[THS] Lawrence Davidson: Your Reality or Mine?

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27052.htm

Your Reality or Mine?

By Lawrence Davidson

December 12, 2010 "WMC" -- There is a postmodern position that states "reality is a
social construct." In other words, individuals and groups have their own realities and,
according to the postmodernists, one reality is as true as another. Certainly there is
more than one way to interpret things. It is because individuals see the world
differently and, at least in the American cultural milieu, have such trouble reconciling
those views, that U.S. divorce rates run at about 50%. Then there is the inescapable
fact that nation states and rival ethnic communities periodically slaughter each other
in an effort to disprove the postmodernist assertion that all realities are equal. Thus
we see the competition among groups to assert the reality of the powerful as
triumphantly more real than all rivals.

It is hard to argue with the notion that there are many social, cultural and political
"constructs," each a product of its place and time. However, the notion that all
realities are equal can quickly take us into a kind of theater of the absurd. If you
want to see what this looks like just take a close look at present day American politics.

Take the issue of climate change. John Shimkus is a Republican member of the
House of Representatives from Illinois. He is presently campaigning for the
chairmanship of the House Committee for Energy and Commerce. Last year, during a
congressional hearing, he asserted that there is no need to be concerned about
global warming because after the biblical flood God promised Noah that he would
"never again...curse the ground because of man..." Shimkus sees this as "the
infallible word of God, and that is the way it’s going to be for his creation." Well, this
is an opinion for sure, but it is also John Shimkus’s "reality." As such is it the equal to
the reality posited by the present scientific consultants of the Environmental
Protection Agency?

How about the world of John Barton, a House member from Texas who has it in his
head that carbon dioxide emissions are not impacting the climate? If someday this
gas does have an effect on the environment, Barton tells us not to worry. We will find
a way to live with it. After all, according to Barton, man is able to adapt to just about
any environment. Again, what is the worth of Barton’s "reality"? Is it equal to the one
posited by those scientists keeping track of greenhouse gases? Finally, there is Darrell
Issa, a Republican House member from California who soon will be the Chairman of
the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Issa’s obsession is climate
data which, he is sure, has been manipulated by environmentalists seeking the ruin
of capitalism. And, he is determined to use his committee’s subpoena power to foil
this plot. Representative Issa has his own "reality." But, beyond his own head, just
how real is it?

It is not only with issues such as climate change that American politicians are riding
the wave of postmodernism. Foreign policy is also an arena of alternate realities.
Texas Republican representative Louie Gohmert took the floor in the House of
Representatives last month and stated the following, "I’ve been greatly concerned
with the hypocrisy of this [Obama] administration telling Israel ‘just let Palestinians
build illegal settlements and take over areas that are not theirs. Just let’em take
over." Mr. Gohmert has his world, his "reality," but I think we can say definitively that
it is less real to that of a new born Palestinian babe in Hebron.

Then there are all those U.S. politicians whose "reality" includes Iran’s drive for an
atomic bomb, and the reality of all U.S. intelligence agency experts who say Iran is
doing no such thing. Are they equal?

Americans are not the only ones subject to impaired or wholly false "realities." A
recent report prepared for NATO by The International Council on Security and
Development revealed that most Afghans in two hotly contested provinces, Helmand
and Kandahar, "are completely unaware of the September 11 attacks on the United
States and don’t know they precipitated the foreign intervention now in its 10th
year." The report concludes, "the lack of awareness of why we are there contributes
to the high levels of negativity toward NATO military operations...."

These particular Afghan citizens live in a remote and technologically poor region of
the world. This remoteness makes their outlook more understandable than that of all
those "modern" Americans cited above. But what about the world inside the heads of
the people who prepared the NATO report? If we assume that their conclusions are
an accurate picture of how they see reality in this case, we can only conclude that
they too, like the Afghans, are suffering from an impaired worldview. It would seem
that somehow they have forgotten, or suppressed, the fact that when, after
September 11, 2001, "President George W. Bush demanded that Mullah Omar...turn
over Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants or face the full brunt of U.S. military
might, Mullah Omar asked to negotiate, and Bush refused.

Instead, the United States invaded Afghanistan...." The Taliban leader had asked the
Bush administration for proof of bin Laden’s involvement in the 9/11 attack and those
in the White House, aided by the Pakistanis, could have probably supplied it.
However, America’s leaders did not bother. This also is part of the picture that should
be given the remote peoples of Afghanistan so as to make their notion of what is real
more complete. Thus, the reality of the Afghans of Halmand and Kandahar is
different than that of the NATO commanders and their consultants. Are they equal?
And, are either truly real?

Part II

The above examples are from our immediate past, but there are similar ones in our
immediate future. For instance, we can look forward to a new Israeli "advocacy
campaign" scheduled for western Europe early in 2011. The Israeli Foreign Ministry
under the leadership of the Avigdor Lieberman, a man whose notion of reality is quite
openly racist, has instructed Israeli embassies in all major western European capitals
to hire "professional advocacy and public relations experts" as well as to recruit up to
one thousand local Zionists per country to promote Israel’s official view of "reality" in
the Middle East. This comes after a relatively successful effort by both Israel and the
United States to suppress the picture of reality put forth in the UN’s Goldstone report.

The Israeli picture of Middle East reality, and its role therein, has been eroding in the
minds of many Westerners. That is why this effort is being made. The source of the
erosion is the demonstrable difference between Israeli behavior and Israel’s publically
promoted image of reality. As long as the gap between these two is a yawning one,
the Israeli effort to restructure reality for the citizens of Europe is likely to be no more
than a rear guard action. On the other hand, one should not underestimate the
impact of such efforts. Public relations campaigns, advertising, and the like obviously
do work. They are capable making you passionate about new cars and new clothes,
and they are capable of making you a supporter of the invasion of Iraq because you
are convinced Iraqi WMDs are real.

Part III

We all live lives that are relatively local and in terms of an understanding of outside
(foreign) events we rely on the reports of others. That means, except for our
immediate experience, our realities are heavily influenced by our media environment.
That environment might entail serious and objective research or it may consist of
daily doses of Fox TV. In either case that, in part, is how the universe inside our
heads comes about and it, in turn, motivates our behavior. The whole process can
bring us down to earth or send us into the realm of fantasy.

In the end we are confronted with two problems. One is that there are people who
do occasionally attain power whose private realities are fantasy driven. As noted
above, the House of Representatives seems to have an increasing number of such
people. The second problem is that, unlike the postmodernist claim that we are all
living in equally valid private realities, most individual realities are not private at all.
They are instead the artificial creations of a manipulated information environment
brought to us by way of the government and its allied media. And both of these
problems are sure to lead to on-going tragedy.

Dr. Davidson has done extensive research and published in the areas of American
perceptions of the Middle East, and Islamic Fundamentalism. His two latest
publications are Islamic Fundamentalism (Greenwood Press, 1998) and America's
Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood
(University Press of Florida, 2001). He has published thirteen articles on various
aspects of American perceptions of the Middle East. Dr. Davidson holds a BA from
Rutgers, an MA from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in history from the
University of Alberta.