Will America Drown in Anger?

There is a great deal of anger in America today, and it is a multidimensional anger…a neo-Hobbesian war of group against group, with the boundaries of the groups and the axes of their hostilities shifting constantly.  I am reminded for the lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s song There is a War.

And while much of the anger is politically-motivated, not all of it is. There are political assassination attempts…and approval for such attempts…but there are also incidents of very bad behavior on airliners and other public conveyances, and snarly interactions between customers and representatives of businesses…with the snarling sometimes on both sides.

Of course, there has always been a lot of anger–probably characteristic of all societies, certainly the case in American society. In the 1850s, a Senator was brutally caned by another Senator on the senate floor.  Lynch mobs existed. There were insane attacks against German-Americans and all things German during WWI, in a toxic climate that had been established by Woodrow Wilson. And some of the same against Japanese Americans during WWII. But what is unique about present-day anger is both its multidimensional nature and its pervasiveness.

What are the reasons for all this anger?…what will be the consequences if it is not damped down?…and can it be damped down?

The first thing that will surely come to almost everybody’s mind as a reason is social media…and, particularly, the algorithms that encourage negative rather than positive interaction.  There is some truth in this, but it’s too easy to treat it as the exclusive cause.  Cable media is at least as bad, though cable news viewership seems fortunately to be on the decline.

Some of it is career and economic disappointment. There are strong feelings on the part of many college graduates that they did what they were supposed to do, and ‘society’ did not hold up its part of the bargain by providing them with the kinds of careers and incomes that they expected. And non-college graduates often feel disrespected as well an unfairly limited in their careers.

A friend once remarked that “if someone is bitter, then he is publicly announcing that in his own eyes he is a failure.”  I thought this was a profound comment, and by that measure, there are a lot of people in America today who consider themselves to be failures–too often not leading them to seriously consider how they can do better, but rather toward envy and resentment toward others.

There is an expectation of perfection which leads to a continual sense of disappointment. For example: after the recent NYC helicopter crash, comments were flooded with accusations against the helicopter designers–‘how could anyone possibly design something that can fail like this?’ But things aren’t ever going to be perfect, and thus, there will always be something to be angry about.  I’ve read that there are tribal societies that believe that nothing bad ever happens except through witchcraft…if someone gets sick or dies, well, bad things don’t just happen, he must have been witched. There is an unwholesome amount of this kind of thinking in America today.

The above is related to the myth of a golden age. I’ve seen many people asserting that there was some golden age in which Americans were naturally healthy, before we were poisoned by Big Food and Big Pharma. No historical memory of the infectious diseases that killed so many children before the age of 5, or the fact that women faced serious risk of dying in childbirth, or of a thousand not-so-healthy things. Of course, we should address problems with food and pharmaceuticals, but this doesn’t justify a denial of everything positive that has been done and from which we have benefitted. See Ruxandra Teslo on why she is glad she wasn’t born a century or two ago.  See also the trend chart of words reflecting progress and future versus caution, worry, and risk-aversion–in English, French, and German–over the past four centuries at this Ruxandra post.

Indeed, the whole idea that people in earlier times have done things from which we have benefitted has been lost, even negated. We suffer from a malign form of negative ancestor-worship.

A huge factor is the focus on identity established through demographically–defined groups, identities usually emphasized for politically-tendentious reasons.  I’m reminded of something Ralph Peters said:

Man loves, men hate. While individual men and women can sustain feelings of love over a lifetime toward a parent or through decades toward a spouse, no significant group in human history has sustained an emotion that could honestly be characterized as love. Groups hate. And they hate well…Love is an introspective emotion, while hate is easily extroverted…We refuse to believe that the “civilized peoples of the Balkans could slaughter each other over an event that occurred over six hundred years ago. But they do. Hatred does not need a reason, only an excuse.

Also see @alexthechick on Tribalism.

Roger Simon argues that a primary cause of the outpouring of anger is the decline of religion. Maybe to some extent, but I’m pretty sure that lynch mobs included a substantial complement of believing, church-going people; the hanging of witches certainly did. The decline of formal religion, though, does contribute to the increase in the number of isolated, disconnected individuals.

A lot of people are looking for a source of identity, and while some of this traditionally came from religion, much of it came from family, which has clearly had a declining influence. There’s an ad for a matchmaking service that’s recently been on tv a lot, in which a woman expresses her disappointment with online dating services and says she “just wants to meet someone she can introduce to her friends.”  I thought this was interesting: a few decades ago, it would have been “someone she could introduce to her parents.”

There are a lot of people who get their incomes from stirring up anger. This includes not only political operators, and online influencers, but a large number of NGOs which are largely about attacking some set of organizations and/or people.   And a significant part of American academia is endlessly busy manufacturing new and revised group identities, and stirring up resentments based thereon.

Rob Henderson says, speaking of much of today’s political rhetoric  “Notice it’s always “smash the system” and “demolish capitalism” and “eat the rich.” It’s never “help the needy” or “feed the poor.” You’ll see a thousand communists say “billionaires shouldn’t exist” but not a single one who says “poor people shouldn’t exist.”

The politicization of absolutely everything is certainly a major factor in the metastasization of anger in our society.  As I remarked in this post:

One reason why American political dialog has become so unpleasant is that increasingly, everything is a political issue.  Matters that are life-and-death to individuals…metaphorically life-and-death, to his financial future or the way he wants to live his life, or quite literally life-and-death…are increasingly grist for the political mill. And where that takes us is that:

People who disagree with your agenda are “attacking” you or “robbing” you.  How commonly do you hear dissent described in precisely those terms nowadays?

When the government controls everything, there is no constructive relief valve for all this pent-up tension.  It all boils down to a “historic” election once every couple of years, upon whose outcome  everything  depends.  They’re  all  going to be “historic” elections from now on.  That’s not a good thing.   (link)

I think it is also likely that therapy culture has done more harm than good as far as the climate of anger goes. Several years ago, the blogger called girlwithadragonflytattoo (no longer available) had a post on anger at which she argued that–contrary to the common belief–expressing one’s anger is generally not  a good idea, from the standpoint of one’s own mental health. A lot of people today seem to feel the opposite, or they are so angry that they don’t care what effect their anger-expressions have on their own well-being. I suspect that therapy culture has often encouraged this attitude.

The post by Dragonfly Girl reminded me of a post by Grim, in which he discussed anger in a political context, and channeled Andrew Klavan to point out that anger can make you stupid.

Grim:  We need to be cunning.  We need to think and act strategically.

Klavan:  You want to win back your country? Here’s how. Fear nothing. Hate no one. Stick to principles. Unchecked borders are dangerous not because Mexicans are evil but because evil thrives when good men don’t stand guard. Poverty programs are misguided, not because the poor are undeserving criminals, but because dependency on government breeds dysfunction and more poverty. Guns save lives and protect liberty. Property rights guarantee liberty. Religious rights are essential to liberty. Without liberty we are equal only in misery.

Anger of course does have a purpose.  In politics, it is anger at bad policies and their destructive impact that can motivate one to get involved and work hard for positive change.  In relationships, anger at mistreatment can motivate one to fix it or get out of it.  But anger needs to be controlled and moderated or it becomes the enemy of judicious thought and effective action.

One of the reasons for the French loss in the campaign of 1940 was the internal angers and resentments which existed in French society at the time.

Another excellent example of the effects of uncontrolled anger can be found in that piece of military history known as the Charge of the Light Brigade.  This  unnecessary disaster took place during the Crimean War, in 1854, and seems to have been driven in considerable part by toxic emotions on the part of British officers involved.  While the details of the Charge are still being debated by historians,  161 years later, the general outline was as follows…

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Sympathy for the Devil

Surveys show a disturbing degree of support for Hamasand even justification of the October 7 atrocitiesamong younger Americans…and also, following the posting of Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ recently on TikTok, a significant number of peopleagain, especially younger ones reading it for the first timereacted favorably to his message.   Anti-Israel views among the young are significant enough that even the rather lame support of Israel offered by the Biden administration has resulted in  negative poll numbers.

What is going on here?…What is driving the sympathy toward enemies of Israel and America, even ones who have clearly and provably committed horrible atrocities?

Wesley Yang, at X, said:

When we made the succession from a text based culture to a streaming one, all prior knowledge instantly evanesced, reformatting all prior culture and leaving a blank slate In the resulting brave new world children can know they are the opposite sex, mass murderers of civilians are heroes of resistance — and Osama Bin Laden is a profound and wrongly maligned truth teller.  

Anything can happen now.

I do think that the characteristics of a media type as well as its content have an influence, as McLuhan argued long ago; I’ve written about that point recently.   And it’s well known that social media algorithms tend to amplify extreme and emotion-driving points of viewand furthermore, given TikTok’s corporate parentage, it’s quite possible that there has been consciously-malign algorithmic behavior directed by the CCP.   But types of medium and editorial behavior (these algorithms do significantly mimic the role of a traditional editor) by no means the whole story; the degree of acceptance of the ideas that Hamas-is-good and Bin Laden-Wasn’t-So-Bad point to some deep problems in American education and American society.

The late Dr. David Yeagley, a Comanche Indian (traditional name ‘Bad Eagle’) and college professor, described an interaction that took place in one of his classes. (excerpted)

“LOOK, DR. YEAGLEY, I don’t see anything about my culture to be proud of. It’s all nothing. My race is just nothing.”

The girl was white. She was tall and pretty, with amber hair and brown eyes. For convenience’ sake, let’s call her “Rachel.”

I had been leading a class on social psychology, in which we discussed patriotism what it means to be a people or a nation. The discussion had been quite lively. But when Rachel spoke, everyone fell silent.

“Look at your culture,” she said to me. “Look at American Indian tradition. Now I think that’s really great. You have something to be proud of. My culture is nothing.”

Her words disturbed and offended me in a way that I could not quite enunciate.

and

When Rachel denounced her people, she did it with the serene self-confidence of a High Priestess reciting a liturgy. She said it without fear of criticism or censure. And she received none. The other students listened in silence, their eyes moving timidly back and forth between me and Rachel, as if unsure which of us constituted a higher authority.

Yeagley saw a resemblance between Rachel and those Frenchwomen who were quick to associate with the conquering Germans…and he wondered:

Who had conquered Rachel’s people? What had led her to disrespect them? Why did she behave like a woman of a defeated tribe?

The interaction that Dr Yeagley described took place more than 20 years ago.   The individuals marinated in the intellectual climate in which the student was steeped have, in many cases, grown up to be professors or teachers inculcating a later and probably even worse version of the attitudes that she voiced.

Yeagley also cited a Cheyenne saying:   “A people is not defeated until the hearts of its women are on the ground.” I don’t have any quantitative data on gender mix, but it’s been observed that a high % of anti-Israel extremistslike those tearing down the ‘kidnapped’ posters and the three just charged with arson at an Israeli defense factory in the USare female.   Would a wise Cheyenne advise us to be very worried?

(The Yeagely passage was cited and discussed in my 2020 post  Bad Eagle’s Question)

The constant lectures about how bad our society is, how Americans are dangerous people who are on a hair trigger to attack Muslims or gay people or minorities…all of these things have surely had an effect on America’s civilizational self-confidence, especially among those who are too young to remember anything else.   As  Chris Ferguson  said at X:

The modern approach to US history is the equivalent of telling people to think of the worst thing they’ve ever done. Then think about it over and over, everyday, without any positivity or relief. Then, later, wonder why everyone is neurotic.

A commenter on that thread noted   that “in all the recent hoopla over identities, kids’ development of an  American  identity has been completely ignored.”   (emphasis added)

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Society, Social Media, and Human Nature

The Instagram Panopticon, at Quillette, discusses the way in which social media has encouraged people to carefully curate their self-presentations and to judge the self-presentations of others.

I think it is certainly true that new kinds of media can affect how people think, feel, and interact…and this effect is nothing new. Joseph Roth, who lived in Berlin in the 1920s, wrote about the impact of radio:

There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack…No one listened any longer to the song of the nightingale and the chirp of conscience. No one followed the voice of reason and each allowed himself to be drowned out by the cry of instinct.

He didn’t like photography very much, either:

There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack…No one listened any longer to the song of the nightingale and the chirp of conscience. No one followed the voice of reason and each allowed himself to be drowned out by the cry of instinct.

But the focus on self-presentation and on evaluating the presentations of other goes back much further.   Consider, for example Russia’s ‘paper Facebook’ of the 19th century.   No computers and no telephones, but, among aristocrats and the well-off, visiting cards were   very important…and:

The cards, decorated with vignettes and lettering, were usually piled somewhere in the entrance hall of a rich house either on a coffee table or tucked behind the mirror; so when a guest was coming, while he waited for the servants to tell the host he’s got a visitor, the guest could assess the popularity and social ties of his host by looking at the cards.

The fashion mongers of the era flaunted each other with a set of business cards from famous and popular people, just as some people now flaunt how many Facebook stars they are friends with!

There were even bot-equivalents to increase one’s count of Likes:

Some people even paid the doormen in rich people’s houses for visiting cards of famous persons princes, counts, rich businessmen to tuck these cards behind their mirrors and make their guests believe they are sometimes visited by such ‘posh’ persons.

Going back even further, in one of Fielding’s novels a woman takes great pleasure in going through the visiting cards of people who called on her.   Again, similar to like-collecting on Instagram or Facebook, probably exactly the same dopamine hit.

So yes, changes in media do influence human perception and behavior…but we must be careful not to ascribe things to new media which are really human constants.

Nothing Beyond the Current Moment

From Harvard:

Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall. She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”

Reading the above, the first thing that struck me was that a university dean, especially one who is an English professor, should not view the 19th century as ‘a very long time ago’…most likely, though, she herself probably does not have such a foreshortened view of time,   rather, she’s probably describing what she observes as the perspective of her students (though it’s hard to tell from the quote).   It does seem very likely that the K-12 experiences of the students have been high on presentism, resulting in students arriving at college   “with a sense that the unenlightened past had nothing left to teach,” as a junior professor who joined the faulty in 2021 put it.   One would hope, though, that to the extent Harvard admits a large number of such students, it would focus very seriously on challenging that worldview.   I do not get the impression that it actually does so.

In a discussion of the above passage at Twitter, Paul Graham @PaulG said:

One of the reasons they have such a strong “orientation toward the present” is that the past has been rewritten for a lot of them.

to which someone responded:  

that’s always been true! it’s not like the us didn’t rewrite the history of the civil war to preserve southern feelings for 100 years. what’s different is that high schools are no longer providing the technical skills necessary for students to read literature!

 …a fair point that there’s always been some rewriting of history going on, or at least adjusting the emphasis & deemphasis of certain points, but seems to me that what is going on today is a lot more systematic and pervasive than what’s happened in the past, at least in the US.   Changing the narratives on heroes and villains,   selecting particular facts to emphasize (or even to make up out of whole cloth) is not the same thing as inculcating a belief that “the unenlightened past has nothing left to teach.”

I don’t think most people inherently view the past as uninteresting; many stores, after all, have traditionally begun with the phrase “Once upon a time.”

I get the impression that a lot of ‘educators’, at all levels, have not much interest in knowledge, but are rather driven by some mix of (a) careerism, and (b) ideology.   For more on this,   see my post Classics and the Public Sphere.

And it’s also true that many schools are not providing students with the skills necessary to read literature–although there are certainly some schools that are much better than others in this area, and one would have hoped that graduates of such schools would be highly represented among those selected to become Harvard students.   Maybe not.    And technologies that encourage a short attention span–social media, in particular–surely also play a part in the decline of interest and ability to read and understand even somewhat-complex literature.

Although I suspect some of these students are perfectly capable of concentrating their attention when they really want to.   Some of them are probably computer science majors–hard to write or even understand a program without really concentrating on it. Some may be drama majors–I imagine that learning one’s lines and acting them requires a pretty significant level of focused attention.   And there are surely many other examples.   But the intrinsic motivation which is there in those cases doesn’t seem to be there in the case of reading literature.
Or am I kidding myself, and has the   short attention span phenomenon now become so pervasive that a lot of these students–and and even higher proportion of the people who didn’t go to Harvard…are going to come into adulthood lacking in sufficient attention span to be able to write code, do engineering design, analyze financial statements, fly airplanes or conduct air traffic control, perform surgical operations, etc?
Your thoughts?

The Fear of Elon Musk

Various people have expressed concern about the Elon Musk buy of Twitter, on grounds that it is dangerous to have such an important platform controlled by one very wealthy individual. I wonder if these people have noticed..

–One of the two most influential newspapers in the country, the Washington Post, is 100% owned by Jeff Bezos, who last I checked is also pretty well-off financially

–The other most-influential newspaper, The New York Times, has been controlled for decades by one wealthy and prominent family. Although The Times is owned by a publicly-traded corporation, the dual-class stock structure means that the control is with the family, not with the other shareholders.

–The largest social media platform, Meta/Facebook, is about 6 times larger than Twitter, based on market capitalization. Although Meta is a public company, it also has a dual-class stock structure, which gives Zuckerberg effective control with 53% of those Class B shares.

–The platform that seems to be getting the most traction among those under 35 or so is TikTok. It is owned by a Chinese company, which means it is required to do the bidding of the government of that country, which means in effect the CCP.

All of those things appear to be just fine with most of those people who are now expressing their upsetness about Musk/Twitter.