The Culture Wars become the Flower Wars

Social conservatives, Aztecs being the most extreme example, need to confront the source of their pain, or they will continue to inflict it on the weakest around them

by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>

For many years now, social conservatives have argued that Western societies are in the midst of a culture war. People who hold traditional values, so the story goes, are under siege. Their enemies are a diverse lot, and include socialists, humanists, and feminists; environmentalists, mystics, and artists; pagans, homosexuals, and bisexuals; and even advocates for children's rights. Members of these groups rarely understand just how seriously social conservatives take this issue; many don't understand why social conservatives take the issue seriously at all. As a result, they're surprised by the ferocity of the attacks that conservatives launch against them.

Where progressive groups see psychological, cultural, and ethical evolution, social conservatives see a morally degenerate revolution. To restore society's righteousness, they advocate a savage counter-revolution. The fantasy lives of social conservatives are saturated with violent images of this counter-revolution, as demonstrated by the popularity of the Left Behind books among fundamentalists and the Turner Diaries among members of the militia movement. The central theme in these and many other staples of conservative fantasy is that the world is imperilled by people's disobedience and decadence, and that it can be saved only through repentance and monstrous sacrifice.

This vision of righteousness typically promotes the collapse of the welfare system, curtailment of civil liberties, the erection of a police state, and unending military expansion. Social conservatives aren't worried that this will cause great misery and many deaths; these are, in fact, necessary features of the sacrificial process. In true bulimic fashion, they seek redemption through traumatic purging.

To better understand this reasoning, it's useful to examine it in its purest form, which can be found in the Aztec Flower Wars, a subject explored at some length by the members of New York's Institute for Psychohistory.

The Aztecs had the most elaborate and aggressive state apparatus of any First Nation in the Americas. As in other highly militarized states, Aztec society was rigidly hierarchical and extremely punitive. Strict conformity to harsh social norms was demanded of everyone, regardless of status or wealth. Submission and dominance were woven into every part of Aztec life. For this reason, Aztecs suffered from numerous unmet psychological needs, needs their culture prohibited them from exploring or expressing in a healthy fashion. Whenever they were reminded of these needs, they experienced grief, anxiety, and anger. The most troublesome reminder was the presence of young people, whose emotional vitality and vulnerability embodied the very qualities Aztecs had to painfully suppress in their daily lives.

To provide an outlet for their anguish, Aztecs institutionalized ritual human sacrifice. They created a mythology that taught that the gods needed human blood to protect the universe from extinction. Flower Wars were among the most important method of obtaining sacrificial victims. These wars were ritual battles between rival Aztec armies, and were designed to produce the fewest number of casualties and the greatest number of captives possible. The captives-who were all young and virile warriors-would then be offered up to the gods.

Aztec civilization demonstrates what can happen when a culture encourages people to develop tyrannical super-egos. Flower Wars weren't in any way "barbaric;" on the contrary, they revealed excessive social conformity. The more socialized Aztecs became, the more threatened they were by people whose socialization was less complete. This tension was expressed in cosmological terms: psychological distress was interpreted as apocalyptic anxiety. Sacrificing the young diminished the threat their example posed. The terror this spread throughout the society crippled the psychological freedom of the populace and reinforced the social hierarchy. Ripping hearts from the few purged the hearts of the many and stabilized their traditional lifestyles. The relief felt by the many was interpreted as the regeneration of the cosmos.

The same basic pattern underlies the current culture war. Like the Aztecs, social conservatives tend to grow up within abusive and authoritarian communities. Rather than condemning their persecutors, they learn to identify with them, and to justify the suffering endured at their hands. Also like the Aztecs, social conservatives scorn introspection, which would only remind them of their unmet psychological needs. To perceive these needs would be to risk overwhelming grief. The need to defend themselves from this grief causes conservatives to despise those who remind them of the freedoms they've lost. This is why they accuse progressive groups of corrupting the social and spiritual order and of tempting apocalyptic carnage: they're interpreting their personal anxiety as an expression of cosmic chaos. The culture war, like a flower war, is meant to thin the ranks of the people who trigger these feelings. It's also intended to suffocate vitality beneath the crushing weight of socialization , to replace desire and reason with unthinking conformity. A social conservative is like a crippled man who breaks the legs of everyone he meets. In the end, this is nothing less than an assault on psychological maturation, and, just like in a flower war, the victims tend to be young.

As our society places ever-increasing value on emotional maturity, progressives should expect social conservatives to respond with mounting cruelty and fanaticism. To effectively respond to these attacks, we need to understand the psychological dynamics driving them. This understanding will let us open the lines of communication with social conservatives and help them begin healing their many wounds. If unmet psychological needs underlie this Flower War, then the best way to protect ourselves is to help as many people meet these needs as possible, especially people drawn to social conservatism. Like any other Flower War, this is a battle for people's hearts, and these are hearts we can't afford to lose.

****