The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (41 page)

When then first lady Hillary Clinton introduced her “politics of meaning,” she was derided for trying to concoct a New Age spirituality that just so happened to support her political agenda in all of its particulars. Charles Krauthammer called it a “cross between Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech and a term paper on
Siddhartha
… delivered with the knowing self-assurance, the superior air of a college student manifesto.”
⁴

Norman Lear, founder of People for the American Way, rushed to her defense. “The sophisticates of our politics, our culture and the media,” Lear opined, “are embarrassed to talk seriously about the life of the spirit.… Our obsession with numbers, the quantifiable, the immediate, has cost us our connection with that place in each of us that honors the unquantifiable and eternal—our capacity for awe, wonder and mystery; that place where acts of faith in a process larger than ourselves, prove ultimately satisfying in the fullness of time.”
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It was an odd complaint coming from the man who devotes so much time, energy, and money to the idea that we must construct a high wall between church and state.

The oddness can be explained by the simple fact that spirituality is what liberals invoke when they want to combine the fun part of liberalism with magic.

23

UNDERSTANDING

I
n Monty Python’s
Life of Brian
, the People’s Front of Judea could not abide the Judean People’s Front, never mind the Judean Popular People’s Front or the obviously ridiculous People’s Front of Judea. In one scene the People’s Front of Judea hatches a plan to kidnap Pontius Pilate’s wife, only to run into members of the Campaign for Free Galilee. They immediately begin to fight over which group first had the idea to kidnap Mrs. Pilate. Finally, Brian cries out that they must stop their squabbling and unite “against the common enemy.” The assembled rebels then shout as one: “the Judean People’s Front!”

But even this brief moment of solidarity quickly unravels as the two factions resume their fighting, with two Roman soldiers watching the whole spectacle. Finally, Brian is the only one left alive. Then the Romans capture him.

The absurdity of the scene is hardly an indictment against its plausibility, for few inanities are more widely held than the notion that increased understanding must lead to peace and solidarity.

How often do we hear variations of this idea that understanding brings peace? It’s a staple of the liberal view of the world that peace comes with mutual understanding; when people get to know each other, they don’t kill each other. “If we could just get both sides in a room to talk
this out…” is the beginning (and end) of wisdom for this crowd. If only X could walk a mile in the shoes of Y. Meanwhile, as discussed earlier, the corollary to all of this is that violence only begets more violence. It’s almost as if the Pax Romana, the Pax Britannica, and the Pax Americana were all the results of intensive group therapy sessions in which the leaders of these regimes simply hugged out all their differences.

The fetishization of understanding as a cure-all is a pristine example of radically utopian thinking hiding in plain sight under the camouflage of a harmless cliché. Look around the world today for the sources of the most intractable, bloody, and passionate strife. Is it ever between groups that don’t understand each other? Palestinians watch Israeli TV. They work alongside Israelis. Many Palestinians speak Hebrew, and many Israelis speak Arabic. They share thousands of years worth of overlapping history, culture, and cuisine. And yet, according to a recent poll—conducted by Stanley Greenberg and sponsored by a propeace process and pro-Palestinian outfit—73 percent of Palestinians agree with the Koranic injunction to slay Jews where they hide, referenced in the Hamas charter.
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If only they understood each other better!

The simple fact is that Israelis and Palestinians understand each other far better than American or Western activists understand either, and that more understanding has only led to more hatred.

The evidence is overwhelming on the global scale. Greeks and Turks, North Koreans and South Koreans, Serbs and Croats, Crips and Bloods, Irish and English, Irish Catholic and Irish Protestant, Springfielders and Shelbyvillians, Red Sox fans and Yankees fans: It is almost always the peoples who understand each other best who have the worst conflicts.

Meanwhile, there have been no significant conflicts between Poles and Guatemalans, or between Ukrainians and Native Americans. The Crips don’t give a moment’s thought to the American Society of Engineers and the Bloods do not spend their days planning drive-by shootings against the Belgian Lesbian Chess Master Association.

Russell Jacoby demonstrates in his book
Bloodlust
that throughout human history civil wars have always been bloodier and crueler than wars with “external” enemies.
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For example, in Thucydides’ account of the lead-up to the Peloponnesian War, he chronicles how the battle for
Corfu (then Corcyra) set off a wave of bloodshed that dwarfed what you might expect in a mere war. When the Athenians arrived off the coast, the pro-Athenian faction set out to massacre their domestic enemies. For a full week the Athenians waited in the harbor as the Corcyreans “continued to massacre those of their own [fellow] citizens.… There was death in every shape and form,” according to Thucydides. “[P]eople went to every extreme and beyond it. There were fathers who killed their sons; men were dragged from the temples or butchered on the very altars.” “Blood ties became more foreign than factional ones,” adds Jacoby, as whole families divided against themselves.
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Did the families not understand each other?

Consider the schism between Pakistan and India, arguably the most likely source of the world’s first nuclear war. Both are relatively new countries but were essentially the same nation for most of their existence. When they were both part of British India—and various other empires—their heritage was, for the most part, a common one. Today, of course, Pakistan is constitutionally an Islamic country (the name means “Land of the Pure”—that is, pure Muslims), while India is predominantly Hindu, though constitutionally secular (though it’s worth remembering that there are nearly the same number of Muslims in India today as there are in Pakistan).

More to the point, ethnically, culturally, historically, and geographically, Pakistan and India have far more in common than they have separating them. Pervez Musharraf, the former president of Pakistan, was born in India. One of India’s leading Hindu nationalists, L. K. Advani, hails from what is now Pakistan. Like millions of Indians and Pakistanis, these leaders understand both the grievances of their neighbors and their arguments. And yet these two countries are constantly flirting with armed conflict when they’re not actually at war.

Meanwhile, let’s not forget it wasn’t a Muslim who assassinated Gandhi, but a Hindu. It wasn’t an Arab who killed Yitzhak Rabin, but a Jew.

Hatred and animosity from ancient Mesopotamia to the present day has more often than not been driven by what Sigmund Freud dubbed the “narcissism of minor differences.” (In fairness. he was developing the work of British anthropologist Ernest Crawley, who conceived the concept first.)
He first used the phrase in an essay, “The Taboo of Virginity,” to describe males’ fear of women as alien and scary. It is “precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them,” Freud wrote in 1919. He developed the idea into a theory of geopolitics in his classic
Civilization and Its Discontents
. Hatred of your neighbor is simply more “natural” than hatred of the true stranger. “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.”
⁴

The evidence of the phenomena is all around you. College professors who agree on everything except who deserves the better parking space and the importance of sexual mores in the novels of Sinclair Lewis hate each other with the heat of a thousand burning suns. In the 1990s Republicans tended to revile Bill Clinton in no small part because he moved his party rightward. On the Internet you can see the phenomenon in all its hypocritical splendor. Some on the left will dismiss Islamic fanatics who burn women, crush homosexuals, behead Jews, and throw acid in the face of schoolgirls. But if some right-wing pundit makes the slightest politically incorrect gaffe, he must be pelted from the public stage. It’s hard not to notice that many on the left seem to revile the “Taliban wing of the Republican Party” more than they revile the Taliban itself.
⁵

There’s even an offshoot of the phenomenon in the fields of robotics and computer animation called the “uncanny valley.” Masahiro Mori, a Japanese pioneer in robotics, coined the term drawing on the writings of Freud and others. The theory of the uncanny valley holds that the more realistic a replica of a human being becomes, the creepier it gets. We don’t mind looking at cute robots or the Man in the Yellow Hat in
Curious George.
But Tom Hanks in
The
Polar Express
, Japanese sex robots, or the entire cast of
Mars Needs Moms
elicits feelings of revulsion in many people, and even in monkeys (though apparently not the typical Japanese sex robot connoisseur).
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Personally, I’ve always suspected that the conventional wisdom about Al Gore had it backward. He didn’t turn people off because he’s so robotic; he turned them off because he’s so lifelike.

Freud notes that the global phenomenon of anti-Semitism can be attributed in large part to the narcissism of small differences. Throughout history
Jews have been the quintessential insider-outsiders. “In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately all the massacres of the Jews in the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows.”
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Freud was hardly surprised that German nationalism rode to power on the back of anti-Semitism. Indeed, genocidal anti-Semitism emerged in a country where Jews were
the most assimilated. Understanding between a non-Jewish majority and a Jewish minority was higher in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s than almost any place in the world, and we all know how that turned out.

If mutual ignorance were the author of war, then Mexico would be once again preparing for battle with the people of Moldova. And yet I’m sure you could waste the better part of a week trying to find a Mexican (or an American) with a strong opinion about Moldova one way or another.

Indeed, ignorance is often the source of love. Not real love, to be sure. But professed love. Who can forget the character of Mrs. Jellyby in Charles Dickens’s
Bleak House
. Mrs. Jellyby is “a lady of very remarkable strength of character, who devotes herself entirely to the public.” She is obsessed with the plight of the Borrioboola-Gha tribe on the banks of the Niger River. So concerned with their plight, she ignores the well-being of her own children. Mrs. Jellyby is one of those people who “had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if… they could see nothing nearer than Africa.”
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Who among us has not met a Mrs. Jellyby whose concern for people she doesn’t know or truly understand overrides her or his concern for the people she actually loves—or is supposed to?

The confusion over understanding undoubtedly has ideological roots, but it is more directly fueled by the common mistake of misapplying the rules of people to the rules of
peoples
. On an individual level, it’s quite common for a good conversation—perhaps even a “beer summit”—to clear the air of animosity. Though even here, the evidence is mixed. The most enduring hatreds are between former friends, members of the same family, or champions of lost causes. Consider, for example, Ishaq Levin and Zablon Simintov, the last two Jews of Kabul. Levin and Simontov were the last Jews living in Kabul after eight hundred years. They lived in the same run-down synagogue, but refused to speak to each other save to exchange insults and, more often, obscene gestures.

In modern times the most reliable—not foolproof, just reliable—engine of peace is not lofty dialogue or religion, or frilly exhortations but lowly, mercenary trade. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a grab bag of different nationalities, religions, and ethnicities. What held it together more than anything else were common economic interests. From time immemorial the most bloodthirsty people in the world have been willing to put aside their differences in the cause of commerce. Mobsters tolerate those they find intolerable in the name of business. Modern democracies do not declare war on each other for numerous reasons, but near the top of the list is the fact that citizens recognize their interconnected economic interests. The cold peace between China and the United States may not be as strong and as healthy as anybody would like, but the sinews of the bond are surely our economic interdependence.

Marxist-Leninst doctrine holds that capitalism is based on war, but Montesquieu had it right: “Peace is the natural effect of trade. Two nations who traffic with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities.”
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Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute notes the global boom in trade has coincided with, and fueled, the decline in cross-border wars. Free trade agreements around the world expanded the incentives of nations to settle their conflicts peacefully.
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University of California San Diego political scientist Erik Gartzke compiled data on economic freedom around the globe and gave each nation a ranking from 1 (most unfree) to 10 (most free). Examining military conflicts between 1816 and 2000, he found that nations ranking with a score of 2 or less were 14 times more likely to be engaged in hostilities than countries with a score of 8 or higher. Meanwhile, the annual death toll from war fell to its lowest point since World War II in 2005, thanks largely to the decline in interstate war. Between 2001 and 2010, only two of the twenty-nine major military conflicts in the world were interstate; the rest were wars between groups of people interested in killing people they understood most.
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Meanwhile, wars between people who understood each other least continued to decline, in no small
part because one of the only things they cared to know about each other was that they delivered goods and services on time or that their checks cleared. Commerce isn’t as romantic as peace, love, and understanding. But that’s what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding; sometimes they’re beside the point.