Rachel Maddow has gotten a lot of attention for her Thursday interview with GOP operative Tim Phillips, head of Americans for Prosperity, and deservedly so. But I want to focus on one specific aspect of the interview, which I see as deeply revealing. In the passage I've transcribed below, Phillips vividly illustrates a kay aspect of sequential thinking, one of three types of adult reasoning in a typology I've discussed repeatedly over the years. The basic outline goes like this:
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.
I first wrote about this typology, from the 1988 book Reason, Ideology and Politics by Shawn Rosenberg in a 2005 MyDD diary, "Terri Schiavo: We're Too Smart!" One of the most significant additional aspect of sequential reasoning that I highlighted in that diary was this:
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?)
As will be seen below, intentionally shaped concepts that are "synthetic without being analytic" are powerful rhetorical weapons. You pack as much of an argument as possible into them, so that the argument can't be critically analyzed. Such concepts are not made for illumination, much less for critical inquiry, they are made for attack.
The concept in this example is "the courage to lead in the war on terror," and it was used to attack Georgia Senator Max Cleland, a Vietnam Veteran who lost both legs and one arm in Vietnam, in the 2002 Senate race. The man running against him, Saxby Chambliss, was a chickenhawk who stayed safely home. I'm not sure how consciously this was done at the time--I do remember other aspects of the ad and it's genesis--but the entire defense of the ad offered below revolves around insisting on that "the courage to lead in the war on terror" be treated as an indivisible concept that cannot be broken down into parts, and hence cannot be taken as an attack on Cleland's courage in general, nor can it be taken to imply that he's a coward. (At one point Phillips says, "Look, I'm not going to parse words," as if simply looking at what he was saying and asking what it means were some sort of underhanded liberal dirty trick.) Naturally, no one hearing or seeing the ad would think that way--which just goes to show how useful this sort of thinking can be in the hands of people who know much, much better than they pretend. The transcribed portion begins around 2:40 (transcript on the flip):
It's important to them [the American people] to know if Palin can handle herself in an environment that isn't controlled and sanitized by campaign image makers and message mavens. Maybe she can, maybe she can't. As far as Wallace is concerned, it's none of their -- or your -- business.
Remember back in the Dark Ages of mid-August when being able to give a good speech was grounds for being dismissed as unqualified?
Looks like McCain was right: we do have to catch up with history!
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.
"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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