Much ink has been spilled by various commentators on the violence that's irrupted anew in recent weeks in schools and prisons (which distinction is apparently nominal), but none gets close to identifying the nature of the problem which is hinted at in the Prime Minister's labelling of some children perpetrators as "monsters." In the first place, let's not delude ourselves with the "these are children" nonsense. They were children once, but they're something else now, as anyone who has seen the video of the two boys jumping out of a car and shooting another young man to death in daylight could attest.
The question is, how do children become monsters? How, as a matter of fact, do they become human? The perception that they're born human is genetically true, we're all the same animal. But it's not true in any other sense, and no one believes it is–the US is in the throes of a "black lives matter" campaign, which is based in the unassailable facts of mass incarceration and murder of black people far more than any other ethnic group in that country. Examples of the different valuations of life and lives abound everywhere–women, poor people, ethnic minorities, lower castes, immigrants.
Away from Trinidad, but relevant to it, is the fundamental issue of the nature of humanity and perceptions and ideas of the human, and how fragile and transient they are. In brief, we're all born human animals, but we have to be made into human beings. The instability of the changing complex of behaviours and rules which comprise this distinction has been shown time and again, and has been examined since the Enlightenment first proposed that all people are equal.
Shakespeare's Tempest, Golding's Lord of the Flies, Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984, have all looked at the ticklish problem of sentience and its construction in a society from a variety of angles. The meta theme of these creative works is the randomness of values–ie, what constitutes good, bad, monster, man is hardly universal, and subject to change with very little effort.
As psychologists Philip Zimbardo (who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment) and Stanley Miligram, and now, economists like George Akerlof and Richard Thaler, have shown, human beings are manipulable to a frightening degree with very little effort, especially via the media.
In the Stanford Prison Experiment in the 1970s (of which story a movie was made recently), 20 normal middle class white males, chosen at random, were turned into sadists and mute, un-resisting victims, within five days. This by simply changing the parameters of the social system: the rules, the clothes, the expectations, and the physical environment, which were all patently artificial, and could be stopped upon request.
Way before Zimbardo, George Orwell had envisioned much the same thing in his novel 1984, whose dynamics and assumptions about control and human response to oppression, fear and deprivation, have been proven time and again to be a more-than-accurate reflection of "reality."
In 1984, the rulers of the party sought to control society via the control of thought, memory, and speech by creating a new language, conveniently rewriting history, constant surveillance, and enforcing its message via repetition in the media, and treating violations with overwhelming violence. One of the subtler effects of these machinations was to control the sense of time of the society. In effect, there was no sense of progression or progressive evolution, no sense of a future, merely a present.
By controlling these elements of human existence, Orwell's party and its embodiment, Big Brother, was able to perpetuate its regime, which was so abominable, you wonder how it could survive. It doesn't take much deep introspection to realise that the fundamental elements of such are state pervade our small nation.
Most evident is the sense of timelessness, the sense that we're always starting over, thanks to the changes in regime in the last couple of decades, but also a highly fluid population, a significant fraction of which is constantly migrating and being replaced by immigrants. But the rest, the re-writing and manipulation of history, the thought control (via media, mainly, using the themes of "nationalism" and "patriotism") and the steady purging of dissent (like academic and professional intimidation) also line up with Orwell's model.
But 1984 is fiction, not reality, right? Wrong. In a fascinating volume, On 1984, Orwell and Our Future, edited by Abbot Gleason, Martha Nussbaum and Jack Goldsmith, Zimbardo and other philosophers, media scholars, and social scientists, agree on the fundamental accuracy of Orwell's vision of society and its dynamics, and give examples of its application in contemporary life.
On the subject of the nature of humanity in dystopia, Nussbaum uses her contribution, "The Death of Pity," to examine the Reaganite re-engineering of the US and its "political approach to emotions in general and compassion in particular." The US changed from the New Deal nation to one which where its citizens were urged to eschew complexity and emotional nuance for the primal emotions of revenge, hatred, greed and individualism whose terminus was narcissism. (In other words, Donald Trump.)
Nussbaum's most important point is: "the intrinsic value of a human being is not innate. It is a developmental achievement and it can be blocked." This value is cultivated through art, (and other institutions, like education). Collectively, they bestow not just emotional intelligence, but an enlarged emotional vocabulary, which allows humans to distinguish the nuances and subtleties of their selves and others.
It's pretty clear, to get back to the beginning of this essay, that this cultivation of the human is precisely what's responsible for our present problems. But are there solutions?
�2 (Continued next week)