The conservative assault on reality continues this week with right-wing parents who believe elementary schools are teaching critical race theory (CRT) adding selective emotional learning (SEL) to the list of things that set them off. Unlike CRT, SEL really is part of elementary school curricula. According to an NBC News article, it is:
…a teaching philosophy popularized in recent years that aims to help children manage their feelings and show empathy for others.
Conservatives are concerned that SEL will…
encourage children to celebrate diversity, sometimes introducing students to conversations about race, gender and sexuality.
It’s easy to dismiss this and other conservative attacks as simply another case of “the cruelty is the point”; however, while it is true that cruelty is part of the point, the main reasons for these kinds of attacks is the conservative management of reality. A rational person experiences reality with their senses and then interprets what they experience to make sense of that reality. The other option would be to decide what reality is first (based on cultural stories you were told by an authority figure), then interpret the information coming from your senses in a way that fits with your pre-determined reality. If what you experience doesn’t fit, you would then make up things to confirm your pre-determined reality and “experience” those instead. It’s as if your brain’s imagination center is re-routed directly into the input channels and the effect is a lot like hallucinating, except there’s no organic brain abnormality. This process is culturally induced, and was formalized by the Nazis as “will to power” (they misinterpreted Nietzsche).
The way this applies to both history curricula and SEL is really interesting. The fantasy that conservatives are trying to make real includes things like:
1. The United States as a country and Americans as its citizens are and always have been morally superior.
2. My children will never consider suicide because they were born of and raised by superior people.
3. White people are not and have never been racist. (They accept that “racist” is bad or at least a thing they don’t want people to believe about them.)
4. My children will grow up to be successful, straight and happy and will never do anything that would be self-harmful.
5. My children will not be victims of sexual predators.
6. My children will not only conform to their parents’ culture but become champions of the same.
From the viewpoint of someone who is actively hallucinating, believing a thing or even knowing about it can make it true. To emphasize — from this perspective, the objective realness of a thing is less important than your belief in the realness of that thing. You might recognize this logic from some horror movies, like the Nightmare on Elm Street series, where believing in the monster makes the monster real and allows it to come and get you.
If you apply this dream logic to the six examples I provided above in relation to history curricula and SEL, some interesting things happen:
1. Children can’t learn about the moral failings of their country or its citizens, because that would make those failings real.
2. Children can’t learn that suicide exists, because then they will kill themselves. (This is specifically mentioned by a protester in the NBC News piece.)
3. Children can’t learn that many white people are racist, because then white people will be racist. (Systemic racism’s tenacity is explained largely by the fact that participants pretend it isn’t happening.)
4. Children who learn about failure, homosexuality, and sadness will become sad, gay failures. If they learn about drugs, they will take drugs; if they learn about sexuality, they will have sex. They will become trans if they learn what that is.
5. Children who learn about sexual predators will be victimized by sexual predators.
6. Children who learn about other cultures will reject the culture they came from.
Obviously, the conservatives are choosing to be extremely irrational, but I think there are valid reasons for conservatives to be concerned. Conservativism really thrives in an environment without any empathy where strict, traditional hierarchies are held sacred and anyone who goes against that is a deviant that must be forced to comply if not snuffed out. If we start developing empathy for people who are nonconforming, then the conservative worldview cannot survive. Empathy is quite possibly the biggest threat to conservativism there is. The meme “the facts don’t care about your feelings” is not about facts — conservatives do not care about those — rather, it is primarily a bold rejection of empathy.
The primary problem — as always — is about how to co-exist with people who are choosing to use their brains this way. We want our children to have a complete understanding of their world, to be kind to others, and to survive. Things like an accurate, complete historical curriculum and selective emotional learning help our children achieve all that, but we have to face these constant attacks from conservatives who would rather deny reality than do what is best for their children. It’s complicated, but one thing that is not a solution would be separating our children’s education from their children’s education.
The other problem is that conservatives are materially harming their own children by championing their fantastical view of the world. For example, the suicide rate among teenagers is much higher in conservative parts of the country. That study emphasizes that this might be partially explained by conservative teenagers bullying queer teenagers, but I want to emphasize that in a conservative part of the country, most of the teenagers are going to be conservative regardless of gender or sexual identity. So, a better way to interpret this is conservative teens excising deviance from the community. Conservatives are happy to sacrifice their own children to their ideology at least partially because they have chosen not to believe that their child (specifically) could be a deviant.
I’m choosing the word “deviant” specifically because the laundry list of marginalized groups that Democrats like to use is wholly insufficient. Any kind of deviance might be attacked by conservatives — it doesn’t have to be any of the specific groups of people that Democrats actively try to protect, and it could be very hard to predict the kinds of deviance conservatives will go after. For example, in a conservative, Protestant community (which might not even know it is “Protestant”), a Catholic family that moves into town is likely to become a target. Conservatives tend to link one kind of deviance to another in an effort to villainize, so this hypothetical Catholic family might be labeled as “Satanists” or something else nonsensical.
We have to understand how they think if we’re to have any success at all. I have to wonder if we can induce them to believe things just by suggesting the idea to them. They clearly believe this will work, so it might be worth a try. For example, “COVID was created by Satanists to kill conservatives! And now they are lying about the vaccine so we won’t get vaccinated!” or “The lizard people are going to be out on election day and they’re going to hunt down and eat conservatives who try to vote! Their lower jaws unhinge from their skulls like snakes and they swallow you whole!” See? We might be able to make this work for us.