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Politics and Pavlov’s dog
(by Ed Flynn - September 24, 2008)
The current presidential campaign has me thinking a lot about Ivan Pavlov’s dog.
I forget when I first learned about the dog’s existence – probably in a science course I took a long time ago, maybe even in high school – but for some reason Pavlov’s best friend made a lasting impression on me.
In case you didn’t take the same course or weren’t paying attention, Pavlov was a Russian scientist who back during the 1890s was doing research on the digestive system when he noticed that his dog not only would secrete saliva when he was fed, apparently to make the food easier to swallow, but that he had developed the somewhat sloppy habit of beginning to droll whenever his lab assistant, who generally fed him, entered the room whether he was bringing food or not. And just as Newton came up with the idea for gravity when he was hit on the head with a falling apple, Pavlov realized he was on the verge of an important scientific discovery. Could it be that the dog’s salivary glands could be tricked into responding to a substitute stimulus, like his assistant’s white jacket?
So Pavlov came up with a clever experiment. He rang a bell every time the assistant placed the bowl of food in front of the dog. Then, after the dog had grown accustomed to the routine, he just rang the bell without serving him food and sure enough the dog began to slobber like that animated canine in those Begging Strip dog food commercials on television. As it turned out, Pavlov’s research was far from trivial. It even earned him a Nobel Prize for discovering the “conditioned response.”
What has this got to do with the political campaign? OK, don’t be insulted – I’m talking about the other guy, not thoughtful people like those who read this column – but it seems to me that like Pavlov’s dog, a lot of people have been conditioned to automatically respond whenever they’ve served some meaningless platitude rather than real meat.
Barack Obama declares, “Yes we can!” and the crowd takes up the chant repeating the phrase over and over but how many of them really know just what it is Obama is proclaiming they can do?
John McCain shouts, “Country first” and his audience comes to its feet and chants “USA, USA” but what does that mean? My country right or wrong?
Blame “the liberal press” or the “Elite” for the nation’s woes at a GOP rally or “conservatives commentators” or “the religious right” at a Democratic campaign stop and the partisan crowd goes wild and responds with catcalls.
Catch phrases and those other emotional but meaningless triggers that the political hucksters know are sure fire crowd pleasers, have become such a standard part of every stump speech that candidates keep repeating the same ones over and over even after some of them have been exposed as outright fabrications. Unfortunately the mainstream press has been so intimidated by the crowd chants that in its attempts to appear “objective” it tends to provide equal time to both parties even when one or the other is using that time to disseminate falsehoods.
It’s been said that this upcoming election may be one of the most important in our nation’s history and there are certainly many issues to be discussed. Two on-going wars – one in Iraq, the other in Afghanistan – for starters. And the economy. And the energy crisis. And health care. And Social Security. And the mounting national debt. And on and on. Yet Rich Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager and a man who knows a few things about how to win a campaign, has publicly declared that “This campaign is not about issues but about the view people will take away of the candidates.” In other words, the objective of the campaign is not to debate the message but to demonize the messenger.
Early on both candidates had promised that this time it would be different, that this time there would be a substantive, intelligent discussion of the issues. However, despite such pledges the campaign has begun to disintegrate into a typical one in which smears and innuendoes and buzzwords replace logic and facts.
However, the television debates are still ahead. There’s still time to elevate the discussion to a level worthy of the American people and the seriousness of the times. That is if the candidates can resist the temptation to cater to the converted who apparently can no longer tell the difference between empty rhetoric and food for thought.
Gosh, even Pavlov’s dog must have been smarter than that. Even though his mouth was watering he must have eventually realized that he was being treated like a fool.
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