how to save the world

cartoon by Bill Bramhall in the NY Daily News

I confess: I am easily seduced into fear over the vast amount of, and seeming power of, misinformation and disinformation in our modern world. As the US and other parts of the world slide closer and closer to embracing fascism, my anxiety about the role misinformation and disinformation, and the social and other media that traffic in them, play, just keeps growing.

So I was both challenged and relieved by an astonishing article entitled Bad News in the September edition of Harper’s magazine (the whole special issue is worth a read), written by Buzzfeed’s Joseph Bernstein. Joseph’s compellingly argued thesis is (my paraphrasing):

1. Most of the political information, including misinformation and disinformation, read and propagated on social media is viewed by the vast majority, if it is absorbed and considered at all, with skepticism, no matter who it comes from. It almost never changes anyone’s mind.
2. What social media have done is to simply display, in a particularly garish and ghastly fashion, what many, perhaps the majority of people already, preposterously, believe.
3. And what we read and repost in social media is what conforms to what we already believe, and what we want to believe, often without any regard for its truth or the evidence (or lack thereof) supporting it. Social media mostly reflect, rather than influence, what we believe.
4. In even worse news for the Silicon Valley paper billionaires, there is compelling evidence that advertising in social media, including political advertising, simply doesn’t work. It is read and appreciated by, and only by, people who were already intending to “buy” what the ad was selling. The billions that advertisers spend on social media (and in most other places), is simply a waste of money, enriching only the advertising and PR industries that sell to gullible businesses and politicians, and, of course, adding to the “cost” of the product that the consumer ultimately has to bear.
5. Facebook, Twitter and Google, then, are basically gussied-up versions of the free “buy and sell” advertising+fluff newspapers you get in street-corner boxes and handed to you on commuter trains — they offer no content or analysis of their own, only regurgitated stuff that corporations, politicians and other sellers are willing to directly or indirectly pay them for — advertisements and promotions for products, political candidates, opinions, and ideas.
6. Citing Jacques Ellul, author of a landmark study on propaganda, Joseph says: “Ellul dismissed a ‘common view of propaganda . . . that it is the work of a few evil men, seducers of the people.’ He compared this simplistic story to midcentury studies of advertising ‘which regard the buyer as victim and prey.’ Instead, he wrote, the propagandist and the propagandee make propaganda together. One reason to grant Silicon Valley’s assumptions about our mechanistic persuadability is that it prevents us from thinking too hard about the role we play in taking up and believing the things we want to believe. It turns a huge question about the nature of democracy in the digital age—what if ‘the people’ believe crazy things, and now everyone knows it?”

Joseph scathingly lists the long-standing dysfunctionalities of the American political and social culture that have contributed to so many believing so many “crazy things”, and the whole article is worth reading and thinking about. As for social media, he writes:

Facebook is full of ugly memes and boring groups, ignorant arguments, sensational clickbait, products no one wants, and vestigial features no one cares about. And yet the people most alarmed about Facebook’s negative influence are those who complain the most about how bad a product Facebook is. The question is: Why do disinformation workers think they are the only ones who have noticed that Facebook stinks?

He concludes:

It’s possible that the Establishment needs the theater of social-media persuasion to build a political world that still makes sense, to explain Brexit and Trump and the loss of faith in the decaying institutions of the West. The ruptures that emerged across much of the democratic world five years ago called into question the basic assumptions of so many of the participants in this debate—the social-media executives, the scholars, the journalists, the think tankers, the pollsters. A common account of social media’s persuasive effects provides a convenient explanation for how so many people thought so wrongly at more or less the same time. More than that, it creates a world of persuasion that is legible and useful to capital—to advertisers, political consultants, media companies, and of course, to the tech platforms themselves. It is a model of cause and effect in which the information circulated by a few corporations has the total power to justify the beliefs and behaviors of the demos. In a way, this world is a kind of comfort. Easy to explain, easy to tweak, and easy to sell, it is a worthy successor to the unified vision of American life produced by twentieth-century television. It is not, as Mark Zuckerberg said, “a crazy idea.” Especially if we all believe it.

So if we want to be concerned about the nonsensical, potentially destructive beliefs of so many of our fellow citizens, we should not be blaming social and other media or trying to “fix” them, but asking ourselves how such preposterous beliefs came to be so widespread in the first place — probably long before social media (and the responses of many to climate change, systemic racism, and CoVid-19) brought these preposterous beliefs to our chagrined attention.

For example: If we want to understand skepticism, in the US especially, of the pronouncements of public health experts about the pandemic, we might start by appreciating that the US health system has evolved to be an utterly and obscenely bloated and inept bureaucracy, offering a pay-as-you-go (if you can afford it) two-tier system that has evolved to benefit for-profit insurance companies, for-profit pharmaceutical companies, extravagantly expensive medical schools, self-entitled corporate executives and extremely rich citizens, and the politicians whose campaigns they fund, and no one else.

As a result, as many Americans use “alternative” medicine resources (many of them shady and even dangerous, like homeopathy and faith healing) as use the expensive, dysfunctional “primary” healthcare system. Most Americans have in one way or another been abused (by neglect, malpractice, or misinformation) by the US medical system, which is, in fact, one of the leading causes of death in the country. So when someone suggests that the latest mandates (which seem to change all too quickly with the political winds), vaccines, and other impositions of the pandemic are fraudulent, there’s a lot of people who are already predisposed to believe that’s true.

What’s more interesting, then, than the role the social and other media have played in providing a venue for the expression of extreme distrust, is what lies behind our propensity to believe they have played any role at all? Americans elected Nixon, and Reagan, before there were social media. They built bomb shelters, believed “better dead than Red”, and held anti-communist witch hunts. They fell for religious and political bigots, organized vigilante groups and worse, believed in absurd and deadly cures for physical and mental diseases, and joined all manner of cults. Why should the 21st century context for what people believe, and are prepared to do in support of those beliefs, be any different? The average American, according to a recent Forbes report, reads at below a sixth grade level of comprehension.

So what if we were to acknowledge that social media are just over-hyped bit players in a bewildered world that has always been prone to believing falsehoods because they’re more comfortable and consistent with what people want to believe, than the truth? What do we do then?

Well, we could ridicule them, get outraged by them, shun them, or dismiss them as “deplorables”. Or we could reach out to them, without expectations, and understand how they came to believe what they believe. Not that we’re going to change their minds. Sorry, idealists, that ain’t going to happen. Any more than you’re going to join the ranks of the Trumpists and Brexiteers and born-again creationist hordes and conspiracy theorists and faith healers and QAnon groupies. But just to understand where we stand. We, plural.

Our human civilization culture, with its 7.8B hostages, is collapsing, ecologically, economically, and, inevitably, to some extent socially as well. We all sense it. The evidence is everywhere. Sooner or later, as collapse takes hold, we are going to have to start to build local communities from the ground up with the people with whom we find ourselves. Some, perhaps most, of those people are going to believe, and believe in, some ludicrous things, things that will horrify and appal you, and you’re not going to talk them out of their beliefs.

You’re going to have to build a local community that works with them. Might as well start now to figure out what you’re going to have to work with.

In the meantime, if you’re paying for advertising, especially on social media, Joseph’s article should convince you that you’re being had. If someone in the business of persuasion — a corporation or a politician or a media ‘representative’ or a guru or an ‘influencer’ or a movement ‘leader’ or an op-ed writer — tries to sell you something, anything… caveat emptor.

But then, if you were going to buy what they’re selling, you would have bought it anyway. So… never mind.

PS: Bonus: Joseph is interviewed by Harper’s web editor on this podcast.

A recent article by Indi Samarajiva gave me a bit of an epiphany about the schism in political thinking in many western nations, and why so many conservatives are so angry and ready to embrace fascism, or any system that they think might be less oppressive than the one we live under today.

Indi cites a 1991 report written by Wang Huning, a member of the 6-man Chinese politburo that rules under that country’s leader Xi Jingping, discussing US style democracy:

I asked a senior professor of American politics “What exactly is the difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party”? After a moment’s contemplation he replied: “There are different views of freedom and equality, with the Republican Party focusing on freedom and the Democratic Party focusing on equality”… In the hearts of Americans, most of them are inclined towards freedom. This is because equality under the western system is only formal political equality, not social or economic equality.

In other words, most of us in the western world are resigned to equality only of voting rights, and not equality of power, social privileges, or wealth. And since elected officials respond primarily to those with wealth, social privileges, and power (who overwhelmingly fund their electoral campaigns, and own the media covering them), voting rights per se are pretty much meaningless for most of us.

So, given the choice between a party that stresses (untrammelled) freedom and a party that stresses (formal political) equality, it’s not surprising that disgruntled citizens opt for the former, and hence why we’ve seen an apparent surge to the right over the past fifty years. We have bred a distrust and loathing of government into every aspect of our society.

So why are conservatives so passionate about “freedom”, which sounds more disruptive and perturbing and even anarchic than the “law and order” they are also passionate about?

My epiphany is that what we are witnessing is a massive resentment against our utter dependence — political, social and economic — on others”outside our control (and often beyond our comprehension), including large institutions, governments, and corporations. That massive resentment has arisen because that dependence so constricts us, belittles us, and incapacitates us, that we naturally long for “freedom” from it. We don’t really know, or care, who or what we are dependent on, or why; for most of us it’s too complex to fathom. We just know we don’t like it, and so, extreme libertarianism is taking over — left and right! — from both progressivism and conservatism.

If we don’t trust anyone else to do things for us, we want the ‘freedom’ to do everything for ourselves, from raising our children and looking after our own health, to Texas-style vigilantism as a means of punishing perceived wrong-doers.

But we have this gnawing realization that, as much as we would ideally like that, we are currently, utterly, and hopelessly dependent on others outside our control and influence for everything that is important to us. The table above, from my earlier article on dependence, lists the extent to which, I think, this is now so.

This is a scary list of dependencies, enough to be unnerving no matter where in the political spectrum your beliefs lie. We’re dependent, mostly on massive national and global bureaucracies we don’t understand, respect or trust, for almost every facet of a healthy human life.

No wonder so many of us are angry, and perhaps a bit ashamed. How did we get to this point anyway; who allowed it to happen? We are a bit like teenaged children, suddenly aware of how dependent we are on our parents, and wanting to do all kinds of things we can’t do because of that dependence. So we complain, act up, and act out — putting antlers on our heads. We can’t run away from “home” though, because we have no place to go, and because we’re dependent on what that despised, constraining “home” affords us.

There is no answer to “How did it get this way?” The collective actions of billions of people will often (perhaps always) lead to situations that no one is happy with and which benefit only a tiny few. No one is in control, and knowing that only makes our dependence on the current systems even scarier. We know the world is fucked, and yet we are helpless to do anything about it. The only thing that prevents our anger and fear from boiling over is our cultivated (both by ourselves — since we really don’t want to know — and by others) ignorance of just how awful and unfixable it really is.

Conservatives in particular (but not exclusively) are therefore conflating their understandable desire for freedom from dependence from those they don’t know or trust, with untrammelled ‘freedom’ to do whatever they, and those who think like them, want to do. What do they do with these ‘freedoms’ when they get them? Well, they accidentally or deliberately kill and injure many, many innocent victims with their righteously-possessed guns (or with their cars when they drive drunk). They infect millions of people unnecessarily with a lethal and debilitating virus. They destroy the natural wealth of the planet to the point it can no longer sustain life. What price ‘freedom’?

So when we say we want ‘freedom’, what I think we really mean is that we want freedom from our humiliating dependence. We want to do the things humans took for granted and did effortlessly for our first million years on the planet. We want a level of control over our lives that we naively or nostalgically thought we once had — though we never really did.

But in a massively complex and interconnected world of 7.8B people, in a horrifically overcrowded, prosthetic world whose biodiversity is in free fall, whose climate is in an accelerating stage of collapse, and whose economy is massively overextended and teetering on the edge of a ghastly disintegration, freedom from dependence is impossible. We will be dependent on the systems that we have cobbled together to try to support us all until they fall apart, and then we will get our wish. We will relearn how to do things locally, with people we know and trust, or we’ll die in the attempt.

I am sure if I were to say all this to conservatives or libertarians I would be told I was sanctimonious and condescending. After all, it’s hard to defend systems and institutions that have fundamentally failed and are beyond reform, even though things will only get harder when they fall apart.

But I’m content to just file this epiphany away, and the next time I hear ravings from conservatives or libertarians about the need for ‘freedom’, I’ll at least begin to understand the pain and terror that underlie their misconceptions about what ‘freedom’ they really long for. We all share that ancient longing.

It’s awful being dependent on those you don’t know or trust or control. But as I suspect many teenagers who’ve been thrown out into the streets could tell you, it could be even worse.

my representation of the key elements of David Bohm’s Dialogue methodology, using some of the Group Works  facilitation cards

The origin of the word dialogue has nothing to do with “two”, or even with “conversation”, but means simply “through reasoning or language”. Many works called “dialogues” are simply intellectual discourses, though many are styled as conversations between an ‘enlightened’ protagonist and other characters, straw men/women, or even between the author and his/her readers. The currently popular Q&A-style interviews could be considered dialogues in this sense. So could much of this blog, even when it finds me talking to myself out loud.

Many philosophers have written about the nature of dialogue and what it reveals about our self-awareness, our nature, and our culture, how we collectively ‘make meaning’, and the essence of relationship and existence itself.

But the current craze around dialogue mostly has to do with the use of the term by David Bohm, who developed a ‘dialogue’ methodology that he used for group deliberation, and honed throughout his life. He was careful about being prescriptive about this methodology, since he apparently believed there was no one way to ‘dialogue’ that worked best for everyone, and since he also believed that the only way to learn to do it effectively was through extensive practice over a lifetime, which would essentially entail modifications of the practice as one learned. So his writing tends to focus on principles and examples rather than explicit practices and processes to use.

We humans like things simple and prescriptive, however, and some of David’s followers have not been as reticent as he was to prescribe specific processes and structures for dialogue.

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”, GB Shaw famously said. We humans tend to filter and misinterpret what other say so that it fits precisely with our preconceived ideas of the truth. We are not, it seems, at least in our current stage of evolution, particularly well equipped for learning. Paul Simon’s song The Boxer has a line that goes: “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

One of David Bohm’s intentions with his work on and use of dialogue was the attempt to wrestle with this very human tendency, and the misunderstandings and lost opportunities for learning and insight that this tendency inevitably produces.

I’ve read several works on Bohmian dialogue, including David’s own booklet On Dialogue, and confess to struggling to integrate them all. David wrote:

Shared meaning is really the cement that holds society together, and you could say that the present society has very poor quality cement … The society at large has a very incoherent set of meanings. In fact, this set of ‘shared meanings’ is so incoherent that it is hard to say that they have any real meaning at all.

David argues, in almost non-dual terms, that much of our problem in communication is that we identify ourselves with our thoughts, ideas and beliefs. They are, he argues, just our conditioning, placeholders for what we have been conditioned to think and hence do; there should be no need for us to be so attached to our thoughts as to need to defend them, since:

if [your] opinion is right, it doesn’t need a reaction. And if it is wrong, why should you defend it? If you are identified with it, however, you do defend it. It is as if you yourself are under attack when your opinion is challenged. Opinions thus tend to be experienced as “truths,” even though they may only be your own assumptions and your own background. You got them from your teacher, your family, or by reading, or in yet some other way. Then for one reason or another you are identified with them, and you defend them… Thought is the problem.

Dialogue, he argues, requires and enables us to set aside our conditioned thoughts and beliefs and open ourselves to appreciating others’ and developing collective understanding. This is especially important to do in the political arena, but also in religion and even in science. We are trapped by our conditioned assumptions, beliefs, and opinions, and unable to see ‘outside’ them unless we use something like dialogue.

It takes, he argues, a group of 15-40 people, seated in a circle, to be sufficiently representative of the wide diversity of assumptions, beliefs, ideas, knowledge and opinions of even the smallest community of interest or practice in a particular subject matter area. Groups smaller than that can be too quick to accommodate each other if they sense basic agreement, which means little or no true understanding of the diversity of assumptions, beliefs etc in the room and hence no shift in perspective towards a truly collective one.

Dialogue groups have to meet without purpose or intention, he says, like aboriginal tribes once did:

Now, from time to time that tribe met like this in a circle. They just talked and talked and talked, apparently to no purpose. They made no decisions. There was no leader. And everybody could participate. There may have been wise men or wise women who were listened to a bit more – the older ones – but everybody could talk. The meeting went on, until it finally seemed to stop for no reason at all and the group dispersed. Yet after that, everybody seemed to know what to do, because they understood each other so well. Then they could get together in smaller groups and do something or decide things.

Dialogue, in essence, is all about the journey, then, not the destination. 

Every dialogue, he said, must begin with a negotiation. What is to be said “all has to be worked out”, intuitively and collectively. It emerges, and cannot be pre-set or forced.

In her wonderful synopsis, Maria Popova says:

Words,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her abiding meditation on the magic of real human communication, “transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” But what happens in a cultural ecosystem where the hearer has gone extinct and the speaker gone rampant? Where do transformation and understanding go?

What made, for instance, James Baldwin and Margaret Mead’s superb 1970 dialogue about race and identity so powerful and so enduringly insightful is precisely the fact that it was a dialogue — not the ping-pong of opinions and co-reactivity that passes for dialogue today, but a commitment to mutual contemplation of viewpoints and considered response. That commitment is the reason why they were able to address questions we continue to confront with tenfold more depth and nuance than we are capable of today. And the dearth of this commitment in our present culture is the reason why we continue to find ourselves sundered by confrontation and paralyzed by the divisiveness of “us vs. them” narratives. “To bother to engage with problematic culture, and problematic people within that culture, is an act of love,” wrote the poet Elizabeth Alexander in contemplating power and possibility. Krista Tippett calls such engagement generous listening. And yet so much of our communication today is defined by a rather ungenerous unwillingness to listen coupled with a compulsion to speak.

The process of thinking is, David says, a “tacit” process. As Dave Snowden has put it: “We know more than we think, we can think more than what we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.” The gaps are quantitative as well as qualitative, and much (content, context and meaning) can get lost in the struggle to translate the tacit knowledge to the explicit statement. Therein perhaps lies much if not most human misunderstanding.

So if there is no universally-agreed-upon process or structure for this form of dialogue, what at least are the underlying principles and practices that govern it when it is effectively done?

Chris Innes, in his book Healing Corrections, about how Bohmian Dialogue is being tried to create “healing environments” that transform the culture of our incarceration systems, describes some of them. He says there are four key practices that must be learned and practiced:

1. Speaking in your own, authentic voice. This is a re-learnable art. It is not the voice we usually use in our conversations.
2. Listening, actively and deeply, with one’s whole body and attention.
3. Respecting other people and their views, and accepting they are doing their best and are genuine in their intentions.
4. Suspending judgements, and suspending claims to the validity our own assumptions and beliefs.

The methods used in most organizations to “solve problems” and “make decisions” do not lend themselves to dialogue, since the purpose of dialogue is different: it is to achieve a shared understanding and appreciation of the issues. From that shared meaning and perspective, one can then, if needed, move to problem-solving and decision-making. Or, more often, the appropriate decisions and solutions may simply be obvious from this new shared perspective and understanding.

Importantly, dialogue encourages and enables a shift of power dynamics in the group, the emergence of a sense of shared vision, and a shift from “fragmented” personal stories towards a collective story.

In a multi-author book on dialogue entitled The Conditions for Thriving Conversations, Mario Cayer lays out what he sees as the five ‘dimensions’ of Bohmian dialogue and their attributes and prerequisites, as follows:

1. Dialogue as social conversation, without agenda or purpose: listening, respect, empathy, care, receptivity, appreciating the others’ experience and perspective, reciprocity
2. Dialogue as collective inquiry about participants’ underlying motivations, feelings, assumptions and beliefs: openness, courage, artful questioning, raising “collective consciousness”, unlearning in order to learn
3. Dialogue as creation of shared meaning and common culture: flow and exchange of meaning, diversity of viewpoints, willingness to be transformed, suspension of judgement, conversation as collective therapy
4. Dialogue as participatory process, a “playing with” each other: empowerment, lack of hierarchy, new ways of seeing, embeddedness in the whole, with more absorbing what is heard and less conceptualization around it
5. Dialogue as collective meditation, as ‘being’ together not ‘doing’: attention, acceptance, liberation from self and a shift of perspective to that of the coherent whole

So what do we do with all this? How do we develop practices and processes for dialogue that will lead to the emergence of enough deep collective understanding that everyone ‘just knows just what to do’?

How do we move from the enormous promise of dialogue, and its appealing underlying principles, to something we can all employ in every conversation we are involved in, including perhaps even conversations/dialogues with ourselves? How can we allow and enable dialogue to unfold without a predetermined purpose, intention, or even theme to get the group focused, in our attention-starved, frenzied, action-oriented modern society?

I think it makes sense, if we believe there is something useful to get from dialogue, to begin with two steps: 

1. Working personally on the four key practices (speaking in our authentic voice, deep active listening, respecting others and the legitimacy of their perspectives, and suspending judgements and our own assumptions, beliefs and opinions), and then 
2. Exercising these practices in a group whose participants are all likewise working on these four key practices, until we have achieved competence in the five dimensions of dialogue and the attributes of each.

I sense that Daniel Schmactenberger has been studying this for a long time, and is acting as a sort of model of what disciplined dialogue practice might offer us. In any of his podcasts and videos, and even in his reflective writing, it’s fascinating and inspiring to observe how he exemplifies the four practices of dialogue. But I suspect not many people have both the exceptional intellectual capacity and the patience to learn these new practices and put them into everyday use unassisted.

Even if dialogue was, as David asserts, the natural, emergent means of communication and collective intelligence of “uncivilized” tribal cultures, it is hard to imagine it becoming so again on any scale in our socially broken, industrial civilization culture.

I wonder whether those willing to go through this self-learning and self-training would mostly be those who have already been conditioned to be intellectually curious and reflective, which might include large numbers of philosophers and scientists and even readers of this blog, but a very small proportion of our entire society. This self-selecting group might then become very good at emerging insights and even achieving a collective understanding and shared culture among themselves (which could be great fun, and hard but satisfying work). But they will be unlikely to convince the vast majority (including most of the rich and powerful) to even consider using dialogue. So what good would it do? 

Perhaps some of the participants might invent goods and services that might make the world a better place. Perhaps where there is a significant concentration of skilled dialogue participants in one community, it could lead to valuable shifts and important new initiatives and discoveries in those communities. But I suspect on the whole it would just distance these participants even more from the people who are actually making most of the decisions that are, in toto, destroying our world. And it would probably distance them as well from the great numbers of people approving these ghastly decisions with their votes, behaviours and pocketbooks.

Still, maybe it’s worth it, just to know what might have been possible. If it’s far too late to prevent civilization’s near-term collapse, and if our conditioning has rendered any significant change in the trajectory of the human experiment impossible, it would still be interesting to know what a healthy, connected human society, re-skilled in the inherent capacity of dialogue, might be capable of. It might even be some small consolation if we could gift this knowledge to the relocalized communities left after civilization’s fall, in the hope they can make better use of it than we could.

photo from a women’s march, source not cited

In a recent article in the New Yorker, Jelani Cobb chronicles the work of Derrick Bell, considered by many the father of Critical Race Theory (CRT). It’s a strange name for a fairly straight-forward, compelling and much-misrepresented thesis: Racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society that it has been able to reassert itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because the same thesis could be applied to many of the other abominations that progressives keep thinking have been done away with, only to find that they’ve never gone away at all, merely stayed underground for a while until the political climate, at least in some circles, is willing to tolerate them again. Things like: misogyny (revitalized by Trump and incel-baiting academics like Jordan Peterson), forced-birth laws, climate change denial, xenophobia, anti-science, anti-authority and anti-regulation paranoia, and homophobia, just to name a few.

So now the message of CRT is being deliberately and systematically distorted, including by the right-wing ‘media’, to portray it as a kind of blame-y reverse racism and perverse thought-censoring ‘wokeness’, all rolled into one. Right-wing hate-mongers like the governor of Texas (and eight other copy-cat states) have encouraged this reactionary behaviour by banning the teaching of anything related to race in the states’ schools. Such behaviour, of course, perfectly (and ironically) confirms the validity of Derrick’s thesis.

I have argued that our very nature and conditioning impede our capacity to bring about and sustain positive social change. My sense from studying history and culture suggests that social, political and economic change happens only when the old generation dies and a new generation with different entrained beliefs and imperatives fills the power vacuum.

So, I would say, change can happen when the new generation has different entrained beliefs and imperatives. For example: We no longer (with some notable exceptions) tolerate overt slavery on the basis of race. Women (in most countries) are allowed to vote and hold office (and usually do so more competently than men). Torture cannot (legally, in most places) be used as a form of punishment or to extract confessions for alleged crimes. Even in our current age of growing fascism, I think reversion of these changes is unlikely to occur.

These changes have come about to rectify what I believe are appreciated instinctively and globally as ‘inhumane’ behaviours, and those behaviours are, I think (at least over the million-year horizon of our species’ existence), relatively rare and aberrant.

In contrast, abominations like racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and epistemophobia (a word I just discovered, meaning fear and distrust of science and knowledge), which seem generally to have their roots in people’s aversion to things that are unfamiliar and hence considered threatening, are more challenging to stamp out. The irrational fear and hatred that underlies them is so widespread and so long-standing that it is often not even consciously recognized. And so this fear and hatred engenders broad, sustained, institutionalized, unchallenged, individual and collective physical, social, political, economic and psychological violence. In other words, the problems that this fear and hatred manifest become systemic.

It therefore doesn’t surprise me that the battles against these ills need to be fought again and again, especially as the stress level in our society ratchets up ever-higher.

The staying power of these systemic ills occurs because the underlying beliefs are often passed down, within each demographic, largely unchanged, from generation to generation. Increasingly and depressingly, for example, young white males tend to vote, on many issues, the same way their old white male parents do.

This heritability can be particularly insidious when it’s unconscious. Many racists and misogynists I have met are entirely unaware of their fear and hatred, because as long as they don’t openly act on it, they can plausibly deny, at least to themselves and to their children, that they are racists or misogynists.

Paradoxically, young people might be more prone to pick up and sustain their parents’ racism or misogyny when it’s not acted out — the fear and hatred is subconsciously inherited by a combination of insinuation, unchallenged beliefs that imply fear or hatred might be understandable without saying so categorically, along with observed aversive behaviours, misinformation, and simple exclusion from, or prohibition from, contact that might dispel the fear or hatred of the unknown group (eg in segregated communities, clubs, schools and institutions).

Whereas if Mom and Dad wear MAGA hats while aiming armed weapons at peaceful protesters of colour passing by their house, the kids may recognize the folly of their parents’ fearful or hateful beliefs and behaviours, and adopt a radically different set of beliefs and attitudes.

The media, by sensationalistic reporting of unrepresentative groups and extremist individuals, and by encouraging misinformation (the more outrageous, the stronger the response and the more attention for advertisers to exploit), amplify this fear and anger, and hence abet the retrenchment of fear-driven attitudes and hatreds, and deepen the resultant social ills.

And this enables reactionary populist fear-mongers like Trump (and Hitler) to use these media to ratchet up the hatred, fear and distrust that they depend on to galvanize their base, making sustained liberalization of attitudes and beliefs almost impossible.

Though we pride ourselves on our rationality as a species, what we believe has more to do with what and how we feel than what we think. Even science is not a purely rational, objective undertaking, as Stephen J Gould stressed in his book The Mismeasure of Man:

Science, since people must do it, is a socially embedded activity. It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition. Much of its change through time does not record a closer approach to absolute truth, but the alteration of cultural contexts that influence it so strongly. Facts are not pure and unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable inductions from facts. The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural.

No surprise, then, that in this age of supposed science and reason, our emotion-charged credulousness has amplified anti-intellectualism, distrust of science, scientists, scientific facts, and scientific institutions, and, among other things, extended a pandemic that should have been over a year ago, and unnecessarily quadrupled its death toll.

The upshot of all this is, of course, not what progressives want to hear. History is not a story of steady progress punctuated by brief periods of backsliding. It is, instead, an endless and un-winnable battle against fear, hatred, misinformation, and the psychopaths and the clueless who exploit it all in times of stress to foment systemic violence, ignorance, and folly. And then we lick our wounds and prepare for the next round.

Conditioned as we are, we can only do our best to deal with it all, to make the best of it. History, for us, it seems, will not be a story with a happy ending. But we have no choice but to keep fighting to make it, at least, a tiny bit better than it might have been had we not tried.

cartoon by David Parkins in the Globe & Mail

Monday was election day in Canada. Nothing changed. The results were essentially identical to those of the last election. If there were any significant changes in voting patterns, they were these:

1. The urban/rural voting polarity increased. Conservatives (and the BQ in Québec) swept almost every rural riding by a huge margin. The Liberals and NDP swept almost every urban riding by a huge margin. Those margins almost invariably increased compared with the last election. Of the dozen or so ridings that changed hands, almost all of them changed to conform to this rural/urban split pattern. The overall votes for the four progressive parties vs the two conservative parties remained unchanged at 60%-40% — it hasn’t moved much in a generation.
2. The borderline fascist “People’s Party”, which is very closely aligned in policies to the borderline fascist US Republican party, received 5% of the votes. That’s one out of every twenty Canadians. One of its riding association leaders was arrested for pelting the Prime Minister with handfuls of gravel during the campaign, which pretty much says it all.

The Liberal party, which has governed for most of the last century, often, and again now, as a minority government propped up by the near-socialist NDP, is at heart socially liberal but economically conservative. It has been totally gutless when it comes to dealing with economic inequality and climate change, and was hoping to win a majority so it could start ignoring the NDP’s calls for action on these fronts and slide further right. But the Liberals are not heartless, and have been less incompetent at dealing with CoVid-19 than any conservative government.

Under the undemocratic “first past the post” system that the Liberals promised to replace (but then reneged on that promise), the results are about the best that could be hoped for. If we could ever get proportionate representation, we could have a government that looks much like what we have now, but it might be able, and would probably be driven, to introduce more progressive economic and environmental legislation (tax the rich, carbon taxes and pollution penalties, GAI, pharmacare, shift away from non-renewable resources etc). But with the current system, we can expect to see the Liberals continuing to largely ignore inequality and climate change, as they think it’s too politically risky to do more than pay them lip service.

But at least we should be able to avoid the creeping fascism evident in so many other western ‘democracies’ over the past few decades.

So we hold our noses and plug on.