"There is the imitative tendency which shows itself in large masses of men, and produces panics, and orgies, and frenzies of violence, and which only the rarest individuals can actively withstand.”
The above
is a line from psychologist William James, in a passage about the human
instinct to imitate and to follow others. It follows a quote from the Roman
Terence, a slave who became a playwright: “Humani nihil a me alienum puto”,
which the poet Maya Angelou translates into: “I am a human being. Nothing human
can be alien to me.”
It’s pure
coincidence that I happened to be reading William James (a friend and I decided
together to explore some volumes of ‘The Great Books of the Western World’) at
the very time that Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial was taking place.
It’s not so much of a coincidence that I’ve also been reading William Shirer’s
“Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, because it’s the disease of Trumpism in
America that drove me to study the rise of Nazism in the first place.
There was a
time when Americans looked to Nazism and asked the following questions in total
bewilderment: How could they? Can they really believe that? How can they follow
him? Don’t they see what’s happening? How can they hate so much? How can they
be so stupid, so gullible? If they do see what’s going on, why won’t they stand
up to it, defy it? Now, we Americans – on both sides – look at each other with
those same questions.
William
James (1842-1910) did a deep study of human beings, how we are physically put
together and how we work. A lot of his massive work, “Prinicples of Psychology”
– at least the parts I’ve read so far – has to do with how we perceive, react,
learn and form habits. And when I came to the sentence at the top, and
researched Terence’s latin phrase (which James doesn’t bother to translate), I
was stopped cold.
It was just
two days ago that 43 Senators excused Trump’s involvement in the January 6th
insurrection, after experiencing the assault themselves and after watching
hours of evidence linking Trump directly to the attempted coup. Immediately
after the acquittal, instead of cries of outrage against the 43, a flurry of
attacks and censures was directed at the seven republican Senators who voted
along with the democrats to hold Trump responsible. And all those “How could
they?” questions are back, pounding in my brain again, as they have for going
on five years.
But
actually, it’s been a lifetime. A lifetime of wondering how others can see what
I see and know what I know and yet hold such drastically different thoughts and
feelings about it. How can racists really believe in their judgements? How can
so many men believe that women are treated fairly? How is it that adults – who
were once children – can accept the use and abuse of children?
The answer
that I’ve usually (but not always) strained to reject is that those other
people are fundamentally different. I’ve had to strain because this explanation
is apparently true. Men and women; black and white; adult and child – all such obvious
differences that the answer presents itself. Growing up, I heard this
explanation a lot. The horror of racism was explained by, “White folks are
different. They don’t think and feel the same. They don’t have souls. They are
devils.” Luckily or unluckily, I was able to perceive, in my then mostly-black
community, that there was a degree of devilment going on there, too. And there
was plenty of conflict – some of it very passionate conflict – that grew out of
people not thinking or feeling the same. There were even a few people who gave
no evidence of having functioning souls. And so, while it was very obvious that
people differed, in subtle and drastic ways, there wasn’t any obvious or simple
way to explain those differences.
As I grew
up, was able to travel, and began to know people whose lifestyles and
backgrounds were very different than mine, alternative answers to the problem
of differences began to suggest themselves. Maybe other people didn’t actually see
what I see, or couldn’t know what I know. And maybe people’s personal
experiences shaped them is such ways that the differences were inside of us
rather than in the world.
Maybe one
of the most useful experiences in my own life, so far as understanding our
differences, was my gradual shift from one who couldn’t understand how people
could reject a belief in God, to one who now often struggles to understand the
things that people believe to be of God. I don’t struggle nearly so much now as
I did before my shift because I still remember my fervent Christianity of
before. Because this belief hasn’t totally vanished, but it has changed
drastically. The belief system that resonates most for me these last many years
is Buddhism. Though I doubt that I’ll ever call myself a Buddhist, I see in that
practice the recognition of an essence of goodness in the basic fabric of the
universe, in the mechanics of living – that lifts us when we surrender to it
(and surrender is a very hard word for most of us these days. Other ways of
expressing it are: fully accept, be in flow with, acknowledge as a fundamental
principle that will not be evaded). And I experience my connection to a
greater, transcendent whole to which I believe we each belong. These notions
have totally replaced for me the idea of the egocentric, white, male humanoid
whom I once prayed to fervently for my personal salvation. But I can still
understand – even feel – the power of that belief. And it allows me to
understand the power of belief, whether in Allah or in the hoax of MAGA or
Q-Anon.
Access to
any belief system requires a process of critical thinking at some point. But,
as William James points out, our brains and nervous systems go through phases that
predispose us to accepting or rejecting influences at particular times. So that
we are influenced when young by trends and styles and revolutionary
philosophies that can’t touch us when we are much older. It will continue to
take generations for Americans – and, of course, humans all over the planet –
to outgrow our traumatic comings-of-age. It had seemed to me forty years ago,
that there were levels of healing going on that we’d never again regress from.
Now, there are so many fresh, psychic wounds that all that progress seems as
lost. Except that the good stuff burrows as deep in us as the ugly, and most of
us will try and cling to it tighter.
