RUTHFULLY YOURS

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The paradigm of psychology rests on the notion that introspection will lead to a better understanding of what our problems truly are so that we can improve our skills in coping with them.  It further insists that since we are unable to control other people’s thoughts and conduct, the most pragmatic way to deal with relationships is to alter our own to a healthier advantage.  Though the field may have begun in Europe, it found its most fertile expression in America where it paired auspiciously with our myth of self-invention and re-invention as often as necessary.  There’s nothing wrong with introspection until such navel-gazing blinds us to what’s happening not under our noses but in the surrounding larger world.  Writ large, this explains why American liberal thinking, obsessed with scrutinizing the flaws of our own economic and political systems, can find sufficient blame in our malfeasance to obscure the larger issues of other ideologies growing steadily, menacingly and independently of our sins.

An op-ed piece in the NYTimes of May 4th is written by a professor of psychiatry whose sister was killed on 9/11;  Professor Robert Klitzman illustrates a Freudian slip by writing that his sister died on that date, using the passive verb instead of the proper term for an act of extreme violence.  After describing his descent into a paralyzing grief, the professor began to heal and discover the importance of annual family vacations, allowing for greater appreciation of each other – all positive and constructive steps for coping with loss.  The problem surfaces as the professor tries to apply the rules of his narrow paradigm to the stage of world politics.  Here he finds that “American imperialism, corporate avarice, abuses of our power abroad and our historical support of corrupt dictators like Hosni Mubarak have created an abhorrence of us that unfortunately, persists.  We need to recognize how the rest of the world sees us, and figure out how to change that.”

Perhaps it’s easier to see how misguided the last sentence is by placing it in the context of the late thirties during the explosive rise of Nazism and fascism.  Cleaning up our own act would have had no effect on the rise of Hitler as it will have no effect on the current plague of jihad running wildly through the Muslim world, affecting Africa, Asia and Europe in ways that have little or nothing to do with U.S. policy.  Professor Klitzman is blind to the dissension and upheaval within the Muslim world, their own sectarian religious hatreds, their own military aggressions against each other, their misogyny and their determination to take their civilization back to the middle ages.  The forces of the Arab Spring have so far succeeded only in deposing some oligarchs without our knowing what will replace them.  History has shown that popular revolutions often end in even crueler tyrannies than the ones they replace.

President Obama was elected under the pretext that he would change the face and standing of America precisely so that the world would like us more.  He began his term by traveling to Muslim and European countries, bowing to their potentates and apologizing for American behavior, but there has been no change in how the world perceives us.  Osama Bin Laden didn’t capture the Muslim imagination because he was the antidote to Coca Cola and Exxon and his followers won’t shrivel up because he has been killed.  In the same way that psychology found a friendly habitat in the U.S., that Nazism found a favorable climate in Germany and that Stalinism was able to sustain itself in the Soviet Union, radical jihad has established a foothold in the Muslim world.

Psychology has taught us that children feel that their bad behavior is responsible for their parents’ divorce.  Professor Klitzman and American liberals need to understand that America is an imperfect country that has made and will continue to make its share of domestic and foreign policy mistakes.  Those problems are real but it is childish to believe that they are the precipitating cause for the birth and growth of radical jihad or that their corrections could ever bring the professor’s longed-for closure to the cycle of destruction.