Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, and Amy Coney Barrett's narratives are bad news for the US narrative

- Dr Bruce Long

Religion and secularism. They go hand and hand in the West, for the most part. Democratic Western nations have significant protections in place for freedom of religion. In nations like the United States, France, and the UK, such freedoms are protected variously by domestic policy, constitutional precepts, and law. The US in particular, unhindered as it is by constitutional monarchies with religious affiliations like that which still prevails in Great Britain (and, by extension, The Commonwealth), has seen an enormous explosion in the establishment of both incipient and derivative religious movements and sects.

The proliferation of religions in the US is broadly regarded as facilitated by and founded upon the US Constitution, and the more recent Jamesian pragmatist inheritance of American culture. It’s an established normative expectation in the secular and para-religious American national psyche. Both China’s Marxist-Leninist CPC and US Jamesian-pragmatist secularism tend to put the lie to the idea that philosophy is ineffectual and without practical function.

Pragmatism, in the technical sense, is, and has historically been, the philosophical disposition of choice in America. American Charles Sanders Peirce is the recognised founding father of scientific and philosophical pragmatism. Peirce was a colleague and friend of William James, whose more psychologistic brand of pragmatism now inheres in the US’ national and collective cultural imagination. The narrative of Jamesian pragmatism has as much influence in the US as the cultural narratives of free-marketism and manifest destiny, both of which it has variously merged with in a cultural intertextual (that’s cultural texts) grand narrative.

Jamesian pragmatism is famously a basis of religious ecumenicalism and syncretism, and along with the constitutional edicts of the founding fathers forms the mainstay of the basis of the US’ brand of secularism. James’ corpus includes the exhortation to believe what one will as it suits one’s psycho-emotional needs. In many ways, it was an innovative cultural technology, if not completely without historical precedent (Rome under Constantine before his conversion and certain periods in the history of Sicily and The Middle East come to mind as precedents).

Both the expansion of existing religious movements and sects, and the seeding of new religious faiths, face comparatively far more restrictions in China. There, the Communist Party of China enforces Marxist-Leninist prohibitions on the propagation and evangelisation of popular religious movements that may become capable of eroding Communist ideals, and those that might hinder the modus operandi and political and social momentum of the CPC and socialist body politic. However, China’s approach is far more liberal than a direct comparison with the extreme religious libertarianism of the US would suggest. There’s significant freedom of religion and protection for religious people in China. In most of the West even limited restrictions on freedom of religion are popularly (although certainly not unanimously) regarded as nothing less than a human rights violation. From the perspective of the West, Nation states that refuse to implement pragmatic para-religious and ecumenical quasi-secular approaches to social cohesion are regarded as oppressive, simplistic, autocratic, and less civilised.

However, is the democratic West right about religions and about how to manage them and their competing demands and ideals? Is the ecumenical, para-religious secularism of The United States really the paradigm model par excellence for social cohesion and harmony? There are many reasons one could offer to challenge these assumptions. The anti-religious caricature of China by Western media is easily contradicted by facts like the initially unopposed rise of Falun Gong, that Christians outnumber the membership of the CPC, and the proliferation of Islam in China’s Northern and Western provinces. China's CPC has also preserved and protected many tribal religious communities, including the matriarchal Mosuo group of Lugu Lake in Yunnan province, whose religion is a syncretic animistic-Hindu derivative.

Arguably, the persistence of the West's pro-religious and para-religious outlook is explained by Western society’s ongoing reliance upon, and obsession with, narratives (Benford, 2002; Löwe et al., 2010; Sheafer et al., 2011; Strawson, 1997). Narratives are the grist for the ideological mill of the contemporary body politic and civil society. They are arguably the programs upon which the computational machinery of society, culture, politics and, especially, religion, runs. From a technical information-theoretic perspective, narratives are comprised of information form many disparate sources, and are comprised of messages encoded and compiled into semantically layered texts. Even if economists and scientists model complex social and economic dynamics using systems theory and its derivatives, it seems undeniable that narratives influence and exert top down control over social, political, and economic systems.

It’s no coincidence that anthropologists, literary theorists, and critical theorists are so interested in cultural texts and social narratives. Such concretely articulable and transmissible abstractions (abstractions in the scientific modelling sense) are the basis of almost all contemporary political practice. Religious narratives are still deeply embedded in the national psyche and social fabric of most nation states. Cultural and religious narrative are also deeply ingrained in the cognition and psychology of individuals. Psychological and psychiatric science are increasingly discovering how thoroughgoing and powerful the influence of their internalised cognitive representation is (Beatty, 2016; Belton, 2003; Coëgnarts & Kravanja, 2015; Dallos & Vetere, 2014; Gleason, 2013; Launer, 1999).

It is thus not surprising that Republican President Donald Trump, with his army of narratology-aware handlers, has nominated Amy Coney Barrett as a replacement of recently mourned associate justice of The US Supreme Court, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Barrett is a religious, Charismatic Catholic, Christian conservative. There’s little doubt that this is a largely (conventionally) pragmatic choice, not dissimilar to the President’s demonstrated penchant for brandishing bibles in the presence of his evangelical voter base. The cultural and religious narratives of evangelicals and their various sects (Puritan, Anabaptist, and Episcopalian, to name just a few) are important by fiat: due to numbers, potency of belief, and operational (including significant economic) social impact. In case one doubts there was at least a hint of pragmatism about such moves: observe that evangelical Protestantism and Catholicism and their various narratives are not, either historically or theologically, happy bedfellows. That being said, Trump’s administration and inner circle are arguably infused with religious ecumenicalism. The President’s parents were Methodist, while his son Eric Trump attended Georgetown University – a Catholic private research university.

Yet, Trump’s nomination of Coney, just like his avid China-bashing rhetoric, is a worrying development in a nation where, for example, there is an ongoing struggle for women's rights to everything from control over their own bodies and personal sexual processes to equal compensation, and participation, in leading professions. The struggle of US women is perhaps unprecedented in the first world (even The UK, with its woman monarch, has long since had a woman prime minister.) It is a telling move on the part of a President, who is himself married to a former soft porn star. It seems to affirm that Trump’s personal predilections are significantly liberal as well as hyper-pragmatic, rather than aligned with the life-guiding narratives of religious theists.

Women are not the only group who are, rightly, concerned. Narratives associated with evangelical theistic dominionism are increasingly propagated by highly motivated religionist and para-religionist agents and groups with specific narratological and psycho-social objectives (Aho, 2013; Maltby, 2008; McVicar, 2013). Recently in both the US and Australia, religious conservative politicians and activist groups have succeeded in bring before parliament and Congress, respectively, proposals and bills that would greatly increase protections for religious intolerance and bigotry. These same proposals would see the implementation of laws that would be (and are clearly designed to be) undeniably oppressive of the freedom of intellectual and political speech and expression of those opposed to the values and ideology of religious dominance and, increasingly, dominionism.

If these moves to broadly operationally enforce certain religious narratives are also implemented at the level of the judiciary by way of the appointment of fundamentalists such as Coney Barrett, then ecumenical secularism in both nations is in increased danger of sliding towards the kind of theocratic civil society that the American Puritans originally fled from, and which are currently prevalent in more extreme authoritarian manifestations in nations like Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, where women’s human rights are well documented to be notoriously disrespected. Such outcomes are initially likely to resemble something more like in-principle democratically constrained de-facto theocracy. However, perhaps one of the problems of the current US administration is that it believes that, once the fundamentalist narratological genie is out of the bottle, it can be controlled. Both history and contemporary geopolitics point to other very likely outcomes.

There is uncomfortable resonance in recent left wing observations to the effect that Canadian science fiction author Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ embodies an uncomfortable narratological prescience in the light of Coney Barrett’s judicial nomination. The setting of the novel is a USA under the control of a despotic theocracy, with Canada as the unaffected and liberal freethinking neighbour. Such assertions of reality threatening to imitate Atwood’s art are perhaps not surprising given that Atwood’s fictional narrative is a modern-postmodern pastiche, and intertextual admixture, of scientific and religious cultural themes from North American history and contemporary society. Her talent is precisely for presenting such dystopian narratives imbued with historiographic and cultural intertext. The Handmaid’s Tale is particularly metafictional with respect to narratology: the narratological references play a key role in the plot and suspense. The narratology impacting Atwood’s characters is dark, insidious, and sadistic: the extreme of neurolinguistic programming as brainwashing. Arguably, and unfortunately, many narratives currently being propagated in the US are not very dissimilar, and are of the same design.

French Christian philosopher Rene Girard famously assigned to novelists and authors the role of society’s paradigm epistemic authorities due to their ability to capture, decode, and re-encode the historical and cultural narratives of their societies accurately and presciently. The roots of theist Girard’s unusual emphasis on authorial and literary epistemic authority undoubtedly lie in the very Christian doctrine that Amy Coney Barrett’s Catholic Charismatic religious sect ‘People of Praise’ are committed to. The god character of the Christian Bible is the ultimate narrator and author of history, and thus the ultimate narratological power and authority. In the narrative of Genesis in the Old Testament, the god character makes assertions such as ‘Let there be light’, and material reality is created.

Girard’s view is eccentric from a philosophical perspective, and few contemporary philosophers give it much credence. That being said, it is interesting to note that religious culture is determinedly about narratives, and that this itself is reflexively part of a narrative that Christian conservatives like Coney Barrett and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have embraced for millennia. That Judeo-Christian narrative view is a pre-scientific carry over from pre-enlightenment history. It tends to impose its epistemology upon the whole of society – science included. Science is just another, and inferior, faith-based narrative according to theist narratological epistemology. (Girard is not the only one to give science such a treatment. Francois Lyotard and Michel Foucault assigned it the role of undesirable controlling metanarrative. Jean Baudrillard assigned it to the set of hyperreality-instantiating simulacra: something that in fact disconnected individuals from reality.)

Contemporary cognitive science, philosophy, and philosophy of science have also presented views that have significant theoretical cohesion with (albeit non-religious) narrative, and narratological, epistemology. Moreover, contemporary psychotherapy, with its many eccentric and experimental techniques and approaches, also exhibits affinity for narratives and narratology (although this is tempered by opposing views). Narrative therapy is currently popular and came to prominence in the late 20th century (Etchison & Kleist, 2000, p. 61). Practitioners often combine it with cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) and other therapeutic regimens (I’ll not venture analysis or criticism of such, nor of the reproducibility crisis in experimental psychology, in this post). It treats psychologically and cognitively-embodied narratives as alterable internal representations of the goals and identity of individuals.

Whether narrative therapy will survive ongoing scientific vetting as a clinical psychotherapeutic approach remains to be seen (it seems to have established a firm foothold in an environment where in general, society is somewhat desperate for any workable solutions). However, both neuroscience, psychiatry, and cognitive science provide significant support for theories of mentalese (a low level symbolic language in the brain) and for accompanying computational theories of mind (CTMs) that regard cognitive processes as being based upon the computational manipulation of strings of symbolic representations (neither are a given, but they have significant traction in cognitive science). There is little doubt that political theorists and the intelligence community have had a longstanding interest in such models. Theories of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics form the basis of much psychological theory deployed in intelligence work. Narrative psycholinguistics is broadly deployed in assessing terrorism risk from narratological ideological radicalisation of individuals (Bélanger et al., 2019, pp. 2–3).

Psychology is not the only discipline in the secular sciences and humanities that has ventured into theories about narratives and narrative transmission, or about elements that are narrative like or can be described in terms of a kind of narrative transmission. Work in information-theoretically orientated social psychology and epistemology, especially with respect to group epistemic updating (the way in which information flows between knowledge agents in a group by way of natural language communication) involves a kind of narrative epistemology expressed in information-theoretic and formal logical terms. The (less formally articulated) meme theory of biologist Richard Dawkins involves similar principles, and to some extent reverses the narratological chauvinism of religious narrative epistemological theories. In his memetic theory (not to be confused with the conceptually related Platonic mimetic theories of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Rene Girard), Dawkins’ transmissible genetic-replicator-like meme can be likened to a narrative ‘packet’ encoded and transmitted between epistemic communities and individuals.

In general (and often pre-theoretic) terms, and at a practical and societal management level, it’s well known by handlers of US presidents, domestic policy makers, and the intelligence community, that narrative is key to controlling outcomes in a nation like the US (Boswell, 2013, pp. 61–62). If one controls the right narratives (or memetic replicators) - controls the encoding and propagation of those narratives - then one controls the keys to the kingdom in economic, military, and political terms (Benford, 2002, pp. 53–56). One controls the national story arc, and all its threads (to draw a metaphor perhaps a little too far.) Franklin D Roosevelt’s observations about the big lie strategy of Hitler’s Third Reich provide ample evidence of the longstanding perception among political powerbrokers of the importance of narrative control. However, it is obvious to most lay students of history that the monarchs of Europe, the Confucian administrators of ancient China, and the Pharaohs of Egypt, all had similar concerns about controlling social narratives.

It is unavoidable that religious narratives will be caught up in national political narrative construction, and, indeed, themselves seek to influence gross national social and cultural narrative. They become part of a greater composite narrative and contribute to the national plot and story arc: the encoded text of the unfolding of the history of a society and nation. They are thus encoded - usually prominently - into the messages coming from the podium of POTUS. It stands to reason that, post truth or not, narratives require great caution in certain contexts. For example, in political and social contexts where large portions of the population are experiencing internalised symbolic threat from immigrants or other examples of ‘the other’ (Rios et al., 2018; Stephan et al., 1999; Stephan & Stephan, 2017). Using such people as scapegoats to distract one’s voting based from the reality of failing domestic narratives is a regrettable strategy that contemporary American politicos seem more than willing to embrace.

The history of the West is riven with religious conflict, with Catholic-Protestant wars being some of the most internecine in the human race’s collective cultural memory. The United States has experienced, internally and domestically, plenty of religious conflict and religiously motivated violence since The Declaration of Independence. The Mormon massacre of immigrant settlers at the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The Salem Witch Trials perpetrated by the descendants of the very Puritans that fled from religious oppression under the governing theocratic principalities of Europe. More recently in the 20th Century, The Jonestown Massacre, Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the subsequent bombing of the FBI Federal Headquarters building in Oklahoma by Timothy McVeigh. It’s also clear that the Nazi and Neo-Nazi involvement has contributed, since the Second World War, to the tragic history of attacks on the African Americans, including exacerbating a vicious and all too recent apartheid in the form of the segregation and Jim Crow laws, opposed by activists from Malcolm X (a Muslim) and Martin Luther King (Baptist Christian), to the Black Panther movement. Thus the influence of the narratives of the bizarre Aryan occult religion of Hitler’s Reich cannot be excluded from the total US grand narrative.

(The elephant in the room marked ‘US religious bigotry and violence’, perhaps, is still the genocide of the native American peoples in the name of Manifest Destiny and missionary evangelical Christianity: a diabolical combination for the xenophobically and religiously motivated destruction of paganism, if ever one has been spawned.)

Both psychology and psychiatry - increasingly backed by neuroscience and an improved understanding of long term reinforcement of ideation by wiring in of cognitive representations – support the idea that political and social narratives can radicalise individuals (especially young people) (Bélanger et al., 2019; Stephan & Stephan, 2017). The radicalisation of Islamic militants in the Xinjiang region of China has led to hundreds of deaths and injuries in violent attacks since the 1990s, and these have affected other parts of the country as well. China’s policy of containment and management has been badly misrepresented in the propagandistic narratives of an increasingly vapid commercialised Western media which is beholden to religious and mercantile interests.

The CPC are right to limit the influence of radical religious narratives over their youth and population in general. This is not tantamount to human rights abuse, nor autocratic despotism. To regard it as such is to give unreasonable weight to a Western para-religious narratological perspective that is deeply troubled. China’s approach is about avoiding broad based religiously motivated, or else religiously facilitated, narrative and narratological abuse of Chinese people.

Does the American public really need, or benefit from, their secretary of state publicly (and aggressively) promulgating war-seeking narratives of belittlement and hatred against "godless" Chinese atheists in the CPC? Does the world need it? No more it would seem, than either the US or the rest of the world needs a US supreme court judge who will imbue their judicial role with narratives that will harm women and potentially undo decades of feminist progress, LGBT rights progress, and general freedom of thought and speech. More to the point, perhaps, is that the narratives of US Republican leaders is centered upon the moral didact of a supernatural overlord, the existence of whom is supported by no testable evidence whatsoever, and the predilections attributed to whom are not only troubling, but all too familiar from human psychology.

References

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