The brain evolved over millions of years, building on itself. First, the brainstem that controls vital functions like breathing and heartbeat. Then the midbrain, that governs some higher functions like memory and emotions, and finally the cerebral cortex -- all that gray matter we see on the exposed surface, which allows us to make plans, form sentences, and do algebra.
The problems begin in that damned limbic system, the part of the midbrain that generates all those primitive emotions like fear, rage, and lust. If Freud had been a little less abstract, he might have interested himself in the limbic system. It's pretty powerful.
It's necessary too. We need fear and we need some hard wiring. Fear of snakes and heights may have helped us to survive, just as fear of a hungry predator did. Humans wouldn't be around if they didn't have a built-in fear of certain physical things and a tendency to fight to the death against physical threats.
But we're rarely faced with physical threats anymore. Few of us will be chased by ghouls or ogres except in nightmares. Instead we live in a world of symbols. Those symbols are all organized into a way of life that can be broadly defined as culture.
And as a couple of talking heads argue, we seem to have transferred our horror of physical threats to a fear response towards anything that threatens our culture. We can't flee from an alien ideology, so we hate it and try to eliminate it. "I'm not a white supremacist," shouts one demonstrator, "I'm a non-white exterminationist!"
Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out. That, in a nutshell, is how the cookie crumbles, according to this very necessary documentary.
I'm an anthropologist and in my view the writer, Mike Ramsdell, got the evolutionary part right. The idea isn't new. He could have gone farther. Charles Whitman, the mass murderer who shot more than a dozen people from the tower at the University of Texas, requested that his brain be examined after his death "to see if it had a tumor." It did, a small one, and it was nudging up against a part of his limbic system called the amygdala, which is associated with the fight or flight response.
There aren't many talking heads, though, if you don't count the many loonies that were perfectly happy to tell you how much they hate Jews, blacks, fags, and everybody else under the sun. Want to see a more focused example? Get hold of "California Reich." To me, the most horrifying scenes in this horrifying documentary are those in which young children are being taught to hate the same people their parents hate. It's positively unnerving to see a little boy of about five smiling and holding up a big sign about "Niggers" or trying desperately and eagerly to follow the lyrics of the song his mother is singing for him, about how all the "faggots" will go to hell.
I wish they'd had more talking heads or narration and had devoted a little less time to the traditional zanies that we've all come to know and love, like the highly vocal group that now disrupts the funerals of dead soldiers, chanting that the deaths were deserved because they are God's punishment for our tolerance of homosexuals. That's familiar stuff. I'd like to have heard more from people usually thought of as the victims of this hatred -- the Reverend Wright, for instance, who preached to his congregation "not God bless America, but God DAMN America." Hatred isn't reserved exclusively for white supremacists and the KKK.
There is one moment that touches on the universality of this lethal tribalism. An Israeli woman is being interviewed. Her husband was killed by a Palestinian sniper, and so was another close male relative, perhaps a son or a father. The interviewer allows her to finish her narrative of victimization, her lack of understanding of such hatred towards Jews. Then the interviewer comments, "But you kill Palestinians." There is a long and poignant pause while she thinks this over, before replying weakly, "Because they kill us."
"We kill them because they kill us." That, in another nutshell, is the cultural form this biological programming takes. No one ever started a war or a feud. It's always the other side. We're just defending our way of life from a symbolic threat to its existence. It's why we don't have a "War Department," only a "Department of Defense." In the last hour or so, some of the talking heads propose ways of short-circuiting this neuro-cultural cascade, but they sounded more wishful than convincing. How do you damp down the midbrain? It's like willing yourself to stop breathing.
The problems begin in that damned limbic system, the part of the midbrain that generates all those primitive emotions like fear, rage, and lust. If Freud had been a little less abstract, he might have interested himself in the limbic system. It's pretty powerful.
It's necessary too. We need fear and we need some hard wiring. Fear of snakes and heights may have helped us to survive, just as fear of a hungry predator did. Humans wouldn't be around if they didn't have a built-in fear of certain physical things and a tendency to fight to the death against physical threats.
But we're rarely faced with physical threats anymore. Few of us will be chased by ghouls or ogres except in nightmares. Instead we live in a world of symbols. Those symbols are all organized into a way of life that can be broadly defined as culture.
And as a couple of talking heads argue, we seem to have transferred our horror of physical threats to a fear response towards anything that threatens our culture. We can't flee from an alien ideology, so we hate it and try to eliminate it. "I'm not a white supremacist," shouts one demonstrator, "I'm a non-white exterminationist!"
Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out. That, in a nutshell, is how the cookie crumbles, according to this very necessary documentary.
I'm an anthropologist and in my view the writer, Mike Ramsdell, got the evolutionary part right. The idea isn't new. He could have gone farther. Charles Whitman, the mass murderer who shot more than a dozen people from the tower at the University of Texas, requested that his brain be examined after his death "to see if it had a tumor." It did, a small one, and it was nudging up against a part of his limbic system called the amygdala, which is associated with the fight or flight response.
There aren't many talking heads, though, if you don't count the many loonies that were perfectly happy to tell you how much they hate Jews, blacks, fags, and everybody else under the sun. Want to see a more focused example? Get hold of "California Reich." To me, the most horrifying scenes in this horrifying documentary are those in which young children are being taught to hate the same people their parents hate. It's positively unnerving to see a little boy of about five smiling and holding up a big sign about "Niggers" or trying desperately and eagerly to follow the lyrics of the song his mother is singing for him, about how all the "faggots" will go to hell.
I wish they'd had more talking heads or narration and had devoted a little less time to the traditional zanies that we've all come to know and love, like the highly vocal group that now disrupts the funerals of dead soldiers, chanting that the deaths were deserved because they are God's punishment for our tolerance of homosexuals. That's familiar stuff. I'd like to have heard more from people usually thought of as the victims of this hatred -- the Reverend Wright, for instance, who preached to his congregation "not God bless America, but God DAMN America." Hatred isn't reserved exclusively for white supremacists and the KKK.
There is one moment that touches on the universality of this lethal tribalism. An Israeli woman is being interviewed. Her husband was killed by a Palestinian sniper, and so was another close male relative, perhaps a son or a father. The interviewer allows her to finish her narrative of victimization, her lack of understanding of such hatred towards Jews. Then the interviewer comments, "But you kill Palestinians." There is a long and poignant pause while she thinks this over, before replying weakly, "Because they kill us."
"We kill them because they kill us." That, in another nutshell, is the cultural form this biological programming takes. No one ever started a war or a feud. It's always the other side. We're just defending our way of life from a symbolic threat to its existence. It's why we don't have a "War Department," only a "Department of Defense." In the last hour or so, some of the talking heads propose ways of short-circuiting this neuro-cultural cascade, but they sounded more wishful than convincing. How do you damp down the midbrain? It's like willing yourself to stop breathing.
