Conflict

What Divides Us

~ John ~ Leave a comment

This bloody week, like too many bloody weeks before it, we face the dread that Americans are descending into a state of deepening, unresolved conflict, and wonder how we can pull back from it.  It is entirely appropriate to line the streets in condemnation of presidential hate speech.  But we can do more.  We can cut our consumption of fear and ditch the word “they”.

The focus on Trump as one driver of our polarized society is readily understandable.  The president has positioned himself as a cyclone at the center of our politics, spinning off epithets and labeling opponents with heedless force, in an obvious – and highly successful – electoral strategy of divide and conquer.  We know from social science that fear makes people more conservative, so Trump sells fear.

But we should also acknowledge that progressives sell fear too, because for both sides, fear sells so well.  And progressives also sell division, both for honest reasons and for cynical ones.  As to the former, by ideology and by custom, progressives have practiced the politics of difference, as a way of honoring and making space for the diversity of human experience.  But now that Trump is successfully portraying this as the politics of division, and using it as a point of leverage to unify his own base, progressives have defended themselves by ramping up efforts to stereotype Trump’s cultural center and identifying religious conservatives with their racist fringe, in order to magnify the threat from the right.

How can this dynamic be de-escalated?  How can a broad array of Americans reclaim the discourse of democracy?

First, we have to start taking the belief systems of Trump’s base seriously, to understand what unites them.  According to Pew, fully half of Trump’s supporters call themselves “highly religious.” The Biblical worldview that God created Man in His image, that Woman was created from Man, and that Earth is God’s creation for Man’s bounty, is deeply and honestly held by millions of Americans.  It also has profound political ramifications.  One is that men and women are intrinsically different creatures.  Another is that the planet does not have an existence independent from the connection between God and Man.  From these precepts flow other, essentially political, conclusions.  One is that men are intrinsically prone to sinful behavior, for which they must be periodically punished, and more often forgiven, but it is utterly unrealistic to think that men can ever be fundamentally changed.  Another is that the planet’s degraded condition is fundamentally God’s will, and if the planet is to be consumed in fire, then that is a sign that the Apocalypse is at hand.  Polls indicate most evangelicals hold such “End Times” beliefs.

Opposed to this is the strictly scientific worldview, sometimes identified as atheism, which accounts for up to 25% of Americans, according to Gallup. It holds that humans are a biological species of animals on a planet that came into being by the evolutionary process of natural selection, that our genders are one of our many traits, and that we inhabit a planet which is alive insofar as it is a vast interconnected web of living things of which we are one small, but increasingly troublesome, part.  Among the political implications of these beliefs are that gender is not subject to political fiat, and that the moral claims of the other life forms on the planet, both now and in future generations, vastly outweigh any human claim  to short-term enjoyment of planetary resources.

In between these two is the ecumenical worldview, informed by both scientific knowledge and religious belief, and characterized by humility in the face of the mysteries of that which we do not understand; by the experience of a divine presence that science cannot explain, but the broadminded intelligence that accepts and engages with scientific inquiry and discovery.  This view swallows the biological pill that we’re animals, but chases it down with the moral liquor that we also possess souls.  It speaks from various demoninations, various faiths.  The political implications of these beliefs can be all over the map, depending on how that mixture goes down for each of us.

This spectrum of belief, and its corresponding political hues, have populated our country since at least the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, which tested the teaching of evolution in schools.  We will not ever dismantle it, any more than the Sunni will eradicate the Shia or the Bosnians will exterminate the Serbs. We should stop trying.  For better or worse, this is the American political family, the “pluribus” from which we must make an “unum” if our democracy is to survive.

What is new about our current political moment is that our president has encouraged – and many of the rest of us have succumbed to – an addictive cycle of fear, igniting dark impulses and awakening latent tendencies that cut across the spectrum described above, tearing old scars of race, gender and national origin into open wounds, and increasingly, open violence.  This confounding overlay turns fear into terror, and risks pushing polarization into war.

The antidote is to remember bravely who we are.   George Washington wrote that the first principle of democracy is “that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately.”   In every one of our spiritual traditions described above is a common belief in the equal worth, dignity, divinity, or salvation – depending on the vocabulary each group might choose – of the individual person.  Rising from that bedrock of belief is the edifice of personal independence which differentiates America from other nations and attracts immigrants to our shores.  When conservatives call for the rights of religious freedom, and progressives champion the rights of gender diversity, aren’t they both proclaiming the basic rights of individuals to exercise liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

FDR, famous for the phrase “the only thing to fear is fear itself,” confronted a racist threat far more powerful than anything we face today.  His last public speech, undelivered because he died before he could speak it, contained the following:

“Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships – the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at peace.  The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.  Let us move forward with a strong and active faith.”

A monumental task — far greater than anything we would conceive today — which he knew would require both the “science of human relationships” and “strong and active faith.”  What FDR had no use for is the word “they.”

Me, Two

~ John ~ 6 Comments

In the “where were you during the Kavanaugh hearings” sweepstakes, I’ll have a unique entry: sitting in our AirBnB in Chiapas, Mexico, clawing like a crazed rodent at the crappy signal on my iPhone.  The Mayan cybergods did grant me a short window to watch Dr. Ford’s testimony, and to profoundly identify with her story.  But my reactions did not end there.  There are things about Judge Kavanaugh’s story too that paradoxically resonate with mine.

First, Dr. Ford’s story.  For her imprecise surrounding details, my shrouds of misty memory clouding that bright summer when I was five.  For her sudden island of crisply focused memory as she climbed the stairs and was pushed into the side bedroom, an itinerant gardener’s invitation for me to enter the little shed in our side yard. For her noise of the turned-up stereo, my smell of potting soil and spiders.  For the hand smothering her mouth, the wood grain of the workbench a half-inch from my eyes, the press of it against my cheek and nose, just before the blinding pain.  For the ring in her ears of the boys’ uproarious laughter, the man’s voice warning me not to tell anyone about our “little game.”  For her decades-later need to build a second front door, my angry run-ins with the gardeners I’ve hired, those few times I’ve brought myself to hire them at all.

Beyond this wrench of recognition, I took in the hearings with the weary disgust I imagine I share with other survivors, as yet another public man’s private abuse comes to public exposure.  While some predations were open secrets committed by powerful brutes, other deeds were truly concealed, done by men of outward virtue, progressive champions, people whom “you’d never think would do it.”  When exposed, like Judge Kavanaugh, they advance the principal defense of their outward “good character”, evidenced by the belief among those around them that they are incapable of such crimes.

I don’t believe it for a second.  For there is a third layer of experience I felt watching the Kavanaugh hearings, that is perhaps less common.  Mixed with my fury and disgust, there lurks in me a sad understanding of Kavanaugh’s cornered rage.  I think he suffers from a pathological case of one of the more common traits of the male psyche: the divided self.  I know something about this.  Although I’ve done none of the deeds of which he, or any of the other parade of recent perpetrators, have committed, I’ve lived with the pain of a split psyche for much of my life.

In my case, it was the trauma of the rape that did it.  The manipulative bastard who cleaved my little body also cleaved my young mind.  From that moment forward, I was not one person.  I was the sweet boy who remained innocent, who got good grades, was never angry, and remembered nothing.  And I was the angry, ashamed boy with dark thoughts, whom nobody knew.  As the years went on, my selves grew more distant still.

I’m no psychologist, but I can see less extreme variants of this divided male self all around me, not necessarily induced by trauma.  Boys are routinely shamed into rigid gender roles at very young ages.  Whereas girls are now encouraged into a broad spectrum of healthy gender manifestations, boys too often are forced to confront a narrow path of masculinity, from which deviation is punished and ridiculed.  Those aspects of the self which do not conform – perhaps, the feminine aspects of one’s personality that cannot be owned — are hidden, rejected, despised.  And a host of institutions, from the Catholic Church on down, offer prayers, rituals, codes, societies, sects, and traditions, to bring the “good” to light and keep the “bad” in shadow.

When threatened with exposure, the controlling, outward self will fight tooth and nail, because he perceives his survival to be at stake. Not only the survival of his career, or reputation, but of his core. I know something about this too.  A major obstacle to my recovery of the memory of my abuse was the tight grip my outward self kept on the explosive rage inside me, and the fear that if I let go I would be annihilated. I was nearly thirty before I finally broke through.  And I would be over fifty before I finally excavated down to the crucial memory, of a bathroom in the basement of my childhood home right after the rape.  I remembered standing there, looking in the mirror, and thinking, What do I do now?

In that desperate moment, a separate me emerged.  It was as though another boy was standing next to me, looking at me sorrowfully. A voice, that said, Give it to me. I’ll take it. And then vanishing like a woodland deer.  I don’t remember knowing what “it” was, but somehow I felt I could cope. And so I did.  I went on being the good boy who must at all costs remain blameless, and not remember. And my disappeared twin went on being the bad one, who must have done something to deserve what had happened.

Until finally, in my decades-later moment of remembrance of that moment in the basement, the wall between my two selves collapsed. From that time forward, I have no longer been two.  I have been one.   As a single self, I have felt a power, and a love, that up to that point had been denied me.

So now I am trying to hold some love and compassion for Brett Kavanaugh, and for those scared, brittle, fulminating old men who surround him.  Not for the damage they have done, nor for the decades of damage they will do if they succeed in embedding their poisonous brand of denial into our Supreme Court.  But for the struggle they would face – and the true public service they could do — if they were ever to move beyond their fear.

Lords and Peasants

~ John ~ 3 Comments

It’s cathartic to blame the state of the world on the current president – especially when he’s of the opposite party, and especially, if you’re liberal and the president is you-know-who.  But honest conservatives knew our problems didn’t begin with Barack Obama, and realistic progressives know their nightmares won’t end with this incumbency.  So this summer I decided to look further back.  WAY further back.

When I was in my first round of grad school, ostensibly pursuing a PhD in sociology but actually pursuing my soon-to-be spouse, I read a book called “The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World,” by Barrington Moore, Jr.  It compares the early modernizations of England, France, the US, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, and India, in an effort to derive universal laws about what leads societies to become democratic or dictatorial.  A huge undertaking to write, and at 550 pages of close argument, something of a doorstop to read.  But it fundamentally changed my worldview.

Moore focused on the relationship between landowners and peasants as one fulcrum for the development of a democratic society.  In England, lords forcibly kicked peasants off the land to pasture sheep – so peasants moved to towns.  This “enclosure” movement, combined with 17th century English Civil War, broke the absolutist power of the monarchy, greatly reduced the number of people under the thumb of a rural lord, and put England on the road to parliamentary democracy.  We think of England’s democratic evolution as “peaceful”, Moore argues, only because they got their major violence out of the way in the 1600s.  The French monarchy, in contrast, kept absolute power, and French aristocrats kept absolute control over the rural peasantry.  So in order for democracy to take hold, there had to be a bloody social revolution – which there was, in 1789.  In Germany and Russia, the local aristocracy retained still tighter control over the peasants and crushed any revolts until the 20th century, leading to a socialist revolution in Russia and fascism in Germany in the 20th century.

Moore’s fundamental point – greatly oversimplified – is that you cannot have a democratic society where, in the countryside, a few people effectively control the destinies of all the others.  Call it plantation slavery, peasantry, peonage, sharecropping, latifundism, reservations, or colonization — the basic dynamic is the same.

Back in the 1960s when Moore was writing, and in the 1980s when I first read him, the book had a self-congratulatory aura, as in: “this is what we democracies did right, and all those bad dictatorships did wrong.”  But the book has sat on my shelf all these years, and I decided to take it on my summer vacation, because of my dim recollection of his chapter on the United States.  The voice of that chapter has been calling to me lately.  Not a voice of prophecy, exactly, but of prescience.

In that chapter, Moore focuses on the US Civil War as a “bourgeois revolution” imposed by one region on another, arguing that the system of plantation slavery in the antebellum South was fundamentally incompatible with the development of democracy in the United States as a whole.  Even though the war wasn’t driven by northern opposition to slavery, Moore argues that American democracy would ultimately have collapsed if the war not resulted in slavery’s abolition.  Still, the southern structure of land ownership mostly survived, after the North abandoned its Radical Reconstruction program.  As a result, southern plantation slavery morphed into a sharecropping system akin to the peonage that existed in Russia in the late 19th century, where landowners had almost complete control over the lives of sharecroppers.   The social structure of peonage sharecropping in both Russia and the United States gave rise to political movements towards “semi-reactionary dictatorship” in both countries.  Moore points out the similarities between the Ku Klux Klan and the marauding “Black Hundreds” who perpetrated pogroms on Russian peasants, even to the point of importing the American word “lynch” into the Russian lexicon.

So what do these analyses of lords and peasants have to do with today?  First, it is strikingly obvious that our most fundamental political divide, both in the US and in Europe, is between urban and rural.   Every nation’s recent electoral map now features polka dots of urban liberalism against fields of rural conservatism.   Though their current manifestations may be new, these cleavages are centuries old.

Second, the American south – and by an extension of the same logic the American west – has only comparatively recently emerged as a democratic society for people of color.  That process is far from complete, and it’s subject to reversal and retrenchment based on the same social forces that have shaped the development of democracy and dictatorship across centuries.

Third, the breakup of traditional social structure in the countryside can become an engine of democracy’s destruction, as local elites try to preserve control over land and power in the face of changing demographics.  In 16th century England, the engine of change was an invasion of sheep that converted farms to pastures and kicked the peasants off their land.  Today, the cultural squeeze comes from two directions – from immigrants changing the faces and power structures of rural communities, and from the cosmopolitan elites changing the faces and power structures of society as a whole.

The takeaway is that rural social upheaval is a fact that nobody who cares about the long-term health of democracy should ignore.  Currently, urban progressives tend to treat the concerns of rural voters with a combination of condescension and scorn – sort of an updated version of the old joke: “The peasants are revolting!  — I’ll say, they’re disgusting!”  This leaves the field wide open for conservatives to gain a monopoly on articulating rural concerns.  Concentrated media ownership enables broad zones of monolithic message saturation, stifling debate and reinforcing local power structures.  We vilify working people for failing to rise above generationally-ingrained — and cynically incited — prejudice. Stereotypes become reinforced to the point of dehumanization. This dynamic leads us in the direction of impending civil war, of city against country, state against militia, gang against Klan.  The predictable – from some perspectives even desirable — form of government to confront such a state of social breakdown is dictatorship.  Moore’s parallels between “semi-reactionary” tendencies in the US and Russia take on a curious and chilling significance.

Some might object that this 30,000-foot view fails to assign blame for the potential loss of democracy to the right or left.  But that’s actually my point.  To me the work of reversing the current slide toward tyranny is as much collaborative as partisan – one that involves more than voting Donald Trump out of office or chanting “lock her up.”  It requires new political alignments that cross the ancient cleavages dividing city and country.  This will require new ways of reaching across divides of class and color, forming new alliances, peeling back labels to find common interests beneath.  These are problems that have vexed European societies for hundreds of years.   Although the technologies of the eras are vastly different, the fundamental solution is the same – we have to look each other in the face.

Easier said than done, of course.  The question is, how?