George Monbiot writes:

In every age there have been political hucksters using aggression, lies and outrage to drown out reasoned argument. But not since the 1930s have so many succeeded.

Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison, Rodrigo Duterte, Nicolás Maduro, Viktor Orbán and many others have discovered that the digital age offers rich pickings. The anger and misunderstanding that social media generates, exacerbated by troll factories, bots and covertly funded political advertising, spill into real life.

Today, politicians and commentators speak a language of violence that was unthinkable a few years ago. In the UK, Johnson mocks the memory of the murdered MP Jo Cox. Nigel Farage, talking of civil servants, promises that “once Brexit’s done, we will take the knife to them”. Brendan O’Neill, editor of the website Spiked, a publication that has received funding from the Koch brothers, told the BBC that there should be riots over Brexit’s delay. They must all know, particularly in view of the threats and assaults suffered by female MPs, that violent language licenses violence. But these statements seem perfectly pitched to trigger unreasoning aggression.

Surely voters must now wake from this nightmare, dismiss those who have manufactured our crises, and restore the peaceful, reasoned politics on which our security depends? Unfortunately, the solution may not be as simple as that.

Several fascinating branches of neuroscience and psychology suggest that threat and stress in public life are likely to be self-perpetuating. The more threatened we feel, the more our minds are overwhelmed by involuntary reflexes and unthinking reaction.

The strangest of these effects is described by the neuroscientists Stephen Porges and Gregory Lewis. They show that when we feel threatened, we cannot hear calm, conversational voices. When we feel safe, the muscles in the middle ear contract, with an effect like tightening the skin of a drum. This shuts out deep background sounds, and allows us to tune into the frequencies used in ordinary human speech.

But when we feel threatened, it is the deep background noises we need to hear. In evolutionary time, it was these sounds (roars, bellows, the padding of paws or rumble of hooves, thunder, a flood pulse in a river) that presaged danger. So the muscles of the middle ear relax, shutting out conversational frequencies. In the political context, if people are shouting at us, moderating voices are, physically, tuned out. Everyone has to shout to be heard, ramping up the level of stress and threat. [Continue reading…]