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Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor

Reading, Reflecting and Believing

By Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor |

In his recent address to students graduating in English at the University of California Berkeley, author Mark Danner reflects on morality, critical thinking, and the psychology of reality creation in the current US political environment.

Mark Danner, well-known writer at The New Yorker and Professor at the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, recently addressed the 2005 graduating class in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. His address began by reflecting on the choice to study English — the title of his talk was What Are You Going to Do With That? — but moved rapidly into trademark commentary on America’s role in the world. Whatever one might think of his unabashedly outspoken politics, his comments seemed to me to carry such insight into the psychology of reality creation, and how we might go about either challenging or accepting reality created for us by others, that I’ve included an extended quotation from his address here.

From the piece, to be published in the 23 June 2005 issue of the New York Review of Books:

Never in my experience has frank mendacity so dominated our public life. This has to do less with ideology itself, I think, than the fact that our country was attacked and that –from the Palmer Raids after World War I, to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, to the McCarthyite witch-hunts during the Fifties — America tends to respond to such attacks, or the threat of them, in predictably paranoid ways. Notably, by “rounding up the usual suspects” and by dividing the world, dramatically and hysterically, into a good part and an evil part. September 11 was no exception to this: indeed, in its wake — coterminous with your time here — we have seen this American tendency in its purest form.

One welcome distinction between the times we live in and those other periods I have mentioned is the relative frankness of our government officials — I should call it unprecedented frankness — in explaining how they conceive the relationship of power and truth. Our officials believe that power can determine truth, as an unnamed senior adviser to the President explained to a reporter last fall:

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. [3]

The reporter, the adviser said, was a member of what he called “the reality-based community,” destined to “judiciously study” the reality the administration was creating. Now it is important that we realize — and by “we” I mean all of us members of the “reality-based community” — that our leaders of the moment really do believe this, as anyone knows who has spent much time studying September 11 and the Iraq war and the various scandals that have sprung from those events — the “weapons of mass destruction” scandal and the Abu Ghraib scandal, to name only two.

What is interesting about both of those is that the heart of the scandal, the wrongdoing, is right out in front of us. Virtually nothing of great importance remains to be revealed. Ever since Watergate we’ve had a fairly established narrative of scandal. First you have revelation: the press, usually with the help of various leakers within the government, reveals the wrongdoing. Then you have investigation, when the government — the courts, or Congress, or, as with Watergate, both — constructs a painstaking narrative of what exactly happened: an official story, one that society — that the community — can agree on. Then you have expiation, when the judges hand down sentences, the evildoers are punished, and the society returns to a state of grace.

What distinguishes our time — the time of September 11 — is the end of this narrative of scandal. With the scandals over weapons of mass destruction and Abu Ghraib, we are stuck at step one. We have had the revelation; we know about the wrongdoing. Just recently, in the Downing Street memo , we had an account of a high-level discussion in Britain, nearly eight months before the Iraq war, in which the head of British intelligence flatly tells the prime minister — the intelligence officer has just returned from Washington — that not only has the President of the United States decided that “military action was…inevitable” but that — in the words of the British intelligence chief — “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” This memo has been public for weeks. [4]

So we have had the revelations; we know what happened. What we don’t have is any clear admission of — or adjudication of — guilt, such as a serious congressional or judicial investigation would give us, or any punishment. Those high officials responsible are still in office. Indeed, not only have they received no punishment; many have been promoted. And we — you and I, members all of the reality-based community — we are left to see, to be forced to see. And this, for all of us, is a corrupting, a maddening, but also an inescapable burden.

Excerpted Notes:

3. See Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt,” the New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.

4. See my essay, “The Secret Way to War,” the New York Review, June 9, 2005.

Danner’s phrase about the inescapable burden of being a member of the reality-based community really seems to me to capture something…something worth pondering.

If you’d like to read more about what Danner has to say, some of his recent books include:

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