AND IN THIS CORNER

So, the presidential campaign seems to be set:  Hillary vs. the Donald.  What a joy- ride it promises to be.  The thing is that these candidates are all too familiar to the American public.  Consequently, an institutional practice which we usually would see at the respective convention, the “meet” the candidate film, might not be so important.  This is the film that is shown just before the candidate addresses the bevy of Democrats or Republicans – the speech being the culminating event of the convention.  At least, that is what usually happens.  Trump promises that his convention will be different; it will be more entertaining, showtime.  And since these two candidates are very well known, can either candidate really reintroduce him or herself; can a campaign really “define” the opponent to its liking?  We’ll see what the attempt will be, assuming one or the other convention follows the usual script.

To the extent that such an effort is made – introducing the candidate and defining the opponent – certain psychological principles will be relied upon to guide producers in their efforts.  I have, in a previous posting, I’ll Get My Fix, reported that the cognitive psychologist, Drew Westen,[1] believes that people generally don’t reason over politics; rather, they feel politics.  It turns out, when it comes to thinking about whom to vote for or what policy position to accept and support, people in general let their gut feelings control their decision-making.  Successful producers of such efforts as an “introductory film” understand this, while those who are guided by notions of presenting a logical argument are not so successful.  That previous posting explains these mental operations a bit – check it out (posted on April 26, 2016).  It all has to do with your neurons working in association among themselves.

Westen, in describing these phenomena, uses two contrasting examples to illustrate this difference.  On the successful side, he cites the Bill Clinton film.  He judges that effort as one of the most successful ever.  He explains how footage of his “birth town,” Hope, Arkansas, and his meeting, as a teenager, of President Kennedy at the White House – an event sponsored by a youth group – engendered those emotional ties to which people could relate.  Here is the story of a poor kid, whose father died just before he was born, struggling to improve himself while the narration informs the audience that his professional commitment is to help others through his public service – he was governor of Arkansas at the time.  Westen then provides a counter example as he describes the film produced for John Kerry, the Ivy Leaguer, born to privilege and married to an exceptionally wealthy woman who has a foreign accent to boot.  While there is nothing wrong with having a wife with a foreign accent, the whole image was one to which the average American voter would have a difficult time relating.

In that previous posting, I pointed out that the electorate is fairly evenly divided into three groups:  30% Democrat, 30% Republican, and 40% not committed to either major party and open to persuasion.  This time around, this might not be the case.  Since the primary/caucus season drew so much attention, given the Trump factor and that it has been going on for a year now, – Trump announced his candidacy last June 16 – many more Americans have probably made up their minds; that is, their gut feelings have settled on a choice and that has been further reinforced by their adoption of the respective narratives the campaigns have been using about their candidate and the opposition.  Coming up this week, Trump is going to make notorious charges against Clinton on her schemes to become wealthy, entailing her official duties as secretary of state, and Clinton surrogates are attacking Trump on his attacks on a federal judge and intimating that he would use the power of the executive branch to intimidate the judiciary – a real no-no under our separation of powers principle.  Vice President Biden just yesterday claimed that that is what Trump threatened to initiate in his tirade against the judge who is presiding over the case in which Trump is being sued over matters concerning his defunct Trump University.  All of this is nasty and promises to get nastier.  The one thing I would add is that Trump, with his experience in show business, does have an advantage in this game of pricking emotions.  The result might very well rely on Hillary’s ability to adopt more emotionally laden messaging; she seems to be getting better at it.  She not only is evoking fear of a Trump administration, but also has taken a reflective demeanor and is able to communicate with an air of knowing what she is talking about – a quality which the punditry will help – whereas Trump seems to be limited as to how deeply he can expound on any issue.  Again, the important thing here is not how true this is, but how the candidate can generate or quell fear or other relevant emotions in the audience.

It is said that successful lawyers are successful not because they can muster the better argument, but because they can put on the better show that plucks at the existing emotional biases of the jury.  Well, in an election, the same principle holds, only we voters inhabit the jury box and the two candidates are the opposing lawyers.  Think more of Johnny Cochran than Daniel Webster or Henry Clay.  I would argue this truism has been true all through our history, but it has gotten worse.  When seeing on TV a Trump rally, for example, one can’t help feeling that we are witnessing a modern version of the Roman Circus.  An event lacking in any substance with a speaker spouting mostly banalities and noted for his outrageous and inconsistent messaging.  And, of course, a news media that has abandoned just about any claim at providing a public service – seeking eyes and ears to bolster its ratings and, therefore, its revenues – has broadcast every spectacle of this roadshow as it moved around the country.  There is more to come, and Trump has promised his convention will be something to remember – not so much an introduction, but a heightened effort to cater the inexhaustible demand for entertainment.  Let the good times roll?

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

BEING GOOD AIN’T EASY

Referring to the last posting, I made the point that the Protestant Reformation contributed to the strain in philosophic thinking that places our ability to “see” reality as a personal, subjective endeavor.  That is, our minds shape what we perceive.  I attempted to explain Immanuel Kant’s contribution to this development, and this posting will add to that explanation.  But first, let me add a few more thoughts to this Protestant thinking.  With this turn toward subjectivism, we can better understand those religions’ claims that the road to salvation was not via outward behavior, a social component of life, but through faith, a mental state.  The former has a social context; the latter has a solitary, internal context.  The Protestant way tends toward the lonely.  I accept this, but with a great proviso; my take of Protestant religions is their bias toward congregational structures, while Catholic structure is hierarchical with a well-defined vertical organization.  While both are social, to me the Protestant form is much more social.  Late in life, my mother took up membership in a Baptist congregation.  Most of her life she was a Catholic.  She sent me to Catholic school and, from time to time, she attended Sunday mass.  Those various Catholic churches never made any effort to contact her or to make her feel part of a parish, much less a community.  This was true in churches in New York City and in Miami, Florida.  Yet, in her old age – and I don’t know how it came about – she did join the Baptist group and they were actively engaged in engaging her.  She loved the minister and was involved with several of the church’s activities.  She became an active reader of the Bible and was disposed to talk to me about religious issues.  I suppose I was a source of some regret in that she was not able to convert me – oh well.  So, this notion of religious belief being so individually defined and such a lonely pursuit on the part of Protestants, I find less than accurate.  But its theology does feature this emphasis on faith – by the way, my Catholic training belittled this feature as a way to justify not meeting one’s social responsibilities, especially when it comes to taking care of the disadvantaged; it was seen as just one big rationalization.

Be that as it may, what else can we observe about Kant’s thoughts on subjectivism?  I pointed out that Kant wrote about the mind’s function in forming the information our senses observed.  It did so, according to Philip Selznick,[1] by utilizing a priori concepts.  Those objects are perceived, and then they conform to these concepts.  It was not Kant’s intention to initiate this level of subjectivism we have today, but he did it in three ways.  One, he argued that the mind provides the elements of necessity (cause and effect) and order (space and time).  These are the a priori concepts.  Our ideas are derived from these mental machinations and, therefore, they are derived objects.  This operates as follows:  we perceive and then we translate according to our past history and these wired-in concepts.  This permits us to impose our own order on any experience based on our unique past experiences and predispositions.

Two, we, through this history of perceptions and “translations” form theories about reality, about things-in-themselves.  The theories are postulates that take on a metaphysical quality.  They are not the real, but a representation of the real.  We strive to represent the real; we just can’t totally, but in the effort, we are tied to the real.  According to Kant, a compromise is formed between the real and our effort to see the real.  This ties us to reality; we are not out and about forming whatever view of the real our fancy happens to want.  We all, in our view of what is out there, have to accept unpleasant aspects.  Sometimes, we find out later that things aren’t as bad as we first perceived them to be and a newer postulated theory can take the place of the more distasteful image or belief.  Unfortunately, this can happen in reverse.  But the point is that in either case, we are dealing with our versions of the truth, not the truth itself.  The good news is that whatever we perceive, there is a real out there and that permits regularity in the course of our lives.

And three, and I believe this to be his most important argument, moral decision-making, due to the above mental functions, has to be autonomous.  By that I mean that it can’t be coerced.  We can’t be moral out of a fear of punishment but because it is rational to be so.  This rationality is based on a commitment to life itself.  Let me quote Selznick on this point:

For humans, to choose life is to choose rationality.  It follows that there can be no morality without the freedom to formulate rules and make decisions in accordance with rational principles.

The logic of morality, as Kant understood it, combines objective and subjective truth.  Moral choices are objective because rational judgment leads inexorably to conclusions that are independent of personal dispositions or beliefs.  On the other hand, moral choices are subjective in that they are freely made by duty-regarding persons who form their own judgments and make their own commitments.  Kant had no doubt about the objective basis of moral rules, but his embrace of self-determination had the more decisive effect on nineteenth-century thought (p. 65).

I would also add the twentieth-century as well.  Questions, consequently, would revolve around what it meant to be genuine, free, and able to make moral choices.  Let me conclude by pointing out the consequence of this contribution:  A result was a more vigorous concern with whether an individual is detached from his social surroundings by being ensconced in some moral abstraction.  Rationality would demand a level of concreteness and how moral choices affect the human condition.  We have the sense of moral dilemmas among values of commitment and duty – good values, at times, conflict in real life.  One can expect a serious level of commitment to do good – “good will” – even if dealing with reality, one might be bound to offend a good value to pursue a more important one.  Choices in such cases can be very difficult.  And, in this, the call is for fidelity and commitment to the good as well as rationality.

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[1] Selznick, P.  (1992).  The moral commonwealth:  Social theory and the promise of community.  Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press.