Author: ken

Why Alvin Greene Won the Senate Nomination in South Carolina

Like everybody else, I don‘t know much about Alvin Greene.  Nor do I have any theories about what motivated him to run in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat in South Carolina.  What intrigues me is how he got over 100,000 votes and won the nomination.

According to news reports, he ran without advertising, without giving any speeches, stating any positions, hiring any staff, or seeking contributions. Some traditional politicians immediately suspected he was put up to it by other politicians of a different stripe, but, apparently, he paid the $10,440 to register his candidacy out of his own pocket.  No one gave him the cash, pushed him or even offered advice.  That sounds plausible.  I doubt any traditional politician would have thought such a candidacy was at all viable, the gesture was so simple and naïve, and the outcome so far fetched.

It’s tempting to think that he won because his candidacy was the closest voters could come to casting their ballot for “None of the Above.”  But actually his refusal to run a “normal” campaign was more eloquent than that.  Running without any of the traditional paraphernalia implied a rejection of politics as we have come to know it.  His lack of a “campaign” obviously showed that he owed nobody anything, had no prior commitments, was grinding no ideological ax.  Interviewed just after his election, he said he is interested in “sticking to the issues that are important — jobs, education, justice — and conveying why he was the best candidate.”  He probably really meant exactly what he said.  (See, “Who is Alvin Greene, State Asks After Vote.”)

Frank Rich, writing in this Sunday’s New York Times, thought he might be this year’s most “real” candidate, with a resume far more “authentic” than most of those running against Washington insiders.  “He really is who he said he is — a genuine nobody with no apparent political views.”  Rich means, I think, a “political nobody,” someone without a reputation, without standing, without a track record. (See “Facebook Politicians Are Not Your Friends.”)

Many in South Carolina were embarrassed by Alvin Greene’s success, seeing it as the latest in a long line of scandals that have plagued the state.  But maybe it actually was a sign of hope.  People did go the polls and they did vote for someone who set himself apart from the others.  They believed there was an alternative to business as usual.

What we may not know we know is that people still hope that a democratic process exists that has not been hijacked by special interests.  A “nobody” stands a chance of being honest – and, maybe, even being elected.

The Hidden Force of Self-Esteem

For some time, research has shown how much we each unconsciously distort our perceptions to enhance self-esteem.  We amplify the good and modify the bad.  We tend to think we are more attractive, smarter, better and nicer than we actually are.

Freud started out with such an idea when he proposed that we “censored” thoughts that threatened our idealized image as civilized human beings.  The American psychiatrist, Harry Stack Sullivan, made the preservation of self-esteem the corner stone of his theory, pointing out how we continually engage in “security operations” to defend ourselves against challenges to established ways of seeing ourselves.

In his book Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy Wilson pointed out how much psychological research supports this idea that we view ourselves through “rose colored glasses.”  In my book, What You Don’t Know You Know, I describe an extensive domain of research that continues to explore how our unconscious minds are dedicated to making ourselves look better that we really are.  “It is difficult to admit being vindictive, spiteful, envious, competitive, mean-spirited or nasty.  But it is also often embarrassing to acknowledge ignorance, dependency, confusion, poverty, or simple errors.  We don’t want others to know such things about us, but often we also don’t want to acknowledge them to ourselves.”

New research reported in the Science section of this week’s New York Times now shows how memory joins in this effort to massage our self-image:   “In piecing together a life story, the mind nudges moral lapses back in time and shunts good deeds forward . . . creating, in effect, a doctored autobiography.”  (See, “Why Indiscretions Appear Youthful.”)

So, it may be worth asking, with all this accumulated weight of evidence, why do we need to be reminded constantly of this tendency?  One more study is not likely to tip the balance.  Why can’t we hold on to such ideas?

It must be self-esteem itself that refuses to accept it.  We want to believe we are objective and impartial.  We don’t want to see ourselves as biased and inaccurate.  Maybe it is as simple as that and will continue to be that simple – and, also, impossible to accept.

What Does It Actually Mean?

Anger frightens us.  That’s what it’s designed to do.  Indispensable to our evolutionary struggle, it generated the extra energy and alertness we needed for defense and counterattack.  The mere signs of anger warn and intimidate potential enemies.  And anger still serves those adaptive functions.  But more recently we have seen it as a way of getting attention – and it has been getting a lot of attention.

Media coverage of the Tea Party rallies has suggested that voters are up in arms against incumbents, enraged by government policies.  Moreover, a number of prominent Wall Street players have been sputtering at the President.  The number of outbursts seems to be increasing.  We all know that childish tantrums turn up the volume when all else seems to fail.  Is that what’s happening?

The Republican candidate for governor of New York, Carl Paladino, for example, has been getting a lot of attention recently for his intemperate outbursts.  According to The New York Times, “He has often promised to take a baseball bat with him to the State Capitol and referred to Albany denizens as leeches, pigs and wimps, and — in the case of Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the Assembly and an Orthodox Jew — as the Antichrist.”  Most recently he physically threatened a reporter, and accused his opponent of marital infidelity without offering any evidence to support his charge.  (See, “Paladino and Anger:  How Much Is Too Much?”)

Fellow Republicans are embarrassed and alarmed, trying to distance themselves without actually criticizing him or saying much of substance. But in an interview earlier in the week, a Republican representative from Long Island, said that Mr. Paladino “may be reading the public mood better than anyone.”

That is what all the media attention being paid to anger suggests.  But a Newsweek poll suggests the opposite.  It found: “despite months of media coverage . . . anger is unlikely to decide this year’s elections. For starters, self-described angry voters constitute only 23 percent of the electorate, and there’s no reason to believe that they’re more likely to cast ballots in November than their calmer peers.”

Moreover, “Fifty-three percent of voters see Obama’s unemotional approach to politics—his ‘coolness’—as a positive, versus only 39 percent who don’t.” (See, “Anger Unlikely to Be Deciding Factor in Midterms.”)

Perhaps we are over-exposed and jaded.  The media are doing what they always do, competing with each other to get the story and tell us how important it is.  And as they amplify the message, voters are actually screening it out.  Perhaps, also, as voters dampen it down, the politicians and others amplify it all the more in their attempt to get through.  It becomes a bigger and noisier story but with less and less meaning.

Maybe, as the Newsweek poll suggests, it end up so much “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

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Should We Worry?

How is the internet changing us?  Is digital technology undermining our ability to think?  To concentrate?  To be creative?  To be ourselves?

As a species, we are immensely adaptive.  It’s our genius.  Aided by large brains and by our capacity for consciousness, we have been capable of great flexibility.  Receiving and storing vast quantities of information, we are constantly adjusting to change – usually without even being aware of it.

Recently, Nicholas Carr has argued that this very “plasticity” is degrading our capacity to think.  As we adapt to the constant interruptions of the internet, our capacity for sustained concentration erodes.  Surfing on the net and multi-tasking compounds the problem.  He argues that we adapted to books 500 years ago after the invention of the printing press, and our capacity for “deep reading” led to great advances in our culture’s development.  But now, as we adapt to computers and broadband connectivity, we are losing much of what we gained.  (See his book, The Shallows:  What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.)

His argument gains credibility from recent neuroscience discoveries showing that the brain is extraordinarily more plastic and adaptable that we had ever thought.  With proper training, one part of the brain can take over the functions of another.  (See, for example, Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself.)  This is great news for stroke victims, but more alarming for those of us more worried about losing the hard won gains of civilization.  If we use our minds in the shallow way the internet encourages us to, we will lose our capacity for deeper thought.

No doubt we are continuing to adapt to the internet, to computers and cell phones, as we adapted to radio and TV, steamships and airplanes.

Electric light made it possible to work 24 hours a day, and that, in turn, dislocated long-standing bio-rhythms.  Will hard drives make long-term memory obsolete?  Will google degrade our capacity for reflection?

Carr’s book is alarmist, filled with anecdotal material about how authors have stopped reading and students stopped thinking.  But, frankly, while it is no doubt true that our brains are rapidly adapting to the digital world, there are fundamental differences between computers and brains.  Computers – and cell phones, and TV’s, and iPods, and all the rest — process information.  Our brains process experience.  Brains are part of our bodies, and have multiple channels of input.  They are constantly synthesizing and reintegrating new sense data and memories with schemas of reaction and response, each time differently.  As a result they don’t easily meld with the invariant programs of computers.  Brains are not tools. They are minds of their own.

Yes, we can all form bad habits of unreflective surfing.  We can get addicted to internet porn, or caught up in the pursuit of more “friends” than we know what to do with.  But our experience will be mediated and moderated by our bodies, and they have many more agendas than we can possibly know – and usually we are not conscious of what they are.  It would not be as easy as Carr fears to override them all.

It’s not yet time to be alarmed.

Why Now?

Suddenly, economic inequality is a hot topic.  The gap between the rich and poor has been growing for over 30 years, but a tipping point in our collective consciousness has now been reached.  What made this possible?  (For a review of the issue, see Slate:  “The United States of Inequality”)

For a decade, cheap credit obscured the increasing impoverishment of the middle and lower classes.  When the poor could buy a house with no money down and vague terms they did not fully understand, they did not feel so poor.  When the somewhat better off could take out home equity loans to compensate for declining real income and run up debt with a fist full of credit cards, they continued to believe in the American dream.   But, then, the bill came due, and economists and journalists started paying attention.  As a result, now we are all thinking about it too.

It’s also obvious that the rich are not suffering nearly as much as the poor.  The stock market is going up, and Republicans are agitating for tax cuts while continuing to fight government expenditures on unemployment insurance and programs to stimulate the economy.  Not threatened by destitution, they are comfortable taking the long view about the recovery.  They worry about long-term debt instead of short-term misery.

The Great Recession is “over,” declares the Treasury Department.  That’s interesting but hardly helpful for those who face permanent unemployment or continual underemployment or those who can’t sell their houses or pay tuition for their children.  Their relief is hardly palpable.

It is tempting to think that the expansion of credit for the poor was designed to placate those who real income was declining for 30 years, but it was probably just another way for the financial industry to make money.  Slicing and dicing the mortgages and issuing securities based on those “assets” pushed sales.  It’s the way our system works.  But it is meaningful that the market for those securities was based on the hopes and dreams of homeowners.  Economists tend to think that consumers are motivated by rational self-interest, but in thus case at least it was denial and irrational aspirations that drove the system – until, wildly over-extended, it collapsed.

Now that the dust is clearing, we see two camps – and two points of view.  The disillusioned, waking up from their cheap credit binge, are in greater pain.  Bewildered, they don’t know who is to be blamed, but are inclined to turn against the government.  Those better off look forward to resuming the acquisition of wealth.

The net result may well be that the gap will grow only wider.