I just published my insights on this intriguing question in the Huffington Post… Here’s how the article starts:
“I don’t want to start rumors, but Gorgeous George the wrestler was thirty-one years old, and already famous, when Donald Trump was born in the borough of Queens, New York City, 1946. Now, I don’t know if it was possible, but with all that travel George did, could he have had a liaison with Donald’s mom? I’m not saying it’s true or not, but I was raised in Queens as well, not that long afterward, and I know for a fact there was plenty of adultery and illicit affairs. So go put two and two together, if you know what I mean.”
For all of you seeking an image, symbol, or story to help you understand the mysteries of confirmation bias, I offer this YouTube presentation of a woman advocating for deer crossing signs to be moved to places safer for deer to cross. (sent to me by Steve Maybury, further confirming my sense of his humor)
"Underneath the many variations of collective folly lie at least two fundamental patterns that alert us to the potential of folly’s emergence. The first pattern is a movement toward separation and fragmentation. In this pattern, group members resist ideas, other group members, or other groups that are deemed “not me” or “not us.”
Sometimes this pull is subtle. Group members ignore divergent perspectives or data, welcoming only the data and perspectives that confirm what they know, or think they know. The cognitive sciences describe this behavior as confirmation bias—a tendency to search for and interpret information in ways that confirm our existing preconceptions." ~ Edited passage from The Power of Collective Wisdom: And the Trap of Collective Folly
One of the fundamental questions for those who believe in listening, respect, and tolerance for others is what to do with people who appear to us as dominating, certain of their positions, and intolerant of those who disagree with them. A most recent example in the political sphere is the emergence of the tea party movement and the ambiguity of what they represent collectively – a group formed out of anger with simplistic prescriptions for what troubles us – our economy, our communities, and our very souls – or a spirited group of rabble rousers calling us to limit the size of government and renew our faith in god, country, and individual imitative.
What does the tea party represent for our collective wisdom or does it represent the annihilation of wisdom and the descent into chaos?
On the surface, the tea party can simply represent a long and documented American history of intolerance for immigrants, a strong strand of anti intellectualism, and a hyper identification with broad concepts such as freedom and liberty but without depth or subtlety.
In satirizing this pattern of thinking, the comedian Stephen Colbert stated, during testimony to Congress on immigration reform, that “My great grandfather did not travel over 4,000 miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this country overrun by immigrants.” And in a separate statement, playing on his character of an ultra right wing television host, Colbert promoted his March to Keep Fear Alive by declaring that “America, the Greatest Country God ever gave Man, was built on three bedrock principles: Freedom. Liberty. And Fear — that someone might take our Freedom and Liberty.”
I find much relief in Colbert’s satiric wit, an example how our cultural shadow can be illuminated through humor and how the fragmentation of thought – an immigrant relative used to illustrate his argument against immigration – can be recognized by transforming it into absurdity.
At a deeper level, however, I remain troubled by the implications of the movement and the further polarization it evokes. The enthusiasm of the Obama election has given way, at least for the moment, to despair among many who supported him that the mid term elections will represent a retreat into apathy and fear. From the right Obama is eviscerated for turning away from capitalism to socialism, for trillions of dollars of new Federal spending, and for wanting to raise taxes on individuals who have demonstrated success in the free market economy that is so dear to them. From the left he is chastised for not accomplishing enough with a Democratic majority in the House and Senate, for not articulating a new vision of economic progress that challenges the self interest of capitalism, for continued militarism, and for failing to back strongly enough what was viewed as game changing policies such as a public option in health care, a carbon tax, and a faster and more complete withdrawal from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And as absurd as it may seem, he is disparaged from all corners for not finding a way to bring us together. I suspect the proper question is not “How is Obama doing?” so much as “How are we doing?”
It is in this larger context that the tea party operates, a polarized electorate creating the conditions for a group of people who feel certain, at least of their distaste of Obama and for what they believe he stands for. And whether their number is three million or thirty million, a political window has opened for them to grow larger, feeding off of the discouragement of those who thought a new day was coming as well as on the desire of an opposition political party to ally itself with new energy. Where does this lead – to collective wisdom or collective folly?
It is at this crossroads that my thinking veers off the conventional lanes of political discussion and goes looking for new perspectives.
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter One:
Eight-Leaved Clovers of the World, Unite
London, 1847
On a bleak November day, two men trudged along Great Windmill Street in London. They breathed in air yellow from industrial waste and pondered the extremes of wealth and poverty that had sprung up like gods and demons across the city landscape. Between their poor vision and the London fog, they could barely see a foot ahead of themselves, but in their minds’ eye, they saw a future of increasing economic division. Somewhere not too distant in time, they believed, anger would well up among the workers, culminating in revolutionary action.
One of them wanted to show the world with a simple parable, like an ancient prophet, why society’s self-destruction was inevitable. The other, the son of a Jewish family that adopted Christianity, was born into affluence and respectability, but called to forsake his relations, though not so much that he wasn’t willing to borrow money from them. So it was that these two compatriots, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, made their way to the Red Lion Pub.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
FLASH POINT New York City, 1890
“These are the economic conditions that enable my manufacturing friend to boast that New York can “beat the world” on cheap clothing. In support of his claim he told me that a single Bowery firm last year sold fifteen thousand suits at $1.95 that averaged in cost $1.12 ½.” ~ From How the Other Half Lives, written by Jacob Riis
It was as if the two of them were destined to emerge victorious among a ragtag group of immigrants, intellectuals, utopians, anarchists, and protesters who had come together to chart a new social contract. Marx, full of himself, was never more alive than in a good intellectual battle, and Engels had the cheerfulness, adaptability, and good nature of a born organizer. “This time we will have our way,” he wrote to Marx before they arrived in London. And have their way, they did. The German Workers’ Educational Union, a convenient public relations front for the Communist League, voted to adopt their draft of the Communist Manifesto, which Marx had read portions of out loud to the group. However, what the group heard was in some doubt, given Marx’s accent and lisp. One witness recalled that when Marx said “workers,” some thought he said “eight-leaved clovers,” which must have been somewhat confusing.
Marx and Engels were early practitioners of a particularly speculative and ambiguous field of social science initially described as “political economy” and later shortened to “economics,” denoting a more neutral and quantitative perspective regarding society’s production and distribution of goods and services. Originally derived from an ancient Greek word, the root meaning of economics had to do with the management or administration of a household. But the household was now nations and transnational corporations.
Marx and Engels were visionaries, foreseeing a new economic institution that was still emerging, one that would harness the energies of human imagination in no less dramatic a fashion than Prometheus’s giving fire to humanity. Engels, in particular, was awed by what was occurring around them. He was not alone marveling at the extraordinary gifts of commerce, high culture, diversity, social mobility, new services, and hope that this new economic institution engendered. Capitalism was a dream for many of an ever-lasting prosperity. Marx and Engels sought to waken them to its true consequences.
In mid-19th-century London, the physical location where Marx and Engels delivered the Manifesto, their parable on social disintegration, there was no greater center of commerce in the world. It was a marketplace without comparison, a hive of activity where “at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs” could be found. Incomes were, on average, 40% higher there than in other English cities, and the results were palpable, with a level of escalating consumer demand driving entrepreneurial forces toward novelty, innovation, new technologies, and entire new industries.
These new economic arrangements were a thunderbolt challenging hundreds if not thousands of years of human history. Commerce of this proportion was a social retort to common beliefs about the inescapability of material deprivation for the masses. Capitalism was to be a buffering institution between the transcendent and random forces of God and nature on the one hand and control over one’s own personal destiny on the other. Trade of this form and intensity was a force for progress, freedom, and increasing liberty. What could go wrong?
The question hovers over us today as it did for Marx and Engels. They were witnesses to an emerging economic institution that still had no agreed-upon name. In the Communist Manifesto, they were more prone to talk about a bourgeoisie class than a capitalist class, but over the next 20 years, Marx would settle on words and terms like capitalist and capitalist mode of production, using them thousands of times in his economic discourses. But just as “eight-leaved clovers” had been mistaken for “workers,” audiences would hear different things, make wildly different judgments about their meaning and effects, and in the end polarize the choices between capitalism and communism, missing the collective context and dreams that had brought these words to consciousness in the first place.
Main Sources The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert L. Heilbroner The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Grand Pursuit, by Sylvia Nasar
Next Week: The Calculus of Capitalism What Marx provided was a theoretical blueprint for cracks that lay in the foundation of a new economic edifice called capitalism. And he did it in the way many intuitive but slightly skewed geniuses operate: by masking it in endless obsessive formulations that make one cry uncle and then demanding that no one deviate from its precepts. Clever…
