A Siege Mentality

A Handmaid's Tale

My mother died, a Fox News junkie. Hannity wasn't enough, in fact. She liked Michael Savage very much, and probably a host of other doomsday sages I never heard of. She was stoutly convinced that the world was in a cataclysmic downward spiral that would end soon- and-very-soon with a heavenly trumpet blast because the Lord God almighty just didn't have the stomach to put up with so much evil all around.

I'd like to be able to chalk up her fears to dementia, but she'd carried all of that for years and years and wouldn't hear her son's skepticism. She wasn't techie enough to buy into the ample paranoia of Y2K, but she didn't need a calendar to know the world was coming to an end in flames.

There was a time when I tried to talk her out of her visions, tried to convince her that Obama, born in Kenya, wasn't an agent of Satan. It was useless to argue because what she believed was her faith.

And she liked it. She took joy in believing the world was on a fast track to Hades. It gave her pleasure I didn't understand to prophesy the end in Oostburg.

I consider myself a Calvinist because I'm jolly well sure all of us, even Mom, tend to choose ourselves when faced with tests of our allegiance: will it be me or God? Most often, all of us, in plain old human fashion, choose ourselves--"me first." Not always, and not everyone. But mostly. Even our best deeds, the Bible says, are filthy rags. Yup.

That belief turns end-time arguments into mincemeat and won't tolerate golden age dreaming. It makes "Make America Great Again" silly--that's all there is to it. We are what we are and what we always have been. Things are not going to pot right now any more than they ever were. Deep down, the human character is what it was a thousand years ago. We move faster, but we aren't constructed of new materials.

David Brooks says what's bothering us now is the siege mentality. "The siege mentality starts with a sense of collective victimhood," he says. My mother surely believed that Christians were at great risk in our world because there was just so many of them out to get so few of us. "It’s not just that our group has opponents. The whole 'culture' or the whole world is irredeemably hostile." Yup.

But it wasn't just Mom. True believers on the left cower before their own bogeymen (and women). For me, Sean Hannity. We become convinced that "things are bad now. Our enemies are growing stronger. And things are about to get worse. The world our children inherit will be horrific." Yup.

On the left, we shudder to think that maybe Judge Roy Moore's fanatic Philistines will take over. Our own apocalyptic scenarios include A Handmaid's Tale and Louise Erdrich's new novel, Future Home of the Living God, a world in which my mother's people rule.

Why do we believe such things? Because apocalyptic visions feel really good. 

Read that line again. "It gives its proponents a straightforward way to interpret the world," Brooks says, "--the noble us versus the powerful them." Want to understand the world-wide appeal of barbaric ISIS? Start here. "It gives them a clear sense of group membership and a clear social identity," he says. "It offers a ready explanation for the bad things that happen in life."

Yup. The "siege mentality" gives us this much at least: the deep faith that we are "the holy remnant," which is just another means by which we honor ourselves. Calvin wasn't wrong.

We need to give each other the benefit of the doubt, Brooks says, hard as that is. It ain't easy either, and I'm certainly not hereby proclaiming my righteousness.

We all need, he says, a good, strong dose of "confident pluralism," respect for "the other." My mother truly believed in Mexican drug-runners with calves big as muskmelons. She needed my Sunday afternoon story--she needed to believe in more Salvadorian Samaritans.