01/11/16 – Rick Shenkman – The Scott Horton Show

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Explosions are fun.
And hey, the closer the explosion is to your house, the more fun it is.
Do you ever notice that?
Sometimes you have the TV on and you're working around the house.
Some guy comes on television, he says, 6,000 people were killed in an explosion today.
You say, where, where?
He says, in Pakistan.
Say, oh, Pakistan.
Too far away to be any fun.
But if he says it happened in your hometown, you'll say, whoa, hot.
Come on, Dave.
Let's go look at the bodies.
Let's go look at the bodies.
All right.
The great George Carlin from Jammin' in New York there.
And I think a pretty good introduction to our next guest.
It's Rick Shankman.
He's the editor and founder of the History News Network.
Imagine that.
That's incredible.
I've written for the History News Network before, me and David Beto.
He's the author most recently of Political Animals, How Our Stone Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics.
All right.
Well, welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Rick?
I am doing fine and glad to be here.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Very interesting article that you've written for Tom Dispatch here.
Ted Cruz's Stone Age Brain and yours.
We like to think that we're all a lot different from Ted Cruz than Ted Cruz, but maybe we're not so much.
And this is in reference to his recent sloganeering about carpet bombing the Islamic State off the face of the earth.
Is that right?
Exactly.
He went and he talked about how he was going to turn the sand just so red hot and he was going to wipe out all these ISIS forces and he was going to do it through carpet bombing.
Now, here's the thing about carpet bombing.
Carpet bombing basically means by definition indiscriminate bombing.
He claimed when he was called on the carpet about this remark that, oh, no, he wasn't going to be doing indiscriminate bombing.
His carpet bombing was going to be focused just on the ISIS fighters.
So this was a great example of Ted Cruz not knowing what he was talking about when he opened his mouth.
But here's the thing.
Within days, his poll numbers didn't decline.
They went up.
That's it.
Well, and so I mean, then again, it's only a certain segment of people who are voting in his primary anyway, which is still a good what third of the population, if not half.
But yeah, pretty bad news.
So now I guess the argument goes, yeah, but exceptional.
So all other arguments null and void.
Right.
What a great phrase.
Well, here's what here's what I'm arguing in in my book, Political Animals, is that when we go on instinct, we wind up going wrong because our brain basically evolved during the period of the Stone Ages, a two and a half million year period, a long time.
And it was designed to meet the problems of hunter gatherers during the Stone Age, not the problems of people in the 21st century.
When politicians, though, want to try to really connect with voters, they try to activate our instincts from that Stone Age period.
And that's what Ted Cruz was doing with his carpet bombing remark.
So what he was appealing, the reason why he got such a good response was he was activating this ancient instinct that's in our brain, in all our brains, which is we're going to go out there and we're going to get the bad guys who are out to get us.
And we're going to take swift, decisive action.
It's going to be overwhelming and we're going to have victory.
We as human beings love that kind of talk instinctively.
Now, why doesn't he appeal to all Americans then with that kind of talk?
Well, because we have higher order cognitive thinking and cultural assumptions and partisan brains.
And so we're not all just acting on our basic human biological instincts.
But when a politician tries to activate those instincts, he usually can really strongly connect with people.
And that's what Donald Trump has shown.
And that is certainly what Ted Cruz showed in this remark.
So it sounds kind of like what you're saying is American exceptionalism isn't exceptional at all.
Every tribe has that same exceptionalism.
We're us and they're them.
And so whatever, maybe it'd be wrong for one of us to kill one of them.
But if we kill all of them, that's OK.
That's what every tribe believes, basically, right?
Well, as historians, you know, the complicated history of American exceptionalism.
So this is a concept that emerged out of the 19th century when we went on a campaign to move west.
At that time, it was basically called Manifest Destiny.
And this was our God-given right to extend across the country because we were going to use land and the Indians weren't using it.
So we could shove them aside because God said, if you don't use it, you lose it.
Well, we have a certain brand of American exceptionalism, but all peoples all around the world always think that they're the best for something.
The difference between America and the rest of the people in the rest of the world is we're now the number one superpower.
So when we get this idea in our head and we start throwing around our power, it has consequences.
Yeah.
Well, severe ones.
And well, there's a thing here when you talk about the caveman brain and whatever, and it is the 21st century one at the same time is just how self-justifying all this is.
You run up against a little bit of dissonance and then next step is rationalization.
So the one I hear most of all is, come on, they wouldn't do all this stuff if they didn't really know that they had to do it.
And we're talking about dropping cluster bombs on people.
And you're telling me that our government is so evil and corrupt that they just drop cluster bombs on people for no reason.
And so it must be.
And if Ted Cruz says that the Islamic State is such a threat that anything is justified, no holds barred in order to protect ourselves from them, then they must really be dangerous and he must know it or else what are you saying?
He's some kind of psychopath.
So it you know, the argument justifies itself.
Reality kind of has nothing to do with it.
Well, it's quite clear that ISIS is a threat to civilized man.
Their methods have been proven to be just appalling.
I mean, slicing people's heads off.
I don't think in the 21st century is something that any of us sits back and looks at with pleasure.
But when you bomb, there are inevitably casualties.
And while the U.S. military, when it bombs, tries to target our weapons on people who are the so-called bad guys, although I always hate that term because it's just too neat and simple and life is complicated.
But when you send a missile from a drone and you hit a building, you may get the bad guys in that building.
You also may kill a family walking by that building or a child who's playing near that building playing soccer or something.
So there's always terrible unintended consequences.
And that's a real problem for us because when we are talking about bombing other places, just as in that wonderful George Carlin clip, which I'd never heard before.
If it's if it's happening somewhere else, we don't really absorb it, that these are human beings who are getting in our way or who are casualties.
The human brain is designed to work with communities of about 100 to 150 people, because those were the size of the communities in which the human brain developed during the Stone Age.
For two and a half million years, our communities were no bigger than 150 people.
So all of our instincts are geared to thinking about communities of that small size.
We literally cannot think in any real way when we're talking about millions of people.
We have to project, we have to kind of imagine it, but it doesn't come naturally to us.
So when we talk about bombing some place over in the Middle East, and that involves people who don't look like us, they don't talk like us, we can't even find where they live on the map.
We turn them into abstraction.
So it's very easy then for politicians like Ted Cruz to say, we're just going to bomb these people over here.
And some other people get in the way and they happen to die.
Well, okay, they're just kind of abstract casualties.
And that's what I'm trying to draw attention to in this piece for Tom Dispatch and also in my book, Political Animals.
All right, now hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody with more from Rick Shenkman, editor and founder of History News Network, HNN, and author of Political Animals.
This one is at Tom Dispatch and at Antiwar.com, how we learn to stop worrying about people and love the bombing.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Scott Horton Show here, talking with Rick Schenkman about this great piece at tomdispatch.com, also running at antiwar.com under Tom Englehart's name, of course.
How we learn to stop worrying about people and love the bombing.
Ted Cruz's Stone Age Brain and yours.
And if I'm reading you right here, Rick, it's your idea that the biology, that where human beings come from and just the way that we're wired, our affinity for very small local groups and our inability to really identify with others outside of those small groups, that it sounds like, from reading your article, I'm oversimplifying, but I'm trying to read you right here.
You sort of sound like you're saying having a philosophy or a good argument doesn't really matter.
The only way you can really counteract this kind of way of looking at things, that, for example, it's perfectly fine for your government to kill whoever they want, as long as it's in a foreign country somewhere far from here, that kind of thing, would be a narrative, a story.
And you mentioned the napalm girl, the famous Vietnam War photo, where get someone to identify with this one person.
And then if you can use that as a symbol of the whole struggle, something.
But it's all about feelings.
And it's all about maybe a little social psychology, whether your uncle agrees with you or thinks you're a dumbass on this issue or that issue when it comes to these things.
But it almost has nothing to do with real arguments or whether people believe in what I thought was Americanism, which was that we all believe if we all agree on anything, it's that everybody is born free.
Right.
You can disagree about everything else other than that.
But that's right there in the Declaration of Independence, the thing that we all sign on to.
Right.
Well, what I'm trying to do in Political Animals is use science to illuminate how we actually respond to politicians and to political issues.
And it's a somewhat distressing story that I tell in the book, because it turns out that while we all like to think that we are rational and that we're responding to important intelligent arguments, most of the time we go on instinct.
And in politics, when we go on instincts, we almost always go wrong.
And one of the studies that I cite in the book is to talk about how in our medial prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain where empathy is registered.
If you put people under a an MRI machine and you have them look, for instance, at pictures of homeless people, they don't register much empathy in the medial prefrontal cortex when they are looking at pictures of people who appear to be homeless.
And why is that?
Because the brain is designed to take notice primarily of people who have high status.
And if you have low status, that means you're probably not a threat to me and you're not probably going to be useful to me, so I'm not going to pay much attention to you.
When you start to really think about the implications of that, it's mind-boggling.
Because what it means is if you go on instinct and you expect that your natural human empathy, which we feel all the time unless you happen to be a psychopath and you don't have any feelings at all for other people, that you can't really rely on that.
You can't trust that in politics.
Because in politics, most of the time, we're not talking about people who are within our intimate circle, people we can touch, feel, see, and talk to.
Instead, we're talking about people who are remote from us, who may be living 500 miles away from us or 5,000 miles away from us.
And if the human brain doesn't show empathy for those people, and yet we have the power to blow them off the face of the earth, you can see that there is a problem.
And that's one of the big problems that we have.
I focus on four problems that we face as human beings because of the way our brain is designed, and it's not designed for 21st century man.
And the lack of empathy for people who clearly cry out for it is one of the big problems.
It's problem number four.
I got three others that I focus on.
Well, and we'll talk about those in a sec.
But let me ask you this, though.
I mean, I understand that you're right.
I'm not disagreeing with you.
But at the same time, it sounds like you're describing teenagers.
It sounds like you're describing me when I was a teenager, when I was 14, 15 in ninth grade.
That was when Bush senior bombed the hell out of Iraq.
And I didn't even like Bush senior, the Republicans or whatever.
But hey, neat airplanes bombing anything, setting off big explosions.
That's good enough for me.
And yeah, men, women and children from Iraq that barely ever even heard of, except in the context of the Iran-Iraq war and whatever, as a kid, couldn't care less.
As long as I get to see explosions, that's great.
But of course, I was 14, Rick.
And so at some point, then I turned actually, I think I turned 15.
And I was exposed to the argument that, hey, maybe it's wrong to mass murder people, even if you're a government.
And I thought, wow, brilliant.
You know what I mean?
I was still a kid before, you know, when I got over this kind of thinking.
And it wasn't because I was already, you know, an ideological individualist anarchist, although maybe I was, but you know what I mean?
This sounds like you're just talking about stupid kids, but we're all grown adults in a constitutional republic here and all that.
What about that?
Well, thank goodness that we don't operate as teenage brains do, because they are unformed, aren't mature.
The brain is still developing until we reach about age 25.
So it's continuing to grow and change until it finally settles down around age 25.
But all of us as adults are constantly asked to make 1000 decisions in the course of a day.
And most of the time, we have to go on instinct, we can't sit there and study all the decisions that we have to make, because you'd be immobilized.
So what the brain does is it doesn't re-litigate issues.
So once it settles on a certain policy, it decides, if you're a right wing Republican, what Ted Cruz and Donald Trump say is golden, then whatever they say, you're going to tend to think, yes, it's golden.
And you're not going to re-litigate that with yourself, because that's too time consuming, you've got a million other things to do, you've got to make lunch, you've got to prepare for dinner, you've got to do your job, whatever.
And that is one of the downsides to the way the human brain operates.
So it's not that we're stuck with a teenager brain, we don't have a teenager brain after we're about age 25.
But we do have a brain that doesn't want to really be thoughtful and reflective.
Daniel Kahneman, who's a psychologist, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, oddly enough, talks about our brain being lazy.
It's primarily lazy.
And it tries to do as little as possible.
And the reason for that is that it takes up energy.
If you start really thinking hard about something, you're literally burning more energy.
And the brain already burns a lot of energy, basically burns about 20% of your body's energy, and yet it's only three pounds.
So if you're 175 pounds, your little brain of three pounds is burning 20% of the body's energy.
And it really wants to protect itself from having to use more energy.
So it doesn't really want to think about anything else that it doesn't have to think about.
So that creates this basic problem of you decide a certain person, it could be Ted Cruz, it could be Hillary Clinton, it could be Barack Obama.
And when they make a case for bombing this group, or that group, you don't immediately start thinking through the consequences of bombing.
You just think that's my guy.
He or she wants me to back her policy.
And by gosh, I've already decided I like her.
And she's my person, or he's my person, they're, they're my candidate.
And you're going to go along with what they say.
That's a real problem.
And that's not a teenage brain problem.
That's a human being problem.
I think maybe I'm the case of arrested development here.
And I'm just stuck at 15.
I happen to be really good on war, because I just won't budge from my childish view.
But anyway, listen, it's really great, interesting work that you've done here.
And I really appreciate you writing for Tom Dispatch where I can get at it, too.
So thanks very much for coming on the show, Rick.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
I appreciate it.
All right, child.
That is Rick Schenkman.
And the book is political animals, how our stone age brain gets in the way of smart politics.
He's the editor and the founder of the History News Network.
And you can find this article at TomDispatch.com and at Antiwar.com under Tom Engelhardt's name there, how we learn to stop worrying about people and love the bombing.
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