Thursday, November 26, 2015

Dreading a Politicized Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is the most American of American holidays. A communal feast, celebrated in roughly the same way throughout the country, it should be a time for affirming our gratitude. We are not only grateful for the bountiful harvest but for being one people living in a great nation.

As I wrote those words I could not help but thinking that they will instantly identify me as a relic. Today, more and more people are dreading Thanksgiving. It seems no longer to be a ritual meal that brings us all together, that unites us and makes us one. Many of our fellow citizens are girding their loins, preparing to see the convivial and congenial dinner table descend into a raucous and dyspeptic exercise in political argument.

One suspects that it’s a new kind of diet. Turning Thanksgiving dinner into a cacophonous din is guaranteed to diminish your appetite.

Things have become so bad and so generalized that various organizations, from Vox.com to the Democratic National Committee to the Hillary Clinton campaign are putting out talking points that young people can use to debate their ignorant and superannuated elders. One caveat here: if you are a millennial and you rattle off DNC talking points at Thanksgiving dinner you will immediately affirm everyone’ caricature of millennials as opinionated boors.

Heather Wilhelm is correct to note that we no longer have social skills. We no longer know how to get along, even for the short time it takes to consume a communal feast. In the heat of a passionate argument over climate change, Islamophobia and Syrian immigrants, table manners will degenerate. How can you master the art of chewing with your mouth closed when you feel compelled to blurt out the definitive talking point about campus insurgencies? Then again, why did you we study all of that critical theory if not to replace table manners with a passionate commitment to big ideas?

Putting politics aside, just for an instant, one is painfully aware of the fact that many people believe that arguing is healthy. Many people believe that couples should engage in an occasional fight, as long as they fight fair. Many philosophically minded therapists even believe in the dialectic, in the clash of contrary opinions. They imagine that a synthesis will arise from the conflict between thesis and antithesis. They believe that it is unhealthy to restrain yourself, to bottle up emotions, to keep it under control. Thus, they want you to let it rip. They tell themselves that the full-throated expression of their opinions will naturally produce a new synthesis that will make everyone happy.

They ought to recall the Biblical injunction, from Luke, 11, 17:

Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth.

Abraham Lincoln said it a bit differently, but the thought is the same. There is no virtue in arguing and fighting over Thanksgiving. At times, argument is inevitable. At times, fighting is required. And yet, there is no superior virtue in turning even the most agreeable communal meals into a brawl.  

The unfortunate point, Wilhelm argues, is that life has become so politicized that we no longer think it is even worth trying to get along with each other.

Wilhelm analyzes the problem:

Politics, for many, has morphed into personal identity. Just look at colleges today, where opposing political sentiments or offensive statements can make students collapse like panicked, half-hearted origami. And hey, it makes sense: If politics is the be-all and end-all of life, and you honestly believe we can build a utopia buttressed by bureaucratic control, your personal worth, by logical extension, is ultimately based upon your political beliefs. No offense is too petty to let stand; no Thanksgiving dinner can be left in peace.

One is reminded of another Biblical verse: “vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”

There is something monumentally vain and exhibitionistic about displaying one’s ill-informed opinions at the dinner table. And yet, if the nation’s political and cultural debates are being led by Leonardo di Caprio and Amy Schumer, why shouldn’t everyone believe that he has a constitutional right to ruin Thanksgiving dinner by expressing his feelings, tactlessly and inconsiderately.

How does it happen that everything has become politics? How does it happen that we have become so politicized that we identify, not as Americans, but as Republicans and Democrats? Why are we more loyal to our political party than we are to the nation? Doesn’t politicized identity look like a symptom of an absence of patriotism? People no longer believe in America; they belong to factions. They do not believe in e pluribus unum, out of many, one; but believe in multiculturalism, out of one, many.

Worse yet, we no longer have a set of rules that define good behavior and set standards toward which we should aspire. Unfortunately, we tossed out all the rules of good behavior when we tossed out religion, when we replaced it with science.

However much you love science, there is no such thing, David Hume wrote around 250 years ago, as a science of moral principles. Science tells us what is; ethics tells us what we should or should not do. The two do not meet. Without religion, without a moral foundation in texts that are taken to be sacred we have made a fetish of dissension.

In the absence of patriotism and in the absence of Judeo-Christian values we have become cult followers. The cults might have involve political parties or they might make us belong to movements like psychoanalysis and Marxism and scientology.

Without religion, people do not take seriously the injunction to love their neighbor, to bless those who curse them, to do unto others as you would have others do unto you. If they did there were be fewer arguments and fewer fights over Thanksgiving dinner.

For many of those who dread a politicized holiday, today’s Thanksgiving dinner is merely a prelude to what really matters: football.



8 comments:

  1. Great post.

    Today's youth mantra is "We are smart, you are stupid." It's the consequence of intellectual indoctrination within politicized education. If you have the intellectual capacity to challenge this orthodoxy, they fall apart. You have taken away their certainty. You have taken away their identity. They're supposed to be the smart people, not you. After all, you told them they were special. Now they don't feel special anymore. They feel threatened. They become bitter clingers, just not with guns and scripture, because they've been told those things are stupid.

    No room for common ground. Even for a holiday meal. After all, we know the Pilgrims were religious zealots and privileged white people who stole the Native American lands that had been held pure and inviolate for millennia. There's nothing to like about tradition when your philosophical foundation is nihilism. Better to ask to be excused... if the child can bring himself to follow this protocol. Time to be alone and watch TV...the height of social sophistication.

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  2. Well said.
    I blame the Foucaldian/postmodern idea that all actions are merely attempts at gaining power.
    Even acts of kindness.
    As such, there are no kin, no families.

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  3. "How does it happen that everything has become politics?"

    Leftism: Everything becomes political. Everything must become political. There are no legitimate refuges from politics and ideology. As leftists are fond of saying, "the personal is political" and "the political is personal".

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  4. Some posts about The Politicization of Everything:

    http://photoncourier.blogspot.com/2015_06_01_archive.html#5012844618318942329

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  5. Leftists, like all children, need to learn boundaries. Perfect example of what happens because parents don't teach manners, politeness, respect for others, et al.

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  6. When all of life is a win-lose proposition, everything is consequential. Everything is about power and exploitation, so we're cynically searching exploiter and victim. It's built in. And marketing everyone as a victim creates enormous political market power, monopolized in government remedies, the entitlement benefits of which lock in the victim for life. Leftism is a business based on dubious premises. It's dependency as a brand, masquerading as generosity. The outcome is always the same: centralized control, no exits. Wake up, America! Free stuff isn't free. Coddling is not a path to freedom.

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  7. Oh, so no personal reports of personal dread or actual incidents in these comments?

    Myself, I attended my aunt's thanksgiving gathering between 3 families. At the dinner table we successfully avoided the taboos of sex, religion and politics, unless deer hunting is political, with smart phone pictures of bloody dead deer were passed around for the young boys to admire.

    After dinner the topic of black lives matter came up, with a group camped out at a North Minneapolis police station, Occupy-style, just in time for our first snow, although we don't know if they took Thanksgiving off. I guess not.
    http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2015/11/26/community-thanksgiving-meal-planned-at-4th-precinct-protest-site/

    In our the discussion there was first surprise how people have the time for 24 hour protest encampments, although with 5 getting shot by "white supremacists" (i.e. stupid 20-something white/hispanic youth?!) with masks they're being the lightning rods they want to be.
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jamar-clark-protest-shooting_5654fd91e4b079b28189924e

    But the general opinion in my family was low sympathy, and a belief the black community should focus their surplus energy on more productive activities. And there was an unopposed politically incorrect opinion expressed about the failure of black fathers.

    It is interesting that the Congressional representative from Minneapolis is Keith Ellison, who is black and Muslim (he's the one who got to be sworn into office under the Koran). It would be interesting to consider how the 1970's black power moment arose in part in connection to black conversions to Islam, while Keith Ellison at least has only promoted "nonviolent" confrontations with power, MLK style.
    http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2015/11/25/rep-ellison-calls-for-protests-to-evolve-beyond-encampment/

    Myself, I hate to take sides, more interested to see how strategies evolve and how effective they are for varied goals of raising awareness what dialogue comes out. And the Minneapolis group seems more generally capable of rational thought than the St Paul group.

    The happy ending for me is where the blacks who were shot apologize for chasing down the masked "whites" for trying to video the protest, and the "whites" say they're sorry for the shooting, but admitted being chased in the dark by angry blacks is scary. Some things are simple if you let them be.

    At least we can all be thankful when whites get to shoot blacks and no one dies. Maybe Trump's neonazi tweets are actually correct about whites really being bad shots.

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  8. Politics was never mentioned where I was--wife's older son and his family, though in a deep blue city.

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