Here’s a quick trivia question for you: What is the motto of the United States? Is it A) “E pluribus unum” or B) “In God we trust”? The technically correct answer is “B” — the phrase that was legally adopted through a joint resolution passed by the 84th Congress and approved by President Eisenhower in 1956. While it previously had only appeared on a two-cent coin from 1864 to 1873, from then on, the motto by law had to appear on all United States currency.
A more complete answer to this question, however, might be “all of the above” since “E pluribus unum,” meaning “From many, one,” has been the unofficial motto of the United States for much longer. In prominent use since the days of the American Revolution, it was first used by Congress in 1782 and incorporated into the design of the official seal of the United States, although it was never legally defined as the official motto. Many people still wrongly believe that “E pluribus unum” is the official motto; even Hillary Clinton cited it as the U.S. motto in her 2016 presidential campaign. So, you could say the United States has two mottos: one official and one traditional.
The difference between these two highlight a cultural dilemma that is unique to liberal democracy: the simultaneous desire to promote freedom, which encourages diversity, and the need for cultural stability, which relies on a certain level of cultural homogeneity. On the one hand, the official motto, “In God we trust,” represents a commitment to the Christian patriarchal culture that dominated the land in 1956 when it was adopted. (There is no mistaking which God was being referred to here — definitely not Allah, Shiva, or the Tao.) On the other hand, “E pluribus unum” represents the desire for the proverbial “melting pot” to work its magic, a wish for people of diverse backgrounds and interests to come together as one people.
For the most part, social scientists have argued that cultural homogeneity is necessary for a properly functioning society. Economies and governments especially rely on it to create cooperation among individuals and to encourage participation in the system. This is a problem for liberal democracies since true liberty includes the freedom to develop beliefs and cultural practices that may be different from or in opposition to the dominant culture. And, liberal democracies also usually allow or even encourage a certain degree of immigration, which leads to a multicultural national landscape.
In the United States and Europe, almost two and a half centuries of liberal democracy have led to continued tensions between the powers of the majority and the unmet needs of the minority. The histories of these countries have swayed back and forth between times of progress bolstering the rights of minorities and times of nationalistic fervor, often in response to waves of immigration or increasing influence from minority groups.
In the U.S., the most recent wave of “build a wall” nationalism predictably follows an era of civil rights gains for minorities (that is, late 20th century civil rights and affirmative action legislation) and a demographic shift toward a minority majority (meaning, the total number of minorities outnumber the number of people in the majority group). And, as a result, political polarization and cultural tribalism, instead of cultural homogeneity, seem to rule the day.
So, what can we do about this tendency toward instability in a pluralistic society? Are we to give up on the ideal of freedom and democracy entirely? Perhaps the answer lies in the workings of the human brain.
Neuroscientists know that the tendency seek out group identity is a normal feature of the human brain. We want to find a place where we fit in and belong. There is nothing wrong with that on the surface, but it unfortunately has a deleterious effect on our view of anyone else who does not fit into our group. In a process called “outgroup homogeneity bias” — we tend to define groups other than our own as a monolith. We may assign this other group some good attributes, but, perhaps due to fear of the group outcompeting or otherwise endangering our own group, we are much more likely to overgeneralize any negative traits that we perceive.
A negative news report about a criminal from another racial group, for example, is a negative reflection on that race as a whole, while a negative news report about someone from our own race is just a story about one guy being a jerk. This mental tendency is likely the root cause of negative racial and cultural stereotypes, and it leads to ingrained prejudice and inequality in societies that are otherwise supposed to be “free.”
Can the human brain overcome its tendency to form biases? Perhaps partially … if given the right information. In a study published in Scientific Reports on the effect of bias on the perception of quality, different groups were asked to listen to the same recording of classical piano music, but one recording was labeled as “student performance” and another was listed as a “professional performance.” Predictably, the study participants rated the “professional” recording as higher quality than the student piece, revealing an obvious bias.
In the brain of the biased individuals, cortex function was increased, and pleasure centers were activated more for the “professional” piece, even though the music was the same. When told about the labeling situation, the participants increased their score for the “student” piece, but not to the levels they had given the “professional” piece. Researchers further speculated that training in classical music could have negated the effects of bias to a further extent.
So, perhaps becoming aware of our group biases is part of the solution. We can point out unfair patterns where we can, but they are not always so easy to uncover as in the music labeling experiment. So, what else can we do? Can we keep our individual pride in ethnic identity and still have the homogeneity needed for society to function?
Dr. Daniel Shapiro, director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program, in Psychology Today says, “Mitigating such tension requires that our systems of global cooperation build a strong institutional sense of camaraderie while simultaneously ensuring that members feel sufficiently free to determine fundamental aspects of their provincial identity.” That sounds easy, but where does the “institutional sense of camaraderie” come from?
In the past in the United States, that came from finding shared values to serve as a foundation for the entire country. Essentially, reunification is a matter of telling the collective cultural brain a new narrative. Literary scholars and historians have noted that certain books have served to heal the nation’s divisions in the past. For example, another wave of anti-immigrant, nationalist sentiment happened after mass immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in the 19th century. The “old” immigrants from Western and Northern Europe, who had come to the country a few decades earlier, responded with a call for closed borders and other forms of nationalist legislation.
This trend changed, however, when the popular fiction of the times changed. As Professor Tim Prchal describes in Studies in American Fiction, the new stories celebrated “the best traits of the world’s peoples merging to create an ever-evolving, cosmopolitan American race in the national melting pot … introducing the radical notion of what came to be called ‘cultural pluralism,’ a vision of a heterogeneous country where ethnic difference is respected rather than erased.”
So, perhaps the best view of the current “culture war” and “political divide” is that it indicates a time in an evolving culture when a new story is emerging. But what will that new narrative be? Only time will tell — if one emerges at all. The human brain is sometimes described as a “meaning-making machine,” but sometimes it gets a bit too attached to the symbols and storylines that helps it do so. So, for now, the bickering will likely continue. The trick will be to keep looking for the one story among many that everyone can share as their own.
More From Brain World
- Assimilated: The Clout of Cults on Identity
- Brainwashing: Decoding How Cults Work
- Is Your Nervous System A Democracy Or A Dictatorship?
- Talking Heads: Is There Cognitive Diversity Between the Left and Right?
- What Political Polarization Looks Like In Your Brain
- The Voice Inside Your Head: The Origin of “You”
