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发帖数: 901 | 1 John Edwards is the putrefied meat of the American political system --
literally, as far as your brain is concerned. Think about Edwards for a
moment -- the perfect hair, the honey voice, the oleaginous smile. Your lip
curled ever so slightly, didn't it? A teensy bit of bile may have risen in
your throat. The lip curl is a threat display, the bile is an attempt to
purge a toxin. Both were triggered at least partly by your prefrontal cortex
and your temporal lobes -- and both would have also occurred if you'd
smelled a piece of food gone bad.
Edwards, the one-time North Carolina senator and serial presidential
candidate, was back in the news last week, as he motioned for another
postponement of his campaign finance trial, set to begin Jan. 30 on charges
that he illegally used campaign donations to cover up his affair with a
staffer -- with whom he later had a child. While his wife was dying of
cancer. (Read "A Proposed Plea Deal for John Edwards.")
Nasty stuff, to be sure, more than enough to exclude a man permanently not
just from the political arena, but even from polite company. And yet there's
a certain deliciousness to the way we loathe Edwards. We dismiss a mass
killer like Osama bin Laden with a simple "rot in hell." We dismiss O.J.
Simpson with a simple "rot in jail." And before you say that the difference
is that both of those thugs have at least been dealt with, consider that the
thrice-married and repeatedly unfaithful Newt Gingrich behaved nearly as
despicably as Edwards, yet even now he is making a credible, if fading, run
for the White House. Edwards, by contrast, can't walk into a restaurant
without the risk of getting pelted by dinner rolls.
There are a lot of things that make the ex-senator the pariah he is, and the
brain is indeed one of biggest players. It was only in the last decade or
so, with the widespread use of functional magnetic imaging (fMRI), that
neurologists discovered the overlapping circuitry that governs morality and
disgust. In one study conducted in many parts of the world, pairs of
subjects are given a quantity of cash to share -- say $100 -- with one of
them getting to decide how the sum will be split and the other having the
right to accept or reject the offer. If the deal is accepted, they both get
the cash; if it's rejected, they both get nothing.
On average, subjects turn down any proposed division that offers them less
than 43% of the pot -- meaning they walk away from a free $43 simply because
the other guy is getting $57. And when the subjects who reject the deal are
scanned by fMRIs, their brains show pronounced activity in the disgust
regions.
"There is literal disgust and moral disgust, and the two overlap," says
Jonathan Haidt, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. "
Betrayal, hypocrisy, certain kinds of baseness trigger the brain's moral
response." (See the top 10 political fashion statements.)
Our umbrage isn't reserved for situations in which our ox is the one that's
getting gored. One 2006 study conducted in the U.K. found similar activity
in the brain's disgust lobes when people simply observe someone else getting
cheated. What's more, the more honorably the victim had behaved, the more
powerfully the observers' brains would respond. By contrast, victims who had
themselves cheated someone else earlier in the study would elicit a much
weaker neurological response. Edwards, a bad guy who cheated a sickly and
suffering woman, practically makes our brain lobes explode.
The hypothetical consequences of Edwards' shabby behavior only make things
worse. He wasn't willing simply to burn down his marriage and his career; he
was also willing to take the country -- or at least the blue-state half of
it -- with him. "Edwards' affair surely would have come out if he'd won the
nomination, and he'd surely have lost the election as a result," Haidt says.
"The country went through this already with Bill Clinton and it arguably
cost Al Gore the 2000 election." That's not something Democrats in
particular are inclined to forgive -- even though they ultimately won the
2008 election -- and may explain why they seem to loathe the man who was,
after all, their party's 2004 vice presidential nominee far more than
Republican do.
For all these things, the biggest factor in the utter destruction of the
Edwards brand might be the way the inner man clashed so dramatically with
the veneer he presented to the world -- and that's not the case with most
political scoundrels. Was it any surprise that Bill Clinton eventually came
to grief over a White House affair? Is it any surprise when Gingrich, who
just ain't a very nice guy, acts that way?
"It's a question of what these people are selling," says psychologist
Michael Schulman, author of Bringing Up a Moral Child. "Clinton was selling
a kind of goodness, but also a sexuality with it. There was a sense he
couldn't help himself. Gingrich, you expect to be a club fighter. Edwards
sold goodness in a sort of beatific way, so when we find out he's so soiled
and corrupt there's nothing left but loathing." (Read "John Edwards Scandal:
Next Stop, Silver Screen.")
The camera-ready looks that made Edwards so appealing to juries and, at one
time, voters, may have made that unmasking all the worse. Haidt points to a
widely cited 1975 study in which subjects were asked to impose sentences on
imaginary defendants, based only on a description of the imaginary crime and
a photo of a person who was said to be the perp. As a rule, the subjects
conformed to the general human bias of favoring attractive people over less-
attractive ones -- and tended to impose more lenient sentences on them as a
result. The only exception was when the crime was fraud and was said to have
been abetted by the crooks' good looks. Then the study subjects threw the
book at them.
"When the people in the scenarios used their attractiveness in their crimes
it switched the valence," says Haidt. "They actually got a heavier sentence.
" Edwards, narcissistic pretty-boy, surely won a lot of early supporters
just that way and is just as surely paying the price now.
No matter how Edwards emerges from his own, very real criminal trial, he may
not be destined to spend his entire life banished to the fringes of the
national village. Paradoxically, the more his critics -- to say nothing of
his prosecutors -- are seen to be piling on, the more our temporal lobes and
prefrontal cortices may switch the valence once more, turning even a deeply
loathed perpetrator into an unlikely victim. It would be a slow and
circuitous road to redemption and it's by no means guaranteed. But for a man
who's justly fallen a far as Edwards has, it may be the only one. |
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