A Talking Politics podcast about the challenges of political journalism in a deeply polarized age (“Facts vs Opinions,” June 4, 2020) increased my confusion about logos (reason, rationality) vs. mythos. While I’ve been puzzling over how profoundly logos-inflected tech reporting and policymaking seem to be, current events are swamping logos-based journalism with pathos (passion, emotion, sentiment). This post is groping towards ways of thinking about what’s going on today.
Analysis vs. morality
This observation by Helen Thompson at timecode 39:32 (lightly edited for clarity) highlights some of these themes:
I think that what's happening in America at the moment does run into the limits of the analytical mode [of opinion writing]. Sometimes I think that's been true about Trump since the beginning. There's something about his presidency, where the analytical mode just seems inadequate to get to grips, in any moral sense, with what has been happening – and that is particularly true now. In terms of what's been going on for over the last week, the analytical mode is near exhausted, because there's something almost religious about what is happening. That means that trying to use conventional political language to try to say something about it doesn't really work. It can risk coming over as simple indifference, and that's simply not what's required in this situation.
I’m skeptical about by the claim that the analytical mode can’t handle morality. I think Kant, Mill and Peter Singer (to name a few) would probably disagree. For example, Singer’s drowning child example is premised on the argument that one should use rationality to extend altruism from kith and kin to anybody, anywhere.
As for the religious atmosphere: CG Jung said, as I understand it (this caveat applies to all my claims), that the religious function is necessary to the psyche. To Jung, religion’s irrationality is a feature, not a bug. Religious experience is a direct contact with the divine. The logos of theology, as well as the rituals of religious practice, is necessary to protect people from being swamped by a direct experience of the numinous. Religion is expressed in (or expresses?) archetypes, i.e. deep patterns of consciousness; it’s therefore not replaceable by science/reason.
When religion is replaced by rationality, something important is suppressed. Helen Thompson links a rejection of the analytical mode to a rise of a moral-religious perspective. One could read this in terms of Jung’s ‘shadow,’ i.e. the dark, unwanted, feared, repressed side of one’s personality. Arguably, reason suppressed religious morality, which eventually bubbled up in popular passions of all kinds, from the religious nationalism of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, to Black Lives Matter.
I suspect the rejection of expertise circa 2016 was a harbinger in the Anglosphere. For example, British politician Michael Gove famously said during the Brexit debate in 2016 that “people in this country have had enough of experts.” The Atlantic has argued several times (Jan 2019; Nov 2019) that President Trump rejects expertise (though not his own). In Freudian terms, Gove’s “organizations with acronyms saying they know what’s best” is a rejection of the superego, and Orbán is the eruption of the id.
Logos, mythos, pathos
While this is pretty clearly a rejection of logos, it doesn’t really sound like a turn to mythos. It’s certainly not mythos in the sense of gods and heroes, as opposed to rational philosophy, as Plato et al. would have it. It’s close to the second meaning Merriam-Webster gives for mythos, though: “a pattern of beliefs expressing often symbolically the characteristic or prevalent attitudes in a group or culture.” (To grind my axe about the importance of stories – both Merriam-Webster and Oxford also give the meaning of theme or plot. As Oxford has it, “(in literature) a traditional or recurrent narrative theme or plot structure.”) There’s a semi-mythical feel, too, as the martyrs of injustice become legendary, incarnating narratives of suffering.
Just saying that mythos refers to a set of beliefs, though, doesn’t capture either the sense of the numinous that is inherent in myth, let alone the militant moralism of American politics, from the Puritans to the Moral Majority and beyond. Nor does mythos capture the passions that frame the podcast conversation. It’s not just morality, and certainly not ethics (to me, ethics connotes codes of conduct, whereas morality is beliefs). Mythos doesn’t capture the animating passions, for example about the immorality of racism or abortion – though perhaps myth, when defined as about something transcendent, does speak to the sacredness of rejecting those values. These are, to my mind, passions – strongly and deeply felt emotions, intuitions, and beliefs.
Thus we come to the triplet of ethos, pathos, and logos. I don’t think the topic at hand is primarily about modes of persuasion, though there seems to be overlap between mythos and pathos. The topic here is the truth program that’s in play, to use Paul Veyne’s term (“our criteria and means of obtaining true ideas,” Did the Greeks believe in their myths, 1988, p. 118), and the characteristics of that program, e.g. empiricism and logical proof (logos) vs. intuition, feelings, and experience (mythos).
I’m left still groping for ways to think about the alternative to logos. It’s not quite mythos, and it’s not really pathos. I’m not even sure what I mean by logos…
References
No comments:
Post a Comment