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The Devil’s Work
By Robert Forrest
If one believed in the Devil he would certainly deserve credit for his
work
in the present world situation, to say nothing of sowing divisiveness
into our
election campaign. John Thune, in South Dakota wants to make gay marriage
a
major election issue. As Cynthia Tucker has pointed out, marriage in the
U.S.
has been troubled by a high divorce rate for years. The troubles with
marriage
and family values are certainly not due to the granting of various rights
for
gays, but politicians have found that by focusing the public’s general
anxieties on such fanciful issues, attention can be diverted from difficult
problems
of greater import.
How would our metaphorical Devil be involved? Well, the master of Ju
Jitsu
uses his opponent’s strength against him. The strength in this case
is one of
our old survival mechanisms, our chemical stress response. It developed
in the
distant past, part of a survival response to the dangers of attacks by
large
predators. Stress chemicals, (adrenaline, nor-adrenaline, cortisol, etc.),
in
men at least, elicit increased alertness, anxiety, strength and aggressiveness.
For acute physical dangers these could be life saving. The dangers we
perceive
today are generally not lions or bears, but even imagined dangers can
elicit
the old chemical responses. Unfortunately they are not particularly conducive
to cool, calm and collected thinking.
Stresses in the modern world (poverty, unemployment, health problems,
or the
threat of these) are seldom immediately life threatening, but they tend
to be
long lasting, and unbalance our chemistry. Men are aware of their emotions,
but not of the underlying chemistry which affects these. They are aware
of what
they see, have heard, and what annoys them at the moment. Propaganda or
their
own rationalizations can thus lead them to attribute their distress to,
and
focus their anger on the wrong causes.
The problems of job security, debt, the cost of housing or health care,
or of
education for our children, while not immediately life threatening, are
not
easily solved. We cannot yell at our boss, our school teacher, or kick
policemen, and banging into other drivers in traffic is hardly worth the
trouble. So
we bring our simmering chemistry home with us, where we can safely argue
with
our wives and children. It would be nice if like Arnold the Robot we had
little
dials in our eyeballs which told us that we were irritable because our
chemistry had been previously upset, and we should run around the block
twenty times
before focussing our irritability on the wrong subject, but we don’t.
Unfortunately an aggressive response to a misperceived problem or relatively
unimportant annoyance can cause trouble. Men beat their wives, policemen,
who
are under stress, sometimes shoot unarmed disturbers of the peace; skin
heads
riot; bin Laden blames the problems of the Muslim world on the U.S. ;
ethnic
groups blame one another and for a thousand years everybody has blamed
the
Jews. Americans don’t (usually) take out their frustrations by blowing
up
government buildings. They get divorced. Iraqis do it the other way around.
But troubles with interpersonal, with social, and with international
relations are largely due to complex problems, not easily solved, many
inadvertently
of mankind’s own making. Our chemical responses then cause us additional,
often
unrecognized problems. We should not be blaming each other, or be misled
by
politicians with catchy slogans promising simple solutions. The world’s
problems will take cooperation, careful thinking and hard work to solve.
They are
complex, and often the Devil is in the details.
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