By now everyone has heard about the Tea Party, but I doubt many are aware of the Coffee Party or their horribly-named “Enough is Enough!” rally planned for October. According to their mission statement:
The Coffee Party USA believes that the influence of money, and the politics of fear and exclusion, stand in the way of a government of, by, for the people.
I can get behind a lot of their ideas, but more than that I support their focus on process: they advocate civil discourse and believe change can come about by “seeking and spreading accurate information” and providing a place for the “respectful and honest exchange of ideas.” In a Coffee Party USA video, co-founder Annabel Lee asks some tough questions: “How do we make these really hard decisions? What values do we use?”
Presumably, when deciding which political candidate to support, we are supposed to research what their positions are on the various issues we care about. This is seen as responsible voting, as opposed to being swayed by soundbites or charisma. However, I am more interested in knowing how they make decisions. The process is more important than the eventual result, because a good process has the capability of producing the best results. How do they get their information? What effort is made to understand the facts? Is their reasoning logical, and are they aware of common biases?
Another important aspect of how people make decisions are their foundational assumptions (whether or not they are viewed as assumptions), because these will influence every decision. These are the starting point, the axioms they take as given, so that even if the logic is sound and there is a good process of making decisions, wrong axioms will lead to wrong conclusions. Optimally these foundational assumptions would also be tested against available facts, but this is not always possible, such as when they represent moral and ethical values (i.e. beliefs about how things should be instead of how they are).
The current political discourse, much of it driven by the Tea Party, is dominated by fear and panic. This is not an environment conducive to a sound decision-making process, but it does get a lot of people motivated and willing to listen to a leader who will tell them what to do. As columnist Mark Shields said on the Newshour:
I think, you know, it's an angry electorate. I mean, if you are angry, Rick Perry is your candidate. If you are nervous, Rick Perry might not be your candidate. But if you are angry, he is. And, I mean, Jon Huntsman is reasonable. He's thoughtful. And I don't know if there is a constituency out there for him to win.Being thoughtful and reasonable will not win you votes. It is boring, and doesn’t connect with people, unlike anger.
What is fueling this anger-driven discourse? There are probably many complex issues at work, but I learned a few things reading Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article, “The Transformation of Michele Bachmann.” On page 4, we learn that one of the people Bachmann was influenced by, Francis Schaeffer, believed Roe v. Wade signified that “they” (The Supreme Court, the federal government, and humanism) are evil, because “now ‘they’ are killing babies.” It goes without saying that abortion is a very emotionally-charged issue, but this way of thinking makes some sort of sense to me. I disagree with both the proposition (they are killing babies) and its conclusion (humanists are evil), but if the federal government were really killing babies, wouldn’t you also think it evil? Wouldn’t it make you angry? And what would you do about it?
Another gem we learn about is Dominionism, which was also recently featured in articles about Rick Perry’s evangelical roots (here, and here; more here and here; another op-ed suggests caution when associating Christian conservatism with political conspiracy here). According to Sara Diamond, the philosophy that resulted from the Schaeffer’s idea of Dominionism, which is the idea that man has dominion over all things of the Earth (Genesis 1:26), is that Christians "are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns.” This is far from a mainstream Christian idea, and it is unclear to what extent (if at all) the candidates themselves believe it, but it is there and it is not going away.
We should be concerned, not with what the articles tell us about Bachmann or Perry, but about the movement they represent. And this movement is not the Tea Party; the Tea Party is merely the latest manifestation of the fundamentalist and evangelical Christian surge for political power. (Also, everyone watch “Jesus Camp.”) Their ideas may be crazy, and these ideas may be held by a small minority, but they are a loud minority that enjoys lots of national media coverage (perhaps because their craziness is entertaining). We should be concerned. It is one thing to recognize that only a small minority of Muslims want to blow themselves up or crash airplanes into buildings. It is another to ignore the fundamentalist movement in our own backyard.
But that is a horrible analogy! It is incredibly unfair to all the fundamentalists and evangelicals who don’t actually want to blow anything up. It comes out of my own fears about where this country is headed and what kind of people want to lead it. They simply do not share most of my core values, and I worry about their vision of the world that is willfully not based on reality but on a 1600 year-old text. I worry about the thought processes that lead people like David A. Noebel, the founder and director of Summit Ministries, to believe that the “Secular Humanist worldview” is one of America’s greatest threats. My initial reaction is that “they don’t understand what it means to be a secular humanist,” but maybe that’s not it at all. If truth comes from the Bible, then being secular and not acknowledging any god will surely lead away from truth. If we are to put ourselves below God in all ways, then a human-centered worldview is prideful and selfish. I disagree with their foundational assumptions and their unwillingness to question these assumptions, and they disagree with mine.
How are we then to have a constructive dialogue? How is civil discourse even possible when both sides strongly disagree with the other’s foundational beliefs? Especially when one of those beliefs includes a mistrust of doubt and an ingrained sense of rightness? … Okay, most likely all sides have an ingrained sense of rightness. As much as I try to abandon certainty, I also believe that I am right, and that it is the correct way to view the world. I am certain about being uncertain. So perhaps what we could all use is the willingness to be wrong.
However, that is harder than it sounds. The other aspect of this discourse on discourse is the psychology of why people reason the way they do (i.e. unreasonably) and the science behind it. I suggest you read this entire article by Chris Mooney (which has lots of scholarly references), but here is one of the key points (emphasis mine):
The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience: Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.
This is something that we all do to some degree. It is a challenge to constantly check whether your emotions may be clouding your judgment. But must we completely remove emotions from decision-making? Perhaps then we wouldn’t care about the outcome one way or another. Mooney suggests that we take them into account: “Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.”
A good example of motivated reasoning is how most Republicans don’t believe in evolution or global warming, despite the overwhelming scientific support for both. In addition to Mooney’s book “The Republican War on Science,” famed economist Paul Krugman recently wrote about “Republicans Against Science” in his op-ed. (I almost talked about how even the libertarian favorite Ron Paul has said he doesn’t “believe in evolution” but, according to a post comment, that video was edited, and Paul is actually agnostic on the matter.) The fact that the evolution “debate” has been phrased as something for which people can have different opinions is what makes it so frustrating. This isn’t a choice between being a Christian or believing in evolution! It’s about whether you think the findings of science can be thrown out according to personal preference; it’s about whether you think it’s acceptable to ignore rational conclusions when you don’t like where those conclusions may lead. A lot of people don’t like falling from heights, but if they stop believing in gravity that won’t make it any less true! But the theory of gravity doesn’t challenge anyone’s foundational beliefs, and apparently evolution and climate change do.
I don’t have any answers. I’ve phrased the discussion in terms of Coffee vs. Tea, but the Tea Party is a well-funded political machine with the backing of a major news corporation that is focused on getting its candidates elected, and the Coffee Party is a lone voice saying “why don’t we listen to each other for a change?” Frankly, the current political discourse disturbs me greatly. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity was great but did nothing of the sort. People are still crazy! Even non-crazy people are crazy! According to the motivated reasoning article, we are very resistant to facts we don’t like, and being more knowledgeable only enables us to find counter-arguments to explain away the facts.
Oh well. I guess I can say that I’m glad the Coffee Party exists, however small and ineffectual it may be.
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