178. Absolutism in Congress

 

It isn't often that we get to see three cases of thought-stopping absolutism play out at the same time but that is now our privilege.  The Norquist pledge, the Second Liberty Bond Act (debt ceiling), and the Budget Control Act (fiscal cliff) are all about to do just what our Philosophy 101 instructors were trying so hard to do: teach us to bear the pain of critical thinking.

Carefully assessing the present situation, making your best projection about the future, weighing all the options, and finally striking a workable balance — that was mentally painful.  But, if you wanted to find the best solution to a problem and a good grade in the course, there was no way to avoid it.

Not that freshmen didn't have a way.  My instructor called it "the absolutist escape."  Any time you declared that there was one value, one course of action, one thing that you would never do or always do, you were taking it.  And yes, you'd get a period of ease.  No more thinking, no more pain.  "That's settled.  Whew!"  But, sure enough, there would be the instructor (or the textbook) with a case that unsettled you.  "Non-violence, you say?  Well, here's this monster whose greater violence your violence can prevent."  There went your declaration.

Absolutists were, in the card-playing analogy my instructor liked to use, one-card-trumps-all people.  They were a drag in any complicated game, like morality, or politics, or life.  Among other people they contributed little.  Among themselves they wound up with solutions that seldom fit the problem.  It could hardly be otherwise.  As soon as they said, "X, whatever the situation," they doomed themselves to a misfit for every situation that wasn't exactly like the situation in which they said X.

Grover Norquist, who has been to college (Harvard BA, MBA), must have known this.  Yet with his offered pledge he was willing at the start of the 112th Congress, to turn 238 members of the House and 41 members of the Senate into absolutists.  "I will not raise taxes, whatever the situation."  We college teachers have to wonder.

The debt ceiling operates a lot like Norquist's pledge.  It says, "You will not budget more than X whatever the situation."  Only in this case X is an exact number, declared first in 1917.  That has been a misfit so many times that by now you'd think the absolutism would be clear, but apparently not so.

Who can miss the absolutism in the Budget Control Act?  "Budget cuts will be made on this date whatever the situation."

See who the absolute authority is in both of those last two?  Members of Congress.  Only at an earlier date.  Both are acts saying, "Congressmen in a different situation are wiser than Congressmen in the middle of the situation that has to be dealt with.  Accept their authority."

The debt ceiling will, according to Timothy Geithner, kick in sometime in February or March.  The Budget Control Act takes effect on January 1.  The Norquist Pledge hangs over the whole period — about the length of a college quarter.  Plenty of time to measure the pain of absolutist playout against the pain of critical thinking.