President Trump signed a historic trade pact with China on Wednesday. Yesterday, senators from both parties approved his administration’s foremost legislative priority—the revised North American Free Trade Agreement.
In between, the House conveyed articles of impeachment to the Senate. Republicans were upset that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi distributed souvenir pens she used to sign the articles. In response, Pelosi’s chief of staff said it is “tragic that the President’s attacks on our Constitution have brought our country to this point.”
It is as though two governments are at work in Washington.
Feelings have become facts
When I was a professor of philosophy of religion, I worked with “channels of epistemology”—ways we know what we know. They can be seen as three lanes on a freeway: the rational, the practical, and the intuitive.
We perform mathematical calculations rationally, we use our computers practically (unless we’re computer engineers, in which case we use them rationally), and we like people intuitively. We all do all three, but one “channel” tends to dominate our personality.
It seems our culture is in an intuitive chapter of our history. Our founders built our nation on highly reasoned principles derived from the Judeo-Christian worldview and the Enlightenment. During times of global war or economic crisis, we have been driven by pragmatic responses.
Today, in a postmodern culture that is convinced all truth is personal and subjective, we measure life through our feelings and passions.
“Democracy and the decline of reason”
This is the thesis of William Davies’s important study, Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason. Davies observes: “Experts and facts no longer seem capable of settling arguments to the extent that they once did. Objective claims about the economy, society, the human body and nature…
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