Us and Them: The Blog

Transition Atmosphere

Watching President-Elect Obama, at his first press conference, I noticed him repeatedly striking a note of thorough, cautious deliberateness. For instance, at one point, he said, ``obviously, how we approach and deal with a country like Iran is not something that we should, you know, simply do in a knee-jerk fashion. I think we've got to think it through.'' And, a little later: ``I'm proud of the choice of chief of staff, because we thought it through. And I think it's very important, in all these key positions, both in the economic team and the national security team, to -- to get it right and not to be so rushed that you end up making mistakes.'' Imagining his team combing through the files of the Bush Administration, I found myself recalling Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest. There's a scene there (when I dug up my old paperback, I found it on page 64) in which the reckless, violent cowboys of an Earth colony suddenly find themselves talking to an emissary from a more civilized planet:

``He looked about at the purple colonel, the flowering majors, the livid captains, the cringing specialists. Contempt came into his face. `You have not thought things through,' he said. By his standards, it was a brutal insult.''

I think Washington may have that atmosphere for a few months . . .

Against Political Correctness

These days the study of stereotypes is rich in ideas and controversies. People are interested in the psychology and even the neuroscience of this human habit of classifying the self and others, in all its complexity and variety. Thankfully, the days are past when stereotypes were seen as always negative, never-changing, ``bad'' ideas imposed by bad people upon good people.

Yet some people still write about the issue in that way.

Publication Day

Today, Oct. 24, is the official publication day for my book, Us and Them : Understanding Your Tribal Mind. Buy early and often.

I'm going to stay in a literary vein today, then, with a bit about the richest such vein there is.

Shakespeare thought about the problem of Us versus Them, as he thought about everything. Specifically, if modern scholarship is correct about the authorship of a play called ``Sir Thomas More,'' written in the 1590's by several hands, Shakespeare had a grip on the essence of the problem. In the passage of the play likely written by Shakespeare, Thomas More confronts a crowd which believes a depressingly modern, Peter Brimelow sort of idea: Foreigners are ruining everything, stealing our jobs, taking advantage of our generosity, and driving up prices. They're ruining us! Drive those foreigners out! (The play was based on histories of anti-foreign rioting in London in 1517.)

To which the probably Shakespearean More replies:

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage

Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,

And that you sit as kings in your desires.

Here, he tells the mob, is what will happen:

Not one of you should live an aged man,

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought

With selfsame hand, self reasons, and self right

Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes

Would feed on one another.

Suppose, for example, you all get exiled for this rioting against the King, he continues. What happens then?

Go you to France, or Flanders,

To any German province, Spain or Portugal,

Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,

Why, you must needs by strangers. Would you be pleased

To find a nation of such barbarous temper

That breaking out in hideous violence

Would not afford you an abode on earth,

Whet their detested knives against your throats,

Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements

Were not all appropriate to your comforts

But chartered unto them, what would you think

To be thus used? This is the strangers' case,

And this your mountainish inhumanity.