In God We Trust


Barack Obama A Moral Cretin

Barack Obama asked that we not “jump to conclusions” about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who is alleged to have killed 13 Americans at Fort Hood last Thursday. Forget “jump to.” If only President Obama would crawl toward, or flirt with, or even stumble upon a conclusion, I’d be overjoyed. On this you can rely: Obama will never express a conclusive opinion on last Thursday’s massacre."

I happen to have been reading a wonderful book by the University of Chicago philosopher and classicist, Martha C. Nussbaum, entitled The Fragility of Goodness. The book was written in 1981. My philosophy professor at Sarah Lawrence College, Elfie Stock Raymond, was likely an admirer of Nussbaum because I see many parallels between Nussbaum's ideas and Elfie's that we discussed in conferences back in the early to mid 1970s, especially her rejection of Kantian ethics. Reading Nussbaum, 35 years later, I am able to better grasp that position.

The book is about moral complexity as seen through the eyes of Greek tragedians and philosophers, notably Aristotle. The third chapter, that I have been working through is about Sophocles's Antigone. One of the themes of Greek tragedy is conflict among moral duties, and Antigone is about this, the conflict between Creon's unitary commitment to the good of the polis and Antigone's unitary commitment to her duties toward her dead brother, killed in a war against the same polis. Nussbaum argues that moral richness and complexity are at the heart of Sophocles's and other tragedians vision, and that they contrast with a much more narrow vision of ethics of Plato. I am waiting to get to Aristotle, but clearly his philosophy emphasizes the importance reconciliation of competing moral virtues. Perhaps you can see the message for corporate maangement here. So many of our business leaders have had unitary moral codes. In the case of Jeffrey Skilling, the emphasis on creativity or the image of creativity at the expense of all other moral values. In the case of Robert Moses an emphasis on transportation flow at the expense of uprooting hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. In the case of the management theorist Chester Barnard, an emphasis on the moral code of the corporation at the expense of all other moral codes, including filial loyalty. These views are Kantian in that they assume so optimal moral solution. Barnard speaks of leadership as the creative reconciliation of moral codes, but his the creativity is unitary in nature and so Creonic--the simple value of corporate profit maximization is the ultimate good in his view; creativity comes in just to convince employees to forsake their other codes.

But here we have Barack Obama. His problem is not the conflict among virtues or the reconciliation of belief, but rather the bankruptcy of belief. He has no values at all. There is no moral ambiguity in an army officer's turning traitor to his country, murdering 13 people and wounding 30 more. Only an ethical cretin would claim that there is a need to "reserve judgment".

Obama's moral sickness reflects a deeper malaise in America. The nation has allowed ignorant ideologues to take control of its education system. As a result, Americans have increasingly become moral degenerates addicted to failed government solutions and incapable of thinking logically. Barack Obama's cretinous morality is a symptom, not a root cause, of American decline.

 

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