Richard Wagner and the 2008 Election

A post over at TPM discusses the two-tier strategy that Republicans use against Democrats in Presidential elections. One tier is a supposedly respectful discussion of differences on the issues. The other is the stirring up of negative emotions by coded messages.

In my book I discuss a number of rhetorical tricks that encourage you to see the targetted person as one of ``Them,'' not one of ``Us.'' These tactics recur in many times and places because they appeal to innate predispositions of the mind -- they work in the same way that optical illusions work, by exploiting the brain's built-in inclinations. And the TPM post made me realize that we'll be seeing a lot of examples during the campaign. I'll try to point them out when I see them, coming from either party.

In discussing all this, TPM's Josh Marshall proposes an operatic metaphor. Rational discussion of public policy, he says, is like the libretto. The coded imagery that flavors a campaign -- the stress on Barack Obama's middle name, the blind quote from a Pentagon official saying Obama's inauguration will be a signal to Islamist terrorists of ``we lose, they win'' -- that stuff, in contrast, is the music.

Marshall's is a nice image, which I think works more broadly as a way to think about the way real people make real decisions. In that process, the explicit, measurable, ``objective'' facts are only part of a mental experience that is also defined by the hidden and subjective parts of the mind. The words of an opera's printed libretto are the same to any reader; but the experience of a performance is highly individual and subjective. Music affects the mind because it follows rules, too, but they are not the rules of logic. They're different.

As it happens, I recently reviewed Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, whose main point could be expressed by this book-versus-music metaphor. We like to imagine (and our theories of economics and democracy depend on this) that people are governed by their rational cognition. But, in the same way that the experience of opera is not the reading of a libretto, the experience of making a decision is not all about the aspects of if that can be explicitly described and reproduced reliably outside their personal context.

By the way, Marshall's example was based on Richard Wagner's operas, which, he later added, were not the best possible example, because

``Wagner is one of the few major composers -- I'm actually not sure there are any others -- to write his own librettos [...]''

There were others -- Berlioz, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss among them. But I don't think the metaphor requires that the words and music come from separate creators. In fact, it makes more sense to me as an image for one person's divided mind. So Wagner works here.

Of course, he also works for another reason. The relationship between his music and his poetry is a good example for the argument that parts of the mind are neither neatly separated nor neatly related. Wagner's music made his ghastly ideas more attractive; his ghastly ideas informed his music. For example, Theodore Adorno pointed out long ago that detestable characters in Wagner operas (Mime, Beckmesser) were written to sound Jewish.

The mind is modular and not coherent in its operations, but this does not mean, I think, that we should think of each module as independent of the others. Every part of the mind affects every other part, and no part entirely controls, or entirely explains, any other.