June 2007 - Did the Cold War Condition Us to Fear Democracy?

July 2007 - Winning: What Does it Mean?

August 2007 - Sick, Sicko and the Absurdity of American Health Care

September 2007 Liberal vs. Conservative: Peace at Last

October 2007 Existential Memories and Peaceful Human Relations

November 2007 Honor: What is It? Who Has It? Who Doesn’t? Why Does It Matter?

December 2007 Failed Citizenship vs. Illegal Immigration

January 2008 Nanosecond Nihilism

February 2008

Facing the Reality of Death:
Angst, Exhilaration, and Solace 
© Charles D. Hayes

The way psychologist Erich Fromm characterized it, aging, especially after age sixty-five, is a time to live as if living is one’s main business. To do this effectively requires keeping the alternative in perspective. So, while thinking recently about Arthur Schopenhauer’s notion that life is a loan from death and sleep is the interest we pay on the loan, it occurred to me that forgetfulness qualifies as a reminder of death which perhaps is what makes it so irritating. As we age it makes sense that many of us seem more easily annoyed. Forgetfulness, when it becomes increasingly noticeable, is a constant reminder that we are not in control.

Near the end of his own life, Sigmund Freud theorized about his long held notion of the existence of a universal death instinct. He acknowledged that what most people do with regard to facing death is to shelve the subject and avoid it with distraction. Freud surmised that all living creatures struggle with the opposing forces of life and death. He believed that, more often than not, the death instinct shows itself as varying forms of aggression. Freud’s theory was not well developed and was not well received in academia. In my view, a far stronger case can be made that a profound conscious and subconscious existential fear of death favors distraction as a means of avoiding thinking about death, period. In other words, whatever it takes: cards, television, books, puzzles, sex, religion, mysticism, golf, a hobby.  It matters not, as both high and low culture, and drama, in particular, provide blissful escape, and perhaps a vicarious but subtle method for dissipating our aggression through our imagination. Ironically, distraction appears to ease one’s immediate angst but in the long run ratchets up anxiety which can readily turn into despair of the worst kind as Kierkegaard defined it - “despair unaware that it’s despair.” 

Deep into my sixties, and in spite of the above, I now find more and more people willing to discuss the notion of their own death.  Through this, I’ve come to believe that there is also a positive side to counter the dread of nonexistence with the potential to show itself nearly as frequently as the negative reminders like forgetfulness. Trouble is, almost no one speaks about the affirmative side. I’m confident that I’m not the only person who has such experiences. There are times, for example, when the music I’m listening to sounds better than it should be possible for music to sound. The same with the endorphin rush of comprehension from reading text in a book with a passage I find particularly inspiring, or an actor or actress in the delivery of a brilliant performance. Similar feelings occur with sights, sounds, and even odors, when these occurrences seem more pronounced than ever before. These are moments of intense clarity and exhilaration. They appear as if in all caps, italicized, and underlined. True they are fleeting, but are no less powerful for it. And they tend to leave an emphasis on my memory as if to place an asterisk on the experience - not that I will recall it exactly as it happened, but merely that it did happen and with the optimistic expectation that it might happen again.

I’m at a loss to explain these experiences. They are describable only as existential exclamation points—a vivid sense of awareness accentuated with a hint of urgency, part lament, and part celebration. I suspect these occurrences are something other than, The Varieties of Religious Experience discussed by William James or Abraham Maslow’s Peak Experiences. The closest example to my own experience that I recall reading about is philosopher Brian Magee’s emotional elation while listening to the music of Gustav Mahler. It’s not surprising though, that there hasn’t been a lot of discussion about the brighter side of gazing into the abyss, simply because of the common practice of vigorously avoiding the subject.

Mingled with the highlighted experiences above, I’m often reminded of events that didn’t seem so special when they occurred, but that now portend a sense of regret that I may not experience them again. Examples, like the mesmerizing sound of crickets on a warm summer night with June bugs buzzing under a streetlight, fireflies sparking like embers in deep woods, the smell of fresh plowed earth, a sudden blissfully cool downdraft of air preceding a thunderstorm on a hot day, the crisp smell winter to come in the fall. These are all exclamation points not fully appreciated until their chances of being repeated are threatened by want of time. 

The longer we live and the more our friends and family members precede us in death, the more profound I suspect is our awareness of our own mortality and the more aware we are of our being aware. It’s sort of like a stage actor observing herself acting, but without worrying about how well she’s doing. After watching the Discovery channel’s series about climbing Everest, I liken the experience of a short time ahead, metaphorically, to trekking at high altitude with the summit, representing the end, in plain sight. The clearer the end becomes, the more sensitive we are to everything in our midst and thankfully the air is too thin at this level to sustain much pretension.

Strewn about below is a lifetime of memories petitioning to be measured against expectation - routine and mundane daily experiences interspersed with moments of high drama that turned days into weeks and weeks into years. Our decades are stacked up like chapters in a novel lacking a definitive plot with some sections that seem that they should belong in the book of a stranger. It’s as if we could hear Auld Lang Syne ringing in our ears about old acquaintances long forgotten. Images reappear in our mind’s eye, as the haunting faces of the elders we knew when we were young. These are the folks who died out of sight and out of our mind, and as we near our own death, we find ourselves wondering what happened to them and how and when they passed away. We recall events that seemed critical and profoundly important at the time, that don’t matter at all now and little things that didn’t seem important then but do now. And there are all of those unpleasant memories of occasions we would rather forget, along with those satisfying experiences we wish we could remember more clearly.

Still, so many questions remain unanswered. Has our life been successful? By whose standards do we judge? What of our legacy? Do we actually have one? Would we know it, if we didn’t, or recognize it as a legacy, if we did? What is there left to do that we still might accomplish? If we had our life to do over again, would it be worth the effort? Would it be worth reliving eternally? What would we do differently? Have we learned enough about living to lay down good memories in the present without wishing we could redirect the scenes? An ending is required to put our story in perspective and yet it is in our psychosomatic nature that doing so will always seem premature.   

Perhaps in the light of the summit, we can imagine that upon our shoulders rests the mountainous weight of all of our earthly problems which, upon our demise, will lift away like a spring mist.  Then maybe we can dissolve some of the angst of our predicament. Moreover, the same can be said of our discomfort about nonexistence and any aggression we may secretly harbor. So, even though Freud was probably wrong about the death instinct, it doesn’t really matter, one way or the other.

As the aging and openly communicative baby boom generation makes their way to the peak, I suspect there will be a lot of discussion about subjects that most other generations chose to leave on the shelf. Based upon my own experience, I think that in doing so they cheated themselves out of something constructive that only comes with a harsh dose of reality and the desire for perspective. Better to do as Emerson and Schopenhauer suggested, and to look death in the eye and refuse to blink. Near the summit, the air is clearer and one can be more objective than ever before. Minus enough air to entertain the routine of daily life all that is available is a panoramic, big-picture view that begs comprehension, rationalization, and justification. It yields no great secrets; instead, it reveals a more realistic view of the way the world is, and not as we had wished that it was, or thought it to be, when we were young. The power of this elevated viewpoint is that it enables us to observe layer upon layer of nonsense we have constructed with the help of our culture for reasons that may suddenly seem incredulous.  This is, in part, why I think it’s possible to experience moments of sharp sensory perception in which music can sound better than we’ve ever suspected possible. It’s a kind of clarity of contrasted experience, part bittersweet sorrow, because life is passing, and part celebration for having had the privilege of living.

But here’s the thing. This kind of perception arises in similar fashion to Alan Watts' “backwards law” which he described as when you let yourself relax in the water you don’t sink as you would expect, instead you float. It’s an unencumbered observer phenomenon unavailable to those whose thirst for security is never satiated. Watts said “belief clings, but faith lets go.” As counterintuitive as it sounds, I believe it’s the letting go of our personal involvement with the world, as aging makes our lack of influence over the future more and more self-evident, that enables us to see and think clearly enough to do something that might actually have lasting consequences. And I suspect it’s, in part, what prompted life-stage researcher Erik Erikson to observe that wisdom is a product of “involved disinvolvement,” and why some aging citizens achieve a sense of “grand-generativity” as a generous and broadly felt sense of goodwill intended as an aspiration for posterity.  

On the dark side though, there are so many people among the living whose daily existence is but one excruciating health catastrophe after another, not to mention those who die young and those who experience premature senility. For persons living in constant pain with relief coming only from stupor inducing drugs, who can blame them for despairing about exhilaration and aging as even being mentioned in the same sentence? I think of people in this circumstance when I encounter the New Age nonsense, so often pitched in self-help books with their empty platitudes and cliché ridden slogans, about how wonderful everything is. I compare these mindless assertions with Schopenhauer’s example of the feelings among animal’s whilst one is being eaten by another and the bubble comes back toward the center.

And then, there is the late Ernest Becker who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Denial of Death. Becker argued that if we were to dwell on it too much, the precariousness of our own mortality would drive us insane. He may have been right. But too much shelter from reality also yields deleterious effects. Near the summit, the perspective is grand unless one refuses to look for fear of the inevitable. To perceive of life metaphorically above the fray of everyday concerns offers a chance, as philosopher Thomas Ellis Katen, suggested for taking up philosophy, in order, as he put it, “to get out of the unremitting rain of unreflected-upon information.” But philosophy, as Socrates demonstrated and as many philosophers since have claimed, is also about learning how to die. The view on high is clear because there is not enough time to be overly concerned about the mundane habits of everyday life, but plenty for the practice of sheer unfettered observation and contemplation. Taking in the view from this level is unique in that after a lifetime of arguing about what is and isn’t of value, it suddenly becomes clear - and it’s not unusual to find that real value is not what we thought it was.

In the sprit of Schopenhauer, Becker wrote, “Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism’s comfort and expansiveness.” A bit harsh, I think. Speaking for myself, I would rather have had the chance to appear as a stain in the pit as not, and I bet I could find lots of folks who would agree with me that there have been some fine moments on our way to the compost heap. 

 More than three decades ago, physicist Stephen Hawking postulated that the existence of black holes means that all information in the universe will ultimately end. Recently he changed his mind. Now he argues that the end will come only to information in galaxies where black holes actually exist. The same kind of logic is, I’m afraid, as close as we will ever get to why some people seem to live charmed lives and others live in perpetual misery. It happens. So, it doesn’t take a lot of life experience for observant individuals to conceive that for human beings there are many things worse than death, but that both the good and ill have to be considered and weighed constantly to keep one’s perspective.

Of course, simply trying to wrap one’s mind around the metaphysical mysteries of time and space as being interchangeable, or the unfathomable notion of space as infinite, and that, as the Theory of Relativity suggests, the past, present, and future, coexist simultaneously, could drive us mad if we thought we had to reduce these matters to a realm of concrete understanding before we die. Contemplating these mysteries is, I suspect, analogous to the difficulty for a living brain to comprehend its own nonexistence, because the very act of doing so is a metaphysical violation of causality.

We appear to be wired to shelter ourselves from too much reality. In Wings of Illusion, psychologist John F. Schumaker argues that we should think it worthy to determine a proper degree of illusion as a psychological shelter, but to be very careful about not overdoing it. He writes, “Reality-transcending paranormal beliefs are of such great survival value that, through evolution, we became biologically predisposed to believe the unbelievable.” If we are truly honest with ourselves, this becomes exceptionally clear near the summit, from here, we can see the distraction for what it is and not be nearly as distraught as expected.

Another key to understanding the exhilaration possible in facing death is that when one begins to tweak with our beliefs near the code level of our biological wiring, haphazardly tripping over endorphins is not unusual. In other words, contemplating existential matters at high altitude is pleasurable by design. Schumaker says that culture absorbs the chaos and “manufactures the stupidity that we need in order to function in this world.” Not surprisingly then when we begin to figure this out during the existential deliberation that comes naturally with aging, a sense of suddenly seeing through illusions without the usual dread is enthralling. As it turns out, looking death in the eye trips a pleasurable circuit. Neurological testing reveals that when we contemplate death directly, our brain responds by activating positive information to compensate.[i] 

We are all familiar with the process of meeting overwhelmingly bad news with denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance that hopefully evolves into a stoic resolve. But for many of us, age catches up, like the frog in hot water that begins to boil before he can escape, and by the time we awaken enough to see the summit in plain view, it is much too late to deny our mortality.  There is nothing to bargain about. Time is short. And furthermore, there is nothing to be gained from fear and depression but the very possibility of missing a last chance to make some subjective sense of it all. Simply stated, the last chapters of life require some graduate level thinking to ensure that we’ve fully checked-in before we check out.

My experience suggests that it’s entirely possible that strenuous efforts to develop our perspective from a philosophical position near the end of life may result in some of the best times we may ever have and that they may have the potential for a lasting effect on whatever legacy we leave behind provided there are no black holes in the neighborhood and there is new grass to cover the pit. Exclamation points are where you find them and when you really start to pay attention because time is short, the rewards are exhilarating and the payoff is the ability to see through the nonsensical distractions that are detrimental to civilization and our progeny’s future.                           

January 2008

Nanosecond Nihilism
© Charles D. Hayes

Albert Einstein seems to be losing the argument that the thinking required to solve problems has to be greater than the indifference or rationale that caused the problems to begin with. Deliberative thinking is after all a time/space product.  These days, though, we are assaulted continuously with commercial messages carefully crafted with the benefit of deep psychological insights into our human insecurities for the express purpose of making us uncomfortable if we don’t take swift actions as consumers. And thus we have become fanatical about our time. Of course nothing has changed about time but our perception of it.  Yet we seem to be striving to apply a microwaveable-fast-food pace to every vestige of our lives.  It’s not at all surprising that a recent study conducted by The National Endowment for the Arts showed not only a decline in reading, but a diminished capacity for comprehension of written text for Americans at large. 

No time to study. No time for books. Give it to me quick. Keep it short. Bullet your proposal. Keep it simple. Get to the point. You have two minutes. Give me a PowerPoint synopsis.  Keep it to one page. Send me a short email. You have a great point here; put it up front.  Don’t bury the most important thing you want to communicate. We need action, not words. Do something quick, even if it’s wrong.

We hear these kinds of expressions every day and what they suggest is that if we ignore their implied sense of urgency we are going to lose something of value. This may be true, but not in the way you might expect. Instead of losing something of real value, today’s penchant for speed decreases the likelihood that we even recognize real value when we see it. At some point, in nearly every enterprise, continuously turning up the tempo obscures the very notion for acting to begin with. We are living in a time of great paradox in which the clarity of what we need to do is grossly oversimplified by the perception that if we don’t do it quickly the opportunity to act will pass.

A generation ago, futurist John Nisbett said “we are living in a time of parentheses.” A time of ellipses might be more accurate.  We are ignoring the occasion needed to think things through in order to convey our thoughts with a frenzied sense of urgency that feeds on its own hyper-vigilance.  A hurry-up culture creates an anti-intellectual environment where doing is exalted and taking the time to think is disparaged. That we experience too much of the former and not enough of the later is painfully obvious. A society suffering unrelenting un-reflection gives schizophrenia a plausible feel. This dangerous unreflective period has led politicians who are unapologetically non-deliberative and anti-intellectual to an American foreign policy where our actions amount to a simple fire, ready, aim strategy. The grand irony of our time dilemma is that we really do need to congeal our reasoning down to the simplest form of communication and yet the most valuable things we learn in life are often the result of extraordinarily thoughtful efforts.  Understanding complexity requires as much time as is necessary, period.  

Behavioral science has long ago revealed that humans are complex creatures hardwired for a kind of tribal affiliation that we left behind centuries ago. In the West we are taught from birth to aspire to democracy as an ideological path to freedom. We are not taught, however, that the pursuit of democracy clashes with our behavioral nature. Moreover, if we do not undertake a very complex and at times counterintuitive exploration of this inherent contradiction we are doomed to experience lives ad nauseam where we say one thing and do another without ever realizing or appreciating the built-in negation which results in self-defeating behavior. To seek democracy with a tribal mindset without an awareness of the irony of our predicament is to be perpetually confused by our own actions and inclinations. And so as we increasingly perceive of ourselves as being short of time, we default to blaming others for problems that we do not take the time to understand.

Steven Pinker has written an extraordinarily insightful book, The Stuff of Thought; trouble is, it’s thick.  Heavy, in fact, clocking in at 512 pages, and - hold on to your hat - it’s the third in a trilogy of fat books about language. And yet, I know writers who would think it a heretical misuse of their time to read Pinker’s books or any books about a subject they think they have already mastered. Not only that, but what if one were to read these tomes only to discover that all of the important material was not up front? Worse, what if all of the good stuff was up front? What then? Why so damned many pages left over? Who has time to look for nuggets of wisdom in the middle or near the end of a long text? And think of how shocking it would be to actually find them there.

It may seem that a society obsessed with keeping things short and simple is efficient, but the reality is that such a culture is always in danger of being a prisoner of the superficial. We increase the very plasticity of our brains not by simplicity but by mastering complex subject matter. Embracing complexity intellectually provides the means with which we are subsequently said to intuit the ability to know that simple, one-page summaries are indeed valid conclusions. People who believe they can stop thinking and learning difficult material simply because they have been to college fool themselves into complacency.  This leads to a special kind of existential angst that sustains and nourishes its own repetitive torment.  

Steven Pinker makes the point that words are not just facts, but “are woven into the causal fabric of the world.” Pinker illustrates semantic time difficulties with a question about 9/11. Was 9/11 one event or two? The North twin tower was hit by a jetliner at 8:46 am on September 11, 2001. At 9:03 am on the same day a jet flew into the South tower. One event or two? Unimportant you say! Well suppose you were the insurer of the towers and if the catastrophe was considered one event, you would have to pay the owner three and a half billion dollars. But if it were deemed two events you would have to pay-out seven billion. You were standing a few streets over and you saw an aircraft strike each tower. You can count.  So when the second airplane hit the South tower you said to yourself, that’s two. So what’s it going to be, one or two?

If we do not do the thoughtful and continuous intellectual housekeeping and study of language required to maintain our perspective about the very nature of knowledge and communication and the way we relate to it and one another, then we cannot help but default to tribal inclinations that trump our ideals as we say one thing and do another. We speak of the need for brotherly love while plotting against our neighbor as an act of retaliation because his worldview does not match our own. He sees one event on 9/11; we see two, or the reverse.

Could we be persuaded to imagine that each person killed on 9/11 represented a separate event? It appears that our language perpetually blocks our ability to discern reality, especially when we are not personally involved. So, is it better to think these linguistic issues through and insist on calling attention to the fundamental difficulties of communication, or do we simply acquiesce and leave these matters to unreflective individuals who will simply characterize them as being matters of common sense? Clearly our language sets the parameters of our take on reality, and the only way to expand it is through the continuous examination of our methods for communication. 

Taking the time to read rich material while making a serious effort to understand linguistics, semantic difficulty and the genealogy and dynamics of metaphor enables one to communicate at ever more meaningful levels. But to act as if there isn’t time to think through what one is about to do is to smother further interest and one’s intellect in the process. A friend of mine once told me about a former girlfriend who had taken a fast-track through college. She obtained a degree in French literature, and yet she didn’t know what a metaphor was. I can understand that. But what I can’t understand is how anyone could be interested in French literature and not know what a metaphor is. We live in, by, and through metaphors and for writers to fail to understand the utility of metaphor is to be like a mechanic who can’t tell simple and special tools apart. 

In politics and matters of disagreement, the ability to frame issues via metaphor gives one a home field advantage. And even more important, delving into the crux of metaphor enriches perception and enables one to examine life through Emersonian eyes with the presence of mind to observe that “the world globes itself in a drop of dew.” Sometimes, metaphors are cloud-like entities that you can’t appreciate fully until you realize that when you reach for them, there is nothing there. Moreover, in a society where the metaphor “time is money” is accepted as common wisdom, intuitive thoughts to the contrary can make a person feel oddly out of step.  That is, until they reach an age in which time as money is perceived as a brutal absurdity and that money can’t buy more time.

A lack of time spent trying to master and comprehend what can be understood only through sustained concentration over time has a deflationary effect on the present. By acting as if we do not have the time to understand that which desperately needs to be understood, we dumb ourselves down even as we up the ante of our frustration by missing the whole point of our enterprise - whatever it might be. It’s not just an academic dilemma; the fact that we lose our intellectual abilities if we don’t use them impacts us if we don’t constantly strive to reunderstand those things we take for granted.  In this case, we are likely to not get a clear picture of our existential dilemmas in the first place. The point is not simply to read for the sake of reading, but to think critically, to discern patterns, to consider, to analyze, to imagine and re-imagine, to construct and deconstruct, to reflect, and to think as if having had an opportunity to live the life of a human being is a project worthy of serious thought.

How ironic it is that when nanosecond technology is making inroads into every aspect of our lives that we feel a need to emulate the lightning-fast technology by applying a fast-food frenzy of speed to nearly everything we do.  Computers are good at making quick calculations. We are, too, but only after we have done our homework. Still, we are no match for computers. We can and should let computers do what they do best and we should do likewise. We should be experts at being human and in creating a world where humans can thrive, lest we forget that’s who we are and what we are up to.

Much of what we learn in life is through casual observation, and it sometimes appears that our unconscious minds have methods of revealing intuited revelations that we have not sought.  Yet at some level, it is a striving to understand that yields this result. Some of Einstein’s major discoveries were achieved through imagery, but he had spent years grappling with the complexity of theoretical physics. Not only that, but during this time he also spent his days as a patent clerk analyzing complex applications for patents of electrical inventions. In effect, he had created a highly sophisticated backdrop for the way things worked in his own mind. When he applied his curiosity using thought experiments, he had a sophisticated internal logic with which to measure his images against. The lesson: no effort, no questions, no images, no answers. Spontaneous solutions to long-forgotten quests occur frequently, but it’s important that we don’t forget that at some point they were born of inquiry.

An increasingly digitized world is making it possible to link ideas and offer access to a whole universe of data with split-second brevity. We have reached a point in human social development in which our intellectual software requires the capacity to surpass our default hardwired tribal settings for the sake of all of us. We have to get beyond our primordial feelings of intolerance for identifiable differences, for the good of humankind at-large.

The bottom line: if we are not trying hard to understand and reunderstand what it is that we think we’ve already understood, then we are likely to be losing ground, as the complex problems in the world suggest that we are. Life is increasingly a high-wire act with perspective being the balancing pole we carry to keep from falling. When the intellectual thoughtfulness and attentiveness that lengthen perspective are stilled or devalued, we get wobbly. And if we keep going in the direction we are going I’m not sure how much longer we can stay afoot.

When you recall 9/11, does it seem like one event or two? If you said one before, pretend you owned the towers and see if it helps. A federal jury must have felt that way because they ruled that 9/11 was two events. My point is that most people who think about it long enough can imagine it both ways.  This is but one example of the infinite number of ways people can witness the same event and yet disagree about what happened. If you want to learn more about semantics and metaphors you might want to read Steven Pinker’s book. And by all means be quick about it.

December 2007

Failed Citizenship vs. Illegal Immigration
© Charles D. Hayes

Let me say this up front: I believe in having secure borders and human conduct governed by law and order. But in The Rapture of Maturity, I quoted Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, where he poses a major existential question. “Would you settle docilely for a life of meaningless poverty, knowing what you know today about the world?” Speaking for myself, I think not. After the publication of my book, I received a note from Professor Dennett, in which he expressed his disappointment that more people didn’t respond to his question in meaningful ways.

Let’s ask the question differently. If you lived in Juarez, Mexico, and couldn’t keep your children properly fed and clothed, would you sneak across the border and look for employment? Or would your sense of law and order take priority over your family’s well-being? Of course, you don’t want to be a law-breaker, but you also know that for as long as you’ve been alive, the folks on the other side of the border have depended upon workers from your country. The Americans say, “We don’t hire illegals,” with a wink and a nod. Moreover, you’ve always known that any job in America can pull your family out of poverty.

So once again, I ask: are you so wedded to your sense of law and order that you wouldn’t break a law that seems much less of a moral imperative than your own family’s hunger? Aren’t some laws more important than others? Don’t most of us routinely break traffic laws? If someone sneaks across a border to steal, isn’t that a more serious matter than to seek work no one else seems to want?

Isn’t crossing a border illegally and allowing oneself to be exploited—by receiving far less compensation for work than most anyone would think is justified—somewhat  neutralized by the crime of so many employers willing to hire illegal workers? Now, before you decide where I’m coming from politically, let’s look at this dilemma from another angle, because what I’ve said so far misses the point.   

For as long as I can remember, people have been talking about the jobs Americans don’t want and, in point of fact, won’t do.  Conventional wisdom holds that Americans don’t want these jobs because they are too hard. I will argue that such claims are nonsense. People will perform practically any kind of work (surely the Deadliest Catch series on the Discovery channel makes this clear) if the pay is high enough and the job carries sufficient high social status.

It’s true that most people do not want to do backbreaking agricultural field work, but it’s not the hard labor so much as the stigma attached to this work that makes able-bodied people avoid it.  Don’t forget that the vast majority of Americans (excluding, of course, the landed gentry of the Deep South) used to perform their own hard labor on their own farms from dawn to dusk without much complaining. But slowly, and then with ever-increasing speed with the rise of industrialization, people left their farms en masse for the city. Manual labor went from being the sign of an honest man’s virtue to a job fit for losers. If picking lettuce and tomatoes paid thirty dollars an hour and the work was steady, then Americans would pick lettuce and tomatoes with the same eagerness that prompts them to crab fish in the Bering Sea or work in minus 40 degrees below zero in the arctic oil fields.

Agricultural and many service sector jobs pay poor wages because circumstances make it possible, not because free-markets require it. Some people maintain a religious fervor for an ethos that equates extreme poverty for some with a moral necessity. Even though a few farmers in any given region might offer decent wages, people who take these jobs are still labeled itinerants. Pick fruit once, and, in the eyes of some people, a fruit-picker is all you will ever be. Therefore, the employer claim that Americans are too lazy to do the work they need performed is a gross oversimplification.

But oversimplification gives way to bigotry when the stigmatization of a particular occupation becomes associated with a particular race or group of people.  Public ambivalence gives way to the loud voices of the bigots who take control of the conversation. American Talk Radio is a case in point. 

So here’s the thing: We have two very different problems.  The first is low-wage jobs.  The second is illegal immigration. The former derives from a lack of equity; the latter is a scapegoat diversion. Taken together, they obscure the morality of work and equality in general. How different things would be if farm work routinely paid living wages, and we looked on farm workers as citizens who were highly prized because of their valuable contribution to society. Imagine if farm workers were as highly thought of as farmers. The scrutiny involved in the hiring process would rule out illegal immigrants in the same way that good paying jobs do so today. If you think you can go to work at a major corporation with an above-average salary without having the right background and the papers to prove it, think again. But just because some people don’t see agricultural labor as important doesn’t make agricultural labor unimportant as a fact. How valuable is it that we have a reliable food supply? Somewhat? A little? Very?

In my view, the confusion over the problem of illegal immigration hides the more egregious moral problem: a failure of responsible citizenship. We have always been predisposed to socializing in small groups, but only a few generations ago we were a comparatively small faction. Along the historical path from an agrarian culture to an information society, we stopped being citizens and became consumers. In doing so, we lost the essential intellectual ingredient that enables us to come together as a country of equals predetermined by law and upheld by our participation as citizens.

Our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights were ethical assertions and moral pleas for the creation of a society where justice was such a priority that American citizens would be preoccupied with the subject of fairness—-and not just for their own kin, but for every other American. If this goal had been achieved, we wouldn’t have illegal immigrants working for impoverished wages today because nobody would be working for less than a living wage.

At every opportunity, I point out that, in spite of all of the righteous political justification for inequality, extremely low wages at the bottom of society are no more necessary than excessively high salaries at the top. Poverty is not an economic requirement or a divine truth. Our economic system does not come from God. Moreover, we’ve replaced the sentiments of character described by Adam Smith as the moral requirements for conducting our business with one another with the easily- metastasizing template of the corporation—which, because of its lack of human accountability, operates with the qualities you’d see in the psychological profile of a psychopath. The circumstances required for ethical commerce between human beings is that all persons involved regard each other as something more than a means to an end, at least as beings worthy of respect.

Corporations are conscience-free entities. The upper-echelon executives rarely stay around long enough to be held accountable for the long-term; instead, they take the institution’s cream—in the form of cash—and leave responsibility behind. Worse, corporations embody the rights of an autonomous individual without an individual’s accountability. Corporations are pathological by design, but not because their purpose is to maximize profits for their shareholders.  That’s expected.  They are pathological because they exploit, destroy, and manipulate without conscience and, although their employees are usually good people, their charter results in the expressed ideology of cancer-cells. In other words, if short-term profits require long-term destruction of the environment, or the dehumanization and the literal using up of the lives of sweat-shop workers, no one person is ever held responsible. And, now, private employers large and small emulate corporations.    

But what is the stage of moral development of a nation whose citizens cringe at the word amnesty when it applies to poor people who want nothing more than the right to a decent standard of living? I’m torn between anger and disgust at the millions of Americans who live in fear that some poor Mexican immigrant is going to get a break in life.  I’m troubled by the lack of thoughtfulness that makes average Americans believe that excessively low wages are anything other than a Stone-Age triggered psychological comeuppance held against others who are deemed less valuable than themselves or their kin. Impoverished wages are unjust for human beings, period. I am more convinced now than ever before that any job worth doing should pay a living wage or forever remain an activity left undone.

We are a nation of immigrants. We consider America to be a land of opportunity. We perceive ourselves to be among the most charitable people on the earth. Our citizens, especially those who characterize themselves as Christians, cannot, in good conscience, behave as if they have so little regard for their fellow man. Living up to the responsibilities of American citizenship requires a vigorous attempt to comprehend the nature of justice as it applies to persons other than ourselves. If we remain silent, while millions of our citizens work full-time for less than a living wage, it is not only a disgrace, but a failure of citizenship.

Growing inequality is a product of indifference. Only two generations ago, one breadwinner per family was enough to sustain a household. That this is no longer possible is not an accident. Our inattention allowed it to occur. We have to be capable of comprehending the concept of fairness, in every moral sense, especially in circumstances concerning those of our leaders who legislate inequality by sending our jobs overseas at the same time they speak of opportunity.

To uphold American ideals, we must distinguish between ethnocentrism and patriotism. To demonstrate the superiority of our morality, the ethic of forgiveness and the religious notion of brotherly love must amount to something more than a Sunday slogan. If all we ever do as citizens is obsess over our own self-regard, our capacity for empathy will be overridden by narcissism.

If we were anywhere close to being the great nation we think we are then illegal immigration wouldn’t have become a problem to begin with. Busyness is not necessarily a virtue. Many jobs required to sustain our way of life don’t pay enough for workers to live above abject poverty; many jobs that bear little but negative consequences to the environment and public health are highly rewarded. This is why I regard indifference to inequality as a bigger problem than illegal immigration. Illegal immigration is a complex subject with significant economic costs and potentially long-lasting consequences for international relations. Unsecured borders invite criminal activity and pose a threat to national security. I don’t have an answer for how to resolve the problem of illegal immigration, but I am confident that the current level of thinking by the people making the most noise about it is insufficient to get to the ethical heart of the matter.

November 2007

Honor: What is It? Who Has It? Who Doesn’t?
Why Does It Matter?
© Charles D. Hayes

One of the first things we learn as children is that what other people think of us is important. Indeed, as we grow older, the opinions of our peers seem to have the powers of life and death, especially when it comes to our reputation. The concept of honor is one of the most fascinating things about our species. It’s also a dangerous feature of our behavior. Thousands of people have died because of something someone said or thought about them.  Or, perhaps, something that was only imagined to have been said or thought. Untold numbers of people have been slaughtered because their actions were perceived as having offended a powerful person’s sense of honor. Consider the range of emotions.  On one hand, we are insulted enough to strike someone who offends us verbally; on the other hand, people have exhibited a willingness to kill their own sister or daughter because it is thought that her actions have brought dishonor, as is the custom in some countries in the Middle East.

At times, what honor is appears to be so difficult to pin down that it seems analogous to the fish and water conundrum in which we speculate that as critical as water is to fish, it’s presence is much too prominent and overpowering to be observed. And yet, every society on the planet has clear notions of appropriate behavior that when dismissed, ignored or in some sense violated, then what is affected by those offended is something that is said to be their honor.

Dictionaries bring honesty, fairness, integrity, respect, merit, rank, dignity, distinction, regard, good name, reputation, uprightness, and achievement to bear in describing honor. Our nation’s highest military decoration is the Congressional Medal of Honor. And although fighting wars may seem to elucidate aggressive tendencies, which it surely does, dying on the battlefield may also be thought of as the ultimate altruistic expression of giving all one has by sacrificing one’s life for others. So even though at times the concept can be a very subtle characteristic, there is a great deal of cultural power engrained in the concept of honor. In no other aspect of life is Neil Postman’s assertion that education is a defense against culture more apt than when it applies to one’s sense of honor. But what matters about honor is not so much what our respective culture says it is, but what we perceive that it is.

In his book Empire of Honour, J. E. Lendon depicts a fascinating portrait of the concept of honor in ancient Graeco-Roman culture. I suspect that if we could witness demonstrations of honor in ancient Rome, it would appear as something of a Monty Python event.  Although the lavishness with which honor was spread about might appear humorous to us, it should not hide the fact that it was a treacherous and deadly serious business. Honor was to the ancients a form of cultural currency that could be spent both above and below one’s station in life. As such, honor was then and is still a cultural substance of power that takes many forms with infinitely complex subtleties. And while it may seem that honor is the power of individuals, the very existence of honor is an exercise of group power over that of individuals.        

Every culture on the planet has expectations of behavior that in some way delineate the actions required to obtain and maintain one’s sense of honor. The range of behavior is extreme and the consequences for deviation are often severe. Tradition then can be thought of in no small way as an exertion of cultural authority from the past to the future.  The trick for humanity at large is to weed out the needless and arbitrary acts from the useful behavior that will enable us to flourish without self-destruction.

The question of honor, of what it really is, and how we decide which traditions deserve preservation and which should be stricken from practice is a pressing, but seldom acknowledged problem by the very people who need most to think deeply about it. In a world changing faster than our psychological makeup can easily accept, we have to get our minds around the concept of honor as power with the attributes of both exhilaration and malignancy before we can make any headway in deciding which traditions are worthy of respect, which should be discarded and which should be criminalized as is the case with “honor killing.”   

In a historical context, consider the absolute power of monarchical societies throughout the centuries and then contrast the stoic independence of Native American Indian tribes where in many instances the chiefs had very little power over the individual members of their tribes. Whereas it may seem that the latter case is that of a simple culture, it is anything but. Such freedom on the part of individuals has to be appreciated with knowledge of the sophistication necessary for a tribe to still function with enough cooperation to thrive as a group. So it’s not surprising to learn that honor played a significant role in Native American culture. It seems paradoxical that there is an enormous amount of sophistication in not being beholden to anyone other than your own council. Indeed, some historians point out that the ethos of the stoic and rugged individual, the person of few words, is drawn from subtle imitations of Native American’s that began with the mountain men in the early nineteenth century and spread to the cowboy culture of the west.

The absence of honor in most cultures results in disgrace. So it comes as no surprise that shame brings forth feelings of contempt, hatred and a thirst for revenge from having suffered a measure of disrespect. What is so fascinating about the concept of honor is the great range of human experience and beliefs that honor elicits which result in contrary expressions of behavior. A loss of face in one culture can mean death; in another it may lead to expulsion and isolation and in another, a book contract. But what is pressing in human affairs is navigating cultural differences at the junctures where people of divergent beliefs and customs come together. Many years ago, Sigmund Freud worried that it will take all of the goodwill we can muster to overcome our culture differences and perhaps nowhere is it more evident than with our experience in the so called “war on terror.”

In their book Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen suggest that much of the patriarchal sense of honor in the West and Midwest derives from the ethos of a long history of herding cultures. Humans herding domesticated animals throughout history have always been subject to loss through predation. Nisbett and Cohen write, “Herdsman constantly face the possibility of the loss of their entire wealth—through loss of their herds. Thus a stance of aggressiveness and willingness to kill or commit mayhem is useful in announcing their determination to protect their animals at all costs.” So, long ago, herdsman adopted “a stance of extreme vigilance” in order to demonstrate a willingness to protect one’s property.  It’s not surprising in the least that this protection extends to one’s family, possessions and territory which lends itself as a culture aptly suitable to the family farm. It’s easy to see how this kind of life leads to a society in which an insult requires an adequate response to avoid being viewed as a sign of weakness and as an inability to protect oneself and one’s possessions. Moreover, it’s not surprising to see how this whole life - posture and stance when added to the stoic character mentioned earlier - became the underlying ethos of the silent stranger in Western cinema.

In his last movie, The Shootist, John Wayne explained the code of honor in the West to his co-star Ron Howard: “I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people; I require the same from them.” This succinct characterization sums up the unspoken premise of honor in nearly all western movies—it’s the archetype for the Hollywood version of honor which was later characterized as being macho. I grew up internalizing this ethos of honor with such intensity that even though I’m intellectually opposed to violence, it would not be wise to surprise me with an egregious insult up close and personal so long as I’m anywhere short of being confined to bed in a senior center.     

And it is my own experience of having grown up in a culture with such clear demarcations of expected cordial behavior that I can at least in part imagine what it must be like for those men who actually believe, I mean really believe with all of their might, that something their sister or daughter did, that might not have even been her fault, could cause them to believe that the remedy would require her death. Still, it’s so hard to get one’s mind around such a custom that it brings to bear the lack of awareness in the fish and water analogy of the former being too caught up in water to appreciate the notion of wetness. The great difficulty is that an absorbed sense of honor is not reasoned away because that is not how it is acquired. We grow up breathing our culture as if it were analogous to water streaming through gills.

In some Middle-Eastern countries, women incur dishonor from having been raped. And death is thought to be the only honorable way to escape the shame imposed on them for no other reason than simply having been a victim. Imagine the kind of emotional fog required to assume that all victims of rape have brought shame on themselves and their families. It appears that this custom might very well derive from a herding ethos in which women, like sheep and cattle, are viewed as property. To those of us raised in America, this seems so counter-intuitive, repulsive and outrageous that we have a hard time accepting that other people actually believe it. But they do believe these things and many people are willing to die to uphold such traditions. And lest we think Americans are not exempt from similar kinds of egregious behavior consider this from W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s book, Lynching in the New South published in 1993: “To aspire to honor in the South—and white men in all social classes coveted their honor—was to be vitally concerned about one’s public reputation. Honor demanded that a person always see himself through the eyes of others because personal worth was determined not by self-appraisal but by the worth others conferred.” And as Brundage points out, the question of honor for white men in the South in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served as an fiscal barometer in venting the economic frustration of hard times through a sense of redeeming one’s sense of honor by expressions of physical power.  Thus thousands of black men were lynched for having been thought to have slighted them in some way. And in some cases, if for no other reason than the fact of their very existence, because like the cultures of the Middle East with regard to women as chattel, black men and women had been and were still during these years in the eyes of many little more than property.

Ironically, the culture of honor in western cinema is reborn in American inner cities because, as Nisbett and Cohen point out, “In the presence of scarcity, high potential gain from theft and illegal activities, and low probability of state protection, the culture of honor has been reinvented yet another time in human history.” They suggest that inner city culture is not likely to change until the economic conditions change. Until then, looking at someone in the wrong way or wearing the wrong color in any major city in the United States can get a person killed. Gang members may not get our respect, but they are willing to substitute our fear as compensation because to them, fear is respect and honor by other means.          

Whenever I contemplate the power of what others think about us in terms of honor I’m beset with visions of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers lined-up shoulder to shoulder, marching toward certain death. Deaths en masse they witnessed only moments before as the rows and columns of men fell before them. And yet, forward they walked, more in fear of their comrade’s opinions of them.  If they were to break and run for cover, then there were the blazing muskets ahead that would kill them hence forth in seconds. Of course, this pales in comparison when we consider that units of Roman soldiers sometimes committed suicide simply as an expression of honor to their leader.    

But today, when noncombatants speak of the need to continue a war such as the war in Iraq with their reason being that our honor is at stake, it’s hard to imagine where this principle comes from that enables them to consent to the routine deaths of others as a matter of their honor. Indeed, how does such arrogance become a commonplace assertion spoken publicly without inciting a public outcry? How easy and how thoughtless it is to bear a stiff upper-lip and suffer the sacrifices of other’s at a distance while imaging oneself experiencing the warm sunlight of honor.   

I don’t mean to suggest that we should be timid in stopping the kind of behavior that results in the practice of “honor killing.” On the contrary, I believe we should make every effort to encourage criminalizing such behavior in the countries where it takes place and that we should offer amnesty to the women of any country who are threatened by such customs. My point is to illustrate how difficult it is to convince people to change their deep-seated beliefs which they absorbed as they grew up with the same cultural influence as comes with learning to accept up and down, left and right.

Having given a great deal of thought to negotiating our differences with others without resorting to violence, I’m convinced that art and literature may offer the greatest dividend. In other words, our ability to elicit empathetic feeling by showing the harmful effects of treating human beings as property is likely to be much more effective than preaching to the unconverted. Khaled Hossenini’s novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, have more potential for enabling people with divergent customs to achieve some sense of imagining themselves in another person’s tradition than any editorial on the subject of the difficulties faced by the citizens of Afghanistan.

There exists such a clash of worldviews between the West and Mideast, in particular that nothing seems very practical as a way to approach the expanse of differences and yet both are steeped in the residue of traditions that arose from herding cultures.

My questions began with what is honor, who has it, who doesn’t and why does it matter?  The answer is that honor is a clouded construct of culture subsumed through living as one is taught to live and to value that which is said to be valuable. Honor is a product of cultural conservatism. Honor as power perpetuates culture.  In every culture lacking honor, frustration crevices of smoldering contempt can be found from which revenge or redress is sought against someone, or perhaps anyone found conveniently available for insult. And this attitude about honor matters, because this is the motivation that spurs the suicide bomber to pull the pin.

It may help dramatize my point by bringing a geographic perspective to bear. Imagine a map of the earth large enough to include all countries, cities and neighborhoods and then draw fracture and fault lines where respect is hard to come by, borders which divide cultures with sharply contrasting traditions and conditions of wealth. Where respect is lacking, individuals suffer a crisis of identity so it should not surprise us that gangs form to fill crevices that fail to offer a means to honor and self-respect. These fault lines of contempt cover the planet. Too often they delineate borders drawn by the ravages of poverty around the world and in some cases they merely expose environments where the residents are starved for the kind of attention that enables respect. Neglected rich kids sometimes form groups to establish an identity they can’t seem to come by through other means.     

It’s hard, though, for those of us who feel we have a sense of honor and self-respect to fully appreciate what it’s like to be without it.  And thus, we come up short in comprehending the vitriol others have for our traditions and we are often confused by their’s.  We would do well to seek out those individuals who grew up believing in the purity that “honor killing” brings to restoring honor, but who have changed their minds and try to discover what has enabled them to see things differently. We need to ask the people who belonged to gangs in the inner city that left gang life how they did it and what enabled them to enlighten their perspective in order to do so. It is these people who, with the help of art and literature, may be able to help turn the tide and come up with an enlightened view of what the concept of honor could and should be if the notion of honor were to serve all of humanity instead of one religion, one nation, sect, tribe or family.

In her bestselling book Reading Lolita in Tehran, John Hopkins University professor Azar Nafisi uses literature, indeed American fiction, to examine and contrast the behavior of people in the Middle East with the West.  There is a high level of insight here as she provides moments that are analogous to the metaphor of fish catching glimpses of water with such vividness that they are briefly made aware that what is before them is water and it is, indeed, wet. Nafisi shows how one’s imagination and curiosity can help one deconstruct tradition in such a way as to bring hidden morality to the surface. She shows us how fiction can help us create a parallel world in which we gravitate closer to a moral north than through any method brought to bear by tyrants, zealots and those extremists whose only claim to worthiness is to demand cultural conformity. Nafisi writes, “Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter.”  This is a way to breech extremist acts of tradition that overreach their original intent of preserving the honor of fidelity and chastity.  But, to the contrary, their actions turn their attempts of preservation into something so depraved that it misses the mark by such a wide much margin that their efforts obliterate any good that could have come of their tradition and is replaced with hatred and contempt. Honor killing disgraces the very possibility of honor, making the cure much worse than the disease could possibly have ever been.  

Is the idea of world peace a fantasy? Maybe, maybe not, but surely it’s within our grasp to imagine that most of the people on this planet are capable of entertaining the idea that world peace is achievable, at least, as a fairy tale. Perhaps only through mutually conferred respect, or a truce ceded to an imagined fictional world in which people who set out to make a genuine effort to understand other cultures could be afforded a place of honor in the hallowed halls of humanity. Through a continuous study of art and literature we honor one another. 

Khaled Hossenini and Azar Nafisi have given us some rich material. How hard will it be to convince people from very different cultures that learning about others is an honorable aspiration? And that regardless of what one’s own culture considers honorable there is also a global attribution of honor available to us all, but for the effort to learn.

My major premise is not to pretend to have presented a history of honor, or even to have satisfactorily explained what it is or where it comes from.  I do hope to have shed some light of the subject though what I would really like for readers to take away from this discussion is that honor, specifically one’s own sense of honor, has to be examined thoroughly and with as much objectivity as one can muster before it is in any way possible to compare one’s own culture of honor with those of other cultures with the goal of improving society in some way.  I don’t believe that it’s possible to discern the best possible usefulness of the attribute of honor without a careful study of many differing traditions. And that whatever can be done to make such an effort seem universally honorable is, in fact, honorable and may prove itself so in the troubled future ahead. That we appeal to reason to resolve cultural differences is important, but perhaps it’s not nearly as effective as opening the empathetic pathways for relating that are found in our art and literature. They don’t call them the humanities for nothing.      

October 2007

Existential Memories and Peaceful Human Relations
© Charles D. Hayes

Death is the last thing most people want to talk about.  Yet I will argue that it is the unwillingness to face the inevitability of nonexistence that is the  greatest detractor to achieving civilization and an improved quality of life for most of the people on the planet. I define civilization as a state in which the best of human instincts flourish and our worst are mitigated. Elsewhere, I have written extensively about how the evolutionary baggage of having lived in small groups for thousands of years has predisposed us to tribalistic behavior.  This is seen most notably through our strong disposition to resort to “us and them” and “truth by association” relating with regard to people we perceive as others. This penchant for relating is in part a craving for certainty and it runs so deep psychologically that it prompts a quest or desire for a reliable sense of order to nearly every aspect of our lives. We so forcefully desire that appearances reflect the rightness of our memories, we do not like suggestions to the contrary. A simple example here is most insightful. A hit song sung by anyone other than the artist who laid down our first memory of it is rarely ever thought of as good as the original. And if we make such preemptive judgments at this level of attention, imagine what it’s like for matters we think are really important. 

The tension brought about by the perceived gap between us and them feeds the very negativity implied by the act of separation and appeals to our worst instincts as human beings. In other words, the implied psychological disconnect makes us hypersensitive to our differences with people whom are estranged from our customs and traditions and we tend to focus on these dissimilarities instead of what’s really bothering us. In a round-about, but deep-seated way, notable differences can overly sensitize us to the fear of uncertainty.  Taken to the extreme, this is really a psychological fear of death and nonexistence. I will return to this issue shortly.    

There have been times in my life that are very hard to describe, in which, for a moment, a focused look at a flower, a tree limb, falling leaves, snow or a sunset offered a feeling that this particular instance and observation was something worth revisiting someday. It’s a haunting sensation but it occurs mostly in retrospect. I’ve never spoken or written about this perplexing occurrence until now. I’ve come to think of it as an unconscious tugging—an existential feeling that time is short and one should contemplate it. In addition, I’ve long been of the opinion that the greatest fear of one’s inevitable death stems not from the anticipation of physical pain, but from all that the implication of nonexistence implies. We all speculate from one day to the next about the news we expect to learn, next week’s weather, what special events will take place, who will win and who will lose in sports, who will marry, who will divorce and who will win the next presidential election, what will our great grandchildren be like.  All of these trivial concerns fade under the crushing reality of the really big questions about the fate of the world and of humankind. I think of these existential notions when time seems to freeze for a split-second, as one gazes at a memorable scene to wonder if these experiences are but a wistful attempt to capture the profundity of being and temporarily suspend the vacuous certainty of the nothingness to come.

My earliest memory of this sort occurred when I was about six years old. I was walking along a wooded path on the way to school and I looked at a bush of red holly and have never been able to forget it. I can’t recall how many times I have had the sensation of wanting to go back there and look again, knowing quite well that the place as I knew it no longer exists. In similar fashion, I recall a robin on a wooded path, a bat diving for an insect under a streetlight, and huge swirling oak trees casting monstrous shadows via a streetlamp on a very dark and stormy night in Oklahoma.

In September University, I make a reference to Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, a play in which one of the characters has an experience at night aboard ship in the shimmering moonlight in which he seems to lose himself in the aesthetic experience of his surroundings. But this is much too profound to compare with the existential moments that I refer to in my own familiarity. I didn’t lose myself in these experiences.  They are simply exclamation points of existence that I can’t forget.

Now if what I’ve said up to this point doesn’t make a lot of sense, no worries. I’m not sure I get it myself. But here’s the thing. In my mind, there are four kinds of memory markers that stand out most of all. The first is of those unforgettable moments when we receive good news, or bad news, a wedding announcement, the death of a friend or family member, a terrible car accident – some emotional high or low. The second is from general experience, the things family, friends, and strangers have said, or done to us, with us, or without us that have mattered. Third is the music and cinematic moments in art, literature and the lines spoken in movies that become unforgettable. And finally, in my experience, there are these nonsensical pauses: things that I make a note to remember without actually doing so.  These scenes just stick in memory, and as they mingle among my thoughts they leave me with a faintly felt need to make sense of something that seems utterly senseless.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised someday to find out that these memories are simply a neurological consequence of brain chemical disbursement in the amygdala. But still, we interpret with the brain we have and even if our experience can be explained-away as a neurological chemical process, it’s still difficult not to attach significance to an occurrence with such a lasting effect on one’s memories. No doubt, it’s connected in some way with what some neurologists characterize as our being wired for religious experience and with that realization one has to be aware that the range of possibility for these kinds of experience for human beings at-large has to number in the trillions.

My point in this discussion is that by facing the inevitability of our own death we are better able to relate to our fellow humans through a kind of mutual and existentially-bound empathy in which we acknowledge that despite our myriad differences we are indeed destined to the same fate. Memories are records of our experiences in parallel. Indeed, they go much deeper in providing a sacred purpose in life regardless of whether we are of a religious or secular frame of mind. Memories contain the recollections that make empathy possible. And compassion, as the Buddhist’s suggest, is the most powerful human emotion with the capacity to bind our species to one another without regard to our dissimilarity.  Moreover, the likelihood that we have unique experiences and profoundly different beliefs and worldviews is a virtual certainty. Consider how much effort I have made over the years to understand the simple sensation of continuously recalling what clearly qualify as forgettable instances except that I can’t forget them.

What but an unusual brain function would cause a six year old to recall the way a red-berried bush looked for nearly sixty years? So think about it this way: if I can assign this much significance to something that seems so trivial, then what are the implications for the vast range of mystical experiences made possible by the ubiquitous fluctuation of brain chemicals in the vast range of human experience on a planet with cultures with such differing customs and religions that their description sometimes seem applicable to different species?

Elsewhere I have suggested that we humans are significance junkies. But it’s also clear that much of the importance we derive from living is due to the narcissistic arrangement of the neurological hard-wired architecture in our heads. It’s simple really.  When one has a head that comes equipped with self-referential gear for making sense of the world, as we humans do, it’s hard not to be deluded into thinking that we are at the very center of the universe.  Little wonder that our sense of self importance is wildly exaggerated or that we become obsessed and simultaneously and schizophrenically allergic to things that remind us of our impending demise.

Existentialism, in my view, is much less a school of thought, dreamed up by philosophers, than it is a way of thinking determined by nature. Even though our perceptions can be profoundly different, it’s the organic self-referential hardware that makes it appear so.   

It may seem a far stretch, but thinking about such things makes the idea of resorting to violence with others over divergent mental states seem absurd.  War amounts to the profound realization that people kill one another because the neural patterns in their brains don’t match. And yet, a little exploration of memory and the exponential possibility for conflicting thoughts among our fellow humans should reveal the ridiculousness of group think as a requirement for peace. Strengths unchecked become weakness and memory confirms this observation beyond doubt? Memory comprises the very structure that enables a sense of identity to exist without which we would be unable to survive. Moreover, it is the very expansive range of our differences that enables us to flourish. Consider the irony in that we are the most neurologically versatile creature on the planet capable of an infinite number of thoughts and actions that make us unique.  Because of these features we are able to add creatively to our respective cultures. And yet, the very crux of conflict at the center of the beliefs that divide us is a longing for ideological conformity reminiscent of bees in a hive or ants in a colony. We are equipped with an infinite capacity for creativity so why do we crave rigid duty assignments with little variation in behavior for our fellow human beings? Why is what other people believe a matter of life and death? Where does the arrogance come from that enables us to be certain about so many things we’ve never really looked into?

In my view, any examination of humanity that does not recognize the value of contradictory thinking is immature. And thus, I believe that our capacity for attaching significance to memories is a kind of yearning for existential tranquility because without memory we do not exist. Without an identity there is nothing to resolve. A bush laden with red holly to a six-year old presents an opportunity to live your life as if you are really interested in it. Reflection enables us to appreciate the diversity of life and the threshold of possibilities if only we can let go of the evolutionary manacles of tribalism that promote fear of the other.

Memory is simultaneously something unique to ourselves as individuals and something we share with every other person on the earth. That memory is also corruptible begs the question of whether or not we can achieve maturity as a civilized planet. Next time you see something you have a hard time getting out of your mind, ask yourself why and what it could possibly mean.  It may be an opportunity to think about the things that we really should think about.                                 

September 2007

Liberal vs. Conservative: Peace at Last
© Charles D. Hayes 

Okay, I’m exaggerating. But what if it were possible to dissipate some of the animosity and contempt between liberals and conservatives.  Wouldn’t it be worth exploring? There is perhaps, nothing more frustrating in life than being face-to-face with someone you care about, and yet, in spite of every appeal to reason and common sense you make, you still cannot get them to appreciate your point of view.

Of all of the problems we face as human beings, it is the inability to cross the intellectual and political divide, to truly appreciate, entertain and indeed give deep and thoughtful consideration to opposing arguments, that seems to be one of the hardest to solve. For years, the cultural divide between liberals and conservatives has been a principle preoccupation of mine. I think about the issue of divisiveness constantly. I’ve read scores of books on the subject. The process is slow and at times the understanding is difficult and imprecise, but every once in a while I get a sense that I have made some progress, like now, with this essay.

First there are some ideas to consider. George Lakoff is the author of Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t. Lakoff argues that the philosophical divide between liberal and conservative can best be described metaphorically between the nurturing parent on the liberal side and the strict father figure for the conservative. Others have described this schism simply as the conflict between a feminine and masculine worldview.

The strict father model, according to Lakoff, “posits a traditional nuclear family, with the father having primary responsibility for supporting and protecting the family as well as the authority to set overall policy, to set rules for the behavior for children, and to enforce rules. The mother has the day-to-day responsibility for the care of the house, raising the children and upholding the father’s authority.”

In the nurturing parent model, according to Lakoff, “Love, empathy, and nurturance are primary, and children become responsible, self-disciplined and self-reliant through being cared for, respected, and caring for others, both in their family and in their community. Support and protection are part of nurturance, and they require strength and courage on the part of the parents. The obedience of children comes out of their love and respect for their parents and their community, not out of fear of punishment.”  

Just before the election in 2006, public radio commentator Brian Mann published Welcome to the Homeland, a book that argued that the real cultural divide between liberals and conservatives stems from that of a geographical nature: urban vs. rural or more specifically rural versus metro. Mann writes about his continuing frustration with his brother whose political views are the opposite of his, but that neither will give ground on issues that very often seem silly to the other. Mann refers to rural conservatives as homelanders and liberals as metros. He says homelanders are likely to be whiter than the national average, three times more likely to be gun owners; they are more likely to attend church and are highly represented in the military service. Metros are more likely to be multicultural, live in big cities and be better educated. What they have most in common is that both homelanders and metros view each other as being fundamentally ignorant about what is, and is not, of ultimate value in America.

My own conjecture about the political divide is expressed in terms of us vs. them and a life lived in no small part through a posture of truth by association. In other words, many of us are so heavily invested in the groups we identify with that we allow them to speak and think for us. My experience suggests that our values are in part formed by the groups that we identify with and that this shaping, marked by both evolution and culture, represents unrelenting forces that are exceptionally hard to overcome.

Recently I ran across a paper posted on the internet by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham of the University of Virginia titled “When Morality Opposes Justice.” The paper, dated October, 2006, argues that there are five pillars that comprise the moral foundation for American culture. They are: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Haidt and Graham argue that liberals use only the first two pillars for making moral judgments, choosing to focus on caring and fairness, but conservatives use all five. I find their research intriguing, although I have many questions about their findings that may be very difficult to answer. Haidt and Graham have a book in the works titled, The Implicit and Explicit Moral Values of Liberals and Conservatives.

Right away you can see the similarity between Lakoff’s nurturing parent vs. the strict father figure and Haidt and Graham’s five pillars. You can imagine the strict father figure commanding respect from the authoritative pillar while insisting on loyalty and obedience on one hand, and proper behavior from his progeny on the other. And still you can imagine him as advocating safety and fairness so that all five pillars are in play.  For conservatives, all five pillars matter but there is greater emphasis on the in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Conservatives, I believe, assume that caring, and fairness as justice are the consequence of the realization of the values of the three main pillars and I hope to persuade you that the assumption indeed contains a kernel of truth.

My experience tells me that Haidt and Graham are making progress in understanding the conundrum of political divisiveness. I will argue, however, that liberals use all five pillars too. It’s just that liberal’s value harm/care and fairness/reciprocity so highly that they find it hard to get worked up about the other three pillars which I believe makes their significance difficult to detect. Sometimes, though in very subtle ways, I suspect that liberals resort to a reliance on the conservative triad, especially when their sense of identity (which may be harder to discern) is threatened. Academics for example, may be very liberal until their professorial credentials are challenged and then their behavior becomes very conservative. 

When all else fails, read the instruction manual. But since humans don’t come with one, the next best thing might be to hook people’s brains up to electronic scanners and watch how they function when they are dealing with political questions of left vs. right. That’s just what psychologist Drew Westen of Emory University did and his discoveries are not a surprise. He writes about his experience in The Political Brain. Turns out we reason about our opposition’s faults and cover our own discretions by recalling protective emotional stimuli just as the behavior above suggests. Westen says to imagine ourselves “weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions—bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work.” Westen writes, “Today, Democrats and Republicans seem like two species, living in parallel universes, unable to speak the same language.” We reason about the faults of others and relate positively to our own group when attacked with sufficient force to up the ante of discourse to an increasingly harsher tone. In other words, our emotions protect our relationships by blocking critical analysis of our own errors and mistakes in judgment. Our brains work by evolutionary default to help protect our sense of identity and that of our group affiliation. And thus, we reserve our inherent capacity for critical thinking for examining the faults and indiscretions of those we deem as others. Perhaps knowing this can help us to stop and think, really think.       

I believe all of the ideas above have merit. Moreover, I trust that fully understanding the fundamental cultural divide between liberals and conservatives in any manner that both sides will agree is totally objective may never occur. And yet I believe that if each side will spend a little time trying really hard to understand the motivation of the other, that some of the traditional bitterness between the political factions of left and right can be dissolved.

Even though I don’t think it is answerable in any satisfactory way, posing the question about where these five pillars of value come from is important, if for no other reason than to demonstrate the complexity of our psychological makeup. Are these values a result of parenting as Lakoff’s work suggests? Could they be learned values from actual experience or are they innate templates of behavioral potential, like our capacity for empathy, compassion, music or language? Is there a strong genetic component? Are these values simply memes? Some studies suggest that our fundamental political orientation may occur at a very early age. Could a liberal or conservative outlook be deep-seated components of personality and temperament?  Haidt and Graham have had thousands of people answer questionnaires that support the validity of the five pillar model, but still there is nothing concrete to suggest where they come from. Perhaps it’s ultimately a multiple choice question and all of the above is the only satisfactory answer.

I suspect Professor’s Lakoff, Haidt, Graham, Westen and I all agree on one thing—each side in the liberal-conservative divide does not fully understand the other and the evidence suggests that liberals are somewhat the worse for understanding their opposition. It is, though, a hard premise to accept and it takes a fair amount of introspection to appreciate the validity of what seems to us liberals such a counter-intuitive argument. It’s exceptionally hard for liberals to understand because we think of ourselves as being thoughtful in the extreme. We imagine we are the only ones who get it. Of course, conservatives feel the same way, but both usually stop far short of trying very hard to understand the other and too often both fill the void of their lack of understanding with contempt.

One way to get an immediate grasp of the lack of appreciation and understanding liberals have for conservatives is to consider the two vs. three sided pillar example as delineated above and then try to call to mind the appeal of humorist Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame. Give it some thought and you will realize that in his imaginary Lake Wobegon community, Keillor focuses in large part on the conservative pillars of in-group-loyalty, authority-respect, and purity and sanctity, but he does so in such a way that makes his fictional characters endearing. In other words, he treats ordinary people with affection even as he makes fun of some of their pretentious foibles. Keillor makes us realize that but not for these eccentricities we would be missing the very things that make us human beings and Americans in particular. 

My experience suggests that conservatives have a sense of group attachment that is underappreciated and undervalued by liberals. Conservatives on the other hand, I believe, infer a sense of fairness in circumstances which in their view should exist, but in reality, because of their ethnocentric tendencies, does not. I suggest the evidence shows that conservatives believe that if one’s group loyalty, respect for authority and moral sanctity are truly sincere, then justice and fairness will be naturally forthcoming with sufficient care to uphold any society. Indeed, if these virtues are not in play with enough strength, then for conservatives what one has is not worth calling a society to begin with. For conservatives, the value of belonging to one’s group trumps most of the other pillars in very important ways. And thus, conservatives perceive of their values as being so virtuous that their deeds in life are automatically self-justifying (just like liberals, but for different reasons).

I am an ex-Marine and a former police officer. In both of these highly authoritative organizations the gravitational pull of in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctified behavior is highly developed and persuasive. I grew up white and a conservative in the South, with all of the bigoted baggage derived from the prejudicial ethos of that region of America in the middle of the twentieth-century. After many years of concentrated study in myriad subjects, I’ve come to think of myself as a liberal even though I’m not fond of labels. My experience suggests that the Vietnam War and the second war in Iraq began as a result of ignorance and arrogance on the part of our elected representatives with the guilt of both political parties in play. Their knowledge of the people we assumed were enemies fell far short for realizing the implications of what we were getting ourselves into.

When other ex-Marines find out about my service, I sometimes get e-mails and letters from them with the salutation “Semper Fi,” which is shorthand for the Latin Semper Fidelis.  This is the Marine Corps motto meaning “always faithful.” Whereas I once felt bound by the saying, today my inclination is to say, “Wait a minute. That depends.” But what I’m doing instinctively is jumping to a conclusion and misreading the communication because my fundamental political orientation has changed. Always faithful does not equal reasoning one’s way through the moral justification for war. It simply means that Marines will always, regardless of their circumstances, remain true to one another. But I am so incensed that our leaders get us into ill-thought-out wars to begin with that I very often fail to recall the feel of Marine Corps camaraderie.

Many conservatives see their duty as citizens fulfilled by virtue of their past service, as if their opinion about the politics of the matter is unimportant.  This view is both understandable and defensible. Of course, this is, in my opinion, why young men fight wars and old men don’t. If only we could make it a requirement that the old men who start the wars actually have to fight them, I suspect the world would at last be at peace.

What I hope to convey to conservatives is that patriotism to liberals in a democracy depends upon, in point of fact, demands that we learn enough about the ways of the world so that we can discern a rational foreign policy based upon the way the real world works and not as we imagine it should. Liberals don’t assume that our leaders will know best without public discourse. What I hope my fellow Marines will understand is that those of us who question our leaders do so because we are faithful to those who will have to carry the burden of sacrifice and perhaps give up their lives in the process. This is fundamental to the pillar of harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity to liberals. It is also our best effort at expressing our group loyalty. But our respect for political authority is not automatically forthcoming. Our esteem must be earned and not by simply holding a position of rank or political power. We respect honorable behavior expressed through leadership that is open and honest about what is to be lost and gained by military action. We will follow leaders who lead, but we are predisposed to question those who simply point and turn their back to avoid the consequences of responsibility.

How, given the considerations above, can we allow ourselves to be deeply divided into us and them categories when it is clear that both liberals and conservatives care enough about America to lay down their lives in the service of their country? How did liberals and conservatives get so confused as to interpret each others motives as representing evil? The answer is easy when you give it serious thought. Any time we try to reduce the right and wrong of an issue to that of a question of personal identity it becomes an expression of us against them and we reduce the matter to a question of good and evil instinctively as a matter of survival. This Stone Age behavior is written into the marrow of human history. If the significance of our lives rests with too much psychic investment in truth by association then it is assumed you are either with us or against us by evolutionary default. We are both biologically and culturally predisposed to engage in eternal self-justification for ourselves and our respective in-groups and the very process of rationalization increases our affection for, and our devotion to, our respective groups.

In The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo provides a compelling argument that circumstances or external conditions have tremendous influence over our behavior and that each and every one of us are capable of both good and evil. According to Zimbardo, the conditions of the barrel can affect the apples as well as the reverse. Psychopathic organizations result in psychopathic behavior regardless of whether they are local social clubs, cut-throat corporations or nation-states. This is why the great founding documents that gave birth to our nation matter so much and why it is imperative that we understand them thoroughly as responsible citizens.  It is our sense of expectations, derived from these ideals, that gives the barrel of our government its shape and provides its moral gravity.

David Sloan Wilson, in his book Evolution for Everyone, shows us that the process of evolution is inherent in every aspect of life. He argues that the selection process is not an artifact of the past but is something alive and hard at work in the present. Wilson tells us that goodness can evolve when conditions are right, but that goodness is vulnerable to subversion from within. He tells the story of a scientist experimenting with chickens to increase egg production who selects the most productive hens from cages for breeding in contrast to selecting hens from the best groups. As it turned out, the most productive individuals had achieved their increased numbers of eggs by suppressing the output of their fellow captives, while the hens from the best producing cages achieved their’s by cooperation. So after six generations, instead of nine hens in the cage there were only three in the first group because they had become so violent that they killed their fellow cage-mates. And yet, all nine of the hens that were selected for cooperation were in great shape and were still productive. This insightful example reminds me of the ENRON Corporation where the practice of forced ranking and firing of a significant percentage of employees each year created an atmosphere where psychopaths were the ones most likely to survive the cuts. We now know that the ENRON example resulted in a moral implosion where future-traders in electricity bragged about ripping off grandmotherly-like customers with arbitrarily high electric bills.          

Given that we are a representative republic, where our elected officials are supposed speak for us, it appears to let us off the hook as citizens in that we can let our representatives govern while and we can keep to our own interests. But that’s, in my view, a gross misunderstanding of the responsibilities of citizenship. And this is why liberals are so obsessed with the pillars of care and justice. Because, the way we see it, eternal vigilance is the only way to keep in-group factions from one another’s throats and from giving one’s own group preferential treatment over every other group. In-group psychology predisposes us to favor our own kind; injustice and inequality are very often the products of defective barrels by the design of those with the power to rig the system to favor their group. Conservatives have great difficulty comprehending how the American Civil Liberties Union can represent the rights of groups without taking their identity into consideration because it never occurs to them to act without demonstrating a preference. Indeed, at times many conservatives seem to miss the whole point of the Bill of Rights which is to demand justice without regard to any characterization of identity other than citizenship.   

Elsewhere, I’ve characterized conservatism as the politics of advantage and liberalism as one of indecisiveness. The politics of advantage is rooted in the ethos of in-group loyalty and indecisiveness stems from a fear of being unjust by being too judgmental. And yet, herein is a great opportunity for the left and right to better understand one another. We seek the same result; it’s just that liberals and conservatives see the problem differently. One has to realize that these five moral pillars rest on the same foundation and at the bedrock level loyalty and justice are reciprocal values. One cannot truly be loyal without being just and the reverse. But loyalty for both liberals and conservatives can be a blinding force because expressions of loyalty, when linked to identity, can be so overpowering that they override every other consideration. This is why liberals are so concerned about the pillar of justice.