I was reading a paper sent to me by a member of our Center’s National Advisory Board, and was struck by the following paragraph:
Democratic modes of association are not given by nature; on this the historical record could not be clearer. Rather, they are built, and much of the construction work is done by people who share an understanding of what kind of polity they are trying to create. These people are not born grasping the difficult political principles of limited government, civil rights and liberties, toleration and equality before the law. These are social, moral and cognitive achievements.
Those “social, moral and cognitive achievements” are missing from the zealots who are currently holding Congress–and the American government–hostage.
We ordinary Americans will bear the brunt of their absence.
Every time I tell myself that Americans have gone through nutty and mean-spirited periods before, and we’ll come through this one, I encounter something that dashes my all-too-fragile hopes.
This time, it was a link sent by a colleague who is equally depressed at the seeming inability of our lawmakers to respond appropriately to facts and evidence.
According to new research by Yale Law Professor Dan Kanan, we’re pretty much doomed.
Okay, that isn’t really the title of his paper. The title is: “Motivated Numerancy and Enlightened Self-Government,” but it might as well be “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Live Here.” Kahan measured the impact of political passion on people’s ability to think clearly, and he found that partisanship can undermine even the most basic reasoning skills.
Even people who are normally very good at math, for example, can totally “flunk” a problem they would ordinarily be able to solve, because the correct answer would contradict their political beliefs.
This research is further confirmation of work done by another researcher, Brendan Nyhan, who teaches at Dartmouth. He’s the one who reached the conclusion that facts don’t matter to people who are deeply invested in an ideology; when people believe something that isn’t so, giving them facts that correct their error just makes them cling more strongly to their original belief.
Death panels, anyone?
Denial, as my grandfather used to say, isn’t just a river in Egypt.
It does appear that this unfortunate aspect of the way the human brain works is limited to beliefs in which we are emotionally invested. You think if we put valium in the drinking water, and everybody chilled out a bit, we could improve policymaking?
With the exception of gay rights, America doesn’t seem to be moving in an inclusive direction.
Quite the contrary.
As I write this, I’ve just looked at a lengthy strand of twitter comments about the new Miss America. She’s of Indian ancestry, and that fact unleashed some truly despicable comments about what it means to be both beautiful and a “real” American.
In the wake of President Obama’s election, overt racism has mushroomed; the sort of sentiments that simply weren’t made in polite company have become commonplace. Blatantly racist emails circulate among the like-minded and (occasionally) other appalled recipients , and racist blogs and Facebook posts are daily occurrences.
It’s not just race. The past few years have seen us take giant steps backward with respect to women’s rights. Bigotry against people who appear to be from the Middle East has hardened, and “Muslim” has become an insult, rather than a description of someone’s religious identity. Immigration reform? Forget it. Anti-immigrant sentiment has stalled even modest Congressional action.
And of course, legal and social progress notwithstanding, gay slurs continue to be thrown around with abandon.
So what are we to make of this ugly time we are going through? Are we just going through a particularly pissy phase, made worse by economic insecurity and rapid social change? Or is the nastiness a permanent part of the American landscape—one that has always been here, but (thanks to the Internet) is suddenly “in our face” in a way it never was before?
Over fifty years ago, a social scientist named Gordon Allport wrote a seminal book, The Nature of Prejudice. The book was written right after President Truman integrated the Armed Forces, while Americans were coming to terms with the presence of “colored” soldiers bunking down with the white ones. Then as now, other social shifts were intruding on “the way things have always been.”
Allport’s great contribution was to distinguish between prejudices that were simply an outgrowth of widely held social attitudes and those that were central to an individual’s identity. He found that most people who expressed bigotry against blacks or Jews (then the most frequent targets) were not invested in their negative opinions –they had simply accepted common stereotypes about “others,” and they could be educated to change what were essentially casual beliefs they had never really examined.
The other category was much smaller, but also much more troubling. These were the individuals that Allport—who founded the discipline of social psychology—described as invested in their bigotries. For whatever reason—bad toilet training, lack of parental affection, abuse—their belief in the inferiority of designated “others” had become absolutely central to their personalities. Education would have no effect at all on their attitudes.
The question we face today, of course, is: into which group do today’s haters fall? And which category will define America going forward?
Perhaps Tallyrand was right when he (purportedly) said that language was given to man to conceal his thoughts; we sure aren’t using it in order to communicate with each other these days.
In order to use language to exchange ideas, rather than to evade the chore of thinking, we’d have to stop the increasing tendency to substitute labeling for communicating. There are two major problems with that substitution: it allows us to avoid responding to the merits of an argument, and the labels themselves are all too often devoid of any meaningful content.
As many of you know, I alternate columns in the IBJ with Peter Rusthoven–I write one week, he the next. Generally, we do not take issue with each other, but a few weeks ago, I wrote a column that criticized the GOPs repeated efforts to derail “Obamacare,” including the House of Representatives’ forty (meaningless/posturing) votes. Rusthoven disagreed with that column, as he has a perfect right to do. But opened his “response” by pointing out that I am (in his lexicon, at least) a liberal. The implication was clear: we need not spend any time on the merits of her arguments, because we’ve placed her in this particular box and we have all made up our minds about the content of that box.
It may not be fair to pick on Peter for this behavior, because he is far from the only person who engages in it–on either side of the political spectrum. Furthermore, we all classify others to some extent; it’s human and it’s often efficient. The problem is, if we are going to affix a label that actually assists us in understanding where another person is coming from, we need to agree on the meaning of that label. And these days, we don’t.
Labels have lost their descriptive utility–they’ve become insults. Epithets. This is especially true of political labels.
A couple of years back, I proposed a quiz:
What highly placed political figure took each of the following actions?
Established the Environmental Protection Agency
Pardoned a powerful person who had committed a felony
Changed the rules governing welfare to restrict benefits and add work requirements
Defended the right of gays to serve in the military
Imposed wage and price controls during an inflationary spiral
The answers are: Richard Nixon established the EPA and imposed wage and price controls during his presidency; Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon after his resignation; Bill Clinton proposed and signed legislation “reforming welfare as we know it;” and Barry Goldwater vigorously defended the right of gays to serve openly in the military.
Which of these actions–and political figures– would we label “liberal” and which “conservative”?
Since Obama’s election, the problem has only worsened. The people who insist that the President is a “socialist” clearly don’t have the faintest idea what a socialist is. (And as I have pointed out elsewhere, he can’t be both a socialist and a Nazi at the same time; “National Socialism” is not the same thing as the political philosophy known as socialism.)
Actually, when I read “The Audacity of Hope,” it reminded me of my own platform when I ran for Congress in 1980–and at the time, I was labeled a conservative Republican.
When I encounter one of these accusatory critics, I want to shout “Agree with the President or disagree with him on the merits of his performance or positions. The substitution of (highly inaccurate) labels simply lets people know that you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
What reasonable people hear when a label is used in lieu of an argument is: I don’t like person X or position Y. I have no clear reason for my animus, and no persuasive counter to his position, so I’ll just call up a handy label.
That’s not communication, and it doesn’t advance any debate. Tallyrand to the contrary, it doesn’t even conceal the speaker’s thoughts.
Don Knebel is one of the lawyer/scholars who contributes to the Center for Civic Literacy’s new blog, and he can be counted on to have wise words for all of us. I particularly loved this one, because–as he notes–people constantly compare the national budget to those of everyday Americans.
Politicians often say that the federal government should emulate families in budget matters. They are right, but not for the reasons most of them think. Until the government distinguishes among types of expenditures as families (and businesses) do, we will not be able make sound financial decisions. Perhaps more important, we will not be able to evaluate the claims of our politicians about the size of our annual deficits.
I particularly loved his analogy to those real families.
The reported deficit simply compares the amount of cash going out with the amount coming in. So, whether the money is spent for a dam capable of producing electricity for 50 years or a toothpick, the money is all counted toward the deficit in the year in which it was spent.
No family looks at its budget that way. When a couple earning $50,000 a year spends $100,000 for a new house, borrowing $80,000, they don’t believe they are $30,000 in the red for the year. They recognize the debt is offset by the value of the house and spread the cost over the expected life of the house or at least over the length of their mortgage. On the other hand, they know they could be in serious financial trouble if they borrowed the same $80,000 to take their family on an around the world cruise generating no offsetting asset. Understanding the difference, prudent families borrow for homes but not for cruises.
The average American family understands and acts upon the difference between capital investments and everyday expenses. We should expect our politicians and pundits to understand that difference as well, and those who don’t–and those who pretend not to understand it–should be sent to a remedial classroom where Don Knebel can explain it to them.
