76, "Reasonable doubt"

A man can't be executed in the United States unless a jury finds him guilty of a capital crime "beyond a reasonable doubt." That tells us that his living or dying is going to depend on what his jurors take the word "reasonable" to mean.

What's to guide them? The word "beyond" suggests that there's a line. Up to it, reasonable; past it, no. How unrealistic. We're in the human world, not geometry class.

Law dictionaries pretend to help. A few tell us that "beyond a reasonable doubt" means "moral certainty." Oh yes, that's where you find clear lines, in morality. All us jurors are going to know when answers to moral questions are certain.

There's no escape. We're stuck with individual differences. Everybody's stuck. If you do away with juries and go with a judge (or a lord, or an apparatchik) you're stuck with his individual difference.

And aren't we, in philosophy class, stuck with relativism? There's no absolute, no objective judgment, no line-drawing machine. You use words that make it sound as if there is such a thing but my, look where they leave you. "Preponderance of the evidence." "Preponderance": superiority in weight. You look to see which side the balance falls on. Yes, and who's doing the weighing? And how heavy is each thing that goes into the pan? Weights are assigned, not discovered.

Even the expression that supports all this, there in the Constitution, "due process," is infected by subjectivity. "Due": owed. What does a man having coming to him? You can specify the procedures in legal statute and establish them in court practice but still, might he deserve more? or less? We differ, friend.

The more we are convinced of our differences, though, the closer we come to that most dangerous of convictions: that everything in the moral sphere is subjective, or relative. Though possibly true, that belief is dangerous because it invites a slide into two really destructive convictions, that one moral belief is as good as an another, and that there is no good guidance.

You have to leave it to experience to counter the first belief, which it usually does soon enough, but to counter the second all you have to do is look at a Supreme Court opinion on the very expression we're most worried about, "beyond a reasonable doubt." In 1970 the Court said (in re Winship) that this standard of proof is grounded on "a fundamental value determination of our society." There you are, juror. Find out what values your society has determined to be fundamental and apply them to the case before you.

The values are many and about some there may be respectable differences but about the one that brought forth the Court's opinion there is, I think, likely to be difference only among those who haven't learned it. It's that "it is far worse to convict an innocent man than to let a guilty man go free."

That's easy guidance. Hard guidance is guidance in society's values that are not so clear or are still at issue. Here's where teachers come in. Let them get young citizens' values straightened out in school, say in civics class, before they get to a jury room. Get them started, at least, on the meaning of words like "reasonable" and "due."

75. What a Teacher Substitutes for Reality

Why do teachers have to find a substitute for reality? Because relativists have taken it away from them. (See Post #73.) No more real world, no more objective truth. Only representations and constructions.

What can they substitute? I, dealing in words, suggest "resistance." It's a word they can use without claiming any of that knowledge they're not supposed to have. All they claim to know is that there's something out there that has to be overcome before a student, or anybody, can reach his goals.

That's their expertise. Want to fly a kite? Run with it into the wind. Tie the bridle this way. Want to design kites? Here are the laws of aerodynamics. Want to read poems? Start by construing the sentences.

They don't need a name for the something out there that makes all this necessary. All they need is consistency in the resistance it offers. It does no good to teach kite-flying if aerodynamics varies from day to day.

Do they need to know why there is consistency? It doesn't appear so, yet such knowledge would be helpful — in the way that knowing why there is consistency in an aerodynamic resistance would be helpful (it lets you generalize at a higher level). But in teaching you always have to think about time constraints. Can we acquire this in a quarter? Ask that question about what's ultimately behind the consistency, or ultimately behind anything, and experience, university-wide, tells you no.

The criterion of helpfulness reduces the discussion-time for many subjects (metaphysics, theology) in our utilitarian courses. And it removes from the discussion those relativists who think that their choice of a representation or construction is unconstrained by reality — to use the old word for resistances. Those who think one representation of reality is as good as another are outside the circle. There's no point in their taking the course.

Note: I see that leaves me with a definition of reality. It's what relativists have to measure their representations and constructions against.

7. "Absurd." Deep Trouble.

1942 when Albert Camus called the universe absurd, meaning unreasonable. His call made no sense. People and arguments can be unreasonable, but there's no way the universe can be unreasonable. It just is.

The harm appeared when people who accepted Camus' statement started to make deductions from it. "If the universe is absurd then it's foolish to approach it rationally. Logic is useless." Logic, though, could have shown them (if their dismissal hadn't already deprived them of it) that by what they had said there was only one possible universe in which a rational approach was foolish: a universe where everything was equally absurd. In other universes, including those most packed with absurdities, you'd have to discriminate among them, and only reason could do that. You'd be wise to use it.

With some people, though, the harm was fixed as soon as the deduction about logic was made. They were deprived of the instrument by which they could test their belief. Their absurdism was self-validating, hedged against any threat.

Seeing a mind abused by a mistake in philosophy is always a caution to us, but when the abused mind inhabits a classroom we teachers feel downright alarm. Here the abuse reduces our ability to lead students through the logical consequences of a belief, an ability vital to the Socratic teacher. The existentialist-abused minds of the sixties and seventies threatened to take away his calling.

If that threat had materialized we'd have to rank misuse of "absurd" among the most harmful in history. It didn't materialize, though. It couldn't. The value of logic was too evident in the daily world. Very few things could be gained there without probable inference and an implicit if-then chain of reasoning.

So how could those abused minds keep going back to existentialism for more abuse? Was the barrier to logical testing so high they couldn't see over it? Or were the signals from the word "absurd" just so strong they overpowered any impulse to examine its meaning?

I'm inclined to think it was the latter. Though all words from a philosophy signal "deep," "absurd" signaled "Parisian deep." Consider the era. As Tony Judt points out in trying to explain the world's tolerance of Sartre's long support of Stalinism, every signal from Paris in those early postwar years got a boost from its place of origin. Romantic, sophisticated, daring, classy. See that in a lover and sure you'll put up with some abuse.

The affair did come to an end, though. The New York Times and The New York Review in the last thirty years either ignore absurdism or condescend to it, as they do to existentialism. Does this mean that misuse of "absurd" did no long-term harm?

It's very hard to know, but I see it in the minds of those who were students in the later postwar years, the ones who took logic and even mathematics to be a social construction, or took logic to be a male, European construction, rather than a codification of reasoning standards.

I suppose there are always going to be students coming out of humanities classes needing to be told that, no, logic is not humanly warm and creative, it only tests what the warm, creative imagination has come up with in the way of propositions. And I'm sure there are always going to be retired professors like me unhappy with what their replacements are teaching. And I'm sure they'll be quick to connect it with the evils they fought in their own time. What I'm most sure of, though, is that the human mind won't quit making connections, and that mine keeps making this one between what I heard from students in the nineties and what their teachers heard in the sixties.

I'm obliged to ask if it could have been different? If Camus had started things off with proper expressions might there have been in the eighties and nineties a greater respect for logic? What expressions could he have used?

Not "irrational universe." That has the same defect as "absurd universe." Not "meaningless universe." That would have gotten him tangled in the old ambiguity, "meaning" as "significance" and "meaning" as "purpose." Though he did occasionally use both words, neither is an advance on "absurd." No, the appropriate expression, the expression that would fit everything else he was saying, and would make sense to us, is "indifferent universe." There's no sign in the universe of care for human beings.

Why didn't he say "indifferent universe"? Was it that that expression was just the one a Darwin-shocked Christian would use? Camus was an atheist, advanced to the point of anti-Christian scorn, conversing in circles where that scorn was common. He couldn't use the word that was correct, right, maybe even perfect, without sending a signal he didn't want to send, and looking like somebody he didn't want to look like: a Christian unable to recover from his Darwin-shock.

There's a lesson here about personal signals. Give more than two or three and, unless you are not the mess most of us are, some of them are going to contradict others. I think the signals in the following passage contradict the signal Camus sends with "absurd":

I want everything explained to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart.... The world itself, whose single meaning I do not understand, is but a vast irrational. If one could say just once: "This is clear," all would be saved.

Camus can't lament the absence of a single meaning in the world without being seen to lament, along with everybody else who talks this way, the absence of God, the one being who gives a single meaning to the universe and a purpose to man. He's signaling Darwin-shock. And th at signals an immature atheist. Mature atheists have gotten over their shock, and speak more matter-of-factly.

Note: It will not be apparent now but Camus's (or his translator’s) use of the word "absurd" was a misuse that should have been apparent then.  Dictionaries at the time carried only "unreasonable" and its synonyms. Only later was the secondary meaning, "manifesting the view that there is no order or value in human life or in the universe," added — as we see now in Internet dictionaries.  More testimony to the power of Camus and the existentialists.

 

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