Two dogmatic world leaders have been much in the news recently: the infallible Pope Francis and the supremely arrogant President Trump.
Trump’s dust-up in the Oval Office, along much of his behaviour this past week, was the perfect demonstration of the United States’s attitude to that disreputable place known as Abroad. A lot of Americans don’t really like “Abroad”, including some of those who actually set foot there, largely because it isn’t America. Not many of them would be able to locate Ukraine on a map; some might even have trouble locating Canada. Trump doesn’t like Abroad either, and has broken with the tradition that as President he’s supposed to have its concerns at heart.
The paradox is that the United States is the most globalised nation in the world and also one of the most parochial. These two aspects of it are, in fact, related. For one thing, the larger a country is, the less it has to rely on others and the more self-enclosed it becomes. For another thing, a country which sees the rest of the world primarily in terms of power and profit isn’t likely to be on familiar terms with its culture and history. The same used to apply to the British Empire, ruled by one of the most insular nations on earth for whom Johnny Foreigner was to be mocked as well as subjugated. It was the great Edmund Burke who reminded these provincially-minded bigots that colonies were to be governed only through an understanding of their ways of life.
In Trump’s eyes, the president of Ukraine is Abroad incarnate. Unlike the unstaunchably eloquent, rhetorically dazzling US President, he can’t speak English properly, doesn’t wear proper clothes, is about half the size of your average American jock, doesn’t grovel at the feet of the powerful and is always on the scrounge. He also stems from an ethnic background about which the Orange Lord may not be overly enthusiastic. So it’s time to stop pretending that America has some God-given mission to save the world, not least when it’s costing you billions of dollars. Nation-states are businesses, not spiritual entities. Trump wants Zelensky’s mineral resources, not his allegiance in the fight for civilisation. Ideology must give way to self-interest, bullshit about altruism to the bottom line. The world is divided into winners and losers, not autocrats and democrats, and nobody looks more like a loser than Zelensky. Moreover, he’s losing at the hands of a man whom Trump admires as a fellow member of the Big Boys’ club.
This is truly a dramatic move. America now has a president who has no time for the sham piety spouted by so many of his predecessors. There was always an embarrassing gap between American talk about liberty, democracy, the city on the hill and the infinite Spirit of Man on the one hand, and screwing over weaker peoples blessed with extractable natural resources on the other. Few, however, have had the audacity to eliminate the gap by abolishing the bullshit. Edmund Burke, naturally enough, saw political power as masculine; but he also saw that in order to be effective it must wrap itself in the seductive garb of the feminine, tempering its coerciveness with grace, beauty, compassion and so on. The aesthetic must come to the aid of the political. In Burke’s view, the French Revolution had stripped those beguiling veils away, laying bare the ugly phallus of power; and President Trump, who is apparently not averse to phallic exposure, has done the same in our own day by dispensing with high-toned talk of the spirit of humanity and the value of civilisation.
That other world leader, the infallable Pope Francis, has been in the news because he has been ill, not because he bullied, harangued and insulted a guest before an astonished world. In fact, from what one hears about him he’s a courteous, congenial character, if given to the odd burst of obscenity. A friend of mine used to be Master General of the English Dominican Order, and was invited by the Pope to his private apartment for coffee. Pointing to the stunning view of the city from his window, the pontiff remarked in his heavily accented English: “This is the best view of Rome there is — and that’s infallible.” It’s hard to imagine Trump being ironic about his authority, or simply being ironic.
There is, however, a logical problem about being infallible, which one can formulate as follows. When the papacy first promulgated the doctrine in the 19th century, was this declaration itself infallible? Or was the Pope’s infallibility initiated at that point? If it was, however, why should anyone believe it? Declaring yourself infallible only has real force if you’re infallible already. If you are, however, why bother to declare it? Didn’t everyone know already?
We have here a case of how far back one has to go to explain something. Take the way one might inform a small child about the names of various objects. You point to a carrot and say “carrot”, and the child grasps the fact that the sound you make is the name of the thing you’re pointing to. But this, as Ludwig Wittgenstein argues, can’t possibly be how children learn language. For this to work, the child must already know a great deal: that there are individual objects, that these things have names, that these names are generic and not individual, that to point your finger at something is to single it out, that the sound you make when you point denotes the thing in question and so on. For the child to know all of this it must already live in a world of meaning. Meaning, in other words, is very hard to get behind; or rather, what you tend to find when you get behind it is yet more meaning. For Wittgenstein at least, meaning is inseparable from language. So the child to whom you’re trying to teach language must have a grasp of it already, rather as declaring yourself to be infallible only has force if you’re infallible already. You must be describing a situation which already exists, not just legislating one into existence. Otherwise it’s a purely arbitrary act, like announcing that you’re a humanitarian when everyone knows that you’re a serial killer.
“It’s hard to imagine Trump being ironic about his authority, or simply being ironic.”
Another example of how far back one can push things is the so-called social contract. According to this theory, first propounded by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, political society is founded by men and women surrendering some of their individual freedom in order to enter into social relations with each other which will ensure their common safety and prosperity. In this way, a bunch of lawless, ruthlessly self-interested individuals with no regard for each other’s welfare is transformed into a commonwealth of shared authority and mutual responsibility. But mustn’t these supposedly uncivilised individuals already have possessed the concepts of contract, sovereignty, responsibility and the rest if this transition could come about? How can you enter into a contract if you don’t already have the concept of a contract?
The doctrine of papal infallibility is much misunderstood. It doesn’t mean that if the Pope announces that Stephen Fry is an alien from Alpha Centauri, all Catholics have to believe it without question. It’s restricted to matters of faith and morals, and rather than pronouncing some new truth, its point is to clarify and define doctrines which the Church has supposedly always held. The Pope exercises this authority not individually but on behalf of the bishops as a whole, and does so extremely rarely, even though he’s known for being infallible rather as Liz Truss is known for not being so. One of the most disastrous papal proclamations of recent times — the ban on contraception — was not infallible. Like most things about the papacy, the doctrine has its roots in the murky political conflicts of 19th century Italy. It belongs to a Church which long ago sold part of its soul for worldly power, a betrayal which is a particular scandal to anyone familiar with the first chapter of St Luke’s gospel.
To say that a statement is scientific is to say, among other things, that it could be wrong. You must have some idea of what sort of evidence, argument or set of logical moves would count against it, which is not true of statements like “Thou still unravished bride of quietness”, or “Drop the gun now!” Even so, the world is full of statements which are effectively infallible, in the sense that it would be hard if not impossible to see how any rational creature could deny them. It’s obvious how someone could deny the claim that Trump is supremely arrogant, but not how they could refute the proposition that one has a body.
So infallibility is no big deal. It only seems so to people for whom certainty is equivalent to dogmatism, which includes most postmodern thinkers. In such a climate, having convictions is as bad as having typhoid. But you can have convictions without thumping the table to lend them force. In ancient Greek, the word “dogma” simply means “opinion”. You can argue for your beliefs as passionately as you like provided you’re prepared to give them up when confronted with convincing evidence to the contrary.
When Catholics speak of dogma, they are talking about what they regard as truth. This is not so in the world of Donald Trump. What we see in the White House is neither dogmatic truth, nor truth without dogmatism, but dogmatism without truth. Trump is a vulgar Nietzschean for whom truth is whatever promotes his own or his nation’s interests; but since the things that do this aren’t always compatible with each other, or don’t stay the same from one moment to the next, the President tends to hold mutually contradictory positions, and holds each of them in dogmatic style. He moves in a relativist way from one absolute to another.
When a spokesman for the Catholic Church was asked some years ago what would happen to its authority if it changed its teaching on contraception, he replied that nothing would happen to it at all. Instead, he explained, the Church would have moved from one state of certainty to another state of certainty. It’s not beyond question that in some months’ time, when someone asks Trump why he called Zelensky ungrateful and disrespectful, he will reply, wide-eyed, “Did I say that?”
