Perception and Democracy

Examples of some visual illusions wgich are frequently examined in undergraduate experimental psychology courses; the Muller-Lyer illusion is at the top left hand corner






THE NEW CEC HAS A HEAVY BURDEN OF RESPONSIBILITY


Democracy has disadvantages as well as strengths and may be ephemeral

By Ali Ismail

aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk

Mobile telephone: 0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)



Just a few days ago I learnt of the decision by the authorities in Bangladesh to appoint as Chief Election Commissioner (Justice) M.A. Aziz, as of 23 May 2005. This, by popular consent, is an important item of information that, understandably, features prominently in the Bangla Mirror.

There is more to this, however, than meets the eye. The assumption throughout is that general elections are the correct method of selecting a nation’s political directing class and that the electorate are the right people to do the choosing. In Bangladesh, all adult citizens are electors.

What tends to go almost unnoticed, particularly nowadays, is that there is a surprisingly large segment of apparently well-informed opinion which dissents from the above viewpoint. These people are, on the whole, not sentimentalists and assert that they have hard and semi-hard scientific facts behind them.

A major component of undergraduate courses in experimental psychology is the study of the field of perception. This is an important avenue of enquiry because, throughout the animal kingdom, almost everything that is known gets internalised through the senses. There are inborn instincts but they all need past and current environmental stimuli to work upon.

Now, what is important for non-scientists to know about perception is that everything that is absorbed by us gets filtered through our genetic structures which we inherited from our ancestors near and remote and through our past experiences, pleasant or otherwise. Therefore, a Bangladeshi man will absorb his environment from the genes he received from his parents and through the milieu of his culture, which is strongly influenced by Islam. Therefore, a Bangladeshi Muslim man reading The Lord of the Rings will have a different experience from, for example, an Icelandic man reading the same book, who follows the German Lutheran church.

There is more. A great deal of the study of perception in a psychology course at any university under the sun is devoted to perceptual illusions, usually of the optical kind, although there are other kinds of illusions. When I studied psychology at a university in the 1970s, for some reason the course leaders chose to concentrate on the Muller-Lyer illusion. The essence of this phenomenon is that so simple a thing as a straight line drawn on a piece of paper can be made to vary in length according to whether or not ‘fins’ are attached to its ends and which way the ‘fins’ are pointing. Now, the guiding ethos of that particular university was that it was dangerous for the undergraduate students to know too much, so the illusion was explained entirely in terms of the compensatory mechanism of the brain when it has a task of judging distances. However, this illusion and all the others have much deeper implications.

The chief of these deep implications is that everything and everyone we encounter with our sense systems is perceived in terms of presentation. The length of the straight line in Muller-Lyer varies according to its presentation, that is to say, with or without ‘fins’ and how the ‘fins’ are pointed. The size of a circle on a piece of paper varies according to whether or not it is presented in company with larger or smaller circles. A straight line can be made to look crooked if it is presented against a certain kind of background.

Another implication which is illustrated by other perception experiments, such as whether or not the outline of a letter seems to be the right way round or reversed when it is pressed against the torso at different points, sequentially in time, is that we are influenced strongly by what has gone on before in our lives. If we have had previous unhappy experiences with, say, members of a certain religious sect, we will be influenced by all that when we meet the next member of that particular sect. It would be strictly speaking incorrect to call this ‘prejudice’ because it is based on personal knowledge, of a sort.

We all know that the above is true implicitly. We all know that it is wise to dress well for an interview unless the job being applied for is extremely low-grade. People do not dress as layabouts or as hippies when going to job interviews to work as accountants. They know, without being told, that that kind of presentation of themselves will lead to an instant writing off of their chances of landing the position. ‘White flight’ is based on previous knowledge of us that makes Europeans fear for their safety and well-being when we begin to appear in their neighbourhoods.

The final lesson of the study of perceptual illusions in experimental psychology is that, for us humans, there is no such thing as absolute knowledge. Nothing is fixed and eternal and is absolutely the same for everybody for all time no matter what happens. Everything is relative and mutable and conditional. ‘Truths’ which appear to be self-evident to one generation in one particular place are not considered to be ‘true’ at all to later generations, especially in other places. In the succeeding intervals of time, even in one place, the environment has changed and so has the climate of opinion; the zeitgeist has altered.

For example, slavery was considered to be natural and normal to the ancient Greeks and Romans and to the Americans in the southern states before the American civil war. Slavery is considered to be a great offence today. During the intervening periods of time, the way slavery has been presented to us has changed and that is why we no longer tolerate it. Novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the preaching of William Wilberforce made the changes.

There was a time when ‘racism’ was so acceptable that there was not even a name for it. The word ‘racism’ is fairly recent. Our ancestors just accepted, without thinking deeply about it, that some people were ‘in-group’ and were looked after and other people were ‘out-group’ and were fair-game for all the trickery and cunning and violence they could think of. The oldest Bangladeshis still alive at this time can remember the British Raj. There was a rule: ‘A white man can do no wrong’. That rule no longer applies officially and explicitly anywhere and is used only furtively and in disguise today. Racial differences have been presented to us in a different way and now we think that treating people according to their racial profiling is evil. Our distant ancestors would be amazed. They were just about all ‘racists’ to the last man, woman and child.

This brings us to the subject of democracy and its use in the governing of nations. The thought-way, which we have all absorbed from innumerable sources, is that the entire body of adult citizenry and permanent residents best decides the choice of leadership in the affairs of a country. Furthermore, everybody has just one vote. The rich man in his castle has just one vote, like the poor man at his gate. In fact, come presidential election time, Bill Gates has only one vote like the street hobo, the ‘knight of the road’, down his way. A previous generation of Americans would have been more than amazed; they would have become enraged and even violent at the very idea.

The dissenters who argue against democracy say that there is something fundamentally flawed about a system of government in which, at election time, a man or woman who lacks the intellectual capacity to programme a VCR or to use the advanced features of a microwave oven, has exactly the same amount of power to elect social leaders as a professor of political science. That particular argument is based on differences in intelligence.

Another argument that is used by men who want to deprive women of the vote is that, by and large, women tend to select politicians on the basis of personalities not policies. In the United Kingdom, a part of the political success of the late Lord Harold Wilson is attributed to the apparent fact that, at general elections, women used to turn out in droves to vote for him because they perceived him to be a ‘cuddly’ man. These men say that women are too sentimental and too personal and too subjective to have a hand on the driving wheel of a nation.

The bombshell that I have reserved for almost last in this article is that how we vote depends heavily, if not totally, on the media. We journalists control how you vote, dear reader. Princess Michael of Kent brought the matter up coyly when she attributed public perception of Prince Harry’s nazi fancy-dress armband to the ‘ownership structure’ of the media.

It is a fact that very few of us actually meet the politicians we have to choose between personally and closely over extended periods of time so that we actually know them well directly. How many of us have even met Tony Blair or Michael Howard or Charles Kennedy personally even for fleeting moments? We depend entirely on the media – the television, the newspapers, the magazines, the radio and nowadays the Internet.

The average man or woman on the streets and in cafés knows the politicians he or she has to choose between in terms mainly of celluloid images which have been carefully crafted and presented to him or her by highly educated and skilled media specialists who know how to condition people and how to change perceptions in such a way that the witless subject is unconscious of being manipulated at all. A crude non-political example of this is the ‘mood music’ in some shops, which has been shown to increase retail sales significantly.

What Princess Michael was trying to get at was probably the undisputed fact that the ownership and resulting control of the media, particularly in the advanced countries, is vested in a few people, not many people. There are only a few Rupert Murdochs and Robert Maxwells to tell us what to think and what is right and wrong. The lower-grade journalists are most definitely not free spirits who can write and speak without fear. I know the struggle I went through just to get a berth in a newspaper. If a journalist causes offence to somebody important he or she can be dispensed with instantly and a crowd of job applicants will fight each other to get his vacated position as soon as he or she has gone.

The new CEC, (Justice) M.A. Aziz, therefore has a difficult task. The average Bangladeshi has no personal knowledge of Sheik Hasina or of Khaleda Zia or of any of the other national leaders. His or her viewpoint is tossed this way and that by persons who will appeal in turns to self-interest, religious sentiment and social justice. Democracy may be just another political system to amuse schoolchildren and students of future ages who look at the funny ways of previous generations.

THE END