Predilection

Predilection

by Marco M. Pardi

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”Mahatma Ghandi

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When we are suddenly pressed to explain someone’s recurrent troublesome behavior we often default to, She must have a predilection. Or, He is accident prone. This leaves the antecedents in a very murky, mysterious dimension. Of course, most of us find no satisfaction in those statements; they ring of Aristotle’s “Harmartia”, an occult character flaw which lies in wait for a passing opportunity to manifest, or an intractable characteristic which defies remedy.

Those of us in the social-behavioral sciences have seen this extrapolated to entire populations: Germanic peoples are warlike; the Swiss naturally make the best timepieces; or, the French are the best lovers. The decades following World War II saw the Germanic warlike claims replaced by the claim that Germans “over engineer” such things as automobiles or any artifacts they sit down to design. Having owned and worked on upper rank German cars I confess to having uttered such condemnations. I’ve also owned a Japanese scuba diving watch which outperformed a world known Swiss dive watch, at one tenth the price. As for French women, well I’m not talking.

In the past four plus years we have increasingly heard the term, Dog Whistle, and the admonition, Words Matter. Having taken, out of necessity, a very early interest in languages I accepted that not only do words matter, the cultural context in which they are said matters. Our culture is permeated with examples of words torn loose from their context, the very basis which gave them their original meaning. And here I declare meaning to be larger than mere definition. In teaching the linguistics portion of college Anthropology I liked to use an example from what Christians call the Bible. We are told that Jesus resurrected Lazarus from the dead. Powerful words. Even more powerful meaning. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the portions of the Bible in which these words appear were written by individuals of the fact based Greek culture, not the Hebrew culture. It is apparent that the Greek writers, quite removed from the Hebrews in time and space, did not know that Hebrews, or “Jews”, saw no distinction between the behaviors of religious faith and those of everyday life. A Jew did not just observe certain religious rules on the Sabbath day and go about his business the rest of the week. Thus, a Jew who stopped believing in the faith became an everyday “Untouchable”. Any person who so much as spoke to an apostate – one who renounced his faith, became polluted and had to endure a lengthy and involved cleansing process. Thus, totally cut off from any form of transaction or interaction, the apostate was considered effectively “dead”. Ever hear someone say, “That person is dead to me”? That’s what the entire community said of the apostate. Of course, the narrow editing of what the average person gets to read since then has obscured the fact that many “healers” went about in those days “raising the dead”, that is, bringing them back into the faith. So, unless you want to believe that Jesus’ times were just the pilot for the popular television show The Walking Dead, you would be well advised to understand the cultural basis for the words, raised from the dead.

So what about these dog whistles? I’ve seen dog whistles put to use. I say seen because, not being a dog, I did not hear the whistle. And, not being a racist, White Nationalist, Fundamentalist, and/or neo-Fascist I almost always found myself saying, Oh, yeah, only after a news analyst points out the dog whistle in some Republican’s speech. I’ve examined my hearing, and have gotten better at recognizing it without help.

I highly value dogs, more so than many of the people I’ve known. But, based on the last presidential election, it must be accepted that there are at least 74 million (people?) out there who hear the whistle. And that self evident fact should inform a deep sense of caution toward the easy explanations for such events as the recent coup d’etat we saw in Washington, D.C. Easy explanations set us up for the classic harmatria, the tragic flaw which tips the trajectory downward toward inevitable doom.

One easy explanation is found in the rush, especially by Republicans, to say everything bad that has happened in these past four years has been Trump’s fault. As a loud mouthed buffoon and shameless grifter he makes that easy. But there are many such people in our society today. As I’ve so often said, Hitler did not walk out of a Munich beer hall and take over Germany all by himself, and the same is true of Donald J. Trump.

Another easy explanation surfaced just after the 2016 election: Trump’s base is made up of angry White men who are under educated and in low wage dead-end jobs. In fact, while that is largely true, it is also true that there are many Trump followers who are well placed in significant careers and who have advanced degrees. Under educated is not the issue; poorly educated is the issue. I have repeatedly maintained that far too many Americans, even if multiply degreed, would not know Fascism if it hit them in the face – which it has.

Years ago several excellent books explained that people vote based on what they feel, not on what they know. So it’s appropriate here to point out that predilections, incipient readiness to act in certain ways, are based in feelings, not in knowledge. The actions of the Hebrews toward apostates cited above were based in beliefs, which are based in feelings. But when something is known it is not a belief, it is a fact. The facts were that the apostates then classified as “dead” were as alive as ever and walking around. Yet, the faith based feelings (beliefs) were so strong as to cause even family members to mourn the “death” of a relative, and perhaps call in some exceptionally eloquent speaker to bring him “back to life”.

We might take a lesson from the Hebrews. Instead of asking what body of knowledge causes people to succumb to the call of a tyrant-in-waiting we should be asking what in our social experience forms the feelings which lead to such submission. What predilections caused the pre-WWII German population to march down a path behind a demagogue to almost total annihilation, and what parallels can we draw to understand the presidential election of 2016?

Numerous examples inform us that we cannot simply legislate feelings. Outlawing discrimination only holds the feelings beneath the surface. How many times have we heard, I know it’s wrong but I believe it anyway. And, I was raised this way.

We must seriously reexamine the K-12 curriculum to understand that how we teach what we teach is obviously not working in the interest of the entire society. For example, instead of concentrating our history, civics, and social studies classes on a deadly boring chronology of who, what, where, and when we must develop means of instilling what it would actually feel like to live under the socio-political systems under review. We must develop the Why and the How of social developments.

Yes, of course there will be outcries from factions of our society as they are exposed and analyzed. We have seen that every time a Republican administration has taken power and they attempt to dismantle the public educational system. And, in 22 years of teaching a variety of college classes there have been one or two instances in which someone claimed I was presenting my personal views as the official views of my discipline. I often tried to foresee that and stated during the first class of the semester, I am not here to presumptively change your beliefs; I am here to present you with information. What you know is my business; what you believe is your business.

Now, I’m not so sure. We have seen the general failure of Sex Education classes and Drug Education classes largely because they focused on mechanics, not meanings. Teaching the mechanics of sex without the meanings of sexuality, teaching the chemistry and dangers of drugs without exploring the reasons why someone would choose to alter their consciousness guarantees failure to reach the potential predilection parts of the mind. No one explained Why; no one explained Why Not in ways that shape the very personal basis of feelings.

I’ve had several courses in Educational Psychology, and I devoted eighteen months to on-site studies of cross-cultural educations systems. But I will not present myself as one who knows how to address the problems I’ve raised, beyond what I’ve already said.

This site is read in many countries around the world, and I am grateful for that. Hopefully there will be those readers who are willing to impart to us some understanding we have not been able to develop for ourselves.