The Great Unraveling

It was supposed to be a laptop that would save them, again.

Trying to determine the definitive clinching event in a close election is perhaps a fool’s errand. However, for the 2016 presidential contest, one event loomed large over the final days of the campaign: the discovery of Anthony Weiner’s laptop.

After the FBI found the device, Director Jim Comey decided to send a letter to Congress making it known that it was tangentially involved in the Hillary Clinton private email server saga. Of course, the public would later find out that the laptop contained no new evidence of anything really—something that was probably pretty clear at the time.

Yet, Comey sent the letter anyway, the media pounced on the story, the race was shaken up, and the rest is seared in our collective cortices as the Last Four Years.

This time around, the Republican apparatus saw the same opportunity to shake up the presidential race in closing days—and by the very same mechanism too. A laptop, allegedly left by Joe Biden’s son Hunter at a repair shop in Delaware made its way into the hands of none other than Rudolph Giuliani. From there, Rudy claimed that it held all sorts of evidence of corruption and wrongdoing, not just on the part of Hunter Biden, but by his father as well. We got screenshots of emails, pictures of text messages adorning the cracked phone screens of Blackberrys past, even the damning evidence that Joe Biden might have once hugged his son. Scathing.

To the right, this was explosive news, the kind that could not be ignored by the mainstream media or the voting public. It was surely going to lead to seismic shifts in the presidential race. 

And yet, it didn’t.

As a morbidly curious observer of the other side and their information consumption habits, it was fascinating to watch the right-wing internet’s reaction to this story as it peaked and then petered out, all within a relatively short period of time and without any major implications for the political landscape at large. There was such certainty about its importance and legitimacy, such hostility toward those who weren’t taking it seriously enough, and such desperation in the need to make it play that you couldn’t blame someone for thinking they might be able to will a scandal into existence. But it didn’t work and the episode ended up being a fascinating unraveling taking place in the following steps.

On Despair

Right now is a challenging time to have hope. The coronavirus pandemic has claimed over 100,000 lives in America and has been mismanaged at the highest levels of government. An economic crisis has left many millions of households in a tenuous financial position. And yet again the public has witnessed the killing of a black man at the hands of the police, an event that has led to widespread protests against racism and injustice.

Still, I consider myself an optimist. I believe, on balance, that humanity is good and that progress is attainable. However, optimism does not require a sugar-coating of the events described above, or an overly rosy assessment of the prospect for immediate change. Rather, my optimism and hope are grounded in compassion and empathy.

I don’t know the loneliness of lying in a hospital bed, dying without the company of my loved ones. I have never experienced the pain of a police officer’s knee against my neck or the fear that my last breath will be taken with my face pressed against pavement. I will never feel the total helplessness as my life slips away with those sworn to serve and protect me standing by idly.

I do, however, have the ability to take significant time and effort to internalize those emotions of fear, sadness, and anguish. By doing so, I can, in some small way, take on the pain that the victims and their loved ones feel. The point of this, of course, is not to wallow in self-made depression, but instead to share some of this burden and distribute it across a larger collection of society. When grief is shared we can let these feelings inform our worldview and inspire our actions. From there it is possible to attain justice and progress so that fewer people in the future are subject to these adverse experiences. Indeed, hope born out of tragedy.  

Lately, though, I have felt much closer to despair. Despair, by my account, is much more than just sadness or frustration. It also requires an element of hopelessness. It is the feeling that whatever bad situation exists cannot be fixed and that there is no value in trying. The logical endpoint of despair is the notion that life is not a worthwhile experience and that taking part in society is meaningless.

What has recently brought me closer to despair has not been the existence of these traumatic events themselves. Rather it is the behavior of those at the highest levels of power and their adherents. Not only do they have no desire to internalize this grief and let it breed hope, they are reluctant to even acknowledge some of the problems at all. To them, those who died of coronavirus were a worthy sacrifice to an illness that is no worse than the flu. Those who are cautious about state reopenings are being hysterical. George Floyd may have been killed but the protests in reaction are the real problem. The demonstrations should be more peaceful but preferably not be demonstrations at all. If we can’t collectively face the problems, it seems unlikely that we will fix them.

So where do we turn for hope? It is a natural instinct to look for it externally, in some turn of events or action outside of our control. However, I think the best place to start is internally.

In his excellent book This Life, Martin Hägglund expounds on the idea of secular faith and how we can find meaning in life outside of a religious context. By his account, the finite nature of our life is what gives it purpose. The potential to lose our lives demonstrates their worth and fundamentally miraculous nature.

Similarly, our ability to feel pain and anguish allows us to have the experiences of joy and fulfillment. In fact, Hägglund prepares us for the contingency of overwhelming despair. “In secular faith,” he writes, “the risk of despair is not only a negative threat but also intrinsic to my positive identity and engagement.” The hopelessness of despair looms over our lives but ultimately it is foundational to, and can perhaps inspire, constructive action.

Hägglund also tells us that we demonstrate our secular faith in the work we carry out. If we believe that life is meaningful, then we must be motivated to use our finite time in a way that brings fulfillment. Whether it is establishing relationships, pursuing education, or fighting for social justice, these goals and our commitment to them are what supply our life with purpose.

Thus, in order to find hope, we cannot push away any current feelings of pain, grief, and even despair. We must grapple with and understand those emotions as definitional to our purpose in life. At some point they will serve as contrast to our fulfillment. And as we take on the burdens of those who are afflicted by coronavirus or who bear the brunt of systemic racism, we need to remain committed to the work of justice and progress. In that work we will be able to find meaning.

So if you feel yourself gripped by despair, know that it is not without its value. It can eventually give us the hope to move forward—perhaps damaged, but striving with continued purpose.

The Post-Context Age

The rise of Donald Trump and the unprecedented dishonesty he and his enablers demonstrated during the 2016 campaign and eventually his presidential administration brought the term "post-truth" to the fore over the past few years. With his willingness to brazenly lie in the face of indisputable facts and the way his most loyal followers accept those lies despite evidence to the contrary, it was easy to believe that perhaps our age had become post-truth.

Obviously, it is justified to worry about whether truth still matters. It is increasingly easy to silo oneself off from much of the world and reinforce any belief, no matter its validity. Certain media outlets have basically adopted this as their mission statement and it is clearly dangerous.

One thing we have on our side though is that truth will always exist outside of our belief in it and it will always matter greatly. If the bridge ahead is out, no amount of lying, obfuscation, or deception will stop you from crashing over the edge. Certainly in a post-modern world our perception of and relationship to reality (and, in turn, truth) can be manipulated. But it is impossible to completely detach yourself from the real world. What' smore is that many people still care about the truth--enough for me to believe that it is possible to combat the attempts at creating a post-truth age.

However, it does seem like our political and social culture has at times adopted a post-context nature. Again, the bridge ahead being out may be indisputable, but what it means for the circumstances of our life can be interpreted.

The need for context manifested itself in the discussion around the boos and chants of "lock him up" that met Trump during his appearance at game 5 of the World Series last night. Of course, the pundit class that views itself as the caller of balls and strikes (I know, boo me) for the political world wasted no time in ignoring any sort of contextual factors around this spontaneous display of small-d democracy.

It would be easy to meet this kind of "analysis" with a dril tweet and move on. But it does represent a particular insidiousness in the state of discourse. As many people pointed out, the chant of "lock him up" was a crowd flipping Trump's own dangerous words against him, a moment of stark relief for someone used to inciting crowds against his own political enemies. Further, Trump has actually been credibly accused of crimes such as obstruction of justice while the target of his ire, Hillary Clinton, was recently cleared of any wrongdoing. Perhaps things are less clownish than Morning Joe perceives. 

Indeed, the errors made by Scarborough and others spring from an overreliance on believing in a surface-level Truth and a willingness to ignore any deeper context. Trump is right now embroiled in an impeachment inquiry over his abuse of power and attempts to use the office of the president for personal political gain. He has dangerous authoritarian tendencies and has attempted (and probably succeeded) in using his position to enrich himself. The baseball crowd that expressed its displeasure with Trump (a feeling which polling tells us many people share) is collectively wielding a voice to combat that corruption, albeit in a small way. So yes, the words "lock her up" and "lock him up" look almost identical. Yet, there are many important differences if you bother to look. 

What's more is that the concept of context hasn't always been roundly ignored and is sometimes tactfully deployed. Often we are asked to judge historical figures by the standard of their time, even if these standards are concocted and incomplete. Mentioning the slaveowning of the founding fathers is out-of-bounds because that was just how things were back then. No matter that John Jay--the first Supreme Court Chief Justice and co-author of the Federalist Papers--was the founder of the New York Manumission Society or that any enslaved person at the time of the founders probably had strong feelings about the evil that was slavery. Those aren't the contexts that support a preordained feeling about the situation, so therefore they aren't valid. When context is perceived as convenient, it is utilized; when it mucks up a false equivalence, it is tossed to the side.

Post-context isn't reserved for our Sunday show panels or historical arguments, however. Recently in Wisconsin a school security officer was fired after he was called the n-word by a student and then repeated the word back to the student, urging them not to use that kind of offensive language. Again, the absurdity of a contextless truth that views all uses of a word as equivalent led to an unjust and baffling outcome. (Since then, the guard has been hired back, but the initial point stands). Without rehashing the ever-so-tiresome "why can't I use this word when I hear it in rap songs" debate, we can see that circumstances are every bit as important to the judgment of events and that to leave out context only ends up hurting our ability to reason, not strengthening it. 

As with almost all discussions about politics, the underlying issue here is power and the mechanisms of its use. Ignoring the contextual divide between the powerful and the powerless only serves those who seek to wield that power dangerously and at the expense of those without it. Equating Trump's dangerous rhetoric with the pushback of a crowd of citizens neglects the fact that Trump's position of power makes his views on the rule of law especially important. He has the power to ruin lives when he plays fast and loose with concepts of justice and equality. A baseball crowd, no matter how uncivil their mocking might be, does not wield that power. Further, a black security guard who is the victim of a racial slur is not the same as the person wielding that hate-filled epithet. Historically the former has been stripped of their power by the ideology that empowers the latter. 

With the way we have seen attempts to distort reality and the truth, I share many people's apprehension over a post-truth society. However, the way to combat a lack of adherence to the truth is not through reasoning that is blind to context or circumstance. When there is this much on the line, we need to look past the surface and make an effort to understand a more complete picture.