My first real discovery as I was student teaching at a technical high school was that not all teenagers enjoyed reading with the analysis of modern, relevant texts such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. We would read a couple of pages of dialogue out loud, and then I would ask why Butch said this or why Sundance did that, and I would be dismayed by the silence of all but maybe two guys in the class. It was an all-boys high school in a small city in Massachusetts.
After a couple of days plodding through the story, one of the boys astonished me by asking, ” When will we study grammar in this class?” “Yeah, yeah,” affirmed other voices.
“Do you mean you’d rather study grammar than Butch and Sundance?”
“Yeah, grammar is fun. Diagramming!”
This was my first discovery that the teaching methods textbooks did not prepare me for the variety of students I would encounter in my career. Certainly they did not anticipate freshmen boys in a technical high school. Tech students liked questions with one answer. They liked the order of diagramming, even though grammar was a lot more complex than they had been taught in the past. There were surface structure and deep structure and context to be considered, but they had been taught the English language was reducible to diagrams.
I realize today that my first class as a student teacher was probably over-represented with students of an “authoritarian predisposition,” as psychologists name it. They preferred the apparently more orderly world of grammar to the evidently more ambiguous world of character analysis. They liked order and organization more than diversity and complexity, as Karen Stenner describes it:
Authoritarianism is a deep-seated, relatively enduring psychological predisposition to prefer—indeed, to demand—obedience and conformity, or what I call “oneness and sameness,” over freedom and diversity. Authoritarianism is substantially heritable—about 50 percent heritable, according to empirical studies of identical twins reared together and apart, a standard technique for separating out the influence of nature vs. nurture.. https://psmag.com/news/authoritarianism-the-terrifying-trait-that-trump-triggers
Stenner describes this predisposition without value judgment, but believes it helps explain why a certain percentage of voters remain loyal to certain political leaders regardless of day-to-day misstatements and missteps. They identify with the predisposition behind the politics. Stenner, a political psychologist and behavioral economist, was cited in Anne Applebaum’s unsettling book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism released this past summer (2020).
As a career English teacher I have discovered we treat language with the same predispositions as we treat politics and the economy. Language may be literal or metaphorical, transparent or ambiguous. We read language as “originalists” and “fundamentalists” or we read it as “contextualists” and “literary theorists.” For some readers the first and last books of the Bible (Genesis and Revelation) are literal moments in time that explain our origins and our ends. For some they are are narratives symbolic of our struggle with good and evil and the pivotal role of God in our history. To a large extent our personalities determine how we interpret what we read and how we use historical documents to shed light on our present circumstances.
In the originalist reading of the U.S. Constitution, the language “the right to bear arms” means every kind of weapon imaginable. To the contextualist, the wording does not anticipate the AK-47 in the hands of private citizens. Therefore the law or amendments have to clarify the language for the present day. This is an act of finesse with language that many authoritarian predispositions will not tolerate.
In the literalist reading of The Revelation to St. John there are all kinds of signs for our present day even though the book was written nearly two thousand years ago. Chapters 12-14 is replete with mythical beasts who are expected to represent anything from the Roman Catholic Church to the European Union, to the Roman Empire. Much more speculation as to what the “Mark of the Beast” represents, because “no one can buy or sell who does not have that mark” (13:17).” The prospect of having credit card identification on our bodies has caused all kinds of furor about “the Beast” controlling our lives. The Beast also bears the number “666,” and we know how much mischief is associated with that fateful numeral. Conforming ancient texts to modern contexts is a tendency of the literal reader.
The possibility of numerous interpretations of texts can not be tolerated by the authoritarian predisposition. To them, the text is sacred and opening up its possibilities is tampering. If we accept the dispute of how to read as a psychological one, we can understand why argument or evidence may not be received well by those of this predisposition. It is the discomfort and disconnect of our method of reading that is alarming, not the mere facts.
Stenner argues that the divide between the authoritarian predisposition and libertarian predisposition is not moral or intellectual, but cultural and psychological. It requires mutual tolerance and understanding to bridge the divide:
It is important to recognize that authoritarian predisposition is another way of being human and not intrinsically/necessarily evil. It is a natural variation in human “political character,” largely heritable and relatively immutable, and, most importantly, pretty much immune to—and, in fact, more likely to be aggravated by—democratic experiences/socialization and the promotion of multiculturalism. https://psmag.com/news/authoritarianism-the-terrifying-trait-that-trump-triggers
For those who have tried to convert their friends by apparently rational argument, this is a clue about why those arguments have failed. It is not the message but the underlying view of the world that prevents us from crossing some political/ economic lines. The world does not look right from the other side. Too much is lost by accepting the opposing view.
The bridge across the predispositions consists of collaborations based on a shared need and desire for unity as well as the avoidance of harsh and polarizing rhetoric:
Shared social institutions, practices, and experiences; unifying celebrations; common rites; etc. are more what I had in mind … alongside less appearance of/public airing of political conflict and partisanship.
The theory of predispositions would explain why our political positions are so intractable, why no one wants to be convinced. We each have a secure way to see the world and do not want anyone to mess with it. As the pendulum swings we get to enjoy a period of power and self-satisfaction. As it swings back, we are disturbed and want a change of leadership. We can not expect collaboration to be natural and comfortable as long as we expect everyone to see it through our eyes. We are not constituted to love what some people deplore.
As a student teacher I failed to grasp what my students needed. In response to their pleas I introduced them to “transformational grammar,” which completely upset the traditional grammar they had been taught. It was systematic, but less predictable. They were not pacified, and I was still mystified. I had a lot to learn about the predispositions of technical high school students.