, it isn’t truth. Truth isn’t truth. The President of the United States says, “I didn’t -- ”

CHUCK TODD: Truth isn’t truth? Mr. Mayor, do you realize, what, I, I, I--

RUDY GIULIANI: No, no, no--

CHUCK TODD: This is going to become a bad meme.

RUDY GIULIANI: Don’t do, don’t do this to me.

CHUCK TODD: Don’t do truth isn’t truth to me.

RUDY GIULIANI: Donald Trump says I didn’t talk about Flynn with Comey. Comey says you did talk about it, so tell me what the truth is.

CHUCK TODD: Don McGahn might know.

RUDY GIULIANI: If you’re such a genius, John McGahn -- Don McGahn doesn’t know. If that’s the situation --

CHUCK TODD: Ok.

RUDY GIULIANI:  -- they have two pieces of evidence, Trump says I didn’t tell them and the other guy says that he did say it, which is the truth? Maybe you know because you’re a genius.

Here we have the lawyer defending Trump insisting that truth isn't truth, because not everyone will agree. Giuliani has attempted to clarify what he meant since the exchange.

My statement was not meant as a pontification on moral theology but one referring to the situation where two people make precisely contradictory statements, the classic “he said,she said” puzzle. Sometimes further inquiry can reveal the truth other times it doesn’t.

— Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) August 20, 2018

Giuliani is correct that sometimes people give differing accounts concerning an event, but it also doesn't resolve the matter. Giuliani refuses to say that if the President testifies under oath honestly that he will be in the clear because it will be backed up by corroborating evidence. He appears to be confident that the President's testimony will be contradicted by other evidence, and rather than expecting to be able to verify the President's account, thinks that his best path forward is to insist that it is impossible to know anything because all we can have are contingent and irreconcilable personal truths presented by various witnesses.

Such a position is precisely the kind of relativism that Pence was bemoaning in his speech.

And, in fact, it is precisely the kind of post-factual thinking that Larry Arnn opposes. He mocked the absurdity of such positions in an essay on higher education policy from 2006, explaining:

But if the measure of things is human opinion and, by extension, human making, it follows that one ought to assert oneself. Be a maker! Create your truth! Your world! This is why radical causes spill from college campuses faster than widgets off an assembly line. This is the engineering project at the heart of the modern university. The work of the progressive academy is to articulate new and ever new ideas of correctness, and to enforce them upon a population that now must wait for the wise and powerful to create their world.

Ironically and tragically, it seems that the Trump is working out of this playbook. He is continually inventing new ideas (Deep State! Fake News! Collusion isn't a crime! Campaign finance laws aren't really laws!) with which to define correctness relative to his own interests. Rather than assessing claims based on evidence, he encourages people to think of them as referendums that prove loyalty to him--believe the President, or join the Enemy of the People. As Arnn is fond of reminding his students, ideas have consequences, and those coming from the White House are doubly potent because they come from a position of institutional and cultural power.

I continue to see a deep contradiction in the words of Larry Arnn and Vice President Mike Pence when they oppose such relativism as evil, but then publicly endorse the actions and words of an administration that continually deploy such relativism for Trump's benefit.