[Dean's World] Dave Schuler: Folly and Futility

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dave Schuler:
Folly and Futility
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1183127291.shtml


   On Wednesday [1]Newsweek published an article which, using the
   research of Drew Westen on how emotion influences political
   judgements, went on to make the point that Republicans capitalized on
   emotional political decision-making while Democrats have erred by
   basing their political campaigns on dispassionate reason. This article
   prompted the predictable spitting contest between the Democratic and
   Republican partisans in the political blogosphere.

   My own view on this is that I live in Chicago and the folks revving up
   the crowds here are Democrats and they aren't using appeals to reason.
   But I don't want to get bogged down in the partisan political aspects
   of the discussion so, please, steer away from them if you feel moved
   to make a comment here.

   Yesterday I posted [2]my own thoughts on the underlying premise, i.e.
   that, like it or not, we're fated that our affective faculties will
   rule our rational ones. I've been taken to task for believing that
   it's possible for us to learn to cultivate reason as our approach to
   problem-solving. I feel in pretty good company on this since
   practically every religious and philosophical teacher for the last
   2,500 years has taught the same thing. For example, in his Republic
   Plato exalted the virtue that he characterized as "the agreement of
   the passions that reason should rule" as the pre-eminent virtue of the
   citizen.

   Here's what I'd like to know. What's the science? Are we hardwired for
   our emotions to dominate our judgments? Or, as I believe, are we
   hardwired for nothing of the kind but that our past experiences
   influence our present and future states and that, through training and
   practice, we can learn to consider our emotions as facts much like
   other facts and, while taking them into consideration in our
   judgments, they will not propel our judgements willy-nilly to who
   knows what end? I further believe that training and practice affect
   the actual structure and operation of the brain (which would make it
   darned hard to demonstrate experimentally using a random sample of
   individuals that we were hardwired for our emotions to rule our
   reason--all that would be demonstrated is that the individuals in the
   experiment were programmed that way).

   What do you think? Remember, if this discussion degenerates into a
   partisan squabble, I'll either delete the offending comments or shut
   down the comment thread entirely.

References

   1. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19461257/site/newsweek/
   2. http://theglitteringeye.com/?p=2990