On Emotional Truths
Love as Sovereign of the Mind
Dear Reader,
In The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare invented a prototype of the modern cancel culture queen in Portia: morally eloquent in public, but ruthless in orchestrating Shylock’s social destruction. Disguised as a lawyer in a Venetian Court, Portia managed to transform Shylock’s clearly repugnant prayer for a pound of Antonio’s flesh into an even more repugnant court order stripping Shylock of all his wealth, estate, life, and religion. Portia symbolizes the ability of certain talented individuals to wield the passions and prejudices of others to achieve public acclaim and devotion, as though Christ-like, without sacrificing their uncharitable realism.
On September 15, 2023, Clare Malone tried to channel her inner Portia by publishing Hasan Minhaj’s “Emotional Truths” in The New Yorker. Soon after its publication, Minhaj reported that his offer to become the next host of The Daily Show was revoked. However, Malone’s report lacked the cardinal ingredient of genuine, Portia-inspired cancel culture, i.e., a substantial morally repugnant character flaw that is attributable to Minhaj.
Unlike Shylock, Minhaj never demanded a pound of proverbial flesh to deserve Malone’s scrutiny. Though merciless and hypocritical in her legal arguments, Portia could still claim she was reasonably defending the life of another from potential ruin. But Malone impugned Minhaj for what? For being a hack in an era that celebrates hacks? What justification could Malone possibly claim for attacking and potentially ruining Minhaj by, likely, misusing an interview where it appears Minhaj simply explained how comedy works to the reporter.
It was, perhaps, Minhaj’s naiveté to give an interview on the basics of comedy to a reporter apparently willing to distort Minhaj’s explanation of strategies in comedy before the American public. Yet, the joke was on Malone, as her report participated in the very “emotional truths” that Minhaj seemed to address with her. For, it appeared, the “emotional truths” that Minhaj generally described were merely the crowd’s imputation of stereotypes and prejudices upon Minhaj that are completely unavoidable for any such stage performer.
Eventually, Malone’s attempt to punish Minhaj completely fell apart. Minhaj’s strategic choice to continue navigating public stereotypes and prejudices as “emotional truths,” rather than excoriating the public for projecting their stereotypes and prejudices upon Minhaj facilitated his persistence as a great American comedian. For Comedy requires a performer’s grace to humbly allow an audience to project their own emotional truths upon a performer so that the audience can start to work out their own issues through laughter. This means a genuine comedian distinguishes himself from the hacks by putting his ego about who he is aside to help others figure out who they are.[1]
The great comedienne Hannah Gadsby clearly explained these boundaries of comedy in her historic Netflix special Nanette. Where Gadsby decided that comedy no longer served her, in Nanette, she candidly abandoned the medium of comedy to carry on a polemical masterclass to better define comedy in the modern era. In my opinion, Minhaj’s projects and his character fit squarely inside of Gadsby’s definitions and elucidations of the medium of comedy, which means that Malone’s critique crossed, not only Minhaj, but Gadsby as well.
Malone’s attack not only crossed the Rubicon laid out by Gadsby as to the medium of comedy by refereeing Minhaj’s objectivity, but she also seemed to cross her own genre of cultural criticism by positioning her report as fact rather than opinion. For the late queen of literary take-downs herself, Joan Didion, admitted that she reported her emotional truths about facts and circumstances to address then popular fears of impending dooms in America. The bulk of Didion’s writings gave catharsis to an America that was clearly uncomfortable with cultural and societal change. Malone did the same, but without honor, by giving voice to the very emotional truths Minhaj addressed about the public prejudice that judged brown children of immigrants raised in rural California as simply incapable of Minhaj’s excellence while pretending she did not.
Unfortunately, Malone’s takedown appears to have punished Minhaj for explaining the truth’s role in the creation of laughter as the foundation of comedy, such that when a crowd bursts into peals of laughter it reveals something true about the crowd. The principle of emotional truths being more important to the truth than the fictional or made-up theatrical premises that evoke a crowd’s emotions seems to trace back to antiquity where Cicero himself respected such signs as nature’s voice (more on this below).[2] Perhaps modern Americans are only okay with reporting emotional truths as a form of catastrophe, as Didion always seemed to do; or, maybe, punishing Minhaj was therapy for certain white Americans who do not find Minhaj funny.
In Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s interesting book The Black Swan, he attempted to pathologize the seeking of knowledge as a form of therapy. Thus, Taleb frequently decried the error of Platonizing knowledge, which was a fancy way of critiquing reductionism. However, by listing out the knowledge Taleb does not know, Taleb appeared to ironically therapize himself in practically the same way.[3]
Like Taleb’s tendency to criticize others for indulging in a self-soothing exercise he also indulged, Malone appeared to skewer Minhaj for taking advantage of Americans seeking knowledge about race and social justice topics to garner fame. As Taleb exhaustively explained in his book, humanity is designed to not only demand, but to require, narratives reduced from the whole truth to make knowledge comprehensible. We naturally lose the whole picture in the ordinary processes of learning and remembering, as explained by Taleb.
Didion, herself, expanded upon the role of disillusionment in the pathways of survival she pioneered, which paradoxically increased her sense of security as she prognosticated about the doom of nearly everyone around her. Even if Didion was a drudge for smothering hope in America, her development of survival strategies were real and good as explored in Lulu Miller’s path making book Why Fish Don’t Exist. Surviving depression and anxiety is potentially an absolute good, which could require a “year of magical thinking” as Didion described in her book about wrestling with grief and depression (though Didion remained a drudge for not admitting that her friend and rival, Eve Babitz, was right all along about human beings needing levity to thrive).
The overall revelation from Taleb, as with many others from our near and distant past, is the sovereign role of the heart in matters of the mind. This revelation is apparent in Taleb’s book, but is by no means a breakthrough. There are several sources that trace back through Christianity and even before Christianity that propose that love is lord of heaven and earth, which may have originated in Cicero’s report of a crowd’s reaction to the expressions of love between two men that proved to him that natural love is the sovereign leader of the human mind.[4]
The Ciceronian-Christian poet of the American Revolution, Phillis Wheatley, characterized Love as sovereign Queen-Goddess over Reason, her subject-votary, in Thoughts on the Works of Providence. Simultaneously, famed Scottish Economist Adam Smith expressed the same idea in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, which John Adams quoted at length in his Revolutionary tract Discourses on Davila. Later, Bertrand Russell and Hannah Arendt extended these ideas into the secular, writing passionately about the central role of natural human love in the realm of mind.
Finally, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky proved this reality through scientific experiments that showed humans have two modes of thinking, fast and slow. But again, their research was misreported in yet more self-contradicting works like Nudge and Noise according to the very errors of thinking they themselves proved. Taleb, Cass R. Sunstein, Richard Thaler, and other Kahneman-Tversky fans paradoxically expressed their own biases for reason over emotion that caused them to attempt hacking emotions with Kahneman and Tversky’s research to force reasonable outcomes.
These corruptions of human reason appeared to arise from emotional corruptions that Adam Smith described as humankind’s tendency to sympathize with the rich and powerful, while disdaining the poor and infirm. In Taleb’s book and in the works of Sunstein, Thaler, and even of Daniel Kahnemen himself, seeking to apply their knowledge of the limits of human reason, these authors seemed entirely preoccupied with justifying the rich and explaining their errors so they could perfect the status quo.
In a telling passage, Daniel Kahneman himself joined Sunstein and French Economist Olivier Sibony to reject Portia’s plea in the Merchant of Venice as fundamentally unfair, and therefore unjust.[5] This analysis was, itself, extremely reductionist and portended a self-soothing end for Kahneman who was always uncomfortable with irrationality, and, likely, biased in favor of the Jew that Portia degraded with her argument. Thus, to beat Portia at her own game of anti-Semitism, Kahneman unwisely sacrificed the emotion of compassion Portia sported as though her position was compassionate, when the actual problem with Portia’s plea was its lack of compassion and hypocrisy for sporting an uncompassionate position as though it was.[6]
In an important law review article, former Chief Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court Rebecca White Berch explained why Portia’s plea from the Merchant of Venice should be regarded as at least as important to American law as Joseph Story’s Commentaries.[7] The prejudice and anti-Semitism of Portia did not take away the justice of her convictions against the apparent cruelty of Shylock. In fact, Portia seemed to exact perfect fairness from a Venetian Court by winning her pound of flesh in the exact style Shylock claimed it from Antonio, which signaled the inequity of treating fairness as if it were automatically justice.[8]
The basic problem with lifting fairness to the level of justice, which the Merchant of Venice seems to poke fun at, is that injustice can also be administered fairly. Slavery can be enforced equally as to every person as feudalism required in ancient Europe. Dystopias can arise in the name of Utopia as they did in Russia and China.
As such, the flaws of Portia should be navigated by judges interested in administering justice rather than canceled. For cancel culture tends to bleed into areas where there was no credible charge of racism, bigotry, or misogyny, as occurred in the case of Malone’s attempt to get the better of Minhaj’s “emotional truths.” Like potentially all children of immigrants in America, Minhaj was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t talk about his culture and upbringing (especially in a particularly racist part of California) and Malone offered Minhaj no quarter now that he was playing in the major leagues.
Perhaps, for human beings at least, there are only emotional truths as nature’s voice keeps speaking to us through laughter and tears. Some people dislike Minhaj and will think the worst of him. Following their emotional truth of hatred or jealousy, perhaps, they are obviously capable of weaponizing genuineness against comedy itself. But most of us will prefer to keep laughing than read a boring critique about why only “genuine” people deserve to make America laugh. And if Minhaj ever stopped making us laugh we would sooner change the channel to watch the latest episode of Hacks, or, at least, that’s what I would do, because Hacks being the best comedy on TV right now is my emotional truth, and I’m sticking to it.
Yours Cordially,
Joshua J. Schroeder, Esq.
[1] Anyone who performs comedy for something greater than themselves should seek to push themselves out of the way. Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal 3 (2013) (“Please help me push myself aside.”).
[2] Cicero, De Amcitia 7.24 (addressing a theatrical expression of friendship love: “In this case Nature easily asserted her own power, inasmuch as men approved in another as well done that which they could not do themselves.”).
[3] Joshua J. Schroeder, Why Cost/Benefit Balancing Tests Don’t Exist: How to Dispel a Delusion That Delays Justice for Immigrants, 125 W. Va. L. Rev. 183, 228 (2022) (noting the therapy of collecting items of knowledge as a way to self-soothe when one is uncomfortable).
[4] Cicero, De Amcitia 7.24 (noting that a scene from Roman play where Orestes and Pylades fervently lay down their lives for the other caused throngs of Romans to rise with shouts and cheers, indicating to Cicero that this kind of self-sacrificial love is a true desire of humankind).
[5] Schroeder, supra note 3, at 258 (noting this passage from Noise on page 340).
[6] Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony & Cass R. Sunstein, Noice: A Flaw in Human Judgment 340 (2021).
[7] Rebecca White Berch, The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1, 10 J. Appellate Practice & Process 357, 363 (2009).
[8] Schroeder, supra note 3, at 258 (disputing the old claim that fairness is justice).