<http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/08/int04045.html
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Of course, we have no choice but to try and reverse - to whatever extent possible - the perceptual misdirect Frank describes. The alternative is to accept life in a barrel of crap in which the level of crap rises higher and higher while the barrel tumbles down the caldera of a volcano into a magma flow. To the truly evil or the unsexily S and M-esque this might be a bit of a fun ride but it's clearly unacceptable to non-fans of crap barrel rides to a sudden heat death.
So we have work to do. Yes, so much work.
Still, I find myself remembering something I heard several years ago during a conference on the prospects for artificial intelligence. One of the speakers, quoting an AI theorist, stated that although the goal was to develop devices that exhibited some machine version of what we believe to be our crowning glory - intelligence, loosely defined to include not only intellect but also distinct personality, styles of emoting and behaviors trained by culture - it "remains to be seen whether this thing we value so highly is, in fact, a successful adaptation."
At the time I didn't understand this. If ever there was a successful evolutionary adaptation, intelligence is surely it I thought. But now I'm not so sure. We're easily distracted and easily led astray. We're always only a generation or so away from losing whatever gains we've made. We're terrible at convincing one another of things via debate and rational argumentation, we spin our wheels in truly bizarre ways as fixations, preoccupations, neuroses and other mind-formed maladies cloud our judgment and prevent us from seeing the whole. We even act - quite often as Frank points out - against our self interest out of devotion to our fixations, mis-perceptions and so on.
I do not believe - though I might be wrong - that ants, for example, face these sorts of challenges to the persistence of time worn ant styles of organization and existence.
Ants may go extinct because of habitat destruction or over predation or something else but never, we can confidently say, because they acted against their self interest in pursuit of some ideal (cue to someone who'll quote a study about the self-destroying ants of Thailand...or something).
Now that I think of it, it seems to me amending human cognitive habits to be more rational (not coolly logical, like a sci-fi android, just more easily correctable by a consideration of new information) is the goal of classical Buddhism and the reason why Brian Dauth consistently puts Buddhist concepts on the table explaining their usefulness to progressive political discourse.
Buddhism's a tough sell to many in this audience - even as a philosophical system worthy of study - so it seems to be an unappreciated offering for the most part; more a target for arrows, darts, beer bottles and empty gestures of left tough guy-i-tude ("take your superstition and shove it!" some lefty gangsta shouted) than a seriously considered point of view.
But that's a digression.
...
And, enough amateur cognitive theorizing.
This excerpt from the Frank interview sums up the challenge neatly:
BuzzFlash: Your book is marvelous, because as a reader I feel that even though I disagree with the pitchfork rebellion and everything about it, that these are basically decent people. They aren’t evil. They’re being manipulated, perhaps, by evil people. You describe one guy who works as a bottler on an assembly line, and he led the anti-abortion movement in his spare time.
Thomas Frank: The first I’d heard about this guy was I read a denunciation of him on page one of the local newspaper, an editorial calling him names. And I thought: Wow, that’s amazing. Who is this guy? He turns out to be a mine worker at a bottling plant.
BuzzFlash: He basically created the anti-abortion movement in Kansas, which led to the takeover of the Republican Party by the pitchfork rebellion. He’s just this working-class guy who was on a mission.
Thomas Frank: In some ways it’s a very inspiring story, and it’s the kind of thing that you just don’t hear on the left any more. It’s the sort of story I’ve been looking for all my life.
BuzzFlash: You don’t agree with what this guy goes for, but you admire his gumption and his tenacity.
Thomas Frank: Absolutely. It’s the very thing that I’ve been looking for all my life and I finally find it. And by God, it’s the people that I disagree with the most.
BuzzFlash: Shouldn’t that tell the Democrats something in terms of motivation and populism? I mean, this guy is a working-class populist for the right. He had an idea. He believed in it. He went around the state organizing in his free time, all the time supporting himself as an assembly-line bottler.
Thomas Frank: That’s what the Democrats used to be about 50-60 years ago. That’s who they were. That’s who the labor movement was in this country. If we don’t recover that, I think the Democrats are done for as a party. They have to be able to tell stories like that of their own.
As for the portrait of Kansas, there’s a sort of Hieronymus Bosch thing going on -- that’s another image. As you say, I admire their tenacity and how hard they worked and the effects that they’ve achieved. But those effects have been to make life worse for themselves and people like them. There’s one state legislator that I interviewed, a woman who is from a very working-class walk of life. She sort of made headlines around the country for saying that whatever amendment it was that gave women the right to vote, that this was a bad idea, that this shouldn’t have had to happen.
BuzzFlash: She’s a happy grandmother and very happy to be subservient to her husband.
Thomas Frank: She’s a state legislator who thinks that women voting is probably not a good idea; she denied ever saying this when I talked to her. It’s controversial there that she says she didn’t say it. The newspapers quoted her saying it. But, yes, she’s a state legislator, votes all the time, and she thinks that it’s a bad idea that women have the right to vote. That’s what I’m talking about -– Hieronymus Bosch. A crazy world, that nightmare world.
BuzzFlash: You end on a sort of despairing note -– that this is not going to get better. It’s sort of self-immolating since the victimhood will continue because of the cultural values that the Republican leaders, Bush and Cheney type, use to manipulate these people. It’s like the war on terror. There’s no end, so you just keep stoking the coals. And you keep spiraling down economically as you see in terms of family farms and industry.
Thomas Frank: And as long as that anger –- you know, these people should be angry. They have a right to be angry about their situation in life, and they have a right to be angry about the culture. What’s funny is that the Republicans supply them a way of being angry about these things that doesn’t fix the problem –- it just makes the problem worse. But it’s very satisfying. They get to listen to their favorite radio show, tune into Fox News. Get very, very angry. Get out and mobilize, go marching down the street, and then propose solutions that only make the problem worse.
BuzzFlash: Or there no solutions to the perceived problem?
Thomas Frank: It’s a cycle that feeds on itself. And the only way it’s going to be interrupted is for the Democrats and the labor movement or somebody like that to bring back the old-school populism, which, as we discussed, that’s going to be very difficult. I wish that would happen, but it’s going to be very difficult. And so it feeds on itself and gets worse.
......
Yup.
Good luck, talking monkeys.
.d.