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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
Spring 2008 Pugilistic Politics: The
Metaphorical Fight of Left vs. Right
2008
Citizen vs. Consumer: The
Perils of Deflationary Democracy
© Charles D. Hayes
Do you think of yourself primarily as a
citizen or a consumer? A generation ago this would have been
a silly question. Not so today. More and more, our country
is becoming a democracy only in aspiration. The phenomenal
success of special-interest lobbies and mass marketing have
had the cumulative linguistic effect of overwriting us
metaphorically as persons of political rights and
responsibilities and turning us into people with nothing
much going for us other than our purchasing preferences.
If you are old enough to remember the
frequent use of the adage “the customer is always right,”
then you might also recall a time when most people thought
of themselves as citizens and only occasionally as
customers. Of course, some of us still feel that way, but
the ubiquitous use of the term consumer has
turned the notion of citizen into a hollow idiom of
generations past. Being referred to as a customer of this or
that store or service is by itself non-threatening to one’s
status as a citizen. But the mantle of consumer as the sole
descriptor of individuals has had the effect of siphoning
the implied responsibility out of citizenship while morphing
into a nihilistic but universal catchphrase for people whose
summum bonum in life is to use up resources.
Nothing captures the contemporary dilemma of
consumer vs. citizen more vividly than the fact that so many
people view the government not as us but as them.
And nothing more need be said to make the bewildering point
that to hold this view is to profoundly misunderstand the
very concept of a democratic republic and the
responsibilities required to sustain it. A citizen’s
conscience vs. a consumer’s choice is a sharp disconnect
between conflicting notions of freedom and responsibility.
Worse, consider the democratic prerequisite of the consent
of the governed vs. the indifference of the governed. An
egregious lack of political authority resulting from
nonparticipation is precisely what happens when citizens
view their government as them instead of
us. Wherever a lack of will resides, special
interests will in time fill the vacuum with a special
purpose.
In A Place for Us, a book about
making democracy work, author Benjamin Barber writes,
“Democracy is not a synonym for the marketplace, and the
notion that by privatizing government we can establish civic
goods is a dishonorable myth.” An insidious myth, Barber
argues, because it has a superficial feel of freedom. He
says, “Consumers speak the divisive rhetoric of ‘me.’
Citizens invent the common language of ‘we.’” And then he
adds, “Ducks, to be ducks, need their pond, and the public
needs its town square.” Moreover, the kind of business
conducted in the public square is often far more important
than the decisions we make with our wallets. These issues
involve common good and common ground. Common ground,
though, cannot be discovered unless it has first been
established. Achieving common ground means accepting a set
of identifying principals, namely American ideals based upon
our Constitution and Bill of Rights, along with the notion
that one can indeed appear different, have opposing views,
and still be an American.
As you watch newscasts in the coming weeks,
pay particular attention to how many times the word
consumer is used, and then ask yourself if, in each
of these characterizations, you can sense a feeling of
implied impotence in the role that “consumers” are expected
to play with regard to anything beyond purchases. I don’t
think it’s a stretch to suggest that the continuous use of
the word consumer has had an emasculating
effect on the roles expected of individuals in a democracy.
The word consumer, by sheer usage level,
leaves little room for other considerations.
To be a citizen is to have an identity for
both being and doing. A citizen has rights, but also
responsibilities. A consumer just feeds on goods and
services. Roman statesman and orator Cicero argued that we
experience freedom as an exercise of participating in power,
but he was speaking of citizens and excluding slaves. What
if one has no power, except to buy things? Is shopping all
there is to freedom? Perhaps we often hear the expression of
voting with one’s dollars because many people can no longer
distinguish a difference.
In my view, consumer choice vs. citizens’
rights is not a parallel proposition. The late philosopher
Rick Roderick likened mass culture to the Enlightenment in
reverse. No doubt, in large part, it’s because trillions of
advertising dollars have been spent to appeal to our most
infantile urges, which tends to cause us to confuse maturity
and success with material possessions, while our penchant
for thoughtfulness is overwritten by media images. Thus,
“consumers” mistake freedom as an infinite choice of flavors
from which to choose.
The “customer is always right” motto
originated early in the twentieth century, and although
there is some controversy about who coined it, there is
little doubt that it started us down the path toward
expectations of political impotence. Worse, to be nothing
more than a consumer is analogous to being a cancer cell, to
being forever voracious of appetite and to demonstrate one’s
success through continuous and often conspicuous
consumption. To be viewed as successful, a consumer must
devour, and leftover spoilage is a sign of power to spare. A
consumer’s response to war is to go shopping, as we were
recently urged to do by the President of the United States.
The sheer banality of a culture in which the populace is
known primarily as consumers is one where
persons are seen not as being ends in themselves, but rather
as frivolous and superficial means to yet further and
further superficial means.
Democracy cannot be attained or sustained
without a rigorous public contribution by enlightened
participants. But what if citizens can’t be depended upon to
educate themselves about important political matters as so
often seems to be the case? What if instead they respond on
cue in consumer fashion to simple-minded thirty-second
commercials, as the data clearly suggest happens? When
political candidates spend millions on mind-numbing
commercials composed of clichés, platitudes, and empty
slogans, it works. It changes voting in predictable
patterns. This is not citizenship. It’s a form of reptilian
persuasion that amounts to bait-and-switch trickery, where
appeals to deep emotions are used for the purpose of
diversion: a means to an end by deceit, a willingness to say
anything that gets the desired result.
If our primary source of news and information
about the world consists of little more than psychologically
spun messages, both political and commercial, from
powerful media conglomerates, then who are we as individuals
to speak above the noise? Are these corporations really any
different than feudal lords? If we are powerless against
them, are we not their serfs? Are employed adults who will
never rise far enough above minimum wage to earn enough to
escape poverty really any better off than sharecroppers? Are
the immigrants who scrub our floors, pick our crops, and
watch after our children really that much better off than
indentured servants? Are credit card companies postmodern
fiefdoms?
A generation ago questions like these would
have offended me. Today they don’t for a very simple reason:
We have enough history under our belts to realize that a
low-wage bottom class is not simply a stepladder to greater
success. There are at present too many rungs missing for
average citizens to still use the metaphor of a success
ladder without cynicism. Reality suggests that a permanent
underclass is actually indispensable to the status quo. A
culture that worships winners requires, of
necessity, a large number of losers. It’s disturbing that
more people aren’t asking questions about a system rigged by
the winners. Of course, to be poor in America may still seem
rich by the standards of some parts of the world, but
belonging to a better class of poor is not really something
worthy of national pride, nor is it good for democracy.
Choices that are inspired by oppression do not represent
genuine liberty. Moreover, the frustration and contempt that
result from a permanent underclass undermine the kind of
cooperation that fosters common ground.
My generation was taught to prize democracy
as an end in itself. Capitalism was to be our means. But
today, for millions of people, these roles are reversed.
Capitalism nowadays enables the lobbied purchase of
governmental power that favors moneyed interests, period.
Real democracy requires that knowledgeable citizens learn
the nature of civic problems and have the leisure to
participate in effecting solutions. Leisure used to stand
for the very foundation of culture and implied something far
greater than having the time to pursue entertainment.
Granted, cyber-communications contain the
seeds of democratic muscle, and like-minded folks all over
the planet are joining forces. But the exponential growth of
media conglomerates represents a much more formidable threat
than Goliath ever presented to David. In addition, the
convenience of discovering people who share one’s views is
having the predictable effect of escalating polarization.
The result is what academics call ideological amplification,
where members of like-minded groups go further in the
direction they are already leaning than they ever would have
gone on their own. So far, public square possibilities for
engaging in constructive dialogue among people with
divergent political views, while not unheard of, are far
from ideal, as ducks do not seem to want to be seen talking
to chickens, and the reverse.
All that’s required for feudalist societies
to function is managers, overseers, and an inexhaustible
supply of serfs, although nose-to-the-grindstone,
minimum-wage consumers seem to work as well.
If one has to work seven days a week just to obtain the bare
necessities of a life of poverty, then the notion of
citizenship and civic responsibility seems hackneyed and
trite to begin with.
In a truly democratic society, military
service via a draft ensures a vested public interest in the
foreign affairs of the nation. In a consumer society where
economic opportunity is dismal for so many young adults, the
term “voluntary” military service should be suspect.
Economic coercion is still coercion, and it’s
undemocratic—especially when corporate elites live in a
business environment that’s increasingly socialistic by
lobbied design. CEOs collude with politicians, and the
fallout deficit due citizens is that all relationships among
“consumers” are commoditized. If you don’t like it, you’re
told, “You can shop elsewhere.” When you listen carefully
to a broad range of political discourse from both the left
and right, it’s clear that many of our most thoughtful
citizens are worried that the American middle class is an
endangered species—a situation that threatens the very
foundation of our way of life.
Citizen vs. consumer is an issue that
transcends political affiliation. Arguments about inequality
aside, I don’t think it’s that hard to convince the
political left, right, and middle that a return to the
ubiquitous use of the word citizen while
scrapping the word consumer in favor of the
word customer, in myriad circumstances, would
likely result in a paradigm shift in democratic
expectations. It seems like such a small thing, and some
will no doubt think it silly. Still, ask yourself what would
happen if our broadcast media were to dramatically roll back
their use of the word consumer and begin
referring to all Americans more often as citizens.
I believe the change in perception over time
would be startling. What do you think?
Special Note:
After studying politics for decades, I have for the first
time discovered an approach for finding common ground that
is truly promising. It is the work of Jonathan Haidt
at the University of Virginia. Regardless of whether you
consider yourself a liberal, conservative, a moderate or
your own special brand of independent, if you really care
about the objective of achieving common ground and lowering
the level of contempt in today’s politics I would ask that
you take the time to consider Haidt’s work. At the end of
this essay there are links to his websites.
Pugilistic Politics: The
Metaphorical Fight of Left vs. Right
© Charles D. Hayes
Historical evidence suggests that but for a few brief
periods of moderation, people have been arguing about
politics for generations with every bit as much vitriol as
they do today. So, when I suggest that,
liberals and
conservatives represent
the very pillars of morality, many of you, I suspect, will
perceive that it sounds out of kilter in one direction or
the other. But I will argue that if it were not true, then
there would be no morality as we know it today.
Ever since my discovery of Jonathan Haidt and Jesse
Graham’s paper “When Morality Opposes Justice” I’ve been
thinking about how to expand my understanding of the
politics of divisiveness. They offer a five pillar moral
foundation for American culture. It’s not that Haidt and
Graham’s efforts have nailed the truth to the door, but
rather that they offer a method for discussing political
differences that provides a refreshing sense of clinical
objectivity, minus the usual contempt, that frequently comes
with polarization. Haidt and Graham propose that the five
pillars of concern comprising our moral foundation are:
·
harm/care
·
fairness/reciprocity
·
in-group/loyalty
·
authority/respect
·
purity/sanctity
They argue that
liberals
are concerned with the first two
almost exclusively, but that conservatives are more likely to be concerned
about all five, although their main focus is usually the
last three (See
Liberal vs. Conservative: Peace at Last).
In
an essay on Edge.org titled “Moral
Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion,”
Haidt offers four principles of moral psychology for further
consideration.
1.
Intuitive primacy but not dictatorship. This is an acknowledgment that more often than not we use
the term reason to support lightning quick emotional judgments only to claim we were
reasoning
all along.
2.
Moral thinking is for social doing. In which
case, Haidt argues “we did not evolve language and reasoning
because they helped us to find truth; we evolved these
skills because they were useful to their bearers, and among
their greatest benefits were reputation management and
manipulation.”
3.
Morality binds and builds which means that a
communally accepted morality brings people together and
binds them collectively in the process.
4.
Morality is about more than harm and fairness
which is self-explanatory. There is a concern for the
prevention of harm and vigilance for justice and
reciprocity. Haidt also raises the subject of group
selection as it applies to Darwinian evolution to show
how these attributes and the five pillars apply to society.
These ideas become even clearer with the example Haidt uses
in his stunningly insightful book The Happiness
Hypothesis. He uses the metaphor of an
elephant-rider (with conscious reason being the rider and
our emotional self the elephant) to make the point that our
emotions represent a very large and powerful force with a
mind of their own. He writes, “Reason and emotion must both
work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion (a
major part of the elephant) does most of the work. When the
neocortex came along, it made the rider possible, but it
made the elephant much smarter, too.”
Thinking about all of the above considerations in terms of
tribal and social group dynamics is invigorating enough to
provoke insightful questions about how, in any given large
population, individuals can be found who have a capacity for
divergent and often diametrically opposing viewpoints. This
is why, for example, during the American Civil War people
born of the same families and of the same sense of
allegiance and regional identity could still wind up on
opposite sides in the conflict.
In
the October 2007 issue of The Atlantic, Olivia
Judson wrote a short article titled “The Selfless Gene.”
Judson too brings up Charles Darwin’s long ignored, but
recently revived, notion of “group selection” which is
growing rapidly in renewed interest. Darwin postulated that
although it would appear contradictory at first glance,
there could be a decided positive effect in warring against
neighboring groups in that it might actually result in the
evolutionary adaptation of creating more caring societies.
It sounds counterintuitive until you think it through and
realize that a driving force toward battle could result in
cohesiveness. By enabling a predisposition toward
conformity, the short-term results may be violent, but in
the long run greater cooperation is facilitated. Not to
mention the inevitable gene scarcity of those with a
propensity for quickly resorting to violence. I believe the
evidence suggests that the behavior of individuals is
inseparably bound to group behavior and vice versa.
I
find it deeply ironic that Richard Dawkins, a scientist whom
I very much admire, has focused almost exclusively on the
biological self-interest of the individual over that of the
group, but that he would coin the term “meme” which I
suspect might be a reflection of grouping tendencies by
subterfuge. Is it inconceivable to imagine that the ubiquity
of meme contagion is in part a grouping propensity? And is
not religion the social embodiment of grouping? I have yet
to make up my mind about these possibilities, but I find the
concept of memes as a grouping mechanism fascinating.
Indeed, in the November 2007 issue of New Scientist,
socio-biologist Edward O. Wilson admits science has made a
historical mistake by not taking group selection more
seriously.
Henceforth accepting some validity in
group selection theories changes the whole landscape of
evolutionary psychology as effectively as if an
eighteen-wheeler were to broadside a giant kaleidoscope. Add
theoretical physicist Mark Buchanan’s insights into social
behavior from his book The Social Atom, and the
experience for me was like Roman candles going off in my
head. All of a sudden myriad peculiar human behavioral
characteristics start to make sense in a whole new light.
Neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and the modeling of
patterns of human social behavior by state of the art
computers, is wreaking havoc with what we’ve always assumed
were common sense notions of cause and effect. In The
Social Atom, Mark Buchanan reminds us that as
repulsed as we are by the use of labels, prejudice and
ethnocentrism, in past primitive settings these attitudes
have been very effective in garnering greater cooperation.
In the present, our primal Stone Age tendencies are easily
used against us by savvy individuals. Buchanan writes, “So
the lesson of social physics, if you will, is that ethnic
hatred is a primitive ‘mode’ of human collective behavior,
akin to the natural vibrations of a guitar string or the
swinging of a pendulum. If this weren’t the case, stoking
ethnic hatred would never be an effective political
strategy, as it would push against human tendency and
inclination. Politicians play to ethnic fears because they
know fear motivates, perhaps, more basically and immediately
than any other emotion. And, in the right setting, the
opportunistic intelligence of a power-hungry individual can
control the actions of millions.”
Now, I caution that there are likely to be many fascinating
and enthralling conclusions to come that will in time be
proved wrong. But these new possibilities are exciting,
especially in the realm of offering a greater understanding
of human behavior and of politics in particular with the
ultimate goal of bettering human relations.
In
my forthcoming book, September University: Rediscover
the Wonder of Existence and Help Shape the Future,
I discuss in detail how our evolutionary past of living
in small groups has predisposed us to viewing the world in
terms of us and them and to resorting to a
truth by association posture in which our
respective group identity shields us from the need to think
through issues that question our veracity in cases of
conflict, simply because of the tendency to see ourselves as
being right by nature of who we are.
When I consider the main
liberal
concern of harm/care,
and fairness/reciprocity,
I’m reminded of the conclusion I had reached before I was
aware of the five pillar theory. In effect, to regard the differences
between those working for justice as opposed to those
protecting their group’s identity as an issue of reasoning
vs. relating breaks down as an argument. Relating is nothing
more than responding to another’s dialogue
emotionally because of its effect at some level on one’s
sense of identity instead of reasoning a reply. People of
all political persuasions relate using the emotional signs
and symbols of their particular identity that often make
little sense to outsiders. Sometimes the result is the use
of code words particular to their group or circumstance. For
example, Christian fundamentalists will often use the word
truth not as in determining that snow is white
if and only if snow is white, but as a code word for “God’s
love.” Relating, as such, performs a very useful social
function for conforming and inspiring collective behavior,
but if one’s group hijacks the meaning of words so as to
communicate only to each other, then the opportunity for
democratic dialogue is lost. Imagine the perplexity and
confusion involved if a particular group were to apply
private meaning to Haidt’s five pillars. The result would be
a closed society incapable of practicing democracy. Given
the historic difficulty with political dialogue, it’s not
surprising to learn that George Lakoff argues
liberals and
conservatives derive
different meaning from words as simple as freedom
and justice. My personal experience with
political discourse bears him out.
Internalizing values as a part of growing up is a process in
which what we come to believe about the world is likely to
be confirmed countless times through our families and peer
cultures using the whole range of our emotions. The result
is that when we learn prejudice or racial bias as part of
our upbringing, these beliefs are ingrained deep within our
brains. It’s so forceful that these learned beliefs are
analogous to the internalized certainty that if we throw a
ball into the air gravity will return it to the earth.
The conservative ethos of
in-group/loyalty,
authority/respect, and
purity/sanctity are such
powerful forces that in most cases they trump the two
liberal pillars. Think
about this quandary as a boxing metaphor and a question of
ring generalship. (A more desirable metaphor might be a
dance or a sewing circle, but we are still far removed from
that level of harmony, not to mention the frequent media
references to taking the gloves off politics.)
The conservative triad
of concern amounts to an over-hand right, a knockout punch. Moreover, the
reasons for bringing people together would seem to require
this kind of force or they would likely be ineffective.
Appeals for
justice
are more like a left jab
and, as in a boxing match, the jab has to be used constantly to stay even and
especially to win. Stretching this metaphor further, America
scored three resounding, though imperfect,
left-hooks with our
Declaration of Independence, our Constitution and our Bill
of Rights. Yet throughout our history, the left jabs thrown
for a caring society with reciprocity and
justice for all have still proven insufficient to
protect those who are considered to fall into out-group
categories. And unfortunately this is easy to explain.
Identity groups serve as powerful cultural filters that
distort reality in favor of their own ends. When the
perception of one’s own identity is such that it is believed
that their uniqueness trumps that of another’s in terms of
literal value, then the result is a worldview in which
inequality is not only justified but is in effect
inevitable, possibly ordained and just by design. In effect
the documents establishing America’s sovereignty gave
dramatic expansion to the traditional triad by providing an
intellectual template for relating on the basis of ideas and
ideals in addition to identity. And thus we have expected
immigrants to leave their former identities at the border
and buy into our ready-made ideological template.
History suggests that negotiating differences with people
consumed with loyalty in a narrow sense of identity is very
nearly impossible. But if one accepts the idea of America as
an ideal based upon ideas then democracy has a chance to
function if the dynamics are properly understood and
accepted by most citizens. Any chance for genuine democracy
requires that all triadic factions have to reason and relate
together. The dialogue has to be “rider to rider” or
“elephant to elephant” or there is no hope for progress. A
rider on either side cannot dialogue with an elephant on the
other. This becomes readily apparent
when it's attempted as the dialogue becomes increasingly irrational.
In
general I use the term relating figuratively, but in actual
practice the result is often literal in that people who let
the group they identify with speak for them are in fact
relating and not reasoning.
Consider this: The triad of the
conservative right provides the ethos that
binds a group as Haidt argues while the
liberal left appeal for
caring and
justice resembles a
perpetual petition for justice, which by its very nature
moves to expand the group by putting ideological principals
above identity. This inevitably results in the ability to
include more and more people: left,
right,
left,
left,
left,
right and so on into
infinity. Could the difference between
liberals and
conservatives be explained in terms of neurological circuitry? For example, could
evolution have equipped a significant number of people with
a conservative
orientation to bring groups together in a pro-group capacity
comparable to the roles of tribal chiefs, coaches and
members for group activities as a means of ensuring a better
chance of survival? Could the drive toward greater
cooperation and innovation have resulted in a similar demand
for people with a liberal
orientation as a need for novelty and to keep the
rightward conforming tendencies from imploding into group
destruction? To my thinking the whole scenario begs the
question: are we liberal
and conservative
because of the way our brains are wired or are our brains
wired the way they are because we are
liberals and
conservatives? Or, could
it be a little of both?
Our emotions reflect our passion for relating as
individuals. Look around the planet at every
conservative culture the
world over and similar conditions apply. Cultural
conservatism, when taken
to extreme as a politics of identity, trumps appeals for
caring and
justice. In a tightly
knit group, the ideological welfare of the group can easily
evolve into an identity that takes precedence over the
rights of individuals. Worse, some group members are likely
to be seen as incapable of doing wrong, their transgressions
forgivable by nature of who they are while those belonging
to out-groups can seem to do nothing right, no matter how
virtuous their deeds actually are. The more highly a group
esteems itself, the more sensitive and hypervigilant its
members will be to insult and signs of disrespect on the
part of those outside the group. If a particular group
believes they are the only nationality or religion worthy of
salvation then all who oppose them in any way are likely to
be viewed as wicked.
A
strong sense of identity is important to individual
well-being, but when taken to ethnocentric-like extremes
identity trumps all laws and moral values through feelings that anything
one does is justified by nature of group allegiance.
Examples abound: Sieg Heil! Banzai! America: Right or Wrong!
To oppose a conservative triad
that has congealed is to face a group that views the world
as us against them or stated more simply as
good vs. evil. Moreover, the triad
represents a hypersensitive
triangle of self-reinforcing sentiment that
ratchets up protective behavior when threatened. Expressions
of paternalistically approved behavior stand in as
expressions of purity
and sanctity and as
such they reinforce in-group
loyalty and respect
for authority. And thus
conservative talk radio
plays directly to the themes that congeal in the
triad in precisely the
same fashion as a percussion triangle vibrates musically
when struck with a metal bar. Strike the triad, and appeals
for justice are drowned in chords of self-congratulatory
harmony of us against them.
In
my earlier essay “Liberal
vs. Conservative: Peace at Last” I suggested that
liberals and
conservatives need each
other and that both have our best interests at heart, even
if unintentionally. But because of our tribal tendencies, a
completely balanced society is so unlikely and so improbable
that even to imagine it is said to be embracing utopia. We
may never know how or why people show a political
inclination toward being a liberal or
conservative, but what should be crystal clear as
our history, suggests, is that a society that veers too far in
either direction awaits disaster.
Based on my own experience and continuous study, I believe
that the principle concerns of in-group/loyalty,
authority/respect, and
purity/sanctity fit the
profile of relating over reasoning
for conservatives.
While harm/care, and
fairness/reciprocity,
represent the primary mode of relating for
liberals. Of course,
nothing is really this simple, and I don’t mean to imply that
liberals and
conservatives don’t both
reason and relate. It would seem to be a matter of degree
and priority,and it’s a bit more complicated than the way I
have presented it.
The
conservative triad
of in-group/loyalty,
authority/respect, and
purity/sanctity
reflect tribalistic tendencies for coming together and they
tend to harden in some type of association: national,
regional, religion, ideology, group, family or cause. These
affiliations often derive from noble aspirations and stand
as respected institutions. But when these identities congeal
and fester in isolation, groups experience conflict at their
borders and they very often begin to perceive of all others
as outsiders. If they feel their identity is threatened by
the actions of out-groups the stage is set to become
hypervigilant for detecting disrespectful conduct. Given
time, these actions gradually evolve into a perception of
the other as a force of evil. Moreover, evolution has
made us experts at keeping track of social grievances. Acts
of aggression are frequently met with an ethos of “we will
never forget,” in effect making an ideological down payment
in escrow for a future act of retaliation. And thus
forthcoming acts of violence are automatically
self-justified. The result is endless conflict as
demonstrated by an example of the war-torn Middle East. People
who imagine that they have been wronged equate justice with
revenge.
Liberals
come together around ideas with an emphasis on
care and
justice that can be
compared to the scales of justice with
harm
and care
on one side and fairness
and reciprocity to achieve equilibrium on the other. But when the idea of
fairness is taken to extreme we need look no further than
the failed efforts of Marxism. Absolute equality would
result in unconditional oppression. The same pitfalls await
both political parties when they venture too far to the
left or
right without sufficient
restraining stability from some degree by the other side.
Communism brought such political certitude to bear that
merely to disagree with its doctrine was enough to be
suspected of being mentally ill. And
hard-right conservatives
frequently accuse those who disagree with them about
anything as being egregiously unpatriotic. Moreover, deeply
imbedded in religious fundamentalism and the notion of
Divine Providence is a diminished importance attributed to
harm/care,
fairness and
reciprocity from the
simple conclusion that pretty much what happens in life is
what should happen, is therefore just and the inequities
will be worked out in the next life.
Unfortunately both
liberals
and conservatives tend
to receive the vast majority of their news and information
about the world from sources that reinforce the views they
already hold. Entertainment may be the best chance for a
crosspollination of ideas, but even here there are imprecise
boundaries of group identity with regard to high-, low-, and
middle-brow culture.
My
argument, in a nutshell, is that for any society to thrive,
especially one built upon democratic ideals, both
liberals and
conservatives are needed
or the society will spiral out of control with its unchecked
strength becoming a destructive weakness that ends in
oppression or calamity. Witness, for
example the plight of women in Afghanistan, virtual
prisoners of a conservative
and patriarchal society run amok, where cries for
care and
justice go unheard and
where women are treated like property. (See
Honor: What is It? Who Has It? Who Doesn't?What Is It?)
When I ask myself why I’m a
liberal I can only rationalize from my own life
experience and my own politics. I perceive that I identify
first and foremost with ideas, which means I
suspect that I relate to ideas emotionally and mix my
emotions with my reasoning in the same manner that
conservatives do with
matters of a more specific group identity. There is no
greater ideal, to my thinking, than to aspire to
Socrates’ notion of becoming “a citizen of the world.” That
kind of aim, however, doesn’t go over well with the America
First crowd. But consider this. Would not both Socrates and
Darwin be vindicated if human beings progressed civilly to
the point of viewing all of the people of the world as
belonging to the same group with the same rights and
responsibilities without regard to any other sense of
identity? Would not real civilization bring an end to
most violent human conflict? And wouldn’t real civilization
achieve Darwin’s evolutionary trajectory for a peaceful
society and Socrates’ aspiration for global citizenship at
the same time? It would seem so to me and it would require a
measure of left jabs
and hooks with enough
consistency to equalize the forceful
right-hand efforts that
bind us together. Because one thing history reveals with the
reliability of the sunrise is that if a significant number
of citizens do not clamor for justice it will not prevail.
As I see it, when we engage in political
dialogue both liberals
and conservatives
react to confrontation neurologically with an emotional
default of relating to that which we most identify
with most strongly. For liberals
it’s the realm of ideas and for
conservatives it’s more often a literal kind of
relating, specific in some enigmatic way to group identity.
It would seem that liberals
might be able to claim a shorter path to reason by
identifying emotionally with ideas but this notion may be
more apparent than real.
My
objective in focusing on the seemingly natural but sharp
differences between liberals
and conservatives is
to show that without these opposing ways of relating to the
world, we cannot survive as any form of government
resembling a democracy. Conservative political consultant Mary Matlin and
liberal operative
James Carville seem to have figured this out better than
most. Championing democracy while hating one another for
having opposing worldviews, though understandable, is absurd
in the extreme. Of course, knowing that both
liberals and
conservatives are
necessary for our general well-being may not help in a
significant way in negotiating our differences, but it
should help us in reducing the hatred and contempt that
often results from sustained tit-for-tat arguments, and this
would not be a small achievement.
As
a cautionary measure, I would add to Haidt’s rider/elephant
metaphor and point out that deep beneath the elephant rests
a primordial beast representing the very worst of our capacity for evil
as human beings. Henceforth, I suggest adding a dragon to
the rider/elephant metaphor. If the elephant stands its
ground and doesn’t hide, remain indifferent, or rampage or
stampede, its weight keeps the dragon beneath the surface.
If not, the dragon shows its ugly head most frequently with
ethnocentric fire breathing exhibited by racial bias and
overt acts of prejudice ranging from insult to genocide. It’s
vital to understand that the rider is no match for the
elephant, let alone the dragon, and yet the rider is still
ultimately responsible for the cessation of fire-breathing.
Both the rider and the elephant are required to battle the
dragon knowing that regardless of the forcefulness of their
efforts they can never be sure the dragon is dead. The
dragon will likely lie in slumber until the elephant hides
in fear, looks the other way, or loses control. So long as
we come together as rider to rider or elephant to elephant,
we have a chance to negotiate our differences, but never
dragon to dragon. When we torture combatants, dragons
surface; in war-time, dragons run freely; when genocide
occurs, dragons rule. Moreover, it’s the rule of dragons
arising from chilling indifference throughout history that
have left the darkest stain on humanity. As Roy F.
Baumeister points out in Evil: Inside Human Violence
and Cruelty, passion can be too disruptive to
efficient killing as demonstrated by the “just following
orders” efforts of the Nazis who industrialized mass
murder. It is my view that one of the greatest lessons to be
learned from the dark side of human nature is that dragons
reside in all of us given the right conditions and that
frequently acknowledging this reality is helpful in keeping
them at bay.
Perhaps the mass of
liberals
and conservatives
in America can be forgiven for not having made more progress
in understanding the moral dynamics of what would constitute
a genuine democracy in a republic. It does seem certain that
our penchant to perceive social class differences appears to
reside in the depths of our genes. But with all that has
been learned about human psychology and human behavior in
the past century it seems incredulous that our legislative
bodies of government still act like children with each party
imagining the other as evil instead of as a necessary
component for governing. Moreover, not to appreciate the
balance necessary to achieve an authentic democracy is to be
so deluded about what one is doing as to lack the ability to
solve problems when real solutions are presented. One punch
does not a match make, nor will it slay a dragon.
It
would be naïve to imagine that we will ever come up with a
way to stop the perpetual pugilistic match between the
left and
right, but then it would
also be unwise to wish to do so, since this constant struggle
is what makes our survival possible. It is desirable to
lower the levels of contempt, keep a steady jab in the face
of authority, tame the elephant and keep all dragons beneath
the surface. Convincing each side that it truly needs the
other may be half the battle. But perhaps much of our
fascination with reason is misplaced in that if emotionally
based relating is such a powerful force in our psychic
makeup then perhaps we should focus on relating and
reasoning whenever appropriate so long as both parties use
the same method at the same time. That which is worthy of
the pillar of authority
and respect should be
examined while striving for a consensus of what it should
be, along with how sanctity
and purity apply and
how and why the realization of these concerns is sufficient
to earn our in-group loyalty,
and finally that the concerns of
harm/care and
fairness/reciprocity
bring a sense of balance to our efforts. Maybe with such
a level of maturity we can substitute the need for a common
enemy with a common purpose. The crux of our inability to
get along stems from the fact that the cultural diversity
which imbues us with the creativity to form a nation also
yields a surplus of contempt for the very otherness that
constitutes diversity. And thus fire-breathing dragons from
our Stone-Age hardwiring continuously threaten social
harmony. I suspect that if in David Hume’s time we had known
about the existence of mirror neurons, today’s
rider/elephant/dragon experience would be thought of as
radically different from the most common ways we do today.
In
typical liberal fashion, I am inclined to value the
harm/care and
fairness/reciprocity
pillars of concern above the others. But I do not want to
live in a society where authority and
respect
are values that don’t exist with enough force to foster our
aspirations toward those ends. Nor do I want to live in a
society without a strong sense of
loyalty or where the
social hygiene of human behavior cannot be judged in the
context of purity and
sanctity. I trust that
thoughtful conservatives
will likewise care enough to seek
fairness as
justice.
So, after obsessing and dreaming about this subject for
months, and with all that I’ve said above, I suspect that the
triad that I’ve characterized as a template for
conservatism may in
practice be a metaphorical pattern for relating, period.
Each of us experiences multiple identities: gender,
geographical, social class, economic class, political,
professional, even sports affiliations. Moreover, I believe
the triad serves as a process in which our
efforts of demonstrating purity
and sanctity in a
metaphoric sense reinforce our in-group loyalty and engender
authority and
respect at the same time.
This is easiest to imagine with conservatives because their sense of identity is
more likely to be to a specific group of readily
identifiable members who place great value on
authority, conformity and
the kind of behavior that validates both. I suspect it’s
true for both liberals
and conservatives that when we reminisce, we engage a kind of triadic relating
in that we recall that which we relate to using our sense of
loyalty, conference of
respect and the
purity and
sanctity with which we
hold on to the memories.
When
liberals relate
to ideas, however, the effect is that the ideas we care
about so obscure the triad that it’s analogous to a roof
burglar who pulls his ladder up after use to hide his
presence. There is no trace that the relating triad was ever
there. And thus when liberals
experience the triad of
in-group loyalty, of
relating to ideas and
then demonstrate their purity
and sanctity
by upholding these ideals and by simultaneously respecting
the authority of those
who do likewise, they leave no sign of the relating triad
even though they have used it too. But change the context of
identity, say in an event like 9/11, and many
liberals will switch
from a posture based upon ideals to a politically based
identity – in this instance, to one of national identity as
that of an America under attack. The same would apply to
conservatives if they
were to awaken one morning and find themselves in a
dictatorship. Of course, these identities are likely to be
felt only as long as the circumstances that caused them
prevail. It didn’t take long for actions by the Bush
administration in Iraq to use up the goodwill from 9/11 and
return liberal attention to the pillars of
harm/care and
fairness/reciprocity.
We
are never going to fully resolve the issues of
left and
right politics, but we can
achieve a greater accord simply through the realization that
both the left and
right are necessary for
the existence of American democracy. So the boxing match
continues. But let’s make sure that the standing
eight-count and three-knockdown rules will apply in all
future bouts and that we won’t allow dragons in the ring. In
Experiments in Ethics, philosopher Kwame
Anthony Appiah sums up the quest for understanding moral
valuations by demonstrating that, regardless of our political
persuasion, brain science is making it clear that what we’ve
long thought was the bedrock of human character is in reality a
murky swamp that is much more subject to situation and
circumstance than we ever dreamed possible. Some serious
reflection is in order regarding our personal politics to make
sure that we are not just shadowboxing and that we know
what we are talking about.
I
have one final comment about the serious nature of political
divisiveness. A strong case can be made that a majority of
Americans have naive views about what democracy actually is
and the notion of what free markets portend globally. In her
book World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market
Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability,
Amy Chua shows in graphic detail how our egregious
misunderstanding of human behavior is ratcheting up ethnic
hatred the world over. And thus, expanding this discussion
about moral values into a methodology to encourage peaceful
relations among ethnocentric factions globally is, I will
argue, as urgent an enterprise as addressing global warming.
And while a boxing metaphor may be applicable to America, it
is not useful where ethnocentrism exists as dragon-seated
hatred. Boxers may hate one another, but as pugilists they
view one another with a measure of respect simply from
having been a worthy opponent. But when respect is absent,
genocide is possible. Figuring out how pillars of moral
value can neutralize hatred may be psychology’s greatest
challenge.
In
an essay titled “The Moral Instinct” in the New York Times
in January 2008, psychologist Steven Pinker discusses
Jonathan Haidt’s work and notes that there is circumstantial
evidence to suggest that morality is embedded in our genes.
He reminds us of Immanuel Kant’s notion of “the starry
heavens above and the moral law within.” It seems such a
shame that humanity has been on the right track for
understanding our self-destructiveness for centuries and yet
we are still unable to articulate morality to the degree
necessary to achieve civilization. It also seems clear to me
that we are getting very close to achieving the kind of
knowledge that will enhance the ability of people from diverse political
perspectives to get along when they really want to.
In
another recent New York Times column piece “When ‘Identity
Politics’ is Rational,” Stanley Fish pointed out that there
are times when identity politics really is rational, as
when it is informed, for example, not by skin color,
ethnicity, or religion, but by a reasoned vision of what the
world should be like. The greatest difficulty in resolving
our differences remains, however, in our inability to
discern between our feelings and our faculties for
reasoning. Until we address this fundamental problem,
achieving common ground will never rise above aspiration.
(If you found the color coding in this text irritating,
think of it as an opportunity for being made aware of the
ubiquity of hot button words we encounter that beg an
emotional response when a reasoned reply is called for.
Think of it as a reminder that one has to train the elephant
to keep the dragon in its place.)
Jonathan
Haidt’s Home Page
Moral
Foundations
Civil
Politics
Recent
Discoveries in Moral Psychology
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.
To
keep the barrel from harming the goods requires rigorous
thinking on the part of both liberals and conservatives. The
sad truth of our cultural divide is that instead of holding
one another in contempt, both liberals and conservatives
should be grateful that each of our five value-pillars is
well represented. If this were not so, our strengths would
spiral out of control and we would self-destruct like
pathologically caged birds. Strengths unchecked manifest as
weakness. The psychological and philosophical barrel for
America requires all five pillars, and yet if any
hierarchical arrangement becomes too ideologically rigid,
unintended consequences are quick to follow. Unchecked power
corrupts ruthlessly in maladapted organizations. Our
torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib demonstrated this
beyond a reasonable doubt.
In
Culture War? The Myth of Polarized America, Morris P.
Fiorina argues that the majority of Americans are accustomed
to living civilly in a society that is not nearly as
divisive as our media suggests. He says, “Most Americans are
somewhat like the unfortunate citizens of some third-world
countries who try to stay out of the crossfire while
left-wing guerrillas and right-wing death squads shoot at
each other.” A good point, but not so fast. The silent
majority are complicit in our divisiveness as I will show in
a moment. History assures us that people who make too much
or too little of an emotional investment in group loyalty
invite disaster. America’s founders knew of this human
frailty which is why they strived to create a nation
dependent upon the rule, not of man, but of law.
In
their book, Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me, Carol
Tavris and Elliot Aronson, two distinguished social
psychologists offer compelling arguments about the
overwhelming human need for confirming and continuously
reaffirming the self-image we already have of ourselves
regardless of whether it is positive or negative. We think
of ourselves as being objective to a fault, but the reality
is that without great care and precaution we see what we
expect to see and then we rationalize to the utmost degree
to make our circumstances square with our actions. Tavris
and Aronson write, “Evolutionary psychologists argue that
ethnocentrism—the belief that our own culture, nation, or
religion is superior to all others—aids survival by
strengthening our bonds to our primary social groups and
thus increasing our willingness to work, fight, and
occasionally die for them. When things are going well,
people feel pretty tolerant of other cultures and
religions—they even feel pretty tolerant of the other
sex!—but when they are angry, anxious, or threatened, the
default position is to activate their blind spots.”
Blind spots have a way of metastasizing into hot button
issues which become rallying points for emotionally driven
group engagements of group-think that have little to do with
learning or of entering into a democratic dialogue. Gay
marriage is an example of a hot button issue. Liberals find
it hard to understand that the purity and sanctity pillar
that conservatives value really is threatened by gay
marriage in that there will be long-term unintended
consequences (recall the significant changes of sexual mores
because of birth control pills) in traditional customs. I
say when gay marriage is legal because future
demographics foretell that legalization is inevitable as
younger generations, who are much more tolerant, take
leadership roles in society. On the other hand,
conservatives should try to understand that historically
tradition was oppressive enough to have hidden the fact that
gay couples cared for one another with the same feelings of
commitment as heterosexuals. While conservatives are free
not to participate in gay culture, liberals believe that it
turns the idea of justice on its head to deny reality and
try to make the law of the land congruent with an illusion
that gays do not really exist and subsequently have no
rights. We do not believe that a right exists to perpetuate
an illusion and to deny reality, even if it has precedence
for having been oppressive enough to have seemed to work in
the past because it forced closeted behavior.
What Tavris and Aronson don’t talk about and which should,
in my view, get a twenty-four inch headline, is the
incessant ethnocentric chatter that sustains Middle America
on a daily basis. It’s a constant stream of derision, name
calling, alienating, hurtful gossip and slanderous ridicule.
In academic terms it’s called ideological amplification—when
groups of liberals or conservatives get together and agree
themselves into a frenzy venturing further left or right
than anyone would have ventured on their own. A lynch mob
provides an illuminating example. Moreover, when we take
oppressive actions against those whom we deem as others,
we will be automatically forthcoming with reasons that they
deserved such treatment, even if we have to pull emotional
reasons out of a hat.
It
is true that extreme voices of the left and right keep the
tenor of name-calling beyond the possibility for serious
dialogue. But Middle America engages in ideological
amplification by ridiculing and making fun of what they
should be trying to make sense of. Doing so encourages
bigoted zealots on the far left and right, further fueling
hatred and contempt. Simply put, one of the biggest
obstacles to genuine democracy is the deep craving for
in-group ethnocentric-justification, indeed
self-justification. Everyone, everywhere, in every group,
longs to be special. I dare say it’s in our DNA. As
individuals, we are so vested in our own sense of importance
and we rely on self-justification to such a degree that most
of us require a significant emotional event before we can
even awaken long enough to see our own complicity when we
make egregious errors in judgment.
But when the group with whom we identify with is at risk,
then we pull out all the stops to protect our group
identity. We endear ourselves to one another as we proceed.
So instead of getting down to the brass tacks of problem
solving in democratic style, too often both the left and
right tune-out their opposition and simply address important
matters in tit for tat fashion until each side runs out of
rationalizations. Democrats point out a mistake Republicans
made recently and then the Republicans respond in kind with
each side raising examples that may reach back for decades
or centuries. As Tavris and Aronson put it, “Aggression
begets self-justification, which begets more aggression.”
But the real kicker is when the argument is over and both
sides retreat and agree themselves into a fury about the
righteousness of their own position, based not upon the
veracity of their claims, but by nature of who they think
they are and the virtue they believe that entails. In The
Age of Insanity, psychologist John F. Schumaker says,
“The need for identity overlaps with the need for
relatedness because an identity cannot be forged unless a
person has developed a significant relationship with the
world of people, thereby making possible a distinction
between the self and others. One comes to know oneself as a
unique identity only through a process of merging
meaningfully with the wider social context in which one must
live and survive.” Indeed, think about how the process of
bonding with one’s group has occurred throughout history:
stories told around the campfire, tales of the hunt, heroic
deeds that made their way into literature and the endearing
gossip that acts reciprocally as I tell you something
tantalizing and then you return the favor and in the process
our relationship is reinforced. Now think of the millions
of daily instances of chit-chat at the workplace water
cooler, backyard fences, street corners, coffee shops,
office cubicles, kitchen tables, email messages, and myriad
other settings where people make senseless and often
outrageous claims about their perception of the motives of
those whom they consider that belong to out-groups.
They do this precisely to curry favor with their own crowd.
This Stone Age psychological default is immature behavior
and it short-circuits reasoned discourse as it shapes our
attitude and the animosity it creates prevents the
realization of democratic behavior.
It’s ironic perhaps that in rural America where the distance
between people is greatest that people feel closer to their
neighbors and in big crowded cities, the mass of humanity
makes us perceive of ourselves as being alone. But
technology, for those who embrace it, brings all of us
closer together in cyber-space in ever greater factions of
like-interested groups. If we can be made aware of our
proclivities for divisiveness then perhaps we can compensate
long enough to stop ridiculing and making fun of those who
we can’t relate to by trying harder to understand their
values and how they connect with ours.
Whether we use the metaphor of a cage or a barrel to
describe our political circumstance, it is crystal clear
that neither liberal nor conservative factions in America
live up to the intellectual standard upon which our
democracy depends. If we did, we would know intuitively that
we need a healthy opposition in order to keep our strengths
from becoming liabilities. As long as we keep it civil and
in the friendly manner of Garrison Keillor we can achieve a
kind of peace that honors dissent as the corner-stone of
democracy and that enables us to acknowledge our opponents
as being above average in Lake Wobegon fashion. We can take
pride in the hard work that it takes to sustain a democracy,
chicken feathers, rotten apples and all.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant was an advocate for
reason as the highest expression of morality and I believe
he would have argued that of the five moral pillars
mentioned above, reason is the vital thread that runs
through them and that because we are capable of reasoning it
is our moral duty to assume a posture of goodwill
when setting about to address our differences with others.
Indeed, democracy and civil dialogue depend upon goodwill
because it is the element that makes these five pillars a
human property. And yet, when we disparage those whose
worldview is different from our own, it is not benevolence
but insecurity that motivates us.
It
is, in fact, bizarre and seldom ever acknowledged, that
expressions of contempt for out-groups leads to a kind of
indifference that actually promotes indifference as a
form of behavioral conformity. Stomping off and refusing to
talk to people who disagree with our worldview brings one
insecure group together through keeping another
individual or group apart and beyond discourse
which makes the antidemocratic inanity self-reinforcing.
Democracy, though, thrives not on insecurity but from
dialogue and the kind of learning that makes the truth to be
discovered more important than kinship and association. And
if we can’t both attain and sustain the kind of intellectual
maturity that enables us to discuss our differences civilly
as liberals and conservatives, then our attempt at authentic
democracy will fail.
A
few months after the end of World War Two, French
philosopher Jean Paul Sartre said, “The first effect of
existentialism is to make every man conscious of what he is,
and to make him solely responsible for his own existence.
And when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do
not mean that he is responsible only for his own self, but
that he is responsible for all men.” I believe our country’s
founders would expect nothing less of American democracy.
Given the discussion above and accepting the challenge of
assuming responsibility for our political divide, I propose
some compromises based upon the exposition by professors
Haidt and Graham. Collapsing each of their pillars to one
word I would reduce harm/care to
compassion,
fairness/reciprocity to
justice,
in-group/loyalty to
community,
authority/respect to
family, and
purity/sanctity to honor. And then, as is
clear, given these human attributes and assuming each of us
has access to each value, there is nothing much left to
argue about except matters of degree.
Study these five key words and the inevitable glaring
conclusion is that if any one of them is left out, then life
is untenable. Compassion and justice are conditions you
either have or you don’t, but family, community and honor
involve divergent descriptions and an enormous range of
possibilities with disaster at the extremes in both
directions. Left vs. right is okay as long as we don’t get
too carried away at either end. For decades the pendulum of
American values has swung from left to right and back again.
That it swings too far in either direction is possible only
if large numbers of our citizens do not pay attention to
what’s going on.
Life-stage researcher Erik Erickson suggested that if we
live long enough, we will eventually reach a crossroads of
choice between generativity and stagnation. Generativity is
a desire to give something back to society from the tax of
having lived. Stagnation speaks for itself. But in plainer
terms, when the hair on one’s head becomes white or gray,
the fruit of the brain is as ripe as it’s likely to get and
if it is not put to good use it begins to rot. The symptoms
of rot often present as a narcissistic self-obsession when
every conversation begins with the details of one’s last
surgery and it ends with isolation when there is no one left
who wants to listen.
All over the country, aging but cerebrally vibrant citizens
are forming groups spontaneously to explore the
possibilities of the last chapters of life. September
University is my effort to assist in bringing these groups
together if not physically then at least metaphorically.
Frances Moore Lappé, a founder of the World Future Council,
characterizes the effort in her own fashion as Getting a
Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad,
which is the title of her latest book. Lappé has
produced what she calls a “spiral of empowerment” through
the realization of what’s possible if we give it our best
shot.
Our children and grandchildren deserve that we use our age
and experience to help shape a better future—a future we
will not live to see. The fact that we won’t live to see it
is precisely what gives us the unclouded judgment to make
wise decisions. Erickson's final life stage is integrity vs.
despair and if we care about posterity we choose the former.
Otherwise, the choice is to taint the barrel as our capacity
for goodwill is suppressed and the state of our
nation decomposes. I hope you will choose to participate in
September University or one of the many groups of concerned
citizens dedicated to posterity. If you have ideas to better
accommodate civil discussion between left and right and to
further the idea of September University, please let me
know.
Stay tuned for further
discussion about participating in Sept-U forums and
suggestions about how to start your own. In the meantime,
your suggestions and comments are welcome.
Email
Charles at: autpress@alaska.net
August 2007
Sick, Sicko
and the Absurdity of American Health Care
©
Charles D. Hayes
Michael Moore’s documentary
Sicko and Jonathan
Cohn’s book, Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health
Care Crisis and the People Who Pay the Price are both
harsh indictments of American healthcare. Michael Moore has
become a liberal lightning rod in American politics, but it
appears that a fair amount of conservatives who have seen
the film have restrained or withheld their criticism.
Jonathan Cohn’s research for his book is irrefutable and
the clarity he brings to the subject is refreshing. Yet
what both works reveal is infuriating.
Both the experience of watching Moore’s documentary and
reading Cohn’s book brings to mind cultural critic Philip
Slater’s query in A Dream Deferred that if
hunter-gather societies can manage to care for all of their
members without whining about freeloaders, then why can’t
we? Slater continually pointed out that “societies do not
exist for the sole purpose of making a few neurotically
needy people very wealthy.” Indeed, if you read Cohn’s book
and watch Moore’s documentary, it’s difficult not to feel as
if America has endured some kind of nefarious brain-washing
over the past half century. In an earlier essay, I described
how our society had become fearful and overly sensitized to
socialism and communism during the Cold War. However, I am
hopeful that if we can inspire enough people to examine the
current state of healthcare in America in an objective
comparison with the rest of the developed world, then
perhaps we can awaken from the dysfunctional nightmare we
have learned to accept as status quo. Both liberals and
conservatives should be able to agree on some fundamentals
about the life and death issues all of us face without
resorting to name calling and political demagogy. Health
care in the United States is one issue that should be
non-partisan.
Moore’s documentary features commentary from citizens in
Canada, France and Great Britain where healthcare is
considered a right. Even though all systems involve some
method of taxation, health care in these countries is, by
American standards, free. In America, we think of ourselves
as the poster country for freedom. We spread our “the
land of the free” slogan around ad nauseam. But when
you compare our system of healthcare with that of the other
developed nations of the world, our bickering about who
deserves treatment and how it is to be paid for makes us
appear both foolish and pathologically selfish. Too many of
our citizens are so heavily invested in petty differences
and nonsensical arguments over the metaphysics of morality
that, ironically, they begrudge basic services to those whom
they identify as not belonging to their group. We
are all Americans. In other words, many of our citizens live
in fear that someone they can’t relate to or don’t approve
of is going to get something for nothing. Is it better to
let an estimated 18,000 people die each year because they
don’t have health insurance?
As
a result of the Cold War, all one has to do in America to be
considered a socialist is to criticize capitalism. I am
a capitalist, though, and I don’t buy the argument against
universal health care. Certainly neither capitalism nor
socialism is without flaws. In my experience, the biggest
mistake about discussing these ideological systems is
getting too caught up with labels to begin with. The sober
reality is that regardless of whether the arrangement one
lives under is capitalism, socialism, communism, or a
dictatorship, it is still the wealthy people with political
connections who pull the strings, make things happen and
ultimately get their way. Moreover, each of these political
systems threatens its people with the ideologically opposite
system if they get too far out of line. The powerful try to
scare the poor in capitalistic economies with tales of
looming socialism and socialists do the same with warnings
about being set-upon by capitalistic robber barons.
Meanwhile both capitalists and socialists fear communism and
dictatorships since there is little assurance about who may
land on top if they gain power and because the capital
assets of the wealthy class are often confiscated. But what
people call these systems is much less important than how
they actually work. And the sad reality is that the trick in
all of them is gaining and maintaining enough political
power at the middle and lower echelons of society to be able
to cash-in enough equity to live with a maximum amount of
freedom, and a minimum amount of oppression and interference
in one’s personal affairs. However, if one is poor and
without political influence, freedom can never be much more
than an illusion regardless of the economic system under
which one resides.
The bottom line is that our vulnerabilities as human beings
are the fundamental reasons we choose to form associations.
Our fire and police departments, our military, our
healthcare and even our educational systems all delineate
these vulnerabilities as matters involving questions of life
and death. If our property burns we may lose our ability to
function and perhaps even our lives. The same principle
applies if we are the victims of crime or if we are attacked
by another country. In similar fashion, our physical
well-being is critical to our ability to function and it
depends in large part on the level of education we are able
to obtain. If we remain ignorant we are useless to ourselves
and our fellow citizens. But if we can’t muster enough
mutual respect to see that all of us, regardless of economic
or educational status, deserve equal consideration, then our
country, in my view, is unworthy of our allegiance. How can
we call ourselves a great nation and continue to let our
citizens die in plain sight because of a lack of affordable
medical treatment?
If
John Smith goes to war on our behalf in Iraq and yet his
sister dies because she has breast cancer and can’t afford
health insurance at home, then isn’t there something
egregiously wrong at the very core of our society, something
so unacceptable that it should have us marching in the
streets? As I have written elsewhere, maximizing profits by
the health insurance industry is like making money in
wartime by withholding ammunition from your own side.
While
physicians
and hospitals may seek legitimate profit for
their services, the only way to achieve a profit in the case
of health insurance is to withhold care. That doesn’t seem
right.
Throughout history, people in positions of power haven’t
needed evolutionary psychologists to tell them that we
humans are predisposed to live in small groups and that our
distrust of notable differences is so acute that we are
easily manipulated through making us suspicious of others.
Tyrants in particular didn’t need Eric Hoffer to point out
that hatred is one of the most unifying psychological agents
in the arsenal of human relations. Nor does anyone in
today’s political arena need to be told that people who do
not truly understand the dynamics of democracy mistake
pliant and obedient behavior for patriotism. They fail to
understand that democracy cannot flourish and, indeed,
cannot endure without dissent.
In
the documentary Sicko, Moore interviews a number of
Americans living in France. One person in the group says
that in America, the people fear the government, but in
France the government fears the people. It may take a
crescendo of public opinion of a similar sentiment if there
is ever to be enough equity in our country so that people at
the lower economic rungs of society have a chance at a
decent life without a form of schadenfreude-supported
poverty—and it all begins with a right to medical care.
Jonathan Cohn’s book represents a five year effort at
examining the crisis of healthcare in America. He offers
compelling evidence that what we need amounts to a
revolution in policy. Cohn and Moore both document cases
across the width and breadth
of
America where people who thought they were covered by
insurance were in fact living under an illusion of false
security. Cohn cites statistics indicating that insurance
company executives spend half of their premiums on patient
care and the other half on seven figure salaries for
themselves. He points out that “Medicare is almost stupidly
simple. It allows patients to see any doctor who chooses to
accept the fees Medicare sets — in reality, this means the
majority of doctors. And it allows its beneficiaries —
unlike most Americans now in managed care — to receive
medical services without going through referrals or
preauthorization.” He says most of the people on Medicare
feel better about it than they ever did about private
insurance. Of course, one would never know this from all the
fear mongering generated by the insurance industry whenever
they feel threatened. I have heard lots of criticism about
Medicare, especially about a shortage of doctors who are
willing accept Medicare patients. But if we move to a
single-payer system this will no longer be an issue, any
more than it is in all of the other developed countries that
have already implemented universal care.
Like Cohn’s book, Moore’s documentary features one case
after another where people thought they were covered by
insurance only to find that their policy had so many loop
holes to escape paying for medical treatment that, for all
practical purposes, they had been paying into a scam. But
it’s when Moore examines the healthcare systems of other
countries that our current predicament seems so pathetically
unjust. No doubt, Moore’s film leaves out legitimate
criticisms of these systems, but the truth of the matter is
that most of the people in these countries are proud of
their universal care and are horrified by the state of
medical insurance in America. No system anywhere is
faultless and none will ever be perfect, but this does not
justify enduring a method that everyone knows is criminally
dysfunctional.
I
find the watered-down proposals from the current parade of
Democratic candidates for President to be bitterly
disappointing. Of course, it’s important to recall that the
insurance industry spent more than 100 million dollars to
destroy the plan for universal care set forth by Hillary
Clinton when she was First Lady. And one can only imagine
what kind of television commercials the insurance industry
will dredge up in the future to scare people into attacking
straw-man arguments about the freedom to choose from plan
options that do little except benefit insurance companies.
Universal healthcare in America is an issue that reaches
across the broad range of moral foundations to address
caring for our families, our neighbors, and the most
vulnerable among us. Universal care appeals to our moral
sense of justice, fairness, and loyalty to our fellow
countrymen. It appeals to our needs as citizens, to respect
the authority of those who manage our institutions with the
assurance that they really do have our best interests at
heart. And universal care enables us to live in an
environment where our behaviors reflect a concern for the
common good—a good so enduring that it really does seem
worth giving one’s life in service of one’s country if
called upon to do so.
I
encourage you to read Cohn’s book and see Moore’s
documentary. Write your legislators and politicians. I hope
that you will tell them that you don’t want to hear any more
nonsense about the virtue of private
health
insurance. I trust you will tell them that, like me, you
want universal healthcare — a single-payer system that
offers some kind of evidence to justify our label as a
great country.
In
Bush parlance, we shouldn’t misunderestimate
our
ability to inspire a revolution in healthcare without
resorting to the French custom of lopping off heads. Then
again, maybe not. In any event, the time has come to demand
to be heard on this issue and let our political candidates
know where we stand.
July 2007
Winning: What Does it
Mean?
© Charles D. Hayes
In May of 2007, I watched an episode of
Real Time with Bill Maher. Among his guests were
comedian Gary Shandling, actor Sean Penn, and former
congressman Harold Ford Jr. from Tennessee. They were
discussing the war in Iraq, and Shandling suggested that we
need to get beyond our “winner consciousness” regarding the
issue of war. Penn seemed interested but remained silent.
Harold Ford appeared mystified by the assertion, but I know
exactly what Shandling was referring to and have been
thinking about it ever since. In short, winning is an
inappropriate metaphor when it comes to war, and we keep
having wars precisely because we haven’t yet figured it
out.
Speaking in broad terms, we have, as a
nation, incurred something akin to “sports-think” in our
conception of how most issues should be resolved. Winning
has become a default position that stops further
deliberation. There are winners and losers and no
in-between. At first glance, the win-lose mentality appears
to be a type of simple-mindedness born of a mediated society
in which sound bytes serve in place of serious thought. But
I suspect that something deeper fuels this type of
thinking. It stems, in part, from what I call “truth by
association,” which is an instinctual and tribal-like
loyalty that says my side: right or wrong makes no
difference, but our triumph does matter because we are,
after all, who we are.
Thus, winning reflects the legitimacy of the
association, especially when ”our side” prevails. In other
words, we validate the truth of our superiority when we win.
On the flip side, losing becomes personal, and loss implies
we have been wronged. Both liberals and conservatives are
guilty of practicing truth by association. But what has
happened with the metaphor of “winning” is similar to what
happened during the Cold War to the word socialism,
which was stigmatized with such vehemence that even to raise
the subject of economic equity is still, for many people,
considered subversive.
The notion of winning, however, took the
opposite direction from the word socialism. Instead
of a negative connation, winning morphed into an
aspirational ideal that is ultimately a dead-end. Somewhere
in the past century of American culture, prevailing in comic
books, in gunfights in western movies, scoring in sporting
events, winning in business, games, lotteries, and politics
and the like converged into one all-purpose metaphor:
winning, winning, winning. The coaches who have gone to the
most extremes to make the point that nothing is more
important than winning are often celebrated as being great.
This popular internalization of winning has
become part of our collective psyche. The significant
emotional experiences we share tend to drive the metaphor of
winning deep within us, and eventually we perceive that
winning reinforces our association without qualification
(when our team wins it is exhilarating) and the metaphor
brings us closer together without need of further
discussion. Moreover, most of us will respond to criticism
of these seemingly self-evident truths with a deep-seated
unwillingness to reason or give ground. In other words, in
matters of conflict between our group and their group, the
word win is enough to close off the conversation, as
in enough said.
Combat experience in war may be the most
extreme example of experiential emotional attachment. Men
and women suffering the stress of war often bond emotionally
to such a degree that their association will thereafter
trump issues of right and wrong. I suspect that people who
have not experienced these feelings can barely imagine what
it’s like. A shared significant emotional experience imbues
a strong sense of commitment and kinship. I’s become
we’s in combat, and the fortune of individuals give
way to an emotional sense of camaraderie and attachment to
the outfit. The rigidity of one’s position about the
politics at hand during war is often driven so deep that,
for some, reasoning about the issue with complete
objectivity will never again be possible.
But set aside the instance of war for a
moment and consider an example in civilian life: cases
involving criminal prosecution where people have been shown
to have been wrongly convicted. When the convicted party is
found innocent by DNA testing and subsequently released from
prison, the prosecutors who convicted them more often that
not continue to believe they are guilty. Prosecuting someone
involves internalizing the righteousness of one’s position;
facing off against defense attorneys drives the prosecuting
attorney’s convictions so deep as to sometimes reside
beneath the reach of reason. So many examples of this exist
on television news that one need not look very far to find
them.
Another example is the racial prejudice that
permeated life in the South during the twentieth century. I
have first-hand knowledge of this experience. People of all
races who believe passionately that they are free of racial
prejudice will remain convinced that they are free of such
bias in spite of the results of tests that detect their
partiality. Similarly, when profound emotional experience is
internalized as feelings of betrayal, the resentment can
last a lifetime. For example, an urban legend of Jane Fonda
“gotcha missives” exist in the form of e-mail circulated
frequently. These e-mails tell the story of how she was
valiantly denied service in a steakhouse in Montana by a
restaurant owner who turned out to be a Vietnam veteran
still angry about Fonda’s actions during the war. Revenge
brings some people vindictive satisfaction; it means they
are winning, getting even, making up from having been
deceived and betrayed. Better yet, revenge means a traitor
is losing (in Fonda’s case, it’s only a steak dinner, but
she is at least suffering humiliation). This kind of
cultural behavior takes the place of rational discourse
about war and justice. And yet, who could doubt the
deeply-felt emotional wounds of veterans who thought—then
and now—that Fonda’s actions betrayed them?
I was a hawk during the Vietnam War. Although
I had already been discharged from a four-year hitch in the
Marines, I almost reenlisted during the Tet Offensive in
1968. What stopped me was the fact I was single, still owned
a home, and could not find anyone to buy it. But I have come
to realize that, but for the anti-war protest movement which
recognized senselessness when they saw it, we might have
lost another fifty-thousand or so men and women to a war
that, in hindsight, seems absurd. More absurdity occurs
when people start railing about how we should have WON in
Vietnam. Perhaps winning would have made any future losses
of life worth the effort. But win what? In his recent
address to the Cato Institute, conservative activist Victor
Gold asked the still-pertinent question that applies to both
Vietnam and Iraq: “How do you win someone else’s civil war?"
A deeper examination of the concept of
winning is critical here. The metaphysics of the idea of
winning is so thin that when you stop and give it some
serious thought, it boggles the mind. One foot short of the
goal, three inches from the cup, a foot from the hoop, a
ball out of the park, or one punch can make all the
difference in the world: one side wins, the other loses. The
reactions of the participants and the spectators are
radically different, yet they do not, in any real way,
reflect the physics of what actually happened. Think about
it. Nothing in the world is changed in physical reality
except something did or did not happen with or to a ball.
Now, one group of people is beside itself with joy, and the
other side is devastated.
How can this same pattern apply to war? How
can winning a game parallel winning a war? “America 14,
Vietnam 7” doesn’t work. Consider the number of deaths:
58,000 Americans; 1-3 million Vietnamese. Bedsides getting
closer to reality, does that mean anything? The more you
think about it, the more intangible and bizarre the notion
of winning becomes. Scores and blood do not mix. One can
receive a mortal wound and still have time to kill their
enemy, but to say then that either side has won stretches
the metaphor of winning beyond its true meaning, and the
catastrophic circumstances stretch the credulity of losing
beyond our ability to comprehend what it means to lose:
anything.
Just as the prosecutor’s psychic investment
makes it so difficult to change his or her opinion about the
guilt of someone they have sent to prison, imagine how the
people feel who have lost family members to a war that
others call a mistake. To think that a war—in which members
of one’s own family have made the ultimate sacrifice—is a
mistake is emotionally untenable. The psychological result
is that most people prefer to believe in the honorable
sacrifice of their family member instead of questioning the
circumstance of war. Asking hard questions after a personal
loss in wartime results in further heartbreak. The only
alternative when one admits the illegitimacy of a war is to
rethink one’s loyalties; rebuke one’s truth by association,
if necessary; and redirect one’s sense of outrage at those
responsible for the injustice—which makes this kind of
action for all but a few very unlikely.
Does imagining Jane Fonda being humiliated
help alleviate a kind of dissonance that borders on the
ethereal? If we were keeping score on the basis of deaths
alone in Vietnam, didn’t we WIN? Not to mention that we got
into the war in Vietnam on false pretense, by pretending to
having been fired on in the Gulf of Tonkin. You see, truth
by association trumps ethics. My country right or wrong
means that our sins are justified and your country’s are
not. It means we don’t need to make amends or apologize
because our errors are beyond reproach. People who assume
truth by association believe that anything they do to
prevail is justified by the simple righteousness nature of
who they are. And this is why human beings are locked into a
feedback loop of irrationality: hypersensitive to the
transgressions of others and oblivious to our own, resulting
in the eternal justification for conflict.
President John F. Kennedy said the war was
the Vietnamese people’s to win or lose. But our strategic
view at the time was that if Vietnam fell, a virtual
stampede of countries would suddenly embrace Communism. But
Vietnam did fall, and nothing of the sort occurred. In fact,
the reverse happened. So we must ask: was the war worth the
death of nearly three million people? Vietnam seems to be a
thriving country today, one with which we have resumed
business relations, and, to my mind, the situation makes the
frequent laments about having failed to win even more
meaningless. Of course, many would argue that a number of
citizens in Vietnam today feel oppressed by their
government, but it is a grand illusion to assume that, had
the South prevailed, there would be a thriving
American-style democracy today in Vietnam.
Establishing a democracy anywhere in the
world today with the conflict of religious, ideological, and
financial interests being what they are is a very tall
order. The ability to perpetually balance power is very
nearly impossible, even in the best of cases. Our own
government is strangled by lobbyists in cahoots with our
representatives, who are so beholden to various special
interests that the majority in America has very limited
influence. Yet we are sustained with centuries of idealistic
notions about democracy and the rights of citizens.
The end-run philosophical threshold of
winning at any cost is that it results in a perversion of
us and them to such a degree that torturing
prisoners is suddenly deemed okay. The historical records
dating all the way to the Inquisition—suggesting torture is
ineffective and confessions obtained through torture are
dangerously unreliable—don’t seem to matter. What this
present pro-torture policy has achieved is to expose our
service men and women all over the world to inhumane
treatment by our enemies, who now feel not only justified
but gleeful about the very opportunity and possibility of
being able to torture Americans in the future.
There is a huge metaphysical disconnect
inherent in the metaphor of winning: racking up points on an
electronic game offers an illusion of winning that does not
transfer to the realities of war. The ephemeral consequences
of winning in athletics are totally inappropriate for war.
Even winning in sports events when huge sums of money are
involved does not qualify as an analogy for combat. War is
catastrophic change, writ in blood. It’s long past time to
for average Americans to think this conundrum through and
get beyond the consciousness of winning, as Shandling
suggested, to quit acting as the cheering section in a
culture that behaves as if winning is a currency for
endless incompatible assumptions and analogies.
It’s unfortunate that we can’t discuss this
subject without people getting red-faced and stomping off
mumbling clichés about patriotism. Such a response
demonstrates just how easy it is to resort to war in the
first place. Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that we did
not learn from our experience in Vietnam. But the proponents
of winning a preemptive war in Iraq may have
outsmarted themselves this time. These same people
incessantly champion small government, yet our bungling in
Iraq has so inspired the exponential recruitment of our
enemies that we may never again be able to entertain having
a small government with such a big
threat
facing us.
The yearning for small or limited government
is understandable but only in an idealistic sense. It’s hard
to be against limited government when you see your
government as an oppressor. But what small or limited
government really amounts to—in this day and age—is
emasculated government, incapable of protecting citizens
from a collusion of corporate interests whose lobbyists, in
effect, purchase legislative support from politicians. A
government that cannot protect the rights of citizens above
those of corporations is not a democracy, nor is it a fair
game.
Winning as a metaphor for games is
appropriate, but for war it is insanely inadequate and
morally bankrupt. Winning as a crossover to a war analogy is
an anti-intellectual shortcut that eliminates thought about
the very things we should THINK about.
We need a
political makeover in America. We need to understand
the concept of winning in all of its manifestations, and we
need to stop being consumers and reclaim our roles as
citizens. This is, in my view, the only way for average
citizens to WIN.
June 2007
Did the Cold War
Condition Us to Fear Democracy?
© By Charles D. Hayes
Early one morning
recently I awoke with my radio tuned to NPR’s Weekend
Saturday Edition. The subject being discussed was a
group effort by the Fairmont Peace Club in Fairmont,
Minnesota, to help promote a bill before Congress to
establish a Department of Peace as a corollary to the
Department of Defense. As the commentator explained,
Fairmont is in Martin County, population 10,000; it’s 97
percent white, and they usually vote Republican. During the
past winter, Fairmont’s city council had been persuaded
without debate to pass a resolution endorsing a Department
of Peace.
Then the backlash began.
As soon as word got out, one Vietnam veteran was quoted as
saying, “These communists are trying to do it again.” When
pressed, he couldn’t say exactly what it was that they were
doing but he knew that it was wrong. He said he thought a
Department of Peace would result in “a bunch of wusses.”
It didn’t matter that
supporters could point to the idea of having a Department of
Peace as having originated during the birth of our nation.
No, the backlash, in my view, was due to the immensely
successful non-conspiratorial campaign during the Cold War
to sensitize Americans to react negatively to the word
socialism as effectively as Pavlov’s dogs were conditioned
to salivate at the ringing of a bell. This was an overt
effort but not a clandestine conspiracy to indoctrinate the
populace. Rather, it was simply the residue of good
intentions that gradually took the place of thoughtful
reflection.
I remember those days
with a vivid appreciation of how millions of us were in
effect pulled together through constantly being reminded
about what we were supposed to be against. Socialism was
bad, evil even, and communism was worse, much worse.
Moreover, these social maladies were thought to be so wicked
that arguments about their merits or lack of them were
unnecessary and were in fact shunned, as if simply
discussing any possible merits might taint one with
wickedness. It was perceived as a black-and-white issue, no
gray. People began to avoid every word with a communal,
charitable or equitable connotation. Simply to enter into a
discussion critical of capitalism was enough to cause one to
be suspected of being subversively socialistic. It was not
exactly the birth of anti-intellectualism, but it was close
enough. It solidified the shunning of public discourse on
the basis that patriotism forbids public communication about
subjects deemed evil.
Over time, the long-term
result of this conditioning was to stigmatize as taboo
anything the majority would rather not discuss. Thus, in
matters of economics, anything and everything we do in a
public context that appears overly generous still raises
suspicions about giving in to socialism. And yet, as I point
out in The Rapture of Maturity, nearly a third of our
economy is made up of nonprofit organizations comprising
millions of people who work tirelessly to make the world a
better place. Social is okay; it’s the ism that hurts.
I am a capitalist, not a
socialist, but even capitalists need to act for the common
good, as our police, fire departments and military services
attest. Elsewhere I have written that there are aspects of
socialism that could strengthen capitalism and keep its
excesses from destroying the planet in the process. For
example, we need a social safety net strong enough to
compensate for globalization and the outsourcing that has
barely begun but is already threatening America’s
middle-class.
In a capitalist society,
despite a barrage of rhetoric to the contrary, wages at the
bottom don’t have to be excessively low any more than they
need to be absurdly high at the top. But they do have to be
high enough so that people don’t take to the streets in
protest as they did early in the twentieth century. Every
year now millions of people who are used to earning enough
money to maintain a relative high standard of living are
being added to the rolls of those with wages so low that
they can barely make ends meet. The mass migration of jobs
headed overseas began under the pretense of reengineering,
as if it were something of technical necessity beyond the
understanding of the general public. These days, outsourcing
is just said to be cheap and necessary.
Our patriotic but
lopsided discourse during the Cold War was such that we
became oblivious to the excesses that have the potential to
destroy the very ideas we champion. Freedom used to mean
something more than being beyond the physical reach of
terrorists. If we resolve to give up freedom for security,
we get neither, and we assume the same operational ideology
as those who oppose us.
We emulate socialistic
practices in military service, but one would never know it,
because acknowledgment would be heresy. Conscription during
times of all-out-war is the very essence of collective
enterprise, and yet any acknowledgment of that is routinely
stripped from our language when the subject is discussed. We
share a history of an American frontier that was
enthusiastically socialistic as people helped one another
far more than our myth of the “rugged individual” suggests.
An even greater
contradiction is the loud mantra of free-markets we hear
from corporate executives. They are theoretically
anti-socialistic, but not when it comes to their own
business practices. Their collusion with government
interests have effectively established massive subsidies
that barely leave the fingerprints of the lobbyists whom
they paid to help put those subsidies in place. For their
part, lobbyists have been so effective in propagandizing the
nonexistence of such financial support for the
well-connected that intelligent people still harp about
free-markets as if they actually exist. Economic subsidies
for those with great advantage are all but invisible, while
those who need food stamps to survive are spewed with
leftover venom of the Cold War as being complicit harbingers
of socialism and moral degradation.
Government purchasing
departments always get the blame, but private-sector
military industrial corporations fleece taxpayers by
overcharging. Examples of their design-flawed engineering
are both legendary and staggering in their harmful effects
for our troops. Indeed, the private- sector construction
projects underway in Iraq are frequently described as a
disaster by both political parties. Cold War rhetoric, with
its disdain for all things public and the championing
of all things private, has contributed to an
egregious misunderstanding of the way things work and a
gross distortion of what we might hope for. Like, who in the
hell could be for peace? Damned communists!
Of course, our war
experiences in Korea and Vietnam sensitized people to rage
against the word peace as representing the social conflict
about war, especially for veterans of those campaigns. It’s
easy to understand why. The stress of combat aside,
military training drives the ethos of obedience so deeply
among many recruits—as I know from personal experience—that
it can take many years to recover one’s sense of objectivity
about questions of loyalty and duty, if ever. But I suspect
if there had been no Cold War and no Korean War or Vietnam
War, there still would have been something that stigmatized
public discourse because of our instincts and affinity for
small group affiliation. I have written extensively about
this subject in my forthcoming book September University.
Liberals and conservatives alike are guilty of resorting to
“us and them” distinctions and “truth by association”
affiliation. It’s a natural tendency among all humans.
In no small way, our
emotionally driven experience of opposition to the former
Soviet Union inadvertently conditioned us to be against the
very thing that democracy depends on for its very existence:
robust public airing of diverse opinion. This phenomenon is
easiest to confirm when people rail against words like peace
without being able to articulate an argument and they get
more and more emotional and irrational as they talk. It’s
also demonstrable with people who constantly use the word
liberal or conservative in a pejorative way. When
pressed for a definition, they get angry but are unable to
offer a coherent explanation. It’s why we can’t seem to have
a rational public discussion about war or any other touchy
subject without resorting to name calling.
I say, words are better
used than suppressed. We can’t learn about what we don’t
talk about, much less claim to know anything about subjects
we are afraid to discuss openly.
Take the idea of joining
forces collectively for health insurance: it is a communal
enterprise if there ever was one. And yet, we are so
befuddled by the paradigm of the virtue of “private” that we
do not see the bizarre contradiction that there is no room
for profit in a health insurance system. To make a profit
depends by its very nature on keeping people from the
getting the amount of assistance that should be available. A
shared risk is a shared risk. Every system has to be
administered, but, beyond the actual cost of administration,
the only way to profit is to reduce benefits. Private
insurance companies fare no better with bureaucracy than
government does. In many cases their arbitrary rules and
regulations are worse, much worse. If you have a complaint
with a public agency, political assistance can help resolve
it, but if you have a grievance with a private insurance
company, you are most often out of luck, absent an attorney
and unlimited funds.
Profit doesn’t make
medical insurance work; it keeps people from getting
reimbursed for illness. Profit serves profit. You don’t have
to be an accountant or a political scientist to figure out
that profit comes at the expense of relief from medical
costs. Nevertheless it’s difficult to appreciate how
internalized the religiosity of the propaganda must be for a
person not to be readily aware of this reality. Simply put:
not everything private is good and not everything
public is bad, even though a large percentage of our
population is conditioned to accept this premise. Maximizing
profits by the health insurance industry is like making
money in wartime by withholding ammunition from your own
side.
Globalization is
wreaking havoc on the American middle-class, and in spite of
all of the exuberance over new ways to be an entrepreneur
(see Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat), the
truth is that we are not going to be able to continue a high
standard of living without a more equitable system. Selling
stuff on eBay and creating network affiliations with
like-minded entrepreneurs around the globe to earn money is
laudable, but these kinds of efforts bring nowhere near the
level of success necessary for millions of people to make
traditional mortgage payments and sustain the middle-class
lifestyle we have come to expect.
The point is that
getting red in the face and shouting about communists is not
going to help us figure out how to proceed. Yet this is
precisely what happens today when someone speaks up about
sensitive subjects that need to be discussed among groups.
It’s a travesty that when important subjects are raised,
instead of having constructive dialogue, people too often
get mad and stomp off mumbling nonsensical clichés and
slogans. Unwillingness to discuss our problems is anathema
to everything democracy is supposed to stand for.
In my view, we are still
so thoroughly addled by the propaganda of the Cold War, and
so detracted from the ideas that made our country strong in
the first place, that we have slipped egregiously in our
ranking with the other developed nations of the world in
healthcare and quality of life in general. We must learn to
be unafraid of code words left over from the fallout of the
Cold War and begin to discuss the isms of life to a level
where we can make sense of the things we fear. Had global
expenditures been devoted to peace-making efforts instead of
the arms race at the time of the Cold War and since, it’s
entirely possible that every person on the planet could be
enjoying an acceptable standard of living today.
If the situation looks
bleak because it seems we have made no progress in terms of
public discourse, you might be surprised to learn that I
think the reverse is true. When we understand our propensity
to react emotionally or defensively, we can put our
brainpower to work and learn to contain it. There has never
been an idyllic time when people treated one another civilly
and calmly in matters of political importance. The truth of
the matter is that, during the founding of America,
politicians resorted to vitriol, hatred and character
assassination of a kind that makes today’s political climate
look tame.
A recent PBS American
Experience documentary on Alexander Hamilton described
how Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson’s visceral hatred for each
other prompted them to do everything possible to destroy one
another’s reputation. And yet, if you are familiar with the
ideas and opinions of these two icons of American history,
it is virtually impossible to agree completely with one of
them without acknowledging the good ideas of the other.
It may seem absurdly
hard to believe, but we have a better chance today to work
out our differences in a civil manner than we have ever had
in the past, though the difficulties will be enormous.
Today’s red state vs. blue state is still not the
devastating reality of the blue vs. gray that nearly
destroyed us. In spite of having differences that sometimes
seem insurmountable, we face nothing that can’t be worked
out without violence, if only people were willing to use
democracy as intended. The difference between us and our
ancestors in our willingness to engage in political dialog
is that they expected it to be rough going but did it
anyway. We simply look for reasons to avoid it.
So, do I think we have
been conditioned to fear democracy, and public discourse in
particular? Yes, and 9/11 brought the old feelings back with
a vengeance. Promise lies in knowing that we are wired in a
way that makes it frightfully easy for us to abandon reason
in favor of an emotional response. Our work is to compensate
to make up the difference. It takes an extraordinary amount
of resolve and self-discipline to act responsibly, hold our
tempers and aspire to the democratic action of engaging in a
dialogue that matches our ideals. But if we don’t do it, who
will?
One thing is crystal
clear: neither of our major political parties can be trusted
with the public good without vigorous input from the
electorate. Moreover, both liberals and conservatives are
smugly convinced that they know their opposition’s true
views and their arguments and feelings on all matters of
importance. In my view, this arrogance is nothing but
derision. Long-held bad feelings from thinking the other
side wrong have calcified into a belief that there is
nothing worthy of discussion.
Only genuine dialog can
reveal that too many of us, both left and right, don’t
really know the other’s arguments, or our own arguments, as
well as we think we do. When we dig beneath the metaphors
upon which our views are constructed, we find that our
assertions vaporize with the same cloud-like dissipation
that comes to arbitrary misunderstandings that exist only in
our imaginations. But to get to this level of democratic
inquiry requires getting beyond tit-for-tat exchanges of
differing opinions and name calling. It requires examining
each issue of disagreement to such depth that the real
problems reveal themselves.
Stay tuned for further
discussion about participating in Sept-U forums and
suggestions about how to start your own. In the meantime,
your suggestions and comments are welcome.
Email
Charles at: autpress@alaska.net
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