Dependence, Independence, and American Politics (response article)

Thinking of dependence, my thoughts go back to 1961 and a traffic jam in New York City. With a carload of fellow peace activists, I was trapped at an intersection in upper Manhattan, not only bumper-to-bumper but from all directions. Whenever a tiny space opened—even just a foot or two—someone would inch their car forward and then the new space behind them would vanish as well. So, being peace activists, we dispersed to the back ends of the four converging lines and asked those drivers to back up, turn around, or turn down side streets, whatever was possible. It took about an hour for the jam to unsnarl.

By contrast, when I think of independence, my thoughts go back to February 1970, which I spent at a cave on a mountainside overlooking southern Colorado’s Huerfano Valley. While meditating there, it seemed I was looking down at everything, including myself, from someplace above it all. Such metaphors aren’t adequate but one word that surely fits is perspective.

I think perspective is therapeutic. It doesn’t require meditation at a high altitude, but it may require some type of “space.” Or maybe it just takes a fixed point of reference. Whether life is viewed psychologically, spiritually, or biologically, it seems intractably relational. So by “a fixed point of reference,” I mean something that’s intimately related to our personal life and is rooted in place, unchangeable—or maybe, psychologically speaking, “internalized,” like the emotional self-regulation that Marilyn Charles writes of.

Marilyn Charles’ first paragraph mentions our infancy and caregivers who relate to our early distresses empathically, thereby fostering “the rhythms of emotional regulation that are eventually internalized by the child as self-regulation.” Without such emo-

Page 286

tional self-regulation, she says, we look to other persons to safeguard our emotional well-being, or we turn to escapist activities to relieve our emotional distress, and either way we can slide toward dependency or addiction. “Most addictive cycles can be seen as inadequate attempts to obtain relief from internal distress,” she writes.

We know only too well the turmoil that emotional dependence can inflict on intimate relationships, but that leaves a question: do intimate relationships by their very nature rule out emotional and/or harmonious independence? I don’t think so. Instead, harmoniously emotionally-independent partners seem to be truly compatible. Rather than dependence or co-dependence, in other words, co-independence seems to be possible—but as Marilyn Charles says, such “autonomous interrelating depends on a secure and stable identity.”

True harmony or compatibility seems likeliest when partners are evenly matched. Mind you, that doesn’t prevent us from projecting our internally-generated expectations onto our partner—apparently the projection of internally-generated expectations is inevitable between intimate partners. But when the partners are evenly matched, the dramas generated by their projections can become a game they play together. They can act their separate parts and still simultaneously be together in harmony someplace with more perspective, looking down on themselves, so to speak, from someplace higher.

By intimate partners being “evenly matched,” I mean mentally and emotionally so—of which mentally simply means equally intelligent. (Don’t take my word for it—ask a dating service.) As for emotionally, I mean equally un-needy emotionally. People are born emotionally needy but, as Marilyn Charles says, they start becoming less needy as infants by receiving unconditional love and acceptance. As toddlers, they grow still less needy when their caregivers supplement their unconditional love by setting reasonable limits, including reasonable consequences for violating limits, thereby prompting self-regulation without ever in the slightest withholding love, a point that Marilyn Charles stresses.

Venturing into social psychology, Marilyn Charles continues,

Historically, parenting behaviors have tended to spilt between a more authoritative style that focuses on

Page 287

teaching the child to accommodate to rules and the needs of others, versus a more permissive style in which the child’s feelings are privileged. In order to move from dependency to greater autonomy, children need some combination of these two styles.

But such a prudent combination doesn’t happen enough. Instead, there’s too much over-authoritative and over-permissive childrearing. Marilyn Charles implicitly cautions against those extremes by saying “Authoritative and permissive parenting styles have been linked to ideological value structures, the right and left respectively.” She cites research published by Sylvan Tomkins in 1979, which “showed that these types of basic orientations are rooted in emotion, which makes them highly resistant to reflection or to change.” Of course, you may happen to like one of today’s ideological value structures, but Marilyn Charles cautions about “a breakdown that occurs at the core of community in America that refuses to recognize our interdependence on one another.”

She ventures not just into social psychology but into politics, broaching what currently is so hard to ignore in America: the damage that is being inflicted on public life by people’s personal emotional needs. On the heels of verbal outbursts by emotionally needy politicians, we’re seeing physical outbursts from some of their followers. Meanwhile, in their private lives, politicians’ emotional needs can lead to ugly if not illegal behavior that can then leave them beholden to people who know their secrets and have the power to reveal them. Acting on needy emotions, in other words, can leave politicians “compromised” and subject to blackmail. J. Edgar Hoover kept files on many politicians’ indiscretions so he could herd them behind his agenda. That didn’t work for Hoover in Martin Luther King’s case, but elected officials can prove more vulnerable to blackmail than movement icons.

Thankfully, a generational perspective on all this might offer hope. After the Civil War, Social Darwinism and philosophical egoism were riding high in the United States; but then in the 1890s they abated, and in the early 1900s progressives often emphasized everyone’s dependence on other people. G. Stanley Hall did keep issuing puritanical childrearing strictures, but meanwhile more progressive psychologists stressed that nurturing, loving mothers were vital to their children’s lifelong emotional wellbeing. Later, after World War II, Dr. Benjamin Spock resuscitated that child-centered view, softening the authoritative 1950s and surely contributing to

Page 288

the 1960s’ permissiveness. Now in 2018, however, we’re seeing another surge of Social Darwinism, and yet another future progressive comeback seems far from assured.

Today’s political polarization and often gridlock isn’t unprecedented in American history. But today’s fast information and communication technologies might give polarization a new volatility and a new outcome. Two weeks ago I asked my General Studies history students for a three-page paper about whether, under today’s conditions in the U.S., it would be easier or harder to turn the U.S. into a totalitarian country than it was back in the early 1930s for Hitler to turn Germany into a totalitarian country under German conditions as of then. Whether they answer “easier” or “harder,” their real assignment is to explain why. I urged the students to consider the huge difference between today’s communication and information technologies and those extant back in the 1930s.

Not that they need any such urging. Judging from other recent student essays, this assignment will prompt assertions by many students that mobile phones, iPads, email, Facebook, Twitter, along with newer social media like Snapchat and Instagram, can be handy-dandy organizing tools—and many of the students’ essays may just “go with that,” as they say, without their thinking out of the box by “looking down” on how dependent they are on instant and continuous access to mobile devices and social media sites. And without pondering how vulnerable they’d be if anyone either threatened to shut it all down or simply did so.

Conditions in the 1930s and ‘40s were far different. Granted, Hitler’s radio popularity after 1929 helped lead to his 1933 appointment as Germany’s chancellor, but later his regime proved unable, even in wartime, to deny radio sets and airwave access to its internal enemies who received news reports from abroad. His regime also failed to prevent radio transmission of German economic and military secrets to Allied intelligence centers in Britain. In stark contrast with the autonomous nature of radio technology back then, almost all of today’s communication and information e-wonders could be abruptly shut down at any time.

I’m curious what tomorrow will bring—tomorrow literally in the student essays and figuratively in America’s future.

Page 289