AN EMOTIONAL ENVIRONMENT

“Let’s be reasonable” is a common refrain.  Yet, are people reasonable?  They can be; there’s evidence from time to time that show people being so.  But overall – in everyday interactions – the evidence is that humans are mostly irrational or emotional.  This blog has shared the work of various cognitive experts that provide arguments and evidence to that effect.  They include Jonathan Haidt,[1] George Lakoff,[2] and Drew Westen.[3]

          This posting picks up on the work of Westen.  A former posting pointed out his argument that politicians, to be effective, need to address issues from an emotional basis.  Logical arguments backed by relevant data are all fine and good, but if it is not encased within emotional messaging, the points will not hit home.  He goes on to point out, according to his observations, that Republicans are significantly better at affect messaging than Democrats are.

          To support this last claim, he offers the example of how the candidate Al Gore, in the first presidential election debate of the 2004 election cycle, critiqued candidate George Bush’s medical care proposal.  While citing a real-life example of a person in the audience, Gore does not emphasize the plight of the man – an emotional story – but his presentation gets muddled by statistics – including percentage numbers. 

Bush, on the other hand, does not logically rebuke the numbers, but reminds everyone of the claim that Gore took credit for inventing the internet and then says his opponent is probably going to take credit for inventing the calculator.  Bush lost logically but won emotionally.  He also won the election.  Emotional appeals, for regular people, win the day and stories are a viable vehicle in appealing to emotions.

But the reader can justifiably point out that this blog often cites the federalist origins of the nation’s polity.  In the late 18^th century, educated thinkers, which the founding fathers were, emphasized humans’ ability to be reasonable.  They particularly ascribed to the arguments offered by the social contract thinkers – Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 

There were other writers who wrote in this vein – Thomas Reid and Francis Hutcheson, among others.  In each case, the assumed process for an ideal polity is for its founders coming together and formulating a government for the purposes of mutual protection and the fulfillment of other identified goals and aims.  This is reasonable and not based on emotional appeals of religion, nationality, ethnicity, or other emotionally based foundations.  One can readily see where this turn in political thinking debased any justification for monarchial rule, for example.

After all, that time or era has been given the title, “the Age of Reason.”  During that time, emotions were taken to be a negative force.  They were seen as having distorting influences on the decision-making processes that policy makers practice in a democracy.  This is still the case today.

[O]nly through reason can people set aside their self-interested and parochial desires to make decisions in the common interests.  Passions can lead to rapid, poorly thought-out, self-interested acts, or to the psychology of the mob, inflamed by the emotions of the moment and capable of turning on anyone in its path.[4]

While all this might be true, it doesn’t change how people think and feel.  And it is the real person with whom a political actor must deal.

And political actors are not just limited to pols; it also includes the whole political industry which encompasses interest groups, lobbyists, and the press.  And beyond those groups, it also includes other entities such as well-endowed corporations and other well-financed organizations. 

There is evidence, according to Westen’s review of the literature, that even coverage by the press reflects how polling indicates popular opinion is flowing.  After all, they are also interested in their viewership, in the number of people who read their papers or view their programming.  In turn, it affects how much they can charge their sponsors.

They, in turn, massage their messaging to appeal to the emotions of their listeners.  In addition, their ability to do so, as the years go by, improves.  Some would say, it improves in scary ways.  This blogger argues that by relying on natural rights views – a person has the right to do what he/she wants to do without any sense of obligation or duty – strategies develop in which the only standard to guide such messaging is success in meeting self-interested goals and aims.

And as such, the press, pols, and other players in the political arena of this and other nations has undermined the more institutionalized entities and processes upon which responsible democratic rule needs to function.  The solution must include better civic instruction by schools, parents, and other socializing agents.  They need to encourage and teach their charges about the value of reason and the skills to practice it.

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[1] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind:  Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York, NY:  Pantheon Books, 2012).

[2] George Lakoff, Moral Politics:  How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago, IL:  The University of Chicago Press, 2002) AND George Lakoff, The Political Mind:  Why You Can’t Understand 21^st-Century American Politics with an 18^th-Century Brain (New York, NY:  Viking, 2008).

[3] Drew Westen, The Political Brain:  The Role of Emotions in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (New York, NY:  PublicAffairs, 2007).

[4] Ibid., 26.