Feeling Right
on political passions
Every Sunday when I was a kid, my family went to the Prineville, Oregon Assemblies of God, a hideous squat gray building on the edge of town. It was one of those weird evangelical churches. Our pastor would speak in tongues if his prayer got particularly fervent. It sounded kind of like: “Shamnala-hamala…carraca fahamala…shambala wabba-dah-shaddaray,” uttered into the wireless microphone with impressive fluidity and a lilting, vaguely foreign-sounding inflection. He insisted that this was the language the Apostles used when the Holy Ghost first descended upon them.
The pastor wasn’t the only one who felt the Holy Ghost, either. While we were singing worship songs, people would sometimes wave flags and ribbons around and dance like hippies. Sometimes, they would really get the Holy Ghost, and they would shiver and faint, and a leader of the worship team would gently cover them with a sheet until they emerged from their trance.
When I saw this saturnalia of holiness at perhaps eight years old, I didn’t find it silly or contemptible. I watched it and wished I could feel the Holy Ghost like they could. But I couldn’t feel God at all. I asked a youth pastor if he could hear the voice of God when he prayed. He told me that he heard “a still small voice.” I imagined that God had a little, flutey, high-pitched voice, and when I prayed at home, I would listen for it intently, pleading over and over: Just say something, anything. Just let me know you’re there. I couldn’t hear a thing. But this didn’t make me think there was no God. Instead, I figured: if there are no voices in my head, there must be something wrong with me.
A few times, when I was in the fourth or fifth grade, I pretended that the Holy Ghost got inside me and mimicked the spiritual trances of my fellow churchgoers. Once, I pretended to faint. As I laid there on the floor in front of everyone, a golden sheet draped over my form by some sympathetic fellow-worshiper, I twitched my chubby little fingers to show that I was in a spiritual trance. I remember feeling satisfaction when I heard one of my fellow child-worshippers whisper to another that my fingers were twitching. I thought they were filled with awe, wondering what profound spiritual mystery I was experiencing. I did not consider the possibility that they were making fun of me.
Another time, in an ecstasy of putatively religious transport, I started shouting about what a wretched sinner I was and how I didn’t deserve to be saved by God. (As I remember it, my brother had started shouting about what a wretched sinner he was right before that, and it seemed to get a good response.) I have no idea what my parents thought as they watched the two of us howling at the heavens, although I remember my mother seeming vaguely embarrassed on the quiet car ride home. Could she tell I was a fraud?
Why did I do these things? For one thing, I wanted to be seen as someone who could hear the voice of God. But I also think that these fraudulent little productions were attempts to induce a genuine spiritual experience. If I acted like I could feel the spirit, perhaps something in my brain would click, and I’d finally hear the voice of God.
After all, even if I couldn’t hear God, I felt a vague dread about what He might think of me. One of our pastor’s favorite verses was Revelations 3:16. In that verse, the author, known only as John, imagines God saying to the church in Laodicea: “Because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” When he read it, our pastor would repeat the verse’s most horrifying phrase: “I will spue thee… out of my mouth!” (It is the only line from any sermon that I can remember to this day.) I imagined God with a mouthful of amniotic fluid, and a bunch of people floating around in it. I never figured out why we were all in God’s mouth, or why we’d want to stay in there rather than being spued. But I knew that after we got spued, we’d go right to Hell.
This verse haunted me because I always felt lukewarm, and no matter how hard I tried or how loudly I praised God, I could never quite become cold or hot. I could not feel the presence of God any more than I could hear His voice. I never wanted to read the Bible like our pastor said we should. When I tried to be good and read it at home, I got bored almost immediately, and I never got through more than maybe a chapter. I preferred my cheap young adult novels and my Calvin and Hobbes anthologies. I didn’t evangelize either. Our youth pastors told us over and over to invite our friends to church, thereby saving them from eternal torment. (You don’t want your little friends to burn forever, do you?) So, despite my embarrassment and nerves, I asked one of my unbelieving school friends, Alex, to come to church with me. He said no, Sundays are for football. I never bothered him about it again. If I had really believed that eternal hellfire and gnashing of teeth awaited him—if I had felt in my bones that he was in imminent danger of endless, shrieking torment because the voice of God told me so—I have to imagine that I would have tried harder. But I didn’t. I could not hear God’s voice—I could not feel Him.
Snuggled in bed, I would imagine God saying to me, “begone, for I never knew ye,” spuing me out of his mouth, and casting me into a lake of eternal fire. But this was never so terrifying that I could not fall asleep. I believed in God nominally; if you asked me then, I would have professed a belief in the Bible as the infallible word of God. But I did not really act as if God existed.
Later, when I was around nineteen years old, I had lost my faith in the God of the Bible. I was playing a lot of guitar, getting a BA in English at Arizona State University, and working at the campus bookstore. Money was tight, but every once in a while, I would treat myself to a 79-cent fountain drink from the gas station next to the house I was renting.
In a class called Ethical Theory, a professor asked us to consider the question of what people owe to one another: are we ethically obligated to give to charity? As I turned this question over, I began to obsess over the ethical dimensions of my occasional fountain drink treats. These drinks were luxuries that I could easily live without. And the world was full of suffering that I might ameliorate if I donated the money that I currently wasted on them. If $5 could buy a malaria-preventing mosquito net for a child, how could I justify purchasing a $1 drink every couple of days? In a week or two, I could save enough to buy a mosquito net. So every time I went into that gas station to treat myself to a cold drink, I was taking away a fraction of a mosquito net that could save a little kid’s life.
The moral reasoning proving that one should never purchase soft drinks and should instead only purchase mosquito nets (or donate to nonprofits helping refugees, or medical research, or pick your preferred life-saving cause) seemed bulletproof to me then. (It is the argument, by the way, made by Peter Singer in his 2009 book The Life You Can Save, a chief inspiration of the Effective Altruist movement.) The critiques of this argument didn’t make much sense to me. For example, one might say that charity acts like buying a mosquito net are band-aids; that capitalism (or some other force) is the real culprit behind human suffering, and that the most virtuous thing to do is to tear down the system rather than to spend our time frantically applying band-aids. But, I reasoned, there’s no reason why I can’t both agitate against capitalism and donate every extra cent to the amelioration of suffering—the two actions aren’t incompatible. In fact, one might argue that critiques of capitalism would be even more convincing and powerful if they came from moral paragons who constantly sacrificed their own pleasures for the benefit of others.
I asked my dad what he thought. He told me that I only had moral obligations to people who were geographically close to me—that I only needed to tend my little plot and be good to those around me, not worry about the world. This seemed so obviously bankrupt to me that it made me more convinced that I was right: just because someone is far away from me, their lives have no moral weight, and I need not concern myself with them? By what magical power does mere proximity vest human life with import? If all human lives matter the same, shouldn’t I act like it?
And so I could not escape the conclusion that I owed it to the world to live an abstemious, monk-like life, sending every extra cent to the very poor. To do anything else would be to elevate the importance of my own petty pleasures above the abject suffering of those in need. It seemed irrefutably wrong to do anything else. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to stop buying myself little treats, even when I thought about the devastating opportunity cost of every purchase! My new moral principles never motivated me to buy a mosquito net. Even worse, I never really felt guilty about it. My conscience, so quick to upbraid me for failing to pick up litter or for being rude to an acquaintance, was silent as I filled up another Polar Pop.
Why did I feel no motivation to do what I had concluded, rationally, was morally correct? I loved to think about moral questions, but they were ultimately a kind of puzzle. When it came to the issue of actually acting according to my abstractly-derived principles, I was, just as when I was in church, fundamentally lukewarm. I could not make myself care; I could only care that I didn’t care. I was meta-guilty: guilty about not feeling guilty. But this time, there was no reason for me to faint and twitch my fingers in front of the congregation. No need to pretend that I felt the Holy Ghost, because nobody else that I knew could feel it either. After all, everyone buys a little treat sometimes, and nobody really feels bad about it.
What does it mean to be a good person? It seems reasonable to suggest that one should live according to their principles. It is not merely enough to figure out what is right and wrong, nor is it merely enough to criticize wrongdoing. One must also act—moral thinking is about determining what one should do, not just what one should think. The American abolitionists of the nineteenth century were fond of quoting the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “Let us be up, then, and doing,” they urged one another. In Civil Disobedience, Henry Thoreau criticized the “thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery…who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to [it]…They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect.” I see myself, rather unflatteringly, in this depiction. I do plenty of hesitating and regretting—but what have I done in earnest and with effect? I see a broken world and shrug in vague regret. Then I buy myself a beer.
I admire vegans because they act according to their principles. They have determined, through thought, discussion, and reading, that a very widespread practice—the use of animals for food—is unethical. Because of this determination, they actually change their behavior. They’re willing to forego the immediate, sensuous pleasures of butter, cheese, meat, and ice cream because they think it’s wrong. They’re also willing to spend more money at restaurants and the grocery store, to avoid healthy foods like eggs or fish, to risk mockery and isolation, to go hungry at social events that don’t serve vegan foods, and so on. Despite their reputation as frigid virtue signalers, vegans don’t just signal their virtue. They live it out, at some personal cost. They act against their social, economic, and nutritional self-interest in many ways so that their behavior comports with an abstract moral principle that they have determined to be valid. They’re willing to eat vegan cheese. That’s commitment.
For moral philosophy to be anything other than a form of trivia, something that is discussed over infinite beers in college and then abandoned when one gets to the real business of living, one must imitate the vegan and live according to our values. But it’s hard to work up the motivation. I find it difficult to care about, for example, climate change. I knowthat climate change is likely going to be catastrophic, and I know that there are things we might (but probably won’t) collectively do to ameliorate the worst of what’s to come, and I know that I should be volunteering and pamphleting and donating and doing whatever I can to mitigate the effects of climate change. I believe all the science. I see the rising temperatures and the changing weather patterns. Intellectually, I know that it’s the most important thing happening in the world right now. And it seems to me now that climate change should make me fanatical. Just as I believed that I should be buying mosquito nets instead of soft drinks. I “believe” in the climate apocalypse as I believed in the God of the Apocalypse spuing me out of His mouth: it is a nightmare, a creeping dread that emerges in moments of reflection or right as I am falling asleep. But if I want to visit my family, I buy a plane ticket. And I have never even considered engaging in the sort of sabotage recommended by Andreas Malm in his 2020 manifesto How to Blow up a Pipeline. I hesitate, and I regret, and sometimes I petition. But I do nothing in earnest and with effect.
And despite the carnage that I wreak continually through inaction, I still sleep, like a baby, profoundly unbothered and un-guilty. And then I wake up, and I go about the business of living. Emotionally, I am far more invested in the petty facts of my life—the minor way I mistreated someone I love, an upcoming work deadline, the way I embarrassed myself at a party, and so on—than I am in issues of profound global import. My mind allows me to care about the minutiae of my own life in a way that I cannot care about God, apocalypse, and the tragedies that constantly happen far away. For a few weeks before I took my qualifying exams for my PhD program, I was very nervous. I lost sleep. My stomach hurt from worry. I felt about my upcoming exam in a way that I cannot feel about the issue of climate change. And my emotive world—the things that matter to me, involuntarily and reflexively and deep down—determines, far more than my rational mind, how I act.
In the conclusion of the 1852 antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most influential social novel in American history, Harriet Beecher Stowe (herself an influential evangelical theologist, I think it’s fair to say) imagines her reader, shaking and crying at the horrors and sadistic depredations that constituted slavery, asking, “But what can any individual do?” One of her answers, famously, is: “They can see to it that they feel right.” Stowe knew how important feelings were in translating abstract moral opinions into substantive action. But she is, I think, too optimistic in suggesting that human beings can “see to” their feelings, can engineer their emotional lives to value those things that they ought to. The fact is that I cannot see to it that I feel in any particular way. I can control how I react to my emotions—by not shouting when angry, for example—but I cannot conjure, by force of sheer will, passions where none exist.
The most canonical book-length treatment of moral feeling is Adam Smith’s 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith’s project is distinctive because his primary aim is not to formulate a prescriptive account of how people ought to feel and act but to formulate a descriptive account of how people feel, “naturally” or instinctively, about moral questions. Smith’s writing is keenly observational, and as I read, I found myself nodding in recognition to much of it.
Smith talks about the question of what to do with the suffering of others, far off. He calls worriers like me—who believe that we should be emotionally motivated to ameliorate far-off suffering—“whining and melancholy moralists” who demand that everyone sympathize with “the many wretches that are at every instant labouring under all sorts of calamities.” But this form of sympathy is “unattainable”—beyond the reach of our limited emotional sensibilities, writes Smith. And, in any case, this form of sympathy would be “perfectly useless.” To worry about remote suffering—especially because we can do nothing to resolve that suffering—is a waste of time and energy.
Later, Smith writes that only God can be responsible for the overall happiness of humanity. “To man is allotted a much humbler department…the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country.” (This is why, for Smith, a lack of faith in God is so emotionally crushing: one can no longer believe that all human suffering is ultimately part of God’s plan.) My emotional world, in Smith’s terms, is properly suited to my department: that category of things over which I really have some control. To accept this is an act of humility, and to feel too strongly for the miseries of those far away—to feel with more intensity than what Smith calls a “certain mediocrity” of feeling—exiles a person from the sympathy of others.
As Smith notes, there is a long and illustrious pedigree of philosophical thinkers who believe in this “mediocrity” of feeling as itself virtuous. Aristotle, as Smith writes, believed that all virtues must be moderated. Moderation of feeling, in one form or another, is important to various religious systems. Other philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century see excessive moral feeling—alternately designated as fanaticism, zeolatory, and extremism—as dangerous, misguided, even pathological. This denigration of fanaticism persists in contemporary critiques of social justice warriors, fanatical activists, and the Puritanical and “religious” excesses of political advocates.
As someone whose soul is not on fire, these defenses of Smith’s “mediocrity of feeling” are comforting. They illustrate my own reflexive emotional passivity as a virtue: I am not callously indifferent, but sane, sensible, attentive to nuance. They depict me as, not unprincipled, but appropriately cautious and reasonable. But one should not form philosophical beliefs because they make one feel comfortable. And in vigorous critiques of the “white moderate,” from the early abolitionists to Martin Luther King, Jr. to the political radicals of today, the idea that it is acceptable to feel only to a mediocre degree is under heavy fire. We live now, it seems, in an age of histrionic feeling—or at least in an age of histrionic expression of feeling, nearly all of it online, where virtue is signalled through constant declamations of how bad we all feel about the world—about how angry and devastated and enraged and just tired, y’all, we are. To admit, as I have done, a paucity of feeling is to fail to read the room. To be mentally and morally average—to be the cold, emotionally reserved, basically normal person I have admitted to being in this essay, who cannot muster a tear for the suffering of those far away—is to be cruelly insensible to the distresses and deprivations of others. According to this rubric, to be a good person is, at the minimum, to be outraged by outrages, and I have admitted failure.
But as I watch the orgy of feeling, the outpouring of just sentiment, the saturnalia of histrionic content, I am reminded of myself as a child, watching my fellow churchgoers frothing and raving in the church aisles, wishing I could hear the voice of God. I cannot, to use Smith’s term, enter into their passions. If I were to join in, as I sometimes joined in at the church of my youth, it would be with my ears perked to hear if anyone was watching my fingers twitch. I would wonder if my peers were watching me, or how this would affect my career, my personal relationships, and so on. To express an outrage that is not really present in my heart would be to pray loudly in public, as the book of Matthew warns against. I do not know the motivations of the content creators, whose impassioned outrage, perhaps coincidentally, raises their profile, gathers “engagement” on posts and podcasts, and establishes them firmly among friends and colleagues as a virtuous person on the right side of history. Nor do I know the heart of my pastor who spoke tongues. I do have my suspicions, however.
Perhaps that is why I am somewhat put off by these deep feelers, even if I agree, in some arid and abstract sense, with the ethical principles that they espouse: that children should not be killed, that the poor should not starve while the rich luxuriate, that we should band together and do something about our carbon emissions. That I should do everything within my power to make these things happen—that I should dedicate my life to the redemption of this broken world. That the only honest way to live is to be continually heartbroken and outraged. But I cannot engineer myself emotionally into a crank, a fanatic, words that the comfortable people like me, who watch Hulu as the world burns, use to tar those who feel too deeply, who light themselves on fire, storm the Capitol, sabotage oil pipelines, speak in tongues, and give all of their money to the poor: those terrifying Christs among us who are all too willing to overturn the market stalls in the temple.
To those plodders like me—those moral middlers who gaze upon the totality of the world’s suffering with a near-bovine serenity—a much more humble allotment is given by our natures: to manage our own affairs without visiting active harm upon those around us, to fulfill our civic duties, and to act on those sympathies we actually experience—to heed the call of the conscience we can hear, not the one we wish we could deduce ourselves into hearing. This is, of course, insufficient, and perhaps grossly so, even if it is difficult enough to tax my own abilities. Perhaps all of us are morally obligated to refuse to accept our moral station, revolt against our own sensibilities, and fashion ourselves into fanatical moral paragons. I am not there yet, if indeed I ever will be. But to pretend a feeling that I do not have seems worse: if one is determined to achieve some kind of virtue, a lie seems like a bad place to start.