I love this. I’m going to use it. Many in my family think I’m some kind of extremist because I am politically active. It started almost 3 years ago after the first trumpie term complete with the insurrection and his decision to run again. Many want to just keep the peace in the family. It’s not worth it. My children’s and grandchildren’s futures are at stake. I will continue to scream and fight like hell. And never back down to any IDIOTS that voted for a convicted felon and rapist. Never.
I wonder Mike about the way that detachment is in fact drummed into us through the way we’ve been educated. I think moral clarity is to do with a commitment to feeling. To remember that feeling is part of the apparatus of our knowing. To stay with all the discomfort that entails. That we are not just observers of the world but participants in it. We have become so disembodied in our understanding of what constitutes knowledge that many of us have not learned how to skilfully integrate our felt sense with our cognition. And we become talking heads. (Or alternatively we are at the mercy of powerful emotions without any ability to react with discernment). I don’t think it is surprising that people stand back and intellectualise. It’s what we’ve been taught to do. Moral clarity requires something of us: embodied presence, a staying in and with the world, not looking over it disinterestedly. And that is not something that is emphasised in an education system that values one way of knowing over all others. We teach detachment and then wonder why everyone is so detached.
Rebecca, you make good points. There’s the cognitive dissonance that can be evoked by seeing and feeling things - the mental discomfort isn’t tolerable for many - it’s too stressful. Some become emotionally detached, emotionally blunted, less empathetic. Former therapist (retired) here - so I have friends and former colleagues who talk about these things.
Mike had posted an excerpt from this piece and I’d responded (copied and pasted):
"Some discussion with former colleagues over the years about how what may come off as ironic detachment is emotional detachment, emotional blunting, inability to engage fully with their own or other people’s feelings. Often presents as a lack of empathy (as one example).
Which I think we’ve seen more and more of over the past decades.
So agree with you. If we are not taught to hold the discomfort of the dissonance—to expand our capacity to be with it—then it can be overwhelming. It is not surprising that people become detached. I think that staying with the complexity, and learning to navigate the internal discomfort that produces, rather than tidy it up too quickly, is a super important skill. Our emotional landscape is fundamental to our understanding of and ability to navigate the world ethically, but it’s been split off into some kind of lesser realm (for therapy!). We are seeing the consequences of a lack of emotional intelligence writ large on the world.
This is excellent: discomfort, disembodied, integrating our felt sense with our cognition. Women and writers who aren't afraid of thinking with their entire brains have brought a lot to philosophy and ethics.
I'll just add that I think part of the discomfort is the possibility of feeling guilt as one struggles with what one can realistically and enthusiastically(!) do to practice one's moral convictions.
Traditionally there have been paths for working through this, but these days they're all gone. Now, you have to "walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting" because you were born privileged and white, or else you have to let effective altruism drive your charitable giving even though those rational causes are just really boring to you.
Feeling guilt is another one of those uncomfortable feelings to feel. I reckon there is a choice other than the skinned knees of repenting or effective altruism. To just feel it and stay with it and learn to expand with the freakin’ messiness of it all! The beautiful and the ugly, the weird and the wonderful. Because that way lies joy too! And liberation. And way fewer eggshells. Mary Oliver had it so right in that poem. I think it’s about allowing for the everything in you. Then you can tolerate far more of the complexity in the world too x
This piece is so bang on. Armchair critique without the depth of commitment. In essence: without true care.
Very much appreciate your observations, Rebecca Sinclair, and agree. At the cold heart of this do-nothing malaise is the Chomsky-esque “manufacture of consent” — in different words: we are comfortable and distracted and we like it that way, it is a kind of spell — our cars, our paint chips, our devices, our travel bucket lists.
Most folks don’t have the guts to live with moral clarity until it’s too late.
A prominent neoconservative, Douglas Feith, once told journalist Ron Suskind - in discussing the run up to our invasion of Iraq - the following: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we’ll act again, creating new realities. We’re history’s actors. And you, all of you [insert moral relativists, bothsideists, etc.], will be left to study what we do.”
The conservative movement - which has morphed into an authoritarian protofascist movement - long ago committed to choosing a side and purposeful action. Which is what has allowed them to capture our fed courts, successfully gerrymander and suppress the vote, and to now existentially threaten our democracy.
As one of my friends who’s retired from special forces said the other day - regarding the regime’s misuse of the Natl Guard and Marines and how to resist - “it’s time to buckle up, buttercups…”
I was also thinking of this era in conservative discourse when I was reading this piece. But I came to a somewhat different conclusion about our current moment in time - ie how the MAGA movement is defined by ironic detachment, burn it all down indifference, joyful embrace of any kind of sensational spectacle regardless of the moral implications, etc. The moral clarity of the good guys/bad guys framing of the Iraq war has been replaced by a President that compares Russia’s bad behavior to the US and shrugs his shoulders and tells Bill Oreilly “you think the US is so innocent?” Obviously there are ideologues one layer below that are willing to weaponize this inter MAGA ironic detachment, but the movement itself seems to be more oblivious and morally vacant than not.
I think Mike’s on the right track. Mostly, we need clarity of purpose and commitment to action. The pro democracy opposition to this regime doesn’t need a detached intelligentsia - it needs an engaged intelligentsia capable of naming reality and expressly choosing light over darkness. It needs wizards and warriors. The former to plan and strategize and communicate, the latter to seek political and judicial offices, get involved at the grass roots level in every imaginable capacity. We need a democratic reawakening across this land…
I'm wondering who this is aimed at. I understand reluctance to name names, opening up the possibility of a "flame war." But it would be useful to know.
"The revolution is moral seriousness" and that revolution is already getting under way! And it's not what anyone was expecting! Or to quote from Dante's Divine comedy:
I have encountered what you are terming "ironic detachment" in virtually all aspects of my 80+ years as a visitor in this strange, strange land, from my father, to patients with life-threatening diseases that entrust their care with me, to neighbors and colleagues. I think there are a few pertinent comments that can be made to clarify this.
AIL vs ACT
AIL: Apathy, Indifference to cause, and lack of Unity
ACT: Action, Commitment, Togetherness
The above is rampant, and it may be more prevalent in the US. Those in the EU view us as individuals who work to purchase goods (consumers). Those in the EU, in contrast, work to live. Spending a month in Spain last September convinced me that this is indeed valid. In my 60+ years in cancer medicine, dealing with individuals faced with life-ending diseases, many or most, perhaps, take an attitude of, "Dr. here's my disease. Take care of it. I am paying for my healthcare." There is passivity rather than involvement. There is a lack of empowerment. So what is "empowerment." Empowerment: taking responsibility for, and authority over one's outcomes based on education and knowledge of the consequences and contingencies involved in one's own decisions. This focus provides the uplifting energy that can sustain in the face of crisis. My co-author and I used this quote in a book for patients entitled: A Primer on Prostate Cancer, The Empowered Patient's Guide by Strum and Pogliano. See http://tinyurl.com/y7mokfr8
The outcomes of patients who became empowered, who were in the category termed by Bernie Siegel as "exceptional cancer patient (ECaP)" almost always had better outcomes.
Empowerment becomes a lifestyle, a road or path in the "woods" that one can take and which changes one's life forever. However, it is a road less traveled because it is far easier to be lazy in both mind and action. Some great writers have expressed this so beautifully.
"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back… Concerning all acts of initiative, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one commits oneself, then Providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never have occurred otherwise. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings, and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."
−William Hutchison Murray (1913-1996)— The Scottish Himalayan Expedition, 1/1/1951
In my childhood, someone blessed me with a wall plaque that, for some reason, I never fully understood. I cherished and hung it in my basement hideout, where my medical career began with a chemistry lab and where my love of biology began by looking down a microscope.
The plaque read, "The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary."
Maybe this sheds some light on why we see what Mike is calling ironic detachment.
I love this. I’m going to use it. Many in my family think I’m some kind of extremist because I am politically active. It started almost 3 years ago after the first trumpie term complete with the insurrection and his decision to run again. Many want to just keep the peace in the family. It’s not worth it. My children’s and grandchildren’s futures are at stake. I will continue to scream and fight like hell. And never back down to any IDIOTS that voted for a convicted felon and rapist. Never.
I wonder Mike about the way that detachment is in fact drummed into us through the way we’ve been educated. I think moral clarity is to do with a commitment to feeling. To remember that feeling is part of the apparatus of our knowing. To stay with all the discomfort that entails. That we are not just observers of the world but participants in it. We have become so disembodied in our understanding of what constitutes knowledge that many of us have not learned how to skilfully integrate our felt sense with our cognition. And we become talking heads. (Or alternatively we are at the mercy of powerful emotions without any ability to react with discernment). I don’t think it is surprising that people stand back and intellectualise. It’s what we’ve been taught to do. Moral clarity requires something of us: embodied presence, a staying in and with the world, not looking over it disinterestedly. And that is not something that is emphasised in an education system that values one way of knowing over all others. We teach detachment and then wonder why everyone is so detached.
Rebecca, you make good points. There’s the cognitive dissonance that can be evoked by seeing and feeling things - the mental discomfort isn’t tolerable for many - it’s too stressful. Some become emotionally detached, emotionally blunted, less empathetic. Former therapist (retired) here - so I have friends and former colleagues who talk about these things.
Mike had posted an excerpt from this piece and I’d responded (copied and pasted):
"Some discussion with former colleagues over the years about how what may come off as ironic detachment is emotional detachment, emotional blunting, inability to engage fully with their own or other people’s feelings. Often presents as a lack of empathy (as one example).
Which I think we’ve seen more and more of over the past decades.
Accelerated in recent years."
So agree with you. If we are not taught to hold the discomfort of the dissonance—to expand our capacity to be with it—then it can be overwhelming. It is not surprising that people become detached. I think that staying with the complexity, and learning to navigate the internal discomfort that produces, rather than tidy it up too quickly, is a super important skill. Our emotional landscape is fundamental to our understanding of and ability to navigate the world ethically, but it’s been split off into some kind of lesser realm (for therapy!). We are seeing the consequences of a lack of emotional intelligence writ large on the world.
This is excellent: discomfort, disembodied, integrating our felt sense with our cognition. Women and writers who aren't afraid of thinking with their entire brains have brought a lot to philosophy and ethics.
I'll just add that I think part of the discomfort is the possibility of feeling guilt as one struggles with what one can realistically and enthusiastically(!) do to practice one's moral convictions.
Traditionally there have been paths for working through this, but these days they're all gone. Now, you have to "walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting" because you were born privileged and white, or else you have to let effective altruism drive your charitable giving even though those rational causes are just really boring to you.
Feeling guilt is another one of those uncomfortable feelings to feel. I reckon there is a choice other than the skinned knees of repenting or effective altruism. To just feel it and stay with it and learn to expand with the freakin’ messiness of it all! The beautiful and the ugly, the weird and the wonderful. Because that way lies joy too! And liberation. And way fewer eggshells. Mary Oliver had it so right in that poem. I think it’s about allowing for the everything in you. Then you can tolerate far more of the complexity in the world too x
Needed to hear this. I resolve to speak and act more effectively and assertively.
This is brilliant thank you.
This piece is so bang on. Armchair critique without the depth of commitment. In essence: without true care.
Very much appreciate your observations, Rebecca Sinclair, and agree. At the cold heart of this do-nothing malaise is the Chomsky-esque “manufacture of consent” — in different words: we are comfortable and distracted and we like it that way, it is a kind of spell — our cars, our paint chips, our devices, our travel bucket lists.
Most folks don’t have the guts to live with moral clarity until it’s too late.
A prominent neoconservative, Douglas Feith, once told journalist Ron Suskind - in discussing the run up to our invasion of Iraq - the following: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we’ll act again, creating new realities. We’re history’s actors. And you, all of you [insert moral relativists, bothsideists, etc.], will be left to study what we do.”
The conservative movement - which has morphed into an authoritarian protofascist movement - long ago committed to choosing a side and purposeful action. Which is what has allowed them to capture our fed courts, successfully gerrymander and suppress the vote, and to now existentially threaten our democracy.
As one of my friends who’s retired from special forces said the other day - regarding the regime’s misuse of the Natl Guard and Marines and how to resist - “it’s time to buckle up, buttercups…”
I was also thinking of this era in conservative discourse when I was reading this piece. But I came to a somewhat different conclusion about our current moment in time - ie how the MAGA movement is defined by ironic detachment, burn it all down indifference, joyful embrace of any kind of sensational spectacle regardless of the moral implications, etc. The moral clarity of the good guys/bad guys framing of the Iraq war has been replaced by a President that compares Russia’s bad behavior to the US and shrugs his shoulders and tells Bill Oreilly “you think the US is so innocent?” Obviously there are ideologues one layer below that are willing to weaponize this inter MAGA ironic detachment, but the movement itself seems to be more oblivious and morally vacant than not.
How do you think we get the left aligned for the decades long fight it’s going to take to reverse this?
The right has long been unified under Christianity, while the left flails and in fights. How do we do that what the right did over the past 30 years?
I think Mike’s on the right track. Mostly, we need clarity of purpose and commitment to action. The pro democracy opposition to this regime doesn’t need a detached intelligentsia - it needs an engaged intelligentsia capable of naming reality and expressly choosing light over darkness. It needs wizards and warriors. The former to plan and strategize and communicate, the latter to seek political and judicial offices, get involved at the grass roots level in every imaginable capacity. We need a democratic reawakening across this land…
So right.
Keep in mind that being on this planet is a temporary phenomenon & committing to the drama = passing in the wind.
See you on Saturday - this grandma is marching!
I'm wondering who this is aimed at. I understand reluctance to name names, opening up the possibility of a "flame war." But it would be useful to know.
I don’t know that Mike knows my personal circle of friends, neighbors, family members but this could very well be aimed at a few dozen of them.
With the compliments of:
William Wordsworth,
WB Yeats,
J. Milton,
R. Descartes,
Dante.
Earth is sick, and Heaven is weary with the hollow words, which states
and kingdoms utter when they talk of truth and justice.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the
falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is
loosed upon the world.
So yet a nobler task awaits thy hand, for what can war but endless war
still breed till truth and right from violence be freed, and publick
faith clear'd from the shameful brand of publick fraud.
Throw out all your beliefs and start over!
For as I turned, there greeted mine likewise, what all behold who
contemplate aright, that's Heaven's revolution through the skies.
https://www.lavitanuova.org.uk
About moral revolution, with the compliments of:
William Wordsworth,
WB Yeats,
J. Milton,
R. Descartes,
Dante.
Earth is sick, and Heaven is weary with the hollow words, which states
and kingdoms utter when they talk of truth and justice.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the
falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is
loosed upon the world.
So yet a nobler task awaits thy hand, for what can war but endless war
still breed till truth and right from violence be freed, and publick
faith clear'd from the shameful brand of publick fraud.
Throw out all your beliefs and start over!
For as I turned, there greeted mine likewise, what all behold who
contemplate aright, that's Heaven's revolution through the skies.
https://www.lavitanuova.org.uk
"The revolution is moral seriousness" and that revolution is already getting under way! And it's not what anyone was expecting! Or to quote from Dante's Divine comedy:
For as I turned, there greeted mine likewise
What all behold who contemplate aright,
That's Heaven's revolution through the skies.
https://www.lavitanuova.org.uk
I have encountered what you are terming "ironic detachment" in virtually all aspects of my 80+ years as a visitor in this strange, strange land, from my father, to patients with life-threatening diseases that entrust their care with me, to neighbors and colleagues. I think there are a few pertinent comments that can be made to clarify this.
AIL vs ACT
AIL: Apathy, Indifference to cause, and lack of Unity
ACT: Action, Commitment, Togetherness
The above is rampant, and it may be more prevalent in the US. Those in the EU view us as individuals who work to purchase goods (consumers). Those in the EU, in contrast, work to live. Spending a month in Spain last September convinced me that this is indeed valid. In my 60+ years in cancer medicine, dealing with individuals faced with life-ending diseases, many or most, perhaps, take an attitude of, "Dr. here's my disease. Take care of it. I am paying for my healthcare." There is passivity rather than involvement. There is a lack of empowerment. So what is "empowerment." Empowerment: taking responsibility for, and authority over one's outcomes based on education and knowledge of the consequences and contingencies involved in one's own decisions. This focus provides the uplifting energy that can sustain in the face of crisis. My co-author and I used this quote in a book for patients entitled: A Primer on Prostate Cancer, The Empowered Patient's Guide by Strum and Pogliano. See http://tinyurl.com/y7mokfr8
The outcomes of patients who became empowered, who were in the category termed by Bernie Siegel as "exceptional cancer patient (ECaP)" almost always had better outcomes.
Empowerment becomes a lifestyle, a road or path in the "woods" that one can take and which changes one's life forever. However, it is a road less traveled because it is far easier to be lazy in both mind and action. Some great writers have expressed this so beautifully.
"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back… Concerning all acts of initiative, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one commits oneself, then Providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never have occurred otherwise. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings, and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."
−William Hutchison Murray (1913-1996)— The Scottish Himalayan Expedition, 1/1/1951
In my childhood, someone blessed me with a wall plaque that, for some reason, I never fully understood. I cherished and hung it in my basement hideout, where my medical career began with a chemistry lab and where my love of biology began by looking down a microscope.
The plaque read, "The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary."
Maybe this sheds some light on why we see what Mike is calling ironic detachment.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vG7CvbccdVM
Carole Cadwalladr and John Stewart
Ironic detachment is armor against uncomfortable personal responsibility. It’s also transparent.