A Year of Cognitive Dissonance

The blogger, Respectful of Otters, doesn't post all the time, but I missed the last of her series on Hurricane Katrina:

Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable collision of two or more contradictory beliefs. It usually results in (unconscious) efforts to reduce the discomfort by modifying one's appraisal of the situation. The classic example is a smoker resolving the dissonance between "I want to live" and "I smoke cigarettes" by downplaying the health risks of smoking or deciding that old age isn't worth living through anyway.

Cognitive dissonance gets particularly ugly when reality collides with the just world hypothesis, the belief that "the world is an orderly, predictable, and just place, where people get what they deserve." Faced with tragedy, victimization, or injustice, just world believers have four options to reduce the cognitive dissonance: they can act quickly to help relieve the victim's suffering (restoring the justice of the situation), minimize the harm done (making the tragedy a less severe blow to their beliefs), justify the suffering as somehow deserved (redefining the situation as just), or focus on a larger, more encompassing just outcome of the "poor people will receive their rewards in heaven" variety. The first response - the only actually helpful one - isn't always possible. Unfortunately, the latter three pretty much always are.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina confronted Americans with a constant parade of images of suffering.

I forget whether it was in the Raj Quartet by Paul Scott or A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, but I remember a scene where a British woman in one of the colonial club functions somewhere in India complained that the hunger one saw in the streets was the fault of Indian merchants, that they had hoards of money and were just too cheap to feed their own people. I could be misremembering the exact details but certainly not the sad rationalization. There's been too much rationalization in the last four years, from Abu Ghraib to Katrina to spying on one's fellow Americans.

Forgive me for my simplemindedness, but in this season of generosity, maybe we can think more kindly of one another, and extend that generosity to those least like ourselves.