America, it's time for your meds

Student (a “normal”-looking 16-17-year-old): “I can’t study today, Miss. I didn’t take my medication”.
Teacher (flusters a bit, then gives in): “Uh, OK, you’d better sit this class out, I guess.”

This kind of scene is a common occurrence these days, according to a recent Washington Post article by high school teacher Nancy Schnog. Ms. Schnog works, incidentally, not in a crime-ravaged inner-city ghetto but in the ultra-upscale suburb of Potomac, home to many of the capital’s top lawyers and politicians. As a pragmatic and reality-based professional, she avoids an emotional response to the situation, preferring to sound out child guidance and medical experts before developing an ad hoc study strategies program for her charges – so I’ll take the liberty of providing the sense of outrage which is missing from her article.

The stress-inducing conditions that lead so many teenagers to be medicated turn out essentially to be the many “pressures on their lives” and “brain-unfriendly lifestyles structured by adults”. In short, welcome to the modern world: unfriendly indeed not only to brains but also to hearts and spirits. Yet to medicate oneself or one’s family in response is to eliminate any chance of a natural and spontaneous response – including rejection, indignation and a desire for change (is it any surprise that the movers and shakers of this world don’t encourage their offspring to rebel against it?) Adolescence is a time of conflict and dissonance anyway, whether we grow up in Potomac or in Anacostia (99% poor, 99% black, 9 miles away), in Zurich or in Nairobi; it’s the frontal impact of our childhood dream-world with the reality that actually surrounds us, the painful acknowledgement of our own and our parents’ limitations, and of the gap we suddenly can’t pretend away between who we’d like to be and who we really are. How we deal with this gap is both a measure of who we are and a marker for the people we’re going to become as adults – and medicating the problem away is an outstandingly bad start to the process of growing up, denying the pain and the challenge rather than responding to it.

And while we’re on the subject of denying reality, the news has been full recently of stories about the rise of the Tea Party Right and its new icons such as Christine O’Donnell, Republican candidate for Joe Biden’s former Senate seat in Delaware. Like her putative role-model Sarah Palin, this champion of fiscal probity and straight talking is trailing some troublesome baggage (in O’Donnell’s case, some $60K in unpaid tax bills and college tuition fees) – but to her followers those are merely the signs that she’s suffered like them, with them and for them. Anyway, since most of the Tea Partiers believe that President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim determined to turn the USA into another North Korea, the evidence threshold for them is clearly very low – it’s about who’s speaking, not the data they amass to support their case.

Here, by way of a bit of real data, is a chart depicting America’s headlong rush towards Socialism over the past 30 years. Interestingly similarly-shaped charts would show the decline of the nation’s transport and communications infrastructure, and of its advantage in secondary and higher education – both areas where the USA once led the world but is now trailing many European and Asian nations. All this bears witness to the New Right’s success in siphoning money away from public-benefit expenditure and into the pockets of the ultra-rich, while deregulating business to the further benefit of that top 1% (or, even more, the top 0.1%). That’s why, of course, right behind and firmly underpinning the supposedly spontaneous and “just plain folks” Tea Party we have massively corporate-backed interest groups such as Dick Armey’s Freedom Works and the Koch Brothers’ various front organizations, not to mention Fox News Corp.

The denial of reality that’s involved here is reminiscent not of adolescence but of a much earlier stage of development, namely toddlerhood, where the dissonance between the world we desire and the one we experience is simply too great to be borne and we opt for the former – until our parents drag us kicking and screaming back to theirs. Bill Clinton has several times warned of the corporate hand in the Tea Party glove, and of course President Obama (a parental figure if ever there was one) speaks repeatedly of the need for massive investment in infrastructure and education. But what use do toddlers have for bridges and trains, schools and universities? – they just want to be told that the candy jar is full, or if it all too obviously isn’t full, a nice simple story about who stole the candy. And provided that story comes from a trusted source like Sarah or Glenn, it doesn’t need to have the smallest element of truth in it, or of evidence to support it. That’s the great thing about toddlers: they may be darned stubborn at times, but they’re quickly and easily turned by a determined adult. They’re not seeking their own way in the world – they’re nowhere near ready yet – just flustered and unhappy and looking to be comforted.

It sometimes seems that much of the USA is afflicted with a debased form of the belief propagated by the book & movie “The Secret” (itself, as Marcus Anthony – http://22cplus.blogspot.com – has usefully and cogently pointed out, a distorted and debased version of the Law of Attraction). The idea – very toddler-like – is that I only have to want and believe hard enough for reality to become whatever I want it to be: secretive right-wing billionaires become defenders of the common people, official birth certificates become Photoshop fake-ups and vice versa, and, above all, everything that’s going wrong is the fault of the bad guys (liberals, immigrants, foreigners etc.) And if ever a glimpse of reality should still appear through the cracks; well, there are always the meds.

The main problem with denying reality or medicating it away isn’t moral but practical – why shouldn’t we all float away on a pink cloud of pharmaceutical and Fox News oblivion if there were no consequences? But there are serious consequences: it weakens one’s ability to overcome difficult circumstances, and makes one vulnerable to manipulation by anyone with a likely story and an ulterior motive. Toddlers don’t look behind the scenes to see who’s pulling the strings; they take the puppets as real and autonomous agents. An unhappy, confused and easily manipulated populace with no real agenda in search of comfort and/or vengeance are easy meat for the powerful corporate interests who aren’t confused, know exactly what they want, and have a very precise agenda.

And in this fairy story the wolf not only eats Grandma but convinces Little Red Riding-Hood that she is Grandma – complete with a spoonful of medication to help settle the little girl’s doubts. America, you’d better wake up; the beast’s appetite is far from sated yet.

GOT HOPE?

It may look like a piece of bargain-basement irony to be juxtaposing this headline with the notorious photo of Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi giving the Roman salute traditionally associated with (pre-WWII Fascist dictator) Mussolini. But the last thing I want to do is to provoke a cynical shrug of the shoulders: there’s a serious point applying right across the developed West, that views and ideas once seen as too loopy, extreme or simply toxic to be expressed in public are edging into the mainstream.

20-30 years ago it would have been instant political death for any Italian leader to be photographed giving the Fascist salute, as it would have been for an American politician to propose abolishing Social Security or public education, or for a French President to propose expelling citizens of a fellow-EU country from French soil, linking them to the crime and insecurity which he has made his favourite theme.

Pretty much everywhere the Right seems to be on the rampage, and leftists and progressives on the retreat – no longer believing in, or at least no longer arguing with any passion for their supposed ideals. Despite the economic crisis and the outrageous greed and irresponsibility displayed by financial élites, the political parties supported by or in the pockets of those élites are forging ahead.

So what’s going on? The discourse of the Right, of course, is that the progressives had their chances and blew them: the war is over and the tough guys won (like they always do). There is of course a serious conservative critique of progressivism, but I’m intentionally not reproducing it here: the followers of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party in the US or of Berlusconi in Italy don’t demand a rigorous analysis; they’re operating from emotions which the leaders in question are expert at arousing and manipulating. Mostly negative emotions at that: fear of losing what one has, and of foreigners and outsiders. In so far as the Left is offering an analysis of the crisis and of the root causes of terrorism and mass immigration, rather than an emotional response, the battle is lost before it’s engaged. In politics, emotion trumps reason every time, and economic insecurity provokes fear of change and a tendency to cling to authority (just ask anyone who was in Germany in the early 1930s).

But we’re not in the 1930s. Berlusconi isn’t Mussolini and Glenn Beck isn’t Hitler, or even George Wallace. The Italian philosopher Raffaele Simone, in a much-discussed recent book, distinguishes the modern Right from its antecedents of 70-80 years ago by describing it as a “soft monster”. For Simone, the “monster” imposes its increasingly uncontested rule through three absolute commandments:

i) Thou shalt consume. Citizenship and civic identity are defined through consumption, rather than through social participation and engagement. Society becomes fragmented, as people see themselves as exclusively individual rather than social agents, focussed on short-term personal gratification.

ii) Thou shalt have fun. Work becomes devalued as a source of meaning and gratification (conveniently enough, as unemployment continues to rise); the modern “consumizen” lives for Friday night, for the weekends, for the summer holidays – and for the celebrity-focused nonsense and other kinds of froth on TV. (It’s no accident that Berlusconi, who incarnates this tendency more than any other politician, uses the huge chunk of the Italian media which he owns and/or dominates to discourage and devalue discussion of social and political issues.) The “vision” is clear: an atomised society composed of disconnected and disengaged individuals, and offering them an infinity of ways to forget themselves – for money, of course.

iii) Thou shalt be (or look) young. Simone, who’s one of the 1968 generation, may have been feeling his age when he added this – and it’s paradoxical considering that the average age of the population is steadily rising, especially in Western Europe and Japan. But he’s also pointing to the narcissism that’s such a feature of contemporary culture – the gym-honed underwear models, the “Hello!” weddings, the love confessions of Z-list celebrities and all the other detritus I just referred to. And hats off to Berlusconi for pushing this envelope too: Botoxed and hair-implanted to the eyeballs, at 73 he boasts of his successes with girls young enough to be his grand-daughters – and the story of his prodigious feats during a night of passion with a 2000€-a-pop call girl, far from causing embarrassment, seems to have increased his supporters’ admiration. (Is it conceivable, by the way, that this story wasn’t manufactured and planted by the Berlusconi media apparatus?)

So far, so gloomy – and to add to the woes of the left, Simone points out how it’s never shaken off a fatal association with totalitarian Communism – not to mention the destructive political protests of the 60s, 70s and 80s. I was intermittently one of those protestors myself (though never violently), but I could never fully commit to a “movement” that maintained such an ambiguous attitude towards the “Socialist” dictatorships of the time – and anyway, how long would those long-haired, grass-smoking, rock music-listeners have survived in the Maoist China they claimed to admire so much?

What’s happened is that, of the two strands of social-cultural change which emerged from that epoch, the pursuit of individualist self-expression and self-realisation has totally swamped the accompanying urge for a renewed society and sense of community. As Simone goes on to point out, the Left has failed to come to terms with the hedonism and individualism fostered not only by modern capitalism but also by the huge technological changes of the past 25 years – atomizing society and leaving each individual enclosed in his or her own iBubble, as it were.

Simone goes on to argue, neither very originally nor very convincingly, for a “reinvention” of the Left, but that time has surely passed – the opposition of Left and Right, of “socialism” vs. “individualism”, has become a stale and destructive cliché, exploited by the various Tea Partiers and Berlusconis to discredit any form of idealism or collective action.

Out of the rubble of sterile and rigid ideologies must emerge – is emerging, hesitantly – a new progressivism which acknowledges, as the old Left never did, that social change necessarily starts with individual change. Changing structures without changed consciousnesses leads inevitably to dictatorship, while more evolved individuals inevitably and necessarily develop more evolved social structures – and the same technology which isolates “consumizens” from each other is also being used to build new communities and networks.

It’s still early, and the old structures still dominate, but there is hope – there’s always hope – that this new trans-ideological collective consciousness will gradually, sweetly and gently, overwhelm the countervailing forces.