E-mail a friendSusan Neiman
original airdate May 13, 2008
Moral philosopher Susan Neiman is the author of award-winning books in English and German, including Slow Fire, Evil in Modern Thought and, her latest, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists. A native of Atlanta, she studied philosophy at Harvard and the Free University of Berlin and has taught at Yale, Tel Aviv University and the Humboldt University of Berlin. Neiman is currently director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, which is an interdisciplinary institution that promotes innovative thinking.
Susan Neiman
Tavis: Susan Neiman is the director of the Einstein Forum, which is based just outside Berlin, Germany, and a former professor at both Yale and Tel Aviv University. She is also an accomplished author whose latest book is called "Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists." Susan Neiman, nice to have you on the program.
Susan Neiman: Pleasure to be here.
Tavis: Let me start by asking what you mean when you say moral clarity, so that I have clarity about what we're talking about here.
Neiman: Let me answer that with a story. I started writing this book on November 3rd, 2004. I had come over from Berlin, partly to give some talks about evil, which was the subject of my last book, and partly to celebrate the party at the end of the Bush administration.
So when I was down on the floor on November 3rd, drinking four double espressos to just try and pick myself up that day, I said, "There are two possibilities." The Republicans are saying they won because people wanted moral clarity, all right? That they had moral values and progressives did not.
And I said okay, well, either you can say all those people were being bamboozled, right, or you can look at what progressives have done wrong, and why we are scared of moral language, why we only use words like good and evil and hero in these little, silly scare quotes, right? And look at what we can do to speak to people who are desperate, are hungry for straightforward talk about morality.
And I figured okay, I'm trained as a philosopher. If there's anything I can contribute to the political climate of this country, it is offering a different moral vocabulary, so we can talk about clarity without being simple. Clarity is not the same thing as simplicity.
Tavis: It's not the same thing as simplicity, nor is it the same thing as religion. And in political conversations, that notion of moral clarity gets - I sense, at least - too often confused with the notion of religion.
Neiman: You have got it exactly, okay? Now, one of the first things that I did - and the book starts with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, but it's not Sodom and Gomorrah the way that you heard it. There's a whole lot of wisdom in the Bible. Whether you're a believer or not, it is one of the greatest sources of wisdom that we've got.
But you've got to learn how to read it, okay? And the Bible itself, in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham's arguing with God actually tells us that even if you've got a direct line to God, religion is not the source of moral clarity, because in that story, Abraham is arguing with God. Abraham is giving God lessons in ethics.
So what you get from the Bible itself is the idea that sometimes, your morality comes before your religion, with all due respect to God. So if the Bible itself - and of course the Bible itself has all kinds of stories in it. The next story about Abraham is he listens to God, who tells him to sacrifice his son - his only son, whom he loves, right?
And that's the story that people like to focus on, that religious people like to focus on and think well, whatever God says, whatever religion says, whatever your preacher says, that's what you do, and you don't ask any questions. So that's a line you get in the Bible.
But if you have this other line telling you no, you think for yourself, and you think for yourself about what's right and wrong and you look at each particular case and you ask questions, well, then, the Bible itself is telling us religion is not the thing that comes first.
Tavis: But isn't that what complicates, though, this conversation about morality, to say nothing of moral clarity, which is that morality, in the world we live today, seems to be what each of us determines it to be. And that's problematic, I think.
Neiman: Well, the thing is a lot of people believe that, if you talk on an abstract level, all right? Once you get down to talking cases, it's really interesting because it turns out we actually agree on so many more cases. There are cases where we disagree, but you can talk to anybody who says, "Oh, morality is whatever you think about it," and it turns out actually that there's a lot more common ground.
But you're right; there are - we don't all agree about everything, and so what I have done in this book is to say let's go back to the Enlightenment, okay? Enlightenment is a great tradition; it's also a great tradition in this country. When this country was founded, the Europeans looked to us as the place where the ideals of the Enlightenment could be made real. And if you look at statements of the founding fathers, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," that wasn't not only self-evident, it wasn't even true, right? So they were proposing a vision of the way the world ought to be.
So it seems to me if you go back to that original vision, if you go back to the sources and you look at what their values are, those are values that give a basis for what I call "grown-up idealism." It's not idealism, whatever moves me, however the spirit moves me, whether I'm the Taliban and I'm ready to die for my ideals, or whether it's certain members of this administration who are ready to kill for their ideas.
We've got some values that we can focus on, and I talk about four of them that come from the Enlightenment: happiness, reason, reverence, and hope. And those are values that I think you can - most of us, not all of us - but most of us can be persuaded to guide our lives by.
Tavis: As I went through the text, though, at the center, it seems to me, of any - at the epicenter of any real conversation about those four values that you lay out in the text, it seems to me, at least, that there has to be present therein an absolute necessity for an understanding and an accepting of what is right and what is wrong.
At the center of any conversation for me, at least, about morality, has to be some sense of what's right and what's wrong. I want to go back to what we talked about earlier, which is I'm not so sure in the world we live today, that even around those four issues, that there is an accepted definition or conversation, formulation, about what is right and what's wrong.
For my mama, there is. Some things are still right, and some things are still wrong. But don't you have to have a sense of that, an embrace of that, at the center of a conversation about morality?
Neiman: I think you have to have a sense that there are rights and wrongs, that these are things we deeply care about, but they've got to be applied to every case. And things don't decide themselves. That's what we have law for. That's what we also have religious interpretation for. Whichever way you go, whether you base your sense of right and wrong on secular law or whether you base it on religious law in any tradition, we've got to interpret.
There is no rule that's going to hold for every single case, and what that means is you do a lot of work.
Tavis: I want to circle back, then, to where you started this conversation, with your first answer about the Bush reelection campaign, much to your chagrin that he won, as opposed to losing to John Kerry, and bring that forward to this election season, 2008. How does one - never mind the candidates per se, although that may factor into your answer, I suspect - but how does one, in the context of a presidential campaign, how does the country, that is to say, find moral clarity in a time like this?
Neiman: I started writing this book, as I said, on November 3rd, 2004, and at that point in time I couldn't imagine that there would be a candidate who lived up to what I wanted to see in my president. And in fact, because I talk about idealism and believing that more is possible than you believe, at that time I thought maybe an Edwards-Obama ticket. Maybe we could just get that through.
When I read "Dreams from My Father," I was blown away, and I said any man who could write a book like this, if he became president of the United States, it would change the world, because this is what I mean by a grown-up idealist. And I think the way that he has been talking almost constantly through this campaign is exactly the embodiment of a grown-up idealist, grown-up idealism, okay?
Distinguishing between what is, having a clear-eyed view of what is, and having a clear vision of what ought to be and understanding the steps that you need to get from the one to the other, and doing it from the grassroots, and mobilizing people - my kids, who were never interested in politics, and peoples' kids across the country.
So I think that it's already being done by one of these candidates. I suppose the thing that's made me angriest about the election is the whole discussion of so-called elitism, and what I think that Obama has managed to do in his best speeches, like the great Philadelphia speech, is actually to have an adult conversation about values, and show that Americans are, in fact, not divided, we're not divided.
What counts is not demographics. What counts is not education. What counts is a set of ideals that actually most of us really are committed to, if we lay them out properly. And I know people are doing that all over the country, and I'm trying to do that myself.
Tavis: We will see - I didn't want to interrupt you; I take your point and Barack Obama's a fine person, no doubt about it. And for that matter, John McCain's a decent guy. The question is for me, and maybe we'll have you on sometime later to see how this thing turns out; I don't want you on the floor again in November of '08, like you were in November of '04.
But we will see whether or not this holds up, because for me, where moral clarity is concerned, it's easy to talk about it, it's easy to write about it, it's easy to give speeches about it. But as you get closer and closer to that power, you find yourself in a battle of truth versus power. And the real question is, where moral clarity is concerned, whether or not in the end truth wins or power wins. Yes?
Neiman: Yes and no.
Tavis: Choked you up?
Neiman: Yes and no. Yes and no. No, yes and no. I think that it will be up to those of us who have a sense of certain moral truths to keep going. I don't think we can stop working once we get the kind of president who shows the first chance in 40 years of realizing those ideals. I think all of us are going to have to keep up the truth.
Tavis: On the note, we will stop. And on that note, we agree. You got to be diligent about moral clarity.
Neiman: Absolutely.
Tavis: We agree on that. The new book by Susan Neiman - now I'm choked up - is called "Moyers on Democracy: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists." Susan, nice to have you on the program.
Neiman: Pleasure.
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