Ingrained

   Have you ever read a book that started off by asking you why you decided to read that book you're now reading?  It was an interesting start and perhaps a gamble for an author to write that, as if taking a survey from a store asking why you chose that particular store but before entering the store.  So what is it about a book that gets you to read it...the reviews, the comments on the dust jacket, the artwork, the opening pitch on the inside flap, a recommendation from a friend, an interview on a podcast, a random stopover at an airport?  Anyway, this particular book was just a series of random thoughts, in fact W. Kamau Bell calls them awkward thoughts (his book is actually titled The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell), and here's how he wrote about a portion of his childhood in the south and his thoughts of returning there in his book, bearing in mind that the author is big (6'4"), black, and a comedian: I'm really happy that I spent so much time there as a kid, because it means that "the South" doesn't freak me out the way it freaks out many people I know who have never been there.  I have seen the look on people's faces --people who have clearly never been to the South-- when I tell them that I'm going to visit my dad in Alabama.  Often their response is to contort their faces into a confused yet stunned rictus and ask incredulously, "What's that like?"  To these people, saying, "I'm headed to the South," is like saying, "I'm headed to my own lynching and I decided to bring the rope just to make it easier on the Klansman."  It is one of my enduring frustrations with this country.  People live in their part of the union, and if they don't travel a lot then there is a tendency to believe that whatever is going on in their part of the union is what goes on in the "real America."  And sometimes it gets even worse.  People think the things going on in other parts are actually anti-American.

   Sad to say but that was (is) actually part of how I feel as well about the South.  Not the big cities such as New Orleans and Atlanta or even Houston and Raleigh, places where I've had tons of fun and have met some great and interesting people.  But with my tan skin and minus a Hawaiian shirt, the thought of having my car break down in a distant country road or as Robin Williams said, hearing the change in voices when those in a bar get drunk, well, somewhere in the back of my mind I'd be asking, "Why did I come here?"  I know, it is ridiculous to think that way in this day and age, likely the result of me seeing too many movies that dig in stereotypes, that and distant background noise that's somehow been ingrained in my head.  Call it what you will --prejudice, bias, mob-mentality, my-way-or-the-highway-- but it exists for most all of us.  Take this example on a piece in The New Yorker on an election rally by then-candidate Trump in Grand Junction, Colorado; the author writes: Along with other members of the press, I was escorted into a pen near the back, where a metal fence separated us from the crowd.  At that time, some prominent polls showed Clinton leading by more than ten percentage points, and Trump often claimed that the election might be rigged.  During the rally he said, “There’s a voter fraud also with the media, because they so poison the minds of the people by writing false stories.”  He pointed in our direction, describing us as “criminals,” among other things: “They’re lying, they’re cheating, they’re stealing!  They’re doing everything, these people right back here!”  The attacks came every few minutes, and they served as a kind of tether to the speech.  The material could have drifted off into abstraction—e-mails, Benghazi, the Washington swamp.  But every time Trump pointed at the media, the crowd turned, and by the end people were screaming and cursing at us.  One man tried to climb over the barrier, and security guards had to drag him away.  Such behavior is out of character for residents of rural Colorado, where politeness and public decency are highly valued.  Erin McIntyre, a Grand Junction native who works for the Daily Sentinel, the local paper, stood in the crowd, where the people around her screamed at the journalists: “Lock them up!” “Hang them all!” “Electric chair!”  Afterward, McIntyre posted a description of the event on Facebook. “I thought I knew Mesa County,” she wrote. “That’s not what I saw yesterday.  And it scared me.”

    It's difficult to understand how much being with a majority can change one's normal behavior.  Psychologists and sociologists have tried to pin down how and why that happens, how inhibitions can fall and sometimes slowly reveal layers that have long been repressed underneath, feelings and emotions that might surprise even the person having them.  Think of generations-old beliefs, Chinese-Japanese, Sunni-Shia, Tutsi-Hutu, black,white, red, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Kurd, Mexican, Jew.  The list could go on and on throughout our history as parents pass down beliefs taught from their parents, consciously or not.   I bring some of this to mind --those words of the South by author Bell-- because you've likely heard about a bill now going through the legislature of Missouri, one which says in part: Currently, under the Missouri Human Rights Act (MHRA), a practice is unlawful when the protected classification is a contributing factor in the decision to discriminate.  This act changes that standard to the motivating factor.  The motivating factor is defined to mean that the employee's protected classification actually played a role in the adverse action or decision and had a determinative influence on the adverse decision or action.   It's caused the NAACP to issue a travel advisory for pretty much the entire month, saying in a press release: ...calls for African American travelers, visitors and Missourians to pay special attention and exercise extreme caution when traveling throughout the state given the series of questionable, race-based incidents occurring statewide recently, and noted therein...“The NAACP is a membership-based advocacy organization that has worked for generations to protect the hard-fought freedoms of all American citizens --freedoms which are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution-- and one of the most basic of those freedoms is the ability to freely travel from state-to-state without fear of threat, violence or harm,” said Derrick Johnson, interim president and CEO.  “The numerous racist incidents, and the statistics cited by the Missouri Attorney General in the advisory, namely the fact that African Americans in Missouri are 75 percent more likely to be stopped and searched by law enforcement officers than Caucasians, are unconscionable, and are simply unacceptable in a progressive society.

    Hmm, is this presaging an upswelling of what we once thought was almost gone?  One only has to think back to the era of the Civil War when the North fought the South in the U.S. and over 600,000 men were killed (this "civil war" statistic of the U.S. is dwarfed by the series of Chinese rebellions and civil wars which have cost that country over 120 million deaths).  So what makes a person, state or country feel that it is right, or right enough to raise hackles and perhaps even go to war?  In a review of a series of books on such subjects, author Elizabeth Kolbert writes in The New Yorker that: ...New discoveries about the human mind show the limitation of reason...As everyone who’s followed the research --or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today-- knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational.  Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now.  Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?  In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question...Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them.  Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments...Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.”  Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous.  Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses.  Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.  Other researchers have unearthed nearly identical results.  Continues Kolbert: Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado, are also cognitive scientists.  They, too, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps more pertinently, malfunctions.  They begin their book, “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” (Riverhead), with a look at toilets...Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain.  It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about.  Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea.  Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map.  The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)  Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results.  “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write.  And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem.  If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless.  When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views.

   The arguments, if they escalate to that, can extend well beyond the political arena, say to our beliefs whether the death penalty is an effective deterrent or should everyone have the right to own a handgun, or should a hijab or kippa be allowed in schools, or whether vaccines are good or that humans are causing climate change...maybe even whether you should legally look askance at a black person while in Missouri.  What will it take for this history of our learnings to de-escalate many of our beliefs, enough at least to remove them from our laws and remove them from our readiness to go to battle?  Perhaps it will take something far greater than our species, something science fiction writers have emulated in books such as Arrival and The Day the Earth Stood Still.  In the latter, the main character basically warns a gathering of the leaders of many nations to keep your aggression in your own backyard.  Bring it out into space and your planet will be destroyed.  "The decision rests with you," he adds.  And as old and as dated as the film version of the book might be, it might be wise to think about what it would take to make all of us --humanity-- band together and forget our differences, real or imagined.  It's like listening to that voice in the back of your head that tells you "this is wrong" or "despite what they're telling you, this is the right thing to do."  In the case of our planet, the decision would rest with...well, us.