Just about any gregarious conservative can register the same
complaint: Their friends of a liberal persuasion firmly believe in
evolution, the hydrocarbon menace, the technogenic global warming,
and the virtues of green energy; they are convinced that racism is
still rampant in America; that all the ills of inner city schools
can be cured by throwing more money at them; that criminals are
actually victims of society; that voter fraud is a myth concocted by
evil conservatives; that cheating at the polls is a sacred right of
minorities; that illegal immigrants have committed no crime even
though the word “illegal” is self-explanatory; that George Bush
attacked Iraq at the behest of Halliburton to grab Iraqi oil… in
short, it is always the same mantra, demonstrably stupid and
illogical, yet fervently espoused by all ardent liberals
irrespective of their social status or educational attainments.
How to account for it? And why are liberals totally impervious to
any counter-arguments – on those rare occasions, that is, when they
actually deign to listen to the contrary views? The easiest
explanation, of course, would be that those who persevere in beliefs
glaringly devoid of any meaning or logic are just plain dumb. But
no, there are a lot of highly intelligent people, in fact almost the
entire academia, among the most vocal proponents of that idiocy. So
there must be some other explanation. As a matter of fact, there is.
The estimable Lee Harris in his wonderful book The Suicide of Reason
(Basic Books, 2007) explores the concept of the shaming code
developed by Thomas Huxley. Huxley, widely known as “Darwin’s
Bulldog” for his ferocious defense of evolutionary theory, thought
long and hard about the inherent contradiction between man’s “innate
tendency to self-assertion…as the condition of victory in the
struggle for existence and the obvious fact that in the struggle for
survival loners are losers and individuals who banded together
increased their chances of survival.” Upon reflection, Huxley came
to the conclusion that the glue that held together individuals in a
group was the collective shaming code.
“It is this code that makes the members of the group feel as one,” -
writes Lee Harris. “They are disgusted, angered, delighted and
shamed by the same things. The unanimity of their visceral response
is what provides the powerful sense of collective identity. It makes
them feel and think as a tribal Us, in contrast to those tribes who
are not disgusted by what disgusts us, or made angry by what makes
us angry, and who feel no shame at what we think of as shameful… A
tribe that shares a powerful visceral code that inhibits the natural
tendency of the individual to self-assertion will present a united
front against its enemies.”
Therein lies the explanation of the total information blockade built
around the highly dubious figure of Barack Obama by the left-leaning
salons and the mainstream media, even including the respectable
conservative media. It doesn’t take unusual intelligence to see that
the 44th President is a patent mediocrity with a totally contrived
past. And yet, crickets. In 1600, Sir John Harrington penned these
immortal words: “Treason doth never prosper; what’s the reason? For
if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” In other words, treason
attains respectability once it becomes a prevalent trait of the
social mores, part and parcel of society’s shaming code. Today, it
is the very same shaming code that causes polite society to rally
around the “right-thinking” Obama and rebuff all attempts to expose
him as the fraud that he is. Even the late, utterly fearless Andrew
Breitbard refused to wade into the controversy around Obama’s birth
certificate, advising his followers not to “go there”, because he
believed it was unproductive and harmful to the conservative cause.
He understood the power of the shaming code.
But why is today’s social and political scene dominated by the left,
allowing it to impose its shaming code on society? In the struggle
for survival and supremacy, the advantage invariably goes to those
who are more committed to maintaining and expanding their cultural
traditions and who, because of the strength of that commitment, are
united by the more powerful sense of group feeling. Hence the
liberals’ domination of the public discourse. Conservatives are
usually reluctant ideological warriors. For the most part they only
want to be left alone, to live and let live. Having won a battle,
they sigh with relief and waste no time beating their swords into
ploughshares. Not so the liberals. They never tire or despair in
their attempts to impose their views on all others; if they lose a
fight, they pick themselves up, dust themselves off and, undaunted,
continue to slog toward their goals. And in the struggle of
opposites the more fanatical will always win.
The vicious hatred of the left for its conservative opponents,
belied by the liberals’ constant protestations of their
high-mindedness and tolerance, is also easily explainable in tribal
terms. It is the hatred of the righteous for the sinner, of the
acolyte of the one true faith for the heretic. Distilled to its
essence, it is the hatred for “the other,” of “us” for “them.” It is
also the reason why liberals so liberally lie and cheat in their
dealings with the conservative “enemy”. Everything is fair in love
and war, and politics is war by other means. Why are liberals
infinitely understanding and patient toward the Islamic terrorists
who threaten to destroy the Western civilization? Not only because
the Islamofascists are of the Third World and thus automatically
endowed with virtue, but also because they offer no competition to
the left for supremacy in American society, while conservatives do.
Today’s left if every bit a tribe with its unthinking, fanatical
devotion to the tribal code and animal fear of being ostracized. The
ancient Greeks believed banishment from the tribe to be the harshest
of all punishments, worse than death. Human nature has not changed,
and the dread of being cast into outer darkness is still as strong
as ever. Sure there are some exceptions, but they pay a heavy price
for their bravery. That’s why so many bright people, eager to toe
the line, join the fawning fandom of Obama; it’s the price of
admission to the club. They may have some doubts in the beginning,
but as time goes by they undoubtedly lose their qualms. The mask
fuses with the face, they convince themselves of the truth of the
cult and internalize its code, for to acknowledge the truth and
rebel against the tribe is too painful and too dangerous.
Emerging from the questioning by the grand jury investigating
President Clinton, Vernon Jordan loudly declared that he had “kept
the faith”, i.e. lied to save Bill Clinton’s bacon. Jordan’s
standing with the tribe was more important to him than the potential
perjury charge. The handlers assigned by John McCain to guide his
inexperienced running mate, Sarah Palin, through the dangerous
shoals of the 2008 presidential campaign chose to throw her to the
media wolves. They failed in their duty not due to incompetence but
because their primary concern was preserving their credentials with
the Washington in-crowd, paying obeisance to the tribal values. And
so they blithely sacrificed their ward to safeguard their social
status.
The astute Robert Heinlein in his 1961 best-selling SF novel
Stranger in a Strange Land invented a special word, grok, to
describe the phenomenon of tribal consciousness carried to its
extreme: “Grok means… to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in
group experience…” The practical corollary of the dissolution of
one’s identity in groupthink is that all Republican outreach efforts
are a total waste of time, money and hope. It’s just too much
trouble to open one’s mind; how much more comfortable just to go on
grokking in the tribal Nest.
Liberal intellectuals like to pose as bearers of the culture of
reason, as fiercely independent thinkers. But they are kidding
themselves. They have traded their intellectual primogeniture for
the mess of pottage of group identity. They are fully integrated
into the socially and politically dominant tribe, sharing the same
visceral likes and dislikes, the same shaming code. Rather than
being autonomous rational actors, they are merely an assemblage of
cipher units marching in lock step to the tribal drumbeat. Harold
Rosenberg mordantly branded them the herd of independent minds.
© V.Volsky