Originally posted at Democracy in America...
Up at dawn, I had a jumble of thoughts inspired by the impeachment and my inability to understand the appeal of Drumpf to 74 million voters. 81 million chose Joe. What is it that divides the 74 from the 81?
I am a product of a Republican family. I know plenty of Republicans. I don’t think that any of them five years ago would countenance the kind of behavior that Drumpf has engaged in since his election as president. Yet today they do; at least they tolerate and accept it. I first thought, why have they changed? But then I thought, perhaps they haven’t changed at all. Perhaps the great divide between the 74 and the 81 reveals a fundamental, maybe evolutionally developed, difference in nature; a difference in American character.
For many in the 81, Donald Drumpf is a fatally flawed human being, with his garish lifestyle, with his gilded palaces, his obvious lack of virtue, and his buffoonery. We know his character by his acts, and it isn't pretty.
Why don’t the 74 see this? I hypothesize that they do see it, but they see something in him they value. They see in him a fulfillment of the American dream. Gold toilets in a Manhattan high-rise, Mar-a-Lago, private jets, beautiful women, etc. And they believe that all this material success is the result of rugged American individualism that characterizes Americanism. This is the character of those that conquered a continent, built railroads and steel mills, and made America great. Howard Roark.
Donald Drumpf is a radical narcissist. He cares about one thing – himself. He embodies a concept of individualism that many Americans see as the essence of the American character. His character, seen through the prism of this perspective of individualism, may be a bit flawed, but he represents American values that the 74, by their nature, possess.
The 81 have a different perspective on individualism. Theirs includes caring for others. They are more likely than the 74 to look through their prism and see problems that affect others in society and to seek solutions that involve change. The 74 resist change, and see authoritarian preservation of the status quo as necessary to maintain American democracy.
The actions of the January 6th mob are indefensible. Their ‘means’ are simply not acceptable in a democracy. But, what about their ‘ends’? Over and over, before, after, and during, their loudest spokespeople proclaimed their mission was and is to preserve American democracy. Was that not the concern of the 81 in the 2020 election? We all have a common goal. We cannot make any progress toward reconciliation without addressing this point.
There is a historical aspect to our present problem. You cannot separate out of the American experience our experience with race. We brought human beings to this country as slaves. We fought a horrible bloody civil war over the right to own and enslave human beings. The descendants of slaves comprise much of our population. These descendants have suffered injustice for 400 years, which continues to this day. And the mob that invaded the capitol carried Confederate battle flags.
Our country is now in a cold civil war. White supremacism has been revealed in all aspects of our society. We face the challenge of white supremacist militias like the Proud Boys, and threats of domestic terrorism (terrorism being violent actions to achieve a political goal).
Today’s civil war is a moral war. It is a war over the proper ethic for Americanism. It is, as Joe said, a war for the soul of the nation. Is Americanism to be characterized by ruthless materialistic individualism, or by empathy for others, and the seeking of a just society? This is a moment of reckoning.
In order to properly address this moment, we must try to understand each other, and reconcile the apparent paradox that both sides have the same goal. We will not rise to the occasion if we only tell the other side why they are objectively wrong. We must try to understand – and appreciate - their subjective feelings. We need to stand in each other's shoes, and articulate each other’s positions. Only then will we be able to reconcile our different means to our common goal.
--Ed Craig
(aka "Grandfather Philosophy")
Thanks for this, Ed.
ReplyDeleteAs we've discussed, grasping another's subjectivity can be extraordinarily hard. But grasping that others have interior lives as rich and compelling to them as ours are to us shouldn't be so hard.
Some others are far less reflective, of course, and less open to this kind of mutual and reciprocal receptivity. I don't imagine we'd make much headway in an exchange of subjectivities with the guy in horns and fur(for instance) and his January 6 comrades. But I appreciate, and William James would appreciate, your willingness to call out "a certain blindness in human beings"...
OUR judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable or significant than any other.
DeleteNow the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat, is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.
We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons' conditions or ideals.
Take our dogs and ourselves... (continues)
https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/jcertain.html
==
William James
https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/james.html#significant
I think he also expressed a similar sentiment in The Moral Equivalent of War.
ReplyDelete"...If now -- and this is my idea -- there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation..."
https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/moral.html