Adult Learning and Discourse

This lipstick-on-a-pig thing’s got me thinking…

I was out canvassing this morning (for the first time in my life) and found that most people were not home (or feigned being not home when they saw me coming!). Of those few that answered the door, the responses were about evenly split. I’m not talking about Democrat-Republican, I mean split between knee-jerk-reactions and rational conversations. The responses that were most satisfying to me were the the civil ones, regardless of which candidate the householder was supporting. Not so wonderful were the: angry shout from behind the door, peeved dismissal-with smirk, flash of panic-with throat rash and tremble, and paranoid counterattack (”that’s none of your business what I think!”). I realize I am intruding and empathize with those who resent having their Saturday afternoon interrupted.  (If the stakes were not so high I would not think of doing this, I rationalize to myself.)

But I worry about the state of civil discourse in our country. BF Skinner & the behaviorists provide a good lens for a starting point: Our election rituals (ads, conventions, etc.) may not be so much adult education as operant conditioning. The media, Park Ave., the spin meisters…provide a constant stream of charicatures and over-simplistic reductions.

But that’s not all. It would be one thing if these reductions were at least cartoons with some basis in the present reality. But the cartoons are drawn to evoke old fears, old scars, old hopes, old scripts. (We detour for a moment into the cognitivist universe.) Each of these memories is loaded with pleasure or pain, joy or fear, light or darkness. Thus when a candidate says XYZ, it is spun immediately into silly images of light or dark; images that by-pass the civil conversation corners of our brains and head right for the reptilian brain (fight or flight!). 

I wonder how can we neutralize this operant conditioning so to have rational political conversations…not just with others across the aisle, so to speak, but with ourselves???   

PS ADLT 601 students: Your discourses last Thursday in class were indeed civil. Keep it up; there’s a world out there that needs you as role models!