First, let me say that I have not read Ms. Faludi's book. While I can see its interest, if I were to set it on the stack of "Waiting to read" it would have to be placed in my coffin to read after my funeral because I know I will never get to it before then. But I'm not writing here about Ms. Faludi's book. I'm writing because Amanda presented a psychological theory that is new to me, and which seems quite fascinating. It is called Terror Management Theory.
Amanda counters Matt's complaint by saying
Faludi's book isn't about the plans to invade Iraq, but about the formation of the anxieties that fed the propaganda effort. There are books about the plans to invade Iraq; I don't see why insisting that all books be on that. The anxieties that made us easy to propagandize to is a perfectly legitimate thesis for a book.So if you want to focus on the anxiety that made large blocks of the voting public buy into bellicose and unrealistic lies and misinterpretations of facts to support the war in Iraq, then a discussion of anxiety is exactly what you want to do.
I would also argue that in his article, Matt confused two levels of analysis. He states that we can never know exactly what thought and emotional processes led individuals like Peter Beinart or Paul Wolfowitz to support the war in Iraq. That is an individual psychological point of view, and would take long terms of individual psychoanalysis to tease out. Amanda is not looking at individual psychology. She is using social psychology - the discipline of understanding how individuals in groups act. That is a realm of psychology which does present and test truly scientific - falsifiable - theories of behavior. Terror Management Theory is one of those theories.
Terror Management Theory (TMT) is based on the theory from Existentialism that describes the human being as the only existing animal which is aware of its own impending death. Amanda describes TMT thus:
Basically, it's the theory that human beings have a lot of tropes and tools to block the fear of death, and they carefully use scientific research to figure out what those are. A standard TMT experiment involves giving people a writing assignment, where half are told to write about something like hanging out at the park and the other half are told to write about their own deaths. And then they measure how the death group compares to the non-death group in terms of attitudes.One experiment that Amanda describes looks at misogyny and terror.
The research is demonstrating that reactionary politics are linked strongly with fear of death, with people getting more conservative, more Republican, and even more hostile to abstract art when they consider their own mortality. (Obviously, not all people, but these are averages.) And of this constellation of internal protections against fear of mortality, misogyny is pretty damn high on the list.
Working with the theory that women are marked as the "vulnerable" sex, and therefore that the threat of death will create more belief that women are more creaturely, more physical, more vulnerable and more penetrable (so that men can feel stronger, more impenetrable---Faludi's theory) [Snip]I find this research fascinating. It puts an explainable and in fact statistically predictable connection between one one side the kinds of cultural terror like Pearl Harbor, the assassination of a leader, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and 9/11 and as a response the readiness to abandon democracy and adopt the governmental forms and promises of authoritarian leaders. There is no question, for example, that the actions of the radical Iranian students who kidnapped the American Embassy staff in Tehran in 1979 and held them through the 1980 Presidential election effectively canceled out the normal reelection advantage held by Carter as the incumbent President and very probably permitted Reagan to with that eletion.[*]
In the series of experiments, they showed that reminders of mortality caused women to pay more attention to restricting calories later in the day (i.e., fit into the feminine ideal), overweight women became more self-conscious if reminded of their mortality, and even that women felt more positively about going to tanning booths after being reminded that they're going to die. The researchers were researching the relationship of sexual objectification to terror management, but we can easily see how the constellation of sexist demands on women to be beautiful, vulnerable, less smart than men, and domestic go together and create an entire coping mechanism that is manifested in culture. [Snip]
...the initial experiments are upholding Faludi and Ducat's theories about how vulnerability is projected onto female bodies so men can feel less vulnerable, and how a huge terror like 9/11 functions as a culture-wide reminder that we're going to die---and present a culture-wide enticement towards more misogyny. [Snip]
When women are marked as the vulnerable sex, and rallying to war is marked as a "masculine" behavior, then it's going to be tempting to deny one's own vulnerability by rallying to war and squelching femininity. It's clear to me that a lot of liberal hawks were willing to ignore reams of evidence that this war was a Bad Idea. You don't see that level of ignoring reason and evidence without strong emotional reasons, and I do think there's good, scientific evidence behind the theory that people's anxieties of sex and death are enough to cause them to retreat into a fantasy world and ignore reason (at least temporarily) when confronted with a trauma like 9/11.
It also strongly suggest that unscrupulous politicians will offer themselves as all knowing and all-powerful leaders to protect the frightened populace. (This is clearly what Giuliani is doing as he tries to wrap himself in the mantle of the Mayor who led New York on 9/11.) In fact, it even leads to a prediction that someone like Rudolph Giuliani who desperately wants that authoritarian leadership position and finds it slipping away because there has not been a recent enough terror incident may very well cause one to occur - the so-called October Surprise.
Essentially the argument is that in a time of terror, the emotional brain will trump the rational analysis of the thinking brain. History has demonstrated this, but TMT provides laboratory evidence of the effect. TMT also has a lot of implications about how early childhood trauma, abuse and lack of family stability could create a higher percentage of criminals and anti-social unreliable people. This has a lot of fascinating social implications as well as political ones.
[*] It occurs to me that Iranians have complained mightily (and justifiably) about how the CIA and British Intelligence engineered the coup in 1953 in which the elected Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown and replaced by the Shah.
OK. So the U.S. changed the Iranian head of government at that time. The Iranian students had much the same effect on America when they used the kidnapped Embassy staff to cause President Jimmy Carter be defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan's election led many of the current Republicans running the American government (and urging an attack on Iran) to reach their current levels of power.
Iran and America have been interfering with each other for a long time. Maybe the lesson to both nations is that it is always a bad idea to change to government of another sovereign nation.
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