© Charles D. Hayes
Wouldn't it have been great if, when we were growing up, there had been an audible signal when each of our beliefs achieved the rigidity of concrete? Imagine hearing inspirational music with announcements declaring, "Listen up, this is important. This is going to be your opinion from now on." Of course, this doesn't occur. Instead, our respective cultures play a strategic role in shaping our views without notice for most of our lives.
We
don't grow up making up our minds about the world independent of our
communities. Quite the contrary: we carry many of our customs, beliefs,
prejudices, and aspirations with us to our graves. Each new generation,
however, rejects some things learned from their elders while internalizing
others wholeheartedly. The pendulum of liberal-versus-conservative politics is
always at sway in the wind, but it never ventures so far in one direction that
it doesn't at some point reverse course.
America
would benefit tremendously if each and every one of us would routinely take the
time and effort to examine our own beliefs genealogically and follow them all
of the way back to ideological bedrock. It is incredibly powerful and
insightful to discover how and why we view the world as we do. Much of what we
come to believe as straight-up reality is the residue of past events and
customs that bear little resemblance to the world we live in today.
I
grew up in the South, in Texas and Oklahoma, in the 1940s and ’50s. As a
teenager, when I went to movies and saw an example of, say, a New York cab
driver shouting obscenities at a male passenger or a pedestrian and nothing
happened as a result, it didn't seem real. This didn't seem possible in my
community because you could not shout insults in another man's face without an
obligatory fistfight. Being publicly humiliated required immediate redress.
Now,
when you take customs like this to their ideological foundations, things get
really interesting. In their book Culture
of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, Dov Cohen and Richard E.
Nisbett report research showing that when men of the South are insulted, they
experience rapidly escalating increases of testosterone and cortisol. And yet,
this is not usually the case with men raised in the North. Stated simply: we absorb
our culture with congealed emotion that sets up like cerebral cement.
Historically
the culture of defending oneself as a matter of principle traces back to the antebellum
notion of Southern honor. From there, it goes all the way back to herding
cultures and then back further still to the male dominance expressed in sacred
religious texts. In other words, this ethos is about pious behavior ensconced
in the values of protecting the flock against any and all comers with a posture
aggressive enough to ward off all those who might be tempted to trespass or
bring harm.
If
you are old enough to recall the 1950s and ’60s, you will recognize the residue
of herding culture psychology combined with a hybrid notion of Southern honor and
the stoic resolve of Native Americans as fundamental to a major theme of
Western movies: A rugged, unshakable stranger comes to town and is not to be offended
or affronted without grave consequences that, more often than not, result in a
gunfight. The core cultural thread that holds this attitude together is the unspoken
declaration that it is a man's world and men are meant to be in charge. Millions
of Americans still feel the influence of this cultural pressure on our identity.
This
ethos continues to prevail across the country, especially in politically red states, where an established sense
of patriarchal authority reigns with regard to how people—especially women—should
behave. The gentility of the Old South, in particular, is steeped in a historical
connection with the philosophy of herding cultures and the protection and sense
of ownership of both women and slaves. Above reproach, ladylike behavior and
demonstrated subservience by both women and slaves amplified the resident white gentlemen’s sense of honor. All
actions or behaviors to the contrary were, and still are, suspect.
When
we hear people say things like, "I have nothing against homosexuals,
except when they shove it in my face," what they are really expressing is
the angst of a threatened worldview. Their identity is at risk, and this is a really
scary situation for them. If they discover a rip in the fabric of what they
consider reality, especially what they revere as moral truth, then the fissure
has the potential to grow wider and could ultimately include their religion,
their politics, and even their simple prescription for what constitutes a meaningful
life. Moreover, the older one is, the greater the threat, since the thought of
having lived one's whole life in existential error is as psychologically
devastating as facing the end of the world.
In
the antebellum South, it's hard to overestimate the amount of influence men were
expected to have over the behavior of women, especially when it comes to being seen
as protecting them and their reputation. Thus, every aspect of feminism was and
still is a threat to traditional patriarchy, and those who conform and behave
as expected resent those who resist.
Take
the issue of abortion. What interests me most is that many of the people who
are most vocal about being pro-life appear to hold their belief, not so much because
of an actual concern for unborn children, but more out of a desire to protect a
parochial and patriarchal worldview. Now I'm sure there are exceptions, but regardless
of your gender, if you are aggressively pro-life ask yourself this question: If
you take this issue clear to its core, do you really care all that much about
unborn children, or could this have more to do with the way you were raised and
how you were taught women are supposed to behave? How much concern do you show
for children, other than your own, when the subject of abortion is set aside?
How do you reconcile the deep irony in the scientific admonition that the
exponential growth of human population threatens our very existence?
On
the other hand, if you believe absolutely in a woman's right to choose whether
or not to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, where do you think this assumption
originates and how did you come to believe it? What sense of a woman's freedom
do you think enables you to readily discount the life of an unborn child? At
what point do you think ending the life of a fetus is wrong?
Most
of the things that we believe constitute our worldview are deeply imbedded in
our sense of identity. Very often the main reason we take sides on an issue has
much more to do with the fact that our respective identity group has already taken
the position and we feel obliged to join in. This, in my view, helps no one
because, until we do the kind thinking that gets us beyond the simple notion of
identity, we have little hope of achieving the kind of objectivity that would
assure a sense of honor for ourselves as individuals and our respective groups.
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