… actually, George Washington was born in Virginia, but the facts aren’t always the most important thing.
The recent political cycle has brought us some important new ways of thinking. At first glance, they seem less lofty, more like political "campaign techniques." Two prominant versions are Drew Weston, author of The Political Brain and George Lakoff who wrote, Thinking points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision [and a lot of other books]. Lakoff is a professor of Cognitive Linguistics at Berkeley and a former student of Noam Chomsky. Trying to discuss his ideas gets pretty heady. For example:When Lakoff claims the mind is "embodied", he is arguing that almost all of human cognition, up through the most abstract reasoning, depends on and makes use of such concrete and "low-level" facilities as the sensorimotor system and the emotions. Therefore embodiment is a rejection not only of dualism vis-a-vis mind and matter, but also of claims that human reason can be basically understood without reference to the underlying "implementation details".
That’s just not the kind of thing that fits in a blog. Drew Weston is a colleague at Emory University – a psychoanalytically oriented academic psychologist. He recently gave a presentation here entitled Shrinking the Presidency. He showed us political ads. The ones filled with logic and facts were boring. The ones aimed more at our primitive brain – emotions, core values, our "soul" were compelling. I’d read both men before that talk, and maybe understood, but the talk moved me a lot closer to understanding the essence of the thing than the books. And that’s the point of it all.
It’s a familiar point to me from my profession [psychoanalyst]. It’s Sigmund Freud’s point. We humans value our higher functions – logic, ideas, argument, civilization. But what really makes us tick are things that are much more in line with what’s "built in" – sex, aggression, greed, envy, love, hunger – the things you feel or just know instead of the things you think. We talk about what’s good for "mankind" but there’s a big dose of thinking about what’s good for "this man that I am" underneath it all. And when we vote, we listen to the candidate’s ideas and programs for mankind, but we vote more on "that’s my kind of guy/gal."
With that in mind, here are two really important blog posts written from a different perspective but hovering around this point by Paul Rosenberg writing at Open Left. Open Left is Chris Bowers’ and Matt Stoller’s blog. I rarely quote it because I can never think of anything to add – they’re "my kind of guys." But Paul Rosenberg is on a real roll and deserves special mention:
… and there’s more coming. I’m not going to summarize and comment on Paul’s posts yet, because he’s not done. But if you’re my "kind of person" and reading this, I’m just suggesting you jump on board early and read what he has to say. And as for my cryptic heading, our "Revolution" didn’t "revolve" as much as we sometimes think…
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