in defense of moral dissonance
...and everything in between.
There’s a recurring moment in the 21st century digital lifestyle which I am forced to return to, and that is watching people argue online about who deserves their grief. Someone posts a photo of a child or family or otherwise unimaginable atrocity to which another responds with a new child or new family or new atrocity and as a third party, I am, inevitably, forced to close my tab, exhausted by the mathematics of suffering.
It is a similar grief of which I am tempted to share when the Yankees lost the World Series. For New Yorkers, it was their series to lose. Heating up at the right time, they had everything going for them.
But it doesn’t make it any less of a harder pill to swallow to think in retrospect. Such thoughts are a privilege to those who can afford to not live in the present. And yet we project onto them - the game, the moment - the clarity and closure we cannot find elsewhere. It is, in a way, a rehearsal for heartbreak that mimics nothing of our morality.
It’s tempting to believe that we’re choosing between competing realities—of our grief, our choices, our companions. But such cognitive dissonance was never a choice. The psychological reality is both simpler and more troubling: we don’t wrestle with competing loyalties as much as we resolve them instantly, oftentimes before we’re even conscious of them.
The correct way to phrase such a situation is not cognitive dissonance, but moral dissonance–the inability to come to terms with our decisions due to conflicting conscious beliefs. It is a tension between your desire to hold up your perceived moral standing and your desire to act freely.
What we see now in protests, in cultural revolution, in graduation speeches is not a failure of understanding but a failure of imagination. A failure to imagine another’s humanity with the same vividness with which we imagine our own.
That’s why the playoffs feel so safe. There is a structure in heartbreak in that there is time to prepare for it, a winding clock to mirror your emotions. Nobody is there to ask you about your values, but only your loyalties. It’s a clean kind of emotion that the rest of the world does not necessarily offer.
It is very easy to remain ignorant. It is, in fact, the path that I have chosen before and inevitably the path I will choose in the future. But the solidarity I have found in such ignorance is unsettling to a point of near irreversibility. Sure, there are times in which community is bliss and the collective nature will triumph and New York will rejoice. But it will take far more to instill such an unrest, a dissonance, an insomnia that lies us awake before, at long last, sleep becomes our only retreat.