In the aftermath of the
Ottawa attack, PM #StephenHarper made the obligatory utterances about maintaining Canadian
resolve, liberties, etc. Substantively, his statement seemed well crafted. But
he himself appeared removed and somehow untouched by all the drama that had
unfolded – and after spending over 12 hours under lockdown in the parliament
building. This, of course, could be seen as an expression of much needed,
admirable, steadfast determination in the face of pure evil. Yet, I was
reminded of #LewisMumford’s putdown of spineless #liberals at the start of WW II: “His first impulse
in any situation is to get rid of emotion because it may cause him to go wrong.
Unfortunately for his effort to achieve poise, a purely intellectual judgment,
eviscerated of emotional reference, often causes wry miscalculations. … Instead of priding himself on not being ‘carried away by his emotions,’
the liberal should rather be a little alarmed because he often has no emotions
that could, under any conceivable circumstances, carry him away.”
Mumford’s essay was
recently republished/reposted, and #DavidBrooks evoked it in the NYT to urge
more decisive action against ISIS and Putin. Some liberal critics then
criticized him for this deployment of Mumford’s argument. Also, Brooks himself
appears in some of his writings (particularly in his neropop book, …) strangely
blasé about some trends which, say, Aldous Huxley once found profoundly disturbing
– though he observed those in much more embryonic form. So the liberal
intelligentsia may not have a monopoly on the “emotional anesthesia” Mumford
once decried.
Several years ago, I
wrote a paper (to which I have probably referred before) arguing that rising to
the top in politics and complex organizations a thick skin. And having such “down-regulation”
of emotional response could then deprive leaders and decision-makers of the
degree of emotional input needed for sound judgment (a danger exacerbated by
the tendency of those exercising power to become even more self-absorbed and
overconfident). With the risk of sounding overly judgmental, this problem now seems
broader – as demonstrated, for example, by all the casual chatter and fake
emoting on CNN; or by the comments of a construction worker in Ottawa who
described – shall I say, indifferently – how he heard firecracker-like sounds,
looked up, and saw “a man with a rifle shooting at a bunch of people.”
All this does look a bit
strange – particularly to someone who is perhaps not “weird” enough. And this
sort of detachment is likely to grow, as the trends highlighted by Thomas De
Zengotita over a decade ago (“The Numbing of the American Mind: Culture as
Anesthetic”) have only been accelerated.
