That Reason Should Rule

Newsweek has published an article, “How Your Brain Makes Political Decisions” on psychology researcher Drew Westen’s findings on the role of emotion in political judgments. Dr. Westen summarizes his findings:

“A dispassionate mind that makes decisions by weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work.” That’s true when it comes to choosing a significant other, buying a car, and choosing a president. Madison Avenue has known this for decades.

The article continues with pap attempting to contrast the two major political parties and their appeals to the emotions (or failure to do so).

While I have no doubt that Dr. Westen’s findings are true, I sincerely doubt that they’re the whole truth. A key difference between the social sciences, the study of human behavior, and the physical sciences—physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, and so on—is that an atomic particle does not require training or practice to express charge or mass but human beings can change the actual workings of their minds with practice and training. Anyone who has ever trained for anything knows this.

The soldier’s courage is not just a quirk of character: he or she has endured rigorous training to cultivate it. Faith is not merely a blessing that some people have and some don’t. It has been cultivated by practice.

The charity of the loving, the prudence of the wise, the patience of the saint, and the tenacity of the scholar are not simply innate properties of the human mind as mass and charge are of atomic particles. They are the product of behavior, not merely the behavior itself. I’m not a psychological researcher and I don’t have brain scans at my disposal that demonstrate that the practice of virtues actually alter the structure and function of the brain but I have no doubt that it is so.

That is what the ancients believed (as did the Founding Fathers, as the article points out). Plato characterized the virtue of moderation as “the agreement of the passions that reason should rule”. This agreement is cultivated by training every bit as rigorous and grueling as the training of an athlete for competition or the training of a soldier for combat. The practice includes moderating one’s speech, demeanor, and comportment, carefully weighing and evaluating facts, and, indeed, learning to recognize and harness the workings of one’s own passions.

Americans and, probably, most people are trained from babyhood to allow their passions to rule. Reason takes a back seat. Much of advertising and politics is completely dependent on this reality and actively cultivate it but it need not be so and we have no reason to conclude that everyone everywhere have been as lacking in moderation as we are today.

As I look around this morning I see that others are plowing similar ground. Callimachus has posted a jeremiad against snark, a literary device nearly synonymous with the political blogosphere and, while not essential to it, is certainly characteristic of it. A brief sample:

Snark mistakes grafitti for architecture.

With snark hath no man a point of good persuasion. Solzhenitzyn came not by snark. Nor Mark Twain; Galileo came not by snark.

Snark lacks courage. It is the self-satisfied snort of slaves and eunuchs. It is a smug cakewalk entertainment for chattels that makes the performer feel special and changes nothing.

Needless to say, snark is intrinsically immoderate, flogging the passions at ever greater speed, abandoning prudence and mercy alike.