Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive biology, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
DP Etiquette
First rule: Don't be a jackass. Most people are good.
Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.
I was going to attempt a relatively serious discussion today about a very relevant topic – The Easter Bunny. However, things slid downhill faster than my car without brakes when I Googled legend of the Easter Bunny.
You’ll never guess what I learned. Brace yourselves.
The Easter Bunny is an anthropomorphic rabbit. Shocking, isn’t it!
Anthorpomorphic? I didn’t realize the Easter bunny suffered from an incapacitating fear. He probably drops a fortune in his shrink’s office. I wonder if he pays in chocolate? I was convinced anthropomorphia had to be a disease of mind or body. Sometimes I’m so ignorant, I wonder how I function in life.
I’m happy to report the Easter Bunny is not contagious. In fact, he’s disease free (for this year anyway).
Back to our discussion.
Have you introduced your children to the Easter Bunny or are you anti-bunny?
I realize many parents do not like to lie to their children or foster false notions in their impressionable minds. I applaud and respect these parents; however, I’m apparently not so honest.
Each year the Easter bunny drops off a basket for each child filled with all the candy I love. How considerate of him. We also have an Easter Egg hunt each year. I’d like to skip this tradition, but FringeBoy likes tradition. He thrives on tradition. As a toddler he’d cry for the same cup every morning. In order to avoid a holiday meltdown, we hunt for eggs.
For our family this does not detract from the true meaning of Easter. The celebration of the resurrection takes center stage in our home. Bunnies, eggs, and yes, even chocolate take a back seat to the One who conquered death and the grave.
What Easter traditions do you celebrate? Please tell us if you hate the Easter Bunny, you wish he would choke on a carrot, or you think peeps are of the devil.
I know. Financial stuff bores most people to tears or sleep. Unfortunately, is it in financial stuff that taxpayers get ripped off of trillions of dollars that flow in opaque, secret, behind closed doors sorts of ways. Darned financial stuff. Darned opacity. Darned corruption.
Bailing out households backed by junk bonds
Wall Street on Parade (WSOP) reports that the Fed is planning to put lipstick on a very large pig. The Fed announced today that it will start buying junk bonds. Junk bonds, as we all know, had been, according to WSOP, “cratering for most of the month of March. That was the pig. The lipstick it applied was worded like this: ‘The Federal Reserve on Thursday took additional actions to provide up to $2.3 trillion in loans to support the economy. This funding will assist households and employers of all sizes and bolster the ability of state and local governments to deliver critical services during the coronavirus pandemic.’”
In the colorfully titled WSOP article, Fed Chair Powell Tells Whoppers This Morning on the Brookings Institution Webcast, commented that households, small businesses and most state and local governments do not issue junk bonds. So, that $2.3 trillion in funding will not assist households and employers of all sizes, or bolster the ability of most state or local governments to do squat. It will help big businesses in financial distress. WSOP argues that instead of the Fed bailing out failing companies with junk bond credit ratings, those companies should use the option that our president has used on many occasions. It is called filing for bankruptcy.
And other whoppers and deceit
WSOP also pointed out that Fed chair Powell fibbed about the loans being paid back. Much or maybe most of the money is unlikely to ever be repaid. Powell said this morning that “the Fed can only make secured loans to solvent entities with the expectation that the loans will be fully repaid.” But on March 26, Powell said this about loan repayment expectations: “We’re required to get full security for our loans so that we don’t lose money. So the Treasury puts up money as we estimate what the losses might be…Effectively $1 of loss absorption of backstop from Treasury is enough to support $10 of loans.”
Sounds like us taxpayers are going to get trillions more in debt stemming from the president’s failure to deal with coronavirus seriously or competently.
Finally, Powell commented this morning that “We entered this turbulent period on a strong economic footing, and that should help support the recovery. In the meantime, we are using our tools to help build a bridge from the solid economic foundation on which we entered this crisis to a position of regained economic strength on the other side.”
If that is true, and it probably is, this coronavirus thing and federal incompetence in dealing with it could end up costing maybe as much as $10 trillion or even more.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be spending some time trying to figure out just how many trillion dollars is going to bail out businesses without much or any oversight. It is starting to look to me like we're in way more trouble than just coronavirus and a mounting death toll. We may be on the verge of trashing our entire economy and entering into a depression on the scale of 1929 or something even worse.
This book helps explain the fundamentally moral, intuitive, emotional, biased and unconscious nature of humans dealing with politics. Existing evidence indicates that our minds are basically “narrowly moralistic and intolerant” when dealing with political matters. Political issues are now routinely weaponized by moralizing them. This tends to reduce conscious reasoning and gives more control to our far more powerful unconscious minds. That tends to make politics more irrational than if issues had not been weaponized. The matter of morality in politics, how to think about it and how to deal with it is arguably urgent and rapidly becoming more important.
Book review
Johnathan Haidt’s 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, argues that politics is largely a matter of moral thinking and judgment, most of which (~99%) is unconscious for most people most of the time. 2012 Haidt is a social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business. He wrote The Righteous Mind to “at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.” He explains: “My goal in this book is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with awe, wonder, and curiosity.”
Given the increasing rancor in American politics since Haidt wrote in 2012, it appears that his goal is not being met. In view of America’s increasing political polarization, Haidt clearly has his work cut out for him.
To find answers, Haidt focuses on the inherent moralistic, self-righteous nature of human cognition and thinking about politics and religion. Through the ages, there were three basic conceptions of the roles of reason (conscious reasoning) and passion (unconscious intuition, emotion, morality, bias, self identity, tribe identity, etc.) in human thinking and behavior. Plato (~428-348 BC) argued that reason dominated in intellectual elites called “philosophers”, but that average people were mostly controlled by their passions. David Hume (1711-1776) argued that reason or conscious thinking was nothing more than a slave to human passions. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) argued that reason and passions were about equal in their influence.
According to Haidt, the debate is over: “Hume was right. The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes) on an elephant (automatic processes). The rider evolved to serve the elephant. . . . . intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Therefore, if you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant first.”
Our intuitive (unconscious) morals and judgments tend to be more subjective, personal and emotional than objective and rational (conscious). Haidt points out that we are designed by evolution to be “narrowly moralistic and intolerant.” That leads to self-righteousness and the associated hostility and distrust of other points of views that the trait generates. Regarding the divisiveness of politics, Haidt asserts that “our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife.”
Our unconscious “moral intuitions (i.e., judgments) arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.” Initial intuitions driving later reasoning exemplifies some of our many unconscious cognitive biases, e.g., ideologically-based motivated reasoning, which distorts both facts we become aware of and the common sense we apply to the reality we think we see.
The book’s central metaphor “is that the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.”
Haidt observes that there are two different sets of morals and rhetorical styles that tend to characterize liberals and conservatives: “Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats don’t. Republicans have long understood that the elephant is in charge of political behavior, not the rider, and they know how elephants work. Their slogans, political commercials and speeches go straight for the gut . . . . Republicans don’t just aim to cause fear, as some Democrats charge. They trigger the full range of intuitions described by Moral Foundations Theory.”
The problem: On reading The Righteous Mind, the depth and breadth of problem for politics becomes uncomfortably clear for anyone hoping to ever find a way to at least partially rationalize politics. Haidt sums it up nicely: “Western philosophy has been worshiping reason and distrusting the passions for thousands of years. . . . I’ll refer to this worshipful attitude throughout this book as the rationalist delusion. I call it a delusion because when a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds. The true believers produce pious fantasies that don’t match reality, and at some point somebody comes along to knock the idol off its pedestal. . . . . We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment. . . . . The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and it is good at finding reasons to justify whatever the elephant wants to do next. . . . . We make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments.”
In other words, conscious reason (the rider) serves unconscious intuition and that’s the powerful but intolerant and moralistic beast that Haidt calls the elephant.
Two additional observations merit mention. First, Haidt points out that “traits can be innate without being hardwired or universal. The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth . . . . But not a single chapter . . . . consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words. . . . Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. . . . . ‘Built-in’ does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience.”
Second, Haidt asserts that Hume “went too far” by arguing that reason is merely a “slave” of the passions. He argues that although intuition dominates, it is “neither dumb nor despotic” and it “can be shaped by reasoning.” He likens the situation as one of a lawyer (the rider) and a client (the elephant). Sometimes the lawyer can talk the client out of doing something dumb, sometimes not. The elephant may be a big, powerful beast, but it’s not stupid and it can learn. Haidt’s assertion that we “will always be cursed by moralistic strife” is his personal moral judgment that our intuitive, righteous nature is a curse, not a blessing or a source of wisdom. In this regard, his instinct is closer to Plato’s moral judgment about how things ought to be than Hume or Jefferson. Or, at least that’s how I read it.
Questions: Does Haidt’s portrayal of the interplay between unconscious intuition and morals and conscious reason seem reasonable? Is it possible that a society can partly tame the elephant and shift some mental power to the rider in hopes of at least partially rationalizing politics compared to what it is now?
Original Biopolitics and Bionews post: August 29, 2016; DP posts: 3/16/19, 4/9/20
“President Trump and his Republican allies are launching an aggressive strategy to fight what many of the administration’s own health officials view as one of the most effective ways to make voting safer amid the deadly spread of Covid-19: the expanded use of mail-in ballots.
The scene Tuesday of Wisconsinites in masks and gloves gathering in long lines to vote, after Republicans sued to defeat extended, mail-in ballot deadlines, did not deter the president and top officials in his party. Republican leaders said they were pushing ahead to fight state-level statutes that could expand absentee balloting in Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona and elsewhere. In New Mexico, Republicans are battling an effort to go to a mail-in-only primary, and they vowed on Wednesday to fight a new move to expand postal balloting in Minnesota.
The new political effort is clearly aimed at helping the president’s re-election prospects, as well as bolstering Republicans running further down the ballot. While his advisers tend to see the issue in more nuanced terms, Mr. Trump obviously views the issue in a stark, partisan way: He has complained that under Democratic plans for national expansion of early voting and voting by mail, ‘you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.’
At his daily news briefing on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he believed vote-by-mail had been abused to hurt Republicans, and ‘I will not stand for it,’ though he allowed that mail ballots could help some older voters — an important part of his voting base. It was a slight modulation that came at the urging of his advisers.
In their efforts to fight expanding vote-by-mail, Republican officials are counting on a crucial and powerful ally: like-minded judges.”
If the president is right that republicans are unelectable in free and fair elections, the Trump Party is defunct except by authoritarian measures to suppress voting. ther than declaring martial law and suspending elections, the Trump Party literally has no other choice but to suppress as many democratic voters as possible, even if it suppresses some Trump Party voters in the process. The Trump Party presumably sees suppressed Trump Party votes as just regrettable collateral damage, while suppression of democratic voters is seen as patriotic and good.
As usual, the president presents no evidence to support his bald-faced lie that vote-by-mail had been abused to hurt Republicans. And, once again, the president’s self-interest above democracy, voting and the rule of law is clear and undeniable. Undeniable, that is, except by the president and his supporters and enablers.
In short, the Trump Party is willing to suppress millions of votes and even endanger voter’s lives in their desperation to remain a viable political party. What a pathetic remnant of what once was a principled institution.
