Sam: “Cops are hunting black people!”
Harry: “Uh … Well, if you look at the data ….”
Sam: [Indignant and angry] “I’m not talking about statistics. I’m talking about people. You’re a horrible, racist person!”
We’ve been told for years that we need to have a “conversation about race,” and what I just described is about how the conversation goes these days, in far too many cases.
It seems fairly clear that a portion of the population is guided by feelings and emotion rather than argument. They react to events based on those feelings. So, for example, when some incident involving the police is reported, they don’t think, “I’d better wait for the facts to see what really happened here,” they just leap to a conclusion.
Ben Shapiro likes to say “facts don’t care about your feelings.” But for a large number of people, facts don’t matter. Only feelings do.
It seems analogous to the way an attorney might try to influence a jury by saying something inflammatory, which he knows will be struck down, but which can’t be erased from the jury’s mind. Once the idea is in there, it’s in there.
Or again, like an accusation against a public figure. It might be groundless. It might be disproven (on page 23, in small type) a few days later. But the impression is still out there. You can’t un-ring a bell.
I have some suspicions about how we got to this point, but I’d like to hear your ideas. First, is this phenomenon worse than it was 20 years ago (I think it is), and second, why?