Rational Philosophy

John McCain on The Daily Show with John Stewart

Last night, as I watched a TiVo’d John Stewart skewering delegates on the last day of the Republican convention, I wondered what it is about small town values that the Republicans love (but can’t define) and that seems to keep America stuck in the mire of bad politics.

If you didn’t see it, Stewart’s convention crew walked around with microphones asking Republican delegates what ’small town values’ meant to them. With big smiles on their faces and earnest willingness to answer the delegates came up with such laughable answers as “real people, real values,” “traditional marriage,” “fishing,” “church.” (The video is posted on the Daily Show website - highly recommended.)

But even those of us who distrust and disagree with the sentiment with which republicans freight the term, we all seem to understand that the essence of ’small town values’ might mean something genuinely appealing and good. So what is this essence, and how has it become distorted and misused.

Block Island, Rhode Island

I spent the bulk of the summer on Block Island with my family. Block Island is essentially a small town with a lot of tourists. (And these are mostly east-coast tourists from New York and Connecticut.) It’s easy to distinguish the tourists from the islanders. The tourists are in a hurry. They’re often nervous and rude. They lock their cars. They expect to get screwed over. They complain about stuff. The islanders understand that there aren’t that many places to go on the island, and everywhere is pretty close. You can trust people because for the most part, there’s nowhere for them to escape to. You couldn’t steal a car and get it off the island (which is car-accessible only by ferry.)

Block Island is a great lens through which to observe that the essence of small town values means enforced responsibility through enforced community.

It’s a lot easier to be rude or unfair to someone if you don’t know them and if you’ll never see them again and don’t have to rely upon their personal contribution to the community you live in. In a small town, people do know one another and rely upon one another and society functions very much as it has done for millions of years. The inherent rules of small social groups therefore tend to operate without the need for too much overt oversight and enforcement. What’s not to like about that?

But this is the problem: The rest of the country is made up of places where that kind of reinforcement can’t be relied upon. And this is the other part of the problem: Conservative Republicans wrap a whole lot of crap into the concept of small town values that has nothing to do with the core function of a mutually-reliant community (such as traditional marriage, fishing and church.)

And this is why ’small town values’ have become the political ruin of America. So much hog-swill passes for the reasonable subject of informed debate under the auspices of what small town folk care about. Every Republican candidate dives in or gets sucked in to the vortex of endless political distraction of the conservative agenda. And this means the every Democratic candidate gets sucked in, too, for fear of committing political suicide.

Other advanced Western nations don’t waste political time endlessly rehashing abortion statutes, gun control, separation of church and state, the teaching of creationism. ‘Small town values’ are the concrete boots of American politics, and until we lose them we won’t have an effective political process that will allow the nation to move forward and solve the very real problems of war, alternative fuel sources, and climate change.

Related Posts from Around the Web:

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On reconciling what we want to think with what logic dictates.

After reading the NY Times editorial on the Supreme Court’s review of gun control laws, and thinking that I generally agreed with the board’s perspective — that some manner of gun control was not only a good thing but constitutional, I glanced down at the readers’ comments and began to question how I’d arrived at my conclusion. Most of the readers’ comments seemed to oppose the board’s analysis. Many of them seemed to have strong, rational views on why the NY Times editorial board was wrong. Had I perhaps sidestepped a thoughtful analysis of the issues? Do I really know where I stand on the effectiveness and desirability of gun control laws, or have I simply adopted a default, liberal stance?

And to mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, President George Bush got back onto his soap box today at the Pentagon to argue against any precipitous move toward troop withdrawal. He warned that if America pulls its forces back too quickly, the result will be “chaos and carnage.” Whereas, “chaos and carnage” would not be valid descriptors of what’s been happening in Iraq for the past five years?

But I’ve long harbored the suspicion that my presumptive position that I would support a withdrawal of troops from Iraq has been founded on ideology, or, perhaps to be more precise, on an opposition to hawkish Republican ideology, rather than logic and reason.

In a nutshell, some things we believe because we want to believe them, not because we’ve thought them through. This is what ideology or partisan thinking is all about, I suppose.

It’s a very appealing way to spilce the issues. It makes things so much easier. We pick an ideology that appeals to us and frame our thinking through that lens. It also seems to be a very common and perhaps inherently human thing to do.

Consciousness achieved evolutionary success because it allowed us to understand events and act accordingly through an abstract perception of the world around us. The very foundation of conscious thought is the manipulation of ideas. Ideas, by definition, simplify the infinite variations that occur in the real world by lumping things together into useful categories. If one were to measure the height, density and hue of cloud coverage and the time variation of precipitation, for instance, one would quickly conclude that no two rainy days are exactly alike. But the concept “rainy day” is sufficient to cover all of these variations and convey the idea of an abstract rainy day.

Abstract thought has been so successful as an evolutionary advantage that it’s allowed us to find ways to survive in climates that would otherwise kill us, to eat and drink despite local droughts, and to realize such huge efficiencies through industrialization and mechanization that for the most part we don’t have anything to do with the processes that shelter, feed and clothe us.

Ideology is a form of categorization. We lump together into a convenient bucket a whole set of related concepts about our philosophy on life or politics or whatever. And, even better, the bucket has a whole set of rules about what goes in there (sometimes these are a little vague or personal, but for the most part they’re pretty solid). If we’re a liberal, we oppose the war in Iraq, support some manner of gun control, abhor Repulican attempts to dismantle Roe vs. Wade, desire more government investment in healthcare… etc., etc.

Is this a bad thing?

It’s neither an inherently bad thing, nor an inherently good thing. Since we categorize by virtue of our way of thinking, it can hardly be intrinsically bad. And since it leads to so much strife and anguish in the world it can hardly be wholly good.

As with so many things, the awareness that we do it, and being prepared to doubt ourselves when we do it, seems to be the important thing.

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.

In the wake of the departure of E. Stanley O’Neal from Merrill Lynch and the possible departure of Richard D. Parsons (of Time Warner), the NY Times has compiled a piece about the opportunities for black executives at the heads of large corporations.  Interviewed for the piece, the chief executive of StarCom, Renatta McCann, said “we have yet to reach a tipping point where the pipeline organically regenerates. We have to achieve momentum and velocity, and it has to achieve scale to make it sustainable.”

Another Times story presents a collection of new data about sexual stereotypes in the workplace. One of the researchers, Professor Glick, found that a female job applicant in a revealing blouse and tight skirt is less likely to be considered appropriate for an executive job than a woman who is conservatively dressed. The story quotes Professor Glick as commenting: “Sexy men don’t have that disconnect. While they might lose respect for wearing tight pants and unbuttoned shirts to the office, the attributes considered most sexy in men — power, status, salary — are in keeping with an executive image at work.”

And in a speech to the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank) today, George W. Bush declared: “We are at war. And we cannot win this war by wishing it away or pretending it does not exist.”

As I chomped down these three stories, I found something sticking in my gullet. In each one, what people have to say and the way that they say it seems to create a mask, or to continue to hold up a mask, that obscures the real questions at hand, or, perhaps, obscures whether there are really questions at hand.

Renatta McCann managed to string together an impressive array of buzzcepts in making her point about the relative dearth of black executives in corporate America. If we try to read through her words to find the meaning behind the ideas of “tipping point,” “organic regeneration,” “achieving momentum and velocity,” and “sustainable scale,” I think she’s saying that only by having more up and coming black executives will we end up with more black executives in the boardroom. This seems logical, but hardly profound. Surely the issue is much broader and much more complex than the actions or inactions of corporations. Corporations comprise people and exist within and in service of society. And executives come and go all the time. It’s the nature of the beast. That we’re talking about the race of the two departing executives seems to be a problem in itself.

The article about sexual stereotypes left me with a nagging feeling that all of this research was kind of screwy. If you ask people about stereotypes with stereotypes in mind, and devise a study to present those stereotypes, doesn’t that to some extent throw doubt on the results of the study? Glick’s presumption that a woman revealing cleavage is sexier than a woman conservatively dressed introduces bias into his analysis. He then compounds this bias with his assertion that the attributes considered most sexy in men are power, status and salary. But surely sexual stereotypes vary according to the context and according to the details? Inappropriateness, for instance, can be for some a very unsexy characteristic. What’s to say that the people in the study weren’t reacting to the inappropriateness of the sexy attire rather than the sexy attire itself?

The words of the piece express a logic and a rational set of conclusions that draws me in and I feel that I have to agree with them, but stepping back I reflect on my personal experience in the workforce and find that the logic weakens and begins to disintegrate. I’m left only with suspicion about the arguments presented rather than a newfound insight into the particular problems faced by women in the workforce.

And our old favorite George W. Bush, who uses words with such audacious disregard for their meaning that one almost feels awed by it, accomplishes several feats of extreme sophistry today for no other reason, one feels, than that he’s begun to have some fun now that he’s a lame duck. He scorns the democrats for not taking seriously a war that he once declared we’d won; he further lambasts them for holding up the nomination of Mukasey at a time when the country needs such high profile positions filled, when, as was reported recently, he himself has left unfilled many such top positions for weeks and months; and he criticizes them for attaching “wasteful Washington spending” to another multibillion dollar war spending bill. Hmmm.

Bush uses an athletic analogy as he closes his speech his most dazzling verbal salvo of all; “I’m looking forward to working with you for the next 14 months,” he says, “but you better put on your running shoes, because my spirits are high and my energy level is good and I’m sprinting to the finish line.” I’m sure he didn’t mean it this way, or at least not consciously, but I’m relieved that he’s in such a hurry to get out of office.