Obama and the Hatred of Thought

Why has President Obama become so unpopular lately, at least in comparison to his early post-election popularity? There are many reasons, and not all have to do with the economy. One possibility infrequently considered is that much of the hatred toward Obama has to do with the hatred of thought. One can approach this possibility through the persistent theme of anti-intellectualism in American life, the topic of Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1963 book of the same name. Yet, the anxiety about Obama’s thinking is, for some, of a different order. Obama’s thought, like Obama himself, seems to represent a way of thinking that is alien to genuine American thought.

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This anxiety has recently been expressed by Dinesh D’Souza, once a reasonable conservative, and currently president of King’s College in New York City. In “How Obama Thinks,” D’Souza deconstructs Obama’s thought about everything from the Gulf oil spill to NASA in terms of his father’s anti-colonialism (Forbes, 9/27/10). “Incredibly,” says D’Souza, “the U. S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950’s”— that is, Obama’s father. He writes, “The philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”

About this article, Newt Gingrich says that it is “the most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.” The idea, of course, is that there is something strange, bizarre about Obama’s thought, an intellectuals’ version of the “birthers” belief about Obama as alien, born elsewhere.

One should not overlook the irony that both D’Souza and Gingrich approach the world in an intellectual fashion, relying not on the sound common sense of ordinary people, as an everyday anti-intellectual might, but upon a bizarre idea as key to unlocking Obama’s mind. But of course Hofstadter always understood that the intellectual idée-fixe was at the heart of American anti-intellectualism (Anti-intellectualism in American Life, 1963, 22-23). Of course, one should also not ignore the possibility that for some, the problem is not just with Obama’s thinking, but with the fact that he is a black man thinking. The combination seems toxic to a number of Americans, evoking a fear and hatred that is really quite striking.

For a short while, particularly in the wake of eight years of President George W. Bush, thought looked pretty good, and Obama was its master. His speech to the nation on race, made during his election campaign in response to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, was a model of thoughtfulness rarely seen in American politics. He talked to us like adults, and many listened like adults. Puzzling is that since he was elected, Obama has seemed less thoughtful. As examples of less thoughtful, more clichéd speeches, consider his recent Oval Office speeches on the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill, and on the United States’ suspension of combat operations in Iraq.

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Another perspective on thought might be helpful here, that of Wilfred Bion, a member of the British Object Relations School of psychoanalytic theory. While Bion might be described as loosely allied with Melanie Klein and her followers, his own work was strikingly original, belonging to no school. Bion writes about the hatred of thought, which he characterizes in terms of attacks on linking (“Attacks on Linking” and “A Theory of Thinking,” both in his Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1984, pp. 93-119). Attacks on linking are how we destroy thought. It’s easy to have thoughts; the trick is to know how to put these thoughts together without being overwhelmed by terror or despair.

Bion’s argument runs something like this: What children and adults both need, albeit in different degrees and in different ways, is for their unbearable emotions to be held and contained by another. What are unbearable emotions? They are feelings of such intensity that it seems as if the self is going to fall to pieces or explode, for the emotions are so intense and unstable they can’t be integrated into the self. If mother contains the young child’s unbearable emotions ten thousand times, eventually the young child will learn to do that emotional work for him or herself. (Kleinians still talk mostly about mother, not dual parenting.) At first mother contains these emotions simply by showing that she can experience them without retaliating or falling to pieces. Later she may help the child put words to these emotions, such as, “You look so angry that you’re about to burst. But I know you’re not, so let’s get on with making dinner.”

Attacks on linking occur when there is a failure of containment and holding. The attack on linking is the fragmenting alternative to being held, in which unbearable emotions are broken into pieces and disconnected from thoughts, so that thoughts become sterile, one-dimensional, bereft of the emotions that would invigorate thoughts and give them life. The result is thinking marked by a lack of curiosity, a hatred of emotion, and from there it is but a short step to the hatred of anyone who publically exemplifies thought. The outcome is not only contempt for thought, but the idealization of stupidity and mindlessness, including mindless passion.

Thought requires that we admit to ourselves not only that

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we are ignorant, that we do not know. Thought requires that we die a little death, or at least risk it. When we are frightened, this risk is impossible, and everything that is the opposite of learning and knowledge will be valorized. Strength, vitality, and self-certainty will be championed as sources of power. Doubt and reflection, including the doubt and reflection that create the gaps that allow one to learn something new, become merely signs of weakness.

Thought is terrifying. Not just what we think about, but the process of thinking itself. In order to learn something new, we have to exist for a moment in a place where we know nothing at all, an empty moment of existence and experience. Bion understands thinking as itself a holding process in which one thought, called a preconception, holds another thought—a thought stimulated by experience.

With this in mind, let us look at Obama and the hatred of thought. One of the first things to say is that Obama is part of the problem. For whatever reason (his coolness, his reserve, his reluctance to “feel our pain”), Obama has not been an effective container for the intense anxiety that has marked the last several years, the result of terrorism, two wars, and economic collapse. Obama has not been publicly emotionally available, as Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton were. Neither has Obama been particularly effective in articulating (that is, interpreting) our fears so that we know that someone understands and cares. Obama has failed in his holding function.

Two related issues are at stake: Obama’s failure to act as a container of our fears and Obama’s apparent inability to speak publicly in a thoughtful manner or at least as thoughtfully as during his campaign. They are related because the way in which Obama seemed capable of holding our fears during his campaign was not through his emotional availability, but through the perceived power of his thought. “Change we can believe in,” his campaign slogan, was also about the power of thought—his thought—after eight years of the devaluation of thought. Obama’s ability to make sense of an economy and world spinning out of control, to bring thought to bear on reality, was a significant part of his appeal.

Obama’s current inability to hold us in and through his

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thoughts likely has to do with the fact that our nation’s problems will yield to no quick and easy solution. In addition, both Obama and his advisors are the recipients of projective identification, in which anger and hatred of thought seek to destroy the ability of the recipient to think. Projective identification is successful when, in this case, the recipient finds his deeper thoughts unavailable to him, when in fact thought’s complexity is only in hiding. That the lesser powers of Obama’s thought might be, in part, the result of a conscious political decision by Obama and his advisors to render him more ordinary does not mean that projective identification is absent, only that it works at conscious and unconscious levels at the same time.

In closing, it will pay to look once more at the thought of Obama’s critics, such as D’Souza and Gingrich. Thought may be destroyed in at least two ways. One is what Bion calls attacks on linking. Another is paranoid thought, in which everything is linked to everything else. Paranoid thought is an excess of thought, the links so tightly bound that nothing can come between them. Imagining that Obama’s anti-colonialism explains everything important about Obama and his presidency is reinforced, in the thought of D’Souza and Gingrich, by the corresponding belief that anything that doesn’t fit this explanation can be attributed to Obama’s genius at pretending to be a normal American. Theirs becomes an irrefutable proposition.

Paranoid thought cannot tolerate the emptiness, the little death of not knowing, that genuine thought requires. Paranoid thought is also an attack on linking: all the links are already made, transforming thought into a fortress aimed at keeping nonconforming thoughts out. Paranoid thought is the process behind the idée-fixe. Interesting is whether D’Souza and Gingrich actually hold to a paranoid belief system, or whether they are deploying it cynically and strategically in order to render Obama an alien outsider, offering up a paranoid way of thinking to any who might be desperate for an explanation of a world in which the usual boundaries seem to be disappearing, such as divisions between black and white, or between genuine American thought and all that is foreign, alien, and other. If the reader is certain of the answer to whether D’Souza and Gingrich believe what they say, then the reader should reflect for a

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moment about the status of his or her own thought. Does the imperative to reflect depend on whether the reader is certain the answer is “yes,” or “no”?

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