Why politics makes us stupid and "Lord, is it I?"
Greetings,
This week I have some thoughts on our public hellscape, and why politics makes all of our discussions more stupid. Then I have some somewhat-more-preachy-than-usual thoughts on Jesus.
Politics makes us stupid
One of the weirder things about the last few years was the way in which COVID got rapidly encoded with political meaning. The progressive position was to be very afraid of COVID and enthusiastic about masks, shutdowns, and the like, while the conservative position was to downplay the risks of COVID and deride public health measures as a sinister attack on our liberties. The strangest thing to me about this dynamic is how ideologically arbitrary it was. It’s very easy to imagine an alternative world in which Donald Trump consistently denounced COVID as the dangerous “China Virus” that was yet another threat to our homeland. Conservatives could have enthusiastically embraced star-spangled be-decked “freedom masks” in the battle to preserve our way of life against the foreign threat. Progressives would have then denounced conservative xenophobia and insisted that Trump was over-stating the risks of COVID as part of yet another sinister lurch toward authoritarianism. The freedom masks would have been compared to brownshirts in very serious essays in Jacobin and Slate. Anthony Fauci would have become widely detested on the left as the witless technocratic enabler of Trump’s lurch toward tyranny. This story strikes me as just as ideologically plausible as the narratives that in fact developed. The very arbitrariness of the ideological reactions to COVID suggest to me the intellectual poverty of our public discussions. We use political ideology as our catchall explanation for everything despite the manifest weakness of our political ideologies as explanations of the world.
Take the variation for any social phenomena by state, and you will notice that the first discussion point will be “Is it a red state or a blue state?” We will then get a set of narratives that, depending on the ideological allegiance of the narrator, will proceed to explain how it is that partisan identity explains the outcome. Conservatives just are such and such, or that’s exactly what progressives would do, etc. Lost in such stories are issues such as technology, demographics, income, climate, or geography, all of which can exert a far greater influence on society than public policy, let alone the way in which a majority of voters cast their ballots in the last presidential election.
In part, I suspect, that what we are seeing is the pernicious effect of the current business model for journalism, in which profit margins are razor thin due to the collapse of de facto local advertising monopolies. The natural reaction is the rise of punditry and the decline of everything else. Pundits are cheap. Every night, you can get them to spout their opinions about anything. Collecting facts – especially when the collection requires more than some Google searches, which sadly is all that much of journalist research amounts to these days – is expensive. The pundits have two tasks. First, they need to have an opinion about everything all the time. Accordingly, they require intellectual shortcuts, something into which they can plug an event and generate an opinion without a lot of thought. In a world where you have to have an instant opinion about everything, no one has time for thought. This is exactly what ideology promises you. Second, pundits need to attract attention, and nothing attracts attention like outrage or the outrageous. This is what debasing the already debased intellectual currency of punditry into cardboard partisanship offers. And with social media, we can all be pundits! (See, e.g., this newsletter.)
The other driver of this, I suspect, are all of the forces from zoning to technology that have pushed Americans to sort themselves politically and culturally over the last generation. We are more likely than we were 50 years ago to live in ideologically homogenous spaces. Here is a crude but striking illustration: In 1980, Reagan won the presidential election with 50.7% of the popular vote, but he carried every state but Maryland and the two homes states of Carter (Georgia) and Mondale (Minnesota). It was an electoral college landslide. In 2020, Biden won the election with 51.3% of the popular vote but carried only 24 states and parts of 2 others. It was an electoral college squeaker. The massive disparity in the electoral college between the two elections, despite the very close overall vote totals, reflects the fact that voters are much more tightly clustered by partisanship than they were 40 years ago. Democrats are more likely to live around Democrats than in the past, and Republicans are more likely to live around Republicans. This clustering makes us stupid. The more homogenous are our social networks, the easier it is to develop false images of the other guy; the lazier we become in accepting as “common sense” views about the world that are in fact very contestable; the more likely we are to have certain arguments treated with respect and other arguments treated with contempt based on their partisan valence rather than their cogency. And so on.
I don’t have any good ideas about what could be done to make us less stupid. My main response is bemused pessimism about the world. I self-medicate against existential despair with running, nature, novels, and philosophy, preferably something really abstract and technical. (In 2020, I read all of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason, along with the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. It was a rough year.) I do think that it is worth treasuring and cultivating spaces that aren’t defined by political ideology, but as the response to COVID suggests this is increasingly hard to do in a world where politics metastasizes through everything.
Using Jesus as a bludgeon
It is very, very easy to use Jesus as a weapon. Every Christian I know loves the story of Jesus cleansing the money changers from temple. It is the ultimate license for righteous indignation, and nothing gives us quite the emotional pay off as a good bit of self-righteous condemnation of the wicked. The story is particularly good for this, because the actual proximate cause of Jesus’s indignation in the gospels – money changers bearing coins with the inscriptions of pagan god-kings so that worshipers could buy animals within the precincts of Yahweh’s temple – is so delightfully remote from our experience. It is devilishly easy to fill the story by analogy with whatever are our pre-existing moral or political concerns. Jesus, it turns out, is just like me, and he wants to whip with cords just the people that I want to whip! Oddly enough even Jesus’s reiteration of the command to love our neighbor can be used in the same way. I am motivated in my political and moral concerns by love of my neighbor. You, on the other hand, are clearly without love of your neighbor given that you don’t think like me. Hence, you’re a bad person for failing to follow the great commandment, which is why, of course, I hate your sinfulness, which, of course, is exactly what Jesus wants (see e.g. the story of the the money changers in the temple).
I am struck by the story of Jesus’s last supper, when he announces that one of his disciples will betray him. The words of their response can be translated in a number of ways. One defensible translation would be something like “Surely, not me!” However, I prefer the language of the KJV, which says simply “Lord, is it I?” (Matt. 26:22). The alternative translations suggest a certain moral self-confidence on the part of the apostles. “We aren’t the sort of people who would do that!” The KJV translation, however, suggests a less self-confident, more morally serious response. “I might be the one, the betrayer. I am capable of that. Am I the one?” It seems to me that this is the better response to Jesus. I don’t think that he is meant to be a bludgeon in our various moral or ideological tiffs. Rather, in the story of the money changers we are supposed to ask, “Am I the one bringing idols into the temple?”
“Lord, is it I?”
See you next week.
Nate
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