Things that worry me. Part one

I have been reflecting that I need to be careful how much I discourage children. By children I mean the generation of late teenagers and early adults who are coming of age this very confusing time.

I transitioned from adolescence into early adulthood in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Things seemed much clearer than they do to me now in the mid 2020s and my mid 50s. How much of this is because my perspective has developed or become more complicated, and how much my sense of the world accurately reflects a complexity that did not exist 35 years ago, is a matter for debate. Many conversations that begin as this essay has, end with an invocation of the sentiment “’twas ever thus” and perhaps a quote from some ancient philosopher shaking his head and predicting gloom at the dissolution he sees in his modern world.

Here are a few of the things that have been troubling me lately and which collectively, led me to sigh to myself that I am glad I am not my daughter’s age.

The first thought I have is about silence. First there’s the kind I hanker for and which is constantly chased away by the whirling clanking din of the city. Second is the silence of numerous social gatherings I have attended of late. It’s the silent conversation about the atrocious events in the middle east. I am complicit in this silence and if I examine my complicity, I find that it is in no small part due to fear.

It is the polarization of the conversation that frightens me. I fear that if I indicate that I am opposed to the murder of 15 000 (and counting) people, the majority of whom are ordinary citizens, I will be perceived as justifying the death of 1400 innocent civilians of another country. I read news reports about university leaders at world famous academic insitututions being admonished by the president of the United States for being vague when pressed by a US senator to officially state that calling for genocide against Jews is hate speech and therefore a criminal act. Reading a little further in the article, the term “intifada” is being construed as an act of calling for this genocide even though there is a persuasive case to be made that the intifada means “uprising” and is applied to mean “protest” in various contexts.

At the same time the US congress has voted approval of a motion that states that anti-Zionism equates to anti-semtisism – that is if one is opposed to the domination of Palestine by Israel then one is antisemitic. With a vote, an entire political standpoint, that the Palestinian people have a legitimate claim to live in Palestine is legally understood by the US congress to equate to a hateful form of racism.

Dangerous times.

Jordan Peterson uses the term “ideologically possessed” to refer to people who substitute the rhetoric of a particular ideology for thought. The concept puts me in mind of the neurobiology that underpins the fight or flight response, specifically the cognitive changes that accompany the activation of this basic response to threat. One of these cognitive changes is that electrochemical activity in the pre-frontal cortex is inhibited. This area of the brain has two primary functions – first the downregulation of impulses towards fear and aggression and second the integration of information into complex and slow process thought. The emergency inhibition of these two functions means that the brain calls on deeply encoded and rehearsed patterns of behaviour that are usually based on instinct. In simpler language, when under acute stress, we tend not to think clearly and to rely on basic and readily available interpretations and responses.

Similarly, I believe that in response to the complexity and confusion of our time, there are large groups of people who are responding with readily available and well-worn paths of ideology. Nationalism, identity politics, factional politics all provide ready-made and automatic answers to the complex questions and dilemmas our global, technological society poses.

Ideological possession then is a threat response to complexity – a collective unconscious admission of an inability to think about the issues of the day in a thoroughgoing and original way. And because it’s a threat response, the result is a global polarization – I am threatened and so I rely on an ideology that makes sense of that feeling of being overwhelmed and in danger which constructs some other element of the world as dangerous. This element is usually another group who then feels threatened and creates a competing ideology and so the wild twisting gyre turns beyond the call of any falconer.

And this is my complicity in the silence at the dinner table – in this frame, difference of opinion is dangerous and cannot be permitted. A clash of ideas is so threatening that disagreement may well be construed as an existential threat and responded to as such.