Image source: The Jewish Star
We are living through the summer of our discontent. Plague and prejudice. They may be the worst of times, perhaps in some future it’ll be seen as the best of times – the time when history is made, hopefully for the better. In this disease-ridden election year, there seems to be more than a little hate to go around, and it seems like the time to think about the dynamics of that hatred.
Portland, until recently my beloved home, is ablaze. Or, at least, there is a downtown park that I used to ride my bicycle through on my way to the university, where there have been standoffs between the federales and protestors. What is striking is that the protestors are ostensibly engaging with the police on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement. That the federales in question are supposed to be US Border Patrol agents detached from their mission of hunting illegal immigrants, puts the matter of immigration as part of this flareup. However, Portland is an odd place for a ‘race riot’, given that Portland is not particularly well endowed with a vibrant black community as I had the pleasure to experience in San Antonio.
That, I think, is the point. The people of Portland, as I know and love them, stand on the side of Black Lives as well as undocumented immigrants, not at all out of a direct connection with them – out of sameness with them - but out of solidarity with them. They are being their brother’s (and sister’s) keeper. Bless them for that.
My more cynical sociological side, however, suggests that it is mostly out of the identification of their common enemy, the Trump Administration and the nationalist/rural/conservative population that provides the administration with its political foundation. My reading of conflict theory is best described by the ancient adage, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. What is animating the solidarity of Portland is not a mechanical solidarity of sameness. Nor is it what we emotionally would like it to be, an organic solidarity of people embracing their differences.
Below the fold I explore the dynamics of a non-materialist conflict theory. I look at the question of ‘why they hate us’, Russia, and the propaganda of the golden shower. The point of it is to consider how these identities live in our minds, but have real-world consequences. The particular labels attached to the identities may shift and be renamed, but the conflicts that underwrite them are much more structural. The point is, by opposing one another, we strengthen the solidity and solidarity of those we oppose. Each material victory of one party is a ‘moral victory’ of the losing party, and so it goes on.
Why do they hate us?
What strikes me as a constant is peoples' dumbfoundedness about why ‘they hate us’? My Portland fellows can probably articulate the notion that this is the 1% whipping up racism in rural and suburban whites, culminating in the disgusting regime of Donald Trump turning into an American Fourth Reich. Meanwhile, the rural and suburban whites see the multi-ethnic, multi-sexual soup of the city thinking about ways in which the latter can take the former’s hard-won earnings away without earning it for themselves; that and eroding away ‘America’ from within. Donald Trump may be an offensive bully, but thank God he is ‘our’ defensive bully. To the diverse urbanites the white Americans are simply greedy and racist, whereas to the white Americans the diverse urbanites are lazy and immoral.
They feel hated by one another, at the same time that they each feel that they don’t actually hate the other. “Why do ‘they’ hate ‘us’?”, and never “why do ‘we’ hate ‘them’?”, except as a tit-for-tat. I hate you because you hate me. That's not to say that there is not a material world of unequal realities providing a foundation to the hatreds. More on that toward the end of the essay.
It doesn’t really matter if the people in question are actually greedy, racist, lazy or immoral. The main issue is that ‘they’ are ‘them’, and ‘they’ hate ‘us’. Also, ‘we’ are ‘not them’. The interesting thing is that the us/them boundaries in this case are rather fluid. Defectors are most welcome in either camp, as long as they can be seen as being on ‘our’ side. In fact, the defectors are celebrated. Good examples are Clarence Thomas and Dinesh D'Souza, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Scarborough. Since nobody is more hated by one side more than the traitor is, celebrating the other’s traitor is the best way to antagonize ‘them’. More importantly in these times is that accepting the traitor into our midst is the best way to signal that ‘we’ are not bigoted; ‘they’ are.
They feel hated by one another, at the same time that they each feel that they don’t actually hate the other. “Why do ‘they’ hate ‘us’?”, and never “why do ‘we’ hate ‘them’?”, except as a tit-for-tat. I hate you because you hate me. If you didn't hate me, I wouldn't hate you. That's not to say that there is not a material world of unequal realities providing a foundation to the hatreds.
Enter Russia
Nothing is greater evidence of this than Russia, and by Russia I mean “Russia”, the mental image that we have of this country like a great bear being ridden barebacked by Vladimir Putin. Russia as image, not Russia as its own reality and complexities.
As far back as two presidential terms ago, it was the Republican candidate who identified Russia as the United States’ great Russia as “without question, our number one geopolitical foe” (citation).
What this illustrates is that while this is a multi-player game, we are mostly focused on that most significant, hostile, ‘other’ – the number one sociological foe. That most significant hostile other is generally not some faraway polar opposite of ours, but a very nearby visceral threat around which we build our own group identity. The enemy of my enemy is not just my friend; the enemy of our enemy is ‘us’.
In politics, the players know that the enemy of my enemy will be my enemy once I vanquish my current enemy. Societies, however, are not quite as strategically nimble as political players are. The Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) systems of societies are odd things, and they work by different mechanisms than they do in politics.
Meanwhile, I have been having discussions with an actual Russian, and not a liberal western-educated Russian. She is a Putin-adoring Russian-educated anti-liberal anti-feminist Russian. She tells me that she doesn’t get it: the West’s hatred of Russia. “Russians don’t hate anybody,” she tells me. On the topic of propaganda she makes the case that it’s the West that’s propagandized about Russia. When I told her that people in the West don’t hate Russians, though they may not like President Putin that much, she wouldn’t believe a word of it. The West's hatred of Russia was too manifest in her mind.
Propaganda of the golden shower
Regarding Western propaganda, I think she is largely correct about that. Our generally open (more or less) media environment does not mean that the truth will set us free from ignorance. We largely see what we want to see, and what we want to see is evil things about our sociological foes. Robert Jervis wrote that “once a person develops … a hostile image of the other – ambiguous and even discrepant information will be assimilated to that image” (Jervis 1976, p. 68). We want to think that Putin has videotape of Donald Trump dancing in the golden showers of Russian hookers, and therefore we do think that. We want to think that Russia would be so evil as to put out bounties on our soldiers, and that Trump is so corrupt as to dismiss this, that we believe that it is true.
However, there is a parallel and a discrepancy in her point of view vis-à-vis that of liberal Westerners like me. We think of the Russians as propagandized haters of the West, She thinks of the West as propagandized haters of Russia. We wonder why they hate us, since we don’t really ‘hate’ anybody, while she wonders why we hate Russians, since Russians don’t really ‘hate’ anybody. The discrepancy is that we (Westerners) do have a group to hate: other Westerners. Our civil war is the only war; the rest is peripheral circumstance. If we really ‘hated’ Russia, then all of our hatreds would revolve around Russia. Instead, Russia, once the bugbear of the right-wing Cold warriors, is now the bugbear of the American left.
Figments of our imagination?
So far, I have painted this reality as one of mutual fictions. Our only difference is our sense of difference. The point here is a non-material conflict theory. The more standard materialist conflict theory argues that ideas, ideologies, and – indeed – false consciousness supports real material inequities. This gets us to a chicken-and-egg problem, in which the chicken represents the material inequity and the egg the identity structure. The Marxist position is that the chicken (material reality) came first and justified the egg by laying it. The “why can’t we all just get along?” point of view, that the identities are just all in our heads, suggests that the chicken of material inequity hatched from the egg of identity consciousness.
I’m more on the egg side of the equation, but not in the facile way of “why can’t we all just get along?” The materialists have a point that the identity structures have real-world material origins and real-world material consequences. I just think that the human instinct toward groupishness is primordial, though we change the particular frameworks of our identity structures like dirty linens, when the need arises.
Some call this groupishness ‘tribal’, though I think this label is a mistake. Tribalism implies some sort of kindship between its members. I do not think that our current groupishness is about the homophilia of preferring in-group members of people who are the same as us (mechanical solidarity). I think that we define ourselves by who we identify as our antagonists – our number one sociological foe. That is how white Portlanders can march against the border patrol in the name of Black Lives Matter. It’s not out of love for the Black Lives. It is out of a mutual hatred of the plutocrat-hillbilly regime.
What, then, makes the identity frameworks change? They change when there is a new number one sociological foe. We quit our squabbling when someone even more threatening comes along. For a brief moment nearly 20 years ago, Islamist terrorism was that sociological foe, though it was very short-lived. The Diversionary War theory (creating a foreign problem in order to distract from domestic issues) is one mechanism that attempts to manipulate this out-group definition of self. Ultimately, I think that these attempts to distract are short-lived and soon revert back to the deeper structural contradiction in society. Ideas and identities may seem ephemeral, but the more deep-seated the conflict, the harder they are to change.
Victories, Material or Moral
If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. ~Obi-wan Kenobi
Aside from cases where one side is able to thoroughly destroy its opponent, whatever material advantages the winning party may gain, the losing party frequently gains in additional social cohesion and ‘hatred’ of the winning party. By and large, that is because winners are rarely magnanimous. Furthermore, history is actually frequently also written by the loser. Those histories are rarely based on ‘strictly the facts’. Mythologies are made in this way to justify why the loser lost. These clashes, then, frequently strengthen both parties in a social conflict – devising new reasons for why their opponent is so loathsome.
As such, these sociological dynamics, are a trap. They go on and go on. By definition, ‘peoples’ cannot get themselves out of such a social-conflict trap. Something exogenous needs to happen in order to get them out. For example, a particularly insightful and powerful leader may be able to maneuver people forward, but such leaders are rare, and the social dynamics are against them. In fact, frequently, would-be leaders advocating reconciliation with the opposing social group are labeled weak or traitors. The leaders who can make it happen come from the advantaged side, but are rarely rewarded for their magnanimity. Aside from politics (ie. leadership and the means of forcing through change), economic and cultural factors operate distinctly from social factors. Yet, with a deep recession, competition for jobs and other resources is likely to deepen social conflict, and culture is too easily mined for its shibboleths of group membership.
In the meantime, the summer continues, as will the disease, the recession, the election, and all the other sources of social conflict. The assessment here is a pessimistic one, though I am – by nature – an optimist. Social dynamics are not the only determinant of a society’s development, but at the present time, the other factors do are not pointing in the other direction than deepened social conflict. Perhaps the election will offer some recourse, but will Joe Biden have the strength to bind up the nation’s wounds without betraying the mandate with which he was elected? Donald Trump certainly does not have the healer’s instinct.
In closing, as I search around for a silver lining, I suppose that the notion that “we don’t hate anyone” could be seen as hopeful, in that in most cases the social conflicts are built less on ‘hate’, and more on something of a social security dilemma. The idea here is that groups behave as though others hate them. That behavior looks like hatred in return, without ‘hate’ really being the emotion being felt. Of course, that does not mean that there will not be actual hate in parts of the population. However, it means that there’s an opening for communication between reasonable people.
Works Cited
Jervis, R. (1976). Perception and misperception in international politics Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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