The War We Are Facing

Steven C. Hayes, University of Nevada, Reno

I’ve been disturbed to see how some have turned away from the challenge we face by dismissing this event as “insane” … as if it is impossible to understand, or has nothing to do real human beings – indeed nothing to do with the person one sees in the mirror. To the contrary, while the outcome is repulsive and extreme, the processes are available to every one of us. All we have to do is to find the fear and prejudice in our own hearts; or to find our own impulse to attack what is different. If we do this, we will discover that Osama is not just hidden in an Afgani cave, but is also hidden within us.

The usual view is that we are without prejudice until a sick culture pours it into us. While there is a seed of truth in that view, it misses the larger truth. Prejudice is built into human beings, and culture is our major hope in the battle against it. In some small way, prejudice is built into all learning, because all learning involves generalization from one situation to another. But prejudice is greatly exacerbated by human language and cognition – by our ability to arbitrarily form verbal categories, give those categories attributes, to compare one category to another, and to do so in such a way that we end up on top at the expense of others. Even school children who are divided arbitrarily into groups by drawing names out of a hat, will quickly begin to develop “attributes” for the arbitrarily created in groups and out groups. So yes, every human being is full of prejudiced thoughts given to us by “our culture,” but we also have a well-developed tendency to form many more. This process is greatly accelerated by any kind of aversive event. Because the human nervous system works by addition, not subtraction, we have little hope of getting rid of prejudicial categories once they are formed, as least as echoes of the past. The best we can hope for is that our values are more important than our automatic thoughts; and that our actions are more in tune with what we stand for than with the psychological sludge that life produces.

Fundamentalist religious extremism seems to me to be at its base a process that shares a great deal with prejudice itself. The process is verbal – dogs or cats are never religious extremists. It produces insensitivity to direct contingencies – insensitivity to the pain of others, and insensitivity to one’s own pain, up to and including suicide. Oddly, seeing the connection between excessive rule control, prejudice, and religious extremism provides an avenue for rank and file Americans to fight this new kind of war.

Seen that way, the present conflict is a conflict of human values -- between our tendencies toward tolerance and our tendencies toward extremism; between our tendencies toward embrace of diversity and the creation of ethnic purity. If you see it that way, you see that when we try to deal with our own psychological biases we are putting on the armor and sharpening some of the weapons that will be of most importance. It is as if reality itself is looking at American values and traditions of tolerance and asking, “Do we really mean it?”

Americans haven’t always passed this test. It wasn’t so long ago that segregation and racial violence was justified as an extension of “Christianity.” Even today, terrorists in our own country blow up family planning clinics in the name of God, and high-ranking political officials feel compelled to give talks at “Christian” schools that expel students because of interracial dating. We have a lot of work to do, but do it we must, because in this kind of war when a person attacks a Muslim or Arab American in the name of America, that person in essence gives aid and comfort to the enemy.

The WWII generation may have been “the greatest generation” but they made mistakes we will not make. In 2001 there will be no Arab American internment camps and any politician who tried to create them would face the wrath of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and non-believers alike.

The substance of tolerance must be a central theme of this conflict. If we try to fight it only militarily, we will have missed the point and we will have missed a great opportunity to produce human advancement.

Fighting that fight will be difficult, precisely because human language and cognition is difficult. For one thing, a substantial body of literature shows that simply attacking prejudicial thoughts tends to increase them. The rule “do not think x” contains and thus evokes “x.” In behavioral terms, not all events are rule-governed. Reducing ones own prejudice, in a contingency shaped way, requires learning to have verbal categories without acting on their basis. It is an action more akin to tolerance and acceptance, than argument and attack. When we sit on a plane next to an Arab American our task is not to beat ourselves up for fearful thoughts, but to hold ourselves compassionately, accepting that verbal categories and the negative emotions they sometimes carry, are a natural produce of human language. At the same time, our task is to reach out to our Arab American brothers and sisters.

Yes, America is engaged in a military war. It is also engaged in a war of human values and learning to let go of our own prejudicial rules is a direct way of making progress in this war. This fight is not simply with the Osama in Afganistan, but also with the Osama inside our own skin.

Dr. Steve C. Hayes is Foundation Professor of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno.

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