The Melancholy Hearings

The Melancholy Hearings

By Joel Levin

The January 6 Committee hearings bring upon those concerned and horrified by the Capitol insurrection a certain malaise, a deep and foreboding anxiety, a feeling that all of this is for naught. The feeling is one of despair and gloom. Nothing new will come out of these hearings. No minds will change. No legislation will be passed. No future danger will be averted. The profound bipolar nature of the country is too deep, too dug in. But the defect is not symmetrical, a matter of equal fault between those supporting the hearings and apologists for the anti-Democratic party faction, overlapping but not quite the same as Republicans. Rather, it is just more evidence that one side has absolutely no interest in acknowledging the truth.

It is difficult to know exactly what makes us humans human. All sorts of theories and explanations abound, from brain size to the immortal soul, from toolmaking to opposable thumbs, from consciousness to forming social groups and communities. All of these are important, central, and probably, to some extent, derivative of and dependent on one another in some way. Perhaps the first thing all of us consider when we seek to separate ourselves from other species is language. We use it to tell stories, joke, inform, argue, sermonize, romance, threaten, calculate, rationalize, and do any of a hundred other things. One thing that we try to do, a thing central to almost all the other things, is to persuade. We speak to one another, communicate amongst ourselves, in a way to try to convince others that what we say is true, that what we say should make them change their mind or alter their actions. Specifically, we want what we say to make others love us more or love someone else less (we charm), cause them to learn (we teach), cause them to improve (we chastise) or cause them to be alarmed (we alert). If we can’t persuade, we feel less human. Unable to communicate, we become disconnected, in social limbo. We feel isolated, anxious, alone, frustrated, and bitter. In short, we feel as we do now when, despite all the evidence, people can’t be taught or persuaded or chastised.

The unpersuadables are a troubling group. We see their rise with far right-wing politics, extreme nationalism, isolationism, fascism, anti-immigrant chauvinism, Islamophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, and those anti-those others. Unpersuadables are now more than willing to say publicly what might only have been whispered earlier: ethnic disparagement, anti-religious venom, immigrant demonization, and traditional sexism and racism. They find allies in similarly minded individuals throughout the globe, those in power like Orbán, close to power like Le Pen, with power but wanting much more like Erdogan and Mohammad bin Salman, or vaguely drifting towards these positions like the leadership in Poland, Brexiteers in the U.K., Berlusconi followers in Italy, and right-wing nationalists everywhere.

This process is sometimes called the cult of personality (as with Trump) or conspiracy theory (as with QAnon). That, however, is not the core issue, merely the effect. At some point individuals have decided, often in alignment with those who they believe, sometimes accurately often not, to be similarly minded in the belief that nothing, absolutely nothing, will count as evidence against certain of their beliefs. The distinction here has traditionally been labeled as one between arguments from reason and arguments from authority, but that is two steps late in the reasoning process. The first step is that authority should be what counts, the second step is selecting the authority. It is only the third step that suggests that authority should Trump reason.

The irrationality here is depressing, the political implications frightening, but what sometimes is overlooked is that the inhumanity is deafening. We communicate daily in ways large and small where we convey information with the purpose of changing people’s minds, of informing and then persuading them, of bringing them along with our thinking, and of getting them to act in ways that may be selfish or may be beneficial or may be both. It is the way we live our lives. Why teach or argue or gossip if the person listening is implacable, if one is only talking to oneself?

The responses to the January 6 Committee hearings are exactly of this nature. So far, they have done little more than recount first in narrative form and then through witnesses through cross-examination, a retelling largely unimpeachable, highly supported, and without any counterargument or varying narrative. Nevertheless, they are discounted by the unpersuadables before and as they are made. The unpersuadables make a point of not wanting to listen, as seen from comments of much of the Republican Senate and Republican House members, talk radio and Fox TV. They essentially filibuster all arguments from reason and listen to but a single authority.

All of this is well-known. All is part of what is seen as our new politics as usual.  But all that misses the reality of how we live. We venture into a social world and only make sense of things and have others make sense of us by persuasive conversing. The Greeks called that rhetoric, but rhetoric for the Greeks, as viewed in Aristotle, was not just PR, can’t, political ads (or advertisements in general), bombast, B.S., and nonsense. It certainly didn’t allow of lies or misrepresentations. The Greeks rooted freedom in the ability to make judgments that were knowledgeable and rational, and rhetoric was meant to advance that purpose. Aristotle’s rhetoric became the basis of western politics, the foundation of the rule of law, the creator of the first lawyers such as Cicero, and embodies the way that Aristotle, who famously labeled us as political animals, saw us as conducting our politics. As Amelie Rorty put it: “Aristotle marks as central to deliberative rhetoric: considerations of prudence and justice, the projected political and psychological consequences of the decision and the likelihood of encouraging – or entrenching – similar rebellious attitudes amongst allies”. We see this in the crucial turn in favor of the rule of law and against authority that became Cicero’s mantra: “Let the heavens fall. Justice will be done.”

Consider this rational tradition of Aristotle and Cicero, the dominant tradition in western thought. As Rorty points out, rhetoric advances prudence that is one’s own interests; justice, that is the interest of all; politics, the method we use to achieve our projects; the psychological, a concern with our own mental well-being; and the attitudinal, encouraging or entrenching ourselves and others to create a viable, flourishing community. Central to creating such a community is rhetoric, the art and skill of persuasion, the ability to pull others with you, bond with them, retreat from your own positions in their favor, work together on common projects, see justice is done, and work to see that the psychological well-being of the community is met.

Yet all of this is ruled out, from the beginning (ab initio, as Cicero might have said), by the unpersuadables, who simply do not want to hear it. In fact, one can cite politician after politician today who does not want to hear it. The last Republican president, Donald Trump, said the hearings should be ignored as a one-sided, totally partisan, political witch hunt”, while Senator Rand Paul said no one should watch them. Members of Congress refusing to watch and demeaning their existence are legion: Jim Banks (hearings are illegitimate), Jim Jordan (where is the hearing on the Afghanistan withdrawal?), or Elise Stefanik (they are about punishing Nancy Pelosi’s political opponents). Their web magazine, The Federalist, called them a show trial, in the spirit, no doubt of Stalin.

The point is not (just) that these individuals are wrong. It is that they have decided that the idea of a social community open to discussion is no longer for them. The reasons may lie with ignorance or fear or anxiety or belief that the truth has been revealed. But whatever the reason, membership in a universal community is no longer an option, and communications between different communities are no longer welcome. This is the melancholy reality noticed and felt by so many of us. It carries a certain irony, however. Being impervious to disquieting or uncomfortable information leads us to what the Durkheim called “anomie”, a sense of being adrift in the world, alienated from one’s environment, without a sense of purpose. With traditional beliefs under attack, many avoid or discount talk that can be alienating, complicated, divisive, puzzling, counterintuitive, and sufficiently erudite to leave them behind. They are like Chinua Achebe’s hero in Things Fall Apart – successful and comfortable in a disappearing world, facing obsolescence in a Europeanized colonial society replacing traditional cultural and economic life – left adrift without skills or a place in the new society. We see it in the violent Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the less belligerent gilets jaunes in France. It is widespread among too many of the once robust western working class, un- and underemployed and financially precarious.

There is an irony here. It lies with the search for community that motivates these groups, just as it has traditionally driven those more partisan, religious, clannish, and xenophobic. Lost in a disquieting world, we seek community. The unpersuadables want to belong, once to religion, now to Trumpism or QAnon. Yet information in these groups is blocked. Persuasion is a matter of pedigree, offered only by the properly credentialed. This saps the humanity from the social process and isolates us more. Of course, there are institutions, Fox News for example, whose goal it is to cut off this rhetoric, this wider humanity.

We might think that the goal of the January 6 Committee hearings is (among other things) to promote knowledge, to persuade. They cause discomfort, but also the potential to learn and grow. But to the unpersuadables they are off-limits, part of the wrong church, wrong group, wrong country. They are cut off from millions, isolated offerings only of value to those still interested in a flourishing community. But in seeing the size of those rejecting of knowledge – rejecting of the act of speaking that is central to our sense of ourselves, the social act of saying to another “Consider this. It might inform or change or amuse or trouble or move you” – we feel a malaise, an uneasiness. When that uneasiness concerns the views of at least a third of our society, the point of the hearing’s dims, and the melancholy sets in.

This melancholy is not particularly one that is focused on the informational. It concerns the social. That is, the enthusiasts of the hearings emphasize the many points made in the January 6 Committee investigation leading up to the public hearings and the hearings themselves. The picture painted is clear: no fraudulent election, no basis for Trump and his team saying there was a fraudulent election, no grounds for the refusal by Trump to accept the clear evidence that the election was fair and that Biden won, no ability of Vice President Pence to overturn or reject the results, the almost certainly fraudulent campaign by the Trump team to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to support the attempt to reverse the election, and the threats and intimidation to any, even their own party members or election officials who stood in their way. Daily we hear from the January 6 Committee, in the hearings, on social media, in press releases and interviews, displaying overwhelming evidence that the 2020 election was fair and that, despite knowing that the Trump team sought to undermine it. That is the informational campaign, and the fact that it is not widely, even universally, accepted to be the case is frustrating, maddening, disappointing, and ultimately the cause of deep concern.

That, however, is not where the malaise originates. Suppose while at work, you tell a fellow employee that a stairway in the office building is dangerous because of broken steps or that an important group luncheon has been postponed or that you have been given a long-anticipated promotion. Suppose your fellow worker simply ignores you, suggests that you have ulterior motives in saying what you say, is uninterested in hearing more and, in fact, discounts to zero what you have already told them. Your fellow worker decides to go forward with the belief that he or she held before you related any of that information. That attitude may not seem to harm you, as you know the danger of the staircase, you won’t mistakenly show up for a non-existent luncheon, and you will retain your promotion. Nevertheless, all of it gives rise to the frustration and bewilderment and maddening feeling of a complete informational failure.

There is a different concern, one both personal and social. It is not rooted in concerns for knowledge but based on how we as human beings view ourselves as individuals and how we see ourselves as part of society. We simply don’t understand how it is that when we communicate or try to communicate and that communication is rejected without consideration – that is, it is just ruled out of court so to speak – we are supposed to continue. It is the absurd upside-down world of an Orwellian dystopia. It is the specter of seeing everywhere the knowledge and conversation barrier of Putin’s ruling autocracy, the soundings of a cult or fanatical religion follower not only spewing pseudo-information without a basis but blocking the interpersonal play central to how we see ourselves. It is building an impenetrable wall to block anything we might offer. The unpersuadable cannot be moved.

That is where we are with the January 6 Committee. We are alone in the world, trying to speak but without others listening. We are part of David Reisman’s Lonely Crowd, by ourselves and without a community, locked into our own solipsistic mind, unable to build a new community. We feel the emptiness of being alone, with non-sharable knowledge, shunned judgments, and reasoning of no interest to others.

There is in this picture the irony of those who seek community yet erect impenetrable barriers, who fall prey to myopic and dysfunctional cults, who remain uninformed by new knowledge and unable to reconsider the reason and function of the community they think they have. That community, absent knowledge, will do nothing but degenerate and die, no doubt taking others with it, but die, nevertheless. That realization makes even the eureka moments of revelation by the July 6 Committee joyless. That is why we shudder at the chill of a malaise in the air and melancholy permeating our private lives. Barriers to knowledge cause a debilitating wound to the spirit.