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