It has always seemed to me that a great many Republicans firmly believe that no rational person could reject the policies they push, so the only rational answer to why so many people do reject them has to be voter fraud by their enemies.
Since those Republicans believe that everyone who opposes them is a liar and criminal, they also don't believe any of the evidence that anyone suggests proves that their policies don't and can't work. So like all "true believers" with an ideology to sell, they know it can't be the ideology that has failed. The problem has to be enemies opposing it and the fact that those supporting it haven't worked hard enough to get the ideology implemented proper over such obstruction.
There is also the fact that they know the mass population has no clue about the way they should be governed. They are just waiting to be led, either in the right or the wrong direction. In spite of their patriotic rhetoric, they have no belief in the ability of the voting public to get it right unless they are led. Democracy is only "magic" to them because it gives them a possibility of replacing the existing government themselves.
Dedicated Communists have exactly the same problem. They know in their hearts that Communism is the wave of the future, so if they just redouble their efforts it will be accepted. Needless to say, such doubled and redoubled efforts frequently involve criminal or near criminal activities, at least by some extremists.
The whole package is a coherent internally self-reinforcing meme, one that applies to true-believer ideologues. Everything they know to be true supports it, and their system of thought is designed to reject evidence that they might be wrong. My point, though, is that such people really believe what they are saying.
Showing posts with label Ideologies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ideologies. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Why do so many Conservatives make clearly insane statements?
I have long wondered why the conservatives publicly make so many absolutely insane statements. For example, Sarah Palin's Friday announcement of her resignation considered in view of her Presidential ambitions seemed utterly insane. So do the efforts of the Discovery Institute to abolish the teaching of science to our children in public schools and replace it with Bible instruction. Then I read a rather arcane literary search to find the source of an odd quotation, and suddenly I had a minor "Aha!" moment. Those people are not insane. They simply hear a different music from what I hear.
So bear with me. The way to the "Aha!" is, like so many such revelations, a bit twisty. Let me start with Mark Kleiman's posts on his problem quote.
Mark Kleiman at The Reality-Based Community recently was taken by a phrase and decided to track it down to its source. The phrase was
In explanation I need to reproduce the fruits of Mark's exploration first. It's a quotation from Henri Bergson translated from the French to English.
Or to reverse that, if someone does or says something that is simply incomprehensible to the point of being insane, perhaps you are not aware of the environment within which it is being done or said.
Which brings me to the way conservatives and liberals see the political issues that are current in today's American political climate. For one point, why did Sarah Palin's announcement of her resignation effective July 26th seem so insane? We don't know what the actual environment Palin is operating in. In terms of Palin running for President in 2012, her resignation announcement is simply insane. But her running for President is the talk of the Pundits. Palin may simply not want to run for President. In fact, Palin may not want to advance in politics at all. Some reports indicate that she is sick of it. If the music she is dancing to suggests that she simply go back to her family and look for other ways to earn a living, then her announcement suddenly makes complete sense.
Or take another thing. The idea being pushed by the Discovery Institute that science is inherently wrong and at best should only be taught to children in school in classes that contrast evolution with the Biblical myths of the creation. As a person with extensive training in science, statistics and research methods and academic management studies, I find the idea that the Creation myth could substitute for science to be literally insane. But what I do not have is a correspondingly deep grounding in the Christian Bible, since it never made rational sense to me and never had sufficient literary interest to keep my attention for long. *
No doubt what the Discovery Institute wants to do is push a thorough grounding in the Bible onto all students. The fact that my mother was similarly insistent and I quickly learned to resist such pressures as not responding to the things I was curious about means nothing to the religious zealots of the Discovery Institute, nor does the utter impracticability of the the literal reading of the Bible as a substitute for science. I simply don't want and have never wanted induction into their environment. But also pretty obviously, they have no use for the environment I have been attracted to all my life. They reject it (science) and want modern children to similarly do so.
The real "Aha!" for me was to realize that Creationism is NOT insanity. It is simply the rational expression of the total environment the Fundamentalist Christians have created for themselves and now emerse themselves into. They have their own school systems, their own separate churches (which reject mainstream churches and call them "Unchristian") and with FOX News, they have their own captive popular news outlet on TV. They also teach their followers that all sources outside their captive media are telling lies and should be rejected.
US Senators like Jeff Sessions and Jim Inhofe have come out of that environment and are representative of it. The apparently insane statements they make describing their beliefs are not so much insane as they are representative of the very insular fundamentalist Christian culture which is their total environment.
But the reverse is undoubtedly true. They see my statements in many cases to be quite as insane as I see theirs. That's because they have no idea of my environment and want nothing to do with it.
Religion is not the only area in which individuals from different environments see each other as spouting insane statements. True believers in Libertarianism also represent such a closed total environment, and for all the logic that has gone into assembling the theories of economic market libertarianism, it simple fails in practice whenever it is tried. The True Believers will not accept that it has failed, however. They don't consider reality and real situations to be refutation of their neat and pretty theory.
Given all that, I don't think I can any longer see what the conservatives say as being insane. It is simply representative of a very different environment. I cannot hear the music to which they are dancing. But unfortunately, they cannot hear the music to which I dance, either. The conflict is not going to end.
But since government has to operate for everyone in the area governed, it cannot operate based on any given ideology. That is the great power of the separation of Church and State given us by the Constitution. The purpose of that provision is clearly to keep the police functions of government from intervening in what is often a conflict between people who have sharply different and conflicting environments and world views. What the Fundamentalists are demanding is that their world view that is expresses as Creationism be taught as a replacement for the world view of the Enlightenment as expressed in science on the general level and Evolution in particular. But public schools are specifically set into place by government to teach students how to operate government without enforcing a specific ideology.
Both Libertarians and Fundamentalist Christians reject reality-testing of their ideologies, because science works by proving that assertion are false. The fundamentalist ideologues reject any suggestion that their ideologies are false, so they attack the schools, teachers and publications the teach other views.
That rejection is a key method of teaching and perpetuating the memes that are at the core of their ideologies. Neither fundamentalist Christianity nor Libertarianism can continually be transmitted to new converts reliably if they are allowed to test the memes against reality occasionally. That avoidance of reality-testing permits the passing on of the memes and perpetuating the doctrine.
So welcome to my analysis of insane political pronouncements. The real problem is that they are only insane when you cannot hear the music the speaker is "dancing to." Does that help?
Beats me. But it satisfies my curiosity.
* A strange and very pleasant recent exception is the outstanding book entitled A Palpable God by Reynolds Price. I picked it up because his opening 44 page essay on the nature of "Narrative" was said to be the best writing on the subject out there. He then goes on to illustrate what he means by translating 30 stories from the Bible, mostly old testament. I will agree that the essay is the best I have found on the subject of what narrative is and how it works, and his illustrating stories become fascinating in context. I find the subject of the nature of narrative particularly interesting because I read that brain researchers using modern tools to study the brain in action have concluded that our memories are laid down in the brain in a narrative form.
Humans have been equipped by evolution, not only with language, but also with the narrative form of structuring thoughts in language. That, it seems to me, also has massive implications on how human societies are formed and aggregated into larger structures like clans, towns, and Empires. In an oral age, story-tellers carried the knowledge of human civilization to others as well as stories being the primary way of passing knowledge from one generation to another.
It also may be the explanation why such written stories as The Torah, the Bible and the Koran consist of are so central to organized western religions.
So bear with me. The way to the "Aha!" is, like so many such revelations, a bit twisty. Let me start with Mark Kleiman's posts on his problem quote.
Mark Kleiman at The Reality-Based Community recently was taken by a phrase and decided to track it down to its source. The phrase was
"Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music."His investigation is reported at
- The Dancers vs Those who cannot Hear the Music. (Second post) and
- Bleg: Quotation Source (First post)
In explanation I need to reproduce the fruits of Mark's exploration first. It's a quotation from Henri Bergson translated from the French to English.
I would now like to draw attention, as a symptom no less worthy of note, the lack of feeling which ordinarily accompanies laughter. It seems that the comic can only shake a person up on condition of falling upon the surface of a truly calm soul, one that is well integrated. Indifference is its natural environment. Laughter has no greater enemy than emotion. I’m not saying that we cannot laugh at a person who arouses, for example, pity in us, or even affection; only that for a few moments it would be necessary to forget affection, to tell pity to be silent. In a society of pure intelligences one would probably no longer cry, but one would perhaps still laugh; whereas souls that are invariably sensitive — in agreement and at one with life, where every event would be prolonged as a resonance of feeling — would not recognize or understand laughter. Try, for a moment, to let everything that is said or is being done capture your attention; act, in your imagination, with those who act, feel with those who feel, let your sympathy open up as wide as possible, and as though struck by a magic wand you will see the lightest objects take on weight, and all things imbued with a severe color. Now detach yourself, look upon life as an indifferent observer; even dramas will turn into comedy. It is enough for us to stop up our ears to the sound of music, in a room where people are dancing, in order that the dancers immediately appear ridiculous. How many human actions would be able to resist a test of this type? and would we not see many of them go from being solemn to funny, if we isolated them from the feeling that accompanies them? Therefore, the comic, in order to produce its complete effect, in the end demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. It is addressed to pure intelligence.In essence that says "You cannot understand how the dance you see makes sense if you do not know the environment - the music - the dance is conducted in."
Or to reverse that, if someone does or says something that is simply incomprehensible to the point of being insane, perhaps you are not aware of the environment within which it is being done or said.
Which brings me to the way conservatives and liberals see the political issues that are current in today's American political climate. For one point, why did Sarah Palin's announcement of her resignation effective July 26th seem so insane? We don't know what the actual environment Palin is operating in. In terms of Palin running for President in 2012, her resignation announcement is simply insane. But her running for President is the talk of the Pundits. Palin may simply not want to run for President. In fact, Palin may not want to advance in politics at all. Some reports indicate that she is sick of it. If the music she is dancing to suggests that she simply go back to her family and look for other ways to earn a living, then her announcement suddenly makes complete sense.
Or take another thing. The idea being pushed by the Discovery Institute that science is inherently wrong and at best should only be taught to children in school in classes that contrast evolution with the Biblical myths of the creation. As a person with extensive training in science, statistics and research methods and academic management studies, I find the idea that the Creation myth could substitute for science to be literally insane. But what I do not have is a correspondingly deep grounding in the Christian Bible, since it never made rational sense to me and never had sufficient literary interest to keep my attention for long. *
No doubt what the Discovery Institute wants to do is push a thorough grounding in the Bible onto all students. The fact that my mother was similarly insistent and I quickly learned to resist such pressures as not responding to the things I was curious about means nothing to the religious zealots of the Discovery Institute, nor does the utter impracticability of the the literal reading of the Bible as a substitute for science. I simply don't want and have never wanted induction into their environment. But also pretty obviously, they have no use for the environment I have been attracted to all my life. They reject it (science) and want modern children to similarly do so.
The real "Aha!" for me was to realize that Creationism is NOT insanity. It is simply the rational expression of the total environment the Fundamentalist Christians have created for themselves and now emerse themselves into. They have their own school systems, their own separate churches (which reject mainstream churches and call them "Unchristian") and with FOX News, they have their own captive popular news outlet on TV. They also teach their followers that all sources outside their captive media are telling lies and should be rejected.
US Senators like Jeff Sessions and Jim Inhofe have come out of that environment and are representative of it. The apparently insane statements they make describing their beliefs are not so much insane as they are representative of the very insular fundamentalist Christian culture which is their total environment.
But the reverse is undoubtedly true. They see my statements in many cases to be quite as insane as I see theirs. That's because they have no idea of my environment and want nothing to do with it.
Religion is not the only area in which individuals from different environments see each other as spouting insane statements. True believers in Libertarianism also represent such a closed total environment, and for all the logic that has gone into assembling the theories of economic market libertarianism, it simple fails in practice whenever it is tried. The True Believers will not accept that it has failed, however. They don't consider reality and real situations to be refutation of their neat and pretty theory.
Given all that, I don't think I can any longer see what the conservatives say as being insane. It is simply representative of a very different environment. I cannot hear the music to which they are dancing. But unfortunately, they cannot hear the music to which I dance, either. The conflict is not going to end.
But since government has to operate for everyone in the area governed, it cannot operate based on any given ideology. That is the great power of the separation of Church and State given us by the Constitution. The purpose of that provision is clearly to keep the police functions of government from intervening in what is often a conflict between people who have sharply different and conflicting environments and world views. What the Fundamentalists are demanding is that their world view that is expresses as Creationism be taught as a replacement for the world view of the Enlightenment as expressed in science on the general level and Evolution in particular. But public schools are specifically set into place by government to teach students how to operate government without enforcing a specific ideology.
Both Libertarians and Fundamentalist Christians reject reality-testing of their ideologies, because science works by proving that assertion are false. The fundamentalist ideologues reject any suggestion that their ideologies are false, so they attack the schools, teachers and publications the teach other views.
That rejection is a key method of teaching and perpetuating the memes that are at the core of their ideologies. Neither fundamentalist Christianity nor Libertarianism can continually be transmitted to new converts reliably if they are allowed to test the memes against reality occasionally. That avoidance of reality-testing permits the passing on of the memes and perpetuating the doctrine.
So welcome to my analysis of insane political pronouncements. The real problem is that they are only insane when you cannot hear the music the speaker is "dancing to." Does that help?
Beats me. But it satisfies my curiosity.
* A strange and very pleasant recent exception is the outstanding book entitled A Palpable God by Reynolds Price. I picked it up because his opening 44 page essay on the nature of "Narrative" was said to be the best writing on the subject out there. He then goes on to illustrate what he means by translating 30 stories from the Bible, mostly old testament. I will agree that the essay is the best I have found on the subject of what narrative is and how it works, and his illustrating stories become fascinating in context. I find the subject of the nature of narrative particularly interesting because I read that brain researchers using modern tools to study the brain in action have concluded that our memories are laid down in the brain in a narrative form.
Humans have been equipped by evolution, not only with language, but also with the narrative form of structuring thoughts in language. That, it seems to me, also has massive implications on how human societies are formed and aggregated into larger structures like clans, towns, and Empires. In an oral age, story-tellers carried the knowledge of human civilization to others as well as stories being the primary way of passing knowledge from one generation to another.
It also may be the explanation why such written stories as The Torah, the Bible and the Koran consist of are so central to organized western religions.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Theories vs. ideology; Which provides better government?
Conservatives and Liberals both try to take the lessons of the past, learn from them, and use them to predict future events. That ability to see reality as being past, present and future is unique to human beings. This plays out in (among many other things) the ways government functions.
Government is always a group experiment in trying to do those things today that provide the best outcomes tomorrow. A good government is one that gathers evidence, develops theories or ideologies of cause and effect and tries to govern from those theories or ideologies.
The difference between a theory and an ideology is (1) how perfect decision-makers expect the ideas of cause-and-effect that make it up are expected to be and (2) how the decision-makers act when it fails. Governing is deciding how to allocate resources and act today so as to achieve a better-predicted future. So let's look at the process of predicting the future and acting today in order to achieve a preferred tomorrow.
That process involves gathering data on events that have occurred in the past, learning which events appear to cause others to occur, and seeing the resulting outcomes. We then choose to take actions in the near future which will be more likely to result is the ultimate futures we prefer. The discipline of General Semantics calls this time-binding and defines it as "the distinctive human ability to build on the accumulated knowledge of others." Every human being does this.
The knowledge that some events cause other events to happen is called a theory. The more often we see that one event, "A", appears to cause another event, "B", to happen, the more certain we are of the theory that event "A" will cause event "B." We use such theories to guess what is the best action to take today to result in the future outcome we most desire. But "theories" come in a wide variety of strength or reliability. Some are pure guesses; some are almost certainties.
Physicists and chemists have developed some very strong theories about the causes and effects in their intellectual realms. Theories in history and the social sciences never approach the degree of certainty that is possible in the physical sciences. Strong theories in the physical sciences result from isolating cause "A" and result "B" from all other confounding possible causes for result "B", then measuring all the objects and forces that remain within the isolated system. Advances in the physical sciences have come from isolating the items studied, identifying every object within the isolated set of items, measuring the forces within that set and then manipulating the forces to a measured degree and measuring the result.
The process of isolating the system, identifying and measuring the objects and forces inside it, and repeatedly testing measured changes in that system to prove cause-and-effect has proven very successful, although it still hasn't worked to give reliable weather predictions.
If theories in weather prediction are not yet perfect, then those in history and social systems are extremely weak. The subjects studied in history and the social sciences are complex systems that do not allow chains of cause-and-effect to be isolated from unexpected outside events. In addition, history does not really repeat itself in detail. On top of that, historical data is, for the most part, whatever is accidentally recorded at the time of an event. Measurements of what event historical event "A" caused another historical event "B" are extremely rough in the best of cases.
Government, however, is an institution designed to do those things today that provide improved outcomes tomorrow, so it sits squarely in the middle of history and the social sciences. Theories of government, history and the social sciences tend to be based on estimates of which guess is better than the others, and cause-and-effect relationships based on such data are rarely very accurate and never precise.
But even with the very best of data, human beings have very limited ability to analyze data and make predictions if the data comes from complex systems. Humans can observe that one event will usually lead to another event as long as nothing from the outside those events interferes, but in human social systems there is always a set of interfering events, too many to take account of. The result is that human beings can predict simple things reasonably well, but cannot identify cause-and-effect in systems very well.
But we are human beings. It is a characteristic of the human being to try to predict what will happen in the future and to cause a better future. Politicians build their careers on providing ideas that if we do something, "A", it will cause event "B" to occur in the future. Or the opposite - if we don't do "A" then "B" will NOT occur. Politicians fight other politicians to apply social resources to their preferred action "A" rather than the alternative "A-prime" proposed by another politician, or to prevent event "X" so that event "Y" will not occur.
Both Conservatives and Liberals play this prediction game. Each takes advantage of the accumulated knowledge from the past on which to base the theories of cause-and-effect they try to sell the voting public. Let's skip the part that describes how the theories determine which facts from history are considered more important than others and go straight to what happens when the theory is used to determine which actions should be taken today fails to achieve the desired future outcomes.
Theories of future outcomes are guesses made with greater or lesser ranges of uncertainty. They are not and cannot be certainties. Performing and action "A" today to cause a result "B" tomorrow is always an experiment. So what happens when the outcomes of an action do not match the results the theory the action was based on? What does the decision maker do when the experiment fails? Here is the difference between conservatives and liberals.
Liberals take the results that don't match those predicted by the theory and go back to revise the theory for future use. Check the measurements. See if all the objects and forces in the theory were accounted for and if any new ones appeared in the experiment. Find out what changed from what was expected, and take the changes into account before using the theory again in the future.
Conservatives reject the evidence that the theory failed. Instead of revising the theory, they defend it. Here are the conservative's defense measures:
- First they attempt to simply ignore the evidence of failure. The first line of defense is to hide the evidence or lie about it. [The Bush administration has sometimes even stopped providing reports that previously were regularly prepared and published in such areas as environmental science and economics.] If others keep bringing it up, they attack those people bringing up the evidence.
- Second is the excuse that the action has not been allowed enough time to succeed. This is usually accompanied by tactical changes in the application of the effort, each of which must be given more time to succeed. [This is the source of the famed "Friedman Unit.' "A slight change and it will be working in six more months!"]
- The next line of defense is to blame those who bring the evidence of the failure and suggest a conspiracy to damage the conservatives for political reasons. Rather than discuss the theory and the evidence for its success or failure, conservatives move the issue to one of who has power and who wants to take it away.
- The final line of defense for conservatives is to blame those who implemented the action for its failure. Conservative ideology is perfect. If the attempt to apply conservative ideology failed to achieve the outcome conservatives expected, then those who applied Conservative ideology must not be "True" conservatives. Any failed outcomes prove that the perfect ideology was not applied or was not given enough effort.
The difference is that an ideology is perfect, where a theory is not. The result of this thinking is that while a theory can be revised, an ideology must be defended.
So the blame for the failures of an ideology always lies outside the ideology itself, and anyone who takes responsibility for a failure is proven NOT to be a conservative. The problem is that an ideology will always fail. It is based on the same imperfect information sources as any other tentative and fallible theory. An ideology is just a theory, even after it has been given sacrosanct status as "Perfect, not open to challenge or revision."
Since social systems are too complicated for any theory to work perfectly, people operating from an ideology will always be forced back on the Conservative's defense methods described above.
When the conservative ideology fails, government by conservatives will always be redirected from governing according to the needs of the people governed to defending and enforcing the ideology as it fails. Since the ideology cannot be changed, as it continues to fail the efforts to prop it up become more radical and extreme.
This caused the collapse of the Communist ideology driven government in the Soviet Union. It is causing the collapse of the conservative ideology as the guiding ideology in the United States. It will cause the collapse of any theocracy in the Middle East or anywhere else.
Government is always an experiment in determining cause and effect and attempting to actually achieve the preferred outcome. Ultimately every government depends on being recognized as legitimate by the people governed. When government begins to defend a failed ideology instead of providing the outcomes the people expect they will replace it.
The USSR fought that off for a generation by preventing their population for learning what outside governments were providing for their populations. American conservatives will not be able to keep Americans ignorant and enslaved to their ideology for nearly that long.
Oh, and why do conservatives elevate their theories of government to the level of ideologies?
I have a theory about that. The mass of voting conservatives have a low tolerance for ambiguity. Their leaders play to that by promising certainty. But this is a theory. It is open to revision given better information.
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