THE LANGUAGE OF EXCHANGE

I have in these postings written about a relationship among citizens that exists in an ideal federalist arrangement; that is, of a sense of partnership.  What I have not done is give this idea much substance other than to express that people in a partnership see the arrangement as one in which the advancement of one partner is the advancement of all partners.  It follows the call of the Three Musketeers:  one for all and all for one.  Of course, this is the ideal and, in its truest sense, not a reality that can be achieved in a society of any size where interests are constantly in competition.  Actually, we wouldn’t have it any other way.  Competition in the real world promotes excellence as one competitor tries, for the sake of earning some limited resource, to outdo the others so as to win the resource.  In business, this is profits, but it can also include status, recognition, and other rewards.  But even here, an understanding that such competition advances the common interest can give resulting relations a hue of federation in knowing that the advancement of the common good advances all citizens even if the short-term results can be disappointing as one loses a sought-after compensation or other positive result.

In a way, all this is a bit of irony.  Trying to do in your opponent can elicit a focused attempt to better someone else, but by doing so, the advancement of society is gained and even the “loser” can benefit by such a turn of events.  Consider the Wright brothers winning the competition to be the first to fly.  Yes, they won the competition at the expense of their competitors, but I am sure that their competitors benefitted by living in a world that cracked the secrets of flying, or at least their children or grandchildren did.  The point is that even if one ascribes to a federalist view of ideal citizen relations, that does not mean one condemns or even bad-mouths competitive contests among citizens particularly in the realm of economic activity.  What one would expect is that any associated behaviors in this competition are conducted under fair rules of engagement – rules that would truly advance the common benefit and give each competitor the fullest, yet equal, opportunity to win the competition.

Many values contribute to this ideal; one is trust.  Let me explain.  To begin with, this language provides metaphors that are useful in explaining this irony.  To an audience “raised” on natural rights imagery, placing trust as a sort of medium of exchange, one can illustrate basic relationships.  It also allows a civics teacher to metaphorically speak in market terms; terms that while metaphoric, are true to what federated expectations are.  I have stated that trust is earned, at least by prudent people.  This is the case if one is the dispenser of it or the receiver of it.  Yes, we do give others the benefit of the doubt in most social and economic transactions – one can probably add political to this list – but if the stakes become at all meaningful, one is dealing with a level of trust that has to be felt and such levels should only prudently be extended to those who by their past behaviors have demonstrated trustworthiness.  As an earned quality, one is dealing with a level of morality or goodness by some shared standard.  Even among thieves, one hears about a code of “honor among thieves.”  So, the first relevant metaphor is one of accounting.

Trust, in this view, represents moral credit, an asset not yet earned, per se.  Using George Lakoff’’s description of this relation (as I did in a posting from last May, Due Sentimentality):

When you do something good for someone, you give something of positive value to him [or her] and what you get in exchange is “credit.”  Credit for acting morally can accumulate.  It is a form of capital. …

To place your trust in someone morally is to give him [or her] advance moral credit, credit he [or she] will repay you by acting morally.  If someone that you place your trust in acts very immorally, then you “lose trust” in him [or her], that is, you lose the moral credit that you gave him [or her] in advance as prepayment for acting morally.  He [or she] is “discredited” and “morally bankrupt.”  “Trust” is a prepayment of moral credit for future moral action.  But in general, people do not trust just anyone.  To be trusted, a person has to “build trust,” to establish a history of being trustworthy, a moral credit rating.[1]

And with this basic understanding of trust, we have the introduction of justice, at least from this angle of “exchange.”  Justice can be seen as those developments in which moral accounts are settled, as in people getting what they deserve and in the process cancelling moral debts.

Lakoff points to the idea Martin Luther King used in his March on Washington speech when he claimed that the blacks who were marching in Washington to “cash a check”  and that within the history of our nation, the African-American race had not been treated with justice in this basic exchange of trust between blacks and the nation.  What is the exchange?  As stated by a Supreme Court justice, the exchange is implicit with citizenry:  allegiance as expressed by performing one’s duties as a citizen – a partner – for the protection of one’s rights as a citizen.  Rights are categorized as being of several types, e. g., life, liberty, property, but also the right to participate in the collective decision-making processes of the polity among other rights.  And what of the duties?  What are they?  Let me offer a list:  to obey the law, to defend, when called upon, the security and interests of the nation, to engage in one’s economic activities that while providing compensation, are aligned with the common good, willingly and conscientiously performing civic requirements (e. g., jury duty), and beyond the base line provisions of the implicit covenant or compact, assist and support legitimate familial and communal endeavors.  Under the language of the exchange, rights are property which can be earned or inherited.  So the exchange takes on a formulated structure.  Someone has a right, someone has a duty, and this reflects the exchange.

Rights need protecting or, in some cases, a medium by which they are experienced.  The main agent to see that they are protected or providing the medium of expression is government.  This service is not free.  We pay for that service by paying taxes.  Generally, fewer taxes means fewer rights.  By viewing taxes through this perspective, one adopts a counter natural rights language; a prevailing language espoused by self-appointed natural rights spokespeople such as Grover Norquist, who is famous for holding Republican representatives to never raise taxes.  In the natural rights language, taxes are castigated as being anti-rights.  They are a form of tyranny, despite the fact that the US has some of the lowest effective tax rates among developed nations.  While the language proposed in this posting, a more federated view, taxes take on the role of monetarily allowing the flourishing of rights among the different segments of the population, of the partnership.  Of course, the language does not promote an unbridled level of taxation, but it does support reasonable levels so as to protect and promote a level of rights that justly corresponds to the exchange between rights and allegiance.

So what is the result of not honoring King’s check?  What happens if allegiance is met with deficient protection and promotion of rights?  We have theft, if either the appropriate levels of rights or duties is not forthcoming, there is stealing.  If this stealing is pervasive, there is an immoral system and certain implications become real.  First, these notions of exchange and moral debt do not just appear among our social relations or within our conscious view of things.  Those functions are satisfied by institutions – the family, the schools, the churches, our businesses, our government – and so a community or nation depends on institutions to defend and promote the resulting supportive values related to the exchange.  Another implication of this exchange is that those who benefit most from it have more duties and that this heightened sense of duty is a moral claim.  It is so moral that we have codified in law as with a progressive taxes code.  To the extent that we promote laws that shield the more (most) benefited from rendering the higher rate of duty – as with implementation of a flat tax – such policy is immoral; it’s stealing.  Therefore, if those who benefit more accrue political power and use that power to avoid accompanying duties, they are engaging in immoral political action.

Of course, such language is speaking metaphorically; equally metaphorically as when one refers to taxes as a form of tyranny.  Speaking more objectively, one can have taxes so high that they are tyrannical, but one can also have such low taxes among favored or advantaged citizens that one can objectively describe the situation as stealing.  At least, that is how I judge the actions of some corporations that enjoy the protection of the US government while keeping enormous amounts of cash off-shore to avoid (?) taxes.  When the rates become so lopsided, one can legitimately ask: is there stealing going on?

---

[1] Lakoff, G.  (2002).  Moral politics:  How liberals and conservatives think.  Chicago, IL:  The University of Chicago Press, pp. 55-56.

I’LL GET MY FIX

In my last set of postings, I delved into the field of punditry.  More specifically, I related what the political writer, Philip E. Tetlock,[1] had to say about predicting political events or developments.  One observation I made was that pundits aren’t necessarily in the business of changing minds.  Their audiences consist of people who pretty much agree with them.  Pundits serve to reinforce already held beliefs about the political world and, in addition, they can provide talking points.  To be open to new information and/or arguments is to take a reasonable approach to political thinking and calculating.  What it turns out to be, though, is that when it comes to politics and what people who have an interest in it tend to do is not think about politics, but rather feel about politics; that is, “[t]he political brain is an emotional brain” – so says Drew Westen.[2]

Let’s state that a bit differently.  If you view our thinking and deciding about politics and government as a dispassionate process – one in which we take in information, weigh pro and cons over possible courses of action or policy and reason what is best either for ourselves, our family, our community, nation, or the world, you’re wrong.  According to Westen, this is not how the human mind works.  Those in the business of politics, such as those working in political campaigns who assume that is how people think about politics, will not be successful.  Westen and his colleagues came to this conclusion from their research into political thinking; I mean political feeling.

For example, in 2004, during the presidential campaign that pitted John Kerry against George W. Bush, Westen’s team identified fifteen committed Democrats and fifteen committed Republicans, each subject supporting his/her party’s nominee.  The researchers showed them slides from which the subjects read information which depicted Kerry and Bush being dishonest, inconsistent, slimy, pandering, or simply acting poorly in some way.  Through accompanying questioning and scanning their brains, the researchers wanted to see how the subjects reacted to the information for each of the candidates.  To begin with, the reasonable response would have been to condemn the depicted behaviors equally along some standard for appropriate conduct.  By recording the subjects’ responses and then reviewing the information derived from the scanning, the researchers’ aim was to ascertain what was happening cognitively.  To guide this research, they proposed four hypotheses:  (1) the negative information would cause the neural circuits found to be associated with negative emotions to be activated; (2) overall activation in the brain would be geared at “regulating” emotions through such coping mechanisms as rationalization; (3) parts of the brain associated with conflict would be activated; and (4) parts of the brain associated with reasoning would not be activated since they expected the subjects to “reason” from their emotions.  The slides, for example, presented one candidate condemning the Iraq war and another slide showing him praising it.  They also saw the other candidate waxing-on about how we need to take care of the veterans while his administration cut funding for VA hospitals.  Summarily, the researchers found that the subjects found it easy to find fault with the candidate they did not support while only mildly finding fault with the candidate they supported.  But not only was this research able to record the inconsistency in the answers the subjects provided, it, due to the scanning, checked on how the brain physically responded to the information.

The first detection was expected; neurons associated with stress fired up.  This causes an unpleasant sensation within the subject.  To “handle” this, the brain attempts to deny the information causing the negative reaction – this reminds one of the five stages of grief.  It seems that this, if allowed to stand, is a way to turn off the unpleasant chemical business happening internally. What the researchers found interesting was how quickly the brain was able to do this type of mental gymnastics.  “The neural circuits charged with regulation of emotional states seemed to recruit beliefs that eliminated the distress and conflict partisans had experienced … [a]nd this all seemed to happen with little involvement of the neural circuits normally involved in reasoning.”[3]

If this weren’t telling enough, the researchers were able to detect another finding that surprised them.  Once the false conclusions were accepted by the subject and the neural circuits associated with unpleasant sensations deactivated, those associated with positive emotions were engaged – they fired up.  These partisan subjects’ brains not only found a way to stop feeling bad, but also found a way to feel good, and the neurons so activated substantially coincided with those stimulated in a drug addict when getting his/her fix.  Westen asks:  is there something to the notion of a political junkie?

If this is what a political operative is facing in a political campaign, what chances does reasoned debate have in the process?  The saving grace is that roughly about sixty percent of the population is partisan (just about thirty/thirty between the major parties).  That leaves forty percent not so committed to either one side or the other and, therefore, these people are subject to being influenced by well-run campaigns that can put together a good, well presented argument relevant to their needs.  Of course, to begin with, these are the same people who have less interest in politics.  People who are partisan become partisan by having this interest nurtured, usually from a very young age.  I attribute my interest, for example, to the interest my father expressed around the house (actually the New York apartment) I lived in during my early years.  Once one is exposed to such messaging, it usually comes with the bias built-in.  My father was a union painter who was very committed to his union.  Along with that, there was a partisan bias toward the Democratic Party – my first trip to Hyde Park occurred when I was eleven or so.  I suppose most strongly held partisan emotions are generated in similar ways.  As the years have gone by, I have tried to become more reasonable in my views of politics.  I still love FDR, but I have in this blog pointed out short comings attributed to the New Deal – you can judge how “dispassionate” I have become.  The point is that a civically minded citizen should be reasonable yet emotional enough about politics and the welfare of our commonwealth to be motivated to learn and become involved in our political activities.  This adds to the challenges of a civics teacher.

---

[1] Tetlock, P.  (2013).  How to win at forecasting.  In J. Brockman (Ed.), Thinking:  The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction (pp. 18-38).  New York, NY:  Harper Perennial.

[2] Westen, D.  (2007).  The political brain:  The role of emotions in deciding the fate of the nation.  New York, NY:  PublicAffairs, p. xv.

[3] Ibid., p. xiv.