{"id":6683,"date":"2017-04-23T20:41:47","date_gmt":"2017-04-24T01:41:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=6683"},"modified":"2017-04-24T20:42:25","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T01:42:25","slug":"exceptionalists-ancient-athens-and-trump-supporters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=6683","title":{"rendered":"Exceptionalists: Ancient Athens and Trump Supporters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not long ago, I listed to a Teaching Company audio course<\/a> on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. CBT is an interesting psychotherapy technique, in that it puts emphasis on getting the patient to “pull up their own socks” instead of relying on the therapist to evolve a plan (after long analysis) for the troubled patient’s mental salvation. Of course, CBT is more subtle than that, but it certainly does try to encourage the patient to build up their own social and mental resources. One of the important resources that the CBT therapist attempts to foster is an inner sense of “meaning in life”. CBT includes exercises whereby the patient identifies things that they find very important, and that give meaning to their lives. These exercises might consider family relationships, social belonging, personal achievement, financial success, religious or spiritual beliefs and expressions, learning and discovery, fame and acknowledgement, feeling needed, etc. Those are the kinds of things that would probably occur most frequently to many modern suburban Americans if asked what do their lives mean.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of the CBT “meaning in life” exercise recently while I was reading an article in the April, 2017 issue of The Atlantic on ancient Athens (“Making Athens Great Again<\/a>” by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein). In this article Ms. Goldstein discussed what some of the great thinkers of Athens said about “meaning in life”. She concludes that they clearly rejected spiritual transcendence. “The cosmos is indifferent, and only human terms apply: Perform exceptional deeds so as to earn the praise of others whose existence is as brief as your own”. <\/p>\n

However, the ancients recognized that there was big problem with this way of finding meaning in life for most people. According to Ms. Goldstein, “most people are, by definition, perfectly ordinary, the ancient Greeks included.” Most people aren’t going to perform very many exceptional deeds in their lifetimes. Still, the Greeks “found a solution to this problem in propounding a kind of participatory exceptionalism, encouraging a shared sense of identity . . . merely to be Greek was extraordinary”. <\/p>\n

So, it was a sense of nationalism and patriotism that supposedly gave the average Athenians their “meaning in life”. They might just be faceless bureaucrats or garbagemen, but the nation that they supported was in fact great and exceptional, much more advanced than most of the world. They had their democracy and their great architecture and their growing wealth and importance in the world, along with their great artists and writers and accumulated learning and wisdom. When the call to war came, ancient Athens was certainly held out to be worth fighting for. Why not, when simply being a citizen (for those who achieved that honor, which excluded women and slaves) in itself is probably the most meaningful thing in life.<\/p>\n

Wow, how times have changed!!! I could hardly imagine anyone I know here in suburban NJ contending that being an American, being part of what America has achieved in the world, is a big part of what gives them meaning in life. I myself never felt much patriotic pride; as I came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s while the Vietnam War raged on, I certainly did not consider the chance to fight for my nation’s interest in Southeast Asia to be an opportunity to accomplish something meaningful with my life. <\/p>\n

Now don’t get me wrong, I never hated America. I always recognized my responsibility to be a dutiful citizen; I vote, I pay my taxes, I occasionally engage in political expression regarding the big questions of the day. Despite our nations many flaws and inequities, I still feel that it’s better than most of the rest, and there are still a lot of good things worth preserving about it. But as to gaining a feeling of meaning in life from being a loyal American citizen, that just never occurred to me. And obviously, as a young man, I could hardly foresee any situation where I would be willing to lay down my life for my country, short of say the Red Army storming the beaches along the Jersey shore or the People’s Liberation Army overwhelming Big Sur. <\/p>\n

And yet, my father and uncles were part of “the Greatest Generation” who served in World War 2 and did indeed offer to put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of the nation (luckily, the Navy and Army Air Corp found relatively safe places to utilize their services in 1944 and 1945; many other families who lived in the neighborhoods where my mother and father grew up weren’t so lucky). I suppose that for them, being an American really was a big part of their sense of self-worth. And yes, I recognize that here in America today, we still have a lot of people for whom national identity plays a big role in their sense of self.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is one of the big fault-lines in America right now. This fault line may well be same divide between those who enthusiastically supported Donald Trump in the recent Presidential election, and those who favored Hilary Clinton (of course, I was a bit of an odd duck amidst the college-educated suburbanite circles — I certainly wasn’t going to get on board with Trump, but I never enthused much about Ms. Clinton either). Trump supporters resonated with the notion that America should become “great again”. They rely on national identity as part of their own personal self-worth, and thus they take very personally the nation’s failures in recent years, especially when some of those failures (e.g. the increasing accumulation of wealth and divide in opportunity between rich and everyone else) were hitting home in their own communities. <\/p>\n

Many pundits regret the increasing political polarization that appears to have been happening in our country in recent years, which the Trump-Clinton contest brought into sharp focus. I’ve heard and read some political<\/a> and psychological theorists<\/a> talk and write about the need for people on each side of whatever this political dividing line is to reach out and try to understand what motivates those on either side. But I’m not sure if we really know just what this line is, e.g. what is so fundamentally different about a white working-class family supporting Trump in Webster City, Iowa or Canton Ohio versus a college-trained professional family in Scarsdale NY or an immigrant Hispanic family in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. Why do the Democrats seem to have a natural constituency with the latter, and the modern GOP an easier way of relating to the former? <\/p>\n

Sure, there are plenty of social factors and economic factors, but what we would really need is a forum where these people could talk heart-to-heart. Right now, I don’t think we have any places of common ground to start such a discussion. So let me suggest, the question of “what gives you meaning in life” might be the place to start. The important sub-question to that is, how does your citizenship as an American fit in with your sense of personal meaning. What do you expect from America, and what would you give up for America? <\/p>\n

I suspect that natural Republican-favoring families would generally expect more and would give up more, at least for the “Great America” that they supposedly remember and want to see restored. But yes, there is a paradox in that these same people are more likely than the “unpatriotic” educated coastal Democrats to hate paying taxes and continue to lobby their politicians for less tax and less government regulation (in keeping with “Tea Party freedom”). They might say that they first want to see a return to civic virtue as a driver of political energies, and not a mix of elite bureaucracy and legislation driven by financial institution contributions. To be honest, the ancient Greeks might have sympathized with this feeling.<\/p>\n

What I’m suggesting — or asking, as I’m really not sure about this theory — is whether there is a sociology factor at play in the big red state \/ blue state rift today. Among the “elite” of the blue states, I think that national issues are very important; there is clearly not a sense of national nihilism. Liberal factions and Bernie Sanders supporters want more government, not less, and thus care a lot about it. But as to where that position stands within the “hierarchy of needs” of their own self-identity, it’s probably not usually in the top rungs. They have their relationships and their spirituality and arts and learning, which may or may not be grounded on American soil. The elite are very internationalist, they appreciate Chinese philosophy and African art and European soccer and Middle-Eastern cuisine, along with Indian yoga. Where as, for many red-state people, the need to have a nation of civic virtue that they could feel proud of is still a big inner motivation, and not unrelatedly, most of their other concerns and joys in life are very firmly rooted within the boundaries of the USA. E.g., NASCAR.<\/p>\n

Are there any potential bridges here, any possible means toward greater understanding and wisdom on both sides? You would think that educated, internationalist Clinton supporters might appreciate the ancient Greek bias towards national identity and virtue as a source of personal value, and consider whether Trump supporters in the heartlands are in some ways in synch with these ideas and ideals. I’m sure that a lot of Hillary people would love to talk the Trumpians out of their vision of whatever a “Great America” would be. But maybe they need instead to try to understand what that vision is, and why it might be personally important, just as it was similarly important to Athenians in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BCE. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not long ago, I listed to a Teaching Company audio course on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. CBT is an interesting psychotherapy technique, in that it puts emphasis on getting the patient to “pull up their own socks” instead of relying on the therapist to evolve a plan (after long analysis) for the troubled patient’s mental salvation. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,7,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6683"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6683"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6690,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6683\/revisions\/6690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}