My deceased wife had an aphorism that seems to ring true and to which I regularly return. It says: “If you can’t explain what you mean, then you can’t know what you mean”. She arrived at this aphorism by trial and error by noticing people who got confused when they were asked to explain themselves. This insight had been formalized by Bertrand Russell's Theory of Definite Description which propounded the idea that a wrong statement was not just incorrect but made no sense. If a statement were properly propounded, it had to make sense. Jane applied this criterion to any number of people who got very annoyed at having failed to make themselves as clear as Jane required people to be. It was a standard that also applied in the mid Twentieth Century to what was then considered an age of ideology. I would have arguments with Marxists and Stalinists where each of us would try to pick out the crucial flaw in their logic, reducing one another to basic and irreducible axioms. I would argue that Weber’s idea of status and organization were independent of social class as the ways to create power and that was all that had to be said, and a Stalinist and I also came to agree to essentials, he thinking that something called the Communist Party would govern over the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its wisdom would lead us to the future, in whatever way the Party chose and saw fit, while I thought the evolution of society was subject to the constraints of social structure. I thought him quasi religious in he giving himself over to an absolute authority, or to put it otherwise, to an almighty, but he was clear and consistent. He knew what he meant even if his basic and stated principles did seem to me muddled because any leader could call himself a Communist and lord over everyone if there were no independent standards. That point of view is very different from the present one where people can, in effect, invoke the idea actors or feigning roles that “you know what I mean” as a way of providing a sufficient explanation for their meaning, having a sense of it that it would be rude to suggest needed further explanation, and people e back in those days also though rude if Jane would persist and insist on people explaining themselves i f they were not to be thought of as engaging in gibberish. No longer insisting on narrowing down to basic principles but only a general sense of things to be respected.
A lot of people are happy that there was an end to the age of ideology, with people focussing on the fine points of doctrine rather than the general emotional tenor of what direction the nation should pursue. But what has replaced it, for some twenty or thirty years now, is what we could call a period of feelings, whereby people respect or disrespect one another for their general sense of things, summed up in their sentiments more than their thoughts. It seems to me some people are motivated by meanspiritedness in that they want to deprive people of their rights, whether blacks or women, in the name of an integrity and uniformity of a nation or a region, while other people are more open to letting other people live their different lives and want government to provide extended entitlements, as Joe Biden does, so as to have the resources so that they can prosper in whatever ways they wish to. Respecting other people doesn’t mean viewing their principles as credible, as was the case in that prior intellectual regime, but regarding themselves as deeply feeling their beliefs, whatever made that possible. Kelly Conway got it wrong in speaking to alternative facts, which meant only that there were other facts to be assembled so as to support one argument rather than another. Rather, there are alternative feelings, whether to trust or distrust the government, or to expand or restrict toleration, and sincerity is the measure of an acceptable point of view, and people are unwilling to regard either liberals or conservatives as being truly sincere rather than hypocritical, as when abortionists think that antiabortionists can’t really believe in the sanctity of life but regard them as only out to diminish the power of women das a social entity.
It is interesting how people cast a change in social sensibilities. At one time, it was liberal entitlement overcoming the conservative doctrines of laissez faire capitalism, or it was Cold War angst giving up, when the Berlin wall fell, to the United States left as the single superpower, or the age of the wasteland of television supplanted by the world of streaming and social networks and the baleful and beneficial results of that change. This time, however, the descent from debate to sensibility, seems to be a quasi apocryphal event that mental acuity has become diminished, just as the Cultural Marxists thought when the mass media were making the popular mind into mush what with comic books and tv ads and now with comic book movies and tweet length rather than extended essays as the vehicles of opinion. Less argument and just resting on your sense of things without having to explain them.
Which brings me back to Jane’s aphorism as a standard whereby to judge those feelings, to contest one or another one of these declarations of sentiment. I am reminded of an interview by Chuck Todd of the Governor of Mississippi a few weeks ago on ”Meet The Press” about the trigger law in Mississippi that would follow if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Todd said that Mississippi didn’t do well at supporting babies once they were alive, the antiabortionists a bit hypocritical about life in general. The Governor, Tate Reeves, said that he was aware of the shortcomings of social welfare legislation in the past and wanted to provide a lot of money for foster care placements so that babies who were born had a better chance, but that the main point he made was about abortion itself beidng bad because a person began at the time of conception and that was the main principle. Todd had no answer nor should he because it is inappropriate to argue basic principles. That is outside decent discourse, a belief so deep seated as to be respected rather than challenged.
Which brings me back to Jane’s aphorism as a standard whereby to judge those feelings, to contest one or another one of these declarations of sentiments. Jane would have thought otherwise. The Governor of Mississippi could not have explained his point of view and so was just a cliche not to be respected as a belief. She would have asked why conception made these few cells into a being rather than, let us say, the implantation of the set of cells into the wall of the uterus, or when the fetus quickened, which was the medieval point of view or the time when the head emerged from the womb, which for so long had been the medical standard. The governor just seemed like a lightweight, not to ponder such matters and thereby dismissed rather than respected for believing whatever he said he believed. He can’t explain it, and so it is gibberish.
Let us invoke another aphorism that can be used to make judgments during an age of emotions rather than an age of ideology that now seems past. It seems more existential than a judgmental standard, but bear with me because it does go political. Let’s call that “Marty’s Aphorism” and it states that “People are what they seem and say what they mean.” The aphorism means that people are surrounded by their appearances which distract them from being what they are. Their appearances are truly what they are, as when an employee or a slave appears compliant so as to gain marginal advantage. Those people really are compliant, or to put it otherwise, they are their roles whatever else they may be, such as people aware of the fact that they are manipulating their superiors. Goffman is wrong to think that the compilation of maneuvers we use to present a credible appearance of ourselves fools us into being something else. Rather, we are the people who have been assembled. Id I seem a competent teacher, then I am one. This is a harsh judgment because people are not acting except when they are acting as actors or otherwise feigning roles. They are not acting when they emulate teachers they remember. Those are role models rather than pretene.So you are what you seem and have responsibility or weight for what you do rather than say an episode of life is a charade, as when you sow your wild oats but that is not really you. It is real for as long as it lasts. JFK never stopped being a philanderer. Similarly, the remarks you make cannot be dismissed as slippages or mistaken utterances or inarticulate formulations because the remarks you make are expressions of what you meant at that moment even if it was cruel or not a full account of your sentiments. You hurt the feelings you love, by saying he or she was callous or occasionally mean or self centered because these remarks hurt because they hit at a truth even if not a complete one. People will remember these wounds because they got something real. And people who sound off about politics, saying all of them are crooks, or that the deep state runs the nation, are what they seem: assertions that guide voting behavior and establish the person as of a certain point of view even if they say they had been exaggerating or not quite what they wanted to say.
Marty’s aphorism is harsh in that it demands an exacting and very judgmental standard. People can’t get off the hook by saying that these were only appearances or that talk was idle. The appearances and the events are treated as real, people as they are and say the events that transpire in reality, full of their implications and people existing as such rather than ways to avoid their import. People are warts and all, not editing their stories so that we rid ourselves of what we later say we didn’t mean or how we appeared to be.Nothing is rehearsed or reshot. No wonder we prefer fiction to reality, all of us redirecting the film of our life so it is better or at least a little bit better than the harsh, existential world, in which time cannot be recalibrated or spliced, only moving forward, inevitably. None of us look very good in that light, whether or not there is an original sin which makes each of us despair of our failings, trying to repent and make us whole. Rather, we are stuck with whatever happened.
Now apply this doctrine of appearances and speech to political life. Appearances make a difference in politics. George Washington and Abe Lincoln were tall. Tall people do better in politics than short people do. That might seem irrelevant to whether a person is capable of being President, but it does matter to voters and fellow politicians. The same is true of other features. Hillary Clinton was right to think that peop[le voted against her because she was fema;e, or that women liked Bill because he was sexy. And this also applies to matters of character because politicians are able to see candidates so frequently that they get a sense of their characters and judge accordingly, regardless of the policy issues at hand. Obama was clean cut and soft spoken even though he was of mixed race; he would not be a radical agitator, while Stacey Abrams is overweight and has a space between some front teeth and so is to be distrusted as part of the black masses despite being so intelligent, well informed and articulate.
Now apply these appearances to Donald Trump. By all appearances, Trump is mean spirited, given to braggadocio, ignorant, and racist. Many of his supporters think he is also recognized as such, but excuse these characteristics as mere appearances, the real issue that he would nominate supreme court justices who would overrule roe v. Wade, which is the only important issue. So the ends justify the means, and that goal might be accomplished. But let the conservative voter think again. Ask what it means to hold your nose to vote for Trump. A person doesn’t care about electing someone indecent as President. That person is so cynical that he will vote for someone he disdains. He appears to be a person of good will or a sincere churchgoer. Yet his cynical behavior is real and so is the basis for questioning his other identities. He is just a cynical person who will be irresponsible at all other issues. Is that the way a person is to judge himself, not as someone who plays the game of politics but when push comes to shove is basically Machaevelian. Is that the way a Christian Evangelical wants to be, deep down? That is clearly the way they have cast themselves and that seems to me to be a wholesale abandonment of what they claimed to be their principles. There were other ways to fight abortion. They could have gotten jailed in protests or rallied petitions but not sided with the devil. There is hell to pay, i would think, about the state of their psyches (or souls) for having sided in this way. Take people seriously; take them at their word and action for what they did.
When Gerald Ford was a leading Republican Congressman, he tried to get William Douglas kicked off the Supreme Court because he had published an article in “Playboy” and he should not be associated with a magazine that showed pictures of nude women. Ford was not a prude, according to his biography, but he had become one because of his action. Prudes are people who engage in prudery whatever their private feelings. Similarly, people who support a racist and otherwise immoral figure such as Trump have become people who think life is a dog eat dog world between ethnic groups and gender groups and class groups regardless of whether they also think that as Christian evangelists they bear witness to their moral probity. Well. not this time out. They are what they do and are taken to mean what they say. Actuality is more real than protestations to the contrary.