Four Men Who Will Save the World, Part 2

Let's examine the assertion of American conservatives that hetero pair-bonding is the "foundation of society." Plenty of philosophers have searched for the rela- tion(s) that society is "based on"--K'ung Tzu (aka Confucius) comes immediately to mind--but from a scientific standpoint, the idea that all human relations are dependent on marriage is patently ridiculous.

Swedish Semites by Luca della Robbia, Florence, c. 1455

As a quick illustration, con- template for a moment the history of European visual art. For every one depiction of Mary and Joseph there's probably a hundred of Mary and Jesus--as an infant. Virgin and Child is (I'm guessing) the most all-time popular motif in European art, and not just because Europe has been solidly Christian for the past thousand years. It would seem the ancients knew what some who claim to follow them today have chosen to for- get: the most important relationship in human existence is the physical and emotional bond between a child and his or her primary caregiver. It is this relationship, especially as it plays out during the first 3 to 5 years of the child's life, that lays the emotional foundation for everything that the child will do and think and feel for the rest of her days. It's not the emotions themselves that come into being at this time--the brain takes care of that by itself--but the way the child will process emotions--the emotional coping style--that is established within this crucial time period.

An emotional coping style is made up of a person's habitual responses to anything that triggers emotion: novel stimuli, relationships with others, and especially stress. If a young child experiences love, trust, security, and empathy within the caregiver bond, she will carry those feelings into every subsequent relationship; she will respond adaptively to novelty; and she will tolerate a fair amount of phys- ical and emotional stress. If, on the other hand, the child experiences anger, randomness, fear, and cold-heartedness within her primary bond, these experi- ences will damage her ability to relate to others in every area of life from the boardroom to the bedroom--and the nursery. She will be mistrustful of novel stimuli (since the changes she's already experienced are likely to have been painful), and will be easily knocked off her equilibrium by stress.

Sai//gai and son =Toma, c. 1965

The emotional coping style is not a series of conscious choices. Infants and young children do not chose to throw tantrums, suck their thumbs, play with their own feces out of boredom, or shriek whenever they're put to bed. Nor do they chose to become the kind of people who, later in their lives, will take drugs, have too many babies, drive Hummers, or commit mass murder. There is a robust correlation between the emotional coping style that a child develops in the first 5 years of life and how that child will behave as an adult. That is: there are direct causal connec- tions between how we rear our children, the kinds of people they become, and the type of society they create. If you want a stable, humane, and honorable society, your first order of business is to raise happy children. The Bushmn did it for 100,000 years. It's time the rest of us to get on board.

So why haven't we? Because we as a society are still used to the notion that "some people are just born bad," or even "all people are born bad." You might call it the doctrine of Fundamental Badness (FB). Its the deep-seated belief that to be born human is to be born, somehow, BAD--and that this badness is so deeply ingrained that it can never be rooted out or overcome. To put it simply, current global culture is in despair over the future of the human race, because it sees H. sapiens  as being unworthy to have a future. You've heard the public laments: "WE are ruining the planet" or "WE are disrupting the climate," or even "Nature would be better off without us." Politics has little to do with it. Liberals believe "we" are "naturally exploitive"' and (eagerly) await the breakdown of civilization; nothing will happen to them--they'll just grow their own granola. Conservatives think "God is angry with us sinners" and (eagerly) await Apocalypse; nothing will happen to them--they're morally superior. They hate queers, don't they?

But in the words of the old joke, "Who you mean WE, paleface?" There's not a shred of scientific evidence that humans are born with a propensity to wage war, commit rape, over-exploit resources, or murder our children. All of these evils are learned behaviors, no more innate than is a knowledge of trigonometry; they are far less innate than is a taste for mango-habanero sauce or a preference for the color green. There's not much I can do about global warming or legalizing same- sex marriage, but there's plenty the Koch brothers can do--and don't. People who voted for George W knew he didn't give a damn about the climate and voted for him anyway--I voted for Gore. And I'm not taking a bum rap just because I happen to belong to the same species as Adolf Hitler--I also belong to the species that gave the universe Aung San Suu Kyi, Harriet Tubman, and the Dalai Lama.

No matter that all the evidence indicates that it is a corrupted childhood--not a corrupted "soul," whatever that is--that is the source of "evil," broadly conceived. No matter that for 99% of our history as a species we lived almost exactly like the Bushmn, who have no history of war, rape, environmental degradation, or child maltreatment. Not matter that we now know enough about the developing brain to observe the effects of different child-rearing strategies. No matter that the international scientific community has spoken out on the origins of war--certainly the ultimate "evil"-- and has concluded that war begins in nurture, not nature. No matter: the "doctrine" of Fundamental Badness is so deeply ingrained in western culture that it's hard to find someone who doesn't believe in it. (Although actually it isn't: the Dalai Lama is one who doesn't. But he's not a Man of the West.)

The one we read in high school.

The idea that we humans are somehow "bad" in our essence, souls, genome, or what have you, is the most irrational, pernicious, and inhumane notion anyone can hold. And yet people can be quite shocked when you contradict it. I remember reading Lord of the Flies in high-school and vigorously arguing with my teacher that the novel was flawed because of its central premise:

Fancy thinking the Beast was some- thing you could hunt or kill! You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? I'm the reason why it's no go? My poor, mis- guided child, do you think you know any better than I do?

And Simon the visionary looks on "with the infinite cynicism of adult life." Infinite? William Golding got a Nobel Prize for this well-written piece of trash, so beloved of English teachers and the pseudo-learned. Even the Funny Times quotes Golding in their "Curmudgeon" column: "Man produces evil as bees produce honey." Though to give them credit they also quote A. A. Milne: "No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature." I think it's time to stop making excuses for despair.

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The difference in attitudes toward same-sex marriage that we observe in the mem- bers of the over-50 and under-30 generations are best explained by differences in the way the generations were raised. The old folk (like me) were raised with a certain level of fear, mistrust, and anger, so that when confronted by anything "abnormal" they respond with these emotions. The youth, on the other hand, do not respond to the "abnormal" in this way because they were raised without the same level of fear, mistrust, or anger. If we can identify just how the under-30s were raised, and what made their childhoods different from those that came before them, we may be able to create future generations of  people who don't reflexively buy into the malarky of Fundamental Badness the way the over-50s do. And once people have gotten FB out of their way, they will be free(er) to be more caring, tolerant, compassionate individuals, and thus--eventually--to create a better society and a better world. That IS what we all want, isn't it? Those of us who aren't Tea Partiers, that is.

So who raised the current generation of under-30s? What made their parenting style so different? To be under 30 in the year 2011 means to be born after 1980. Assuming the parents of this age-cohort were between 20 and 35 years old when their offspring were born, this means the parents we are interested in were born between about 1945 and 1960. Seeing that the vast majority of child-rearing in all known human societies is done by women, we may simplify matters here and ignore males, and instead concentrate on women who are now in their 50s and 60s. What made these women so special? What made them different from their mothers?

For the fact is, they shouldn't have been. Almost all the significant advances in our understanding of child development were made after these women had already matured. And, as the followings of James Dobson and John Rosemond attest, scientific discoveries in this field have been slow to penetrate into the general population: anti-attachment child-rearing is still gospel among many who know nothing of those discoveries and don't care to. Given all of this, the special women we are concerned with here should have been carbon-copies of the women who raised them. Instead, they became something subtly, profoundly different--and not because of anything scientists told them. Nor was it thanks to artists, or writers, or even the Bushmn--it was the doing of those four men who will save the world. . . .

to be continued

Four Men Who Will Save the World (Part 1)

Whenever I despair over the state of the planet Earth, I recall that I am old and dying, and that this is a very good thing.

No, I don't mean that I look forward to death as an escape from the disappearance of Bangladesh, the desertification of Beijing, the nuking of Jerusalem, or the inauguration of President Gingrich. Rather, I figure that if I am dying, so are my age-mates. And not a moment too soon.

The Tunguska Impactor didn't kill anyone--or threaten to.

Here's a key statistic: most Americans over the age of 50 are opposed to legal- izing same-sex marriage, whereas most of those under the age of 30 are in favor. This simple factoid reveals something very profound about America, about its future, and about the future of the species. For I believe that an indi- vidual's attitudes toward homosexuality hint at that individual's basic attitudes toward a broad range of issues--issues that must be confronted, attitudes that will make or break the civilization of the 21st century.

From a strictly legal standpoint, gay marriage is a no-brainer. The 14th Amend- ment to the US Constitution clearly and firmly guarantees equal protection under the law, and that equality cannot be denied without due process. A century's worth of Supreme Court decisions have established that dividing people into categories and treating the members of each category differently--that is, creating "differen- tial standards of treatment"--is only permitted within narrowly defined limits. In par- ticular, a differential standard must serve a definite and necessary social purpose, and it must not be "arbitrary and capricious."

The legal drinking age is a good example of a properly established differential standard. Setting the legal minimum for consumption of alcohol at 21 means that all human beings are divided into two categories (those above and those below the limit) and that members of one category are treated differently from those of the other (those above 21 may drink legally, those below may not). Twenty-one is certainly an arbitrary number---it could as easily be 20, or 37---but it is not capri- cious, because society has a clearly rational need to discourage people from drinking before their brains have finished maturing. The boundary has to be set somewhere, and 21 is a traditional and convenient number. (Teenagers may disagree, whereas on scientific grounds the legal age should be 25.)

Yes, this law is frequently broken--but that does not make it irrational. Law is not just about coercion or punishment: law also serves to embody society's values: in this case the value that society places on the health of its young people. Society can't hold anyone to a standard unless that standard is set up somewhere where people can see it, and in America that somewhere is the law.

Barack Obama is personally opposed to same-sex marriage on religious grounds. Yet he's also a scholar of constitutional law--it's what he taught at the University of Chicago--and he has instructed the Justice Department not to defend DOMA, the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" forced through Congress by Newt Gingrich, and which forbids the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. Obama knows that DOMA won't hold up in the courts, and he sensibly wishes to save the taxpayers time and money be refusing to defend an indefensible law.

Social conservatives such as the members of the Tea Party claim they wish to "restore the Constitution" and to "return to the values of the Founding Fathers." So why do they continue to oppose same-sex marriage? Their arguments amount to calling for a differential standard of treatment under the 14th Amendment. Mind you, those in favor of same-sex marriage need prove nothing--the onus is entirely on the tea-baggers and their ilk. To succeed in court they must prove that such a differential--treating homosexuals as different from and inferior to hets--is neces- sary to the proper functioning of society in the same way that setting the minimum drinking age at 21 is necessary. And they must also prove that such a standard is neither arbitrary (what about bisexuals? transgendered people? masturbators?) nor capricious (i.e., based on personal prejudices).

What kids really need--tiger moms take note.

Yet the anti-gay-marriage forces can mus- ter no such arguments. In fact, they don't even try. Instead, they focus entirely on gay sexuality per se, as if sex were all that gay people did, leaving them no time to raise families, care for sick partners, join the army, or any other myriad other things my gay friends, neighbors, and co-workers do. By claiming gay sex is wrong conserva- tives claim that gay marriage is wrong, as if sex and marriage were the same thing--which, in the eyes of the law, they are not. (The eyes of various churches are another matter.) When not claiming that the Bible forbids gay sex (which it does not, and I can prove it), social conservatives claim it's "unnatural" (so is underwear--do you see any other animal wearing any?), or that "the union of a man and a woman is the foundation of society" (which it certainly isn't, and here's a summary of the evidence). These three claims--from the Bible, from nature, and from social structure--simply don't hold water legally, logically, or morally. So why do so many of my fellow elders continue to make them?

When people are being grossly illogical there's usually a perfectly logical reason for it. That reason is emotion. Emotions don't just pop up at random: they are caused by certain experiences. Experiences that link regularly to emotions are commonly called "triggers"; when someone has a powerful emotional reaction to a seemingly innocuous trigger, we suspect an illness such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Sometimes the relation between trigger and emotion is evident--a smiling baby makes us happy, a Simpson's rerun makes us laugh, the brilliant acting talent of Rondo Hatton inspires a feeling of awe.

But the relation of trigger to response can also be buried in the unconscious, and here is where things can get tricky. And dangerous--it can be all too easy to blame the trigger for the severity of the response. We've all heard of cases in which a war veteran cannot tolerate exploding fireworks because they remind him (or her) of bombs. However, I know of no veterans who consciously think fireworks are bombs, or who think that July 4th celebrations are sponsored by Al Qaeda. A diagnosis of PTSD, oddly enough, may help protect the veteran from making the mistake that conservatives make in reacting to homosexuality--reading into the trigger stimulus something that isn't there.

No gay person I've ever met is any more dangerous, offensive, immoral, or annoy- ing than any straight person I've known, and I have no reason to believe my ex- periences with human beings are fundamentally different from those of most people. If the majority of my conservative age-mates find gay people more dan- gerous, offensive, immoral, or annoying than they find straights, I am forced to conclude that my age-mates are reacting to a trigger in much the same way that veterans with PTSD may react to loud noises. That is: by venting their spleens at queers, they reveal themselves to be reacting to something not in their triggers, but in themselves. Like shell-shocked veterans they have a mental disorder: one captured as well as may be by the term "homophobia."

If homophobia were merely a garden-variety irrational fear like arachnophobia or claustrophobia, we as a society might sympathize with it or offer its sufferers some kind of thearpy. But since homophobia is a fear of a particular kind of people, it is potentially damaging to those who are feared (because they are likely to be targets of violence--think Matthew Shepard), and thus damaging to the society of which they are members. And it seems that, like PTSD, homophobia is positively correlated with a wide variety of other anti-social behaviors, so that a homophobe is likely to be several other brands of bigot

Chicxulub--Yucatec Maya for, "Bye-bye dinosaurs."

The tendency of illnesses to appear together--e.g., PTSD and alcoholism--is called "co-morbidity." Co-morbidity explains why the same people who would make the lives of gay people miserable would also do nothing about global warming (or make it worse); would interfere with women's ability to control their own bodies; would sabotage Obama's presidency because he's smart, good-looking, and Black; would do nothing to rein-in the reign of the rich; would let the poor and downtrodden die painful, preventable deaths; and would cheat the rest of us out of our only opportunity to obtain health care. Homophobia, in other words, is co-morbid with racism, sexism, climate denial, class warfare, and mindless worship of the Invisible Hand. Homophobia is just one part of a complex of attitudes and behaviors--fears, resentments, greeds, hates-- that has made the Republican Party and its astroturf offshoot the greatest threat to the health and well-being of this planet since the Chicxulub Impactor.

And the GOP's core constituency is old people. My age-mates are trying to kill the planet. And they're succeeding.

But the youngsters . . . there's more to being a progressive than being in favor of same-sex marriage, and I daresay the under 30s have their fair share of fears, resentments, greeds, and hates. Yet from my observations I would say that those in favor of same-sex marriage are also more likely to want us to get below 350 ppm, to advocate for the rights of women, workers, minorities, the poor, and children, more likely just to be aware. They may not know just what actions to take, but they want to do something, and they care about the future. They are going to be living there, after all, as I and my fellow elders are not.

And so we return to this mother of all generation gaps, the profound differences in attitude and outlook between the over-50s and the under-30s, the gap I am sum- ming up in shorthand terms by dis/approval of same-sex marriage. Why the big diff? What can anyone do about it? Should anyone even bother?

And what does it have to do with the four men who will save the world?

to be continued