Is This Really About Healthcare?

Like many, I have been taken aback by the coarse violence — and effective organization — of the backlash against President Obama’s proposed healthcare package.  The lying, shouting, and disruption of what might have been reasoned debates bodes ill for the political culture, and hence the political destiny, of this country.  During the neoconservative hysteria that boiled up around the Presidential ‘election’ of 2000, John Updike commented from the UK, “America has entered another of its phases of historical madness; but this is the worst I have seen.”  Until now.

I don’t want to be a part of the shameless name-calling that’s going on — everyone is calling everyone else a Nazi, it seems — but the contrived ‘populist’ character of the disrupters, fed by and feeding into the ‘faux News’ messages that play on their fears with shameless and endlessly repeated lies does, after all, recall the frightening resonance of the brownshirts in the street with the cynical propaganda from above that became the frenzy that swept Germany into World War Two.  I hope I am exaggerating.

Even if the purpose of the present uproar were good — say, a saner immigration policy or a trimmer military — we would have to be appalled by what it’s doing to our political discourse.  This I do not think is exaggeration: a struggle is going on for the soul of America.

It’s hard to predict what the voting outcome will be on the issue itself; but already there are some lessons to learn from this shock — and there may even be a way out.

The first lesson — and it may not be obvious or particularly welcome to some of us — is that the truth is not limited to, or guaranteed by, a given demographic.  Some of the obstreporous people in the town halls are carefully planted “astroturf” and shills of insurance companies — that story is coming out steadily now — but there is no question that ordinary people, or what we idealistically called in my youth “the people,” are among those disrupting those town hall meetings across the nation.  It was community organizing and the skillful use of new technologies that got President Obama elected, but it now looks as though the same political methods and technologies can be used to neutralize his presidency.  As one commentator said recently, we are seeing Saul Alinsky turning into a right-wing fanatic.  So the lesson is, to repeat, that it’s not about whom you organize or how you collect their views; it’s about what are those views.  Gandhi organized a nonviolent revolution (mostly) from below; but long before him William Penn had crafted one from above, from his own governorship.  Likewise, there can be oppressive regimes, or oppressive just-plain-folks.  Everyone has an ego, and everyone has a sense of compassion, has access to reason.  It all depends on which of these principles you rouse, not whom you rouse them from or by what means.

A second lesson is, while this is a particularly shocking manifestation, we have long been living in a culture that pushes reason off the margins of discourse.  Partly this is inevitable in a culture of advertising, for advertising by definition has to suppress reason: it has to make you buy things you don’t need, so it has to rely on impulses, urges, and mob psychology in the sense that most of the desire that’s whipped up by advertising is imitative.  You don’t buy things because they make you happy, really because you or other people will think you’re happy.  If we thought about what we really need we would probably buy a tenth of what we buy now, to the great relief of the planet.  So advertising (and we see more than 3,000 commercial messages a day, on average) has to prevent you from doing that — or any other — thinking.

Now, how do we get out of all this?

As far back as 1954, psychologists Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif conducted a classic study called the Robbers Cave Experiment. They created two separate groups of twelve-year-old boys and had them do competitive sports and other competitive activities at a summer camp in Oklahoma.  Taking the names of “The Rattlers” and “The Eagles,” the groups’ hostility to each other soon reached unsafe proportions, at which point the Sherifs started to place before them what they called “superordinate goals” — tasks that both groups had to carry out together, like haul a “broken down” truck back to camp (the scientists had removed the distributor cap). When the boys worked together in this way it quickly reversed the polarizing effects of the competition. By the end of the experiment both groups insisted on riding back to town in the same bus.

We are not hurting for superordinate goals!  The destruction of the earth’s capacity to sustain life will do nicely. Imagine if we could all pull together to tackle this enormous problem.  We could save life on earth — and find a way to talk civilly to each other about real issues in the process. But I would urge that we also work on a second problem: violence. That ‘superordinate’ problem underlies all the rest; as Vandana Shiva said, ‘if we stop the pollution in people’s minds they will stop the pollution of the environment.’  One powerful way to do this is to get violence out of the media; and while we’re waiting for that to happen, get the media out of you. Just stop watching it.  Neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni told me recently that knowing what he knows about the human nervous system he opined that if we could only stop all the violence in the media for one week “it would never come back.”

That may be an exaggeration, but it’s certainly a pointer to the right direction.  If we act civilly toward one another, even those who hold dangerously irrational notions, and stop putting our precious minds at the disposal of big, commercial interests, both the brownshirts and the insurance companies will find themselves with little purchase on our political culture.