by Ervin Staub
In times of severe and persistent life problems, the poor are often most affected. If they suffer greatly while others still seem to thrive, they are likely to feel a sense of injustice. Dislocation by rapid technological and social change may have a similar effect.
In all our instances of genocide and mass killing, disparities in the suffering of different groups under difficult life conditions were significant. In Germany, between the two world wars millions suffered great deprivation while some lived ostentatiously and well; Hitler used this to fan the dissatisfaction of the masses. He also fanned anti-Semitism by claiming that Jews profited from the suffering of Germans. In Argentina with its very rich elite and many poor, the decline in living standards severely affected many people but not the wealthy elite. This contributed to the violence of leftist groups, which provoked the military. In Cambodia the cities swelled with people who had lost their land or could not live off it, while corruption and profiteering were rampant.
Societies need institutions, both government agencies and citizen groups, that deal with the material and psychological effects of difficult life conditions and mitigate inequality in misfortune. Such institutions must offer material help, for example, through adjustments in welfare policies or through work programs like those in the United States during the depression. Added taxes on the rich may be needed to equalize the burden. Institutions are also needed to reduce isolation and to enhance feelings of community. The experience of shared suffering contributes to feelings of community and minimizes the psychological impact of material difficulties.
When facing adversity, people have a strong urge to protect their own privilege and resources, but their separateness makes them lonely and scared. As the bombing of London by the Germans in World War II and the Hungarian revolution of 1956 showed, people are greatly strengthened when they face adversity together. Joined in a fight for survival, they can feel strong, even joyful, under the worst of circumstances. Trusting enough in a better future to share their resources with others can make them feel strong and contented. Can societies help people come together in such ways?
Creating a society of enablement
Enablement is one important avenue to social justice. The experience of enablement and the capacity to choose and fulfill “reasonable” goals go a long way toward increasing personal satisfaction and the perception of justice. The “culture of poverty,” “underclass” mentality, and disordered and chaotic family backgrounds greatly impair enablement. Children from such backgrounds do not develop faith in their capacity to shape their lives. They cannot take advantage of education and other opportunities, or they lack the values and motivation to learn or work hard. They have no stake in the community and therefore no concern for the communal good. On the other hand, stable families with their basic needs fulfilled have a stake in society and a belief in the possibilities it offers.
Programs such as Head Start, a government-sponsored preschool enrichment program for disadvantaged children that proved successful in preparing them for the schools, offer one avenue to enablement. Children do better in these programs when the parents are also involved. Parents who participate may come to value education more and learn modes of interaction with their children that enrich the children’s experience and improve their skills and self-esteem.
Social justice requires that some people accept less materially. This means finding contentment and satisfaction less in material wealth and more in connection and community. People must be more willing to devote themselves to improving the welfare of others and more interested in the intrinsic values of excellence, creation, and cooperation, as well as aesthetic and other nonmaterial pursuits. Satisfying connections among individuals and communities can evolve into deeply held values and increasingly become realities of life.
Individualism and community
In the United States an ethic of individualism is a potential barrier to feelings of connection and responsibility to others. Bellah and his associates, writing about contemporary American values and mores, note that individual freedom is interpreted as freedom from restraint. They identify two dominant forms of individualism: economic and expressive. Americans have long valued the pursuit of economic gain and have come to value the pursuit of knowing, developing, and enjoying the self and its potentials. As they found in their interviews, expressive individualism can be narcissistic, or self-centered. People can selfishly cultivate themselves and believe that they have no responsibility even for their spouse or children.9
Alternatively, people can see self-actualization in relationship to other people, as part of a community. In my view Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, the psychologists regarded as fathers of the current cultural movement of expressive individualism, believed this. Maslow found that the people he regarded as advanced in self-actualization were also willing to act for the common good.10 Rogers said that as people in therapy accept and love themselves more, they also accept and love others more. Maslow also believed that “uncovering” therapy leads to more caring and even that this was probably evidence that human nature is basically good.11
People who fully develop and harmoniously integrate their capacities, values, and goals will be connected to others. The full evolution of the self, the full use of the human potential, requires relationships and the development of deep connections and community – as well as the capacity for separateness.
Along with an ethic of individualism there is widespread volunteerism in the United States.12 People collect money for the United Way, volunteer in hospitals, help with youth activities, and join to work for political causes. Still, the overall sense of community is limited. Subgroups have strong feelings of differentness, and many Americans are isolated. Individualism accounts for this in part, but the complex technological society we live in and the traditional U.S. pattern of mobility are also important. Americans move more than people in most other highly industrial societies. An analysis reported in the 1960s found that the average American moved about fourteen times in life, the average Briton about eight times, the average Japanese about five times. In other countries populated by immigrants, such as Australia and Canada, the rate of moving is similar to that of the United States.13
Our experience of connection and community shape who we are, how we experience other people, and how we bear the stresses of both ordinary and extraordinary events. For example, in Korea, prisoners of war were “brainwashed": through isolation (e.g., solitary confinement for long periods) and extreme psychological pressures, their captors tried to get them to confess to crimes by their military and government and to endorse the communist system. Amitai Etzioni writes that American prisoners of war were more susceptible than prisoners from other counties.14 For example, thirty-eight out of fifty-nine air force men “‘confessed’ to nonexistent U.S. bacteriological attacks on Korea” and many collaborated with their communist captors. In contrast, almost all Turkish prisoners withstood the pressure of isolation. According to military investigators, they “stuck together as a group and resisted as a group.”
When a Turk got sick, the rest nursed him back to health. If a sick Turk was ordered to the hospital two well Turks went along. They ministered to him hand and foot while he was there, and when he was discharged, brought him back to the compound in their arms. They shared their clothing and their food equally.15
In contrast, many Americans thought of themselves “not as a group bound by common ties and loyalties, but as isolated individuals.”
Individualism has advantages as well as disadvantages. Young American children are less affected by the presence of teachers, for example in subscribing to standards of good conduct on questionnaires, than children in other cultures.16 Perhaps in “normal” times Americans are more able to preserve their own views and resist authority.a Without support by connection to others, however, one’s views may collapse under the pressure of difficult life conditions.
We must strive for an ideal of individuals with strong, independent iden
tities who are also supported by their connections to others and rootedness in a community. Connectedness that extends beyond one’s group to all human beings is an important building block of a world in which groups turn toward, not against, each other.
The accountability of leaders
The lack of accountability and the limited perspective of leaders are problems even in a democracy. A leader is usually advised and guided by a small group of persons who have the same values and views as the leader. The processes of decision making in groups further limit a leader’s perspective.17 Following the Bay of Pigs fiasco (the attempted invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained Cuban exiles), President Kennedy wondered how he could have been so ignorant. Apparently, in the course of lengthy deliberations, two facts that most members of the group knew were never discussed. First, the invaders would face an enemy that had a 140:1 numerical superiority. Second, CIA investigation showed that the Cuban people would not rise up to support the invaders. The decision to invade had been made, so nobody brought forth this information. Human beings cannot commit themselves to a course to action while contemplating information that makes it unreasonable; such information may submerge in their consciousness and disappear from working memory.
Great power is another danger. Power and the leadership role easily lead to a belief in special knowledge and the devaluation of those who dare to oppose. Leaders may come to believe that they have the right to use whatever means are necessary to achieve their desired ends.
For all these reasons, it is essential to decrease the insulation of leaders and increase their accountability. One way to achieve this would be to increase direct contact between leaders, especially the president, and the public, in ways that are conducive to dialogue. Leaders might be obliged to attend town meetings or other comparable public gatherings on a regular basis to answer questions and hear varied views. Exposure to a broad range of views and the need to talk to a broad range of people in settings that are not “managed” (like news conferences) would require leaders to seriously think about perspectives different from their own and the human consequences of their policies.
Freedom, pluralism, and self-censorship
Freedom requires the free flow of information that makes people aware of discrepancies between their ideals and existing realities. Awareness of such discrepancies led to the civil rights movement. A BBC television program depicting the famine in Ethiopia produced an outpouring of help. The visions of blood and suffering in Vietnam on the daily television news were important impetus to the antiwar movement. Seeing the homeless freezing on the streets of New York City can mobilize movement for change.
Without free public discourse a uniformity of views can be imposed on the population. Barry Goldwater, a political conservative, showed the spirit of pluralism when he spoke out against the Moral Majority’s attempt to censor television and against Jesse Helms’s attempt to deny the courts the authority to rule on cases involving the separation of church and state in public schools.18 Censorship and intimidation of the media are one mark of a repressive system. Government “disinformation” (falsehoods intended to affect international or domestic conditions) also deprives the people of a fair knowledge of reality on which to base their judgments.
“Self-censorship” by the media (biased and selective reporting) has the same effect, and it is widespread. A well-documented example was the reporting of the extermination of Jews during World War II. Reports in American newspapers were rare and mostly buried inside the papers. America’s response would certainly have been different had the horrendous story screamed at the people from the front page. When Franco ruled Spain, the editors of Time magazine rejected a report on Spanish communists because “it made the communists look too good.”19 In 1963, their reporters from Vietnam submitted an article that depicted a losing war. The article was rejected and replaced by one that stressed, among other things, improved fighting by government troops.20 Nuclear alerts because of computer malfunction are frequent, and some proceed to the last stage before launch, but stories about them are reported in small articles inside newspapers. The attitude of the population toward the huge nuclear arsenal might have changed and the pressure for disarmament might have intensified if lead articles had called attention to this situation.
Social systems use “propaganda of integration” to promote citizen support.21 The media tend to report in ways that support and maintain the system, sometimes consciously, at other times not. One reason is that editors and newspaper and television reporters share with their audience dominant cultural perspectives or biases. Like almost everyone else in the United States, when the Vietnam War started, they saw not a freedom fight or a civil war, but dominoes falling.
The suppliers of information and opinion may also fear straying too far from culturally dominant views because it would mean breaking with the group and might result in social sanctions: disapproval, criticism, loss of readers. Reporters may incur problems with their editors if their point of view is “radical,” even if this is expressed simply in their choice of facts to report. After all, facts acquire significance by their meaning, which derives from the perspective of the reporter – and the reader or viewer. Adherence to currently dominant views often occurs automatically, as a result of shared views and a natural tendency to conform. However, a conscious choice to avoid controversy may explain such things as the problems citizens’ groups had in 1984-88 when they tried to get films about Central America on television. Editors and reporters may also want to “protect” the people and not cause panic or social discord. It is clear, however, that such protection is selectively employed.
The value systems dominant in organs of the media are known to reporters and influence their reporting.22 In a pluralistic society different orientations can counterbalance each other, but dominant values and views tend to result in overall biases, limiting the picture of reality.
The economic factor is also a subtle and potentially destructive influence. This is a complex issue; the independence of the media requires financial independence. But if, in pursuit of money, the media create a climate of sensationalism, that climate will in turn require the media to be sensationalistic. A television report on black-Jewish contacts aimed at improving relations concluded with a picture of Farrakhan, the virulently anti-Semitic black leader; this added drama, but counteracted the point of the news it was reporting.
Finally, even in a free society, powerful government pressure can influence reporting. Some of this pressure is direct. The FBI in the late 1960s pressured Columbia Records and other companies to stop advertising in underground newspapers that opposed the Vietnam War.23 As a result, many of these newspapers went bankrupt. Subtler pressure is produced by government requests to underplay, not report, or report in a particular way certain events – or simply by knowledge of what the government would prefer. This power of government has many sources, including its ability to regulate access to news.
Self-censorship may be an intentional decision, a barely conscious bias, or an unconscious screening of reality. This cognitive screening can involve “dissociation,” the keeping out of consciousness aspects of life or reality that do not fit cultural self-conception and values. For example, members of the media probably screened out clues about atrocities in Vietnam before My Lai because they were discrepant from Americans’ views of themselves. Because the screening and the resulting dissociation are shared by the group, the distortions are difficult to detect. Attempts to call awareness to it will generate hostility. It is essential to promote public discussion that enhances awareness of self-censorship and its sources. One way to correct cognitive screening is to take seriously the voices of those who claim to point to a reality we do not see, even if they present an unpleasant image of us.
Self-censorship can work in many directions. Conservatives have claimed that the media have a liberal bias. This is debatable. In the mid-1980s there have been reports of atrocities by the Contras in Nicaragua. Especially because the United
States was directly involved, “objective” reporting would have included pictures on television and in the papers of the aftermath of brutal Contra attacks on civilians. Such reporting did not occur. Whatever political orientation is its main victim, self-censorship impedes the natural processes of a free society.
* * *
a One reason Oliver North struck such a chord in the American people may be Americans’ ambivalent relationship to authority. In his testimony at the Iran-Contra congressional hearings North showed disrespect for members of congress and lectured them on a number of topics including patriotism, while professing deep respect for and obedience to the president. Respect for authority combined with a realistic sense of its limitations and imperfections makes a nation less vulnerable to excesses that might arise from a strong authority orientation.
18 The creation and evolution of caring, connection, and nonaggression
Changing cultures and the relations between societies
Crosscutting relations and superordinate goals
As I have noted, human beings tend to create “us” – “them” differentiations and stereotypes. Constrasting ourselves with others is a way to define the self. We see our values and way of life as natural and good and easily see others who diverge as bad. By preadolescence even trivial differences in clothing, musical preference, appearance, or behavior may cause substantial devaluation.
