ShrinkWrapped

Changes: Part IA, a Digression

Yesterday I started a series which offers a potential explanation of how the mind binds mental energy by the use of symbolic representations of objects (an object meaning anything from a thing, to an idea, to a relationship, with multiple layers of complexity.)  The goal of the series is to understand how people's "reality templates" change.  I pointed to the change in our view of Ronald Reagan's place in our recent history.  While there are many who will hold into the old meme, the weight of opinion has tipped to embrace the image of Reagan as a great liberator and a giant of the 20th century.  Understanding how these changes take place is crucially important because it is by way of our symbolic representations that we understand the world around us.

We tend to value people who have great facility in manipulating words, writers, lawyers, politicians, for example. One particular group that is particularly powerful and particularly well compensated for their ability to manipulate language, and more powerfully, to combine the language with vivid visual imagery, is Hollywood.  The fact that Hollywood is predominantly liberal, intellectually arrogant, elitist, and, of course, unthinkingly anti-war is not terribly troubling.  (If anyone knows of a thoughtful critique of the war in Iraq by a Hollywood personality, by all means send it to me; I haven't seen anything that even approaches coherency from Hollywood.)  However, there is something going on in contemporary Hollywood that is much more insidious and troubling; whether or not it ultimately presents a danger is less certain to me.

Our earliest templates are formed in our early years.  Once we move outside of the family relationships, our templates tend to be more schematic; the farther removed from our current experience, the more sketchy our templates become.  This is one of the reasons people who have never met a Jew can be anti-Semites, or why people who grow up in lily white communities can be racist.  They have no personal experience of the "stranger" and form their templates by using the information presented to them by others.  They tend to identify with their parent's attitudes, but are also influenced by the visual images they see in the media.  For those who do not have a strong emotional investment in the particular template, a minimalist template can be  changed with relative ease by confrontation with reality.  This occurs both with the non committed anti-Semite who meets some Jewish people personally and discovers they are not all __________ (fill in the blanks) but exhibit the full range of human behavior, just like anyone else.  It can also happen with the conservative who used to be a liberal but was "mugged by reality."

Until 9/11, most American's template for Islam and the Arab was fairly schematic.

Changes: Part I

As a Psychoanalyst, I have spend a great deal of time trying to understand how people change (more accurately, how people's minds change). In a psychoanalytic therapy, the changes we are striving for involve fundamental shifts in the way a person sees himself and others, which then affects how he or she interacts with the world. The goal is to help them minimize the distortions in their perception of reality.  We recognize that there can be no such thing as a completely objective sense of reality, but there is, within certain parameters, a consensus reality. 

My interest extends from how people change in their most personal psychology to how the conventional wisdom, a part of our consensus reality, can change.  For example, for most of his term in office, Ronald Reagan was considered by many (readers of the New York Times, for example) as a doddering fool, who nearly caused catastrophe by his lack of diplomacy (calling the USSR an "evil empire" was just as bad as George Bush and his "Axis of evil"), a reckless cowboy who threatened the world.  Amazingly, by the time of his death, he was seen as a giant of the 20th century who was instrumental in freeing millions from the clutches of totalitarian communism.  How did the meme change?

Dangerous Portents

There is an ongoing, dangerous escalation of rhetoric taking place in our nation.  It is reminiscent of the tone that existed in the anti-war precincts in the late 1960's.  At that time, the United States was routinely derided as an imperialist, capitalist, fascist state which had as its goal the subjugation of the freedom fighters of the Viet Cong, who were fighting to rid their country of foreign invaders, and deserved our support.  The rhetoric had an inexorable logic to it, and by the late 1960's, we had our homegrown minor league terrorist groups, the Weathermen (a pale precursor of al Qaeda without a Koran, but with the Port Huron Statement as a manifesto) and the Black Panthers, a group of thugs loosely analogous to the irredentist Sunnis, but without the suicide bombing.  Luckily, the violence was held to a minimum, few people were killed, though not for lack of ambition, and with the end of the draft, the passions dimmed.  The left won the war over Vietnam, won the control of the government (with the Democrats and the liberal agenda an attenuated form of leftism) and the right went to work honing their philosophy and message.  The United States retreated from large scale military interventions, and any terrorism that occurred, tended to come from the right.

Once again, we seem to be treading into dangerous territory.  Just as back in the 60's, the MSM, Walter Cronkite, the New York Times, various pundits, gave intellectual cover to the worst excesses of rhetoric and ultimately to violence, the rhetoric is ratcheting upwards into dangerous territory.  Central figures in the MSM, and in the Democratic party, are making charges that legitimize violence.  If Bush lied (a meme that seems to never be far from the surface of the NY Times), if the Republicans "stole" a second consecutive election, if our soldiers, just as charged n Vietnam, are committing atrocities sanctioned by their superiors, logic dictates that some on the extreme left will take this as fact (and, some go much further into more complicated paranoid delusions) and take the step into violence.  Thus far we have been treated to various conservatives being pelted with food when they have appeared on campuses.  It will almost certainly escalate from here.

Yesterday, in Contradictions, I wrote about the contrast between the brutality of the Iraqi terrorists (rarely mentioned in the Times) and the US military, and the slander by Bob Herbert printed in the Times.

Today, John McCandlish Phillips, an author and former reporter for the New York Times, wrote in the Washington Post an article titled, "When Columnists Cry 'Jihad'". 

Contradictions

As the barbarity and inhumanity of our enemies continues to reveal itself, there is an interesting contradiction at work among our elites.  Whether we examine the leftists in academia, the left/liberal prevailing wisdom in the MSM, the shrill, unexamined left/liberal mindlessness of much of Hollywood, or the ongoing drift in the ethos of the Democratic party, the disconnect between the versions of reality described in the blogosphere and that described in the house organs of the PC culture, as exemplified by the New York Times, becomes increasingly incongruous. 

Yesterday, Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs, and today, Bill Roggio at the Fourth Rail wrote about a horrendous incident in Iraq.  Iraq TV is now showing confessions from captured terrorists and MEMRI provided the translation.  A policeman was kidnapped, whipped, beheaded, and then had his abdomen sliced open, his internal organs replaced with explosives, and then set out as  a trap; his body was blown up, killing the policeman's father and two other policemen.

There is little to say about the depravity of people who would do such a thing, and the TV show is apparently quite popular in Iraq and instrumental in de-legitimizing the insurgents there among the bulk of the Iraqis.  I would add that all evidence suggests that this kind of depravity is shared by many if not all of the Jihadis under the sway of Islamofascism.

The reaction of he western elites is instructive, as well.  Bob Herbert, who writes for the newspaper which used to be considered "the paper of record" but is now losing circulation almost as fast as the network that used to be known as the leader in giving us the news ("and that [was] the way it is"] is losing viewers, has repeated a story, which apparently grows in the re-telling of American troops happily shooting unarmed prisoners.  Since others in the blogosphere (New Sisyphus has a reasonable take on this story) are looking into this further, I would only add that if there were these kinds of atrocities going on all the time, as suggested, it is hard to imagine the New York Times and CBS, along with Reuters and the AP, have somehow missed such a juicy story.  Other pundits on the left have continued to construct more and more fantastical fantasies about how the Bush administration is imperialistic or the Dominionists are, any day now, going to take over and create a Theocracy here.

Paul Mirengoff, Deacon from Powerline, writes in Argument By Metaphor, about the failure of discourse on the left:

For a while now, the left has been fond of argument by creative metaphor--Zionism equals racism; pornography equals sex discrimination or even rape; and, more recently, Bush equals Hitler. In this way, a controversial phenomenon is equated with one that everyone agrees is bad. Leftists in the academy particularly favor this show-stopper approach, since they are used to having their theories evaluated not for their objective validity (a hopelessly passé concept), but rather for their creativity.

John Hinderaker, another of the Powerline writers, noted a conference being held in New York called "Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right," which was co-sponsored by the New York Open Center, the City University of New York, and People for the American Way. He does a ice job deconstructing their arguments (which are little more than name calling and paranoid fantasy).  He comments on many of their statements, including this one by Joan Bokaer, founder of TheocracyWatch.org, who

"compared the Federal Communications Commission's threatened crackdown on indecency on television with the Taliban, the repressive Islamic rulers of Afghanistan who harbored Osama bin Laden's terrorist network until toppled by a U.S.-led invasion."

Hinderaker concludes:

In Afghanistan under the Taliban, girls weren't permitted to attend elementary school, and large numbers of people were executed before crowds in soccer stadiums. In "theocratic" America, the FCC thinks that women's breasts shouldn't unexpectedly pop into view while millions of children are watching a sporting event. SAME THING! NO DIFFERENCE! These people, by the way, pride themselves on "nuanced" thinking.

This would be just another example of the kinds of things that is passed off as sophisticated thinking in some circuits on the left if not for the fact that  a few days ago, I received an e-mail form an old friend who lives in Westchester, New York, 30 minutes form where I live.  We have known each other for many years and have both been fairly traditional Democrats, basically buying the conventional New York liberal wisdom that Republicans are robber barons, only interested in their own self interest, and Democrats, along with being peace loving, caring for the environment and the poor, are also wiser, better educated and smarter than Republicans.  There was no need to question these assumptions (despite the obvious and continuing slow erosion of the Democratic Party's reality testing in terms of taxes, political correctness, affirmative action, and other issues) until 9/11.  Since then, it has been incumbent upon people to take a serious look at the world we live in; reality has mugged us. 

Back to the e-mail.  After a brief exchange about the impact and influence of the Christian right and the possibility of a theocracy in America he wrote: