As the southern states started seceding from the Union in 1861, public passion for Texas to join them was strong. When the issue was put to a vote in the Legislature, only seven representatives opposed it. One of them, James Webb Throckmorton, was greeted with hisses, boos, and catcalls when he voted “No,” whereupon he famously retorted, “When the rabble hiss, well may patriots tremble.”
There has been a lot of hissing from the rabble across the land this month, as lawmakers have vainly tried to shed light and seek reasoned constituent input on the health care issue through town hall meetings in their districts. These invitations for feedback have too often led to nothing but shouting matches, rage, and vitriol. Whether an orchestrated conspiracy, as health care reform proponents charge, or a genuine expression of outrage as the shouters maintain, the heat from their fury has shed no light on the critical issues at hand.
A neuroscientist by training, my research has long focused on a part of the brain called the limbic system. It mediates emotional behavior. Stimulate an electrode implanted in the right part of the limbic system of an animal, and it will spontaneously go into a rage. This part of our brain mediates our most aggressive and destructive behaviors. The limbic system is a remnant of the forebrain of our reptilian ancestors. In mammals, a newer part of the forebrain has evolved -- to reason, calculate, and analyze beyond the emotion of the moment. What we have seen in town hall meetings more often than not, has been too much reptilian rage, and not enough mammalian analysis.
This is not to say that proposals for health care reform should be immune to criticism. Nor is it to say that anxiety, fear, and emotion have no relevance to public policy decisions. It is to say, however, that emotional outbursts and personal attacks do not further the cause of enlightened legislation.
The founders of our nation were deeply distrustful of central authority, so they gave us a democratic form of government. But with almost equal skepticism, they were fearful of public passion and mob rule. That is why they placed the power of our democracy in the hands of elected representatives, established a judiciary with lifetime appointments beyond the reach of political influence, and called for an indirect election of the President through an Electoral College and the election of senators by their respective state legislatures
Over time, the trend has moved away from these intermediate buffers between the people and their government. Now we elect our senators directly, and the Electoral College has become anachronistic. We have become more democratic than our founders envisioned, or thought wise. For the most part, though, we have shouldered the burden of direct democracy responsibly and well.
Now is a time of testing. For people to govern themselves wisely, they have to have accurate information, know how to analyze it, and proceed to do so in good faith. Misinformation subverts enlightened decision making, and misinformation currently abounds in the health care reform debate. Emotion, for emotion’s sake, hampers reasoned analysis; so even if a legitimate point underlies a passionate outburst, the value of the point is lost in the emotional storm of its presentation.
If we are to validate our trend toward direct democracy, we need to show ourselves worthy of the responsibility. We need to behave like we are the educated decision makers that our founders knew a democracy demands – not in college degrees, necessarily, but in a genuine desire to get the facts straight, and a willingness to be as objective and fair minded as we can.
We need to shout less and listen more. We don’t have to deny the passions we feel, but we do have to mold those passions into reasoned arguments if we really want to affect the outcome of the policy debate. If we really think that hissing accomplishes anything, consider how that decision on secession turned out.
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Louis Irwin is a Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at the University of Texas at El Paso.
