Month: March 2019

According to my online dictionary, a demagogue is “a person, especially an orator or political leader, who gains power and popularity by arousing the emotions, passions, and prejudices of the people.”  By this definition, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy were demagogues, for they certainly gained power and popularity by arousing emotions, passions, and prejudices. In fact, with the possible exception of Calvin Coolidge, it’s difficult to imagine anyone in a democratic society gaining power and popularity, especially the presidency, without arousing strong feelings.  The Wikipedia entry gets it more accurately, at least according to common usage: “a leader in a democracy who gains popularity by exploiting prejudice and ignorance among the common people, whipping up the passions of the crowd and shutting down reasoned deliberation.”

Emotions, passions, and prejudices are not the result of deliberation, defined as “careful consideration before decision.”  They are feelingsrather than thoughts, and therefore are not rationalor derived from the exercise of reason.  As a basisfor action they are therefore very dangerous, for their roots are unconnected to the ends to which they are committed.  Indeed, an action based on feelings can easily produce the opposite of what a process of due deliberation would aim at.

On the other hand, no action of any kind can occur without the motive power of feeling or emotion, for emotion is what moves us, what puts us in motion, what motivatesus to act.  This is so because we act not on the basis of thoughts or facts or even reasons but on the basis of value. That is, values inform our emotions, passions, and prejudices.

Values are personal and cultural.  We value something personally or, as members of a group, culturally, if we believe that that something contributes to our welfare. Conversely, we disvalue something if we believe it threatens our welfare. We acquire our personal and cultural values over time and experience and reflection on that experience.

Reflection is a rational process.  It is an attempt to gain control over the valuation process so as to give us greater confidence that what we value indeed promotes our welfare rather than threatens it. It requires that we bring all relevant information to consciousness so that we can examine that information in a rational process of thinking, of deliberation.

Here is an illustration of what I mean, drawn from my personal experience.

I value my marriage.  I believe that it promotes my welfare, and to a high enough  degree that I assign a very high valueto it; which is to say that I am prepared to sacrifice  other things I value to maintain and to keep it (or, “to have and to hold” it, as the old ritual line says).  So, when conflicts with my spouse became so regular and repeated as to threaten marital dissolution (or ongoing misery), I began to question my evaluationnot only of my particular marriage but marriage in general, even though my culture gives marriage a high–although, it seems, diminishing–value.  My personal welfare—immediate, intermediate, and long-term (“till death do us part”)—was on the line, and a very large decision needed to be confronted, resolved, and undertaken.

I found that I was unable to resolve this decision by myself or in dialogue with my spouse.  My deliberation (“careful consideration before decision”) on a suggestion from her that we seek marital counseling led at first to denial (no holding-hands-remember-our-vows bullshit for me) and then, finally, to acceptance, as if I were rehearsing the stages of the dying process.  The main thing, I think, that I had to confront was: did I really value this marriage?  Was this person really good for me?  Till death do us part?  This unfortunately was not, is not, a question that can be answered definitively. I can definitively say that my mental and physical health has a very high value for me.  But the value of my marriage to this person was and remains a matter of faith.  I don’t know; I believe. 

 

So, we betook ourselves to a marriage counselor; and, to make a long story short, I discovered that, in a phrase, “I can be right, or I can have a relationship.”  That is, my spouse and I are a unit, and we must function as a unit or fall apart.  Self-knowledge—Socrates’ great and simple goal—must be applied to our marital unit. I must know, understand, and appreciate how she thinks, feels, and values, and she must do the same for me. Our conflicts derived from our ignorance.  Keeping the faith that what had attracted us to each other has a basis other than superficialities, some deeper connection such as “this person really sees who I am and values that,” led us both into the deep waters of mutual self-knowledge, how we are alike and how we are different, and how recognizing those likenesses and differences promotes rather than threatens our welfare as individuals and as a couple.  My fear of losing my integrity, my sovereign personhood, in the compromising give-and-take of marriage was, I discovered, a false fear born of a mistaken notion of the self, or my self.  Indeed, my natural determination to “be right,” to hold on to my hard-won understanding of my self and the world of my experience, was what was preventing me from seeing more clearly that self and that world.  I now understand that my marriage—indeed, any marriage or deep friendship—is a vehicle for an expanded consciousness of value, of what and how to value; that is, to recognize what contributes my welfare, and what threatens it.

Values, then, inform our emotions, passions, and prejudices.  We act through the energy of those feelings on the basis of our values, and we acquire our values through our experience.  If, however, those values acquired through experience are not examined by rational reflection, through deliberation, our embrace of those values may be misplaced, for despite our belief that they promote our welfare, they may in fact promote the opposite.  Had I not resolved to get to the bottom of my marital conflicts by seeking professional help, I would have continued to believe that I was right, my spouse was wrong, and that we were not suited to each other.  The value I had placed on what I took to be adequately complete self-knowledge would have led me to a miserable marriage, or divorce, and neither of those outcomes would have been in my best interests.

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“This should be our safe place.” – Dakota Shrader (16), student at Sante Fe High School (TX).

As a child growing up in a small Massachusetts town, I regularly walked to school, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone.  At the age of five, I learned from my parents and neighboring adults to be aware of two threats to my safety: motorized road vehicles and untethered dogs.  I was taught not to cross a road until I had looked both ways to determine if the road was clear, and not to run from a menacing dog but to face it, arms down, and slowly back away.  One time in an unfamiliar neighborhood, while I was selling raffle tickets to raise money for my Boy Scout troop, I turned and walked quickly away from an angrily confrontational dog, who then jumped and bit me on my back.  Lesson relearned, the hard way.

In my little world, there were two places I could always count on to be safe: my home, and my school. In both places I could focus my attention freely on whatever engaged my interest, and in such manner I was able to learn and grow.  Between home and school, however, was the danger zone, for there I had to be alert to possible threats to my health, even my existence.

As a parent, I imparted to my children what had been imparted to me: the message that the world is a wonderful place, but it nonetheless contains dangers of which you must be aware and against which you must be ready to defend yourself.  Home, and the homes of your friends, and your school, are safe places where you can let your guard down and feel free to live, love, and grow.

We can now no longer take this conventional wisdom for granted.  Since the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, according to the Washington Post’s database of school shootings, 141 students and teachers have been killed, 284 have been wounded, and over 214,000 have been traumatized by the experience of armed violence occurring during normal school hours, usually at the hands of members of their own school community, 70% of whom were under the age of 18.  In a population of millions, these numbers are relatively small, but they indicate a destructive trend that’s likely to worsen unless effective measures are undertaken to arrest it.  In addition, we should note that today’s mass media are so powerful and omnipresent that almost everyone—adult and child alike—has instant access to information that before the Digital Age had been the exclusive purview of the gods.  This access to information, and our now habitual if not obsessive use of it, intensifies our emotional lives, especially our fears and anxieties, and in consequence we and our children have effectively lost the belief that a school is a safe space.  This is a loss of innocence on a grand scale.

In the past nineteen years, 216 of our nation’s schools have been subjected to the kind of collective horror that, in the hands of emotionally disturbed and disaffected youths, only guns can engender.  The failure of our elected representatives to take effective action against this horror is shameful and unconscionable.  But then we must realize that our representatives—local, county, state, national–represent us.  The failure is thus oursas a political community responsible for self-government.

I think that it is not for want of courage that we have failed.  The failure is more due, I think, to a kind of Hamlet’s Dilemma concerning the 2^ndAmendment.  On the one hand we have “the right to bear arms,” which is an extension of our right to self-defense.  If illegitimate force is used against us, we have the right to oppose it; and to be ready to do so, we must be prepared with appropriate means.  On the other hand, possession of appropriate means such as the kinds of firearms that are today readily available to virtually everyone makes it increasingly possible for such weapons to get into the hands of irresponsible and emotionally disturbed people.  An 18^thcentury musket—the mainstay firearm available when the 2^ndAmendment was written and ratified–is one thing, an AR-15 is another. One simply could not go on a mass killing spree with a muzzle-loaded smooth-bore musket.  Today, even a semiautomatic handgun with 9 mm. Parabellum cartridges can make a ten-year-old a killing machine.  Damned if we fail to regulate, but also damned if we do. Result: inaction.

The resistance to any form of regulation or restriction seems to be largely based on the absolutist position that sees any compromise of “the right to bear arms” as a dilution or debilitation of an absolute principle, as if a compromise would deny the “natural” right of self-defense.  On the face of it, this seems a reasonable position.  If others have access to guns to threaten me, I must have access to defend myself.  If access to guns is prohibited by law, than the law-abiding will lack the means to resist the law-breaking.  Therefore, “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” as the NRA puts it.

The flaw in this reasoning, I think, is that it regards regulation as a compromise of principle. “The right to bear arms” is a right, and thereforeit “shall not be infringed.”  Any right, as a right, is “unalienable,” which is to say, it can no more be eliminated than the law of gravity.  It can be “infringed,” however, or indefinitely suspended, by action of others in positions of power over me, such as a parent over a child, or a government over a society.  The 2^ndAmendment denies the right, if not the ability, of government to do that.  It does not, however, deny the right of government to regulatethe right to bear arms.  Indeed, government is obligated, through the establishment and execution of laws, to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  The disruption of our domestic tranquility from the increasing incidence of gun violence demandsthat we subject “the right to bear arms” to such regulation as will allow our children, and ourselves, to devote less of our psychic energy to a constant fear of being threatened by a bad guy with a gun.

If our elected representatives fail to enact legislation that effectively addresses the solutions to this growing problem, we have ourselves to blame.

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