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I now want to turn my attention to global warming, by way of revisitng a recent, diary from Joe Brewer, of the Rockridge Institute, Why We Are Losing the Global Warming Battle. In it, Joe argues:

Right now, things don't look very promising. It isn't just that we've reached the tipping point, as James Hansen suggests. (warning - large PDF file) It isn't just that the first-ever climate bill is about to arrive DOA on the Senate floor--maybe not such a bad thing since Lieberman-Warner is built on the wrong ideas. The real problem is in the way we think about the problem and, therefore, the solutions.

There are two problems with "the way we think"-the actual lack of a well-developed framework of ideas, and the lack of an institutional framework for propagating the ideas we do have. These are, ever and always, the two sides of what Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci described as a "culture war" or "war of position"-a struggle to control the institutions that shape our culture, including not just the ideas we think, but the ideas we can think. In this case, I would argue that the later-the institutional framework- is much more of a problem than the framework ideas itself is.
For example, Joe goes on to say:

Consider this sampling of Big Ideas conservatives have pushed into public discourse:

* Nature is a resource to be exploited.
* Wealth is measured simply by money.
* The economy and environment are distinct and inevitably in conflict with one another.
* Polluting is a right, so companies should be compensated for the cost of clean-up.
* Markets are natural and naturally good.
* Government is distinct from markets and intrudes upon them.

These ideas are at the heart of the climate debate.

It is not hard to think of ideas counter to those. What is hard is to envision powerful organizations engaged in systematically refuting them with a vigour equal to that of conservatives pushing them.


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Higher education has been highly contested terrain in culture wars as far back as ancient Greece, if not farther. But a recently-published article in The Nation magazine gives a fascinating snapshot of the efforts undertaken since 9/11 to bring academia into line with George Bush's highly-partisan "homeland security" agenda.

As such, it illustrates a particularly broad front in the struggle for hegemony-subsuming the entirety of an inherently troublesome institutional sector to the most rigorous forms of hierarchical control-those associated not simply with the military, but with military intelligence. The article, "Repress U", by Michael Gould-Wartofsky, is organized perfectly for illustrating how a well-coordinated war of position can be carried out. Discussion begins on the flip.

The article begins:

Free-speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors. Welcome to the homeland security campus.
From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.
Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:

1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice organizations.

From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Defense Department itself. In 2006 the ACLU uncovered, via Freedom of Information Act requests, at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the United States--some listed as "credible threats"--from student groups at the University of California, Santa Cruz; State University of New York, Albany; Georgia State University; and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.

No doubt many of you read something about these incidents. Or about campus "free speech zones," which Gould-Wartofsky also mentions in this section. But few probably thought about it in terms of what it might it portend operationally. What was the purpose being served? Obviously, chilling dissent is one purpose. But chilling dissent is not the end of it, this article shows. It's just one piece of the puzzle.

2. Lock and load. Many campus police departments are morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry, from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of the "war on crime" only escalated with the President's "war on terror." Each school shooting--most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech--adds fuel to the armament flames. Two-thirds of universities arm their police, according to the Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the province of military units and SWAT teams: for instance, AR-15 rifles (similar to M-16s) are in the arsenals of the University of Texas campus police. Last April City University of New York bought dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Some states, like Nevada, are even considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a "special reserve officer corps."

And so, slowly but surely, people become acclimatized to living in a garrison state. It makes them feel "secure," by simultaneously making them feel insecure. It changes their everyday experience, expectations, and assumptions about what is normal, taken-for-granted.

Want to get even MORE scared?

The proper perspective for viewing the NYT McCain story, the unfolding food fight, and the continuing fallout, is Gramsci's twin concepts of the war of position and the war of movement. I've written about this several times before, but here's a quick refresher. (A) Gramsci's motivation was that the predicted worker's revolution did not occur in the mot advanced capitalist countries, as Marxist theory predicted. He therefore sought to explain why this was so, and what to do about it. The answers he came up with, described briefly below, have been adapted by people whose viewpoints are far removed from his--Rush Limbaugh, for one--so there is no need to accept his initial premises, if--like I do--one finds his descriptions of processes compelling.

(B) Gramsci attributed the failure to make an anti-capitalist revolution to the capture of worker's ideology, and organizations by the hegemonic (ruling or dominant) culture, transmitted by institutions such as the church, compulsory education, popular culture, etc. as well as appeals to bourgoise ideologies, such as nationalism, consumerism, careerism, etc. which also enjoy their own forms of instutional support.
Such institutions and ideologies have both their own independent rationale and function in their own spheres, as well as their function in the largr social system. Gramsci's conception allows us to view both institutions and narratives at varying different levels of abstraction operating according the same over-all logic, without denying or distorting the fact that they also follow their own particular logic as well.

(C) To overcome the power of hegemony, and create a workers revolution, Gramsci argued for a two-fold strategy, First, a "war of position" to build working-class counter-institutions, and take over bourgoise ones while promulgating working-class ideology. Second, once this stage was successful, then a "war of movement" to the actual insurrection against capitalism, with mass support that Marxist theory originally predicted.
Consciously or not, the American right has adopted Gramsci's fundamental insight, but adapted it to their somewhat different position in society. On the one hand, as Gramsci advised, they have dilligently built up their own institutional infrastructure, and attacked existing instriutional structures that they do not control, seeking either to take over or cripple or destroy them. On the other hand, they have combined the war of position and war of movement into a more integrated whole, frequently taking advantage of a constellation of positions to launch a "war of movement" attack on an insitution they wish to cripple, destroy or take over, or an idea, principle, value, or narrative they wish to discredit, or subvert.



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So, again, Straight Talk? Not so much....
Which leads me into one of my recurrent topics--the politics of cognitive developmental levels--and how it helps illuminate the strange workings of the "Straight Talk" meme, a meme that's been prominently applied to Ross Perot, George W. Bush and Ron Paul, as well as John McCain. The implications of "straight talk" are quite clear--in ordinary parlance, a straight talker is someone who tells the truth, without all manner of qualifications and embellishments.

But the "Straight Talk" meme is something quite different--it takes the superficial lack of qualifications and embellishments as proof that what is said is true, even if what is being talked about happens to be rather complicated, and very much in need of qualifications and embellishments. One could understand the "Straight Talk" meme simply in terms of American anti-intellectualism, ala vintage Richard Hofstadter. But I prefer Robert Kegan. In the table below, "Straight Talk" is an example of the underlying structure of Level 2--a "durable category":

Click through and scroll down for chart


The first thing to understand is that we are talking about mere appearances here. While the real deal is an "Enduring Disposition"--the psychological manifestation of a durable category--the "Straight Talk" meme refers simply to the appearance described above.

The second thing to understand is that normal conservatism operates on Level 3. It corresponds to adult consciousness in a traditional society. The self is defined in terms of the matrix of social roles and relationships of the surrounding society.
At that level, we are those roles and relationships, and any criticism of them is a criticism of ourselves. "America, love it or leave it," indeed.
Except that--Third Thing--America was founded as a Level 4 institution. Our very Constitution is the very embodiment of a "Relationship-Regulating Form." And it is the conservative, Level 3 mind's complete incapacity to deal with Level 4 that leads to falling back on Level 2 pseudo-certainties.

You see, each level is more complicated than the one before. Each level involves taking what was subject, the foundation of thought and being, and making it object, turning taken-for-granted context into clearly manipulable content. For those who remain embedded in the taken-for-granted context, this is not merely a frightening possibility, it is, quite literally, inconceivable, because they lack the context needed to conceive it.

Traditional, Level 3 societies change only very slowly over time. This is where the "narrative of 'personal virtue' as the foundational concern of politics" described at the beginning of this post fits in. So long as society is basically unchanging, the person who exemplifies living by the rules has a very strong claim to encompass the very essence of what politics is all about.


But modernism developed out of the quickening pace of change that first hit Europe a good seven centuries ago, in the fast-paced trade-oriented city-states of Northern Italy. They called it "The Renaissance," but it was actually much, much more than the rebirth of ancient knowledge, because that ancient knowledge feed into a newly dynamic form of life, from which a wholly new future would spring--the future in which we now live. This future requires, among other things, the active engagement in reshaping the rules by which we live. Change is simply too rapid, and too all-pervasive for us to remain unchanged and still fit with the world around us.


But the Level 3 mind sees such change as its very destruction. To note things that need changing in America is to be anti-American in this view. Ironically, this view is quintessentially un-American. People come here to reinvent themselves. That is the whole point of America. If reinvention is not your thing, then you just don't belong here. Of course, no Level 3 mind can grasp such a basic Level 4 fact, which constitutes an existential threat to its very existence. And a common response to such overwhelming threats is one form or another of ego defense mechanism, such as regression, which is defined as :returning to a previous stage of development."


Much more

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Journalism Ethics As Problematic
But the workings of truth suppression revealed by Parry's account are only part of the picture. A deeper part goes to the very nature of how journalism as a whole defines its roles and purposes. This is the subject of a unique book of media criticism, Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest. In it, Iggers argues that the core problem with journalism is not that journalists sometimes violate their code of ethics, the problem is the code of ethics itself.


Instead of being a disinterested code, divorced from the everyday pressures of realworld journalism, Iggers shows how codes of journalism ethics are deeply interested documents, reflecting the over-arching material concerns. Conflicts of interest, for example, are held to be a very serious concern for individual journalists. Yet, dependence on advertising creates much more powerful economic incentives at the corporate level, which are routinely ignored. At the same time, it's clear that journalists and their sources both benefit from dealing regularly with one another, and yet the journalist-source relationship is regarded as a pillar of journalism, not a source of ethical problems. This is but one aspect of his critique, which demonstrates a complete lack of level 4 reflection on the practice of journalism from outside the system of relationships that practical journalism is embedded in.


Iggers also provides a compact history of how journalims ethics has changed over the years, particularly around the notion of truth-telling, as various different proxies for quasi-scientific "truth" have been tried and found wanting. In the end, we have arrived at a state in which "balance" has come to substitute for any concern with "truth"-we're much too sophistatced to believe in that anymore. This helps to explain why the media can get things so thoroughly and deeply wrong-as they have done continuously with Iraq, and as Glenn shows, with the 2006 mid-terms-and yet not be bothered at all: they have done their jobs according to the book.


Journalism Ethos As Problematic
Finally, one can consider the matter of journalistic culture and ethos. There are ways of promoting or validating some stories, just as there are ways of dismissing others. The Downing Street Memo provides a classic example. Here was smoking gun evidence that the President of United States had lied about invading Iraq, had planned for it roughly a year in advance, and worked to construct a plausible rationale. It was, by any sensible measure, a blockbuster story. And yet, it has been regularly and routinely ignored by the Versailles media.


When I interviewed a USA Today reporter who had co-written an excellent, high-profile article on the first anniversay of 9/11 which told a similar story, but without the evidence of the Downing Street Memo, she showed no interest in following up on it, and did so using a coule tropes I've heard before-it was an "old story" that was "up to the historians now." Of course, it went directly to the issue of impeachable offenses and the needless deaths of thousands of Americans, and many more Iraqi civilians. What's more an even "older story"-the Whitewater land deal, in which no one died-was kept alive ad nauseum by the press, despite copious evidence that the Clintons had lost money on the deal and done nothing wrong whatsoever.


But this only goes to show that such explanations are not to be taken seriously at face value. They are semi-ritualized behavior, by which certain unwanted stories are gotten rid of, while others are embraced-nothing more, nothing less. They are part and parcel of how level 3 life is lived, and as such they cannot be seriously questioned by a level 3 consciousness. Only someone who stands outside, someone at level 4 or above who regards such rituals and the purposes they serve as objects can properly question or challenge them. And any attempt to do so will be severely attacked. Just look at how Versailles screams bloody murder about the blogosphere, almost every day now.


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The notion of an independent truth to be served--an 18th Century Enlightenment notion that fanned the flames of the press that helped win our freedom as a nation--is virtually nowhere to be found. Global warming, evolution, George Bush's numerous impeachable offenses, none of these are, or possibly could be matters of simple, straightforward truth, because such truth no longer exists in the lowly precincts of Versailles.

They owe their allegience to another 18th Century tradition, from which they take their name--an opulent, excessive, out-of-touch culture of gossip, terminal triviality and utter incompetence. That is their reality. It is all they know, and it has total dominance over mere facts, which are completely powerless to change the stories it tells.... just like it was in the old Versailles until the guillotine came.

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There's a rather far-flung concept in mathematics known as "duality." A few days ago it struck me how this concept can illuminate something very fundamental about the current state of American politics. It's a powerful, and far-reaching concept, but fortunately you don't have to grasp a great deal about it in order to get my point.

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The Basic Duality

(A) Democrats are reality-based when it comes to policies, and totally out to lunch when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.

(B) But Republicans are totally out to lunch when it comes to policies, and as reality-based as it gets when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.

Actually, that's just a first approximation. It's actually more rigorous than that, which is what makes it interesting. But that's enough to let you know the ballpark we'll be playing in, if you care to continue this exploration.

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One such example is Shawn Rosenberg (no relation), who emphasizes a greater role for the social environment, as opposed to seeing development as purely an internally-driven process. In his 1988 book, Reason, Ideology and Politics he lays out a three-fold typology of adult reasoning,
which is discussed along with other developmental approaches in an online papepr, "Structures of Geopolitical Reasoning":

* Sequential thinkers reason "by tracking the world," recognize regularities in sequences of events, but have no abstract understanding of cause and effect. The world they perceive is a world of appearances that has very little organization to it beyond the recurrence of sequences.

* Linear thinkers understand cause and effect, limited to a one-direction, one-cause/one-effect model. The world they perceive has logical order and structure, but the structure is invariably hierarchical, causality flows top-down, and the world is divided neatly into cause and effect.

* Systematic thinkers understand multi-faceted, multi-linear cause and effect, with mutual cause-and-effect relationships between different elements. The world they perceive is primarily a world of systems and relationships, rather than objects.

Because sequential thinking plays such an important role in movement conservatism, I want to elaborate it more fully. The first two points come from the paper linked to above, the last two from Rosenberg's book:

* The notion of causality, e.g. that events are caused by necessary and sufficient preconditions, does not play a salient role in the sequential mind. Events transpire, without much interpretation of how they come about. The attention is occupied by one item at a time, and there is little spontaneous effort to relate them to other items or to a general context.

* The sequential thinker is not really aware that the world may appear differently to other people, and he or she has therefore a limited ability to take the perspective of others.

* Sequential thinking involves conceptual relations that "are synthetic without being analytic. They join events together but the union forged is not subject to any conceptual dissection." [Direct quote from Rosenberg's book.] Because such relations are non-rational, there is nothing rational one can say or do to change them. (Sound familiar?)

* But they can change, Rosenberg explains, based on changing appearances. These relationships "are mutable," they can either be extended, based on "share[d] recognized overlapping events" (connections provided by Limbaugh, O'Lielly, etc.) or changed, when the sequence does not play out as expected. Because it is a pre-logical mode of thought, "the relations of sequential thought engender expectations, but do not create subjective standards of normal or necessary relations between events."

In The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem, I made the claim that Republicans and Democrats are inverted mirror reflections of one another:

(A) Democrats are reality-based when it comes to policies, and totally out to lunch when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.

(B) But Republicans are totally out to lunch when it comes to policies, and as reality-based as it gets when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.

And I argued that there is a deeper, more specific explanation for why this is so. To lay the groundwork for that argument, I spent most of the diary laying out two related schemas for understanding human cognition in a stage-like developmental framework, and I presented an initial argument that liberalism represented a generally more advanced way of thinking about the world. In this diary, I want to take one main example-the defining example of the "war on terror"-to flesh out that argument some more by showing how the "war on terror" is heavily dependent on a low level of cognitive development. I will add some comments at the end about several other issues as well, to give the flavor of how such an analyisis can be generalzied into other areas as well. Then, in the next diary, I will look at how liberals and Democrats tend to be as clueless about politics as conservatives are about governance.

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Two Other Brief Examples: The "War on Drugs" and Abortion

I'd like to supplement the above exhaustive look at a single example with a few other observations about other examples, which I would like to deal with thematically, using a single example in each case to stand in for a number of other different examples.

First of all, a common movement conservative practice is to divide the world up into good and evil, and declare war on evil in a fashion that has no clear foundation in even a single simple causal explanation that one would find in linear thinking. The foundation of such an approach in Lakoff's Strict Father morality is fairly straightforward, but Lakoff's argument is largely separable from the argument here. (Lakoff does argue that there is a set of logical entailments involved, and I don't dispute this. But these entailments act primarily to structure the issue landscape, which is a different subject entirely from what I am discussing here, which is how arguments are presented within that landscape. )

Here my focus is simply on the fact that a good-vs-evil framework drives the argumentative assumptions, so that logic can be dispensed with almost entirely. A "war on drugs" means that we need not ask about why people might want to take drugs in the first place. Nor do we need to ask if the war on drugs might cause more problems than it solves. Nor do we need to ask if there might be other high-priority problems we ought to pay more attention to. These are all examples of systematic thinking that might lead us to question the "war on drugs" project-much less, of course, the obvious racism involved. But we don't even have to go there to see enormous problems with the "war on drugs" if we engage in systematic thinking as a matter of course.

When liberals-or even just reality-based professionals, such as criminologists, public health experts, etc.-try to raise such systematic concerns, they sequential response is simply to label them as "soft on crime," as "pro-drug," as lacking "family values," or something similar. It is simply inconceivable from within the sequential thinking framework that someone might agree with the assessment "drugs are destructive" and yet want to take a significantly different approach to dealing with them. It is even more inconceivable that someone might agree on the wisdom of reducing and controlling drug use without thinking that drugs are inherently evil, but only that they are inherently risky, and that the risk alone is reason enough to take prudential action.