[Update at end]
Recently there have been two occasions to note regressive responses, one on a macro level and the other on a more micro level.
Last week the Swiss voted in a referendum to outlaw the building of any new Minarets in their country. Elder offers a cogent explanation of the subtext for the ban, of which both proponents and opponents are behaving in a disingenuous manner; my excerpt focuses on the proponents of the ban:
Minarets, Switzerland, and power of symbolism
However, the opponents of the minarets are being equally deceptive in hiding their motivation. They pretend that the ban is to preserve the skylines of their towns, but in reality the movement to ban minarets is completely about the fear of Islam and Muslims. The initiative came from right-wing and ultra-conservative parties that are often associated with xenophobia. Their most famous poster against the minarets doesn't even try to hide their real anti-Muslim agenda, as the minarets are consciously drawn to evoke missiles and the woman wearing the abaya plays on fears of Muslims.
To them, the minaret is a sign of growing Islamic encroachment on their land, and Muslims are regarded as undesirable outsiders. The minaret is no less a symbol to them than it is to Muslims.
Without symbolism, the existence of minarets is no more offensive than their ban. In this case, each side's symbolism is the same: minarets partially represent Islamic dominance and the opponents fear that dominance.
Robin Shepherd is concerned about the reaction from the always easily provoked and enraged Muslims at whom the ban is aimed:
Swiss vote to ban Muslim minarets in sharpest challenge to Islam in Europe yet
It is far too early to draw conclusions about today’s unfolding events in Switzerland and I will comment later when the situation becomes clearer. But it looks as though a backlash against Islam in Europe by nationalist forces energised by the failures of multiculturalist orthodoxies is now really starting to take hold.
It is just such an implosion of the centre-ground in favour of polarising groups on either side that has long been predicted by critics of politically correct, multiculturalist ideology. In other words, if mainstream parties refused to deal with the problem of intolerance and bigotry inside Muslim groups in a civilised manner, it was inevitable that fringe groups would deal with the problem in an uncivilised manner, all the while garnering ever greater support from a wider public disillusioned by the way things have been going. There’s more of this to come. You can rely on it.
Ed Morrissey effectively summarizes and echoes both arguments and points to the existence of the First Amendment as a de-fuser of the kinds of regressive reactions now being evoked in Europe.
WaPo: When did Switzerland become Europe’s Saudi Arabia?
Events like these make me appreciate the wisdom of the First Amendment and the founders who established it. Through all of the passions of the American body politic, from Know-Nothings to today, that fundamental tenet of religious freedom has rescued us from serious and rather embarrassing missteps, such as the one taken by the Swiss this week. The US has around two million Muslims, the vast majority of which live peacefully in our communities. For those who do not, we trust our law-enforcement agencies to deal specifically with lawbreaking rather than conduct purges based on religious affiliation, which is how the Swiss should have left it.
The point is that when more mature and adaptive responses (ie, verbal arguments, even including name calling and insults, all far preferable to physical violence and intimidation) are blocked, more regressive responses are inevitable. The Swiss vote, and the Muslim use of symbolic intimidation and actual intimidation, are evidence that there are significant regressive trends at work beneath the placid surface of European society. This deserves to be watched closely.
Closer to home, we have evidence of a regressive response, in statu nascendi, at the Little Green Footballs blog of Charles Johnson. In Why I Parted Ways With The Right, Charles Johnson lists 10 items supporting his contention that the Right has gone off the rails. LGF was one of the first blogs I read on a regular basis. Charles Johnson played a major role in exposing the perfidy of the liberal MSM during Rathergate and has always been a strong supporter of Israel and a leading Christian anti-anti-Semite. Over the last year or so I began to read LGF less and less often as Charles Johnson appeared to become preoccupied with attacking various straw man arguments, like Intelligent Design, birtherism, climate denial, etc. Unknowingly Charles Johnson has illustrated how a regression to an "us versus them" primitive splitting can arise even in an apparently quite rational individual.
Jules Crittenden pointed out what should be fairly obvious, that is that there are "crazies" on both sides.
Charles Johnson Explains The Crazy Hating
Well, not really. Little Green Footballs on why he flipped from right to left. The explanation is a little thin. It’s more an illustration of how he’s flipped out, from right to left. But apparently it works like this: If you disagree with any element of half of the American body politic, you disagree with the whole thing. This makes you saner, more compassionate, more embracing of diversity. Probably smarter, too.
And if you agree with any element of half the American body politic, you agree with the whole thing, and you are a crazy hater. But the whole thing is crazy and hateful. That’s an inference, because he doesn’t really get into it. He really only offers the broadest outlines of his crazy hate problem, basically how some people drive him crazy, and he hates them. Which is too bad, because even if you buy the premise that broad swaths of America are crazy and hateful, it doesn’t get into what he finds so attractive about the presumeably sane, loving, rational part. I would have preferred a detailed description of the moment when all that inclusive thoughtful concern hit him like a silver bullet, when the switch flipped on the bright shining light on the road to Damascus, when … enveloped by its warm, mentally balanced, nurturing embrace … he started frothing about the hateful craziness. Also, how the crazy hating on his new side of the aisle fits into his new anti-hate/crazy world view. Not on offer in this brief crazy hate-a-thon. But it’s pretty obvious he bought this line that it is all about crazy hateful bigoted insurrection, which comes across ironically as crazy and hateful sounding. Unfortunately I never read his site enough — largely because its content was never much more sophisticated, informative or entertaining than this crazy hatefest — to offer any meaningful analysis of where, when and how the crazy hate obsession kicked in. Scroll down for calming beach views!
I would go further and say that there is "craziness" within each of us, ideas that are so powerfully held that they become immune to rational discourse. It is when such ideas become the prime movers of one's mental life that they overwhelm the higher mental functions (rational thought, appreciation of complexity, etc) and rationality becomes subsumed by a regressive mental state that enables the freer expression of ambivalence, rage, and hatred. I do not plan on performing the research but it would be interesting and illuminating to know what portion of the LGF readers and commenters will accompany Charles on his journey form right to left.
[Jules notes that a similar dynamic occurred with Andrew Sullivan, who once having discovered that the most important issue upon which to base one's political life is gay marriage, retrospectively invalidated all his prior concerns and shortly thereafter submerged into the fever swamp of left wing birtherism (ie, the fantasied provenance of Trig Palin.)]
This post is not meant as an attack on Charles Johnson or the Swiss but rather as part of an ongoing exploration of how people regress in the public sphere and how populations regress in the face of stress. Homo sapiens is above all a rationalizing animal; although many people believe they struggle long and hard to arrive at the answer to complex problems in their lives, most of the time people "decide" on the basis of unconscious mental processes and provide the rationalization post hoc. (There is increasing laboratory evidence for just such a sequence occurring when subjects make much simpler decisions.) This means that the vigilance necessary to catch oneself in a regressive state is at a premium. I would suggest that if you find yourself making categorical statements such as "all Muslims are potential terrorists" or "anyone who questions Global Warming is akin to a Holocaust denier" you should take a respite and consider whether, under the pressure of stressful events, you are succumbing to the kinds of regressive states that can damage societal functioning.
Update: In a fascinating bit of naturalistic observation, Dymphna, at Gates of Vienna, writing about Charles Johnson, notes: [HT: Jules Crittenden]
Speaking of metaphors, earlier today the Baron pointed something out about Chaz. I had noted back in 2007, when he first went off the track, that he’d begun using smell metaphors when he was sounding particularly regressed. [Emphasis mine-SW] If you have the time or interest I suppose you could dig through the late 2007 threads when he began expressing disgust by referring to his olfactory nerves. Things smelled bad or good. And now it seemed he was back to his bloodhound tricks.
This example today was an attack on some ad which ran in the paper. CJ complains about the noxious smell emanating from this ad. Originally I’d planned to just use his nose, but if you read the whole passage, you can observe both his deep sense of persecution and how invaded he feels. This is the full quote the Baron sent me:
The racism at the Washington Times (former employer of white supremacist blogger Robert Stacy McCain) is bubbling to the surface for all to smell, like noxious sewer gas. Today they ran the following advertisement, a lunatic Birther ad featuring images of monkeys. This isn’t even “dog whistle” racism. It’s right in your face, poking you in the eye.
This is fascinating. His sense of smell is assaulted, even his eyes are in danger of being “poked”. I tell you, Charles is a walking, talking (and biking) Freudian slip (if you want to read the whole thing, Google is your friend. I don’t link to his site anymore).
Sometimes when I see this Icarus figure lying in the withered grass, staring sightlessly at the stars, I wonder if his fall could have been avoided. At other times I simply don’t give a fig beyond wondering how much farther he has to go before he’s finally finished falling.
Disgust is one of our most primitive emotions. The sense of smell is the only sense that does not recieve significant processing in the Thalamus (between the Midbrain and the Cerberal Cortex) before entering the cerebral cortex. (Afferent fibers from the nose go through the cribiform plate directly into the olfactory bulb and from there into the limbic system which is the area of the brain responsible for our most primitive emotional reactions and states.) This is why aromas are among the most powerful evocative stimuli of emotional reactions and memories. The use of olfactory metaphors often accompanies the deepest emotional reactions. One could speculate that Charles Johnson was disgusted by that which he then "discovered" were those very ideas that so offended him that he was "forced" to flip from right to left.
Recent Comments