Our American Love-Hate Affair with Aggression (Part II: Sunday 4.3.22)
The Passions We Love To Hate... Until We Don't
Greetings and welcome to this Part II edition, widening the newShrink soul/psychological lenses.
Here we take off from the Part I closeup profile of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and her Supreme Court nomination hearings under way in the U.S. Senate.
Email readers: In your Friday inbox you’ll be seeing both Part I and Part II, each titled for planned Friday and Sunday website postings — a bit of reading-time flexibility in case things like basketball and extended-family stuff figure a lot in your weekend ahead, like mine.
To recap a bit, news of this particular week underscores dramatically the intensely ambivalent — or more like love/hate — relationship that we Americans have with our universal instinctual human drive of aggression. That is, our own as well as that of others in our lives and beyond.
This piece touches on that theme in four arenas of our culture as depicted above: In the halls of our government at highest levels, on the world diplomatic stage, in the arts and entertainment, and in highly competitive contact sports. (Here we leave for another day the enormous issue of our human aggression in our gun-loving culture.)
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across the arenas
1. Our halls of government
Ginni Thomas Urged White House to Overturn the Election in Unhinged Texts (From New York Magazine)
Justice Thomas discharged from hospital, faces mounting ethics scrutiny (From The Hill)
Legal Scholars Are Shocked By Ginni Thomas’s “Stop the Steal” Texts (From The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer)
Several experts say that Thomas’s husband, the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, must recuse himself from any case related to the 2020 election.
Virginia Thomas urged White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, texts show (The Washington Post)
What the Ginni Thomas text furor warns about an outsize role of faith in politics (from WAPO’s columnist Michael Gerson, who applies the apt term “deification of ignorance.”
The Christianization of politics makes people in a democracy less persuadable. It is more difficult to question your cause if you regard it as a holy cause. And it becomes harder to see any glimmer of truth in your opponents’ views.
🌀Many if not most of my relevant thoughts on this are presented or implied in the Part I sections on Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh.
🌀I believe both Thomas and Kavanaugh should be recusing themselves from several kinds of cases involving what they have clearly demonstrated publicly as, at best, serious psychological blind-spots where unconscious bias can be reasonably assumed a concern.
🌀About other justices appointed over recent years to the increasingly conservative leaning Court, I should note that while I don’t agree with or like many of their opinions and intentions I do not have the specific concerns warranting recusal.
🌀Will say it is breathtakingly difficult to watch or fathom a female nominee — such as conservative originalist Justice Amy Coney Barrett, much less a Black female like Jackson OR a Black male — being questioned in all apparent earnestness by a white male Senator extolling and pressing them to agree on the virtues of Constitutional originalism. In the originalist view no women, Blacks, native Americans or any other people of color were legally existent and certainly not in the room or at the table. (How does a conservative woman like Barrett square that? Does she think she’d have perhaps been somehow exceptional to the Founders, perhaps as a result of her faith?)
🌀 And, for what my opinion is worth on this, it does make sense for Supreme Court justices to be under recusal requirements regarding possible perceived conflict of interest similar to those of lower courts.
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2. On the World Stage
This story is just a small example from the extensive role the President, Administration, our Congress and military and diplomatic corps are playing in managing the deadly and violent Russian attack on Ukraine — with the necessary just-right balance of appropriate aggression and intelligent caution.
Also important is the President’s and other leaders’ management and delivery of the appropriate levels of rhetorical fervor and engagement to reassure, inspire and motivate both allies abroad and intensely concerned Americans at home. In this speech his expression of moral outrage was a Churchillian gesture too far, requiring his team and diplomats to walk it back amid backlash concern regarding regime-change.
American officials scrambled to clarify Biden’s suggestion that Putin ‘cannot remain in power.’ (NYT)
Meanwhile, also during the Jackson hearings at the close of Women’s History Month, we lost a lioness:
Madeleine Albright, First Woman to Serve as Secretary of State, Dies at 84 (NYT)
She rose to power and fame as a brilliant analyst of world affairs before serving as an aggressive advocate of President Bill Clinton’s policies.
Madeleine K. Albright, a child of Czech refugees who fled from Nazi invaders and Communist oppressors and then landed in the United States, where she flourished as a diplomat and the first woman to serve as secretary of state, died on Wednesday in Washington…
It was not until after she became secretary of state that she accepted proof that, as she had long suspected, her ethnic and religious background was not what she had thought. She learned that her family was Jewish and that her parents had protectively converted to Roman Catholicism during World War II, raising their children as Catholics without telling them of their Jewish heritage. She also discovered that 26 family members, including three grandparents, had been murdered in the Holocaust.
🌀For many more reasons Albright’s long been on my personal hero list. From her memoir and interviews regarding her time and many successes in the Bill Clinton Administration, both with the United Nations and as Secretary of State, I have appreciated a consistent candid apology and regret Clinton has shared. Her greatest regret among many accomplishments was her and the Administration’s not having acted aggressively, or quickly, enough in response to genocide and rape in Rwanda.
🌀 On a personal level, I’m not much of a coveter-of-jewels or gems without symbol or story attached. My idea of a dream gift is something like Albright’s stunning and symbolically meaningful commemorative brooch pins. She presented and wrote about them in her book “Read My Pins.”
🌀(Actually in a nighttime dream of just a couple of months ago I meet Albright and her pins. In it I am completing some complex diplomatic mission she is overseeing with apparent approval, and I feel so comfortable with her that I ask if I may have one of her pins when our mission is done — even specifying that I would like something abstract with blue lapis on it!)
Now we come to…
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3. Arts and Entertainment: the ‘Slap Heard Around the World’
Between the emerging aggression themes already under way and the many depth- as well as clinical-psychological dimensions, I have been unable to ignore completely the Will Smith “slap.”
(Much more than anyone likely needs or wants on this by now is browsable on You Tube and elsewhere. Here’s a representative sampling of headlines.)
Why We Can’t Agree On Will Smith’s Slap (From USA Today)
🌀While there are some good general points somehow the “expert” analysis, particularly from a therapist, misses the mark, as though “violence” were something one-dimensional, context-neutral, compartmentalized, either-or binary.
🌀Sweeping statements about violence — and nothing about universal instinctual human aggression — regardless of context, scale and setting are concerning to me, both as a psychologist and as a citizen in one of the most violent, gun-happy cultures on the planet. (We don’t solve violence by prohibiting it, and we don’t learn or teach our young to recognize and manage our aggression by denying its existemce and even its value.)
🌀We have a former president who egged-on participants at his rallies to hit on-the-job journalists before cheering crowds on national TV. This week’s intense national discourse isn’t even venturing into the enormity of our gun violence problem. On the international scene we are, and should be, seriously concerned and engaged — and involving our youth — in a deadly war against massive Russian aggression. The extent to which we concern ourselves with the slap is and needs to be with the perspective of that larger context.
🌀Many of my thoughts about the psychodynamics of our human relationship with our instinctual, fundamentally unconscious, human drives such as aggression are similar to those regarding sexuality, discussed in the 8.13.21 edition of newShrink.
Will Smith Apologizes to Chris Rock After Academy Condemns His Slap (NYT)
🌀With a tonal twist of the headline the NYT manages to suggest that Smith’s apology to Rock only comes after public outcry and when he’s at risk of censure and consequences.
🌀Those are real, but not the only, relevant pieces here. First from the purely neurological-physiological psychological standpoint, Smith by a day or two later had gone from state of intense emotional arousal/reactivity to regained capacity for rational choice and conscious responsibility. (The neuroscience of our response to emotional arousal and reactivity is the topic of the 10.15.21 edition of newShrink.)
🌀Then there is the content of the apology: It’s real. It takes responsibility, is honest. In both memoir and publicly shared individual and joint efforts regarding their personal challenges both Will and Jada Pinkett Smith demonstrate psychological and moral maturity — which, by the way, is never a done-deal but an ongoing process of becoming and staying more conscious.
🌀Worth keeping in mind as well, this is an entertainer, someone millions of us have paid to behave in many ways that look and feel like the clearly unconscious action he took onstage at the Oscars. In addition to psychology, my years of training and teaching Yoga as well as life in this old body have clearly taught by demonstration that our bodies carry the memory and energy of everything we have ever experienced, particularly intense experience, unless/until we bring those experiences to conscious awareness. Once conscious, the body-memories become part of the fabric of our larger reality — minus their emotion-charged capacity to show up explosively to catch us, and others, unaware.
🌀I am curious: Which embodied memories might have jumped to that Oscar stage? The actor in high-arousal anticipation of finally receiving the award for which he was an also-ran nominee 20 years ago… for his title role portrayal of the most renowned, invincible hitter on earth in the biopic “Ali?” The small boy long unable to defend his mother from attack, now finally feeling strong… or still compensating for never feeling strong enough?
🌀We don’t know. Nor, most likely, does Will Smith. The shock of the move was its utterly unconscious instinctual nature, and in the most scripted of settings. Unlike most, to me encouraging and hopeful, Smith by all indications is curious too and eager to learn.
🌀Perhaps we might compare and contrast Smith’s demonstrated psychological and moral maturity to that of sitting Supreme Court Justices, screaming Senators and Congressmen, an insurrection-rallying former President…
Here is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Substack piece, “Will Smith Did a Bad, Bad Thing,” which is being widely praised and shared by many of both races, particularly those a bit older… and a lot of white liberals are clearly liking and sharing it a lot.
However, there’s another intersection — a generational bridge to cross. Here’s Carron J. Phillips, senior columnist for Deadspin, who has been: A senior editor for sports, race and social issues fro the New York Daily News… winner of the 2016 Journalist of the Year by Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists… generationally a 2006 graduate of HBCU Morehouse College and a 2011 Syracuse University alum:
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s take on the Will Smith/Chris Rock situation is an outdated view of progress
For time, space and stamina reasons I’ll allow most of these remaining stories — and the story told by the selected photo images — to speak for themselves.
Pinkett Smith one of millions with alopecia condition (The Charlotte Observer)
Chris Rock's joke was stupid, and Will Smith’s slap was uncalled for. But the worst part was the bind it all put Jada Pinkett Smith in.
🌀I have been particularly focused on Smith’s own candidly described childhood experience of domestic violence and — with the exploration clearly deep and continuing, even before last Sunday night. His mother’s and siblings’ affirming comments this week, including acknowledgment of the domestic violence against his mother that he as a small boy was helpless to halt, all ring very true from a trauma-psychological standpoint.
The Fresh Prince of Belles-Lettres? Will Smith Has a Memoir. (NYT November 2021 book review)
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Arenas of Sports
This realm so high on a lot of our minds this Final Four weekend incorporates these complex questions of well-managed (ie conscious) aggression as part of the games themselves — the rules, the referee calls, the permitted behaviors for bodies and brains in high arousal on field and court… with inevitable spillovers in day to day life. Here, and depicted above, are just two obvious examples from this week’s news.
Deshaun Watson Won’t Face Criminal Charges in Houston Cases, Grand Jury Decides (NYT)
A grand jury heard evidence Friday to consider criminal charges against the Texans quarterback accused last year by two dozen women of lewd behavior. He was also deposed in two civil lawsuits.
And from a different, on-court angle…
North Carolina’s Brady Manek Ejected for ‘Flagrant 2/Throwing-Elbow’ Foul (The Charlotte Observer)
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And with that I shall leave you this time on a pure silliness note…
And, that is all I have! Happy Madness and talk to you soon.
🦋💙 tish
•🌀🔵🔷🦋💙
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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