Of Fear and Strangers, page 27
Like that sixteenth-century debate in Spain over whether the Aztecs were obliged to welcome “visitors” like Cortés, this challenge hinges on one factor: power. Can we fairly weigh discrepancies between the hosts and their outsiders? Can we distinguish those who come with arms, wealth, and a foreign state behind them, those who stride forth as conquerors, from those who arrive with no such desire or advantages? When is the cultural threat from the strangers supported by such facts, and when is it symbolic? For while shifts in populations may correlate with some manifestations of xenophobia, these migrations do not always result in the vilifying of the strangers. Far from it. Something else is required.
What then causes xenophobia? This history suggests tentative answers that pull from domains like philosophy, psychology, and sociology. While purists from those disciplines may protest, let us first divide this question and distinguish between Other anxiety, overt xenophobia, and covert xenophobia.
Other anxiety is known to us all. It is an ontological state of being. Humans can’t read each other’s minds or easily fathom each other’s intentions. We must rely on analogies to our own minds, and clues from appearance, behavior, and communication. Upon meeting a stranger, we thus become embroiled in a mystery. Who is the foreigner from Elea to whom Socrates posed his queries? What’s with the fellow with no valise who boarded the ship in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man? “Whodunit” mysteries offer the vicarious pleasure of experiencing a touch of that anxiety and, in the end, resolving it. Ritualized forms of greetings and pleasantries like those attached to the Greek rules of xenia function to diminish some of that uncertainty. Still, as many children’s tales remind us, the wolf at our door may come in peace, but he may be sporting that grin because he just spotted his next meal.
The cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman explored ways we may have evolved to master Other anxiety. For survival, humans developed associative, unconscious assessments that take a stab at the truth, what he called “System 1” thought. These shortcuts, he experimentally demonstrated, sprint ahead of deliberate decision making. “Fast thinking” allows us to instantly read anger on another’s face. We immediately finish sentences like: “Thieves are usually …” Whatever once led to such an association has long been forgotten. As with Joseph LeDoux’s amygdala-based threat reactions, there may be no conscious experience of fear. Rather, this reaction is nonconscious, automatic, lifesaving, and too often wrong.
Stereotypes, for Kahneman and many cognitive scientists, are simply the stuff of fast thinking. This, unfortunately, can lead to a confusion of tongues, since categorizing a chair, for example, surely must be distinguished from motivated negative portrayals of, say, Asians or lesbians. The difference emerges when we recall that System 1 reactions, as associative links, are forged in a social world. Hence, they may be false associations, displacements that, like the ones drilled into the minds of Pavlov’s dogs, we learn and live by. G. Stanley Hall’s questionnaire featured Blacks as the most feared American stranger. How did they come to be so chosen? How did certain strangers and outsiders become swiftly seen, known, and denigrated while others did not? As any targeted minority knows, therein lies a sea of assumptions in which one might easily drown.
Other anxiety, in theory, can be managed. The behaviorists’ cure of exposure and habituation can be put to work to diminish such conditioned reflexes through social mixing and integration. Unconscious biases can be reworked through relearning. Workplace sensitivity training often rests on this premise. Dialogue with the Other can restore the capacity for empathy and the possibility of mutual recognition. In one encouraging study, California canvassers found that by simple fifteen-minute discussions, they were able to significantly reduce prejudice against trans-gender people in ten percent of their subjects. If the hosts and strangers work, play, and love together, the psychic processes that drive conditioned threat reactions and unconscious bias can diminish. We learn to tolerate an initial discomfort, take in new information, refine our appraisals, and go beyond categorical judgments as our slower, conscious capacities for judgment kick in.
For this to occur, we must be challenged. Online tools may help us encounter our own “implicit biases,” but the Black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde put the task best: “I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch the terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.”
That alone, sadly, may not be enough. Kahneman found little evidence to support an individual’s capacity to rein in his or her own stereotypes, and pointed us to thought “factories,” those entities that help manufacture opinion. Institutions and media play important roles in furthering or, conversely, displacing bigoted stereotypes. What credos can keep us alert to Other anxiety and its destructive effects? For Saint Paul and Las Casas, the Christian Church served this purpose: we are all God’s children, the Bible taught. For Diderot and post-Enlightenment secularists, it was the democratic nation, based on the self-evident truth of human equality and the requirement for toleration. For those shocked into action by the Holocaust, it was a commitment to international human rights and a redoubling of efforts to dismantle racial, religious, and sexual hierarchies.
Other anxiety should be distinguished from overt xenophobia, in which fear and hatred of the Other has solidified into more than an errant anxiety or a cognitive error. Here, it has become a defended solution. Overt xenophobes need their villain; they hate the xénos so as to stabilize themselves.
Xenophobia, like Other anxiety, is marked by stereotypes, but these are more rigid. They do not easily alter, for the focus on the degraded Other as bad, defective, or immoral is desired. In this way, the world has been simplified and purified: we are good and they are bad. The reliance on defensive projection can be discerned by three tell-tale signs: a vanishing capacity to consider “the gray zones,” an inability to tolerate affective ambivalence, and the loss of a capacity for guilt. The xenophobic are always justified, always the victims, even after perpetrating violence. External condemnation falls on deaf ears. In-between arguments are swept aside as weak. Shaming the offender only provokes rage.
Sadism is prominent in overt xenophobia. There is pleasure, as Sartre and others reminded us, in the “I”’s domination of the Other. Psychoanalysts, however, considered this to be motivated by self-hatred. Defensive projection makes the need to control the Other never-ending. The evil out there must be constantly reasserted, or those same attributes might find their way back to their rightful owner. Xenophobia therefore can seem, in a descriptive not a clinical sense, to be both paranoid and obsessional. Its repetitive function is to cleanse the xenophobe of his own self-loathing by constantly soiling the devalued Other.
Groups, by definition, share common notions of the not-us, those that lie outside our boundaries, but these exclusionary criteria are usually not also the collective’s only core commitments, its raison d’être. For xenophobic groups, however, that is precisely the case. Their rigid borders, defined by diminished Others, give both definition to members and provide the main purpose for the group. To allow the xénos passage in, then, poses an existential threat to this community.
Xenophobic groups, over the last century, seem to have emerged as a symptom of broader social failures, in which, for example, affiliative bonds in a nation-state weaken. Joining a xenophobic group thereby may become a solution. However, a price must be paid upon entry: these communities demand ideological purity. Dissent brings with it the risk of being wrong, that is, being shamed (again) oneself. Meanwhile, leaders encourage regressive submission by offering relief of internal conflict; they take up the role of group conscience. Members are then lifted up on two fronts: they are identified with the Great One, and they are distinct from the denigrated stranger.
If the social conditions are right, xenophobic groups can grow quickly. Their divisiveness and demagoguery may encourage those who may possess run-of-the-mill Other anxiety to adopt harsher beliefs, as a solution to their own isolation, helplessness, and weakness. We are not the scared and debased; they are. Charismatic leaders masterfully play on these emotions, because they too often dance around the fires of shame themselves. As Adorno showed, authoritarian families, societies, and political parties all engender fears of humiliation and offer relief through a regressive dependence on an idealized leader. Those red faces shouting in the crowd are ecstatic for being so accepted; they are determined to never be cast out, to never be strangers themselves.
Unfortunately, the ameliorative efforts that quell Other anxiety will fail here. As numerous studies reveal, diversity training and sensitivity classes often do not have the hoped-for effect. Exposure and habituation with this population go nowhere. Cognitive models—what Kurt Lewin called “re-education”—don’t stick either, not among those who belong to groups that reinforce an obligatory commitment to hate them. Bigots switch the station from television programs that humanize their demons; they don’t care if the Iraqis had anything to do with 9/11. That policeman is not just jumpy; he is quick to shoot a Black motorist because he knows that’s one of the “bad guys.”
What to do? For those who take the long view, the path leads back to the family. The greatest ally of the hyper-intellectual Freudo-Marxists, ironically enough, was that homespun purveyor of homilies, Dr. Benjamin Spock. Schooled in psychoanalytic theory, Spock’s immensely popular parenting guides called for less harsh, shame-driven forms of child-rearing. Social groups that mirror these forms of self-regulation may also be less prone to authoritarian solutions.
When overt xenophobia has emerged, what is to be done? How may we confront vilifying groups without vilification, not merely out of some lofty virtue but because otherwise it won’t work. To shame the already shamed only heightens their defenses. And, yet, to coddle xenophobes or retreat from their accusatory polemics only makes their cause and their aggression grow stronger.
If reeducation and exposure here do nothing, if this is not strictly a matter of economics or cultural preservation as I have argued, then the guiding principle for amelioration must focus on matters of identity. In my view, as an ethical absolute and a political guiding force, radical egalitarianism poses the greatest threat to xenophobia. That rudder will help opponents steer clear of the temptation to demonize the demonizers, and transform into their doubles. Alongside that view of equality and basic human rights, I agree with Joshua Greene, who argued that toleration should not be seen as solely a liberal value, but rather a rule for all, a “meta-morality.” We therefore confront bigotry while offering acceptance to all, except those who, as Karl Popper argued, would destroy toleration. Over time, such constancy may attract those who have lost their taste for submission, or have grown tired of the turbulent drama that comes with maintaining fantasies of a world so divided. Meanwhile, legal protections must be robust in their defense of the victims of these projections.
Finally, consider covert xenophobia. This form of discrimination operates in the shadows. It deploys the “dividing strategies” that Michel Foucault illuminated, and it does so freely. The battles, if ever fought with the Other, have been long won. The victor can be naturalized, the vanquished, too. These discriminatory rules seem just like the way “we” prefer to do things. In this way, highly socialized and accepted forms of xenophobia disappear into norms, conventions, and discourses.
Unlike cognitive notions of implicit bias, these forms of discriminations are not mere associative errors; they are quietly motivated. Those desires may be disavowed, but they make themselves known as a resistance to change. Unfair? Devaluing? When so accused, counter-forces kick up, baffling those cognitive scientists who would teach away all implicit bias. For example, my medical school was hardly alone in having a quota for Jews some fifty years ago; admitting too many Jews just wasn’t a good idea, the leaders agreed. However, when pressed a little, when lectured about the evils of bias, they did not amend their ways. After a cognac at the club, if asked to defend this rule, the deans might become shockingly overt about why too many Jews was not a good idea. Mostly, they did not need to explain.
Covert xenophobia operates then at the level of individuals as well as institutions, organizations, and social structures. However, no individual—it would seem—need take responsibility. Rule-based dictums inscribe hierarchies, logical relations, and differentials, all of which support discrimination against the degraded group. These ways of thought create, protect, and enforce power. Foucault’s followers have sought to pry open how Western discourses and institutions hid these effects and redefined them as benevolence. The marginalized of a social order thus take their place in a series of legal, medical, bureaucratic, and institutional matrices that define and limit them. The machinations of covert xenophobia quietly purr along, then they may come to light due to an egregious crisis or scandal. Only when looking through the wreckage do these structural forms of discrimination become clear.
THIS OUTLINE IS but one attempt to synthesize a century of efforts from a number of disciplines. It is my hope that it will be replaced by others that employ more data and yield more explanatory power. In the end, I insist on only one thing. The Balkanization of stranger fear and hatred into many moral, political, historical, psychic, and social entities has blinded us to their possible commonalities. In addition to specialized working vocabularies, and the instructive histories of distinct, maligned communities, we need an overarching concept that organizes our thinking about similarities.
Others have made the same point. The psychologist Gordon Allport pulled many biases into his notion of “prejudice,” but his effort, as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl deftly showed, led to overgeneralizations and obfuscations. She herself sought to rehabilitate Allport’s term by dividing up kinds of prejudice between three psychoanalytic character types, an ambitious effort that was so specific, and so unsupported empirically, that it collapsed under its own weight. The closest proposal to my own came from Albert Memmi. The author of The Colonizer and the Colonized had experienced what it was like to be the object of anti-Arab, anti-Semitic, and anti-French vitriol. He understood the need for a broadly encompassing term that linked such hatreds together. In 1982, Memmi proposed to call it “heterophobia,” a fear of the dissimilar, which led to forms of “domination based on real or imagined differences.” His logic was impeccable, but Memmi’s coinage never caught on. Perhaps at that historical moment, the whole matter, like xenophobia itself, seemed rather academic.
CHAPTER 15
The New Xenophobia
UNLIKE NUMBERS, words gather new meanings. They grow and mutate, so much so that poor Noah Webster and his lot must string lists of definitions to a sole entry. What happens when words transform or when they suddenly travel and pop up amid new signs and symbols? Then our verbal calculations may quietly go awry. No one may notice that things add up differently, but they do. The story of xenophobia has been of a word that has gone through a series of alterations and migrations. A late-nineteenth-century neologism that was brought forth in French and English became a tool, a map, a mirror, an atmosphere of opinion, and finally a curse.
Curses, of course, matter. In 1934, one of the Frankfurt School’s exiles, Norbert Elias, published The Civilizing Process, in which he examined some ways in which cultural adaptations occurred. Social disruptions led to shifting standards of behavior, he argued, so that what was once acceptable—like eating with your hands or spitting under your host’s dinner table—became dishonorable, disgusting, and shameful. After 1945, xenophobia came to represent such a taboo. What once was condoned or ignored now warranted a rebuke. How that prohibition related to the word’s past meanings became obscured. No matter. The Holocaust and the continued mixing of the world’s populations made it critical to forcefully reject the assumption that foreigners and strangers were enemies.
During the Cold War years, Western liberal democracies as well as socialist nations shared this revulsion. Soviets and Americans each took pride in their defeat of Fascism and Nazism. They each conceived of themselves as the Hitler slayers, the ones who ended the genocide of the Jews. As these Goliaths pointed their nuclear arsenals at each other, this much they shared. After millions of dead, the prayers for a new moral code, those entreaties that linked Bartolomé de Las Casas to Raphael Lemkin, seemed to have been answered. During the postwar years, xenophobia had become a curse. Its problems seemed to belong to a bygone era. It was hard to imagine that they would ever return.
BREXIT AND THE election of Donald Trump almost made no sense to me at first. They seemed to contradict assumptions I held for most of my adult life. During the 1980s, I came of age awash in the belief that a broad-based commitment to human rights was slowly but inexorably progressing. In college psychology class, we asked whether the James-Lange theory or misplaced associations or stereotyped ideas made for prejudice. Historians and sociologists examined how communal affiliations sequestered and distorted knowledge. Literary and semiotic studies analyzed the power of misrepresentation in everything from literary masterpieces to ads for the Marlboro Man. Many of us studied Freud, the Frankfurt School, Beauvoir and the second wave of feminists. My campus hummed with excitement thanks to illuminations and, somehow, sexy obfuscations emerging from deconstruction and the French invasion.
With the Holocaust hovering not far behind us, and American racism all around, these pursuits hardly seemed abstract; they translated into a concern with language and politically correct culture, which in my time was a rather timid call for self-restraint. Prohibitions were strong against the N-word, a few derogatory terms for Jews and women, not much more. Gay men and lesbians generally stayed in the closet, and other minorities, myself included, mostly kept quiet. When a New York society girl called my wife’s Nicaraguan friend a “spic,” that was supposedly good fun, though he got the better of the encounter when he replied, “and you are despicable.”
