[Disclaimer: this post has been written with no academic authority whatsoever and, perhaps more importantly, no real psychological or sociological training or background, so if you really, seriously know about this stuff I would appreciate you enlightening me.  This is just a 'best guess as I see it' sort of a post, so please don't think I'm setting myself up as an authority.]

There has been some chat going on in the comments section of the Gaza Appeal post which I thought worth elevating to a post all of its own.  When I rant about religions and anti-Darwinism and mysticism and so on one of the things I inevitably end up shouting at everyone is that as a species and as individuals we have a lot of misplaced vanity.  We think we are special, and we aren’t.  I don’t mean it in a mean, pompous way, but I firmly believe that human beings have no real conception of how mechanical, how average, how just like everyone else we all really are.

One of the key comments on the Gaza post was about fundamentalists and fundamentalism and it betrays an important and very dangerous mistake almost all of us make when faced with this sort of behaviour.  It is the ‘they just aren’t like us, they can’t be reasoned with and ‘we’ are nothing like them’ mistake.  There are people who are mentally ill, and there are psychopaths and so on, I am not denying that, but for all these people may also be fundamentalists (of whatever stripe), the characteristic of fundamentalism is not an illness.  It is simply a human behaviour to which we are all prone and which can be relatively easily induced by certain social conditions.  We all like to think that we’re special, that we’re immune, but the vast, vast majority of us would simply be wrong in making that assumption.

Did anyone read about the teen suicide epidemic in the South Pacfic which was described in the Tipping Point?  Lots of otherwise normal teenagers started committing suicide for no obvious reason, until the phenomenon reached something akin to epidemic proportions.  How about the high school experiment The Third Wave, where the behaviours of Nazi Germany were so easily recreated, in order to demonstrate just how easy it is to get human beings to do insane and awful things.

Given that the whole discussion was brought about by discussion of Israeli and Islamic terrorism, it is interesting to note that MI5 has recently concluded that, in terms of domestic Islamic terrorism, there is no simple ‘they’ category.  In fact, the one defining characteristic of domestic Islamic terrorists is that they have no defining characteristics.  They are simply normal people, and in fact are often not all that religious.  It would appear, then, that we are not discussing a kind of person at all, but more accurately a set of circumstances which would make extraordinary behaviour seem perfectly rational to a normal person.

Apart from simply being wrong, I think this blanket ‘they can’t be reasoned with’ approach is also very dangerous.  This is a phenomenon to which we are all prone, and yet is nevertheless reassuringly rare, so to dismiss it in this way is to deny ourselves the opportunity to prevent it.  It’s not something that is going to magically go away as a generation of people with a particularly antiquated mindset die out, it is a social phenomenon which is caused by a set of circumstances, and if we want to solve this issue then we have to identify those circumstances.  And by that I don’t mean the Easy Liberal Answer of jobs and prosperity, because that ignores the fact that a lot of people who you would consider to be dangerous fundamentalists are prosperous, well-educated and middle class.

But turning fundamentalism of any sort into something ‘they’ do is simply to deny the real problem in order to focus on a patently false caricature, which is dangerous for everyone.

Supergrass – What Went Wrong (In Your Head)

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Day One – Ordinary Man

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I received this email in response to my post about herd reactions to political arguments and, at times, facts themselves.  It was thoughtful and well-written so I thought it deserved elevating to post status.  The other reason is that for all I am very anti-religious myself, I have plenty of religious friends who I like and respect, and I’m always slightly fearful when I lurch into one of my rants that I might be mortally offending them, or at least taking great liberties with both our respect and friendship.  So it’s a relief to hear a complete stranger not just react with something along the lines of ‘fuck you, you Jesus-hater’ or something else equally angry.

So I apologise for the just everso slightly facetious picture and leave you in the hands of the lovely LS:

Okay, so first of all I should say that I’m one of those Christian types. I know, I know, venomous antipathy coming at me from the house of Toad, but I also love Broken Records (amazing Toad session btw) and am currently about 47% gin so don’t judge me too harshly just yet. The reason I wanted to comment on your post is, as you seemed to be suggesting, the idea that Christianity and conservative capitalist politics are cut from the same cloth is clearly misguided, their incompatibility should be completely self evident. But obviously this isn’t the case, in the States at least.

A cursory googling of Christianity+Socialism brings up a huge number of anti-liberal diatribes by rattled Republicans, clearly feeling the need to remind their readership that any left-leaning ‘Christians’ out there are clearly in the thrall of their Satanic overlords (some are truly terrifying, viz. ’60 Hard Truths about “Liberals”‘ http://famguardian.org/Subjects/Politics/Articles/Liberals.htm).

The ‘vote for me because I’m a Christian’ campaign tactics of so many Republican candidates is genuinely repugnant, appealing to just that kind of tribal, herd mentality that you’re talking about, perpetuating a Them and Us way of thinking. What they’re really saying is you’re not a Christian if you don’t vote for me. In fact you’re not an American either, or a human being at all – off to Guantanomo you terrorist-loving, child-murdering, communism-causing, mp3-downloading scum. And then there’s the “family values” mantra, a term that means precisely whatever the user wants it to. Jesus was a single man rejected by his own family, without property, who made his home among prostitutes and tax collectors – the most despised elements of society.

Most evangelical Christians I know in the UK would probably lean more to the left, and I’m tempted to suggest that the emergence of the evangelical right in the States is much more of a cultural phenomena. The American emphasis on the unassailable constitutional rights of the individual is so often twisted out of shape into a dogmatic, self-righteous advocacy of personal responsibility – to the point where the Right seem to believe that people either choose or deserve to be poor, or exploited, or made redundant or whatever; that if they just tried a bit harder to be proper Americans then they could have nice big houses in the suburbs too. Whereas a left-leaning perspective acknowledges that there are systems and structures that entrench and perpetuate poverty, and that social reform is the responsibility of those who have power in society. Those who selectively choose parts of the bible to support a particular political position ignore the simple fact that the bible advocates both personal responsibility and social responsibility, to ‘love my neighbour as myself’. The capitalist model of social Darwinism that promotes avarice and exploits the weak couldn’t be further from the biblical emphasis on the importance of community, of economic justice and responsible stewardship of the environment. It teaches us that we cannot serve both God and Mammon.

As much as I agree with your opinion that much electoral activity is determined by a mentality in which the individual seeks to align themselves with the group in which they feel most comfortable, I also think that the way politics is reduced to black and white one-issue campaigns is equally significant. Voting for someone simply because of their stance on Iraq, or abortion, or wind farms is just lazy, the voter picking what issues affect them personally and ignoring the wider implications of what a candidate represents. The idea that if you disagree with a party on one issue you thereby must support the opposition by default is patently ludicrous. Surely no one can wholeheartedly subscribe to every single issue or policy that any political party espouses? Parties constantly shift stance on issues, and change can be effected from within. Obviously some issues are more important or personally relevant than others, but voters need to look beyond individual policies at what lies behind a party’s decision-making, even if that means choosing, as it were, the lesser of two evils.

Yikes. Did I really write all that? I know, get myself a blog already. I think I win hands-down in the portentous pomposity stakes, and I’m sure I will hugely regret sending this in the morning! I blame the gin.

Hoping that the next Toad post won’t be something along the lines of ‘Crazed Fundie Evangelist tries to Convert the Toad with Poorly Thought-Out Polemic’. [snigger - Toad]

You’d probably better go off and listen to something loud and blasphemous right away.

All best,
LS

I think, actually, that I can oblige there:
The Thermals – Pillar of Salt

And there’s more good stuff where that came from too:
The Thermals – Here’s your Future
The Thermals – How We Know

Not that I mean to make things even more pompous and portentous around here than they already are, but I just read an article about Evangelical Christians in America causing family schisms by switching their vote to the Democrats and found myself bubbling away with inane chatter once more. Sorry.

Articles like this show up human rationalism and thought for the sham that it is, if you ask me. We humans are so proud of our brains, of the power of thought, analysis and all this other shit, but ultimately even on subjects as important as political decision-making we are basically tribal.

I have never entirely understood how Evangelical Christians can almost invariably end up as Republicans, apart from the unavoidable conclusion that for a great many of them terms like ‘the love of Jesus Christ’ seems to rather oddly translate as ‘vicious, petty, small-minded bigotry’. I have my doubts as to whether that was quite what a bearded Jewish hippy would have had in mind, to be honest.

That Biblical teaching translates so directly into the policies of Conservatism, the right wing and free market fundamentalism strikes me as far from obvious. I have always tended to assume, despite my rather venomous antipathy towards devout belief, that most devoutly religious people actually do think that the teachings of their religion centre around love and kindness, compassion and generosity. Don’t they? I mean seriously? Otherwise, why not just fucking throw the whole fucking lot in the bin right now?

When you look at it that way, love and kindness, compassion and generosity are palpably absent from most of the political teachings of the politicians most such people tend to choose as their leaders. Quite how the parents in that particular article came to ask their children ‘how can you vote for abortion?’, without ever asking themselves how they can vote for a party whose attitude to its own poor seems to be to cut them entirely adrift and fuck ‘em if they can’t survive, indicates a childlike, bovine credulity that I find baffling. How exactly does ‘protecting the family’ involve attacking other people’s families? Do you honestly think that Jesus really would persecute, terrify and ridicule homosexuals? Do you really take it as a given that Jesus would hate basic socialised medicine, well-funded state schools and some form of protection for the unemployed and unemployable? I am not saying a religious person should automatically take a left-wing line these things either, but I am not convinced that trying to support the weak and the poor is exactly an anti-Christian sentiment.

This shows up on the other side as well. Most left-leaning types slaughter the Bush administration for its cheerful disregard for the US Constitution and in particular the checks and balances imposed on government therein. Those same lefties also tend also to lionise Bill Clinton, particularly after the utter debacle of the Bush years, but Clinton was just as aggressive in undermining government oversight as Bush is. He was, at heart, an authoritarian. He may have been an authoritarian whose policies we preferred and whose bungling was generally restricted to his administering of the Presidential Saucisson d’Amour, but that doesn’t excuse it in the slightest. Or at least it shouldn’t.

My mother became positively tearful with agitation when I said that I could never, ever bring myself to vote for Tony Blair, I guess because her politics are still quite firmly rooted in the partisan wars between Labour and Tory that she grew up with. I had to point out to her that voting for Blair would involve voting for so many things she didn’t believe in that it would be crazy to do so, but I doubt I entirely persuaded her.

Basically, all the article above exposes is that we vote tribally. What we believe depends almost entirely on who is telling us, irrespective of what they are actually saying, and we will not listen to arguments from ‘the other side’ even if they make sense. We all do it and it can lead to egregious mistakes.

Not one of us, I would imagine, examines our political decisions on their own merits, and free from the knee-jerk instinct to support our sort. We all tend to see only the evidence that supports our own theories and this only gets worse as we get older and increasingly surround ourselves with people with whom we agree on most matters. What does that mean? Well it means that we aren’t using our brains, doesn’t it. It’s a more gut reaction than that – it’s basically the same instinct that leads to street gangs. Human beings, in other words, are fucking idiots, despite what our species’ colossal vanity might tell us.

We really should make an effort to try and have these inner dialogues more directly between our own consciences and the actual facts at hand, rather than seeing it through the lens of these sorts of silly, falsely dichotomised tribal shouting matches.

Billy Bragg – Ideology