If we are actually going to fight the Talibanesque aims of the fundamentalist, religious right, it seems necessary to understand why they are here. I mean, why, in the twenty-first century are we devolving sociologically into the medieval culture of religious authoritarianism.
Progressives tend to blame George W. Bush, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and a crowd of southern, bigoted, individuals for fomenting such a reactionary cultural movement. But are they the cause or merely the symptoms of a larger force.
Maybe we should blame the seventies.
In 1980 I was working in the management of a large corporation which was trying to be somewhat enlightened in it's approach to human resource issues. The powers that were mandated that all of us attend a series of films authored by Dr. Morris Massey, a psychologist (as I recall) who had studied the way in which generations develop their value systems.
The series was titled, "You Are What You Were When" and expressed Massey's thesis that people generally, and permanently, develop their basic worldview by the age of ten - a worldview heavily influenced by the major trends and significant events going on at the time. Therefore you could tell a lot about the world by looking back in time to the era when individual age groups were approaching their tenth year.
We observed that government was largely run by people in their sixties which, considering when the film was made meant that our circa 1980 leaders developed their basic values in the 1920s and to understand how they looked at life we should look at the headlines and social trends of the roaring twenties.
Likewise, large businesses were often led by fifty year-olds; small business by those in their forties; entrepeneurs were generally in their thirties; people starting families in their twenties and so on. To understand the sociological origins of our world you needed to go back and look at the events that effected children during the the depression, the WWII years, the Cold War and the television age of the sixties. Multiplying the childhood experiences of these generations by their role in current society and then adding all of these groups together yielded a composite picture of our society and a framework for describing our culture.
It has been twenty-four years since I've seen the film, so forgive me if my recollections are hazy and probably not a little inaccurate. But the fact that I'm recalling any of this at all is an indication of how powerful the presentation was. The point of this essay derives from the part that I remember most clearly - the last segment where Massey used his theory for predictive purposes: How would the children growing up in the world of the 1970s be affected and what would that mean for society in the early part of the twenty-first century?
Massey first asked the question: What are the major societal forces upon seventies era children? His answer was twofold: The loss of confidence in authority post-Viet Nam and post-Watergate, coupled with the rising divorce rate and the emergence of the non-nuclear family.
The result of these forces upon children would be, according to Massey, to instill a sense of impermanence and a search for belonging. He went on to make a startling conclusion: The early decades of the twenty-first century would be marked by a rise in deeply held religious beliefs and a return to orthodox religious values.
At that moment I recall thinking, "Hogwash. We're not going back to the fourteenth century! We're heading for a new age of enlightenment." But based upon the power that the religious right has upon our society today, perhaps I was a bit too presumptuous.
So let's assume for a moment that Dr. Massey was right and that the religious right has achieved it's weird dominance as a result of underlying social currents. This would mean that George Bush and his right-wing fanatics are merely opportunistic vultures taking advantage of trends that were set in place thirty years ago.
It would also mean that simply tossing George out of the White House would only be treating a symptom and not part of any overall cure. In order to return this country to any form of modern, secular and progressive values would mean confronting the sense of dislocation buried within the memories of the American population.
The implications are staggering. Since the Middle East was going through similar dislocations in the seventies, perhaps that explains the current regional upheavals there as well. Considering that the U.S. was merely one of the modern world's first country to exhibit the fundamentalist effects of the turbulent seventies, the rest of the world could subsequently fall, domino fashion, to the far-right.
It seems to me, based upon this analysis, that the job facing progressives is not simply to change the political rosters of our government but to address the global sense that we've lost our moral and cultural bearings, and to show that enlightment values are capable of restoring them.
What do you think?