Tag Archives: ideology

Abandon Hope….

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?

Just a thought….

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If Only Today’s Crackpots Would Listen

This morning’s comic strip, Non Sequitor, explains ideology. And Fox News. And the Tea Party.

Unfortunately, a stubborn insistence on an alternate reality is more and more likely to do irreparable damage to the real world we occupy.  A couple of days ago, William Ruckleshaus, Lee Thomas, William Riley and Christine Todd Whitman made precisely that argument in the New York Times. All were EPA administrators in Republican Administrations, back when the GOP was a political party rather than a cult.

They point out that there is no longer any credible debate about the reality of climate change (the operative word here being “credible.”) And they endorse President Obama’s climate plan.

 The costs of inaction are undeniable. The lines of scientific evidence grow only stronger and more numerous. And the window of time remaining to act is growing smaller: delay could mean that warming becomes “locked in.”

A market-based approach, like a carbon tax, would be the best path to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, but that is unachievable in the current political gridlock in Washington. Dealing with this political reality, President Obama’s June climate action plan lays out achievable actions that would deliver real progress. He will use his executive powers to require reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the nation’s power plants and spur increased investment in clean energy technology, which is inarguably the path we must follow to ensure a strong economy along with a livable climate.

……

Mr. Obama’s plan is just a start. More will be required. But we must continue efforts to reduce the climate-altering pollutants that threaten our planet. The only uncertainty about our warming world is how bad the changes will get, and how soon. What is most clear is that there is no time to waste.

If only the petulant ideologues would listen. But we live in a world best explained by the Non Sequitor cartoon linked to above.  The party that gave us Bill Ruckleshaus and Christine Todd Whitman no longer exists; for its current manifestation–the Party of No–blocking anything and everything that Barack Obama proposes is far more important than saving the earth.

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Worse Than I Thought….

We’ve been onboard our ship for eight days, and it has been delightful; the sole complaint I have is that our only option for television news is Fox. (This may have something to do with the average age of the passengers, which looks to be somewhere around the mid-eighties, just barely older than the average age of Fox’s audience.)

At home, I almost never watch Fox. I see Jon Stewart’s clips and I read about some of the more outrageous and/or embarrassingly wrong reports that periodically become a topic of broader discussion, but this has been the first time I’ve been exposed to extended “real time” broadcasts.

It’s even worse than I thought.

Earlier today, during a discussion about the (genuine, troubling) IRS scandal, one blond “newscaster” turned to another and said the problem stemmed from the fact that President Obama has total power—“there are no mechanisms to keep him from doing whatever he wants. There has never been such a powerful chief executive.”

I am not making this up.

Blond bimbo evidently never heard of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, the Senate filibuster, Mitch McConnell, the Party of No….

Yesterday, there was a roundtable of some sort about Benghazi. I listened for a good ten minutes in an effort to figure out precisely what the participants believed the “scandal” was. What, exactly, do they think is being covered up? What misdeeds are suspected? What is it that they are insisting is “worse than Watergate?” Not a clue. But one of the hosts signed off the segment by saying “You’ll only hear about Benghazi on Fox, because all the other media are covering for the Obama Administration.”

Really?

Perhaps “all the other media” are hamstrung by that old-fashioned journalism practice called verification—the quaint notion that reporting requires demonstrable facts and that in the absence of anything remotely resembling evidence, responsible news organizations don’t manufacture and air stories, no matter how ideologically satisfying such stories might be.

A research project a year or so ago found that people who got most of their news from Fox knew less than people who didn’t follow the news at all.

I believe it.

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Choosing our Authorities

I was going to blog about the Reinhart-Rogoff thesis this morning, but Paul Krugman not only beat me to it, he (unsurprisingly) said it better.

What–you aren’t familiar with Reinhart-Rogoff? The term is shorthand for a paper circulated by two Harvard economists, Reinhart and Rogoff, in 2010. (It evidently wasn’t even a peer reviewed article–just a working paper.) The paper purported “to identify a critical “threshold,” a tipping point, for government indebtedness. Once debt exceeds 90 percent of gross domestic product, they claimed, economic growth drops off sharply.”

The paper was immediately seized on by proponents of austerity, despite the fact that other economists criticized the methodology, and still others tried but couldn’t replicate the findings. It became the basis of policy decisions throughout Europe. It was a justification for Paul Ryan’s budget. And then, when the authors finally shared their calculations, it turned out that a coding error–in lay language, a mistake in their use of the Excel computer program–invalidated their results.

There is a moral to this story, and it has nothing to do with economics, or the importance of peer review, or the tendency of a Harvard pedigree to lend unearned credibility to a scholarly product. This fiasco is another example of a growing phenomenon: ideologically-driven choices of reality. In today’s America, too many of us read everything selectively; we comb the news for evidence that supports our pre-existing beliefs. We read the bible and the Constitution selectively, conveniently ignoring the parts that conflict with our worldviews. We dismiss evidence that confuses us. Ambiguity and complexity become enemies.

The problem is, the clarity we achieve with our chosen authorities often conflicts with messy, ambiguous reality. And that makes matters worse.

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Losing Facts

I came to my computer keyboard this morning prepared to rant about the ever-growing dismissal of facts in favor of more useful spin–and increasingly, out-and-out lies. I was still annoyed by an email forwarded by a friend of mine, who sent it not because he agreed with it, but in order to demonstrate “what’s out there.” This particular message was full of anti-immigrant sentiment, and “facts” about how much undocumented immigrants supposedly cost the American taxpayers.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on the economics of immigration, but I do know enough to recognize inaccurate propaganda, and the email was filled with it.

Before I began my post, however, I read this one at Daily Kos, and it made my point better than I could have. It’s a bit on the long side, but I hope you’ll read it to the end, because no matter what your politics, the extent to which we are ignoring reality and rewriting history in service of ideologies, left and right, is far and away the most dangerous threat we face.