DRIVEN BY EMOTION
Today I am going to wrestle with several personal issues that seem to me to be connected with the hyper emotional tension between vaxxers and antivaxxers, left and right, conservatives and liberals.
I have long wondered what impels me to do the things I do, what makes me feel intensely open and responsive and what immobilizes me and suffocates me, because these two things seem to determine whether I am able to do things with energy or whether I shut down and am barely able to get out of bed. And the more I wonder about this the more I wonder what impels any animal along, including me. Maggie, the Melrose 15 dog, who sometimes goes into paroxysms of tail wagging at the prospect of a walk, then when on the walk sometimes pretends to be a ferocious attack dog when another dog walks by, then almost purrs with delight when tickled behind the ears and then sleeps much of the rest of the time and murmurs as she dreams. What makes her do these things? She doesn’t make any conscious choices. She is impelled along entirely by unconscious emotional drives which evolution has implanted in her. The more I watch her, the more I wonder if I am any different. I am impelled along or flattened by emotion, by some connection between my DNA implanted responses to the world around me that I am feeling my way through. Even now, when it appears that I am being objectively rational, it is emotion that makes me feel alive. I write because I feel good when I write not because of what I write. Writing is more like jogging than objective rationality. I like to write but I don’t like to jog. Other people like to jog, but won’t write unless absolutely forced to. But in either case it is feeling that drives us.
What makes me feel alive? Is it the same for other people? Could this determine why some people feel so strongly in one direction and others in another direction? Is it as simple as the difference between writing and jogging. Is it something that we learn in school or from our families or is it something deep within our DNA selves or is it some combination of all of these?
An example of this is Biblical stories including the story of Jesus that I grew up with as a child of missionaries in North India. My family didn’t talk about religion or even appear to be religious, but Christian fundamentalism was all around me in the missionary boarding school, Woodstock, that I attended in the lower Himalayas. It now seems to me that whether the facts of the story, the virgin birth, rising from the dead, both scientifically impossible, are true or not depends not on science but on how the story makes you feel. Mircea Eliade says humans have long divided the world between the sacred and the profane. What the stories of Jesus do is to open us up to the sacred presence and power of God in which anything is possible, but most of all, this sacred power makes us feel so fully alive that to shut ourselves off from this power is a form of death which is worse than physical death, which is what the martyrs through Christian history demonstrate as they refused to betray the presence of God and were willing to die gruesome deaths. If you are a born again Christian or a Christian (or a Hindu, or a Moslem) of any sort, the presence and power of God, which cannot be scientifically proven or demonstrated, makes you feel fully alive. Jesus preached being fully alive and let politics go and economic well being go and factual science go. Love is what matters, love of God and of your neighbor as yourself. What matters is the intense feeling that being open to the sacred brings us. Feeling is central to Christianity. Biblical stories cannot be scientifically proven, God’s presence cannot be scientifically proven. A Christian (or a person worshipping within any faith) knows God’s presence because he feels God’s presence.
And I am guessing that the same thing is true for an antivaxxer. He is not so much concerned with the scientific facts supporting vaccination, he is energized by the feeling that big government and elites and so-called experts are a threat to the things he feels most intensely. These are common sense things, such as the fear of liberalism threatening his fundamentalist religious beliefs, which secularism certainly does. He feels the threat of multinational economics which threaten his job, which global supply chains certainly do. He feels the threat to his white racial identity, which immigration and racial equality certainly do. He feels the threat to American exceptionalism, which multinational institutions certainly do. He feels the threat of technological change to the old ways of doing things, which rapidly changing technology certainly does.
He lives (actually he is not he, he is me) we all live in a world of rapid cultural, economic, scientific flux. Change is everywhere and threatens not only antivaxxers but threatens all of us, unless you are turned on by change and new perspectives which for some inexplicable reason I am. But why is it that I am turned on to change, when others around me are not? It is similar to the writing/jogging difference. It is simply because this awareness makes me feel more alive. It is why I am hopping from country to country when other octogenarians aren’t. This explains to me why urban centers with their rapid change in population, technology, food and religious beliefs welcome change and why rural areas resist change and want to return to the strong MAGA traditions of the past. All of us are caught between wanting to hold on to the past and needing to embrace the future.
I don’t think vaccination is the issue. The issue is whether we embrace change or want to hold on to our traditional identities and values. Everyone is wanting to be fully alive in their own way, either defending values or embracing values. What makes us feel alive is what is different. We are all behaving in an understandable emotion driven way.
And that’s all you get of my interior musing and trying to figure myself for today, folks. Tomorrow I will wrestle with the way that facts, fake or not fake, and tribalism make our emotional differences ever more intense.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 