It is a double-barreled dinner party — not only a party organized by a dinner, but also a dinner organized as a tribute to one of those at the table. We are supposed to be fawning and on message. We are supposed to admire the food and agree to more wine. We are not supposed to slip out early. And, given the epoch in which we find ourselves, we are supposed to be aghast about Donald Trump.
You have been in so many of these conversations that I don’t need to tell you the content for you to hum along. The conversation never starts straight. It never begins with someone saying, “Well, what about this election and this remarkably unusual Republican nominee Donald Trump?” It begins sidelong. Nobody intends to go there but they are so glad the opening is made so the phrases they’ve been practicing in their cars and in front of debates can get public hearing. But they don’t want to show eagerness, so everyone speaks in knowing punchline.
I don’t want to speak about Trump. I am concerned that our focus on him adds to the thing he needs to stay alive, namely our attention. I do not want to feed his reality — a reality defined by punchline, by non sequitur, by compulsive distraction from the subject at hand. If I get past that and assume attention is necessary, I worry that the way we talk reiterates, in every phrase and posture, why those who follow him do. He has got our goat. And when our goat is got, we talk in ways that show how he came to be by showing why he is someone who others — those not sitting at this dinner table — want.
This time Trump came up because someone mentioned Brexit. Brexit! Can you believe it? someone says. Eyes are rolled. Why are people voting against their interests? How has ignorance taken over the Anglophone world? What is happening? In reply, I do a thing that nobody likes at a party: I give an account of the punchline that isn’t a joke. I begin well enough, nodding at the outrage, and then referring to a story I heard on NPR about a British baker who claimed that after Brexit he could export more cheaply to Europe. If I’d just leave it at that, fine, but I keep going, as if I’d become a scholar of this NPR story and this Brexit-voting baker: he also said that the potential relaxation of employment laws would bring greater flexibility to adjust his labor force; he also said that the increase in customs procedures didn’t bother him; he also said that the diminishment of skilled immigrant labor could be a problem in some sectors but not his; he also said that he knew the tech companies and other newer industries would be hurt the most but that in general expected that any of these losses were nothing before the gains to be had by the decline in the exchange rate between the pound and the Euro.
In this minute, I am being the worst. The worst because I can’t stop talking, and the worst because everyone at the table is clearly getting nervous that I am a little too committed to the Brexit baker. Whose side am I on, anyway? The guest of honor speaks up: Well, he’ll be shown wrong. And the woman on my left, the one who’d spent three years in England, the one with the gumdrop pearls and moss-green cashmere layers, observes that racism drives it all. All of it. See how the baker doesn’t care about immigrant labor? Racism. And everyone at the table nods, knowingly. We know what is wrong in the world, and it is Donald Trump and his offensive forms of speech, his offending acts of racism, his offensive certitude relative to our own.
Understanding is dangerous, here. You are worried maybe now that I don’t agree. That I don’t know that Donald Trump is a world-class bigot who has insulted Mexicans and Muslims, who doesn’t do his homework or honor his debts, who thinks immigrants are leeches and women are walking pussies. You are nervous, I assume, for the same reason that room was nervous: because they comprise that portion of the electorate decidedly disgusted by Donald Trump, and to be a member of that collective you have to understand things that I seem unwilling to see. I don’t get how Brexit is about race and I don’t get, therefore, why we so easily segued at that terrible dinner party from my babbling monologue about the baker into a zippy exchange of pre-auditioned quips about Trump’s racism.
So I fell silent. I didn’t have it in me to keep going with the shallow talk of elite people avoiding comprehension in favor of the pulse of commiseration. At that table, the cohering principle of togetherness was a commitment to the senselessness, the irrationality, the uncomprehending ignorance of it all. Staying shocked at the Donald keeps us all in it, eroticized by our own disgust. What a drag it would be to cease being shocked by his ascendancy, and pursue instead an explanation of how we contributed to it, contributed to it by our very knowing: mine, theirs, ours.
To be a scholar of religion is to participate in a hermeneutics of the incomprehensible. That isn’t exactly right: what scholars of religion do is account for why groups of people consistently agree to things that other people think are incomprehensible, irrational, even senseless. Images illegible relative to contemporary notions of geometry or perspective; abstractions so abstract they twist the brain; doctrines so specific they seem impracticable; myths so fantastic they seem extraterrestrial. Through documentary engagement, linguistic specificity, historical and sociological and economic analysis — scholars of religion make those things legible as human products of human need.
It is therefore unsurprising that I, a scholar of religion, am invested in an account of Trump that renders his absurdity less so. It is, perhaps, my sole specific obligation: to figure out the reason in his seeming madness. To ask, too: Why does he seem mad to some, and not at all to others? The history of religions has long suggested the one does not exist without the other, that to be inside something requires someone else being outside. And, too, that making the strange familiar inevitably ought to make the familiar strange. But here I get ahead of myself.
