Who Are the Wolves?

Vol. 1, No. 5--December 4, 2004

by Stephen Wangh

After the election debacle, my wife and I drove into the mountains from our home in Boulder, Colorado to recover. But the bed-and-breakfast where we stayed in Hot Sulfur Springs was filled with Christian images. In each room hung a crucifix; on every dresser lay a Bible and other Christian books. The gentle woman who ran the place spoke proudly, not only of the antiques with which she had furnished the place, but also of her three eldest sons, all U.S. marines, all serving in Iraq. And at the side of our breakfast table stood a small blackboard on which she had written out a passage from Paul's Letter to the Ephesians (6:11).

Put ye on the whole armour of God that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

The blackboard lesson seemed clear: Neither the mountains nor our hostess' sweet homemade scones could help us escape the fears upon which this election had fed.

Toward the climax of the campaign, the Bush-Cheney camp released a television ad portraying our society as threatened by wolves lurking in a dark forest. Democrats were appalled. Vice-presidential candidate John Edwards proclaimed that Americans would not be taken in by such scare tactics. He was mistaken.

But maybe we all made a much larger mistake: we misunderstood what those wolves symbolized. We assumed that they represented the terrorist threat that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney kept talking about. But the exit polls have made it clear that these wolves were actually emblematic of other, more personal terrors by which many Americans feel themselves threatened.

Now perhaps, the electoral catastrophe will make us see that the threat of terrorism is itself a symbolic threat. And the reason that the "war on terrorism" resonates so deeply with the American people is because it provides those who are already consumed by fear with an external image upon which to project their apprehensions.

Certainly the campaign has made one thing clear: simply trying to provide people with "the facts" will not suffice. A few weeks before the election, a poll of likely voters revealed that 73% of Bush supporters still believed that Iraq possessed "weapons of mass destruction." The poll-takers suggested that these people seemed to have difficulty dealing with reality.

My friend, science reporter Michael Belfiore, corroborates this suggestion:

Before the election, I met a woman in Vegas who thought it was a good thing that our soldiers were in Iraq kicking butt and getting even for 9/11. She was not a bit shaken in this feeling by my statement of the facts of the matter--namely that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and had demonstrated no threat to this country. ...The facts just didn't matter to her.

But if this is the case, what are we to do? Do we throw up our hands in disgust-as Maureen Dowd did in a New York Times op-ed piece in which she referred to fundamentalist Bush voters as "this loony bunch?" Or do we start asking questions like:

Why and when do people find facts confusing?
How can we communicate with people who do?

In their book, Political Paranoia, The Psychopolitics of Hatred, Robert S. Robins and Jerrold M. Post, M.D. write:

The paranoid cannot afford to question his fixed conclusion of danger [because]... it is psychologically essential to his emotional well-being.... It is not reassuring to a paranoid to tell him that there are no enemies plotting to destroy him. In fact, such a comment will often provoke anger, for it threatens important psychological props. The paranoid holds tenaciously to his comforting, sense-making delusion that he is surrounded by enemies.... Paranoids do not have adversaries or rivals or opponents; they have enemies, and enemies are not to be simply defeated and certainly not to be compromised with or won over. Enemies are to be destroyed.

Clearly, this is the way George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden and Ariel Sharon think. But it is not enough for us to blame the present world situation on the rise of fundamentalism in the three Abrahamic religions. We must ask why, at this moment in world history, is fundamentalism so ascendant.

If these people are frightened, perhaps they have good reason to be so. After all, we do live in a world of overwhelming complexity, contradiction and chaos, a world in which human beings hold the power to destroy all of civilization and when our own material "progress" threatens the entire ecology of the planet. So it is not strange that people should feel as though they are threatened by wolves. What is strange is that, faced with such insecurity, many Americans would rather attack Iraq and same-sex marriage than destroy nuclear weapons or fight against global warming.

But this peculiar response begins to make sense when we note the parallelism between the Taliban's insistence on the female burkha, the Ashcroft draping of the nude statue of Justice and the Hassidic dress and hair codes. It seems clear that what is really going on here is a reaction against the physical and the mental disrobing of human sexuality which has been going on for nearly a century now. An uncovering of the forbidden landscape of the human psyche which began with French painting, Freud and the flappers, and has now spread from Hollywood to television and the internet. Moslem fundamentalists say this out loud, Christians simply vote to change their state constitutions.

If this is true, then perhaps it is not so strange that people might feel more threatened by gay marriage than by nuclear war or ecological disaster. In fact, both nuclear war and ecological disaster present fundamentalists with images eerily akin to the "hopeful" descriptions of the end of the world which they have read in the Book of Revelation. Gay marriage, on the other hand, raises a much more terrifying specter: the hint that each of us carries within our own psyche sexual thoughts and images which, if admitted, would actually undermine our sense of who we are.

So perhaps it is not al-Qaeda or the Taliban who are the "wolves;" but we artists who write explicit lyrics or display our bodies during half-time, we scientists who insist that human beings evolved from apes through millenia of sexual reproduction, and we psychologists and other "liberated" folk who insist on talking openly about the unconscious mind and about sexual identity: we are the wolves.

So, it is not strange that, to people harboring such hidden fears, our "facts" might seem like a violent attack upon their faith, and our talk about economic issues "the wiles of the devil." And if we simply condemn and condescend to these frightened people, we merely confirm their conviction that we are, indeed, Satan's emissaries on earth.

If, on the other hand, we truly wish to make progress towards disarming their fears, we must learn how to empathize with these people. But how is that possible? How can we ever empathize with people who seem to be living in such deep denial?

Perhaps the other "wedge issue"--abortion--can help us here. For on this issue, it is not only those on the right who avoid looking at some of the "facts." In her article "Gambling with Abortion," in the November issue of Harper's Magazine, Cynthia Gorney points out:

For two decades the people who frame legal-abortion campaigns in this country had been working assiduously to keep the door to that procedure room shut, redirecting the national attention to the action beforehand and afterward: the choice to seek an abortion, the decision to have an abortion, the values inherent in a society that gives women the liberty to make this momentous decision without interference from the state. They had worried for years that if the general public were forced into a mangled-fetus-versus-women's-autonomy tradeoff, the mangled fetus would win.

So, Gorney asserts, the pro-choice organizers have carefully avoided the unpleasant "realities" of abortion itself. Why? Because not to avoid these realities might weaken our resolve. It might require that we abortion advocates encounter our own unconscious feelings of violence or of guilt, and such feelings might undermine our self-image as a non-violent and "innocent" people. In other words, in dealing with abortion politics, the "politically correct" pro-choice line entails the very same sort of avoidance of the inner landscape as the gay marriage issue entails for fundamentalists. If we can acknowledge this, then perhaps we can begin to empathize with those we've been calling "this loony bunch." If we dare to let go of our own righteousness, perhaps we can help others do the same.

Please don't mistake what I am saying here. This is not an appeal for us to give up our fury. Our anger at the arrogance of George W. Bush, and our disgust with the pusillanimity of John Kerry are well founded. But we must be careful about two things:

We must be careful to distinguish between Machiavellian characters like Karl Rove who distort the truth to their own ends, and the millions of frightened and confused voters who voted for Bush. To lump these two together is both a tactical error and an ethical misjudgment.
And we must be careful to distinguish between our anger and our righteous indignation. If we cannot find the way to give up our righteousness, our anger will not only fail to serve our ends, it may also transform us into a mirror image of our adversaries--as righteousness has so often done to revolutionaries in the past.

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