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September 3, 2007
I came across this idea. Cultural citizenship ("the right to know and speak") can be distinquished from the zones of political ("the right to reside and vote") or economic ("the right to work and prosper") citizenship. Cultural practice matters as much to citizenship as do political rights and economic status, whilst understanding culture necessitates engagement with popular mass media, especially television; and that coming to terms with the mass media requires attention to the political economy in which it is situated, and the way the mass media works. How then does the mass media work.
This text----The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation by Drew Westen, which focues on how voters experience politics, offers a suggestion. Westen argues that the dominant model of mind, brain, and decision making for three centuries has been an essentially dispassionate one, a view that privileges rational decision making. The view of democracy that naturally flows from the dispassionate view of the mind is of a marketplace of ideas. Parties and politicians who want to convince others of their point of view lay out the data, make their best case, and leave it to the electorate to weigh the argument.
That's pretty right.
The central thesis of Westen's book is that this view of mind and brain could not be further from the truth. In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins.
Although we have a marketplace of ideas, the marketplace that matters most of the time in American politics is the marketplace of moral sentiments, images, analogies, frames of reference, and moving oratory. These "markets" matter because they in turn create a marketplace of emotions. Of particular importance for understanding politics are "networks of associations" -- bundles of thoughts, feelings, sounds, images, memories, and emotions that have become linked through experience.
Westen argues that republicans have a keen eye for markets, and they have a near-monopoly in the marketplace of emotions. They have kept government off our backs, torn down that wall, saved the flag, left no child behind, protected life, kept our marriages sacred, restored integrity to the Oval Office, spread democracy to the Middle East, and fought an unrelenting war on terror. The Democrats, in contrast, have continued to place their stock in the marketplace of ideas. And in so doing, they have been trading in the wrong futures.
Isn't this an account of the importance of political rhetoric? A rhetoric that speaks to the unconscious - isn't this what Westen is talking about?
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The book by Linda Kintz titled Between Jesus and the Market is a superb, and chilling, example of how the "right" weave their deadly spell over (or rather into the very bones) of their susceptible constituents.
Rational ideas have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Another book by Susan Harding titled The Book of Jerry Falwell tells the same story.
Tragically, ironically, some influential right wing Christian outfits that more or less support the agenda of the crudely political "right" are very big on promoting "reason" as a means of "proving" the existence of the Judeo-Christian "creator"-god and the entire cultural mind-set created by that.
As in Stand To Reason and Let Us Reason. And also some Christian "universities" that have creating strong Christian minds, as an integral part of their mission statements---all supposedly within the framework of a classical liberal arts curriculum!!
The contradictions are endless.