On Passion

[jducoeur]

The previous posting aside, I'm slightly annoyed at Kerry for one thing: I dearly wish the man would get a little more passionate on the campaign trail. I mean, some of the stuff the Bush administration has been doing has been utterly heinous, not least the way Kerry himself has been getting abused, and Kerry just blandly takes it. And the worst of it is the realization that he's probably doing exactly the right thing politically.

I think it was siderea who observed a while back that our culture has become deeply suspicious of enthusiasm, and nowhere is that more apparent than in modern politics. Any politician who should dare to commit the sin of being passionate about something is immediately castigated in the press. Howard Dean's campaign was torpedoed largely due to a moment of unbridled enthusiasm. Al Gore, who last week did actually allow himself to get honestly angry about the horrors being committed today, was immediately ridiculed for it in the press. It's almost a knee-jerk reaction -- passion is somehow translated as a complete lack of control, something to be pitied or scorned.

And look at what that has gotten us. We have a President whose public self-control verges on the sociopathic. We have politicians who only feel safe speaking in code, and who hide their passions in under-the-surface agendas. We have a press that is unwilling to point out when the Emperor has no clothes. We have an entire society that is locking itself in the closet, unwilling to admit that it actually *cares* about this stuff, or indeed about anything at all.

I half wonder if it's actually related to the drug war. Consider: this extreme public dispassion comes at a time when the abstinence meme has really taken hold. I genuinely believe that particular meme to be deeply harmful, because it is fundamentally immoderate -- it paints the world in terms of Good (things you must do) and Bad (things you absolutely must not do), with little recognition of the gulf of middle ground in between.

The public attitude towards passion seems much like the politically-correct attitude towards drugs: something to abstain from, rather than something to use moderately. And that's downright unhealthy. When we teach people that the world is black and white, when it so manifestly is not, that failure of reality-checking amounts to nothing less than lying to ourselves...

Comments

[tpau]

i am not sure you picked a good analogy, but that beign aside, i think people have mostly jsut descided that beign openly passionate is simply dangerous

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

"Passionate" is what you are. "Emotional" is what the other guy is. Bush and co. are doing a great job of making this distinction, allowing them to be pissy and emo and whatnot and making it look "patriotic" (cf. Bush's not-at-all-veiled hatred and vehement anger during speeches, including the famous "Come and get us" speech), while succeeding in branding as unstable irrationals those in opposition who express emotions.

I think Dean's campaign failed because he was goofy in expressing himself, and the media wanted to crush him. I think Gore lost the election because he didn't have any clue how to _do_ emotion, and was just plain old scary when he tried (cf. the french kiss incident, scary "Uncle Al" in sweater and tie photo ops). Kerry is very close to this himself.

Re: abstinance -- I find this exceptionally amusing given how fundamentally it disconnects from how teens themselves are thinking about sex (and drugs) nowadays. (evidently the NYTimes magazine this weekend has an article on "Friends with benefits" that might be appropriate here, but I haven't read it) It seems like the gulf is widening, but somehow no one points this out.

[jducoeur]

I think Dean's campaign failed because he was goofy in expressing himself, and the media wanted to crush him.

IMO, you're attributing more agenda to the media than was really there. I don't think anyone was consciously trying to crush him -- heck, even Fox TV probably wanted him nominated. It just became one of those horrible media spirals that we're seeing so much nowadays. It's become downright routine for a story to just adopt a bizarre momentum of its own, and all the media outlets pick it up because they don't want to be "left behind".

Basically, I think that the media's herd instinct has become, if anything, even worse over the past decade. So we wind up with more and more news outlets, all reporting exactly the same stories with exactly the same spin. In that environment, it's remarkably easy for any meme to spread like wildfire -- and in this case, the "Dean is goofy" meme went viral in a matter of days. (Granted, the memetic groundwork for that had already been laid: many people were suspicious of him to begin with. But that crystallized astonishingly fast.)

It's actually pretty scary when you think about it -- the presumed front-runner dropped to abject failure almost instantly, at least largely on the basis of five seconds of videotape. That does *not* say good things about our culture.

Gore is a different case: he showed a pattern of behaviour that really didn't change much for a long time. It looks to me like he made the classic mistake of believing his spin doctors instead of his own instincts. When he genuinely opens up, he can be rather fascinating: both passionate about his work and smart enough to accomplish a lot. But his campaign was run by Gore the Politician rather than Gore the Man, and he's just not that *good* a Politician, frankly.

The other end of the spectrum, incidentally, may well be Schwartzenegger. I'm unconvinced that he's going to be any good as Governor, but I'm increasingly impressed at how canny a politician he is proving to be. Bush wants to be the next Reagan, but Arnie is proving to be a much more skilled disciple of the man's style...

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Because of that echo-chamber effect, I would believe that it only takes one person to steer the whole media chariot. Given that there are enough people out there willing to *do* that, I'm attributing to malice what could otherwise be simple idiocy, out of some sort of bizarre reverse Hanlon's Razor.

For the record, I also don't believe that Dean was *ever* the front-runner. It was just that a lot of people were willing to nod and smile when people asked them "So you are voting for Dean, right?" I never understood who, exactly, his constituents were; he seemed to benefit from activist overrepresentation, in that his supporters were more vocal and visible than those of others, and so seemed more numerous. I think this may also be the reason for his downfall -- there were so many people who were ready to dump him given the least opportunity.

Also, he's not handsome enough to become President. I wish this weren't true, but it sure seems to be. This is the other reason picking up Edwards as a VP might help Kerry out. Kerry *looks* like a President, but doesn't have the boyish charm of GWB. God, I hate TV.

Arnold will be President provided he can live another 16 years; that's my prediction. I'm guessing it will take that long to have another switch to Dem and back to Rep, and get the "non-Citizens with more than X years of residence" amendment passed.

Or maybe this is just the drugs talking.

[jducoeur]

I think this may also be the reason for his downfall -- there were so many people who were ready to dump him given the least opportunity.

Actually, I disagree. Rather, I think that Dean was indeed the frontrunner in the sense of having the strong and passionate support *of the people who had developed an opinion*. The problem, though, is that it was only the "hardcore" who had developed such an opinion yet.

I'm fairly sure that what happened is that the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party was a bit suspicious of him from the beginning, not least because of the consistent reports that Karl Rove desperately wanted him to be nominated. So when the press started playing up the "Dean is goofy" meme, everyone but those hardcore supporters decided that he was unelectable, and voted for Kerry instead.

Arnold will be President provided he can live another 16 years; that's my prediction.

My suspicion is that the amendment won't happen: it's too much work, and it's too obviously designed to favor him specifically. (Or will be perceived as such.) But that's the only reason I disagree with the notion of him winding up as President -- for better or worse, he has all the makings of a true political power-player...

[mr-teem.livejournal.com]

I'd love it if that amendment saw the light of day. I think that there'd be a lot of people embracing a debate over a positive change to our constitution. It's an amendment that increases participation in our democracy, not one that restricts rights or reduces democratic representation (http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/02/congress.continuity.ap/index.html).

The Democrats can name their own people that could serve as President as well to push the idea. One name I have heard mentioned is Michigan Governor Jennie Granholm, who was born in Canada.

[sjo.livejournal.com]

I think Kerry will become more passionate when it counts -- closer to the election. While I hate to sound cynical, I think you'll agree that the American Public™ has a very short attention span. Nobody will remember in November what Kerry did in June. What he does in October will be more crucial. The campaign trail is damned exhausting, and I suspect (hope!) that he's saving himself for the final stretch.

[jducoeur]

I hope you're correct. It's certainly true that Kerry's record support this -- he has a history of laying low until it's time to make his move, and then going all-out until he wins. I'm actually reminded of this right now because I'm catching up on ancient (January) issues of the Economist, all of which rather blithely assume that Howard Dean would be the Democratic nominee.

Still and all, it makes for a nerve-wracking time until he decides to start, and I'm at least slightly nervous about the degree to which he's allowing the Bush camp to define him. He's got a good record of fighting that effect, but it does mean that he's going to be fighting a bit of a rearguard action image-wise, at least to start with...

drug digression

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

And apparently the "war on drugs" and fear of drugs, is causing Drs and patients to not use very useful controlled drugs for the short amount of time that they are needed for surgical recovery, end-of-life pain management, etc.

See: http://www.stats.org/record.jsp?type=news&ID=455

Re: drug digression

[jducoeur]

I have a personal connection to this one. My grandmother spent 20 years crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, in more or less constant pain. There was only one analgesic she ever found that really helped: pot. But aside from a brief period when some young friends of hers supplied her with some, she basically couldn't get her hands on it.

I'll be frank: I regard the War on Drugs as the single dumbest thing America did in the 20th century. I mean, making that mistake once I can understand. But starting it up again, scarcely 50 years after the total failure of Prohibition, was simply arrant idiocy. And it's been a more or less total failure again: there's still plenty of illegal drugs out there, and the negative societal effects have been sweeping and terrible. Talk about the Emperor having no clothes...

Re: drug digression

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I regard the War on Drugs as the single dumbest thing America did in the 20th century. I mean, making that mistake once I can understand. But starting it up again, scarcely 50 years after the total failure of Prohibition, was simply arrant idiocy. And it's been a more or less total failure again

In my more cynical (and tin-hat) moments, I think that the WoD has been a smashing success, at least in terms of its architects' actual goals. Yes, Prohibition was a failure. But many of its observed effects seemed sufficiently useful to enough people in power, that they refined it to enhance those effects in version 2.

Prohibition : The War on Drugs :: The Cold War : The War on Terror

[siderea]

I brought it up, but it's hardly my observation: I think I got it from Brad Blanton's Radical Honesty (chapter Six is titled "Taboos Against Excitement"), but I think Arnold Mindell's Sitting in the Fire: Large Group Transformation Using Conflict and Diversity also addresses it.
–

[siderea]

P.S. Both date it waaaaaay previous to the War On Drugs (think Victorian repression). But that's an interesting idea.

I see the WoD as one instance of a larger class of convulsions our society is going through right now, which have to do with morality. I'm way too hungry to get into it now. :) Suffice it to say, it's news to no one that our country seems torn apart by conflicting ideas of what is and is not right in personal conduct. I think that conflict is happening at a meta-level not usually perceived or addressed, and that conflict has been evolving and building in ferocity for at least 100 years.

[jducoeur]

Both date it waaaaaay previous to the War On Drugs (think Victorian repression).

Hmm. Perhaps at its roots, but I genuinely think it's gotten worse in recent decades. Compare political speeches today with recordings from 50 years ago -- there's a fire in most classic speeches that is rare or nonexistent in political speech today, at least among the Big Two parties...

I think that conflict is happening at a meta-level not usually perceived or addressed

Yes, I suspect this is correct. There's a whole family of interrelated ideas there, all tying into the notion of the individual's responsibility of right behaviour and relationship to small-s society. It's likely that there are deeper precepts underlying most of it.

Creeps the hell out of me, frankly, because carrying the logic of the "moralist" viewpoint forward would appear to produce a highly conformist society, which I am quite certain I wouldn't be entirely welcome in. (And one that I regard as fundamentally antithetical to the ideals this country was founded upon...)

Fire the speechwriters

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Compare political speeches today with recordings from 50 years ago -- there's a fire in most classic speeches that is rare or nonexistent in political speech today,

I have a simple-sounding solution for much political ill: fire the speechwriters; make the candidates & office holders write their own material.

This would remove the blandness, the spin-doctoring, and the nicey-nicey masks that folks wear when delivering someone elses' work. Then we'll *really* know who we're voting for.

Re: Fire the speechwriters

[jducoeur]

God, that would be wonderful. Bush writing his own speeches. His approval ratings would fall to, like, 6%. The man's completely incoherent without a speechwriter...

Re: Fire the speechwriters

[mr-teem.livejournal.com]

There've always been speechwriters. The problem is that the age when debate and oratory was a contact sport for both the participants and the observers is gone. There's too much false offense or false outrage at any kind of passionate speech these days.

Recent case in point: consider the reaction to Gore's speech last week. He was "hollering"! He gave a "red-faced tirade"! He's "gone off his lithium again"! He's "insane"!

[siderea]

OK, I've gotten some food.

Hmm. Perhaps at its roots, but I genuinely think it's gotten worse in recent decades.

Essentially, yes, but I think a more incisive view is that there have been reverse-pendulum swings. There's an oscilating pattern which is swinging ever wider and more severe.

OK, I despise the pendulum analogy. This actually looks chaotic to me, not regular. It's a slosh, not a pendulum, and a driven slosh. For instance, like someone walking on a tightrope, and losing their balance; first they're just a teeny bit off balance, but their over-correction makes them a bit more off balance, so they over-correct their over-correction, arms milling, wobbling back and forth, until they lose it entirely.

But the way I really see it is more like the phase-state diagram of Fe-C alloys, or another reasonably complicated eutectic diagram. (Waves to the local Material Scientist.)

It's like our temperature and pressure are increasing, and we're crossing phase-state boundaries. That is, we are going through successive processes of agitation (heat) tearing apart society's crystaline structure, then re-crystalizing with a new crystal structure at the higher temperature.

The crystaline structure is the ways people form up into groups -- families, congregations, neighborhoods, towns, cities, subcultures, clubs, corporations, unions, states, etc. That crystaline structure(s actually, for not wholly mutually soluable metals) are a function both of the intrinsic properties of the individuals, and of the behaviors (mores, values, institutions) of society around them. So to speak of either "people's choices" or "society's effects" misses out on more than half of what's going on.

And each time society re-crystalizes, it crystalizes in more durable, stable forms.

There is the population pushing re-crystalization (they're the folks lamenting about the tearing of the fabric of society) and there's the population turning up the heat (they're the folks lamenting injustice and unfairness of society.)

The fact is, no society can handle endless heat. We're going to have to re-crystalize at some point. To my mind, there's a race on to see how fast we social justice folks can come up with a new phase which is more just and less internally conflicted than the last one, before the forces of re-crystalization lock everything down.

The recent push for gay marriage is an example of that. If the timing turns out to be right (and I think the odds are good) when society next crystalizes, gay marriage will be a social organizational form which will be included as part of the new structure of an otherwise rigid society.

So the race is on to construct an order of society which has room in it for people like you and me. Because if we don't manage it before the next crystalization, we (or our nieces and nephews) are likely to be marginalized and persecuted the way gays were in the 1950s.

Or to put this whole thing in a different way: society is re-deciding on what bases it's permissible to discriminate, and whatever it chooses we're going to have to live with for a long time, because it's going to be harder to set off the next social revolution than it was this one.

[jducoeur]

Hmm -- interesting viewpoint, and I can see a fair amount of historical evidence for it. The only thing I'm genuinely unsure about is that the next recrystallization will be long. Looking at the last century, we've essentially seen a number of increasingly-brief recrystallizations; as someone (Barlow?) put is a while back, the nature of change is changing.

I'd be leery of making any assumptions about how that's going to play out. I agree that it can't continue to spiral as it has indefinitely, but it's not clear that when it settles, it will settle down in quite the same *way* it has done before. The fluid forces have been growing nothing but stronger over the past century. One possibility of the end reaction is that things will crystallize very hard, but another is that society may have no choice but to accept that fluidity at a more fundamental level. And no, I don't know what that means, but it's interesting to speculate about...

[umbran.livejournal.com]

see the WoD as one instance of a larger class of convulsions our society is going through right now, which have to do with morality

My Lady has a very nice analogy - the United States fo America is an adolescent nation. We have an inscessant need to display our own strength and identity, a horrible inability to cooperate with out elders. We are only starting to comprehend that our actions have repercussions in the long term, and we still usually ignore that fact. We have problems dealing with sex and drugs.

All in all, the USA tends to behave like a teenager.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Any politician who should dare to commit the sin of being passionate about something is immediately castigated in the press.

There is a slightly simpler explanation for at least part of this - remember that the first duty of the press is not to report truth, but to sell news.

Issues that elicit a passionate response are rarely one-sided. That means that if a politician shows passion for a topic, he's going to cheese off a great many people who have a passion for the other side. The press then jumps on the politician because conflict sells, and the way to get it to sell more is to play it up.

[jducoeur]

I'd have more respect for it if it was presented as conflict. But it usually isn't: what I've observed is that passion is being *ridiculed*, instead. If anything, that's tending to quell the conflict, rather than play it up. And it sends a message that passion is a silly thing, to be avoided...

[rickthefightguy.livejournal.com]

Passion is not the only thing that politicians are no longer permitted. How about humor? How long would a Winston Churchill be politically alive in today's arena? I love all the funny stuff he used to say, but he would get creamed. Just like Reagan, who was pretty funny too - at least when he thought the mike was off. Remember that famous quote of his? "I have just signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever - we begin bombing in five minutes". Now, that's funny. If you have a sense of humor. But of course, senses of humor aren't politically correct, so he caught all kinds of flack for saying something as 'awful' as that. And then he caught even more flack for being 'stupid' enough to be wrong about his mike. Jeez - like nobody smart has ever made that mistake before.

Passion or Self-Expression?

[kestrell.livejournal.com]

Reading your examples of passion/lack of, I'm struck by how close the descriptions come to self-expression. Self-expression is how we convey our passions, but it seems our society really does its best to split self-expression away from passion until, even when an individual wishes to express passion, the very ability to do so has been so thoroughly repressed that the individual has difficulty even hitting the override button. I wonder if much of the spin of the current campaign comes from this fact, that recycling old material or using the tit for tat form of "debate" means no oe ever has to produce any original expression of personal belief or conviction, thereby never offending any group which may represent some important demographic. Original ideas, which I have found to be bizarrely absent in the constant spin about spin that is this presidential campaign as represented by media, is only possible if self-expression is an acceptable mode of communication. Communication has become instead a means of conveying the force you have behind you, the groups which support you, the fact that you are not alone but represent a majority of some sort, and this is the image politicians now wish to represent, rather than representing themselves as individuals with individual beliefs. Passion often makes one risk looking ridiculous, just like that fool in the tarot deck, and looking like a fool is something which public figures have become unwilling to risk. In the emphasis on image, demonstrating emotions which might destroy the carefully constructed image is seen as a bad move, not only for the momentary injury to that carefully constructed image, but because now images can be taken out of context, parodied, replayed, permanently kep in the public eye on web pages on in sound bites, until the momentary emotion has become the overriding representation of the person. A passing emotion can be used to do permanent damage to a politician's image, he/she (certainly not she) cannot afford to let an emotion slip through for a second. We are now a culture which is always conscious that any of our reactions could show up digitally recorded and broadcast at any time.