This morning we feature part eighteen of our series on the global brain from an important book by Howard Bloom. See: 1) Biology, Evolution and the Global Brain, 2) Creative Nets in the Precambrian Age, 3) Networking in Paleontology’s “Dark Ages”, 4) The Embryonic Meme, 5) Why Birds and Humans Flock Together, 6) Mammals and the Further Rise of Mind, 7) Tools of Perception and the Construction of Reality, 8) Reality is a Shared Hallucination, 9) The Conformity Police, 10) The Huddle and the Squabble, 11) Ice and Fire, 12) The Dance of Attractors and Repulsors, 13) The Birth of Boundary Breakers, 14) The Guesswork of Collective Mind, 15) The Pluralism Hypothersis—Athens, 16) Pythagoras Subcultures and Psycho-Bio-Circuitry, 17) Swivelling Eyes and Pivoting Minds. Reposted from Telepolis.
Howard Bloom
Nations and their leaders battle for control over the common sense. But other contestants struggle behind the scenes – subcultures, clusters of like-minded folk who live within and ooze between societies. In the subcultural clashes of the 21st century, Sparta and Athens are vigorously alive.
“When I, or people like me, are running the country, you’d better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we will execute you.” —Randall Terry – Operation Rescue
“I represent a Political Party (The Creator’s Rights Party) that would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons…and all the potential slaughter that entails… in defense of a State’s Right to secede in order to restore God’s plan for government.” —Neal Horsley
“the one who blows up the enemies of Allah by blowing up himself as well …is, Allah willing, a martyr.” —Br. Abu Ruqaiyah – “The Martyrdom Operations”
“We are the millennial promise. Get used to us.” —Mary Matlin – American conservative activist
The Athenian strategy moves to the top when things are going well. Spartanism grabs the throne when the world is going to hell.
Today’s cyber-era Spartans are bone-crushers of conformity. They are the Fundamentalists4 of both the left5 and right.6 . Some are godly,7 some are secular. Religious extremists, ultra-nationalists, ethnic liberationists, eco-terrorists, and fascists8 fall on the fundamentalist side of the line. Brooking no tolerance of those who disagree, they invoke a golden past and a higher power, both of which demand submission to authority. The worst shoot, burn, and bomb to get their way. Their opposites are Athenian, Socratic, Aristotelian, diversity-generating, pluralistic, and democratic. They pay lip-service, and often a good deal more, to such slogans as “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The groups which follow this pattern are more diffuse than their rivals; in fact, the right to be loose-knit is part of their philosophy. They include liberals, democratic socialists, libertarians, and free-market capitalists. These champions of human rights use the word “freedom” to liberate the individual, not to hammer home the triumph of a Chosen Collectivity.9
Rules of the Subculture Game
Give me a lever long enough, said, Archimedes, and with it I can move a world. Many are the levers in the games subcultures play.
Back in 1932, a social and political psychologist named Richard Schanck carried out a field study of “Elm Hollow,” a literal horse-and-buggy town in rural New York State cut off without a bus stop or a passenger railway.10 Nearly to a man and woman, Elm Hollow’s Baptist residents spilled forth hatred of the era’s godless sins: card games involving the use of the king, queen and jack,11 alcohol, and Satan’s incense burners – the products of tobacco leaves.12 Strange thing was that once Shank had gained a bit of trust, he was often pulled behind closed doors and shuttered blinds by some lone figure hungry for a game of gin, a hard cider-drinking binge, and a cigarette or two. The hell-tempter sneaking off the straight-and-narrow wasn’t a town hoodlum, but one of its respected citizens.
Despite a population of less than 500, Elm Hollow was riddled with subcultures: insiders versus outsiders, Baptists versus Methodists, those who lived near the freight station versus those who lived near the post office, and members of the local Lodge versus those who hadn’t joined. But of the town’s competing factions, one had trussed up the community.13 Thirty five years before Schanck showed up with his sharpened pencils, an influential Baptist minister had died. To all intents and purposes, this worthy’s memory no longer should have thrived. As Schanck put it, “the church has been remodeled, every one of his parishioners, save one, is gone, and in fact, in the realistic sense, nothing except the property upon which the building rests remains the same.”14 But the minister had left more than just a minor legacy – he had provided the platform for what the researchers called a “personality tyranny.” The heritor of his stored influence was the minister’s daughter, Mrs. Salt, a woman who puzzled the researchers enormously. She “was not liked,” writes Schanck, yet “she dominated” the attention structure of the community.15 Forty two percent of Elm Hollow’s Baptist parishioners declared publicly that her word demanded “extraordinary respect.”16
How, Schanck wondered, did Mrs. Salt manage to hold her sway? The answer was in imitative behavior and the fear which keeps us sheep from going astray. Mrs. Salt controlled what you did and did not say. Hence Elm Hollow chorused with almost unanimous piety. In private, Schanck heard the choked-off sound of heresy. Numerous Baptists secretly hankered for their nip of alcohol. But Mrs. Salt had been highly effective in scattering her enemies. Even the most vehement behind-the-scenes believers in the good of a bourbon-sip from time to time, when caught in the spotlight of neighborly attention, echoed Mrs. Salt’s religious party line.17 And many of those who secretly felt she should be treated as no better than any other woman of the town spoke out of a different side of their mouths when they knew folks who could overhear them were around – publicly they inveighed that Mrs. Salt should be obeyed.18 Even the new minister, who’d only been on the scene a year, admitted privately to liberal views. Yet on the pulpit it was the fire and brimstone of Mrs. Salt’s fundamentalist sanctities he spewed.
How completely the anointed had commandeered collective perception became apparent when Schanck asked the closet dissenters how other people in the community felt about face cards, a snort, a smoke, and levity.19 Hoodwinked by suppression, each knew without a doubt that he was the sole transgressor in a saintly sea. He and he alone could not control his demons of depravity. None had the faintest inkling that he was part of a silenced near-majority.
Here was an arch-lesson in the games subcultures play. Reality is a mass hallucination. We gauge what’s real according to what others convey. And others, like us, rein in their words, caving to timidity. Thanks to conformity enforcement and to cowardice, a little power goes a long, long way.
From Open Hand to Social Fist – The Clenched Society
“In our flexible, reengineered economy…we are unmoored – from our pasts, our neighbors, and ourselves.” —Patrick Smith
“Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure. Fundamentalism is, therefore, inevitable in an age which has destroyed so many certainties by which faith once expressed itself and upon which it relied.” —Reinhold Niebuhr
Groups under threat constrict.20 They do it to gain leverage and force. Toss bacteria onto a surface so hard that feeding becomes almost impossible, and they’ll abandon individual freedom, pull together their members, and form a tight-knit phalanx which can, according to physicist/microbiologist Eshel Ben-Jacob, carve through the obstacles around it like a blade.21 Human groups in times of trouble stiffen up their unity,22 squelch ideas,23 rally ’round their leaders,24 and spit out those who fail to ape the top dog faithfully. Group members project their own forbidden emotions onto others, and in their ferocity become enforcers for the group’s norms. They spot the smallest sin among their fellows and punish it intolerantly.25 In biology, emergency measures like these have a tendency to cut two ways. In short jolts they produce bursts of power. But used in the long run, they destroy.26 The oneness which gives society the punch of a bayonet produces over the course of time a paralyzing rigidity.
This lesson may prove critical for the 21st century. Old ways of life are crumbling, and the victims of disintegration hunger for something new around which to cohere. As I write, Russia has ceased functioning as a state. It cannot collect its taxes, pay its workers, or protect its citizens from crime. In this chaos, money is worth nothing and ordinary citizens cannot buy the food they need to survive. Siberian workers unpaid for over a year told television crews from Britain’s Independent Television News27 that if they could get their hands on enough rubles they’d forget buying groceries, purchase a rifle, go to Moscow, and take revenge. The hungrier, angrier, and more desperate they become, the more they will be ripe adherents when some new “liberator” arrives.
During the late 1900s, the seams of European and American society were also fraying ominously. Waves of migration brought Turks into Germany, North and sub-Saharan Africans to France, Pakistanis to England, and Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, South Americans, Asians, Lebanese, Palestinians, and a host of others into England, Canada, and America. Drowned in a sea of strangers, many natives of the West were groping for a handhold, a new form of identity.
Americans were thrown from jobs which had been in their families for generations – everything from autowork to farming.28 Their expectations for the future were tossed aside as economic boundaries melted and western workers were forced to compete with those of China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, India, and the Philippines.29 In the new environment, Koreans could take advantage of their average worker’s superior education in mathematics and the sciences,30 Indians could slam home their aptitude for computer programming, the Chinese could utilize their Confucian tradition of general education, their genius for grassroots and elite technologies (Chinese technologies consistently eclipsed those of the West until just the last few centuries),31 and their willingness to turn agricultural laborers into industrial and technological slaves.32
Meanwhile, jobs in America had disappeared in areas like Michigan and migrated to new territories like North Carolina, sucking the life from towns and severing the roots of citizens in communities like Flint, Michigan, which had once seemed fixed eternally. General Motors alone had laid off 65,000 workers between 1993 and 1998.33 As jobs shifted from lifetime positions to serial career transitions, even homes riddled with luxuries – central air conditioning, computers, cellular phones, and extra tvs – were bedeviled by new forms of layoff anxiety.34 Then came the economic collapse of the late 1990s, when Asia was first to hear the sucking sound of a looming credit catastrophe. Bank after bank discovered that roughly 60% of its assets were tied up in loans no one would ever repay. While the International Monetary fund scrambled to plug the holes with six billion here and ten billion there, the total vacuum mounted to over a trillion dollars35 – roughly twice the size of the Federal Budget of the United States.36 Economies imploded. During the ’90s, Japan tottered economically.37 With her went Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Washington state’s apple farmers, wheat growers, and timber harvesters had grown to depend on the markets of the Far East. So had Oregon’s electronic producers, Maine’s fishermen and paper products makers, Colorado’s industrial machine crafters, Alabama’s chemical manufacturers, and Nebraska’s food processors and leather makers,38 not to mention the oil producers of Venezuela39 and the Arab states. With no place to sell their goods, small entrepreneurs and international corporations stared disaster in the face. More jobs were downsized and yet more who had known security were tossed from their accustomed place.
Sponge cells sieved apart frantically regain their hold by constructing fresh communities. Chimps and rhesus monkeys clump together on the basis of similarity.40 Displaced humans find common ground by rallying around a common sentiment,41 a shared sense of experience, a point of connection whose expression offers hope and certainty.42 When the formulae of the center prove powerless to save one’s soul from chaos, the new straws to which men cling may be peculiar “truths” which come from the periphery.43 Often these are beliefs which stress the fist instead of social niceties.44
The collapse of global boundaries which had wrenched so many from their comfort also enlarged the ways in which those stripped of self could seek new brethren and new ideologies. On the internet45 Americans, Japanese, and British who found their solace in worshipping nature could make common cause with eco-terrorists like the German-based Earth Liberation Frontists and their ilk, self-styled “warriors” who attacked fur-farmers, tossed fire bombs, and set up booby traps for loggers to restore Earth Mother’s sanctity.46 Those convinced that the Aryan race was Biblically destined to rule creation could cluster ’round extremist web-preachings like those of the Kingdom Identity Ministries in Harrison, Arkansas.47 Moslems who felt like driving a car-bomb into a crowd of civilians could read on the website of Australia’s The Call of Islam: a comprehensive intellectual magazine why this form of “martyrdom operation…will be rewarded in paradise.”48 And even Serbs from Chicago and British Columbia to Belgrade, whose extremist brethren were carrying out mass-killings in Bosnia and Kosovo, could share the justification for this ethnic cleansing via cyberspace.49
More than ever, the newly dispossessed needed a sense of social warmth,50 a home, a family, a nest filled with friendship, caring, and stability.51 Post-modern Spartans were masters at catering to this need. Through schools, clinics, youth groups, political committees, missionary programs, prayer clubs, parenting classes, safe houses, family nights, societies for the oppressed, volunteer organizations, charitable projects, and other nests of nurture, extremist movements offered those who’d been cut loose instant roots and genuine nourishment.52 They also proffered haven from the storm of insecurity,53 for all they did was anchored in eternal bedrock – God’s or Gaea’s verity.
Nothing grows a movement faster than opposition to assault.54 Confront two squabbling cliques with a common danger and the two will join to face the adversary. 55 Give humans a sense that death is in the air and their individualistic views will ebb in favor of the creeds clasped by the collectivity.56 What’s more, they’ll go on the attack against those who challenge commonplaces they themselves had doubted in untroubled days.57 Aggression drowns confusion’s agonies.58 The German youth of 1914 were lost in anomie. War was anesthetic and salvation – redemption from a hell of private pain. Ernst Troeltsch testified to the healing power of conflict when he made the following wildly popular speech:
“The first victory we won, even before the victories on the battlefield, was the victory over ourselves…. A higher life seemed to reveal itself to us. Each of us…lived for the whole and the whole lived in all of us. Our own ego with its personal interests was dissolved in the great historic being of the nation. The fatherland calls! The parties disappear… Thus a moral elevation of the people preceded the war, the whole nation was gripped by the truth and reality of a suprapersonal, spiritual power.” —Anne Harrington
If a crisis seems indecipherable, its victims sink into utility-sorter shutdown, the helpless nail-biting of anxiety. But if the causes of a crisis seem explainable the result is a surprisingly healthier emotion – fear. Fear is a form of arousal which prepares us to act rather than to give up. And it drives us toward group unity.60 This is true even if an actual solution is nowhere to be seen.61 The leader’s ability to create the illusion of a handle on the situation matters more than the reality. And the idea of a demonic foe is often at that handle’s core.62 Post-modern Fundamentalisms are masters at the craft of enemy creation and the manufacture of a siege mentality.63 Their world abounds in villains – one-worlders with black helicopters, Satanic secular humanists, Beelzebubian New Agers, homosexual conspirators, Zionist bankers, Illuminati, Trilateral Commissioners, Great Satans, real estate developers, mink farmers,64 abortionists, and genetic engineers. 65 Bringing the sense of battle to fever pitch is the myth that we are on the brink of the mother of all subculture wars, that of the final days in which an avenging Nature, Allah, or Jehovah will wipe this old, iniquitous world away. The impure and unbelieving (that means you and me) will die in manners horrible to contemplate. When all is stripped and cleansed through nuclear flame, greenhouse flood,66 or the final bloodbath of the scimitar, the righteous will finally take their place at the right hand of destiny.67 Unfortunately, extremists armed with weapons of mass destruction can turn eccentric visions of Apocalypse into self-fulfilling prophecies.
Imagine what might happen if a group believing as the Spartans did that death is a noble thing and that adherence to authority is the ultimate salvation of mankind gains control of long-range missiles tipped with atomic weaponry.68 The dedication of those who know that a violent end will bring a kingdom of blessedness could lead to human suicide, which is exactly what one of the first of these groups to get its hands on chemical weapons, Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo, had in mind.69
Here’s how the rain of brimstone forecast looked at the turn of the 21st century. Iran, Afghanistan, and Sudan were already in Islamic Fundamentalist hands. Afghanistan’s Taliban had stripped women of their jobs and rights,70 required that they cower in their homes wrapped in black with their windows curtained and painted over, wear no shoes a man could hear, and possess no reading material outside of pamphlets promoting official religious views. 71 Ladies of learning and skill who transgressed were beaten with rifle butts in the streets. The Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Suppression of Vice – modeled on Saudi Arabia’s religious police – was known for its stonings, its amputations, its hangings from mobile cranes so the body could be paraded high above the city’s roofs, its deaths by crushing-under-a-wall, and its list of other “divinely-ordered” atrocities. 72 Citizens deemed guilty of perjury had their tongues cut off. Even men were restricted to education doled out by clerics who taught a single subject – the Taliban version of Koran. Using the slogan “film and music leads to moral corruption,” the Ministry of the Fostering of Virtue ordered that citizens destroy their televisions, vcrs, satellite dishes, and other connections to corruption. 73 Meanwhile, Taliban troops pursued a war of extermination against heretics, specifically the Hazara Shiites in their northern territories. 74 The slaughtered were victims of Allah’s order to eliminate unholiness. Those reporting on this murder of women and children saw it differently – they called it simple genocide. 75 All predictions were that Pakistan’s 130 million people 76 (more than the population of England and France combined)77 would be the next to experience fumigation · la Taliban. Pakistan’s new leader, it was said, would be someone like the bomber of U.S. embassies and financier of worldwide Holy War Osama Bin Laden – the man who had issued this simple order about Americans: “kill them wherever they are.” Money had been sent from Saudi Arabia to finance Pakistan’s Fundamentalist coup. Its probable source was none other than Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who, according to British reporter Robert Fisk, was turning Saudi Arabia, the allegedly “moderate” American ally, “into an anti-American nation in front of our eyes. Of course,” added Fisk, “we’re not told about that.”78 Nor were we told that Saudi Arabia had long been yet another Fundamentalist theocracy.
Meanwhile, the groups who would purge Pakistan of its sinners were hardening their homicidal skills through bloodbaths in the Punjab, where they chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Democracy,” then, between guerilla raids, headed out to spray more detailed slogans on the town walls in their training camps’ vicinity: “democracy leads to secularism” and “Jihad [holy war] leads to dominance of Islam.” North of Pakistan’s capital, Lahore, was Muridke, home to the Army of the Pure which daily drilled recruits in slitting throats, dynamiting bridges, and rocket-attacking with precision blows. The Army of the Pure’s goal was death to heretics – Indians, Americans, and Jews. John Stackhouse of the Toronto Globe and Mail delivered the following message from this arm of Allah’s will made real:
“We will go to America with the gun,” vows Sultan Atiqur Rehman Allehadi, who quit the Pakistani air force and now guides younger men in the Army of the Pure. “First we will ask them [Americans] to take up Islam. If they don’t, then we will use the gun.”
Should Pakistan fall to the Fundamentalists this would give Islam’s ultra-militants a heroic roto-rooter with which to extirpate American impiety – Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, called by its cheering supporters when it was first tested in 1998, “The Islamic Bomb.” 81 The result, said Australian journalist Greg Sheridan, could be “devastating.” 82
Then there was the Saudi-backed Gamaa al-Islamiya (Islamic Group), which had turned the hinterlands of Egypt into a killing field, slaying tourists, assassinating policemen, stabbing moderate writers, and massacring Christians who’d been in the land of Egypt since long before Mohammed’s birth. Russia, China, and the Central Asian Republics – Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan – feared they could be next on Allah’s hit list. 83 In a Western internet discussion group, an Islamic militant who spoke for many laid out the Word as he sees it: “The oppression and aggression of the United States of America and its protectorates has no end. So it is time that they pay, and it is time that their people taste… torment….” 84 Meanwhile America, target number one, slumbered in a state of ignorance. 85
On the other side of the religious divide stood the new Fundamentalists of Racial Purity and Christianity. 86 Typical among these was a group called Russian National Unity, 87 which claimed an army of 70,000, snapped up members at the age of nine, enrolled them in “military patriotic clubs,” dressed them in fascist uniforms, gave them the insignia of the swastika, taught them the Nazi salute, drilled them in combat maneuvers, honed their marksmanship, and identified the target of their weapons in their anthem:
We are going down the straight road
to believe, desire, and dare
death to the cosmopolitan dogs and Jews and masons!
National Unity’s founder, karate coach Alexander Barkashov, quoted yet another tune when giving interviews on the dangers of world Jewry and of the United States:
Plunge your knife in the vampire’s throat
And the world will become good again.
Parents welcomed National Unity’s training for mass murder. With crime rampant and all order gone, at least groups like Unity kept their children off the streets and lived up to the promise enunciated by one local Unity leader, Andrei Dudinov, who declared that the movement would “drag” the young “away from drugs and vodka.”
Meanwhile, like their Nazi models in the early 1930s, Russian Unity’s leaders were taking advantage of their country’s feeble democracy. They won elections in Vladimir, curried favor with the militia of Krasnodar (which let Unity use its facilities), and earned such approbation from the 101st Internal Brigade and from the 22st Airborne Brigade that government soldiers trained Unity troops in Stavropol. Unity contingents were welcomed by the militia of Voronezh to officially patrol the town, and were under contract with the police to perform similar services in Moscow itself. National Unity leader Barkashov, quoting a book he says is “a must for any intelligent man,” Hitler’s Mein Kampf, explained that “He who controls the streets controls the politics.”
As of 1998, there were roughly 85 similar fascist groups in the Former Soviet Union with enough sympathizers to support 140 newspapers. London’s Economist declared that it was just a matter of time before the proponents of the iron fist would seize the reins of government. The result, at its best, would be:
a kind of extreme nationalism: intensely prickly and Pan-Slavic, anti-Semitic, hostile to foreigners, and eager to reabsorb the Slav heartlands of Ukraine and Belarus within the Russian fold. …The armed forces and the KGB would be raised again to special eminence. The press and television would be corralled. Russia would become an angry place – neither democratic, nor prosperous, nor kind to its neighbors. It is a nightmare scenario.
For a preview of how such ‘angry nationalists’ would behave, the assembled journalists in a 1998 issue of the magazine World Press Review urged us to look at the margins of the Slav territories, where rehearsals for the new millennium were already taking place. The future, they said, was Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevich writ large: ethnic cleansing, mass rapes, mass graves, and blood in the streets; cities and towns destroyed; everything we’d learned to loathe about the Balkans, but this time with a nuclear brigade.
Then there was America, where the Covenant, Sword & Arm of the Lord Christian Identity enclave in Bull Shoals Lake, Arkansas, had planned the bombing of Oklahoma City’s Murrah Federal Building in the 1980s, and where a Christian Identity hanger-on named Timothy McVeigh, boosted by phone calls to another Christian Identity stronghold in the Ozark Mountains, had followed up on the Oklahoma bombing strategy and killed 16889 enemies of Yahweh’s chosen race.90 The Aryan Republic Army was on a rampage of midwest bank robberies designed to finance triumph for the one true form of Christianity. Sandpoint, Idaho’s, Promise Ministries91 were charged with planning similar hold-ups, the bombing of a newspaper, and the demolition of an abortion facility. The Phineas Priesthood provided encouragement to a network of lone killers “cleansing” in the Bible’s name. Christian Reconstructionists like Gary North insisted that women who undergo abortion be hung or stoned to death.92 The Aryan Nations movement93 was determined to seize the mountains of the west as a new Canaan94 for pure Anglo-Saxon whites.95 The North American Militia of Southwest Michigan stood accused in court of having targeted the Battle Creek Federal Building, an IRS office in Portage, and, in the words of one militia member, “anybody in higher ranks of politics,” including the state’s two senators.96 At the same time, self-styled eco-“warriors” were setting up clandestine “direct action cells” devoted, as one anonymous cell-organizer put it, to ever “bigger and better actions…with more severe amounts of damage being done to the target. This, of course, includes arson.” 97 America was the land where Eric Rudolph, the accused bomber of abortion clinics and of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, roamed free in the mountains of North Carolina, supported by the local populace.98 Ours was the nation where college students in Oklahoma had tied a gay 21 year old to a fence post and beaten him to death encouraged by Christian guardians of righteousness who said all homosexuals must die,99 where a Buffalo, New York, obstetrician had been killed by a sniper as he stood with his wife and children in his kitchen, and where this murder had been cheered by the organizer of The Christian Gallery, a website dedicated to such causes as “secession via nuclear weapons” and the replacement of the two-party system with “God’s plan for government.” The Gallery had posted the medical practitioner on a cyber-hit-list of “child-killers” whom it declared to be in the “war zone.” In the hinterlands of fifty states,100 extremist Christian militias drilled their detonation, reconnoitering, and shooting skills as thoroughly as their doppelgangers in Pakistan and in the former Soviet States, aiming for the day when the use of violence would eradicate the blemish of secular democracy and allow them to structure the ways of men according to the dictates of an unforgiving Deity.101 As right-wing Christian theoretician Gary North put it, “Man…is under God in the same way that a military man is under his commanding officer. He is to abide by his Commander’s instructions, and he is to ‘do it by the book,'”102 The Spartan premise Plato had stated in his Laws was very much alive again: “in reality every city is in a natural state of war with every other, not indeed proclaimed by heralds, but everlasting.”103
The threat of today’s Spartan storm troopers turned some defenders of democracy toward what in better times could have been dismissed as paranoid delusion. However when one is up against a real-life conspiracy, paranoid thinking can produce accurate predictions of reality.104 Wishing away a concerted attack from the other side was tried in the 1930s and proved a failure of the highest kind. Whatever approach one takes has to keep the ferocity of a real enemy in mind. Those who despise alarmism forget the lesson of 1933, when a Keystone Cop political party which had been able to boast a mere 25,000 members in 1925 declared itself ruler of the German nation and swept democracy away. Democrats use words. Zealots use weaponry. With guns and bludgeons, 25,000 rapidly de-factos into a majority. Hitler seemed preposterous to his opponents. There was no way, they felt, that someone with such outlandish views could take over the nation of Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Handel, and Brahms. Lack of paranoia lost these defenders of reason their lives, their homes, their children, and their wives. The Germany they were sure could never fall to lunatics soon plunged beyond the fringe of sanity. It was the sane, the sober, and complacent who were erased from Germany’s collectively-enforced reality.105
Monkeywrenching the Works
When conformity enforcers overwhelm diversity generators, all of us are in trouble. Spartans – fundamentalists, militia groups, fascists, and ultra-nationalists – can freeze the machinery of collective mind. A shutdown of urban diversity devastates that exercise of collective acumen we call an economy.106 Christian Fundamentalism has been shown by the research of sociologists Alfred Darnell and Darren E. Sherkat to retard the learning of children raised within its grasp.107 Darnell and Sherkat sum up a common Fundamentalist attitude in the following words: “No schooling is better than secular schooling.” Then there’s the paralysis of thought which outright battle brings. When World War I erupted, Sigmund Freud was horrified by the sudden “narrow-mindedness shown by [even] the best intellects, their obduracy, their inaccessibility to the most forcible arguments.”108 Such closings of the mind may explain why authoritarians are prone to ignore it when their approaches flop. They goose-step from one year to another rigidly glued to backfiring ways.109
Here are the implications of a neural net simulation carried out at Tokai University in Kanagawa, Japan.110 If citizens combine civility’s self-restraint with social freedom, the neural net in which they’re twined spills forth solutions of the finest kind – those which produce a host of winning strategies. If citizens rage out of control when left alone but are held in check by a police state, the neural net goes blank. All power seeps into the hands of a central authority. This maximum leader, implies the research, can be a previous fringe figure and an utter incompetent. What’s worse, complexity pioneer Stuart Kauffman has shown with yet another mathematical model how a “Stalinist” chief and his morality enforcers can give the collective brainwork a lobotomy.111
The Kanagawa simulation implies that Fundamentalist strategies of beating up on others for their sins rather than controlling one’s self drags us all toward authoritarian ferocity. The trick is to reassert the right to self-restraint and to the definition of one’s own boundaries of behavior and privacy, boundaries which include that consideration toward those who disagree with us which we call civility.
The consequences of imposing control on others rather than controlling one’s self show up in the American South, where culture pushes a disproportionate number of men to discipline those who wrong them while letting their own instincts rip. A University of Michigan study demonstrates that when they are threatened, the testosterone level of Southern males shoots up to almost three times the level of males in northern society. 112 Northern males have a greater grip on their emotionality. One result: “43% of the murders in the United States occur in the sixteen Southern states,” according to an ABC Weekend News report digging into the phenomenon. 113 In an interview on the broadcast, Southeastern Louisiana University historian Samuel C. Hyde explained that, “Here in the South violence is not merely an accepted response, it’s an expected response.” 114 Both Hyde and sociologist Dr. Edward Shihadeh 115 agreed that when one’s honor was violated a Southern male had to retaliate, even if it meant the end of his own life. If the simulations of neural net researchers are correct, this helps explain why the Southern swathe which harbors so many of this nation’s murders is also the Bible Belt – where the word-for-word Scripture of the Lord is still the Great and Inerrant Authority, 116 harboring absolutes of true Platonic rigidity. 117
Other research indicates that the wider the horizons of a subculture, the more its citizens are likely to exercise the self-control which tweaks a group brain to top strength. 118 In large-horizon situations among ants, each worker is a law unto herself, exploring the landscape in the way that she feels best. This allows the collective mind to test a maximum of new possibilities. In small-horizon ant colonies, each worker seems restricted by the presence of others, puts the clamps on her rambunctiousness, crimps her path, and with her tightened focus becomes a thread in a search-web which zeroes in on just one thing. 119 In human groups, a society open to distant horizons also produces those who will probe for the next great uplift, a soar into the wonders of dreamworked possibilities.
Fundamentalism and its fellow militancies are one way in which authoritarian small-town subcultures like that of the South, of Muridke, or of Voronezh assert themselves in the national and the global body politic. This was true of ancient Greece, in which liberty-loving Athens was a big city for its time, while Sparta – the home of the muzzled mind – was an encampment of remarkably small size. It’s true of the United States, where Christian Fundamentalism has been called a suburban upheaval of nostalgia for small town certainties.120 It seems to have pertained in the Nazi party, whose leaders were so parochial that few had ever travelled internationally.121 And it’s equally true of the Middle East, whose fundamentalisms hark back to the days when Ibn Khaldun’s desert nomads came in to “purify” the corrupt cities through a control-the-other-rather-than-yourself sweep with a broom of sword and flame.122 It’s even true when the subculture of a city’s parochial enclaves (like those in Boston’s Southie, New York’s Queens, and L.A.’s Orange County) clash with the subcultural movers and shakers whose connections snake across continents and seas.123
Open-minded internationalists are part of a massive social brew. The folks who’ve seldom travelled outside their neighborhood are part of a tiny social stew. Sometimes a society needs the cutting focus of small-town single-mindedness.124 But more often it benefits from pluralism’s many points of view, from carrying many arrows in its quiver, not just one or two.125
As in Elm Hollow, the new Spartans are poised for a kidnap of mass mind. Each subcultural army has its weapons ready: the Internet, Armies of Virtue, and instruments of massacre. And each feels chosen to impose its purged and regimented paradise on all humanity. But the mass mind needs its Faustian introverts, its oddballs, kooks, and deviants, its challengers of holy Mother Nature, sectarian Righteousness, and traditional ways. It needs its internationalists, cross-cultural floaters, homosexuals, abortion-supporters, cosmopolitans, explorers, and imagineers, those who extend their reach beyond old boundaries and open new frontiers. The blasphemers the Fundamentalists feel God-bound to eliminate are the mass mind’s option-makers, its catalysts of new hypotheses. In an atmosphere of debate, new approaches thrive. But when bullets replace words as disagreement-settlers, the mass intelligence nose dives. The totalitarian Spartans must be stopped by pluralists. This is a task which falls to our century’s Athenians. It is a task which falls to you and me.
Copyright © 1996-2001. All Rights Reserved. Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Verlag Heinz Heise
Visit Telepolis.
At Amazon: Howard Bloom’s The Global Brain