(if you feel like sticking with this it will eventually get around to Fox News and all the usual suspects)
This persistence of Evil, its refusal to die and instead live on as Fear, hate and blame in group memory is nothing new of course and was old before the Shakespeare play. But the modern world's ability to spread and keep alive inflammatory memes and even breathe new life into old memories of evil is nothing like it was in Shakespeare's day... though they well able to use the latest 16th century media and methods in England to fan the flames against Catholics or Protestants, French, Jews, Irish, Spanish and anyone that they wanted to... maybe the odd witch... and in that England was of course no different than anywhere else back then or before or since.
Movements and causes
We all know plenty of examples of past wrongs that are very alive today... Some of them are our favorite causes even. They may all be justified in some way and others not as much and yet, regardless of merit, many people are prisoners of the movements the old inequities engender and get caught up in the myths and legends of their family and the groups they feel allegiance to. Some evils are remembered differently and are used today to explain away an unjust status quo. Just as bad news dominates and fascinates us in current events, evil from the past lives on and inspires or motivates for more than one reason than a lot of less sensational good.There is a lot of nice stuff on the Documentary channels but there is also an awful lot of War and violence and crime and punishment and crazy people in general and the harm they did. While these presentations are mostly balanced and reasonably well researched there are people with different memories and stories they believe who reject at least some conclusions or assumptions in each film. And historical fiction is no different, for instance White Americans will still be mostly rooting for the cavalry to save the day in a Western and rather
forget Little Big Horn or Wounded Knee (if they even knew much about them in the first place), while a Neo Nazi will not be rooting for for Allies in a War film... My Wife's long dead Former Nazi party member Grandfather was incensed when he saw episodes of "
Combat!" and "
Hogan's Heroes" on US TV during a visit "It vas not like zat!!!". He did not live long enough to be able to screen the war over and over again on cable and would that have helped him revise his own certainties? I never did find out how he came to see the war in the end and maybe nobody else did either. It may be indicative that he used to holiday in all white Iceland back in the 60's....very Aryan looking at least... but maybe it was just a quiet and inexpensive place to take a vacation.
Evil may be remembered in a wrong headed way or more as a set of lies told to justify something or to re-interpret bitter memories to place your people in a better or more heroic/tragic light skipping over the less favorable details. It may be material used and abused to pump up a media circus or co-opted by powerful interests for shortsighted economic and political mistaken ends... (insert Fox clone and most pertinent industrial group or component of oligarchy, religion etc. that fits.) They enable evil's of the past to live on longer and stronger past their fade by date. The pundit or preacher or entertainer may just be filling a market need by pandering to what people think they know and what they believe they must fear. But there has to be a moral limit to how much to pander... if the advertising revenues justify it there is no doubt apparently.
Some who do not have a sufficiently motivating cause of their own may search for a cause to fill an open personal need for an enemy who one can feel good about opposing. And some of the history accepted today is a misleading mishmash that we can project our own fears and needs onto. We can buy into rewriting facts or correcting lies and we are all prey to both possibilities. Relearning history and finding a way to get some resolution and closure may be tantamount to treason for some people in some struggles who need only a struggle for total victory against the ancient enemy, the hereditary injustice which may have grown in the retelling or be exactly as handed down though the perpetrators may be in complete denial. And for them the destination is not as important as the means to get there the purpose and life style it enables and even justifies. And again they may be fighting an evil in a way that guarantees more or worse to come. How to know?... inaction can let evil go unchallenged.
Fighting the correct components of evil at the right time in the right place in the right way can finally bury it for good. Easy to say, actually succeeding in that, not so much. Maybe it is just time we need and wait for the evil to die with the stubborn people who fight to retain poisoned legacies. But passive waiting only allows the more motivated to pass on the evil in a renewed updated way to yet another generation.
As George Orwell once explained, whoever controls the past, controls the present
It is astonishing that so many
New Deal deniers have been nursing their FDR hatred for so long that it can pop right up again 76 + years later. How to smack them down gently with reality so they don't simmer in a vengeful state like some twisted reactionary multi generational version of the
Chushingura story, biding their time in zealous loyalty to a defeated master, but unlike the Japanese tale, no heroics and ritual death at the end... instead it's a sneaky, incremental oligarchical claw-back of prerogatives and policies, which ultimately sabotage the next set of financial safeguards till they finally cause the next semi or full blown depression. Or a Neo-Nixonian version of the tale: NeoCon revenge culminating in the Bush II years, but only after step by step imposition of their world view in the face of reality and focused on the destruction of everything they could from the progressive years in America. It is not so much that they are evil... it's just that they have reasons to learn the wrong things from history and motivations to keep these notions alive beyond all reason... They might as well be singing Dixie like they really mean it... like it was still 1860. Their counter reactions are all out of proportion to the "problems" they think their enemies have caused and fail to see why the extremes of their reaction will absolutely guarantee, as we have seen recently,a very vigorous progressive political counter-reaction much to the the conservatives befuddlement and rage.
Empires
And think of how many other lingering wrongs endure in every part of the world? The memories of past empires and the deaths, suffering, deprivations and injustice they caused by their very coming into being. There is not a single tribe or nationality that does not harbor mythologies of either being the standard bearer for "civilization" versus the barbarians next door or else as the victims of it are the tenders of the flame of a lost past or stolen land or identity when the evil invaders despoiled them of that which they held most dear. The one enduring law of human history seems to be if a people can be suppressed and dominated by others who have the power to do so it will happen one way or another... softly or harshly, wrongly in the short term or inevitably in the long term. And the loser in this interaction risks disappearing entirely unless the invaded or suppressed group finds ways within their own identity that empower or enable them to change or adapt or fight back whether directly or indirectly, constructively or destructively. Finding ways to endure and survive and even come back may bring out the best of their heritage or the worst or both. And inevitably some evil will be kept alive by both sides. We in the US of A live on the bones of peoples decimated by disease and then trampled underfoot by our ancestors who ignored or reviled or belittled and marginalized them up until the present day. I'd say they have been very patient with history....and also with those of us who descend from those who wronged them by action or inaction or ignorance.
I do not want to pick on the USA in particular and I haven't even got to the history of slavery here. Every tribe and people who lived in the Americas before Columbus represented a long history of struggle and replacement and effacement and conquest and bitter rivalries as well as trade and peaceful coexistence. The point is even though we have collectively transgressed against them they were no different than us ultimately. And no different from the rest of humanity before or since.
Our wrongs against them are just newer, bigger and better documented than theirs but no more justifiable or deniable. And all groups have gained or lost at the hands of others over and over again whether by direct design or by varying degrees of accident and fate... and regularly each group find themselves trapped in victor and vanquished roles of Hubris in order to explain what happened to themselves, and that can evolve for some into victor guilt-hubris and victim-hood entitlement-hubris ... where a myopic view of one's own suffering or the suffering of one's people becomes so important as to minimize, deny or overlook the historical wrongs to or suffering of others. These cherished justification myths are important drivers of the evil that lives on among us. And here as well as elsewhere there are cheerleaders in the media, politics and religion for every form of these types of Hubris. The human blame game is played at every level in every age and finding a fair and just understanding is easiest for those with the fewest facts. But even forgiveness or redemption requires at least some facts to be able to forgive with the right words and actions... or to be able to ask for some sort of understanding and grace. There a people confessing to things they did not do in police stations all over the world... under coercion or due to delusions if it is based on lies it will never help bury the Evil that men do.
The details of who did what to who and why, are endless and comprise most of the human history of earth... no scope for an "encyclopedia of hostility" here but examples like the Roman empire, Chinese empires, Arab conquest, Mongol invasions and empire, Inca empire, Spanish Empire, English Colonial Empire, Russian Empire, and any other other empire that ever was and all the tribes, kingdoms and beliefs, traditions they destroyed or absorbed in the process of empire building. Intermixed with that have been countless mass migrations, expulsions, enslavement, climatic disasters over decades and even centuries, plus religious conflagrations, delusions, fear and hate all intermixed as well. Most of our ancestors lived quiet lives and did not have to face the times of upheavals themselves but they all lived with the memories of dire times and wrongs their people faced in the past and dreaded in the future. Often with good cause but often overblown and self-serving in some way. With the ebb and flow of empires the Evils created or enlarged lived on for all of them and still live in all too many of us today. And way too many in the world do not want the historic hates and angers of their own group to die down but are actively trying to spread it as far as they can.
The histories of the winners overlook or explain away the harm done and every loser exaggerates and up spins the crimes against them. If the empire gold plates the murders and devastation, their victims are just as apt to paint extra blood on anything done or achieved by the winners. And of course fortunes can ebb an flow and the defeated "barbarians" harbor their resentments long enough to drive a vigorous counter empire someday. Legends of towering wrongs against your own tribe justifies the desired revenge that often follows and of course if enough of the defeated enemy survive they will follow the same pattern in turn if allowed by circumstance in an indefinite cycle. Often these cycles align with climate liked changes that favor one group over another (see Central Asia for the biggest and maybe longest running example of cycles of invasion followed by counter invasion due to macro changes in climate).
Us & Them, Winners & losers
Every Country in the world and every people and language and dialect, every ethnic group is a living experiment in what happens when one is overwhelmed by another or encroached on intentionally or unintentionally. Good and progress has come mixed with destruction and annihilation. We are all descendants of invaders, winners, losers, looters, creators, peacemakers, war-makers, and every mix of all of that and more. Most of the languages of our forbears are no longer spoken and sometimes that was due to conquest and subjugation or maybe just migrations and replacement in mainly non-violent ways. When is resistance needed or justified? Those who could not or did not resist enough often faded away. The evil was interred with their bones because there was no one left who cared or remembered what their "tribe" endured. Today there are languages dying and the wrongs done to the people who are vanishing will be forgotten. The good remembered will omit the wrongs. Maybe that is sometimes good but enforced forgetting is a crime a bad as poisoned exaggerated memories. Who or what is in control of the content of the memories? Those who feel threatened should be listened to but even their ability to judge can be insular, ignorant and wrongheaded and lead them to resist in reckless and misguided ways that ultimately threaten what they want to keep all the more. And all too often profiteers just use conveniently existing historical problems to stoke up rivalry for their own ends...piling on and even taking over a movement or struggle because that's what they are good at.
Every group of people on the earth large and small is caught up in the Us and Them paradigm. Translate the name of most groups and it boils down to something meaning "People" or "the people" or some form of "Real people".. which implies that others who live elsewhere and do things differently and may look different as well are not people as much as your group are. And almost without exception in every society there are second class citizens, minorities, outcasts who in many cases have had their label for generations even many centuries. Being black in the USA is only one example and most others in other countries are unknown to the average American. There is an outcast group in Japan named the
Burakumin descended from those with
occupations relating to death, such as executioners, undertakers or leather workers. Severe social stigma was attached to these occupations, influenced by Shinto notions of kegare (穢れ "defilement")
..... in Korea:
Baekjeong. In India there are of course the people who used to be known as Untouchables, non-caste people also named Harijans but more properly known as
Dalits. In Nigeria there is a group among the Igbo called the
Osu whose origins were as people kept apart who were dedicated to the gods whose place in society has turned into a
people reviled or rejected and in particular as with the other examples above as marriage partners. The evil of these kinds of traditions lives on today and in every part of the world there are people who are seen as virtually sub-human and at least unacceptable as equal participants in society. Much progress has been made but the same tendencies to reject and resent and repress will make new sub classes to hate and revile for some people if there are no traditional ones to hate or repress. Some sort of need for pecking order, rivalry for mates, material support and dominance in part but again goes back to our primate roots somehow.
Jane Goodall studied chimps in Gombe and
found controversially that if a group got too large it would split and often become very violent towards their former kin. We seem little capable of escaping similar behaviors.
For many the need for a suspicious or bad intentioned other is part of their nature or nurture or both. If they don't have one at hand they can rapidly acquire one. (Fox news types, rabble rousing politicians or a paranoid militia member, rabid preacher, radical Islamist any of whom will be happy to guide you.) And along with it new mythologies of your own importance that will grow alongside the extreme dangers of the new enemy.
It does not require more moderate people to buy into notions that we are all killer apes doomed to be eternally violent. At our worst we are simply reverting to our fallback inbuilt survival modes and not all of us are inherently apt to become the full on extreme defender type that easily. But we all capable of extreme measures in extreme situations. We are here because those defensive behaviors served our ancestors well enough to survive often at the expense of others. But those behaviors only come out in the most destructive ways in the more extreme circumstances and probably most people are sensible enough better able to know when to revert to primal default programming. Hair trigger defense is not really a defense. Many societies needed peaceful cooperation to thrive and benefited from welcoming infrequent strangers to their midst (for genetic reasons as well as trade and ideas) show that we can adapt to more sensible options if we or our surroundings allow it.
Kid Politics & Tribal tendencies
A good way to think about our human responses it to remember moving to a new neighborhood or seeing new kids move nearby and the memories of welcome curiosity and making new friends, as well as other memories of kids who automatically distrusted you or challenged you in some way. The overlay of parental attitudes and class and race and age and any number of judgments over geekiness or looks or clothing, speech, accents only add or subtract to the mix. Being thrown together with a very large group of kids in your high school days still reacting to everything with the intensity of our elementary school days is another vivid experiment in how we get along or not. Remember the life and death nature of every put down and pimple, every clique's attitudes and petty confrontations and your own defensive or aggressive ploys to assert your well being or even your very "survival". It was all in hindsight mostly very minor stuff but usually it did not feel that way at the time.
Consider the way some people root against the team from the next town or resort to vandalism and worse? The insulting graffiti in the gas station toilet out on the highway referring to the people in the town next door in unflattering terms are signs of our default programming. (see "
Springfield" & "Shelbyville" episodes on The Simpsons for a more humorous take on this phenomenon) Aspects of "gang culture" and belonging is a quite normal feature of growing up; we all had a group of friends or a club we made but when kids grow up without a larger meaningful constructive group identity it takes on a more destructive character. It's very tribal and we all have a tribal hunting/gathering group default program that will emerge if the absence of anything else. Just look at bonding between boys and girls from @ages 8 till early adolescence. It is an important part of our life as Jesuits and Authoritarians of every stripe know very well recently shown by research to be a time when our brains go through a major reprogramming and rewiring phase. Among other things we need to master during this phase in order fit into our group as adults, it's also the best time to program in the "Us and Them" memes of group identity, whether positive or negative, that will dominate the rest of everyone's life.
Without access to more benign balanced role models, the more divisive and strident indoctrinators can step in. For the unnattached more vulnerable less fortunate, gangs of some sort can be not only a refuge but a school of life as older gang members act as your recruiters, protectors and instructors on how to live and who is your enemy. And we are all members of an extended gang of some sort, consciously or unconsciously since many
parts of culture can fall under a more general definition of "gang". Your gang may be harmless or helpful or various shades of corrupt, self-serving and even harmful as it strives to promulgate its understanding of the world and expand it's numbers. The Murdoch "Gang" for instance is at work day and night to improve the membership of their own idea of what the Republican party and the Uniteed States of America should be. And the more fearful, information access disadvantaged who want to be protected by a strong pack are their prey. It is their right in a free society but we leave them unchallenged and un-refuted at our peril and too many of our fellow citizens stuck in an immature mental state. It's the logic and politics of the schoolyard bully they seem to admire and emulate. They and similar media revel in the conflicts they choose to highlight and even conflict largely of their own making and not the merits of the ideas involved or even verified facts. They focus on Evils they designate or identify as well as false claims of evil and actively bury or deny any good done by those they disagree with. Their arguments are much like shooting fish in a barrel... they set up a completely controlled predictable information-sport, peddling their propaganda via scripts where all the components of any argument reliably produce a pre-ordained conclusion. It is a morality play, psycho-drama script suited to our 12 year old selves in content, character and scope.
The way Kid politics seem to work gives us an insight to our default responses. If we were living in a traditional society with inherited longstanding enmities with certain neighbors or our own distant and not so distant ancestors who were almost all agrarian villagers we would have much the same responses to other people. Our brains seem to be wired to cope with a finite number of people on the order of a large village... if a tribe gets too big a it will split into subgroups... and there is always the outer darkness of the unknown out there that can be populated with all of our folklore and fears. Our childhood fears often grow up into grown-up versions which are more abstract but just as illogical as the monster in the closet or under the bed... We obviously move on from most of that but many of us still retain way too much and have a large uninformed streak that is easily fleshed out with replacement faces and notions that are still driven by the same fears and angers. And again consider who in the media drag out the same scary monsters in a new form and digs up the same alleged evils relabeled for their own purposes. They want us all to buy into the nightmare at the edge of town that they create and puff up to scary proportions. And maybe a large part of their audience can't help being susceptible to calls for protection and defense against threats real, imagined and hyped.
People who react more strongly to bumps in the night, spiders on a human body or the sight of a shell-shocked victim are more likely to support public policies that emphasize protecting society over preserving individual privacy. That's the conclusion of a recent study by researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). Their research results appear in the Sept. 19 issue of Science magazine.
According to Research by John Hibbing as reported on the NSF website
"....tended to endorse political positions that were interpreted as protective of social groups,"....
Hibbing defined those "protective policies" as more defense spending, more government resources directed at fighting terrorism and tighter controls on immigration. "People in this group are more willing to sacrifice a little of their privacy to protect the social unit,"....
......believes the greatest threat to them and their communities comes from other people
It may be that most of are collectively not much advanced if at all beyond irrational fears in our subconscious reactions and understanding of scale and populations is not much beyond the xenophobia of a small town. But it would seem that viewers/listeners of Fox News and other similar media who seem to value the message and world view of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and the others offering similar mix of fear, phobias, fiction and fallacies prove that we have many many people who if not inherently "Us vs. Them" type people they may be trapped by their upbringing into seeing the world through fear tinted glasses. They need to be in or can only understand a world with defined opposites who can never be reconciled, the good guys, us, who are by definition correct and them, the bad guys who are inherently wrong. The stronger their fear and uncertainty and inability to inform themselves or question the "facts" they are provided the more they desperately follow a leader who seems to embody the response they believe is needed to safeguard themselves. And they cannot see the harm and outright evil of the "collateral damage" caused by mindless defense. It only sows seeds for new harvests of evil from people with the same mindsets on the other side.... and the cycle repeats. Even Klingons can see reason when it is revealed that they are trapped into being reactive pawns in a struggle which ultimately benefits other agencies with other motives. (see Star Trek episode the "
Day of the Dove..."
"....they find themselves uncontrollably driven to violence through fearful paranoia
Spock believes the entity may be feeding off everyone's negative emotions, especially fear and anger. He suggests it may have.... set up this battle between the crew and Klingons so that it has a convenient source of nourishment....." The battling crews finally decide they don't want to "....spend the next thousand lifetimes satisfying the alien's twisted desires".
Now, that sounds like a Fox News-style metaphor entity if there ever was one... feeding off negative emotions for
nourishment ratings...
Evil and Heroes these days... on TV etc.
And all too often on 21st century earth just as in the past there are very real reasons to buy into extreme views and actions to save you and your loved ones. And also all too when there is not... some people would want to be not just a "Wolverine" wanna-be but to some how embody heroic traits who can and must take extreme measures due to very real threats... and when the nasty stuff is only real somewhere else; in Gaza or Iraq or Tibet or Darfur or vast swathes of the Congo and other places in the 3rd world not to mention residual anger in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Moldova, and just about anywhere in the world for that matter and only shows up on TV news or echoed in movies or in video games... why it's almost like a wanna-be culture for survivalist and militia types develops. Like a military officer who has never seen combat... and gets his unit into harms way just for his own need for bragging rights... live the dream, walk the walk, wear the campaign medal, be technically "under fire" they imagine extreme rightwing nightmare scenarios are plausible and they can pretend they are the brave warriors in the village that are the only real last defense against the bogey man. Me, Walker Texas Ranger, Me, Jack in 24, Me, Bruce in Die Hard, Me generic action hero resistance fighter™.
That's great at times when there is a real and present danger, but egging people on to the point where imaginary perils become real begs the question: Why are so many ready and eager to buy into any excuse to be a hero in their own minds? Are we built that way? I think we have that capacity and men in particular as but one way to be an
Alpha Male but what triggers it when it is not really needed? Sensory overload, inability of a large minority to learn what is needed to live in a 21st century society in a supposedly 1st world country? Or is it due to the numbers of poorly informed, fearful sub groups that would not be so numerous if we had had better education and better participation in governing ourselves in the past 40 years? Or in the end is the US just too large and maybe our political structures and system outdated and in inherent way diverts too many people away from real issues and focus instead on inflated diversionary dangers sold to boost TV ratings and the political fortunes of financial pirates and looters?
The evil being done now by the glut of defenders over-defending everywhere on earth will live on for a long time... and if they have done some actual good along the way the harm they also did will tend to negate any positives they could claim. Lasting positive deeds may well be outshone by instant myths and memory polishing of false achievements that did actual harm. Poishers and promulgaters of rightwing fantasies and myths erect temples to the memory of designated heroes while demonizing of the enemy du jour on places like the Fox instant history channel that rewrite the enmities of the world faster than the old Soviet Encyclopedia
airbrushed history. Reagan and Bush II's legacy do not bear much examination but that is of little interest to the true believers. A balanced view would not deny them their actual achievements, small though they were and would allow many people to become aware that Carter, and Clinton among others deserve more recognition. The all or nothing judgements of each presidency do little to explain reality all that well. Pass - Fail, good evil... bad good... that is another facet of enduring Evil... tweaked and incomplete headline histories and simplistic
explanations for everything and everyone.
Evil lives quite well already without the fire-stoking sectors of world media and political parties aiding and abetting it through even partial control of mediums, discourse and limitation of choices but it sure gets a big helping hand from them these days in ways that surpass similar methods, means and tendencies in the past. There are of course new technologies and more democratic venues for dissenting and moderating voices that can deflate fictions of evil and re-balance debates and inform in revelatory ways.
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Any Hope? Sure... but not from Fox News types etc.
If we have a chance to get past this, it's with dialogue, trust, forgiveness, education, reconciliation, and all that "gooey" nice stuff that actually works... And no matter how hard the enablers and perpetrators of evil try the reality is that it just as hard to bury the things that will allow us to escape the effect of evil memories. And in the end they can lead to constructive realistic memories living on and replacing the warped evil justifying memories and interring them for good.
And to that end, it would help if Glenn Beck and Rush and Mr Hannity and all the rest would somehow get the big picture, the real big picture more in focus and more balanced and generally stop spraying gasoline onto the bonfire of our public discourse. Ensuring there is more fear and misplaced anger serves their own masters in the short term but it is a long term evil they are enabling. They may be prisoners of their own demons, misinformation and fears more than most... but more than most in their line of work they are ensuring that the evil that lives on in their world view is perpetuated and disseminated as widely as possible... if I were a prayin' man I'd say they do the evil one's work and that they do it very well. But here is no need for a devil with these guys on the loose. They are crying fire in the theater of the nation and egging on those who will set the fires. The evil that will likely ensue will not be easily buried unlike the potential victims of it. Will they help humanity get off the treadmill of recycled memories of blame and evil or crank up the fear juice?
The evil that men do in the world will still live on... but courtesy of Fox News, plenty of Evil will just get made up if not rehashed and reinterpreted by them and the rest of the "mis-media" out there while the good that progressives have done, are doing or may be able to do is quickly buried under hours of inflammatory innuendo and distortion.....and if Shakespeare were alive today he'd probably ask to be re-interred after only a few minutes of Glenn Beck or any of his media relatives.
(update with correction on attributing the quote to the correct Shakespeare play... thanks to NormAl179... plus additional grammar and phrase tweaking/repairs)
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