The New York Times, in a front page article a week or so ago, could not understand what was so upsetting to large parts of the population of Enid, Oklahoma, and neither could I. It seemed to be about mask mandates, but how could the local populace be so energized about what was a practical and usual public health measure of the sort that had been in place for hundreds of years so as to avoid pestilence? There had to be something more about the matter and the anti-maskers said it had to do with liberty, which is a very big deal concept not to be invoked so cavalierly. So the Times and others tried out alternative explanations which I, for one, found wanting. The article noticed that local residents were concerned about uncertain sexual identifications, but those people have been going on for thousands of years. The article also mentioned that there are more diverse populations in the area, but how does that demographic change impact on a particular person rather than serve as a background for the entire group, and how masking and sex orientation and government distrust are all tied together even though the issues are so different from one another? Masks are a pretext for outrage, but about what? The experts cited said that it had to do with emotions about conflict, but that does not tie it down very much. I will give it a try.
Philosophers are very good at explaining how people communicate with others. They take two major approaches to do so. One, from Plato, is the idea of engaging in dialogue, which means allowing one’s own thoughts to be modified by opening u to appreciating what the other person is thinking and so coming to realize that at least part of what was in the other person made sense in that you recognize that you already agree with what that person is saying, or at least think you knew it when you heard others say it. Even Kant, 2300 years later, was engaged in the same strategy. Kant insisted on what he called critical thinking, which meant that he observed what was inevitable as implied by the way others thought about things. So people everywhere had a sense of free will because they could not avoid the word “should '' in their discourse. A second approach to how people can inevitably communicate with one another is to provide a systematic and logically articulated set of assertions and what other people do i duplicate or repeat in their own heads the same procedures and arguments read from elsewhere, and I think of Aristotle as having crafted that system for duplication, this the mechanism by which scientists and systemic philosophers follow, while literary people offer their own personal observations and hope that others will find a way to follow into the gist of what is being communicated.
Social scientists, on the other hand, are very good at explaining why people fail to communicate. The basic idea is that their demographics separate them. People in different circumstances will understand their own distinct way of life and the beliefs that make sense for them and are part of their culture and so0 will resist the ideas of other groups and situations. Ghetto Blacks will think white people are out to get them even though that was not the prevailing view before the Forties. Catholic wives are opposed to abortion because of general practice and also because of the teachings of the Church. Southerners distrust coastal peoples and think that the federal government is the enemy of “small government”. Moreover, ideology is just the systematic presentation of such ideas and individual people more or less make use of one or another variant, so a working class family where the husband is in a Union thinks employers are out to get them whether or not they think that the government should take control of the means of production. This idea that people are reasonable about their interests and so can communicate with one another about the negotiations between labor and capital is undercut by psychologists and economists who insist that people make mistakes all the time about what are their interests. Khanneman says we misjudge inferences and engage in faulty logic and other economists are preoccupied with subjective matters such as consumer confidence, that not reducible to the actual economic situation but fads and beliefs.People vote for candidates who are charismatic or just have charmor a neat coif, as was the case with Bill De Blasio’s son’s neat Afro.
I want to try a third alternative, neither the view that communication is rational nor irrational, neither communicating nor obdurant nor finicky. That is to go back to the Eighteenth Century ideas of David Hume and Adam Smith ( in his “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”) that sentiment informs communication. Some emotions like sympathy and reasonableness lead to communication, while suspicion and hatred lead to uncommunicativeness.The facts and the principles don’t count, just as is the case with the people in Enid. What matters is the sentiment, and the overall sentiment of those naysayers in Enid is that they are suspicious of government and all its manifestations, though excepting those benefits that they receive from government, like flood relief or price supports or government funded roads. A coastal resident might think that hypocritical but the apparent contradiction is easily resolved by saying that only controversial issues, like mandates, are considered bad because they are foisted on by the government.
It is much more difficult to trace out the sources of sentiments, to mark out when there was a major source of the displacement of one sentiment to another, though the change in sentiment about the Negro people was ocassioned, i would think, by Martin Luther King Jr’s emphasis on calm and civility rather than anger and racial hatred. Sometimes a person can make a difference in history. I suspect that the same is true with regard to the suspicion that has overcome some sectors of the population about the government. I trace it to Richard Nixon who was, despite his denial, really a crook in that he tried to bribe people to keep quiet about their shenanigans. Nixon had always been bitter, and why that is so is not at all certain. His bitterness had consequences in that his own erstwhile supporters, the silent majority, took up his bitterness partly because he was discredited and partly because they thought he should not have been unmasked as a crook. Ever since, Presidents are taken to be of questionable character, even if, like Obama, they have no hint of scandal. There must be something that is discreditable about people in high power, while people assumed before Watergate, that Presidents like Ike or FDR were on the up and up, while still thinking that Harry Truman was into underhanded practices or at least had associated with them when he was in Missouri.
The same post-Watergate perspective held with Trump, who everybody knew was not to be trusted, who extended his own suspicious nature to everyone about him, his supporters thinking that you needed one of that type to help do something about the web of suspicion that surrounded politics, even though Trump never accomplished much, only a wall that was not built and one not paid for by Mexico even if it happened. The venom was enough to keep his supporters engaged and enraged. So when January 6th came around, they were less concerned about the facts of whether the election was stolen from then than for the sentiment that it might well have been stolen from them because that is what they believe happens in elections and that Trump himself might have stolen the election if he had had the chance to do so. There are no facts to refer to, even though it is curious to think that some Trump supporters would have concocted a white paper that outlined their case, never mind that there were over sixty court cases whereby any electoral irregularity of any significance was uncovered. The sense of irregularity is enough.
Moreover, there are no principles that have to be evoked, as would be thought to be the case in constitutional matters. It never occurred to the January 6ers to consider due process of law, that the procedures of constitutional succession should be honored because that is the way things ought to happen. Rather, and the afterwards that occurred when legislators acted as if this was a romp or an expression of anger rather than an insurrection, there was no need to consider the enormity of this affront to the Constitution, something unprecedented. Trump was not well enough versed in law and history to think that overturning a government was no big deal, just useful to his ends, and legislators learned soon enough that those who supported the effort did not much care either and so put aside their qualms even though Mitch McConnell and Kevin MacCarthy had right after the event were willing to defame the insurrectionists but drew back when, I take it, their constituents and supporters objected to the constitutionalism of the two leaders. This similar slight of hand whereby people do not bother or is never concerned about outstanding and time honored principles occurred quite rcently during the Feminist Me Too agenda, where women should be believed when they claim that they have been abused and never think to invoke the need for due process to see if it actually happened and the result was that Al Franken was defrocked as a Senator and Mario Cuomo as a governor even though no criminal charges have been brought against either. So no punishment for the higher up insurrectionists, including Trump as a major inciter, even if convictions have occurred with some of the people who actually took part in the insurrection.
The 6ers are rather cavalier about their transgressions, whether to find a way to get off or to say they had just been hot heads and so not to be taken seriously. That was very different than the posture of the Chicago Five who, when protesting the Democratic Convention in 1968, engaged in high seriousness, careful to claim not to be treasonous but engaged in the best traditions of American liberty and free speech, even if Jerry Rubin played the clown so as to emphasize that the war was bad and he was making fun of it and it's supposed principles. Now, there is seriousness on the other side, those defending the government, while the insurrectionists are beyond criticism because they meant well or were briefly deranged, or at least so appears to be the case until whether the Jan. 6th House committee is able to find out just how designing were the participants and the instigators. Meanwhile, people willing to throw the book at Black Lives Matter activists in the previous summer say only tsk tsk about the insurrectionists. Why are law and order people so willing to dismiss an unprecedented act of political rebellion even when they did claim they wanted to hang the Vice president? This is a strange time when you cannot get a coherent attempt by the revolutionists. Not so in revolutions past. Revolution is lowering its standards from when those who signed the Declaration of Independence said exactly what they were up to.