The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
As people cast around to find reasons for Barack Obama's now epic collapse in the first debate against Mitt Romney, one of the prime culprits identified is the office of the presidency itself.
While there are a great many people who fancy themselves as straight talkers and speakers of truth to power, the fact of the matter is that there aren't too many who are willing to tell any president of the United States exactly what they think on the issues of the day. This ought to surprise no one; meetings usually occur on the president's turf, in the Oval Office, where visitors are intimidated and psyched out of the ability to speak their minds. Additionally, the president possesses a great deal of power; it therefore isn't all that easy to tell the president that things are going badly, or that a particular policy is failing, or that the president is not exactly on the job.
So the president lives in a bubble. The White House staff, cabinet secretaries and other officials of the United States government feel a great deal of pressure to say only those things that the president wants to hear. Even members of Congress, governors and mayors are often too awed to tell the president what they really think regarding a given subject. The tendency for epistemic closure is built into the job.
And it makes things worse when the president has not shown the ability--prior to becoming president, mind you--to listen to differing points of view.
I am in the position to tell you lots and lots and lots of things about the intellectual culture at the University of Chicago. I can tell you that from the Lab Schools to the College to the various graduate schools, there are any number of opportunities for people to be exposed to debates with others possessing differing views on a panoply of issues. I am in the position to tell you that those debates are interesting, fascinating, enriching, deeply valuable. I am in the position to tell you that after being exposed to such a culture, you will want no other.
I am also in the position to tell you that like all good things presented to a person, a person has to want that good thing, to grab for it and to partake of it eagerly. The opportunity for intellectual enrichment may be there, but an individual has to actively take advantage of that opportunity. It will not force itself on you.
With all of that in mind, consider this four-year old article on our president, which includes the following vignette featuring in part, Ricochet's very own Richard Epstein:
. . . Mr. Obama’s years at the law school are also another chapter — see United States Senate, c. 2006 — in which he seemed as intently focused on his own political rise as on the institution itself. Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was well liked at the law school, yet he was always slightly apart from it, leaving some colleagues feeling a little cheated that he did not fully engage. The Chicago faculty is more rightward-leaning than that of other top law schools, but if teaching alongside some of the most formidable conservative minds in the country had any impact on Mr. Obama, no one can quite point to it.
“I don’t think anything that went on in these chambers affected him,” said Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague who says he longed for Mr. Obama to venture beyond his ideological and topical comfort zones. “His entire life, as best I can tell, is one in which he’s always been a thoughtful listener and questioner, but he’s never stepped up to the plate and taken full swings.”
[. . .]
Nor could his views be gleaned from scholarship; Mr. Obama has never published any. He was too busy, but also, Mr. Epstein believes, he was unwilling to put his name to anything that could haunt him politically, as Ms. Guinier’s writings had hurt her. “He figured out, you lay low,” Mr. Epstein said.
The Chicago law faculty is full of intellectually fiery friendships that burn across ideological lines. Three times a week, professors do combat over lunch at a special round table in the university’s faculty club, and they share and defend their research in workshop discussions. Mr. Obama rarely attended, even when he was in town.
“I’m not sure he was close to anyone,” Mr. Hutchinson said, except for a few liberal constitutional law professors, like Cass Sunstein, now an occasional adviser to his campaign. Mr. Obama was working two other jobs, after all, in the State Senate and at a civil rights law firm.
Several colleagues say Mr. Obama was surely influenced by the ideas swirling around the law school campus: the prevailing market-friendliness, or economic analysis of the impact of laws. But none could say how. “I’m not sure we changed him,” Mr. Baird said.
Because he never fully engaged, Mr. Obama “doesn’t have the slightest sense of where folks like me are coming from,” Mr. Epstein said. “He was a successful teacher and an absentee tenant on the other issues.”
It's true that as president, Barack Obama has not often had to face others criticizing him. That's regrettable, but it is the nature of the office to insulate its occupier and the occupier is forced to fight against that tendency. Should he become president, Mitt Romney will face a similar challenge.
The problem, however, is that even before becoming president, Barack Obama was never really interested in engaging the ideas of others--perhaps especially the ideas of a "rightward-leaning" law school faculty. And if the above excerpt doesn't convince you of that, perhaps an excerpt from this piece will:
Economist John Lott, noted for his academic advocacy of gun rights, says that when Barack Obama was his colleague at the University of Chicago, the future president treated him as if he were “evil.”
Lott relates his interactions with Obama in his new book, co-authored with Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, “Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We can Do Now to Regain Our Future.”
“The book relates a couple out of the dozen-and-a-half conversations that I had with him,” Lott told The Daily Caller. ”But they were all very short, cut off by Obama turning his back on me and walking away.”
“He wouldn’t shake hands. It was very clear that Obama disagreed on the gun issue and acted as if he believed that people who he disagreed with were not just wrong, but evil. Unlike other liberal academics who usually enjoyed discussing opposing ideas, Obama simply showed disdain.”
Lott and Obama were colleagues at the University of Chicago Law School in the 1990s.
I have no doubt that Barack Obama will shake up his approach to debating after his awful first performance against Mitt Romney. He is too prideful and to desirous of a second term not to. But our concern ought to be whether four more years for Barack Obama may mean four more years during which views opposing the president's don't get the time of day in the Oval Office not because of the insular nature of the office of the presidency, but because of the epistemic closure affecting the current incumbent.
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Comments:
Apr '12
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
So, to summarize we have a President who sticks his fingers in his ears and says, "Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, I can't hear you!"
Luckily, he's not a real Maroon, he was just employed there.
Dec '10
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
Don't forget the epistemic closure of Obama's supporters. Back in 2007 and 2008, people who wanted to believe in a champion to defeat the Bush legacy created a myriad of fantasy Obamas. Each person cast their personal fantasy Obama in the role of savior - whether that was a bipartisan uniter, a pragmatic Democratic Party builder or a Progressive fighter against the evil Right Wing. And once his nomination was secured in 2008, those fantasy versions of him became rock-solid in the fantasizers' minds; nothing he said or did, nothing that happened in the real world, could shake their faith. There was always some excuse, someone else to blame, for anything that Obama did wrong. Only when he was finally cornered on stage with no one to do the job for him or take the blame for him were his followers required to see him as he is... and we've seen in the past 24 hours that a lot of them are still willing to believe him instead of their own eyes.
Oct '10
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
Actually, four more years of the same close-mindedness is an optimistic prediction for Obama. With no election (ever) on his horizon, his instinct for intellectual isolation will be magnified a hundred fold. He signaled this himself in his infamous, give-away-the-farm, sub rosa comment to Putin's puppet, Dmitry Medvedev.
Jul '12
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
An Obama-supporting friend of mine posted on Facebook that he thought Obama was just so disdainful of his unworthy opponent that he couldn't be moved to respond to that idiot. Talk about whistling past the graveyard. I merely suggested that this was wishful thinking. Much as I love my old pal, the term "invincible ignorance" might apply in this matter.
May '11
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
I doubt Obama has ever been open to considering opposing views. That's very rare among leftists, which is why they are still leftists. And it's not just that no one is willing to speak truth in the Oval. There is the famous story about how Christina Romer and Lawrence Summers tried desperately to convince Obama that technological improvements were not the cause of unemployment, and could not budge him off that belief.
I do find myself wondering how, in the depths of his soul, Obama manages to rationalize the spectacular failure of his stimulus program. It was supposed to keep unemployment below 8%. But we haven't seen a day of unemployment below 8% since it was passed. How can that be? How? How? It's impossible, yet it is. What do you suppose he thinks when that question haunts him late at night?
Mar '11
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
From personal experience, once one starts questioning the Leftist orthodoxy, it is only a matter of time before one is no longer a member in good standing of the side of the angels in the Great Struggle for whatever we thought we were struggling for. Allan Bloom was right: the American mind in Obama's realm has been soldered shut for years now. Obama spent much too much time in those dorm room bull-sessions. (The proper response to those was to stagger out around 2:30 AM thinking "man, I am so baked!")
Talleyrand was discussing the Bourbons, but it applies to the Obama Administration. They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
Jun '12
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
With all due respect, I'm not sure he wants a second term.
It interferes with his golf game, the work is too hard for him, and he has to face criticism for what he does.
He'd much rather be an ex-president, free to do what he wants.
Mar '11
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
From the New York Times article:
That was then. Since then, he's moved on to the Illinois Senate, U.S. Senate and the White House, and all along the way, we've discovered that it's not so much that we wish we'd seen more of him, it's that we've come to realize that that's all there is.
Sep '10
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
The only regular opposition Barack Obama gets is from his wife.
Apr '12
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
ConservativeWanderer
With all due respect, I'm not sure he wants a second term.
It interferes with his golf game, the work is too hard for him, and he has to face criticism for what he does.
He'd much rather be an ex-president, free to do what he wants. · 3 hours ago
Watching Obama in the debate, my impression was exactly the same: he wants out of there.
Apr '12
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
I doubt he listens. He is a man, after all! :-)) (Sorry, I couldn't help that!)
Oct '12
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
Remember the description of poliboro meetings under Stalin in the Gulag Archipelago where the crowd would cheer and clap for Fearless Leader until hands were bloody and participants passed out? As Solzhenitzyn told it, the apparachiks were so afraid of offending Stalin, and hence going missing, that they stood in praise until they fell in exhaustion. Maybe Obama has his own fear factor.
Jul '10
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
Read this for a somewhat different view of Obama.
Apr '12
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
Wow, thanks, Devereaux! Tweeted it!
My reading of Obama during the Debate was that he was bored out of his mind and just going through the motions. I also thought that whilst watching the Democrat Convention. He was just reading his speech, it didn't come from his heart.
He wants out!
Apr '12
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
It just struck me, do you mean Obama is afraid of someone or something? :-)
Mar '11
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
Can one suffer epistemic closure if one was never epistemically open to begin with?
Mar '11
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
But there's actually a serious problem here.
While there have been some moments in the past couple of years of right wing solidarity over candidates and causes that are just baffling outside of their immediate context (what originally led to the epistemic closure charge against us on the right), the Left (not moderate dems but movement Lefties) has actually deteriorated into epistemic closed loops.
We see exactly this sort of thing in California and in Greece today--despite all the evidence of their eyes to the contrary, both have come unmoored from reality and continued to drift further leftward without any capacity for self-criticism.
It is as though they cannot even conceive of any other way.....
Apr '12
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
Crow's Nest: But there's actually a serious problem here.
...
We see exactly this sort of thing in California and in Greece today--despite all the evidence of their eyes to the contrary, both have come unmoored from reality and continued to drift further leftward without any capacity for self-criticism.
It is as though they cannot even conceive of any other way..... · 3 minutes ago
From my front-seat perch in Canada, I see Obama as a bigoted ideologist. He seems to be the puppet of an equally bigoted group of ideologists, none of whom want to see the other side of any situation or argument. There is definitely a problem in the White House.
The debate showed him up for exactly what he is, and confirmed my suspicions in my mind. He doesn't even know his ideology well. How on earth did he manage to earn degrees from the most prestigious universities in the States? Affirmative action at its worst.
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
Question of the Day!
Oct '12
Re: The Epistemic Closure of Barack Obama
Red Feline
That's actually a good question. Stalin was ruthless with his friends at least in part because he saw them as threats to his all encompassing power. The left may be Obama's biggest threat, since if they really turn on him he loses his cloak of invincibility. That is a very good reason for him to bully his friends, even more than his enemies.