American myths
The State of the Union is always an odd spectacle, filled with little absurdities. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one quite like the event that unfolded on Tuesday evening. One of the more interesting moments came, though, after I’d already switched away from the speech, when, at its conclusion, Nancy Pelosi stood and ripped up her copy of the president’s speech. It would have been understandable had she done so in a fit of rage, but Pelosi doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who does things like that in an uncalculated fashion. I have no idea whether it was a clever tactical move; maybe it will step on coverage of the speech and crowd out some of the talking points Trump hoped to get across. I found it fascinating for another reason, though.
There were plenty of people upset by the stunt. Take this for example [double spaces after periods removed, because they are an affront to all that is decent]:
Pelosi's act dishonored the institution and destroyed even the pretense of civility and decorum in the House. If this is the Speaker's "drop the mike" moment, it is a disgrace that should never be celebrated or repeated. In a single act, she obliterated decades of tradition.
It’s an odd instinct to watch a speech in which a man who has spent the past four years shredding one norm after another shows a flagrant disregard for truth and decorum, and to decide that it is the action of the Speaker of the House that deserves the scolding. (But then it’s also odd to make arguments in defense of an embattled Republican president that directly contradict the arguments one once made against an embattled Democratic president, as Turley did.) But set that aside. What I’m interested in is the invocation of tradition. Let’s talk about tradition.
The problem that all societies face is the need to maintain order and nudge people’s behavior in socially useful directions despite the fact that individuals have minds of their own and can do any damn thing they please. The problem becomes especially acute in societies that are highly complex and hierarchical, because then some of the people who can do any damn thing they please are in positions of great power. Societies design all sorts of clever institutions in an attempt to constrain the behavior of the powerful, but those institutions are only as good as the respect people pay them. America’s Constitution has its flaws and its features, but the latter does not include the ability to free itself from its place in the National Archives and physically constrain a president in the process of abusing his power. For institutions to work—for them to succeed in shaping people’s behavior in the desired way—they must be more than just words on paper. And that’s where tradition comes in.
A tradition is something we do because we’ve done it before. Humans are creatures of habit. Having walked into a room for the first time and chosen a seat location, you are almost certain to return to that location on subsequent visits. We get a positive emotional response from this tendency: the comfort of familiarity, the confidence of knowing what to do without having to think about why. And our species has learned to deploy this tendency, and this emotional response, as a means to coordinate collective action.
You see this in a fairly innocuous way around things like holidays. Those of us who grew up celebrating Christmas, for example, were taught to observe particular rites and rituals—from decorating a tree to cooking a Christmas turkey—which instilled in us a strong sense of the uniqueness of that time of year, its special significance. We carry that with us into adulthood, and with it the effect of these various observances on our behavior. The specialness of Christmas serves to coordinate collective behavior and direct it in particular ways: toward greater generosity to others, for instance, or, for those who are observant Christians, toward solemn reflection on the meaning of the birth of Christ. Brands recognized the power of this ages ago, as Charlie Brown once observed, and used it to coordinate people’s energy and money toward an orgy of mass consumerism. Maybe Charlie Brown didn’t use the word orgy.
How does it work? Well, it works in part by tapping our natural emotional response to repeated behaviors: to tradition. And it works because it becomes a self-sustaining cultural equilibrium. We see others observing various rituals and feel social pressure to pay homage to them ourselves, which reinforces the importance of the rituals to others in turn. People who neglect the rituals experience negative social feedback. They get lampooned in popular art, called things like Scrooge, and so on. They get tsked by their neighbors for not upholding the street’s demanding house-lighting reputation. They become the subject of right-wing hate campaigns for daring to offer acknowledgement and respect to other traditions, thus waging war on Christmas.
To review: tradition and ritual imbue certain institutions with meaning. In doing so, they create behavioral norms which shape individuals’ behavior. And in many social contexts, the traditions are there to help to constrain individuals who might otherwise use their power to act in socially destructive ways. Which brings us back to Speaker Pelosi.
Founder worship in America is often frustrating to observe. America’s founding institutions have always had serious flaws, and social progress has been a process of recognizing those flaws and building the political strength to rectify them, one by one. Founder worship impedes that process, and for those of us who want to see an America which adheres more closely to the principles of liberty and justice and equality, blind respect for tradition often represents another obstacle which must be overcome.
But that reverence also serves a purpose—or it did, once. Solemn respect for America’s institutions is an obstacle to change, but also a bulwark against abuse of the system. Because the system, it’s important to remember, is just people, and some people are not good, and those who aren’t good will often seek to use the system to ends that don’t serve the broader public. Ritual solemnity—tradition, and respect for it—are there, first, to work on the consciences of those who might otherwise do as they damn well please. And they are there, secondly, to coordinate the actions of everyone else around the bad actor—even those who stand to benefit in some small way from the bad behavior of that bad actor—toward a response that checks his negative actions. If the awe with which so many Americans are struck as they contemplate America’s great institutions doesn’t faze a would-be tyrant, then perhaps it will move enough of his cabinet, or of the legislature, or of the broader public to prevent him from doing irreparable harm to those institutions. Many of them might not be excited about choosing the one over the other, but between a nagging conscience and the social pressure that the at-risk tradition triggers, they do the right thing. That’s why we’re supposed to get upset about the violation of traditions: because the institutions they support are fragile, and because our collective emotional response to traditions, and to the flaunting of them, is a nifty cognitive hack that has served humanity remarkably well over the ages.
It’s worth noting that the deep respect for solemn rituals and institutions doesn’t come out of nowhere. You can’t just conjure it up out of nothing. It builds over years, centuries. It’s created by popular mythologizing, but the myths are often built on top of real stories of personal sacrifice and heroism. It takes time to create effectively powerful traditions, is what I’m saying. They’re not something that can be thrown up over night in order to deliver behavioral results the next day.
They are, however, subject to being repurposed. That’s what the brands learned about Christmas. And that’s also what many talented, unscrupulous leaders have discovered about all sorts of other political myths in all sorts of different political eras and contexts. And that, I fear, is where we are now: at a place in which a deep respect for our myths and traditions, which is meant to reinforce the principles on which a functioning democracy is built, instead becomes a substitute for those principles. Instead of providing that additional incentive to self-interested politicians to make at least some small effort at fulfilling their duties, the traditions and the respect they inspire make it harder to discern which actions are the actual betrayals of our ideals. They lose their power to influence behavior, and instead become a performance which distracts from what’s really going on.
That was what the State of the Union looked like to me. We all know what the theatrics are supposed to inspire in us: a respect—grudging, on the part of the opposition but real nonetheless—for what all of the associated ceremony represents. The president gets to bask in the glory. But the absurd grandeur of it all is also meant to be something—one of many such things in the career of an American president—which reminds him of the awesome responsibility he faces. It’s meant to make him think: jesus, I’d better not fuck this up. And look, the system is not perfect: which is why we don’t rely on myth and tradition alone, but on an interlocking system of institutions whose legitimacy is merely derived in part from myth and tradition.
But none of it is working anymore. He clearly does not feel the weight of responsibility. He clearly does not feel any constraints of conscience rooted in respect for the institutions and their surrounding myths. And he clearly is not constrained by the conscientious behavior of others, inspired by those myths. Maybe he will be at some point; maybe in November. But it’s important to understand: if the respect for tradition is no longer serving its purpose, that we need to be more explicit about how our system is functioning and what it will take to save it. The respect for tradition stuff—the myths and solemnity and all of it—may seem weird and crude and backward, but it actually allows for a less brutal, more civilized sort of politics. It’s the thing that prevents politics from being entirely about the exercise of raw power.
It is possible, though, that that’s all gone by the boards now. Trump has learned that if he keeps his party onside, he cannot be held to account while in office. What are the constraints on him now? The electorate, maybe, but having avoided any negative consequences from his other efforts to interfere in elections, he’ll almost certainly do his best to ensure a favourable outcome in November. And what else? Some mutinous official? The military? That’s wild and woolly territory, miles and miles away from the rule of law.
Everyday I try to think of reasons why that’s not going to happen. Maybe it won’t. But among many of the most powerful people in this country the spell has broken. And I think maybe that actions which puncture a mythology that’s obscuring reality—well, maybe we need more of that. The only reason ever to be awed by these things is that they serve the purpose of supporting our democracy. It’s the principles that matter, not the stupid traditions. And if the traditions make it harder to defend the principles, then you’ve just got to rip them up and defend the things that matter for their own sake.