You have to wonder what Nathaniel Hawthorne would’ve made of ousted House Republican Party Conference chair Liz Cheney. Would she have been standing on the scaffold with Hester Prynne and her out-of-wedlock baby, Pearl, wearing a big scarlet “O” for ousted or a scarlet “B” stabbed with an interlocking “L” for “Big lLie”?
in the Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” perhaps the ultimate story of cancel culture, he contrasts Prynne’s apparent adultery — hence the scarlet “A” she is forced to wear in 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony — with the greater sins of cowardice (Arthur Dimmesdale, the secret father of her child) and especially hate and revenge (her cuckolded husband Roger Chillingworth). Cheney may have been “disloyal” to the party, out of lockstep with its Trumpian worldview, but at least she is not deluded into twisting the truth of the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 Capitol attack into a lie. Nor is she beguiled into the false equivalence of Covid-19 mandates with Nazism, calling Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene’s association of mask mandates with the Holocaust “evil lunacy.”
Cheney is not merely standing up for the truth here. She’s standing up for logic, which is really in short supply in our dumbed-down, digital age, and which I have also tried to do in this blog. I must confess that I’m as passionate as the next person, often giving in to my temper and impatience. I love affecting things, like the arts. The world would be a dull place without emotion.
But our society has become only about emotion, abetted by intellectually lazy leaders like former President Donald J. Trump and the unfiltered internet but especially by the lack of education. (Recently, Ziwe, a Black comedian known for her racially confrontational show, took actress-activist Alyssa Milano to task for not knowing who Huey P. Newton and Angela Davis are. But does that make Milano racist or rather uneducated? Frankly, Milano should’ve learned about Black activism in the 1960s in an American history class. Indeed, she could’ve learned about such activism and be a racist, too. Correlation is not causation.
But we live in a society that doesn’t understand correlation is not causation, that cannot think critically and because it doesn’t think critically, its pillars like the fourth estate are constantly dumbing down in an effort to appear relevant to the un- and under-educated and make money. (It doesn’t help that publications like The Chicago Tribune are purchased by hedge funds that gut newsrooms for profit or that celebrities with megaphones like Prince Harry don’t understand the First Amendment.)
Because we have watered down institutions, we perpetuate the vicious cycle of dumbing down and illogic. In a New York Times story about Marathon County, Wisconsin’s refusal to pass a resolution saying it was “a community for all.,” we have this bit of wisdom:
“Bruce Bohr, a retired engineer, called the resolution a giveaway to the county’s people of color. “Government cannot give someone something without taking it away from someone else,” Mr. Bohr said.”
Really? Do you see how that reduces life to a zero-sum game? It’s like saying that because you earn a living, you are robbing me of money that could be mine. There’s no understanding that in raising the oppressed to parity, we all benefit, that diminishment of some is diminishment of all. There’s also no understanding that saying you are a community for all is merely a reaffirmation of your values in a time of a renewed quest for social justice. It doesn’t mean that you were racist before.
There’s simply no logic to what Bohr said, and he’s an engineer. But then, that is what education has been reduced to — STEM, the computer, things that can be quantified. And things that are above all else utilitarian — a very American way of thinking. Even a smart woman like The New York Times health columnist Jane Brody wrote in a piece on turning 80 that she regretted taking French in school instead of the more useful Spanish. Why? If life is only about the useful, then maybe we should get rid of the arts and fashion. Wouldn’t knowing one Romance language help her learn another? An education must include the qualitative as well as quantitative, including the arts and the humanities. All must be integrated into a thinking, feeling whole.
Sometimes, passion will lead. At other times, reason must. As an independent moderate, I don’t hold with Cheney’s political beliefs. But I do know this: Context drives perception. On the issue of a political party that has been paralyzed by the zero-sum, white grievance of Trump’s base, hers is a voice of reason and courage.