To the extent that democracy is an experiment, media pundits seem to confuse the control group with the intervention where they conclude the failings of electoral politics stem from constituents “voting their feelings.”

If anything, the closest thing to a control in this scenario would be the pulling of levers that have long since ceased to register meaningful change, whereas that I feel still matters insofar as there is information to be gained through the heart as transducer (R. Epstein). I see this information as a signal of belonging to a time and place, thereby functionally enabling movement beyond it, even if as imperceptibly as a single grain of sand toward the fullness of an hour.

What I mean by belongingness here sidesteps any demand for a purity test which would seem to satisfy the least complex definition of authenticity that is in accordance with an authoritarian impulse. If we accept from Bergson that recollection tends to imitate perception and from Berkeley that pure memory is not perceptible, what this suggests by extension is an annihilative purity of spirit that doesn’t track due to its instability, whereas what we are looking for is the registering of difference.

For example, there is the etymological tracking of the difference between “heimlich” and “unheimlich” by which Freud expanded on the elusive feeling of the uncanny through its multiple and myriad guises. Elsewhere he appears to have uncovered a signature ambivalence in the hearts of young boys at the time of the fin de siècle. There, “every boy, everywhere, felt toward his mother” an amalgam of loving devotion and envious resentment (Aleksandar Dimitrijevic). We see this ambivalence more recently in William James’s “dilemma of the American conscience,” taken up and fictionalized by Ursula LeGuin.

If anything, the searching after purity of feeling leads to self-deception of the kind described as what must be the “peace” part of War and Peace, which appears to be none other than neoliberal globalism on another scene, an apology for and period of integration in which “one could kill and rob and still be happy.” Here, Nicholas concludes:

As long as the vibration of his note awoke in his soul whatever was best and purest beside this superhuman, this divine sensation, what mattered his gambling loss and his pledged word? Foolishness! (Tolstoy 1869).

What would it matter in such a case, if all there is left to do is adjust ourselves to accommodating a murderous instinct? I refuse to believe our only task is this colossal effort of resignation. What feels more true is to regard these other customs, traditions, morals and mental habits as a keenly interested fate imposed from without. This would imply any “heredity” in which we are each of us “fatally shrouded” (Pater) is but a vestigial vestment, singularly ill fitting for one and all. The conflicted heart theme, as over against an overly reactive purity of affective experience, further suggests an alignment within of what is not outside of or unmindful of law. Rather it observes the fragility of law (Lincoln) while restoring to it wealth of spirit.

If we are at a time in which lack of moral clarity (feigned or otherwise) forestalls decisive action, this hesitance is partly due to lack of direction and partly arising from this misguided standard of purity of conviction as the necessary threshold to bypass the censor. It should therefore be noted that impurities of feeling such as repulsion from what is injurious to the self are themselves regulatory against the loss of whatever obtains in fact, while allowing the rest to fall away. The censor on this account appears as superfluous, contributing nothing as safeguard or protection but only the illusion of efficacy.