I find myself repeatedly contemplating the potentially vast predictive power of Terror Management Theory in light of this cold blast of mortality salience related to COVID-19. This is the biggest flare-up of mortality salience since 9/11 and much of the resulting frenzied societal dysfunction was foreseeable, including the fact that so many modern-day tribes are so vigorously circling their wagons.
COVID-19 is a such terrible thing to grapple with. Many of the people we care about are going to be hurt, physically and economically. We are particularly taunted by COVID's invisibility because, as a species, we rely so heavily on brain systems related to vision. That said, we human animals are now living in a huge sphere-shaped petri dish. It's difficult to imagine the huge number of dissertations and research papers that will result from this upheaval. My speculative hope is that as a result of this pandemic we will learn something critically important about how to get along with each other. Whatever we learn, we need to learn it both in our hearts and our minds. We so desperately need some sort of reboot down here on Planet Earth.
I've closely followed the writings of Jonathan Haidt. His conclusions are closely tied to scientific findings. He crosscuts the current American political divide. He is hopeful that we will find our way as a country.
Haidt laments the state of contemporary American politics, believing that on both the right and the left we’re seeing populism that responds to real problems but in illiberal ways. “On the right,” he said, “the populism there is really explicitly xenophobic and often explicitly racist … I think we see strands of populism on the right that are authoritarian, that I would say are incompatible with a tolerant, pluralistic, open democracy.”
Looking in the other direction, Haidt says, “we’ve messed up the word liberal and we’ve used it to just mean ‘left.’ I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense. I believe in a society that is structured to give individuals the maximum freedom to construct lives that they want to live. We use a minimum of constraint, we value openness, creativity, individual rights. We try hard to maximize religious liberty, economic liberty, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech. That’s my ideal of a society, and that’s why I call myself a liberal.”
But on the left, Haidt said, “there’s been a movement that has made something else sacred, that has not focused on liberty, but that is focused instead on oppression and victimhood and victimization. And once you get into a framework of seeing your fellow citizens as good versus evil based on their group, it’s kind of a mirror image of the authoritarian populism on the right. Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.”
Haidt went on: “I think this is a very important point for us to all keep in mind, that left and right in this country are not necessarily liberal and conservative anymore. On the left, it’s really clear that there are elements that many of us consider to be very illiberal; and on the right, it’s hard to see how Trump and many of his supporters are conservatives who have any link whatsoever to Edmund Burke. It’s very hard for me to see that. You know, I would love to live in a country with true liberals and true conservatives that engage with each other. That, I think, is a very productive disagreement. But it’s the illiberalism on each side that is making our politics so ugly, I believe.”
The key quote from the passage above: "Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.” This is a modern version of MLK's classic advice that is scorned by many modern day "liberals": "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Why has this beautiful sentiment become so difficult today?
On July 17, 1996, I was walking through downtown St. Louis when a reporter from a local TV newscast approached me. Her cameraman aimed his camera straight at me. In a loud voice, she asked, “What is your reaction to the fact that terrorists have shot down a TWA passenger plane over Long Island?”
My response to her: “How do we know that terrorists were involved? What is the evidence of that?”
Instead of answering me, the reporter and the cameraman walked away from me and started walking up to another person nearby. As we now know, no terrorists were involved. A short circuit caused fuel vapor in the center fuel tank to explode.
The news media is the only profession mentioned in the Constitution. When news media is done well, it is the lifeblood of democracy as well as our prime method for shedding light on government ineptitude and wrongdoing. Done badly, however, it amounts to what I have often termed “conflict pornography,” attempts to stir up anger through any means in order to sell commercials.
That TWA incident was my front row seat to seeing hack journalism in action. That “news” station knew that it would be financially valuable theater to provoke me blurt out some form of bigotry toward people from the Middle East, even if my outburst weren’t based on accurate information. Financial incentives and bigotry are two of the many ways for warping conversations, for making the exchange of words worse than useless. Today’s news is often distorted beyond recognition by the prominent ideologies of the day. Today’s “news” consumers can reliably choose the kinds of “facts” they want to hear by choosing particular news outlets.
Those of us who are conscientious consumers of the news media are in a difficult spot. Every news report comes from a point of view, but it’s often difficult to figure out what point of view is driving that news report. Whenever we consume a “news” report uncritically, it is the news equivalent of chomping down junk food. The more we do either of these things the less healthy we are.
I have studied journalism for years, including attending multiple conventions sponsored by a non-profit organization called Free Press. I have seen in detail that our news media is hit and miss, giving us some valuable news by heroic reporters, but also publishing shlock. How can most of us tell the difference? Many people set dangerous default when sizing up the industry, declaring that all news is fake news, which is a terrible position to take, though I can understand the frustration. Fuel on this fire is the fact that there are now four times as many PR specialists as news reporters (see the 4-minute video where I interviewed John Nichols of The Nation on this point. Things have gotten dramatically worse since this interview). Truly, how can a consumer of “news” know what to believe? It is difficult to know where to start.
One problem is the most people insist on getting free quality news. That’s weird, because we expect to pay for most other important things. We never go into the grocery store expecting free food, for instance. I’d suggest that each of us think about paying for those news sources you consider thoughtful and accurate. Many of the best sources are facing financially precarious times and they need you. It’s never fun to pay the money, of course, but it feels great in the long run to know that you are a partner to quality journalism. I currently support about ten magazines and newspapers.
Another thing on my wish list is that the news media needs to report much more often on the accuracy of the news media. We need a lot more information, based on careful analysis, about what factual claims made by the various news outlets are accurate. We need more news about the news. I know this sounds like a big task, but I have studied many ways to approach this. Journalism schools could be at the forefront of this movement. In this time of COVID-19, the stakes, including who lives and who dies, could not be higher.
Coronavirus is not an excuse to be racist. We all know that. Nonetheless, as we struggle to deal with the Coronavirus crisis, significant numbers of Americans are dusting off their favorite go-to tactic, racism, and aiming it toward the Far East. This time, it’s racism against Chinese people. For many examples, see the attached clip from Samantha Bee’s show (begin at 3:05 min for many examples where Fox Commentators follow Donald Trump’s xenophobic lead).
I struggle to find words to express my disappointment at this celebration of bigotry, and it’s not simply because I have many acquaintances and friends who are Chinese. It’s not simply because my daughters are Chinese. It’s because engaging in bigotry is a cruel thing to do to any another human being. We need to stop painting hundreds of millions of people with this broad brush. Have we learned NOTHING from the civil rights movement? For those who are tempted to push back at me and continue to blame “the Chinese” for our current struggle, which particular people are you angry at? You know it’s not all the Chinese people. You know that viruses don’t respect national borders. If you know anything about the evolution of viruses, you know that the next pandemic might originate in your own hometown.
Making this even more irritating for me, many of these racists claim to be Christians. Here’s my advice for those of you who are working hard to rename Coronavirus as “Chinese Coronavirus” or “Chinese Virus”: Take a deep breath, look in the mirror, take seriously your own commandment to love your enemy and put your fucking dog whistles away.
PS. This entire episode in hyper-nationalism is predictable by “Terror Management Theory.” (TMT). It’s well documented that people do this kind of shit when they are scared. See, here and here. Also see "The Worm at the Core," an excellent book on TMT by Sheldon Solomon.
That said, we can work harder to become better versions of ourselves in this crisis. We need to do a better job of keeping the focus on saving lives.
In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Attorney Greg Lukianoff (founder of FIRE) and moral psyhchologist Jonathan Haidt address America’s mushrooming inability to engage in productive civil discourse. Increasing numbers of people are claiming that they cannot cope with ideas that challenge their own world view. They sometimes claim that ideas that challenge their own ideas are "not safe." In dozens of well-publicized cases, rather than work to counteract "bad" ideas with better ideas, they work to muzzle speaker by disrupting presentations or even running the purportedly offensive speakers off campus.
There is a related and growing problem. We cannot talk with each other at all regarding many many important issues. We shout each other down and use the heckler's veto. These maladies are especially prominent on some American college campuses, but these problems are also rapidly spreading to the country at large, including corporate America.
Consider this 2016 example featuring the students of Yale having a "discussion" with Professor Nicholas Christakis:
You would never guess it from this video alone, but this mass-meltdown was triggered after child development specialist Erika Christakis (wife of Nicholas), sent this email to students. This incident at Yale is one of many illustrations offered by Haidt and Lukianoff as evidence of a disturbing trend. Here's another egregious example involving Dean Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna College who was run out of her college after committing the sin of writing this email to a student. More detail here.
The authors offer this as the genesis of the overall problem:
In years past, administrators were motivated to create campus speech codes in order to curtail what they deemed to be racist or sexist speech. Increasingly, however, the rationale for speech codes and speaker disinvitations was becoming medicalized: Students claimed that certain kinds of speech—and even the content of some books and courses—interfered with their ability to function. They wanted protection from material that they believed could jeopardize their mental health by “triggering” them, or making them “feel unsafe.”
The solution offered by Lukianoff and Haidt is to take a moment to stop to recognize what they call the “Three Bad Ideas.”
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9/11 and much of the resulting frenzied societal dysfunction was foreseeable, including the fact that so many modern-day tribes are so vigorously circling their wagons.
