Rebuilding a Future When Our World Comes Crashing Down

Raw reaction and ancient wisdom for the morning after

Like so many (all?) American liberals, I got almost no sleep last night. But I apparently fell asleep long enough to have perhaps the worst nightmare I’ve ever had:

I find myself on a visit to very good friends, who have a baby of several months. We’re all in our fifties now, so perhaps it was their grandchild. The baby was beautiful and I was overjoyed for them and thrilled to hold the baby. It had such soft, huge, cheeks!

But I soon find myself carrying the baby through city streets, while also managing other logistical challenges. I also find myself accompanied by a small child who is close to me (my child? I don’t know), and I give the baby to the child to hold while we navigate through a tough spot (I think I am now carrying a bike?). And then to my horror, a shadowy group of people steal the baby from the child’s hands and abscond with it, at a moment the child and baby are out of my reach. I then give chase, all the way to a seedy part of town. But when I get to their ‘lair,’ I just see them disappearing. I am certain that the baby is gone for good.

And then I woke up. And realized it was just a nightmare. But then I recalled what had happened last night, and how it ushered in a living nightmare for us liberals. And so I was barely consoled at the thought that my awful nightmare was just a dream.

The 2016 election changed many of our lives. One way it changed my life was by changing my research. Together with my wonderful former students Oliver Hahl and Minjae Kim (later joined by then-student, Ethan Poskanzer) we shifted our research to providing some insight into how it is that a “lying demagogue” can be “authentically appealing” and how it is that— on both right and left— there is a marked tendency to exhibit “partisan moral flexibility,” whereby we privilege “deeper truths” over objective facts when statements are made by our own side’s political standard bearers, but we flip the script when it comes to statements by opposing politicians. In short, we demand factuality from the other side, but only ‘truth’ from our side.

Indeed, we may even enjoy it when our standard-bearers deliberately distort the facts in order to proclaim what we regard as a suppressed truth, especially if it drives the other side wild with rage. Stop the steal! we scream even when there’s no evidence of stealing and we wouldn’t say anything about the stealing had the result been the desired one (hence, the silence today). Defund the police! we shout even when we have no serious plan for accomplishing that, if construed literally. But we do know the other side will take these slogans literally (and seriously) and will be enraged as a result.

As you can see, our finding that this tendency occurs on both right and left have led me to the view that we all are suspect to partisan moral flexibility. Who among us is able to maintain the same level of high moral dudgeon we express when the perceived moral infraction accords with our interests and commitments vs. when the infraction is in tension with our interests or commitments?

And so a key takeaway for me is to be humbled by our struggle to separate what we feel is true because it accords with our commitments and what is actually the case. And if such humility is essential for us to grope our way towards the truth, how much the scarier that a majority of Americans have chosen to be the most powerful person in history (especially given the recent SCOTUS decision) a man who makes a mockery of humility and of anchoring truth claims in objective evidence.

What to do now? I don’t know. For the moment, I take a small amount of solace from the fact that the challenges we are facing are age-old. Just before Jan 6, 2021, I drafted an essay that melded my research with Oliver and Minjae with a literary analysis of the text of the story of the golden calf. (I then published it on the 8th). I think the reader of the essay, “The Golden Calf of Trumpism”, may be startled to discover that the fundamental dynamics behind Trumpism were well known to the author of Exodus.

Regardless of whether you believe in divine authorship of the biblical text, I think it should be somewhat reassuring that there is little new in the challenges we are experiencing, and that an ancient text can be so insightful regarding contemporary politics. I think the essay is also useful because it gives us a name for why the embrace of Trump is so dismaying: It is a form of idolatry. I’d add also that the fact that Trumpism is idolatrous (in particular, worship of oneself and the myths we concoct about ourselves rather than the negative theology we should embrace given our ignorance about the world) doesn’t mean that that other political ideologies— particularly those on the left— are not also idolatrous. They are.

The ancient wisdom of the Torah may also help make sense of the nightmare I had last night, and perhaps the living nightmare so many of us feel we are now living through (once again). In the spring of 2020, at the beginning of another nightmare (with the challenges of COVID exacerbated by the politics of the first Trump administration), I wrote an an essay entitled “Rebuilding a Future When the World Comes Crashing Down.” I shared it with a close friend this morning after I shared my nightmare with him. Here’s how I explained its relevance to us, at this moment:

I think a lot of the crisis is for us as parents. We built our lives up on certain foundations and brought kids into the world assuming those foundations, and encouraging our kids to assume those foundations too. And now somehow we have to help them find a way forward. This is how I was feeling in early COVID too.

For those who read the essay, you will hopefully find it reassuring that this ancient text (actually, three interlinked texts— Genesis 19, Genesis 38, and the book of Ruth) so profoundly capture an aspect of the feeling that I summarize above and that you are somewhat inspired by the text’s lesson (which the parental figures ultimately succeed in putting into practice, if with considerable struggle and in limited fashion).

How do we rebuild when the word comes crashing down? In short, the biblical answer is to face the fact that we owe it to our children not to give up on them. We must find a way to work for them, to help them find their way to a secure home base even when we cannot find our way there ourselves and there’s no going back to the home we knew.

Take care, everyone.