All roads lead to America

All roads lead to America, that is, if your starting point is a certain region of the contemporary global mind. Here's one such road. Andrew Brown is citing research which shows that being reminded that we must die makes us worse:

There is some quite solid psychological research that suggests that people who have been unexpectedly reminded of their own mortality become more grasping and less tolerant as a result. In particular, they become more attached to the traditions of their own cultures, and more hostile to those of others - an interesting refinement, because it suggests that liberals become more tolerant under stress, since tolerance is one of their core cultural values.

Now, I'm not in any position to question the results of this psychological research, but unless Brown is giving a poor account of it, it looks mighty strange. And so I shall question it. We are to understand, are we, that seeing others suffering through famine, tsunami or other natural disaster, or being informed of human beings in danger of murderous attack, being informed of a genocide in progress, makes us close up, become grasping and inward-looking? Or does Brown's closing 'refinement' undercut that, so that if there are traditions of humanity and compassion within the culture, as there are within most cultures, it doesn't have that effect (and the research then looks useless)? Well, read for yourself. He says that gawping at disasters is...

...a horribly equivocal instinct at the best of times. Very few of the gawpers will ever do anything to help the victims...

He quotes one researcher as follows:

Christian participants reminded of death liked fellow Christians more and Jewish people less; Germans sat further away from a Turkish person and closer to a fellow German after a mortality salience induction; and following a reminder of death, people were more physically aggressive toward someone with different political beliefs.

Anyway, what this is all in aid of is that watching re-runs of 9/11 is bad for you; it's the sort of thing that led to the re-election of George Bush. Thus does a supposedly general psychological impulse of the human species home in - just precisely - on the White House and one particular anniversary of a day when people were killed. No doubt we shouldn't remember Hiroshima either, or Rwanda, or the First World War, since this can only go towards strengthening the Republican Party.

Here's another road. Mike Marqusee is enthusing about the lyrics of Bob Dylan. Good that he is. He picks out this line:

The executioner's face is always well hidden

It evokes for him 'some of the ghastlier truths of our age', and you can just see it coming now, can't you?...

... the ease with which great and lethal powers destroy human life from a safe distance, the need to see through the masks of power, the absence of accountability

Any other figure suggested to you by 'executioner' or 'hidden'? No, of course not. It's about 'the need to speak the truth... to power' - unfailingly that's what it is. It's never about speaking truth to the conventional pieties and consensual silences of all the people who think exactly like you do.