Rachel Maddow's Herman Cain Thesis

First off, full disclosure: I know Ms. Maddow prefers the ladies, but O! what I wouldn't give to just snuggle up with her for an hour or two. (Rachel? Call me!?)

I'm feeling a bug coming on, I'm watching my DVRed Olbermann and Maddow very late last night, virtually gargling with strong beer to bathe my throat in numbing ethyl alcoholic splendor. And Rachel - the smartest pundit on Unistat TV - by a very long margin, no one's even close - began her show with her thesis that, all along, Herman Cain's candidacy has been one long bit of performance art. She's kicking herself for not seeing it ALL sooner. The gnomish hints were there from the earliest Republican debates, when Cain read his prepared final remarks by citing the words of a "poet" who turned out to be Pokemon. And the gorgeous Ms. Maddow goes on to marshal quite a lot of data to support her thesis - Cain's numerology, the absurdist responses to questions about abortion, surrealistic campaign ads, etc - and it was very entertaining, but I'm not convinced, for reasons I'll get to after this clip - the one that lays out Maddow's thesis/interpretation:

What I found particularly interesting about Maddow here: this is the sort of pattern recognition that very intelligent people use to make artistic and scientific breakthroughs. It's also a mode of thought that brilliant minds can use to convince themselves that some sequence of data that supports a hypothesis is cogent, each piece of information suggesting a "fit" in a puzzle in which, following the logic of the original abduction, reveals the hypothesis as "true," when it will later be found to not be true. There's an overall plausibility when you're "in" the hypothesis and excited about the robust richness of your overarching idea. It's seductive, and encourages the brain to continue on, deeper into the thesis, making connections.

If anyone takes issue with me implying Maddow has come up with a "conspiracy theory," please be aware that I admire conspiracy theories for their artistic components, whether the theorist(s) see themselves in their own act of creation or not. To be blunt: my stance towards conspiracy theories is by and large Ironic, and I'm not sure of this could be helped, after so many years of reading the works of Robert Anton Wilson so closely.

And besides, many conspiracies contend in the night, despite what Academia tries to tell you. Watergate, Iran-Contra and the buildup to the Iraq War by the NeoCons are all recent examples. History is filled with conspiracies, and when you re-read Shakespeare's oeuvre take note that at least half of the plays involve conspiracies, especially the history plays. Q: Where did Billy Shakes get these ideas? A: From history.

Rachel (Notice she's "Rachel" to me. I am a deluded heterosexual male, but I can dream, can't I?) can't make sense that Cain, despite not knowing anything about taxes or foreign policy or even basic geography, coupled with the fact that he's had to pay settlements for sexual harassment, is currently more popular than ever with Republican voters in polls. There must be some explanation that we're missing. He's clearly a motivational speaker with a book to sell. Why a run for President? Ahh...that's just the tip of it all. You need to have an IQ of 150 (or whatever Rachel's is) to see It.

This business of very intelligent, witty, whip-smart people (Rachel was a Rhodes Scholar) seeing something that might not be there is a phenomenon that has long fascinated me. For anyone interested, the thinking processes of smart people making errors in trying to make sense of the data in a complex sequence of events, is displayed in baroque detail in two novels, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's 805 page book The Illuminatus! Trilogy, and Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, tallying a mere 641 pages in my hardback copy. (Readers are invited to add other titles or films in the comments section.)

It was either Nietzsche or Oscar Wilde who said, I paraphrase probably, "We are all far greater artists than we realize." And this was derived from the observations of the propensity of the human mind to see puzzles when there may not "be" a puzzle in the first place, or at least not as assumed by the thinker trying to solve the Mystery. In tandem with this, we need a Narrative to explain to ourselves what we're doing. We need Narratives - at times rather ornate ones, apparently - like a junkie needs junk. The classic Occam's Razor can probably be seen as the obverse in this overall cognitive conceptual schematic I'm groping toward.

Why don't I buy Rachel's thesis? Because my intuition tells me this guy is more of a bumbling phony out to enrich himself. A shameless huckster. A classic American Type. Occam's Razor, folks. I admit Rachel's thesis seems far more intellectually interesting. (See the Isaiah Berlin quote at the bottom of this page?)

I think maybe stupidity can look artistic if placed within certain preconceived assumptions and within certain domains of "reality" in which we are not used to seeing stunning ineptitude. Art seems to me to require conscious intent. (IF Cain's consciously, intentionally doing art, I think how he ends the "piece" should be telling.) Rachel says something about three-four minutes in that Cain's level of gaffes don't occur "in nature." I like that line, but I'm not sure it's true. How easy it is to forget GWB43's daily idiocies! (See my faves, #5 and #1 HERE.) I think Cain's probably just a banality who knows he's full of crap politically, but may be surprised he hasn't dropped back into the single digits in the polls yet. He figures it's only a matter of time, and he sure as hell ain't trying. But the money is rollin' in, the Koch Bros keep throwing cash at him, his book's selling.

But consciously artistic? I don't see it. I have to wonder about the mentality of people who hear, "Don't blame the banks and corporations. If you're not rich it's your fault!" and cheer loudly. Unistat is brimming with mindless drooling fascists, lapping up every other sociopathic "motivational speaker" who comes along. I see THAT as a major problem...And Cain probably has a lot of people working for him who don't believe he's viable, and they're sub-mediocrities he met on the pizza circuit at some point. It also doesn't hurt that the mouthpieces representing the mainstream media seem dumber every year. (This thesis begs the question: how come so many saw through the females Bachman and Palin? Is there somehow a gravitas that aids a verisimilitude that attends a dapper, glib African-American MALE, no matter his vacuity? And if so, what does this imply about some sort of unconscious sexism in our culture?)

I find Maddow's thesis provocative and highly entertaining, and also hold a steady suspicion ever since seeing her lay out her explanation about the Herman Cain Conceptual Art Experience/Put-On, that she's in turn ironically putting the thesis forth. She has her reasons. (This might constitute a meta-conspiracy theory?) One only need understand that Maddow's politics are very very far away from Cain's putative dumb-show, I Know Nothing and I'll Try To Act Like I Care and I'm Proud of It Act. To float out a proto-meme that might go viral, that Cain's making you look like a fool if you take him at his word, could have an effect on the race. IF Maddow is consciously doing ironic art herself here, I applaud her. Who gets it?

Finally, my understanding of the sociology of knowledge and neuroscience and the logic of perception and reasoning from an abduction and other areas requires me to admit Rachel Maddow may be right and I'm wrong in asserting she was earnestly putting the pieces together in a brilliant, artistic Fool's Errand.

Another reason for her side: she's smarter than me.

I may be the Fool here. But if I am, Maddow is once again the Smartest Person in the Room, the first to "get it" and millions of Republicans will be shown to have been duped in a new way, the most artistic con yet. If anyone out there has on record a date before November 4th in which someone else declares definitively that Cain is pulling some sort of prank, let me know, please! As of the date above, millions of Republicans are apparently being "taken" in a way that seems a distant cousin to Jerzy Kosinski's Chauncey Gardiner, from the novel Being There. I will admit that I hope Rachel turns out to be right and I'm wrong. If only for the entertainment value of the reactions of fascist morons like Limbaugh, Coulter, and Bozell, who spent the past week defending Cain against the "liberal" attacks on him. (As if his settlements for sexual harassment weren't FACTS!)
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Politics as Art. If it's something like Maddow is suggesting, then what's the worst that can happen? We all realize there's another conceptual frame that may be used in politics. Art has had overt and covert political messages for eons. Maybe now it's time for Politics to use Art as a pinprick for our perceptions?

Maybe.

A Foray Into The Logic of Abduction

When you see the word "abduction" in print these days, it's usually a crime story: some larger person is holding a smaller, probably younger person. Probably unlawfully, we're not sure. Do we really want to delve deeper into that story? (Maybe so, but maybe no.)

The other less-common but still seen by all of us are the claims of being "abducted" by aliens, who are probably not of the Earth. I confess I tend to continue reading these stories, because they're so ubiquitous and baffling. There is no shortage of experts who want to make fun of people who believe the aliens are here and need our fluids, or a little kinky action. I agree, it is funny, but what bores me is these self-congratulatory "experts" who "know" it's all impossible, and pat themselves on the back for being so much smarter than most people, and these fundamentalist materialists are here to help us be more rational, but we just won't listen. But they're here for us. Boring clods. (See just about any issue of The Skeptical Enquirer for these types.) 

What bugs me: when I continue to follow these stories and read books about them, I find:

1.) There are no end to these stories. They seemingly happen to all sorts of people; farmers living in Possum Crotch and white-collar professionals are victimized as well. It could be anyone...except myself?

2.) I have come to strongly suspect that almost all of the people greatly troubled by their exceedingly weird experience truly believe it happened to them. Most are not playing games in order to ripoff the public. I don't believe these poor souls are simply "starving for attention." (Or maybe they are in need of attention, but both we and they don't know quite know why yet?)

3.) As a reader of books on the theory of relativity, cosmology and astronomy, given our current understanding of physics, I just can't buy that They are here. There has to be some other explanation.

And that's where I part with the Know-It-Alls. If, as some of the fundamentalist materialists want us to believe - that mass sightings of a ball of light landing and doing physically impossible things are really "only" "mass hallucinations," then...isn't that something we ought to study? How do we account for sudden "mass hallucinations"? That seems like a marvelous field, open for research. 

Oh, I have 17 models of what I think might "really" be going on with these people abducted by aliens, but that's for some future blog maunder. (Number 17 is "They really are here, toying with us." I have 16 more plausible ideas.)

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What I have come to talk to you all about today is another meaning of the term "abduction." In logic, we have deduction, in which the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises:

All bachelors are unmarried males.

This guy right here is a bachelor.

Therefore, he's not married.

We have induction, in which the conclusion seems to follow with a generally high degree of probability:

Most Swedes are blonde.

My brother's girlfriend is from Sweden.

She must be blonde.

These two - deduction and induction - get all the logic press, it seems. But far, far, far more intriguing to me, and maybe to you too, is abduction.

Imagine our earliest homo sapiens ancestors. They're in a group of about 50, making their trek through the forest, looking for food or a place to make camp and sing. And suddenly it's raining. And then: thunder and lightning! What did they think about it? Given if I throw the rock at the rabbit and the rabbit dies and we eat meat an hour later, I'm thinking someone caused that loud sound that rumbled the ground, and possibly threw those bolts of lightning at us! What did we do to deserve that? Did someone say something that pissed off that...Big Man? What can we do to make Him not angry at us anymore?

Abduction happens when there is some phenomena, and we really don't know how to explain it; we make something that seems like a plausible hypothesis. And then someone else comes up with something just as plausible. Abduction, in fact, is thought of as that part of logic almost synonymous with hypothesis. It's played a big part of any scientific method.

Another word for abduction might be "guessing." But there ought to be some appeal to intuitive probability at least. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), one of those odd geniuses the public really should know more about, was trained as a chemist, but made contributions to math, logic, philosophy, and semiotics. He had a very colorful life. He was brilliant beyond words but not the most exemplary character. Go read about him soon!

Anyway, Peirce (pronounced "purse") ended up enchanting William James, and James, being an Adept at the role of public intellectual, championed Peirce's ideas, and American pragmatism was born. And it has been, for around 100 years now, "the" reigning philosophy in Unistat. 

Lots of serious philosophers detest pragmatism because it seems to be an "anti-philosophy." William James tackled the "free-will" vs. "determinism" problem by reasoning that they both have their merits, and so a sort of free-willed determinism must rule the day...Hey, whatever works!

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But back to C.S. Peirce. He seemed fascinated by this idea of abduction, and it's difficult to pin him down on it; in his collected papers he seems to define it differently every few years, adds a wrinkle, expands it here, talks about it in a completely new context there, changes the name of it a few times. He gets very technical with it, massages the idea, combines it with other ideas. But what strikes me is that his many years of meditating and cogitating about the idea of "abduction" in logical reasoning led him to a fallibilism that engenders an affection from a lover of speculative thought such as myself, the OG.

Because I know you have important things to do, people to see, video games to play, and sexual positions to try out, I will just get in this one last thing before I let you all out of class and into the sunshine...

In a paper titled "The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism," dating from 1896 or 1898, even the curators of his papers are not sure - he wrote stuff willy-nilly and let it pile up - he says there are four types of bullshit arguments that other philosophers or Authority figures or self-appointed "experts" will try to pull on us to get us to stop thinking about one phenomena or idea or another, and they are:

• There are ancient and eternal truths that have been discovered; we must never question them.
• There are just some things that can never be known.
• (Here's where it gets muy interesante for the OG, and I will quote Peirce so you get a feel for his rhythms:) "The third philosophical stratagem for cutting off inquiry consists in maintaining that this, that, of the other element of science is basic, ultimate, independent of aught else, and utterly inexplicable - not so much from any defect in our knowing as because there is nothing beneath it to know. The only type of reasoning by which such a conclusion could possibly reached is retroduction. (This was one of Peirce's other words for "abduction." - OG) Now nothing justifies a retroductive inference except its affording an explanation for the facts. It is, however, no explanation at all of a fact to pronounce it inexplicable. That, therefore, is a conclusion which no reasoning can ever justify or excuse."
• We have finally found the "last and perfect formulation" so don't bug us with anything that attempts to contradict it. Peirce: "'Stones do not fall from heaven,' said Laplace, although they had been falling upon inhabited ground every day from the earliest of times. But there is no kind of inference which can lend the slightest probability to any such absolute denial of an unusual phenomenon."- pp.55-56 Philosophical Writings of Peirce

In a discussion of Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, Mark Fenster brings in the idea of abduction, which was ultimately derived from Peirce : "Abduction is the process of interpreting unexplained events or results by figuring out a law that can explain them, a process of 'figuring out' that often, in the case of great scientific discoveries, requires imaginative or analogical steps. In the process of abduction, the text to be interpreted contains a 'secret code' of the law but requires an inventive or at least quite dynamic and productive interpretive act to identify and decipher the explanatory law." - pp.99-100 of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power In America, 1999 edition; I have seen a newer expanded edition. It seems most conspiracy theorists are far better at using abductive logic than they probably ever knew! (But it doesn't mean all conspiracy theories "are wrong.")

...Which brings us back to the aliens abducting humans thingamabob? Passing strange, eh? Or is it only word-play?