Why do people take part in insurrections, like the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the storming of the presidential residence in Sri Lanka, or January’s sacking of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidential palace in Brazil?

Sometimes, that question is answered by pointing to precipitating events—elections and their results, protests that descend into anger, or the speeches of powerful demagogues. On other occasions, we blame insurrections on prejudices, or bigotries—racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, white nationalism.

I’d suggest that we think about insurrections differently—because they originate in our brains.

Indeed, I’d suggest that the insurrections in Washington, D.C. and Brasilia are due to overactivity in the limbic system in the brain—a primitive part of the brain that evolved millions of years ago, which we share with rats and cats and lizards and other creatures.

Social scientists used to focus on rational actions. But in recent years we have made great advances in understanding what goes on in the brain when we think politically. The biology of radical politics is no exception.

Scholars have explored why people rebel as long as there has been political science. In the early 1970s, one sociologist hypothesized that the reason was poverty, or “relative deprivation.” Political scientists and economists, using sophisticated mathematical models, also tried to explain rebellion, but found it hard to come up with a rational explanation. Very few people, the math showed, had any personal incentive to risk life and limb for the rather abstract benefits of overthrowing a government.

From a rational point of view, rebellions seem pointless. A political scientist even coined the phrase “the paradox of revolution.”

Enter neuroscience.

Since the early 2000s we have been able to look at what happens inside our heads when we think. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans which measure changing blood flow to brain cells, we can now see which parts of the brain get activated when we engage in various activities, like shopping, thinking about sex, and feeling remorse.

This perspective has also entered into the realm of political analysis—finally putting the “science” in political science. Of course, fMRI isn’t useful for studying rebellions in real time; there’s no way to scan people’s brains at the moment they storm the palace. But we can design experiments that observe how people who share insurrectionist views react to hate-speech and views that are articulated by politicians on the far right. Presenting subjects with statements about vulnerable minority groups during some brain scan studies, and showing them photos of political candidates they didn’t agree with during others, researchers could literally see what happened in would-be insurrectionists’ brains.

When neurologist Giovanna Zamboni and colleagues conducted such an experiment a little over a decade ago, they found that a part of the brain known as the ventral striatum, which is associated with the limbic system, was activated when individuals who were identified by psychological tests as “radicals” were exposed to hate-speech statements or other intolerant  assertions about other groups or minorities. These studies have been replicated in recent years and their findings confirmed and refined.

That the ventral striatum was activated is remarkable. This part of the brain is one of the oldest, in evolutionary terms. It is what makes animals respond positively to simple rewards in social situations and to negative stimuli in dangerous moments, such as fear that they might be attacked. The ventral striatum is linked with amygdala, the fight-and-flight center in the brain. When people hear statements about—or see images of—groups or individuals that they fear, the brain reacts as if it is attacked.

In contrast, study subjects who, based on personality tests, were identified as “moderate” or “conservative” used parts of the brain that only humans have evolved, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for planning and working memory and associated with listening, speaking, and reasoning. In another study, from 2011, young people with far-right views showed greater activation of amygdala, indicating that they were less likely to reflect on political statements and more likely to revert to fight-or-flight mode.

The most interesting part of this body of research: Generally, brains respond differently to politics than to policy. Scans show that when people think about politics—as in the rough and tumble partisan struggle—the fight-and-flight amygdala gets activated. But when people are exposed to questions about policy, they use the more advanced parts of the brain. In fMRI studies dating as far back as 2009, scientists found that the dorsolateral frontal cortex lit up in people exposed to arguments about economic policy.

I started out as a biologist before becoming a political scientist. Together, those two different academic fields offer a similar lesson: To prevent rebellions and insurrections, we should avoid angry and polarized debate. And when possible, we should avoid political hot-buttons and instead talk about the policy issues that affect our lives.

Biological research suggests the advantages of such an approach go beyond de-polarizing the public square. When we really listen to each other in debates about policy and related politics, we learn new things. And learning new things may make us less likely to develop degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Humans are the product of 8 million years of evolution. We have the capacity to use the powers with which we have been endowed, namely to learn by being attentive, and through open deliberation. Human evolution hardwired us to process information, and make progress, through listening. But when we engage in hate speech and angry rebellion we revert to an evolutionarily primitive stage.

Neuropolitics shows us a way out of the current polarized debate and into a better future.

The post Blame the Brain, Not Bolsonaro, for Brazil’s Riots appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One enduring answer to that question lies in the ways that Romans responded after the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths and their king, Alaric, in the year 410 CE.

That fall of Rome is among the most famous and closely studied attacks on a capital in world history. It also shares some key particulars with the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Perhaps most notably, just as some American politicians spurred on the insurrectionists of Jan. 6, a group of 5th-century Roman politicians engaged in treacherous acts that eventually culminated in the attack on their capital.

Alaric’s final assault on Rome came after three years of failed negotiations over payment for past military services. Alaric had fought for the Romans in the Balkans upon orders from the emperor Honorius. But Honorius changed his plans and then refused to pay Alaric and his followers.

Early in 408, Alaric moved just north of the Alpine passes to Italy, and threatened to attack Rome if he was not paid. Honorius’s great general Stilicho convinced the Senate, which had grown increasingly involved in negotiations, to make some payment. But Stilicho’s support for paying Alaric aroused the suspicions of the emperor, so Honorius had Stilicho killed on allegations of having colluded with Alaric.

According to the Greek historian Zosimus, Alaric’s demands then changed; he wanted only a “moderate” sum of money, an exchange of hostages, and the concession of land in Pannonia (modern Hungary and parts of Austria and the Balkans) for his people to inhabit. Alaric marched through northern Italy to the walls of Rome unopposed. His first siege of the city in 408–9 brought suffering for the inhabitants. So, the Senate sent an ambassador to negotiate with Alaric and then voted to agree to his request. But Honorius and his courtiers kept delaying approval of the agreement.

In winter 409, Alaric seized Rome’s port, Portus, and its granaries. In a direct challenge to Honorius, the Senate, with the support of Alaric, recognized one of their own as emperor: Priscus Attalus. Then, Attalus installed a number of senators in prominent positions in his regime, although some senators, including the eminent Anicii family, refused to go along.

Attalus’s regime did not last long. After Attalus failed to defeat Honorius’s general in the province of Africa, Alaric removed his support for Attalus, who renounced his claim to the throne.  Once more, Alaric began negotiations with Honorius. The unexpected appearance of Alaric’s enemy, the Goth Sarus, who volunteered to fight with Honorius, disrupted what may have been the final resolution of the conflict; Honorius declared outright war on Alaric, who in anger turned against Rome.

For the third time, Alaric laid siege to the city.  No doubt, Honorius expected Rome would withstand another siege, and it may well have. But someone in the city—the culprit remains unknown—opened the gate for the Goths, and Rome fell.

“The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Vandals” (1890) by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Alaric’s path through the city makes his anger at Roman elite institutions visible. His men targeted political centers. They set fire to the lush green park known as the Gardens of Sallust, which were part of the imperial properties. Then they advanced to the center of the city, plundering and destroying public buildings in the Forum, including the Secretarium off the Senate House. They then looted certain churches and private houses, taking with them as much gold, silver, and captives as they could. Priscus Attalus, his son Ampelius, and the senators who had supported his attempted regime change left Rome with Alaric after three days of violence.

In the shock that followed Rome’s fall, many Romans across the Mediterranean decried this violence to the capital of the Empire and found it easiest to blame the “barbarian general” Alaric. In North Africa the Christian bishop and future saint, Augustine, was among those who interpreted the attack as God’s punishment for the Romans caring too much about the present world. Blaming Alaric or God was also safer for the senators who wanted to remain in Rome.

Yet contemporaries and later Greek historians acknowledged that some of the blame fell on the senators themselves. The disloyalty of Attalus and his supporters had undermined Honorius’s efforts to restore his authority as emperor and weakened his claim to the loyalty of the Roman troops at a critical juncture. Attalus had put his political ambition above the security of the state.

Alaric departed the city on August 27, 410, and died unexpectedly in southern Italy weeks later. The Goths then headed west for Gaul, easing the Romans’ fears. Some of the senators who had fled Rome appeared in public in the city once more.

A number of senators who had been loyal to Honorius emerged to help rebuild the city. Senator Epiphanius, who was also urban prefect (a position akin to mayor of Rome), started repairs on a section of the Senate House that had been damaged in the attack. Another senator, Albinus, oversaw the restoration of the food supply, and Probus, a member of the Anician family who had returned to support Honorius, was put in charge of state finances.  Absent from any of these positions were the senators who had supported Priscus Attalus, and, we must imagine, those who had left with the Goths as well.

Honorius’s new general, Constantius, regained control of Gaul in 415 and captured Priscus Attalus and his followers, handing them over to the emperor. We can only imagine the conversations among the senators as they saw the chastened Attalus being paraded through the city. No one spoke publicly in Attalus’s defense—including the senators who had sided with him. There was no attempt at minimizing Attalus’s role in the coup, nor did the senators pretend they had not witnessed an attempted regime change by their former colleague. Rather, the full Senate and the emperor witnessed and approved Attalus’s public punishment—the removal of his thumb and forefinger, the digits used for speaking. Attalus accepted his punishment, and was exiled to the Lipari Islands. No one objected or appealed the sentence.

Our leaders would do well to reflect on these Roman exemplars. We do not have to remove the fingers of members of Congress who colluded with the insurrectionists. But politicians must publicly acknowledge their responsibility for the attack, including spreading the “Big Lie” about the election. And if they cannot acknowledge their guilt and accept the consequences and take steps to repair the damage, as the Roman Senate did, like Attalus they should be forced from the capital.

Only then can our representatives begin to rebuild the civility and public trust that once made the Congress a respected institution, and the Capitol a hallowed place. The Romans did it, and their Senate lived on for another 200 years after the attack of 410.  We should be so fortunate.

The post Let’s Respond Like Romans to the Jan. 6 Attack on the Capitol appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Bauer and some of her fellow Jan. 6, 2021 rioters have testified that they were divinely inspired to participate in insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. They carried crosses and religiously themed posters and participated in a prayer on the Senate floor. Testifying to a congressional committee a few weeks after Bauer’s court appearance, District of Columbia police officer Daniel Hodges, who sustained wounds to the skull and attempts to gouge his eyes out, described seeing the Christian flag directly in front of him as an insurrectionist beat him with his own baton. Other signs read, “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president” and “Jesus is king.”

The blending of Christian symbols with national imagery is not a new phenomenon in the United States. Some of the earliest European colonizers maintained that the formation of the U.S. was a divinely ordained set of events. But the type of white Christian nationalism witnessed on Jan. 6 is also a product of the Cold War.

In the 1950s, relations between the United States and the USSR dissolved into an arms race nursed by fears that World War II was just a prelude to a more cataclysmic war. Some evangelical leaders converted the political threat of communism into the detrimental religious threat to the very soul of the nation. Billy Graham, the late traveling evangelist and preacher, called on all Americans to engage in a “born again” experience in hopes of not just saving their personal souls for the afterlife but providing the United States spiritual warriors against the godless communists. In Graham’s theologizing of Cold War realpolitik, America was divinely good while the USSR was satanically evil. In one early sermon at his “Los Angeles Crusade,” Graham told his listeners: “Communism is a religion that is inspired, directed, and motivated by the Devil himself, who has declared war against Almighty God.”

From the white evangelical perspective, the divine protection from communism afforded to the United States required evangelicals’ ongoing religious and political labor. White evangelicals prayed for the nation within their homes and churches and galvanized their membership base. Billy Graham, by then pronounced the “preacher to the presidents,” met publicly and privately with each president starting in 1950 with Harry Truman.

As America was experiencing a post-war manufacturing boom, white evangelicals were manufacturing born-again souls. New evangelical denominations emerged in the religious marketplace along with mass publications, seminaries, and mission organizations, which yielded thousands of new converts. And while many children were under their desks practicing for a possible nuclear holocaust, white evangelicals were placing their faith in the divine as a security measure against the evil communist enemy.

A spiritual arms race for political superiority developed within the collective theology of white evangelicals. Within this construction, the war against communism and the atheist Soviet “Evil Empire” could only be won if the U.S. was a godly Christian nation. In 1954, the federal government revised the Pledge of Allegiance to this end—now, the United States was “one nation, under God.” Fearful of a nuclear holocaust, white evangelicals, as well as many other Americans, took solace in the fact that the U.S. had established itself as a god-protected nation.

Even though white evangelicals saw their interests manifest, there loomed below the surface a suspicion that godless conspirators would undermine their efforts. Developments in the political and social spheres affirmed this suspicion. The first crack in the godly shield emerged in 1962, when the Supreme Court banned public prayer in schools. The chaos and upheaval of the civil rights era solidified evangelical fears that the U.S. was straying from the divine purpose upon which it had been founded. They grew to despise the direction that liberalism and equity measures took the country.

In their fear and loathing, white evangelicals needed to blame someone, something, or a group of people for the ways in which the United States failed to align with their vision. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, white evangelicals turned their attentions to a list of internal threats—including liberals, secular humanists, LGBTQ people, the poor and disenfranchised, activist Hollywood actors and sports stars, the ACLU, and pro-choicers. The shorthand for these enemies remained “Commies.”

But even if the enemy has the same moniker, today’s white evangelicals are skeptical of the American government’s ability to properly filter out internal threats. In previous decades, white evangelicals relied heavily on government officials, like then Senator Joseph McCarthy, to do their bidding. Today, many white evangelicals think that elected officials are part of a covert attempt to instate eventual persecution of white evangelicals. One poll found that a majority of white evangelicals believe that Donald Trump was working against a “deep state” network attempting to undermine his policies.

Paranoia in white evangelicalism has festered in recent decades. The number of those affiliating with white evangelicalism is shrinking. Prayer has not been reinstated in public schools, abortion remains legal, and evolution endures as a standard scientific explanation. This suspicion of the American government and fellow citizens creates a collective marginalization complex—white evangelicals think that they are under attack. This means some of them are willing to take matters into their own hands with spiritual and physical measures.

In a convoluted way, the Jan. 6 insurrection was an attack on communism, or at least what white evangelicals understand as communism within their country: an evil so persistent that they needed to defend the nation and themselves. “QAnon shaman” Jacob Chansley articulated this on the Senate floor, when he loudly thanked his god for “allow[ing] us to send a message to all the tyrants, the Communists, and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs, that we will not allow the America, the American way of the United States of America, to go down.” For insurrectionists like Chansley and Bauer, our current federal government is godless, moving toward communism, and, thus, un-American. While Chansley has been sentenced to a 41-month prison term, he echoes a call to arms against the sentencing of America to damnation. These religious rioters seek a national conversion, even if it requires the use of spiritual and physical force. What remains to be determined since the insurrection is what needs saving—the church or the state.

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