Rational Philosophy

On letting go.

Hillary Clinton seems to have been finding it difficult to pick her campaign strategy, vacillating between a softer, less strident tone and what has come across as a somewhat nasty tactic of questioning the qualifications and sincerity of Barack Obama. People differ on whether she should have been more ruthless from the start, or less ruthless all the way through; but all seem to agree that picking one would have been better than flipping back and forth.

After conducting extensive research through carefully constructed experiments, Dr. Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at MIT, has concluded, not surprisingly, that people like to keep their options open. But, more surprisingly, Dr. Ariely thinks that we like to keep them open not necessarily because we feel we need them, but because we don’t like to let go of them. Dr. Ariely found that his test subjects worked hard to keep their virtual doors from disappearing, even when they knew there was no cost to making them reappear.

No matter how carefully arrived at, the results of research can be misinterpreted. The test subjects can’t tell us why, on a fundamental level, they wanted to keep the doors from disappearing, so this becomes a matter of inference. But an incredibly valuable aspect of Dr. Ariely’s research seems to be that it gives us a tool we can use when making choices.

Once we are aware that we will be tempted to keep our options open, even when logic tells us that this is detrimental, we will be more likely to trust our logic and let go of unproductive options.

No one would accuse Hillary Clinton of being stupid. I am sure she understands objectively that it would be better, or would have been better, to pick one style of campaign and stick to it. But she was tempted to hold on to all her cards. Whereas, if she’d had the benefit of the insights from Dr. Ariely’s experiments, she may have been able to make the tough call and pick one strategy or the other. (Interestingly, this inability to let a door close seems to be the Achilles Heel of much political decision making. I wonder whether it played a role in Clinton’s initial support for and later distancing from the Iraq war?)

Another example from today’s news: The NY Times reports that after a review of treatments for prostate cancer, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality could not determine which of those treatments to recommend. The article and those interviewed describe this circumstance as “scary,” “troubling,” and “disappointing.” But, as the article points out, in the absence of a prefered treatment, practitioners tend to select the treatment that they most ascribe to or feel most comfortable with. The Agency doesn’t say that any of the treatments being employed don’t have merit. And, in the absence of better data, it seems appropriate that doctors employ techniques they’re happy with. One can’t argue that it would be better to have better treatment data, but in the absence of better data, selecting the most appealing option and letting go of the others, seems a rational choice.

As a more mundane case in point I am put in mind of grocery shopping. A trip to the supermarket for a few items can take me several times as long as a visit to the bodega around the corner, just because in the supermarket I feel obliged to weigh my options. Modern life presents us with so many choices that letting go becomes a more and more valuable technique in time management.

I would present more examples, but I have to stop somewhere…

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

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On causality, with specific reference to the hatred of Hillary Clinton, and muscle fatigue.

When I first read Stanley Fish’s pieces about those who love or live to despise Hillary Clinton — All You Need Is Hate, and A Calumny A Day To Keep Hillary Away — I resisted the temptation to respond to Fish’s comments. After all, wasn’t he standing up for rationalism and logic? Wasn’t he speaking out against the rude jibes of the senseless masses? And didn’t Hillary deserve his defense?

But in the end I came to realize that I should respond. Again, I found in Fish’s purportedly rational column an absence of thoughtful inquiry. Couched in the language of rationalism, his analysis bashed the Hillary bashers without offering up a viable explanation for the phenomenon. Perhaps by understanding the reason for the hatred we can better counter it. “Perhaps nothing accounts for it,” Fish says, and again I feel myself confronting the same kind of lazy thinking that brought Fish to claim that the humanities as a field of study serves no purpose.

Does rootless ill-will toward Hillary engender the bashing, engendering more bashing? Or does the ill-will result from some other cause, with a side-effect being the bashing?

Research toward the causes of enlarged hearts has yielded interesting information about the way in which muscles fatigue. Scientists have found that when we use our muscles to the point of fatigue, they leak calcium. The calcium leaks cause weakness and stimulate an enzyme that eats away at the muscle fiber. When given a substance that blocks the calcium leaks, mice can swim and run further without experiencing muscle fatigue.

In considering whether there could be value in blocking calcium leaks to enhance athletic performance, Dr. Ligget, a heart-failure researcher says, “We have to ask whether it would be prudent to be circumventing this mechanism.”

Hear, hear. If we give evolution any credit we would have to think that creatures with muscles, ourselves included, experience muscle fatigue for good reason. The cause of muscle fatigue is not calcium leaks, it is the valuable feedback mechanism that has evolved to prevent us from pushing ourselves beyond exhaustion. (Being a person whose muscles tend to fatigue quickly, on the other hand, I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on some of those mice pills…)

Back to Hillary Clinton. Why didn’t Fish want to explore the possibility that the Hillary bashing is an end result of some other phenomenon? Clearly, this would bring him onto thin ice. He would need to confront the idea that perhaps there was a cause for it, whether it was rational or not, defensible or not. Effects must have a cause, after all.

Fear and anger cause hatred. With Hillary Clinton, I think the likely cause is fear, whereas with George Bush (Fish’s counter-foil) the cause is anger.

Why would we fear Hillary Clinton? Here are three reasons.
1. She has demonstrated ruthlessness.

2. She doesn’t hide her sense of superiority well.

3. She strives but fails to demonstrate that she is not ideologically rigid.

We find it difficult to express these fears rationally, in part because each of them has a perfectly acceptable and reasonable corollary — commitment, brilliance, and consistency. But we do fear the ruthless, those who hold themselves up as superior, and those who are rigid.
For good measure, here is why we would be angry with Bush.

1. He’s lazy when he has work to do.

2. He makes life and death decisions based on an arbitrary will to exert his power.

3. He’s ignorant but touts his sway over us.

What’s not to be angry at?

Sure, Hillary Clinton is committed, brilliant, and consistent. And Bush is a life loving, god fearing everyman. But, when we’re talking about the country’s highest office, we have good reason to fear the former and be angry with the latter.

Every effect begins with a cause. Just as our muscles fatigue to prevent us from overtaxing our bodies, so, too, we lash out with seemingly irrational hatred and bias when we fear or resent a greater ill. And, just as it would be good to spare our bodies the fatigue and wasting that comes from calcium leaks, so, too, it would be good to spare society the vitriol of hateful criticism by recognizing the onset of symptoms and directing our feelings of fear and anger toward a more constructive end.

On senators, singers, and security officials. Or, judging books by their tables of contents.

With Mitt Romney’s last flip, his decision to take himself out of the presidential race, it seems a safe bet that we’ll have a senator in the White House (unless Bloomberg decides to run). Something of a phenomenon, this likely senate coup has people asking why senators, despite running often, haven’t often won their bids for the country’s highest office. A Times piece raises several possibilities — the baggage of voting records, the Washington-insider stigma, the lack of executive experience, the relative comfort of the senate. But, being forever on the lookout for an inherently rational explanation, I wonder whether something about wanting and winning a senate race doesn’t take significantly different qualifications from winning a presidential bid.

The senate is a buffer. The constitution encourages the senate to check the powers of other branches of the Federal Government (e.g., by ratifying presidential appointments).

Rationally then, those who seek a position in the senate (unless they have higher goals —Hillary Clinton, I think, viewed the senate as a stepping stone on her way back to the White House) seek to exert a moderating and deliberative influence. That’s very different from someone who sets his or her sights on leading a state as governor or leading the country as president.

But, as has been demonstrated in the current race, while being a senator doesn’t qualify you as a presidential contender, it doesn’t disqualify you either. Clinton may have ducked through the low gate of the senate on her way to a presidential bid, but voters have decided that senators Obama and McCain have qualifications for more than checking and balancing.

As for disqualifications, Grammy-nominated recording artist, Ledisi, reveals that she had about given up on her career after hearing repeatedly that she didn’t have the right look and the right sound to make it. It’s good to hear that in the music industry creating music that people want to listen to can still qualify one for success. (On a personal note, and if you’ll excuse the shameless plug, I was bouyed up yesterday to learn that nerdlitter, a music blog, selected a song of mine amongst its top thirty for 2007.)

And the story of government official Julie Myers who disciplined an employee for wearing an inappropriate, racially stereotyped costume had me scratching my head. The employee was counseled and forced out on leave while Julie Myers, who posed for a photograph with the man at the party after participating in awarding him the prize for the most creative costume, went on to nomination as a top ranking Homeland Security official. “I was not aware at the time of the contest that the employee disguised his skin color,” Myers wrote.

Either Myers is an idiot or a liar (or both). How she can be qualified to make decisions about immigration and deportation policy defies imagination.

Philosophically speaking, qualifications present an interesting set of concepts. A qualification begins by defining some essential skill or requirement for a given role. This immediately calls upon the concept of “that which is essential.” Very often we get into gray area over the difficulty of defining “essential.” This leads to ad hoc exceptions or exclusions.

Defining essential qualities for a leader, for instance, can be quite tricky. People lead in different ways. And people have many theories about what makes a good leader. Easier perhaps to define those qualities that disqualify a leader — like Myers being an idiot or a liar. But even being found out as a liar might not disqualify someone. Leaders lie all the time to gain strategic advantage. It’s not the lying so much as the “what” and “why” of the lying (as I explored in a post the other day).

And this perhaps brings us to the core difficulty of qualifications. When we define the essential attributes for success in a role, we find that they are necessarily recursive. To be a successful singer, the singer must be able to be successful as a singer. The singer need not necessarily even produce wonderful music (Celine Dione is a case in point).

To borrow from Beckett, ill seen, ill said, this then is the insight: Beware qualifications.

 

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On testing in.

Anya Kamenetz today makes a case for lowering the voting age to 16. This initially struck me as a ridiculous idea. But that was before Anya set out the details of her plan: “16-year-olds who want to start voting should be able to obtain an “early voting permit” from their high schools upon passing a simple civics course similar to the citizenship test.” She likens this to a driving permit granted to a young person after they’ve demonstrated that they are qualified.

In this season of political fervour, my daughter’s high school engaged the children in a voting exercise: The result? All (100%) of the children voted Democrat, and the vast majority chose Obama over Clinton. So, while my heart wants me to embrace Anya’s proposal, bless those little idealists, my head says that 16 is too young for the vote, even after getting a passing grade on a civics test.

On the other hand, requiring that voters are qualified to vote strikes me as a wonderful idea. (It reminds me of the conviction of a particularly misanthropic friend of mine that only after passing a parenting test should people be allowed to have children.) To purloin Anya’s parallel, people of all ages need to pass a driving test if they’re going to drive, so why not a voting test if they’re going to vote?  Yes, yes, I know it goes against the very premise of a democratic society, but can you argue with the logic?

The Times Editorial today makes the reverse argument. The editorial complains that the current political contest isn’t helping fix the country’s state of polarization. Obama fans are saying they won’t bother voting if he doesn’t win the nomination. Republicans miffed at McCain’s unamerican brand of conservatism are saying that they’d rather see a Democrat in the White House than see McCain there. “That is not the way democracy is supposed to work,” the Times laments.

Frankly, if Obama fans aren’t engaged enough to vote for Clinton, let them stay at home. It’s the job of the Democratic party to convince them to come out and vote (which is I think one of the points the editorial is trying to make). If Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter want a candidate who passes all their litmus tests, let them want. I for one won’t be unhappy if Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and their ilk are disenfranchised. Democracy as it exists in America today is a ramshackle, unfair, unrepresentative, incredibly flawed system for selecting leaders. If fewer people vote but those who do are less passionately partisan and better-informed, it can only improve matters.

At the risk of being helpful, I noticed something about yesterday’s voting maps. (Democratic map to the left with Obama in green; Republican map to the right with McCain in orange.) The support for Obama is pretty much the mirror image of the support for McCain. Here’s my theory: McCain will likely win the Republican nomination. Ironically, McCain’s support is strongest in traditionally Democratic strongholds (the east and west coasts) and weakest in traditionally Conservative strongholds (the middle and lower states). I would assume that Obama could hold off McCain in the Democratic strongholds if he edged out Clinton for the nomination. And he has a much better chance of picking up votes in the middle states than Clinton does. Judged by the demographics of the primary support so far, Obama then has a better chance than Clinton does of beating McCain.

Of course, if you’re a Republican you can apply the reverse logic and determine that the best way to beat Obama would be to vote for Romney. In which case, I guess you’re pretty much screwed…

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(OK, that’s one of my four lies for today.)

On lying and its uses: Rudy, McCain, Bush, and your average guy.

After Giuliani’s thankfully dismal showing in Florida, the rush to spout fibs found Giuliani and McCain vying for who could tell the biggest whopper. First Giuliani suggested that he had failed in Florida because his opponents had built up too much momentum in earlier primaries, whereas, in fact, Giuliani spent a lot of money and time in New Hampshire before retreating from that state. McCain countered with the gracious and fallacious compliment that Giuliani had “invested his heart and soul” in the race, which of course was exactly what Giuliani hadn’t done, otherwise he would have performed much better. McCain followed this up swiftly with an upper-cut of an untruth declaring that Giuliani had “conducted himself with all the qualities of the exceptional American leader he truly is.” Giuliani tried to recover with a transparent falsehood of his own; that he had run “a campaign of ideas.” But McCain, again, clearly had him beat.

On a less happy and more serious note, the editorial board of the NY Times brings our attention to the latest lies from George W. Bush. If you’re going to tell lies, I suppose that delivering them in a state of the union address endows them with a deep and lasting sense of moment and history. The Bush legacy will be in large part one of mass deception – about weapons of mass destruction, the illegal activities of the government and its agencies, and the intent and actions of Bush himself. As The Times points out, Bush’s reconciliatory rhetoric conflicts with his deeds, yet again, as he refuses to respect certain new legal provisions that would increase oversight of military contractors, their actions, and the acts of government agencies by asserting in his signing statement that these provisions step on his constitutional powers.

Bush is an inveterate and habitual liar. One can presume, by studying his behavior and his words, that he feels no remorse about his lies and that he believes the ends justify the means.

Which brings me to a recent study that finds that people admit to telling about four untruths per day and that two-thirds of those polled don’t feel guilty about lying. Now, statistics can be misleading, but in this case, as one commentor wryly observed, asking people to admit to how many lies they tell will probably result in under-reporting rather than over-reporting. (Another study lends support to this theory by finding that people underreport the number of their sexual partners unless they’re told that they’re hooked up to a lie-detector.)

The actual numbers concern me less than the philosophy of lying.

We lie, it seems, to avoid unwanted repercussions, to sway the course of events by untruth. This applies to the fib “no, you don’t sound bitter” as well as to the deception of a nation so that you can fill your cronies’ coffers. 

Essayist Harold Nicolson defined a person who tells the truth as ’someone who, when they tell a lie, is careful not to forget they have done so, and who takes infinite precautions to prevent being found out.’ This is humorous, of course, but hints at the “humanness” of lying. Surely very few people habitually tell the truth, and those that do would be considered odd and unnecessarily blunt. One generally likes to be lied to if one looks lousy or has made a fool of onesself, for instance.

Is this a distinction that helps us? Lies are OK if the person wants to be lied to.

And what about lies that avoid unreasonable conflict? If we know that someone will react unreasonably to the truth, does that justify a lie?

It seems that we get much more worked up about the lies people tell to get away with something, to avoid being held accountable for their actions, unless the accountability is unreasonable or irrational. (We like the idea of Robin Hood. And we support the concept of the resistance fighter who lies to the oppressing power.)

The intent of the lie and the legitimacy of the repercussions of the truth then seems to be far more important, rationally speaking, than the act of lying itself.

Which brings us to the concept of honesty. When we speak of honesty as a virtue, we are really speaking of the bravery that comes with telling a difficult truth, of risking the consequences. What seems to be lacking in politics today is the bravery to tell difficult truths. One by one the candidates shift positions in order to sound more appealing to the voters, or to cast shadow on an opponent. McCain has done it, Romney has done it, Clinton has done it, Obama has been accused of doing it (did he snub Hillary Clinton deliberately or unintentionally before the state of the union address?)

And I wonder if we were to be served up an honest politician, would we elect them, truth and all, or would we prefer to be lied to?

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“Today, I am not the person I was ten years ago.” Karl Svensson, a convicted murderer, told his Swedish classmates at medical school when his past caught up with him. The prestigious Karolinska Institute eventually side-stepped the unprecedented question of whether to expel Mr. Svensson simply because of his past criminal acts — once a neo-Nazi, apparently, Svensson’s crime had been deemed a hate crime. Instead, the institute expelled him on a technicality — he had falsified his high school records by substituting his assumed name for his birth name of Hellekant.  The story raises two very interesting questions: 1. Can we change? and 2. Should a person who has committed this kind of crime be allowed to practice medicine (or another similar profession)?

The New York Times editorial board has endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate. Its opinions supporting the endorsement of Clinton for the Democratic and McCain for the Republican vote make fascinatingly candid reading. The Times’ opinion of Clinton again raises the question of whether someone, fundamentally, can change. It left me wondering whether Clinton has changed, and, if so, whether she has changed enough to overcome the disadvantages in her character that have revealed themselves so often in the past — her divisiveness and “I know best” intellectual hardness. The Times uses the example of her “famously disastrous foray” into trying to solve the healthcare issue to support its premise that she has changed and now displays a new understanding of what’s to be done.

I’ve written before about our capacity to change as it relates to the concept of free will and personal development. Being conscious allows us to choose between options, and to select options that may be difficult, unattractive or counter to our immediate instinct. Through this reasoning we can see that it is possible to develop new levels of awareness and new patterns of behavior, to make choices different from those we would have made in the past.

But if we examine the concept of behavioral change we find a composite concept. And we tend to conflate and confuse its constituent parts: When I ask, “can we change?” I could really be asking two separate questions. The first: “Can someone become altered such that the same impulses will lead to different immediate responses?” And the second: “Can someone become altered such that the same impulses will lead to different eventual responses?”

Ten years go, in an angry confrontation, Svensson reacted violently. His immediate response was to be urged to violence. And he acted on this immediate response by lashing out.

To say that Svensson’s immediate response may have changed, we would have to believe that he would not feel urged to violence if faced with a similar confrontation ten years on. I would say that we have very little reason to believe that Svensson or anyone could change in this way simply through reflection and remorse. Our immediate, instinctual response is pre-conscious, and therefore isn’t subject to conscious influence.

On the other hand, to say that Svenssion’s eventual response may have changed seems a much more reasonable and rational conclusion. Svensson, still feeling a violent urge, could now have a modified conscious response and resist the desire to lash out.

Svensson’s classmates were split over whether he should be allowed to stay on. Those that supported him said that he’d paid his debt and, by inference, should be trusted to have changed his conscious response to confrontation. But we can infer that those of his classmates who still distrusted him understood and feared that his immediate response to confrontation (or other stress) could and indeed would still be violent.

Should a violent killer, rehabilitated in his conscious actions, be trusted in the medical profession? To answer that question we would need to understand the degree and range of provocation that Svensson may react violently to, and the strength of his newfound ability to keep his emotions in check. In the absence of reliable ways and means to measure these variables, it would seem reasonable for society not to want Svensson providing medical care. Svensson has rights of freedom, but it also seems reasonable for society to say that he has forgone some of those rights (such as an unfettered choice of career) by his past actions.

So to Hillary Clinton: Although the circumstances are very different, we are confronted with the same logical argument. As I understand it, the instinctual fervor of Clinton’s liberal ideological passion inspired and limited her original approach to tackling the healthcare issue. Her newfound understanding means that she’s better able to consciously override her immediate divisive response. But the concern remains that she would encounter similar instinctual responses in a broad range of political situations.

As we’ve seen with Bush and as tends to happen to those in high office, the stresses and demands of the job certainly don’t make it easier to overcome one’s immediate responses. As the Times’ opinion points out, Clinton has been succumbing to these impulses during her campaigning, underscoring the perspective that we have reason to doubt that she has truly learned to keep her immediate responses in check.

Obama, on the other hand, reveals a more promising character for non-devisive leadership. This then narrows the gap between the candidates that the Times claims to exist, and perhaps even makes Obama the more logical choice. It becomes a matter of character versus experience. I for one would choose character every time.

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On sexism, racism and any other ism: Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, Gloria Steinem; the importance of drawing distinctions, and the unfortunate side-effect of bigotry.

Gloria Steinem’s Op-Ed yesterday — “Women Are Never Front-Runners” — shows that even a fervent anti-ismist can get tangled up in her own knitting. Ms. Steinem laments that Hillary Clinton faces an uphill struggle convincing voters that she’s a viable leader just because she’s a woman. Steinem contrasts Clinton’s task with Obama’s, arguing that Clinton has it harder. Although Steinem presents no evidence, I wouldn’t try to argue that she’s wrong. Unfortunately though, her thesis swells with the rhetoric of bias, ending with what’s supposed to be a rallying cry against isms ‘We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”’ And this would demonstrate lack of bias how?

Human beings have developed an extraordinary ability to draw distinctions and categorize the world around them. Consciousness requires that we do so. The first glimmer of consciousness rests on the awareness that there is a self and a non-self. From this primary and fundamental distinction we begin to separate the world into up and down, in and out, hot and cold, blue and pink, soft and hard… This ability has been honed to a fine point because it has provided an evolutionary benefit. The better able we were to draw distinctions, the more skilled we became at identifying safe foods to eat, suitable materials for clothes and tools and shelter, etc.

In another story today, brewers pursuit of ever hoppier beers and consumers pursuit of ever more gratifying flavor, gives an example of just how far we’re prepared to go along the road of differentiation and distinction. The whole enterprise of humankind rests to a large degree on the striving for new distinctions.

But the faculty to draw distinctions, while it can be trained or enhanced, is fundamentally indifferent to the nature of those distinctions. In other words, although some of us can’t distingush Bach from Hayden we can all distinguish a jackhammer from a songbird, a pen from a pencil, and our own cell-phone ring tone from everyone else’s. We draw distinctions so naturally that they become easy pegs for our murkier judgments.

This is where isms come in. When we derive arbitrary judgments from a characteristic, no matter how well distinguished that characteristic may be, we fall into the trap of the ism.

By all accounts, Hillary Clinton is a woman. Identifiying her as a woman is not an ism. Saying she’ll make a better or worse leader because she’s a woman is an ism. There’s no rational basis for making such a connection. (We can easily find many examples of both men and women leaders who are wonderful and many who are awful.)

To get to an ism from a distinction we have to apply flawed logic and reasoning, or blind ourselves to logic and reason. Racism in all its forms, for example, requires the racist to suspend his or her faculty of reason. But why do we do that?

Isms are born of ignorance or fear. Either we are too ignorant to understand that our judgments are flawed, or we are afraid of some group that’s different from us, or of losing our power over them, or of being forced to recognize their equality.

The antidote to isms is reason and logic, persistenly, patiently, blindly, and tirelessly applied.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

PS. Of the IPAs I’ve tasted, my personal favorite is Smuttynose IPA. Highly recommended.

In writing yesterday’s post as I waxed on about Bush as a puppet I made a mistake. I realized this last night in the lucid wakefulness that comes between dreams. I allowed my reason to be swept away by my infatuation with the argument I was making. I made unsubstantiated and in some respects improbable claims about the degree to which Bush has been manipulated in his presidency.

I both gave Bush less credit than I truly believe he deserves (for being his own person) and correspondingly more credit than he deserves (for not being responsible for his administration’s blunders). Doubtless the truth lies somewhere between my accusations that Bush is no more than a stooge, and the opposite possibility that he’s largely steered the political and ideological course of his presidency.

I feel better now I have that off my chest.

The title of a New York Times piece on Obama’s Illinois State voting record misleads the reader: “Obama’s Vote in Illinois Was Often Just ‘Present.’” By using the word ‘Just,’ the Times implies that the vote of ‘Present’ must be some kind of lesser vote than ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ Indeed, the piece investigates Hillary Clinton’s campaign claim that Obama’s voting record was softer than he’d like people to think. But instead the piece provides a compelling body of evidence and perfectly good rationale supporting the concept that Obama’s voting record, far from being weak, gives evidence of leadership and careful deliberation. The ‘present’ vote can imply leadership, register dissatisfaction, display a tactical approach. Statistics give the dots, joining them up requires context and detail.

So why did the New York Times choose that headline? It’s beyond me…

What do you know! I go back to the same story and the headline has been changed. “It’s Not Just ‘Ayes’ and ‘Nays’: Obama’s Votes in Illinois Echo,” it now reads. No doubt, after the story was posted, an editor spied the discrepant title and changed it.

In another story South Africa seems likely to elect Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma as its next president. As the article points out, Zuma, like most people and many great leaders, is far from perfect. Facing corruption charges and having been acquitted of raping an HIV positive woman, but admitting to having sex with her, saying she seduced him by wearing a short skirt and posing provocatively, and having also said he showered after having sex with her to reduce his likelihood of catching HIV, Zuma nevertheless seems to be popular because of his admission of human frailty rather than in spite of it.

Failure is a fact of life. Further, failure is a natural and inevitable part of existence. The path of the evolving universe, particles popping in and out of existence, gas clouds swirling, stars imploding, has been one of many unproductive paths and just a few fruitful ones. Life is the same way. The DNA of a living organism mutates blindly. Each mutation knows not what it might bring to the organism, something useful, something harmful, or something of no particular use or harm. Successful mutations we call adaptation. They are successful because they get passed on by natural selection; they hold no special quality other than the fortune of being favorably transmitted.

As human beings, however, we have the ability to conceive of success and failure, to foresee, or recognize and regret our error. It is an interesting parallel to reflect that if we recognize and face up to our errors and try to address them, we are performing our own task of natural selection and adaptation, we are mimicking life by choosing to improve ourselves.

Without our awareness of our frailty we would have no ability to effect positive change. This is why, I suspect, I feel relieved for having admitted yesterday’s failing, why my faith in the NY Times editorial process is reinforced by the change of a headline, despite the original blunder, and why South Africans recognize in Zuma, a flawed man, a leader who may have the power to effect positive change.

Paul Krugman writes today that Barak Obama is naive for believing that he can bring industry leaders and big insurance companies to the table to help reform health care. Krugman’s reasoning is both pragmatic and cynical. Obama isn’t realistic about the battle ahead, Krugman says, and isn’t listening to the populist outcry for reform. He therefore won’t win the same kind of majority as an Edwards or Clinton, who understand that people are hungry for a knock down drag out fight over health care reform and that such reform will only happen over the dead or doubled-up bodies of the industry lobbyists.

And Bush today spoke of a sound economy in much the same way that the Cuban news media these days speaks of Castro’s health. “The underpinning is good,” Bush said to a quiet crowd. And followed this up with the old chestnut — “I’ll veto any tax increase,” which drew a notable lack of applause. To whom was Bush speaking? Members of the Rotary Club of Stafford, the Fredericksburg Rotary Club, the Rappahannock Rotary Club and the Fredericksburg Regional Chamber of Commerce. Where was he speaking? Yak-A-Doo’s restaurant in a Holiday Inn. Could Bush’s populist agenda have run afoul of circumstance and reality?

And in a related story, researchers in a remote Indonesian jungle have discovered a rat “five times the size of a typical city rat.” The rat apparently betrayed no fear of the human intruders. (In this much at least, he resembles the rats of New York City.) ”It’s comforting to know that there is a place on Earth so isolated that it remains the absolute realm of wild nature,” said expedition leader Bruce Beehler. ”We were pleased to see that this little piece of Eden remains as pristine and enchanting as it was when we first visited.”

But, reference to Eden notwithstanding, how does the third story related to the first two? Well, I found myself bridling at Krugman’s dismissal of Obama’s ingenuous call for a new approach to politics. Sure, populism gets the vote. Sure, that’s what’s worked. Sure, industry won’t roll over and beg. But doing things because they’ve been done, limiting ourselves by history, doesn’t that doom us to repeat history?

In his first campaign, Bush touted his ability to bring both sides to the table, but we now know that for Bush the function of speaking and the function of communication haven’t yet been brought under the administration of a central mental bureau. Nor do we hold our breath for that miraculous event.

There’s an oft-repeated myth that George Washington invited Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson into his first cabinet in order to bring both sides to the table. It’s a myth because there was no formal or informal opposition at the time. Washington wanted the best minds and hearts in the country at his table. Hamilton and Jefferson developed partisan divisions over the course of their tenure in Washington’s cabinet. Washington over time veered toward Hamilton’s Federalism, but truly wanted and valued Jefferson’s more democratic counsel.

Obama’s ideas about the path to health reform may be naive and impractical, but so what? At least they’re new. At least there’s a chance that they won’t leave us in four years time with a tired and tiresome repeat of the current roll call for populist opinion.

Obama then could well be the big rat appearing at the edge of the camp, strange and fearless and larger than life. You bring big business to the table and you tell them you’ll be happy to listen to their opinions so long as they’ll be happy for you to bite them in the ass if they don’t play along. Government should prevail, whether you start at a big table or a small table. The idea is surely to bring them to the big table so that you lay the cards out all the more clearly.

Of course, the Indonesian researchers also discovered a tiny possum, one of the smallest marsupials in the world. Krugman would doubtless liken Obama to that diminutive possum before he’d liken him to the massive rat. But couldn’t a possum win the hearts of big business, just as his brother rat would nip at their ankles?

The unfolding hostage (just freed) and bomb threat at Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign office provides a sobering example of the difference between rhetoric and reality. As an armed man stands off with a bomb strapped to his chest the sparring between campaign candidates doesn’t seem the slightest bit important. Reality trumps rhetoric every time.

Critics of former mayor Rudy Giuliani have stepped up their attacks on his rhetorical device of bandying about mistated, inflated or exaggerated statistics to present his mayoral accomplishments in a brighter light. Here, it seems, rhetoric and reality combine to demonstrate that Giuliani, if elected, would prove to be a deceitful and egotistical leader. Something that by now we’ve surely had enough of.

Then there’s the “outcry” in the Sudan over the thankfully relatively lenient sentence (15 days in jail versus six months and 40 lashes) meted out to Gillian Gibbons for allowing the children in her elementary class to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Sudanese demonstrators have called for Gibbons to be executed. But witnesses indicate that the protesters were supplemented  (or perhaps seeded) by government workers. And the outcry seems to provide convenient rhetoric for the Sudanese government as it tries to block Scandinavian peacekeepers from being sent to Darfur — this in response to last year’s publication in Scandinavia of cartoons that depicted Muhammad and offended muslims.

And for all of the endless rhetoric about Iraq, when one reads some of the details of the violence there (as I’ve been doing in the New Yorker (Inside The Surge)) one realizes just how bloody and brutal and real the war is, and how divorced from those facts is the rhetoric.

The aim of rhetoric, when it has an aim, is to sway the listener or audience. The speaker uses rhetorical devices (such as emphasis, repetition, sarcasm, humor, logic or sophistry, the inducement of fear, omission, bullying, and charisma) to highlight his or her points, and to persuade the listener that his or her perspective has greater merit than any other. Unfortunately, the better the speaker the harder it becomes to differentiate a valid, worthy perspective from an invalid or fatuous perspective. And, given the established methods we employ to select the leaders of our regions, cities, states, and countries, rhetoric must remain for now an indispensible part of the process.

Rhetoric is employed so pervasively around the world that it’s almost impossible to imagine processes of government and leadership without it. But perhaps that’s because we’re not trained to recognize and counter rhetoric. Plato’s Socratic dialogs or their teachings should be required readings in schools. If we could learn to decode rhetoric and diminish its influence the world would be a better place.

Reality on the other hand often gets too little attention. It takes a lot of reality to impinge upon our consciousness. And all too often it’s the sensational stuff that we focus on. In the past few days I’ve been struck by the number of high profile news stories that have focused on tragic disappearances and deaths for no other reason than there was something odd or grizzly or heartbreaking about them (the hoaxed teenager who killed herself, the missing teenager who’d been involved in porn, the couple who allegedly killed their two year old child, the ex-cop who may have killed his wives). I’m not saying that these tragedies aren’t worth our attention, but should they occupy, relatively speaking, so much of our news-space? News serves two purposes — it delivers information of note and it keeps society apprised of things that we should care about and perhaps act upon. Of course, news media don’t make the news, it’s the consumers (us) who dictate our appetite for sensation to the savvy editors and pundits. What would it take to bring about a more enlightened media? A more enlightened public…

One can only hope that the armed hostage taker in New Hampshire is defused. I’d rather have more rhetoric than that kind of reality.