The importance of "context" to all human actions and decisions is too obvious to need mention. Or is it? How and why has this most fundamental law of human intelligence been so thoroughly obscured and misconstrued in modern American politics? Attempts to answer this question could, and I think do, fill libraries. Is it because of our failing education system? Our technology driven instant gratification culture and consumer marketplace? The domination of an increasingly superficial and profit driven mass media? The decline of bowling leagues famously highlighted by Robert Putnam's popular book? The breakdown of the nuclear family? Declines in church membership? Increases in church membership? Rock and roll, rap, sex and violence on TV? Runaway social individualism preached by liberal college professors? Runaway economic individualism preached conservative Social Darwinists in business schools and the "real world?"
The explosion of literature and media attention in recent years on the
apparent "dumbing down" of everything in America, including politics, seems to me to revolve around the obscuring (and even denigration) of the importance of "context." Ask yourself what the media and political opponents do to a politician who tries to explain that his or her statement/ vote/ action has been "taken out of context." Despite the reality that such claims are usually correct, the mass media and political opponents drown voters with the very strong suggestion that such recourse to context is just a rhetorical trick designed to avoid being caught waffling, flip-flopping, deflecting blame, or some other deceptive practice employed by integrity-challenged politicians. The cynical assumption that any mention of context is always a self serving trick in politics is profoundly anti-intellectual and it perpetuates a counter-rational relationship between sound thinking skills and political (or at least electoral)success.
What is context? Let me employ a method to answer this question that is very popular with undergraduates who didn't pay close attention to class discussion. I am referring of course to the use of the dictionary definition of "context" as a way to broach the topic. Webster's tells us that "context" is "parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning." Or, "interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs."
Any questions?
Put simply, and bluntly, context means relevant reality or realities. It's proper (or at least shared) understanding is required for any idea, claim, or fact to have rational meaning. An idea/claim/fact is meaningless to rational audiences if it is irrelevant to the context into which it is introduced.
If two people speak and think in different languages, a rational conversation using their known languages is by definition, impossible. Inorder for two such persons to communicate rationally, they would have to devise or discover a language or means of communication with which they were both proficient (a shared system of meaning, or "context"). This common language would be a linguistic "context" that would facilitate communication and discussion. Without a common language these two people would simply talk past each other and accomplish nothing substantive.
An example may be useful here. If a soccer referee signals a handball after a player (other than the goalie) overtly grabs the ball with his hands, no reasonable, lucid player, fan, or coach would protest or chastise the referee. Indeed, if someone did so, most people at the game would recognize that he or she was acting irrationally. The irrational complainer in this situation may have failed to appreciate the context of a soccer game. Maybe he's a fan of American football and showed up at the wrong field leaving him hopelessly confused. For him, a football player is supposed to catch passes with his hands. According to the context he perceives, the ref's call was inappropriate, even crazy.
Rudimentary knowledge of the rules of football and soccer makes plain the absurdity of the complaining fan's behavior and decision making process. But what happens when those observing actions, claims, or arguments of others DO NOT understand the relevant context? What if a group of fans shared this complainer's particular confusion because they too expected an American football game. They might join in with the irrational complainer and cheer him on. This would likely anger the people at the game who understand soccer. It also might confuse some other fans who may have known it was a soccer game but who had little or no understanding of the rules of soccer (aka European football). Now we have a soccer field inhabited by three kinds of people; the rational people; the confused/unsure people; and the certain but wrong people.
I submit to you that the American electorate can be seen as just such a tripartite group where those in the electorate who are akin to the knowledgeable soccer fans, players, and coaches, are a decided minority. They are also a group of citizens that do not respond uniformly to the majority's misunderstanding of the rules, institutions, and other realities of American government and politics. Some channel their frustration into denigrating and/or ignoring politics. Some, like Sisyphus, endure the uphill battle of trying to explain their political perspective and convince fellow citizens to share their point of view.
Others understand the contextual realities and unrealities, but nevertheless choose to exploit the majority's ignorance of political context. They adopt the norms and expectations of a context with which American voters are quite familiar and much more comfortable - a commercial market context. Politicians and activists in this group devote their energies to establishing an emotional (non-rational) connection with average Americans in order to develop voter loyalties based not on relevant political ideas, institutions, and interests (i.e. relevant context), but on ideas that voters can understand without having to go out of their way or do too much homework. These political actors use their knowledge of politics and marketing to attract the "unsure" voters and to exploit the "certain but wrong" voters. They accept the role reversal inherent in this market context, willingly seeking to attract customers by being whatever customers want, rather than attracting voters by being what they think voters need. It is in this group of knowledgeable political actors that most mainstream politicians can be found. Indeed, this group is dominated by an ethos of "realism." They believe that a focus on educating voters in a competitive electoral context (i.e. a political marketplace) is a sure route to defeat at the polls, just as those selling nutritional but bad tasting foods will lose to those selling less nutritional but tasty foods.
Obscuring and even denying substantive political principles and ideas (read contextually relevant to governance) is seen as the "cost of doing business" in the political marketplace. Instead of clear, objective standards of right and wrong, good and bad, political salesmen must attach themselves to popular ideas that are vague enough to attract a majority coalition and general enough to accomodate variations in how voters interpret or define the same ideas. Any mention of specifics has to be very carefully managed so as to avoid offending or raising any doubts among the voters needed to prevail in an election. In politics, there is very little utility in niche marketing. Without a plurality or majority of voters, politicians are "out of business."
In other words, modern American politics, like consumer markets, has only minimal quality standards. Practically speaking, consumers/voters are left to INDIVIDUALLY determine the quality and utility of what they buy at stores and at the polls. The only objective standard of quality measurement in a commercial market is sales. High sales, measured in profit, equal high quality in the venacular of the commercial marketplace. If a commercial good or service were not the best, consumers would go elsewhere (in theory). Because American politicians approach politically ignorant voters as customers, and because these same voters are numerous enough to decide most elections, quality and success in American politics is very often measured by the political equivilent of sales, public opinion polls. Politicians and political agendas are as good as their public opinion poll ratings and their success at the polls that count most - those taken in the voting booth.
Customer-citizens judge politicians and political agendas the same way they judge most commercial goods and services. If they are selling well, politically ignorant Americans assume they are good, and are more likely to support them in polls and at the polls. This dangerous replacement of commercial standards for democratic political standards is both cause and effect of the way the mass media operates in America. Because journalistic ethics require reporters to report the news without injecting personal bias or opinion, virtually all media outlets have become venues for political "market analysis," reporting on political sales figures rather than the content of contending political ideas.
Instead of evaluating policy proposals using objective intellectual standards, the media merely reports the opinions of the customers in the market for political ideas, which tacitly encourages Americans to equate good ideas with popularity rather than substantive quality. Whose up and whose down, whose winning and whose losing? Any suggestions that the relationship between popularity and quality is inappropriate brings "swift" attacks from political and media competitors. Suggesting that an unpopular idea is better than a popular idea is an admission of "elitism" and of being "out of touch" with the American people and their creedal values. For reporters, it is surely a sign of their biases. Ironically, reporters perpetuate this mind numbing situation inorder to maintain their professionalism. We might be better off if media outlets overtly chose an ideological perspective and educated readers, viewers, and listeners explicitly from that perspective.
Adding to the collective irrationality of purely subjective criteria and quality standards in American politics is the fact that American consumer-citizens are constantly assured that quality standards in markets (political and otherwise) are 100% personal and that smart customers/voters should never let anyone tell them what is best for them. The customer is always right and everyone has a right to believe whatever they want. Indeed, much has been made of Americans' seeming entitlement to even "their own facts." This frustrating scenario denigrates objective standards of quality, intelligence, and utility in the political marketplace while lowering the cost of developing maximum consumer/voter loyalty. Sadly, in politics as in commerce, it seems clear that you "get what you pay for."
If objective standards are undemocratic,if they are merely the tools of elitists and "special interests," then political coalitions can be built and maintained without the difficulty (cost) of ideological or substantive specificity, complexity, or even accuracy. American voters are constantly reassured that their beliefs are valid by political and commercial salesmen pandering for their votes and their money, as well as a radically individualistic culture that relentlessly praises individuality and denigrates conformity (to anything, including objective standards of any kind).
In November, more than 100 million consumer-voters will make a choice at the polls. Because average voters have been courted according to their highly subjective personal preferences rather than according to contextually relevant and rational ideas and policy prescriptions, their decisions will be divorced from the political context (i.e. relevant realities) in which their candidate of choice will function if elected. They will, in essence, be convinced to by a car based on its color (form) rather than its utility (function). Let's say the red car is a compact car and the blue car is a pick up truck. After a multi-billion dollar campaign centered on which color car is the best for America and repeated assurances that "style"[read candidate's personal qualities]is important, Many, if not most, Americans will be left with a serious case of buyer's remorse. It is only after the election that some farmers will realize that their new blue car is a compact car and is therefore useless to them. Some suburban commuters will come to grips with the incompatibility of their needs and a pick up truck, regardless of how pleasing its shade of blue appears. Some urban commuters will realize they didn't even need a car at all.
The ensuing buyer's remorse will push some voters to tune out, others to steele themselves against lying politicians and redouble their efforts to give their vote ONLY to good PEOPLE, who won't burn them. In other words, some will stop voting and others will redouble their commitment to criteria and standards that are based on THE WRONG SYSTEM OF MEANING-i.e. CONTEXT! They will continue to apply personal standards of character that may be appropriate when choosing someone to do business with, but which have only very marginal utility when making electoral decisions in our constitutional democracy. Those who plunge deeper into political cynicism without recognizing that it is their criteria for judgement (decisional context) that is wrong, not the people they elected, will unwittingly become more certain, more cynical, and less capable of rational American citizenship.