It is the angels’ return, heroes’ resurrection, the heart’s uprising against the reason’s dictatorship.—Aleksandr Dugin, advisor to Vladimir Putin
(Note: this essay was written in June 18, 2018, in the second year of the Trump presidency and at the height of the #MeToo movement. Some of the references are dated, but four years later, things remain mostly the same)
Have you noticed the change? Are your friends acting strangely? Like the pod people in INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, human beings are abandoning thought, discernment, and civil tolerance. They haven’t become soulless zombies, but they’ll open their mouths, point their fingers, and screech if they recognize an apostate in their crowd. And the crowd, more often than not, will follow suit. “Gut reaction” is the order of the day, and nowhere more than in that great gladiatorial arena known as ‘social media,’ a truly Orwellian name for something designed by borderline sociopaths. We are fleeing the frontal lobe for the temporal lobe and the ancient limbic system, the seat of our emotions, the processing center for fear and panic as well as love and hate. Hurt feelings, raw as a new bruise, are endemic.
Everywhere you look, someone is feeling hurt, feeling assaulted, and feeling angry about it.
Trauma, triggered by assaults on social identity that are conceded to be “micro” (as in, “Is your hair naturally curly or what?”) is sending us to safe rooms, barrooms, and rubber rooms. But we don’t go quietly. Our response to these perceived offenses is getting increasingly aggressive. Whether we are wielding a taser or a smartphone, it’s ‘shoot first, ask questions later.’ Being enraged is all the rage. Solace is found only in the sanctuary of our ideological bubbles. With our kind. Our tribe. What we prefer to call “like minds.”
Feelings. We live for the good ones and dread the bad ones. They are like sudden storms over Scotland: rash, powerful, and completely unpredictable. Release of feelings is generally thought to be a good thing; letting out better than keeping in. “Better to vent than get an ulcer,” some people will say. Part of this is a hangover of the psychoananlytic dogma of the 70’s and 80’s, when we were all urged not to suffer in silence and counseled in yoga classes to ‘abandon that which does not serve us.’ Another contributor to our vomitousness is movies and TV, the continual hammering of our head space with all the variations of a Joe Pesci character’s one-word vocabulary. Watch a single episode of HBO’s ‘Succession.’ Yes, even the very rich talk like wiseguys now. They are no longer so very different from you and me.
A third factor, and fittingly, one that probably can’t be spoken of without triggering the pod person screech, is the broad feminization of western society. Hold your fire ’til I’ve made my case for why this may be so. Both first and second wave feminism carried an implicit promise: that the world would be a kinder, gentler, saner place if feminine values were allowed a place at the table in bedroom, boardroom, and war room. Men, prizing the rational, the strategic, and most of all the efficacious, could send teenagers to their death in war based on constructs like “the domino theory” and “containment.” Surely women, the carriers of life, reservoirs of sympathy, listeners par excellence, would be less rash, more likely to see the folly of war, and make us all better keepers of the peace. Just as surely, women’s more highly developed skills in communication and cooperation would make for more smoothly running companies and a more responsive politics.
Against this were all sorts of new iterations of the old canard that women are too emotional to be in leadership positions. Whatever its dubious origins, it’s a durable myth, maybe partly because certain women keep affirming it. But men have now caught up, and are proving themselves capable of just as much “hysteria.” Just take a look at the faces of the dudes who marched in Charlottsville.
The good news is that many of the promises of feminism have been kept. Husbands, for one thing, are more caring than they used to be. Companies have HR departments (staffed mostly by highly educated women) that guard against the egregious abuses of old. Nations still go to war, but the human losses sustained in, say, Vietnam, will never again be tolerated. Queer people of all stripes have come out, and if still at risk from bullies and bigots, increasingly have the law and public opinion in their side. Women are ascendant in medicine, and for the better of all. For young boys and men, the open expression of emotion without fear of ridicule has allowed for richer lives and relationships.
The not so good news is this: valuing the sensing-feeling side of our natures over the intuitive or analytical, and then giving it freedom to lord over the vast playground of the internet and 24 hour cable news has led to snap judgements that often cross the line into snap damnation. We are reacting to things before we even fully understand what we’re reacting to. The primacy of feelings has permitted an avalanche of outrage and condemnation, in both present and past tense, that sometimes makes going online feel like stepping into a court of the Inquisition. Two recent upswellings of feeling exemplify how this has played out in the bleachers of both political right and left.
First, let’s meet our contestants. On the right (which includes the alt-right, the religious right, and the Trump right, but not the center right) are a collection of disgruntled folks whose resentments range from loss of work and economic security to loss of racial and cultural preeminence to loss of manhood. Their territory ranges from the gun show and the Masonic Lodge to the First Church of Christ and all the way to the hidden corners of Reddit, 8chan, and the Dark Web. The most extreme of them may be the white supremacists who cry “White genocide!” and the incels who bleat that they’ve been “vaginally defeated,” but the most ubiquitous are the web-spawned provocateurs who stalk and troll the virtuous left. Regardless of their place on the spectrum, they are all what the teenagers call “butt hurt.” Their hurt and anger derives from their conviction that nobody cares about them, wants or desires them, or respects their native-born dominion.
On the left is a motley aggregation of the aggrieved that on good days looks like the parties in Matrix: Revolutions or Sense8 and on bad days like the dateless kids in the corner of the gym on Prom night. From this coalition of the injured come the howls of “Racist! Fascist! Nazi!” when some old liberal suggests that life may be too short for so much grievance. Within this group are the impassioned partisans derided as “SJW’s” by the trolls on the right, as well as all those who ever had an epiphany in Gender Studies class and now consider themselves “woke” to the ugly reality of intersectional bigotry and marginalization. All these, too, are butt hurt. Their feelings are hurt for lots of reasons, but primary among them is outrage that not everbody feels as outraged as they do. And like their opposites on the right, they suffer a profound sense that they, and the marginalized people they claim to speak for, have been treated unfairly, and feel bad about it.
While the #MeToo Movement may have been kicked off and driven by Hollywood liberals, it is—at the level of feelings—deeply conservative. It is anomalous among social movements in recent history, because its raison d’etre isn’t the establishment of new rights or the restoration of rights taken, but the cessation of unwanted sexual attention: a movement with a ‘negative’ goal, i.e., not to be harassed. Its objective is not liberation, but protection; not empowerment, but safety. The deeds on which the movement’s leaders called “time’s up” are not, for the most part, criminal acts, but violations of personal space. Often these violations were not “acts” at all, but intentions or desires suggested by words or gestures. Not rape, but “rapey.” Things that makes the person on the receiving end feel acutely uncomfortable, but only rarely in serious physical danger. #MeToo doesn’t mean “me, too, I was raped” or even, “me, too, I was coerced into sex acts,” but, “me, too, I was mashed on by a creep I had absolutely no sexual interest in.” I, too, am a victim, and now, a survivor.
And, setting aside the handful of prosecutable actions uncovered (most of them committed by one man), it was all about feelings. Women who had, since puberty, been the object of ogling, innuendo, cornering, grabbing and groping finally put their fingers down their throats and retched, “Enough!” The philosophical, not to say the legal basis of #MeToo is a little shaky, and many of its proponents would be hard put to articulate any sort of doctrine, but feelings ran very high. So high that even to suggest that Al Franken and Garrison Keillor might have been a bridge too far would earn you an instant badge of shame. But this is the problem with movements rooted in the limbic brain. They cannot brook dissent, and dissent is the ground of democracy and the reasoned discourse it demands. Notwithstanding the Democrats’ insistence that they had to expel Franken in order to prove their bona fides, make no mistake: Al Franken was the victim of feelings. This is exactly the situation on the right, especially among Trump diehards. “We know we’re right because our feelings tell us so.”
Even if it means separating children from their mothers.
The rumble on the Mexican border is the latest emotionally-driven face-off. On the right are all the defensive-stance feelings: fear, suspicion, pride, protectiveness, and tribal hatred. These also brook no dissent. On the left, it’s not enough to say that the Trump administration, with its usual staggering ineptitude and absence of forethought, executed its “zero tolerance policy” with zero consideration of the follow-through, much less the human cost of its brutal clumsiness, and even less to the blowback in terms of “optics.” No, to stand with your tribe, to shield yourself from the pointed finger, the gaping mouth, and that awful screech, you must declare that the entire lot of them, down to the last ICE agent and immigration clerk, are irredeemably evil. (Remember this moment: it may be the last time you hear the largely agnostic, once humanistic left insist that there is such a thing as ‘evil.’) And what is it that informs us of this monstrous evil: the sound of a child crying for its mother. That’s about as primal a level of feeling as you can find. The compassion is admirable—compassion is the noblest of feelings—but unfortunately, it does nothing for the children still suffering in the Central American triangle, much less those in East Kentucky.
And now, in the latest skirmish of our nascent civil war, we are dispatching platoons of our well-intentioned but tragically glandular pod people to restaurants, schools, and soccer games to stalk and shame all who aid and abet the misguided agenda of the current ruler. That ought to work out well. They go low, we go lower. Instead, give a moment’s thought to the advice of David Frum, a once stalwart Republican who has had his nauseous fill of Trump. “You don’t want to be like Trump? Good. Do something he never does: Think.”
you are a great writer. two quick notes, cause you wandered into my territory --
- there are almost NO "first church of christs" as the "church of christ" as a fellowship is anabaptist and would never be caught dead being publicly prideful. (privately-- OF COURSE) -- their congregations are almost always named after geography. "Main Street Church of Christ" "Mayberry Church of Christ" etc.
- nobody says East Kentucky -- the phrase is always "Eastern Kentucky." But yes-- one of the last places of abject poverty in the US (well, abject white poverty).
sources - went to college in kentucky and am currently a member of Otter Creek (a church of christ).