Though I had intended not to make any new posts until after I take the Bar in late February, the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona raises an issue that truly does require our attention, and every voice of reason and goodwill in this country needs to urge in unison that we attend to it.
The question is not whether this shooting was influenced by the overheated rhetoric of an implicitly violent right-wing movement currently infesting the United States, but rather whether there is a reasonable concern that the violent rhetoric and imagery of that movement, the ten-fold rise in membership in armed militia movements in this country in recent years, the anger and vitriol spewing forth from radios and social media accounts and one television broadcast network in particular, contribute to an environment conducive to violence and not conducive to civil discourse and rational self-governance. The answer is, clearly, “yes,” and an incident like this one, regardless of what the impetus for it turns out to have been, serves as a wake-up call for all of us.
One thing needs to be made clear about this incident and this conversation: It makes absolutely no difference what the explanation turns out to be for Loughner’s attack. The fact remains that we are a violent society suffering the disease of a (thus far mostly implicitly) violent political movement, and the probable result is an increase in incidents such as this one (as indeed is already in evidence, even independently of this incident). We are a society in which reason and goodwill have been sacrificed to blind fanaticisms, a society in the throes of an angry mania.
It is natural that when a member of the group that those infected with this cognitive virus call every pejorative imaginable gets shot in an act of predictable and predicted violence, the inference will be that it was probably a direct symptom of that implicitly violent political movement. Whether it was or wasn’t doesn’t matter; the probability remains intact. It’s the same as the original assumption that the Oklahoma federal building bombing was committed by Middle Eastern terrorists; the fact that it wasn’t didn’t mean that the danger of attack from Middle Eastern terrorists wasn’t real (and that recognition of that danger led many to make an inference that turned out to be mistaken in the particular, but correct in general). Similarly, in this case, if it turns out that the most probable interpretation is incorrect, that doesn’t change the fact that it was the most probable interpretation, and that the danger and general dysfunctionality it recognizes still exists.
There is nothing wrong with people feeling and arguing passionately in service to their beliefs about what best serves the public interest. We can all hope that those beliefs will be as informed as possible, as reasonable as possible, as committed to humanity as possible, but whether or not that is always the case, we live in a country that thrives by having a robust marketplace of ideas, and all ideas are fair game. Vigorous debate on matters of public interest and public policy is good and proper; let it ensue. But we must strive to remember that we are all entitled to be participants in that debate, that those who disagree with us are not our enemies just for disagreeing with us, that none of us has a monopoly on the one infallible truth, and that usually others with whom we disagree have something of value embedded somewhere in their perspective. We need to strive to be less certain, and more open to the possibility that we each may be wrong about some things, and that others with whom we disagree may be right. We need to be civil.
But this incident is relevant beyond how we engage in public discourse and debate. It is relevant to the substance of the ideas held and expressed in that debate as well. The Tea Party is not just about the rhetoric and imagery of violence, it is also about an attitude of social disintegration, of extreme individualism, of indifference to the welfare of others, to a dismissal of a sense of mutual responsibility to one another. And, in that way, it contributes not just to violence in service to a political ideology, but is a political ideology in service to violence.
We are interdependent, and our actions have consequences that ripple outward, beyond their immediate vicinity. When our words or actions implicitly or explicitly condone violence, they contribute to the violence that actually occurs. When they try to reinforce mutual goodwill, or reason, or generosity, they contribute to the mutual goodwill, reason, and generosity in the world. There are reverberations, feedback loops, in human systems, amplifying our words and deeds in how they affect others. No one is all of the sudden, after the fact, noticing the potential for inciting violence that this violent imagery and rhetoric carries with it; many have been very aware of it for quite some time. When the predictable and predicted consequences of an attitude and mode of behavior actually result, it makes perfect sense to say, there you go, this is what we’ve been talking about.
In The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions and The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, I described how memes spread through the social institutional landscape, defining and redefining it constantly, and how our own words and actions contribute to that process. This is an example of how that works: People churn the waters with certain ideas and attitudes, and our world is transformed by the cumulative and sometimes mutually reinforcing effects.
Blaming Sarah Palin for this is a distraction, and beside the point. I have no way of knowing and no reason to suspect that Palin’s rhetoric itself, directly and sufficiently, inspired the actions of the shooter. But I do have reason to know that she contributed to an atmosphere conducive to those actions, whether they were relevant in this instance or not. And that is on her; that is her culpability, by contributing to the creation of a hateful and violent cultural context. More importantly, it is the responsibility of all who have participated in that dynamic to step back, take a breath, and recognize that it’s not what we want to be as a people.
We all have a responsibility for doing what we can to increase the roles of reason and goodwill in our world, and decrease the roles of anger, hatred, and irrationality. We all slip up (at least I do), but underneath all of the politics and rallies and fighting for certain policies, what I hope we’re all really struggling for is a kinder, gentler, and wiser world. Few things are more frustrating than the extent to which humanity inflicts suffering on itself. And every unkind word, every attempt to put someone else down, is a drop in the ocean of anger that crests, as it did today in Arizona, in acts of violence. Let’s all strive to do better.
(See A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill and The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified for specific ideas about how to do better.)
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Extreme Individualism was dead. Even Economics, the most individualistic of Social Sciences, knew that it was dead. But Abandoner Screwage didn’t. (“Abandoner´s” real name was “Abner,” a Tea Partier who attended Sarah Palin rallies in a Medicare-supplied “Hoverround,” along with hundreds of others similarly equipped, like a confused geriatric biker gang).
Abandoner saw the ghost of Extreme Individualism everywhere, as if it were alive and well. He saw it in a century-old non-empirical Austrian economic philosophy and in a century-old poorly written and conceived novel expressing an adolescent superiority complex. He saw it in his caricature of the American Constitution, and in fabricated economic principles that no living economist actually adhered to. He saw it in his door knocker, heard it ringing all his bells (like a drunken hunchback defecting from another novel of the same era), filling his dreams with the slack-jawed stupidity of blind fanaticism.
But Abandoner didn’t realize that Extreme Individualism itself knew that it was dead, and that it wanted Abandoner to know it as well. For the Ghost of Extreme Individualism was ashamed of itself, and longed only for peaceful oblivion.
Extreme Individualism’s Ghost clanked its chains in Abandoner’s 3000 square feet of well-apportioned and larded living space that Abandoner knew he deserved by being born into an affluent family (or by being fortunate in other ways, but never primarily by the mythological “merit” with which he always rationalized the inequitable distribution of wealth and opportunity as inherently just, in much the same way that landed aristocracy had in centuries gone by). The Ghost passed through the door into Abandoner’s room, howling and rattling and moaning, and in general giving Abandoner that warm fuzzy feeling of being favored by a dead and discredited idea.
But the Ghost of Extreme Individualism was repentant, and introduced itself to Abandoner by declaring the error of its, and his, ways.
“Business!” the Ghost cried. “Mankind was my business! The common good was my business!” The Ghost looked out the window and saw the misery that it and its past adherents (now moaning specters floating through the air) had wrought, all tortured by their inability to work toward instituting the public policies that would help alleviate that suffering, the policies that they had all so rancorously opposed in life.
“You will be visited by three spirits,” Extreme Individualism’s Ghost told Abandoner. “The first will come when the clock strikes one. The second when the clock strikes two. And the third when the clock strikes three. Heed their lessons well, Abandoner!”
Abandoner fell asleep trembling at the thought that his beloved dead and discredited ideology had turned on him, and awoke at the stroke of one to find himself confronted by the Spirit of Reason and Goodwill Past. The spirit was simultaneously old and ageless, quiet and strong, unpresuming and relentlessly imposing. But it was filled with sorrow and regret, for it knew that ages of suffering that it had failed to prevent had cost so many so much.
“Touch my robe, Abandoner, and I will show you your predecessors in elitism and oppression, in indifference to the unjust suffering of others, in rationalized selfishness and implicit cruelty.” The spirit took Abandoner on a tour of human history, showing him how private property came into being and passed from hand to hand through military conquest and theft, how titles of “nobility” assumed by thugs and descendants of thugs sought to rationalize and justify that distribution of wealth, how the evolution of democracy and capitalism, though generally improvements on what had preceded them, still largely preserved the injustices of past distributions of wealth and opportunity, and how those who were left to suffer in poverty and despair were usually guilty primarily of “being born into the wrong womb,” as much in the present as in the past.
The spirit shamed Abandoner by showing him that even the thugs of the past were more convinced of their social responsibility than he was, the Roman and Medieval aristocrats who understood their “noblesse oblige” and paid for public works and public feasts and alms for the poor with their own money, not as a charitable whim to satisfy or not as they please, but as a sacred (quasi-legal) obligation that would have brought disgrace upon them to fail to fulfill.
The Spirit of Reason and Goodwill Past showed Abandoner the American Revolution, on which Abandoner based so much of his self-justification. The spirit showed both the ways in which that revolution served to defend the current and potential wealth and power of its mostly landed aristocratic perpetrators against the British attempts to protect the Indians of the newly acquired Ohio Valley, the captive African population, the Scotch-Irish rural poor (who sided with the crown), and the French Catholics of newly acquired Canada from the avarice of the colonial coastal landed gentry; and the ways in which its underlying ideals were far more committed to the common welfare and the ideal of equality (as well as a commitment to continuing political progress rather than enshrinement of that moment in history) than Abandoner’s self-serving parody of those ideals recognized.
The spirit showed Abandoner the struggles for justice and equality that followed, struggles often opposed by oppressors using precisely the same language and ideas as Abandoner himself; the struggle for abolition of slavery, which Southern slave owners ironically decried as an attack on their liberties; the struggles to respect the rights of the indigenous population, to secure for women the right to vote, to overcome the legacies of history which deprived some of rights and the most basic of freedoms in the name of service to the “liberty” of others.
Abandoner watched the slaughter of innocent indigenous women and children in the name of “liberty” but in service only to the theft of their land. He saw slaves whipped, husbands separated from wives and mothers from their small children in sales designed to increase the master’s wealth, all in the name of “liberty” (as argued, for instance, by John C. Calhoun in his tome Union and Liberty, using language and arguments identical to those used by Abandoner today). He watched the denial of real, lived, shared liberty in the name of his false, greedy, oppressive and destructive mockery of the word. And he couldn’t help but be moved, for his self-serving ignorance and avarice could not withstand the onslaught of reality presented by this Spirit of Reason and Goodwill Past, a spirit who showed the blaring absence of all that it stood for, a surging sea of ignorance and malice rationalized by the convenient idols of petty and shrivelled souls.
Abandoner awoke again in his own room at the stroke of two to find a bright light seeping through the cracks in his firmly closed door. He opened the door to find the robust and hearty Spirit of Reason and Goodwill Present sitting on a raised chair surrounded by bounty, raucous laughter on his face and on his lips.
“Come in, Abandoner!” the spirit bellowed with resonant good humor. “Come in, and partake of our shared feast! Plenty flows from my horn when more are more disposed to share with others, and even deprivations are borne more lightly when borne together!”
The spirit showed Abandoner the rest of the developed world, less diseased by Abandoner’s miserable and miserly ideology than America. In these countries that share many of the same values and ideals, but have been spared the misfortune of enshrining them and thus reducing them to parodies of themselves, poverty has been virtually eradicated, there is less violence and more personal security, health care is universal and less expensive to provide and health outcomes are better by almost every single statistical measure (including public satisfaction), self-reported happiness is higher, and there is greater rather than lesser ability to prosper by virtue of one’s own efforts.
“The folly of condemning THAT, while embracing THIS…,” cried the spirit, showing Abandoner his own hyper-individualistic society, the one that Abandoner himself had helped to shackle with the rotting corpse of Extreme Individualism, with higher rates of poverty and all the social ills that accompany it: Higher infant mortality rates, poorer health, less happiness, poorer educational performance, more violence, more suffering. “This is what you are fighting to enshrine as the perfection of human genius! Clinging to a fictionalized past to impose greater suffering and less joy on a population ridiculed and pitied by all others of comparable economic power! Shame on you, you shrivelled little excuse for humanity! That poor child you’ve abandoned to your false idols is worth more in the eyes of God than all you self-satisfied misanthropes combined, who claim that the suffering of others is no concern of yours!”
The spirit showed Abandoner the other America, the one which Abandoner did not define, filled with many who accepted salaries far lower than they were capable of earning in order to do good works for others’ benefit, the teachers with advanced degrees, the public interest lawyers earning a fraction of what their peers in private firms did, the workers in non-profits and social services struggling to stem the tide of social indifference that Abandoner, with his every word and breath, struggled to preserve and perpetuate.
“Join them, you petty little parasite!” intoned the spirit. “Join them in the shared feast which you choose instead to horde and call your own!”
Abandoner saw joy; joy in the faces of a teacher who inspired a child to learn rather than despair, to aspire rather than prey on others; of the social worker who helped another child find safety and love; of those who fought to govern themselves with compassion and empathy for one another rather than with individual avarice and mutual indifference; of those who were blessed by the Spirit of Reason and Goodwill and appalled by the specter of Extreme Individualism which so smugly and callously opposed it.
Abandoner couldn’t help but feel their joy, the celebration of humanity’s shared existence, the knowledge of belonging to something larger than himself and lovingly shared rather than being the covetous hoarder of something smaller and jealously guarded. He fell asleep with that joy dancing in his heart, truly light-spirited for the first time for as long as he could recall. He fell asleep knowing what it means to thrive, something that requires generosity of spirit, something that is the fount of true liberty.
He awoke at the stroke of three to see the Spirit of Reason and Goodwill Yet to Come standing beside his bed, a lithe form and beatific face, but human rather than ethereal; a mild satisfied glow in its eyes and a slight knowing smile on its lips, unburdened wisdom and contentment dancing across its features and flowing through its every movement and gesture. It was filled with passion but not anger, knowledge but not arrogance, reason but not certainty, imagination but not superstition, humility but not fear. It was what Abandoner would have dreamt of being, were Abandoner wise enough to understand the meaning of human potential.
The spirit stood before Abandoner saying nothing, piercing him with its gaze. Abandoner felt profoundly naked, trasparent, revealed. He felt foolish and small, which, of course, was precisely what he was.
“Are you the Spirit of Reason and Goodwill Yet to Come, whose appearance was foretold to me?” Abandoner asked, having wanted to invoke his customary bombast, but finding himself unable to, knowing now what a farce it had always been and would always be.
The spirit didn’t move, didn’t answer, didn’t even nod, but its smile seemed just a bit more intent, and its eyes to sparkle just a bit more brightly.
As Abandoner gazed into that face, he saw a future he had been unable to imagine, a future in which liberty and mutual responsibility were inseparable ideals, in which the interdependence of all was understood and acknowledged, in which freedom was heightened and enriched by transcending the shallow pretense that its exercise by each occurred in a vacuum, and recognizing instead that no one has the inalienable right to (for instance) contaminate another’s air and water any more than one has the inalienable right to put a bullet in another’s chest.
The spirit took Abandoner on a tour of a future devoid of both ostentatious wealth and abject poverty, a world of mutual care and support, a world not cleansed of human foibles but rather adapted to them. People lived to celebrate life, to discover and expand and enjoy and assist others in doing the same. Their work was both more productive and more satisfying for the value and respect that others gave it. Entertainments were edifying and enriching rather than mindless distractions that sapped the soul. Robust and knowledgeable discussions were commonplace, sometimes heated debates, but almost always reverberating with reason and imagination and goodwill. There was greater joy, greater health, greater mental health, less suffering, less abuse, less neglect, less violence, more freedom –real freedom, the freedom born of nurtured human consciousness.
But then the spirit showed Abandoner a different future, or perhaps the inevitable road to the one he had just shown, a road whose length would be longer or shorter depending on the choices of those who comprise it. Abandoner saw all the Tiny Tims that would die because of his callous insistence that denying health care to those who can’t afford it is a requisite of “liberty.” Abandoner saw all of the violence and suffering and heartbreak that could have been prevented, that had been prevented to a far greater degree in places less in the thrall of his shallow and life-denying ideology. He saw that it was real, that the tormented howls of a parent who lost a child to violence that could have been prevented, to a disease that could have been cured, to abuse or neglect by another that a society that placed greater value on empathy would have avoided by investing in its avoidance, were all real, and he knew that each and every instance was a crime against humanity, a crime for which Abandoner and all like him shared a portion of the guilt.
The spirit led Abandoner to a large book on a book stand, like a relic of a previous age. Abandoner’s trembling fingers reached out to trace the embossed letters that formed the title on its cover: “Humanity.”
The book suddenly flipped open, pages fluttering by as Abandoner recoiled in fear. Then the flurry ended and the book lay open, the spirit glancing suggestively at the revealed page.
Abandoner, quaking with fear, leaned over the book and read history’s judgment of the movement to which he belonged. He read how he and his kind would be as disdained by future generations as all others of similar disposition had been before, for just as those before had hidden behind distorted ideals, it was not “liberty” for which these shallow and selfish people were really fighting, but rather injustice and inequality.
History has always condemned the brutal, self-serving disregard for the welfare of others that litters its pages, and it condemned Abandoner. He was just another foolish adherent in another chapter of the long and tragic tale of Man’s Inhumanity To Man, and the false idols he gloriously cloaked himself in were just another swastika, another sickle-and-hammer, another white hood, another brown shirt, another tool of another Inquisition, another blind faith denouncing heretics while obstructing the less stagnant and reducible truths of Reason and Goodwill. He had wasted his life as just another dupe of ignorance and belligerence, and if he were remembered at all, that’s all he would ever be remembered for.
“Spirit!” cried Abandoner. “Are these the shadows of things that must be, or can I, if I change my ways, change what is written in that book?!”
The spirit looked into Abandoner’s eyes, and spoke for the first and last time. “What do you think Freedom really means?”
Abandoner awoke on Christmas morning, a white blanket of snow covering the Earth, and a weight lifted from his heart. He felt free, freer than he had ever felt before, free of a pettiness that had imprisoned him more securely than bars or chains ever could, free to work for the common good, free to be a part of something bigger than himself. He knew that individual generosity was a part of it, something that was as important as any other part, that he had to help others of all ideologies to understand that. But he knew also that it isn’t enough to express that generosity just as a bunch of atomized individuals, that it must also be expressed as a part of our shared existence, that we also each have a responsibility to work with all others so inclined, and to try to convince all others to become so inclined, to reach down into the systems that order our lives and refine them to better express that generosity of spirit that he had been shown by the three spirits who embodied it, not in defiance of individual liberty, but in the ultimate and most meaningful service to it.
Abandoner abandoned his old way of thinking, and gave his name new meaning, for he abandoned ignorance and belligerence; he abandoned extreme individualism; he abandoned fixed and inflexible, rigid and unsubtle ideas that do more to shackle otherwise free men and women than any other agent of oppression; he abandoned the struggle to impose injustice and suffering on the world, and joined instead the struggle to liberate ourselves from the constraints we have imposed on ourselves, together.
And he was forever loved and respected for having done so.
Merry Christmas, Everyone!
(For more precise, analytical discussions of the logical and empirical errors of extreme Libertarian/Tea Party ideology, see the other essays in the fourth box at Catalogue of Selected Posts: “Political Fundamentalism”, “Constitutional Idolatry”, Liberty Idolatry, Small Government Idolatry, The Tea Party’s Mistaken Historical Analogy, The True Complexity of Property Rights, Liberty & Interdependence, Real Fiscal Conservativism, Social Institutional Luddites, The Inherent Contradiction of Extreme Individualism, Liberty & Society, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” American Political Edition (Parts I-V), An Open Letter To The American Far-Right, A Frustrated Rant On A Right-Wing Facebook Thread, The Catastrophic Marriage of Extreme Individualism and Ultra-Nationalism, Dialogue With A Libertarian, More Dialogue With Libertarians, Yet Another Conversation With Libertarians, Response to a Right-Wing Myth, and The History of American Libertarianism. For an alternative vision, based on the realities of the complex dynamical systems of which we are a part and how we can most wisely and effectively articulate our own individual and collective aspirations within those systems, see the essays in the second box at Catalogue of Selected Posts. For some insight into the nature of those complex dynamical systems and our place in them, see the essays in the first box at Catalogue of Selected Posts.)
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There is much emphasis on the Left on the failure of our leaders to control the message, but this emphasis conveniently deflects the responsibility that each of us has, oversimplifies and “arm-chair quarterbacks” the far more complex challenges faced by those of our party representing us in government, and reduces “messaging” to sloganeering, assuming that we should become Tea-Party-esque, hawking a progressive message in the same way that Tea Partiers hawk a regressive one. But as I posted in The Ultimate Political Challenge, there is more to progressive messaging than pithy slogans and official spokespeople; there is, instead, the ultimate importance of each of us making the most eloquent and heartfelt appeals we can, to anyone and everyone who is not yet on board that we can, to move the center of gravity to whatever extent that we can.
At the local MoveOn.org meeting I attended last night, that was in many ways discouraging to me due to the focus by some (who were vocal enough to seem to express the mood of the group to me) on office-holders rather than on us as a people, on griping rather than on identifying positive things we ourselves can do, and on trying to impose political “purity” on elected officials rather than making any allowance for the combination of expertise and pragmatic commitment necessary to advance progressive policies in the halls of government (see “The Fault, Dear Brutus….”), the issue that many identified is “messaging.”
We’ve all heard it repeatedly: We let the Tea Party right define the message, and did not counter it effectively with our own. But it wasn’t just their slogans, or their way of couching their propaganda, that was effective; it was also their ability to resonate with the frames and narratives in people’s minds. And it was the fact that each and every adherent took responsibility for that message, conveyed it themselves, shouted it from the rooftops. Messages from the heart and from the many can be messages of hope or fear, of love or hate, of realistic aspiration or of clinging to fictions, but their power comes from the combination of passion and contagion. The Tea Party did not wait for their preferred candidates to shout the message; each and every one of them shouted it themselves. And that’s exactly what we have to do, with a message that expands rather than contracts the human spirit and its positive effects on the world.
That’s part of what my previous, and largely overlooked post on The Ultimate Political Challenge was really all about; “messaging” as emotional and cognitive appeal, but emotional and cognitive appeal to our better angels, such as MLK and Gandhi and Obama in 2008 were able to do, rather than to our basest and darkest aspects, such as Hitler and Joseph McCarthy and Glenn Beck and too many others have been able to do.
It’s not only the challenge of “messaging,” as so many rightly identify, but messaging of the former rather than latter variety. And it’s not only about demanding that inspirational messaging from our elected officials (as so many focus on), but also demanding it from ourselves, reaching for it, engaging in it, contributing to its formation in what would be the ultimate contribution to grass-roots progressivism.
Not everyone has to be an MLK or a Gandhi or an Obama to contribute to this, and complaining that this or that elected official isn’t an inspiring enough speaker or didn’t do enough to control the message doesn’t contribute to it at all (just the opposite, really). Posting comments and diaries on SquareState, responding to injunctions to get out and vote in the days before the election, by insisting that the lack of inspiring leaders on the left is why the rank and file on the left are so uninspired, is the opposite as well.
Rather than complain about a lack that each of us is partially responsible for, we should each step up and do what we can to meet out responsibility. It is first and foremost the responsibility of each of us to inspire ourselves if no one else is inspiring us, and to inspire whoever and however many around us that we are able to.
We need to focus less on our at best partially-informed gripes about Democratic office holders who are dealing with the complex challenges of maneuvering within the political arena, and more on creating a context which improves their hand and their position in those complex negotiations and strategic interactions.
We need to focus less on holding others responsible, and more on holding ourselves responsible. We need to focus less on our anger (which is what motivates and informs the messages we oppose) and more on our hope and goodwill. We need to focus less on hubris and more on humility, less on trying to direct remote others and more on trying to move those around us by creating something attractive to move toward.
We need, each of us, to step up to the plate in positive and constructive ways. We need to stop using our scapegoats in Congress as excuses for our own failures to persuade those around us, who are not already persuaded, that there is a better path into the future than Tea Party extreme individualism and social irresponsibility.
Hope, like anger, crests on a sea of millions of people contributing to it in small ways. Our message depends not just on pithy slogans and official voices, but also on all of our voices, and how we use them. What I saw at the MoveOn.org meeting, at least among the two most vocal participants in my break-out group, is the opposite of what we need to do to turn this country around again, not because of any defects in their preferred public policies, but because of the defects in their understanding of what they can best do to realize them.
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What’s in a name? An Attitude. The Denver Post reported that the newly minted Republican State House Majority has not only renamed several committees to announce their disdain for workers, the poor, and the disabled, but threw in a little historical revisionism for good measure (http://blogs.denverpost.com/thespot/2010/11/12/house-committee-names-included-labor-and-welfare-under-prior-republican-rule/18581/). Yes, delightfully reminescent of other previous incarnations of a similar mentality, the House Republicans changed the name of “the House Business Affairs and Labor Committee” to simply “the House Business Affairs Committee,” and “the House Health and Human Services Committee” to “the House Health and Environment Committee” (signalling the presence of an obviously absent interest in environmental issues, while assuring us of a continuing disinterest in humanity?). They then claimed that they were changing the names back to what they had been prior to the 2004 Democratic takeover of the House, though in neither case were the pre-2004 names what the Republicans now adopted, and in the former case, the pre-2004 name was the same as the one that the Republicans inherited and then dumped. Remember the original Charlton Heston version of “Planet of the Apes”? Republicans = Gorillas, and Democrats = Chimpanzees and Orangutans. Nowhere more true than it is in Colorado, where we’ve been blessed with folks like Dave Schultheis and Scott Renfroe, the former having argued against a prenatal HIV test which prevents the transfer of HIV from the mother to the fetus on the basis that the mothers should have to suffer for their immorality, and the latter for having compared homosexuality to murder (http://blogs.rockymountainnews.com/rockytalklive/archives/2009/02/schulteis_says_if_baby.html).
As expected, the 2010 elections left us with a Congress comprised mostly of the Far-Right and Far-Left, and the few remaining moderates from either party badly outnumbered. The Economist reported on the increased power of the Tea Party nut-jobs who have now taken power while remaining utterly clueless, and on the decreased power of moderate Democrats who now comprise a smaller minority of the Congressional Democratic Caucus (http://www.economist.com/node/17465283). Immoderate voters give us an immoderate and polarized government, and a lot of spinning wheels kicking up lots of mud but getting no traction, and getting us nowhere, not even on issues such as deficit and debt reduction.
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There is much about the Tea Party mentality that is similar to anti-progress attitudes of the past, such as the fear that any improvement in the production or distribution of wealth comes at the expense of those who are invested in the status quo, and that the local and immediate interests of those who are inconvenienced or made worse off in the short run should trump the global and long-term interests of the many who would benefit from advancements in the production and distribution of wealth.
Throughout human history, in varying balances, there have been those who cling to a familiar past and those who reach for an improved future. The progress made despite the former has included a shift in balance in favor of the latter. Whereas traditional societies anchored themselves in ossified rituals and beliefs, modern societies have increasingly embraced the possibility of progress. But, as many have noted, modernity is “a candle in the darkness” (Carl Sagan’s phrase to describe science, still today), flickering in the midst of howling hordes of gods and demons, superstitions and arbitrary certainties, that continue to hold us back.
Early in the industrial revolution, British artisans protested mechanized production by destroying the power looms that were displacing them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite). There are two important things to note about this: 1) Progress does indeed cause dislocations, and, unless we take pains to address it, localized losses amidst generalized gains; and 2) to the extent that these victims of progress, whether their victimization is real or imagined, succeed in obstructing progress, we all lose in the long run, for the improved techniques that were obstructed would have created far greater wealth and opportunity in the long run than the archaic techniques that were preserved.
The Tea Partiers are modern Luddites, taking mallets to social institutional rather than technological innovation. As I discussed in several previous posts (see, e.g., The Politics of Consciousness , Information and Energy: Past, Present, and Future, The Evolutionary Ecology of Audio-Visual Entertainment (& the nested & overlapping subsystems of Gaia), The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix), both technological and social institutional innovation are part of cultural evolution, the reproduction, mutation, and selection according to differential reproductive success of “memes” (i.e., ideas). And as I’ve also discussed in several previous posts (“Political Fundamentalism”, “Constitutional Idolatry”, Liberty Idolatry, and Small Government Idolatry), the political fundamentalism of the Tea Party is akin to the religious fundamentalism from which it mutated, and to the Inquisition which is the historical model of such fundamentalism, clinging to archaic orthodoxies that do not stand up to rational scrutiny (see Real Fiscal Conservativism for an economic analysis of this vis-a-vis the Tea Party), and fighting against the heresies of progress.
We are simply embroiled in one of the on-going battles of human history, constantly reincarnated, and constantly obstructing our ability to do better. It is incumbent upon us to open as many eyes as possible to this fact, and leave those who prefer to be champions of avoidable human suffering to become increasingly marginalized and reviled, while those who prefer to be champions of human welfare and true spiritual growth can join all other reasonable people of goodwill in the shared enterprise of forging a progressive path into the future.
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(This is the fourth in a series of four posts which discuss Tea Party “Political Fundamentalism”, comprised of the unholy trinity of “Constitutional Idolatry”, Liberty Idolatry, and Small Government Idolatry.)
To recap briefly, “Political Fundamentalism” is the mutation of christian fundamentalism that allows it to appeal more broadly to the highly secularized by equally dogma-reliant anti-intellectual populism that permeates our culture. Whereas there has long been cause for some concern about the fanaticism and cooptation by the Republican Party of right-wing evangelicals, I had always maintained that dogmatic ideology rather than merely religious fanaticism was the real problem, and that religious fanaticism in our highly secularized society could only go so far. This mutation into a secular fanaticism, equally rigid and dysfunctional, equally tyrannical, and equally anti-intellectual, is far greater cause for concern.
Political Fundamentalism is the continuation of the Inquisition, adapting to a changing world in an attempt to prevent the world itself from adapting to changing circumstances and insights, creating an obstruction to the continuation of the growth and application of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Political Fundamentalism can be found all over the political ideological spectrum, just as religious fundamentalism can be found all over the religious spectrum, and, in both cases, the differences in ideological particulars are less compelling than the similarities in attitude. But the currently most dangerous form of Political Fundamentalism in America is the right-wing version, comprised of the three elements already named.
“Constitutional Idolatry,” the first element I wrote about, is the conversion of an historical document meant to provide a somewhat flexible legal doctrine and framework into a sacred text the caricature of which must be rigidly adhered to according to some non-existent and impossible literal interpretation. And “Liberty Idolatry,” the second element I wrote about, is the reduction of the concept of “liberty” to one divorced from consideration of interdependence and mutual responsibility, defending freedoms independently of consideration of the harm they may inflict on others or on all.
The third element in the unholy trinity of Political Fundamentalism is Small Government Idolatry. It is a fixed belief that smaller government is always better, that lower taxes and less spending are always better, that “government is the problem” (as Ronald Reagan famously proclaimed, ushering in a movement that will long be the bane of our attempts at designing and implementing reasonable proactive policies and public investments). Like its strongly intertwined fellow travelers, Constitutional Idolatry and Liberty Idolatry, it is a fixed belief, impervious to reason and evidence, insulated from compelling counterarguments or sensible attempts to achieve balance and moderation. It is a force for the contraction of the human mind, opposition to reason and knowledge, and obstruction of progress, at a very real and tragic cost in increased human suffering and decreased human welfare.
An argument against Small Government Idolatry is not an argument for big government (just as an argument against Constitutional Idolatry is not an argument against the Constitution, and an argument against Liberty Idolatry is not an argument against liberty). It is an argument in favor of doing the analysis, in favor of applying our principles knowledgeably and rationally in the context of a complex and subtle world, on a case-by-case basis. It is an argument for facing the responsibilities we have to one another and to future generations, utilizing authentic economic analyses rather than ideological pseudo-economic platitudes to balances the demands imposing themselves on government against the real economic and fiscal constraints that must discipline how these demands are met.
A blind commitment to “small government” is both humanly and fiscally irresponsible, for most economists, other social scientists, and lawyers recognize the inevitably large role that modern governments must play in modern economies, even independently of the demands that a commitment to social justice and improved equity impose on them. I’ve frequently referenced the role of information asymmetries in creating an absolute imperative that we continue to develop our regulatory infrastructure to keep pace with the opportunities to play the market system to individual advantage at sometimes catastrophic public expense. We’ve seen examples in the Enron-engineered California energy crisis of 2000-2001, and the financial sector collapse that nearly catalized a second Great Depression in 2008. Designing, implementing, and enforcing functional rules of the game for our complex market economy is an essential function of government, and one which already destroys the notion that a government too small too meet that need is preferable to one large enough to do so.
It is also fiscally, as well as humanly, irresponsible to let the problems of extreme poverty, child abuse and neglect, frequently unsuccessful public schools, high rates of violent crime, poor public health and inadequate healthcare for many, and other similar and related social problems, all of which form a mutually reinforcing matrix of dysfunctionality and growing problems that both undermine the safety and welfare of us all, and end up costing us far more to react to (with astronomical rates of very expensive incarceration, and other costs of dependency and predation) than it would have cost us to proactively address.
The fiscal concerns that the Political Fundamentalists identify are not to be disregarded, or treated as irrelevant, but rather are one set of considerations among many, to be included in a complete analysis rather than treated as always and forever dispositive independently of any application of reason or knowledge to the question of whether it is actually dispositive or not. The challenge of self-governance requires utilizing our fully developed and focused cognitive capacities, applied to all available information, in pursuit of intelligent and well-conceived policies. It is undermined by the imposition of an a priori set of fixed certainties that are impervious to both knowledge and reason.
We need, in our political discourse, less fundamentalism and more analysis, less idolatry and more (and better) methodology, less false certainty and more foundational humility. We need less deference to fixed and static beliefs, and more to our process by which we test our beliefs and improve upon them. We need less commitment to ideologies, and more commitment to working together as reasonable people of goodwill, doing the best we can to confront the challenges and opportunities of a complex and subtle world.
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The Right is angry with Obama and Congress for having done too much. They vehemently oppose the Obama Administration, and the Congressional Democrats, as advancing a radical left-wing agenda. The word “socialist” probably hasn’t been used so often (and so erroneously) in America since the New Deal.
The Left is angry with Obama and Congress for not having done enough. Many if not most are disenchanted with the president and their Congressional representatives, angry that they did not fulfill their mandate, as these critics see it, to pursue a more aggressive progressive agenda.
Those who read my posts undoubtedly know that I would personally prefer moving as assertively as possible in the direction of using government to address both market failures and social problems, but I also recognize that it is impossible to get too far ahead of the center of gravity of popular opinion. Even having done as much as Obama has done has catalyzed a radicalized, blindly ideological, mostly irrational reactionary movement so passionate that it threatens to sweep Congress in the midterm elections.
Some on the left might argue that that’s why we should have done more in the two years that we had. But what’s done can be undone, in a variety of ways, and the goal is not to be stuck in an unproductive tug-o-war, a perpetual stalemate, both sides pulled into the mud every two years, but rather to create a sustainable progressive path into the future.
The fickleness on the left, the mirror-image of Tea Party irrationality, is, in many ways, a bigger threat to our ability to forge that progressive path than even the Tea Party, because the opposition doesn’t want us to move forward, while our own implacable extremists (or purists) want to move forward but are partners with the radical right in undermining our ability to do so. Without the disaffected Left, the Right would not be as successful as they are likely to be in this election, and in prosecuting their agenda. Which leaves those members of the left who are facilitating the right-wing takeover as responsible for it as the right-wing activists themselves.
The parallels between America today and 1920’s Germany may be reflected in this dynamic as well. The rise of the far-right Nazi party, which shared with our Tea Party a set of angry, scapegoating beliefs (anti-intellectualism, disdain for the poor, xenophobia and widespread racism, de facto service to corporatism), may also share with that era the implicit assistance of mainstream disaffection with the more moderate current government, allowing a group of hateful right-wing extremists to take over the country.
The Tea Party isn’t the Nazi party; it is both less explicitly racist and less explicitly corpratist. It is also far less capable of “getting the trains to run on time.” But it is fundamentally similar in being a movement that hates reason and idolizes a blind and self-destructive ideology, clinging to a fixation scrubbed of rationality rather than addressing the real complexities and subtleties of the world in which we live. And the end results, while unlikely to be as horrible as the Holocaust, are likely to be extremely destructive, and extremely cruel.
And those results toward which we are plummeting will be the fault of both those who fought to bring them about, and those who were foolish enough to abandon the effective fight against them.
Reading an AP article on President Obama’s appearance on The Daly Show (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101027/ap_on_en_tv/us_obama_daily_show) reminded me of the title truism, the flip side of “the electorate rewards pandering.” Of course, to the current dominant populist force in America, there’s no such thing as “pandering,” because democracy to them means, should mean, must mean, government by the lowest common denominator, that whatever is shouted loudest must be truest, that the mob is never wrong, and knowledge is never relevant. Forget the fact that history has thoroughly disproved this (ever seen film clips of Nazi rallies in 1920s Germany?). Forget that fact that it is mindbogglingly obvious that there are complex issues, economic, legal, technical issues that require the application of actual knowledge to actual systems. Forget the fact that the only response this neo-Neanderthal movement has to these obvious observations is to yell:
I have never before read so much elitist, “better-than-thou” snobbery rife opinions full of progressive intellectual drivel in my life than right here. Somebody has spent way too much time in isolated Liberal environments and media.
(That was a direct quote from someone named Keith Perry in a recent Tea Party Facebook circle jerk I had the honor of inspiring). There are better quotes out there, ones that more explicitly denounce any application of knowledge with accusations of disdaining “the unwashed masses.” Any attempt to suggest that we should consider that governance merits professionalization in much the same way that medicine, law, education, accounting, geology, carpentry, mechanics, and any other profession that deals with even moderately complex systems do is met with blind, unreasoning rejection. Even when it is coupled with recognition of the need to hold those professionals democratically accountable for the job they do.
No, the rising tide is one that rejects such quaint notions as that there is any relevance to expertise. They don’t want laymen to instruct surgeons on how to do their child’s open-heart surgery, but they want laymen to instruct representatives on how to deal with complex economic, legal and technical challenges, because they are incapable of recognizing social systems as systems, complex and subtle systems, systems as challenging to work with effectively as (really more challenging than) human anatomical systems, or mechanical systems. But we are cursed by an ignorance so aggressive that it isn’t content merely to lack any understanding of social systems, but has to insist on dictating how they are addressed.
The people best equipped to govern are those who do know enough about these social systems, about the economic dynamics, the technological complexities, the legal and administrative framework, the ways in which all of these articulate with one another and with the natural and cultural systems that envelop and permeate them. These are people professional enough to examine the historical and international record, to compare various institutional arrangements, to identify their strengths and weaknesses, in short, to do what professionals do, applying training to information in service to the job for which they are paid.
And those so equipped shouldn’t say, “yes, Joe-the-Plumber, you are the expert, you know all that needs to be known about economic and fiscal policy, about international relations, about geohydrology and electrical grids and toxic environmental contamination. There is no knowledge anywhere in the world that you don’t possess that can possibly be relevant to public policy.” No, they should say, “You hired me to do a job, and it is my responsibility to do it faithfully and capably. And doing it the way your telling me to do it would be neither.” Just as the surgeon would refuse to take a hacksaw to his patient just because the father insisted it was the best way to go, so to the most talented elected officials, the kind who have the combination of knowledge, integrity, and courage to do the job they were paid to do, and to do it well, the true leaders, are punished at the polls for being true leaders. Only sycophants to popular ignorance need apply.
In fact, true leaders do more than tell the public that not each and every member knows each and every relevant fact or systemic dynamic, but also tells the public that, collectively, they possess vast untapped genius, and that that wisdom can only be tapped once the public stops drowning it out with undifferentiated noise. The job requires not just technocracy, but also energizing and mobilizing what’s best about the populace, inspiring each to contribute what they have in greater degree than others, while also encouraging each to acknowledge what their individual limitations and areas of inexpertise are.
If too many cooks spoil the broth, then the Tea these particular chefs are steeping is a toxic brew, one so putrid that it poisons the body politic each and every time it is served.
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Tea Party Fanatics Believe the Means Justify the Ends: Just a couple of days after a Tea Partier, in an on-line conversation with me, criticized Democratic Party get-out-the-vote efforts, not only on the paranoid basis that it is a secret attempt to access personal information, but also because many voters “[have] no idea what the issues are or the qualifications of the candidate,” the Denver Post reports on increasing voter intimidation tactics by Tea Party fanatics (http://www.denverpost.com/ci_16441222). Actual violence by a (male) Rand Paul volunteer against a (female) MoveOn.org volunteer just before a debate between Paul and his Democratic opponent, a fortunately thus far exceptional event in American politics, may be just an isolated incident, or it may be indicative of the general disdain for democracy increasingly in evidence among Tea Party fanatics. Just yesterday I wrote about The Tea Party’s Mistaken Historical Analogy, drawing parallels between the Tea Party’s anti-intellectualism and disdain for the poor with mid-twentieth century European Fascism. Continuing evidence of the parallels should raise people’s awareness of how corrosive and dangerous this movement really is.
9News removed the anti-Perlmutter ad that the Denver Post had called “a whopper,” 9News had called “false,” and 7News called “fiction,” the last adding, “Perlmutter did not vote for a bill to allow rapists access to Viagra.” (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16442793, Saturday Night Briefs: Deceptive Political Ads & Dogmatic Intolerance). Another example of the Far Right’s extreme tactics. Negative ads are one thing, but even some unfortunately mainstream excesses, such as taking quotes out of context don’t rise to this level of outright deception. The Tea Party is upping the ante in electoral deception and distinctly unethical conduct. Shadowy right-wing groups attacking Democratic candidates with outright lies so egregious that television stations have to pull ads (in another break from the previous standard, the groups themselves refuse to when called on the deception), along with the observations noted above and yesterday, need to start registering on the collective consciousness.
Not only does it mark a new level of outright deception and voter intimidation, but The Tea Party is based on the notion that we are better governed by the arbitrary opinions of uninformed lay people than by any degree of professionalization of governance (New Tea Party Bumper Sticker: “If It Isn’t Dumb, It Isn’t Right”, John Andrews Recommends Protecting CU From Intellectuals). The horrors of the rise of fascist and communist totalitarianisms in Europe and Asia in the early and mid-20th century were preceded by just such populist rejections of moderation and professionalism in governance, embracing instead demagogues who promised to cure government of those defects.
We have enjoyed, longer than any other country, a modern democracy characterized by a high degree of professionalism and moderation in our governance. We need to preserve and reassert our collective commitment to maintaining both, especially as such a distinctly immoderate and anti-professional movement is so passionately on the rise.
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The Tea Partiers are More Like 2oth Century European Totalitarians than 18th Century American Revolutionaries. The original Tea Parties on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States immediately prior to the American Revolution, though more complex and less noble than American mythology would have it, were not the anti-intellectual and anti-empathy movements that the modern Tea Party is. Those characteristics align our own contemporary movement more with 20th century European Fascism and Eastern European/Asian Communism than with liberty-loving American revolutionaries. And The Tea Party’s ideology is even in some ways quite similar to the anti-government sentiments that inflamed the Russian populace to support a revolution that put into place a government more autocratic and repressive than the one it overthrew.
Both the Central European fascist countries (Germany, Italy, Spain), and the Eastern European and Asian communist countries, were deeply imbued with a passionate anti-intellectualism, always identifying intellectuals with the hated scapegoats (often Jews), or sometimes identifying intellectuals themselves as the primary hated scapegoats (as the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia). This tracks closely with the Tea Party’s identification of American intellectuals as the “elitists” they most fervently despise, and with their idolization of distinctly non-intellectual (and non-intelligent) leaders such as Sarah Palin.
The indifference to, or outright hostility toward, the poor as freeloaders on hard-working people also more closely tracks European fascism than it does American founding principles and ideas. Part of the “smaller government” message of Tea Partiers, that I encounter in virtually every interaction, is some statement about how the left insists on taking money away from those who earn it to give it to those who are too lazy to work. This characterization is, of course, far removed from reality, in which poverty exists for a multitude of structural reasons, has far more to do with the chances of birth than with individual merit and effort, and involves tremendous suffering by the most innocent members of society, our children. But the complete absence of empathy, or of understanding of the realities of the problems we face, combined with antipathy toward intellectuals (and particularly empathetic intellectuals) who accept the social responsibility of seeking systemic ways to address those problems, makes our Tea Partiers far more analogous to Fascists than to American Revolutionaries.
But certainly the Tea Partiers aren’t totalitarians; that would seem to be the exact opposite of what they stand for, right? Wrong. Opposition to government per se, and liberal use of the word “liberty,” do not necessarily imply a movement that is not essentially totalitarian, even if unbeknownst to the majority of its adherents. The Russian peasants that facilitated the Boleshevik revolution were trying to oust an oppressive government, not usher one in. And they made the same exact mistake that our modern Tea Partiers do, and that our American Revolutionaries did not: They look more to the promises of people who claim to represent their interests, than to the careful design of social institutions, to ensure that their interests are being addressed.
The Tea Partiers ignore completely what social scientists call “the agency problem,” the challenge of aligning the interests of agents (elected officials) with those of the principal (those they represent), instead happily and haplessly investing all of their faith in those who claim to be their champions. They are, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff noted in his book The Political Mind, actually inherently driven more by an authoritarian ideology than by one committed to liberty, though they clothe that authoritarianism in a professed commitment to liberty.
The Tea Party does not object to government as an oppressor of the downtrodden, but rather as an ally of the downtrodden, perceiving this commitment as an infringement on the advantages enjoyed by those who have drawn an at least adequate lot in life. It is a movement heavily funded by corporate wealth, which sees in this opposition to an empathetic government a population that will complacently allow corporate America to continue its advance in the recapture of government as an agent of the most privileged at the expense of the least privileged, rather than as an agent of the populace as a whole, striving to preserve the robustness of our economy, while addressing the demands of increased equality of opportunity and sustainability.
What brought this comparison to mind today was an article in The Economist on Germany’s resurgence, and the angst associated with it due to Germany’s unavory mid-20th Century past (http://www.economist.com/node/17305755). As I was reading the description of the kinds of xenophobic, scape-goating attitudes that Germany has actually in recent times managed to exhibit to a far lesser rather than greater degree than many other nations (most notably The United States), but that any trace of which still raise concerns among Europeans about a resurgent Germany, I couldn’t help but think “if those trends concern you, they should concern you where they are currently most robust: in The United States of America.”
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