Years ago, I sat in a lecture hall listening to a certain Prof. J.C. Cameron expound on a concept called "cluster thinking". As this was the late 1970s before the Internet, he wasn't using it n the way it is used nowadays by Connectivists or by people doing that awful stuff called "mind-mapping", or studying pagan rituals about thinking clustered around one image -- no, that wasn't it.
What he talked about was the tendency of people to form opinions that always appeared in a bound cluster -- and how these clusters tended to reinforce each other. For example, if you opposed abortion, you would generally support the death penalty, and support gun ownership and possible some foreign war. like Vietnam. If you supported abortion rights, you would generally oppose the death penalty, advocate gun control, and urge peace instead of war. And so on.
It would be rare to find people then who would oppose abortion, but also oppose the death penalty -- but you could find them, say, some Catholic liberal group in Pennsylvania. So you would study groups and organizations and see how often people came as a "package". They might think of themselves as unique, but in fact they predictably thought in clusters that fit a kind of community of conformity. So then the task was to find what universality they would be invoking that would be the overarching theme that would explain their seeming hypocrisy. Why would people opposed to abortion support the death penalty? Jokes would be made about the Republicans' "catch and release" program -- they'd oppose abortion for some poor black woman having a baby she couldn't afford as a single mother, yet they'd be happy to send her son to the electric chair 21 years later if he grew up to be a felon. How could that be? Because such conservatives had a notion that privileged the sanctity of human life as an individual even before birth, yet also privileged the sanctity of the state when it came to preserving order to enable other individuals to enjoy their freedoms. The state could be sanctioned to kill, where doctors couldn't, because the state was conceded a necessary function -- deterring serious crime with lethal punishment.
By the same token, anyone who clustered in the other direction could be considered to accept the killing of an unborn baby in the name of individual personal freedom for the mother, but oppose the death penalty even for a convicted murderer because the state was seen as something suspect, discredited, perhaps wrong in its evidence, and therefore not to be accorded such great power. If anything, what both these opposite clusters had were similar valuations of abstraction conceptions that led to beliefs about individual freedom and the need for order -- in one case, freedom for the baby versus freedom for the mother; in the other case, the state's need to preserve order against criminals and the individual's need to prevent the state from disrupting order by overreaching its powers. In fact, the two groups shared, in one sense, similar values -- individualism, order, restraints for the sake of a higher order -- but wanted to apply them to different places in the equation. Like many controversies, the debates about "pro-choice/abortion" or "war/peace" or "death penalty/life imprisonment" all come down to a pivot concept: when one set of rights or values conflict with another set of values, or when the same concept, applied to different situations, puts them at odds.
Somebody who both opposed the death penalty and abortion both would be cast then as someone for whom the sanctity of life had to be kept at all ends of the spectrum, and the issue wasn't then the state, but life. Or, you could find someone with the position like Maggie Darwin has. Ordinarily, liberals and lefties who support gay rights are against gun-toting Republicans and Bible-thumpers who advocate gun rights. She turns the table on them by advocating the Pink Pistols concept of having gays pack pistols to protect themselves against anti-gay violence. So in that sense, she is like the person against abortion and against the death penalty crossing the usual cluster lines; she is for gay rights but not for abolishing guns when the issue involves protecting gays -- and crosses several clusters there.
Thus you can find variations of American groupings -- some people might oppose a war because they are for pacifism and they also drink green tea and meditate and refuse to wear furs; others might oppose a war because they are isolationists, want budgets to be spent at home, and drink Budweiser and bowl. The popularity of questionnaires and surveys determining your political views on the Internet relies on the usual cluster thinking; the popularity of the game Jennifer Government also relies on funny outcomes to cluster thinking -- or forced breaking-up of cluster thinking...I just started it again because it's always hilarious.
I first noticed what I have come to think of as the nasty insolent and maliciously gleeful spirit of political campaigns with Bush I, I think, and then Bush 2. I can't pin it to a certain year, but I do think of it in my mind as related to the chicken campaign. This involved people all over the place, at every whistle-stop of the Bush campaign, appearing in giant chicken costumes that they would rent or make. The purpose of this chicken meme was to blast Bush for refusing to debate Kerry in Iowa. Of course, when Obama refused to debate Clinton or McCain in this or that state, nobody came wearing a chicken outfit. Instead, they would do all kinds of different hateful videos, like the one showing a male midget in drag as Hillary doing the macarena and lots more youtubes like that.
The people doing the chicken routine -- and they kept it going for ages -- thought they were terribly clever, but they also just seemed juvenile -- it was like a male frat prank. The spirit of the chicken ridicule -- something that was in part grassroots and homegrown, but in part paid-for and scripted -- continued in other forms in the Obama vs. Clinton campaigns, but never as chickens again to my knowledge. Now you didn't have to raise $135 to don a hot and sweaty chicken outfit; you could make a YouTube. Andrew Keen was right to flag the fact that quite a few of these popular YouTubes that seemed "from the masses" and "amateur" were in fact clever PR campaigns paid for by political groups.
The nastiness of the youtubes, blogs, and twitters was just a tide of obnoxiousness and even filth. It was a huge turn off to people like me of an older generation that are more rapidly wearied of Internet Insolence and the valleywag.com or gawker.com ethos. It was never persuasive. We were supposed to hate Hillary or think she was fake because she cried. Or we were not supposed to notice that Obama had waffled while brushing away reporters telling them he was busy eating waffles. There were endless subjects for ridicule, malicious glee, hatred, even sinister stalking. Some of it bordered on crime or led to police action, like the breaking into Sarah Palin's email. The vicious hatred of Palin is really something to see -- it's pathological. Sick. The scandal around David Letterman insulting Palin's daughter, the hysteria that Olive Garden might pull their advertising because of his cynical insolence; his eventual apology -- well, it was just like a Second Life forums drama.
It used to be insecure middleaged men or unemployed or unemployable young geeks would sit around talking about baseball or computers or in some cases, if they were perhaps a bit more urban and intellectual, talk about books or movies. At some point, they all began abandoning those passtimes or intellectual pursuits, and took on obsessing with evil glee and hate about various political targets, that were set up each morning by whatever blog was taking the lead, sometimes scripted from central command in a party or PAC or politicized NGO. We all had to hate on Palin. We all had to call for the impeachment of that woman congressmen whose name escapes me now who didn't do the right thing on hate crimes legislation. When a guard was tragically shot by a loon at the Holocaust Museum, we were supposed to now obsess on our blogs and tweets about how the right was now becoming a violent threatening backlash force in Amerika, and listen to wildly false Youtubes by snotty tekkies claiming that Mrs. Cheney was whitewashing murder by simply pointing out that one loon did not constitute proof that there was some giant violent backlash from conservatives about to wash over the country. Of course the NY Times columnists fanned this, the blogs fanned this, and it's almost impossible to have any coherent discussion. Of course we had all been told that we could never, ever in our lives associate a loon like William Ayers with Obama, just because he knew him slightly, and that extremist bombers in a friendship list didn't make Obama an extremist, and we were supposed to just accept that Ayers was for education.
And today it's Sen. Sandford. I never focused on this senator from South Carolina, who apparently lied that he was hiking on the Appalachian trail and in fact ran off to Argentina to have an affair behind his wife's back. This family drama, and lack of transparency about where a public representative was located and his even lying about it didn't end there, because the hate machine had to crank up in way high gear. All the influencers and A-listers and power brokers swung into action. Mitch Kapor was microblogging to Twitter audiences with snide and chuckling remarks giving the kill signal to the masses. On facebook, I saw my lefty friends all salivating on cue -- joking about "hiking the Appalachian" or sneering with adrenalin-pumped outrage about "hypocrisy".
I tried to think what had cranked up the hate this time about this particular guy, as I hadn't remembered him to be associated with anything causing such Twitter-hate. I tried my usual method to figure out where the scandals lie by Googling his name with terms like "socialism" and "Iraq" and "gay rights" -- and sure enough, I found out this fellow opposed gay marriage.
That is why he had to die.
So, in the vengeful minds of those fighting for gay rights by ridicule and harassment (which kinds of undoes their point, but that doesn't stop them), Sandford was hypocritical having an affair because...let's see if we can parse this...because if he were for the sanctity of marriage, and felt it had to be protected from gays, if he himself didn't respect the sanctity of marriage, then he was hypocritical.
Quite a cluster thinking exercise, that.
In fact, he could respect the sanctity of marriage, violate it himself and admit that he was in the wrong (he was remorseful at least for the cameras), still value the sanctity of marriage, but still not want gay marriage -- not because he felt it violated sanctity, but because he just had a visceral or religious belief about it.
And, of course, in the extremists' minds, that's not allowed. You can't have that position -- no one can.
That more than anything is the hallmark of our times -- the inability to concede that there are, if you will, parliamentary factions with different platforms of views and beliefs, and that's it's *ok* for this pluralism to exist, and for people to debate each other not to the death, but to political compromise.
I personally support gay marriage and never understand what all the fuss is about. I think the gay rights movement has done a terrible job of selling this normal idea in many places -- except...where they haven't, and it has gone through, not because of hate campaigns, but just because of positive, steady, campaigns for the rights aspect and the equality aspect of it rather than the hate.
When people see gays hating and screaming about hypocrisy and ridiculing and slamming someone caught in an affair, if they are against gay marriage, they are likely to gather new fodder for their antipathy just by seeing what antagonistic douches people are when they get like this on Twitter. People think of right-wingers seething with hate and frothing -- I guess they never read Twitter or blogs. There's a tide of ridicule, hate, and hysteria around this guy today and...why, again? What does having an extra-martial affair have to do with affairs of state? If he lied about his whereabouts, that's a problem for a public servant but...if we now find he lied to cover up an affair, aren't we glad that he wasn't, oh, in a casino, spending the state's budget instead of putting up a levee, or whatever it is he is supposed to do? I mean, as scandal material of real state important, it just doesn't fly.
"Nothing good ever comes out of South Carolina," says some douche -- and it's because they are seething with hate for this senator, for the conservatives who elect him, for the "good old boys," for the Christians -- hate, hate, hate, ridicule, ridicule, ridicule.
It's as if these methods are all that pass for politics these days. Nobody argues sensibly about why somebody's affair would matter, really. It's sad, it's not a good character reference, but at the end of the day, other congressmen's affairs ultimately don't get in the way of their staying in office, and life goes on.
Even Mitch Kapor (especially Mitch Kapor) seemed gleeful that they were publishing Sandford's emails to his girlfriend. Is that the attitude he takes to our IMs and private communications to each other in Second Life? Why is that ok? Some people question this.
Reading the search tag to see the hate-fest -- but what's interesting is how many ordinary people say they don't care, and find it troublesome that the media and the rabid lefties are now invading Sandford's privacy.
And Colbert and Stewart are cranking up to fill tilt. and it's all funny. But...why don't people discuss politics more normally any more? Why is the stuff of Mad Magazine or National Lampoon not just one sector of the media diet, but the constant 24/7 repast?
I guess we have to understand this sort of national preoccupation with prurience of obscure senators -- who Colbert said was like a vanilla envelope pinned to a beige wall, he was so dull -- with a kind of gigantic denial of the fact that more than 60 people were blown away in Baghdad, while we were supposed to be protecting them, and hundreds are being beaten and arrested in Tehran, where we really don't have a good idea of how to help them, and would likely only harm them if we got involved as a state power. So I guess that's how it works.
It's also a sad thing when people fall in love and it breaks up a marriage with kids, and sad that gay people can't get married just like everybody else.
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