LIFE COACHING NEWSLETTER
October 2005
Psychological Type and Politics:
The Psychology of Liberals and Conservatives
A Wholebrain Perspective
A Series of Essays
This is an introduction to a series of essays that will focus on the psychology of American politics and their shadowy inclinations using the lens of Jungian Psychological Type.
I didn’t send a newsletter out in September because Katrina deluged New Orleans while I was in the process of writing it. In the aftermath of this transformative event, I was so deeply affected by the tragic images I saw on my TV screen, I put aside the newsletter I was working on and decided instead to write a series about the Psychology of American politics. I was captured by the same impulse after 911 but never acted on it. Instead, I watched in alarm as our nation lost its balance and the Bush administration used the tragedy to rush the United States into its first preëemptive war of choice. Why? Obsession and Power !
Obession: Many in his administration were known to have a propensity for the backwards glance and an obsession with the unfinished business of Saddam Hussein ; and
Power: Because they could! After the shock and awe of 911, Bush et al. were the unworthy recipients of a wave of unprecedented support and power. During this disturbing period, Samuel Johnson’s famous quotation,"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” often crossed my mind. While all this was happening, most of the world and half the country saw through the illusion the Bush administration was beaverishly constructing.
But Justice keeps its appointments and finally arrived in New Orleans with the gutsy newsmen and newswomen pointing klieg lights at their fellow Americans who were left behind without food or water for days -- the direct result of a government agency that had been intentionally reduced to a level of incompetence that was stupefying. But not a surprise, since Bush surrounds himself with strategists like Grover Nordquist . Mr. Nordquist is ever famous for this aspiration :
"My goal is to cut government in half in 25 years to get it down to the size when we can drown it in the bathtub."
Finally, if you add up all of the above and throw the presidential election of 2000 into the mix , you have the reason why a poisonous divide now exists between the Republican Conservative Right and the Democratic Progressive Left in America.
The first essay [adapted for this series] follows. It was written and delivered one year ago. I include it as background for the series:
The Power of Religious Language to Usurp the Common Good
Existential Focus by Angela Maffeo
for The Theological Opportunities Program
Emerson Chapel, Divinity Hall
Harvard Divinity School
© October 28, 2004
The reason I agreed to do the existential focus this morning was because the tragic cast of its title was in such sharp contrast to the heroic and secular currents that swept through my life during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
In 1954, I was a senior in high school and rushed home every day after school to watch the Army McCarthy hearings on television. The spectacle of government up close and so personal was a first for the nation and most Americans watched it. Like most of you in this room, I witnessed the exasperated Joseph P. Welch, repulsed by Joe McCarthy's behavior, pose this question,
“Have you no decency, sir?” [1]
Since Welch’s self-righteous indignation was in accord with the sentiments of most Americans, his words struck a death blow to the Senator's malicious conduct. He was censored by the Senate and soon limped off the public stage in disgrace and died an alcoholic.
On May 17th of that same year, the Warren Court ended school segregation. That fall the painful reality of southern segregation erupted into the national consciousness because President Eisenhower was forced to send soldiers into the south in order to protect and escort little black students into white schools since their entry was blocked by snarling Southern governors and hate-filled whites.
Notwithstanding these events, I was grounded in the belief that our national life reflected the forward movement of a humanistic and open culture. The tidal wave of events included Desegregation, the Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty, Head-Start, the Anti-War Movement, Feminism, the Gay Liberation Movement, the First Man on the Moon, Watergate and the Nixon resignation. It was my experience that no matter how bad things got, a countervailing force of grace returned our nation to a sense of balance, most of the time. In Kerry’s acceptance speech this summer, he said “JFK inspired us to change the world and we did.” It was true.
Simultaneously with all those events, we also had the Pill, the sexual revolution, the drug culture, Hippies, Charles Manson, Viet Nam, Roe v. Wade, Aids, the deregulation of many of the safeguards in our society, and a media whose newsrooms were reduced to mere profit centers. According to writers on the "culture wars," a great Backlash formed in reaction to these events.
Fast forward to the early 90s. I am studying at Harvard. One day while walking along the Charles, I am startled to hear a new voice on the radio. When I heard him use the word FemiNazi to describe feminists, I was stunned and outraged! During the previous decade, I had paid little attention to politics. But after that day, I listened to Limbaugh just long enough to figure him out. His persona was a mixup of the classic drunk who tyrannizes and controls his family with incessant attacks and the classic gossip who creates fictional cartoons of their victims and ideologies which bear little resemblance to reality. Obviously, politics had changed while I was not listening. In my absence, incessant ad hominem attacks had replaced issues and ideas.
It was clear to me that he and his clones occupied a fear-ridden,two-dimensional black and white world; were intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, rushed to judgment, possessed strong tendencies to catastrophize about the future and all were addicted to every weapon system ever created.
During that first year at Harvard, I took a course called The Madness of Crowds because I'd always wondered why great nations like Germany and America engaged in such inhuman horrors like the Holocaust and Slavery. I guess I knew even then that some form of cultural madness always resides just under the surface of every crowd in every culture.
The text we used was " Crowds and Power." The author, Elias Canetti, won the Nobel Prize and managed to strike a transcendent note throughout the book. I wasn’t surprised when I read these words:
“…the desire to turn men into animals was the principal motive for the development of slavery.”
I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t the same motive now driving the engine behind Globalization.
Canetti said this about the inception of war:
“It is the first death which infects everyone…. It is impossible to overrate the part played by the first dead man in the kindling of wars. Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim.”
Tragically, 911 delivered thousands of dead bodies to President George Bush, and he used the power of religious language to incite the nation into a war of choice, an unjust war, an unnecessary war, and then instituted policies that usurped the common good:
· As when he injected the phrase Axis of Evil into his speech and revealed himself to be a religious zealot;
· As when he used religious language to frame the war on terrorism and effectively halt all public debate on a war of choice;
· As when he framed the public dialogue in Christian terminology even though we live in a pluralistic society with respect to religion;
· As when he used religious language that “…bypasses the brain and goes straight to the gut" and may have encouraged untold acts of violence in Abu Graib;
· As when he used the language of good and evil both politically and socially so as to create the illusion of being on the moral high ground since it is so much easier for soldiers to take violent action if they believe they are right and are able to justify horrendous acts;
· As when he continuously cut taxes on the rich while so many continue to go homeless and jobless;
· As when he encouraged the suspension of rights to all prisoners and detainees in the war.
As we all know, 911, and the effect of the policies of George Bush on the nation’s common good has been everyone’s concern for the past three years. And, as more and more is revealed about the way President Bush took the country to war, that concern grows ever stronger.
Last week I heard a penetrating analysis by Walter Russell Mead on the Pew Forum on Politics and Religion on C-Span, and it helped me better confront the forces behind The Devaluing of the Common Good. This is an abbreviated and paraphrased version of what Mead called an evolving story. Make of it what you will.
The common good we all took for granted came out of a consensus between mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism with respect to basic standards of morality during the 1950s.
That same consensus began to dissolve in the 1960s when mainstream Protestantism lost much of its influence and Evangelical Christianity and other forms of Christianity rushed in to fill the vacuum.
According to Mead, that old consensus was replaced by a pair of opposite world views in torturous tension.
On the left, we have a small (c) catholic perspective, which shares the European Union’s commitment to a global perspective, a social net for all and the implicit commitment to the United Nations, a World Court, the environment, and other universal values.
On the right, there is now a very influential dissenting view of small (p) protestants or small (p) puritans who reject this global perspective because they perceive universal institutions as bad, just like they did with respect to the Catholic Church in the 16th century and the Anglican Church in the 17th century! They reject these global institutions as tyrannical and bad and as harbingers of, are you ready, the “antichrist” kingdom.
Then he spoke about the role of Israel and the belief by Zionist Jews, Zionist Christians, and Secular Zionists that there is a unique historical significance to the Jewish people and the Jewish state and believe they should not be judged by the same criteria used for all states; and that there is a special right to possess a certain land. He claims this is a strong force in the United States. It takes hard and soft form. Bush believes that Christians have a concern for the Jewish people and a special obligation to protect the Jews.
On the other hand, others want to normalize Israel, want to treat it as just another state among many, and generally see it as a troublesome state which is not necessarily in compliance with a lot of the norms that other states are expected to observe.
To the Evangelicals, the proliferation of the weapons of mass destruction, both chemical and biological, and Green House Warming, 911, and Aids are all evidence of the Apocalypse and to them feels as if we are in some kind of End Times as described in the Book of Revelations.
Apparently it is felt by many that this kind of ultimate evil in the modern secular world was not supposed to happen and when combined with the return of the Jews to Israel many now feel a connection exists between the god of history and history.
Welcome to the Apocalyptic Christian view of the Radical Right and Bush World.
***************
Over the course of this series, you will be introduced or reminded of the fact that we experience reality through eternal "pairs of opposites." Alan Watts is eloquent on this subject:
" I have sometimes thought that all philosophical disputes could be reduced to an argument between the partisans of “prickles” and the partisans of “goo.” The prickly people are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise, and like to stress differences and divisions between them. They prefer particles to waves, and discontinuity to continuity. The gooey people are tender-minded romanticists who love wide generalizations and grand syntheses. They stress the underlying unities, and are inclined to pantheism and mysticism. Waves suit them much better than particles as the ultimate constituents of matter, and discontinuities jar their teeth like a compressed-air-drill. " [The book [p. 134, Alan Watts]
Angela Maffeo
©October 2005
The schedule for the Day of Self-Discovery Programs at Radcliffe for
2005 and early 2006 is:
Sunday, December 4, 2005
Sunday, January 8, 2006
Sunday, February 5, 2006
For more information, visit
www.discoveryourpsychologicaltype.org.
email: amaffeo@post.harvard.edu
[1] The website for the movie Good night, good luck: wip.warnerbros.com/goodnightgoodluck/
