What's Left?

There is something disparagingly rotten about the present American condition.  Everyone seems to know this.  The last couple of weeks in which the US government was placed on gardening leave while Congress squabbled over a budget and the Congressional Republicans tried to include the anti-democratic roll-back of a law they didn't like managed to take center stage.  Meanwhile, that old bug bear, the negotiated debt ceiling made its reappearance and we were warned of the threat of potential economic catastrophe on a day to day basis.  For the last couple of weeks, politics, government and the failure of the politically class to actually govern was hammered home.  This was a crisis seemingly manufactured by the hard-right, however, it was allowed to occur through decades of acquiescence by the American left to an extreme right wing, market economy driven agenda.

We exist in a society that is divided, anti-scientific, self-involved, frivolous and otherwise disengaged. Nowhere is this decay more apparent than in the contortions of the American left.  While the American right has proven itself notorious for its takeover by radical revolutionaries who seek to ruthlessly transform society, the left has shown itself idyll, complacent and smug.  There exist a set of underlying problems, both in theory and practice, with the American left that undermine the stated present and historic beliefs of the left and prevent genuine dialogue with those that favor a policy of public good across the spectrum.  This essay is an exploration of these tendencies.

One of the underlying problems that continues to undermine American liberalism is its ongoing, almost demur, obedience to neoliberal market assumptions.  These manifest themselves in both a tendency to kowtow to political authority and an emphasis on consumer activism.  Effectively, the emphasis on markets has resulted in, to borrow Evgeny Morozov’s terminology, a deeply 'solutionist' mindset that has further undermined political dialogue - this outside of the very obvious obstructionism of the American right.  This has been furthered undermined by persistent belief in material progress that has become inexplicably tied to the belief in markets.

This tendency is further undermined by the ascendency of the utopian cult of Meliorism within the American lefts purview.  This often time quasi-religious (according to the English political philosopher John Gray) belief in persistent material progress undermines the ability of the American left to genuinely enact meaningful policy while further reaffirming the cult of the individual.  The notion that things are always socially ‘progressing’ or that a narrative of perpetual marginal improvement drives history is entwined with the ‘solutionist’ mindset.  While this belief is unjustifiable and results in political dis-engagement in the form of perpetual mindless sloganeering through social media platforms.  Thus we have a form of unquestioning “reposting’ from anointed channels often at the expense of genuine political thought. 

Rather than question the explicit and self-destructive tribalism within American politics, people have only dug deeper into those tribal distinctions.  This tendency, has resulted in a failure of the American left to thoroughly question the excesses the American Democratic party, which is, at present, actively waging a war against independent reportage, 'whistle blowing' and the very constitution.  It has also driven a dangerous cult of personality around individual charismatic politicians that has precluded adequate questioning of the political agendas to be advanced.  As national consensus appears to begin to arrive around many of the more contentious social issues, such as gay marriage, immigration reform and the like, it becomes increasingly odd to watch the triumphalism of members of the American left who appropriate these victories, that belong more to the individual groups historically discriminated against, as their own.  This largely by virtue of their “Facebook-activism” rather than from actual diligent social campaigning around said issues.

Finally, the left appears to be afflicted by the same anti-scientific bias that blights the American right.  This tendency to cast aside scientific claims, specifically those that do not adhere to individual beliefs in alternative medicine, perceptions of purity, or which undermine the utopian belief system that underpins notions of ‘progress’ are made to give way to a set pseudo-scientific, quasi-spiritual justifications often elevated in the minds of the proponents to that of science.  That this is precisely the same process engaged in by religious fundamentalists of the right – specifically discarding of scientific evidence in favor of higher “moral” beliefs - does not seem to enter into consideration.  This tendency runs deep through American public life and remains as dangerous as it is tragic.

In identifying these issues, the goal is to force members of the American left to examine their positions and convictions in the hope of driving both a wider public debate in how to conduct politics but also to beg the question, what we actually wish our society to resemble.  Mine is a generation, the Millennial, that have been brought up to collectively believe that we are each individually special, gifted and likely to rise above the fray and correct the problems of the world.  Instead, we have actively continued the politics of previous generations and simultaneously engaged in the same wasteful, unsustainable behaviors.  We have also pursued these aims with a sense of self-righteousness that remains unjustified. While numerous pressures and hardships abound – and people should take pride in having stood up to the pressures of student-loan hardships, a miserable economy, dealing with the anti-tax/pro individual (though not collective) service gorging of the baby boom generation, etc. – this does not excuse us from the callings of civic obligation. 

Only in questioning how we go about engaging with politics can we truly engage.  The radical political right – specifically the Tea Party, which is effectively engaging in an open fantasy of restoration of libertarian utopian past that never was - does the left no favors in its obstructionism.  That said, many conservatives hold highly sensible beliefs are fully open to engagement yet are partially prevented from doing so by the assumptions of the American left.  Much can be learned from classical conservatives, such as Michael Oakeshott and Edmund Burke as well as from conservative peers who, for the moment, appear to be alerted to the dangers implicit in many of the above-mentioned assumptions.

The American left is peculiar by international standards in that it is not really of the historic left.  It has never really been for large-scale upheavals of the existing order, regardless of what the collective rhetoric around the radicalism of the 60s states.  Instead, American Leftism has largely been a highly statist, largely partisan beast.  Marx, the traditional touchstone of many international leftist movements never had a great deal of traction in the United States.  Much of this likely has to do with the outright persecution of Marxists during the early days of the Cold War and the ongoing threat (largely rhetorical) of the Soviet Union.  Some of the Presidential Administrations viewed as most liberal, such as that of John F. Kennedy were firmly anti-communist, seeing escalations of the Cold War, with the Cuban Missile Crisis (fall-out from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion) almost bringing us to the brink of international thermonuclear annihilation.  

It may also be that leftism within the US has done little to directly dissent from free-market capitalism, for which Marxism is anathema.  Marx of course, has very real limitations: his prescriptive ideology, adherence to a form of social Darwinism and presumed knowledge of "social evolution" place his ideology soundly in the category of religious thinking, however, as an observer and critic of capitalism he is inimitable.  Because of the failure of the American left to take onboard Marx's critique of capitalism, (with the exception of certain academic circles that responded by obsessive naval gazing at the arcana of Marxist dialectics) much of what was held sacred by left-wing counter-culture, particularly around environmentalism and the aesthetics, has been monetized and marketed.  Thus, the activism that remains is built around consumer-choice.  That this is largely a false activism goes without saying.

This co-option has also seen the failure of the left to address issues of income inequality and declining social services.  The last Democratic presidential candidate to truly define themselves with wanting to improve the plight of the poor was Hubert Humphrey, a reviled figure who lost the 1968 election to Nixon and is viewed by many retrospectively as some sort of out-of-touch dinosaur.  Jimmy Carter, for example, ran on a platform of economic conservatism (though he did eventually prove to be America's least imperialist president, at least when it came to international affairs), while Clinton, who surprisingly initially ran on a platform of anti-globalization, was rapidly co-opted by free-markers and joined with the Newt Gingrich's Republicans in actively gutting the welfare state.  Clinton's roll in orchestrating many of these reforms, which have been fiercely destructive to many lower income and particularly minority families has been well documented, particularly in Jason DeParle's American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare.  This has resulted in shocking income inequality, the decline of social cohesion and the undermining of civil society as a whole  Income inequality is growing so rapidly in the United States that a recent Unicef Study on global income inequality predicted that, if current trends continue, the United States will have similar income inequality to the current most inequitable country, the DR Congo, inside of 30 years.

As the left seems unwilling to deal head on with inequity, to reform financial markets to actively protect people from shocks or to address austerity policies in any meaningful way, this has left with an agenda largely constituted by "solutionist" policy agendas that pay lip service to the idea of environmental improvements and equity while simultaneously reaffirming the same neoliberal economic polices that are actively driving inequality.  As the economist Paul Krugman points out almost weekly in his New York Times column, the stimulus implemented at the start of the 2008 financial crisis was insufficient and we should be actively pursuing a policy of full employment.  Instead we have implemented a series of financial reforms that have deregulated as much as they have regulated, such that it is questionable that even the Volcker Rule, which would once again require that financial institutions receiving FDIC insurance not engage in high-risk investment and instead limit their activities to standard commercial banking, seems unlikely to ever come into force.  Never mind that all this rule would do is to let financial institutions know that they are not guaranteed public support if they want to run a casino.

'Solutionism' comes in the form of believing scientific, or more commonly, technological solutions will solve many of our problems.  By relying on silicon valley to solve our social problems, many of which are pressing and require, active engaged public debate, we instead rely on quick fixes that not only fail to deal with the underling problems but also rob us of the ability to have the necessary debate.  Many of the solutions proposed to the financial crisis have taken the form of 'solutionsim'.  Rather than have a larger debate about what we value societally and where we want to direct resources, we sought quick fixes to short-term budgetary problems and largely failed to regulate in accordance of what we would determine to be of societal value.  Austerity policy is one form of short term 'solutionism'.  Rather than determine where emphasis should be placed, instead we are seeing across the board cuts that effectively damage the ability of government to actually govern and to provide basic services for those most in need. 

Austerity, however, remains one of the biggest problems we are facing and is further driving the income inequality that is disrupting our society.  The anti-union bias that many on the left seem to carry is indicative of just how difficult it will be address these issues and just how deep neoliberal ideology runs through the American Left.  Everyone in theory believes in the notion of an honest days pay for an honest days work, however, when it comes to actually fighting for this ideal, and organized labor is really the only game in town equipped to demand this, the American left is largely missing from the table.  Union busting laws and increased austerity, most often targeted towards welfare recipients, have received  limited protest and only the attempt to cut SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - an acronym for the food stamp program) benefits as part of a the last Farm Bill, a policy so callous that it sounds the subject of a Dickens novel, that have any serious questions been asked.

Meanwhile, we are told, we have been told that we need to hold faith in Obama.  Never mind that the administration has embroiled us in an unnecessary conflict in Libya that is now driving that country into civil war, while escalating drone attacks in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere.  This has also included an attempt to commit us headlong in the active civil war in Syria, before a gaff by Secretary of State John Kerry led to a last minute demilitarization.  At the same time, the administration has done everything it can to limit transparency, increased NSA surveillance of its own citizens, pursued journalists and whistleblowers left and right using such draconian policies as the Espionage Act and generally been the most secretive and repressive administration since that of Nixon.  While we have seen some policy improvements, notably a health care bill that remains untested when it comes to actually achieving its goal of reducing costs and some necessary investment in domestic infrastructure (particularly around transit) none of this is really enough.  There is a serious lack of transparency, and the financial industry has been given undue ability, by the administration, to determine what rules they would like to play by, thus failing to adequately protect American consumers and failing to take preventative measures that would avoid further historically unparalleled bail-outs of the financial services industry.  They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  By that notion, the American Left's faith in this administrations ability to transform itself should be put forward as Exhibit A in its insanity defense.

Then there is the anti-science bias that appears to eat away at both political parties across the political spectrum.  While the left does seem to be (mercifully) on board with climate science, it seems to fail to grasp a lot of the logical outcomes of this.  While paying lip service to dealing with climate, the Obama administration seems hellbent on pursuing Keystone XL, which renowned climate scientist James Hanson (formerly of NASA) has noted repeatedly represents such a large economic investment in non-renewable energy that it would largely render any climate legislation null.  Further, the preferred suburban settlement patterns, general NIMBY-ism when it comes to denser nearby development and use of lower emission (or hybrid) vehicles rather than transit by many do almost nothing to actually address this issue and instead simply slightly reduce or relocate carbon emissions.

Then there is the matter of willful obstruction when it comes to public health interventions that might actually benefit the working poor, based on anti-scientific hysteria.  The controversy, incredibly heated public vitriol against, and eventual defeat of a plan to introduce water fluoridation in my home town of Portland, Oregon is a definitive example of this.  Never mind that water fluoride is exceptionally safe and efficacious once correct dosing for a particular municipal water supply is determined.  The debates that ranged around this subject indicated that, despite claims to the contrary many people on the left (a) have no idea how to read a scientific survey, (b) have no idea how to select a reliable scientific source, (c) have little understanding of how science is actually conducted and (d) instead rely on emotional response around a "purity" taboo.  The sheer volume of studies cited by critics of fluoride, for which it was clear that they had never read the studies or willfully misunderstood them was terrifying.  Many studies that were pointed to purporting to prove that fluoridation was unsafe were either based on doses 20-30 times higher what would be added to Portland's water supply, showed stronger correlation elsewhere, were heavily redacted to mask other findings, or in many cases, said the exact opposite of what their proponents were claiming of them.  Fluoride was actively defeated by many people firmly of the left, proving time and again that they were as actively contemptuous of science as the creationists of the right when the scientific facts do not fit their particular agenda.

For those that remain engaged in providing services to the American indigent, the revolutionary ideology of the old left hardly seems relevant.  Indeed, it has been the right which has become a truly revolutionary movement, willfully disrupting the very nature of civil society in order to realize economic development "potentials" often at the cost of the working poor.  Meanwhile, European Social Democracy relies on notions of social security and overall avoidance of socio/economic disruption.  As the late historian Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, this was more the purview of classical conservatism than of the left itself.  In our effort to provide effective social services, perhaps we should be looking to thinkers like Edmund Burke, who had a strong interest in limited revolution and systems that protected people from social shocks than we should revolutionaries with prescriptive ideologies like Marx.  Similarly, the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott (who many have retrospectively declared a 'liberal') also held a remarkably 'statist' view.  While Oakeshott believed that the answers to most problems reside in tradition, he was particularly fond of a cooking metaphor: what good is a recipe without a pre-existing cultural knowledge of the process of 'cooking', this places him closer to Keynes than many on the left who have bought into the neoliberalism.  After all, both Oakeshott and Burke spoke extensively about our shared responsibility to one another, hinting strongly at the need for the state to maintain institutions to care for our poorest.

The American left remains in only lightly better standing than the American neo-right.  While the right has become a truly revolutionary force, smitten with the (frankly dystopian) visions of Ayn Rand and set upon revolutionizing society by destroying government, civil society and the right, never once acknowledging the individual entitlements and subsidies through mortgage tax credits and the rest that many of the Tea Party's staunchest organizers are the recipients of, the left dithers in cult of personality believing that the Obama administration will somehow rise, phoenix-like, and implement some kind of as of yet unspecified liberal agenda.  There is a word for both sides, it is "delusional".  Until we insist on genuine accountability, protect our whistleblowers, and transform our political dialogue such that we insist upon equity and effective public services, the situation will only continue to deteriorate, particularly for our most needy.  This is a shame.

Michael Jackson was a Cultural Imperialist

Michael Jackson was a cultural imperialist.  No, really!  This idea occurred to me while reading a recent post by my friend over at Africa in DC which came as shortly after a lengthy debate I incidentally initiated over Facebook.  This has got me thinking a lot about the nature of art, culture and what people listen to, particularly in the age of wildly proliferated communications technology.  Music obviously means a lot to people, however most people do not put a lot of thought into the music that they listen to.

The issue raised by my friend over at Africa in DC is that there is a lack of diversity in what people listen to here in DC and what shoes they go to, particularly when it comes to African music. Listeners are segregated.  Contemporary African Pop music features a small, largely African ex-patriot audience, while older African genres, like the afro-beat pioneered by the late Fela Kuti manage a healthy white audience through DJ shows and the like.  A lot of this appears to be come down to a type of consensus within peoples listening habits established through media outlets like NPR and Pitchfork Media which often drive exposure, canonize certain acts that fit the aesthetics of both outlets and ultimately determine cultural preferences.  I agree with my friends assessment to some degree here, but find three additional points of interest: (a) pop music is in itself a form of cultural imperialism, (b) what is canonized is rarely "serious music"and (c) increased access to information technologies is creating a global monoculture that is narrowing rather than widening listeners' musical palates.

To begin with, there is absolutely nothing morally abhorrent about liking pop music. I like pop music and as a record collector, I own quite a bit of it. Pop songs can speak to us and move us sometimes more readily in ways that more serious art does not mostly because it works largely on the subconscious.  It's easy and it's pleasant - by definition it largely does not challenge the way more serious art does - hence: pop. Where pop music runs into problems is when it is exported internationally and begins to change existing cultures.  In some cases, as with Thai Molam music, which saw the blending of traditional rural Thai folk music idioms with the soul and rock and roll records brought over by US GIs during the Vietnam War, this led to the creation of interesting new hybrid forms.  A lot of these forms are interesting because they were downright weird and often didn't quite work.  The more formulaic Molam became, arguably the less interesting.

Often times though, the export of Western popular music results in replacement of existing ethnic musical forms.  A lot of this process started int he 80s when, Western record companies, looking to capitalize on overseas (and thus larger) markets for their super acts started pushing Michael Jackson records and the like down the rest of the world's throat.  Now, there is nothing wrong with Michael Jackson's music (his personal life, being another matter) however, many of the places that Thriller and the rest were exported and heavily marketed had their own vibrant musical traditions and ideas.
The ascendance of Hip-Hop of course further changed everything by further driving interest away from the instrumental, rhythmic, harmonic and melodic parts of the music and placing the emphasis increasingly on lyrics.  This trend seems to have begun with 60s singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan but with hip-hop, this became the case with African American musical forms as well.  No longer did anyone have to write an actual tune, now all that was necessary was a hook and a beat.

In the end, this process seems to be actively impoverishing a lot of contemporary African music.  While hybrid styles like Hip-life claim to blend the musical aesthetics of highlife music with hip-hop, the outcomes are, for all extensive purposes, indistinguishable from contemporary Western Top 40s radio hits.  While this strengthens the point made on the Africa in DC blog that it is bizarre there isn't a bigger audience for contemporary African music from white people with an interest in Africa (especially as the music in question is hardly radically different - in fact it's pretty close to the Western pop music they may already be listening to) it also represents music that is, ironically extremely un-African. The African music tradition has always been reliant on polyrhythm and intense rhythmic complexity. Much of this is rhythmic complexity is culturally inherent, as anthropologist John Miller Chernoff argues in his book, African Rhythm and African Sensibility.  As James Gleick further elaborates in his book on information theory The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, a lot of this rhythmic complexity was linguistically present in the tonal languages spoken in central Africa and carried to drums as a means of long distance communication. Thus, in much of Africa it is innate to communication.  This polyrhythmic sensibility was later exported to the West (through forced relocation of Africans to the Caribbean and the Americas via the slave trade) and makes up the basis for a lot of latin as well as jazz music.

Thus to hear contemporary African pop music built around stagnant 4/4 rhythms in order to more fully line-up with the aesthetic of hip-hop indicates not only a serious cultural loss, but also the clear emphasis of the domination of American cultural exports.  Just as Hollywood has pushed its conventions upon other countries film industries, American popular music has undermined a lot of what made traditional popular music forms culturally relevant.  It drives a sort of internationalized, sanitized lowest common denominator consumer culture.  The exception to this rule appears to be the Bollywood Film music coming out of India and the Tamil Film music of Sri Lanka.  Sure it borrows from Western musical traditions, but then again, Bollywood has always borrowed from a lot of different sources and remains incredibly creative.  (Legendary Bollywood composer, R.D. Burman, appears to have have long absorbed not only the entirety of the Western and Indian musical traditions, but also far Eastern, Latin and African at the same time that the Beatles were just starting to mess around with sitars. Burman isn't the only one.  His closest Western contemporary is probably someone like the ever inventive, ever open, Ennio Morricone.)

That said, this leads to a lot of questions about who is the gatekeeper for international music for Western culture.  This appear to have largely fallen into the hands of National Public Radio (NPR) and the "indie" music website Pitchfork Media.  (A nuanced critique of both sources can be found here and here.)  What both overwhelmingly do, in their gatekeeper rolls is to create an extremely lazy, incurious white mono-culture that predominates a lot of people’s thinking, particularly when it comes to other cultures artistic outputs. What both elect to anoint as canonical are usually a lot of old safe oldies or gimmicky newsworthy acts (i.e. K'naan) while ignoring a great deal of what people actually listen to within the cultures being studied. This mono culture pretends to be reasonable but never really allows its own assumptions be challenged. It also feeds back what is "commercially viable" in the West to those cultures, further driving an internationalized mono culture.

So, given that a lot of pop music may serve as a form of cultural imperialism, the NPR/Pitchfork Media consensus does nothing to acknowledge this and instead pushes itself as a gold standard of cross cultural awareness, despite having an extremely narrow focus and positively dripping an non-acknowledged Orientalism. This Orientalism though is careful not to go too far. A little exotica is fine, too much of “the other” makes people feel uncomfortable.  Orientalism is not in and of itself a bad thing.  I think in engaging with other cultures, it is almost impossible not to project onto or fetishize "the other" in some way.  That said, some musicians are able to play on this notion of Orientalism and use it to their advantage.  The guitarist Sir Richard Bishop (a favorite of this blog) takes on a lot of the negative Orientalist stereotypes and appropriates these as virtues, actively incorporating them into his own work.  Richard Bishop, however is a serious artist with a strong interest in music who has been ignored (due to the marginal nature of his work) by NPR while Pitchfork has tended to condescend in their reviews of his work, speaking of his "impressive amount of skill" as though this were somehow a bad thing.  It has also, similarly condescended in reviews of Jazz musicians, a genre that NPR has instead elected to treat as some sort of venerated museum piece, something to be wheeled out and "recognized" as important rather than as an actual living genre full of still-living practitioners that could be, you know, actually listened to.  To its credit, NPR occasionally takes risks promoting more difficult music, but always in back alleys of its website and only after that work has received wider cultural acclaim.

This is especially telling when contrasted with the Americana derived roots/ folk rock that both NPR and Pitchfork have been in lockstep as being the work that speaks to our times. The gentle, guileless work of Wilco or Mumford & Sons or the retro rehashing of The Arcade Fire and Phoenix.  None of this work is terrible, it is all perfectly 'pleasant'.  It is more that none of it is particularly novel, most of it is quite disposable popular music which, because of lyrical stance, is now canonized as new classics that will stand the test of time.  NPR and Pitchfork readers see themselves as being part of two very different sub-strata yet they seem to be largely in lock-step when it comes to "recognizing" work. NPR, the more conservative middle of the road source perhaps a bit slower on the uptake.  So we have a situation in which arguably the two most active, determinant and influential sources are both affirming a particular style of (limited) music as being great art (which arguably it isn't: instead it's pop) and feeding this back internationally by limiting channels of exposure.  Thus, the selections made by these sources become self fulfilling prophecies and we have variations on the same works.  Add to this the odd endorsement of international music and hip-hop (in order to demonstrate that both sources are "cultured" and lather, rinse, repeat.

These ideas are then spread online through the endless cycle of posting and reposting on social networking sites, twitter, internet radio (which effectively creates echo chambers by broadcasting 'similar' works to listeners to help them discover 'new' music) taste and review aggregation and the like.  No one ever really stops to question the wisdom or agendas of those making decisions about what is popular, but what is remarkable that, despite the incredible variety of music available and one-click through the internet, everyone seems to listen to and watch the same things.  Critics lament the lack of a shared cultural background as a result of internet stratification, but this could not be further from the truth.  Instead, there has been a remarkable shift of the non-threatening, canonized classics and semi-pleasant pop music through repeated self-reification, with limited questioning.  This tendency is now becoming internationalized.

So yes, this does result in a de facto segregation of work, however it is ironic that much of this work not being listened to should be accessible to people across the spectrum of “pop music listeners” because feedback mechanisms have already prevented it from being genuinely challenging, culturally specific or different. It is as much a failure of telecommunications technology to actual broaden people’s scopes as much as anything else.

Or, we can also just blame Michael Jackson, because this tendency seems to have started with him.  Go on, he's an easy scape goat.

Behavior Change And Its Discontents

Post-enlightenment Western society is built on the belief that reasoned argument should be able to change people's minds about a given issue.  It is understood that if a case is made clearly, factually and without pejorative; it should be able to sway the opinion of similarly rationally minded others.  This, like the myth of permanent social progress, is a fallacy. More often than not, it represents another form of wishful thinking.

In a previous piece, I addressed both the cognitive difficulties we experience associated with rational thinking (we are much more likely to "intuit" the world than to rationalize our way through it) and the problem of verification bias (by which we reject data that competes with deeply held views out of hand), however neither of these completely describe the extent to which behavior change is difficult to implement. Indeed, it can be said that people change their minds about major issues with some frequency, people evolve their belief systems and our brains are endowed with incredible neuroplasticity, allowing us to change almost anything about ourselves.  As neurons that wire together also fire together, is behavior change simply not a measure of developing alternative repetitive cognitive programming? Should sufficient exposure to an alternative script not simply create new neural connections that spring a cognitive frame around that script?

Unfortunately, it is not that simple.  Just as research seems to indicate that increased exposure to negative political advertising does not really seem to affect people's voting choices, simple exposure to a particular ideology is unlikely to result in prescribed behavior shift. Further, increased cognitive sophistication does not increase self-awareness, and thus capacity for behavior change. As a study (brought to my attention by way of the now disgraced Jonah Lehrer) in The Journal of Personal and Social Psychology indicates,  cognitive sophistication may actually serve to mask cognitive blindspots.  Thus, smart people (the cognitively sophisticated) may be more likely to believe in fallacious information as they have increased neural capacity to self-delude.

While this helps to explain the enduring popularity of certain counter-factual ideologies, it does not answer the questions of why we have trouble eventually shifting to an alternative script. Daniel Kahneman may have a response to this in noting that we are very poor at thinking statistically and much better at thinking intuitively, thus a data driven script is not one that we are particularily wired to latch on to. We are extremely poor at making meaningful snap judgements in the face of complex data, regardless of what Malcolm Gladwell might tell us. We also, arguably, tend to dramatically overestimate our capacity to be swayed by rationale argument, requiring alternative means of pushing behavior change. In my earlier piece, I spoke to some of the strengths and limitations of community-based social marketing as a means of affecting behavior change and so, will not rehash them here. What is interesting about all of this is that our process of accessing data and coming to new positions is slow, collective and incremental.

While certain early adopters may adhere immediately to a new ideology, and repetition tends to blunt the ability of a message to get through, eventual social conditioning to an idea may eventually drive acceptance of that idea.  My observation has tended towards noting that once something has happened, we are more likely to be willing to repeat that process even if the first case ended in failure or catastrophe. I recently used the case of "liberal intervention" becoming mainstream across the political spectrum, which I think is a clear case of collective acquiescence to a formally controversial concept in the face of repeated exposure to the outcomes of that concept.  I have not encountered any research that completely substantiates this exact point, though there has been some work on the subject.  

Further, it may simply be the case that if things don't go as badly as some would predict, or if a situation seems to have been salvaged in some way, our natural tendency towards optimism will allow us to count an idea as a success, even if it was not one per se.  This is the same principle at work as that which sees us fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger Effect- we overestimate our abilities in fields we lack expertise in because we lack the knowledge to meaningfully access our skills in those fields. Dunning-Kruger may tell us more about ourselves than we would like to believe.

Behavior change can also often by rendered through the construction of narratives that tap into the emotional rather than the rational.  By creating a good versus evil dialogue around a given topic, and creating a clear sense of heroes, victims and villains, the dialogue around a given issue can be altered.  This does not necessarily work around all issues - many are likely to prove resistant to this form of framing.  This process of reshaping and dictating the dialogue is close to the recommended by George Lakoff in his pamphlet: Don't Think of an Elephant and in the various pronouncements of the Republican speech writer Frank Luntz.  Both believe that the way the enact behavior change around a particular issue is to actively adjust the cognitive frame through which people understand an issue. Lakoff in particular has been a pioneer in the theory of how this works in his seminal The Metaphors We Live By (written with Mark Johnson), while Luntz has been a master of implementation.

The problem that is implicit in the sort of issue framing that Luntz and Lakoff recommend is that it tends to obfuscate the issue.  While Luntz has fatuously compared himself to George Orwell, claiming that his approach to political discourse is perfectly in line with Orwell's prescription put forward in "Politics and the English Language", in effect, issue framing achieves the exact opposite.  Luntz is correct when he paraphrases Orwell as noting that honest political speech requires the speaker:

“(S)peak with absolute clarity, to be succinct, to explain what the event is, to talk about what triggers something happening… and to do so without any pejorative whatsoever.

That said, Luntz (and for that matter Lakoff's) suggestions that politicians alter the language used to allow only one particular 'frame' or avenue for discussion around are given topic are far closer to another Orwellian construction: "newspeak". In the novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the forced lingua franca, "newspeak" worked by limiting vocabulary in order to suppress dissent altogether by simply eliminating the ability to put that dissent into language.  

This practice is precisely the tone that much political speech has taken on, however it is unlikely to drive successful behavior change as people that do not share the belief system implicit within a given frame are likely to ignore that frame or simply to ignore the issue.  The internet and speciality cable news channels have further given people the ability to increasingly select which media, and thus world view, they consume, which further limits the effective of trying to fight it out for dominant framing device in the court of public opinion.  Beyond this, the shift in the way we consume media means that there is no longer a singular, consensus news 'court of public opinion' where these matters are decided (if there ever was one to begin with).  This shift away from "framing" has been seen to play out increasingly in the business-end of political practice.  Most leading political thinkers have quite suddenly grown very quiet about "framing" issues despite the topic having been very much in vogue just a few years ago.

So, if simply controlling the language by which an issue is addressed or using a community-based social marketing mechanism are both insufficient to enact behavior change, what works?  I'm increasingly of the belief that most behaviors are generationally learned.  To that end, it often takes generational shifts in order to drive social change.  Younger generations grow up with greater exposure to particular issues that are of the moment and at an age when their brains are at their most plastic.  As a result, they have significantly greater capacity to question and diverge from prior generations' thinking patterns. Further, no ones wants to replicate the mistakes of their parents generation.  While some repetition does occur, a certain degree of generational backlash frequently occurs resulting in different sets of belief systems or outlooks that are generationally determined or the product of generational rebellion.  While nature and nurture are both important,  many cognitive neuroscientists increasingly argue that nurture is increasingly key to determining thinking patterns.  Different important cultural events or touchstones can also help to inform the views of a particular generation depending on when they occur and the wider social impacts of said event.  Thus the norms of a society and of our generation have important impacts.  We tend towards not only "group think" but also "generation think" and these tendencies can result in different paradigms or beliefs predominating across different generations.

Also of value in encouraging behavior change is the capacity of some for scientific thinking.  The ability to think scientifically, alter belief systems in response to data and actively falsify predictions or theories is an important cognitive tool.  It is also one that is criminally underrated.  One of the reasons many Americans seem to cling to beliefs or belief systems that are factually insupportable likely has something to do with a general public incredulity and even hostility towards science.  Scientific thinking encourages greater flexibility in thinking patterns and as a result can serve as a vehicle for behavior change.  The ability to analyze data in a rational, comprehensive away, utilize research statistics and other features of a basic scientific education cut away the limitations of dogmatic thinking and encourage cognitive flexibility.  To this end, if one is used to using data to prove or disprove theories, then one is less likely to adhere to a rigid ideology when it comes to personal or social matters.  In that regard, science may be, once again, one of our most precious assets as a species. It may also be the most important tool we have when it comes to trying to encourage behavioral or cognitive shifts.

'Hit'ch Piece

Disclosure: Post-mortem character assassination is not the aim of this writing. The goal is simply to demonstrate how varied the thinking of the late Christopher Hitchens could be.  I feel that enough time has passed following Hitchens' death that I can write a more nuanced piece about his beliefs, strengths and weaknesses as a intellectual.

"I will not be reconstructed!" - Shane MacGowan 

“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." - Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens once accused me of being soft on fascism.  This happened after I had expressed reasonable doubts about the Iraqi-Niger "yellowcake" link- a particular canard of the Bush administration that Hitchens treated repeatedly as a smoking gun rationale for liberal intervention in Iraq.  As part of his refusal to admit miscalculation in Iraq, Hitchens could never quite give up on the Niger yellowcake claim, even after evidence emerged revealing that members of the Bush administration acknowledged the speciousness of said link as early as 2002. The claim itself has been well-proven false while the documents purported to have supported it  were themselves exposed as forgeries.

The great irony of the argument came that the venue at which Hitchens' elected to attack my unwillingness to to agree to magical claims regarding Nigerien yellowcake and Iraq was at a conference whose purpose was the promotion of freedom from Religion.  So here was Hitchens, the great champion of atheism, engaging in deeply ideological, determinist, and in its own way, 'religious' thinking in lambasting me for not sharing his faith in a war of choice.  I bring the issue up only because it speaks to a certain contradiction within Hitchens' character.  I doubt that someone of Hitchens' intelligence could possibly have meant everything that he was saying, however, there certainly came a point with the man where it proved to be anathema to doubt his faith in the belief system he espoused. This point was echoed by Noam Chomsky regarding Hitchens' proselytizing for foreign military action to destroy "Islamism".  Hitchens' tendency to take certain ideological beliefs on faith also showed in his strange affinity for Trotsky and Lenin despite the pair's well documented roll in laying the ideological, intellectual and policy groundwork for later Soviet atrocities.

With Hitchens, there seemed a certain need to believe in ideological revolutionary thinking, regardless of the facts supporting the ideology.  In this way, Hitchens was never the intellectual heir to Orwell that he seemed to perceive himself as.  Certainly, Orwell was committed to causes, but never to ideology. In fact, the great narrative of Orwell's career is, in many ways, his extrication of  himself from ideological systems (well-illustrated by his eventual anti-communist stance).  Hitchens himself, in his excellent book: Why Orwell Matters, described Orwell as a naturally conservative and inherently biased with the predilections of the British Middle class of a particular period who, through education and exposure, managed to talk himself out of many of these petty biases.  Thus with Orwell, we see active moral assertions but tempered by a strong mechanism for self examination.  Orwell increasingly stepped further and further away from ideology and previous beliefs, denouncing first colonialism, then Marxism and antisemitism.

With Hitchens, we do not see this same flexibility, but rather a strongly held belief in the inherent rightness of his initial positions.  A New Yorker profile on Hitchens went so far as to title the somewhat unflattering piece, "He Knew He Was Right".  The narrative of Hitchens' political education is a sort of Orwell in reverse - early extreme pragmatism followed by the engorgement upon ideology, culminating with Hitchen's  unshakable belief in the moral rightness of the Iraq war. Beyond this, Hitchens sought, to his dying day, to expand the war against Islamism, demanding the opening of new fronts in Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere, while framing the debate as part of a greater war between fascism and civilization.

There was always the element of the flat-track bully about Hitchens.  We see evidence of this in the misogynistic attacks Hitchens takes on the political predilections of two women in the profile, "He Knew He Was Right". He refers to said women sarcastically as "honey" and "sweetie" and generally gives the impression of the barroom bully and tremendous bore. Further, the slightly dubious claims of wishing he had been able to serve in combat and the mental exercise of equating ongoing support for the Iraq war with a battle for civilization, remain troubling.  Hitchens slight megalomania even went so far as allegedly claiming of the Iraq War: "It is glorious and it is my war because it needed Paul Wolfowitz and myself to go and convince the President to go to war."


The veracity of this claim is questionable, bordering on self-delusional. The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), within which many of the advocates for the war within the Bush administration had received their intellectual foundations, had long advocated for the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Beyond this, following 1998's Operations Desert Fox and Desert Storm, the official policy within the United States government was regime change in Iraq.


This is not to say that Hitchens was not actively critical of the Bush administration. He did refer to Bush's America as a "banana republic": stunted by incompetence and ideology. This was a nice blast of the old Hitchens - the one who actively criticized systems of power and authority rather than providing unflinching support for the policies of them - yet much of this also seemed opportunistic.  In 2004, Hitchens had endorsed Bush over Kerry, identifying himself  as a "single-issue voter".  His later criticisms of Bush, while in line with the thinking of the old pre-9/11 Hitchens, had the ring of the well-documented 2006 divorce of neoconservative intellectuals from the war in Iraq on the grounds that the Bush administration was ill-equipped to adequately carry out the lofty policy goals proposed.  Thus, like Hitchens after them, these neoconservatives did not so much as acknowledge past errors, as simply state that their policy was too perfect and beautiful for the harsh realities of the world.  


The position is, of course, an intellectually disingenuous one- allowing these thinkers to have their cake whilst simultaneously stuffing it down their gullets. On Iraq and the wider war on terror, Hitchens proved to be fundamentally neoconservative in his prescriptions - effectively joining the very group he had formerly lambasted as hucksters and peddlers of American imperialism. Indeed, the decision to attack in print two of the great intellectuals of the left and popular targets of neoconservative thinkers: Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, demonstrated that Hitchens had an innate understanding of neoconservative ideology and how he could announce his joining of the group.  While Hitchens was always careful to avoid labeling himself as a neoconservative individually, it became increasingly clear from the friends he kept where he now stood ideologically.


With Hitchens, it is also hard to say where his new found hatred of Islamism suddenly emerged from. Hitchens stated that much of it resulted in response to the fatwa against his friend Salman Rushdie.  He claimed that his compassion for Rushdie was  instrumental in his realizing that Islamists were targeting civilization itself.  Rushdie himself notes that Hitchens had not really been a close friend until after the fatwa and that Hitchens had made the effort to tie himself to Rushdie in partial response to said fatwa, so there may be something to this, however it seems altogether too facile a rationale on it's own.  


Beyond the Rushdie explanation, the historian Tony Judt had some profound thoughts on the strange death of liberal America and the seemingly mainstream acquiescence to liberal intervention. Judt's explanation goes some way in explaining what may have happened to Hitchens, but, as with the Rushdie explanation, it does not tell the full store. Curiously, Hitchens also wrote a hit piece about Judt, for Judt's protestation in the face of Israeli policy - a position that Hitchens' both historically and at the time of his attack on Judt, shared. This said, beyond simply Judt's outlined wishful thinking as a result of neoliberal ideological domination, or even fraternal compassion and outrage resulting from the fatwa placed on Rushdie, there must have been something further feature driving this shift in Hitchens' thinking. The most likely suspect: shameless self promotion.


Hitchens appears to have jumped on the Iraq bandwagon and an opportune moment - aligning himself with liberal interventionism just as it became fashionable following the public perception of successful military action in Bosnia and Kosovo.  While Hitchens' latter day militarism may derive from the experience of his father, a deeply conservative man who had served as a low-ranking officer in the British Navy, a shift later in life towards macho posturing has disturbed many of Hitchens' old allies on the Left who knew him as a staunch critic or the Vietnam and First Gulf Wars.  

In a way, Hitchens' pro-war position was careerist.  Hitchens was excellent at predicting social trends and perhaps saw a way to tie his atheism to a controversial but increasingly socially accepted rationale for conflict.  Hitchens himself called himself a "contrarian" and sought to be unpredictable, but despite this, his contrarianism was never that outside of the realm of the mainstream.  The case can be made that Hitchens sought to recast uncontroversial though slightly unconventional beliefs as edgy in order to feed into a cult of celebrity. He realized that the anti-Clinton bandwagon he had shackled himself to throughout the 90s (a position seen as controversial only because Hitchens self-identified as being explicitly of the left) had reached a natural expiry date as Clinton left office. Hitchens needed to reinvent himself do so in a way that would seem unpredictable in order to retain his outsider credibility.

This is a point noticed by Norman Finkelstein (of all people) and quoted below in a piece on Hitchens' triangulations:

Norman Finkelstein at the time explained that Hitchens was forever attempting to be unpredictable. Finkelstein contrasted this with Chomsky, who is quite predictable in terms of the positions he takes but is read because he marshals evidence and facts that one learns from.

Hitchens' advocacy for the War in Iraq was a way to take a controversial (for a self described Trotskyite) stance on an issue that would dominate the coming decade but would be palatable to great portions of mainstream society. Must as with Oscar Wilde's edict that the only thing worse than being talked about is not talked about, Hitchens found a way to controversially insert himself into the regular ebb and flow of cable news chat shows. The arch-liberal intellectual turncoat - armed with a glass of whiskey, the memorized complete works of Blake and soaring moral conviction.  This position seemed novel following the great moral relativism that so completely characterized the end of the Clinton years.  9/11 served as the great catalyst to recast good and evil for the American public and Hitchens star rose. Around this time, he gave up his position as a columnist with The Nation opting instead for the wider, and more mainstream readership of Vanity Fair.

While the war on terror and soon, in Iraq, was extremely popular among pundits when first prosecuted, Hitchens' decision to hold to the moral justifications for intervention  war after it had been abandoned as a failure by many of its original supporters further insured that we would be talked about - further drawing linkages from the Iraqi insurgency to Salafist militants as a means of also promulgating upon his equally controversial (in America, at least) uber-atheist credentials. It was this that catapulted Hitchens to celebrity "public intellectual".

That said, this is not to discount the importance of Hitchens on issues outside of the scope of the war on terror.  If Islamic terror was a topic on which Hitchens seemed to take leave of his gift for rationality, it did not seem to affect his other work as a brilliant social critic. As John Gray makes clear in a review of Hitchens' collected journalism:

To fasten on [Hitchens'] role as a celebrity journalist (as many of his critics have done) is to underestimate his achievements, because, when he leaves behind the certainties of ideology, he is an incomparable truth-teller.

Hitchens' best work has always included polytechnic prose, deep critical thinking, compassion and an unerring appreciation for comic irony.  Some pieces that immediately spring to mind include Hitchens' promulgations on the death penalty, "Scenes from an Execution" (which along with Camus' "Reflections on the Guillotine" should be considered the last word on capital punishment), his response to the modern banalities of a heavily commercialized Route 66, the examination of Karl Marx's career as a journalist, the brilliant books on Orwell, Henry Kissinger and the Elgin Marbles.  As I mentioned in my immediate reaction to Hitchens' death,  the man was also extremely generous with his time and genuinely seemed to care about the thinking and well being of his readership.  As embodied in his best work, the man's prose could be absolutely stunning. Hitchens had a kinetic, full-voiced style of writing. He disparaged cliché and mined the English language and literature for always just the right turn of phrase.  It may have been, ironically, that horror of cliché that lead to Hitchens to take some of his more ludicrous and reactionary stances.  


The defection of Hitchens to neoconservatism seems to have brought out the very worst in him.  Many of his later pieces on Iraq war and on Islamic terror have a somewhat deflated feel about them. In some ways, Hitchens came to resemble the reactionary latter day Evelyn Waugh. Unlike Hitchens; however, Waugh at least had the good sense at self parody, writing what Hitchens himself called  his 'own literary obituary' in Basil Seal Rides Again:

His voice was not the same instrument as of old. He had first assumed it as a conscious imposture; it had become habitual to him; the antiquated, worldly-wise moralities which using that voice, he had felt himself obliged to utter, had become his settled opinions.

If there is a clear summary of Hitchens' views post 9/11, this is it.  Full of bluster, pressed with sound and fury and saying nothing - but also, at the same time, saying everything about Hitchens himself.  Hitchens' gifts as a writer and as a thinker were prodigious, but so too was his gradual intellectual dilapidation.  If there is any justice, he will be remembered more for all the good than for the bad.  However, justice would also dictate that the unknowingly self-parodying and self-imposed asterisks of ideological thinking will always remain as a blemish on his legacy.

Why Ideas Matter

I've been writing a lot about ideas recently. The tendency has become to overlook ideas and the theoretical basis that drive people to make decisions and instead focus on the outcomes of those decisions. This is a jaundiced view, increasingly taken in much modern analytic work, presuming that the motivations for action should be ignored as long as the outcomes eventually line-up with our desired world view.  While I do agree with the case for pragmatism in the construction of public policy - there is a necessity to work with a broad set of actors who may have radically different motivations for their actions - it is also wrong to ignore the ideologies that drive people to act. Further, the semi-predictable outcomes of our decisions may often have their seeds in the ideologies that informed these actions. People in general, and particularly political scientists, may be poor forecasters of the future, but the shortcomings of our ideas and the "propaganda"-driven frames we use to interpret the world  have a roll in shaping those outcomes all the same. Belief in an ideology paves the way to a set of outcomes that may have otherwise been off the table.

In an interview, the filmmaker Adam Curtis, summarizes what he sees as the importance of ideas:

...I believe that ideas have consequences. And why I like people like [19th century conservative sociologist, Max] Weber is because they are challenging what I see as that crude left-wing vulgar Marxism that says that everything happens because of economic forces within society, that we are just surfing, our ideas are just expressions—froth on the deep currents of history, which is really driven by economics. I’ve never believed that. Of course, economic forces have a great effect on us. But actually, people’s ideas have enormous consequences. And to be honest, if you had to reduce what I do, I spend my whole time just looking at how ideas have consequences, not necessarily what the promoters of them intended, because I think that’s a really big thing in our time. (emphasis added)

I think that Curtis articulates a very important point here. Just because our limitations at making predictions are very real does not mean the ideologies that we use to make those predictions will not have some resonance upon the outcomes.  No one would initiate grandiose mechanisms of social upheaval if they did not intrinsically believe that their ideology would result in a desired impact. Stalin did not agriculturally collectivize the Ukraine with the goal of starving millions of his own citizens, he did it because he believed that he was implementing a scientifically derived socio/political framework that would help deliver the Soviet Union to a greater degree of resource independence. It was in part, because of the near religious nature of the prescriptive Marxist dialects involved that the policies were implemented on the scales that they were and resulted in the level of destruction that they did. The same case can be made for the decision of the Khmer Rouge to return Cambodia to the technological stone age or by neoliberal economists to subject developing economies to the cruelties of structural adjustment throughout the 1980s.  The beliefs themselves shaped and determined the outcomes, even if they were not the outcomes predicted.

Further, the extent to which ideas have shape the values of a society will help to determine how resilient a society is in the face of systemic shock or crisis. Jared Diamond, in his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed, makes a case for culturally determined ideological factors that can equip societies to fail or succeed shortages regardless of preexisting resource conditions. The ideas that shape these societies and the values that the societies hold will help determine ability to adapt and withstand shock. Cultural ideas determine how effectively resource management can operate within a particular society. Within this context, ideas, and how they are constructed and implemented, can mean the difference between life or death. While environmental conditions may to some extent drive cultural distinctions or ideas, the belief in how a society should be structured or operate cannot in and of itself be dismissed.

While it may seem too ideologically inflexible to insist that people and particularly political leaders do the right things for the right reasons - perhaps it is enough that they merely do the right things - rationale will always guide implementation. Rationale must also always be given to build public support. It can be difficult to get someone to implement a policy they do not believe in unless they can be coerced in some way: whether this is through propaganda, threat of force or bribery. While ideology should not be inflexible, people need to understand the reasons they are being asked to act. It is in this explanation for action that ideas become so powerful. Some of the worst excesses of 20th century ideologies - Nazism, Soviet Marxism and American Neoliberal Capitalism -were all derived from an erroneous belief in Social Darwinism. This idea proved to be pervasive and allowed for systematic destruction of societies and their reconstruction around absolutist systems on a scale never before imagined. Ideology and the widespread public acceptance of that ideology can result the full-scale reshaping of society. None of the results of the dramatic social shifts of the ideologies of the 20th century could have been achieved simply by "muddling through".

Ideas remain important and will likely remain, in response to environmental or resource conditions, the underlying engine that drives social, political and structural transformation. This is the raw power of ideas. While the outcomes of an ideology may not always be easily predictable, those outcome often lie as a shard within the very core of the idea itself. Ideas may be the most powerful dictators of human action that exist. We should bear this in mind as we plan the future of our societies.

The Problem of Political Labels

The standard and often interchangeable political labels that continue to underpin many conversations about politics are ill-suited to the political realities of today. Notions of liberal and conservative no longer hold their historical precedents. As the historian Tony Judt pointed out in his book, Ill Fares the Land, the left has lost much of its radical bent, while the right, particularly the American Right, has become increasingly revolutionary.  As a result, modern would-be leftists, or those who believe in the preservation of the social state and public institutions, have more in common with traditional conservatives such as Edmund Burke. Meanwhile it is the radical right, with its ideology of repealing 'entitlement' programs and eliminating the roll of the state in public life, that represents a new strand of revolutionary thinking. There is good reason why the Tea Party has co-opted 18th century radical, Thomas Paine, to it's cause, even if Paine would have been at odds with much of the Tea Party agenda.


Modern political distinctions becomes all the more confused when we further consider the political triumph of  economic neoliberalism throughout most of the Western economies.  While it may be a fallacy, as John Gray notes, to speak of "The West" as unified place, it is true that ideals centered upon deregulated markets, privatized industries and the like have become the dominant paradigm throughout the American and European world.  While the current economic crisis has demonstrated the fallacies of neoliberalism, the dominance of this economic/political ideology has not been slowed. This is partially due to a lack of politically implementable alternative. Social Democracy and the social state persist in several Western European (particularly Scandinavian) states and as vaguely autocratic neo-Marxist holdovers in parts of Asia and the Americas, however, the notion of developing new and meaningfully implementable ideologies from these frameworks seems to be impossible.


The lines have been further blurred to with the emergence of a consensus around liberal intervention and that ideologies close alignment (acknowledged or otherwise) with neo-conservatism. The distinction in the position of someone such as Christopher Hitchens regarding the case for War in Iraq and those of neo-conservatives who orchestrated the war, such as Paul Wolfowitz are so minute, they represent the parsing of the very finest of hairs. This is also true of other liberal interventionists, such as Samantha Power who is, according to consensus, the intellectual architect of recent US action in Libya. Indeed, the speed with which the United States along with many of European states jumped to intervene in Libya last year - despite gross exaggerations as to the nature of the situation on the ground in Benghazi and sensationalist intelligence marshaled in favor of intervention that was acknowledged as bogus at the collection level at the time it was being peddled - speaks to how liberal intervention has become politically uncontroversial. The ease with which modern states are willing to go to war-  largely in part as a response to the new found mechanization of warfare, allowing for most killing to be done by way of remote controlled drone aircraft or long-range bombing - has further erased barriers between right and left.  


The remnants of radical militarism inspired by ideologies of the old left seem to have ended with the Soviet Union, while former Marxist radical groups like the militant wing of the PFLP or the SDS collapsed.  This shift is best dramatized in the French miniseries on Ilich "Carlos the Jackal" Ramírez Sánchez, Carlos, in which we see an aging Carlos realize he has become truly irrelevant, finds himself persona non grata in his old client state of Syria and eventually finds himself in Sudan, where the Khartoum authorities eventually sell him to the French for the long-standing bounty.

What is likely to emerge may be a new paradigm of culturally divergent forms of capitalism that compete with one another.  As the English political philosopher, John Gray, notes in his shockingly clairvoyant book False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, the variety in culturally determined forms capitalism is enormous and there is no reason to expect, as much neoliberal economic theory suggests, that any of the emerging and soon to be dominant world economies will necessarily take on Western characteristics. Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, Russian and Japanese capitalism all have their own important traits and characteristics which are likely not reproducible outside of  their cultural contexts. Thus, while economists may criticize Japan for its years of apparent economic stagnation, the Japanese economy may be far more robust than many Western neoliberals may realize, or as Gray points out, may be simply returning uniquely Japanese development of high standard of living at zero economic growth. The irony of globalization is that, while it drives deregulation internationally, it also manages to strengthen certain culturally determinant characteristics of societies and economies.  It has also internationalized the actions of new types of internationalist militant organizations, such as Al-Qaeda that are simultaneously products of modernity while reacting against it.


If and how a Western political left may re-emerge is difficult to tell.  It may take the form of the mass civil society uprisings that the Occupy Wall Street movement and Stéphane Hessel agitate towards, however there is a question of if it can even re-emerge amid the new Western neoliberal consensus. Especially as this consensus, technology and entertainment industries take center stage, appears to increasingly conform to that Neil Postman forecasted in his seminal Amusing Ourselves To Death. Political alternatives may very likely proliferate in different cultural settings or contexts, however it remains to be seen how these alternatives will be able to be translated cross-culturally. Political conflict, in the United States at least, has been transformed such that, as David Bromwich points out, one political party: The Democrats have won on the cultural issues, while the other: The Republicans, have won on the public policy and economic ones.  Both parties, however, remain largely preoccupied by political tribalism without articulating a clear view of the public good. This distinction is important and is rarely acknowledged in mainstream political discourse.  Until there is some consensus as to which public services are valued by society - and that these services historically represent the backbone from which functional civil societies are built - the dominance of a dehumanizing and destabilizing neoliberal economic theory will continue to go unchecked.

So what of our political labels then? Without the above-mentioned shift away from neoliberalism, they remain absolutely meaningless.

How Our Cognitive Shortcomings Drive Utopianism

Humanity's attempts at utopia have ostensibly failed.  Instead, hubris has been the ultimate outcome of most human attempts at social engineering.  We have a marked tendency, as a species to embark on grandiose projects driven not by rationality or data, but rather by ideology or magical thinking.  Often, these ideologies are masked by pseudo-scientific rationale or portrayed as necessary, albiet painful steps towards a public good.  Some of these projects can exist for cultural reasons: the ridiculous opulence of Dubai, for example, while others may simply be utopian thinking: Biosphere 2 or Soviet, (and later Chinese), efforts at agricultural collectivism spring to mind.  The question becomes, what drives much of this ideology?  Where are the rationale checks that should prevent our leaders from pressing the self destruct button?  Two observed tendencies in neuroscience seem to hold some form of explanation.

The first of these tendencies is that noted by Cognitive Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his recent book: Thinking, Fast and Slow.  Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for proving (along with his now late collaborator, Amos Tversky), that people do not make rationale decisions under uncertain conditions, particularily in markets (market rationality has long been regarded as a necessary condition for markets to function by many economists).  Kahneman notes that our thinking is determined by what he calls two systems. System 1, which is our instinctual, immediate response tends to predominate, while System 2, which is our rationale decision making system, has to be cajoled or forced to activate.  Because of this, though we tend to delude ourselves into believing that we are rationale actors, instead, we tend to make most of our decisions based on immediate, emotional or intuitive reasoning rather than using reason.  As a result, the types of ideas that are likely to appeal to us are those that seem to hold a form of intuitive logic.  We are very poor at thinking statistically and as a result, we have a hard time of making decisions in the face of data.  As a result, ideas that may appeal on emotional grounds but be difficult to verify via data have greater pull societally.  

Kahnemans work also indicates why planning, and particularily social planning, are so difficult for us as a species.  It explains why Sir Peter Hall's wonderful history of planning policy, Cities of Tomorrow, can almost be read as a history of failed ideas and why necessary actions, such as the development of a comprehensive climate management plan, or even some system of governance to comprehensively manage resources is likely beyond us as a species.  Sadly, how we make decisions and engage in planning seems to further make a case for a deeply Malthusian view of the world and society.  In the face of our cognitive inabilities to engage in long effective range planning, we act as little more than bacteria, actively overusing resources until such a point that we manage to make the environment we operate in sceptic to ourselves. As Kahneman himself laments, despite all the work his on the subject, he has been unable to dramatically change the way he intuits the world and is as susceptible to over-use or over-dependency on System 1 thinking as the rest of us.

The second notable explanation for our tendency towards persisting with magical thinking comes from the researchers Brenda Nyhan and Jason Reifler.  In their study, When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions,  Nyah and Reifler look at what is called the "verification bias" and its impact on political thinking.  The verification bias indicates that when given data, no matter how compelling, that contradicts a strongly held viewpoint, rather than rationality integrate this data into our understanding of the world and use it to change our beliefs, we instead have a tendency to simply reject the data and then use this act of rejection to actually strengthen our initial underlying misconception. As a result, many political arguments are intractable even when one side may have a factual basis for believing what they do, while the other operates solely on conjecture.  This tendency appears to render much meaningful behavior change impossible.  As a result, new fields have spring up, including that of community-based social marketing dedicated to finding alternative means of subverting an embedded ideology. While efforts can be successful, they frequently involve dramatically changing the nature of the discussion around a given issue and can have mixed success. That said, the approach by no means guarantees results and calls for cultivating agents within given ideological communities who are receptive to change in order to cultivate different beliefs within that wider community.  This can, in some instances, be seen as manipulative.

The neurological fallacies outlined above appear to be inextricably linked to how our minds function.  As a result, there appears to be something innately human in attempting to intuit the world around us while rejecting unwelcome truths.  There is a reason, after all, that Aristotle and Plato are the fathers of modern Western philosophy while uber-rationalists such as David Hume and Karl Popper seem to inhabit a lower spot in the pantheon.  It also seems to explain why we will continue to make decisions about society strongly linked to ideological belief systems rather than developing true data driven public policy.  The question becomes, will sufficient self-awareness of these limitations result in dramatic changes in how we see the world?  In light of human history thus far, it would represent a wildly optimistic wager.