The image of a partisan’s brain

One of my nightmares, next to being asked to write about sports, is to sit beside a die-hard supporter of either the administration or the opposition (whoever they are at the time of this writing), while watching an event in plain view involving a scandal that incriminates members of his or her favored party. This is because die-hard supporters of anything seem to only see what they want to see and not what is plainly being shown. I involuntarily tilt my head when I watch these partisans run away with their emotions, as if tilting my head would help me achieve an angle friendlier to understanding these people, but I just really end up with a stiff neck most of the time.

I had some political science courses where we were made aware that political theories were woven within assumptions of rationality. But politics, particularly in our nation where we can muster the same enthusiasm for fiestas and coup d’etats within the same weekends, it is unlikely that rational political minds will ever be products we can boast about and officially declare a surplus of. But it turns out that this is not just true of partisan politicians but their supporters as well!

The New York Times last Jan. 24 had an article by Benedict Carey that reported a study led by Dr. Drew Westen, a psychologist at Emory University, that was going to be presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Palm Springs, California. In sum, the study had respective supporters of George W. Bush and John Kerry judge the two then candidates, after being shown a clip where the two candidates reversed their own previous positions on the matter of Enron and Social Security. Both let their "party man" off the hook while harshly judging the man on the other side of the political fence, even when BOTH candidates clearly showed that they had reversed their positions. These were all done while the supporters’ brains were hooked in brain-imaging machines. The scientists saw that the brain areas that govern emotions were lighting up, including the "cingulated," when they "forgave" their party man, and some "reward" centers of the brain, when they issued harsh words for the opposing candidate. The real surprise is that the cortex, known to be the brain’s highway of reason, remained unlit! This means that the partisan supporters were not really evaluating what they saw in terms of reason but on sentiment. That is not exactly good news because using only emotions to interpret and make sense of issues that are of national consequence is like mounting jello on a wall – it will never get done, period.

Maybe that is why local politics makes for exciting pieces of news but we could never really make sense of it in terms of a coherent explanation. Explanations are rational, mounted on scaffoldings of reason installed in the cortex and thus, could never be installed without lights! So try as the best political columnists may, the nature of partisan politics will remain frustrating because emotions are slippery and unmappable in rational political terms. Might as well try to capture an eel with your bare hands. Hmm, and I thought we only behave too emotionally when it involves family. I guess in a personalistic culture like ours, "family" is extended to political patrons as well as fraternity members and the like. With brain-scanning images like these showing total blackouts in the reason centers of the brains of these people in situations when reason is exactly what is called for, I hope I am not alone to call for the neurological equivalent of a "generator" for these areas of their brains with these power outages.

It seems that the "generator" required, i.e., the only way for reason to illuminate the day, is to find a way out of this well of emotions that drowns the broader perspective that is required in evaluating politics. Dr. Westen says that these partisan emotional bundles can "go out of themselves" or in her words, "engage in ruthless self reflection, to say, ‘All right, I know what I want to believe, but I have to be honest.’" I guess this is the same as the "meta awareness" that Dr. Emy Liwag, chair of the Ateneo Psychology Department, spoke of when we were having coffee discussing how clueless fraternity members are on how they are victims of their own synapses (see De Rerum Natura column entitled "Aquila, Beta Sigma, Gaya, Puto, Maya," Jan. 27). Hey fellows, the secret to break from those mindless cults has been out for a long while now, articulated by a fellow named Socrates (and it is free!) – "an unexamined life is not worth living."

It might then be a good idea for our politicians, particularly the senators and congressmen and their staff, to light up, even starting with soft candles, their reason centers. There are, of course, many ways to do this. Going back to science classes is one of them. US lawmakers started doing this again last January (see New York Times article by Cornelia Dean last Jan. 31), attending lectures sponsored by a congressional representative himself, asking questions of scientists who came to lecture. In science, there are no revered authorities whose words you just have to blindly believe. Science as a way of knowing is also notoriously reliable for arriving at clarity at certain issues that require its voice and it is of no dispute that a predominant number of issues in government and public life are so impoverished in terms of a view from the sciences. I do hope that if this at all happens, our lawmakers will leave their egos behind and meet science in its own terms, plain and unadorned, without any political agenda. Then, after the lectures, they can all go ahead and rejoin their debates, where sentiments and reason are all in a jumble, as they vie to win their positions on national issues.

The sciences just gave us a view of the coliseums of partisan minds at work and we are worried with what we saw: there are not even tealights in areas when there should be floodlights. We just want to do our part and remind our politicians and supporters to turn some lights up in some of the dark corners of their minds.

* * *

For comments, e-mail [email protected]