More Somerbyanigans, proceed at own risk.
Progressives have accepted an old view of reason, dating back to the Enlightenment, namely, that reason is conscious, literal, logical, universal, unemotional, disembodied, and serves self-interest. As the cognitive and brain sciences have been showing, this is a false view of reason. (pp 1-2)
*
A great deal of the political strife in America and elsewhere stems from the cognitive unconscious of individual citizens. [...] We need a new, updated Enlightenment. [...]
The Old Enlightenment values were a great advance in their day. But we know so much more now than in the eighteenth century about what it means to be human, and what challenges face humanity. Our Constitution is in large part based on the intellectual tools and ideas inherited by its framers from Enlightenment thinkers. These tools and ideas are no longer adequate. They have brought us great political, social, and material wonders. And, miraculously, the framers seem to have anticipated such developments, because the dynamic democracy they designed leaves open the possibility of revolutionary change. [...]
We will need to embrace a deep rationality that can take account of, and advantage of, a mind that is largely unconscious, embodied, emotional, empathetic, metaphorical, and only partly universal. A New Enlightenment would not abandon reason, but rather understand that we are using real reason—embodied reason, reason shaped by our bodies and brains and interactions in the real world, reason incorporating emotion, structured by frames and metaphors and images and symbols, with conscious thought shaped by the vast and invisible realm of neural circuitry not accessible to consciousness. (pp 13-4)
I recommend Lakoff’s book. I haven’t read much of his earlier political stuff, so I’m not sure quite how The Political Mind compares, but my impression is that he’s on to something at this point in a way he wasn’t a few years ago. Meaning in political, not scientific, terms — AFAIK his science qua science has always been good. Those unfamiliar with the science should also look up, say, António Damásio and Christopher Frith.
To gauge the distance between the 18th and 21st century, one might consider that, in 1791, this was a scientific document.
[Disclaimomancy: etc blah out of my ass yadda splunge]
In what follows, I am not critiquing Somerby in the sense of trying to assess how correct he is or how worthwhile, but rather attempting to describe the disjunction between him and his critics.
Somerby, as far as I can tell, starts from the stance of disembodied reason (not an unlikely result of being trained in philosophy in the mid-20th century). He does not entirely ignore recent developments in science, but it does not seem to occur to him that they mess with his philosophy.
He condemns people as “tribal”, because, from his standpoint, “tribal” is outside the realm of “rational”. The problem is, it’s not. Tribalism, in a generalized sense, one not limited to reflexive, herdlike behaviors, is one part of what our human brains use to reason about life as a social animal (most of our brains, anyway — the ones that more or less don’t we label things like “autistic”). Declaring oneself an adherent of reason does not mean that one is not using tribalistic modes of thinking. It’s not something a person can think their way out of as it is part of thinking.
That does not mean that many of the things Somerby condemns as “tribalism” are not worth condemning and worth avoiding to the degree possible. Just that doing so from a standpoint of disembodied logic does not actually serve that purpose very well, as once someone has declared themself an adherent of a “universal reason” and convinced themself that they are using the tools of “universal reason”, they often cease to pay attention to those aspects of embodied human thought that they want an adherence to “universal reason” to make them free of. (Note: such complaints about “universal reason” (or “disembodied reason”) are based upon the consequences of treating it as “universal”, not upon the usefulness of any particular mode that gets called that.)
Of course, not many people think in these terms (possibly only shorebirds), but Somerby’s philosophical standpoint is not irrelevant, and is, to my eye, a chief reason why so many react badly to him. I think his tone is likely a red herring since it’s difficult to say that his tone is any more snarky than people who don’t cause the same reaction he does. I’m also not sure he’s all that much more over-focused on his favorite illustrative examples than other bloggers. Perhaps the 2000 election is just enough outside the time horizon of liberal blogospheric self-reflection for it not to seem part of the common pool of references.
Arguably (not that it’s usually characterized in precisely these terms), the primary insight that holds the liberal blogosphere together and which distinguishes it (and its allies) from establishment liberalism seems fairly well described by the idea that universal reason does not work — the successes of the Republicans being the proof. This is why someone like Rick Perlstein, who seeks to explain the rationality of the right in its historical context, is so central even when not terribly visible.
Some of the people reacting badly to Somerby’s condemnations of tribalism do so because they seem to embrace tribalism. Though they do this not from a wary scientific standpoint, but from what can appear to be an instrumental political standpoint — they’ve seen what works for the Republicans and they are trying to adapt those methods to their purposes without necessarily trying to account for, not just the mechanisms that can be derived from certain political successes, but also the plasticity of human minds. That this is done uncritically does lead to messes, e.g. the primary season meltdown.
Also, our media as established in the 20th century is organized around a cult of objectivity. It is probably no accident that some of our best political journalism right now (from the point of view of the bloggy types) comes from a comedy network, some kind of jumped-up fashion/gossip magazine (or whatever Vanity Fair is), and a temperamentally anti-establishment (in sociopolitical, not musical, terms) organ of music culture (Rolling Stone), none of which ever pretended to belong to the cult.
Somerby’s take on universal reason, which I imagine as being more or less some version of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, is obviously a fairly cogent intellectual mode on its own terms, and it allows him to do certain kinds of analysis, but largely only of others who pretend to universal reason — after all people who don’t pretend to that are the rabble, he just calls them “rubes” rather than “blogofascists” or “hippies”. His argumentation is unlikely to be aesthetically palatable, or even necessarily usable, by those whose central political dictum he rejects, since what largely comes across to them, seems to be the glaring bits of projection which he seems oblivious to, and his disdain.
I would guess that most progressives define “real liberals” somewhat differently than Somerby. It is certainly necessary for progressives to be reflective on and critical of their enthusiasms and lazinesses, but without a different sort of insight into how current progressives think than he seems to possess, it seems unlikely that he can communicate his observations effectively to them. Disembodied, universal reason is, as a rule, defined by its champions as the only rational place from which to argue, it is thus a citadel that is hard to leave — all the obvious exits appear as madness.
Thank you plover. I thought this was an excellent post, and I’m going to quote you elsewhere will you, nil you
Ass futures just went through the roof. plover has cornered the market. For those not in the know, that is a very great compliment.
I’ll just link here the other places where we’ve been having such a wanky discussion. Here, here, and even the Prof. Bérubé has been involved. I won’t over-invoke him, I wonder if he’ll think plover is using the right words or if this isn’t just another Sokal hoax of gibberish. I feel like I kind of get what plover is saying. Norbiz punctures our balloon animal here. The sweet freedom of not having a stupid web log has gone to his head. He is giddy with it. I’ll admit that I spite myself by eating at Long John Silvers just to spite him.*
*I wish this high-minded notion were true.
Although I think some smart aleck will come by and accuse p of “mind reading.”
This is fascinating, but I don’t quite grasp it fully: “This is why someone like Rick Perlstein, who seeks to explain the rationality of the right in its historical context, is so central even when not terribly visible.”
Can you elaborate?
I forgot to tell plover that RP is summoned by only saying his name once, although this time p forgot the “bitches!”
My take on plover’s comment about the invaluable work done by Perlstein is that while it is respected, it seems like it should be more omnipresent or front-and-center than it is. Even if it is well known and all the big bloggos hopefully have well-thumbed review copies of Nixonland, it doesn’t seem to shape the day-to-day discussions as much as it should. A lot of the daily discourse about conservatives seems to be about point scoring at a junior high debate level.
Additionally- Republican success has clearly been antagonistic to reason- the dissonance of their arguments relative to logic has nothing to do with their resonance with the public.
Adding- Perlstein’s work attempts to understand the thinking and mindsets that have created the modern conservative movement.
I see the “Liberal”² NYT chose syndicated columnist and global warming expert George Will to review Nixonland.
² Did I do that right, Mr. P.?
~
Yeah, that was a laugh a minute. Let’s neuter an incredibly important book by having a self-interested review attempt to abort it in the name of contrarianism. Up next, William Donohue on the systemic child abuse within the Catholic Church, or McMegan on Krugman’s latest, or Ann Althouse on anything of substance.
Also, ITTDGY, it’s “Mr./Ms./Bird p.”
Also, ITTDGY, it’s “Mr./Ms./Bird p.”
Wouldn’t that be plover? I was referring to Pinko Punko and the use of quotes around the word liberal, from back on the Thers blog.
~
Oh yes, carry on. Even better is when they get Lee Siegel to review something.
Rick Perlstein:
In a simplified but seemingly standard guise, the mythology of the netroots runs something like: prior to the Dean campaign, left politics (on the organizational level anyway) was mostly divided between ineffective establishment politics within the Democratic party and ineffective anti-establishment politics outside of the party. Then out of the Dean campaign, the liberal blogosphere/netroots coalesced around a strategy of movement building and the idea that American political parties were less obdurate poles of an unchanging establishment order and more power bases that could be captured by strategic, long term organizing. From what I’ve seen from digby, Markos, et al. over the past couple of years (especially around the time Nixonland came out) exhibit #1 in favor of that last notion was apparently Before the Storm.
In any case, that’s more or less the appearance from my standpoint largely outside the maelstrom. I should add that I have, sadly, not read BTS, and thus my impressions of it derive from those same readings of other bloggers and from your own articles and video appearances.
In the post above, I (rather telegraphically) recast that basic mythos in terms of Lakoff’s notions of the New and Old Enlightenments. In order for BTS to play the role that it does, it seems necessary (whether consciously or no) that netroots figures reject on some level the Old Enlightenment ideal that requires the conservative movement to be irrational because it does not conform to liberal models of rationality. As I understand it, one of the things accomplished by BTS (how explicitly I don’t know) is to demonstrate that the model of reason used by the conservative movement is entirely adequate for manipulating the parts of the world they are interested in manipulating, and that it is indeed — however nonsensical its premises appear to liberals — a rational model and not simply an appeal to “emotion” or to “instinct” (or some other faculty that Old Enlightenment reason treats as being outside the intellect but which neuroscience demonstrates as being an integral component of embodied cognition). Your success at this was, arguably, most clearly signaled by your invitation to that conservative conference at Princeton a few years ago (which (viewed on C-SPAN) was my first meaningful encounter with your work — though any coherent sense of what you were really about and my impression of the role played by BTS is more recent).
As you, I assume, know rather more intimately than I, there were various dynamics at work in the 90s seeking an exit from the rather static form of progressive politics at the time. That BTS could serve as one of the catalysts of the netroots has to do with the collective political experience and historical perceptions driving those dynamics. I take Lakoff’s work as confirming that the sensibility that emerged from those dynamics can, in a fairly straightforward way, be put in accord with current models in cognitive and neuroscience. That Lakoff often struggles for a hearing among many progressives, and that others seem to misunderstand him, is a measure, as I see it, of how entrenched the language and habits of the Old Enlightenment are. (Also as an interplay between the descriptive way that scientists tend to talk and the prescriptive way political types apparently tend to hear things.)
Whether or not Lakoff’s approach to formulating the insights of his field in a political context is on the mark, I think his arguments that it can be done in a fairly natural fashion compelling. And while I often agree with those who find his approach questionable, since reading Lakoff’s book a month or so ago, I have yet to encounter anything to dissuade me that his frame of Old Enlightenment vs New Enlightenment rationality is a good way to express the importance and possibilities of recent brain science to a non-science-oriented audience, and may be a meaningful political tool too.
As for the “not terribly visible” line from my post: it is meant to reflect my own (possibly idiosyncratic) early impressions of you as a respected, but somewhat shadowy figure. I’m not sure quite what brought together the scattered impressions I had, but it probably coincided with something digby wrote about the importance of BTS when she was posting your advance excerpts of NL. And then suddenly, at some point in the runup to the release of NL, it seemed like everyone was talking about how indispensible BTS was to the ideas of the netroots. For Markos in particular, it seems to have been a touchstone. The story everyone told of the story BTS told made it seem like the hieratic ur-text of the liberal blogosphere. For me, this discussion provided an important structural explanation for some of my observations about the blogosphere. I guess my point is that, unlike other people whose thinking seems to be central to the netroots sensibility, your role is less obviously overt. One has to dig a little for it to become clear. I imagine this is simply a result of your most influential work being in book form rather than played out on people’s screens every day.
Am I making any more sense yet? Am I providing an alien portrait that’s impossible to recognize as your career? Thanks for taking an interest.
More ploverian awesomeness. Even though I’ve never read Lakoff’s recent work, or really anything beyond when he was a generative linguist.
Okee dokee. With such a respectful and appreciative audience, this is as good a place as any for me to announce publicly for the first time that…
BEFORE THE STORM IS BACK IN PRINT BITCHEZ!!!!
http://www.amazon.com/Before-Storm-Goldwater-Unmaking-Consensus/dp/1568584121/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236493313&sr=1-2
Republican success has clearly been antagonistic to reason- the dissonance of their arguments relative to logic has nothing to do with their resonance with the public.
Um, I’m saying Republican success has not been antagonistic to the embodied idea of reason, but rather has been antagonistic to the liberal idea of reason when taken as universal. The point of people like Damásio and Lakoff is that you can’t start from an idea of reason: the types of cognition that we call reason are dependent on the types of cognition that we call emotion or moral judgment, and in any case, most cognition is unavailable to the conscious mind.
The public all has embodied minds. Republican success is, in part, because the model of the mind they use for politics is actually more like how people think than the Kantian abstraction used by liberals. This is not because the Republican one is derived from neuroscience, it is because some of the aspects of the Enlightenment model that liberals cling to most tightly are demonstrably, scientifically false.
None of this reduces or simplifies well. In economics, say, it is the progressives who have the better model of the mind. (And by Lakoff’s reading, the people who more or less use a screwed up version of reason for everything are the centrist neo-liberals.)
Haha- that comment from RP was almost in the form of autospam.
“Thank you for your helpful webpage. I will think about it. Allow me to share this link [whale pen*s]”
Has anyone referred to RP as shadowy before? I think shadowy tops dangeral. Shadowy=cabal of one.
On a more serious note, I wonder what Rick’s take on this one-star review would be?
The review:
Now I definitely need to read the book.
p- that is what I was talking about when I said “resonance”- it is true I was using “dissonance” to refer to what I view as logic, and “resonance” for how such an approach would still appeal to large numbers of people. I think it is the same as what you are saying, but I was falling into your trap.
I’m not sure “shadowy” was really the right word, but “obscure” is even more not right. “Indistinct” might be the best choice.
fish sez: Now this page is cogent.
fish responds: No, now this page is tagged “cogent”. Who are you to misquote the pingback?
Pot Stirrage 21
plover, plover, plover,
plover! plover! plover!
~
“Gott ist tot” – Zarathustra
No, He is not! – Flying Spaghetti Monster
“Grund ist tot” – Lakoffustra
No, It is not! – Banana
This thread is not cogent until the pingback says it is. Oh wait.
True story: I was wondering what had become of Professor Booty, when I saw this post and remarked the lack of Rick Mother****ing Perstein taggage. The author of the sole piece in that category? Professor Booty.
Maybe I just like to say that: Professor Booty. Or I just like the backbeat.