Category Archives: Psychological Musings

Europe has a Muslim problem (and I mean that in the best possible way)

The peoples of Europe, in creating an ever closer union among them, are resolved to share a peaceful future based on common values. Conscious of its spiritual and moral heritage, the Union is founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality …Human dignity is inviolable. It must be respected and protected. From the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

Europe has a Muslim problem, is something I’ve been thinking of ever since we got back from Europe, and have been afraid to say out loud. Europe is caught between its founding values and being drastically changed. The European Union may have started for economic reasons but common social values have become as important and those values were spelled out with the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997 and then put in concrete with the Charter of Fundamental Rights in 2000. Those values include a respect for human rights and the dignity of the human being. Those values demand that Europe accept the huge number of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa (refugees that were created, in good part, by previous European actions as well as the first world lifestyle that is polluting the atmosphere which has resulted in an increased desertification of these areas). 

The history of Europe is, in many ways, the history of Christianity.  As an aside, sort of, I originally wrote the first sentence the other way around. They are that intertwined. End aside. Every village, no matter how small, has a church and driving through the countryside, the first sight of a village is always the church steeple. Every city, no matter how sophisticated, has a cathedral. These churches and cathedrals are so important to the culture of Europe – France and Germany, at least – that there is even a special tax to maintain them. When we were in Schifferstadt – everywhere, well, in both Germany and France, at least – we were really aware of the church bells.  They start about seven in the morning, go on a morning frenzied binge shortly afterward, and ring every fifteen minutes throughout the day. They are marginally annoying. 

Now, in Schifferstadt, the new Muslim immigrants say that all that bell ringing is too much. I agree with them but the natives grew up with the bells and they like them, they are part of their national culture and heritage. If that weren’t enough, the Muslims want to be able to broadcast The Call to Prayer five times a day including dawn and at night, which is not what the natives want. 

Muslims made up about 5% of the population of Europe in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center and that is supposed to grow to about 10% by 2050 even if immigration stops; because the Europeans are older and the immigrants are having more babies per capita. The pressure to leave the Middle East and North Africa is only going to increase so the immigrant population will probably be much higher. These immigrants also want to be treated as humans, with dignity, freedom, and equality, after all, that is the core value of Europe, that is what makes Europe, Europe. But they are from wildly different cultures. Different religions, yes, but of more importance, different cultures. Their coming to Europe in big numbers will change Europe but keeping them out will change Europe even more. 

 

Trumpism and Jung/evolution

Stories about anti-heroes are powerful not because they confuse us, but because they deeply satisfy our unconscious understanding of who we are. The victory of Donald Trump was another story about who we actually are. From an article,  Jung and the Trumpian Shadow by Alexander Blum, in a Web magazine called Guillette.

A day or so ago, Patricia Karnowski posted an article, referenced above, with the comment: OK friends. I found it. This explains what is going on… or at least it helps. And it does…or, at least, it clears up many of the very muddy ideas I’ve had swirling around in my heart and head. I want to yell “Read This Article!!” – I actually considered making it the title of my post – not so much because it is so insightful or that it tells the truth – although it is and it mostly does – but that it looks at the election from a new-to-me, detached, Jungian-pattern, overview. So much discussion of why Trump won the election is lost in yelled accusations or, just, sheer rage.      

One of my strongest memories of the disastrous – in my opinion, at least – 2016 election was the first Republican Debate. Trump on the far end of the stage, in no man’s land, and, in the center Jeb Bush, the man who had raised $120 million, more money than everybody else put together. He was resplendent, waiting for his anointment, and Trump destroyed him. In almost every argument about how stupid Trump might be, I have told my arguer how masterful I thought Trump played his position but I couldn’t really define what happened or how Trump did it. Blum analyzes it from a pattern level. 

In an essay titled “Feminism and the problem of supertoxic masculinity,” political scientist Justin Murphy makes an unconventional argument. In encouraging men to be passive, polite, and non-offensive through social pressure, most men will conform to that feminist standard out of a genuine unwillingness to be abrasive or do harm. But a small number of men who cannot be shamed, in a world filled with men who refuse to check them, will begin to dominate….Jeb Bush was far closer to the feminist male ideal than Donald Trump ever was. Bush was tepid, meek, and asked for polite apologies. Trump refused to apologize, bullied him, and bulldozed him. Jeb was too used to the polite society of elite socialization to deal with a man who was, by comparison, an uncouth barbarian. Everyone across the political spectrum, from socialists to Trump’s supporters, thoroughly enjoyed watching Jeb, the civilized man who was promised everything, be devastated by a shameless and cruel competitor. People, regardless of their political views, enjoyed watching a man perceived as weak be totally dismissed by a morally darker but more interesting man.

I don’t agree with every word of the above, or, more accurately, I don’t want to agree with it, but I have to admit that both Michele and I enjoyed Bush getting trashed. My default, however, is not to moralize over what Blum calls the shadow; I prefer to think selfish, unthinking behavior like racism, as being rooted in our territorial animal past and is a deep and powerful force.

As quoted by Blum, Jung says: 

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

And Blum points out that 

American progressives believed that through a respectable politics, the psychology of hatred could be repressed through a combination of censorship and social pressure. They imagined that the march of progress was so inevitable that by shaming and denying the power of our worst impulses, we could create a paradise.

It is turning out that we can’t and I found this article very helpful in my trying to find out how we got here. Jung and the Trumpian Shadow, check it out.   

An interesting observation

My sister, Paula, made an interesting observation. By way of background, putting a hand on the other person’s back – or any body part, really – is a sign of dominance. A father puts his hand on the son’s shoulder, not the other way around; the homeowner puts her hand on the gardener’s arm to direct his attention. 

When Donald Trump, President of the United States, and   Kim Jong-un, Supreme Leader of North Korea, first made a joint press conference at Capella Resort, Singapore, Kim seemed completely out of his league. He had obviously had never been in front of a gaggle of press and photographers before, not one that large, at least. Trump looked like the kind father, hand on Kim’s back, guiding the naive newcomer around. By the last meeting, however, Kim was doing the guiding.   

Sanity and other people

I don’t believe it’s possible to have a disembodied intelligence without a physical connection to reality. Everything we think, everything in our thought processes is built around being in touch with reality. Even the word “touch”…Rodney Brooks, former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot and co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Rethink Robotics

I first heard of Rodney Brooks in 1997 when I saw him in Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. In it, Brooks talks about making simple, cheap, insect-like, robots with closed circuitry that didn’t work on paper (it was ten years ago that I saw the movie and I am technically way over my head so I may have misremembered some of this). The robots kept falling down and bumping into walls but as they did they started self-correcting; soon they were walking and not bumping into walls. Their learning was shaped by an external reality.  

We humans, Homo sapiens, are social animals and we are shaped by our social environment as well as our physical environment. Not just growing up but as grown-ups. Hermits aren’t hermits because they are weird, they become weird because they have no social environment to bump into to keep them reasonable. People who live alone, like the uni-bomber, become strange; if they started strange, they become stranger living alone; isolated. Because dictators are usually behind a wall of courtesans, in a very real way, they are also alone which, I think, is why so many of them spiral into increasingly extreme behavior. They are alone because nobody is pushing back everybody is unctuously agreeing.

I think this isolation, surrounded by toadies and fixers, is the way Trump ran his business and, increasingly, the Trump Presidency. Extrapolating, this is the problem with the closed feedback loop of Facebook. Only hearing our side of the story makes us crazy.  

Michelle Wolf and the loss of irony (and humor)

Dang, I thought I posted this when it was current, but, anyhow…

Last night’s program was meant to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honoring civility, great reporting, scholarship winners, not to divide people. Unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit of the mission. The complaint by The White House Correspondents’ Association’s president, Margaret Talev who, apparently, has no idea what a “vigorous and free press” means. A press that is afraid of dividing people by telling the truth seems to me to be too close to a press that self-censors the truth because it might offend somebody in power

Margaret Talev was reacting to Michelle Wolf’s comedy act at the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Dinner, where the press and the people they are supposed to be covering, get together. I thought her act was just OK, but, to be fair to her, I read that this is a very hard crowd to play; it’s in a big space, everybody is formally dressed to impress not laugh, and, with round tables, half the people in the room are facing the wrong way to start with. The big damper, however, is that the room is full of very important people who are sucking-up to each other and they don’t like being made fun of. Trump stayed away which just shows that he is not as stupid as some people think.