Tout comprendre, c’est
tout pardonner, as the old saying has it. Mary Trump’s tell-all book about
the Trump family is now in the hands of reporters one week before its scheduled
publication and I suspect that very soon we will learn that Trump as a little
boy was dyslexic, that his father mocked him and treated him brutally because
of the disability, and that it is from this original fact that much of his
appalling personality derives. Well, I am not going to let him off the hook.
Many people are born dyslexic, some are treated badly by their parents and
teachers as a consequence, but very few grow up to be the appalling human being
that Donald Trump is. The fact that his niece, Mary, is a clinical psychologist
will add weight to her revelations. Poor little Donald. These days he just
doesn’t seem to be able to catch a break.
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A Commentary on the Passing Scene by Robert Paul Wolff rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."
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About Me
- Robert Paul Wolff
- As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.
8 comments:
Donald Trump (the most powerful person in the White House) paid someone else to take his SAT exam and thereby committed test and admissions fraud. So the University of Pennsylvania should revoke Trump’s bachelor’s degree.
Jared Kushner (the second most powerful person in the White House) got into Harvard and NYU Law School only because his father donated $1+ million to each school.
So it’s no surprise that the US response to the coronavirus pandemic has been a horrendous failure.
Yes, the great American Meritocracy and its elite academic institutions! But it's incredibly unfair that we might want to provide some affirmative action to racial minority groups instead of to wealthy whites...
In addition, both Trump and Jared Kushner truly believe they’re much smarter than everyone else. Trump considers himself a “highly stable genius,” and some in the White House consider Kushner a “hidden genius.” They both consider themselves “disrupters” who know more than everyone else.
Kushner is the second most powerful person in the White House in that he is covertly leading the administration’s response to the coronavirus.
Given all this and given their academic backgrounds, it’s no surprise that Trump’s response to the coronavirus has been a colossal failure.
In Trump's case, the response failure has to do, in large part, with his wishful thinking that if he pretended Covid wasn't a big deal, it wouldn't be, and also with his inconsistent and ineffective public communication. Plus his absurd remarks about bleach and praise of hydroxychloroquine.
It's a matter of his temperament. If he'd gotten into the Wharton School legitimately and gotten straight A's there but had the same temperament, the result would be the same. His "academic background" or lack thereof is not the issue. It's him.
Harry Truman's formal education stopped after high school. Do you think Truman would have made a comparable mess of this?
No, Truman would have handled this pandemic much better than Trump has. Truman had superior character, common sense, and practical reason.
I should clarify my previous comments. I do not think intelligence, SAT scores, other standardized test scores, Ivy League universities, or other “elite” universities/colleges are the end all, be all. I say this as someone who has attended such schools.
One can get so-so SAT scores, attend a local public university, work hard and diligently, get a solid undergraduate education, and ultimately become a practically rational, mature, adult professional who has good character and the relevant experience for the job. If such a person were running for president as a Democrat, I would happily vote for him or her.
That said, however, I do think that if Trump had legitimately gotten into Wharton and gotten straight As, it would reflect a different type of character (or temperament as you say). In that case, he would have been a more honest, more diligent, more conscientious student who could have still become a reckless sociopath.
But, yes, character and academic background are not perfectly or highly correlated with each other. You can have excellent character with a weak academic background, and you can have horrendous character with a very strong academic background.
To LFC
Truman did not have much of a formal education. But like many successful leaders of the Twentieth Century he was a formidable autodidact, apparently one of the few members of Congress to spend significant amounts of time reading in the Congressional Library.
There is an interesting story about Peter Fraser, New Zealand's wartime Prime Minister and a close contemporary of Truman’s. Like Truman , Fraser had little formal education but like Truman, he was formidably well-read. And moving in working-class socialist circles, he was used to being the most well-informed person in the room, particularly on subjects such as history. And (though this is just speculation) he probably thought it his duty and his pleasure to spread his hard-won enlightenment around. (The better informed the electorate is, the more likely they are to make sensible political choices.) Anyway during the War he was on a visit to Britain (where the Commonwealth Prime Ministers often took part in the War Cabinets) and had been invited out to Trinity College Cambridge to receive an honorary degree. Whilst wandering the corridors in company with the Master of of Trinity College, he came across a portrait of Henry VIII. 'That's Henry VIII' said Fraser and embarked upon an impromptu lecture on Henry VIII , his reign and character and his historical significance. Subsequently Fraser was mortified to discover or perhaps was reminded that the Master of the Trinity was in fact the famous historian G M Trevelyan. (in whose works Fraser would probably have been soaked). Fraser was so embarrassed the he wrote Trevelyan a letter of apology. But Trevelyan, as might have been expected, was all graciousness, complimenting Fraser on his historical knowledge & the quality of his impromptu lecture and enclosing a copy of his recently published ‘English Social History’. This of course was precisely what you would have expected since Trevelyan was a noted popular historian producing a long string of Whiggish histories aimed at people exactly like Fraser., people who might not have had much formal education but wanted to understand (and perhaps improve) the world by understanding its history. In the Prime Minister of New Zealand he was meeting a member of his target clientele. Also perhaps (and not coincidentally) our greatest Prime Minister.
Anyway I guess the moral of the story is that although the fancy degrees from famous universities often help (after all I have got one myself) what’s really important is to have emerging political elites who are well-read and well-informed, especially about history. And one of the things that is wrong with Donald Trump is that he one of the most ignorant men ever to sit behind the resolute desk and that he can’t compensate for this (as some people can) by being a quick study with the capacity to pick other people’s brains. To do that you have to be interested in something other than yourself.
Charles Pigden,
Thank you for that great story about Peter Fraser and G.M. Trevelyan.
(I have to say with perhaps a bit of embarrassment that if you had asked me before this to name the PM of New Zealand during WW2, I'm
pretty sure I couldn't have. Though I think I have encountered Fraser's name before -- I just wouldn't have been able to place it.)
Hmm, my phone did some strange things w/ the spacing there.
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