KEITH C. BURRIS ON THE DANGEROUS ADDICTION TO OUTRAGE
My favorite living Christian preacher preached a sermon a week ago on addiction. He got me thinking — along the lines of “let me count the kinds.”
He spoke mostly about the addictions that destroy families — opioids and alcohol being the most obvious. These interact with homelessness, cyclical poverty and crime.
But he also said an interesting thing. He said one of the worst addictions is the addiction to selfrighteousness: There but for the grace of God I will never go because, I get it. I know truth. I know virtue.
An admonition against self-righteousness is an interesting thing to hear in a church and an interesting thing to hear in the America we are all co-inhabiting today.
Aside from those physical addictions mentioned, most addictions to the self are, in the end, corrosive, even dangerous: self pity as much as self-adulation and absorption; self-loathing as much as self-help.
But what makes self-righteousness so corrosive?
Two things, perhaps. One is that it makes a good quality of the self (in proper doses) — self-doubt — all but impossible.
If you are always in a state of self-doubt, you go crazy and make the wrong decisions when you do decide, like Hamlet. But if you are a total stranger to selfdoubt, you cannot learn and you will not listen. Like …
You fill in the blank.
The other pernicious quality of self-righteousness is that it values performance and appearance over deeds.
Self-righteousness requires what we now call “virtue signaling.” What people think of me matters more than what I think or do, so I am constantly seeking to demonstrate my virtue for the approval of my peers.
Self-righteousness leads to other forms of social and psychological addiction.
Hence we are addicted, in our culture today, to incitement, disruption, echo chambers, ideological silos, gotcha-ism and demonization.
We are addicted to outrage. We are, many of us, outraged, most of the time.
Watching what are called, without intentional irony, the “highlights” of the most recent Democratic debate, I realized that President Donald Trump and the Democratic candidates have two things in common: They all now oppose what we used to call, when it was the establishment consensus, “free trade,” and they are all outraged.
Utterly, totally, and continually outraged.
Mostly by each other, of course.
The question is, where do you go with outrage?
It puts me in mind of what a great classical actor said of another fine actor’s King Lear: On an emotive scale of 1 to 10, he began the play at 10. So he had nowhere to go with the performance for the next three hours.
With outrage as your “go-to” mode of public speech and reasoning, there is nowhere left to go — nowhere but the next level of outrage, or repetition when the top level has been reached.
As a practical matter, as Gen. James Mattis has said, this means we can never transition from the perpetual campaign to governing.
We are more than a year from the next election and the mayor of South Bend, Ind., running to be commander-in-chief, has already declared that his courage, moral and physical, is not to be questioned.
The president, the other day, said the Speaker of the House “hates America.”
They have nowhere left to go. Politics can run on any one of four engines: ideas, ideology, interests and identity.
The first engine seldom has the last or decisive word. But at least it is not addictive. Ideas work the opposite way. Their consequences, like the music of Mozart or Duke Ellington, have a way of surprising us.
The second engine leads to intolerance, for what used to be ideas are hardened into absolutes to use as cover or bludgeon.
The third engine is predictable. Interests can be understood, calculated and divided to mutual benefit. A politician pursuing his interests can deal with another politician pursuing the same. He cannot deal with a politician who wants nothing but to virtue signal to his peeps.
The politics of identity are the worst politics, for there is no common ground for compromise: I am my political identity. If you attack my opinion, my party, my tribe, my hat, you attack me.
Those of us old enough to remember the politics of 1968 also may recall the opening act of the culture wars: William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal debating on national TV during the violent Democratic convention and the ultra-controlled and boring Republican one. Two distinguished American men of letters, and wits, lost their tempers, called each other names and almost came to blows. They never figured out, said the great American novelist Walker Percy, that they were really on the same side.
Both were men of ideas. They were not men of identity or ideology or interests. They were men who bet their very lives on their ideas about America, its history and its possibilities.
A few weeks back, I met a friend at the gym. He told me that, in his career, he had migrated from FBI agent, to lawyer, to professional mediator, a job he re-trained for. Why? “Listening,” he said. “I figured there had to be a better way.”