I'm getting a few lectures about how wrong it is for me to be so hard on the tea partiers because they are mostly good-hearted folks who hate the bailouts/outsourcing/corporatism just like the rest of us. But that argument makes me feel the same way I felt when people told me that Bush wasn't really that bad or that Rush is just an entertainer or that the rush to war with Iraq made sense. It's an awful lot like being told you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes. I know what I see. Digby
Yes and No. This post by Digby gives me the opportunity to clarify a few things about recent posts I've put up. There's a difference between a "mindset" and a "person". My critique is directed toward mindsets and not persons. A mindset does not tell us everything about a person who has a particular mindset. Different people participate in a mindset to different degrees. Only fanatics are completely possessed by a mindset; most people are more adaptive.
Now all of us operate with a mindset because we have to. But some mindsets are better than others, and the measure of a good mindset as contrasted with a bad one is the degree of complexity a particular mindset can work with comfortably. And the degree of complexity a particular mindset can work with depends on the individual's adaptability and capacity for independent thinking. Mature, independent thinking requires, for instance, that we have some sense that our mindset does not define who we are, that our identity, our humanity, is not coterminous with our mindset and that whatever our mindset might be, it's not THE truth; it's just a set of mental habits that help us to navigate effectively in the world without having to rethink everything we've learned as we go through our day.
But some times we do have to rethink things. From time to time we have experiences or learn something new that doesn't fit the way our mindset organizes the world, and we have the choice to either reject that new thing or find some way of adapting our mindset to incorporate it. The difference between a good mindset and a bad one is that the good one is adaptable in that way. It understands that we have to live with uncertainty and instability; that whatever we think is real is just a provisional and metaphorical approximation, and that what we know is dwarfed by what we don't. Maturity and a supple mindset allows for adaptability, the ability to live with paradox, to hold together in tension seemingly opposite or contradictory ideas. We humans comprise both matter and spirit; we need to be individuals and we need to be in community; we need to be positively oriented to the future and we need to be nourished from the past.
Now having a rigid, unadaptive, simplistic mindset is not merely a question of intelligence. It's not a head thing so much as it's a soul thing. There are plenty of people who are not particularly gifted intellectually but have what might be described as an emotional intelligence, a soul intelligence, a wisdom of the heart. People with this kind of intelligence are immune from absorption into any kind of mindset. And it could be that if a pollster asked these people their opinion about a political issue their answer might reflect a left or right leaning mindset, but that mindset does not define them. It's not central to their sense of who they are and to the organization of their experience.
Back to the Digby quote. I know that on the religious right and among the very conservative there are many, many people who have this soul intelligence, and because they are not particularly intellectual, they accept the prevailing mindset of their communities--or at least they accept the parts of the mindset that fit with their emotional intelligence. These are the kind of people who think that being gay is wrong because they were brought up to think so, but are forced to rethink what they were taught once they have the opportunity to meet and befriend gays in their community or at work.
Such people are confronted with new information that doesn't fit the conservative preconceptions they were raised with. They are perhaps surprised to learn that gays are just like everyone else and want the same wholesome things that they know in their own hearts are good, decent things to want. And so they're forced to make a choice. Either to retreat into a bunker mindframe where their souls will wither or to choose to adapt and grow. New information like this forces an adjustment in one's mindset, but it's made possible not by intellectual argument but by an adaptability or suppleness in the soul. And that suppleness allows for an adaptation that increases complexity, and a maturing of the soul: Such a person holds in tension what she was taught about homosexuality and what her heart tells her is true.
And let's be clear, this failure to choose to adapt and grow is found on the left, too. The kind of smug, politically correct mindsets of left intellectuals can be equally as rigid. But the point here is that the primary problem is not the ideas these people hold, but the disposition of their souls.
So a mindset is not a head thing; it's a soul thing. If one has a rigid or stony heart, he is likely to have a rigid, unadaptive mindset. It is very difficult to argue with someone whose soul has rigidified. It doesn't matter what you say if the person with whom you are conversing has no soul adaptability. There's no arguing with someone in a mob that is bent on burning a witch or lynching a negro. His soul is all made up, so to speak. We can talk about the different factors that incline one to have a more or less supple soul, but fear, obviously, is the biggest cause of the shrinkage, flattening, and rigidification of a person's soul. Fear makes us soul stupid and unadaptive--and that stupidity and unadaptiveness is the root cause of the kind of virulent anger that causes people to drive planes into buildings or start shooting at people for no apparent reason.
The reason is always fear, and we are living in a society in which that fear and that anger is epidemic in certain precincts, and the causes of it are more complex than I can go into here, but a major cause is the information overload that overwhelms most people's soul capacity to adapt their mindsets. The world is changing at a pace that outstrips all of our capacities to keep up with it, and either we find a flexible, adaptive mindset that can live with that change and information overload, or we don't. If we don't, that usually means developing a bunker mindset. We make enemies of anyone who threatens to topple our sense of order and identity.
But the fear question is a subject for another day. Ultimately what matters is the disposition of one's soul, not one's mindset. But mindsets matter in the political sphere because they shape what's possible there. And my exploration of the architecture of American political mindsets is ultimately about trying to understand which mindset gives us the best chance of moving forward, and which presents the biggest obstacle. And so from what I've written here it should be clear that the mindset is not about logic or rationality; it's about a predisposition of the soul that is free from fear and capable of adaptation in a rapidly changing world.
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My attempts over the past month to write about Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians or Whigs and Jacksonians or Lockeans and Rouseauans are really about my groping to understand what it is in the American character or American soul that is best in the terms I define here--supple-souled, adaptive, and unrestrained by fear. If the primary difference between progressives and conservatives in modern societies is the former's orientation toward the future and the latter's orientation toward the past, the former's embrace of change and movement and the latter's need for stability and security, I would argue that a progressive mindset is more healthy in the political sphere and a conservative mindset more healthy in the cultural sphere. One without the other leads to the flattening of the soul that we see all around us on both the left and the right.
So the first takeaway is this. We have to find ways to hold in tension both the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian. We have to be Whigs and Jacksonians at the same time. My argument is that during the New Deal the Democrats achieved that integration and lost it in the 70s. And in doing so created the preconditions for the country to return to the bitter factionalism that divided the country in the 19th Century.
And the second takeaway is that holding together in tension an orientation toward the future and the past is essential for the soul's health. I believe that history has meaning and that it is a slow, steady evolutionary movement toward a deeply felt but impossible-to-envision telos. But I believe that we cannot arrive there if we continue to jettison as superstition and irrationality what the premodern ancestors understood but that we have trouble understanding now. The ancestors feed us from their store of wisdom, and we wander aimlessly without their nourishment. So the way forward in part lies in retrieving what the ancestors understood but what we have lost. In other words, the measure for the healthiest, most adaptive mindset is the one that lives in a tension between what calls to us both from the future and what nourishes us from the past. Living in that tension is what keeps the soul, and therefore also the mind, supple.