Aristotle and Emotional Understanding

I remember the first time Trump was elected in 2016 like it was yesterday. 

But first, a little context. I had been living in Connecticut since 2013 at the time. I had graduated from Yale, in New Haven, and moved down the coast to Milford. Connecticut was good and bad for me. And I’ll probably get into more of that later. For here it’ll suffice to say that it was the first time I’d been surrounded by folks who, more or less, shared my political opinions. I’d leaned liberal/progressive in the mid-west and southeast, or in conservative Christian circles. And I was used to getting in trouble or being disliked for it. So I really leaned in to being around folks who thought like I did. There had been a lot of pain, rejection, and painstaking philosophical reflection in the past. So I really want to underline that I was grateful for the ideological respite and robust intellectual life I had in Connecticut. 

I started to realize that maybe I had gone too far - or just fallen out of touch - when Trump was elected. I had been hunting with my dad and cousins in northern Minnesota. My family is typically respectful of each other, and not crazy political anyway, so hunting camp wasn’t as absurd as maybe you’re imagining. Folks were definitely for Trump, but the scene was toned down compared to anything a television show has depicted since then. 

What I’ll never forget was driving back to Connecticut through the night with my dad. All the different local radio stations were reporting the results as they were coming in. Each locale gave their own little feedback, colored by the region and its local politics. It was fascinating. And it drove home that I had been in Connecticut for too long. I was disconnected from a lot of the country. I had heard the arguments. Intellectually, I could repeat them. But I didn’t really understand what was wrong with these people that would make them vote for this orange guy who talked a lot of shit. I got back to Connecticut and cried under a bush while I waited in the rain for my girlfriend to pick me up for the last leg of the trip. 

One of the things I picked up during my degree in Ethics was what Aristotle thought about virtue. He thought it was what humans were aimed at (telos), whether they meant to be or not. So, for example, the rebellious kid who thought they didn’t want to become virtuous - whatever else they wanted would actually be some other approximation of virtue, just in a different form than whatever they were being presented with. Aristotle has 5 points regarding virtue: it’s doing the right thing, to the right degree, to the right person(s), at the right time, and having the right feelings about doing it. He also thought that virtue couldn’t really be achieved by anyone under 40 - attaining virtue around 40 was even ambitious. And he thought that anyone without the right upbringing from youth had absolutely no chance. He wouldn’t take students without the right upbringing, for example. (He also didn’t think slaves were people, so we don’t have to take him too seriously about everything. But he’s also in the top 2 or 3 most influential thinkers in history, so we can’t really write him off, either). 

So rebellious kids - while they aren’t even close to virtue to begin with - are still aiming at virtue. It’s just a fairly distorted version of it. Too much damage has already befallen their sense of love, trust, discipline, etc. Good luck, I guess. 

I typically have a good idea of what I’m feeling, and why I’m feeling it. I’m often thinking to myself that I don’t have the right feelings about what I’m doing even though it’s technically the right thing. I’m not talking about anything major. Like I’m not arguing with myself whether to pay for items at the store while I’m heading to check out. But I’m not always feeling that jazzed about tipping - stuff like that. 

As Trump finally took office and the media started sending writers and staffers out to do reports on who these people were that voted for him, I noticed something. The intellectual arguments were being made pretty easily. The reasons why readily became apparent. But basically nobody was doing anything close to trying to understand the other side emotionally. They were willing to understand them intellectually - usually so they could call them stupid. But then they withdrew into their own enclaves. And so the shift took hold nationally. Zip-codes started forming as more blue or red than ever. If I was a better reporter I’d have more data here - but people started to move because of political affiliation. Today, eight years later, it feels pretty normal. Folks moved during covid, but they still went to places not too hostile to their own political leanings (or they took the opportunity to get out of the office to go somewhere they liked). 

I knew how disconnected I was from at least half the country so I decided to do something about it. 

It sounds so noble when I give myself that much agency. The reality was that my life fell apart in Connecticut. My mental and physical health had deteriorated. My business failed. My long-term relationship exploded. I was broke, financially and otherwise. Oh, and my lease was up. It was perfect timing to search for truth - or try and reconnect myself to my native land. I could head off on a grand search for my fellow American. Or something like that. Most people had to maintain jobs. They couldn’t just up and move on a wild goose chase to emotionally understand others with whom they disagreed. Me, on the other hand, I took to traveling the country full time. I started sleeping over with people I didn’t agree with - family, and friends from past periods and geographical regions in my life. 

It took me 4 or 5 years before I had an involuntary emotional reaction to something regarding Trump. I forget what it was. It wasn’t major. It was just that I had an emotional reaction that I had heard Trump supporters articulate before. It wasn’t that my political ideas had shifted. I didn’t magically start respecting him. But I got my first glimpse of what it felt like to have the right feelings about doing the right things, to the right degree, to the right people at the right time for the right reasons. I finally started to take Trump supporters I didn’t know more seriously. 

Now, I realize there’s a bit of a leap between emotionally understanding someone and having the right feelings in an Aristotelean sense. Let me clarify. Regardless of where a person is on their journey on the road to virtue, they are on a spectrum regarding these five categories. We all do things, to varying degrees, to others, at specific times, for varying reasons, and we all feel certain things about these varying actions. So what I’m saying is that if we can find a way to feel an ostensibly similar way to someone we don’t agree with, we approach something close to emotional understanding. If we can have similar involuntary emotional responses - it’s almost impossible not to find some common ground. 

It was an interesting realization. Plenty of folks I knew voted for Trump. My family, mostly. They got my unconditional love, if not support, in life regardless of their political inclinations. But I had never thought that my ability to feel the same involuntary emotions as someone I wasn’t close with affected how I was able to understand or deal with them. And then I reflected on how long it took me to get to that point where it finally happened to me - before I had an inkling of an emotional response that would’ve resonated with Trump supporters. 

It took years, some-what embedded exposure, and I was pretty intentional about trying to cultivate it. A lot of work for a medicare result - some would say an abhorrent result. It's not exactly a solution that scales. 

Besides, people can’t move on a whim, even if they wanted to. They can’t just leave their geographical echo chambers. They can’t gain the relevant subcultural immersion required to shift thoughts and emotional responses. Journalists, though they get to travel and see events on the ground, don’t have the ethnographic training - or perhaps just the time - to stick around and feel the larger contexts that give rise to socio-cultural situations. JD Vance did an OK job in his book Hillbilly Elegy - that’s why it did so well. It gave a glimpse into the emotional lives of, among other Appalachian souls, so many of Trump’s supporters. Again - because it’s so hard to portray something resembling emotional understanding, the book resonated with people. It did more than just give an intellectual articulation of the reasons why people acted the way they did. It got into the emotions of what it felt like to be doing the things. 

My solution isn’t yet practical. 

It’s to make traveling the world an accessible way to develop human capital - to educate significantly more of the population. It involves a collective shift toward travel - geographically, sure, but also ideologically, culturally, socio-economically, religiously, (insert any element of life), etc. This type of travel is just as valuable locally as it is internationally. We can travel ideologically or socio-economically without moving more than 100 miles, often much less, depending on where we live. In many ways it’s the same “try to listen and understand where people are coming from” or “try to get out of your echo chamber” kind of answer. 

I just don’t think it’s possible for most folks to  get out of their echo chambers without the physical shock that is geographical travel. 

I could learn a ton about the country of Turkey on the internet and in libraries. But I’ve never learned more about the country, it’s culture, etc, as when I physically went to Turkey. It’s people, culture, language, memes, religion, etc, never mattered to me more than when I was physically confronted with their presence in live and living color. My long-term solution is to integrate travel into people’s lives over the long term, and at scale. If folks could travel for a week, a weekend, a month, a year - any custom amount of time - repeatedly, a few times a year, for many years, they’d be able to develop a robust emotional understanding of many more sub-cultures and populations. Over decades we can build an emotional understanding of each other. 

I think that’s how much work has to be done to bring the country together again. I’m thinking of it as a generational thing.