Strength and danger

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/08/2023 (1141 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WHAT does it take to be a good man? Once upon a time the Platonic ideal of manhood was a simple thing, and that simplicity part of its virtue. Stoic. Productive. And, of course, strong. Perhaps it could be argued that there was a time when it served both society and men to fit into this basic construct.

But contemporary men deserve better. Because that stoicism can be a stifling thing that bottles up emotions which require proper expression for a healthy life. That productivity can be exploited by an economic system which will gladly drain you dry, with only paltry monetary compensation in exchange for your sacrifice.

Then there is strength, which perhaps needs the most nuanced redefinition.

The other day in one of Winnipeg’s online community forums, there was discussion about an incident at a grocery store where a man was acting erratically while brandishing a weapon. Police were called and the man was removed. But in the comment section one person stated “Hopefully the police take him out… Wanna act crazy and bother people? Boom.”

Now, obviously the man causing the disturbance was having a mental health break. But, I wondered, what was this commenter’s reason for having such a broken moral compass? How do we get to the point where we are fine with flippantly executing our fellow humans in the street when they, by all current reports, didn’t even harm anyone?

There is a good deal of science behind our capacities to empathize with a social in-group while dehumanizing those in the out-group.

For example, there was a study published on PubMed called Empathic Neural Responses Predict Group Allegiance. Participants were hooked up to an MRI and shown a series of people’s hands on a screen. Then those hands were either brushed with a cotton swab or jabbed with a needle, as to illicit a response from the participant.

When we see somebody experiencing pain, the part of our brain called the medial prefrontal cortex ignites to give us a jolt, an expression of empathy. However, when these hands were shown with a label that differed from a person’s own religious background, the activity in the medial prefrontal cortex was muted compared to when they observed somebody who shared their religious identity being jabbed. This held true across all denominations. Atheists reacted less to Hindus, Hindus reacted less to Christians, etc. across the board.

Alarmingly, these results held even to arbitrary demographic differences without the baggage of religion. When participants were asked to flip a coin to divide themselves into two teams, Justinian and Augustinian, there was still a significant decrease in how their brains reacted to hands of the outgroup being stabbed, despite it being derived entirely from a zero stakes coin-toss.

So this capacity to divide and devalue our fellow humans is a deeply engrained one. And other studies show that we can be so far removed from one another that our brains react to people in perceived distant out-groups on the same level as inanimate objects. It’s no secret how propagandists have exploited this weakness in somewhere like Nazi Germany, but it does behoove us to examine how our modern media play into this, even if in some cases we might generously call it an accidental byproduct of creating clickbait headlines in the service of profit seeking.

After all, even supposedly enlightened outlets such as the New York Times have referred to homelessness as “a plague” in their headlines. Or our politicians, like when British Prime Minister David Cameron warned of a “swarm” of migrants. And this is just how the supposedly more politically correct among us speak of marginalized people.

This insidious tendency is very difficult to weed out after the seeds have been planted. And it falls outside the realm of politics as well, and can afflict even the most educated among us. For example, the old fallacy that Black people experience less pain still lingers with us today, as studies show they are underserved by doctors when it comes to treating pain.

So neurological phenomenon or not, our institutions are complicit in exploiting this tendency, insisting to the in-group that those in the out-group do not deserve our consideration. Those atop our social hierarchy exploit a weakness in us, and perhaps this is where we can start redefining what “strength” means. Because strength should continue to be a cornerstone of manliness, but not in the traditional idea of a callous strongman doling out harsh punishment, like that online commentor.

Strength should be to resist such impulses, not indulge them. To hold power, but restrain it.

Because the true measure of strength is not how one dominates those weaker than him, but in how he accommodates them.

Alex Passey is a Winnipeg-based author.