| The only response I had to Hunter's recent masterpiece on why our Congress won't follow the law and prosecute torture was to wish I'd written it.
They genuinely don't see what's wrong with what they're doing.
That goes for the non-citizens that they don't mind bombing and torturing. That goes for the citizens whom they're unbothered to see homeless, sick, penniless, humiliated and crushed with impunity by corporate monopolists and liars.
They just. Don't. Care.
And again, an absence of good moral principle isn't an absence of principle or belief. It isn't truly amorality, lack of ideology, or even what I sometimes suspect them of, nihilism. This seems to be, from what I can tell, the motive principle behind a lot of buy-in to organizing as the answer. (Even, Adam, if that isn't your perspective on the matter.)
It's an avenue of false hope leading many to believe that Congress are blank slates of some kind, waiting for wisdom and instruction from the masses. No. They're grown men and women and they need to own their persistent patterns of behavior.
Letting them off the hook in this way shifts the blame for their bad behavior to us, or leads us to focus overmuch on lobbyists, when the sad truth is that they don't think there's anything wrong with ruining the lives of the weak and poor for the sake of amassing more power and wealth.
Realism
I got into an argument (you are shocked, I know) with some international relations folks over the term "realism."
They insisted that it should be understood to mean a non-ideological position, where the world is taken as it really is. You advance your cause at all costs, screw them before they screw you, always mistrust, always press advantage.
Someone named, I believe, Omar Khoury was quoted to me. He said that, "Realists tend to treat political power as separate from, and predominant over, morality, ideology and other social and economic aspects of life."
Isn't that special. But that's realism.
Anything else, anything besides the pursuit of power above all else and for its own sake is "idealism."
By international relations standards, the default human view, the unsignified signifier, the wellspring of ideas that is itself above and separate from ideology, is a view that can only be described as a blueprint for being a completely irredeemable bastard.
This is what the Serious People of our political elite call being realistic.
The justification is that of course, they would do to you what you're going to do to them. This is the bromide that gives the intolerable the air of the inevitable.
I somehow doubt that this way of thinking has stayed within the confines of the foreign policy contingent.
The Easter Bunny
In my view, non-ideological perspectives are the Easter Bunny. They don't exist.
Neuroscience somewhat backs me up on this.
An ideology is an emotional weighting, a hierarchy, of means and ends. It's a decision tree of sorts, as well as a map of predicted outcomes.
Everyone assigns value to methods and outcomes, and even if that value doesn't fit exactly into a publicly understood belief system, that doesn't mean they haven't gone through an emotional process of determining those values they do have.
Medical imaging of the brain during the decision-making process is fairly conclusive on the predominance of emotion in choosing outcomes, and the scientists who work in this field are on solid ground in saying that ...
... In fact, people who lack emotions because of brain injuries often have difficulty making decisions at all, notes [neuroscientist Antonio Damasio of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.] The brain stores emotional memories of past decisions, and those are what drive people's choices in life, he suggests. "What makes you and me 'rational' is not suppressing our emotions, but tempering them in a positive way," he says.
Who could be more impartial, more logical, than people who are physically incapable of emotion? The idea tempts me to fond memories of hours whiled away watching Mr. Spock on Star Trek. Yet emotionless people in real life can barely make decisions at all.
A study to which Damasio contributed noted the failure to learn to avoid loss in subjects with damaged amygdalas, a region of the brain that's heavily involved in governing emotions, and thus in valuing reward over punishment, gain over loss.
That's the behavior of people who don't make decisions from emotion, from having emotion give rise to ideas about what they should prefer.
It isn't hyper-rational focus, it's paralysis. It isn't seeking after power, it's indifference.
It's that friend you dread going out to eat with because it takes half an hour to wrangle out of them the tiniest hint of what they want to eat, squared.
This is not the behavior profile of members of Congress. I mean, I'm no Bill Frist, but I don't think that Congress is collectively suffering a very specfic type of brain damage. They seem to have a few functional amygdalas between them.
As Obama himself said this last week, they have strong opinions over there in the Senate.
Default
The political realist would have us believe that human nature is basically uncooperative and backstabbing.
This is simply untrue, so I can only regard it as an effort to normalize antisocial deviancy.
Most people, all around the world, spend most of their time cooperating. The proof is that we don't all live like bears, seeking each other out only to mate, raising children for the minimum possible time, and existing in perpetual conflict and antagonism under all other circumstances where we can't avoid each other.
That's how a species of uncooperative animals acts; they're always at war with the entire world, including every other member of their kind.
There are, to date, no bear societies.
You could look at a different animal, like wolves. They can cooperate with between one and 30 other wolves sufficiently to maintain a small society. Chimpanzee societies are a little larger on average, with maybe a few dozen individuals, while even human beings who live as foragers have societies composed of up to 2,200 individuals.
We rank high on the cooperation scales for large mammals. Our largest cities, where millions of individuals live together, would completely fall apart if 'realism' were in fact the normal means of approaching all our dealings with each other. Families and friendships would be impossible to maintain, no one would be able to stand the onslaught. Most people aren't criminals, even when the police aren't watching.
It is in fact extremely hard to make people commit the ultimate of antisocial acts, murder, and the method for doing so usually involves taking young, excitable male humans and destroying in them aspects of the social conditioning imparted by nearly every human family.
(An international relations afficionado reading this is probably screaming, 'You think people are basically good! Idealist! Idealist!', right about now. Erm, sort of, or at least not antisocial. Or we couldn't have societies. F*ing d'oh!)
Environment
I do love reading Malcolm Gladwell, he never fails to impress. He's also made the persuasive case in his book, The Tipping Point, that a very great deal of bad behavior can be attributed to environmental cues.
Backed up by social science case studies, including the very large experiment in 'Broken Windows' theory in New York, Gladwell notes that much petty crime and bad behavior respond positively to cues of cleanliness and well-functioning infrastructure.
Things, I'd note, indicating a high degree of cooperation in the collective enterprise.
People (somewhat smartly) cooperate less when their environment tells them that whatever they do, they aren't going to get anything good out of it.
So I might tend to come down in the 'it's the culture' camp by inclination. It's just that I don't feel such absolutism is warranted.
Among all those cooperative individuals, there are still parasites who use other people's natural tendency to be agreeable and seek each other's approval in order to take unfair advantage. Cruel, manipulative and endlessly greedy, they seek approval they'll never be satisfied by because they know that most approval they do get is based on fictions. Not the best circumstances in life, the most opportunity, fortunate genetics, nothing seems to improve what ails them.
Some people are just jerks. Maybe they'd be more suited to living like bears, though they're probably a little too used to wearing clothes and enjoying entertainment produced by others to take that plunge. I'm not going to generalize their damage out to the whole of society as a realist might, but jerks are a fact of life.
And what else am I supposed to think of people who go to work in the clean comfort of the Capitol buildings, surrounded by polite, well-dressed people, provided with good salaries and fine health care, who then go on to approve of crimes against the social compact that most ordinary people would feel transgressive even to consider participating in?
These are some pampered m*f*ers, and they have so little mercy and decency towards their fellow citizens that I can barely understand how they aren't wracked constantly by shame and guilt. But evidence indicates that they aren't, usually indicating some powerful rationalizing. They know just as much as I do, and probably more, about the harm their actions cause and yet they go ahead because they have a story they tell themselves that makes it okay. Perhaps that we'd all do the same thing if we were in their shoes.
Maybe they should join vampire bat colonies for practice with a more managable population size before experimenting on cooperating with a nation of around 300 million.
Guilt
Still, I'm not Congress' mom or dad. (Thank God!) It's not my own, personal fault when they fail to meet minimum standards of humanity expected of street vendors, retail managers, baristas, accountants, teachers, stay-at-home parents, web developers, farmers, machinists, etc. (Maybe not credit company executives and hedge fund managers.)
They fail the tests of humanity passed every day by the typical soldier or police officer. A person who has, let's not forget, been trained in both cases and with great difficulty to kill other people and yet can remain considerate and conscientious.
And it's not my fault, I didn't make them that way.
I understand the importance and the power of the 'make them do it' dynamic, but that only worked between Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson because Johnson wanted to pass the Civil Rights Act. Johnson was begging King to give him an excuse to act according to his natural inclination.
Yet with the election just passed, Congress already has its 'excuse' to do the right thing on torture, to address the impacts of the economic and foreclosure crisis devastating communities all over the country. They need no excuse to get their fellow citizens the same good health care that they have.
Those things are popular. They're what the public wants, because we, too, would like to enjoy some of the security in our basic needs that members of Congress have in abundance.
The time is ripe for anyone who wants to act in accordance with the public interest to do so, nothing stands in their way.
So it's just sodding infuriating that even under these circumstances, their failures are somehow our responsibility for not sending enough emails or making enough phone calls. I'm having none of it. That isn't my guilt to bear, nor yours, unless you're one of a handful of 'moderate' Senators or Blue Dog representatives.
Responsibility
Madison was surely right that if we were all angels, we'd have no need of a government. It is therefore my responsibility in a democracy to try and ensure that the government sucks less, to pay attention to it.
It's necessary to do my part (which will always be small, and no less necessary thereby) to push towards a better society, to give a damn and encourage others to do the same.
That's the proper work of a citizen and it's important.
Yet work based on an unsound premise will get poor results. I can't help but think that the premises common to much organizing, such as that sufficient volume of response is enough to sway any legislator, that legislators can exist in a moldable state of blank-slated un-principle (a Schroedinger's Rep, if you will), that legislators really want to side with people they've demonstrated nothing but contempt for (via), well, I have little confidence in it.
I understand wanting to rally the troops and fight off despair, convince people to come back and try again another day. We need to have those good ideas prepared at all times for the right opportunity.
But something seems wrong with the current picture and I just don't think that it's the committed citizens who carried our Democratic leadership to office and who have continued to organize following the election. If our elected officials don't know what the people want by now, they just haven't been listening. |
