I’m fascinated by pieces like this because they’re not about particular politicians or political parties, but how deep human nature determines why we align into such parties and support such politicians. The spectrum of political opinions reflects — of course — the range of psychological states. (Politics is not a matter of evidence, experiment, quantification, and so on, as science is, that arrives at objective truth.) This raises the question of whether things might ever change, or whether humanity is doomed to cycles of progress and tyranny.<\/p>\n
Key points from Brooks’ essay. (The print version is slightly cut from the online version linked here.)<\/p>\n
The fact is that human behavior is often driven by forces much deeper than economic and political self-interest, at least as Western rationalists typically understand these things. It\u2019s these deeper motivations that are driving events right now \u2014 and they are sending history off into wildly unpredictable directions.<\/p>\n
First,<\/strong> human beings are powerfully driven by what are known as the thymotic desires. These are the needs to be seen, respected, appreciated. If you give people the impression that they are unseen, disrespected and unappreciated, they will become enraged, resentful and vengeful. They will perceive diminishment as injustice and respond with aggressive indignation.<\/p>\n…<\/strong>
\nSecond,<\/strong> most people have a strong loyalty to their place and to their nation. But over the past few decades many people have felt that their places have been left behind and that their national honor has been threatened. In the heyday of globalization, multilateral organizations and global corporations seemed to be eclipsing nation-states.<\/p>\n…<\/strong>
\nThird,<\/strong> people are driven by moral longings \u2014 by their attachment to their own cultural values, by their desire to fiercely defend their values when they seem to be under assault. For the past few decades, globalization has seemed to many people to be exactly this kind of assault.<\/p>\nAfter the Cold War, Western values came to dominate the world \u2014 through our movies, music, political conversation, social media. One theory of globalization was that the world culture would converge, basically around these liberal values.<\/p>\n
The problem is that Western values are not the world\u2019s values. In fact, we in the West are complete cultural outliers. In his book \u201cThe WEIRDest People in the World,\u201d Joseph Henrich amasses hundreds of pages of data to show just how unusual Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic values are.
\nHe writes: \u201cWe WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist and analytical. We focus on ourselves \u2014 our attributes, accomplishments and aspirations \u2014 over our relationships and social roles.\u201d<\/p>\n
[[ I have the Henrich book. It’s very long, and I haven’t gotten to it yet. ]]<\/p>\n
Finally,<\/strong> people are powerfully driven by a desire for order. Nothing is worse than chaos and anarchy. These cultural changes, and the often simultaneous breakdown of effective governance, can feel like social chaos, like anarchy, leading people to seek order at all costs.<\/p>\n…
\nWe in the West subscribe to a series of universal values about freedom, democracy and personal dignity. The problem is that these universal values are not universally accepted and seem to be getting less so.<\/p>\n
…
\nTo define this conflict most generously, I\u2019d say it\u2019s the difference between the West\u2019s emphasis on personal dignity and much of the rest of the world\u2019s emphasis on communal cohesion. But that\u2019s not all that\u2019s going on here. What\u2019s important is the way these longstanding and normal cultural differences are being whipped up by autocrats who want to expand their power and sow chaos in the democratic world. Authoritarian rulers now routinely weaponize cultural differences, religious tensions and status resentments to mobilize supporters, attract allies and expand their own power. This is cultural difference transmogrified by status resentment into culture war.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
My thought at this point is that it’s precisely the emphasis on “communal cohesion” — which is what US conservatives desire at the expense of recognizing the existence of people outside their traditional norm — that makes a society subject to the influence of authoritarian tyrants. Here, I think, is why the American religious right puts up with, even admires, Donald T****.<\/p>\n
Brooks concludes:<\/p>\n
At the end of the day, only democracy and liberalism are based on respect for the dignity of each person. At the end of the day, only these systems and our worldviews offer the highest fulfillment for the drives and desires I\u2019ve tried to describe here.<\/p>\n
… What we call \u201cthe West\u201d is not an ethnic designation or an elitist country club. The heroes of Ukraine are showing that at its best, it is a moral accomplishment, and unlike its rivals, it aspires to extend dignity, human rights and self-determination to all. That\u2019s worth reforming and working on and defending and sharing in the decades ahead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NYT, front page article today, posted yesterday 9 Apr 2022: Spurred by Putin, Russians Turn on One Another Over the War, subtitled, “Citizens are denouncing one another, illustrating how the war is feeding paranoia and polarization in Russian society.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14496"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14503,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14496\/revisions\/14503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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