If the Jena Six affair is about anything national, it seems like it's at least about harsh sentencing. This column of a year ago by Malcom Gladwell feels relevant. Procedures can and will be racist, but egalitarian principles can be unjust too.
Malcom Gladwell has been writing both explicitly and indirectly a lot about what I'll call "what people are really thinking" and in particular about how organizations and institutions can get to know it and better exploit it. Of course, it must have occurred to me that the same insights might be exploited for goals not shared by the rest of us, but I think the lure of a pure and attractive currency--"what people are really thinking"--made me eager to see a free market in it. I just noticed a terrible flaw in that vision, thanks to the PBS Frontline documentary "The Persuaders". Notwithstanding the eternal underlying motive of making money, I had been thinking that putting psychological and social science into marketing was the very opposite of the "sex sells" mentality or mission. I guess unconsciously I had assumed this science was all about the so-called "higher" cognitive processes. Or maybe I had forgotten that feelings and desires aren't pure manifestations of high-mindedness but originate in all sorts of ways, which can descend as low as cognition goes. Here's "The Persuaders" producer Rachel Dretzin commenting online
I think we are already seeing the impact of Luntz' preference for the "gut" over the rational.. and Dr. Rapaille's preference for the "reptilian" brain over the "intellectual" brain. In politics and in commercial marketing, it is our emotions that are played to most. Look at this past presidential campaign and the kind of emotional hot buttons that were pushed in voters from both parties.
So here we have a program that's even worse than "sex sells," because now we're learning how to drive shoppers and voters with forces as primal and potent as sex but which do not risk alienating the Bible Belt or baiting the FCC. Now, I'm not saying that all that's primal and potent in us is to be ignored. I want my shoes to be comfy, my TV dinners to taste good and above all I like my models' abs hard. But I also don't want individuals so tuned to the primal virtues of a Hummer that they never mull more complicated things like the societal good of controlling carbon emissions. I don't think the Sierra Club should have to put girls in bikinis on its Web site or tap mother love to sell socially beneficial policy goals. In fact, I think that in that direction there only lies peril. It's not just because I know they lack the deep pockets to compete with the oil lobby for production value. It's because for one, societies don't control the TV remote, individuals do. For another, it's the producers who are truly catering to our inner lizard in offering us something to consume. What the Sierra Club has to sell isn't even intelligible to the lizard. Likewise for what Kerry was selling versus what Bush was selling--fear.
Whither society when all broadcasting goes out on the lizard frequencies?
Malcom Gladwell's New Yorker piece on plagiarism and intellectual property set me to thinking. Here are a few of the resulting thoughts.
1) I think this question Gladwell wrestles with about the extent to which an intellectual property maker such as himself is actually victimized by a borrowing and/or theft ties in deeply and perhaps belongs to the matter of prestige and influence.
2) The article took me back to a moment in grad school, when I got really excited that a name I was coining for a technique might become the name by which everybody would eventually call it. I was longing to have my trademark violated, Gladwell might say. The value of the word or name in this case is the idea behind it. By using that name a scientist frames the natural world in a certain way--my way!--and implies that the people in my lab actually invented something (rather than incrementally adapting something else) and so my presitige is enhanced--though nobody may ever know who coined the name.
3) I think you could say a political candidate generates a whole lot of intellectual property in a campaign--"Bridge to the future," "compassionate conservativism" etc--and since campaigning generally pays no salary to the candidate, I feel tempted to say this is stuff that candidates get nothing in return for. But of course the candidate works for "political capital," like the prestige and influence that academics work for.
4) Everybody in modern society has ways they might go about putting a monetary price tag on almost anything, down to their own mother. But we seem to lack an instinctive sense for valuing prestige and influence. That says something about our development as a civilization, I think, but I don't think P&I are any less valuable or intrinsically harder to value than the things we know how to price: P&I get you T&A, among other things, so from the perspective of evolutionary biology, I would think they ought to rank right up there with food, shelter, tools and labor, for which we have arrived at money.
5) So I think by making patenting an article of the consitituion the founding fathers made a natural social advance. That is, to the extent they weren't just copying others.
BTW, when I sent these thoughts to Gladwell, he wrote back that they are "really interesting," so yawn at your peril.
[Postscript: In case point 5 is opaque, it's congratulating the framers for tethering food-shelter economy to the idea-influence economy and so facilitating transactions in the way that the invention of currency advanced us over barter.]
