I don’t get this.  How are Bakker’s “rich, wondrous” life experiences untrue?  

No one else has a brain with your unique neuroprint, nor have they had the exact same experiences as you, so what exactly is the profound difference between “free will” (whatever that means) and the complex interaction between the chemicals in your head and your experiences?  And why are so many people bothered by this?

Articles within articles within articles! A sample:

The piece riffs on a recent study published in Science that reported that conservatives show greater skin conductance and higher blink rates to threatening images than liberals, indicating higher levels of arousal.

This was widely interpreted as suggesting conservatives are more fearful than liberals. Although the study didn’t ask about fear directly, both blinking and sweating have been linked to elevated fear responses before.

…

These interpretations are interesting, because they immediately make a value judgement about whether the fear response is appropriate or not. As the Slate piece notes, another interpretation is that liberal participants were less emotionally responsive.

If you’ve read, listened to, or thought about the Heidt results, this isn’t any surprise, really: if you have different moral axioms that guide your interpretation of the world, then you’re going to have different physiological responses to stimuli that push those moral buttons. Even so, this is a nice overview for the increasingly-mythical Person Who Gives A Shit.

From a completely surprising direction comes this piece on sort of the same idea. Seth Godin’s blog is usually about business and marketing and having good ideas so you won’t have to have some suckass job to pay the rent but rather some tremendous job that will allow you to blossom like the beautiful flower that you are. (I’m trying to work in a burn on DDB, who I like to think about as “blossoming into a beautiful flower” but I can’t think of anything.)

Every person makes decisions based on their worldview and the data at hand. If two people have the same worldview and the same data, they’ll make the same decision, every time (unless they’re stupid.)

…

In my experience, a closed-minded worldview (“I can’t read that book, I disagree with it”) is the most difficult hurdle to overcome. But a closed-minded worldview doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it means that you are selling yourself and your colleagues and your community short.

There must be something in the air; everybody’s beating around the edge of this idea. Godin is talking about business, so you can forgive him for using the language of change. He’s asking: what do we have to do to change this guy’s worldview? That’s fine for business, which is quantifiably successful or not, and whose DNA can be discussed as if there were some Right Answer. (Sort of. Not really, but let’s not complicate things.) But for people, is it “right” to avenge your father’s murder by killing the guy who knifed him, even if that guy has a wife and kids who will have no means of support if you do?

On a side note, the game Ultima VI, which was released … in 1990, I think, created your character in just this way. It asked you a bunch of difficult questions, and forced you to come up with a moral hierarchy for your character. I stole that “avenge your father” question directly from the game. Wes will doubtless be glad to hear of an example of games being considerably MORE morally sophisticated than culture.

If I’m right in thinking that this attitude is normal, than the acrimony between “both” poles of the political spectrum isn’t surprising. Nor the acrimony between anybody, for anything. The only surprise is that there aren’t _more_ problems.

With this in mind, indulge me, and take a couple of these moral surveys. Each one takes less than ten minutes, and I promise you’ll learn something about yourself, and if not about yourself, then about other people, whose results you will see after you finish a survey.

I’ll wait.

***

Those surveys were designed by Jonathan Heidt, the guy giving this talk, which is one of those things that, after I watched it, made me grateful to live in an age where such things can be viewed, freely, on the web. You can read his central thesis in this paper, but the idea is this: in the same way that Chomskians (dunno what the concrete noun form of this is. Daniel?) believe that all humans have a Universal Grammar, which is responsible for the deep structure common to all languages, Heidt maintains that the diverse flavors of morality exhibited across human cultures are all generated by the same five parameters: harm, fairness, authority, loyalty, purity.

This formulation makes a lot of sense if you reason forward from one simple axiom: that people, in general, are pretty much the same in most basic ways. Everyone likes to eat food, for instance. Everybody likes sex, even if they try not to. Everyone likes scrapbooking. Etc. If you start with this, it becomes more difficult to believe, to really believe, that, say, fifty percent of the United States are complete fucktards who would as happily goose step about the place sending people to death camps as look at them.

It’s weird how comforting that thought is sometimes. It’s weird to be “comforted” in the knowledge that so many people are so fucking stupid, and evil. I suppose the comfort lies in the moral ease with which you can then go about your day, slotting anyone who disagrees with you into some appropriate Other bin, and then getting together with your coterie and grimacing at each other. But how right am I when I’m doing this? Because I do it a lot, even though I don’t want to. Here’s Roger Schank, who’s now living in Florida for some reason:

It is common to make the assumption that people are thinking when they vote and they are making reasoned choices. I harbor no such illusion. No argument I have ever gotten into with these people, (despite avoiding talking to them, I sometimes can’t resist saying something true) has ever convinced anyone of anything. They are not reasoning, nor do they want to try. They simply believe what they believe. What do they believe?

1. They don’t like blacks. Forget the rest. It isn’t that they are racists. They will be polite if a black person ever appears. (This doesn’t happen much, although I am sure they must live here too.) They just don’t like them. They have no reason. If you ask them today, as a result of recent remarks by Michelle Obama and their pastor, they will say that blacks hate America. This is not the reason, but they sound more reasoned in their own minds if they say it that way.

2. They don’t like wussies. The Democrats are always nominating wussies,—men who are not men. Obama looks like his wife runs the show at home. Kerry? Gore? Dukakis. Wussies. Not real men. Bad people are trying to kill us. We need to kill them first. Those guys wouldn’t pull the trigger. (I am not making this up. I wish I were.)

3. They worry about money. Who wants to take their money away? Liberals of course. They want to give it to the blacks.

Where I live is not redneck country. There is a lot of church going but no talk about abortion or of being born again. There is a just a distaste and distrust for people not like us (which I am sure includes me.)

Roger Schank is an intellectual giant; a pioneer of AI and cognitive science; an iconoclast and a gourmand; and you’ll be hearing more about him as time passes because I love him. This excerpt was from an essay called What Makes People Vote Republican?, featuring Heidt again. These Edge essays are fantastic; they take the form of a central essay, followed by a bunch of responses from noted intellectuals. Reading stuff in Edge is a good way to intelligently explore the nuances of an issue.

But think about it: the zeitgeist amongst the academic community is so comfortable with the idea that voting Republican is something aberrative that we can search for the genesis of its pathology the same way we try to figure out why people are still getting genital herpes. The problem isn’t that this seems ridiculous; the problem is that it seems perfectly reasonable, because they’re just so backwards and ignorant and ignorance-embracing and contemptible.

Right?

Schank is famous for his temper and his acid tongue, but he’s also wicked smart, and thoughtful, and generally dismissive of people who dismiss other people for not thinking the things they’re supposed to think, or doing the things they’re supposed to do. But here he abandons that nuance. It’s easier, and more fun, to diagnose his Florida neighbors according to those three bullet points. And let’s even say that he’s right. Then the question becomes: why do the democrats appear to be wussies? Why does a geniune war hero (John Kerry) seem to these people to be wussier than a draft-dodging rich boy who used daddy’s money to stay out of Vietnam?

Heidt’s argument gives us a context to reason about this issue, and I think it’s increasingly important that we do so. Not just for political reasons; not even mostly for that. But in a world where it’s commonplace to sequester yourself inside your house, and bombard yourself exclusively with chatter from people whose opinions are exactly like your own; in an era where contact with The Other is totally optional for huge swaths of the populace; when it’s so easy to demonize, so simple to back up any opinion with selective sampling, and when the consequences of doing so are so poisonous -

well. You get the point.

POSTSCRIPT:

This is a lovely bit of symmetry:

During an email exchange today apropos the death of David Foster Wallace, my friend Aimee sent me a scanned version of a commencement speech he gave in 2005. You can find a more-or-less decent transcript here. The essay is about the value of a liberal arts education, and what a liberal arts education actually means. For DFW, it essentially means realizing that you have a choice in whether or not to see the complexities of the world. From that essay:

[I]f you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

It’s no surprise, really, that somebody acclaimed as a great artist would have this attitude. You pretty much have to, or else you write shit. I dare you to try to publish your shit-ass novel full of superior characters who hold all your opinions, and other stupid and evil characters who fail to live up to your precise moral code. I dare you.

Which isn’t to say that once every blue moon those people don’t get novels published; sometimes they’re even successful. But the percentage is small, and their success is ephemeral. You’ve got to be willing to open up a vein for the people you hate if you’re going to amount to anything.

In his book “Creating Short Fiction” Damon Knight writes:

Love and understanding are the missing ingredients in most slushpile stories. If you don’t understand your character, you can’t make her believable, and if you don’t care about her, the reader won’t either.

Give us this day our daily fiction, and forgive us our trespasses against the characters we find there.