By J. Dean Spence
Allow me to tiptoe into a minefield: the culture wars that are so prevalent in the USA and other parts of the world. It’s an atmosphere where disagreement often doesn’t broaden our perspectives, but instead adds fuel to the enmity that’s scattered throughout our society like dried tinder.
The following is the perspective of a strategic communicator who has an interest in Carl Jung’s analytical psychology.
Let’s start with strategic communication. One of the things I admire most about public relations is that it is seen as an important contributing voice in the marketplace of free ideas. It starts from the premise that all sides of an issue must be weighed. Indeed, The International Public Relations Association’s Code of Conduct states that practitioners shall “seek to establish the moral, cultural and intellectual conditions for dialogue, and recognize the rights of all parties involved to state their case and express their views.” (Emphasis added.)
As far as analytical psychology goes, having read several of Dr. Jung’s books I now often wonder what he would think about today’s identity politics and the “dying art of disagreement” as a New York Times column written by Brett Stephens dubbed it two months ago.
Dr. Jung’s writing style was at once poetic and esoteric, a style that I could never emulate. However, I do think he would approve of what I have to say—no doubt with some editing to clarify my admittedly limited knowledge of Jungian psychology. But I’ll give it a go!
First, though, what is meant by the “dying art of disagreement”, the culture wars and identity politics? For Stephens, disagreement is a vital ingredient of a “decent” society. At the very least, Stephens suggests that when you disagree it has the power to help you define your individuality, assert your freedom and broaden your perspective. Yet in America and around the world, disagreements are fueled by people’s close mindedness about race issues, religious issues, gender issues, politics and the law. Today’s disagreements are engaged in not to learn from one another, not to broaden our perspectives, but to lash out at others and to keep us within the “safety” of our own ideological cocoons. The result is dull minds, hatred, short tempers—and even violence.
As Stephens writes, “we judge one another morally depending on where we stand politically.”
If you doubt Stephens, you only have to observe some of the flame wars on social media, or read stories about how protests erupt on university campuses when “controversial” speakers are invited to present their views—on universities where students actually pay to be stimulated by different ideas.
And then there’s identity politics. We have lost the ability to argue effectively because of it. Stephens writes, “the primary test of an argument isn’t the quality of the thinking, but the cultural, racial or sexual standing of the person making it. As a woman of color, I think x. As a gay man, I think y. As a person of privilege, I apologize for z.”
An individual’s thinking should not be dominated by social identification alone. Just because your arguments offend me as an African-Canadian doesn’t mean that you or your arguments are wrong and immoral. But this is a typical scenario. And “the result,” Stephens writes “is that the disagreements we need to have…are banished from the public sphere before they’re settled.”
So, what might Dr. Jung say about all of this if he were still alive. For starters, he might say that in this climate of toxic disagreements people are confusing the Self with the Persona, or the Masks we wear. We all have masks (our religion, our profession, our clothes, our car, our diplomas) and they help us to navigate in society. Jung argues that our masks help us to function in society, largely by establishing connections, all the while keeping the true Self hidden. In totality, the Masks we wear do not even equal the Self. In fact, Jung suggests that some people identify too much with their Persona, without recognizing their true Self. Hmmm!
So, I may be critical of a Trump Republican, mistaking this Mask for an expression of his or her Self (“Of course she is crazy and has a bad soul, she supports Trump”). The mistake should be obvious. And if we are honest we would agree that people are attacking one another’s Masks and confusing those Masks as expressions of the totality of the Soul.
And as a corollary of this, people whose Masks are attacked mistakenly think that it is their Self that’s being attacked. (“How dare you attack me for being an Obama Democrat. I am a good person!”)
Also, when you are in a disagreement with someone and you are so upset that you act irrationally and won’t even listen to what the other person in saying, WATCH OUT! Dr. Jung suggests that it is at these times that the archetypes in our psyche are talking to us. Whether it be the Anima (the little woman in a man) or the Animus (the little man in a woman) in these instances the psyche is crying out for balance. If we ignore the psyche’s sage voices, we will continue to act in self-destructive ways. Personally, I know that I have caught myself acting irrationally in heated moments and have been fortunate enough to later discern what my Anima was telling me about myself.
Listen to what your Anima/Animus is telling you, for your own good.
And then there is the Jungian Shadow, our dark doppelganger. When this archetype is activated in our psyche, we tend to project the darkest regions of our Soul onto the Other. The evil within us finds a home on the object of our gaze. I think that a lot of this is going on during these culture wars.
So that’s it. My two cents on the contemporary culture wars and the environment of toxic disagreement. Forgive me, Dr. Jung, if in this hurried blog (in which it was beyond the scope of my words to do justice to analytical psychology) I have misunderstood and misrepresented the basics of your psychology. At the very least, perhaps you will agree with a couple of things:
- Open-mindedness—even in the midst of disagreement—is the mark of a progressive mind.
- We must be wary about the algorithms in the social media we use, as these tend to feed our personal biases and filter out voices that may expand our horizon.
Ultimately, however, whether or not we entertain the viewpoints of others or completely close our ears to them is largely a matter of choice.