Creating Our Own Stereotypes

 

In Oklahoma, we do things that sound like they come out of an SNL routine that was expressly designed to ridicule Okies. That is, we seem to want to create a stereotype of ourselves that fits the widely-held images. The events I am about to describe are all exactly what you would expect from benighted rednecks, and the odds against all of these things happening at once are huge. I can only conclude that rural Okies want to make themselves look stupid. They sound like they come straight out of a book by Billie Letts or out of Tracy Letts’s screenplay. Chance cannot explain this.

All of these news items were posted on May 22, 2020. All of them occurred in Rogers County, three of them in the same town (Inola). Remember that rural Oklahoma is the buckle of the Bible belt, exactly where you would expect people to behave in a religious, even if not sanctimonious, fashion.

• First, the pastor of the Cowboy Gatherin’ Church in Inola was arrested for raping and molesting three underage girls. That’s really the name of the church. It meets either outside, amidst cattle barriers, or under the tin roof of an auction barn.
• Second, there was a fatal stabbing at a rodeo.
• Third, a man sustained burns when he set fire to his estranged wife’s house.
• Fourth (this is the only one not in Inola; it was in the Oologah-Talala school district), a former special education teacher was arrested for having sex with one of the girls in his class.

These things all fit our stereotype: fundamentalist religion, illegal sex, cowboy culture including cowboy churches and rodeos, stabbings, deadly marital strife, and arson.

If I wrote these things—separately, or together—into a novel, an editor would rightly accuse me of creating stereotypes, and ask me to remove at least two or three of them. But in Oklahoma we feed our stereotypes, and that is why all four of these things appeared in the news on the same day.

One inescapable conclusion is that the prevalence of the Christian religion does not make people behave any better. Creationists like to claim that believing in evolution will make us behave like apes. But does fundamentalism make us behave better? Are evangelicals more moral? Remember they believe they have the Holy Spirit living within them to empower them to act righteously.

There is actually a tragedy in the making here. As René Dubos pointed out in So Human an Animal, humans individually and collectively have an almost unlimited capacity to adjust to circumstances, no matter how dismal. While this has helped us to survive and prosper in any and all circumstances, they create a tragedy today. He said, people are accustomed to being immersed in pollution and in the stress of modern life, and hardly notice that anything is wrong. In Oklahoma, the particular version of this that we have is that sexually corrupt preachers, stabbings, arson, and marital strife seem normal, something to be forgotten as soon as we hear it on the news. They have become as normal a part of Oklahoma culture as cowboys and rodeos. We will not solve these problems, because we hardly recognize them as problems. We are comfortable with keeping these problems with us forever.

A Nice Spring Day?

I was walking home the other day through the most beautiful springtime you could imagine: just enough warmth to be enjoyable, a slight breeze, sunshine, fresh green leaves everywhere. You would expect that I would have rejoiced at it. And I tried to. But it didn’t work. Here’s why.

Many of the trees were almost barren. They had been stripped of most of their fresh green leaves by a hail storm the previous week. Another hailstorm was predicted for the night before my walk, to finish off the job, but it didn’t happen. Fresh green leaves everywhere? Well, if you count the dried-up green leaves in the gutters. Now, of course this was an act of nature. As I might have said before, Mother Nature can be one tough mama. But the problem is that even though humans have the capacity to come together, to cooperate, to love one another, and help one another against the dangers of the natural world, we often do not do so. We could, as a species, form an altruistic network that could dampen the disruptions of Nature, but we do not.

One house that I walked past illustrated the Oklahoma anti-environmental, anti-altruistic attitude in just about every possible way. Old cars were parked on the lawn. The house is about to fall over. Inside the fence there are very, very mean dogs. An indoor couch was outside, soggy with rain. The dogs ran around in puddles of accumulated water. A tree had been cut down, the chunks left lying around, and beer bottles were propped on the stump. And there were lots of beat-up, dirty toys, proclaiming redneck fecundity. These people neither care about their immediate neighbors or about the rest of the world. Their attitude is not too different from that of their dogs, with the difference that the poor dogs don’t know any better. Nearby, a pickup truck drove slowly down the street, spewing thick clouds of smoke and fumes.

Durant, Oklahoma, is a world center of three things: Trump supporters, Confederate supporters (mostly the same people here), and creationists. Our local state senator is an outspoken creationist, but he sneers openly and loudly at anyone who wants to protect the habitats of non-human animals and—and plants! He believes that God made all of these species so that he and his friends can destroy them. They hate God’s creation and would enjoy destroying as much of it as they can. And with the Trump juggernaut, they might just get a chance to do so. Everyone knows that Trump’s attitude toward biology is, if you can’t eat it or fuck it, what use is it?

So as I walked home, looking at the trees stripped of their leaves and breathing deeply of pickup truck exhaust, I mourned rather than rejoiced in the springtime.

Altruism Under Attack

I am revising my Encyclopedia of Evolution, which Facts on File plans to reissue only in electronic format. Don’t look for it at your local bookstore. But, I hope, you can buy it soon online. Librarians! Alert! You can have it on your computers for your patrons!

When I got to the “altruism” entry, I dutifully recited the scientific arguments for why humans are the most altruistic species. My summary is concise and interesting, but for a fuller picture, you can read Michael Shermer’s book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule; and Frans deWaal’s book Age of Empathy. You can even read Dacher Keltner’s Born to Be Good. Well, maybe you don’t have to read the books. The subtitles tell you everything you need to know. Altruism is basic to the human psyche.

Their viewpoints are without doubt correct regarding the instinctual capacity that humans have for altruism. And I wish that I could believe that such altruism will actually prevail in the world. But I am sad to report that altruism is being strangled.

It is quite clear, on the national political scene as this blog is being posted, that the Republicans are willing to destroy the nation’s financial future in order to promote their power. Every thought they have and every action that they take is only for their own power. They have no sense that altruistic cooperation with Democrats would not only be good for the whole nation but also enhance their own electability in 2012. They seem oblivious to even the benefits they would receive from altruism. Rather than acting like altruistic humans, or chimps, or bonobos, they are acting like gorillas, using force as the sole means to consolidate their power.

And that is the way society is also. I am speaking, of course, from Redneck Central, in rural Oklahoma. I have neighbors—such people are all over the place in rural Oklahoma—who believe that they have the right to vandalize my property and threaten me with physical violence if I raise any objection to their vandalism. They act like gorillas, not chimps or bonobos or humans. When you look at them, they even look like gorillas; they look like they have been taking steroid injections since age six. Hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, producing the capacity for altruism, has been jettisoned by these people in my neighborhood.

Oh, by the way, these people claim to be followers of Jesus Christ. I wonder if Jesus would have said, Blessed is he who destroys his neighbor’s property and threatens his neighbor with physical violence.

I dutifully write about the evolution of altruism—in my encyclopedia, as well as in my book Life of Earth—even though I no longer believe that there is enough of it left in American society to save us from social chaos.