Rachel Maddow noted on her show that the conventional wisdom is that even a ban on selling assault weapons to people on the Terrorist watch list would be defeated. Why is that? In response to the
tragedy in Tuscon,
Rabbi Joshua Grater calls for moral conversation. What sort of conversation does that need to be, and what do we know about the sort of language that is required?
We face opponents who speak to universals that expand their "base" far beyond that of the Christian right. Due to the impotence of Rove's approach in the 2008 election, the right recalibrated their attention to focus on more primitive memes that function not just on relatively higher cognitive centers that religious language work on, but on far more fundamental brain stem responses.
Does it mean that the Right has better propaganda and that progressive leadership needs to get better at manipulation of the American psyche? Far from it. We begin by observing that the Right is tapping into the power of what
Paul Tillich calls ultimate concerns. Martin Luther King became interested in how Tillich intended to expand the religious message to those who consider themselves agnostic or secular. He saw even in the sixties that progressives were losing touch with a deep source of motivation to act on ultimate concerns.
As those who concern themselves with religious matters, the service we can provide our non religious brethren is connection with those ultimate concerns. Whether Tillich was or ever will be convincing to this group, Martin Luther King's objection to Tillich was that he went to far in his apologetics- that it was difficult to understand how Tillich's personal God was anything more than a "mere symbol". Yet Tillish's symbols are the units of consciousness that some neurologists call cognitive maps, and others popularly call
memes, and if anything is to be learned from current neurological research, there is nothing "mere" about them. Mainstream theories in neuroscience state that the memes of the cerebral cortex have connection to the brain stem where modeling of the intentionality of potential prey or predators is shared with many other species. Down in the non conscious centers of the brain stem, these memes are inextricably linked with primal feelings of fear, fight or flight, sex and so on. Researcher
Antonio Damasio refers to these deeply penetrated narratives as "maps" of actions. It is wrong to think of these negatively as "baser" feelings, since included among them are positive emotions of nurturing, loyalty and courage a mother bear feels in protecting her cubs. There is substantial fossil evidence of similar behavior from dinosaurs that extends well beyond guarding a nest of eggs or a clutch of its newly hatched offspring. So the meme of the parent protecting the innocent is not just ancient- it is a unit of consciousness that is so deep in our evolutionary makeup that it existed prior to the rise of mammals. The points here are multiple but for the thread I am pursuing the point to keep in mind is that there are memes that are so deeply wired into our minds that they can gives us powerful motivation to act.
I am not suggesting that the solution involves everyone holding moral conversations in the language of the Judeo-Christian memeplexes that are deeply jacked in into our brain stems. Although these can powerfully motivate people to change their lives, heterogeneous societies require a more inclusive language. Tillich's notion of ultimates went well beyond a prescription for a specific religious perspective, or in fact what we typically think of as religion. Everyday we come into contact with people expressing ultimate concerns that are not overtly religious. We've seen the bumper sticker: "You can take my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers." The political reality that keeps bludgeoning progressives is that the Right is hooked into multiple interlocking sets of memes that their members take very seriously. For gun owners as an example, it's not just an isolated issue but part of an interlocking memeplex (or if you like, Weltanschauung) expressing a deeply held ultimate concern regarding rugged individualism and so on. They take it very personally. Progressives in general regard such a cognitive style with the suspicion because of the its frequent co-occurrence with self delusion, bigotry, authoritarianism and so on.
There is no such necessary correlation, and progressives should not allow the Right to take ownership of Ultimate Concerns any more that they should allow them to own the flag or patriotism. Until progressives get hooked into memeplexes that convey such deeply held ultimate concerns, we will keep losing elections. I'm not saying that progressives don't get passionate and don't care about important issues. We all feel sad we lost the House and if nothing changes, we will feel even sadder when we lose the Senate in 2012. But unless an issue touches us personally, very few of us have fire in our belly about it. The battle is being lost because progressives and those who occasionally vote for progressives are alienated from the perspective that what they do or don't do on political issues really matters in an ultimate sense.
As we approach Martin Luther King day, we can consider not just the platitudes and general ideas associated with Martin, but look more deeply at a subject that concerned him so much that he devoted his dissertation to it. It was not an obscure theological point, but one that had enormous social impact. When we read his work devoted to the analysis of two Postmodern Christians, we find that MLK parts ways with Tillich over his juxtaposition of the ontological discussion of God versus what Tillich perhaps unfortunately characterized as "symbolic" representations of a Personal God. MLK recognizes that Tillich means symbol in a very rare sense, that a "genuine symbol participates in the reality of that which it symbolizes." The full depth of this participation with representations (as being the only reality that humans actually ever talk about) is something Owen Barfield expands on in his works, but its full epistemological ramifications elude the young MLK. To him, the juxtaposition Tillich makes between the ontological and symbolic terminology make it seem as if Tillich's Personal God is either an inconsistency or some sort of charade that a minister is expected to foist on his congregation. MLK decides on the former and though he recognizes that Tillich denies he is positing an impersonal God, I believe MLK incorrectly concluded that TIllich failed to address the inconsistency. Whether he was right about Tillich or not, MLK was brilliant in his response to the problem of translating from the ontological inconceivables to practical religious and moral action. I personally think the young MLK felt compelled to cut his scholarly work short by the urgency of a quickly approaching moment in history. If there were more time, I think he would have more fully described his solution that is later actions communicate. Individuals do need to feel a personal connection with an ultimate concern, and they need to feel it intensely. He knew that he could not rely solely on the terminology of overtly religious symbols and myth because they are confusing to a lay audience in a world where the account of nominalism and literalism is dominant.
Leaders on the right can dip freely into a vast language that touches the ultimate concerns of potential voters. A leader adept at metaphoric language like President Obama can overcome this limitation and reach others so that they do take the message personally. In the Tuscon speech Obama juxtaposed the powerful memes of the hopeful innocent versus the responsible parent or adult who must set an example. Progressive candidates unschooled in the art of literature find it exceptionally difficult to speak to ultimate concerns with the skill that Obama does. Unlike those who cynically advocate greater propaganda sophistication, Obama establishes a personal connection between idea and deed that is intellectually honest. It is here that we can make a difference, We can help our candidates by crafting ways of communicating to commonly held concerns that potential voters for progressive candidates take very personally.
That's where we can continue in the struggle for establishing personal connections with meaning that so concerned Dr. King.
References:- Martin Luther King's dissertation, ‘‘A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,’’ 15 April 1955, (link)
- Paul Tillich, "History of Christian Thought" (link)
- Owen Barfield "Saving the Appearances: a Study in Idolatry" (paperback)
- Antonio Damasio, "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain", (kindle, paperback)
