Irony And The Plastic Mind

On John McCain's ironic disposition and rodents using rakes.

Times Op-Ed contributor Neal Gabler proposes that the media likes John McCain because he has an ironic outlook on the political process. McCain, with his candor and his self-deprecation and his broad wink at the distorted rigamarole of politics agrees with the default, liberal journalistic "notion that our system (in fact, life itself) is faintly imbecilic." Gabler describes McCain, with his gleeful cynicism, as a postmodernist candidate.

This is fascinating both in and of itself and more generally. What would an ironically detached president do with his power? How would his sense of irony, of life's faint imbecility, help or hinder him in running the country?

We get a glimpse perhaps in McCain's reluctance to support a rigorous bailout of housing lenders and borrowers. McCain lays blame with the lenders for pushing risky loans and with the borrowers for wishful thinking. Bailing them out only rewards their behavior, he says.

His response is aloof, dismissive. He shows a reluctance to engage with the history of the current crisis, the emergence of the shadow banking system to sidestep the kinds of controls that the government put in place as a response to the market crash that precipitated the great depression. Doesn't the government share a good part of the responsibility for allowing the shadow banking system to emerge without taking steps to regulate it?

Although, this same detachment might be an unusually helpful quality in some situations.

But, more generally, Gabler's take on McCain points to a philosophical matter of engagement with reality. The ironist perceives the difference between our immediate perception of existence and life, and the larger context of those perceptions. The awareness that ultimately nothing really matters. The central character of Albert Camus' The Fall (La Chute) comes to realize through a process of self-reflection that everything he's held dear to him, the whole grand idea of his importance, is nothing but an illusion, an appearance that, ultimately, means nothing. Literature is strewn with such examples of the ironist. Detachment and perspective are essential skills for a novelist, so it is little surprise that this is the case. Hence Gabler's reference to McCain as a post-modernist candidate.

Gabler surmises that perhaps McCain gained this perspective while a prisoner of war. I would have disagreed with him until I read about the rodents who learned to use a rake.

Dr. Atshushi Iriki, a neuroscientist at the Riken Institute in Tokyo, has trained degus (sociable, Chilean rodents) to use a rake as a tool. By putting the little fellows out of arms reach of their lunch, Iriki coaxed the rodents to take advantage of small rakes so that they could drag the sunflower seeds close enough to eat them. (You can watch a video of the degus at work here.)

Just in itself, this is fascinating. But even more fascinating is the proposal that this kind of learning may lead to molecular and genetic changes in the brain. When Doctor Iriki conducted a similar experiment with Japanese macaques "their brains showed signs of gene activity in a brain region that integrates vision and touch."

The latent capability for a particular mental aptitude, when prompted and exercized, can lead to a new organization of brain function. This isn't spelled out in the article, but one presumes that Iriki believes that the animals have not simply learned a new skill, but developed a new capability, one that allows them to process things differently.

And so perhaps Gabler might be right about McCain. It makes sense that being a prisoner of war might lead to the exercising of the functions of the brain that put our existence into perspective. Held captive, treated as insignificant, denied the power of our own self-determination, I can easily see how one would come away with a more ironic perspective on the world.

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.