I look at the other members of my focus group – well, actually there are no others. Focus Sub-Group Z5 consists of one urban professional white male in the 37-58 age grouping wearing gray plaid pajamas at 9:00 PM EDT, 20-year-old Tawny in hand, port that is, pacing, rather than sitting in the available worn, striped corduroy recliner circa All in The Family, while the televised presidential debate begins. Lacking an actual Perception Analyzer®, he will be limited to objective, subjective, deductive, and critical thinking, with all the concomitant butterfly effects of chaos theory infused with the wood-aged uncertainty of the port’s sweet nectar, whereupon he will use his free hand to grasp the closest thing he has to a perception analyzer with the hope of being able to discern a rising and falling graphical worm-line that corresponds to an instantaneous visceral and "pure" response. Although absolutely devoid of any residual tumescence, as soon as Tom Brokaw begins speaking, the PA tool indicates a slight but definitely perceptible downward momentum.
Earlier this year, on March 19, 2008 in Fayetteville, NC to be precise, Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama delivered a speech titled The World Beyond Iraq in which he explained his views not only of the extant war in Iraq but of how we came to be there in the first place, as well as America’s responsibility, with regard to employing military force, to use sound judgment "rooted in reason and facts, not ideology and politics". Senator Obama began the speech by quoting and elucidating Woodrow Wilson’s address to Congress (April 2nd, 1917, just before America’s entry into WWI):
"It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war," he said. "...But the right is more precious than peace." Wilson's words captured two awesome responsibilities that test any Commander-in-Chief – to never hesitate to defend America, but to never go to war unless you must. War is sometimes necessary, but it has grave consequences, and the judgment to go to war can never be undone.
Using a concise dialectic, Senator Obama illustrated the ideological path to war employed by the Bush administration:
Five years ago today, President George W. Bush addressed the nation. Bombs had started to rain down on Baghdad. War was necessary, the President said, because the United States could not, "live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder." Recalling the pain of 9/11, he said the price of inaction in Iraq was to meet the threat with "armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities."
At the time the President uttered those words, there was no hard evidence that Iraq had those stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. There was not any evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks of September 11, or that Iraq had operational ties to the al Qaeda terrorists who carried them out. By launching a war based on faulty premises and bad intelligence, President Bush failed Wilson's test. So did Congress when it voted to give him the authority to wage war.
Five years have gone by since that fateful decision. This war has now lasted longer than World War I, World War II, or the Civil War. Nearly four thousand Americans have given their lives. Thousands more have been wounded. Even under the best case scenarios, this war will cost American taxpayers well over a trillion dollars. And where are we for all of this sacrifice? We are less safe and less able to shape events abroad. We are divided at home, and our alliances around the world have been strained. The threats of a new century have roiled the waters of peace and stability, and yet America remains anchored in Iraq.
History will catalog the reasons why we waged a war that didn't need to be fought, but two stand out. In 2002, when the fateful decisions about Iraq were made, there was a President for whom ideology overrode pragmatism, and there were too many politicians in Washington who spent too little time reading the intelligence reports, and too much time reading public opinion. The lesson of Iraq is that when we are making decisions about matters as grave as war, we need a policy rooted in reason and facts, not ideology and politics.
Reason and facts. How does that play on a Perception Analyzer? Not so much, according to Frank Luntz, president of the polling and communications firm Luntz Research, who has served as an adviser to the U.S. House Republican leadership, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and numerous candidates in this country and abroad. He studies focus groups in political settings to see how they "feel" about issues, stating:
...while we have all the numbers we can possibly crunch, we are severely lacking in insight. "Not seeing the forest for the trees," as the saying goes, most pollsters know what voters think, but too few understand how voters feel.
Although focus groups for products like lottery games and snack cakes are carefully chosen to be homogeneous, political focus groups are more peer-oriented. Luntz puts it in this self-contradictory way:
The composition of the focus group must be selected strategically, with homogeneity as the key to a successful session. Human behavioral studies have consistently proven that people will reveal their innermost thoughts only to those they believe share a common bond.
For example, if your goal is to study the real, in-depth feelings of whites and blacks toward affirmative action, welfare, or crime, you cannot have an integrated focus group. Similarly, women will not talk freely and emotionally about abortion if men (including a male moderator) are present. This is just a fact of life.
The mood of the group is also critical. A single dominant voice can cripple open, honest discussion by intimidating the other participants.
Obviously, a room of 15 men in white hoods is going to register more honest responses to questions regarding racial profiling than if there were 13 hooded men with two large African American MMA fighters thrown into the mix. Or maybe not; this is just an opinion. There is no empirical evidence to prove the statement, nor is there evidence to prove Luntz’s statement that "this is just a fact of life" in opining that women will not talk freely and emotionally about abortion if men are present. Reasoning and critical thinking, even regarding complex moral, ethical, intellectual, and emotional questions, is the singular act of an individual - one who has taken the time to consider facts, read and/or listen to dissenting opinions, looked inward as well as outward, and has reached, perhaps, a point of intellectual balance, a kind of repose, that has occurred through a dialectical journey that may or may not be over. The problem with a focus group is that it is a group. The individuals in that group may turn a dial when presented with a lottery game with a race car theme that results in identifying a proclivity toward playing among the 18-30 year old white males in that group and a diametrically opposed reaction by 38-55 year old white, stay-at-home housewives, with variously off-the-grid dialed-in responses from say the 28-year old African American hedge fund manager to the 62-year old white male who just sold his mom-and-pop shoe repair shop after 39 bone-brattling years to the 37-year old single, white female high school geometry teacher who is actually not, as filled out in her pre-screening questionnaire, a vegetarian. But how does a dial get turned when considering Senator Obama’s assertion that:
When you have no overarching strategy, there is no clear definition of success. Success comes to be defined as the ability to maintain a flawed policy indefinitely. Here is the truth: fighting a war without end will not force the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own future. And fighting in a war without end will not make the American people safer.
"Fighting in a war without end." That phrase registers a negative. But in the context of the paragraph, the implication that we should not be fighting wars that do not end registers a positive. Yet the complexity of Iraq, with its sectarian population inclined to violence based on ancient rivalries now further fueled by the speculative enormous wealth of petroleum dollars (if dollars remain the dominant currency). Add to that dynamic Iraq’s deep and complicated relationship with Iran’s religious leaders, i.e., the government of Iran, and how that seems to run counter to American interests – it is a very dysfunctional ménage à trois – and the Personal Analyzer needs a direct link to the Google, because some research is necessary to determine which direction to turn the damn dial.
Perhaps the ideas Senator Obama expresses regarding Iraq trend toward a positive response, but his stated views on Afghanistan seem to conflict with the notion of fighting endless wars. The PA tool is in stasis; if only it were as simple as dialing up for a chocolate-like filling in a snack cake and down for the stiffly creamy white, heroin-like sugar high of the Twinkyish filling. My grandmother loves the bingo scratch ticket; I prefer the poker-themed game. But in listening to the polemical rhetoric, and often disjunctive reasoning, of a presidential debate – trying to decipher solutions, if any, to hyper-political speak, how does one simultaneously concentrate on turning a dial that will create a perceptible response to what – tone of voice, the complexities of an economic solution, the repetition of the questioner’s name by the candidate?
If one happens to watch one of these debates on CNN, then there exists the added tier of watching the converging and diverging lines of the focus group’s Perception Analyzers in action, all while trying to listen and discern, but wait – how can I be so far off the trend line? Wow, look at the spike in the female response. What was that for? Clearly, the focus group rules the debate. But who analyzes the "data" (if one can really call squiggly lines created by a PA dial data)? Luntz characterizes the motivational aspects of a political focus group as being based on one or a combination of three primary categories of problems, although in pre-screening no individuals actually identify these categories of concern:
• "Declining quality of life" explains public concern about health care, the economy, the deficit, taxes, and unemployment.
• "Disintegration of morality in society" is the primary motivational factor behind concern about crime, drugs, welfare, and immigration.
• "The break-up of the American family" is the fear most associated with the problems in education, and to a lesser extent, crime, drugs, and welfare.
In telephone polls, rarely do more than 2% or 3% of those surveyed ever cite any of the three factors themselves. However, using traditional statistical analysis and an adjusted conjoint interviewing technique in focus group research, these three attitudes explain the fundamental motivational factors of more than 80% of Americans.
What is "an adjusted conjoint interviewing technique", you ask? According to the producers of Sawtooth Software:
Conjoint analysis aims for greater realism, grounds attributes in concrete descriptions,
and results in better discrimination among attribute importances. Conjoint
analysis creates a more appropriate context for research. Consider a pairwise
trade-off question featuring laptop computers. See exhibit 3.2.
Of course, conjoint questions can also be asked one product profile at a time,
as in a traditional card sort. The rationale behind pairwise comparisons is this:
People can make finer distinctions when they directly compare objects. For example,
if someone hands you a four-pound rock, takes it away, and then hands you
a five-pound rock, chances are you will not be able to tell which is heavier. But
if you hold one rock in each hand, you will have a much better chance of guessing
which weighs more. Despite the probable benefits of pairwise comparisons,
we conducted a research study and found virtually no difference in the results for
one-profile versus pairwise traditional conjoint analysis (Orme and King 1998).
Another flavor of conjoint analysis offers even greater realism and extends the
idea of side-by-side comparisons: choice-based conjoint (Louviere and Woodworth
1983; Sawtooth Software 1993).
I think the phrase "results in better discrimination among attribute importances" says it all.
When Thomas Paine published (initially anonymously) his political pamphlet Common Sense in 1776, it was not only a reasoned call for and defense of American independence from England, it became a catalyst and inspiration for the birth of a nation:
The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances hath, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected, and in the Event of which, their Affections are interested. The laying a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of Party Censure, is the AUTHOR.
Any cursory study of American history reveals that these ideas were discussed, dissected, argued upon for and against in meeting places small and large throughout young America. Such a study would further reveal that the decisions were hard fought and eventually reached by a studious elite of thoughtful men. The issues were complex; the actions therein immutable. Clearly, what was lacking were focus groups that represented the equivalent to today’s Joe Sixpack and hockey moms. What a fluke of fate that we were able to flounder in reason and critical thinking at such a tumultuous moment and somehow deliver such a response:
The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. 'Tis not the affair of a City, a County, a Province, or a Kingdom; but of a Continent — of at least one-eighth part of the habitable Globe. 'Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed-time of Continental union, faith and honour. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound would enlarge with the tree, and posterity read in it full grown characters.
Of course, Mr. Paine would go on to write polemical treatises in response to criticism of the French Revolution, with The Rights of Man and, later, a challenge to institutionalized religion and the inerrancy of the Bible in. One could easily spend a decade or more reading and thinking about the ideas presented in these three aforementioned works. Yet they would not in themselves touch upon the concerns that Luntz identifies above. Nor would the ontological and epistemological questions that arise in Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, or Derrida, or the economic and sociological ideas of Malthus, John Stuart Mill, C. Wright Mill, Max Weber, et al, be implicit in those pages.
Ever since man began to notice his own hairy hands, and all the places those hirsute opposable thumbs could explore, he has wondered for what the hell he exists, or, for that matter, if he exists. Five million years later, in Starbuck’s all over the world, there sits at least one individual in each who ponders his or her hand wrapped around his or her latte-esque beverage and wonders if he or she is actually holding the coffee or if the coffee, the Starbuck’s, and the Cocteau Twins playing in the background are just an illusion. With the sweet clarity of caffeine induced consciousness, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is extant in these cafes, as it is in movie theaters, the bedrooms of the very lonely, and those watching reality television. Of course these ephemeral diversions into the ontological realm are not limited to those who have chosen to pursue the meaning of life from some Carthusian starting point to a Kantian dialectical conclusion. We are talking about Bob in accounting, who has this flash of existential angst for a nano-second right after figuring out that these coffees are costing 2.7% more per year than his phone and electric bill combined. To be human is to have one of these glitches in the program, whence one questions everything in a passing moment, and to deal with the issue more substantively through religion, contemplation, social and political involvement, drugs and/or alcohol, sex, lethargy, a career, or any infinite combinations of these and other obiter dicta.
When Socrates invoked, and reinterpreted, the Delphic Oracle’s injunction, "Know Thyself.", he turned philosophy away from an outward observation, a view of the individual in relationship to Nature and to other individuals, whereas the injunction meant, "Know thy station and it duties and do not usurp a position not thine by right.", to an introspection by the individual, whereas the true aim of life, as he puts it in the Apology, is to "make one’s soul as good as possible." This, Socrates believed, is only attainable through self-knowledge, and it is only through this understanding of the self, to know who and what one is, that a person can truly know good from evil. Therefore, another supposition in the tendency toward one type of action/consequence over another is the degree to which the individual is actually self-evident. How many choices of a significant nature do we make based on a clear understanding of how our own morality relates to the decision rather than an inclination based on reward vs. punishment? When the grandé, triple-shot, wet, heat-sleeve protected cup of cappuccino in one’s hand momentarily seems to threaten the nature of reality, what is really going on?
Perhaps we can organize a focus group, a carefully gleaned heterogeneous cross-section of American society – from the Ozarks and San Francisco to South Dakota and Brooklyn – equipped with state-of-the art Perception Analyzers to help us determine how the rest of us should feel about Credit Default Swaps and the Large Hadron Particle Collider. Reading, thinking, logic, and reason – they’re all so exhausting and time consuming. Why not simply watch the writhing worms of the PA tool to see how we feel?
As I continue to watch the debate I find myself pacing around the room and can’t help but notice that John McCain is doing exactly the same thing, whether he is talking or not. My anxiety level is through the roof. Wait a minute, did he just refer to Senator Obama as "that one"? I need a dial to turn. Perhaps the one on the oven, after I blow out the pilot.
"These are the times that try men's souls." -Thomas Paine