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In Part 1, "The Truth-Free Zone, Part 1: Truth And Lies Switch Places", I laid out a set of three closely-connected ideas, in response to an earlier post by Matt . These were:
- Truth and lies have switched places: Lies continually repeated function like the truth, while truths that go unuttered function as if they were lies. A prime example of this in the 2000 election was the conventional wisdom that Gore was a serial liar, while Bush was a man of great integrity-a straight-talker.
- Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths. A prime example of this is the so-called "war on terror"-something that makes absolutely no sense, if you stop and think about it.
- Verbal formulations are used that are inherently non-sensical and cannot be used rationally-at least in the existing total environment. "Supporting the troops" is a prime example of this.
Part 1 ("The Truth-Free Zone, Part 1: Truth And Lies Switch Places") explored the first idea. Part 2 ("Not Even Wrong: The Truth-Free Zone, Part 2") explored the second one. Now it's time to examine the third one:
"Supporting the Troops" As An Inherently Deceitful Formulation
Sending soldies off to die in a worse than meaningness, counterproductive war is "supporting the troops." Trying to end that counterproductive war, and bring them home alive is "not supporting the troops." Sending them off to war without adequate body armor, medical care, and R&R is also "supporting the troops." Trying to ensure that they do have adequate body armor, medical care, and R&R is not "supporting the troops," it may even be "not supporting the troops." If they come back badly injured mentally, giving them bogus discharges for previously undiagnosed "personality disorders" is "supporting the troops." Trying to stop this heinous practice is not "supporting the troops," and even, very likely "not supporting the troops."
In sum, "supporting the troops" is supporting whatever Bush wants to do. But we don't say, "supporting whatever Bush wants to do." We say "supporting the troops," instead, because Bush has a long, long history of hiding his failings behind other people's reputations and virtue
Clearly, something very odd is going on here, and while many bloggers have commented on this over the years, I'm not aware of anyone who I think has fully nailed it. I'm not going to nail it either, because I think it might well take a 300-page book to do it justice, but I am going to add something useful, I hope.
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| Identity Politics
First off, I think what we're seeing is primarily an expression of identity politics. The yellow ribbons are the big giveaway on this. In Vietnam, millions of families had loved ones who served in Vietnam. It didn't just touch folks in military base towns, or folks inner city neighborhoods where recruiters set out on months-long campaigns. It touched folks everywhere. And so when I see a yellow ribbon on an SUV, I know the odds are very, very good that the driver doesn't know anyone who is risking their life for the sake of his low MPGs. The ribbon is, generally, not about someone they know. It is about them. And it is certainly not about some responsibility they feel. It is about a show of faux responsibility.
In case you hadn't guessed, I hate those yellow ribbons. If I were a drinking man, I'd surely have a string of charges against me by now. But at least they make it obvious: we are faced with a tribe of wannabes that don't really wanna be, if you know what I mean. They just want to seem to wannabe. And this is what the functionally incoherent "I support the troops" rhetoric is all about.
It's like being a sports fan, only the team is Team USA! It doesn't really matter if a sports fan can talk intelligently about "their" team. Of course there's a hard core of fandom for whom it's vitally important, and that's one big difference between sports fandom and the yellow ribbon crowd. But as anyone who's ever been to a sports or a tailgate party or even just high school can tell you, there's a huge contingent of sports fans who are utterly and totally clueless as well. They operate at the most basic level on which fandom is built: repetitive chants, group-coordinated body movements, team colors, etc. None of these is about communicating reality-based information. It is about self-expression in the service of strengthening social bonds. Which perfectly describes-at least from one angle-the way people use the expression, "I support the troops."
Angle #2: Sequential Thinking
Related to the notion of "I support the troops" as an expression of tribal identity is a concept I've talked about before both here and at MyDD over the years. I'm referring to Shawn Rosenberg's (no relation) three-fold schema of adult reasoning:
- Sequential thinkers reason "by tracking the world," recognize regularities in sequences of events, but have no abstract understanding of cause and effect. The world they perceive is a world of appearances that has very little organization to it beyond the recurrence of sequences.
- Linear thinkers understand cause and effect, limited to a one-direction, one-cause/one-effect model. The world they perceive has logical order and structure, but the structure is invariably hierarchical, causality flows top-down, and the world is divided neatly into cause and effect.
- Systematic thinkers understand multi-faceted, multi-linear cause and effect, with mutual cause-and-effect relationships between different elements. The world they perceive is primarily a world of systems and relationships, rather than objects.
Sequential reasoning is also commonly referrred to associational reasoning. Things are connected together by some association, which may be entirely arbitrary. Logic plays no role whatsoever.
In addition, here are some further characteristics of sequential thinking:
- The notion of causality, e.g. that events are caused by necessary and sufficient preconditions, does not play a salient role in the sequential mind. Events transpire, without much interpretation of how they come about. The attention is occupied by one item at a time, and there is little spontaneous effort to relate them to other items or to a general context.
- The sequential thinker is not really aware that the world may appear differently to other people, and he or she has therefore a limited ability to take the perspective of others.
- Sequential thinking involves conceptual relations that "are synthetic without being analytic. They join events together but the union forged is not subject to any conceptual dissection." [Direct quote from Rosenberg's book.] Because such relations are non-rational, there is nothing rational one can say or do to change them. (Sound familiar?)
- But they can change, Rosenberg explains, based on changing appearances. These relationships "are mutable," they can either be extended, based on "share[d] recognized overlapping events" (connections provided by Limbaugh, O'Lielly, etc.) or changed, when the sequence does not play out as expected. Because it is a pre-logical mode of thought, "the relations of sequential thought engender expectations, but do not create subjective standards of normal or necessary relations between events." People who think this way can be quite unbothered by a lack of consistency.
I want to draw particular attention to the third item. The various uses of "support the troops" phraseology are like a group poster-child photomontage for "conceptual relations that 'are synthetic without being analytic.'" People who comprehend the world at this level can't even imagine what they are missing. The very notion of logical incoherence makes no sense if you have no reference frame of logical coherence to compare it to. And that's precisely the situation they find themselves in, although they may not realize it.
You see, they can watch or listen to someone-such as Limbaugh, O'Reilly, even Bush-who acts out a vignette of engaging in logical analysis, and they will take this enactment as a defining example of what logical analysis is. All that is necessary is that it be presented as "logical analysis" and the true believer sequential thinker will accept it as such. With misguided models of logical analysis in place, such people are doubly protected from the real thing. First, they lack the necessary cognitive development to actually understand what it is. Second, they already think they know what it is, and thus they have no interest in looking into it, should the matter ever come up.
I said that this perspective was related to the notion of "I support the troops" as an expression of tribal identity. The reason for this is that Rosenberg argues this level of thinking is congruent with growing up in a tribal social setting, or something roughly analogous to it-a relatively simple social environment in which complex, cross-cutting loyalties do not play a significant role. The use of sequential ideas both reflects and helps promote a social environment in which complex loyalties simply are not possible. Which means that if you are not blindly loyal, then the only alternative is that you are a traitor.
Coda
I think I've only scratched the surface here, in response to the question that Matt asked. But I hope that in doing so I've kept that question alive, and encouraged others to continue the discussion. We are clearly not operating according to the rules of normal discourse as it has develeposed over the course of the last several centuries, especially since the 18th Century Enightenment. We need to do a lot of work in order to understand how and why that is, and what can be done about it. Hopefully, these three diaries have helped spur poeple's interst in that direction. |
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