Are we being indoctrinated?
Left or right, our minds narrow and voices fall silent if we don't keep thinking and talking, and laughing
If I were going to join a cult or religion or commit to a radical movement, it would have to have a handsome leader, not an scowling fat old man with orange skin. There’s a reason a popular painting of Jesus1 makes him positively dreamy—handsome, masculine, sensitive.
If the cult leader was a woman, I wouldn’t want her to be one of the scowling ladies who promoted Communism and women’s suffrage. A bit more style, please, and a smile.
But I seem to be in the minority. An angry grimace seems to signal power and protection. Frumpy clothes mean seriousness.
Cults and commitment are on my mind because in the US we’re seeing the manifestation of what the pundits call “the MAGA base,” people whose own identities are tied to their overt devotion to Donald Trump.
‘MAGA (Make America Great Again) does not, for the “base,” conjure an image of purple mountains’ majesty but of a single human being. I won’t remark on his less than dreamy appearance since we’ve all seen far too much of it, but it is strange that for his devotees he personifies American Greatness. It’s as bizarre a notion as I’ve ever heard, but as the Yorkshire saying goes, “there’s naught so queer as folk.”
“Christians do have something in common with cults: zeal and confidence. We cherish and value similar signs of spirituality. Many of us share with them similar ideas concerning authority, loyalty, and submission.” —Pastor Harold Bussell
In late 2016, when the polls said Hillary Clinton was certain to win the presidential election, a consultant named Kellyanne Conway insisted that the polls were wrong because they didn’t understand Trump’s fans, who were committed to him but didn’t want to say so. At that stage, they felt isolated in their admiration and devotion.
The Trump faithful are not isolated now, even if they are outnumbered. Insignia is everywhere: baseball caps, tshirts, jewelry, bumperstickers. Like criminal gangs, MAGA is keen on using clothing, and colors, as a signal of belonging.
But that kind of faithfulness—even when faced with facts, mere mutable evidence—isn’t confined to religion or politics. We all adopt beliefs that we call knowledge. And it’s extremely hard to see where these hardened places are. Myopia about our own assumptions is one reason I so value third places, the miscellaneous and often humble tables where we spend time together and talk face to face. In a third place, strangers do something of supreme value: they help us look at our beliefs from new vantage points.
This function of the stranger in our lives is grounded in a simple fact: truth is a very large matter, and requires various angels of vision to be seen in the round. It is not that our view is always wrong and the stranger’s always right, but simply that the stranger’s view is different, giving us an opportunity to look anew upon familiar things.
That text comes from a Christian writer, Parker Palmer, in his The Company of Strangers, a book Ray Oldenburg recommended to me long ago. And here’s a passage about different points of view, in this case different ways of looking at an ice cream sundae. It comes from a novel set in Bangkok, narrated by a Thai detective as he watches an American colleague:
To eat alone is a sad and pathetic condition in my country, evidence of social and emotional dispossession. To do so in front of another without offering to share is an obscenity and almost impossible for me to watch. I feel the blood draining from my face as she gulps down a miniature Everest.
No wonder Thailand is known for its early effort at gastrodiplomacy, supporting the establishment of Thai restaurants in other countries through the Global Thai Program of 2002.
“The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it the more it will contract.”—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr
Can we cleanse our minds?
Doris Lessing was a Nobel Prize winning novelist. She was a committed Communist when she was young. The experience of being absorbed into a movement with cult-like characteristics alarmed her. She wrote later about how important it is to learn to think for ourselves. In a foreword to The Gold Notebook, she suggested this speech to be given to all students:
You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself—educating your own judgement. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.
I learned the term “culture-bound” when I started with work with anthropologists at the Human Relations Area Files at Yale. That institution was founded to do comparative study of human cultures. By amassing and categorizing a huge collection of ethnographic studies, they were able to identify attitudes and behaviors we have in common, and some that only exist in certain cultures. There are even culture-bound illnesses that seem to be tied to beliefs, not to genetics. I worry that our culture-bound and time-bound assumptions limit our ability to find solutions to pressing global problems. Here are a few assumptions that concern me:
The normal and right thing is to live alone or in a nuclear family.
Medical technology should have no limits.
Progress is necessarily positive and desirable.
Remember the line at the end of Animal Farm? “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” Americans, and American politicians, often talk about what every American deserves in terms of comfort and opportunity, and a way of life impossible to achieve on a global scale. We talk about equality here at home, but what about equality across the planet?
Most of us have views that are compatible with those of our friends, schoolmates, or church community. Lessing saw that this is limiting and can be dangerous.
But how can you tell if you are too tightly bound, caught in a web of invisible assumptions? Here’s a simple test: is there any important issue on which you hold a different opinion from the people you are closest to? Can you articulate it? And do you talk about it, or stay discreetly silent? “Let’s agree to disagree” should be welcome, not something to fear.
I’ve pulled out a few passages from Doris Lessing’s Prisons We Choose to Live Inside2 that seem especially relevant today.
People like certainties. More, they crave certainty, they seek certainty, and great resounding truths. They like to be part of some movement equipped with these truths and certainties, and if there are rebels and heretics, that is even more satisfying, because this structure is so deep in all of us. In Britain, a country that is rapidly being polarized into extremes (it is frightening to be a part of it), it was the miners’ strike [in the 1980s] that precipitated or made obvious a process that began, I believe, with the collapse and fragmentation of the Left. For a very long time in Britain we have had a balance of Left and Right, each side containing within itself a large range of different opinions. This balance has gone. The Left is a mass of small and large groups. This is a classical recipe for social disorder, even revolution.
Lessing saw Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party advisers use modern political framing methods:
Those people who like to regard themselves as the armies of the good, the well-intentioned, disdain such means. I am not saying they should use them, but they will often refuse even to study them, thus leaving themselves open to being manipulated by them. As an experiment I tried talking about this subject to a series of my friends who are part of the well-intentioned movements of our time, such as Greenpeace, various types of Socialism, people against nuclear war, campaigners for civil liberties, for the rights of prisoners, the abolition of torture, and so on. Every one reacted identically—emotionally, with dislike and distrust, as if it were in some way reactionary or anti-libertarian or anti-democratic to look at the behaviour of human beings, at our behaviour, dispassionately, as something that one may learn to predict.
Our opponents have no such inhibitions.
Of course, if you are a member of a group that by its own definition is right, good and true, with all the complacent attitudes that go with this—such as that one’s opponents are evil—then of course it is hard to stand aside, hard to take that necessary step upwards on the ladder into objectivity. But it does seem to me sometimes that Thatcher’s last election exactly summed it up: there she was, her every gesture, exit, entrance, smile, remark, stage managed according to very sophisticated social prescription; while Michael Foot was grumpily and highmindedly slamming a train window in the faces of some enquiring reporters.
Lessing urges us to educate free thinkers, reminding me of Margaret Mead’s optimistic line about leadership: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Looking back, I see what a great influence an individual may have, even an apparently obscure person, living a small, quiet life. It is individuals who change societies, give birth to ideas, who, standing out against tides of opinion, change them. This is as true in open societies as it is in oppressive societies, but of course the casualty rate in the closed societies is higher. Everything that has ever happened to me has taught me to value the individual, the person who cultivates and preserves her or his own ways of thinking, who stands out against group thinking, group pressures. Or who, conforming no more than is necessary to group pressures, quietly preserves individual thinking and development.
I am not at all talking about eccentrics, about whom such a fuss is made in Britain. I do think that only a very rigid and conforming society could have produced the idea of an eccentric in the first place. Eccentrics tend to be in love with the image of eccentricity, and once embarked on this path, become more and more picturesque, developing eccentricity for its own sake. No, I am talking about people who think about what is going on in the world, who try to assimilate information about our history, about how we behave and function—people who advance humanity as a whole.
It is my belief that an intelligent and forward looking society would do everything possible to produce such individuals, instead of, as happens very often, suppressing them. But if governments, if cultures, don’t encourage their production, then individuals and groups can and should.
Choose to laugh
I always listen for laughter because it’s the sign of a good time, and a Great Good Place. Laughter is a marker, not just in conversation but on talk shows and in political debate, and on podcasts. It is notable that America’s most famous comedians trend liberal, and that the current US administration is deadly, cruelly serious. Here’s what Lessing wrote:
It means, and I hope this won’t sound too wild, choosing to laugh. The researchers of brainwashing and indoctrination discovered that people who knew how to laugh resisted best. The Turks, for instance . the soldiers who faced their torturers with laughter sometimes survived when others did not. Fanatics don’t laugh at themselves; laughter is by definition heretical, unless used cruelly, turned outwards against an opponent or enemy. Bigots can’t laugh. True believers don’t laugh. Their idea of laughter is a satirical cartoon pillorying an opposition person or idea. Tyrants and oppressors don’t laugh at themselves, and don’t tolerate laughter at themselves. Laughter is a very powerful thing, and only the civilized, the liberated, the free person can laugh at herself, himself.
This is the image of Jesus I grew up with, but I hadn’t known the story behind the blue-eyed Jesus until now. “Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ is an icon of American religious art. Painted in 1941 the image was continuously reproduced throughout World War II and the YMCA and Salvation Army handed out the image to soldiers during the war. It has become the most reproduced image of Christ with over 500 million reproductions.” Read the whole thing.
I got this book from the library in my search for material on political polarization. It’s based on a series of lectures given in Canada. “In her 1985 CBC Massey Lectures Doris Lessing addresses the question of personal freedom and individual responsibility in a world increasingly prone to political rhetoric, mass emotions, and inherited structures of unquestioned belief.” It’s still available from House of Anasi, a renowned Canadian press.