Yes, that Cornell West and that Robert George. That leftist, rapping, divinity school teaching preacher and that deeply conservative, Latin mass going, James Madison worshipping establishment professor. Those two guys. But first, let me remind you of my argument from Part I and Part II. It drove me nuts that so many people write posts, make YouTube videos, publish books on the premise that the problem with the electorate is that one group on the other side is polluted by misinformation and, therefore, the answer to our current democratic woes is to find a way to give them the right information. This is very much how much of the left proposes to fix things. The right? Not so much on the misinformation bandwagon because whatever vibe shifts may or may not be happening people wearing red MAGA hats do not seem very interested In educating people who watch MSNBC.
Not going to go back over all of the information provided in installments one and two of this trilogy, but I will point out that an additional area of supportive research comes from self-perception theory, which proposes that people adopt attitudes without access to their states of mood and cognition.[109]
in other words, the premise of many political enthusiasts that by pointing out the wrongness and even foolishness of someone’s self-perception that they made the right choice and adopted the right opinions in the last election will magically make them drop their previous beliefs and decisions is itself WRONG. Those cognitive crusaders are correct that such a change would be magical because nothing that we know about attitude in our muggle world suggests that this is possible, Indeed, such efforts serve to harden opposition to the new advertised as more enlightened weltanschauung.
So let’s forget the information mistake, and let’s get to the changing attitudes before I explain how an event at Princeton University last Friday with West and George provided an example and an epiphany about this issue.
The Sermon on the Mount and the Healing of the Leper (1481-82), fresco, Sistine Chapel,
The famous Beatitudes in the New Testament were the teachings of Jesus in the
Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1-10) that teach his followers how to live. My promised beatitudes are not as ambitious; they focus on how to stop kidding ourselves about how people change. Here they are:
- Blessed are those who stop reposting every meme about how corrupt, stupid, and senile the current POTUS is. These saints have realized that doing so is useless, that it only feeds the delusion that this activity matters and their own understandable but misguided desire for revenge against a horrible person. Virtuously, followers of this beatitude have stopped this self-pleasuring which isn’t even as good as the other kind of self-pleasuring.
- Blessed are those who stop demeaning and insulting everybody who voted for the current President of the United states. When did insulting someone ever change their attitude? See above as to the futility of self-pleasuring exercises and constant bleats to remind us and them of their superiority.
- Blessed are those who resist effectively illegal and unconstitutional Executive Branch maneuvers instead of wasting time on #s 1 & 2
- Blessed are those who have foresworn forever the nostrum of ‘ How could those people have voted against their own interests?’ They discerned that if we knew what their interests were we would have done a better job in the election. They had the epiphany that ‘it’s the attitude, stupid’ and interests may take a back seat to feelings of satisfaction at trashing the place.
- Blessed are those who took a look at what happened with Brexit and realized how difficult attitudes are going to be to change. Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times recently noted that the INFORMATION that the English are “a profoundly unhappy tribe”, still leaves almost one-third unchanged in the attitude that led them to vote for skipping out of the European Union in 2016. Thirty percent of Brits polled know the sad facts of that move — low-income households in Britain are now 27 per cent poorer than their equivalents in France and 60 per cent poorer than those in Ireland, UK goods exports are 30% lower than they would have been if UK had not left the single market and customs union according to the BBC, net migration to the UK not only didn’t decrease but soared to a record high of almost 1m in the year to June 2023. The thirty percent know those facts and they still have the same attitude. Blessed who understand this is not just an English phenomenon.
- Blessed are those who can find a way to stop judging those with whom they disagree politically and instead to put themselves in their shoes for a better understanding. They shall sleep better.
I am so NOT there on # 6. Trying, failing… The whole Sam Beckett deal.
Of course, people likely will ignore these beatitudes delivered from my digital soapbox as regularly as they ignore the original set of Beatitudes delivered 2000 years ago from Mount Eremos by someone with the greatest wisdom and authority. But if only a few of us would insist on making these distinctions might there be a difference?
And that’s where Cornell West and Robert George come in and their talk on May 23rd: Truth Matters: Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division . I’ve heard both of them speak previously. Neither of them matches my own ideological profile, which is on the left more pragmatic and from the right a lot less dogmatic. But there they were two men who have known each other for a couple of decades and worked together saying things like ‘your vocation is truth-seeking’, ‘character matters’ and’ ‘richness has to do with things that money can’t buy.’ On the page, those words could be out of a banal self help book for all of their ordinariness. But that’s the thing about how attitudes change, it wasn’t the words but that these sentiments were delivered by genuine human beings and we all felt better for hearing them.
What mattered in changing my attitude toward both of them and altered the way in which I was looking at the world was not what they said although what they said was wonderful ranging from Socrates to Maya Angelou, from Augustine to Martin Luther King. It was their presence. Going back to Robert Gagne and his framework of varieties of learning, we understand that attitudes are predisposition for positive or negative actions. When our attitude is in the driver’s seat, we are choosing personal actions toward or away from objects, events, or people. To quote Margaret Gredler’s description of this concept, “What changes attitudes is the human model of behavior. When the model is perceived as admirable, powerful, and credible, learning is most effective.”
What West and George were able to project was not scripted. There was a genuineness about the dialogue they enacted that acknowledged their differences but emphasized their empathy for each other. And everyone in that packed auditorium felt the electricity of their example. I was certain that we all walked away wanting to be more like them even while cognitively we understood that we had many differences with them.
In order to change attitudes we need different human models of behavior, different people. And I’m not suggesting that those two would change the attitudes of the people who are both susceptible to shifting their predispositions and critical to shifting the electoral power and what is left of our democracy. This was Princeton reunion weekend and you had Ivy League graduates with the sprinkling of townies like myself in that room. Michigan and Ohio and West Virginia and Florida will require different human models. Having Trump fill their spirits may be the equivalent of ingesting junk food from the haughty perspective of the coastal elites but who among us has not eaten at McDonalds in our life and been glad of the blood sugar rush? Are these different human models to inspire attitude change the equivalent of health food then? I think not. But they need to be real which means probably not current politicians. (Bernie worked for a large swathe of the population, but these models need to emerge new unencumbered by past positions.)
These models of choice of behavior and outlook will certainly not be those who failed to follow the other set of beatitudes especially the ones blessing the clean of heart, the seekers of justice, and the makers of peace. We will know them by their actions; the very last line F. Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote in block letters was “ACTION IS CHARACTER.” Amen. Henry Oliver recently wrote of how the philosopher the Baruch Spinoza “proposed that humans are not discrete and self-sufficient entities, but are constantly being formed by the world around them.” To find the new models look at what they are putting out into the world around those whose attitudes we seek to change? Are they just being out-fluencers tossing off the same tired and ineffective ideas and policies, the casual disregard and condescension? Do they realize that as Walker Percy once wrote that we are all always seeking to win “title to our own existence“, to be acknowledged? Our cognoscenti talks about ‘feeling seen’ without imagining how those who voted for Republican candidate rage that if they are ever seen it is as misfit, misguided, misinformed monsters.
We need human models who will reach out to a group that like their fellow travelers in the UK who still believe Brexit was a good idea are as the researchers Henderson and Wyn Jones noted “are deeply conscious of what they clearly regard as a jarring contrast between past glories and a present brought-low; … a national group (that) seems to feel besieged both from within and without; …that has secured major changes in order to assuage its concerns, yet remains deeply dissatisfied with the results; that is angry at its lot.” Like it our not, Donald Trump became a model for millions of people. Our job as citizens is to find better models for many of those same angry, dissatisfied, resentful people. It isn’t going to be easy, but it also isn’t going to be done unless we accept that the issue is attitude.
