NINE SIGNS YOU MAY BE PART OF A POLITICAL CULT*
by Gary Pavela
“He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions”―Confucius
Editor’s note: See our related essay on MEDIUM: “Belief + Doubt = Sanity”
[1] You find a sense of purpose in embracing a totalistic ideology that sees itself in intractable opposition with the “evil other.”
Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in his book The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941) that human beings stand “at the juncture of nature and spirit” and cannot enjoy “the bovine serenity of the animal world.” Out of this tension arise many variations of a search for meaning, all amplified for better or worse by our affinity to think and act in groups. [1]*
*Each note has a direct link to the note text. Our definition of “cult” is included in Note 1.
Even the best-intentioned groups can be induced to display innate distrust of the “evil other.” One contemporary manifestation of this phenomenon was described by Steven Hassan in his book The Cult of Trump (2019):
Playing on ancient human tribal tendencies, cult leaders encourage a kind of dualistic “us versus them” mindset. Trump uses this trope constantly, and to great effect. During his campaign rallies, he would single out members of the audience whom he perceived as hostile and eject them, often to deafening cheers from his supporters.
One doesn’t have to look far for other historical examples. In his book “The God That Failed” (1949) editor Richard Crossman assembled chapters from six intellectuals (including the American author Richard Wright) who “describe[d] the journey into Communism — and the return.” As suggested by the book title, this journey had religious characteristics, including an all-encompassing ideology with concepts of sin, conversion, confession, and redemption. Unity was maintained, in part, by authoritarian leadership and relentless ideological scrutiny, accompanied by an ever-growing list of pejoratives for outliers, including devianist; petty-bourgeois exhibitionist; Trotskyite; Menshevik; foul dog; and accursed viper among others. Listen carefully to contemporary discourse on the extreme right and left and you’ll see variations of these pejoratives — all grounded in a perception of the “evil other” as an insufferable sinner and heretic.
[2] You strive for the creation or recreation of a utopian society
Intellectuals who eventually defected from Communism described it as a failed “vision of the Kingdom of God on earth” [2]. This kind of utopianism takes many forms, including Herbert Marcuse’s call for an “Orphic Eros” that “transforms being” and “masters cruelty and death through liberation (Eros and Civilization, 1955, p. 171).
In politics, the authoritarian pursuit of a perfect society gave us Nazism; Stalinism; the “Cultural Revolution” in China; and the mass killings in Cambodia. Millions of people died with no enduring benefit to anyone. Philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin reflected on this history in a 1998 New York Review of Books article:
Someone once remarked that in the old days men and women were brought as sacrifices to a variety of gods; for these, the modern age has substituted the new idols: isms. To cause pain, to kill, to torture are in general rightly condemned; but if these things are done not for my personal benefit but for an ism — socialism, nationalism, fascism, communism, fanatically held religious belief, or progress, or the fulfillment of the laws of history — then they are in order. Most revolutionaries believe, covertly or overtly, that in order to create the ideal world eggs must be broken, otherwise one cannot obtain an omelette. Eggs are certainly broken — never more violently than in our times — but the omelette . . .recedes into an infinite distance. That is one of the corollaries of unbridled monism, as I call it — some call it fanaticism, but monism is at the root of every extremism.
[3] Your views are defined and enforced by a select cadre of thinkers, leaders and co-believers.
Experts debate whether the word “cult” presumes a charismatic leader, but the topic is complicated by the fact that mass movements are rarely “of one character . . . usually [they] display some facets of other types of movements, and sometimes it is two or three movements in one” (Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951). Marxism, for example, may be described as a totalistic ideology, but it also evolved into “personality cults” associated with figures like Stalin and Mao, among others. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton wrote in this regard that “[a]ny ideology . . . may be carried by its adherents in a totalistic direction . . . [a]nd where totalism exists, a religion, or a political movement, becomes little more than an exclusive cult” (Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, 2012).
One of the most likely places in contemporary society to find “a select cadre” of carefully screened and policed “co-believers” is in social media groups. Angela Nagle described the origins of this phenomenon in her book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right (2017)
While taboo and anti-moral ideologies festered in the dark corners of the anonymous Internet, the de-anonymized social media platforms, where most young people now develop their political ideas for the first time, became a panopticon, in which the many lived in fear of observation from the eagle eye of an offended organizer of public shaming. At the height of its power, the dreaded call-out, no matter how minor the transgression or how well intentioned the transgressor, could ruin your reputation, your job or your life. The particular incarnations of the online left and right that exist today are undoubtedly a product of this strange period of ultra puritanism.
“Ultra-puritanism” on the left is mirrored on the right by a more traditional form of charismatic cultism — fanatical devotion to Donald Trump. Among many examples in this regard was the Republican Party’s 2020 decision to dispense with a Party Platform and replace it with this Resolution:
“RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.”
Tom Wheeler, Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, described the implications:
If Donald Trump wins, does he have a mandate for anything (other than himself)?. . . [I]t appears as though the Republican Party has codified that it is for whatever Donald Trump wants to do. As the Sun King might have said, “Le parti, c’est moi.”
[4] You regard freedom of expression as essential for your opinions, but “problematic” for all others.
Political theorist Herbert Marcuse retains residual influence among intellectuals on the left. In his book Repressive Tolerance (1965), he called for “the systematic withdrawal of tolerance toward regressive and repressive opinions” and rejected the “democratic argument” that “nobody, neither group nor individual, is in possession of the truth . . .”
It’s not clear in Marcuse’s work who should be given functional authority to define social and political truth for others, but he seemed to believe essential leadership should come from “small groups, widely diffused” committed to “an emancipation of sensibility.” His “new radicalism”(exemplified by student-initiated protests in France in 1968) would have “a strong element of spontaneity, even anarchism” as it challenged bureaucratic structures, corporate capitalism, consumerism, and “the rules and regulations of a pseudo-democracy.” The end goal would be “a universe where the sensuous, the playful, the calm, and the beautiful become forms of existence and thereby the Form of the society itself.” (Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 1969).
Marcuse’s rejection of “democratic” arguments for freedom of expression has found appeal among some thinkers on the contemporary left — even though protection of “radical” and “leftist” minority views has been a characteristic of First Amendment jurisprudence for over fifty years. [3] For example, in their prominent work “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2017), Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic wrote that “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”
“Critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”
President Obama grew increasingly concerned about “repressive tolerance” (also pejoratively called “Wokism”) on college campuses and addressed it in a 2016 commencement speech at Rutgers University:
And if participation means voting, and it means compromise, and organizing and advocacy, it also means listening to those who don’t agree with you. I know a couple years ago, folks on this campus got upset that Condoleezza Rice was supposed to speak at a commencement. Now, I don’t think it’s a secret that I disagree with many of the foreign policies of Dr. Rice and the previous administration. But the notion that this community or the country would be better served by not hearing from a former Secretary of State, or shutting out what she had to say — I believe that’s misguided. I don’t think that’s how democracy works best, when we’re not even willing to listen to each other . . .
If you disagree with somebody, bring them in — and ask them tough questions . . . If somebody has got a bad or offensive idea, prove it wrong. Engage it. Debate it. Stand up for what you believe in . . . Don’t feel like you got to shut your ears off because you’re too fragile and somebody might offend your sensibilities. Go at them if they’re not making any sense. Use your logic and reason and words. And by doing so, you’ll strengthen your own position, and you’ll hone your arguments. And maybe you’ll learn something and realize you don’t know everything. And you may have a new understanding not only about what your opponents believe but maybe what you believe. Either way, you win. And more importantly, our democracy wins. (Applause.)
Obama’s reference to intellectual humility (“maybe you’ll learn something and realize you don’t know everything”) [4] should be contrasted the Marcuse’s suggestion that a political elite would somehow discover and enforce unquestionable Truth. Marcuse’s lack of intellectual humility in this regard is a case study in the failure of his own philosophy. Brandeis University American Studies professor Stephen J. Whitfield wrote in Dissent Magazine (Fall 2014) that:
Most devastating for [Marcuse’s] reputation as a seer, however, was his failure to anticipate the significance of the reaction to the sixties that the right would soon advance and benefit from. Two years after Marcuse’s death, Ronald Reagan would take his first oath of office. But just as noteworthy has been the rise, which Marcuse did not foresee, of the New Right in Europe . . .
A failure to foresee [resurgent conservatism] may have stemmed merely from the habit — common to our species — of being surprised by the future. But a limitation of Marcuse’s own sensibility can be held accountable as well. To put it simply, he was not good at appreciating the force of political orientations other than his own. Nor did he manage to exhibit empathy for other philosophical perspectives. As Alasdair MacIntyre complained, Marcuse did not conscientiously seek to meet objections to his ideas or to duke it out with serious adversaries.
In his famous 1944 speech on “The Spirit of Liberty” Judge Learned Hand saw intellectual humility as essential to a working definition of liberty itself. “The spirit of liberty, he said, “is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” Adopting this view — which is also deeply engrained in the philosophy of science — [5] does not inhibit making and acting upon a well-founded hypothesis. What the “Spirit of Liberty” does require is an understanding that we’re likely to come closer to Truth when we consider perspectives different from our own.[6]
[5] You consider the “mere presence” of someone who disagrees with you as “threatening” or “harmful to the community.”
One characteristic of cultism on both right and left is a refusal to tolerate even the slightest deviation from orthodoxy. Consider, for example, Donald Trump’s reaction to a January 9, 2022 statement by Republican Senator Mike Rounds:
ROUNDS: We simply did not win the election, as Republicans, for the presidency. And moving forward — and that’s the way we want to look at this — moving forward, we have to refocus once again on what it’s going to take to win the presidency.
Rounds had voted against Trump’s impeachment and “didn’t rule out supporting him if he runs for president again in 2024.” Still, Trump regarded any suggestion that he didn’t win the 2020 presidential election as apostasy and declared:
TRUMP: Is [Rounds] crazy or just stupid? The only reason he did this is because he got my endorsement and easily won his state in 2020, so now he thinks he has time, and those are the only ones, the weak, who will break away. Even though his election will not be coming up for 5 years, I will never endorse this jerk again.”
“Even though his election will not be coming up for 5 years, I will never endorse this jerk again.”
Punishment for apostasy on the left mirrors Trumpism on the right. Among many notable examples was the forced departure of columnist Andrew Sullivan from New York Magazine. Sullivan explained the circumstances in his July 17, 2020 departing column:
What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me . . . They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space.
Exclusion for heretical views is also manifest in many social media groups and listservs. Administrators in both left and right- leaning groups have moved beyond screening comments for relevancy and courtesy to enforcement of orthodoxy. Except for some topics in the sciences and rare holdouts in the humanities, the goal of “intellectual diversity” as President Obama championed it has largely disappeared.
“Except for some topics in the sciences and rare holdouts in the humanities, the goal of “intellectual diversity” as President Obama championed it has largely disappeared.”
This phenomenon was well described by Kill All The Normies author Angela Nagle, supra, in an August 3, 2018 interview in The Economist:
Many people are attracted to progressive politics because they see that the world is unequal and unfair and they want better wages or education or healthcare. But they quickly find out that this isn’t enough. In order to not be purged they have to learn an ever more elaborate and bizarre set of correct positions they must hold on a range of issues . . . .
No humour or intellectual exploration is any longer possible in that environment. Think of any progressive intellectual of any significance from the last century and try to imagine them surviving today. They’d just be purged. They’d have to dissent on some issue and it wouldn’t be tolerated . . . .
Public discourse has never been as idiotic, cruel, irrational and utterly pointless in my lifetime as it is now. The point the culture wars have taken us to is really a war between two irreconcilable sides and each side wants a world that the other would rather die than accept. When you reach that point I’m not sure if a liberal public sphere is possible anymore . . [L]iberalism is extremely weak right now and I think much stronger ideologies are likely to trample it in the coming years . . .
“[L]iberalism is extremely weak right now and I think much stronger ideologies are likely to trample it in the coming years . . .”
The Restorative Justice movement (that portion not captured by cultism on the left) can be an important voice for a rejuvenated Liberal tradition. An example of that voice can be seen in a December 28, 2021 New York Times commentary by Michael Eric Dyson ( University Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and University Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society in the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University):
In our culture, reconciliation is often impossible because one side is hellbent on proving that it is right and the other side wrong. Archbishop Tutu’s vibrant sense of restorative justice might help Americans grapple with two problems in society today: the soul-destroying focus on punishing others, including the overincarceration of people of color, and the temptation to wipe out enemies through the means of cancel culture. Cancel culture fails to acknowledge nuance and complexity and nullifies the notion of a spectrum of ills, caught instead in rigid binaries and vicious absolutes.
Fortunately, there is growing disgust about such absolutist, reactionary measures committed by both the left and the right . . .
Advocates of restorative justice are suspicious of the self-righteousness that can fuel cancel culture. They want to encourage the forgiveness that is a redemptive route to moral restoration . . .
When people claim the political utility of forgiveness, they help stabilize a culture addicted to the satisfaction of petty vengeance, establishing in its stead a measure of justice supported by big-picture moral values and social visions.
[6] You seek unanimity of opinion and routinely dismiss alternative views as displays of “disloyalty” or “fragility.”
A common characteristic of cultist behavior on both far right and left is the refusal to engage in sustained dialogue with those who have opposing views. Expressions like “RINO” (Republican In Name Only) or “White Fragility” are used as dismissive, conversation-stopping epithets. Like Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” targets are portrayed as one-dimensional archetypes of evil or ignorance— not complex human beings who may have worthy insights that don’t fit the group zeitgeist.
Hanna Arendt’s analysis of the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s sounds alarm bells for the present. In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968) she described the growth of mass movements made up of alienated individuals who lacked previous engagement in “political parties . . . professional organizations, or trade unions.” Many had “never join[ed] a party”; “rarely [went] to the polls” or engaged in the give-and-take of political debate. Cult-like “supreme leaders” eventually solidified their power by welcoming and amplifying these characteristics. A worrisome contemporary example was provided by Donald Trump in 2016 when he accepted the Republican presidential nomination: “Nobody knows the system better than me,” he said, “which is why I alone can fix it.”
Arendt also found that the totalitarian mass movements she studied used “new methods in political propaganda” to foster conformity:
“[T]hese movements . . . found a membership that had never been . . .“spoiled” by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the power of reason.”
“Totalitarian mass movements ‘did not need to refute opposing arguments . . . They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the power of reason.’”
Arendt’s analysis suggests that free societies facing anti-democratic populist movements must protect and expand existing democratic structures (e.g. voting rights); encourage broadly based civic education and social engagement; and model successful strategies in daily governance that foster social trust, respect for a diversity of views ( e.g. protecting freedom of expression for both left and right), negotiation, collaboration, and principled problem solving.
Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela provide two instructive role models for liberal renewal. A resource from President Obama is his 2020 book “A Promised Land.” He described there how the “fierce and humorless” idealism of his college years was tempered by the reality of his subsequent work in community organizing. Organizing, he said, “got me out of my own head. I had to listen to, and not just theorize about, what mattered to people.” This experience undoubtedly contributed to his appreciation for negotiation and compromise; his willingness to seek out and listen to a diversity of views; his sense of humility about “not knowing all things,” and his capacity for self-insight.
Many of the intellectual virtues President Obama described in A Promised Land were also crystallized in theory and practice by Nelson Mandela. Mandela is famous, in part, for his greatness of spirit, reflected in observations like “[r]esentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies” and “[i]f you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.” [7] One speech in particular highlights Mandela’s capacity for combining an admiration for socialism and steadfast opposition to white supremacy with open-minded appreciation of admirable qualities in Western societies:
[F]rom my reading of Marxist literature and from conversations with Marxists, I have gained the impression that communists regard the parliamentary system of the West as undemocratic and reactionary. But, on the contrary, I am an admirer of such a system.
The Magna Carta, the Petition of Rights, the Bill of Rights are documents which are held in veneration by democrats throughout the world.
I have great respect for British political institutions, and for the country’s system of justice. I regard the British Parliament as the most democratic institution in the world, and the independence and impartiality of its judiciary never fail to arouse my admiration.
The American Congress, that country’s doctrine of separation of powers, as well as the independence of its judiciary, arouse in me similar sentiments.
I have been influenced in my thinking by both West and East. All this has led me to feel that in my search for a political formula, I should be absolutely impartial and objective.
During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
— From Nelson Mandela’s “Statement from the Dock at the Opening of the Defense Case in the Rivonia Trial” (April 1964).
Consider again the observation from author Angela Nagle, supra that “intellectual exploration is [no] longer possible” in both far left and far right social media groups. “Think of any progressive intellectual of any significance from the last century and try to imagine them surviving today,” she said, “[t]hey’d just be purged.”
The evident likelihood [8] that Nelson Mandela’s magnificent Rivonia Trial speech — including his praise for Western theories of democratic governance — might be banned from activist social media shows how far down the road of political cultism we’ve traveled.
[7] You’re more concerned with shaping others in your own ideological image than encouraging them to think for themselves.
A President of the United States who asserts that “I alone can fix it” and “I am the chosen one” probably won’t be an admirer of independent thinking in others. The same is true on the far left, as seen in Marcuse’s call for intolerance toward “regressive” opinions — and the widespread practice of such intolerance as described by Angela Nagle, supra and by Columbia University linguist John McWhorter in his new book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (2021). [9]
An important resource for encouragement of independent thinking in the academic world is the AAUP “Statement on Professional Ethics” (2009). It states, in part:
As teachers, professors encourage the free pursuit of learning in their students. They hold before them the best scholarly and ethical standards of their discipline. Professors demonstrate respect for students as individuals and adhere to their proper roles as intellectual guides and counselors. Professors make every reasonable effort to foster honest academic conduct and to ensure that their evaluations of students reflect each student’s true merit. They respect the confidential nature of the relationship between professor and student. They avoid any exploitation, harassment, or discriminatory treatment of students. They acknowledge significant academic or scholarly assistance from them. They protect their academic freedom.
How might “student academic freedom” be defined? We previously provided this suggestion in the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 27, 2005):
Although the idea of student academic freedom may seem surprising to many faculty members, the Supreme Court recognized the concept almost 50 years ago in Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957). The court observed that “teachers and students” (not just teachers alone) “must always remain free to inquire, to study, and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.”
The Court upheld a similar view in 1995 in Rosenberger v. the Rector and Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia . . . Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy declared that:
>“In ancient Athens, and, as Europe entered into a new period of intellectual awakening, in places like Bologna, Oxford, and Paris, universities began as voluntary and spontaneous assemblages or concourses for students to speak and to write and to learn. … For the university, by regulation, to cast disapproval on particular viewpoints of its students risks the suppression of free speech and creative inquiry in one of the vital centers for the nation’s intellectual life, its college and university campuses <
Justice Kennedy rightly identified “ancient Athens” as a place where students were seen as integral partners in academic life. Teaching in Plato’s Academy was a form of soul-craft, based on friendship in pursuit of truth. Indeed, the center of Raphael’s famous fresco “The School of Athens” shows Plato, the teacher, pointing up to a vision of eternal harmony, while Aristotle, many years younger and the student, seeks to bring him down to earth to explore and understand the world as it is. Raphael’s image depicts what Aristotle described in his Nicomachean Ethics as an enduring friendship — even as the two disagreed about fundamental philosophical issues.
“Raphael’s image depicts what Aristotle described in his Nicomachean Ethics as an enduring friendship — even as [Plato and Aristotle] disagreed about fundamental philosophical issues.”
A core distinction between teaching and indoctrination was stated in the classic AAUP “Statement of Principles” (1915).
The university teacher, in giving instruction upon controversial matters, while he is under no obligation to hide his own opinion under a mountain of equivocal verbiage, should, if he is fit for his position, be a person of a fair and judicial mind; he should, in dealing with such subjects, set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators; he should cause his students to become familiar with the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine upon the questions at issue; and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently.
An influential example of what the best college teachers do can be seen in Mark Edmundson’s 2008 book Why Read? Edmundson, University Professor of English at the University of Virginia, wrote:
[I]t strikes me that it’s a very bad idea for us teachers to have a preexisting image of how we want our students to turn out . . . No, I think that what we need is for people to understand who and what they are now, then to be open to changing into their own highest mode of being. And that highest mode is something that they must identify by themselves, through encounters with the best that has been known and thought.
Describing his own teaching, Edmundson wrote:
It is not the professor’s business to eradicate every form of what he takes to be retrograde and disgusting behavior. All student perspectives are welcome in class; whether they are racist, or homophobic, or whatever, they must be heard, considered, and responded to without panic. The classroom I am describing is a free space, one where people can speak their innermost thoughts and bring what is dark to light. They may expect to be challenged, but not to be shouted down, written off, or ostracized. Bitter, brutal thoughts can grow prolifically in the mind’s unlighted cellars. But when we bring them into the world and examine them dispassionately, they often lose their force (p. 84).
Edmundson, in the present moment, may be articulating a minority view in higher education. [10] If so, he’s fighting a tendency seen long ago by philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead:
Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.
[8] You feel compelled to confess past ideological sins and demand similar confessions from others.
Robert Jay Lifton (author of Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, 2012) wrote in an earlier essay that the idea of “purification” in totalistic cults “is a continuing process, often institutionalized in the cult of confession, which enforces conformity through guilt and shame evoked by mutual criticism and self-criticism in small groups.” He concluded that “[r]epetitious confession, especially in required meetings, often expresses arrogance in the name of humility” and cited with approval Camus’ observation that “I practice the profession of penitence to be able to end up as a judge . . . The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you.”
Public confession as a form of theatrical humility seems especially strong on the left in American society — notably in the work of Robin DiAngelo. [11] It’s also manifested in a variety of controversial statements professing collective guilt for being a “settler” on “stolen” land — regardless of how many times the land may have been taken or retaken by migrating tribes over millennia. Columbia University historian Jacques Barzun offered a relevant historical summary in his book From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present (2001):
The Caribs whom Columbus first encountered had fought and displaced the Anawaks who occupied the islands. The Aztecs whom Cortez conquered had originally descended from the north and destroyed the previous civilization. To the north and east many of the tribes lived in perpetual warfare, the strong exploiting the weak, and several — notably the Iroquois — had slaves. In short, what happened on the newfound hemisphere in early modern times continued the practice of the old: in ancient Greece alien tribes marching in from the north; likewise in the making of the Roman Empire, in the peopling of the British Isles by Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans; in France, Italy, and Spain by Franks, Normans, Lombards, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and later by Arabs. Everywhere the story is one of invasion, killing, rape, and plunder and occupation of the land that belonged to the vanquished. Today, this fusion or dispersion of peoples and cultures by means of death and destruction is abhorred in principle but flourishing in fact. Africa, the Middle and Far East, and South Central Europe are still theaters of conquest and massacre.
An otherwise friendly critique of what might be called “settler contrition theater” was offered by Atlantic staff writer Graeme Wood in a November 28, 2021 article ‘Land Acknowledgments’ Are Just Moral Exhibitionism.
Wood wrote that:
Do you acknowledge the Quinnipiac, or the tribes they at times allied with the English to fight? Or both? . . . Nor is there an “easy way” to reckon with this past. In the early 1600s, as many as 90 percent of the Quinnipiac were wiped out, along with other coastal Native Americans, by chicken pox and other diseases imported by Europeans. How does one assign blame for the spread of disease, hundreds of years before anyone knew diseases were something other than the wrath of God? (Does China owe Europe reparations for the Black Death, which came, like COVID-19, from Hubei? Or should China take two Opium Wars and call it even?)
“ The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you.”
— Albert Camus
Striving to be truthful about the past has become an admirable aspiration in the Western World. Unfortunately, this kind of transparency isn’t being replicated worldwide — as evidenced in the second image below.
Built in 2018: National Lynching Memorial installed adjacent to the state capital in Montgomery, Alabama.
Removed and dismantled in 2021: Tiananmen Square massacre “Pillar of Shame” at Hong Kong University.
Candid acknowledgment of historical truth can be a means to help define a cultural trajectory toward what President Obama described as “a constant widening of our founding creed to embrace all and not just some” (2017 Farewell Address). An alternative focus on past crimes without any context (e.g. excluding or denying the long history of abolitionism in the United States, starting with the founding in 1775 of one of the world’s first antislavery societies) becomes a polarizing exercise in penitential theater. The latter may be helping tear the United States apart.
French writer and philosopher Pascal Bruckner described modern Europeans as “[b]rooding over its past crimes (slavery, imperialism, fascism, communism) . . . always ready to feel pity for the world’s sorrows and to take responsibility for them” (Europe’s Guilty Conscience, 2010) In a context where much of the rest of humanity refuses to engage in comparable self-flagellation (e.g. Russia is busy rehabilitating Stalin), single-minded European and American contrition could begin to look suspiciously like a new form of congratulatory exceptionalism.
What Robert Jay Lifton called “the cult of confession” has deep roots in Western religious and political history. Probably the most grotesque form came in Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s. In that context, Hanna Arendt contemplated “the amazing fact” that many of the accused — loyal Communists all — declined to waiver “even when the monster [began] to devour its own children.” [12] Instead, “to the wonder of the whole civilized world” they were “even willing to help” the prosecution and facilitate their “own death sentence if only [their] status as a member of the movement [was] not touched” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1968).
[9] You tend to see individuals — for all their complexity — as dualistic manifestations of good or evil.
George Orwell’s 1984 provides additional insight into how a dystopian cult might exercise power. One essential activity for members of the “Outer Party of Oceania” was to engage in daily “Two Minutes of Hate” directed against the arch-villain “Emmanuel Goldstein.” Goldstein was such a one-dimensional character that none of the “Two Minutes” participants were entirely sure he was alive. That question became irrelevant, however, since Goldstein’s purpose was to be as singular as his existence: He was an object of hatred created to inflame, unify, and lobotomize the group. Knowing anything about Goldstein as a person (beyond a summary of his condemned, heretical ideas) might induce complex feelings of empathy, curiosity, or even the untenable idea that “Big Brother” didn’t define all Truth and Reality itself.
Fortunately, there are better ways to understand the complexity of the human mind. Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, for example, contains an evocative reference to “the better angels of our nature.” There’s considerable philosophy in that phrase, including a sense that the human heart is not wholly “good” or “evil,” but a blending of competing drives and interests, ultimately manageable by a higher self. The underlying theory behind a growing interest in restorative justice is that individuals can strengthen the higher self in ways that build admirable individuals and communities.
Lincoln’s life history is an example of the evolution of the “better angels” he identified. His early views on race were initially derived from the cultural environment he shared with other poor whites in Kentucky and Indiana. He then grew increasingly tormented by his observations of slavery; fought against its expansion; disputed any suggestion that African-Americans were somehow “not included in the Declaration of Independence”; issued the Emancipation Proclamation; was instrumental to adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment; and eventually became an advocate of expanded voting rights for African-Americans (his April 11, 1865 speech on that topic led directly to his assassination by John Wilkes Booth).
W.E.B. Du Bois could not ignore Lincoln’s earlier expression of racist views, but he described the trajectory of Lincoln’s moral growth in his 1922 essay “Again Lincoln.”
Abraham Lincoln was perhaps the greatest figure of the nineteenth century. Certainly of the five masters,–Napoleon, Bismarck, Victoria, Browning and Lincoln, Lincoln is to me the most human and lovable. And I love him not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet triumphed. The world . . . is full of folk whose taste was educated in the gutter. The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: See this man. He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.
The difficulty is that ignorant folk and inexperienced try continually to paint humanity as all good or all evil . . .
Frederick Douglass was equally candid in challenging Lincoln’s shortcomings, but was also capable of seeing Lincoln whole. See our related MEDIUM essay: Frederick Douglass Calls Out Abraham Lincoln: Humanity and Accountability in Social Justice Discourse.
The human characteristics Du Bois and Douglass saw in Lincoln encompassed empathy, self-insight, skillful adaptation, courage, and a strategic awareness of how to best foster enduring social change. These qualities are not unique; they can arise and evolve in tension with other components of human psyche. Microbiologist Rene Dubos wrote in this regard:
Every perceptive adult knows he is part beast and part saint, a mixture of folly and reason, love and hate, courage and cowardice. He can be at the same time believer and doubter, idealist and skeptic, altruistic citizen and selfish hedonist. The coexistence of these conflicting traits naturally causes tension but it is nonetheless compatible with sanity. In a mysterious way, the search for identity and the pursuit of self-selected goals harmonize opposites and facilitate the integration of discordant human traits into some kind of working accord. — The God Within (1972).
There’s an analogous metaphor in Plato’s Phaedrus:
Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure. And let the figure be composite — a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of [human beings] are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him.
This insight, predating Freud by over 2,000 years, does not suggest unharnessing or trying to eliminate the “ignoble” horse (human beings aren’t gods). What the human charioteer — the higher self — does is control and channel the energy of both horses to reach higher ends. In this sense, the weakness of the human charioteer becomes a blended component of his strength.
[end]
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*The word “cult” has multiple definitions. We use it here to describe “great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work” (Merriam-Webster) combined with a rigidly enforced totalistic ideology that seeks to claim “ownership of reality itself” (Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality, 2019, location #52). See our related discussion in Sign #3.
NOTES
The notes below are also directly linked in the text.
[1] One of the best summaries on this topic can be found in E.O. Wilson’s Social Conquest of the Earth (p. 56) (Wilson was Pellegrino University Research Professor, Emeritus at Harvard University; a Member of the National Academy of Sciences; a winner of the National Medal of Science; and a recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes for General Nonfiction):
The expected consequences of this evolutionary process in humans are the following: • Intense competition occurs between groups, in many circumstances including territorial aggression. • Group composition is unstable, because of the advantage of increasing group size accruing from immigration, ideological proselytization, and conquest, pitted against the opportunities to gain advantage by usurpation within the group and fission to create new groups. • An unavoidable and perpetual war exists between honor, virtue, and duty, the products of group selection, on one side, and selfishness, cowardice, and hypocrisy, the products of individual selection, on the other side. • The perfecting of quick and expert reading of intention in others has been paramount in the evolution of human social behavior. • Much of culture, including especially the content of the creative arts, has arisen from the inevitable clash of individual selection and group selection. In summary, the human condition is an endemic turmoil rooted in the evolution processes that created us. The worst in our nature coexists with the best, and so it will ever be. To scrub it out, if such were possible, would make us less than human.
[2] Crossman, The God That Failed (1949), p. 3.
[3] Our ongoing First Amendment outline includes these examples:
[a] Tinker v. Des Moines School District 393 U.S. 503, 509 (1969) (wearing armbands in school as silent protest against the Viet-Nam war protected by the First Amendment)
[b] Papish v. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri 410 U.S. 667, 670 (1973) (distribution of newspaper containing offensive language and depicting policemen raping the Statue of Liberty): The court held that “the mere dissemination of ideas — no matter how offensive to good taste — on a state university campus may not be shut off in the name alone of ‘conventions of decency.’”
[c] Joyner v. Whiting 477 F.2d 456 (4th Cir., 1973) The court in Joyner ruled that the president of North Carolina Central University (“the first public liberal arts institution for African Americans in the nation”) could not withhold funds for a campus newspaper that expressed opposition to enrollment of white students and endorsed the statement that “aggression is the order of the day”.
[d] In the 1980s college administrators typically protected the free speech rights of provocative speakers like Louis Farrakhan and Kwame Ture, widely viewed as racist and anti-Semitic. See this example from the University of Pennsylvania. By doing so they established viewpoint neutral standards that protect lawful expression from multiple perspectives, left and right.
[e] Felber v. Yudof (N.D. Calif., December 22, 2011) (university not liable under the facts presented for failing to prevent student-on-student harassment). See our MEDIUM article: Distinguishing criticism of Israel from Anti-Semitic Harassment of Jewish students (First Amendment rights of the “Students for Justice in Palestine” and the “Muslim Student Association” upheld).
[4] See, generally, “For A Modest Personality Trait, Intellectual Humility Packs A Punch” (Duke University Magazine, March 17, 2017
[5] See our related MEDIUM essay: “Belief + Doubt = Sanity.” We cited a speech by physicist Richard Feynman at a CalTech forum in 1956:
“[I]t is imperative in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress in science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature. To make progress in understanding we must remain modest and allow that we do not know. Nothing is certain or proved beyond all doubt. You investigate for curiosity, because it is unknown, not because you know the answer. And as you develop more information in the sciences, it is not that you are finding out the truth, but that you are finding out that this or that is more or less likely.
That is, if we investigate further, we find that the statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known to different degrees of certainty: ‘It is very much more likely that so and so is true than that it is not true;’ or ‘such and such is almost certain but there is still a little bit of doubt;’ or — at the other extreme — ‘well, we really don’t know.’ Every one of the concepts of science is on a scale graduated somewhere between, but at neither end of, absolute falsity or absolute truth.
It is necessary, I believe, to accept this idea, not only for science, but also for other things; it is of great value to acknowledge ignorance. It is a fact that when we make decisions in our life we don’t necessarily know that we are making them correctly; we only think that we are doing the best we can . . .
I think that when we know that we actually do live in uncertainty, then we ought to admit it; it is of great value to realize that we do not know the answers to different questions. This attitude of mind — this attitude of uncertainty — is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire. It becomes a habit of thought. Once acquired, one cannot retreat from it any more.”
[6] See the April 18, 2003 Chronicle Review (commentary by Gary Pavela)
“In my senior-level seminar on historiography, I encountered this observation from the Oxford philosopher W.H. Walsh in his book An Introduction to Philosophy of History (1951):
“Just as a portrait painter sees his subject from his own peculiar point of view, but would nevertheless be said to have some insight into that subject’s ‘real’ nature, so too the historian must look at the past with his own presuppositions, but is not thereby cut off from all understanding of it”.
For me, Walsh’s ‘portrait painter’ metaphor has been an invaluable guide through the intellectual world of the past 40 years. Truth, to some extent, is culturally defined, and remains elusive. But cynicism about seeing or defining any aspect of truth is one of the great (and inherently self-contradictory) falsehoods of our time.
[7] Cited in the Los Angeles Times: Nelson Mandela transformed himself and then his nation, December 6, 2013).
[8] I personally experienced this phenomenon when a Restorative Justice listserv administrator refused to share a message containing an excerpt from the Mandela speech — along with other examples of civil rights leaders expressing “traditional liberal” perspectives.
[9] Examples are provided by Columbia University linguist John McWhorter in his new book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (2021). One social media post he cited highlights the ultra-puritanism many others have encountered:
A friend wrote on Facebook that they agree with Black Lives Matter, only to be roasted by an anonymous person: Wait a minute! You “agree” with them? That implies you get to disagree with them! That’s like saying you “agree” with the law of gravity! You as a white person don’t get to “agree” OR “disagree” when black people assert something! Saying you “agree” with them is EVERY bit as arrogant as disputing them!
McWhorter concluded:
You are in Russia under Stalin. You no more question KenDiAngelonian gospel than you question Romans or Corinthians. The Elect are not about diversity of thought. Eliminating it, on race issues, is their reason for being.
[10] A comparable perspective about the scope of freedom of expression outside the classroom was presented in the 1974 Report from the Committee on Freedom of Expression at Yale University, chaired by the distinguished historian C.Vann Woodward:
Because few other institutions in our society have the same central function, few assign such high priority to freedom of expression . . . Because no other kind of institution combines the discovery and dissemination of basic knowledge with teaching, none confronts quite the same problems as a university . . .
[A] university . . . is not primarily a fellowship, a club, a circle of friends, a replica of the civil society outside it. Without sacrificing its central purpose, it cannot make its primary and dominant value the fostering of friendship, solidarity, harmony, civility, or mutual respect. To be sure, these are important values; other institutions may properly assign them the highest, and not merely a subordinate priority; and a good university will seek and may in some significant measure attain these ends. But it will never let these values, important as they are, override its central purpose. We value freedom of expression precisely because it provides a forum for the new, the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox.
Current policies at Yale cite the Woodward Report and urge students to abide by it:
Freedom of expression is especially important in an academic community, where the search for truth holds a primary value. In 1975, a committee chaired by the late C. Vann Woodward, one of Yale’s most distinguished professors, issued the Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at Yale, informally called the Woodward Report. This document emphasizes that the history of intellectual growth and discovery demonstrates the need to be able to “think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.” The report acknowledges that such freedom may sometimes make life uncomfortable in a small society such as a college. But it also asserts that “because no other institution combines the discovery and dissemination of basic knowledge with teaching, few need assign such high priority to it.”
Yale’s commitment to freedom of expression means that when you agree to matriculate, you join a community where “the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox” must be tolerated. When you encounter people who think differently than you do, you will be expected to honor their free expression, even when what they have to say seems wrong or offensive to you.
See also the 2014 Report from the Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago:
[I]t is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Although the University greatly values civility, and although all members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.
[11] Philosophy professor Craig Delancey offered this conclusion about DiAngelo’s work in his essay White Fragility and the Judge-Penitent (Areo, August 20, 2020)
In White Fragility, DiAngelo repeatedly recounts how white audiences find her diversity training seminars a kind of torture. She takes this as proof that they are racists. Yet, this is the best case future that DiAngelo offers us: society as an endless diversity training seminar, in which we spend our lives ferreting out and denouncing the racism that will always lurk in white individuals, white bodies and the white collective. DiAngelo and others like her will be the accusers and the judges at this perpetual struggle session, having earned their right to preside because they are the most repentant.
[12] Richard Wright (author of Native Son and Black Boy) joined a Communist Party unit in Chicago and wrote in The God That Failed about a bizarre incident when a forceful man arrived, purporting to be from Party Headquarters. This authoritative sounding man immediately initiated a “purge” and had the entire Unit in turmoil. At least one member made an abject “confession” to crimes he couldn’t remember.
The Scene:
Wright and a colleague examined a suitcase the “authoritative new member” left behind after he disappeared.
What was found in the suitcase? (from pp. 125-126 in The God That Failed)
“There were long dissertations written in long-hand; some were political and others dealt with the history of art. Finally we found a letter with a Detroit return address and I promptly wrote asking news of our esteemed member.
A few days later a letter came which said in part:
“Dear Sir: In reply to your letter, we beg to inform you that Mr. Young who was a patient in our institution and who escaped from our custody a few months ago, has been apprehended and returned to this institution for mental treatment.”
I was thunderstruck. Was this true? Undoubtedly it was. Then what kind of club did we run that a lunatic could step into it and help run it? Were we all so mad that we could not detect a madman when we saw one?
I made a motion that all charges against Swann be dropped, which was done. I offered Swann an apology, but as the leader of the Chicago John Reed Club I was a sobered and chastened Communist.”
