Morning Thoughts: December 22, 2017

 It seems to me that, more and more, we’re doing it wrong, not only doing it wrong, but doing it dead wrong, and from the top down. I'm talking about achieving harmony. We’re never going to come back together as a nation until we fundamentally change our direction, or unless another country attacks us “Pearl Harbor” style. Oh, I guess the entire planet could be invaded by aliens. I doubt it. What would they want with us?

What happened was, I spent the early hours this morning reading about the psychology of racism. First, let me say that, having grown up rural Arkansas, I was raised to be as prejudiced against African-Americans as a person could be. For Jewish people, not so much. We knew a few, but not many. Catholics were fine, except they were all going to Hell of course. That’s back when they were called “Roman" Catholics, or “Catlicks.”

Yes, so-called “in-group bias” was imprinted within me as strongly as “follow Momma” is within a duckling. I have worked my whole life to overcome it, and hope that, in the final tally, it might be said that I was somewhat successful.

White people raised in the Jim Crow South will never overcome prejudice completely. Like any mythology-based belief, it is strong and lasting. That’s why I cringe when I hear one say, “I’m not prejudiced at all against blacks.” (Just a few years ago it was “coloreds”). Give me, anytime, the person who says, “I am prejudiced, but I work hard every day not to be.”

Where are we now? Each day, we are fed, at the highest levels of leadership and government, a diet of divisiveness with a hearty helping of hatred for anyone not in our group. That’s a stiff barrier to cross. Is there a solution? Perhaps.

Recently I read, for the first time, about the (apparently) famous “Robbers Cave Experiment” back in 1954. A large group of white teenage boys from a homogeneous background were involved in staged “camp” experiment in Oklahoma. They were divided into two groups, the Eagles and the Rattlers. They were then made to compete in games for scarce resources, i.e. trophies and rewards for the winning team but not for the losers. In a scenario straight from William Golding's Lord of the Flies, (published that same year, coincidentally) the groups established both cultural norms and enmity with one another. Fights and vandalism between camps soon appeared.

In the second phase, the two groups participated in achieving common goals, like pulling a stuck truck from the mud with the same rope previously used for “tug-of-war.”  After a few such exercises, guess what happened. Yep, the enmity disappeared, to be replaced by inter-group friendships. Harmony ruled the remainder of the experiment.

See a short documentary here.

I’m not sure the experiment would pass muster in this hyper-sensitive age, but it got my attention. Perhaps we could choose leaders that might take notice and act accordingly. That would be a good second step. The first would be to change ourselves.                                                                                                                                                                               

Look familiar?