Shirts and Skins

Things may have changed, but there was a time when everyone knew the drill. A bunch of guys who don’t know each other are shooting baskets in the park and want to get a game going. So they choose up sides, either by counting off or by appointing two captains and letting them pick. Then the problem is how to make the two teams identifiable, preventing pointless miscues that only detract from the game. So one team strips off its shirts and becomes the Skins, while the other is the Shirts.

What happens then, psychologically, would be fascinating if it were not so familiar. You start to like, really like, your teammates, appreciating and exploiting their skills, praising them for good plays, glowing with pleasure when they compliment you on good work of your own. But you like the other team less and less, individually and collectively. This guy guarding you, who threw off your last shot with a quick lunge and then grabbed the rebound, really is a jerk. You dislike his moustache, his silly shoes. The center on his side, a tall blonde kid, is a crybaby who claims too many fouls. You play harder and harder, determined to put these fools in their places.

So it’s not at all uncommon to have loud arguments break out, between guys who saw each other for the first time not half an hour ago. Sometimes there are even fights, disrupting play, and hard feelings that outlast the game, escaping into reality, like an experimental virus getting out of a locked laboratory. Normally, though, the passions sparked by the game end when the game itself does. The winning bucket goes in, you cheer or groan, and suddenly you and the jerk you were guarding are trading grins, shaking hands, saying “Good game.” It feels a little like waking from a dream: what was it that had you wanting to punch him, fifty seconds ago? Quite often there is another game, and other games after that, with the teams reshuffled each time, so that you go from Shirt to Skin and back again all afternoon. All the while your opposite number keeps transforming into your trusty ally and sidekick, then back into an enemy and a jerk again.

My idea is that this phenomenon makes a pretty good paradigm for racism and prejudice: those necessary obsessions, in modern multiethnic societies, and especially so on the liberal left, my political home turf. Racism, I want to say, is what happens when something – authority, economic pressure, a disturbing incident, divergent interests, “society” (whatever that is) — divides us up into teams and bids us compete, activating our powerful underlying capacity for group identification and rivalry. We are tribal creatures and probably always will be, but the good news is that the tribalism is so lightly worn, so provisional and context-driven. Like the penchant for violence itself, it is always latently there but doesn’t have to come out, and it can always be softened, sublimated, redirected.

Such a model can put a somewhat hopeful gloss on a calamity that still feels fresher than it should: the Disaster of November 8, 2016, when I and all my tribe were defeated by the Evil Clown and his forces — defeated, fooled, routed, shamed, driven shrieking from the field. In the long run-up to that horror, as the Clown broke one taboo after another, we liberals kept telling each other, “Now he’s done it!” “He’s toast now!” “The American people will never stand for this!” We were not underestimating the Clown so much as overestimating the voters, the people, ourselves. Things had changed, we thought, since Jim Crow, since the World Wars, since the Sixties, since the Defense of Marriage Act, since the internment of the Japanese, since Stonewall, since the McCarthy hearings, since the Selma marches, since Watergate, since the Scopes trial. Progress had been made, and people were, you know, just better than they had been in the old days: less violent, less cruel, less superstitious, more buff, better dressed. Even a work as soberly analytical as Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels could look around cautiously and note that murder rates had fallen by orders of magnitude since the Middle Ages, that people no longer flocked to public executions or torture, that there had been no great Maoist or Stalinist purges lately, that since 1945, in place of the third world war all reasonable observers expected at that point, we had muddled through various brushfire conflicts into what would have to be called, by the standards of any previous era, World Peace — though much of the credit for that belongs to nuclear weapons, that perversely salutary deus ex machina that may yet roast us all.

So when the Clown proved himself, early on, to be a shameless and methodical liar (though never a convincing one), we thought, people’s basic sense of honor will disqualify him, their demand for honest dealing above all. When he revealed himself to be a racist (from the Birther episode on, in your face, not bothering with disguise) we thought, people’s basic compassion and tolerance will now sweep him from the board. When his whole life revealed him to be a sexual predator, and the lesson was renewed at the eleventh hour by the Access Hollywood tapes, with the collusion of a media panicking by then over the monster it had created, we thought, women’s basic self-respect, and men’s respect and love for the women in their lives, will now sink him to depths from which he can never return.

And the polls always told us we were right, preparing what was in some ways the cruelest blow of all: the disgrace of reason itself, of order and evidence and method: that dreadful 11/9 sensation that the world was upside down, and now nothing would ever make sense.

What the Clown always knew, in that feral, unreflective way he knows things, was that human nature was about as nasty and as nice as it had always been. All the old buttons were still there, waiting to be pushed, so he by-God pushed them, with the flair and confidence of a lifelong grifter. He threw out the ball, blew the whistle, and let us choose up sides, white vs. nonwhite, men vs. women, north vs. south, rural vs. urban, poor vs. affluent, whatever —  it didn’t matter much, for it was division itself that propelled him, not the victory of any one faction. If you can get people screaming at each other and you are a “change candidate,” however nonsensically, you have a shot.

So now we liberals are left gasping at a dismal spectacle: roughly forty percent of the electorate revealed as what, apparently, they always were: racist, sexist, and so on, and dumber than a box of rocks, to have bought by the bucket the crapola the Clown was peddling. Being ruled by him is terrible, but what cuts deepest is the sense of their betrayal. How could they? How can we ever live with them again?

In fact this is an over-reaction, born of a certain lack of self-knowledge on our part, a certain failure to nose out BS of our own.

2

On the day of the Nazi attack in Charlottesville (yes, Nazi attack in Charlottesville: everything you need to know about 2017, bundled in one bleak phrase), while the Clown was giving a response so tepid and conflicted that even his base thought it came too close to shouting “Sieg Heil!” (he would later perform some half-hearted damage control, then decide, Hell with it, and double down) — that day, ex-President Obama posted what quickly became one of the most popular tweets of all time: 

https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/896523232098078720/photo/1

"No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion..."

First off, let me say that the meme is wonderful: uplifting, full of hope. Obama takes one of the hoariest clichés of the left (face it) and breathes life back into it with a photo that proves to be a perfect (though subtle) gloss: himself, hand gently on the sill, looking up through a window at four happy-seeming babies of four different races. Joined to the quote, the high window seems to open onto a better world than this one, a place just barely visible to the man standing on tiptoe. But it seems to be where he wants to go, to lead us: the spirit of 2008, precisely, never entirely disappointed in the two terms that followed. On some level we are being exhorted, in almost Biblical terms, to recall a childlike capacity to hope and to accept. No wonder the ensemble so quickly touched so many.

But what about the intellectual content of the tweet, the pc truism it quotes? The idea, clearly, is that only “society” — that conveniently amorphous, unfindable scapegoat — can be to blame for prejudice. “Nature,” our human nature, is innocent and pure. This notion, making its way from Rousseau through countless intermediaries to Nelson Mandela and thence to Obama, is at best a canting oversimplification. Of course babies are not born hating anyone or anything. They are also not born with pubic hair, deep voices, or long torsos, but when these arrive no one blames false socialization.

In fact there is every reason to believe that racism and prejudice are about as natural as farting, another human penchant that requires strong social intervention. Serious scientific inquiries into human nature, like Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee, routinely report on xenophobic reflexes and genocidal aspirations among hunter-gatherer groups, and on the robust survival of such tendencies into modern times. (They usually appear with blazing clarity in any society you care to consider, except, of course, your own.) In The Nurture Assumption, Judith Harris makes a powerful argument for placing what she calls “groupness” near the top of the list of human motivators. In numerous studies, she points out, “people divide up into groups in the blink of an eye,” but the affiliations so casually formed prove weirdly forceful. History, meanwhile, shows an ominous human willingness to kill and die in the service of group identifications, which seem even more powerful in this regard than personal passions. The habit of dividing up into Shirts and Skins, then fighting like the devil, is a bottom-line instinct. “The emotional power of groupness comes from a long evolutionary history in which the group was our only hope of survival . . . ” But the grim inexorability of the drive is softened by the nimble way we dodge in and out of groups, defining and redefining both them and ourselves. Tribalism is a given, but the tribes themselves are perpetually TBD.

Then there is Jane Elliott’s famous, rather cruel “classroom exercise,” conducted in 1968, in which she divided her third-graders into brown-eyed and blue-eyed clans, then took notes as they behaved horribly to each other. Elliott’s report is a canonical text of liberalism, which has absorbed it, just barely, by assigning an anodyne meaning (racism is really dangerous and really hurtful) while side-stepping a far more disturbing implication (it is also seemingly natural and spontaneous). What should haunt any of her readers (but usually does not, it seems) is how easy it is (as in Milgram’s experiments on obedience) to seduce people into vicious behavior. Basically, you just tell someone that he is a Shirt and the Skins are out to get him, and presto! Even if he doesn’t really believe it, he is constrained by what military and game theorists call a “security dilemma” to behave as if it were true, and so is his counterpart. Gotta get them before they get us. A feedback loop is generated, and intergroup hatred becomes a runaway self-fulfilling prophesy.

Really, though, we liberals know all this. We are aware of Diamond and Jane Goodall and Thomas Hobbes. We all read Lord of the Flies in ninth grade. Often we will even argue that the human default setting is known to be tribal, that that is all the more reason to be vigilant against racism: a neat job of having our intellectual cake and eating it too. At the level of polite political discussion, though, we mostly cling to our weak narrative of smiling babies corrupted only by the unexplained malignity of “society,” and this seems remarkable. It is as if the smiling-baby story were our book of Genesis that we want to uphold over climate research and the theory of evolution — or in our case, psychology and anthropology and (Lord knows) history. Part of the reason, clearly, is that dispassionate explanations of racism and prejudice are felt to be morally dangerous. To explain a thing, we fear, is a giant step toward normalizing it. Demystify racism, explain it too convincingly as a routine operation of human nature under certain kinds of stress and temptation, hint that its operations are often strangely gamelike and superficial (however terrible the consequences), and you seem to forfeit the right to condemn it. Clearly, this will not do. Better to leave racism as an inexplicable darkness, harder to account for than the Serpent in Genesis, if that enables full-throated denunciation. We need racism to be an aberration, a fateful canker on the soul — a sin, in short — rather than a somewhat casual by-product of group dynamics.

But I am being too hard on my homies on the left. In the end there is something cannily practical about our smiling-baby story. If from one angle it looks like a goofy contrafactual myth, from another it seems only a necessary polite fiction, a way of getting on with business. You simply cannot begin a useful discussion of anything, in the Big Tent of liberalism, by remarking, “We know that racism and other forms of discrimination are well-nigh universal, that these potentials exist in nearly everyone, that even people of good will must struggle to overcome them. In fact mere probability tells me that many of you guys, deep down, must be real assholes.” Such candor instantly becomes a disaster of pre-emption and self-actuation. Everyone looks around and thinks, Gee, I hadn’t been noticing, but I’m white (or black or brown or gay or what-have-you), and these other people aren’t. I wonder if they are prejudiced against me. That guy over there is staring. Then everyone looks at the speaker and thinks, he must be talking about himself; he must be really racist, exceptionally racist, to have said such a thing. Even if it is sort of true, what can be his motive for emphasizing it? Where is he headed with this?. At this point the speaker likely loses his nerve and tries to backtrack, but the damage is done: anything he says from here on is assumed to be a panicky cover-up.

What is needed instead is a strategy of decent evasion. In place of agonizing candor, you begin with the smiling-baby theory of human nature, the Pollyanna premise that everyone is amicable and rational and well-disposed to everyone else: silly fictions if closely examined, but polite and helpful. Almost no one really believes them, but everyone agrees to pretend to believe them. Here in the Tent we’re all right, Jack; the bad ones are all out there in the dark. Now we can get somewhere. Now we are a community and can discuss things. We may even make our way, step by careful step, into a surprising degree of the candor we were careful to avoid at the outset. More important, our blithe idealism can sometimes be as self-actuating as its opposite. The Pollyanna premise that people are nice constrains speech and behavior in ways that some find annoying, but fosters calm and trust and allows everyone to relax so that soon enough, by golly, most of them are pretty nice. Wishing makes it so: the smiling-baby theory lulls away tension and turns itself into reality.

But this is just the strategy the Clown has been pursuing in reverse. He always knew, deep in his grifter’s bones, that racism and sexism are self-performing, that they feed on themselves, that the triggers are obvious and easily touched. He even seems to have grasped that they proceed more from circumstance, and less from the soul, than almost anyone thinks. So throughout the campaign he pursued a course of calculated transgression. It didn’t finally matter that he horribly insulted Mexicans; it mattered that he moved us to identify as Mexican or not. It didn’t matter (or not enough) that he had always demeaned women; it mattered that so many women bought the idea that voting against him would be voting their gender, period, and they didn’t want to do that. His assaults on the norms of civilized politicking — insulting opponents, dragging their families into the fray, condoning violence — worked somewhat in the same way, dividing the country up into the fun crowd and the stiff crowd. Even if you were just surfing through on your way to PBS, you had to see that those oafs in their red baseball hats, carrying on like teenagers getting drunk in a parking lot, were having the hell of a good time airing grudges and defying the principal. Meanwhile “Let’s Be Civilized” was, as a slogan, under-inspiring. No one identifies with the Dean in Animal House.

So here we are. The other day a friend told me, “the worst thing about the Clown is that he’s let the white supremacists out of the closet.” Not exactly, I think. The worst thing is that he created the conditions under which many became white supremacists who might otherwise never have sampled that heady drug.

But we liberals can at least quit grieving at what we see as the revealed moral bankruptcy of our countrymen. What the election really showed is just what we knew all along: in conducive circumstances, we can all be nasty sons of bitches.  

3

Back at the beginning, in happier times, Megyn Kelly of Fox News kicked off the first Republican Primary Debate with a question that, to all my tribe, seemed everything a debate question should be: factual, exact, pointed, clear, and relevant to essential issues:

. . . one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don’t use a politician’s filter. However, that is not without its downsides, in particular when it comes to women. You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs’ and ‘disgusting animals.’ . . .  Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees.  Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who is likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?

The Clown’s answer, I thought at the time, was as floundering and feckless as answer could be: frantically evasive, borderline incoherent. The second half was especially bad: the Clown’s voice got angrier and angrier as he convinced himself, before our very eyes, that a perfectly proper question had been a deep betrayal, succeeding so completely that  the total effect was quite creepy. By the two thirds mark he was actually threatening Kelly, in euphemisms that, on paper, completely fail to catch the menace that was in his voice, till at the end he recoiled into bromides from his stump speech: 

I think the big problem this country has is . . . being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total — political —  correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either. This country is in big trouble, we don’t win anymore, we lose to China, we lose to Mexico, both in trade and at the border. We lose to everybody, and frankly, what I say . . . and oftentimes it’s fun, it’s kidding, we have a good time, what I say is, what I say. And honestly, Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry, I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me, but I wouldn’t do that. But you know what? We need strength, we need energy, we need quickness, and we need brains in this country, to turn it around. That I can tell you, right now.

Well, I thought, there you have it: a meltdown on national TV. Pretty much what can be expected of a rank amateur, propelled by clinical narcissism into this gross over-reaching. Now he drops out, and we go on with the serious candidates. Good riddance to this creep.

Probably I will never understand how I got it so miserably wrong. I go back to the tape and still see the same dimwitted, inarticulate, surly man, completely out of his depth, making a fool of himself (though winning some points for sheer chutzpah), utterly failing to fight clear of the indictment that Kelly, a lawyer after all, has so competently leveled.

What always strikes me, though, is that first sentence: I think the big problem this country has is . . . being politically correct. This is as murky conceptually as it is grammatically. Never mind climate change, nuclear proliferation, income inequality, job insecurity, or even the favorite bugbear, Islamic terrorism: our real problem is the guy at work who doesn’t like your jokes, the gal who wants you to quit saying Sweetie. And all this is supposed to excuse public bullying and insults? The disconnect seems stunning, but the line played well in the room: a brisk round of applause interrupted the tirade at just this point. That simple two-word mantra, politically correct, seemed to be enough to save all the rest.

Can it be that mere etiquette weighed so heavily on the voters? Maybe so. We liberals have never quite learned to have a certain kind of necessary discussion without going batshit crazy. Questions of protocol, style, and grammar are seeming trivialities packed (it turns out) with emotional TNT because they function as shibboleths, ready signs of group identity. Reviewing them even in the most constructive tone tends to set dark tribal emotions in play. In a really bad meeting, under the Big Tent, the questions beneath all other questions are Who are you, anyway? and What are the teams here? Discussion quickly devolves into ad hominem bickering, one-upsmanship, and then a general paranoia that sends everyone racing to the shelter of humorless dogmatism. Suddenly everyone is demanding tolerance in the most intolerant way possible, using the ill-fitting language of moral absolutes to discuss mere manners, mere language. The tone grows increasingly high-and-mighty, and we get entrapped, in a way, in our polite procedural fictions -- the smiling-baby theory, the Pollyanna premise -- taking them far too literally.

The proscriptions and demands that emerge from such meetings have of course been a bonanza for polemicists on the right, who delight to portray us as hypersensitive snowflakes and would-be commissars, offended by everything and tolerant of nothing. Of course they never pause to address any of the questions with which we began, the obvious problems posed by, say, a statue of Robert E. Lee outside the county courthouse; they only need to expose the weakness of our insufficiently tentative answers. The Evil one himself clearly imagines “political correctness” as a regime of hardship from which he is delivering the faithful — he is on record saying that in America whites are more oppressed than blacks — but in fact it is mainly a problem for liberals themselves, not something we have yet managed to impose on others. What matters most is the idea of it, the myth of the fuming, fussy liberal out to destroy every habit and tradition that makes life possible for everyone else. That functions as a master shibboleth, forcing everyone to choose sides in the great Snowflake-Redneck War, a contest that currently seems as bitter and fateful as racial divisions themselves. 

These days the programs I watch mostly seem confident that the Clown’s days are numbered. His closest advisors are fed up with his antic incompetence, the public is sick of the show, he himself is bored and ready to quit, Mueller and his seventeen lawyers are circling his little orange dinghy like so many sharks. But all this seems too reminiscent of last year’s overconfidence. My own take is that the Clown’s crazy grip on the short hairs of the republic is strong as ever. The approval numbers from his base never budge. The impeachment machinery invoked so hopefully by so many looks rickety and insufficient. Last week he took 800,000 Dreamers hostage, did a star turn as the maverick cop who was going to save them, then extorted several high-ranking Dems into climbing aboard the dinghy, showing how easily he can divide the Resistance when he pleases. As Bill Maher points out, “he hasn’t even played the war card yet.” But lately he and Hateful Haircut, aka Rocket Man, his erstwhile role model and current convenient archrival, have been exchanging threats of nuclear war like Christmas cards, to their obvious mutual benefit, since no one will oppose a Dear Leader while the country lies under existential threat. Where this circus is headed no one can tell.

I keep thinking, though, of that moment at the end of the game, when Shirts and Skins wake up and discover that they are really members of a single larger team. I think of the smiles, the handshakes, the strange way that conflict itself seems to have bonded them. The way they call each other things like asshole and dumbshit but mean it affectionately. They will be coming back again next Saturday, in good spirits. A guy can hope.