“Yeah, I noticed.”
“Have you also noticed that there seems to be no end to the turmoil?”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“Would you like to know why?”
“Yeah, I would.”
“It’s a matter of infinite regress. Take any side of a politically hot debate and try to trace the arguments of that side to their roots. And what do you find?”
“What?”
“There are no definitive roots. Say you want to argue, for example, that the economic sluggishness of the Obama presidency was simply a continuation of the downturn at the end of the Bush II presidency. The counter would be that the roots of that downturn started during the final years of the Clinton administration. But that would then lead to the argument that Bush I was involved somehow, and before him, the Reagan group. But Reagan was straddled with whatever economic condition he inherited from Carter who had inherited from Ford who was locked into Nixon who had dealt with Johnson and the war economy that derived from decisions that Kennedy had made after Eisenhower let things get out of hand when he inherited a world in shambles from the end of the Truman-Roosevelt era, and they, in turn, had to deal with a Hoover-age depression. See what I mean?”
“Maybe, keep talkin’.”
“Look, we have this need to find a cause that supports our position. And the cause of that need? I can’t name an ultimate cause, but I can postulate that it’s a leftover cultural thing, a way of thinking that we might have acquired through centuries of inculcation. It could derive from the historical influence of Aquinas and Leibniz who argued for contingencies, namely, one specific Cause-of-It-All. For both of those philosophers, the ultimate cause of the universe was God, the First Cause. In tracing the existence of the universe to God, both guys laid the groundwork for arguing that the current world depends on something that existed before, something that is not part of what now exists, something that was itself not contingent on anything else, that is, God. We seem to apply that mode of argument to our debates. We certainly don’t want to stop on some political figure whom we might favor. If I’m a Democrat, I’d argue that the root of any political problem harks back to the last Republican president; if I’m a Republican, I’d argue that the root of any political problem harks back to the last Democrat president. Yes, I realize that this can’t be an infinite regress because Americans have had fewer that fifty presidents. But, truthfully, if you try to use the arguments as they become regressions, you will go back to Andrew Jackson, to J.Q. Adams, Monroe, Madison, Jefferson, Adams, and, Washington. For argument’s sake, every administration’s failures seem to be contingent on all previous administrations’ failures.
“The result is that no one is ever going to win one of these political arguments because everyone can point to a contingency. Everyone can use, if not an infinite regress, an indefinite regress. The turmoil will continue because no opponent will want to stop at ‘his guy.’ No one will claim First Cause, but everyone will claim an earlier Cause.”
“Makes some sense.”
“Pay attention to the politics—without getting emotional—and look at every debate. The debaters will reach into history for contingencies. ‘Well, we wouldn’t be in this circumstance if your guy hadn’t done such-n-such.’ That’s the argument you hear pundits make. It won’t change during your lifetime, I’m sorry to say. Two decades from now the arguments will point to today; forty years from now the arguments will point to two decades from this moment, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum, an ad infinitum of regressions.
“But it makes sense to the debaters and pundits to do so. How can anyone lose such an argument? Since every era is complex and has multiple contingencies of its own, debaters will always find it easy to pick and choose the contingency that favors an argument, always easy to find blame in some set of past details. It will always be easy to build a tree of connections whose roots go back to George Washington, and before him, to the Continental Congress or King George III. We’re apparently doomed to an endless regression in political debates.”
“So, you’re sayin’ that if I trace all these arguments about who caused today’s problems, I’ll ultimately blame God?”
“Something like that.”