| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
24 Jan 2006 01:54:41 AM |
| Object: |
A Shocker: Partisan Thought Is Unconscious |
A Shocker: Partisan Thought Is Unconscious
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/science/24find.html
By BENEDICT CAREY
Neuroscientists have tracked what happens in the politically partisan
brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: A Shocker: Partisan Thought Is Unconscious |
24 Jan 2006 08:10:32 PM |
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Not very shocking, really. Gland-based politics is far EASIER than
anything that would stimulate those "'cold reasoning' regions of the
cortex."
And working out a plausible cold-reason response to "damning facts
about favorite candidates" is quite an advanced exercise. What every
militant bozo at Qom or Rio Limbaugh immediately wants to say in that
fix, it seems, if written out frankly would read something like "If is
quite OK when we do it, but abominable of you ever to do it." Glands
have no trouble with that sort of proposition at all, it is simply what
the Usness of Wonderful US _means_ at a warm subcognitive level, but
political intellectuals have said some of the damnest things anybody
human ever said trying to fadge up a presentable _reason_ for
disinterestedly preferring our noble Usness over your shady Youness.
And the tiny percentage of anthropoids who do try to apply their
cortical regions to the problem immediately invite the attentions of
Senator McCarthy &c. for doing it: who can really believe in the
loyalty of an ex-monkey who needs to find a _reason_ for being loyal?
There's nothing in the NYTC story about "origins" that I can see,
however. A just-so-story account of why Loyalty achieved a
reproductive advantage over Reason and thus got the survival nod from
Ms. Natura Selectrix would be easy enough to fadge up, but you'd have
to like Kipling-style narrative biology more than most readers if you
can seriously believe there were ever any rootless cosmopolitan Kantian
monkeys in the first place to die out because they couldn't be properly
loyal to any Us that wasn't everybody else's Us also, at least
potentially and teleologically.
Where the deuce Kantianism and "cold reason" ever came from in the
first place would be an interesting question too. I can't myself
imagine them not being "post-biological," so to speak, but perhaps
that is only because I haven't yet encountered a really _persuasive_
Evolutionary Psycho addressing herself to the topic.
"Persuasive" has been called Aristotle's favorite word, and perhaps
that makes sense since The Master was notoriously the gold mean guy
also. If I were ever "persuaded" by an evolutionary psychologist,
which parts of my brain would light up if it were properly wired, the
Loyalty parts or the Reason parts? Most likely both -- the lady would
have won me over to wanting to belong to her Faculty Club faction and
become subcognitively loyal to it, but only by way of presenting me
with what she wants me to take for coldly rational arguments and not
dismiss them as mere wannabe-rational just-so stories to be enjoyed for
their literary merits but not paraded around the ring as "natural
science."
The hero of the NYTC piece is very heroically stern and demanding:
"It is possible to override these biases, Dr. Westen said, "but you
have to engage in ruthless self reflection, to say, 'All right, I know
what I want to believe, but I have to be honest.' "
He added, "It speaks to the character of the discourse that this
quality is rarely talked about in politics."
Everybody adult and sane and political this side of the wombscholarly
"intelligent design" neo-crew will find that quotation edifying, I
daresay, and so do I as well, but the character of Dr. Westen's
discourse seems a bit fishy -- not to mention that his solecistic
"self-reflection" sounds like it must mean some smoke-and-mirrors magic
trick on the stage rather than merely thinking about oneself. Edifying
the quotation is, yet edification is not the same as persuasion. If
you don't begin with at least some vague antecedent desire to be Loyal
to Honesty, an Enlightenment fortune cookie like that one is not even
edifying, it just sits there and sogs. Should you happen to be a
run-of-the-mill neoteric downdumbee at Wingnut City, all that is
scarcely audible at all, that stuff is only what the bad guys always
say, only the Themness of Them dronin' on and on on ....
If you should happen to have the even loftier, the positively
Eddie-Burkean, neo-honour of bein' a "conservative" "intellectual" in
the age of Rancho Crawford, Dr. Westen comes close to askin' you to
damnwell kick him in his conceptual rear end. Forty or fifty years
ago, Freudianity used to pass almost for Nat. Sci., after all, and
surely almost nobody ever insisted more insistently that St. Sigmund
did on "ruthless self reflection," and yet _ou sont les neiges de
Vienne_ nowadays?
Phillip Johnson, Esq., perhaps the chief paladin of "intelligent
design" and all that Wombschool Normal 'varsity song-and-dance, takes
for granted that his neo-Endarkenment team have already toppled Dr.
Marx and Dr. Freud, and now Phil is out to make it a neological hat
trick by takin' poor Mr. Darwin's scalp as well. The counselor would
probably not have much trouble with Dr. Westen if he could ever get him
on the stand and ask a few good courtroom-type, jury-oriented,
questions about "ruthless self reflection" and a' that and a' that.
Neocomrade Dr. Behe did not exactly shine in Pennsylvania, obviously,
but since there wasn't a jury involved, that skirmish scarcely decides
the whole war. Dr. Behe had to depend on sheer argument, appealin'
unprofessionally to a Fedguv Bench that was, so to say, all cortex and
no glands, and inveterately of Dr. Western's party, and of course at
that level he was bound to lose. But "Wait till next year!"
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