First, what is mood affiliation? As far as I know, the term was coined by Tyler Cowen in a blog post on March 27, 2011, Meta-ethics, realism, and intuitionism. Here is how he defined it:
People who believe that ethics is objective and intuitive are often quite keen to make a lot of detailed pronouncements about the content of those ethics. The agnostics tend to be relativists or subjectivists. It seems to me that people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those views by the mood. I call this the “fallacy of mood affiliation,” and it is one of the most underreported fallacies in human reasoning. (In the context of economic growth debates, the underlying mood is often “optimism” or “pessimism” per se and then a bunch of ought-to-be-independent views fall out from the chosen mood.)
He elaborated on that definition four days later, The fallacy of mood affiliation (March 31), and has used the idea ever since.
Here’s an interesting example from a New York Times article on seven women who’d voted for Trump in 2016 and are reconsidering that choice:
Yet their disgust with the president was palpable. A well-spoken woman with grown children from central Pennsylvania appeared to have mentally rewritten the history of the last election to justify her vote. She’d opted for Trump, she said, thinking that it would be “refreshing” to have a president with a business background. In her recollection, it was only after he won that he revealed his true character.
“His Twitter, his comments, things that he was recorded saying, his misogyny — I was just, like, horrified and embarrassed,” she said. Looking back, she didn’t think she knew about the “Access Hollywood” tape before she voted: “I certainly hope that I didn’t, because it was a disgusting comment. I would think that had I known that might have given me pause.” She’s now considering voting for the Libertarian candidate, Jo Jorgensen.
I strongly suspect she’s remembering wrong — the “Access Hollywood” story would have been very hard to miss in October 2016. But it’s telling that she can no longer quite imagine how she could have supported Trump after hearing him boast about his penchant for sexual assault. It’s another tiny piece of evidence that 2020 could be the year Trump’s misogyny finally catches up with him.
Here’s a different example, representing a different region of the political spectrum, from the article that prompted this post). The article appeared in 3 Quarks Daily this past Monday (Oct. 12) and is by Eric J. Weiner. Here is the opening paragraph:
Today in the United States is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a time to bear witness and remember the savagery of Christopher Columbus and other European explorers when they first encountered indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. It’s also a day to recognize and celebrate the courage, knowledges, and cultures of indigenous peoples throughout the world. It coincides with Columbus Day, a national holiday that triggers a day of protests and celebratory parades, rekindles debates about removing statues of Christopher Columbus from parks, squares and circles throughout the United States, and provokes critical discussions about the kind of stories we should be teaching the Nation’s children about his earliest encounters with indigenous communities.
The rest is in a similar vein and is a critique of Trump’s efforts to bias the teaching of history in a narrow nationalist it way. Weiner argues that history is more complex than that.
And rightly so. Still, I wonder if:
A. He could write, “Columbus’s first voyage in search of India was an act of courage and imagination,” in any context, without:
B. Immediately following with qualification like, “and it lead to unspeakable cruelty toward the indigenous people.”
I think both propositions are true, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Weiner would admit that as well. That’s not the issue.
Nor am I quite sure about just how to state the issue. It does seem to me that we should be free to explore A – should we not teach children stories about what Columbus had to do to assemble an expedition and cross the Atlantic? – without immediately and always following it with B. And, for that matter, vice versa. My guess is that, when he wrote his article, Weiner was in a mood, to use Cowen’s word, that could not countenance A at all. At this point in his life is he ever in a mood that could countenance A? I don’t know. Could Donald Trump countenance B at all?
Juxtaposing these two in the way I have done is risky business. Donald Trump is a demagogue for whom mood affiliation is a working method, his only working method. Weiner is a professional scholar, he is at Montclair State University in New Jersey, and as such is committed to rational discourse. What counts as rational discourse is not at all easy to define. And when that discourse is about history, we’re in a domain where objectivity is problematic and ideological affiliation ever tempting. Trump wants the telling of history yoked to nationalist sentiment. Does Weiner want the telling of history freed of any sentiment at all, or does he merely wish to affiliate it with a different sentiment. If so, what?
It is easy enough to say that the telling of history should be freed of any sentiment whatever. That is more easily said than done. It is not simply a matter of a good will and a good heart. It is a matter of method, and that is tricky.
Meanwhile we have that voter who has apparently edited her Trump-centered memories of 2016 to fit her current assessment of him, and of herself. She is not, I assume, a professional scholar in any discipline, nor are most citizens. They are people trying to make their way in the world as best they can. What role does national sentiment play in their lives? How do they use it to make sense of the world? What is the difference between national sentiment and nationalist sentiment?
THAT is what interests me.
* * * * *
Early in my undergraduate career I read an essay that Talcott Parsons published in 1947, “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World” (reprinted in Essays in Sociological Theory), which has influenced me a great deal. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.
Parsons, as you may know, was heavily influenced by psychoanalytic theory, which has come down in the world since Parsons was writing. While I’m not as skeptical of psychoanalytic theory as many, I do think it needs reconstruction in contemporary intellectual terms and so with the old essay. What’s important in that essay is that Parsons links the events of a person’s personal affairs with national sentiment.
Of course, our society devotes a great deal of effort toward inculcating national sentiment in its citizens. School children in the United States regularly recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day in school. Various holidays celebrate the nation. Such practices seem both proper and necessary to me. A nation could not function without them.
I take it that Parsons was talking about something different. He assumes national sentiment – for what it’s worth, I’m just now making this up and so it must be regarded as provisional – and argues that it is being assimilated to the task of regulating one’s personal affect. Is that how nationalism functions, using national sentiment as a device for regulating affect arising in actions having nothing to do with the nation?
* * * * *
What of Columbus Day and Indigenous People’s Day? Columbus Day is one of those holidays celebrated on behalf of the nation. Do the Lakota celebrate Indigenous People’s Day on behalf of the Lakota, but not, say, the Seneca, and vice versa? Or is that question impertinent and wrong-headed? As far as I can tell, I don’t have a drop of Indian blood in me. Should I celebrate Indigenous People’s Day at all? I’m sure Weiner thinks I should. But why? What about Bastille Day, should I celebrate that? I’m not French, but perhaps I could celebrate it to thank the people of France for the Statue of Liberty.
Or is the celebration of Indigenous People’s Day an attempt to get outside the orbit of nationalism altogether? If so, then it needs to free itself from (apparent) opposition of Columbus Day.
More later.
* * * * *
Addendum [meta]: The second section, on Parsons, was not on my mind when I started writing this post. I wasn't thinking about Parsons at all, though that essay has been very influential in my thinking. That only came up in the course of writing the post. In retrospect, though, that section is what I got out of this post. In a sense, you might even say it's why I wrote it. The final paragraph asserts, in effect, that nationalist sentiment is established through one dynamic and, once established, can be put to more general use in affect regulation.
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