Two Skillful Paragraphs about Meanness and Blind Self-Justification in Politics — from Writer-Philosopher Cheryl Mendelson — and My Comment about the Utility of Self-Awareness, Attention and Reason

25 August 2012

Citation — to the Cheryl Mendelson essay that I am referring to

Cheryl Mendelson, Why, in Politics, Crazy Goes With Mean, Huffington Post (25 August 2012)

I have trouble writing about our culture’s moral insanity because it is so blindly and determinedly insane — but Cheryl Mendelson capably synopsizes the trend toward meanness and self-delusion

Here are some extracts from two paragraph that this writer-philosopher published today:

On the one hand, rightist politicians question the science of evolution and climate change, endorse wacky economics, and insist that Obama is a muslim who was born in Africa.

On the other, they promote rage politics, tell fibs and destroy jobs and wages and families in order to enrich a tiny group of bankers and businessmen.

To evade the central moral ideals of kindness, mercy, and forgiveness, the right dismisses those who defend them as weak, effeminate, whining, bleeding hearts. Then it enacts laws that make the United States the prison and death penalty capital of the world.

In fact, the right promotes vengeance and heartlessness throughout the law and, against all reason and in defiance of obvious fact, denies both that waterboarding and other horrors are torture and that law and morality forbid us to torture prisoners.

To preserve its image as the party of virtue, the right defends a smug pseudomorality, detached from any real sense of guilt or obligation or compassion and aiming first at control and punishment of others rather than, as with true conscience, self-judgment and self-control.

So rightists inveigh against homosexuality and gay marriage, deny any moral difference between live human tissue and real human lives, and sentimentalize that doing so protects families.

This false moral fervor lets them deceive themselves and others about their own greed and crookedness. The worse they are in reality, the more rabidly they defend these fake, self-serving "convictions."

In the end, they conclude that they are so good, and their enemies so evil, that they must be in power at all costs, even if this means undermining rational government and fair elections.

And rather than lose a campaign debate about reality with some pointy-headed, high-IQ economist or geologist or climatologist, they choose instead simply to abandon truth and reality altogether.

Instead, they opt to undermine the voters' understanding -- manipulating their rage, inflating their prejudices, and feeding them misinformation.

Vitriolic, but impressionistically true.

“So, Pete, what does Ms. Jenkins think is the cause of this self-deluding nastiness?”

Moral laziness:

These policies reflect failures of conscience -- a lack of empathy or a habit of overruling empathy when it is inconvenient or conflicts with self-interest or self-approval, and a surrender to sadism and vengefulness.

That is a political liberal’s well-stated perspective.

My own view is subtly different.

On a deeper cause of self-serving nastiness

Much of the political right wing, it seems to me, is either too lazy to reason, or too stupid to. And in predominantly all instances, skillfully applied attention and self-awareness are lacking.

Note

Here, the word “stupid” is defined to indicate an inability to think rationally, along the lines of logic and weighted evidence.

I slightly disagree with Ms. Jenkins’ formulation, which seems to assign moral laziness exclusively to the Right. Ethical short-cutting partially characterizes the political left, as well. It also lies incessantly and rejects evidence that it does not agree with.

That said, I do agree with Jenkins’ implied opinion that the right political wing’s departure from rationality and self-awareness is significantly greater than that the left routinely demonstrates.

Another difference between the political parties is that the Right is disciplined and hostile enough to achieve its goals and the left is usually not.

What may be really going on in the nastiness sweepstakes

Some psychologists seem to think that humans have essentially two cognitive systems, sometimes called System 1 and System 2.

Jim Holt’s review of Daniel Kahneman’s book on this subject explains the difference:

System 1 uses association and metaphor to produce a quick and dirty draft of reality, which System 2 draws on to arrive at explicit beliefs and reasoned choices.

System 1 proposes, System 2 disposes.

But System 2, in addition to being more deliberate and rational, is also lazy. And it tires easily.

Too often, instead of slowing things down and analyzing them, System 2 is content to accept the easy but unreliable story about the world that System 1 feeds to it.

If we accept that Daniel Kahneman’s representation of Systems 1 and 2 — which certainly fit with my observations regarding how my own mind works — intellectual laziness characterizes a good deal of people’s information-processing.

With rationality and evidentiary standards in the American toilet, much of the population does not feel compelled to support perceptions, inclinations, and poorly formulated arguments with reliable evidence.

And the more our passions are inflamed, the intellectually lazier we get. Why reason about something that is obviously “wrong,” right? And who cares what the evidentiary “minutiae” are that point in the other direction?

Perhaps Cheryl Mendelson’s political right is not indulging failures of conscience — instead, they are just not self-aware enough to examine their carelessly generated propositions in Reason’s light

With the above statement, I am not really criticizing Ms. Mendelson’s conscience-as-key formulation.

In a sense, the effort it takes to access conscience, which requires self-awareness and situational attention, is indeed a moral failure. The sin of soul-sloth.

On the other hand, if I want to persuade someone to reason more and jump to conclusions less, I probably would not accuse them of lacking conscience. After all, that is the same as calling someone immoral or sin-filled. Not exactly an accusation that will rouse their enthusiasm for listening to the rest of whatever the accuser has to say.

And there is more to this than just persuasion-oriented tact.

Conscience can exist, even when it is ignored. How often have we reminded ourselves, or our children, that we (or they) did something impulsively, without properly examining the consequences to others of what we had done?

The terrible feeling that comes from recognizing these negative effects is conscience. And we often promise ourselves that we will strive to pay more attention in the future.

Paying more attention is System 2 in operation. Honing attention into becoming diligently and masterfully applied is also a System 2 function.

So the flaw of hypocrisy and its often accompanying viciousness is not necessarily a lack of conscience. It may be a lack of emotionally even-handed (disinterested) self-awareness, manifested as:

(a) the failure to recognize what is going on inside us in the immediate moment,

combined with

(b) lapses in thinking far enough ahead to examine the repercussions of our thoughts and actions.

In sum, it is a failure of both attention and reason.

Subtly unlike Ms. Mendelson, I therefore conclude that the moral flaws of the political right (which she is referring to) are due to the Right’s frequently characteristic failure to energize System 2.

Or, alternatively, when System 2 is energized, to use it in a grossly data-biased fashioned that (perhaps) exceeds the preferentially prejudicial use of information that characterizes all of us, including the Left.

The Right’s hypocrisy and generalized nastiness comes from an unwillingness to reason according to the rules of logic and evidence. It employs System 2, in the political arena, noticeably less often than its critics do.

The right wing is often intellectually lazy. Rational and moral nuance frequently escape it.

And there is more to this — masquerade

Many among the prominent right wing in this country are not stupid. But, being toadies to the plutocrats that support them politically, they cannot very well admit (to the non-plutocratic public) that most of what they do supports an oligarchy.

Note

Here, I should point out that much of the governing Left is also toady to plutocrats.

And, even more dishonestly that the Right, the governing Left pretends not to be so, by concealing its allegiance to Oligarchy behind a veil of verbal sops thrown to the Ninety-Nine percent.

That is one hypocrisy that the Right (usually) does not share.

Much of the Right’s hypocrisy comes from dwelling on politically and socially charged issues that engage the public’s passions in a way that makes everyone else lose access to the System 2 thinking, which would penetrate the veil of deceptions that these people want to weave.

The moral? — Let’s set aside judgments about conscience and, instead, talk about ways to access it better

Self-awareness and reason are ways to reduce human suffering. One of the biggest differences between people is their varying willingness to engage the two.

Our spiritual and cultural focus should (arguably) be on developing fair-minded attention and using reason and evidence to negotiate the tangle of what we see.

Of course, the key to doing this successfully is learning to properly weigh and sum evidence. It seems that all of us have a pronounced tendency to sift facts and reasonable conjectures to favor answers that we have pre-supposed.

Perhaps pessimistically, I think that — even absent our irrationality trait — we would have difficulty negotiating a wise way through Life and Society’s complexities.

What I object to in regard to America’s political right, with the same level of exasperation that Ms. Mendelson demonstrates, is its consistent failure even to try.

PeteFree.com

Two Skillful Paragraphs about Meanness and Blind Self-Justification in Politics — from Writer-Philosopher Cheryl Mendelson — and My Comment about the Utility of Self-Awareness, Attention and Reason