[lbo-talk] who supports/opposes war on Iraq?

[Marvin Gandall]

Wojtek wrote:
> You seem to be reducing the phenomemon in question to ethnocentrism
> (jingoism) which exists, in various extents, in every human society.  In
> my
> original posting, however, I referred not only to anti-foreign sentiments,
> but to vicious bashing of domestic enemies, especially liberals.  I would
> say that liberal-bashing outweighs foreigner-bashing by the factor at
> least
> 2:1.
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They usually go together - what some describe as components of an
"authoritarian personality".
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WS:
> This is not really about imperialism, and insisting as you and Carrol do
> that it is really misses an important point that such attitudes exist
> regardless of the imperial status of the country.  For example, the
> Russian
> population was far less jingoistic during the heyday of the Soviet empire
> that it is now, when their empire is but fading memories.
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I think the Soviet Union had a fundamentally different social system and
foreign policy - the two are not unrelated - than the Western imperialist
powers, so I hesitate to describe it as an "empire". Although it had
unpopular occupation forces in Eastern Europe and frequently weighted the
terms of Comecon trade to its advantage, there does not seem to me to have
been the same inherent impulse to economic expansion as in the capitalist
societies. I think the motives were essentially military - to create a
buffer zone against the Western powers after WW II.  I see the relative lack
of jingoism of the Soviet people as being an outgrowth of the
non-imperialist nature of the USSR. You see it as being in contradiction to
Russian "imperialism" - as an outgrowth of some "cognitive predisposition"
to cooperation of the Russian people.
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WS:
> My thinking on this issue goes more along the line argued by George Lakoff
> in _Moral Politics_ - that people are cognitively predisposed to either
> ideologies of hate, fear individualism and domination, or nurturing,
> cooperation, and mutualism.  Lakoff also claims that each these ideologies
> change the chemical structure of the brain, thus making self-perpetuation
> easier.
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I think people are contradictory beings with the potential for being both
more and less cooperative at different times in their lives, and that what
quality predominates will often depend on the context. So you get
communities banding together in some circumstances - usually a crisis which
demands cooperation - and dividing when the crisis abates. That's frequently
the fate of revolutions, which tend to progress from an heroic
self-sacrificing first generation to subsequent ones who take what has been
won for granted, and pursue more individual interests. How do you determine,
for example, whether the Russians and Chinese - who have within a lifetime
produced and experienced cultures celebrating the "collective" and now the
"individual" - are "cognitively disposed" to one or the other? I prefer
explanations which trace these developments primarily with reference to the
technological and economic pressures of the late-century world capitalist
economy bearing down on these societies .
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WS:
> I do not know for sure what, if anything, makes the US-society more
> cognitively predisposed to right wing ideology and attitudes than, say,
> European societies.  Perhaps neuroscience will find that answer one day -
> but right now we can only speculate.  My speculation is that the social
> structure and spatial organization of the US society (e.g. individualism,
> alienation, geographic isolation) tend to produce affective personality
> disorders - no doubt grounded in brain chemistry - that make people more
> prone to fear, inability to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity and in
> response to embrace authoritarian aggression, the right wing drivel and
> fundamentalist religion as crutches to cope with these disorders.
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Before WWII, US society was less disposed than European ones to embrace
right-wing ideologies like fascism. Over time, after the Second World War,
the opposite case could be made, and you are making it. So what changed -
the brain chemistry of the respective populations over the life of one or
two generations; or the rise of the US as the pre-eminent imperialist power
in the world, confronted by a nuclear-armed USSR and the Chinese and
colonial revolutions, and the effect these challenges had on the
militarization and related internal dynamics of US society?