We have arrived at the expected development that not following protocols would inevitably mean Trump would develop the Corona virus. It makes the two communication styles I discussed on 9/30 even more relevant. Of course, we’re not talking about rhetoric finally, but about the underlying worldviews. There’s not much surprise that such a duality has been heightened by the confusion of our circumstances.
I framed the difference as between “hot” and “cold” in order to escape political or religious definitions, like “liberal” versus “right wing”, one based on affinities and experience and the other based on facts and reason. In reality those two approaches are intertwined and cross-references despite our best efforts to keep them apart. Either one of them can be distorted, possibly unconciously.
So Trump’s diagnosis is seen from one side as just what we expected and a gift that might shut down a monster. The other side, the “liberal, educated, civilized” side, cautions us that propriety requires us to be compassionate rather than mocking. This divides us between what is labeled a base, vulgar, but authentic feeling, and a much nicer but phony wish for Trump’s recovery.
Not only does this set up a split in our reactions, it also becomes a kind of class cleavage, but ironically it is the beer-bingeing proud boys who would naturally have a gut-level contempt for a victim that is now forced into concern for their presumed defender. They don’t think in percentages of consequences, so they are even more separated from the reality that most of us know. If Trump is seen in ICU with nurses desperately working to keep him alive, this will be fatal to their idea that they can “nuke the whirlwind.”
The rational people who did studies tried to tell them that running through the streets, shouting and waving tiki firebrands, would not defeat a virus — may simply carry it around town and shower everyone with contagion. Maybe one enraged person can take a sniper approach to shoot people he hates, but he will still not kill 2 million people, which the virus already has. Burning people at the stake did not change history; the various pandemics did.
Consider these snippets I got from Google. They are curiously circular and do not reference reality.
“Rational thinking is the ability to consider the relevant variables of a situation and to access, organize, and analyze relevant information (e.g., facts, opinions, judgments, and data) to arrive at a sound conclusion.”
“Rationality is the quality or state of being rational – that is, being based on or agreeable to reason. Rationality implies the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons to believe, and of one's actions with one's reasons for action.” Wikipedia
“Rationality is a quality of an individual to think or make decisions sensibly or logically i.e. with a valid reason. Reason is the justification for an action or event. ... A person who is rational is always reasonable but a person who is reasonable is not always rational.”
The wiggle room in these definitions is a bit startling. We tend to think that “rational” and “logical” means actual and real, but they are only part of our struggle to improve our understanding of what is outside us and anchored in the absolute. Lately some have suggested that there IS no absolute, but only our individual approaches and beliefs. We’ve come a long way from the logical belief that women have one more rib than men do, because God took a rib out of Adam to use in making Eve. Who was that Greek thinker who somehow came to the idea that women had a different number of teeth than men? Was he afraid to look for fear of being bitten?
Those who depend on direct observation do better, but even so there is plenty of room for interpretation. One can “rationalize” some very unreasonable things, just as the Proud Boys believe that their unmarrigeability and unemployability is due to someone else making victims of them. The motives for such conclusions are emotional, maybe subconscious, and often lead to even more emotions as motives.
Consider the characters in “Star Wars.” It is the joking, rueful, over-risking characters who fall in love that attract us — it’s the cold Palpatine who stands for evil. Even the robots have more emotional warmth than the uniform white soldiers. Evil scientists were a cliché even before German death camps.
Biden leavens his reason and propriety with affection and compassion, but even that amount of emotion feels a bit risky to us. Do you think he’s a good chess player? Doesn't it seem a bit, um, weak?
We have a force in our culture that abhors rules, finds them unreasonable restrictions, and deliberately evades them. Some of this is just self-interest, like faking taxes, and some of it is loyalty to a conflicting group that differs from those people who make all the rules. This can put minorities in a very hard place, esp. if open defiance can mean punishment to enforce the logic of the larger stronger culture.
Thus, people of color or immigrants can be forced into prison, not for the big crimes like murder or arson, but for small technical thefts and disobediences. The ultimate defiance is being poor. This is not met with logic, which would mean safety nets and supports, but with emotion, disdain and contempt. This last attitude gets votes.
There is another related split between logic and emotion that applies particularly to the judiciary. Thus the attachment of logic and precedent to writing on paper, both the accounts of past cases to preserve the reasoning in them, and in the many regulatory applications, records, and qualifications of those participating.
Even so, it is sometimes the emotional speeches of skilled lawyers that sways juries. In fact, our system allows juries to simply refuse to convict. And Judge Emmet Sullivan is reminding us that lawyers cannot control judges, even if they are District Attorneys. It is dismaying that corrupt people can use niggling details to defeat both emotion and reason in order to favor some corrupt goal. The written rule of law struggles in the face of an army of loophole-finders working on computers.
A virus, we are discovering, is both emotional in its consequences and logical in its progress, but it turns out to be so complex to understand that this is a GOOD use of computers. It acts in spite of attempts to control or even foil it. The Rule of Law is always subject to the Law of Nature.
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