One of my favorite reads of the last several years, Daniel
Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, documents
why our reasoning faculties – which should be protecting us from making bad
choices based on emotion or instinct – contain flaws that make them the source
of many human errors.
The book title refers to a model developed by Kahneman and
his fellow researcher Amos Tversky (both Israelis, BTW) in the 1960s that
posited a human mind driven by two processes: one fast, one slow.
The slow process is effortful and gets turned on when we
engage in deep contemplation or perform other activities requiring heavy
cognitive work (such as solving a mathematical problem, or writing something –
like this blog entry). In contrast, our
fast process takes in information from our senses and processes it very
rapidly, taking charge of everyday activities like driving a car, or listening
to or reading something (again, like this blog entry) spoken or written in a
language you already understand.
Because our slow process is rather lazy, it tends to defer
to the fast process to do as much work as possible. This makes sense, given the sheer amount of
thinking/processing that must take place to get through a single day. But deferring to a fast process to make sense
of the world comes at a cost.
For example, the fast process performs its sense-making role
by looking for patterns and then fitting those patterns into a storyline, one
which takes a lot of deliberate (i.e., slow process) work to unlearn. In many cases, this is not a bad thing. Unlearning that a loud noise signals danger,
for example, might not be such a wise idea (which may explain the evolutionary
benefit – and thus origin – of this fast-process/slow process duality).
But flaws in our reasoning, notably the many biases to which
all human beings are vulnerable, are a side-product of this brain structure
with considerable downside. For example,
Confirmation
Bias which leads us to believe information that confirms existing beliefs
and reject information that does not, is just one of many cognitive biases that
result from letting our fast process take the first cut at story formation.
You see this theory play out in the context of politics all
the time. For what are candidates for
office doing when they try to “define” themselves and their opponents if not
creating narratives they hope will get taken up by the story-loving fast
process of a majority of voters? Even
those endless rows of lawn signs bearing only a candidate’s name (no policy
positions, no slogans) can be seen as a means to embed that name into the non-deliberative
component of a voter’s brain, hoping it will be top of mind when a majority of them
walk into voting booths.
The BDS propaganda campaign is doing something similar with
its endless repeating of their beloved “Israel = Apartheid” equation,
regardless of how many times that and all their other accusations have been
debunked. Given that many of the
constituencies they address (like college students) were not even born during
the era when Apartheid South Africa stood, the BDSer’s hope is that their mantra
will result in those who know nothing about either Israel or Apartheid will
build a fast-process connection before any slow-process cognition (i.e.,
thought) can interfere.
The narratives the BDSers spin for themselves offer an even
clearer set of examples of cognitive biases at work. That’s because many of the manipulative
techniques used by Israel-haters (and hyper-partisans of all stripes) are
targeted not at opponents but supporters.
Spending a little time on the #BDS Twitter feed (or do some
lurking on BDS sites like Mondoweiss and Electronic Intifada, if you can
stomach it) to see what I mean.
When the BDSers score a win with a student government vote (like
they did at Brown last week), that is portrayed as the latest example of their
unstoppable momentum. And when they are
rejected (as they were by at Columbia the week before last) that simply shows
that their eventual embrace by all is just a matter of time.
When a handful of college professors (from a pool of tens of
thousands) sign onto an academic boycott campaign, this news is treated as
demonstrating wide acceptance of their position within academia. But when hundreds of college presidents
condemn such boycotts, suddenly the BDSers discover the concept of percentages,
declaring that these hundreds represent just a fraction of every college
president in the country (never mind that they’d be screaming from the rooftops if even one such president embraced their cause).
As with many partisan political projects, the trick is to
find an angle to fit any news (good or bad) into the storylines already established
in the boycotters own heads (which they would like to insert into everyone
else’s). Thus news about financing of
anti-BDS efforts is turned into a story about Sheldon Adelson (a Right-leaning macher who gets to play the role of bête
noir in their narrative), ignoring the involvement of Left-leaning Israel
supporters like Haim Saban in that same effort.
Yet when Hilary Clinton publically trashed the BDS “movement,” Saban is suddenly
rediscovered but only to the play the role of pro-Israel moneybags pulling
Hillary’s strings.
“Look over there!” might be a proper label to slap onto a
strategy that involves scouring any news story for an element – no matter how
tiny or irrelevant – that might conform to the boycotters' view of the world,
and then blowing up that detail and screaming that it must be considered the
Alpha and Omega of the tale. If you want
to see what I mean, just check out how quickly Mondofada declares “case closed”
whenever they can find a members of AIPAC or StandWithUs in the vicinity of a
civic organization that has just told them to drop dead.
It’s easy to declare everyone involved in such efforts to be
knowingly peddling falsehoods. But that
misses the point that the boycotters should be seen as both pushers and junkies
for the dopey lies (or, better, fantasies) they are
peddling.
The BDS fantasist, after all, must continually build and
reinforce their self-image as noble knights and warriors, the vanguard of a new
world order, owners of the Left end of the political spectrum, battling dark
forces that represent evil incarnate. How
can they continue to chant “Free Gaza” as Gaza descends into a murderous hell
hole and the rest of the Middle East goes up in flames? Because the slow
process that might have once had the power to revise the storyline making up
their primary identity has atrophied from long disuse.
All of us, by virtue of being human beings, routinely fall
prey to Confirmation Bias and other frailties of reasoning. But under normal
circumstances, competing aspects of our identity (represented by competing
storylines in our own heads) allow us to occasionally engage Mr. Slow Process
to impose some reality onto our view of ourselves and the world.
Failing that, we are also surrounded by other people who are
likely to have other narratives floating around in their fast processes,
creating a check on any one falsehood or fantasy dominating a group or
society. But what happens when large
groups of people (perhaps an entire self-declared “movement”) have decided to
not just stop using its slow process entirely, but surrounds themselves only
with people who have performed a similar self-lobotomy?