George Rebane
Peggy Noonan (8mar19 WSJ) draws a useful parallel between Mao’s 12-year Cultural Revolution and the present-day antics of the Blue Mobs on campuses and our streets. Both roilings have involved pre-intellectual young people, mostly students in each country’s academe. And both sought/seek to banish politically incorrect traditions, customs, learning, behaviors, and thinking. Mao’s revolution followed a devastating famine, brought on by his extremely ignorant economic policies, which reportedly killed Chinese in the high tens of millions by several post-Mao accountings. (Liberal media have since sought to reduce that number down to the low millions.)
And today as then, both types of ‘gatherings’ with shouting throngs of young people were directed to identify and publicly shame those politically incorrect who sought to speak, comment, write, or attend in places their betters identified as being out of bounds. These ‘struggle sessions’ (Chinese term), conducted by the youth who became the Red Guards, would take place in streets, conference halls, legislative chambers, classrooms, administrative offices, and wherever else such targeted people could be found, hounded, transported, or summarily executed. As then, today the so-accused also have learned to quickly admit their guilt in the attempt to limit added opprobrium. Leading the currently accused by the hard-Left are self-deprecators from the ranks of Democrat politicians like Kirsten Gillibrand and Joe Biden who have quickly pled ‘guilty as charged’ and recanted.
For generations since Marx, these reactions by devotees of the Left have expressed the fear of ideas that are difficult for them to debate in public forums. The Left’s perennial reaction has been to simply silence or eliminate the source of such countering ideologies. Today the manifest fragility of these junior leftists has earned them the sobriquet of ‘snowflakes’. Veteran readers of these pages may remember that some years back I cited clinical research done at the University College London (here) which showed that liberals and conservatives use different parts of their brains to reason about socio-political problems and issues. This gave some comfort to people of my ilk to explain away the strikingly different modes of reasoning peculiar to each side of such a political spectrum – there actually was a repeatedly observable difference in how we processed stuff between our ears.
Well, not to be outdone, the Left has now returned the favor with a ‘study’ that correlates the size of a person’s amygdala (the self-preservation, fear center of the brain) with their political leanings. As reported in the WaPo (here), this study conducted at Yale, concluded that conservatives have larger amygdalas than liberals, and therefore they fear more things more easily, and therefore they are conservatives. The report by psychologist Prof John Bargh, one of the principal investigators, then goes off the rails claiming how to turn conservatives into liberals through various psychological ruses of imagining secure and fearful situations (which presumably don’t change the size of their amygdalas). But the bottom line of this research is twofold – 1) our political orientation has a neurological basis, and 2) having a more developed ‘fear center’ makes you subject to wrong ideologies and bad political decisions. I won’t insult your intelligence by describing their added claim to change you into a proper liberal without messing with your amygdala, you can do that yourself.
(BTW, one local worthy in The Union (here) even connected amygdala size to explain the election of Donald Trump.)
What should be amazing, but isn’t, is the hubris of progressive science be it in global warming or brain-based choices of wrong socio-political thought. One could more plausibly argue that given their purely clinical results from brain imaging, the greater fear evinced by conservatives is actually a prudent reaction to preserve productive social orders from abrupt (revolutionary?) changes. Humans have known for millennia that the fear response in children is poorly developed and has to be inculcated by parents and culture. It is well-known that brains change as a person matures to about his mid-twenties. Perhaps a more persuasive hypothesis that needs examination is that an under-developed amygdala portends liberal thought of the kind that has made them historically and fearlessly adopt public policies that have subsequently delivered death and disaster.
In any event, all of us are indeed organically different along every imaginable attribute and dimension. And that itself should lead reasonable people to examine more conducive ways of assembling their social orders. One size definitely does not fit all.
[10mar19 update] The conversation in the comment stream below has turned to fears dominant in the represented ideologues. The Left has left us a rich and documented legacy of all their fears in the laws and regulations they have passed across the land restricting and limiting almost every imaginable behavior from speech through property rights, family prerogatives, public behaviors, gun ownership, school curricula, …, to the practice of religion. In sum, the Left fears citizens who are free, independent, enterprising, and seek to preserve America as a strong and exceptional nation-state with minimally regulated markets and a minimally intrusive government.
The Right has its own fears, some of which were succinctly summarized by Richard Lamm, former three-term governor of Colorado, in a speech he gave nearly 20 years ago, and again presented in a 2006 Washington Examiner op-ed piece (here). I reprint it below for your edification because its contents have been much discussed in these pages over the years, and it points out my own fears with which I have had to learn to live as I witness the implementation of this plan to destroy America.
I have a secret plan to destroy America. If you believe, as many do, that America is too smug, too white-bread, too self-satisfied, too rich … then let’s destroy America. It is not that hard to do.
History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and they all fall, and that “an autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.” So here is my plan:
- We must first make America a bilingual/bicultural country. History shows … that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. …
- I would then invent “multiculturalism” and encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture. I would make it an article of belief that all cultures are equal … there are no cultural differences that are important … and the black and Hispanic dropout rate is only due to prejudice and discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is out-of-bounds.
- We can make the United States a “Hispanic Quebec” without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity. As Benjamin Schwarz said in the Atlantic Monthly recently: “… the apparent success of our own multiethnic and multicultural experiment might have been achieved not by tolerance but by hegemony. Without the dominance that once dictated ethno-centrically and what it meant to be an American, we are left with only tolerance and pluralism to hold us together.”
- I would encourage all immigrants to keep their own language and culture. I would replace the melting pot metaphor with a salad bowl metaphor … I would make our fastest-growing demographic group the least educated. I would add a second underclass, unassimilated, undereducated, and antagonistic to our population. …
- I would then get the big foundations and Big Business to give these efforts lots of money. I would invest in ethnic identity, and I would establish the cult of victimology. … I would start a grievance industry blaming all minority failure on the majority population.
- I would establish dual citizenship and promote divided loyalties. I would “celebrate diversity.” … It stresses differences rather than commonalities. Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other … when they are not killing each other.
A diverse peaceful or stable society is against most historical precedent. People undervalue the unity it takes to keep a nation together, and we can take advantage of this myopia. … Dorf’s World History tells us the [ancient] Greeks believed they belonged to the same race; they possessed a common language and literature and worshiped the same gods. All Greece took part in the Olympic games in honor of Zeus and venerated the shrine of Apollo at Delphi. A common enemy, Persia, threatened their liberty. Yet all of these bonds together were not strong enough to overcome two factors … local patriotism and geographical conditions that nurtured political divisions … .
- Then I would place all these subjects off-limits and make them taboo to talk about. I would find a word similar to “heretic” in the 16th century that stopped discussion and paralyzed thinking. Words like “racist,” and “xenophobe” halt argument and conversation. I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws.
I would develop a mantra: because immigration has been good for America, it must always be good.
- Lastly, I would censor Victor Davis Hanson’s book, “Mexifornia.” This book is dangerous. It exposes my plan to destroy America. … This guy is on to my plan.
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