Another Year of Moral Outrage

Our feelings about right and wrong are so immediate, self-activating, and compelling that they influence us as being as (one-sidedly) correct as our perceptions of objects around us. As another year passes off, there linger incessant expressions of outrage that typifies every year. 

Digital culture has shaped our mind to an extent that we think being outrage has become our duty, and in the process of fulfilling that duty we often neglect how this outrage has become replaceable and forgettable year after year.      

An angry society is not an unhealthy society. Moral outrage, mostly sounded off on Twitter and Facebook, recently proved to be a major force for holding wrongdoers accountable during the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements by democratising and loudening the voices of disempowered sections of people.

 

Nonetheless, there are fears that social media may be moulding our moral emotions in manners that could ultimately make it tougher for us to reshape society for the better.

In 2014, a study by researchers at the University of Illinois concluded that we were more likely to come to know about immoral acts online than in communication with others in person or through traditional media forms such as newspaper, radio, or TV. The study also underlined that the online content provoked a stronger sense of outrage than immoral acts encountered via traditional media sources or in person. 

Social media and online forms of communications often artificially exaggerate our experiences of outrage. Molly J Crockett, an American neuroscientist, in a 2018 opinion piece published in the Globe and Mail, says that 'if moral outrage is a fire, social media is like gasoline.'  

As we welcome another year, it's worth reflecting on whether we want to give up the control of our moral emotions and hand it over to social media algorithms that are unconcerned about our own welfare.

Scarcity Trap

When we need something urgently, our mind starts focussing on that thing instead of seeing its long-term outlook. Consumed by what we don’t have, we often ignore other important things in life and make bad choices.    

Brandy, a thirty-something lady from Detroit, Michigan, was fired from her job after she once mistakenly used her company credit card to buy diapers for her child. Being the breadwinner of the household, losing the job wreaked havoc on her financial conditions.

In America, statistics suggest poverty is decreasing, but hunger is actually rising, and when your child is hungry, you don't care where the food is coming from. With no solution in sight about how she was going to meet her daily needs, credit card bills kept piling up and pushed Brandy into heavy debt crisis. Poverty compounds itself in several ways than just incurring debts.     

An NPR’s podcast on Hidden Brain channel that I recently listened, in which Brandy is one of the persons interviewed, also discusses about Katie, a young girl who is too busy achieving professional successes. Instead of spending free time on relaxing and doing other important things in her life, she began to focus only on things related to her success at work. In Katie’s case, scarcity was brought on by a lack of time.  

One of characteristics of scarcity is that it draws significant amount of attention to itself. Focus on oneself brings benefits, but it has huge costs, too, and that adds up to the scarcity trap. When you are lonely, you tend to adopt certain behaviour that in the short term aids you manage that scarcity, but in the long term only makes things worse.  

There are psychological connections between scarcity and how we react to that crisis. Experiencing scarcity leads to biases in the mind that only exacerbates a difficult situation. In their book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013), sociologist Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University and Eldar Shafir, behavioural scientist and psychology professor at Princeton University, explain that ‘just as food possesses the minds of those starving, scarcity steals mental capacity wherever it occurs—from the hungry, to the lonely, to the time-strapped, to the poor.’     

Mullainathan further suggests that ‘our solutions always struggle because the underlying problem is so complicated’. While social scientists focus deeply on the economist of poverty, they tend to pay much less attention to the psychology that creates the problem. ‘The mistake we make in managing scarcity is that we focus on one side of the calculus’, the book concludes.           

Scarcity is a trap. Building cognitive capacity to identify scarcity and realise that we are afflicted by tunnel vision - a condition in which we are consumed by intrusive thoughts and focus on what we don’t have while ignoring other important things in our life - may help us find a way out.

On Dissent

An act of dissidence is eventually solitary. It’s the result of a choice taken in the solitude of a person’s conscience. The same was the case with the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who disappeared on 2 October after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents for his marriage. Weeks later, Saudi authorities admitted that the journalist - who had been close to the Saudi royal family for decades but went into self-exile in the US following crackdown on dissident in Saudi Arabia – was killed inside the consulate.          

‘In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot,’ said Czesław Miłosz, a Polish poet, writer, and diplomat, in his Nobel Lecture in 1980. ‘And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn’t allow one to think of anything else,’ he goes further to say.   

Khashoggi, who, after moving to the US, had been penning a column for the Washington Post, was publicly critical of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, as well as of the Saudi military intervention in the ongoing Yemeni civil war. Khashoggi regularly wrote columns criticising the policies of the Saudi crown prince. His killing, according to the Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor, was premeditated - most certainly aimed at silencing and eliminating yet another dissenter.

Dissent has predominantly been linked to the activity of thinking critically and questioning the established notion of authority, meaning, and truth. A key question today is about what roles dissent should play in democracy or any other form of political arena or governance.

For Immanuel Kant and Plato, dissent was important for developing the ability of individuals to inspect their lives in relation to others or collective ability for public reasoning. Even more recent philosophers, including the nineteenth-century liberals like JS Mill, the twentieth-century critics of liberalism like Foucault, and those belonging to the Frankfurt School, termed dissent as a vital good.                   

While many see the acknowledgment of dissent identities as essential to a healthy democracy and a wide-ranging pluralist political culture, others fear that dissent may lead to the fragmentation of socio-cultural and political system.

Curbing freedom of speech and cognitive diversity and silencing dissident are a dangerous stride towards Orwellian oppression.