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Disintegrating America

When a society believes that emotions define reality, what holds it together?
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Reader Pacopond made a great comment on the Trump and Other Shady Types thread, which is already too long; I quote Pacopond here because I don’t want his comment to get lost on the other thread:

 Rod says, ” I’ve had over the past few years with middle-class, economically secure Republicans who watch a lot of Fox and listen to talk radio, who believe really nutty things about the government, and who refuse to have their views challenged. It’s total emotivism — the concept that if you believe it strongly enough, it must be true. I don’t actually believe this is merely a GOP phenomenon; rather, I think it’s generally true of our contemporary culture (MacIntyre called it nearly 40 years ago), but it has a particular manifestation on the Right today.”

Well, I have a meta-political point to a political posting. Yesterday I listened to a 16-year-old girl giving an oral presentation of a persuasive paper she had written. Hers was on how we all should be more accepting of gender fluidity, and not resort to “binary” classifications.

She said this in a semi-private venue instead of in front of the class. A friend was with her. They were both white girls with metal studs and rings in their noses and lips. I later saw my student smiling and holding hands with a boy in the halls.

But the point that struck me is that she said that self-expression is a fundamental human right, that the right to one’s identity is basic an should be protected.

I proceeded very carefully. Explaining that I’d been a philosophy major in grad school, and that it’s good to test your own opinions, I asked her what identity meant. Ultimately, she said, it’s how you feel.

I asked–taking care not to be argumentative–if personal feelings were sufficient to establish identity. I proposed the case of a white person who “identified” as a black person. Her response to “blood-line” led me to caution her that such arguments were too redolent of racist rhetoric, and we backed away from that.

She said that identity is distinguished from persona (our representation to the world) because our feelings tell us who we “really” are.

I reminded her that words like “really” deserve deeper investigation. It was a cordial exchange. I didn’t want to make her defensive, because defensiveness closes the mind.

On the other hand, I had a conversation with my brother about climate change. My usual strategy is to eliminate all talk about policy and politics, putting those issues into abeyance until we can establish what the truth is, and how we know it, and how certain we should be about our knowledge.

Didn’t work. He’s spent many years with talk radio and Fox news. Ultimately he said the reason that the scientific consensus on climate change is fraud is because of something Nancy Pelosi said about the need to pass Obamacare.

And he said nothing could convince him otherwise.

He’s a bright guy who is a chiropractor and knows a great deal about anatomy and physiology, therapies, and nutrition. He has been an avid hunter and fisherman since his early teens, and I would love to know the names of the plants and animals that he does, and the ways that fish and game live.

But he’s a non-reader. He has no idea of what’s in The American Conservative, The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard, The Claremont Review, etc., not to mention the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Nation, and so forth. Yet he’s very confident that he’s right. His conservatism comes from Rush and Fox and that ilk, and he believes that arguments are all about working up to zinger one-liners.

What do these two anecdotes have in common? Well, I think there is an appeal to emotion as the validating principle for personal and political identity.

And emotion is necessary but not sufficient for guiding ourselves, whether through dark woods or bright sunny uplands.

When people in a society cannot even accept that some things are really real, apart from how we feel about those things, what holds that society together? What can hold it together?

We are disintegrating. Coming apart. Losing our hold on reality.

 

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