The Other As Enemy / Is Enemy to Democracy

© Charles D. Hayes

Described as “an eloquent meditation on the nature of hatred,” philosopher Sam Keen’s Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination, published 20 years ago, should be taken down from the library shelf, reread, and republished.  It doesn’t, however need to be updated; it’s as pertinent to today’s reality as it was when it first appeared in print.   

Keen opens the introduction with this observation: “In the beginning we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.” He goes on to explain that depth psychology presents us with the “undeniable wisdom that the enemy is constructed from denied aspects of the self.”

While acknowledging the fact that there are real aggressors who qualify as real enemies, Keen calls to our attention the idea that, to produce mass hatred, the body politic must remain unconscious of their own paranoia, which, due to a predilection for thoughtlessness, never seems to be much of a problem.  Moreover, Keen acknowledges that paranoia, far from being aberrant behavior, is a normal part of the human condition and that it contributes to the ethos of tribal loyalty and patriotism.

Faces of the Enemy is rich with quotable material on nearly every page. Keen shows how utterly easy it is to alienate one’s imagined opposition in such a way as to justify any and every means of obliterating them. The reason this is so effortless is that people we observe as different in some way are easily dehumanized. Differences can be exaggerated and magnified, and once someone’s humanity has been destroyed, the way they are to be treated is no longer a matter of morality because they are no longer seen as qualifying for fair treatment.

Although I’ve said Keen’s book does not need updating, we do need to put contemporary culture in perspective through the lens of Keen’s insightful and morally profound observations. I still recall reading a few years ago about the notion of ideological amplification in academia and how stunning a revelation I thought it to be. Ideological amplification is simply an acknowledgment that when groups of people of a particular political or ideological bent get together they are apt, by nature of their association, to go further in the direction to which they are already leaning. On the face of it this seems too simple an observation to get excited about. But to the contrary, people unaware of this tendency are especially vulnerable to ideological manipulation. In my view, America is suffering mass manipulation today for perhaps the most sinister and egregious reasons ever: egoism and greed.

Each day millions of people begin their day with nothing particular on their minds other than how they will spend their time and perhaps how they will spend their evening. But in the course of the day, whether they are engaged in meaningful work or drudgery, they often tune in various media pundits as a means of staying, in touch with what’s going on in the world or simply for entertainment. Now this would seem a harmless activity, except for the effects of ideological amplification.

Many media pundits make their living by fomenting human emotion into a response ensuring enough rage to keep anxious listeners tuned in. Doing this helps pundits maintain their ratings, and thus add to their wealth, while simultaneously satisfying their narcissistic egos. Hatred, after all, is metastasized emotion, and unfortunately it plays to our worst instincts: to promote the bonding of the group so engaged at the expense of the other. Hatred is one of the greatest unifiers for human beings, as philosopher Eric Hoffer frequently noted. 

That millions of people willingly go along with the mass manipulation of their emotions in ways that alienate others as enemies unworthy of the respect due to our fellow man is one of the most pathetic behavioral traits of our species. We have extraordinarily sophisticated brains but make little use of them when it comes to finding simple fault in matters that aren’t simple at all when we really examine the evidence.

What if most days, most people spent their time living up to the responsibility that democracy requires? What if instead of listening to narcissistic zealots, they listened to people looking for and working toward real solutions to problems with so much enthusiasm for the better argument that it wouldn’t matter to them from which side it was presented? Given the current state of public discourse, this may sound insanely naïve, but it would be the mature thing to do.

If we don’t begin soon, en masse, to act like adults, our children and grandchildren are going to experience wretched lives because of our inability or our unwillingness to stop the commercial manipulation of our emotions. Generations from now (providing there is a viable future), our current society may be viewed as having been ignorant beyond credulity because of our passivity and willful inattention.  

For unscrupulous pundits, the way to a quick fortune is to read between the lines of Sam Keen’s book and think about how easy it is to turn fear into a profit center. It is embarrassingly easy, and for that we should be ashamed. The resulting incivility keeps us from being a just society, one that could leave succeeding generations something to live up to instead of an economic shambles where a great nation was once thought to stand as a living example of a viable democracy.

Pundits who decry those of us who point to vitriolic media as a major reason for incivility these days do so to protect their livelihood, not to further civil discourse. People of retirement age can recall a time when civil discourse was a reality, even when political issues were as ideologically divisive as they are today. But, with rare exceptions, those were the days before hate-radio, partisan TV, Internet echo chambers, and the commercial application of dogma for the sake of audience share.

Of course, none of this would matter, except that human beings have an overpowering predilection to argue about things they know very little about. That’s in large part why it is so easy to alienate the other in the first place. In point of fact, we have no real social problems in America that could not be readily solved if most people were educated to the level necessary to sustain a legitimate democracy.

The greatest threat to the future is ignorance, and the first step to a better outlook is to acknowledge that those among us who promote and perpetuate ignorance are not patriots. People who attempt to gain stature through promoting fear of the other undermine the very idea of democracy. That they are able to do so without being exposed as the self-absorbed zealots they are speaks volumes about the current state of adult education in America.

But Keen offers us a way out. He writes, “There is a single secure, sacred vocation to which human beings can surrender without the fear of falling into idolatry. We are called to bring justice and compassion into the communal life of our species. Our purpose is to create an order that is not red in tooth and claw, a commonwealth that is governed by our highest capacity for consciousness, conscience, and compassion, rather than by our lowest capacity for inventing the means for the triumph of raw power. Precisely because the ‘objective’ world does not incarnate the virtues of repentance and mercy, it is the human calling to do so. Ours is the task to so reduce the unnecessary ‘surplus’ of evil, that we will be left with the necessity of coping only with the inevitable evil of disease, tragedy, and death.”  A tall order, no doubt, but one worthy of our aspirations and one that in a nutshell captures the idealism that gives purpose to the very notion of September University. I hope you will join in the effort and begin to speak your mind.   

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September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life

Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher

The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning

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Generosity as an Expression of Affection

© Charles D. Hayes

When I was growing up in the 1940s and 50s, vegetable gardens were ubiquitous. Indeed, victory gardens were encouraged in both world wars, and although I was too young to perceive an association with patriotism and gardening, it helps explain the enthusiasm for gardening I witnessed among adults when I was a child. I have clear memories of the custom of sharing food and of a time when neighbors would come for a visit bringing bushel baskets of fresh produce. My guess would be that this is still a frequent occurrence in many parts of the country today, and yet, for the most part, these customs seem to have been lost to the lifestyles of modernity and urbanization.    

My maternal grandparents usually had a garden, but during the times when they didn’t, they would still purchase their produce from nearby farms. They would then spend several days each spring and fall canning a vast assortment of fruits and vegetables. Their pantry was seldom stocked with less than a year’s worth of food. Of course, people still do this, but the tradition is not nearly as common as it used to be.  Increasingly I wish that weren’t the case. Although it would seem we have gained from the enormous availability of food in the modern-day supermarket, there is still something lost—something important and something for which finding a suitable substitute seems difficult. Vegetable gardens engender a sense of community in a way that binds us to the land and to one another at the same time.  

Moreover, the care and effort required for growing and preparing food for storage is rewarded with an appreciation for the precarious nature of our physical environment and the degree to which we are dependent upon the biological requirements for life. At a deeper level lies an ethos of sharing because most gardens produce more than one family can consume while the produce is still fresh. For many years my grandparents lived in Oklahoma while my family lived in Texas. We would travel several times a year to visit my grandparents, and without fail, when we prepared to leave and return home, we were inundated with food from my grandparents’ pantry. Thinking about this practice many years later, I realized this gesture of showering family members with the fruits of your labor was an overt expression of affection.

My grandparents, like so many others of their Victorian generation, were not much for expressing affection verbally, but when I compare their customs to those of the present day, I prefer the old ways. But for a few changes in lifestyle, what’s to keep us from sharing as our grandparents once did? After all, we reap what we sow.    

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September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life

Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher

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A Longing for Solitude

 © Charles D. Hayes 

A few months ago, while presenting a September University workshop, I made a point of suggesting that each generation longs for something it grew up without—something that is likely to be disrespected or readily dismissed by the generation to follow. This prompted a question from a participant about today’s younger generation currently in high school and college. What are they growing up without? What will they long for and subsequently rediscover in a few years? It didn’t take long to come up with an answer—something I suspect will someday in the not too distant future seem like a profound breakthrough. The revelation hit me like a lightning bolt: what’s missing today is solitude.

If history is a reliable measure, today’s frenzy of texting and tweeting, with cell phones and a never-ending selection of new gadgetry with which to connect oneself with the rest of the world, is going to produce a backlash. But whether the repercussion will have lasting reverberations is an open question. The rush to cities decades ago resulted in a back-to- the-land movement that seems to have subsided, even though telecommunications opens up more opportunities for living in the country than ever before. So perhaps, in the long run, multitasking will be humanity’s destiny. I’m quite confident it won’t be mine though.

Many people spend a big part of their vacations answering business e-mail. Millions upon millions of people increasingly live in a constant state of perpetual distraction, where one interesting subject of focus morphs into another before the previous matter of attention is fully satisfied or absorbed. In effect, individuals are being overwritten both by their tools and by the crowd.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal” and “It is easy to live after the world’s opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Of course, it’s doubtful that Emerson could have envisioned a society like ours, where the horde follows us to the bathroom and to bed, and awakens us in the night to connect. But I can imagine what Emerson would have said about tweeting, and I suspect it would be an eloquent expression of outrage. He had little tolerance for chit-chat. There is, however, growing resistance by more and more people to being constantly connected, and I would wager that it’s only a matter of time before this resistance begins to get wider public attention.

Scientists sometimes express annoyance when analogies are drawn to subatomic particles as a way to illustrate a point by people who don’t know enough about quantum physics to know what they are talking about. Knowing that risk, I’m going to join those ranks with regard to what’s known as the observer effect, which says that the act of observing subatomic particles affects their behavior. Even though I don’t have a clue how this works, I am quite confident that this analogy applies doubly to human behavior. There is no doubt that our actions are affected by the eyes of others, and can influence us in the same way.  

So, if a person spends most of his or her time responding to email, texting, and participating in our vast cornucopia of social media, then what becomes of the self? What happens to our individuality and authenticity if everything we do is a reaction at the behest of another individual or group? The very thought of living one’s life as a perpetual reaction to external stimuli is disturbing, and yet at some level this is philosophically inescapable. The antidote, I suspect, exists only as a matter of degree and comes from thoughtful contemplation. Such contemplation requires some measure of privacy and quite possibly a generous serving of solitude as well, at least enough to dissipate distraction.    

  

Philosophers through the ages have expressed the notion that there is strength and creativity to be gained from brief periods of isolation. Albert Einstein observed that we shun solitude in our youth but cherish it as we get older, and I couldn’t agree more, except that I clearly recall being fond at times of being alone during my childhood. I used to spend many hours by myself in the woods. Now, with five acres of tall timber on my property, I feel as if I live in the woods. I admit to liking e-mail and some social media, but I do not text and I will not tweet on the principle that chit-chat is an absurd waste of time. Life is much too complicated to reduce the essence of our experience to 140 characters.

We are all affected by our interrelationships in society, and much of what we do each day is not what we started out to do. Instead, it is the result of a reaction to something someone else has done. What we think about is affected, in large part, by the media we use. Moreover, if one is not very careful, becoming subordinate to one’s tools of inquiry is a real possibility. Spending most of your waking time on Twitter is analogous to being a proton perpetually spooked by no-matter.

In The Shallows, a book about how the Internet is affecting our brains, Nicholas Carr observes that Google is in the business of distraction. We think we are using it, but it may be more accurate to suggest that Google is using us. Carr discusses the fact that young people today are shying away from novels because the sentences are too long and difficult. How unfortunate that as society gets more and more complex and our problems grow exponentially, our citizens become less and less thoughtful.

Carr writes, “A personal letter written in, say, the nineteenth century bears little resemblance to a personal e-mail or text message written today. Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.” I suspect it’s much more than that; it’s a loss of the substance of critical thought at a time when the need is so important that it’s hard to overstate the case.

So, anticipating a backlash that my generation may not live to see in full measure, we can only hope our children and grandchildren will someday reawaken to the realization that without setting aside sufficient time for contemplation, without a dedication to thoughtfulness, humanity’s future is suspect. While it may not seem so readily apparent now, someday soon I trust it will be clear to anyone striving to live fully that thoughtfulness is what holds society together and that some solitude is necessary in order to nourish autonomy. Otherwise there is nothing to tweet about.                  

 

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September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life

Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher

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September 2010

Sept-U: Setting the Movement in Motion
© Charles D. Hayes

One thing I think most people today would agree about is that the Internet is having far-reaching effects on society, and at this point in time, it’s difficult to predict the outcomes. Radio and television required passivity. The Internet invites participation; it promotes curiosity, conversation, and conviction. Social connectivity makes ideological amplification easy, allowing like-minded people to get together and venture further in the ideological direction they’re already leaning than they would have ventured on their own.

Regardless of the sentiment, it can be amplified in cyberspace. Any one of the above features of social media offers the possibility of revolutionary change. The Internet, therefore, can bring us together or rip us apart. Today’s communication upheaval can play to our worst instincts or our best; how we respond is up to each of us as citizens.  

During the past half-century the media sources we utilize have continued to dramatically affect the way we live. Television, for example, has entertained and educated us for more than sixty years, but in some respects it has had an anesthetizing effect. It’s managed to distort our intelligence into a sort of semiconscious stupor in which we can watch reruns over and over without recalling having seen them before. In other words, millions of people use television to relieve stress and tune out, so to speak, just as others under the stress of modernity use drugs to turn their anxiety into euphoria.  

Contrast today’s communication capabilities with the 1950s, when there were only three television networks. The differences are so profound that many young people today have difficulty imaging what life would be like without constant connectivity.  Millions of people used to go to work each day having watched the same programs the night before as most of the people they worked with. This shared sense of entertainment offered the feeling that we were really in the same boat, minus the racial and gender biases prevalent at the time. Social media may seem to have a similar effect today, except that the groups are far more self-selecting and the subjects of interest more trivial in nature. After all, how thoughtful and reflective can one be when the expectation is to respond quickly in 140 characters or less?

If you had a message you wanted to communicate to the general public in the 1950s, you were pretty much out of luck. Radio, television, newspapers, magazines, and letters were about the only options. Not so today. But when you start to imagine what the results might be from turning those billions of hours of television stupor into something more productive with today’s connectivity, the possibilities are mind-bending. In Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Clay Shirky, who teaches in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, shows how using our heretofore dead-to-the-world time differently has the potential to change the world. He describes interactive media as the connective tissue that holds society together.

Shirky writes, “In a historical eyeblink, we have gone from a world with two different models of media—public broadcasts by professionals and private conversations between pairs of people—to a world where public and private media blend together, where professional and amateur production blur, and where voluntary public participation has moved from nonexistent to fundamental.” Shirky also makes it clear that we have always found the time to do what interests us and what we really care about—the same realization that prompted me to write September University.  

As I make clear in that book, the fall and winter of life is the optimum time to reflect on our experience, to use that experience and our learning to achieve a fulfilling end to life, and to do so with enough enthusiasm that we leave something worthwhile behind. Regardless of whether you are politically left, right, or center, what is important is to set contempt and animosity aside and be willing to engage in a civil dialog with people of opposing views while maintaining a resolve to opt for the better argument.

Imagine what the Internet and all of the attendant social media could and would support, if most people used its power to find real solutions to real problems. What if more and more people were to truly care about discovering the better argument, regardless of whose side might appear to be winning? What if, instead of spending so much time posting incendiary remarks about their ideological opposition, people sent out positive messages seeking common ground? What if most people began to act as if the way we act toward one another really matters, and as if they believed we will get the future we deserve? What if a significant number of people past middle age began to focus on generativity and their legacy for the generations to follow?    

I invite you to join the discussion and to visit the September University Facebook page and engage. Please invite others to do so as well, and tell us how you plan to make the best of the rest of your life.