An Exchange On Compassion Between Jim Boushay and Jean Bethke Elshtain |
| August 22, 2004 From Jim Boushay to Jean Bethke Elshtain Greetings, Jean. F.Y.I. Just in case you missed this article below in today's New York Times. Jim Boushay The Political Brain By STEVEN JOHNSON A few months before retiring from public office in 2002, the House majority leader Dick Armey caused a mini-scandal when he announced during a speech in Florida, ''Liberals are, in my estimation, just not bright people.'' The former economics professor went on to clarify that liberals were drawn to ''occupations of the heart,'' while conservatives favored ''occupations of the brain,'' like economics or engineering. The odd thing about Armey's statement was that it displayed a fuzzy, unscientific understanding of the brain itself: our most compassionate (or cowardly) feelings are as much a product of the brain as ''rational choice'' economic theory is. They just emanate from a different part of the brain—most notably, the amygdala, the almond-shaped body that lies below the neocortex, in an older brain region sometimes called the limbic system. Studies of stroke victims, as well as scans of normal brains, have persuasively shown that the amygdala plays a key role in the creation of emotions like fear or empathy.If amygdala activity is a reliable indication of emotional response, a fascinating possibility opens up: turning Armey's muddled poetry into a testable hypothesis. Do liberals ''think'' with their limbic system more than conservatives do? As it happens, some early research suggests that Armey might have been on to something after all. As The Times reported not long ago, a team of U.C.L.A. researchers analyzed the neural activity of Republicans and Democrats as they viewed a series of images from campaign ads. And the early data suggested that the most salient predictor of a ''Democrat brain'' was amygdala activity responding to certain images of violence: either the Bush ads that featured shots of a smoldering ground zero or the famous ''Daisy'' ad from Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 campaign that ends with a mushroom cloud. Such brain activity indicates a kind of gut response, operating below the level of conscious control. Could the U.C.L.A. researchers be creating the political science of the future? Consider this possibility: the scientists do an exhaustive survey and it turns out that liberal brains have, on average, more active amygdalas than conservative ones. It's a plausible outcome that matches some of our stereotypes about liberal values: an aversion to human suffering, an unwillingness to rationalize capital punishment and military force, a fondness for candidates who like to feel our pain. What would that kind of insight tell us that we didn't know already? One thing is certain: evidence of a neurological difference between liberal and conservative brains would not be another instance of genetic determinism, since patterns of brain activity are shaped by experience as much as by genes. (Those who suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome also show unusual patterns of amygdala activity, but those patterns are almost inevitably the imprint of a specific event, and not the long arm of DNA.) Nonetheless, opening up the brain's black box might provide new explanations for how people become Republicans or Democrats, not to mention libertarians or Maoists, in the first place. It's pretty to think that we all decide our political affiliations by methodically studying each party's positions on the issues. But a recent study by Paul Goren at Arizona State found that voters typically formed their party affiliations before developing specific political values. They become Democrats first and then decide that they, say, oppose capital punishment and support trade unions. But how do they make that initial decision to be a Democrat? The most likely indicator of political preference is your parents' party affiliation, but if everyone simply voted along family lines, the dominant party would simply be the one whose members had the most voting offspring. The real question is why someone would ever break from the family tradition—without feeling strongly either way about specific issues.Those M.R.I. scans suggest an explanation. Perhaps we form political affiliations by semiconsciously detecting commonalities with other people, commonalities that ultimately reflect a shared pattern of brain function. In the mid-1960's, the social psychologist Donn Byrne conducted a series of experiments in which the participants were given a description of several hypothetical strangers' attitudes and beliefs. They were then asked which stranger they would most enjoy having as a co-worker. The subjects consistently preferred the company of strangers with attitudes similar to their own. Opposites repel. Say you're inclined to form strong emotional responses to images of violence or human suffering, and over the course of your formative years, most of the people you meet who respond to these images with comparable affect turn out to be Democrats. That's a commonality of experience that exists beneath conscious political affiliation—it's closer to a gut instinct than a rational choice—but if you meet enough Democrats who share that experience, sooner or later you start carrying the card yourself. Political identity starts with a shared temperament and only afterward deposits a layer of positions on the issues.Seeing political identity as a reflection of common brain architecture helps explain another longstanding riddle: why do people vote against their immediate interests? Why do blue-collar Republicans and limousine liberals exist? The question becomes less puzzling if you assume that 1) people choose parties primarily because they desire the companionship of people who share their cognitive wiring, and 2) they desire that companionship so much they're willing to pay for the privilege. These are all hypotheses now, and indeed it may turn out that some other region of the brain plays a more important role in creating political values. But if the U.C.L.A. results hold water over time, it won't justify the Armey theory that liberals are somehow less rational than conservatives. One of the most celebrated insights of the past 20 years of neuroscience is the discovery—largely associated with the work of Antonio Damasio—that the brain's emotional systems are critical to logical decision-making. People who suffer from damaged or impaired emotional systems can score well on logic tests but often display markedly irrational behavior in everyday life.Dustin Hoffman's autistic character in ''Rain Man'' was brilliant with numbers, but you wouldn't necessarily want him in the White House. Is there something intrinsically reductive or fatalistic in connecting political values to brain functioning? No more so than ascribing them to race or economic background, which we happily do without second thought. Isn't it more dehumanizing to attribute your beliefs to economic conditions outside your control? At least your brain is inalienably yours—it's where the whole category ''you'' originates. No one denies that social conditions shape political values. But the link between the brain and the polis is still uncharted terrain. Prozac showed us that the slightest tinkering with brain chemistry could have transformative effects on a person's worldview. Who is to say those effects don't travel all the way to the voting booth?Steven Johnson is the author most recently of ''Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life.'' ___________________________________ August 22, 2004 From Jean Bethke Elshtain to Jim Boushay Dear Jim, I had, in fact, missed the piece and read it with interest. It is an altogether weird piece, though, and reminds me of all the failed attempts over the years —the centuries, really—to find some 'materialist' explanation for complex phenomena. Also, to the extent that the writer is correct, it would mean that Democrats are less rational—there is less cognitive activity involved—than Republicans—if indeed the important stuff is going on below the level of consciousness.Very strange. I had some good news recently. The University of Edinburgh has invited me to the deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 2006. The only other political theorist who has done these lectures —they began back in 1908 or 1911 or so with William James or Alfred North Whitehead, I believe—was Hannah Arendt. (Charles Taylor did them a few years back but he is more philosopher than political theorist, if you know what I mean.) So I was/am very excited about this. I thought they might pass me by for this honor because I am such a controversialist! They indicated that that was one reason they chose me—that I was prepared to let the chips fall where they may. Love to you and Rickey, best, Jean___________________________________ August 2 7, 2004From Jim Boushay to Jean Bethke Elshtain Jean, Give thanks with a grateful heart. The news is awesome, truly. The once in a lifetime experience means you now will follow in a long line of distinguished thinkers and public intellectuals who have given the Gifford Lectures—particularly ethicists and political theoreticians in the last half of the 20th century, and theologians in the first half. Some of my favorite thinkers from among that grouping have given the lectures. Stanley Hauerwas is not among the group. Big smile. I'm so proud to know you, and Rickey has a similar response to the news. Thank you for saying something. The university is lucky to have you. And I mean that, even given its incomparable position around the world. Year 2006 is a while off, and now you've got plenty of thinking and consulting and writing to do. So for now, here's the one pressing thought floating in my head about this most felicitous opportunity and challenging assignment. Christopher Lasch is a compelling and brilliant social critic, a hero to me in some ways, but his stuff is churlish, complaining and—my chief criticism—mostly angry. I believe you are as compelling and brilliant in your analyses of what's wrong as he is. In contradistinction you know how to communicate and write in love and compassion not only about what's right but also about what needs to get fixed. You're honest enough also to talk about what can't be fixed. Your students say that compassion is the authentic you. Make compassion work for you—again and again—as you put your ideas to work on the lectures. That remarkable quality and attitude of genuine compassion is omnipresent, for example, in the tough-minded Real Politics at the Center of Everyday Life. Clearly compassion is but one of several telling qualities in your work over the years. You can't mask it. Similarly the hard-nosed Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World is an example of the possibilities in compassion and reconciliation. That analysis brings home once more the Christian imperative of not giving up, of trying to keep on keeping on, even perhaps in extreme and impossible circumstances, and of bringing opponents together no matter how dastardly and demonic each thinks the other side. I believe that many of Lasch's cultural and social observations are tragic yet true. I include here, as examples, his seemingly unrelenting criticism of political leaders in Haven in a Heartless World as well his criticism of the university—and several other spheres of knowledge and influence—in The Culture of Narcissism. My sense is that the world needs someone of your intellectual and, yes, controversial stature to tell the truth while showing how we might try critically to embrace humanity in its awful and magnificent perplexity and sinfulness. That implies a decision in favor of forgiveness, reconciliation, and tolerance within the struggle to affirm both mind and heart. They are opposite sides of the same coin. Lasch, because angry, refuses to acknowledge the crying need for compassion, for feeling, in a deeply flawed world. In effect he creates another intellectual circle of elites to criticize the intellectual circle of elites. Ahhhh. I find that approach oppressive, counter-productive. Given his extraordinary intellectual power and reputation, whenever I go to his books I keep hoping somewhere in the volume that he will use that monumental intellectual power to show how the ultimate answer is the ineffable mystery contained in the practice of love and compassion. He's too angry to say that. He's too mad at the way people stubbornly refuse to think, to pay attention, to fight the automatons in our age of too much affluence and not enough enough. But we can do better. I think you know how to give us hell, "us" meaning politics, religion, education, law. You are good at speaking truth to power and at loving us at the same time. That's one of your gifts, seems to me. It's the difference shown in the juxtaposition of two words in a Holly Near song. She sings, "We are a gentle angry people...and we are singing for our lives." Whatever it is you are going to sing about in the lectures, you might consider speaking more with an attention-grabbing attitude of being angry gentle about our culture's manifest deficiencies in envisioning a future beyond daunting diseases, abject poverty, global war, mass destruction. How do we envision a future beyond the seemingly unstoppable degradation of the person and sacredness of the environment? Do we have a future beyond our clumsy lack of skill and of intestinal fortitude in distinguishing between self interest and the greater good? Not inelegantly, Yeats says in Dialogue of the Self and Soul, "A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure, what matter if we endure it all once more?" What matters is that we need a clear, authoritative, and nurturing voice that says, "We've made a mess of it, and we're likely going to continue making a mess. Still, we must do what we can to make things better." Yet the voice must be a call to move beyond a position of stasis (in the classical Greek sense of opposing armies always poised for battle) by showing in love how we as individuals often create and foster those very stresses and conflicts that we yearn, in fact, to discourage and banish away from ourselves and others. So then, one question is, What's the role of acceptance (not resignation) in all this mess? A second question goes to the heart perhaps of our spiritual hungers. Art Simon of Bread for the World asks, How Much Is Enough? in his book of the same name. He discusses ways of finding God and meaning in the challenges of an affluent culture. For example, health studies and statistics show that clinical depression is at epidemic proportions in Western culture. I'm not aware of whether similar health statistics are recorded or reported in Eastern parts of the world. The brutal reality of American and Western depression and despair was first brought home to me when I was on the Menninger Foundation staff in the late 70s and early 80s. Karl Menninger's work in part was to draw attention to the tragically inevitable ways Western society seems actively to foster mental illness, self-destructive passiveness, ennui, spiritual sickness and debilitation. Menninger's 1973 bestseller Whatever Became of Sin? broadly covers the complexities involved in naming the ways individual lapses of responsibility toward building a better community contribute cumulatively to our anxieties about human failure and human success. The struggle to acknowledge and treat the causes of despair and depression as well as other forms of spiritual sickness must continue. That mighty struggle must find (as opposed to might find) its answer in what I call Beyond the Beyond. So my second and last question then is: Is there a way to use the Gifford Lectures as an opportunity to show how God—or at least the idea of God—is with us now in the struggle and has always been with us in bringing us to greater vigor and fulfillment? Enough for now. For a later date for us to discuss perhaps, the Foundation would like to help with the new undertaking. I'm offering assistance without my knowing at this instant what that service might look like. We can think on it. I'm deeply humbled by my connection to you. Once more, congratulations from both Rickey and me. Yesterday your great news simply made my day. Jim ___________________________________ August 27, 2004 From Jean Bethke Elshtain to Jim Boushay Dear Jim, Thanks so much for your lovely, brilliant email. I have printed it up and will cherish it. I do agree, with regret, about Kit Lasch. He was a dear, dear friend of mine—he died in 1994. I think the underlying note of bitter regret you detect in his work came from the fact that he kept looking for the silver lining, or bullet, that would turn the country around--and, of course, he would never find it. Those he identified as the source of hope always failed him, disappointed him. This, I believe, was a hold-over from his flirtation with a type of Marxist oriented analysis where there is always some x you can identify (the proletariat, e.g.) that will lead you to the promised land. It doesn't work like that, of course.You need thousands and thousands of actions of decent ordinary folks to make social and civil life more generous, less brutal, even as those responsible do what they are duty-bound to do to protect people from random violence. So I do not despair as Kit did. Interestingly, he had been raised in an irreligious family. People of religious belief were curiosities to him as he grew up. Yet, the last 10 years of his life, he found himself being tempted by faith. The last thing he said to me on the phone, only a few hours before he died, and his mind was garbled, had to do with Orestes Brownson, a man who had been a member of the New England Unitarian elite—either Unitarian or 'high church' Brahmin, forget which, and who, shockingly, converted to Catholicism. This has haunted me ever since. There was faith on his mind when he died, in some form. I only wish he had lived long enough to explore this side of himself. Warm regards to you and Rickey, Jean___________________________________ |