Populist Revolt Against Elite’s Vision of the U.S. New York Times
Not really a big surprise, still a big shock. It’s very likely not as bleak as it looks this morning.
It’s probably going to be a little worse if you are Jewish, or Muslim, or undocumented, or a woman, or anything but white European male, for that matter. The white male hierarchy – and it must be larger than I imagined from the viewpoint deep in my little bubble – will have more legitimacy.
The very rich will do better, NATO and Ukraine worse, but in our day-to-day lives, we (Michele and myself and most people we know) probably won’t notice much change .
The spirits that I summoned, I now cannot rid myself of again. Johann Wolfgang von Goeth in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,as quoted by Yuval Noel Harari in Nexus.
The dog barking at you from behind his master’s fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the fence was built; essentially, they both see the area as their territory and are protecting it, even if the dog doesn’t fully understand the concept of ownership like the human does. Robert Ardrey in The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry Into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (1966)
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image. Joan Didion in The White Album (1979)
Michele and I watched the VP debate last Wednesday. I know the debate was on Tuesday, but we had long-standing plans to see Yuval Noel Harari. I’m a big fan of Harari, though, to be accurate, I should really say that I am a big fan of Sapiens, Harari’s first book (I did not get through his second book).
Harari has a new book out, as do many of the other speakers in the same series of talks, and I think that is largely the reason for his being on the speaker tour. The book is Nexus, subtitled A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, and, from his talk, the book sounds interesting, if not very optimistic. One thing that Harari said that was both interesting and frightening is that Israel is using AI to pick targets in their wholesale killing of the indigenous Palestinians (I keep reading that it is called the Israeli-Palestinian War, but with the overwhelming superiority of the Israeli weapons, and an estimated death toll of about 1,706 Israelis to 41,431 Palestinians this fight can not be called a war). Harari pointed out that humans still pull the trigger, but only after AI tells them where to shoot. He did not say it like it was a good thing.
Watching the debate the next day, after reading the reviews, so to speak, was more like doing homework than “Oh boy! Let’s watch the debate”. Vance was very polished and has the ability to make some of his and Trump’s crazy ideas seem almost normal. It seems obvious to me that Vance has done a lot of debating. I kept thinking, Hum, I guess the elite schools are better; Yale, Vance’s alma mater, is better, at least in preparing people for debates, than Chadron State College, Walz’s alma mater.
The first question was something like, “Governor Walz, if it was up to you, would you support or discourage an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran?” Walz didn’t answer the question, saying instead that Hamas attacked first and that Israel has the right to defend itself, and Vice President Harris will provide steady leadership. I understand the Harris/Walz Campaign’s problem here; the Jewish population is a big demographic and a bigger donor pool. On the other side, Michigan and Minnesota, which are both swing states and could go either way, have a lot of Muslim voters, which the party does not want to lose.
Next, one of the moderators asked Vance the same question. The Republicans have a different problem; they lost most of the Muslim vote after President George W. Bush senselessly attacked Iraq (before Bush’s attack, a plurality of Muslims, who are pretty socially conservative, voted Republican). Vance, who is new to the national scene but already disliked for some of his past comments like, “Cat ladies are unhappy and trying to make everybody else miserable.”, said, “I want to answer your question, but, first, let me tell you about myself.” He came across as a nice, reasonable guy. At the very end, he said something to the effect that Israel can do whatever they want. I started to worry that this would be a bad day for the Democrats. Still, as the debate went on, Vance seemed to misrepresent various Republican and Democratic positions and, in the end, refused even to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election, leaving me feeling better.
In the background, the threat of war in the Middle East is ramping up, and Israel is increasingly seen as the bad guy, which, in my opinion, it is. That’s not good. Not good for Israel or for Jewish people around the world who are mistakenly tarred with the same brush as Israelis. I say mistakenly because Jewish people who were born and live outside Israel and Israelis are not interchangeable, and many Jewish people, especially younger Jewish people who consider Israel the dominant power in the region, think the Israeli government is in the wrong.
I’ve been interested in human evolution for a long time, probably since 1966, when I first read The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry Into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations by Robert Ardrey. Robert Ardrey was not a scientist; he was a playwright and a screenwriter who was also interested in human evolution and became a science writer. He was a very controversial science writer in 1966, but most of what was then controversial, like humans evolved in Africa and not Asia, is now considered obvious. Ardrey also wrote that we evolved from animals and were still, in large part, run by our animal roots when the prevailing wisdom was that animals acted out of instinct, and we were different because we acted through our power of reasoning (which, of course, animals didn’t have).
Ardrey postulated that one of the instincts that we are controlled by is our animal instinct to acquire land and defend territory. He further postulated that the Nazis were able to round up and slaughter the Jews because they did not have any territory to defend, and if they did own territory, they would have fought back.
Now, both Israelis and Palestinians think that the land between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean is theirs, exclusively theirs, and both are willing to fight to the death to keep it. I think that it is a problem without a solution. One of my many doctors is an Israeli who moved here from Israel because she did not want to raise her children in a country that treated the Palestinians so cruelly. Off and on, when I have an appointment with her, we end up talking about Israel and Palestine, although neither one of us has a solution.
On one of those visits, I suggested that the only solution was for the Israeli people and the Palestinian people to learn to live together in a single state. She snapped back, “No way, we would never let that happen.” It was the most animated I’ve ever seen her. Much more animated than either Vance or Walz in the aforementioned Vice Presidential Debate.
That debate was, for the most part, a civil, lowkey affair. I don’t mean that as a compliment. It would be a compliment if Senator Vance or Governor Walz actually debated their different takes on the issues, but they didn’t. Both debaters were excellent at not answering the questions, although Walz did it better. I think Vance hurt himself when he started, several times, with, “I don’t want to talk about the past, I want to talk about the future.” Maybe, in the end, that is the good thing about AI. I read that different AI programs make up answers – called hallucinating in the trade – but they haven’t yet learned to equivocate.
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.
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.
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.
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.