It has been a particularly interesting and enlightening experience reading the comments to my post The Paradox of Liberalism in War Time. Stephanie Guttman made some comments that suggested to me that I had done a poor job of communicating some of my basic points, ie that I think that liberals believes that people are basically good (the "noble savages" concept) and there is little need for them to control their impulses, while conservatives believe society works best when people are acculturated in ways which promote their ability to control the expression of their instincts.
Another, more Psychodynamic formulation would be that Liberals believe in unleashing the Id and mitigating the effects of the Superego, while Conservatives believe in supporting the Superego in its attempts to rein in the id. For just one example, a Liberal approach to the spread of AIDS by homosexual men would involve offering condoms while a conservative approach might be to close down gay bath houses where promiscuous sex takes place. (Please do not start an argument as to which approach works better; we almost certainly need a mix of approaches and adequate research to determine which works better.)
Gary Farber, who posts at Amygdala, was kind enough to offer a comment from the point of view of a self-described Liberal, in which he, not unexpectedly, took issue with many of my comments.
His language tends to the intemperate at times, but what comes through is that we are using the same words to mean different things.
I rarely write about science articles from the MSM anymore because unless they have a link to the original study, there is no way to determine how accurately they report the study findings. (Click for an example of Science Mis-Reporting.) However, last week the New York Times reported on a study presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Palm Springs, Calif. The article, A Shocker: Partisan Thought Is Unconscious, describes the use of fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans to look at the decision making process in the brains of partisan Republicans and Democrats.
Liberals and conservatives can become equally bug-eyed and irrational when talking politics, especially when they are on the defensive.
Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain's pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.
"Everything we know about cognition suggests that, when faced with a contradiction, we use the rational regions of our brain to think about it, but that was not the case here," said Dr. Drew Westen, a psychologist at Emory and lead author of the study....
Anyone who spends any time in the blogosphere would easily recognize the irrationality of their political opponents (a comment that applies to those on the left and the right) but the problem may be even more insidious than the study authors suggest. I have written extensively on the ways in which our minds are organized to use templates to simplify our ability to understand and comprehend the world.
More and more scientific evidence is accumulating that shows how our minds respond with unconscious reactions that occur without our awareness; we then tend to rationalize, "fill in the blanks", after the fact in order to make sense of our reactions. The significant element in this is that we often form impressions and respond to others based on where they fit into the unconscious templates we have in our minds.
Here is how this can work:
In the 1980's I was a committed Democrat and a liberal. I believed in all the liberal platitudes of freedom, equality, fair play. I also believed that Republicans (and I knew almost no Republicans) were avaricious social Darwinists, more interested in what I did in my bedroom than in helping my less fortunate neighbors. Thus when Ronald Reagan ran for President, he fit neatly into my pre-existing template. He was a typical (evil) Republican, only interested in cutting taxes for the rich, forgetting about the poor minorities, and even worse, a war monger threatening to blow us all up. Since at the time and for many years after, my primary source of information was the New York Times, who also used their own liberal templates to frame their stories, though without many people realizing it, I had no real way to gather the data I would need to question my assumptions even if I recognized I was reacting to unconscious or pre-conscious assumptions. Thus when Reagan would give a speech in which he talked about freedom and supporting American values, what I actually heard was not his speech but the speech of a phony charlatan looking to put one over on the gullible masses of fools who would thereby give him the means to make their lives worse.
Here is an alternative that illustrates the point. More recently, when Tom Delay was indicted by a partisan Democrat, my initial reaction was to reject the accusations as politically motivated and baseless. It took an act of will to reflect on how I had come to such a quick decision about someone I actually knew very little about. I was able to journey out into the blogosphere, gather more information, from both left and right, and came to believe that while the prosecution is politically tainted, the likelihood of Delay being an incorruptible innocent is minimal. Am I correct in this assessment? I don't know, but that is a judgment we will find out in time.
In the current climate, there would seem to be two primary templates through which people view the world.
One, shared by most Liberals and those on the left, is that Bush is a duplicitous sneak who is interested in aggrandizing power to himself and his cronies in order to steal from the American people. In mild forms, this leads to people believing the worst of the President in every circumstance. With such a template, there is no question that for the President to use the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans is illegal. Bush lied about the war, is a right wing ideologue and wants to grab all the power he can. Despite the fact we know very little about the NSA program and it was vetted with top Congressional Democrats, it is not just necessary, but obligatory to believe the worst about Bush.
The second template, shared by many Conservative and the Right, is that George Bush is an honorable man who is doing the best he can, while in temporary control of the executive branch of our government, to keep us safe during very perilous times. With this template, Bush is not only entitled to use the NSA to keep tabs on our enemies, but we would insist upon it.
Very few partisans do the simple thought-experiment that could indicate whether or not they were responding with their unconsciously determined templates, or with that small part of the mind we are most aware of and pretend controls our thinking, our rational minds.
For Democrats: Imagine a situation where a President uses the FBI to investigate political opponents, misuses the IRS to conduct audits on the political opposition and boosts judicial nominees far out of the mainstream onto the Supreme Court. If that would be of concern with a Republican President, would you be just as concerned with a Democratic President? The fact is that partisan Democrats did everything they could to block investigations into such practices during the Clinton years.
It is just these kinds of templates that inform our understanding of others' language. In Gary's second comment to my post on The Paradox of Liberalism in War Time, he wrote the following:
But insofar as there have been objections to that, and objections to the use of assassination, those have come from the mass of the American people, not from some strange "liberal" minority. That's American idealism talking. Is it somewhat naive? Yes. That also is American idealism. Does it get in the way at times of doing things that would be useful? Absolutely. But the problem here isn't with "liberalism," but with the American public. You'll have to take it up with them, rather than try to pin it on some weird caricature of "liberalism."
And this:
Yes, yes, the vast liberal conspiracy is so awesomely powerful and all-controlling that it even controlled Reagan and Bush 41, and the Republican Congress that has been in power since 1994, as well, although somehow, strangely, inexplicably, Iran-Contra managed to happen. I'm sure there's some explanation for this that proves liberals are all at fault. Of course.
Gary is agreeing with me while missing my point. The American idealism that he writes about is American liberal idealism. Liberals tend to be idealists, believing that under the proper conditions, we can arrive at something close to liberty, equality, and fraternity. Americans tend to be optimists about the human condition and from the 1950's until the end of the 1970's, it was our belief in liberal idealism that damaged our national security apparatus in ways which reverberate today. It is the recgonition that we have "over-corrected" too far to the left, coupled with the manifest failures of the governmental policies derived from such beliefs, that turned the country away from the politics of liberalism. Many of our current disputes are about the choice of using more and more governmental power to ensure the right outcome of policies that haven't worked very well versus trying something new.
On the other hand, Conservatives aren't idealists, by and large, (which is one reason people tend to become more conservative with age) and believe that there are significant limits to what can be achieved by government power; further they believe that the market is the best invention man has that can determine which ideas work better than others.
The liberal idealism of many in the Democratic party is to be applauded; the illiberal authoritarianism of too many on the left must be fought. Here is another thought experiment for anyone who calls himself a liberal: If you believe that the NSA program is illegal yet wire tapping of our enemies is necessary, would you support jailing those who leaked the program? After all, the Democratic leaders knew about the program; further, if there is evidence of infringement of civil liberties (and even with all the leaks none has been alleged or provided) , it would be their job to investigate, in secret sessions of the intelligence committees, among others. If your answer is "No" then you are not a liberal; you believe the New York Times can jeopardize national security because there may be a dispute between the Congress and the White House on a national security issue, a position taken by no Liberals during the heady days of Bill Clinton when such accusations were regularly made (FBI folders found in the White House, remember). During a time of war, we can hope for, and expect, better from you.
[Gary, et al, I know I only offered thought experiments for the liberal and/or left; feel free to suggest some for the conservative and/or right.]
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