“Culture is man’s medium; there is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and altered by culture.” — Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture
According to Ed Hall, American anthropologist and writer, culture is not innate but learned, all of it. Everything in a culture is bound together and culture sets the boundaries that define one tribe or group from another. The odd thing about this is not that we have to learn our culture, but that having learned it we are no longer aware of it. Knowing our context so well we take everything for granted and only pay attention when we stub our toes in the dark because someone moved the furniture. In other words, we only see what we are when we come up against someone who is not like us.
This can be a profoundly disturbing experience, one that sets us back on our heels and causes tempers to flare. Since we learn best through comparison and contrast we should not be surprised when the contrasts between what we think we know about the world, and the way others experience and shape the world, get up in our face. That becomes an ordinance of humility, a teachable moment, an occasion to learn from our mistakes without rubbing out the one who points out our mistakes.
Amartya Sen, Harvard economist and Nobel Prize winner, explores the presumption that we live in an overarching system which categorizes all of us in exactly the same way. This way can be either religious or cultural, but inevitably it sets us against each other. “A solitarist approach,” writes Sen in Identity and Violence, “can be a good way of misunderstanding nearly everyone in the world.” Sen’s reflection on this leads him to the conclusion that when we are assigned one dominant classification —whether it be religion, or community. or culture, or nation, or civilization — which ignores so much that is essential to our personal identity, the many diverse roles that we play and the interlocking communities we move through — violence is almost always the result. Holding hands and singing Kumbaya no longer works in promoting peace, and the wish to see ourselves as really all the same under our skin ignores the recognition that we are, says Sen, “diversely different (italics the author’s).”
Crises can lead to opportunities for us to learn more about our pluralistic human identities and to use those very differences to wake up and hone our sensitivities. Sen and Hall do not exaggerate when they suggest that our very survival as a species may rely on us understanding those diverse differences, not in seeking to conform us all to one identity.
This understanding is hard work, very hard work. In fact, some virulent strains in our own culture inoculate us to these exposures. Religion and politics, the two things most avoided in close relationships, seem to thrive on the us-them dichotomy. Since we tend to grow our own identities in proportion to acceptance by our groups, the easiest way, apparently, to quickly build solidarity in the group is to turn it against other groups. That’s a shortcut we cannot afford these days. This is such a natural law of group formation, in my experience, that we may well expect it sooner rather than later in the life cycle of the groups we belong to or desire to join.
Many years ago, in the wake of the Second World War, Gabriel Marcel, the French Catholic existentialist philosopher and playwright, grappled with parallel issues of individuality and freedom. Writing in Man Against Mass Society, Marcel asked what freedom meant in a society which routinely places us in situations that erode our ethics. We have a choice, of course, but we may not always have the means to live out our convictions. There are others who rely on us and for whom we make compromises just to survive to fight another day. In a materialist culture, says Marcel, everything is reduced to commodities and objects, even human beings.
While he could not have foreseen the reach and scope of the global economy of today, he seemed acutely aware of how entangled our convictions and duties are. If you have a problem with the economic conditions that make affordable clothes, food, and electronics, how far will you go to buy only those goods produced in fair labor conditions?
We don’t know the future, Marcel says, but it is that very ignorance that keeps us hopeful. By way of revolt against the mass society, Marcel argues that “all philosophies of immanence have had their day (italics his).” And we are called to fight against the idolatries of race and class that they foster. Such a fight, he intimates, isn’t just reserved for those with power, assuming of course, that they haven’t already succumbed to the degradations that go with power over others. He puts it in a sentence: “A man cannot be free or remain free, except in the degree to which he remains linked with that which transcends him, whatever the particular form of that link may be. . . .”
Artists have the possibility of creative action against this materialism more readily than most of us, says Marcel. But he’s quick to note that being an artist brings temptations to startle, to innovate at all costs, to sell oneself to the highest bidder or to retreat into the world of the aesthete. All of us are called to be creators of our own freedom. And the way to that freedom lies through remaining open to others. Materialistic societies like ours, says Marcel, sin against this freedom by excluding as forcefully as possible this openness to others. For Marcel the individual could not claim to be free in a culture which callously excludes some and commoditizes almost everything.
It’s not easy to reach for the transcendent in a culture that rewards selfishness nor should we presume that our mere opposition to such a culture means that we are open and unselfish. But on the eve of a bitterly fought election perhaps we can remind ourselves that no matter the outcome we may choose the side of the transcendent by learning to listen and to understand those unlike ourselves.
“Life is long if you know how to use it.” — Seneca
When someone in the public eye passes away it causes us to refurbish old memories. Such was the case when Senator George McGovern died at 90 this week, and Jacques Barzun, perhaps our last public intellectual, died at the age of 104 in San Antonio, Texas. Both men were, in their own ways, the last of a kind, the public figure who lives out his or her convictions with grace and irony right up to the end.
McGovern is often remembered as the man who lost to Richard Nixon by a landslide in the 1972 presidential election. Nixon, our most paranoid of presidents, was fearful that George Wallace would take away votes and sought to find anything he could to smear Wallace. The assassination attempt that left Wallace paralyzed took him out of the race and all but assured Nixon the victory. While he sympathized with Wallace in public Nixon privately exulted that the way was now clear. As for McGovern, Nixon’s men explored the possibility of trying to link his campaign with funding from Castro’s government. That particular move proved unnecessary: the country resoundingly rejected McGovern and his liberal politics. Nixon went on triumphantly to a second term in which he disgraced himself and the country by attempting to subvert the Constitution. He avoided impeachment only by resigning on Friday, August 9, 1974.
Nixon’s resignation speech, a rambling, self-indulgent paean to his mother and his lack of money, was picked up by radio by a group of us that day on a windy, rain-swept headland overlooking the sea in the south of Wales. At the time I remember feeling relief that the whole sordid episode was finally over and that we wouldn’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore.
In moments like that you wonder what alternate history might have been written had McGovern miraculously won. The Democratic Party was never so aligned again with politics that was unabashedly for the rights of women, blacks, the poor, the lame, the halt, and the blind. After defeat McGovern went on to devote himself to the war against hunger in the world. Richard Nixon resurrected himself in time as an elder statesman and at his death was feted by the living presidents of the time. McGovern’s political beliefs seem almost impossibly naive by today’s “whatever” standards. Forty years of Democratic centrism has meant that the party has all but abandoned its constituency of the marginalized.
History unreels behind us, not so much a transcript of orderly actions, but rather a confession of conflicting desires. We gather it up occasionally, expecting a confirmation of our cherished memories. We are often rudely shocked by the distance between our present selves and our reverenced past. The passing of George McGovern, himself a scholar of American history, reminds us that there is more to life than Real Housewives and that we learn best from that which we have understood.
Jacques Barzun, in the words of the New York Times’ obituary for him, was a “distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history.” A man who resisted authoritarianism and the dominance of systems, he lived and breathed a liberal humanism that treasured reflection and gratitude for great learning.
Barzun’s bemused and ironic sensibilities could be read as support for the status quo. In his last major work, From Dawn to Decadence, he notes that “most of what government sets out to do for the public good is resisted as soon as proposed,” and that “The upshot is a floating hostility to things as they are. . . . The hope is that getting rid of what is will by itself generate the new life.” The answer, he suggests, is neither in baptizing the past nor in embracing the new. Rather, “Our distinctive attitude toward history, our habit of arguing from it, turns events into ideas charged with power.”
Both George McGovern and Jacques Barzun lived with the assurance that ideas matter—profoundly—and that what today seems so new and unprecedented may have already appeared in our past, either as an Angel of Light or of Darkness. What we do with our interpretations will create our futures.
“If monarchs have little sympathy with mankind, mankind have even less with monarchs. They are merely to us a sort of state-puppets or royal waxwork, which we may gaze at with superstitious wonder, but have no wish to become . . . .” — William Hazlitt, On Personal Identity.
Why would anyone wish to become president? On the face of it, the highest office that we were told anyone could aspire to and some could attain, is a thankless job. Daily the president is assailed on all sides, sometimes by his own kind, but relentlessly by the disloyal opposition. When he does something that approximates the right thing to do, someone—Charles Krauthammer, most likely—will thunder from the Washington Post and George Will will mutter and mewl. Everything he says and does is subject to the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for “persons of interest” by the FBI or Kim Kardashian.
Of course, anyone in that position should expect that they’ll be held “accountable”—our favorite euphemism for who is to blame—but the accountability factor often becomes a political football and a blanket term for general dissatisfaction. We don’t often hear that someone is held to be responsible, perhaps because that implies actions governed by ethics rather than just a faux economic term.
William Hazlitt, writing in the early 19th century, had in mind kings and princes when he disavowed any interest in changing places with them, but his words could apply almost as well with the office of the President. In a way we ask the impossible of our presidents. We expect them to be extraordinary communicators who can talk to anybody—Saudi princes or Joe the Plumber, pizza makers or heads of state. We expect them to have the intel at their fingertips to make a definitive statement on horrific acts that are still unfolding. And we believe that everything that happens between their inauguration and their reelection—or defeat—is a direct result of some action they’ve taken or left out.
They must be one of us, yet without our annoying and petty grievances. They should be smart enough to solve world economic problems but they shouldn’t be tarred as one of the ’Harvard elite.’ We ask them to maintain America’s dominance by any means necessary but we don’t want to pay for it. We want them to tell the truth but we don’t want to hear it.
There are a number of reasons why a person might want to be president. First, they want the perks and the power. It’s not the money: the President makes $400,000 per year plus expenses. The CEO of Goldman Sachs made $16.5 million in 2011; John Hammergren of McKesson made $131.19 million in a recent year. But they get the use of a plane, Air Force One, a helicopter, Marine One, a nice place in the country—Camp David—and a tony address in downtown Washington. They’re referred to as “the most powerful person in the world,” and people wave as they drive by in motorcades.
Another reason is that they might be driven to accomplish what few people do—make it to the top in a profession. If you’re a lawyer I suppose the Supreme Court would be your last and best job offer. Some academics aspire to be presidents of universities, actors to win Oscars, and athletes to compete and win in the Olympics, the Superbowl or the World Cup. And politicians want the White House. Lyndon Johnson ran for the Vice Presidency, not because he wanted it, but because his mentor, Sam Rayburn, couldn’t bear the thought of Richard Nixon getting it. In time and tragically, Johnson got his turn and his term, a position he’d been climbing toward since his early days as a Texas congressman. Bill Clinton found his inspiration in a meeting with President Kennedy as a teenager. Kennedy himself was groomed for the presidency by his father, so the legend goes.
And no doubt there are those who believe they might do some good, might shape the events of history toward justice or freedom or prosperity. We believe them enough to elect them but we doubt them before they are done. “Why will Mr. Cobbett persist in getting into Parliament?”, asked Hazlitt about a perennial candidate. “He would find himself no longer the same man.” There’s the rub: if you’re man (or woman) enough for the job are you willing to pay the price?
The price is literally in the millions. Some estimates put the total cost of the 2012 election at over $5 billion, an obscene amount for the return on investment. At least three times a week I get an urgent email from Democratic headquarters: for a mere $3 I can help turn the tide and rout the Republican berserkers. The money will go, I am assured, to paying for ads to refute the latest lies the Romney camp is spouting. Money for truth. . . .
To run, to put yourself and your family through the merciless gauntlet of American public opinion, you’ve got to have a massive ego, strong enough to withstand the constant criticism, supple enough to dodge the blows and yet deep enough to listen to counsel. You have to realize that you ran to make a solid difference in the world, but now it’s not about you, but the myriad powers that be. And if you have anything different to say about it you’d better be sure the mic isn’t hot and it’s off the record. Because you didn’t get there on your own. There are many who put you there for reasons of their own, reasons that will demand a return on their investment.
But at the end of the day, climbing the stairs to bed like any other person, can you look back on your efforts that day and feel like you rolled the rock up the mountain with purpose and intention? Can you be glad for small victories and brush off the defeats? If you’ve got the ego strength and the humility to realize that the hinge of history may not turn on your command, but you might have pushed the door open just a bit wider for Goodness—then may you sleep well.
They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another and saying, ‘We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.’ — Luke 7:32, 21st Century King James Bible
When I have a bad day the world does not swerve, is not shaken to its foundations nor rattled to its timbers. This is as it should be. Yet, when Barack Obama has a bad day Democrats gasp and clutch at their hearts, Republicans sneer, and Mr. Mitt comes off a winner.
The wonder of it all! In the hours that followed the first presidential debate of the season, liberal commentators cried out to their deities, examined the entrails of small animals sacrificed to cast light on the mysteries, and pronounced the President unfit for reelection. With the insight only those blind with fury can have, they looked deep into Barack Obama’s psyche and recoiled at what they saw. Ennui, arrogance, an insouciant desire to hang it all up and knock out a few rounds on the links—it was all there. They shuddered. The President does not want to win! He has thrown the election! My high school debate team could have done better! Alarum!
David Graham of The Atlantic took people like The Beast’s Michael Tomasky, Harper’s Kevin Baker, and unliberal Byron York of The Washington Examiner to task in a perceptive piece which included the great line, “I’m old enough to remember when Obama was running away with the election. It was early last week.”
Perhaps in a horse-race where the lead changes from moment to moment those backing a particular steed can be forgiven if their hearts freeze in terror when it stumbles. But let’s be real: no legs were broken. This horse need not be put down just yet.
An hour after the debate I read most of the transcript and I thought the candidates had dealt with some substantive issues. I missed the head-shakes, the downcast eyes, and the pursed lips of Obama, but I also missed the bright gleam in Romney’s eyes as he shape-shifted yet again.
It’s an interesting experience, reading a debate: it focuses attention on the words and their meanings, not on the gestures, expressions, signals, sounds, and the myriad motions that burn impressions into one’s memory. Researchers in cognitive and perceptual studies tell us that we remember little of what was said but much of what was seen, a fact not lost on political handlers, pole dancers, sales people and senators.
In a mediasphere formed around images, sound bites, and opinions it might not matter all that much what the candidates think or even less, what they believe in. They are blurred in our eyes, distinguishable only by the captions they are tagged with by the media. Like modernist paintings, they take on the shape suggested by the titles conveniently mounted on the wall next to them. “The new Mitt!” “Obama sags!” “Romney takes command!”
George Gerbner, a communications scholar who studied media effects for decades, believed that the media don’t tell us what to think—they tell us what to think about. They set the agenda; we carry it out and pride ourselves on knowing what’s current. That may not be entirely true anymore. Public figures are primed, prepped, and produced. Like a new line of frozen dinners they come with ingredients listed on the side, a banner with the magic words, “New and improved!,” and attractive packaging. We don’t know what we’ve got until we open it up—and by then we can’t take it back for a refund. This is more than agenda-setting. News organizations used to counter the spin of the public relations people; now they work for them.
For all the scrutiny that candidates for the presidency go through in the long and excruciating path to election, we may not know much about their souls. We see what we’re allowed to see, hear what’s been scripted, and realize that we’re seeing shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave. None of this is deliberately malevolent or deceitful. It’s simply how business works in a contemporary news cycle.
The best illusions are those in which the audience trusts the illusionist. Oddly enough, it’s the burden, the weight, the power of the idea of trust between the people and their leaders that can, occasionally, elude the barriers set in place. If there’s any integrity at all in the leader the trust of the people will elicit a genuine response, one that will be evident in the moment. The unspoken hope that keeps this experiment going is the belief in those moments of truth.
“The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality.” — Walden, Henry David Thoreau
How much of our life do we truly comprehend? We may feel like political observers at a rigged election: we can see what’s going on but we lack the power to change it. Caught up in our routines, not daring to vary from them lest we lose a step, we see the surface changes of light and shadow, while we sense that tectonic shifts are taking place beneath us.
At a corner of an intersection frequented by panhandlers a man held a hand-lettered sign which proclaimed him to be God’s anointed, a “prophetic, proud, American preacher.” I held a dollar out to him while waiting for the light to change, and listened while he spoke about his ministry. He was a handyman who had been touched by the Lord some years ago and sent on a mission to bring a message of hope, prosperity, happiness, and health to all who would listen. He gave me a flyer he had written up, complete with a website, and resources that, if ordered, would restore a sense of pride in America and gratitude to the Almighty. There was no irony for him in the fact that as the bearer of the message he was a walking refutation of its benefits. But that suspicion was answered by his earnest claim that it was his humility which marked him out for the divine dispensation.
His jaunty sanctity was touching. Far from being an object of pity he thought of himself as a man with a mission. He wasn’t begging, he was witnessing. The transactional nature of his work called for him to give as well as to receive. If I gave a dollar he was happy to bless me and share with me the nature of his work. The dollar, a gesture of solidarity, was less a donation to an indigent than it was a validation of his calling. You’ve got to respect a man like that. As the light changed and the phalanx of cars pulled away, he proclaimed his willingness to work at anything—car repair, house painting, yard work, preaching.
I’ve wondered at the necessities and rules of panhandling. No doubt there are social norms that come with the occupation, perhaps even vocabularies and expectations that must be met. Does a median strip belong to those with seniority or is it ‘first come, first served’? Do you dress for the neighborhood or for the rigors of the job? On blazing hot days can the men go shirtless or is that a social faux pas that cannot be tolerated? Must the women always be mothers with four children and no rent money or can they be young, single, and brave—with time on their hands? How does the body adapt to or resist the thrumming roar of traffic, the waves of heat radiated from exhausts, engines, and metal surfaces? Do you stay on the median or walk between the lanes? Smile and thank whoever pauses or keep it to a minimum of gestures?
These are the lines of adaptation to which the organism conforms, the terrain that must be plowed, the rules of engagement for a public transaction of a moment. I’ve seen lithe, well-dressed young men, affable and surefooted in the traffic, whose only indication of need was the hand-lettered sign they carried. And I’ve seen men, perhaps veterans of our interminable wars, whose faces were roasted red from the heat, whose hair was bleached and lifeless from the exhaust and the wind, and whose clothes had lost all semblance of garments.
I have found myself imagining, while waiting out the light, what slight movements of the spirit brought them to this place and this moment. What butterfly, blithely flitting from flower to bush in a garden on an island in Japan, set in motion the winds that blew these people up on our concrete beaches? Alone in a crowd, islands in a river of molded plastic and glass, do they wonder as they pace their walkways, if there was an inexorable fate that brought them here? Were they singled out for punishment or just slower than the rest sprinting for the exits?
Matthew Arnold’s The Buried Life comes to mind:
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
The consistency and persistence of these people is what lingers in the memory. Every day they are out there in all weathers, working the lanes, radiating discomfort and regret, regulating their practice according to the elements they have found that work through necessity and chance.
Every one of them began as a child without guile. Most were loved, some no doubt carried the hopes of the family on their shoulders. I don’t want to romanticize them or bill them as urban artists; they have too much dignity in themselves to be the object of our casual pity.
Perhaps they live with the facts, the bare unadorned necessities of survival. They are not a tribe apart, they are the rest of us stripped down, without our pretense and assurances, without our bored indifference. There was a time when the Fates got the credit for having twisted up these lives in ways that could not easily be undone. Now they are proxies for the millions whose existence is noted by a downward tick on a graph.
“We know not where we are,” says Thoreau near the end of Walden. “Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface.”
“It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.” — Niccolo Machiavelli, c. 1515.
Soon after Paul Ryan’s ascendancy to the Republican Vice Presidential candidacy, he flew to Las Vegas to meet with a hotel room full of wealthy investors. They were there, we might suppose, to look over the merchandise and to assess its value to them in the coming months and years, provided—God willing—that their money and influence prevailed and the American people returned the throne to its rightful owners after a brief hiatus. That such bald-faced dealing goes on in American politics is no surprise. After all, this is the old normal brought out of the smoke-filled back rooms and given a shave, a fresh suit of clothes, some cheery one-liners about “opportunity” and “economic realignment” and made to sing and dance in the public square. We’re used to it by now. And that is what is disheartening about the current grand experiment in democracy.
Those who lean toward the liberal tradition should not congratulate themselves for good taste in morality either, since no one ascends Capitol Hill without having first bowed the knee to Mammon. At least that is what we are led to believe, and without first-hand experience how are we to refute it? There is so much that relies on trust in the political realm that we find our limited supply used up with nothing much to show for it.
We like to think that in electing a person to the Presidency we have first fairly assessed his character. We look to opinions by the press, statements by the candidates, endorsements by the parties, and most especially, actions taken. In the glare of campaign publicity every flaw, every hot mike statement, every photo op becomes a lens through which we might examine them with a critical, if not discerning, eye.
Cicero, Roman statesman and grand orator, wrote to his brother Marcus in 64 BC, advising him on running a campaign for political office, by counseling, “For a candidate must be a chameleon, adapting to each person he meets, changing his expression and speech as necessary.” Cicero notes that Marcus is courteous and thoughtful, “but you can be rather stiff at times.” No stranger to political machinations and intrigues, Cicero urges his brother to learn the art of flattery, “a disgraceful thing in normal life but essential when you are running for office.” In other words, even in ancient Rome, the campaign was all about appearances, not about substance.
Cicero is up front and center in this season, especially his letter to his brother. James Carville, former Machiavelli to Bill Clinton, has quoted it at length with approval as an effective playbook for candidate Obama to follow. Others have done so for Romney. The letter appears, with irony, in Lapham’s Quarterly for Fall 2012. Although Cicero may appear calculating by our standards, he was, in his own time, something of a model for public officials. Incorruptible and uncompromising in his personal morality, he nevertheless knew his way around Roman politics and, more importantly, he understood human nature. It is both disconcerting and strangely reassuring that so little has changed over the centuries.
It’s a game, Cicero seems to be hinting; play it well and you can change things for the better. It’s a utilitarian argument that many a public official, church leader, statesman, and citizen has used to justify bent actions leading to a straight-arrow outcome. But there are two potential outcomes of such actions that cannot be dismissed.
The first is the polarization of positions, each extreme quick to portray the other in the worst possible light. While the name-calling and mud-slinging is irritating and distracting, it’s not dangerous unless it actually threatens our position in the world. Politicians can kick sand in each others’ faces in their own playground, but when lies are daily compounded with interest on the world stage then it’s time to put the country ahead of the candidates.
The second—and by far the more dangerous of the two— is that the citizenry, in every generation, comes to realize that politics falls far short of the enterprise it claims to be. Far from advocating on behalf of the people, the elected enjoy the spoils of their war upon the electorate. We’d be touchingly naive not to recognize this, but that betrayal of trust corrodes the very beams and braces that support the structure of government. Realizing this provokes cynicism and indifference. The game is rigged and we find ourselves, like the farmyard animals in Orwell’s Animal Farm, unable to tell the pigs from the humans. Jean-Jacques Rousseau presumes us to be in a social contract and says, “As soon as public service ceases to be the main concern of the citizens and they come to prefer to serve the state with their purse rather than their person, the state is already close to ruin. . . As soon as someone says of the business of the state, ‘What does it matter to me?’—then the state must be reckoned lost.”
Sometimes it feels like we’re living out Yeats’ Second Coming: “The best lack all conviction/While the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Is it wrong to believe in the promise of democracy even though those who would govern us don’t seem to?
“. . . . [B]y keeping a watchful eye on men of extraordinary rank I have discovered that they are, for the most part, just like the rest of us.” — Michel de Montaigne, On Friendship
The Republican and Democratic conventions are over. The confetti has landed and the balloons have popped. The circumstances of the scripted pomp made it possible to see in the faces of the attending faithful both the past and the future: for Republicans a virtual sea of white, for Democrats a fair slice of what America looks like now and shall be evermore.
Pundits (a Sanskrit word for explorers; now referring to scholarly commentators for media outlets) were surprised at Romney’s modesty and lack of viciousness. Some were underwhelmed by the President’s speech and angered that he didn’t use the occasion to bludgeon his opponents or at least box them about the head and ears.
We can imagine that such events are carefully scripted to avoid such embarrassments as Clint Eastwood’s amateur hour show, but it is a measure of the political expectations of the day when the President is faulted for a speech that does not promise the moon, but remains firmly planted on this earth.
I’m not sure where the truth about the state of the country lies, but I am fairly certain that the lies about the country will be stated ad nauseam in the weeks that remain before Election Day. Both sides will endeavor to influence us—the masses—through sophisticated techniques of propaganda. Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, authors of a respected textbook in communication studies entitled Propaganda and Persuasion, conclude their fourth edition, released just after 9/11, with some generalizations about propaganda. Several of these bear repeating for they can serve as litmus tests—if the water turns red or blue as a result, there must be some propaganda about.
Propaganda, say Jowett and O’Donnell, tells people what to think and how to behave. When we get most of our information from the media we become the unwitting supporters of an invisible institution.
Even when it’s clear that we are receiving propaganda, we’ll still react favorably toward it. The familiarity of the message through the constant repetition gives us the comfort of the ‘known’ and creates resonance where there may have been none before.
People form up into opposing camps in response to propaganda and ‘fight’ for their ideological truths. How many candidates for public office offer to ‘negotiate’ or ‘compromise’ or ‘dialogue’ over the issues? Ummmmm. . . . almost one. Most of them assure us they’ll be off to Washington to fight corruption, cut our taxes, and defend our God-given values.
Media techniques and technologies operate 24/7, compiling research and data that can be mined, filtered, sorted, dispersed, compressed, and reconstituted by simply adding money. Jowett and O’Donnell note that, “People’s predispositions are easily identifiable through market research, making them easy targets for propaganda.”
Displays of aggression toward the enemy are likely manufactured for internal consumption. The authors add drily that these displays “may not phase the enemy, but they can bolster morale at home.”
Finally, propaganda may not be an evil thing in itself. It all depends on the context: one man’s assault weapon may be another’s Constitutional right. Propaganda comes in many guises, some of which are closer to the truth than others. The difficulty, of course, is finding the distinction between them.
The authors close with the somewhat world-weary hope that “in a free society, somewhere, somehow, alternative message systems always appear.”
Montaigne had another take on the matter of political leadership. Having served in public office and been welcomed at the courts of various European countries, he had opportunity to observe the rich and powerful close up. He likens the entourage around public figures to a religious cult and cheerfully observes that “the gravity, academic robes and rank of the man who is speaking often lend credence to arguments which are vain and silly . . . . or that a man who is entrusted with so many missions and offices of state, a man so disdainful and so arrogant, is not cleverer than another man who bows to him from afar and whom nobody ever employs!”
Religious politics, like secular politics, is never far from mind-bending justifications for its follies. There, too, we find fertile land for propaganda, for the very word, derived from a Latin term for propagating or sowing, was embodied by the Vatican in 1622 in the institution responsible for propagating the faith of the Roman Catholic Church. While it was thus originally a positive term it later came to have pejorative connotations through Catholic opposition to Protestantism.
When a religious institution feels its foundations to be threatened, either by a shift of the theological tectonic plates or the drift of social ethics, it often responds with a swift denunciation of the new and a demand for conformity. Falling into line is never referred to by such a gauche term however; the usual language is for unity over dissension, the preservation of the church as a structure being paramount over ethical considerations. In such ways, the church might actually lag behind society on important issues like gender discrimination, the ordination of women, and the role of women in an institution that has traditionally been supported and sustained more by women than by men.
Perhaps what we might come to reluctantly is the understanding that since propaganda, like the poor, is always with us, we have ample opportunity to study it and learn its forms and range. In politics, as in religion, there is much at stake, not the least of which is the universal desire for power and status. Propaganda arises from fear, the fear of losing control. Montaigne lightly dismissed such fears by saying, “Most of this world’s events happen by themselves,” and concludes, “The outcome often lends authority to the most inept leadership.”
But we do not have to leave it up to Fate. In a democracy, however fractious and fearful it is, the hope remains that where people act for the good of all their own needs are most often met. The process is slow, change is incremental, solutions will not be found through vilification or greed, but at some point we can turn around, look back, and see that the dots actually connected. Truth was lived in the struggle.
