Rational Philosophy

Bill Clinton and dumb ideas, memory loss and wisdom, and enhancing mental sharpness.

“A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.”
Plato

Brain researchers should be studying Bill Clinton; Bill is a smart man, by all accounts. Why then does he sometimes say stupid things? As Hillary battles on against the odds, Bill, speaking off the cuff outside Lynn’s Paradise Cafe in Louisville Kentucky, said that not counting the votes in Michigan and Florida would be dumb, even though the states were disenfranchised prior to their primaries, and despite the fact that Obama didn’t campaign in either state and took himself off the ballot in one.

Brain researchers have in fact been finding that, Bill Clinton’s apparent example to the contrary, older minds may well be wiser minds. Aging brains pay more attention to what may seem to be extraneous information, mulling over it and absorbing it much better than younger minds. This seems to indicate that younger minds tend to power through information happily dispensing with seemingly spurious data, sticking to the highways. Whereas older minds have learned that the journey itself can be as informative and valuable as the destination.

(I’m quite prepared to believe that Bill Clinton has as much fun with his illogical statements as he does with his logical ones. He doesn’t really expect anyone other than those blindly partisan to his wife’s cause to agree with him, but he doesn’t really care. Why he doesn’t really care is a much more interesting question, and I can only hazard guesses.)

Other scientific evidence points to the benefits of activities that improve brain function. Exercise, diet, mental stimulation, engaged and engaging social and family contacts — all can contribute to our ability to stay sharp. As the article points out, and as I’ve written about here before, the idea that the brain inevitably declines and can’t grow new cells or forge new pathways has been debunked and cast aside. A very exciting turn, and one that can give us some optimism in these times of dumbness in high places.
As Socrates said and as Plato reported, “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” This seems in keeping with the concept that as the brain gets older it is less likely to discard seemingly irrelevant information. It understands better that wisdom comes through accepting fallibility, rejecting absolute knowledge.

Socrates was also saying that we can never know anything. We can only perceive and infer. To claim absolute knowledge is to posture, to attempt to overpower someone with the assertion of knowing.

Bill Clinton cannot know what the voters in Florida and Michigan would have done if the delegates from those primaries were to be seated and the candidates campaigned accordingly. He can only posture and infer. While it’s understandably frustrating for Hillary to have perhaps missed out on a couple of wins and some delegates from those states, it is far from fair for her to convert this frustration into a claim of victory.

Related posts from around the Internet:

Alzheimer's Plaques And Tangles

 Why Brain Fitness Training Works to Combat Cognitive Decline

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the disjunct between power and wisdom.

I keep coming back to Plato’s words, not because they are perfectly rendered, but because they capture the essence of the idea that power and wisdom seldom coincide:

“There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.” - Plato

And then there’s Thomas Jefferson, not generally recognized as a philosopher, but clearly a man who lived and breathed the search for truth:

“I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.” - Thomas Jefferson

As we watch the candidates campaign for the presidency I’m most saddened and depressed by how far we remain from Plato’s ideal of power coupled with wisdom. The deeper into the race we get, the more conniving and unwise the rhetoric becomes. (Clinton’s racial politics and her unwise and insincere politics of pandering on the gas tax; McCain’s hard swerve to the right.) The competitive, beauty pageant, micro-focused format of modern politics works against the ideal, of course. Obama seems to be sincere in his desire to break the mold, but he has a long hard road ahead of him and he’s already begun to falter with snipes against Hillary and rash policy promises.

I keep being drawn to stories of good being done by those who’ve quickly made a lot of money and therefore accrued a lot of power while still remembering what it’s like to be one of the have-nots. The Times has a piece on Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, who is one such newly moneyed philanthropist. Newmark, who’s been slow to capitalize on the extraordinary success of his Craigslist idea, even says this about relative wealth: “We know these guys in Google and the eBay guys, and they are not any happier than anyone else. A lot of money is a burden.”

The purist in me reviles against the idea that people who’ve been successful in business should be holding sway with social and philanthropic programs. But why not? Presumably, we’d be able to intervene if one of them turned out to be a nut-job who was out to achieve dubious ends.

Philosophically speaking, if someone has made a lot of money and chooses to spend his or her time and money dedicated to things other than making himself or herself wealthier, it’s more than likely that they’ll be aimed at making positive impact. The concept of philanthropy requires a focus on others over self. A persistent focus on self will tend to have a much less expansive outlook.

Whereas the desire for political power involves a composite desire to achieve sway over others and to be seen to effect change. The desire for political power doesn’t intrinsically have anything to do with effecting positive social change. It should, but it doesn’t.

This points to an intriguing development in the tensions between power and wisdom. Perhaps we will see a period in which politicians are shamed into behaving more responsibly and sincerely by the wealthy philanthropists. Why shouldn’t social improvement occur outside the mainstream political spectrum? And if they do, why shouldn’t this result in more pressure on politicians to focus on doing a job that serves the people rather than serving themselves?

Power rests where it lands. Wisdom, too.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Early news of the destruction of the CIA interrogation tapes had the distinct whiff of smoke about it; the kind of smoke that hints at the existence of fire. The sad story had all the hallmarks of a not-so-wily White House cover up. The protestations of ignorance from all corners; the silent finger pointed at the lone and lowly scapegoats, I mean maverick lawyers at the CIA… I’m sure that many of us had the same question: could this really have happened without the knowledge and endorsement of the White House?

Today we have a glimpse of the smoldering coals of that fire. At least four lawyers close to the administration weighed in on the question of destruction, apparently, among them Alberto Gonzalez, the long arm of the war. And a former senior intelligence official speaks of the “vigorous sentiment” of some White House big wigs in favor of destroying the tapes. Why? Because at the time the Abu Ghraib detention scandals were making the administration and the country look bad, as if we lacked principles and decency. So came, we may presume, the principled and decent voice of power: Let’s burn those incriminating tapes.

I’ll go out on a short and sturdy limb and predict that the US administration also had a hand in Pakistan’s quiet release of about 100 detainees who had been held on suspicion of terrorist involvement in secrecy and with dubious legal grounds or outright lack of same. One of whom was so sick and malnourished that he died about twenty days after being left on a garbage dump.

What philosophical lesson can we take away from the miserable conduct of the present administration? An odd aspect of the Bush presidency seems to be that the man himself hasn’t garnered more ill will. And therein perhaps lies the seed to the lesson.

Bush is the president by title but not by function. He’s the front man. Bush has been more truly and firmly manipulated than the American public. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Fieth, Wolfowitz, and the rest of the hawkish bunch, all with their overlapping and dangerously ulterior motives have molded the clay of the hapless Bush. The plan, but for one fatal flaw, would have been perfect. Bush is so clearly incapable of complex subversive maneuvering that the country was duped into thinking he mostly meant what he said. He probably mostly did mean what he said having been fed the uncomplicated black-and-white surface ideology of his puppeteers.

Here is the point: The American public has been manipulated. Bush’s wranglers used a political system short on insight and long on hype to get an unqualified stooge into the highest office of the government. When that can happen, the system needs revision. The public needs to use the lessons of the last few years to allow itself to yield to wisdom and to carefully evaluate the policies, strengths and weaknesses of the current batch of candidates. The beauty pageant is a distraction. We owe it to ourselves to get wiser, to dig deeper, to understand the motives and motivations of the hopefuls so that we pick the one who is the least corruptible, the best intentioned, and the most effective. Sound bites be damned; America needs a real president again.