Such People in the Brave New World

Heraclitus was wrong when he said you can’t step in the same river twice. You can’t even step in the same river once, except for a microsecond.
 --Jim Harrison, from Returning to Earth


Even the microsecond in the quote from one of my favorite fiction writers is a fiction. Everything is in motion, in process. Some processes operate at speeds observable by us, and some are too fast or too slow for us to notice. The motion goes on, indifferent to human reaction.

I spent nine of my first eighteen years in small towns that had, in most ways, been the same for decades. But even then people were building bomb shelters against a possible change of temperature in the Cold War, and drugstore soda fountains were dismantled and hauled away after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. At the onset of the polarization that would characterize the sixties, however, most of the people around us still looked like us, or at least familiar to us, and that familiarity may have been reassuring.

A 2008 projection from the U. S. Census Bureau shows white Americans projected to make up less than half the population around 2042, should current trends continue. Almost 310 million people live here now, so what does it mean when people say they want “their” country back? It may, at a fundamental level, mean that the current in the Heraclitean river is speeding up at a perceptible rate, and that people are uncomfortable with that.

The idea of “my country,” or “our country,” is just that—an idea. The reality on the ground is that a large and growing number of people can use the term “my” in reference to their national home, and what people have typically meant is that they identify themselves with the nation. The use of “my” in the want-mine-back sense is possessive. It carries the presumption of ownership, and of the privilege of defining what the country is. This is not only presumptuous, but absurd. And it insists that things should stay the same, when things never have and never can.

At the moment, a controversy of the building of a mosque in New York City near the 9/11 Ground Zero has apparently stirred up protests around the country against plans for construction of other mosques. The direst predictions from mosque opponents say the Muslims are out to replace the U. S. Constitution with Islamic Shariah law. In the August 7, 2010 New York Times an article by Laurie Goodstein (“Across the Nation, Mosque Projects Meet Opposition”) gives examples from Tennessee, Wisconsin, and California. In Temecula, California, one of the Muslims’ outspoken defenders is a Mormon who sits on the local interfaith council, so the business isn't simple.

It may be the case that some Muslims believe Shariah law is appropriate for everyone, just as there are Christians, particularly conservative evangelicals, who see the conversion of the rest of the world as something desirable, and who believe that God Himself is planning a grisly eternity for those who are outside their circle. But a lot of mosques exist in the U. S., with most of their members being here primarily for economic reasons, and building their mosques as places to preserve the culture that has nurtured them, the culture that continues to provide them with community bonds and identity.

Proliferation of mosques isn’t the only development that Tea Partiers and others find unsettling. The President’s name isn’t George or Bill or Ronald or Jimmy or Richard or even Lyndon. And he’s black, being half of African descent and half of European descent, which equates to black as we define it. The economic times are tough for a lot of people, with unemployment rates remaining high and length of unemployment at extremely high levels, and troubled economies always influence the national mood.

People who oppose rapid social change usually see themselves as conservatives. Yet it’s not as easy as one might think to define conservatism. Witness the political primary season we’ve just gone through, where battles raged in several races over which candidate was the “real” conservative. In 1971, a political scientist named Ronald Lora published his study titled Conservative Minds in America. Lora posits three foundations or primary varieties in American conservatism—psychological, possessive, and philosophical. He writes: “Since its roots lie deep in all organic life, psychological conservatism undergirds all other varieties. Its primary cause is fear; its basic objective is security.” That doesn’t necessarily mean the impulse to security represented here is dishonorable. We all want security. But how conscious are we of the attitudes we develop to preserve it? Possessive conservatism seems pretty clear. You or your class has enjoyed wealth and power you don’t want to see displaced by others. Philosophical conservatism isn’t simply about resisting change—these thoughtful types recognize the river’s unceasing current. They simply like to keep change incremental and rooted in a tradition that has what they regard as proven reliability.

A mixture of these three elements probably characterizes American conservatism, and all three may exist to a greater or lesser degree in many individuals. But it seems the philosophical element may be least prevalent. Psychological conservatism, where it’s most strident, seems to me more or less to be made of up people who are unceasingly angry because it’s not 1955 anymore. (To be fair, some strident liberals seem to have a belief, probably rooted in the Enlightenment and the positivism of Auguste Comte, that human societies are perfectible and that if we could all be reasonable and realize their ideas—the pictures of the world in their heads—then suffering would cease. That’s equally unrealistic.)

We’re still left with the problem of how to live together. It’s not a new issue; it’s as old as humanity, even older. And the problem of how to live together is much complicated by the pace of change. It’s fast enough right now, this pace, to disorient a lot of people and have them looking for scapegoats. With the increase in the sheer volume of “otherness,” mostly in the form of people who look different, believe different things, and even have the nerve to speak different languages, there’s no shortage of scapegoats.

Humans are tribalistic, and for the most part oblivious of the fact. So instead of talking about our tribalism we talk in terms that assume it’s as useful as it might have been when tribes didn’t encounter each other often, and may have had to fight to maintain a hunting and gathering territory. The talk we have too often comes out in accusations and self-justifications. What was once perhaps adaptive is now in some respects maladaptive.

And yet even now there are reasons to assert our own cultural territory. The mosque builders understandably want to keep their culture alive in the new places they live. It’s the source of their identity, their sense of self, their community. Their opponents, in turn, feel their own identity threatened by what they regard as an alien presence. Does it have to be like this? The opposition to the assertion of Muslim identity would have people assimilate to American ways, just as the opponents to bilingual accommodations would tell Hispanics and others to speak English if they want to be here.

But the push for assimilation recalls what we did to so many native tribes all over North America, packing their children off to schools to learn Euro-American ways, banning their religious expressions, outlawing their languages. We couldn't simply be content with taking their land and sustenance. We demanded they also yield their identity.

Certain groups can be a danger to others—there’s no denying this. But groups may be gripped by fears and enthusiasms of the moments. The Germans of today are manifestly not the Germans of the Nazi years. So it isn’t just the group that generates threat and conflict, but attitudes held by groups. Sometimes a tribe will come together under any banner. Some individuals will commandeer a religious tradition to serve their agendas of toxic tribalism. We may at some point get conscious enough as a species to dampen this tendency better than we now do, though I’m skeptical that it will ever go away completely.

We are who we are, and it’s unlikely we’ll see breakthroughs in our nature that solve all our conflicts. Can we accept that for what it is, and think about moving toward a way of being in the world that makes more sense in this world? If we can’t step in the same river twice, can we at least think about the implications of where we’re stepping?