TO WAR! Part 1: War and America's National Psyche

Once again I"m bumping this to the top of the queue. And for obvious reasons. Once again a foolhardy President has taken the country into a war with no obvious end in sight, just a squandering of human live and productive resources.

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As part of a special WAR EDITION of New Savanna I'm reproducing a set of notes I wrote up during the 2000 Presidential Election. I first published them on NS back in November of 2011 and I'm republishing them now in recognition of yet another turn in the long-spinning wheel of American mythology. Yet another bump to the top, as I'm thinking of this stuff, this time in connection with the relationship between war and nationalism.

Everything is connected to everything else and the causal forces meeting in the historical present stretch back into the past without end. Figuring out where to start is not easy. My sense is that we need to focus our attention on the dissolution of the Soviet Empire in the late 1980s. That left the nation without a national scapegoat, thus radically altering the nation’s psycho-cultural landscape. We no longer had Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire to kick around.

As some of you may know, my thinking on these matters has been strongly influenced by an essay Talcott Parsons published in 1947 on “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World”. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.

For the most part I have used Parsons, and others as well, in arguing about the nature of racism in the USA. While Africans were brought to this country for economic reasons it seems to me that during, say, the 19th century African Americans increasingly assumed a dual psychological role in the white psyche. On the one hand, they were a source of entertainment. On the other, they were convenient scapegoats, as became evident with the lynchings that emerged during Reconstruction and continued well into the last century. That is to say, African America served as a geographically internal target for the ethnic and nationalist antipathy Parsons discussed.

Thus we have the thesis in Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March (U. Chicago, 1999). They argue that African Americans have been able to move forward on civil rights only during periods where the nation faced an external threat - the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the major wars of the first half of the 20th century. When the external danger had subsided, gains were lost. From my point of view, they’re arguing that, when external danger looms large and demands attention, the citizenry can focus aggression there and so ease up on the internal colony. Beyond this, of course, it becomes necessary to recruit from the colony to fight the external enemy, both physically and propagandistically - be kind to your black citizens when you fight the Nazis, etc.

  

Vietnam was the last major war of the Cold War period. As it receded into the past, a political backlash set in and affirmative action came under attack. That’s the situation we faced when the Soviet Empire collapsed. With the major external threat suddenly collapsed, there was a crisis of aggression - I’m reminded of the phrase “conservation of aggression” coined by Robert Wright. The fall of the Evil Empire deprived a great many people of an object for aggressive impulses. What then, happened to that aggression?

It got directed elsewhere. My sense is that the political rhetoric on a number of issues heated up in the wake of the fall: gun control, abortion, the arts, gays, affirmative action, violence in the media. A number of these issues come under the rubric of the so-called “culture wars”. Each of these issues was already on the political agenda, and had been there for some time.

Sexy music had been inspiring pulpit denunciations and legislative action since the early decades of the 20th century. Movies have been problematic since the beginning and the NAACP put itself on the political map by organizing protests against “Birth of a Nation.” But, it seems to me, that the scope of politicized cultural contest broadened. [If I’m correct, then this could be verified empirically by doing content analysis of periodicals, looking at opinion polls, crime rates, etc.]

Perhaps the most interesting redirection, however, was into the so-called War on Drugs. Political concern about drug use is not, of course, new. It goes back to Prohibition - which, was, of course, intimately linked with that objectionably sexy music - and got redirected by and in reaction to the counter-cultural 60s and 70s. However, it is my impression that the current effort ramped up in the wake of the Soviet collapse.

This war on drugs has had substantial material consequences: increased law enforcement and court activity, a considerable increase in the prison population and, of course, in the prison industry. Our prisons now have a relatively large population of non-violent offenders who are disproportionately black, taken off the voting rolls as felons, and available for labor in various prison-based enterprises. I do not know whether or not the increase in the economic “weight” of the prison sector is roughly equal to the losses suffered by the defense sector. I would, of course, like to know.

Regardless of how those numbers work out, my basic point is simply that the end of the Cold War changed the psycho-cultural system in a major way. Psycho-cultural aggression had to be redirected and much of it was redirected at targets within the country, rather than externally. That redirection is the central political phenomenon of the 90s and is responsible for much of the ugliness and programmatic futility of current politics.

Addendum 2011: Obviously, this internal redirection of aggression continues. It may well have gotten worse – I wonder what ‘sentiment analysis’ would turn up if applied to documents written over the past decade? The problem facing us, of course, is not that of finding suitable targets for this displaced aggression. No, we have to restructure our way of living so as to reduce our need to have such targets. That’s a tough one, and one that will take a generation or three.

Addendum 2014: Obviously the Arab world is a perfect target for this repressed aggression. We've got a long-standing and well-crafted Orientalist mythology of the exotic and crazy Arab Other. I fear we're going to be banging on this nail for a long time.

 

Note 2026: The second post in this series has a clip from the Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup, that can be taken as a comment on how Trump arrived at the decision to attack Iran: TO WAR! Part 2: A Marx Brothers Analysis of America's War Craziness.  

Fecundity and Implementation in a Complex Universe

I'm bumping this post from October 2011 to the top of the queue for two reasons: 1) in its discussion of abundance it contains seeds to the idea of arena, which I have made one of my fundamental philosophical concepts, and 2) it employs chess as a metaphor.

 

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Or, Compositionism in the Pluriverse

As I’ve indicated several times before, one of the reasons I’m finding object-oriented ontology (OOO) and Latour so congenial is that I’ve had similar ideas, often in conjunction with the late David Hays. But we arrived at those ideas, not through immersion in continental philosophy and thought, but through the cognitive and neurosciences. In that we have been a bit like Latour in that we’ve mostly been trying to figure out how things work out there in the world, not trying to do philosophy. But we did some, if not philosophy, philosophy-like thinking.

Thus we came to believe that reality is inherently complex and that, consequently, the way to empirical truth was not through dispersing phenomenal complexity in favor of a deeper underlying simplicity. We came to talk of a universe that not only has spawned multiple Realms of Being, but that might well spawn more of them. Had we known William James’ term pluriverse I’m sure we would have adopted it.

We didn’t and so we couldn’t. Instead we talked of the universe as being fecund (Hays proposed the term), with later Realms of Being implemented in ones that had evolved earlier. Our notion of implementation, which derives from computer science, seems kin to Latour’s notion of composition. Objects of one kind can be said to be implemented in, composed of, objects of some other kind. But the implemented/composed objects cannot be reduced to the objects of which they are composed/implemented.

We never attempted a systematic exposition of this notion, but I did outline it briefly in a review of John Horgan’s The End of Science. You can download a PDF of the complete review from my Academia page, here. I have reprinted the discussion of fecundity and implementation below.

Note that it is not at all clear that where Hays and I talk of Realms of Being that we are talking of Being in the sense of object-oriented ontology. Most likely we’re not. But this is a matter of mere terminology, not fundamental conceptualization.

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A New World: The Fecund Universe

One of the people Horgan talked to is Paul Feyerabend, the well-known philosopher of science. At the time Feyerabend was working on his autobiography (Killing Time) and on another philosophy book, one he was unable to complete before he died.

Tentatively titled The Conquest of Abundance, it addressed the human passion for reductionism. “All human enterprises,” Feyerabend explained, seek to reduce the natural diversity, or “abundance,” inherent in reality. “First of all the perceptual system cuts down this abundance or you wouldn't survive.” Religion, science, politics, and philosophy represent our attempts to compress reality still further. Of course, these attempts to conquer abundance simply create new abundances, new complexities.

This has the feel of the emerging world view, especially the line asserting that “these attempts to conquer abundance simply create new abundances.” That abundance is what the new view is about. It is a topic the late David Hays and I discussed under the rubric of fecundity—Hays suggested the term—and that is the word I shall use. I have no particular reason to believe that our discussions paralleled Feyerabend's ideas in any detailed way, but “abundance” and “fecundity” share a thematic similarity.

Let us start with an analogy. Consider the game of chess. It has a finite number of pieces and is played on a board which is finite in size; the rules governing play are finite in number and restrict each move to a finite number of steps; and all games must end in a finite number of steps, though it is possible for a game to end in a draw. Thus described chess is an inherently simple game. And yet it is rich enough to tax the abilities of very intelligent and creative people who devote their lives to playing it. A substantial community of people devotes a great deal of time and effort, not only to playing chess, but to studying it and teaching it, writing books and articles and, in the last half-century, programming computers to play the game.

The devotees of the simple world are like those who think that, when you know the rules of chess, you know all there is to know about the game. All the rest is either mere appearance, mere contingency, or mere engineering; whatever it is, it is only merely so. To the devotees of fecundity the rules are only the starting point and all the rest, that is what we must understand. And, more to the point, that is what we can understand, if not just yet, and not necessarily exhaustively and finally.

Of course we need to look beneath the surface of things. But there is no reason to think that what we will find will be simple. On the contrary, I believe that complexity inheres in the basic fabric of nature (Benzon and Hays 1990a). That complexity is necessary and not contingent. It is that inherent complexity which makes the universe so fecund, so full of abundances.

Fecundity is about the capacity of one Realm of Being to give rise to another Realm. In a fairly standard version—see Horgan's account of the views of physicist Philip Anderson, one of the founders of the Santa Fe Institute (pp. 209-210)—the inorganic gives rise to the realm of life; life gives rise to mind; and mind perhaps gives rise to culture. Culture may well give rise to something else, and that something else will in turn give rise to something yet all-together new, and so forth. The laws of a higher realm must be consistent with those of the lower realms, but they are not derived from those laws. Each realm has its own laws, and there is no inherent limit to the number of realms. Hence there is no reason to believe that the universe is inadequate to our cognitive needs. [In The End of Science Horgan argued for a mismatch between the universe and our minds such that the latter could not, in principle, fully know the former.]

The relationship between a higher realm and the one(s) which gave rise to it can be said to be one of implementation. The term is from computing and designates a phenomenon which is ubiquitous there. A computer is, of course, a physical device, a complex bit of engineering. The nature of these devices has changed considerably in computing's short history, from mechanical relays and vacuum tubes in the 1940s and 1950s to transistors and integrated circuits in the 1960s and 1970s to ever denser microchips starting in the late 1970s and continuing to this day and on into the future, though not very far into the future--just what technologies will supplant microchips is not at all certain, but many things are in the works. In order for these circuits to compute anything they must implement certain logical functions. The nature of those functions is quite independent of the medium in which they are implemented. Nor can one in any meaningful way reduce the logical function of a circuit to the physical laws of the device implementing the circuit. Those physical laws tell you what will happen at a certain point Q when the voltage goes above a certain value, but they tell you nothing about why Q is connected to O and P and R and S in a certain way. That pattern of connections is dictated by logic, not physics.

The implementation of logical functions in physical circuits is only one side of implementation, the hardware side. Most implementation is on the software side. High-level languages are implemented in assembly language and end-user programs are implemented in high-level languages. Currently one of the most popular languages is one called C, with a sibling called C++. It requires one implementation to run on a “Wintel” machine, one for the Macintosh, another for a Sun Sparcstation, and so forth. The C language is the same in each case; it has the same nouns and verbs. But the assembly language which implements those nouns and verbs is specific to the machine it runs on. Further, the assembly language for a given machine can implement the nouns and verbs of other high-level languages, such as Basic, Pascal, Fortran, or Cobol. The fact that one language is used to implement another is not the same as asserting that the high-level language is reducible to the lower level language. Each language establishes its own domain, its own realm; implementation is the relationship between one realm and another.

Of course, it is one thing to explore implementation in the world of computing. It is rather different to assert that the relationship between biology on the one hand and physics and chemistry, on the other, is one of implementation. That requires an argument which I am not prepared to make, though some practitioners of artificial intelligence and artificial life seem to take it as a matter of faith. Given the work that Hays and I did on natural intelligence (Benzon and Hays 1988) I feel a little more confidence about the relationship between psychology and neurobiology; for that article proposed five principles governing the implementation of mind in brain. The most ambitious research program under the aegis of AI is about the implementation of mind in computer. However doubtful I am about what AI has so far achieved—Horgan quotes Marvin Minsky as asserting that consciousness is a trivial matter he resolved long ago (p. 184)—that goal doesn't seem to be inherently problematic. However mind operates, it is a realm unto itself. Its laws are not reducible to those of biology or those of computing, though it may well be possible that they can be implemented in either. Beyond mind, David Hays and I have speculated in personal conversation that the phenomena of social role (Linton 1935) and double-contingency social interaction (Parsons 1951) are the seeds of a new realm which we might as well call culture. We could then say that culture is implemented in mind, though explicating that is another matter entirely.

If this is how the universe operates then the closest one could come to what Horgan calls The Answer would be to understand how one realm could give rise to another. That is perhaps where Ilya Prigogine’s work comes into play (Horgan, pp. 216-221; Benzon and Hays, 1990a, pp. 36-37). However, while Horgan's Answer is complete unto itself, the Answer implied by Prigogine’s work assures us only that the universe generates yet further fundamental questions.

Blacks, Blues, and Soul Sickness: Lynching and Racism in the USofA

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue, 1) to reinforce in my mind the name John Dollard (see below), and 2) in general principle. It's good to keep these things before the mind.

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[11.18.14] I've posted this before, about a year ago, but I'm bumping to the top in view of yesterday's 3QD piece about America's cultural psychology. In that piece i talked about the empath dynamic (named after an episode of Star Trek) whereby white America has made black America suffer for its sins.

Here's two (incomplete) sections from my (incomplete) draft of the opening chapter of an unsold (and therefore unpublished) book on the interaction of blacks and whites in the creation of American musical forms – and expansion of my longish article, Music Making History: Africa Meets Europe in the United States of the Blues. The first section is a rather graphic and grim piece about lynchings. If you thought that lynchings were mostly carried out in the middle of the night by a few drunken good ol' boys, well think again. Some of them were like that, but then some were also elaborate public spectacles. They even had photographers there who took photos and put them on postcards (you can find images of some by conducting a google search).

You might just want to skip over that section and go straight to the second, which is about the psychology of lynching. Not so graphic. But just as important.

Paris Burns: The Immolation of Henry Smith

In one of the songs most closely identified with her, “Strange Fruit,” Billy Holiday sings of “black bodies swinging from the cottonwood trees.” With over three-thousand black (and seven-hundred white) victims, lynchings plagued this country for a fifty-year period straddling the turn of the 20th century and are a telling example and symbol of racist violence. One doesn’t have to examine them too closely to suspect more than we are even yet prepared to acknowledge about the cultural psychodynamics of racism.

We must be quite clear on this point: as horrible as the beating of Rodney King was, the lynchings were much worse. The national outrage which followed the broadcast of that beating is a sign of how far we have advanced in the last sixty or seventy years. One way to appreciate that advance is to confront the enormous pain, horror, and evil of those lynchings.

Consider the case of Henry Smith as described by Joel Williamson in The Crucible of Race. In 1893 Smith was alleged to have raped and murdered three-and-a-half year old Myrtle Vance in Paris, Texas. As there was no trial, kangaroo or otherwise; there was no legal judgment of guilt, but Williamson says nothing to suggest that Smith was innocent of the crime.

While two-thousand men spent four days hunting their prey, special trains brought people to Paris so they could take part in the grand ritual. Smith was finally tracked down and brought back to Paris. Thousands cheered as he was taken from the train, tied to a chair on the bed of a large wagon designed to haul cotton, paraded through town, and then taken to a ten-foot platform where 10,000 people, men, women, and children, had gathered to witness final retribution. Smith was tied to a stake thrust up through the platform and then tortured by the girl’s father and male relatives. A photographer took pictures and it has been said that someone made a gramophone recording of Smith’s cries. At the end, Smith, stake, and platform were piled with fuel, soaked with oil, and burned. When the ashes had cooled a day later, people raked through them looking for teeth, bones, and buttons, not exactly pieces of the true cross, but relics of a similar ritual.

The torture and death of Henry Smith was a very grisly business, but not wildly atypical. Torture was common and so were mass mobs, though this one was unusually large. As in the case of Henry Smith, most of the lynching victims were black men and many were accused of some sexual offense against a white woman; in some cases the offense was real, in many it was not. Many lynchings were elaborate public exhibitions, having about them the extravagance of the Inquisition’s autos-de-fé (acts of faith) where penitents would confess their sins, profess their faith, and be immolated to purify their bodies; or one of those old Roman entertainments involving Christians and lions or; a bit closer to home, a New England witch burning.

In a detailed study of lynchings occurring between 1880 and 1930 in Georgia, representing the deep South, and Virginia, representing the borderline South, W. Fitzhugh Brundage shows that lynchings were committed by several types of group, the terrorist mob, the private mob, the posse, and the mass mob (Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930). Terrorist mobs were relatively small, generally less than fifty people, and consisted of members of groups organized to maintain white supremacy through intimidation and violence; the Ku Klux Klan is the best-known of these groups. Private mobs were also relatively small, but were convened only to avenge or punish specific alleged offenses, and then dispersed. Posses were quasi-legal bodies constituted to capture criminals. However, they frequently overstepped their charge and lynched the criminal.

Mass mobs, such as the one that executed Henry Smith, were responsible for the largest number of lynchings, 34% in Georgia and 40% in Virginia. These were also the most spectacular lynchings and involved hundreds or even thousands of people from all strata of Southern society, from top to bottom. These were the most highly ritualized lynchings, a matter emphasized by both Brundage and Williamson, who talk as though these mobs did their work according to written standards and practices.

When the victim had been captured, he (or, in some cases, she) would be given an opportunity to confess and to pray. Then he was hung, sometimes with a drop so as to break the neck, other times there was no drop and the victim just strangled, or died from gunshots. For particularly heinous offenses the victim was tortured prior to hanging—something mass mobs were more likely to do than posses, terrorist mobs, or private mobs. Once the victim was hung, tradition often dictated that all present should shoot a bullet into the dead or dying body. All those shooting, in effect, took responsibility for the death, thereby making the community responsible, not just a few individuals. In some cases the firing was done with military precision, with rank upon rank firing in turn. Thus a hundred, two hundred, or more men would have the opportunity to register their anger and hatred, disguised as justice, on the bodies of black men. It is as though these bullets had some cleansing magic, transferring mental pain from angry whites to the bodies of helpless blacks.

When the victim was well and thoroughly dead, and perhaps mutilated as well, a sign might be hung on the body—Brundage notes a sign that requested “Please do not wake him.” The body often remained on display for hours or even days and people would often take relics, pieces of rope and chain, or even fragments of the victim’s body. Finally, a coronor’s jury would be convened to determine the cause of death, often set down to death by “unknown parties.” In fact, nothing was unknown. Everyone in the community knew who did what, and there were often photographs to prove it. According to Brundage:

What is paradoxical is that coroners’ juries would adhere to the process of the law when they carried out bogus investigations of violence which, however much it violated the rule of law with impunity, they had no intention of condemning. In reports typically written out in crude longhand on any convenient piece of paper the most horrifying details of mass lynchings were recorded. The juries had little difficulty in finding witnesses who could describe events in detail. But even when the witnesses mentioned specific names, juries, which in many instances included men who had participated in the lynching, either exonerated the community of all involvement in the lynching or else openly applauded the mob violence. . . However token the process, in the eyes of white southerners the investigations by coroners’ juries and grand juries were testimonials to the rule of law.

And that, presumably, was the function of the coronor’s jury in these cases—to exonerate the community of any wrong-doing. Mass mob lynchings didn’t represent violations of community standards. Rather, they expressed those standards.

However savage the violence in a mass mob lynching, the ritualized nature of that violence means that the lynchings were not simply wild outpourings of anger and hatred. Rather, they represent culturally sanctioned and rehearsed expressions of attitudes. This ritualized violence is one way that people were able to affirm their communal life.

Many lynchings were occasioned, if not by rape, then by allegations of rape, but not the majority of lynchings. According to Brundage, murder was the offense alleged in 46 % of Georgia lynchings and 44% of Virginia lynchings while sexual offenses were alleged in 28% of Georgia lynchings and 46% of Virginia lynchings. The remaining lynchings, 25% in Georgia and 10% in Virginia, were for a variety of offenses, such as theft, arson, or insulting a white person in any of the numerous ways whites perceived insults from blacks. In contradiction of these facts, the general perception of lynchings in the South was that they were occasioned by rape. Sex is what was on people’s minds.

Why Lynching? Why Racism?

Why, we would like to know, did reign of extralegal violence straddling the turn of the twentieth century? John Dollard addressed this question in his classic 1937 study, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, which “redirected the study of southern race relations in general and lynching in particular” by asking a simple question: Why do people need racism? The question implies that mistaken beliefs about others are symptoms of racism, not its cause. Racism has some useful function in the individual or collective lives of racists. What function could that be? Dollard’s answer was, in effect: to keep the peace.

Given the practices standard to lynchings one could imagine a lynched man bedecked with a sign saying that “He’s at peace.” But that man’s friends and family were certainly not at peace. On the contrary, they were likely both grief-stricken and terrified. But, one can imagine that the community of racists was, for awhile, unusually united and more conflict-free than normal — though I don’t know of any studies which have attempted to verify this. That’s the peace Dollard had in mind, the peace of a community righteously united against a common enemy.

Scapegoating the American Way

I’ve got a new post up at 3 Quarks Daily, Free-Floating Anxiety, Teens, and Security Theatre. It continues with the same theme I explored in my previous 3QD post, American Craziness: Where it Came from and Why It Won’t Work Anymore. That isn’t what I was planning when I began thinking about the post in the middle of last week, but that’s what popped up Sunday morning when I started working on it.

Over the previous week I’d been blogging about danah boyd’s study of teens and the internet, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale UP 2014). It seemed to me that she was developing an argument that intersected with the argument about displaced aggression and anxiety that I have derived from Talcott Parsons (“Certain Primary Sources and Patterns of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World,” 1947). On the one hand, teens have more or less been “forced” online by irrational restrictions placed on their movements on the physical world (and over-scheduling, a different phenomenon) and that adult fears about sexual predation online were exaggerated at the same time people weren’t sufficiently attentive to the real sources of sexual predation.

So, I decided to write a post that links boyd’s observations to mine on nationalist aggression and racism. In the current post I refine my statement of Parsons’ argument and use the American response to 9/11 as an example. On the one hand the nation has undertaken two destructive and expensive wars, that have failed to achieve their announced object, the elimination of terrorism, and at the same time we’ve created the Transportation Security Agency to conduct largely pointless searches of passengers boarding aircraft.

Vacuum Activity and Scapegoating

These actions strike me as being akin to what ethologists call vacuum activity: “innate, fixed action patterns of animal behaviour that are performed in the absence of the external stimuli (releaser) that normally elicit them. This type of abnormal behaviour shows that a key stimulus is not always needed to produce an activity.” In this case the issue isn’t so much the lack of an appropriate stimulus but the inability, for some reason, to identify the source of one’s aggressive impulses while at the same time feeling the need to act on them. So one chooses a convenient or culturally targeted object whether or not it is causally appropriate.

My point of course is that the possibility of such irrational action has a basis in our biology. In a sense that’s just a specific version of the truism that all behavior has some kind of biological basis; we are, after all, biological beings. But the behavioral patterns I’m examining aren’t widely appreciated, perhaps because we would prefer to continue our irrational behavior rather than dealing with real issues. In the context of such denial it is useful to point out that, really, this is how animals (can) behave. It’s not at all farfetched.

It’s Complicated 3: Social Manipulation in a Culture of Fear

danah boyd. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale UP 2014).

Let’s start with a footnote to Chapter 4, “Danger: Are Sexual Predators Lurking Everywhere?” (p. 232)

In The Culture of Fear, sociologist Barry Glassner provides a detailed account of how American society uses fear to regulate everyday practices. He points out that people are terrible at assessing risk; many fears are connected, not to risk, but to how the media shapes the public’s perception of key issues.

That’s it in a nutshell: “American society uses fear to regulate everyday practices.” But America is not exceptional in that regard. It’s a widespread socio-cultural practice and it’s at the heart of cultural mechanisms of social control.

Free-Form Fear

Here’s the paragraph to which that footnote is attached (p. 102):

From the advent of social media, it has been impossible to talk about teens’ engagement without addressing the topic of online safety and sexual predators. More than any other issue presented in this book, the topic of online safety generally—and sexual predators specifically—has played a significant role in configuring teens’ relation to mediated communication, adults’ attitudes toward teens’ participation, and policy discussions about social media regulation. Online safety is also a particularly complicated issue, in part because a culture of fear is omnipresent in American society, and no parent wants to take risks when it comes to their children’s safety. Statistics showing the improbability of harm fail to reassure those who are concerned. Even when highly publicized stories turn out to be fabrications, parents still imagine that somewhere, somehow, their child might fall victim to a nightmarish fate. They are afraid because terrible things do happen to children. And although those violations most commonly take place in known environments—home, school, place of worship, and so on—the internet introduces an unknown space that is harder to comprehend. Nothing feeds fear more than uncertainty.

A bit later (p. 106, emphasis mine):

Legal scholar Larry Lessig argues that four forces regulate social systems: market, law, social norms, and technology or architecture. Fear is often used in service of these forces. Companies sell fear to entice parents to buy products that will help them protect their children. Policymakers respond to fear by regulating children’s access to public spaces, even when doing so accomplishes little. The media broadcasts fears, creating and reinforcing fearful social norms. And technologies are built to assuage or reproduce parents’ fears. Given the cultural work done in the name of fear, it’s astounding that young people have as much freedom as they do.

Of course, there are real dangers out there. The existence of those real dangers lends plausibility to the hyped up dangers, and the hype, in turn, makes it difficult to deal with the real dangers in an intelligent way (p. 109):

Parental fear regarding sexual predators is understandable. No parent wants to imagine her or his child being harmed, and the potential cost of such a violation is unfathomable, regardless of how statistically improbable such an event might be. Combine this with the media’s magnification of the cultural mythos of the online sexual predator and it’s no wonder that countless parents become hyperprotective without considering the costs of their actions. But this distorted fear obscures the very real and costly risks that some youth do face. Untangling these issues requires stepping back and rethinking what we think we know regarding sexual predation.

In this situation, how do you draw a line between real danger and fantasized danger?

It’s Complicated 1: Escaping on a Raft in Cyberspace

Farewell to freedom on the Adriatic and to days of wild abandon. – Hayao Miazaki

Are we heading toward a world in which our activities in the physical world are totally institutionalized so that our only “free” time is the time we spend online? That’s what I’ve been thinking as I read danah boyd’s new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale UP 2014). But before I get to that – I’m only three chapters in, anyhow – let me tell you about my childhood. It’s not that my childhood was particularly interesting or significant, but simply that in one crucial way it was quite different from the lives of the 150+ teens boyd interviewed for the book: within broad limits, I could go where I wanted, when I wanted; these teens cannot.

From there I follow boyd to a discussion of the social management of anxiety and then shift gears and end up patrolling the backwoods in the antebellum South, looking for escaping slaves and other miscreants. That’s when we meet up with Huck and Jim riding the bit stream to freedom, thereby returning me to dana boyd. You’ll see, it’ll all work out in the end.

Sorta.

Confined to Quarters

I grew up in the 1950s and 60s in Richland Township, a suburb of Johnstown in Pennsylvania about 70 miles east of Pittsburgh. My neighborhood bordered on small farms and forest. As a teenager I had to be home for dinner, be home before dark, get my homework done, and practice my trumpet. I had various activities as well, scouts, school clubs (band and others) that took time, but they didn’t fill my schedule. I could, and did, roam freely about the neighborhood. I had to tell my mother generally where I was going, but that was it.

As I’ve indicated, that’s not the case with the teens that boyd interviewed. This is important, for it is the main reason many of them spend so much time online. Cyberspace is the only place they can hangout with their friends without adult intrusion into their lives (pp. 20-21):

The social media tools that teens use are direct descendants of the hangouts and other public places in which teens have been congregating for decades. What the drive-in was to teens in the 1950s and the mall in the 1980s, Facebook, texting, Twitter, instant messaging, and other social media are to teens now. Teens flock to them knowing they can socialize with friends and become better acquainted with classmates and peers they don’t know as well. They embrace social media for roughly the same reasons earlier generations of teens attended sock hops, congregated in parking lots, colonized people’s front stoops, or tied up the phone lines for hours on end. Teens want to gossip, flirt, complain, compare notes, share passions, emote, and joke around. They want to be able to talk among themselves—even if that means going online.

While boyd has a great deal to say about just what they do, I want to leave that aside for now. Much of what she says is generally about life online, written for people who don’t spend much time online. I do, so the world she describes is familiar to me even though I’m old enough to be a grandfather to the people she’s interviewed.

Here’s a bit about one of boyd’s subjects (p. 89):

My interview with Myra, a middle-class white fifteen-year-old from Iowa, turned funny and sad when “lack of time” became a verbal tick in response to every question I asked her about connecting with friends. From learning Czech to track, from orchestra to work in a nursery, she told me that her mother organized “98%” of her daily routine. Myra did not like all of these activities, but her mother thought they were important. She was resigned to them. Lack of freedom and control over her schedule was a sore topic for Myra. At one point, she noted with an exasperated tone that weekends were no freer than weekdays: “Usually my mom will have things scheduled for me to do. So I really don’t have much choice in what I’m doing Friday nights. . . . I haven’t had a free weekend in so long. I cannot even remember the last time I got to choose what I wanted to do over the weekend.” Myra noted that her mother meant well, but she was exhausted and felt socially disconnected because she did not have time to connect with friends outside of classes.

It’s Time for America to Reinvent itself Top to Bottom

But that’s not what I titled this month’s article at 3 Quarks Daily. I gave it a somewhat more provocative title, American Craziness: Where it Came from and Why It Won’t Work Anymore. The craziness is why America has to reinvent itself.

The core of my argument somes from an article I read in my freshman year at Johns Hopkins, “Certain Primary Sources and Patterns of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World” (full text online HERE). Parsons argues that life in Western nations generates a lot of aggressive impulses that cannot, however, be satisfied in any direct way. Why not? Because Western society is highly hierarchal and there is a great deal of aggression from superiors against inferiors, who cannot, however, respond in kind because to do so would be dangerous.

What, then, can those social inferiors do with their aggression? Well, they can let it rot their spirit and, eventually, their bodies as well. And that does happen. But they can also direct their aggression at external enemies. That happens as well.

This has certainly been the case in America. The Cold War was more of a psychic release mechanism for the nations involved – America included – than it was a collision of rational foreign policies East and West. But, as I point out in the 3QD piece, American had developed a sophisticated variation on the mechanism that was organized around slavery.

The institution of slavery in effect gave America an internal colony against which white Americans could direct their aggressive impulses. And when slavery was banished, institutionalized racism kept that colony in place. While the Civil Rights movement certainly changed the legal parameters of that social mechanism, and had real and beneficial effects in the world, the mechanism is still alive.

But, really, as I argue in the 3QD piece, this baroque contraption is ready to fall apart, hence the deadlock in America’s national politics.

I do something else in that piece, however, something of a more theoretical nature. I push Parsons’ argument a bit further than he did. As his title notes, he was arguing about Western nations, not nations in general. Yet anyone who finds his argument convincing can see that the mechanisms he describes are not confined to the West. They’re ubiquitous.

What if, I suggest, that mechanism is built into the fundamental cultural psychodynamics of the nation state? For Parsons there is the nation, on the one hand, and, incidentally, there is this strange psycho-cultural dynamic that happens in Western nations. In his argument that dynamic is not intrinsic to the nation-state, it is merely incidental. I argue that, on the contrary, that projective dynamic is intrinsic to the nation-state; it is how the nation state works.

Culture as a Force in History: the United States of the Blues

I have long thought of cultural evolution as a driving force in human history, perhaps even as THE most important driving force, but making an argument on the issue is difficult do in an intellectual environment where cultural evolution is hardly even recognized as an important historical process. At least one problem has to do with our conception of historical actors. There is, of course, the Great Man or Great Woman – gender makes no different though the historical record is biased toward men – who discovers things, leads armies and states, and so forth. We’ve got city-states, nation states, and empires, large commercial concerns, and social classes, all historical actors we know how to conceptualize. But culture? Other than the Great Culture Makers, male and female, where are the actors and what do they do?

The actors in cultural evolution are, of course, people, all of us. And what we do is that we try to live as good a life as possible. Collectively, we constitute the culture, and our actions, in the large and over the long term, constitute cultural evolution.

American Popular Music in the 20th Century

Back in the previous millennium, near the end, I did make one explicit argument about culture as a historical force. The argument was not a general one but rather was about a specific set of cultural formations, American popular music in the 20th century. And I didn’t frame it as an argument about cultural evolution, but simply as an argument about music: Music Making History: Africa Meets Europe in the United States of the Blues (in Leading Issues in Afro-American Studies, Nikongo Ba'Nikongo, ed., Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, pp. 189-233, 1997).

I‘m not going to try to summarize the whole argument, but I’d like to look at enough to give a sense of the terms of the argument. Here’s the abstract:

European-American racism has used African America as a screen on which to project repressed emotion, particularly sex and aggression. One aspect of this projection is that whites are attracted to black music as a means of expressing aspects of themselves they cannot adequately express through music from European roots. Thus twentieth century expressive culture in the United States has been dominated by an evolving socio-cultural system in which blacks create musical forms and whites imitate them. It happened first with jazz, and then with rock and roll. The sexual revolution and the recent florescence of blacks in television and movies suggests that white America has had some success in using black American expressive forms to cure its affective ills. The emergence of rap, from African America, and minimalism, from European America, indicates that this system is at a point where it is ready to leave Western expressive culture behind as history moves to the next millennium.

The fundamental dynamic is thus psycho-social We’re dealing with psychology at the individual level–for that’s where psychology takes place, in individuals–but where certain characteristics are typical of whole groups. In a section on the cultural psychodynamics of racism I sketch that out in some detail:

Freud argued that, in general, much behavior is driven by unconscious desires. Moving beyond the individual psyche, he argued, perhaps most explicitly in Civilization and Its Discontents (1962), that Western civilization is built on a foundation of emotional repression. Racism is a society-wide manifestation of that repression. The basic point is simple: many of the characteristics racists have attributed to blacks are simply the repressed contents of their own hearts and minds which they have projected onto African Americans (Baldwin, 1963, p. 95 ff.; Gay, 1993. pp. 69 ff.; Morrison, 1992, pp. 37 ff., 51-52; Young-Bruehl 1996). In particular, the heightened sexual desire and potency, and the greater emotionality, which whites have insisted on seeing in blacks has more to do with unconscious white desire than it does with black behavior.

In an essay originally published in 1947, Talcott Parsons (1964, pp. 298-322) explored the dynamics of aggression, arguing that Western society is so structured that aggressive impulses are often generated in situations where they cannot be directly expressed, creating a need for ethnic and national "Others" who can be scapegoated. Calvin Hernton explored the sexual dynamics of racism in a study originally published in 1965 (and reprinted in 1988). Erik Erikson made a general theoretical statement in the final chapter of his Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968, pp. 295-320). He argued that no culture has been able to adapt the full biological range of human desire and feeling to its patterns. Each culture cultivates some characteristics at the expense of others. The neglected characteristics may then coalesce into a negative identity which members of a given society will often project or displace onto members of some other society or culture. Joel Kovel (1984) has undertaken an investigation of American racism in which he argues for different psychological processes in the North and the South. Most recently, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1996) has undertaken a psycho-social analysis of prejudice–including anti-Semitism, sexism, and homophobia in addition to racism–in which she identifies various kinds of racism and attempts to identify the historical conditions which give rise to them...

However, if the lynching is the prototypical scene of racist violence, there is a contrasting prototypical scene of racism, one which is not dominated by physical violence. Consider those nightclubs, such as the Cotton Club, where the performers were black but the clientele was exclusively white. Why did all those white people seek black entertainment? No doubt most of them came for the erotic floorshow, but some of them were interested in the music. Why? The question is not a new one, and the answer is obvious--in the same way that the applicability of Freud to racism is so obvious that it has been little discussed. European Americans have liked African-American music because it has expressive powers which are lacking in European and European-American music (Crouch, 1990b, p 83; Keil, 1966, p. 49; Small, 1987, p. 154; Williams, 1983, p. 254). In particular, as we've seen above, African-American music is comfortable with sexuality, while European music is not. People may have come to the Cotton Club to see black bodies enact jungle pseudo-rituals on stage; but they left with the expressive sound of African American music boring into their brains….

Unfortunately the psychodynamics of racism doesn't end here. The need for projective psychological relief is an equal opportunity affirmative action agent of social destruction. Black Americans have demonized whites even as they have been demonized. The Black Muslims provide the most obvious example, with Elijah Muhammad's story of the evil Mr. Yacub who created a race of “blond, pale-skinned, cold-blue-eyed devils--savages, nude and shameless; hairy, like animals, they walked on all fours and they lived in trees.” These white devils then turned a black “heaven on earth into a hell torn by quarreling and fighting” (Haley, 1965, p. 167; for different examples, see e.g. Crouch, 1990c, pp. 200-202, 231-244; Early, 1989, pp. 199-207; Young-Bruehl, 1996, 481 ff.). Considering that African Americans have legitimate grievances against European Americans, the problem of sorting out the justified anger from the projective demonization seems hopeless. From that hopeless confusion Dr. Martin Luther King, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz–aka Malcolm X, Detroit Red, Malcolm Little–struggled to discriminate right from wrong and thereby exercised moral and political leadership which gave hope to millions.

Given that as a fundamental psycho-cultural dynamic of American culture and society, the logic of the cultural argument becomes obvious. But listening to and then imitating black music, with its obvious sensuality, white America becomes more comfortable with its sexuality and therefor has less need of projection as a mechanism of psychic relief. The largest part of the article then traces out the back and forth dynamic in which popular music gave expression to sexuality and then, with hip-hop, anger.

HD10: Empiricism, Psychohistory, Narratology: The horror! The horror!

Once Marlow reached the Inner Station, he found Kurtz, of course. Kurtz was weakened and gravely ill. He died on the trip back:

"One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, 'I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.' The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, 'Oh, nonsense!' and stood over him as if transfixed.

"Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—

"'The horror! The horror!'

At the very end of the story, when Marlow is talking with Kurtz’s fiancée, known only as “the Intended,” she insists on knowing the last thing he said. He tells her that it was her name, which is, of course, a lie. But as Johanna M. Smith* points out in a feminist reading of the text, things are not so simple:

And surely the particular lie Marlow chooses is meant to satisfy his “dull anger” with the Intended’s naïveté and her insistence that he give her something “to live with.” He and his audience—and the reader—know that by substituting the Intended’s name for “the horror! the horror” he equates the two; her ignorance of this equation becomes a punishing humiliation.

I believe that she is correct in this matter. And that opens up three lines of inquiry which I’d like to sketch out: 1) empirical, 2) psychohistory, and 3) narratology.