Having travelled widely across the ideological planes of the 20th century, I’m interested in the subject of how we as individuals form what they take to be coherent ideas about how the world works and what is needed to make it work better and what , if anything, stands in the way of improvement. Basically that’s what an ideology is.
With time I’ve come to the conclusion that our ideas about the world are like our street clothes that we put on our naked bodies. Sometimes they fit, sometimes they look borrowed, sometimes they are attractive but faddish, sometimes they are merely outrageous and will be only worn by a tiny minority. But in all cases they are there to cover up our naked bodies.
And how do we pick our clothes. How do we choose the political truths that we claim for ourselves. The naked body stands for our emotional selves which consist of clusters of emotions that we for the most part are not that able to name.
So when I read about Drew Westen’s book “The Political Brain; The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation”, it was a title tailor made to get my attention.
The book is ostensibly a how-to manual to understand that successful political campaigns must understand that the path to the voter’s brain is through their heart and gut.
Ontario’s political culture is not known for it’s highly charged emotive qualities. After all, we need to recall the famous words when Bill Davis met his caucus after the 1981 election. “Bland works”, he said.
That of course doesn’t mean that Ontarians in contrast with Americans are bereft of emotions. How to engage them is a different story.
That’s why we brought together a rather large assortment of individuals who had reasons to reflect about the underbelly of our ideological lives but also about how ideological differences might be changing from our historical preoccupation with the left-right axis to something else …..or not.
