KNEE-JERK REACTIONARIES DON’T CONTRIBUTE MUCH
By Mark A Rudis 2018
People are knee-jerk reactionary, not contemplative. TV especially promotes this cultural behavior. Most conversations anymore, at home, on the street, at school or work, are a series of comebacks, quips, repartee, each statement as conclusion, one-up, a straight line or the rejoinder. Look at long strings of social media to see the remarkable sameness of the repeated words and phrases. It’s like TV.
Webster’s defines a knee-jerk reaction as, “an immediate unthinking emotional reaction produced by an event or statement to which the reacting person is highly sensitive.”
Webster’s defines a reactionary as, “an opponent to progress or liberalism; an extreme conservative.”
Why combine these two concepts? Because people want to be smart. No, I take that back. People want to seem smart. Let’s review a bit of The Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason, for real smarts. In over simplified summary, the thinkers of the Enlightenment time debated that with “Reason” there no longer was a need for God because physics and chemistry were revealing the qualities of nature that up-to-then were ascribed to a supernatural being and creator. These science and philosophy thinkers were the “liberal” thinkers who embraced the new discoveries and the new changes these discoveries revealed to society. Other thinkers, though acknowledging the natural discoveries, made arguments that new discoveries were not cause to abandon the old institutions (principally the Church) that up-to-know had created vast libraries of knowledge, wealth, and social organization. These thinkers were the “conservative” thinkers who embraced the stability and continuity of existing institutions. Thus began a conflict between these two words: “liberals” sought the new and improved, “conservatives” held for the established and proven. Philosopher Immanuel Kant imagined a smart person as one who felt the pull of the liberal new and truly improved yet resisted abandoning the conservative established and proven in perfect balance and with mediation between the two forces.
Unfortunately, people no longer read much and, worse, suffer lack of interest in developing their own thoughts relying instead on repeating what others say. TV has become the main, many times sole, source of information. TV watchers want to seem smart by repeating what is presented on TV, and, unfortunately, the result is opposite – – People knee-jerk their way to stasis.
What differences and similarities are found in human behavior? Psychology and neurology can establish a baseline of the considerable number of standard behaviors across cultures. The amazing part is the sameness of it all. Social events within the USA are so same. Individual encounters are so same. From generation to generation behaviors are so same. Go to a popular rock concert today – it’s the same – – orchestral music and chamber music change more, and more rapidly, than rock music. Go to a ‘happening’ from the 70s and a young people gathering today – it’s a time tunnel between the two.
The vox populi (voice of the people) is just chatter sprung from TV talking heads who chirp like birds on a wire. The chirping spreads through the populace and creates feedback. The TV talking heads, in turn, repeat the same chirping heard when interviewing the populace. Our current vox populi is just a ‘broken record’, an old-timey reference to vinyl records that skipped back endlessly to repeat prior moments. In the populace, this repeated feedback cultivates opinions unburdened by the thought process. People love to express their opinions – now it’s easier to do than ever because modern news and social media provide a smorgasbord of opinions without the mental burden of thinking first. This is one of the worst parts of conservatism, viz., just use established opinions as one’s own.
Few people have intellectual patience enough to allow thoughts to develop, both on the speaker side of a conversation and on the listener side. Speakers require a little brain work to choose words for expressiveness and to compose phrases that suit the speaker’s philosophies. In fairness, a speaker should expect a little time to state the chosen words and phrases. Typically anymore, the listener becomes impatient if more than one or two ideas are said without interruption. The speaker becomes anxious that interruption is imminent. A speaker rushes speech and uses overly simple and final sentences due to anxiety that thoughts requiring a bit more time will not be expressed before interruption. And listeners do interrupt compliant to and content with their enculturation to do so.
TV formats and practices for news and commentary illustrate the problem. TV news and sports personnel serve up to the viewing customers their weak intellectual speaking and listening skills, and practice interruptions, and rush to make an over-simplified conclusory statement or braying riposte. Sometimes the TV news and sports anchors and sidekicks compete in an exchange of simplistic metaphors and misguided intensifiers that come off as orchestrated chirping such as, “the ball’s in his court”, she’s hangin’ in the balance”, “at the end of the day”, “bells and whistles”, “collateral damage”, “believe me”, “out of control”, “a great firewall”, “in the wheelhouse” ad infinitum.
TV sitcoms especially drive the style of conversation now common – statement, comeback, next comeback, and-so-on. The audience more-and-more is conditioned to talk like that over time. The result is that TV viewers sound like TV characters and the TV characters sound like the viewers in a social, behavioral spiral. Spirals are common in nature, such as in a nautilus or Romanesco broccoli. Maybe spiraling dialogue indicates something fundamental about human nature.
Children who watch young persons’ programming face the same spiraling dilemma. Those who create the kids’ shows were and are the audience subservient to the lessons of prior TV talking heads. Kids learn from TV a method of repartee and comebacks, not discussion nor contemplation of ideas. No surprise when the new generations of young people emerge as adults as the same drones – because they were imprinted with the TV mode of thinking, they mimic the TV style of talk to react to words in a knee-jerk manner.
Where does knee-jerk reactionaryism come from besides TV? Where does it originate? Only from prior enculturation? Perhaps from ancient times, this behavior is primeval. Spirals are all over nature. Maybe spiraling knee-jerk reactionaryism is natural. Maybe birds chirping on a wire is nature’s model for human conversation.
Science informs us through studies in psychology and neurology. Action-reaction and stimulus-response are just ordinary brain chemistry and neural wiring – not much deliberation is necessary, just let the neurons fire away. The amygdala is the part of the brain that is primal; its roots come from a time homo sapien was a lesser creature with less brain power. The amygdala rules fear and pleasure, our most basic survival instincts, and it regulates emotional memories. A great poet laureate, Maya Angelou, said it best, “… people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” For example, when young we struggle a little to memorize the multiplication tables, but the task is not hard and after a bit of rote we permanently etch these memorized facts into the appropriate part of the brain. Not much emotion here as we passionlessly remember the tables decades later. By contrast, decades after a young woman and young man break up their deep relationship, the feelings are recalled and felt with emotional power, yet the words and actions from that long-ago moment fade from memory and significance. The reaction to a long-ago break-up and the feelings created back then persist in long term memory, but the words hardly.
Perhaps a strategy for long term memories is advisable. Is saving money for retirement a corollary, a savings’ plan for memories of meaningful moments? Maybe it is hard to do, but maybe we should try. We save money now for a future retirement, but saving memories for a future retirement … that’s harder to do deliberately. Such a plan requires the kind of mental work that is hybrid – part memorization such as with the multiplication tables, and part reliance on what the amygdala contributes feeling-wise. An internal library of long-term memories could be good planning for old age. Writing down one’s thoughts is a patient process that counters the practice of chirping away, but hardly anyone does that anymore except professionals and amateur devotees of community writing groups. Is there hope that people in ordinary situations will write more about their quotidian experiences? Unlikely. How about extraordinary experiences? Maybe less unlikely.
The consequences and rewards of memories learned from higher brain functions and rote are, for example, the recollection of the multiplication tables, and the familiarity with the streets, stores and houses of our community, and the ability to recite quotes from books, and the talent to create art and speak languages, communicate, and understand other people. By contrast, the consequences (or rewards) of being a knee-jerk reactionary are: 1) higher brain functions do not get enough exercise because people are content with the results of amygdala-style thoughts and feelings; 2) a meager inventory of long-term memories for future use; 3) lower brain functions dominate – – the population gets stuck in the TV/amygdala spiral.
In biology, atavism is the re-appearance of ancient traits that have been absent for a while. Perhaps there is a scientific reason people resist change – unconscious yearning for and clinging to the past may be a part of the evolutionary process. Science informs that atavistic qualities appear, but the studies of how many and how deeply is on-going. Scientists now possess mechanisms to change the genome – a possibility for new-and-improved humans or to bring back ancient traits. CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats – the mechanism used to splice genes) provides an example of one of the unsettling parts of liberalism.
Maybe atavisms rule and there is no free will, eh!? The emergence of the science of neurology gives philosophers pause to re-think the concept of free will. Can an individual prove his or her exercise of free will? Prof. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford Univ. presents in his book, Behave, his thoroughly researched findings, in summary, that our understanding of the term “free will” is not what we think, it is not the product of reason. Rather, it’s complex brain chemistry with only a skosh of socially triggered behaviors.
Philosopher Immanuel Kant said, “Thoughts without content are empty…” He also said, “There is nothing higher than reason.”
Just ponder, what if free will is as illusory as was the idea that the universe revolves around the Earth? Ahh. Now I’ve talked myself into a conundrum – if there is no free will, if it’s all just brain chemistry and firing neurons, then everybody is just a knee-jerk reactionary reiterating the same old scripts. If there is no free will, then we’re predestined to be chirping birds.
Unfortunately, reason does not resound in the vox populi. It’s just chirping.
© Mark A Rudis 2018