If I'm arguing for empathy for the South, some people assume I'm upset because I am identifying with former slave owners and I want to defend them. If I'm arguing for empathy for teabaggers, some might assume I'm a troll, unrealistic, or selfishly driven by a need to hurt a Democratic Party not responsive to my needs. If I argue for empathy with soldiers who kill civilians, people think I'm upset because I'm a blind patriot or militarist. If I argue for empathy with either of the "factions" on dailykos, people assume I am a partisan of the other faction.
When such discussions progress at cross-purposes, I often become agitated, stomach churning, but for none of the assumed reasons. The reason I am upset is because I sense the seeds of war in the prevalent psychology on my beloved dailykos. All too often, my desperate pleas for awareness are received as accusations.
Fear and Loathing
One evening a reporter asked antiwar activist A.J. Muste if he really thought that by standing outside the White House holding a candle night after night, he would change the policies of the country, to which Muste replied:
Oh, you've got it all wrong. I'm not doing this to change the country. I do it so the country won't change me.
The country seems to be changing many of us. For over a decade now relentless talk radio, and now television, have bombarded our senses with sophisticated if dumb-seeming propaganda calculated to keep citizens at a fever pitch of fear, anger, uncertainty, and alienation. You don't have to listen to Rush Limbaugh to be affected by it; we hear it echoed by mainstream politicians, see it reflected in government policy, sense it in the voices of our confused, betrayed neighbors. It is manifest here on dailykos as rage, alienation, and desperation. Reality TV trains people to trust no one; even if few of us watch these programs, distrust is contagious and we've come down with a bad case.
In comments here, as well is in public discussions, I see the creation of enemies, assigning them simplistic outlines and one-dimensional black and white attitudes and views. Cornering the enemy into a position that is utterly without merit requires denying all relevant facts that might complicate or contradict one’s stance, resulting in little tolerance for ambiguity or uncertainty. Yet, a recent study showed that people possessed of such tolerance make better decisions than rigid thinkers. If we are to participate in wise decision-making, it behooves us to move away from these habits of conflict. Of all the enemies we fight, genuine as some may be, the most ruthless, unyielding and elusive we face is the enemy within.
The Psychological Root of War
The problem after a war is the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence will pay. Who will now teach him a lesson? - A.J. Muste
Like climate change and the financial meltdown, the factors that lead people to fight are well understood. But as we see with those other problems, knowledge divorced from action is useless. The sine qua non of warfare is a projection of one’s own negative traits and tendencies onto others. Ironically, this very tendency is often actively practiced as we read explanations of the psychological underpinnings of war. We like to think we are understanding what is wrong with other people, rather than learning the universal human tendencies that make each of us vulnerable to being violent. The challenge lies in understanding that the psychology of projection that leads to warfare applies to me as fully as to any Nazi. This fact has been well demonstrated by experiments in social psychology. The veil between civilized and barbarous is precariously thin in all but the rarest of humans.
Sam Keen
It should go without saying that individuals dealing with their personal enmity will not automatically solve the problem of warfare. But it is likewise certain that the politics of the warrior will not change without a constituency of individuals who have made the solitary decision to follow the path of metanoia rather than paranoia and to begin the practice of compassion rather than competition. Or, as the matter was stated a long time ago, "Remove first the beam from your own eye and then you will see more clearly to remove the mote from your brother's eye."
This diary is an invitation to discuss the roots of violence, the ways in which dailykos interaction militates for and against violence, and ideas for active participation in reducing the dangerous atmosphere in which Americans now carry on their national business. Any positive practice can start right here. The same behaviors--grounded in self-awareness--that will diminish verbal abusiveness on dailykos will lead as well to diminished warmongering on the global scale.
The following excerpt from a Sam Keen poem applies to the psychology of all humans in all places. It is easy to fall into a paradoxical reading of this poem as an explanation of the psychology of other evil-doers—Nazis, neo-cons, or slave-owners. Here’s a challenge. Think of a group you blame with a visceral emotion approaching hatred—racists, teabaggers, Republicans, or a rival dailykos faction, for example—and apply the lessons here to the way in which you create enemies by projecting on to them the parts of yourself that you can’t bear to acknowledge as present even in latent form. In the poem, "kill" can be meaningfully understood as metaphoric, in the sense that people on dailykos regularly attempt to annihilate their interlocutors.
To Create An Enemy
Start with an empty canvas
Sketch in broad outline the forms of
men, women, and children.
Dip into the well of your own
disowned darkness
with a wide brush and
stain the strangers with the sinister hue
of the shadow.
Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed,
hatred, carelessness you dare not claim as
your own.
Obscure the sweet individuality of each face.
Erase all hints of the myriad loves, hopes,
fears that play through the kaleidoscope of
every finite heart.
Twist the smile until it forms the downward
arc of cruelty.
snip
When your icon of the enemy is complete
you will be able to kill without guilt,
slaughter without shame.
The thing you destroy will have become
merely an enemy of God, an impediment
to the sacred dialectic of history.
Blame and Victimization
Basic Stance:
- I am not accountable
- I am morally right.
- I am forever entitled to sympathy.
To play the victim is to be legitimate, righteous, and morally superior. It is a virtually guaranteed victory, because you cannot fight "victims," you can only appease them.
An insidious deterrent to confronting the tendencies to violence is habitual seeking of victim status for the sake of the power it brings. This habit also leaves one vulnerable to manipulation by the propaganda of self-righteous blame coupled with encouragement to feel unjustly accused oneself. The country is experiencing an epidemic of victim-seeking, or so it seems to me, as evidenced in manipulations of Christians, teabaggers, and I fear a significant number of kossacks. If we would step into the world confidently and vibrantly, courageously committing our energies to creating a more peaceful and tolerant world, we must first take responsibility for our own suffering as well as ways in which we contribute to the suffering of others.
Sam Keen Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination
Healing begins when we cease playing the blame game, when we stop assigning responsibility for war to some mysterious external agency and dare to become conscious of our violent ways....
The persistent efforts of liberals, peacemongers, and assorted groups of nice people to assign the blame for war to the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, or some other surrogate for the devil, are no less a denial of responsibility than laying the blame on an external enemy. The sentimental cliché "The people don't want war, only their leaders do," is a pious way to avoid thinking seriously about the problem. And we will not make progress in severing the roots of war without reowning our consensual paranoia and the corporate responsibility for evil. The body politic will change only when there is a democratization of guilt, responsibility, power, and authority. We become politically potent by accepting responsibility, for better or worse, for the conduct of our leaders. In the long view, nations have the leaders they deserve.
What is necessary is not an easy confession, but a political work, a path, a discipline of consciousness that must be undertaken by a community of solitary individuals. There is no way to repent en masse....
[emphasis added]
Preparing for Peace
War is not genetically inevitable. It’s not in our genes; it’s in our social arrangements. If we studied peace as much as we studied war and we prepared for it as much, the whole human psyche would change. – Sam Keen
We must resist war on more than the political level. If our daily habits feed violence, our world will continue at war. The wise lessons of peace and non-violence apply as fully to the simplest comment thread on dailykos as to the most hostile confrontation between countries. The basic skills are the same.
I don't believe that acting skillfully for the greater good is a natural human trait. The socialization process which begins in childhood can continue into adulthood if we practice skillful interaction likely to bring peace and resolution rather than conflict and violence. The practice of compassion requires more than a comfortable feeling of how good and loving we are. We all face stubborn limitations on our ability to step aside from petty jealousy, competitiveness, or fear in order to bring an active compassion. Compassion might mean letting go the need to win an argument we want to win, choosing to place the emotional well-being of the other person above the compulsive need to win, which fades into insignificance so quickly after the battle is abandoned. Much more lasting are the feelings of shame, hurt, or anger internalized from abusive language directed our way. It is possible, through practice, to become more skillful in negotiating differences both with friends and with enemies.
Rescuing the Wisdom Embedded in Religion
I am an agnostic concerning the movement of society away from "real" religion. (The politically motivated fundamentalist fake religion doesn't even count.) But I feel the left is wanting two things that religion used to provide: a common vocabulary and structure for placing service and society above one's immediate ego needs, and practices which strengthen the human ability to live and act in compassion. I feel the loss keenly in the often painful daily interactions here on dailykos.
The practical core of every major religion is the golden rule: treat others as you yourself would like to be treated. Humans are better or worse at this depending, more than anything else, on their commitment to practicing it and on their willingness to look at themselves realistically. Some treat the golden rule as a negotiation—I’ll treat you the way you want to be treated if I feel that you are doing the same for me. Some treat it with delusion—if I were as bad a person as you, I would want to be abused the way I am abusing you. Some think acting in accordance with this rule of compassion is an inherent trait—one that they naturally possess and that their enemies don’t. The essence of the golden rule, however, requires the learned ability to move one’s awareness outside one’s world of narrow personal concerns into an expanded awareness which includes the other. Skillful practice means seeing that the other commenter, like you, would like to be treated kindly and respectfully even when he is intentionally or unintentionally being very, very annoying.
Gandhi brought this understanding to a profound level. The golden rule is not just a giant religious "thou shalt" based on myths and fairy tales; rather, it is a technology of human behavior which can resolve conflicts in ways which seem miraculous to a mind habituated to conflict and paranoia.
Erik Erikson – Gandhi’s Truth: on the origins of militant non-violence
He [Gandhi] would not permit either side to undermine the other; even as the mill owners became virulent and threatening he forbade his workers to use counter-threats. He extracted from these starving people a pledge that they would abstain from any destruction, even of the opponent’s good name. He thus not only avoided physical harm to machines or men (remember that the police appeared unarmed from the third day of the strike on) but also refused to let moralistic condemnation arouse anger in the opponent—and guilt feelings in the accuser.
He refused, then, to permit that cumulative aggravation of bad conscience, negative identity, and hypocritical moralism which characterize the division of men into pseudo-species. In fact, he conceded to the mill owners that their errors were based only on a misunderstanding of their and their workers’ obligations and functions, and he appealed to their "better selves." In thus demonstrating perfect trust in them, he was willing to proceed with daily improvisations leading to an interplay in which clues from the opponent determined the next step, although he was never willing to exploit any sudden appearance of weakness on the part of his opponent. The acceptance of suffering, and, in fact, of death, which is so basic to his "truth force," constitutes an active choice without submission to anyone: it includes the acceptance of punishment which one knew one courted. All of this is at once a declaration of non-intent to harm others . . . an expression of a faith in the opponent’s inability to persist in harming others beyond a certain point, provided, of course, that the opponent is convinced that he is not only not in mortal danger of losing either identity or rightful power, but may, in fact, acquire a more inclusive identity and a more permanent share of power.
. . . The mood of the Event was pervaded, above all, by the spirit of giving the opponent the courage to change.... At such periods in his life Gandhi possessed a Franciscan gaiety and a capacity to reduce situations to their bare essentials, thus helping others both to discard costly defenses and denials and to realize hidden potentials of good will and energetic deed.
Snip
Gandhi’s way, as we have seen, is that of a double conversion: the hateful person, by containing his egoistic hate and by learning to love the opponent as human, will confront the opponent with an enveloping technique that will force, or rather permit, him to regain his latent capacity to trust and to love. In all these and other varieties of confrontation, the emphasis is not so much (or not entirely) on the power to be gained as on the cure of an unbearable inner condition. Some of the revolutionaries of today share with Gandhi the readiness to suffer and to die in the pursuit of their conviction that there are ills in the human condition which an insightful person must not tolerate. Gandhi could sympathize with proud and violent youth; but he believed that violence breeds violence from generation to generation and that only the combined insight and discipline of Satyagraha can really disarm man, or rather, give him a power stronger than all arms.
[emphasis added]
Pledging to Live for Peace and Harmony
In 1914 Henry Hodgkin and Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze attended a Christian pacifist conference in Konstanz in southern Germany. With WWI breaking out, they stood on the platform of the railway station at Cologne. The English Quaker and German Lutheran pledged to each other
We are one in Christ and can never be at war.
Hodgkin carried this pledge forward, organizing the Fellowship of Reconcialiation (FoR), which involved more than 100 Christian denominations. The FoR set out six principles, known as "the basis." Because Quakers don't believe in creeds, the principles express general agreement rather than a fixed form of words. A religious person who wishes to commit her/himself to peace may study these words, memorize them even, and make a conscious attempt to put them into practice. The words provide an anchor, a reminder and guidance, for the longing so many of us feel to work toward bringing an end to war and violence.
What can be the "basis" for an agnostic or atheist who wishes to feel united with others in a commitment to peace? Can our dailykos community create a framework from which to work toward our common goals while minimizing the accusations and demeaning insults which are bringing emotional pain to many of us here, a set of principles which will also increase our skill in defusing the violence inherent in much public debate today? I believe such guidelines would be immensely helpful.
Here is "the basis," stripped of all religious references. The word "love" here is synonymous with "compassion."
* That love... is the only power by which evil can be overcome and the only sufficient basis of human society.
* That, in order to establish a world-order based on love, it is incumbent upon those who believe in this principle to accept it fully, both for themselves and in relation to others and to take the risks involved in doing so in a world which does not yet accept it.
* That therefore we are forbidden to wage war, and that our loyalty to our country and to humanity calls us instead to a life-service for the enthronement of love in personal, commercial and national life.
* That the power and wisdom of love stretch far beyond the limits of our present experience, and that love is ever waiting to break forth into human life in new and larger ways.
* That since love manifests itself in the world through men and women, we offer ourselves to its redemptive purpose to be used in whatever way it may be revealed to us.
We Can Never Be at War?
If not in Christ, how about in the name of a healthy society. Sometimes kossacks, I know, use the issue of civility as another bargaining chip for proving making others wrong. But for the many kossacks truly interested in contributing to a healthy atmosphere for debate, connection, and empowerment, what principles might we "pledge" ourselves to support? Here are some of my notions:
- In general, identify the anger, harshness, irrationality, and nastiness as serious issues on dkos and commit to doing something active to undermine them. This does NOT mean identifying perpetrators and pointing them out. Rather, this means taking active steps to add elements of communion, respect, open listening, appreciation of differences, etc. Instead of fighting an atmosphere we don't like, actively creating the atmosphere we want.
- Make a conscious effort every day to say positive, supportive things, even to those with whom we disagree but whose behavior is honorable. This means where in the past we would have let a comment go unremarked, we would now take a moment to respond in a supportive way.
- Refuse to engage negativism devoid of useful content. Just turn away. Don't point it out. Don't correct it. Don't condemn it. Just let it dangle by its own weight over the abyss of meaninglessness.
- Respond to sincere but disturbing comments with soothing gentleness, being willing to place concern for the emotional state of the person above the content of the discussion.
- Stay out of circular fights.
- When necessary, gently remind commentors known to be honorable to avoid personal insult, hyperbole, and other behavior destructive of useful discourse. I keep hoping we will do this with people whose content we support.
- Refuse to use civility as a weapon in discussions, i.e., accuse others of incivility only for the purposes of winning an argument.
I believe we can marginalize harsh behavior and insults if we work consciously to create an atmosphere of active respect and caring.
Our best hope for remaining human, and remaining alive for the generations it will require to convert our disposition toward hostility to a disposition toward kindness, is to devote the full energy of our imagination and will to finding a way to live in relative harmony with our neighbors. - Sam Keen