Helpful dynamics.

Helpful dynamics.
I wrote about the limits and obstacles to political education. We also have a lot going for us.

• It’s not easy to make us obey gangsters.
We may be selfish and hierarchical by nature, but we don’t naturally rob, kill and die just to make Halliburton richer. The cockroaches spend hundreds of billions of dollars on propaganda every year, not because they are tired of buying racehorses, palaces, beautiful artifacts looted from ancient graves, and tropical island getaways. No, they have to scurry around like crazy, plugging their beauty pageants, 10 Commandments, Pledge of Allegiance, “reality TV”, Shopping Network, and so on, just to keep us in line.

David Grossman gives an interesting example of the kinds of training it takes to make us suitable employees and consumers. In reviewing many battlefield accounts he found that even in battle most soldiers have historically preferred running away or pretending to fight to actually shooting at enemies, even when not killing increased their own risk. As the generals figured this out, they intensified training to overcome our natural reluctance to kill. According to one study, "This bootcamp deification of killing [was] almost unheard of in World War I, rare in World War II, increasingly present in Korea, and thoroughly institutionalized in Viet Nam” (Grossman 252). Practice boosted the firing rate (soldiers using their weapons) from 55% in Korea to 90-95% in Viet Nam (35). Halliburton can train us, but it’s a constant effort. I was interested to read a

On our own, we do in fact like to use our minds, to make sense of the world, to search it for tasty delights just as when our ancestors foraged the grasslands of Africa. Moreover, selfishness and hierarchy are but the flip side of the coin of our cooperativeness. We’ve come to dominate the planet because we’ve learned how to work in groups. Perhaps more than any other characteristic it’s our drive to communicate that defines us as human.

We can’t halt killer training until we establish democracy. We've got to build our democracy even as we're trained to abuse each other. In the meantime we have to craft oases, models, and experiences of liberty that let us develop our democratic impulses and practice democratic skills.


• We have more than one idea.

Our fear of the losses can keep us from changing. What is it, exactly, that we are afraid to lose?
As I try to strip away the layers of deceit that I have been taught, it is hard not to be afraid that these are like wrappings of a shroud and that what I will ultimately come to in myself is a disintegrating, rotting nothing: that the values I have at my core, from my culture, will only be those of negativity, exclusion, fear, death (Pratt 39).

Terrifying, to think we might be no more than the sum of the viciousness of the dominant ideas. But all of us are bigger than that, stronger.

Sure, I carry around a lot of meanness, but that’s not all I’ve got in my head. I’ve also got bits and pieces of practical approaches to my problems other than beating up women or brown-nosing the boss. I believe that’s true of most of us: the guy who complains he can’t open his mouth for fear of the dark forces of Political Correctness, but also thinks (accurately) that the Senator is a crook; the woman whose poor health ejected her from bourgeois bliss into the infernal regions of the working class, who complains about her vulgar neighbors, but recognizes very well the policy makers who are the source of her troubles, and admires the young, reforming black councilman; the guy who’s equally concerned about gun rights and the threat of layoffs; the immigrant-bashing letters-to-the-editor writers who dovetail their foaming hatred of immigrants with their deep suspicion of Reagan/Clinton Free Trade policy.

Thus responses to surveys about affirmative action (Wade, Tavris 1993 p. 651) or abortion vary with the wording of the questions. Some of this reflects a complex understanding of complex issues, as when anti-abortion South Dakotans rejected a very rigid anti-abortion law. Other times we simply don’t see the contradictions in our ideas. We’re very skilled at compartmentalizing. Even more fundamentally, we can juggle many contending ideas because we so rarely have the opportunity to put them into practice. We don’t always have to think them through or take responsibility for how they work out in reality.

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“ . . . three quarters of Catholics said they would disagree with the bishops who would deny the Eucharist to politicians who disagree with the church on abortion, and nearly 70% said the Catholic Church should not be trying to influence either the positions that Catholic politicians take on the issues or the way that Catholics vote. That held true even among majorities of Catholics who consider themselves very religious and who attend Mass at least once a week”
(Tumulty 35).
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It's easy to make fun of other people's inconsistencies, and yet there’s an important advantage to having all sorts of stories to draw on. It’s like a species having a big gene pool; we never know what the world will throw at us, and it helps to have a wide selection of possible responses. Along with our firearms orgasms, yearnings to be a princess, and need for scapegoats, among us we also have keen understandings of the political and economic underpinnings of this country. Together these constitute a rich source of raw materials for our storytelling projects.

“Clearly, values are generally not imposed on men in any crudely mechanistic way. Men also impose their will by selecting, as it were, from the range of values which any complex society generates” (Parkin 82), and of course it's those values that our political stories express. Moreover, other observers point out that we may apply seemingly contradictory understandings one after the other, as changing circumstances and audiences require. For instance, Tarule’s schema of Women’s Ways of Knowing may not be so much progressive stages as finely tuned responses to varied contexts and authorities (91).

Groups necessarily change focus over time, because of changing circumstances, including the need and possibilities of coordinating action and taking advantage of new technologies or institutional openings and vulnerabilities. C. Smith notes that " . . . evangelical approaches to the influence of religion in the public square tend to run in cycles, so the dominant evangelical worldview in one decade may be quite different from that of the previous decade or the decade to come" (p.12). Naturally, left-wingers have our own trends. Changing focus is not a problem except when we confuse our current focus with the whole of reality, our latest tactics with long-term goals.

It doesn't hurt to remember that no group has a monopoly on inconsistency:

Scholars value and expect intellectual systems and arguments that are internally lucid, tight, consistent, and elegant. But, in actuality, this kind of thinking is unusual and unnatural in humans-- which is why developing it takes years of critical training. Even then, highly educated scholars and professionals are often less consistent in their own thinking and behaviors than the norms of rationality and science prescribe . . . (C. Smith 12).

So: how might we enrich our repertoire, select more truthful stories, and then rework them to make them truer still?


• I count at least 3 chances to change our minds.
The first is before we’ve taken a stand in public, which usually sets our ideas in concrete. Go, Bulldogs! I’m a Marlboro Man! I like Ike! Before that public declaration, we are still in learning mode, trying to figure out what the issues are and what we should do about them.

Later on, we can change our opinions ver-r-r-ry gradually. We might take a tiny step back on this or that issue, then another. Maybe we hope nobody’s looking, because our status in the community is built not on a particular politics so much as a reputation for consistency (some people call it “integrity”). A little shuffle here and there, then alla sudden we find ourselves in a different position altogether, and we’ve forgotten we started somewhere else. I think a lot of people who grew up in gay-bashing environments never did make it a big part of their daily lives, and after a while found they could live very well without it.

Or not; sometimes the little changes don’t add up to a new story. For instance, I might grudgingly admit to myself that, gosh, LBJ and Tricky Dick lied about the war in Viet Nam; that, in retrospect, North Viet Nam posed no threat to the U.S.; that an awful lot of people died there needlessly; that the U.S. lost the war; that the war bitterly divided U.S. citizens. But hey, that was then. In retrospect I could draw any of several conclusions about the war. If only the hippies hadn’t betrayed us to Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh. If only we had nuked the gook. Some folks are still playing Rambo, refighting the war in fantasy. Alternatively, I may never have a reason to think about that crime at all until the next time a president lies us into war.

Whether I cheer or protest the latest adventure depends partly on how I arrange all these bits of information in my head about the previous ones. Have I figured out how wars benefit politicians? Can I imagine how I would react to foreign soldiers in my country? Do I have a good sense about how spies, generals and journalists process information? Have I learned how they construct boogey-men? Have I developed my own ideas of what makes up “national security”? Do I understand that the Viet Nam war was not a tragic mistake, but a typical prop and product of the U.S. political economy?

Making sense of experience, fitting the pieces together, is work that takes time, and is hard to do well at the last minute. Best get it underway well before the next crisis.

Crises prompt us to change our minds. When all our strategies have failed, when we are about to lose our status and independence, we might be ready to acknowledge our problems and change our ideas. A lot of people will cling even more desperately to the familiar lies. Others will realize that holding on to an anchor doesn’t help if we’re already under water. Or to use a different comparison, we are so attached to some of our stories, it can feel like losing limbs to give them up, when what we’re really doing is letting go of the crutches. In crises it’s important to have something else to reach for, some idea that helps us act more effectively.

Of all these possible circumstances for developing new stories, which do you think political workers ought to focus on? Some of us like to say, Things will have to get worse before they get better, meaning that only a crisis will undermine the status quo enough to make a difference. We’ve seen how Halliburton’s blunders shifted the balance of military, economic, and political forces. As I write this, though, it remains to be seen how much our national goals and strategies have changed. And eleventh hour conversions can’t undo all the damage that’s already been done; can’t reopen all pathways bombed and bridges burnt.

Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie describes the career of John Paul Vann, a dissenting U.S. officer during the Viet Nam war. I was struck by how much this one guy influenced the media's take on the war, just by pointing out what was happening on the ground in Viet Nam: the incompetence, corruption, and cruelty of the anti-communist forces, the vast civilian casualties, the blindness of the top generals. Many of the U.S. reporters he tutored, including Sheehan and Halberstam, went on to turn the tide of opinion against the war. Vann's co-worker and good friend Daniel Ellsberg, once a big fan of the war, copied the secret Pentagon Papers for the New York Times, to expose the lies, selfishness and miscalculation that led to the U.S. invasion. Perhaps the series of personal crises he was going through helped Ellsberg rethink his commitments at every level.

While he saw all these problems, Vann himself could never shake his great investment in "winning" the war; all his criticism was directed to improving the war machine. From Sheehan's description, it's clear he was one of those folks who likes war, and does it well. Ellsberg was able to change his mind. Vann could not. Despite his courage and insight, he couldn't turn his back on the ideals of a lifetime. The young reporters Vann cultivated, who had gone into the war as enthusiastic crusaders, but had not yet invested so much in the war machine-- they found it easier to absorb and accept the reality of that atrocity.

So I think we need to pay close attention to that critical period before we’ve made up our minds. Or rather, before we’ve placed our bets. We’re already full of ideas about how the world works, mostly pretty accurate, but most of us don’t declare our political commitments but once in a while. Religion and flag rituals usually leave a good bit of leeway in terms of how we apply these obediences. In the periods before and between heavy investment in one political program or another, we have a chance to consider and compare alternatives. In safe settings we can talk about our ideas without feeling they are the only possibilities, or that our personal sense of identity and worth hinges on them. We can help each other build better stories before the concrete sets.