by Bill Benzon
During the course of my adult life I have witnessed the collapse of the political culture of my nation, the United States of America. To be sure, there have been some good things – the Civil Rights movement, for example – but the framework that served from the nation’s founding through the end of World War II no longer functions well.
Over the last three or four decades the prison population has increased enormously, as has economic inequality, and during this century we’ve become mired down in an enormously destructive, expensive and militarily ineffective series of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As far as I can see there is no near-term prospect of ending either the internal problems or the hopeless and ill-founded war on terrorism.
How did this happen?
Cultural Psychodynamics
The problem, I believe, is rooted in the cultural psychodynamics of the nation-state. The sociologist Talcott Parsons diagnosed it in his classic 1947 article, “Certain Primary Sources and Patterns of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World” (full text online HERE). At some length and with great sophistication Parsons argued that citizens of Western nations project many of their aggressive impulses onto other peoples so that, in attempting to dominate those peoples, they are, in a psychological sense, attempting to attain mastery over themselves. I fear this problem is not only a Western one, but that’s a side issue in this context. It’s not merely that I’m writing about America, but that America remains the most powerful nation in the world, with by far the largest military establishment. Through that establishment America has tethered the rest of the world to its internal psychodynamics.
That’s crazy.
If by chance Parsons’ argument strikes you as improbable, well, I urge you to read his essay in full. Pending that, I offer as a bit of supporting evidence an extraordinary statement made by Mario Cuomo, ex-governor of New York, in interview published in The New York Times Magazine on March 19, 1995:
The Second World War as the last time that this country believed in anything profoundly, any great single cause. What was it? They were evil; we were good. That was Tojo, that was that S.O.B. Hitler, that was Mussolini, that bum. They struck at us in the middle of the night, those sneaks. We are good, they are bad. Let’s all get together, we said, and we creamed them. We started from way behind. We found strength in this common commitment, this commonality, community, family, the idea of coming together was best served in my lifetime in the Second World War.
That’s what Parsons was talking about.
I have no idea whether or not Cuomo is familiar with Parsons but, while he is certainly an intelligent and sophisticated man, he is not an academic. When he spoke those words he was speaking as a practical politician skilled at the complex and messy business of governance. The socio-cultural milieu that Parsons analyzed is the arena in which Cuomo lived his professional life. Judging by his political success, he had a good intuitive grasp of those dynamics.