The trouble with emotionalism

March 16, 2009 at 5:39 pm (Psychology)

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Emotion. I was thinking of this apropos of last week’s NIC-ICTU peace rally at City Hall. I was wondering how, since it was a silent protest, you would characterise it. It’s easier to gauge these things if there are speeches, and if the platform is getting applause or heckling. But in an atmosphere of silence… the only thing I could fall back on was that, whatever the agendas of some people who were there, the bulk of those in attendance were motivated by basic human sympathy.

And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. Sympathy is a fundamental part of the human condition, and if you can’t feel it then you’ve lost something very important. Even in a time of war – and we’re not in a time of war – the taking of human life is a very very serious business, and should always be a matter of deep regret. It’s those who actually glory in the killing of the designated enemy – no matter that they may theoretically be on your side – who you have to watch out for.

The question arises, though, of whether you can stop at sympathy, whether it’s sufficient. You know, I feel a basic human sympathy for Jade Goody. That doesn’t mean I’m going to commit intellectual suicide by saying I believe Jade is the greatest human being on earth, and her death will mean a huge amount to me. There is the question of going beyond the immediate emotional response and towards the rational, despite the danger that that may leave you looking a little cold-blooded. But that’s no worse, and in my opinion a lot better, than having emotionally driven politics.

Take as a case in point the killings in the north over the past week. These are dramatic events, and you’d be surprised if they didn’t evoke some sort of emotional response – which, despite all the axe-grinding, was entirely sincere on the part of many thousands of ordinary people. But one difficulty is that, if you’re relying on moods, the mood can change in an instant. Let’s say that there’s a riot in Craigavon and the police shoot three teenagers. That would change the mood massively in that community. We’ve seen this before. After Bloody Sunday, you couldn’t get a hearing if you weren’t in favour of armed struggle. After Omagh, you couldn’t get a hearing if you were opposed to the peace process.

There’s also the use of emotion in an oppressive way, in the sort of post-Diana, why-aren’t-you-griefstricken way. Again, look at the pressure that was put on republicans last week, republicans who had nothing to do with the killings in Antrim and Craigavon. You may assume there was bad faith involved, and you’d be right, but look at the form. Adams came under attack because his statement was too cold, impersonal, emotionless. That’s what I would expect from Adams, it’s his style. Martin McGuinness, although I think he was ill-advised to deploy the T-word, was always going to make a stronger statement in that he’s always been more of a heart-on-his-sleeve character. (Apart from his anger, I also suspect there’s something of a guilty conscience involved. You don’t have to be a mad unionist to realise that the Provisionals did plenty of completely unjustifiable things.)

So, in the emotionally charged atmosphere, McGuinness’s statement seemed to be what the punters wanted. It certainly mollified Jackie McDonald, although the Belfast Telegraph’s posse of unionist columnists may prove a harder sell than the UDA emperor. Then the spotlight was turned on éirígí, who are one of the few republican groups without an armed wing, but who nonetheless were put under intense pressure to dissociate themselves from something that other people had done. And so it was found that Breandán Mac Cionnaith’s statement, identical in form to what any Sinn Féin spokesperson would have said a few years back, did not contain the requisite amount of outrage. Saying that the conditions did not exist to justify armed struggle was not enough – you needed denunciation and obloquy.

This sort of hectoring really doesn’t serve much purpose in clarifying matters, but it can be a great tool for rhetorical bullying. That’s why I object so strongly to the Decent Left and their condemnathons. If you want to have a rational discussion, it really doesn’t help to have some loudmouth demanding that you prove you don’t support the Khmer Rouge.

And a Mr Angry act doesn’t really convince. I’ve been working my way up to a review of Richard Seymour’s book. (Not the American football player, of course, but the nice wee man who runs Lenin’s Tomb.) If I compare it to, say Nick Cohen’s What’s Left?, it’s not just a matter of me agreeing more with Richard than Nick – although I do. It’s also a matter of Richard, notwithstanding that he feels strongly on many issues, adopting a cool and rational style, while Nick’s book is just brimming over with rage and bile, which does nothing for his accuracy but does serve to devalue whatever valid points he may have to make.

And here’s another example, in the al-Muhajiroun demo against the army parade in Luton last week. You have to ask why these parades are being held in the first place, and the answer is that it’s part of Gordon Brown’s campaign to make the Afghanistan adventure a popular patriotic war, by giving the punters flags to wave. But I’m interested in what Anjem Chaudary was playing at. On Radio Galloway this weekend, George was very good on this point, arguing that al-Muhaj had made their case in a way that would alienate the maximum number and win over the minimum. But I’m afraid that George misses the point.

Why do Anjem Chaudary and his dozen or so mates go around behaving like assholes. The answer is precisely to provoke a response. It gets Anjem on the telly, where he can justify behaving like an asshole, outrage white suburbanites and maybe spark the interest of one or two young and impressionable Muslims. So after the Luton demo, Anjem got not one but two appearances on GMTV the next morning, introduced as a “Muslim leader” despite his lack of followers. And so good an outraged response did he provoke that they had him on again the next morning.

At this point Muslim leaders who are infinitely more representative and have more rational things to say will bury their head in their hands and wonder who they have to bribe to get on Newsnight. It’s partly lazy journalism, which likes to set up easy oppositions instead of complex discussions. It’s partly because an unrepresentative rentaquote will be permanently available for interview. (One notices Haris Rafique of the bogus “Sufi Muslim Council” playing the same game, except he’s telling the kufaar what they want to hear. Indeed, Haris and Anjem were sitting side by side on a discussion show the other week.) But it’s mainly because the easy thing to do is provoke an emotional response – Look at the scary mad mullah! Fear him! Hate him!

And, with all this overwrought emotionalism, it becomes harder and harder to have an actual rational discussion.

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The angry men

April 19, 2008 at 1:51 pm (Cruise Missile Left, Psychology)

Moral outrage. It’s not one of the first things I always think about in terms of the Decent Left, but I do think it’s an essential part of their group psychology. Hence, I suppose, the appellation. They are the only decent people around, the only moral people, the only people capable of compassion, solidarity or empathy. That’s what they would like to think, anyway.

It’s a bit like Mr Tony Blair’s faith-based approach to governance. For Mr Tony, the fact that he lied about WMD in Iraq is neither here nor there. The fact that the invasion has turned out to be a disaster is neither here nor there. What’s important is that he acted with the best of intentions. It’s all about the purity of motives, you see.

On the other hand, it’s a bit like Peter Tatchell, who’s not actually part of the Decent Left – he draws the line at actually supporting foreign wars – but is pretty close to them. Peter’s strength, as has been pointed out before, is also his weakness. He can’t be aware of an oppressed minority without running a solidarity campaign, and he has enough nervous energy to keep thousands of these campaigns on the go. Most of them are entirely worthy, but many are so obscure that, while you’re happy Peter is doing something, you yourself would take some convincing to do more than sign a petition. But Peter believes that his hobbyhorse of the moment should be everyone else’s top priority. So he’ll launch a campaign for gay Tibetans, and about five minutes later (with jabbing finger in play) start demanding to know why the left isn’t mobilising for the gay Tibetans. Could it perhaps be their deeply ingrained homophobia? Eh? Eh?

Sometimes, as I said recently, it’s just the normal positivist response of getting extremely irate when confronted with scepticism. In philosophy, this has a lot to do with the perception that sceptics are simply destructive in their criticism, which has a lot of truth behind it.

But transpose that into an emotionally driven view of foreign affairs. It tends to lead to the Yes, Minister fallacy of “Something must be done; this is something; therefore we must do it.” But it also leads to a tendency to see one’s antagonists as being corrosive cynics devoid of humanity. This is what Daniel was saying on CiF the other day: if you put hard questions to Decents about what, in practical terms, the American and British armies could do to make things better in Zimbabwe or Darfur or Tibet or Chechnya, they don’t want to have that discussion. They just get red in the face and start shouting about Henry Kissinger and Douglas Hurd. You see, practical politics is a distraction from the important business of being outraged.

The obsessive vilification of Hurd, who left office a whole thirteen years ago, is interesting in itself. You’ll recall the rather embarrassing chapter of What’s Left? wherein Nick Cohen tries to prove that Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind are co-thinkers of Noam Chomsky, a proposition that might make sense in those rarefied circles where people think Marko Attila Hoare is a superhuman genius. But Hurd, whose political thought I am rather familiar with, is very far from being a peacenik, let alone a Chomskyite. Actually, he’s a rather run-of-the-mill Palmerstonian. Douglas doesn’t object to military action when it’s in the British national interest. He doesn’t even object to the projection of military power for humanitarian ends, if a sensible plan can be put forward that is likely to make things better rather than worse. What he is adamant about – and this enraged a lot of people over Bosnia – is that the British government shouldn’t be bounced into precipitate military adventures so as to make celebrities, do-gooders and campaigning journalists feel better.

Chomsky is another revealing target. I suspect most of the antipathy to Chomsky comes from his consistent application of the mote-and-beam principle, his insistence that you don’t win moral brownie points for loudly denouncing official enemies, and that it displays much more courage to take on your own rulers. Not to mention, the British journalist has much more chance of doing something about the abuses of the British government than those of the Chinese or Zimbabwean governments. But I also suspect that tone comes into this. Chomsky’s political writing, deriving in style from his academic writing, is cool, dry, dispassionate, often pedantic and often surprisingly sarcastic. This can be guaranteed to annoy people whose yardstick of morality is how very, very angry they are.

And, you know, there is a case for being cool and dispassionate. I think it says a lot that one of the great trailblazers of Decency has been the Dude, a man who’s always – even in his Trotskyist days – always played fast and loose with the facts, and relied on panache and rhetorical hotdogging to win arguments. This can be entertaining, up to a point (and the Dude passed that point long ago). But I do have a strong streak of empiricism in me, probably from that chemistry background, that doubts that emotion can be a real basis for good politics. Of course you bring values and beliefs to bear – but when anger (synthetic or otherwise) is your measure of virtue… well, you’re almost predestined to get bad policy resulting. And that’s even assuming that you get to the point of hard policy. Many of our Decents seem to prefer sticking at the stage of ostentatious displays of outrage.

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Decency, rhetorical dishonesty and psychological projection

August 13, 2007 at 11:55 am (Cruise Missile Left, Intellectual Frauds, Psychology)

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So, let’s return today to considering the rhetorical tropes of Decency. This time around I want to postulate that the Decents’ characteristic rhetorical style is closely linked to their group psychology. You see this demonstrated clearly in the methods of argumentation they use.

Guilt by association is a prominent one, and sometimes the associations are pretty tenuous. As in: the Socialist Workers Party, via the Stop the War Coalition, has a relationship with the Muslim Association of Britain; the MAB is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood; the Brotherhood reveres the obscurantist theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi; therefore the SWP must endorse the teachings of Qaradawi, especially the more outré ones about gays and women. Now, the SWP may be opportunistic in their alliances, but I’m fairly sure they don’t endorse stoning gays. It’s a bit like saying that, because Marko Attila Hoare endorses Chechen separatism and so does Osama bin Laden, therefore the Decent Left are fellow travellers of al-Qaeda.

Another one is “if you’re not with us you’re against us”. This draws not only on the rhetoric of GW Bush, but also on many of the Decent cadre’s background in far-left sectarian groups. A basic part of the sectarian’s psychological makeup is that anyone not entirely enamoured of his sect is on the side of the enemy. A sort of reductio ad absurdum of this appears below, with the assumption of SWP comrades that if I’m cynical about their little campaign around the Glen Road barracks site, then I must want West Belfast to be overrun by the Greedy Developers, who seem to be doing a pretty good job without my support. A considerably more annoying version is the tendency of the Decents to throw epithets like “appeaser”, “apologist” and “pro-fascist” at anyone dissenting from their agenda.

But, beyond this basic sort of rhetorical dishonesty, we have to consider the possibility that many of the Decents believe what they’re saying. This is where the concept of psychological projection comes in. There is a Decent Left equivalent of this, which I term “Chomsky in your head syndrome”, because, thanks in no small part to Oliver Kampf, poor old Chomsky seems to get the rough end of this more than anyone else. You found this with the Grauniad’s infamous hoax interview with Chomsky, and the Francis Kammovitch letter urging the Graun to retract its retraction. To the average rational mind, the idea that Chomsky had “denied Srebrenica” could be easily disproved by the multiplicity of quotes in Chomsky’s writings and interviews explicitly saying that there was a massacre at Srebrenica. This, however, did not deter the likes of Nick, Francis, Ollie and Attila from blowing lots of smoke about how Chomsky was an “all intents and purposes denier”. They seemed to be suffering a form of cognitive dissonance quite common on the Decent Left – so Chomsky must have denied the Srebrenica massacre because that’s just the sort of thing a reprobate like Chomsky would do, in the same way that the Decents don’t need a quote from Socialist Worker to “prove” that the SWP supports stoning gays – you just need the Decent equivalent of mystical intuition.

This sort of thing happes all the time. Let’s do a compare and contrast between Tariq Ramadan and the late Alija Izetbegović. Ramadan is an outspoken modernist who frequently speaks and writes on how European and North American Muslims will not only have to adapt their religion to their environment, but in doing so will transform Islam on an international scale. Izetbegović, on the other hand, was a conservative adherent of political Islam – not a mad fundie by any means, but someone with a distinct Islamist ideology not a million miles away from the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood. You would expect, then, that the Decent Left would embrace Ramadan in preference to Izetbegović. Wrong! They simply take the subject’s position on issues dear to the Decent worldview, and extrapolate a whole set of politics based on that. Therefore Tariq Ramadan, because he has said somewhat Indecent things about Israel and the War on Terror, must be a mad fundie. And, because Bosnia was the Good War, Izetbegović must have been a liberal multiculturalist who definitely had nothing to do with political Islam.

There are further things flowing from this, not least the increasingly hysterical tone as it becomes ever clearer that Iraq and Afghanistan are disaster areas. It’s a worldview that is both Manichaean and Antinomian, positing that, because we are Good and Decent, therefore anything that contradicts our position doesn’t exist, and because our opponents are Indecent, their villainy is boundless indeed. It’s deliciously ironic, isn’t it, to watch people who have built up reputations as scourges of postmodernism – without, mind you, bothering to find out what postmodernism is – themselves becoming ever more detached from empirical reality. This might be classed as the revenge of the simulacrum.

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