Language, Fact & Emotion, Oh My!!

Many thanks for all the kind comments yesterday! They were much appreciated!!

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Computers haven’t only changed our day-to-day lives in multiple ways, their computational capacities have made it possible to conduct studies far beyond the ability of mere humans. One of my sons sent me an article published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists detailing a research project that would have been impossible to conduct prior to the availability of today’s technologies.

The researchers set out to examine the roots of what they dub–accurately, in my view– our “post-truth era.”  In order to do so, they employed “massive language analysis” to document the rise of fact-free argumentation. They analyzed language used in millions of books published between 1850 to 2019–an analysis that required Google nGram data.

What they found is illuminating, to put it mildly.

After the year 1850, the use of sentiment-laden words in Google Books declined systematically, while the use of words associated with fact-based argumentation rose steadily. This pattern reversed in the 1980s, and this change accelerated around 2007, when across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.

The researchers concluded that this “surge of post-truth political argumentation” is evidence that we are living at a time when the balance between emotion and reasoning has shifted.

To explore if this is indeed the case, we analyze language in millions of books covering the period from 1850 to 2019 represented in Google nGram data. We show that the use of words associated with rationality, such as “determine” and “conclusion,” rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined. This pattern reversed over the past decades, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected, among other things, by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as “I”/”we” and “he”/”they.”

The reversal occurred in both fiction and nonfiction. It wasn’t limited to books, either– they found a similar shift in media (like New  York Times articles).  The results of the research “suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.”

The bulk of the article is a description of the methodology employed, the care taken to avoid “cherry picking” of data, and a variety of theories about the reason for the language shift. (There is definitely a “chicken and egg” aspect to the shift: did disillusionment with science and evidence drive a language shift? Or did something else prompt the change in language and thus promote an anti-science mood in the general public?)

The researchers concluded with a section they captioned “Outlook.”

It seems unlikely that we will ever be able to accurately quantify the role of different mechanisms driving language change. However, the universal and robust shift that we observe does suggest a historical rearrangement of the balance between collectivism and individualism and—inextricably linked—between the rational and the emotional or framed otherwise. As the market for books, the content of the New York Times, and Google search queries must somehow reflect interest of the public, it seems plausible that the change we find is indeed linked to a change in interest, but does this indeed correspond to a profound change in attitudes and thinking? Clearly, the surge of post-truth discourse does suggest such a shift, and our results are consistent with the interpretation that the post-truth phenomenon is linked to a historical seesaw in the balance between our two fundamental modes of thinking. If true, it may well be impossible to reverse the sea change we signal. Instead, societies may need to find a new balance, explicitly recognizing the importance of intuition and emotion, while at the same time making best use of the much needed power of rationality and science to deal with topics in their full complexity. Striking this balance right is urgent as rational, fact-based approaches may well be essential for maintaining functional democracies and addressing global challenges such as global warming, poverty, and the loss of nature.

This study is fascinating, albeit depressing.

I’ve previously suggested that our current era will be labeled (assuming there are humans and historians left to do the labeling) “the age of Unreason.” The language we use matters far more than we generally recognize; it both reflects and produces our biases.

And right now, those biases evidently elevate emotion over reason and logic. Which explains a lot….

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Holiday Recess

We’re in the midst of the holiday season–Chanukah is behind us, Christmas is today, Kwanzaa begins tomorrow, and New Year’s is coming…

I know it doesn’t feel very “joyous” these days.

That said, I hope everyone who follows this blog has a holiday filled with family and/or friends, good food and drink, and much love and laughter.

The challenges we face aren’t going anywhere; they’ll still be here tomorrow.

And so will I…..

Enjoy the day.

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(Some Of) We The People

I’ve been reading The Words That Made Us, a magisterial history of the origins of the Constitution, written  by Yale Constitutional Law professor Akil Amar. Amar’s previous books include The Bill of Rights and America’s Constitution: A Biography, both of which I read and found enlightening. (For example, in the latter book, Amar documents the extent to which the Amendments passed after the Civil War–especially the 14th–represented a significant reconstruction of the nation’s legal framework.)

This new book is also copiously and carefully documented, and as a consequence, it can be a bit of a slog; on the other hand, I’m encountering a number of heretofore unknown (by me, at least) details about the process that produced our Constitution, and the personal characteristics of the men who fought over it, theorized about it, and negotiated it.

Which brings me to a point on which most of those Founders apparently agreed–sovereignty in the U.S. rests with “We the People.” Not with the individual states, certainly not with Kings or Presidents–but with the people. We can now be critical of the worldview that confined definition of “the people” to free White males, and we should celebrate the later expansion of “the people” to include women and people of color–but we shouldn’t minimize the importance of what was then a truly revolutionary concept of sovereignty.

Interestingly, Amar points out that after the “constitutional conversation” over ratification took place, most colonies eliminated property ownership requirements for voting on the new charter. (Something else I’d previously not known.)

“The people” was–for that time–an inclusive concept.

America today faces a very dangerous tipping point–brought to us by a party, really a cult or cabal–that wants to change the concept of sovereignty and the definition of “people.”

We talk and write a lot about democracy, but what we mean by that term varies. As a number of pundits have pointed out, autocrats around the globe often claim to be “democratically” empowered, because their countries hold “elections.” (Note quotation marks.)

The men who crafted America’s Constitution broadened the then-definition of People, and saw democracy as the authority of those people. Today, faux patriots are engaged in narrowing it.

Gerrymandering carves out particular “people,” whose votes will outnumber and void the voices of others. The Electoral College–which Amar reminds us was an unwise concession to the slave states–operates to nullify the votes of a majority of the people who cast Presidential ballots. And as the Committee investigating  the January 6th insurrection is discovering, a not-insignificant number of elected and appointed Republicans–including Trump– fully intended to mount a coup and overturn an election decided by the people that numerous investigations (and Trump’s own dishonorable Attorney General) confirmed was free and fair.

The introduction to the U.S. Constitution doesn’t say “We (some of) the People.” It doesn’t say–as far too many of today’s faux patriots evidently believe– “We the (White Christian) People.” It says “We the People.”

If sovereignty is to be vested in We the People, all people’s votes must be counted and all people’s voices must be heard. That isn’t happening. (Okay, it’s never really happened, but we have previously moved in that direction.) To the contrary, we’re moving backward, thanks to a well-organized effort to subvert democratic equality and the very idea of “one person, one vote.”

As Barton Gellman reports in the linked article,

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

It is past time to reassert the sovereignty of ALL of We the People, and take back the country we thought we inhabited.

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Terry Munson

Blogging–not unlike other forms of more-or-less “mass” communication–is a conversation largely directed to people the blogger doesn’t know personally and is unlikely to meet. Obviously, I form impressions about those who comment regularly, but in most cases, I will never have an opportunity to compare those impressions against personal observations.

Terry Munson, who died last week, was an exception.

Terry and his wife Pat live in an area of South Carolina where my husband and I have for many years owned and used a vacation time-share. Some years back, we joined friends from Indianapolis who split their time between here and there at a get-together of the local chapter of “Drinking Liberally.”  (I joked that it was a gathering of all 30 of South Carolina’s liberals…). When we were introduced as Indianapolis folks, the man sitting next to my husband said he followed a blog written by a woman from Indianapolis.

Needless to say, we immediately became friends, getting together with Terry and Pat for dinners and conversations whenever we were in the state.

Terry was incredibly thoughtful: when I mentioned that one of my grandsons was interested in marine biology, he set up a dinner at which that grandson could meet and converse with a close friend of his–a professor at Coastal Carolina who teaches marine biology. (My grandson was wowed.)

Terry hasn’t commented here recently, as his health further declined, but many of you will recall the thoughtful and erudite observations he shared here on a wide variety of subjects.  Those opinions were informed by a wide, liberal education and a wealth of life experience, and by Terry’s ongoing intellectual engagement with the world in which he found himself. In retirement, his hobby was writing letters to the editor on the multiple topics he had researched and analyzed; according to his friends in Drinking Liberally,  several hundred of those letters have been published.

His voice will be missed.

Engaging in written commentary, entering into always-civil, evidence-based debates on the important issues of our times, is my definition of exemplary citizenship.

Terry was a Chinese linguist, a systems engineer with IBM, and a passionate environmentalist. His obituary noted that he was a co-founder of SODA – the movement to stop off-shore drilling off the South Carolina coast–and asks that memorial contributions be made to the South Carolina Environmental Law Project (SCELP) at www.scelp.org.

If this country is ultimately saved from the vicious and vacuous know-nothings who threaten it–the empty suits who have captured headlines and far too often, political power–it will be because America produces  enough sane, civic, good-hearted and generous people like Terry Munson.

R.I.P.

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The Rattle Of Empty Vessels

There’s an old saying to the effect that empty vessels make the most noise. We can see the truth of that observation in multiple venues:  when we look at some of the loudest members of Congress and our state legislative chambers, when we look at a variety of media loudmouths–and it is painfully obvious in the assault that a few parents and others are mounting on their local school boards.

Periodically, we need to remind ourselves that decibels don’t translate to majorities. We are living through an era when people who feel threatened by change are emulating two-year-olds throwing tantrums–and unfortunately, tantrums are newsworthy. (They pull attention away from all the two-year-olds who aren’t lying on the floor shrieking.)

I’ve previously noted that Indiana’s Attorney General–desperate panderer Todd Rokita– has rushed to issue a “Parents Bill of Rights,” and now the empty vessels in Indiana’s Statehouse prepare to “empower” parents to overrule educators.(Next, perhaps they will allow unhappy citizens to overrule traffic engineers or building inspectors, or even police. After all, specialized training and expertise just gives people airs…)

As legislators rush to placate parents who want to protect their children from wearing masks or studying accurate history, it seems reasonable to inquire just how widespread the anger of parents with public school rules and curricula really is. The Brookings Institution has recently conducted research to assess parental satisfaction with their schools, and it will probably not surprise you to find that the screaming and irrational folks who’ve descended on previously boring school board meetings aren’t particularly representative of parents in general.

Brookings’ study concerned school rules and conduct during the pandemic, and the researchers found that earlier criticisms had abated considerably as school systems have returned to in-person instruction.

I was more interested in the hysteria over curricula–especially the hyped-up anger over (non-existent) teaching of Critical Race Theory. I wasn’t able to locate survey date focused on that issue, but a review of media reports on clashes at school board meetings suggested that the people expressing hostility to teaching about the more negative parts of America’s history were neither numerous nor particularly representative of the parents in the district. (In a couple of cases, the angriest folks didn’t even have children in the system.)

Of course, that hasn’t stopped the GOP from jumping on a divisive issue that they think may activate racism and give the party a political advantage.

House education leader Bob Behning said the next legislative session, which starts in January, will include a bill inspired by the critical race theory controversy that focuses on “transparency.” He suggested requiring districts to form “curriculum control committees,” groups of parents, community members, and educators who would review curriculum, classroom materials, or library books and advise school leaders to change aspects they disagree with.

Also in response to contentious school board meetings, Republicans are drafting a bill that could reshape school boards, which are currently formed through nonpartisan elections. Behning said his colleagues are considering a bill that would allow school board members or candidates to choose whether to reveal their political affiliation.

In other words, the empty vessels in our legislature want to stir up racial animosities and politicize previously non-partisan school board elections. In an already polarized age, they want to add to the polarization.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Here in Indiana, the legislature has waged persistent war on public education, draining resources from our public schools and sending millions of taxpayer dollars to predominantly religious schools via the nation’s largest voucher program.

In innumerable ways, Indiana’s legislators continue to signal their lack of respect for the professionalism of our public school teachers and school administrators, and their utter lack of understanding of the civic mission of the schools. Like the loud and self-righteous culture warriors descending on school board meetings, they are sure they know better than educators what the curriculum should and should not include and what lessons should be transmitted.

The emptier the vessel….

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