So far, between finishing George Lakoff’s Whose Freedom? and beginning Geoffrey Nunberg’s Talking Right, I’m edging closer to a rather annoying conclusion: The human brain is so mindlessly mechanistic and programmatic, it’s no wonder that the righteous wing has taken control of the political language and landscape.
As near as I can tell, given the obsessively over-simplistic ways in which the righeous wing sees both themselves, others, and the world as a whole, it simply comes natural to them to “stay on message” — because when you think as over-simplisticly as they do, it’s easy to do.
But when you live in the reality-based community, where the world is complex and interconnected, contradictory and nuanced, complicated and difficult… well, you can’t just have a set of key phrases and core stories to repeat over and over and over again until the brains of those listening to you are mechanically reprogrammed to your liking.
Why?
Because the problem is that liberalism (or, if you prefer, progressivism) isn’t just a set of issue stances, it’s a way of viewing the world: As complex, interconnected, contradictory, nuanced, complicated, and difficult. And to deal with such a world, you need brains that are not merely mechanistic and programmatic.
You can’t fight righteous wing mechanistic programming with liberal mechanistic programming, because liberalism opposes the very idea of living that kind of obsessively over-simplistic life.
But the obsessively over-simplistic is what plays to the crowd, and plays to the press corps. It’s the very nature of the arena the righteous wing has constructed for American politics over the last thirty years.
Even if, for example, the Democrats trounce the Republicans in the midterm elections, it will have very little to do with waking the nation from its slumber of obsessive over-simplification. It will just be because enough Americans grew to see too many holes in the specific mechanistic programming the GOP has been feeding into their brains.
But that just opens those brains to different mechanistic programming, not to an entirely different model (the legitimately complex model) of how the world works.
So, really: How do you beat back the obsessive over-simplicity that’s come to be the foundation of our political language and landscape? You could find a “better” mechanistic programming which would train brains to support liberal policies, but that’s just the same brainwashing and cultural subversion the righteous wing has been using all along.
The method is the message, no? “Don’t follow their obsessively over-simple mechanistic programming, follow ours!” That might lead to a nation of liberal sheep instead of righteous wing sheep. But it’d still be a nation of sheep.
There is indeed plenty of blame to go around regarding the shortening of the national attention span and the resulting dumbing down of political discourse. My favorite targets are TV and right-wing radio, but your mileage may vary.
This problem is manifested in thousands of classrooms every day. How do you teach kids whose minds have been nurtured and shaped by TV? How do you lengthen an attention span in order to teach, say, critical thinking or civic responsibility, not to mention the three Rs? The war for the minds of adults may or may not already have been lost, but it is still being fought every single day for kids. Vote for a school bond, volunteer as a reading mentor, donate books to the school library, or do whatever you can for kids and schools. It couldn’t possibly be more important.
It’s a battle that’s going to take 500 years.
And I mean, 500 more years.
Y’know… if we last that long.
(I’m feeling optimistic today.)