In his Oct. 7, 2024 “Israel Update” video with the Hudson Institute’s Middle East analyst Michael Doran, right-wing Israeli historian Gadi Taub selected this as his dumbest media commentary moment of the week: “[Journalist] Ilana Dayan speaking on CNN to Christiane Amanpour who asked her about the horrible death tall in Gaza including she said 16,000 innocent children… Ilana Dayan is trying to explain why she is under such a strong impression of October 7 that she primarily sees that, but she confesses Israel does not cover Gaza’s suffering enough. this is how our elites are — the supplicants of progressive elites elsewhere because what any sane Israeli journalist, and there are very few of these, should have said is that why are you asking me when these [Hamas] people are deliberately using their children as human shields and then you want me to take responsibility for that? These [Israeli] elites are looking up to elites [elsewhere], their their sense of solidarity and belonging is closer to elites in other countries than they are to their own people and this becomes especially poignant since they think of themselves as provincials and they want to rise up to the tier of the metropolitan elites where the real elites are, the real cultured people are Christian Amanpour, who are the real people with a moral compass, so they end up kissing the feet of anti-semites and playing to CNN biases with which are tinged with with anti-Semitism. This is not just a dumb take on the news, this is infuriating. Ilana Dayan is called the Barbara Walters of of Israeli TV so she’s the dean of highbrow journalism and she has the fanciest Israeli accent with the knitted brows and and the thoughtful look in her eyes and the rimless glasses, she’s like the epitome of intelligence and conscience and yet what she does in the end when faced with something like that is she grovels at the feet of a nasty CNN anchor.”
Michael Doran: “I need to get a knitted brow and rimless glasses. I’ve never mastered that look — thoughtful, pensive.”
This discourse by Gadi Taub made me wonder if there are certain physical manifestations of the elite point of view and of the counter-elite view. Take Tucker Carlson for example. I can’t think of any elite commentator who makes Tucker’s dramatic facial postures. Could we detect who has the elite worldview vs the counter-elite worldview just by looking at someone without listening to anything they’re saying? Did Tucker’s expressions change as he became more populist?
Tucker today presents himself differently from the Tucker of the 2000s. He no longer wears a bowtie. He’s more dramatic now and he pulls more funny faces.
This discourse by Gadi Taub made me wonder if there are certain physical manifestations of the elite point of view and of the counter-elite view. Take Tucker Carlson for example. I can’t think of any elite commentator who makes Tucker’s dramatic facial postures. Could we detect who has the elite worldview vs the counter-elite worldview just by looking at someone without listening to anything they’re saying? Did Tucker’s expressions change as he became more populist?
Tucker today presents himself differently from the Tucker of the 2000s. He no longer wears a bowtie. He’s more flamboyant and he pulls more funny faces today.
In the Alexander Technique world, I heard the intriguing idea that each emotion requires a particular alignment of our musculature, and without that alignment, we can’t access the emotion. To feel depressed, for example, there needs to be a depression of one’s muscular alignment in the direction of a sag. To feel joy, you need an upward direction in your alignment, and so on. Each thought requires an increased level of muscular tension. You can’t think through an idea without having more muscular tension than when you are not doing mental work.
Are the gestures of populist politicians more flamboyant than those of establishment politicians? Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, for example, seem more expressive than normal pols.
Is there a cognitive and physiological change when you change your politics? Does embracing a particular politics develop a certain physiological reaction? Is there a correlation or a causation between one’s politics and one’s physiology?
After the presidential debates of June 27 and September 10, and the vice-presidential debate of October 1, there was much discussion in conservative circles about the mannerisms of the TV anchors. They were variously described as smug, constipated and stilted. These states are a reflection of a physiological state.
I am curious about the embodiment of the conservative and liberal worldviews. Between ages 19 and 22, I flirted with Marxism, and I recollect that I experienced a different physiology during those times that I imagined that Marxism was truth. On the other hand, I’ve been more extremely right-wing and racist than I am now, and I think I experienced a different physiology in those extreme states.
I think I can usually tell somebody’s politics by his physiognomy. Physiognomy might have some relationship to certain cognitive and physiological patterns.
What liberalism upholds as autonomous self-possession is in fact the internalization of the new restraints and inhibitions of the disciplinary society. The modern liberal identity is not an unvarnished naturalistic lucidity, as liberals are wont to see it. For it embodies the contingent historical forces that first generated it, a new uniformization, homogenization, and rationalization that liberalism’s Enlightenment narratives conceal or discount. These narratives trace our modern “innerness” to a certain psychic liberation from blind convention. But they overlook that this innerness is a kind of blind convention in its own right, the outcome of the disciplinary molding that quietly undergirds liberal ideals.
* Here is the “higher truth” at which conservative claims of cultural oppression are always intimating. Liberals may be the ones who most ardently defend science and naturalism, but it is conservatives who are the more viscerally naturalistic at the primordial level of embodied human experience, where the dualisms by which liberals would distinguish their principled high-mindedness from conservatives’ hidebound prejudice and egoism become untenable. What liberals dismiss as the politically opportunistic swiping of progressive lingo reflects conservatives’ more naturalistic, less rationalistic understanding of human beings in general and liberals in particular, their profound sense that liberalism’s official rational morality grows out of a pre-rational identity that is being imposed alongside what purports to be moral idealism pure and simple. Liberals cannot see the broader context of their idealism because their antiquated Enlightenment view of reason as predominantly conscious and disembodied leaves them insensible to this layer of human experience, and so over confident of their ability to recognize oppression and inequality. The conscious categories through which they would distinguish their own cosmopolitan idealism from the narrow parochialism of conservatives can capture only a fraction of what transpires at the deeper level of our unconscious functioning, in the merely animal of human nature, where liberalism’s neutral abstractions lose all meaning. This is what the symbolic grievances are ultimately symbolic of.
* individualism and free-spiritedness that are in truth more greatly embodied by conservatives.
* ideas must be understood in the context of their pre-theoretical psycho-cultural embodiments, in forms of lived experience of which political ideas are merely one expression. David Gelernter captures this thought in proposing that ideology “is a projection of your personality.” It is “you cast like a spotlight onto the cultural landscape in which you live.” Liberalism and conservatism are not just opposing ideas, but also opposing ways of being, different “spotlights,” each giving resonance to certain ideas and not others. Political ideology is not just a cluster of principles through which events in the world are self-consciously conceptualized, but, like personality generally, the lens through which the world first appears to us prior to explicit belief-formation. The conviction that liberals and conservatives are divided by “indelible psychological differences” originates in just this epistemology…
* conservatives’ greater sensitivity to liberalism’s status as a physiologically embodied ethos, to what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “imperceptible cues of bodily hexis [disposition].” Bodily hexis, Bourdieu explains, is “political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking, and thereby of feeling and thinking.” That disposition constitutes a “pattern of postures that is both individual and systematic” and which, “charged with a host of social meanings and values,” permits these “to pass from practice to practice without going through discourse or consciousness.” Our pre-verbal comportment can carry political significance because it is the physiological and instinctual embodiment of what is only later reflected upon as ideas. This liberal-looking girl’s “coy smile,” then, may be but the temperamental and physiological embodiment of her overall worldview.
* Hellen Rittelmeyer explains that her cohort at Yale “smoked on principle” and were bothered by smoking bans, which undeservedly “gave the modern cult of health the force of law.” Reacting to this, she and her friends chose to embody conservative values rather than articulate them, which is what smoking enabled them to do. For reasons they never quite understood, “smoking felt like rebellion against Yale’s moral consensus that the two most important things in life are for everyone to be happy and for everyone to get along.
* Christopher Lasch explains the intuition: “Upper-middle-class liberals, with their inability to grasp the importance of class differences in shaping attitudes toward life, fail to reckon with the class dimension of their obsession with health and moral uplift. They find it hard to understand why their hygienic conception of life fails to command universal enthusiasm. They have mounted a crusade to sanitize American society: to create a “smoke-free environment,” to censor everything from pornography to “hate speech,” and at the same time, incongruously, to extend the range of personal choice in matters where most people feel the need of solid moral guidelines. When confronted with resistance to these initiatives, they betray the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence.” Conservatives can see themselves as generally more tolerant than liberals because they equate liberalism with a “hygienic conception of life” that variously manifests itself in a wide range of spheres. Smoking can qualify as a political act because it is a rebellion against this conception, which liberals seek to impose on the rest of us.
* it is liberalism qua social identity, qua automatic social reflex, that has been culturally credentialed as the embodiment of a privileged intellectual acuity. Just as the classic finishing schools strove to inculcate a certain physical posture, so the elite universities now inculcate a certain mental and spiritual posture through which to announce oneself curious, broad-minded, given to scientific detachment and dispassionate analysis, etc.—that is, as a member of the anointed in good standing.
* There is no inconsistency if conservatives suspend their usual hostility to government whenever it comes to military spending. Given that the military embodies Strict Father values—“hierarchical authority, self-discipline, building strength, and fighting evils”—it can be publicly subsidized without offending those values.49Educationspending, on the other hand, is wasteful, because educators are mostly nurturers standing in the way of Strict Father morality.50Likewise, conservatives support the freedom to own guns while opposing the freedom to abort a fetus because “[g]uns are seen as the individual’s form of protection in a hostile world,” as “symbolic of the male role as family protector.”51By contrast, abortion symbolizes corrupting parental indulgence, a child’s failure to “learn from her mistakes,” or a woman’s preference for career above motherhood—all affronts to Strict Father morality.52The difference between liberals and conservatives isn’t that one party is more true to its professed ideals, but that these ideals’ concrete meaning and application is being determined by opposed familial metaphors and moralities.
* Strict Father morality as described by Lakoff embodies the pre-modern conviction that individual and communal flourishing depend on upholding some wider order of things, and that this dependency can justify action against those threatening that order. The ostensible concerns of conservatives are modern, but the deeper impetus behind the concerns is, in a way, pre-modern. The goal isn’t just to uphold certain conduct, but to uphold the order that sustains that conduct. This is why deviation “goes beyond mere immorality,” as Lakoff says. The teleological hierarchies of pre-moderns had an ever-present religious foundation. But religion for Lakoff is only one outle tfor conservatives’ devotion to “Moral Order.”
* While all emotions carry the potential to distort our grasp of reality, [liberal Martha] Nussbaum argues that disgust is distorting in its essence. For moralized disgust involves externalizing our primal sense of animal vulnerability onto social outsiders, turning them into embodiments of the human frailty we would like to deny in ourselves. Whereas anger can in principle track real danger in a reliable way, disgust is intrinsically unreasonable, embodying “magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity, immortality, and non-animality, that are just not in line with human life as we know it.”69The attempt to control or contain what become seen as contaminated persons is a form of magical, atavistic thinking…
* The strategic self-understanding expresses what Taylor calls “that recurrent figure which our civilization aspires to realize, the disembodied ego, the subject who can objectify all being, including his own,” and thereby achieve “total self-possession.” Such self-possession is an impossible aspiration, however.
* by way of these social understandings—and not any disengaged and disembodied inner self—that our identities are first revealed to us. Since these understandings embody shared social relations, they ultimately refer us to our place within a larger order, without which we cannot be ourselves. If individuals cannot readily alter social meanings at will, this is because that very will originates from out of those meanings. The total self-possession of the strategic agent is illusory because our “mine-ness” and the field of significances toward which it is always “opened out” each permeate the other… Meaning is first encountered in the world, not in our disembodied interiority, which has itself been created by a social world that “calls on us” to think and act as individuals.
* The strategic conception of the human agent is naturalistic inasmuch as it seems to free us from any untenably anthropocentric teleological commitments. But it is also in tension with naturalism inasmuch as it conceals the culturally embodied nature of human consciousness.
* Liberals will characterize the prejudice of conservatives as a failure of “enlightenment,” the symptom of irrational animus. But what is called “prejudice” is more primordially a failure to transcend ordinary embodied perception toward a higher state of spiritual purity and freedom, a failure to adopt the sort of emotional asceticism that would enable this transcendence.
* an inextinguishable drunkenness is being concealed behind what gets passed off as a mere love of reality. It is a particular form of spirituality, not disembodied intellectual rigor, that impels liberals to highlight America’s historical moral failings at the expense of its moral achievements, to judge America’s record by a standard higher than is applied to other nations, and higher than the history of the human race indicates is reasonable. This is why conservatives feel, with Kahane, that the Left has “made America’s entire history hostage to the legacy of slavery” and highlights America’s failings in order to “invalidate any aspect of your culture” whenever it chooses.133That culture must be invalidated because it is incompatible with the secularized asceticism which the elites seek to institutionalize as “thoughtfulness,” which is yet another weapon in the arsenal of liberal ideology…
* The ultimate prestige symbol, propagated as the subtext of all the derivative ones, is the ideal of the disengaged subject—“that recurrent figure which our civilization aspires to realize, the disembodied ego, the subject who can objectify all being, including his own.” And what conservatives really mean by the “liberal culture” is the civilizational framework in which that figure can make his recurrent appearances. If conservative claimants of cultural oppression are “uncivilized,” the “half-savage relics of past times,” this is because they seek, not to realize the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, but to expose it as a cultural pretense—“the manipulation of prestige symbols”—that is untrue to what human beings, including the liberal elites, are actually like.
* “CCD [careful critical discourse] treats the relationship between those who speak it, and others about whom they speak, as a relationship between judges and judged. It implies that the established social hierarchy is only a semblance and the deeper, more important distinction is between those who speak and understand truly and those who do not. To participate in the culture of critical discourse, then, is to be emancipated at once from lowness in the conventional social hierarchy, and is thus a subversion of that hierarchy. To participate in the culture of critical discourse, then, is a political act.”
[Conservatives:] Nature was understood to be regulated… The natural world, and indeed the social world, was seen as embodying, and not just as being caused or affected by, the divine…
* Religious Reform moved us from an era in where religion was more “embodied” or “enfleshed” to one where it becomes more “in the head.” As Barrett observes, faith in God was originally experienced as a “concrete mode of being,” as “the opening up of one being toward another.” Only later in the modern era did it become “propositional,” an intellectual assent to statements, creeds, and systems.69Only at this point did religion become strongly associated with thinking and acting rightly. And this meant disciplining away people’s sense that they were opened out to forces that can suffuse their very being, turning them into vessels of an unpredictable higher power. An earlier Christianity had made its compromises with paganism and its embodied, undisciplined, and unreflective forms of spirituality. But the religious reformers were now demanding a complete break with this past.
And so what was formerly the essence of religion was now condemned as sinful pride. The true faith had become excarnated, propositional religion. And the embodied religious feeling through which the sacred was formerly accessed by Christians and pagans alike became stigmatized as mere sensuality and impulse, a threat to religious clarity.
* If public policymaking cannot be permitted to fall into the hands of the American people, this is because the American people refuse the buffered distance, because they are too mired in their unreflective folkways and too indulgent of their embodied religious feelings to accede to the civilizing process that liberals feel they must spread to them.
* The elites are despised because they have become the symbolic embodiments of the buffered identity. Correlatively, this resentment also fuels conservatives’ powerful sense of their own authenticity, of their special insight into liberalism’s campaign of “stealth and subterfuge,” and the accompanying conviction that liberals’ verbal eloquence is too glib and shallow to grasp the deeper layers of meaning to which they are attuned.
* The patriotism of conservatives consists in their surrender to the embodied feelings of the higher which the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity seek to extirpate. This is the threat they see coming from unpatriotic liberal elites. It is the reason why John Kerry derived so little political mileage from his Vietnam War record in his 2004 presidential run. His persona was quintessentially buffered—“haughty, French-looking” and marked by an “out-of-touch aristocratic bearing” as Anderson puts it.65And this vitiated everything else in the eyes of more porous Americans. If the liberal elites are, as conservatives complain, “out of touch” with the lived experience of “ordinary Americans,” this is a detachment, not from their empirical condition, but from their cosmological orientation. The liberal identity is premised on the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, and this places it in direct conflict with those whose patriotism resists that ethos. Liberals will insist that their patriotism is the reflective patriotism of ideals and principles rather than the unreflective patriotism of blood, soil, and language…
* worship of ignorance is merely a means of opposing the buffered distance and its disciplinary impulses. Given that intellectuals and experts are among the foremost embodiments of these impulses, they are natural targets for conservatives, for whom intellectualism and expertise are just further emanations of an all-pervasive liberalism that must be opposed on every front.
