Leon Wieseltier certainly qualifies as a public intellectual. Currently the Isaiah Berlin senior fellow in culture and policy at the Brookings Institution, he previously spent more than 30 years as Literary Editor of The New Republic. Today’s Washington Post features his essay, How voters’ personal suffering overtook reason — and brought us Donald Trump, which has a subtitle noting that “Grievance narrows the imagination.”
He begins with a reflection on the first hour of the movie The Deerhunter, with its setting in the working class culture of whites ethnics (in this case Slavic) in Western Pennsylvania. It is the culture of that segment of America that is in crisis — loss of jobs, despair, etc. — about which much has been written, and that in many cases fuels the rise of Donald Trump — and to a lesser degree that of Bernie Sanders.
It is a wide-ranging essay, thought-provoking in many ways, invoking the words of Adam Smith, not from Wealth of Nations but rather from The Theory of Moral Sentiments (people tend to forget that Smiht’ academic position was not in economics, which really did not exist as a field at the time, but as a moral philosopher). That part of the essay is worth reading if for no other reason than it might give you a broader understanding of Smith’s thinking, including on economics. It certainly poses the issues of how we understand the sufferings of one different from ourselves.
I am going to quote only three paragraphs from this thought-provoking piece by Wieseltier. Two are long, but I am still, given the length of the piece, well within fair use.
The first comes before he turns to Adam Smith to provide a basis for his own writing:
The partiality of our consciences, our inability to care about all who have a proper claim upon our care, is not the result of a constraint upon our budgets, or more generally upon our institutions of politics and government. It is the result of a constraint upon our imaginations. Ethical principles are most commonly ascribed to the operations of reason, but we need to remind ourselves of the role of the imagination in moral action. Without the imagination, we would act only against wrongs that we ourselves have endured. We would be prisoners of our experience — which is to say, the experience of people less lucky than ourselves would be incomprehensible to us. To be sure, it would be presumptuous to believe that we fully understand the agonies of people who have suffered war and famine and pandemic and extreme poverty and slavery and genocide, when we, or most of us, have suffered nothing of the sort. But it would be callous, and a dereliction of our human duty, to believe that their agonies are completely beyond our comprehension, closed off to us, so that fellow-feeling is not possible and acts of assistance and rescue are not obligated.
To some degree, as he will argue later in the piece, it is art that often enables us to step into the world of someone completely different. Even though their experience may be totally outside that of our own, we are able to connect beyond our own experience. It is in that sense that he uses the first hour of “The Deerhunter” — as flawed a film as it is (the mountains in the hunting were not in Pennsylvania, but rather on the West Coast, and the interior of the Orthodox Church was in Cleveland — but those are somewhat irrelevant to the larger point both of the film and of the essay I am exploring).
The next paragraph I wish to share is this:
As I watched “The Deer Hunter,” I was struck by the scattershot nature of American compassion. There are many groups in our society that suffer hardship and discrimination, but we confer moral glamour on some of them and not on others. We are never concerned in equal measure about them all. We are inconstant in our decency, which is perhaps the most common form of indecency. The media has made our attention, and therefore our mercies, fickle; from our digital sources we know about all sorts of suffering, and we just live with the knowledge. But our passing sympathies, the soft betrayals of the intermittent heart, are not exactly random. When, for example, politicians and political consultants decided that their fate would be decided by the American middle class, the American poor more or less vanished from our political discourse. More recently, odious events have forced many Americans to acknowledge the selectivity of our solidarity — a year of lives suddenly mattering. The shatteringly long list of young black men killed by police, and the obscenity in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. , rattled even the most devout believer in the progress that has been made in American civil rights and complicated American pride with American shame. The sense of achievement in this struggle has been harshly qualified by the sense that this struggle will be unceasing. And then the eruption of populism in the primaries turned the spotlight on the “Deer Hunter” electorate: The campaign of Bernie Sanders, before his success transformed him into a sanctimonious messiah, established the moral urgency and the political salience of the issue of economic inequality, while the campaign of Donald Trump, always and forever an authoritarian boor, exploited the issue without knowing how to do anything about it. And so the white working class is trending.
I need to share the entire paragraph to provide proper context for the final two sentences, which I think is crucial on a number of levels. Let me repeat it:
The campaign of Bernie Sanders, before his success transformed him into a sanctimonious messiah, established the moral urgency and the political salience of the issue of economic inequality, while the campaign of Donald Trump, always and forever an authoritarian boor, exploited the issue without knowing how to do anything about it. And so the white working class is trending.
I realize some will not appreciate his description of the later stages of the campaign of Bernie Sanders, but he gives the Senator proper credit for elevating on several levels the issue of economic inequality. Describing Trump as “an authoritarian boor” and how he is operating is spot on, in my opinion.
Let me also offer the final paragraph, because I believe it may help us to understand why so often people do vote against their economic (and other) best interests as we perceive them:
What does economic wretchedness have to do with the appetite for authoritarianism? There is nothing very mysterious here. Liberals and socialists have been wondering for a hundred years why people in economic distress do not vote according to their economic interests. The answer should have been obvious long ago: People in adversity turn not to economics but to culture. They are fortified not by policy but by identity. They seek saviors, not programs. And as the direness of their circumstances appears to imperil their identity, they affirm it by asserting it ferociously against others. Hurt people hurt people. Against these hurt people, therefore, and against the profiteer of pain who shabbily champions them, it must be insisted that no amount of sympathy for their plight justifies the introduction of a version of fascism into American life. No grievance, however true, warrants the fouling of American politics by the bigotry and the brutishness peddled by Donald Trump. Either he wins or America does.
Hurt people hurt people. We need to remember that. We can remember the famous words spoken by Obama at an event in San Francisco about what people cling to. It is what they turn to, their “culture” because it is what is left to them, a sense of identity when so much else seems to have been taken away.
Whether or not we defeat Trump — and if we do not, this country will not survive as a democracy — we need to understand how much change has unsettled people.
Economics and international issues and technology is rapidly changing our lives, even as immigration for a variety of reasons is simultaneously changing the nature of our country. I would argue that the latter enriches us, but the ever increasing economic inequality that has occurred at the same time leads many who are hurt to direct their anger at those changes, rather than the real cause of their hurt.
Because politicians of both parties are seen — fairly or unfairly — as responsible for what has happened, there is a real willingness to blow up the system because for many their hurt is so great they cannot fully grasp that the result of the destruction might be even worse.
The essay I am examining was long. It may take you a while to read through it. It will probably take quite a while to reflect upon it.
I hope you will take the time to do so.
I also realize that that kind of essay, and this kind of post, are not likely to appeal to large number of the readers here. So be it. Having read the piece in the Post, I felt a responsibility to try to encourage others to read it.
So you can do what you want with this.
Peace.