Violent Right?

An article from Sunday's NYT by Frank Rich.

Rich, if you don't read him, is an excellent columnist, funny, scathing, sarcastic, and all in the straightforward service of screaming that the Emperor's got no clothes on. He is sharp and lucid as glass when it comes to historical analogies as well, which comes out in this article quite a bit.

One subtle undertone of the column is that the Right, for whatever reason, seems to be legitimized in the US in a way the Left never would be. Perhaps it is that huge swaths of the country are rural, or the sort of suburban sprawl metros that maintain a rural twang even as they reach a million people. Maybe it has to do with our pledge towards liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And surely there's something in it of the protestant ethos of individual responsibility and accountability and belief in a personal soul, which tends the "life" omitted above and that happiness to refer strictly to one's own, and which informs even our atheists' senses of self.

But whatever it is we surely would not be in this situation if there were an equal balance of Left and Right in this country, at least in so far as what is acceptable in the public discourse, or what is weighing down the levers of power. There does honestly seem to be a virtual tie in terms of the private views of the citizenry, wobbling back and forth every few years, but could you honestly imagine a scenario where far-left zealots caused enough of a stink to get anything on the ropes, let alone something (we're not even considering single-payer here) fairly centrist? They are ostracized, not eulogized as the equally imbalanced recent protesters have been, even with much grumbling about how incorrect their take on the contents of reform are. As Paul Krugman writes, it's almost insanity that the Right's 'government is satan always' rhetoric hasn't died off after the actual policies grown from it have failed beyond failure. The question isn't why the right is so loud- they're loud because they've got amplifiers. But why do they have amplifiers in sober thinking people?

That for some reason seems to be at the heart of this whole matter. America has been the greatest force of progressivism in the last two hundred and thirty-three years, through fits and starts, and yet it's as if every positive step is taken against the weight of a begrudging dragging boulder, and mitigated by terribly insensitive acts that would cause, I'm sure, quite a few people to blanch at the first clause of this sentence.

Maybe it's just energy- America and her people are both energetically progressive and energetically conservative, and we get the best and worst of both. Thanks to that. Without it the world would probably either be a right or left dystopian hell. But we could sure use a burst of progressive energy now.

And we'll need it seriously if we're going to get over the money, without which the situation just doesn't add up. Things are going the way they are because of money, and I think the real disenchantment with Obama now isn't just because of the flagging of the public option, it's because the only thing that could possibly be behind it is gobs of questionably earned money. I, for one, voted for the man mostly because I thought he could be the kind of rare person to point this out and step around it, which is really the only way to make this work in the long run. As an optimist I hold out hope, since the O-man's pattern so far has been staying out of the fray until everyone thinks the game is up, descending, and laying down the law, no strings attached, which is why so many people look to him as a sort of savior figure. The race speech, the clearest example of this pattern, is much less important in the long run than the current debate, but Obama must know this as well. My confidence in him would be destroyed if a bill passed that screwed me (no income no health insurance 27 year old male) but it remains, waiting for the man to work things out. He certainly has the ability to. It would be a shame if he didn't realize that, and it will ruin his presidency if he doesn't act on it.

Perhaps it's coming. Lefties are fairly outraged by all the blabber about the impossibility of passing real meaningful reform in the face of a bullying insurance industry, and if history is a guide the right is about to become more and more violent, something which can only discredit them (much of what Rich is saying.)

And Washington is not a campaign. That is, he'll need all the prodding from the left and discrediting of the right he can get to sort this out. A speech isn't going to cut it.

It's ironic that I lived through eight years of W and am only contemplating finding a Canadian woman to marry with a Democratic president.

Supportive community, longer life.

An article on the "Well" blog in the times.

The article talks about several studies indicating that having a strong social net makes people significantly more healthy. Not just a little bit:

'In 2006, a study of nearly 3,000 nurses with breast cancer found that women without close friends were four times as likely to die from the disease as women with 10 or more friends. And notably, proximity and the amount of contact with a friend wasn’t associated with survival. Just having friends was protective.' !!! Four times as likely is pretty significant.

If you think about humans as being social animals, as if we were all really just one big human, this makes a great deal of sense. One ant, after all, has almost no purpose, and anything cut off from its support (like a plucked flower) has a short life expectancy.

What does it mean in the long term?

I think that people are going to gravitate more and more towards supportive, open communities, ones that (unlike the communalism of level 6 greens) allow the individual to make his or her own choices, while providing a fluid and open support structure. For more, see this post.

The family may well be on it's way out, not as the bedrock of human culture, but as the discreet bedrock of human culture. Tribes were basically no more than enlarged families; as humans advanced, those 'tribes' became smaller and smaller, interacting with a larger and larger culture. Another way to track this movement would be to say that starting at tribes, where the family/culture unit was the same (the tribe,) the general size of a culture expanded greatly to include huge nations, and the size of the family unit shrank greatly to include, as an extreme, a family of four. Obviously, this is rough, and general. Plenty of extended families are very close. The next step is to extend the size of the cultural unit to include all of humanity, and to shrink the size of the family unit to the individual. But that'll look much better than it sounds like at first:

As the article says:

'Friendship has a bigger impact on our psychological well-being than family relationships'.

Why? My theory would be that family relationships tend to be far more structured, and rigid, than healthy friendships. 'In a six-year study of 736 middle-age Swedish men, attachment to a single person didn’t appear to affect the risk of heart attack and fatal coronary heart disease, but having friendships did. Only smoking was as important a risk factor as lack of social support.' (ONLY SMOKING!) Over the years, semi-healthy to unhealthy spousal relationships may well solidify around a few major interchanges, which would mean much of both of the people involved in the relationship would be closed off from their partner, not allowing an honest exchange of the kind mentioned by one of the subjects of the article when she says it's easier to talk to her friends about the disease than her doctor.

Friendships, however, are much more equal, dynamic, and open, because we view them as being different: "friend" in any case is such a loose term, that instead of approaching your friend as your "friend" you're more likely to approach them as being a person. Contrast this with your Father, or Mother, or even siblings. It's much harder to see these people objectively as people without the heavy baggage these relationships necessarily bring.

What I mean by the individual becoming the "family" unit is not that an individual becomes isolated from the rest of the world, far from it. It is saying that as we begin to become actually comfortable with the idea of individuality for people of all races and sexes/sexual orientations, is that people will become much more consciously free and aware of the relationships they form with other people, and that those relationships will undoubtedly change in nature over time as the individuals do, and that these relationships will constitute that individual's "family," a group that obviously may also include actual relations.

What this ought to create is a culture where both the individual's rights and wishes are respected, and where each individual is embedded within their chosen community/communities as active and valued members, all within the larger human global being. Again, this is far from isolating, in fact, we in the west might be coming to the last wave of that kind of social isolation.

Humans used to be isolated families. Then they became tribes. Then Nation-States, and Nations under God, then Nations of Individuals (with varying de facto rights) under the Law. We are on the way to a Planet of United Individuals, though there's a hell of a long way to go. We'll get there though. Look left, look right. No man is an island.

'Last year, researchers studied 34 students at the University of Virginia , taking them to the base of a steep hill and fitting them with a weighted backpack. They were then asked to estimate the steepness of the hill. Some participants stood next to friends during the exercise, while others were alone. The students who stood with friends gave lower estimates of the steepness of the hill. And the longer the friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared.'