Rational Philosophy

Lou Dobbs’ strongly worded commentary on CNN.com today begins with the words “lunacy among our public figures.” He’s referring to the likes of Katie Couric, Barak Obama, and Bill Moyers who have all expressed discomfort with the prevailing symbolism of the American flag.

Barack Obama has stopped wearing his American flag lapel pin, for instance.

Lou’s thoughts on the subject (if you can call them that) are so coarsely grained that I would have been inclined to shake my head and move on, but his knee jerk patriotism must be widely felt, and that makes it worthy of some analysis. After all, which of us hasn’t felt the tug of a strong, arbitrary allegiance at some point in our lives?

Patriotism reflects an identification with the nation of one’s birth or adoption. The idea of patriotism expresses the impulse or feeling that our nation should prevail over or is better than others. By saying: “I am American” or “I am Iranian” or “I am [fill in the blank]” we are also saying: “I am not anything else.” It seems simple enough, but the feeling of patriotism emerges from a complex and overlapping set of responses:

Fear of other people and other cultures, fear of the unknown, fear of threats to the nation real or imagined. Pride in one’s nation, its culture, habits, principles, laws, history. Familiarity with one’s surroundings — the weather, the habitat, the geography.

If we parse out these various complexities we start to see a pattern. Some of the impulses for our sense of patriotism are completely arbitrary and subjective such that arguing about it becomes a ridiculous matter (weather or geography or success at a particular kind of sport, for instance). And some we may logically defend — the extent to which a country upholds basic human freedoms, for instance, is not a subjective matter, and has led more than one person to change his or her nationality.

So, patriotism can be divided into two distinct concepts — an identification with the idea of one’s nation, or an identification with the ideals of one’s nation.

Dobbs clearly argues for the idea of America, regardless of its record on matters of such grave importance as human rights, war-waging, and international diplomacy. Couric, Obama, and Moyers on the other hand clearly want to make a point about the ideals of the nation, and the degree to which they support the way that those ideals are being upheld by the current administration, or not.

Last night I performed a show with no audience. Apart from myself and the bass player, the only people in the room for much of the gig were the sound engineer and the wait person. (Toward the end a few people showed up early for the next act.) And yet, I was aware of creating a performance, an event. This event lacked an object, and so could be said to be not a true performance. After all, what is a performance without an audience?

The reverse of this experience, I suppose, would be an object without an event.

Just now I read the New York Times piece about a woman called Tania Head who has claimed to be a 9/11 survivor, a claim which now seems unverifiable and possibly false. Her story of survival has moved people. She has acted as a survivor and engaged with others as a survivor. If she is not a survivor, if her stories have been fabricated, then what does that say about the truth of the responses she has evoked in others?

From reading the Times piece it seems that Ms. Head has not been trying to make anyone feel anything inappropriate about the events of 9/11 or its aftermath. She has not been attempting to misrepresent the tragedy, only her own part in it. And yet, if I put myself in the shoes of someone who has spoken to Ms. Head and responded to her story, I would feel that something had been taken away from me, that I had been cheated.

This reaction seems at once rational and irrational.

In communication and in representation, the truth is illusive. Any encoding of a story or feeling into words or signs must fail to perfectly convey the truth. Communication is at best an approximation of the truth. Likewise, the study of fundamental physics tells us that nothing can be exactly known about a physical measurement. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle indicates this with great force: The more accurately we measure the location of a thing (a particle) the less sure we can be about its momentum. We can never approach exactness in either one or the other, since the inexactness of the other will approach infinity.

In Ms. Head’s case, if we presume for the sake of argument that she is not a survivor, then her story is a fabrication. Then again, it is a fabrication in which many of the aspects of the story are approximately accurate, they just didn’t happen to her. Ms. Head didn’t survive, but some did. Ms. Head didn’t experience the emotion of that trauma, but some did. She has drawn on her fiction, one presumes, from reports of the actual experiences of others.

Rationally then, again presuming that Ms. Head’s tale is fabrication, what she has done is to label something as her experience when it is not her experience. To label it a best approximation of her truth, when it is not. We only have our lives, and in our lives the closer we can come to an honest and true awareness of the world around us, the more we can derive value and add value. This, I think, is why a report such as this, of possibly deliberate fabrication, so makes us recoil and wish it were other.

 

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