The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (7 page)

★
5
★

Politics and Personhood

E
ach of us has a sense of personal identity: your sense of who you are as a person. Central to that personal identity is a moral sense, a sense of what is right and wrong, what justifies our actions. That moral sense, like all that we believe and understand, is physical, built into the neural circuitry of our brains. If that changes, if the circuitry characterizing our moral sense changes, it changes our personhood. That is, it changes the kind of people we are: what we think is right and how we act.

We have seen that all politics is moral, since political policies are assumed to be right, not wrong or irrelevant. Our political divisions come down to moral divisions, characterized in our brains by very different brain circuitry. We’ve seen that the major moral divisions in our politics derive from two opposed models of the family: a progressive (nurturant parent) morality and a conservative (strict father) morality. That is no accident, since your family life has a profound effect on how you understand yourself as a person.

The effect of family life is complex, and peers have an effect as well. One result of that is biconceptualism. Biconceptuals have both kinds of moral circuitry in their brain, mutually inhibiting each other and applying to different issues, person by person. There is no “middle,” no morally based political ideology common to all moderates.

Regardless of whether you are progressive, conservative, or biconceptual, though, your morality—your sense of what a person should be and do—is deeply connected to the way your brain triggers emotions and determines whether you feel good or bad in certain situations and about certain ideas. It is worth understanding why.

The Science behind Empathy and Morality

One of the great discoveries of neuroscience is the mirror neuron system. Simply put, that system operates in our brains and gives us the capacity to connect with others, to know and even feel what they feel, and to connect with the natural world. It is the heart of our capacity for empathy. From emotion research, we know that certain emotions correlate with certain actions in our own bodies—in facial muscles, in posture, and so on. When we feel happy, for instance, our facial muscles are prompted to produce a smile, as opposed to a frown or a baring of the teeth. We also know that the physical cues that broadcast emotion in others will usually trigger in an observer the same brain response that would accompany those physical cues of the same emotion in ourselves. That is why we can usually tell if someone else is happy or sad, or angry or bored—and why a smile is often unconsciously greeted with a smile or a yawn with a yawn.

All this is thanks to the mirror neuron system, which has circuitry connecting the brain’s action centers and perception centers. As a consequence, what you see others doing is neurally paired with brain activity that could control your own actions. Muscles are activated by firing neurons, and many of the same neurons are firing whether you are performing an action or whether you are seeing someone else performing the same action. This “mirroring” allows you to see the musculature tied to the emotions of others and sense in your brain what the same musculature would be like in your body, and hence the same emotions, in yourself. In short, it allows you to feel the emotions of others! That is what empathy is about.

But this effect has further repercussions in the brain. Neuroscientists have discovered a brain overlap, too, between imagining and doing. Many of the same neural regions are activated when we form mental images as when we actually see. The same holds true for whether we imagine moving or are actually moving. That means that we have the capacity to empathize not only with someone present, but also with someone we can imagine, remember, read about, dream about, and so on. That is why we can be deeply moved by a novel or a movie, or even a newspaper story.

Neuroscientists have also shown that, when someone is in love and they see their loved one in pain, the pain center in their own brain is activated. Emotional pain is real.

Sounds simple, but there are some twists to the story, some neural complications that affect how we ultimately respond to what we see, hear, and imagine. The prefrontal cortex has regions particularly active during the exercise of judgment. These regions contain neurons that are active when we are performing some particular action and less active when we see someone else performing the same action. It is hypothesized that this gives us the capacity to modulate our empathy—to lessen it or turn it off in certain cases. The mirror neuron system thus connects us emotionally to others, but can in certain cases also distance us emotionally from others.

The prefrontal cortex is active in another neural system, too—one that I’ll call the well-being/ill-being system. This is the system that releases certain hormones in your brain when you have experiences that make you feel good, and releases others when experiences make you feel bad. In essence, this system regulates whether you have a sense of well-being or ill-being at any given time. It is also the system that presumably is involved in making judgments on the basis of your imagination of what will or won’t bring you well-being.

The well-being system and the empathy system can interact in complex ways. Some people feel satisfaction both when they are personally satisfied and when those they empathize with feel a sense of well-being.

Other people do not have the two systems connected in that way. (1) They may have the well-being system overriding the empathy system—with their interests overriding the cares and interests of others. Or (2) they can have a complex interaction in which they maintain their own well-being and balance it with contributing to the well-being of others. Or (3) they may be self-sacrificing, always placing the well-being of others ahead of their own well-being. Or (4) they may be part of an in-group, and may place their well-being and that of in-group members first, without empathizing at all with out-group members. This can vary, depending on what counts as a given person’s in-group.

Since morality is about well-being, your own and that of others, these four alternatives define different moral attitudes.

Can the mirror neuron system be affected by inborn factors? Apparently, yes. With certain forms of autism, empathy is lessened or largely absent. In psychopaths, empathy is controlled: Psychopaths can sense what someone else is feeling, not be affected themselves, and then manipulate the other for their own benefit or enjoyment.

Can the mirror system be affected by how one is raised, by one’s family life and peer relations? Does one’s political morality correlate with one’s capacity for empathy—that is, with the operation of the mirror neuron and well-being systems? That is being investigated, and preliminary results suggest that there is a difference between extreme progressives and extreme conservatives, with extreme conservatives showing less activation in their empathy system.

Since all thoughts and feelings are physical, a matter of brain circuitry, it is not surprising that moral sensibilities should be constituted by physical brain structures like those we have just been discussing. These brain structures form the neural basis not only of your own moral sensibilities, but also of your views on what an ideal person ought to be.

The Ideal Person

What should an ideal person be like? Conservatives and progressives have largely opposite views, given their different views of morality. Biconceptuals have different views as well, depending on how their moral views are divided up: biconceptuals who are largely conservative will tend to have a conservative view of what people should be like, and biconceptuals who are largely progressive will tend to have a progressive view of what people should be like. Or, biconceptuals that are less extreme may believe that an ideal person is biconceptual in the same way they are, with the same distribution of conservative and progressive views.

The progressive (nurturant parent) moral system maintains a delicate balance between the empathy and the personal well-being systems. At its core is empathy for others and the responsibility to act on that empathy, but it is modulated by the proviso that you can’t take care of anyone else if you’re not taking care of yourself. That is, it centers on empathy and includes both personal and social responsibility.

The conservative moral system centers on the well-being system—on personal responsibility alone, on serving your own interests without depending on the empathy of others to take care of you and without having empathy and responsibility for others.

There are nuances, but this gets at the heart of the difference.

Empathy versus Sympathy

Empathy and sympathy both involve the capacity to know what others are feeling. But unlike empathy, sympathy involves distancing, overriding personal emotional feeling. Someone who is sympathetic may well act to relieve the pain of others but not feel the pain themselves. The word “compassion” can be used for either empathy or sympathy, depending on who is using the word. For example, George W. Bush, in first announcing his run for the presidency, called himself a “compassionate” conservative, citing the book by Marvin Olasky,
The Tragedy of American Compassion
.

Olasky and Bush’s take on compassion and conservatism point to a central difference between progressives and conservatives. Progressives tend to believe that society as a whole has a responsibility to aid those in real material need and that the government should be a major instrument, with support from taxes. Conservatives tend to prefer charity, delivered through nongovernmental organizations, and tend to believe that real help for most people in material need is a refusal of aid, to give them an incentive to help themselves. Hence the conservative motto: It is better to teach someone to fish than to give him a fish to eat. Incidentally, charity for the “deserving” few costs a lot less than taxes to provide resources for the benefit of all.

This dichotomy leads to two very different ideas of what an ideal person should be like, and how our politics should be arranged to produce a version of the ideal person with the “right” moral system, whether purely conservative, purely progressive, or the right combination of the two.

Reflexivity and Personhood

At this point we have to ask The Reflexivity Question for Personhood: Can linguistic framing change the kind of person someone is? The answer seems to be yes, though possibly not in extreme cases. And of course it may depend on age and circumstances. But such changes do appear to have happened over the years—so far as I can tell, mostly with biconceptuals. Extreme conservatives (estimated at about 25 to 30 percent of the US population), it appears, cannot be changed by reframing and setting up an effective communication system that operates full time, not just at elections. Yes, this means that some people cannot be “reached” (an inaccurate progressive metaphor) or “woken up” (another inaccurate progressive metaphor).

Consider a moderate progressive who is partly conservative. She hears conservative language and conservative arguments over and over, day after day for years—in the media or with friends or both. The conservative language will activate the conservative moral system, making it a bit stronger every time the language is heard. As the conservative circuitry in her brain becomes stronger (the synapses strengthen), the more likely it is that her views on issues will change from progressive to conservative. The result may be a shift within the brain from a person who is partly conservative to a person who is mostly conservative. I believe that this has actually happened in many cases.

That is the power of the conservative messaging system: It is reflexivity in action. Over time, someone’s very personhood can change, and with it her ideal of what other people should be. And, of course, who they should vote for.

The other conservative use of reflexivity depends upon getting those votes. Once in office, conservatives can not only say that government cannot work and has to be minimized and privatized, but by being in the government, they can also stop it from working, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. How? By cutting taxes, by cutting funding, by passing laws, and, in the Supreme Court, by reinterpreting laws.

In contemporary America, politics and personhood are inseparable—and apparently moving in a conservative direction. To change that direction, progressives need to understand the role of the brain and of communication systems in the process.

Politics and Personhood at the Founding

When the United States was founded, politics and personhood had come together, but in the progressive direction.

Historian Lynn Hunt at UCLA goes through the history in detail in her book
Inventing Human Rights: A History
. She starts with the defining passage of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

If these rights are self-evident, she asks, why does Jefferson have to say that they are self-evident? And when did they become self-evident?

Hunt, a former president of the American Historical Society, studied the writing and culture of France, England, and the Thirteen Colonies. She shows that those ideas were not there in the 1600s, and came into existence in the mid-1700s, mainly after 1760, when Western Europe and the States were swept up in a major cultural change. That change can be seen in the period’s novels, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
Julie
, the biggest bestseller of the century, with seventy editions between 1761 and 1800.
Julie
was written as a collection of intimate letters between two lovers. Readers identified deeply with the emotional lives of the characters, whose psychological states were revealed and developed from letter to letter, arousing empathy for the plights of ordinary people. Between 1760 and the 1780s, such novels multiplied, laws were passed ending torture by the state as being inhuman, portraits showing the individual characteristics of their subjects started to be painted, manners changed to increase personal control over one’s body (e.g., blowing your nose into a handkerchief), and the idea of individual autonomy came into existence in a rush.