ShrinkWrapped

Civilizational Insecurity

In a comment to Surrendering to Army Ants, David Foster, the proprietor of Photon Courier linked to his post from last month, Sleeping with the Enemy.  (His link was to an introduction to the post on his blog; I have linked to the full post at Chicago Boyz.)  In his post, David discusses a forgotten novel:

Sleeping with the Enemy

Why has the western world shown such loss of will in defending itself from radical Islamic terrorism? Why, indeed, do substantial numbers of people–particularly those who view themselves as intellectuals–endlessly make excuses for dictatorships and terrorist movements whose values are completely at odds with their own stated values–and even romanticize these goons? I think some clues can be found in a forgotten novel by Arthur Koestler.

The Age of Longing (published in 1950) is set in Paris, “sometime in the 1950s,” in a world in which France–indeed all of western Europe–is facing the very real possibility of a Soviet invasion. Hydie Anderson, the protagonist, is a young American woman living in Paris with her father, a military attache. Hydie was a devout Catholic during her teens, but has lost her faith. She was briefly married, and has had several relationships with men, but in none of them has she found either physical or emotional satisfaction…she describes her life with a phrase from T S Eliot: “frigid purgatorial fires,” and she longs for a sense of connection:

David's essay is rich and deep, well worth your time.  Koestler joined the Communist party in 1931, in his mid-20s, but became disillusioned with the evils of Communism by the end of the 1930s.   In 1940 he published his devastating anti-totalitarian novel, Darkness at Noon.

As noted, The Age of Longing (which I have not read) was published 10 years later and did not achieve the acclaim of his earlier book.  However, the excerpts David Foster quotes illustrate Koestler's facility with language and ideas and the artist's ability to penetrate to the soul.  The story is complicated.  The heroine, Hydie, rejects a man who is appropriate in favor of a committed Communist, Fedya.  The characters are all awaiting the inevitable invasion of western Europe by the Russian army and Fedya is part of the Soviet vanguard:

At a diplomatic affair, Hydie meets Fedya, a committed Communist who works for the Soviet Embassy. She is powerfully attracted to him: things get physical very quickly and, from Hydie’s point of view, very satisfactorily. (Fedya is one of Koestler’s best-developed characters. His boyhood in Baku is vividly sketched, and Koestler–himself a former Communist–does a good job in showing how a political faith can become core to an individual’s whole personality.)

The affair blows up when Fedya humiliates Hydie sexually in a way that could only have occurred to a Dialectical Materialist–and, indeed, humiliation was not Fedya’s intent, he was “only” attempting the demonstrate to her the truth of Pavlovian conditioning as an explanation for human behavior. Hurt and furious, she pours out her heart to Julien…who now feels free to tell her the truth about Fedya, a truth he felt unable to divulge while Fedya was Hydie’s lover.

Fedya’s real job, underneath his diplomatic cover, is to collect lists of names–the names of the key people to be killed or imprisoned immediately after the Soviet invasion. Hydie is, of course, horrified, and is particularly appalled that so many people already knew about Fedya’s activities–and did nothing to stop them–while she was blissfully unaware.

Hydie is the epitome of the Western "useful idiot" but it is not her soft ideology that Koestler and David Foster emphasize but rather her reflection of the dissolution and dissipation of the Western idea.  David quotes Koestler, and adds his summation:

“Listen, please,” he said. “We have talked about these matters often before. You don’t like that we make scientific studies of human nature like Professor Pavlov. You don’t like revolutionary vigilance and lists on the social reliability of people, and discipline and re-education camps. You think I am brutal and ridiculous and uncultured. Then why did you like making love with me? I will tell you why and you will understand…”

“I am not a tall and handsome man…There are no tall and handsome men who come from the Black Town in Baku, because there were few vitamins in the food around the oilfields. So it was not for this that you liked to make love with me…It was because I believe in the future and am not afraid of it, and because to know what he lives for makes a man strong…Of course many ugly things are happening in my country. Do you think I do not know about them?…And what difference will it make in a hundred years that there is a little ugliness now? It always existed. In a hundred years there will be no ugliness–only a classless world state of free people. There will be no more wars and no more children born in Black Towns with big bellies and flies crawling in their eyes. And also no more children of the bourgeoisie with crippled characters because they grew up in a decadent society…I am not handsome, but you have felt attracted to me because you know that we will win and that we are only at the beginning–and that you will lose because you are at the end…That is why I was not afraid of your little revolver, because you can’t have the courage to shoot me. To kill, one must believe in something.”

Nevertheless, Hydie pulls the trigger…

One one level, this book is sort of a romance novel, with the theme “chicks like self-confident guys.” This is no doubt true, but emphasizing this point wasn’t Koestler’s main reason for writing Age of Longing. Koestler’s deeper theme is that the decline in religious belief in the West (and Koestler himself was certainly no traditional religious believer) has created a hunger for faith which will likely be filled by those who carry their convictions with great certainty.

I could simply quote the entire essay but suggest you go to his post and read the whole thing.  It has become trite to note the feminization of the West and the price we are paying for our insistence, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that all people are not just created with equal value (which is actually a fairly vapid idea once any reference to God is removed from societal discourse)  but that the absence of equal outcomes must denote societal disrepair.  These reflections of our commitment to Political Correctness are a measure of the soft collectivism that even the Republicans have adopted.  It is possible that the overt collectivist policies that the current Democratic leadership is pressing will evoke enough of a reaction to stop our progress toward a 21^st century quasi-Socialism, but what I find most interesting is that the "ground up" zeitgeist is increasingly at odds with the overt diminution of the rights and responsibilities of the individual.

Societies, as in Europe and parts of Asia, who transition from the potential of empowered individuals to a cheap narcissism risk demographic collapse.  If there is nothing more important than the self, sacrifices for another (ie, offspring) are unthinkable and undone.  They are then left with no ability or inclination to defend against the predations of more confident Collectives, an apt description of Islam in its current incarnation.  A warrior wiling to die for his beliefs is always more appealing to a young woman, who owns the future after all, than an effete, dedicated narcissist.

Pre-industrial Collectivism was the norm.  Tribes and ethnically homogeneous groupings were the rule.  Individuals were subordinate to the group ethos.  Gradually, as the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution matured, ie as increasing numbers of people became increasingly empowered, Collectivist solutions diminished.  In reaction to the excesses of Capitalism, Karl Marx introduced a new structure that leveraged the foundations of tribalism (deprivation and envy.)   Communism showed itself to be a monumental and monstrous failure in the most human terms; more people were murdered by Communism in the 20^th century than in all the religious (ie, tribal) wars before it.  If we add in the other 20^th century Collectivist ideology, Nazism, a tribal ideology based on race, he deaths attributed to our primitive tribalism in modern guise, numbered in the hundreds of millions.  the left was thoroughly discredited by its failures but the collectivist urge, based as it is on the twin human banes of deprivation and envy, can never disappear.  No matter how wealthy a society becomes, there will always be some who have less than others, and always some who have less than they desire.  Yet, in the 21^st century, there is a growing tension between the individual and the collective that is moving powerfully against the collective. 

Our technology, in its accelerating acceleration, is making each of us potentially more powerful than individuals have ever been before.  There will soon come a time when small communities, perhaps even individuals, will be able to live with all the accouterments of modern high tech existence, with minimal interaction with governing bodies and those who act in the name of the Collective.

It should not be a surprise that just at a pivotal moment when the rights, abilities, and responsibilities of the individual are set to make a quantum leap to a new level, we have a reaction form those who are most insecure about the future.  The Left continues to think of itself as the vanguard (no longer of the proletariat perhaps, but of the future course of society.)  They pride themselves on being  progressives, keepers of the future, yet the most progressive ideas today all involve empowering the individual.  

If we surrender to the siren call of pseudo-security, protected by a benevolent government from the vicissitudes of life, we will continue to descend into the morass of Civilizational Insecurity and will find ourselves less and less able to defend our liberties against those who would encroach upon them.  Many of our institutions have already surrendered (as for example, our failing and fading Mainstream Media who will almost dare never utter a word that might offend our enemies.)  It is likely that the next two election cycles will determine whether or not We, the People, are ready to follow.

How Do Universities Breed Terrorists?

"There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."
— George Orwell

Jeffrey Goldberg links to an interesting piece today by Delia Lloyd:

Smart Bombers: Do Universities Breed Terrorists?

"What most people say is that people who turn to terror are the underclass, excluded, social detritus of the globalized economy," says Anthony Glees, a professor of political science and director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence at the University of Buckingham. "But a significant number of people convicted of terror offenses or killed in the commission of those offenses are university students or graduates."

In fact, the Centre for Social Cohesion -- a non-partisan think-tank that studies issues related to community cohesion in the U.K. -- puts that number at slightly over one-quarter for this country. According to a forthcoming report by the center, 26.2 percent of those involved in Islamist related terrorism convictions and attacks between 1999 and 2009 in the U.K. were educated at or above university-degree level. As Glees -- who identified extremist organizations on as many as 30 British university campuses in his 2005 book, "When Students Turn to Terror" -- put it, "Not every radical is a violent extremist. But every violent extremist has been a radical."

Interestingly, two sociologists who looked into the situation determined that Engineers are over-represented among terrorists:

More recently, however, two sociologists -- Diego Gambetta and Stefan Hertog -- discovered that what really matters isn't so much the level of education of would-be terrorists but what they study. According to their research, engineers are four times more likely to pursue violent extremism than their peers in finance, medicine or the sciences. In the West, at least, these scholars found that jihadist organizations actually attract fewer educated individuals, drawing more heavily from the working and middle classes. But there are proportionately even more engineers among their ranks than there are in similar organizations in the Middle East.

In his comments, Jeffrey asks a salient question:

Fighting Terror by Closing Engineering Schools

While they're at it, I'm wondering if Gambetta and Hertog can explain why so many Palestinian physicians (even pediatricians) take the leadership of terror organizations.

[He includes a rather chilling exchange from an interview he had with Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a Pediatrician who became head of Hamas after the assassination of Ahmed Yassin.  Rantisi was later removed from the scene by an Israeli missile in April 17, 2004.  The leadership of Hamas during periods of active attacks against Israel is an insecure professional path.]

Although all such outcomes are over-determined, there are some fundamental reasons why Engineers and Physicians end up over-represented among ideologues who are so readily willing to murder those they see as their enemies.  In a post from 2007 I specifically considered the genesis of Doctors of Death:

Several trends intersect to produce Doctors of Death.  The intellectual underpinnings go back to the Nazis, whose ideology forms part of the ideology of the Islamists, adapted to their interpretation of Islam.  For certain types of Doctors who have an overabundance of intellect and an insufficiency of humanity, Physician training can be easily corrupted by ideology.

Physicians during their training must reconcile several seemingly contradictory impulses.  In order to cure illnesses it is almost always necessary to first inflict greater pain.  Early on, we learn that pain is a signal, it points to the source of the problem.  Patients who enter an emergency room in terrible distress ideally should not be treated with pain killers until the Physician has a very good idea what the underlying problem is; the alternative, treating the pain alone without an etiology, risks masking the illness and leading to disaster.  While pain medication should never be needlessly withheld, it is often necessary for the Doctor to allow for such pain in the service of the patient's greater well being.  Worse, many times manipulations and tests must be done that actually make the pain a great deal worse before a diagnosis can be found and definitive treatment established.  The only way for most Physicians to overcome their natural empathy is to objectify the patient in order to maintain an appropriate and helpful distance.  Only by turning the patient into an object, for example, can the surgeon allow himself to cut into a human being, causing immediate terrible damage and pain, with the ultimate aim of curing or ameliorating.  As our technology improves, the need for pain to direct treatment decreases, but pain will always be a part of Medical practice and, of necessity, so will objectification.

...

The Nazis took such objectification several steps further.  They skillfully created an ideology, based on identity politics, that considered the population as a whole as an organic entity, akin to a person.  The body politic was reified.  Once such a conceptualization had been made, the step toward seeing certain sub-populations as being akin to infectious agents or tumors, causing illness and distress in the body politic, became inevitable.  Medical Doctors then were tasked with curing the body politic by excising the offending sub-populations.  The gas chamber followed.

Islam as practiced by the purveyors of Wahhabism, goes yet another step.  Here the objectification of the sub-population is religiously sanctioned.  Islamic states overtly treat non-Muslims as sub-humans, with limited rights, whose very existence is a stain on Islam, though Islam gains stature by not only tolerating such lesser beings but actually hold themselves out as moral and peace loving by protecting the "inferior" races and religions ("Muslim man's burden", perhaps.)

The confluence of the Nazi inspired objectification of entire populations with its attendant genocidal rationalization with the Islamic religiously sanctioned genocidal rationalizations, creates a powerful toxic mixture which can easily overcome the rationality of a Muslim Physician.  Add in the tendency of the Muslim world to eschew any responsibility for their own suffering and the need to project all their hatred and failure onto others, and the Physician, in complete agreement with Mengele, Habash, Rantisi, and Zawahiri, takes it upon himself to "cure" his community by murdering the objectified other.  Murder and suicide then become evidence of his loving devotion to the well-being of his people and all the while he keeps himself unaware of the sadistic hate that fuels his "treatment."

The nature of engineering is such that there is a self selection of people who have less than the usual quota of "people skills."  The Engineer is then trained to understand problems in the most objective and objectified ways.  For someone steeped in the ideology of radical Islam (or raised in a religiously rigorous Islamic household)  it is a small step to perceive the problems of the Ummah as stemming from deformations of an ideal system caused by the presence of foreign objects, ie sand in the gears.  The necessity of removal of the offending dirt would naturally follow.

In the 14 Signs of Large group Regression discussed by the American Psychoanalytic Association panel at the 2005 winter meetings, number 3 on the list was:

3. Severe splitting. This can occur as a polarity between "us" and "them" or within society.

Fundamentalist Islam specifically divides the world into the World of Islam and the World of War, members of the Ummah and infidels. 

Number 10 on the list was:

10. Dehumanization.  Exemplified by the Nazis, this is a two-step process.  Step one is identifying undesirable humans; step two is turning them into nonhumans, as in the Hutus' degradation of the Tutsis, referred to as cafrads, or insects.  Interestingly, the Tutsis were also called the "Jews" of Rwanda.

The combination of a Regressive religion which fosters splitting and dehumanization with specific intellectual pursuits which foster objectification of other human beings can, in unfortunate cases, create a toxic mixture which enables the emergence of the well educated terrorist murderer. 

Ideologues have always valued the masses more than the individual human beings who occasionally have to be purged for the "good of all."  Islam does it as well as any other ideology we have seen.

Societal Regression Watch

[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]

Maybe His Wings Melted?

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.

Societal Regression Watch

From Terror and Societal Regression:

After a national trauma, there are a number of signs of "large group" regression.  (I will not here go into some of the characteristics of what constitutes a large group; it relates to elements that I have referred to in the past as our tribal nature; see also here.)  The panel chair, Vamik Volkan, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and founder of the Center for the Study of the Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia and Emeritus Training and Supervising Analyst of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, described 14 major symptoms of large-group regression:

...

9) Reactivation of a "chosen trauma" whereby a large group unconsciously "chooses" to make a shared mental representation of an event that caused it terrible losses, helplessness, humiliation, and victimization....Slobodan Milosevic exemplified this phenomenon in his reactivation of the shared memory of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which the Serbian hero, Prince Lazar, was killed. [Emphasis added-SW]

There has been a great deal already written about the difficult to understand decision of the Obama administration to bring Khalid Sheik Mohamed to New York for trial within eyesight of the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood.  Andy McCarthy has made the point that by bringing KSM to trial in a criminal proceeding, the Obama administration can effectively put the Bush administration on trial without taking respoonsibility for their behavior.  The Bush administration's dirty laundry (renditions, secret prisons, enhanced interrogations) can be put on trial, names can be leaked via discovery, and a host of untoward events can cause great pleasure to the left and great distress to those who were involved in protecting us for the last 8 years. 

James Taranto, quoted by Glenn Reynolds notes:

“You have to wonder if the Obama administration and its supporters bothered to think through the implications of their decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohamed and four other enemy combatants as civilians. An immediate effect, and one that will only be strengthened by an actual trial or trials, is to bring 9/11 back into the public consciousness. That can’t be good for President Obama. . . . When appellate courts decide questions of law, they set precedents for future cases. If they make allowances for the exigencies of the war on terror in order to uphold convictions of KSM and his associates, it could end up diminishing the rights of ordinary criminal defendants. That’s why the smart civil-libertarian position is to oppose trying terrorists as civilians.”

It would not be unusual for the unintended consequences to far outweigh the intended.  If the administration believes this will simply be a showcase for the wonders of our legal system and that the political effects will be helpful to them or at least minimally harmful, they may end up surprised.

However, whatever the conscious motivations of Obama and Holder, et al, the unconscious ramifications may be even more powerful, more long lasting, and deeper. 

John Opie pointedly notes the juxtaposition of trial and empty space:  [Emphasis mine-SW]

WTC as Metaphor...

I've commented on the absurd situation surrounding the rebuilding of the WTC before.

And yes, it was a comment to a post by Bret Stephens at the WSJ.

He's remindedonce again that there has been, functionally, no progress there, and that indeed there are multiple ways of viewing the WTC at this point in time.

It's where what effectively amounts to a show trial is now scheduled to be turned into a media circus.

It's where literally thousands of people are waiting for closure and rebirth.

It's also where petty scrabbling and pathetically disgusting incompetence has led to no reconstruction.

... what I really want to talk about here is the WTC as metaphor: a metaphor for how screwed up things really are.

After eight years in which the views and interests of, inter alia, the Port Authority, NYPD, MTA and EPA, the several governors of New York and New Jersey, lease-holder Larry Silverstein, various star architects, the insurance companies, contractors, unions and lawyers, the families of the bereaved, their self-appointed spokespersons, the residents of lower Manhattan and, yes, even the fish of the Hudson river have all been duly consulted and considered, this is what we've got: a site of mourning turned into a symbol of defiance turned into a metaphor of American incompetence—of things not going forward. It is, in short, the story of our decade.

....

Think of it this way: as long as the WTC is not rebuilt, things will not get better. There is a malaise here, a sickness unto the heart, the ritual self-loathing of what once was the great liberal tradition in the United States, poisoned by greed and corruption from within and deliberately targeted for subversion from outside.

Rebuild the WTC. Rebuild it now.

The empty hole where the WTC used to stand is a symbol of American impotence.  9/11 was traumatic not just because of the terrible personal losses of those who lost loved ones that day.  What makes a loss traumatic is the helpless rage evoked by the victimization.  America was rendered helpless on that terrible day and all who watched the planes fly repeatedly into the twin towers and saw those poor doomed souls falling to their deaths, who watched those towers come down, felt the helplessness deep in their emotional cores.  When George W. Bush, in his finest moment, stood on top of the pile of rubble and announced we were coming, it was a necessary turn from mourning to action, psychologically necessary even if the action taken was poorly executed. 

We have now returned to a pre-9/11 passivity in our National Defense.  (I am not here discussing any actual details of how our defensive posture may have changed or whether or not our military is carrying the fight to our enemies but of the atmospherics, the zeitgeist, which is much more significant at the moment.)  By returning KSM to the scene of the crime (rather than dealing with him in a military tribunal that would mete out justice, an active position, versus the enforced passivity of the legal forum) the Obama administration is reawakening the trauma.  When the vast majority of people are opposed to treating KSM with the kids gloves required in our legal system and their wishes are ignored, the sense of powerlessness returns.  Just as the abused child is secondarily traumatized by the parents refusal to listen, those who were traumatized by 9/11 can be re-traumatized by our "parents" refusal to listen.  But where a traumatized child is forced to remain passive, the once traumatized American people may well not remain passive.  The Tea party movement is an expression of the adaptive defense of turning passive into active.  The movement can only grow with each new insult.

Obama and those who share his pre-9/11 mindset (of a wishful fantasy world) would continue to reinforce the trauma and maintain us as a humiliated, helplessly people.  They have unconsciously "chosen the trauma" and moved well down the pathway to a regressed state.  There is a connection between the still vacant hole in the ground and a President who appears to be constitutionally incapable of exercising leadership and taking action.  (Impotence is not a problem in the Academy or the Senate but in the Executive it is disastrous.)  We are facing a genuine test of whether our society will continue to regress or if the people, that amorphous mass who define the zeitgeist in America, can refuse to allow the pervasive state of helplessness and trauma to persist.

Addendum: David Brooks, who is paid to have a sense of the zeitgeist, is in tune with my post today; note the tone of resignation and near despair as he compares our sense of the future and China's sense of its future:

The Nation of Futurity

The anxiety in America is caused by the vague sense that they have what we’re supposed to have. It’s not the per capita income, which the Chinese may never have at our level. It’s the sense of living with baubles just out of reach. It’s the faith in the future, which is actually more important.

China, where President Obama is visiting, invites a certain sort of reverie. It is natural, looking over the construction cranes, to think about the flow of history over decades, not just day to day. And it becomes obvious by comparison just how far the U.S. has drifted from its normal future-centered orientation and how much this rankles.

The U.S. now has an economy shifted too much toward consumption, debt and imports and too little toward production, innovation and exports. It now has a mounting federal debt that creates present indulgence and future hardship.

Americans could once be confident that their country would grow more productive because each generation was more skilled than the last. That’s no longer true. The political system now groans to pass anything easy — tax cuts and expanding health care coverage — and is incapable of passing anything hard — spending restraint, health care cost control.

The standard thing these days is for Americans to scold each other for our profligacy, to urge fiscal Puritanism. But it’s not clear Americans have ever really been self-disciplined. Instead, Americans probably postponed gratification because they thought the future was a big rock-candy mountain, and if they were stealing from that, they were robbing themselves of something stupendous.

It would be nice if some leader could induce the country to salivate for the future again. That would mean connecting discrete policies — education, technological innovation, funding for basic research — into a single long-term narrative. It would mean creating regional strategies, because innovation happens in geographic clusters, not at the national level. It would mean finding ways to tamp down consumption and reward production. The most pragmatic guide for that remains Michael Porter’s essay in the Oct. 30, 2008, issue of Business Week.

As the financial crises ease, it would be nice if Americans would once again start looking to the horizon.

Societal Regression Watch

It is clear to most of us that we are living in perilous times.  There is a sense, amplified by the behavior of the "experts", that we are in uncharted territory when it comes to our economic straits.  (Is this a period of structural change in the economy?  Is our understanding of how the economy works no longer operative?  Does anyone understand how to get out of this depression/recession?)  A recent poll suggests Americans believe we are now losing the war on terror, which is now another source of heightened anxiety.  We are told daily that the war in Afghanistan (the "good war") is not going well, that our military has developed a strategy for winning that requires more troops and that our President must decide on a new strategy, yet he has time to meet with the head of the SEIU over 20 times but no time to come to a decision about Afghanistan.  There appears to be a drift in foreign affairs (and in foreign affairs, vacuums of leadership do not last for long) and a drift on the economic front.  The Stimulus was too small (according to Paul Krugman) yet we see little evidence we have gotten anything from the $787 billion we have had to borrow.  All of this is a prescription for Societal Anxiety and its evil twin, Societal Regression.

Yesterday Nouriel Roubini suggested that the reason the Stock Market has risen so high (along with commodities) is that we are in a bubble fueled by a weakening dollar:

Mother of all carry trades faces an inevitable bust

Since March there has been a massive rally in all sorts of risky assets – equities, oil, energy and commodity prices – a narrowing of high-yield and high-grade credit spreads, and an even bigger rally in emerging market asset classes (their stocks, bonds and currencies). At the same time, the dollar has weakened sharply , while government bond yields have gently increased but stayed low and stable.

This recovery in risky assets is in part driven by better economic fundamentals. We avoided a near depression and financial sector meltdown with a massive monetary, fiscal stimulus and bank bail-outs. Whether the recovery is V-shaped, as consensus believes, or U-shaped and anaemic as I have argued, asset prices should be moving gradually higher.

But while the US and global economy have begun a modest recovery, asset prices have gone through the roof since March in a major and synchronised rally. While asset prices were falling sharply in 2008, when the dollar was rallying, they have recovered sharply since March while the dollar is tanking. Risky asset prices have risen too much, too soon and too fast compared with macroeconomic fundamentals.

John Crudele takes a different angle on the problem but arrives at a similar conclusion:

The Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee will meet this Tuesday and Wednesday and it will issue the usual communiqué afterwards -- growth picked up some places, not in others, inflation low -- blah, blah and blah.

But even though most of the wording will be ordinary, you should pay very close attention to two things.

First, will Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke change the wording on his interest rate intentions?

If Bernanke doesn't say he plans to keep rates low for an extended period of time, the financial markets could get very bothered.

Longer-term interest rates could go up without the approval of the Fed. And they have been.

But the words Bernanke utters on this matter are still important.

Second, the Fed has supposedly ended one portion of its quantitative easing program -- meaning the program under which it was printing money so it could act as its own shill in buying Treasury securities.

It's still buying mortgage-backed securities in this way, but the ending of quantitative easing will make both the stock and bond markets tense.

Nobody knows why stock prices declined so much last Friday when the Dow fell 249 points.

But the bubble in stocks that started last March is largely being caused by liquidity, not valuation. Translation: It wasn't that stocks were such a great value.

The bubble inflated because the Fed has been pumping so much money that people had to put it to work.

When the Fed stops printing money that could be a big problem for Wall Street.

Bubbles always pop and bills always come due.  John Crudele adds:

Here's how the economy is broken, and why.

Yesterday President Obama said the US economy is "back from the brink" But he added that the US must "get serious" about reducing debt.

Problem one: The more the president says that the economy was near the brink, the more he reminds people how scared they should have been. Not good for confidence.

Problem two: Under normal circumstances, it's much too early to talk about reducing the US debt level.

But Washington has to do it because we are borrowing so much from very nervous foreigners and that's causing the value of the US dollar to collapse.

Problem three: it's hard for President Obama to be a budget cutter when he's trying to spend a lot of money on health care reform.

Spending on something new just doesn't seem like reducing spending to most rational adults.

It sounds to me as if our only way out of this is to thread the needle between precipitating a deeper abyss by tightening already tight credit or terrifying everyone with cheap money as far as the eye can see, which will cause the dollar to collapse.  We are not getting out of this pain-free.

I have quoted more than is my wont on economics; there is a reason for my focus on the economy today.  Economic distress has historically been the most powerful generator of Societal Regression and there are many reasons to believe it is driving some of the regressed behavior of our elites.  On Sunday Frank Rich wrote a column that would be risible if it did not reflex some part of elite conventional wisdom. Peter Wehner summarizes:

Frank Rich’s Paranoid Style

Here’s a stunning development: the New York Times’s theater-critic-turned-political-columnist Frank Rich is foot-stompin’ mad. The cause for Mr. Rich’s latest outburst is the race in New York’s 23rd District, in which the liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava was challenged by the Conservative party’s Doug Hoffman, forcing Scozzafava to withdraw. (She subsequently endorsed the Democrat Bill Owens.) For most people, this is an interesting intra-party skirmish with some potentially important political ramifications. But for Mr. Rich, it’s so much more than that. It’s going to set off a “riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war.” The northern district in New York “could become a G.O.P. killing field.” What’s going on there is evidence that “the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama.” And conservatives are “Jacobins” who are “re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode.” And in case that was too subtle, they are “the Stalinists of the right.”

This is what passes for stylish and temperate discourse on the Left — references to the Civil War and to Cambodian genocide, to the French Revolution and to one of the greatest mass murders in history – all in the context of a congressional race in New York’s 23rd District, mind you.

This also comes from a man who in August wrote a column — without irony — warning about the rise of what Richard Hofstadter called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and who earlier this summer castigated conservatives for their “toxic” rhetoric that is “getting louder each day of the Obama presidency.” It could lead, Rich has warned several times, to political violence. Conservatives, you see, are so terribly uncivil and so terribly indecent in their rhetoric. Coming from Rich, it is all rather comical.

Again, this is comical only in proportion to its irrelevance; there are enough in the MSM and in the leadership of the Democratic party who  in extremis believe this nonsense, which in and of itself is not grounds for concern.  The concerns depend upon the leader of the Democratic party; consider these elements of large group regression, from Terror and Societal Regression:

1) Rallying around the leader.

12) The narcissism of minor differences.

14) Heightened importance of the leader's personality.  When a large group is regressed, the personality organization of the leader becomes extremely influential, as he or she can tame or inflame the regression.  Contrast Slobodan Milosevic's use of violence and terror with Nelson Mandela's use of nonviolent means.

With his ideas under fire, there is a natural tendency for Democrats to rally around Barack Obama.  There is nothing sinister about this but it is worth watching since there is often a tendency among the most fervent, and less intact, supporters to see fantasied dangers where none exist and to believe they need to take actions to support their leader which can go over the border toward violence.  We have seen this in the Union thug who assaulted the older black tea party protester some months ago.  Again, isolated incidents do not speak to Societal Regression, but a pattern of incidents would raise concerns.

The narcissism of minor differences is an important point here because it does reflect concerns about Obama's style of leadership.  He has acted, since becoming President as if the gravest dangers to our country arose from his domestic political opponents rather than from foreign societies inimical to our interests.  This can just as well be the result of his inculcation in the "Chicago way" as to any deeply held political ideology or character traits.  His difficulty in recognizing that the most Conservative Republican has more in common with the most fervent liberal than with either has in common with Islamic radicals or "Soviet" commissars is deeply troubling.  By elevating the smaller distinctions between Republicans and Democrats to a greater level than they deserve he has emphasized the narcissism of small differences.  It is important to keep in mind that when such small differences become exaggerated the easy path to devaluation of the opponent (No. 3) and dehumanization (No. 10) often follow.

Finally, the President is in an unique position.  By recognizing the danger of Societal Regression, he can avoid behavior that worsens the downward spiral.  By reminding his supporters that his opponents are not evil or racist but merely disagree he could do much to defuse some of the tension int he current political debates.  When he joins in the easy demagoguery (by demonizing Fox news, for example) he fans the flames and risks unleashing forces that he would have difficulty controlling.

Since I believe we are living through dangerous times and there are significant risks of Societal Regression (though I continue to believe that Americans' native good sense will prevent us from descending too far down the road; I am less sanguine about Europe and other at-risk societies)  I plan on starting a Societal Regression Watch.  I plan on scanning for evidence of regression and will periodically discuss such evidence here.  Clearly I am much more likely to notice signs of Societal Regression that occur on the left side of the political divide, but it should be obvious that the left has no monopoly on regressive tendencies.  (The fact that the Democrats control the Executive and both houses of Congress measn that their regressive tendencies are more dangerous than any such tendecnies among Republicans and this is an additional reason for greater concentration ont he left.)  Since there are many liberals who read my blog I would ask that if they see an item that suggests conservative or right wing regression to please send it to me for inclusion.  We all have an interest in maintaining rationality in the face of danger. 

Societal Regression: On Splitting and Re-Fusion

In my writings on Societal Regression, I have made the point that societies regress in the face of powerful stressors.  This can occur during time of war (the confinement of Japanese-Americans during WWII) or during periods of intense economic stress (Germany during the Depression.)  We are currently in a time of significant stress, though our economic woes have not yet approached the extremes of the 1930s and our current military involvements do not come close to the existential struggle of WWII, and the evidence of regressive tendencies can be found if one looks. 

The clearest evidence for societal regression, as noted in my original post on Terror and Societal Regression, include:

3) Severe splitting. This can occur as a polarity between "us" and "them" or within society.

10) Dehumanization.  Exemplified by the Nazis, this is a two-step process.  Step one is identifying undesirable humans; step two is turning them into nonhumans, as in the Hutus' degradation of the Tutsis, referred to as cafrads, or insects.  Interestingly, the Tutsis were also called the "Jews" of Rwanda.

(It might be worthwhile to review the entire panoply of signs of large group regression because there is so much of it going on today; that could be a future post.)

The tendency to splitting is ubiquitous.  The healthiest societies always need to work to maintain awareness of such tendencies to divide people between "us" and "them."  We accept as a necessary part of the functioning of our democracy that, especially during election times, political opponents will be characterized as "them" while allies are defined as "us" yet traditionally, the attempt to re-fuse into a single polity is made post-election. 

[Under duress such attempts at re-fusion can fail or can be covertly or overtly sabotaged; such efforts are one of the reasons that the current administration is losing support.  People recognize we are in a stressful time, yet the administration seems to spend more time and energy demonizing its opponents than working to restart the economy.  The lack of any discernible effort at re-fusion is a potentially dangerous omission by the Obama administration.  This can be contrasted with George Bush's work with ted Kennedy early in his administration on No Child Left behind.  Thus far, Obama has found no area for compromise with his political opponents.]

In ways large and small, signs of splitting are becoming troublingly evident.  Consider Jeffrey Goldberg's post, Anatomy of a Smear:

Dalia Mogahed, the executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies and a member of President Obama's faith-based partnerships advisory council, is in a bit of a pickle these days for speaking on a British television show hosted by a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an extremist Muslim group. Fox News, and others, have been after her for this appearance, in which she said, "I think the reason so many women support sharia (Islamic law) is because they have a very different understanding of sharia than the common perception in Western media... The majority of women around the world associate gender justice, or justice for women, with sharia compliance."

...

One key difference between American Muslims and British Muslims -- and this is a massive over-generalization, of course -- is that American Muslims seem to like their country very much. Obviously, there are pockets of Muslim extremism in America and I'm all for watching the extremists, and arresting them if needed -- but Dalia doesn't live in one of those pockets. In fact, she is quite often criticized by Muslim radicals as a "sell-out." Most recently, she was attacked for speaking at an iftar (the Ramadan break-fast meal) at the Pentagon. She's stuck in the responsible middle, in other words. Right where many thinking people find themselves these days.

Compare this to the comments of Wafa Sultan to Andrew G. Bostom:

The final chapter of  "A God Who Hates" includes Wafa Sultan's devastating critique of remarks Colin Powell made during the latter phase of the 2008 US Presidential election campaign. Appearing on NBC television's "Meet The Press," Powell glibly asserted nothing would be wrong with Americans choosing a Muslim President. Wafa Sultan's analysis of this comment exposes both the terribly dangerous flaws in Powell's limited, naïve understanding of Islam, and how that ignorance is compounded by obligatory allegations of "anti-Muslim prejudice" (or "Islamophobia"), precluding any rational discussion of the very real threat mainstream Islamic doctrine poses.

I know that Mr. Powell, who lives by the American moral code on which he was nurtured, refuses to judge people on the basis of their religious affiliation, and that is his right. But he does not have the right to be ignorant or to disregard the fact that Islam is not just a religion: It is a political doctrine that imposes itself by force, and we have to subject to microscopic scrutiny any Muslim in America who ascends to the heights of this sensitive and supremely important post.

I would not want anyone to regard what I am saying as anti-Muslim prejudice. Muslims, like any other national group, can be either good or bad, and the best among them do not act in accordance with the teachings of their religion, either because they are not familiar with them, or because they have deliberately progressed beyond them; but to understand what it would mean for a Muslim to become President of the United States, one must search through Islamic history-the history of the Arabs, which is my own history-for a Muslim leader and look at his actions.

The first and most obvious Muslim leader we meet in our search is Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam. Had Mr. Powell read the life of Muhammad, as it is recounted in the Arabic sources and as I learned it in my schooldays, he would fall down in a dead faint. In third grade at primary school I read with pride in our religious primer how Muhammad had beheaded 800 Jews from the Bani Quraiza tribe in one night, then taken their wives and children hostage, and spent the same night with the Jewish woman Safia, whose husband, father, and brother he had just killed. This is only a drop in the ocean of what was written about the crimes of Muhammad in the Arabic sources, but, unfortunately, Mr. Powell-it seems-has never troubled to familiarize himself with the most malicious enemy ever to have confronted him or threatened his safety. Once Americans understand that the Koran insists that Muhammad is the ideal that every Muslim male should imitate, they will realize that a Muslim candidate for the American presidency is a very serious matter.

I do not know if Dalia Mogahead is in "the moderate middle" (though I am willing to take Jeffrey Goldberg's word for it) and I do not know if Wafa Sultan is correct with her implication that the Koran is the ineradicable source of Islamic terror, but the ideas both express suggest that the tendency to splitting into all-good versus all-bad is percolating below the surface of the current and previous administration's insistence that Islam is a religion of peace.  By Bush and Obama both insisting that Islam is all-good, we have lost the opportunity to press the Islamic world to confront their own Manichean tendencies and as a result, even as we remain targets of radical Islam, the stresses which press toward splitting remain underground, to grow over time.

The sense of subterranean movements along regressive fault lines can be found both here and in England, in two recent articles.  First, Thomas Sowell worries about a President who he believes does not privilege America's ethos or history:

Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year-- each bill more than a thousand pages long-- too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question-- and the biggest question for this generation.

Second, Shannon Love worries about The Collapse of the British Liberal Order, apparently much further along in its regression:

Via Instapundit comes a disturbing report that one-fifth of the British electorate would consider voting for the British Nationalist Party (BNP), which is considered by almost everyone left or right to be a genuine fascist party.

How did Britain come to this state?

Simple, the current liberal order has proven itself ineffective in addressing many of the major problems that Britain faces. As I wrote three years ago, liberal orders don’t slowly evolve into authoritarian ones. Instead, they become less and less effective until they suddenly collapse into an authoritarian order. People simply lose faith that the liberal order can function and they throw their support behind an authoritarian order just to survive.

The major problem in resisting authoritarian orders is the simple fact that they usually work quite well in the short term. In the 1920s, Mussolini was widely admired across the political spectrum for saving Italy from imploding after years of red socialist strikes and violence had all but shut down the country. Hitler pulled Germany out of the Great Depression spectacularly. The communists did manage to rapidly industrialize peasant economies (albeit at a staggering cost in lives). Less dramatically, authoritarian corporatist/state-capitalist regimes in South Korean, Taiwan and Singapore raised the population out of poverty and led to democracy in the former two.

The BNP could very well rise to power by quickly and easily fixing problems that many Britons see going unaddressed by the left.

For both fascism and socialism/communism, splitting is the sine qua non.  Regression to such totalitarian, even soft totalitarian liberal fascism, is facilitated by societal stress.  The longer untoward trends continue, the more likely the worse outcome and the more difficult the task of re-fusion. 

As Richard Fernandez notes in his response to Shannon Love's post

What the Left and Fascism share is a belief in the transformative power of the state. Both regard government as the “high ground” of society and not, as some Americans still believe, simply a necessary evil. It is a prize to be seized by main force; the castle to be stormed. In the long run there is little reason to think that Nick Griffin will allow any more freedom than Gordon Brown. What is likely to happen is the substitution of one set of sacred cows for another. When the Left and fascists contend for power, the surveillance cameras are in every case fully employed.

Regression always includes a move back from more mature to less mature functioning.  A regressed society is one which looks for a powerful leader to rescue and protect it.  The greatest problem with one party rule in a democracy is that the one party never recognizes its own tendencies toward authoritarianism when stressed, which is how we lose freedom "for our own good" during such times.

Symptoms of Large Group Regression: Part II

First, some clarification is in order.  One of the reasons I decided to write a post clarifying what is meant by large group regression is to provide a metric by which to assess the state of our, and other, societies, in the face of an ongoing, massive economic trauma.  Under such strain, past history tells us that some societies will become less free and others will regress toward tyranny.  After the last 8 years, when parts of the left spent much of their time worrying about a knock on the door in the middle of the night, it would be troubling to see parallel reactions from the right.  To that end, it is important to understand that even if a leader is anti-democratic (and most Presidents at one time or another have wished that their critics would be silenced and that their opponents would be marginalized) the determinative factor of a regression to tyranny remains the reactions of the greater society.  To that end it is worth noting that liberal members of the MSM have recently been making more pointed critiques of the President and his shortcomings; this is not the mode of a controlled press (though the press remains far too liberal and unidimensional for my tastes.)  As just one example, Paul Krugman, with whom I rarely agree, is quite pointed in his criticism of Barack Obama today:

Behind the Curve

resident Obama’s plan to stimulate the economy was “massive,” “giant,” “enormous.” So the American people were told, especially by TV news, during the run-up to the stimulus vote. Watching the news, you might have thought that the only question was whether the plan was too big, too ambitious.
 
Yet many economists, myself included, actually argued that the plan was too small and too cautious. The latest data confirm those worries — and suggest that the Obama administration’s economic policies are already falling behind the curve.

To see how bad the numbers are, consider this: The administration’s budget proposals, released less than two weeks ago, assumed an average unemployment rate of 8.1 percent for the whole of this year. In reality, unemployment hit that level in February — and it’s rising fast.

...

... economic policy is falling behind the curve, and there’s a real, growing danger that it will never catch up.

To continue with a look at symptoms of large group regression:

Symptoms of Large Group Regression: Part I

It occurred to me that there may be some lack of clarity about the "major symptoms of large-group regression" that I mentioned yesterday.  For example, splitting refers to a process in which all-good is attributed to one person while all-bad is attributed to a different person. 

[This gets complicated when the all-good is conscious and the all-bad is attributed to split off and unconscious object and self representations, but for our purposes of understanding societal regression in the face of trauma, understanding splitting to involve making Manichean distinctions between "our" side "their" side is useful and accurate as far as it goes.

Furthermore, it is important to note that in mild forms much that is immature or poorly adaptive is well within the bounds of normal character and behavior.  It is only when regression becomes significant that it becomes seriously maladaptive and pathological.]

This means that when one criticizes Barack Obama as incompetent, foolhardy, an illiberal liberal, or even a socialist in waiting, such attacks do not constitute splitting.  In a similar vein, criticizing Rush Limbaugh as an ideologue, intemperate, ignorant, and a social Darwinist would not constitute splitting, but would simply reflect political na ideological differences.  Calling Barack Obama "Stalinobama", Rush Limbaugh a racist, or George W. Bush "Bushhitler" does constitute splitting.  These kinds of labels consciously attribute all-bad, evil, tot he target and do not recognize the complexity or reality of the man so attacked.  At the same time, there are opportunistic politicians and commentators who use such language in the full knowledge that it is demonizing an opponent and has little relation to reality; such opportunists have roles in both of our major parties and are beneath contempt.

In the original post discussing Societal Regression, I pointed to the 14 signs of large group regression, as described by Vamik Volkan, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and founder of the Center for the Study of the Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia and Emeritus Training and Supervising Analyst of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute at a panel of the American Psychoanalytic Association devoted to the consideration of Societal Regression.  Since societies tend to regress under stress, and regression is a necessary prerequisite for devolution from free to less free societies (including, in the worst case scenarios, to tyranny), the subject remains germane in the face of our current highly stressful economic straights.  In order to be able to recognize these symptoms, a brief discussion of each may be useful; this is going to be more of a didactic exercise than usual so consider that as warning.

Playing With Fire

Dick Meyer warns of the danger of scapegoating today:

Wall Street Blame Game: Tag, You're It

"This is the greatest wealth destruction I've seen by a president," Jim Cramer, one of the great cheerleaders of the early 21st century bull market, said of President Obama on television the other day.

Herbert Hoover must be so relieved. And let the scapegoating begin.

...

The idea of blaming one person for the downfall of the economy with a gross domestic product of about $14 trillion, powered by 300 million people and engaged in complex global commerce is nuts — whether that person is Bush, Obama, Alan Greenspan, Bernard Madoff, Osama bin Laden or the editors of opinions at The Wall Street Journal.

...

His enemies and critics are just doing to Obama what Bush's enemies and critics did to him. Two wrongs don't make a right, but they do make up the infantilism of American politics. It has been a long time since an American president fended off the piranhas of public opinion and propaganda to be effective deep into an administration.

There is one very important thing right with Dick's post and one crucial thing very wrong.  As I have noted a number of times, when Societies are stressed, they tend to regress.  Less mature, childish, reactions become common place, rationality is relaxed in favor of scapegoating, demonizing and splitting; when the regression is severe, the results can be quite dangerous, as I noted in Terror and Societal Regression, which commented specifically about our post-9/11 reactions as a society:

After a national trauma, there are a number of signs of "large group" regression.  (I will not here go into some of the characteristics of what constitutes a large group; it relates to elements that I have referred to in the past as our tribal nature; see also here.)  The panel chair, Vamik Volkan, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and founder of the Center for the Study of the Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia and Emeritus Training and Supervising Analyst of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, described 14 major symptoms of large-group regression:

1) Rallying around the leader.
2) Losing individuality.
3) Severe splitting. This can occur as a polarity between "us" and "them" or within society.
...
14) Heightened importance of the leader's personality.  When a large group is regressed, the personality organization of the leader becomes extremely influential, as he or she can tame or inflame the regression.  Contrast Slobodan Milosevic's use of violence and terror with Nelson Mandela's use of nonviolent means. 

[For the complete list of symptoms of large group regression, see Terror and Societal Regression; further considerations of this topic are collected at Societal Regression.]

When societies regress, splitting and attendant scapegoating are common early features of the regression.  Dick Meyer is absolutely correct to be concerned about the tendency, yet he misses a crucial element of the discussion. 

Terror and Societal Regression III

[Update at end]

Two nations which have been integral parts of Western Civilization show signs of internal dissolution.  England has banned Geert Wilders from its shores and justifications are risible:

Preserving ‘Harmony’ for Islamic Radicals
Geert Wilders is barred from entering the United Kingdom.

It has come to this: If you are an Islamic radical, trained to carry out terrorist atrocities in al-Qaeda’s jihad against the United Kingdom, the British will welcome you with open arms. Not content with that, Great Britain will lobby insistently for your release from custody so that you may freely roam British streets—and the halls of Westminster.

If, by contrast, you are a duly elected representative in the democratic government of a country to which England is bound in the European Union, and you speak about the undeniable—though mulishly denied—nexus between Islamic doctrine and jihadist terror, Great Britain will slam her door in your face.

That is the lesson in the appalling saga of Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch parliament and Exhibit Umpty-Umpth illustrating the depths of capitulation to which the West has sunk in its half-hearted bid for cultural survival.

This is nothing less than surrendering to the mob.  The supporters of radical Islam, who are more than willing to attack their adversaries in the most hate filled ways, not only with mere words, but with more concrete implements of "political" discourse, have cowed the British authorities, who appear much more fearful of angering the Islamic mob than of the destruction of lawful order that is occurring by virtue of their dereliction of duty.  The British bureaucrats who are directing the surrender couch their cowardly appeasement in the language of rights and sensitivity, ie "free speech does not confer the right to offend", but of course that is exactly what free speech means.  Once a country surrenders the free speech rights of a minority, that country is no longer free.

In Canada, the surrender proceeds apace:

Muslim Mob Attacks Jewish Center At Toronto University. Police Respond By Shutting Down The Center.