After Gutenberg

Subtitle: The Flexible Control of Fear

“One of the duties of the modern nation-state is persuasion,” writes Jeff Strabone. “Each state aims to keep its citizens convinced of the legitimacy of its rule.”

The state may be run chiefly for the enrichment of a few at the cost of the many, but the endurance of the state is widely thought to depend on its ability to sell its rule to the many as a common-sense truism. Antonio Gramsci, in his prison notebooks, called this persuasive activity ‘hegemony’.

“According to Gramsci, hegemony occludes the domination of the state and the classes whose interests it serves. One does not have to be an Italian communist of the 1920s to see the usefulness of Gramsci’s groundbreaking insight.”

It seems to me that over the past decade, in the United States, the state and a narrow circle of powerful interests—banks, energy companies, and private health insurers in particular—have simply given up trying to persuade the rest of us that their interests were our interests. Could we be moving in the twenty-first century to a state that practices domination without hegemony? Or, to put it in plain English, will the state shamelessly turn itself completely over to serving the interests of a powerful few without bothering to pretend that it’s not? And if it does, how should we respond?

Intriguing questions, eh? Strabone’s treatise reassured me that I am not the only one to ask such questions. With the recent SCOTUS (Supreme Court Of The United States) decision favoring corporate-financed efforts to effect policy, the Internet has expressed more fear for the survival of the democratic process in these United States.

Jeffrey D. Sachs gives us his take on the SCOTUS decision:

First is … inability to focus beyond the next election. “Shovel-ready” projects squeeze out attention to vital longer-term strategies…

Second, most key decisions are made in congressional backrooms through negotiations with lobbyists, who simultaneously fund the congressional campaigns.

Third, technical expertise is largely ignored or bypassed, while expert communities such as climate scientists are falsely and recklessly derided…

Fourth, there is little way for the public to track and comment on complex policy proposals working their way through Congress or federal agencies.

Are such considerations familiar, After Gutenberg readers? They should be. So, be forewarned, this is another foray into the realm of moral conflict and democracy. Strabone writes, “how delusional the admonition to ‘Speak truth to power’ really is: when power is exercised shamelessly, it has no need for truth.”

But, first, a question, “Does the imaginary ballet, Guantanamo, Guantanamo, frighten you?”

Memories of emotional experiences imprinted in reactions of synapses is referred to as Emotional learning.

“Fear learning” write researchers at the NYU Center for Neural Science, “is a rapid and persistent process that promotes defense against threats and reduces the need to relearn about danger. However, it is also important to flexibly readjust fear behavior when circumstances change.”

A central, yet neglected aspect of fear modulation is the ability to flexibly shift fear responses from one stimulus to another if a once-threatening stimulus becomes safe or a once-safe stimulus becomes threatening. In these situations, the inhibition of fear and the development of fear reactions co-occur but are directed at different targets, requiring accurate responding under continuous stress.

To date, research on fear modulation has focused mainly on the shift from fear to safety by using paradigms such as extinction, resulting in a reduction of fear. The aim of the present study was to track the dynamic shifts from fear to safety and from safety to fear when these transitions occur simultaneously.

We used functional neuroimaging in conjunction with a fear-conditioning reversal paradigm. Our results reveal a unique dissociation within the ventromedial prefrontal cortex between a safe stimulus that previously predicted danger and a “naive” safe stimulus. We show that amygdala and striatal responses tracked the fear-predictive stimuli, flexibly flipping their responses from one predictive stimulus to another. Moreover, prediction errors associated with reversal learning correlated with striatal activation*. These results elucidate how fear is readjusted to appropriately track environmental changes, and the brain mechanisms underlying the flexible control of fear.”
J Neurosci. 2008 Nov 5;28(45):11517-25.
From fear to safety and back: reversal of fear in the human brain.

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“In humans the striatum is activated by stimuli associated with reward, but also by aversive, novel, unexpected or intense stimuli, and cues associated with such events. “

* Note: The striatum is best known for its role in the planning and modulation of movement pathways but is also involved in a variety of other cognitive processes involving executive function.

Speaking of normative dimensions of sustainability, if you answered, “No” to the question, “Does the torture at Guantanamo frighten you?” then did you take into account emotional learning can be unconsciously mediated?

If subjects are shown an angry face as a target visual stimulus for less than forty milliseconds and are then immediately shown an expressionless mask, these subjects report seeing the mask but not the target. However, an aversively conditioned masked target …can elicit an emotional response from subjects without being consciously perceived. — Conscious and unconscious emotional learning in the human amygdala.

Is there any glimmer of hope? Well, not much. Still one might take small comfort from the success and / or failure of Donald J. Blankenship. Yes, yes, this blog has referred to the CEO of Massey Energy as an incredibly scary, coal zombie clown, yet consider Strabone’s admonition that “political actors pursue their agendas by trying to narrow other people’s imaginations in order to make desired outcomes seem common-sensical and undesired outcomes outside the ambit of reasonable thought.” Could there be some positive in Blankenship’s participation in debate?

In expressing the opinion that Don Blankenship won in a debate with Robert Kennedy, Jr. at the University of Charleston, West Virginian and HuffPo contributor Tracy Edmonds Herz writes, “there is no way on earth a self-made scrapper from coal country who once slept on a dirt floor is going to let a Kennedy stand him down. ”

Don won… he not only held his own with Bobby, he outclassed him with poise and restraint. He countered Bobby’s facts convincingly and the merits of his arguments were largely superior in my mind.

While everyone in attendance had a dog in the fight and minds were almost certainly unchanged, it was impossible to see Don as uncredible and illegitimate, pursuing a position based solely on the basis of greed.

That is until you see some of the landscapes he leaves behind.

Could the money invested in The Coaching of Blankenship be that glimmer of hope? In other words, the powers at be still are investing in persuasion and deception, rather than outright takeover. Perhaps, yet some say the recent SCOTUS decision and Bernanke’s reappointment are harbingers that the gloves are coming off and the wealthy want to see some ROI (Return On Investment) on prisons being such a growth industry in the United States. And, what to do, what to do, what to do if such a takeover continues?

As previously noted H. Stefan Bracha has argued that the real world range and order of animal fear response is “Freeze, Flight, Fight, Fright, or Faint” (PDF format). Such self-protective behavior leaves the individual with additional time to confabulate accuracy, good planning and, ultimately, safety. Thus, if we fear not only for the survival of democracy in the United States, but also for survival of life on the planet as we know it, which federal policy has failed to address adequately, then the question to be put to the Internet is: Do we freeze, faint or ignore what is happening because we don’t know what to do? Do we fight, as a few brave souls have chosen to do? Or, do we flee, and, if so, to where and why is it we always are leaving?

Democracy and Moral Conflict ASIN: 0521513545