This post is inspired by a recent interaction on Facebook, far too similar to far too many other interactions, in which someone appalled by the fact that human beings are capable of thinking and acting like human beings (or what human beings should be) responds with a spittle-laden string of childish pejoratives, including such timeless gems as “retard.”It is a stock post, to be linked to each time, thus saving me both the time and tedium of actually responding to these creatures.
I prefer to be neither the person who initiates such mindless belligerence, nor the person who responds to it in kind, because both are unappealing and assertively unimpressive. If I respond by, for instance, noting that my detractor appears to be a bit of troglodyte, my detractor is likely to note that while he merely “referenced” the empirically demonstrable fact that I’m a “retard,” I engaged in “typical liberal name calling” in response, which is “pathetic.” (True story.)
Far be it from me to knowingly engage in such “typical liberal name calling” (as opposed to the more respectable conservative preference for calling those they disagree with “retards,” of something similar, over and over again, in this case always in all caps…). Instead, I offer this one word response: Really?
It’s telling what you focus on most about my posts: their length. Not their content, but their length. Those long posts, that discuss economics, history, law, demography, and numerous other lenses that are relevant to the political and social issues discussed on these threads, err by having any substance, by failing to be shallow expressions of blind and reactionary bigotry.
To you, economics is irrelevant to economic arguments, history irrelevant to historical ones, an understanding of how law works irrelevant to an argument about legality, reality irrelevant in general. The realization that good public policy isn’t defined by legality but that we must continue to refine legality in service to good public policy is completely beyond your grasp. The notion that one must use their minds to understand their world is completely foreign to you. The possibility that your arbitrary and unconsidered beliefs could possibly be anything but the absolute truth is as beyond your reach as it has been to Inquisitors and Jihadists, who share with you the same destructive modality of blind ideological certainty, expressed more in terms of hatred than of hope, more antagonistic toward humanity than constructively in its service. That’s what defines you.
You often assure me that I wasted my time, that there’s no way I could ever change your minds. Of course I know that: Changing the minds of the mindless is beyond the reach of the best formed arguments; appealing to human decency a joke to those steeped in the toxin of belligerence and bigotry. But juxtaposing what reason in service to humanity looks like with what you represent is a lesson for any others who are not as far gone as yourselves. These threads are read by an unknown number of silent lurkers, who have the chance to choose to be reasonable and decent human beings.
So, my spittle-spattering spokespeople for the far-right rejection of reason and civility, of concern for humanity, may you enjoy the elongated reach of your pre-human limbs to all the more effectively pat yourselves on the back for such wit and wisdom. Such simian sophistication deserves only praise, and certainly a treat from one another as mutual trainers, for it far surpasses the prowess of, say, single celled invertebrates. And, truly, how much higher do any of us expect you to aim at this point?
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(Thanks to Andy Lewis for posting this Daily Show clip on my facebook page.)
This brilliantly funny, and wonderfully “equal opportunity” satirical skewering of columnist Froma Harrop, plays on a seemingly almost universal failure to make the distinction between humanity and civility. Before I discuss that in more detail, check it out:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c Civil Disservice www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on FacebookHarrop clearly was, by most definitions, “uncivil” in her representation of Tea Partiers as “economic terrorists,” but she may not have been unreasonable in her assessment. And while it is uncivil to use such language, if it is used well, as a vehicle to oppose irrationality and bigotry, then it may not only be consistent with a commitment to humanity, but actually mandated by it. (There is a related but not identical discussion in The Basic Political Ideological Grid, in which both the form and substance of discourse combine to define where it falls in an ideological grid, or space.)
(A quick disclaimer: I am not arguing that it was used well in this case, or that it really was a productive use of “uncivil” language. I remain unconvinced one way or the other in this particular instance.)
“Humanity” means applying the best analyses to the most reliable information in service to human welfare, without prejudice, and with passion and commitment. “Civility” means being polite and non-incendiary while doing so. Both are generally worth striving for, but the former is far more important than the latter, and occasionally the former is served by breaching the latter. Harrop’s principal mistake was in presenting herself as an advocate, and presiding over an organization dedicated to advocacy of the latter when in reality she is an advocate of the former and not particularly committed to the latter.
She made several other classic, interrelated mistakes as well: A lack of wit, of humor, and of humility. She wasn’t nimble enough to recognize the inconsistency between her official commitment to “civility,” and her marginal breach of it at the same time. She wasn’t gracious enough to see the humor in that inconsistency. And she wasn’t wise and humble enough to admit that it is a complex and subtle world in which we live, and that striving for these ideals is not the same as attaining them.
Here’s what she could have said to John Oliver: Civility isn’t an absolute value that supersedes all others. To take extreme examples, if a genocide is occurring, I am not bound by the rules of civility to refuse to participate in an effort to stop it by any means necessary, including physical violence directed against the perpetrators. If my country is being invaded by conquerors, I am not bound by the rules of civility not to defend myself against them. Clearly, there are some times, at least at the extremes, when acting “civilly” isn’t necessarily the course of action recommended by a commitment to humanity. This is a lesson that Neville Chamberlain, and all who were counting on his commitment to civility, learned the hard way.
Political discourse and action that is non-violent should never be met with violence, but irrational, self-destructive, or hateful non-violent political movements might reasonably be met with strong non-violent language in service to humanity, even if such language is “uncivil.” If a racist organization preaches racism, I am more concerned with stopping that ideology in its tracks than in avoiding offending those who are preaching that odious doctrine. If I can shame them or their followers, or humiliate them with a forceful articulation of why their ideology is odious, even using metaphors and imagery that might be considered “uncivil,” I would feel very well justified in doing so.
Obviously, Tea Partiers and others in their ideological vicinity would argue that their ideology bears no resemblance to such odious ideologies as racism, and so my analogy is moot. But therein lies the crux of the matter, for I disagree with them, and either of us might be right in our assessment. If I am right, in both my assertion that incivility can sometimes be required by a commitment to reason in service to universal goodwill, and in my assertion that extreme Tea Party ideology (not necessarily all moderate variations of it) is comparable to other odious ideologies of human history, then strong language might be justified, whereas if I am wrong on either of those points then it is not.
We gain by striving to be reasonable people of goodwill, and by encouraging one another to be reasonable people of goodwill, not by being self-righteous about it, or pretending that “we” (whoever “we” might be in the particular context) have gotten it perfectly right while others have gotten it perfectly wrong. The difficulties and challenges of a multitude of human beings with a multitude of ideologies pursuing a multitude of interests are not going to be swept away by any panacea. But the effort can be improved by advocating for certain values, and practicing certain disciplines.
Civility is among these disciplines, but, I would argue, clearly not chief among them. No one who is in reality primarily committed to humanity should claim to be primarily committed to civility, because the two are not identical, and people who confuse them will look, as Harrop did in this interview, foolish when the two are at odds and they choose the one they actually care more about. (As an aside, and in fairness, it looks like the editing of this piece, which was intended as comedy rather than as journalism, was designed to make her look like even more foolish than she may actually have been.)
The lesson is, I think, that such language should be resorted to minimalistically and with restraint, both to avoid error and to preserve its effectiveness. It is not that every “uncivil” utterance is an offense against humanity, but rather that too many uncivil utterances certainly are, and, in any case, make those that aren’t less powerful by diluting them in a flood of similar sounding noise (see Godwin’s Law, Revisited).
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We have a lot of work to do. All reasonable people of goodwill have a lot of work to do. It’s not enough to groan, to bemoan, to talk or even walk, to vote and encourage others to vote, to protest or rally or lobby or canvass, to organize for specific goals, to engage in rituals and contribute to the noise of a very noisy world. It’s not enough to write, or implore, or contemplate, or engage others. We need to take action; a very specific kind of action; a less familiar and, for many, less emotionally gratifying kind of action; a less cathartic and more creative kind of action; a less ritualistic and more conscious kind of action; a less well-trod and more innovative kind of action.
The first step is to know that we can do much, much better. I don’t mean we could do better if only we beat the political opposition at the polls, or that we could do better if only others saw the world the way we do and joined us in our efforts to create a kinder, gentler, saner world. I mean that those of us who claim to believe in our collective potential to improve the human condition can do much better at translating that belief into results. That’s not something that depends on any superficial panacea saving us from a very deeply entrenched status quo, or on any sudden mass change of consciousness (that, in truth, it is our challenge to catalyze and cultivate), but rather on the discipline and commitment of those who share a general vision and goal, in service to that vision and goal.
First of all, I shy away from using the term “progressive,” because, while among existing political ideological orientations, that is clearly the one I align with, and clearly the closest to being the force for moving in the direction of being a kinder, gentler, saner world, it falls woefully short, and leaves behind some who might join us in this effort, while being overtaken by others who are as much an obstruction to moving in the direction of becoming a kinder, gentler, wiser world as our ideological opposites are.
We need a movement within and beyond the progressive movement that commits to something many progressives have not committed to, and some conservatives would: To leave behind the false certainties, the overwrought commitment to oversimplified panaceas, the ancient tribal impulse to reduce the world to the “good guys” that are us and the “bad guys” that are them, and commit instead to disciplined reason and universal goodwill alone as the ultimate goals and underlying means of all that we do.
That doesn’t mean, as some people always insist on interpreting it to mean, that this is advocacy for always being “nicey-nice” and never taking firm stands for or against specific positions, even engaging in “hardball” politics in service to those stands. (Indeed, there are many who accuse me of the opposite error, of not being “nicey-nice” enough in public discourse, of “bullying” people, either with my intellect or my “flowery, condescending bullshit,” depending on their disposition toward me. While I am not claiming that I always get it right, I am claiming that there are definitely times to “bully” people with one’s intellect, or, as I like to put it, to make arguments so compelling that those who find them inconvenient are made uncomfortable by the difficulty of refuting them.) Those are determinations that must be made in the context of the kind of comprehensive analysis, holistic vision, and disciplined commitment to them that I am advocating. Nor does it mean that this vision is meant to (or possibly could) displace the current and familiar popular political landscape, with all of its oversimplifications, precipitous manias, and narrow interests or visions. I discuss below how these two visions and orientations, one of strident advocacy for passionately held views, and the other for cultivating a broader and more accommodating commitment to reason and goodwill in both the form and substance of our political advocacy, can coexist.
Rather, this is the articulation of a higher ideal, a more conscious and restrained and aspirational political and cultural movement, to which people who aspire to the creation of a kinder, gentler, and saner world can invest some or all of their energy, either while engaging in other more familiar political movements that also appeal to them and capture their imaginations and their motivations, or (as might be the case for some few) as their primary or only vehicle for social change.
I had, not long ago, developed one specific blueprint for what such a movement could look like (see, e.g., Transcendental Politics, A Proposal, The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified, How to make a kinder and more reasonable world, Meta-messaging with Frames and Narratives, Community Action Groups (CAGs) & Network (CAN)). The specific blueprint developed in these essays is not the subject of this one. Our efforts to create this new “transcedental politics,” this more disciplined and humble and wise commitment to working toward a positive vision of what can be rather than against all of the windmill-dragons populating our ideologically saturated realities, can take what form it will, but it must begin with a commitment to it, and an organized effort to cultivate this new species of activism so that might flourish amidst the flora and fauna of the current political ecosystem.
Many of the essays I wrote in the course of developing and fleshing out my “politics of reason and goodwill” are iterations of the same theme of this one, such as The Ultimate Political Challenge, Second-Order Social Change, “A Theory of Justice”, The Foundational Progressive Agenda , The Politics of Anger, The Politics of Kindness, The Power of “Walking the Walk”, “Messaging” From The Heart of Many Rather Than The Mouth of Few, The Heart of Politics, A Call To Minds & Hearts & Souls, Politics & Social Change, Changing The Narrative, Cluster Liberals v. Network Liberals, Realizing Human Potential, The Loss of Humanity, Getting Off The Political Treadmill, and An Argument for Reason and Humility. Though there is undoubtedly considerable redundancy laced throughout these essays, it is my hope that together they, somewhat haphazardly and inefficiently, carve out a well-defined and increasingly detailed vision of how to do better, of what it means to do better, and of what it requires of each of us who wish to help change the world for the better.
The keys to this vision for progress are two-fold: 1) We need to cultivate within ourselves and within whatever organizations we create committed to this vision the humility, wisdom, and universal goodwill that must inform it, and make those values a discipline that we actively pursue, both within ourselves as individuals and throughout all social fields to which we belong; and 2) we need to explore, in depth and with precision, the nature of the social institutional and cognitive landscape that is the field within which we are operating, applying the knowledge gained to the challenge of affecting that landscape in desired ways. (For my nascent contribution to that second component, see, e.g., The Politics of Consciousness , Adaptation & Social Systemic Fluidity, The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions, The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Technology, The Fractal Geometry of Law (and Government), Emotional Contagion, Bellerophon’s Ascent: The Mutating Memes (and “Emes”) of Human History, Information and Energy: Past, Present, and Future, and The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix.)
The articulation of these two aspects of what I’ll now refer to as “Transcendental Politics” is one of the challenges I have only barely waded into. It’s clear that they are closely bound together, in numerous ways, and that the discovery of the conceptual threads that weave them into a single whole will be an exciting and gratifying enterprise. I alluded to some of the connections in The Dance of Consciousness, The Algorithms of Complexity, and undoubtedly in other essays as well: They revolve around the fact that we are both participants in, and elements of, the social institutional/technological/cognitive landscape that we are simultaneously operating through and trying to affect. These are not too distinct spheres of reality, as we so often pretend they are, but rather one; recognizing that, and acting on the basis of that recognition, is a cornerstone of Transcendental Politics. (I have just recently bought a book, “Spiral Dynamics,” recommended to me by a friend, that purports to address precisely this dimension of the challenge, to develop a leadership and social movement/social change paradigm based on, essentially, the evolutionary ecology paradigm of our shared social institutional/technological/cognitive landscape.)
Transcendental Politics is one specimen of a larger, already defined category, referred to as “Transformational Politics,” which is political action designed not just to win battles within the current paradigm, but to change that paradigm as well. Transcendental Politics specifies a very precise kind of transformational goal, one which relies less on assumption and more on analysis, is more dedicated to humanity, all things considered, and less to narrower goals that conflict with that global goal on closer examination. It is a transformation that discourages stridency and encourages thoughtfulness and civil discourse informed by humility. It is, in short, the politics of reason and goodwill (leavened with imagination and compassion), pursued with Discipline & Purpose.
Part of what is to be transcended is the level of analysis on which the current ideological dichotomy defining the contemporary partisan divide is to be found (see A Tale of Two Movements). While both contentions are true to varying degrees and in varying ways (the Right is correct that there is a very salient agency problem embedded in any reliance on government to order our lives, and the Left is correct that corporate power, particularly over the political process, has reached crisis proportions), neither dynamic is as simple as its staunchest advocates imagine, and neither lies at the core of what is obstructing progress. (Admittedly, like peeling away the layers of an onion, the core itself may be ever-elusive, but part of the project of Transcendental Politics is to focus on the peeling back of layers to find the ever-more fundamental issues to address, and to eschew the self-satisfied belief that complex issues require no further analysis once a position has been taken. See The Algorithms of Complexity; or The Wizards’ Eye for a fictionalized representation of the dynamic.)
Transcendental Politics involves digging beneath these issues, recognizing the elements of truth in them, but also the utility of the institutions being critically analyzed, and eschewing the manias of obsessive exaggeration and oversimplification. Transcendental Politics requires us to embrace rather than scoff at the habit of qualifying assertions, identifying exceptions and conditions and variability, and, in general, declining to reduce the world to pithy soundbites in favor of exploring the world in all of its subtlety and complexity. To paraphrase the former Colorado (and now Wisconsin) political journalist Adam Schrager, quoting his father, Transcendental Politics favors thinking and speaking in commas and question marks over periods and exclamation points.
Stridency doesn’t exclude anyone from participating in advocacy of Transcendental Politics, or joining any groups that may emerge to implement it, though the stridency itself is excluded. There are times to be strident, and we each use our own judgment to determine when that time has come for us, though, on average, I would say we err on leaping to stridency too quickly rather than refraining from it too often. (For instance, I recently became very strident in an exchange on Facebook, with a bunch of right-wing evangelicals preaching anti-Muslim attitudes, calling for an attitude of prejudice and policies of discrimination toward all Muslims residing in the United States. I found their attitude so reprehensible, so horrifyingly familiar, that, while composing powerful arguments designed to increase the difficulty of rationalizing their bigotry, I also declined to mince words in my characterization of their position. See “Sharianity” for my depiction of their position.)
Many of my fellow progressives are strident about things I choose not to be, and am less convinced merit it. The governmental and police responses to “Occupy” protesters, for instance, while certainly sometimes excessive and counterproductive (and therefore deserving of very clear criticism), seem to me to be embedded in a more complex and nuanced challenge of balancing legitimate needs to enforce laws designed to protect the public health and safety with the need to limit the freedoms of speech and assembly (especially political speech and assembly) to the slightest degree practicable. It is an issue in which there is an inevitable balance to be struck (even if it is not currently being struck in the right place), and therefore an issue in which stridency is to be avoided.
But if an individual, on careful consideration, and in full consciousness, determines that, by their judgment, the issue of overzealous and overly violent enforcement of marginal laws, against political protesters generally not engaging in any serious misconduct of any kind, is an issue worthy of strident condemnation, that’s not a judgment I am in any position to say is “wrong.” I can only say that, since such determinations are a matter of personal judgment, and since one goal of Transcendental Politics is to increase our thoughtfulness and reduce our stridency in general, both my stridency toward those anti-Islamic xenophobes on Facebook, and others’ toward overzealous police action toward the “Occupy” protesters, should be left in the arena of conventional political discourse (where we all will still be participating as well), and removed from the attempt to transcend it.
In fact, people who are stridently opposed to one another on some or all issues might find a venue in which to discuss underlying aspects of those issues in a different way, if some of them at some times share the basic commitment required of participation in Transcendental Politics: That of striving to be reasonable people of goodwill working together to confront the complex and subtle challenges of life on Earth. To enter that new venue, we take off our hats of issue advocacy, and put on our hat of tolerance and acceptance. We do not have to worry that we are tolerating and accepting something intolerable and unacceptable by doing so, because we have not forsaken the other hat of passionate advocacy on that issue. But we can rejoice that we have, without giving anything up, opened up a channel through which reason and goodwill might have more opportunity to gain more purchase on more hearts and minds.
Transcendental Politics is about reducing the entrenchment of mutual antagonism, and increasing the commitment to reason and goodwill. It is about reducing irrationality and belligerence, and increasing consciousness in both thought and action. It is about moving from a politics that reproduces and reinforces our folly toward a politics that liberates us from and gradually transcends that folly. It is about growing as human beings, as individuals and as societies, and reaching toward higher and more life-affirming expressions of our humanity.
My role, thus far, has, for the most part, been to articulate this vision and try to rally others to it. (I have made some organizational attempts as well, such as trying to form my own community organization as part of that component of my “Politics of Reason and Goodwill” project, and engaging, both professionally and avocationally, in a multitude of public interest advocacy efforts. I developed this project, beyond my writings here, in the context of a Colorado Leaders Fellowship, with the Center for Progressive Leadership, outlining a long-term plan for bringing it to fruition. I also sent out hundreds of packets to political and civic leaders in Colorado, describing my specific project to them, looking for support and funding. However, despite all of that, I have not yet done enough to take these ideas across the threshold from the drawing board into implementation.) But, while social progress is always urgent, and millions suffer every day from our failures to address the challenges we face more effectively, instantaneous success is rarely an option.
This is not something one individual can make happen on his or her own. We often look to leadership to lead us, and lament its failure to do so, but, in the end, we should lament most of all our own failures to step up to the plate, and become leaders ourselves, leaders in our families and communities, leaders in our organizations and professions, leaders in our thoughts and actions (see What is Leadership?). None of us should wait for someone else to make this happen; we each should take action ourself to make it happen, to move it forward, to spread this meme and this paradigm, to help it insinuate itself into our cognitive landscape, and, from there, into our social institutional landscape.
If this is a vision you share, or one that you believe has a vital place in our social field, then please, step forward and say, “yes, I want to be a part of this.” Email me with an expression of your interest (even if you have done so already, please do so again: steve.harvey.hd28@gmail.com). Let’s start a dialogue around it, a continuing effort on all of our parts to transform our world for the better, not by raising our fists and expressing our rage, but by raising our consciousness and expressing our humanity.
We are capable of accomplishing so much together (see, e.g., Public Entrepreneurialism and Gaia & Me). But it takes more than a wish and some words. It takes commitment. Let’s not lament our failure to transform this world for the better to the extent that we know we are able to; let’s, instead, rejoice in our commitment to doing so, and act on that commitment with a renewed sense of determination and indomitability.
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(This is my most recent post on a thread on a Denver Post comment board, my participation beginning here: http://neighbors.denverpost.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=17865742&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=quote%3Dsteve+harvey&start=100. See Godwin’s Law Notwithstanding for the essay to which I am referring)windbourne wrote:Do you feel that he should apologize for locking up rapists as well? Perhaps murderers, or bank robbers as well?I already made a distinction between crimes of predation, and “crimes” that are an artifact of trying to legislate human migration. Border control is one thing; creating a permanent underclass within our borders by ignoring the reality of how our society forms itself is another.
windbourne wrote:Or he should apologize to those that have had their lives destroyed by the drugs that gangs from Latin America bring in?
And there we have it: Guilt by membership in a race or ethnicity. Since some Latin Americans join gangs and smuggle drugs, all Latin Americans share in the guilt, and are to be treated accordingly. I’m sure that you apply the same logic to whatever group you belong to, and consider yourself guilty of every crime any member of your own ethnicity or race ever committed, and thus believe that you should be treated accordingly as well. You have chosen to illustrate for us the dimension of the similarity that I did not emphasize, between the two historical contexts I compared in my essay.
If you respond by falling back on the illegality of their presence, then please explain what the relevance of the mention of the criminal activities of other Latin Americans has.
windbourne wrote:NONE of these illegals are suppose to be here. Many of them are DESTROYING American lives and livelihood. PURPOSELY.
Add in a hefty dose of hyperbole and paranoia, and the similarities become even more striking, almost down to the language used. You have a dehumanizing label that you apply (“these illegals”) which reduces human beings merely migrating toward opportunity to some subhuman status that you can then dismiss and revile. You can’t see it; you won’t see it. But others can and will, and America will wake up from the nightmare it is drifting toward. One of the tensions of human existence is the degree that we, as individuals and as socieities, yield to the basal ganglia of the human brain (“the reptilian brain”), rather than striving to be rational and compassionate human beings. That tension, and which of those two poles is dominant in what is being expressed on this thread, is clearly in evidence.
windbourne wrote:At what point will you show compassion for your fellow citizens that these illegals are harming??
What harm is produced is an artifact of pushing people into the shadows, and forcing them to find ways of surviving there. My compassion is for all, as the real rather than imaginary or manufactured need arises.
While I am writing for those lurkers who are not so completely lost to their hatreds and their bigotries, who recognize that we can be more or less cruel as individuals and as societies, and more or less reasonable, I also suspect that many of you who are most outraged by my posts are so outraged in part because you know, just beneath the surface of your awareness, that there is at least a grain of truth in what I am saying; that there is a disconcerting similarity between the attitudes expressed here toward our own undocumented population living among us and the infamous attitudes of Nazi Germans toward German Jews in the prelude to the Holocaust; that there is something unpleasantly familiar about the suggestion that these Latin American immigrants are somehow contaminating our otherwise pure society with the evils imputed to them as a race (as happend to the waves of Chinese, Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants before them, many of whom also came here without documentation); that there is something cruel and ugly about mocking the suffering of others you’ve managed to dehumanize (“waaahhhh, waaahhhh”).
I have no ill-will toward anyone here, though I do have a feeling of disgust at what is being expressed and demonstrated. But I am a hopeful person; I remember an interview of a woman several decades ago, who had been a teenager at the time the Little Rock Nine had been escorted into their new school, a cluster of Black students accompanied by National Guard troops surrounded by whites whose faces were contorted in hatred and rage. She was in the photo as a teenager, a white girl whose face was more contorted than all the others. And she said in this interview, in all sincerity, that she now knew that she had been wrong, just plain wrong. I have more respect for her, and for people like her, than for those who never had to grapple with those particular inner-demons, for she demonstrated the wisdom and courage of someone who could triumph over her own hatred.
We can and should discuss our immigration policies, and consider the balance of interests involved. We can and should weigh our real interests (not those that are based on arbitrary beliefs mobilized in service to blind bigotries, but rather those based on considering all analyses applied to all reliable data) against our commitment to humanity, and decide how to balance the two. But we do not have to contaminate that with hatred and indifference to the longings and strivings of other human beings; we don’t have to dehumanize those we decide to exclude or even remove.
Or, perhaps, that’s precisely the point: If we don’t dehumanize them, then we have to own our choices, and take moral responsibility for how we treat those seen in the light of what they truly are rather than what we need them to be to avoid any qualms about our own brutalities.
In the end, it doesn’t matter what you think of me, or even what your opinion is about the policies under discussion. What matters is that each and every one of us strives to avoid the orgies of hatred and irrationality that have played such a prominent role in human history, and that are clearly implicated in the attitudes being expressed by some on this thread. That, at least, would be a step in the right direction.
Though I had intended not to make any new posts until after I take the Bar in late February, the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona raises an issue that truly does require our attention, and every voice of reason and goodwill in this country needs to urge in unison that we attend to it.
The question is not whether this shooting was influenced by the overheated rhetoric of an implicitly violent right-wing movement currently infesting the United States, but rather whether there is a reasonable concern that the violent rhetoric and imagery of that movement, the ten-fold rise in membership in armed militia movements in this country in recent years, the anger and vitriol spewing forth from radios and social media accounts and one television broadcast network in particular, contribute to an environment conducive to violence and not conducive to civil discourse and rational self-governance. The answer is, clearly, “yes,” and an incident like this one, regardless of what the impetus for it turns out to have been, serves as a wake-up call for all of us.
One thing needs to be made clear about this incident and this conversation: It makes absolutely no difference what the explanation turns out to be for Loughner’s attack. The fact remains that we are a violent society suffering the disease of a (thus far mostly implicitly) violent political movement, and the probable result is an increase in incidents such as this one (as indeed is already in evidence, even independently of this incident). We are a society in which reason and goodwill have been sacrificed to blind fanaticisms, a society in the throes of an angry mania.
It is natural that when a member of the group that those infected with this cognitive virus call every pejorative imaginable gets shot in an act of predictable and predicted violence, the inference will be that it was probably a direct symptom of that implicitly violent political movement. Whether it was or wasn’t doesn’t matter; the probability remains intact. It’s the same as the original assumption that the Oklahoma federal building bombing was committed by Middle Eastern terrorists; the fact that it wasn’t didn’t mean that the danger of attack from Middle Eastern terrorists wasn’t real (and that recognition of that danger led many to make an inference that turned out to be mistaken in the particular, but correct in general). Similarly, in this case, if it turns out that the most probable interpretation is incorrect, that doesn’t change the fact that it was the most probable interpretation, and that the danger and general dysfunctionality it recognizes still exists.
There is nothing wrong with people feeling and arguing passionately in service to their beliefs about what best serves the public interest. We can all hope that those beliefs will be as informed as possible, as reasonable as possible, as committed to humanity as possible, but whether or not that is always the case, we live in a country that thrives by having a robust marketplace of ideas, and all ideas are fair game. Vigorous debate on matters of public interest and public policy is good and proper; let it ensue. But we must strive to remember that we are all entitled to be participants in that debate, that those who disagree with us are not our enemies just for disagreeing with us, that none of us has a monopoly on the one infallible truth, and that usually others with whom we disagree have something of value embedded somewhere in their perspective. We need to strive to be less certain, and more open to the possibility that we each may be wrong about some things, and that others with whom we disagree may be right. We need to be civil.
But this incident is relevant beyond how we engage in public discourse and debate. It is relevant to the substance of the ideas held and expressed in that debate as well. The Tea Party is not just about the rhetoric and imagery of violence, it is also about an attitude of social disintegration, of extreme individualism, of indifference to the welfare of others, to a dismissal of a sense of mutual responsibility to one another. And, in that way, it contributes not just to violence in service to a political ideology, but is a political ideology in service to violence.
We are interdependent, and our actions have consequences that ripple outward, beyond their immediate vicinity. When our words or actions implicitly or explicitly condone violence, they contribute to the violence that actually occurs. When they try to reinforce mutual goodwill, or reason, or generosity, they contribute to the mutual goodwill, reason, and generosity in the world. There are reverberations, feedback loops, in human systems, amplifying our words and deeds in how they affect others. No one is all of the sudden, after the fact, noticing the potential for inciting violence that this violent imagery and rhetoric carries with it; many have been very aware of it for quite some time. When the predictable and predicted consequences of an attitude and mode of behavior actually result, it makes perfect sense to say, there you go, this is what we’ve been talking about.
In The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions and The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, I described how memes spread through the social institutional landscape, defining and redefining it constantly, and how our own words and actions contribute to that process. This is an example of how that works: People churn the waters with certain ideas and attitudes, and our world is transformed by the cumulative and sometimes mutually reinforcing effects.
Blaming Sarah Palin for this is a distraction, and beside the point. I have no way of knowing and no reason to suspect that Palin’s rhetoric itself, directly and sufficiently, inspired the actions of the shooter. But I do have reason to know that she contributed to an atmosphere conducive to those actions, whether they were relevant in this instance or not. And that is on her; that is her culpability, by contributing to the creation of a hateful and violent cultural context. More importantly, it is the responsibility of all who have participated in that dynamic to step back, take a breath, and recognize that it’s not what we want to be as a people.
We all have a responsibility for doing what we can to increase the roles of reason and goodwill in our world, and decrease the roles of anger, hatred, and irrationality. We all slip up (at least I do), but underneath all of the politics and rallies and fighting for certain policies, what I hope we’re all really struggling for is a kinder, gentler, and wiser world. Few things are more frustrating than the extent to which humanity inflicts suffering on itself. And every unkind word, every attempt to put someone else down, is a drop in the ocean of anger that crests, as it did today in Arizona, in acts of violence. Let’s all strive to do better.
(See A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill and The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified for specific ideas about how to do better.)
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One of the defects of our political process is the degree to which it brutalizes us, and we brutalize it. Certainly, as, in essence, pacified civil war, whenever and wherever we succeed in substituting the verbal and ideological brutalities of politics for the physical violence of warfare we have taken an enormous step forward. But wherever we settle for the verbal and ideological brutalities of politics rather than reach further in our ongoing struggle to replace brutality with civility and irrationality with reason, we have cause for shame rather than pride.
Many people seem to believe that being a candidate is something that one does only for their own benefit, and, of course, one’s own benefit is generally a consideration, on some level or in some manner. But more often than not, wrapped up into what one perceives to serve their own interests is their commitment to certain ideals, or goals, that serve some public with which they identify (hopefully, but not always, the public as a whole). Politics is a human enterprise, a human endeavor, not fundamentally different from those enterprises and endeavors with which we all are familiar in our own lives: We aspire, we care, we want, we try, we succeed, and we fail.
Sometimes, we do so in competition with one another. If I start a business that sells widgets, then I am in competition with other businesses that also sell widgets. It is not unusual (though neither is it universal or inevitable) to feel some animosity toward my competitors, since their success comes at my expense, and mine at theirs. But we are both just striving to succeed in our chosen endeavors, and the animosity, unless for other reasons as well, is an unnecessary addition of brutality to a shared existence that is already far too brutal.
In politics, more is at stake. We are competing over how we will define ourselves, over who and what we are, over how we will organize our shared existence. And the emotions of those most involved run very high indeed. Some anger may be inevitable, may even be useful, but when some feel glee not only over the victory of their vision for our state and nation, but also over the loss and suffering of others, they contribute to what we should be trying to transcend rather than what we should be trying to augment.
To be sure, sometimes the animosities aren’t ideological, but personal. During my years posting on Colorado Pols, for instance, a few bloggers there decided that my form of argumentation made me a despicable person, and sought every opportunity to shoot any irrelevant barbs within their reach. On three occasions (twice for having knowingly and intentionally posted false factual assertions about me, and once for threatening me both physically and to virtually stalk me) I mentioned that there are legal limits to how they can express their hatred. Now, “Ralphie” (with the help of the one who both threatened me physically, and promised to stalk me on Pols, who recently posted a highly revisionist reference to that encounter) wants to turn that into yet one more vehicle for his relentless vendetta.
In the wake of the election, I’ve noticed them coming out of the woodwork on Colorado Pols, creating the same group-think reality, piling on as a form of entertainment (which helped inspire the following two posts: The Battle of Good v. Evil, Within & Without, The Battle of Good v. Evil, Part 2). Initially, I felt a far more muted annoyance than usual, the degree of pettiness appearing to me too obvious to be effective. But, to my dismay, others, including some who have been friends, helped reinforce rather than confront the meme, some casually and carelessly.
It is, in part, the expression of a strange cultural attitude, one which, on the one hand, cheers malice, and, on the other, dehuamanizes certain categories of people, including “intellectuals” and “candidates,” two categories to which I have belonged, or have been perceived to belong. That combination of approved malice against approved targets creates ideal designated scapegoats, against whom it is not only acceptable but customary to vent all pent-up aggressions, and to do so as rudely and crudely as you like.
The anger, and sense that there is a specially exempt political zone in which it is acceptable to express it with as much hostility, as little restraint, and as much indifference to what we consider to be basic decency in almost all other realms of life, extends beyond our attitude toward politicians and intellectuals (see The Politics of Anger). But a special sphere of heightened disinhibition is reserved for them, both, I think, justified by some perception that both are attempts to put oneself above others, and so inviting of being taken down a peg.
How strange and contemptuous that we should reserve our most vicious expressions of belligerence for those who have chosen to work on behalf of the public interest in these two ways, either by trying to understand or directly affect our social institutional landscape with the desire to improve it. And how dysfunctional that we should remain so committed to reducing our public debate over how to govern ourselves to a frothing-at-the-mouth hate-fest, one which not only drowns out reason, but seems most hostile to it.
The irony is that “Ralphie” and “MOTR” and many others like them do not direct their rage particularly at their ideological opposites, but rather at anyone who “contaminates” politics by treating it as something more than a fairly shallow exchange of arbitrary opinions. They perceive analysis as hostility and hostility as reason, in one of many complete inversions of reality particular to political discourse.
At the Jefferson County Democratic Party’s election night vigil at the Lakewood Holiday Inn at Hamden and Wadsworth, I sat with fellow candidates and supporters, in what was a very emotional night for us all. We rejoiced at our party’s victories, and mourned our party’s losses. We felt for our friends in office who were not re-elected, who we knew had given so much, with such a sincere desire to serve others, and who at times lost to opponents who, to our minds, represented the insanity of politics. Those of us who knew we could not win joked about the inevitable, and, if anything, found some joy and comfort in watching the culmination of our small slice of the shared story of this election cycle, one which we agreed was really a pleasure to have lived.
I will continue to argue passionately for the policies and perspectives that I believe best serve our long-term collective interests. And I will continue to seek out all people, of all perspectives, who are willing to engage in an ongoing discussion, in a context of mutual goodwill, as fellow human beings trying to do the best we can, regardless of what policies they believe would best serve the public interest. If we occasionally get angry with one another, let’s not enshrine our anger as the defining quality of our relationships. If we disagree, let’s not turn disagreement into justification for implacable hostility. If an olive-branch is offered, take it. If one might be taken, offer it.
If we err in our treatment of others, let’s use it as a reminder to redouble our efforts to do better. If others err, let’s give them every opportunity to find their way back to civility, and accommodate and encourage their efforts to do so. There is never any justification for viciousness and malice. There is never any need to condemn or mistreat any individual for any sincere belief about what best serves the public interest, but there is neither any need to insulate those beliefs from critical scrutiny and blunt challenges. We need to put everything we have on the table, set aside our animosities, strive to cultivate mutual goodwill, and work together as reasonable members of a single society working together to do the best we can.
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Some recent on-line interactions, and many that came before, have brought home the importance of addressing the role that anger plays in political discourse. There are many dimensions to the problem (and I do see it as a problem), involving both empathy and narcissism, fragile egos and legitimate concerns.
First, a disclaimer: I do not consider myself either immune to or innocent of the expression of anger in political discourse. This is not one of those political divides with some people on one side and some on the other, but rather one in which aspects of each of us can be found on either side of the divide, with some individuals more to one side than the other.
This is not a problem that belongs exclusively to one ideological camp or another: Within the last week, I’ve been angrily lambasted by two ideologues, one on the left and one on the right, cascades of enraged pejoratives issuing forth from each, each upset with me for disputing their respective highly combative certainties. The problem, as I repeatedly tried to tell them both, isn’t the ideology, but the attitude. It may be that the attitude correlates more strongly with one ideology or another, but that is not the relevant point; rather, the attitude, wherever it occurs, is toxic, and far more of an obstruction to progress than the substance of any particular ideology.
Still, there are legitimate questions involved: Is anger ever useful? Does it ever serve an indispensible political or social function, motivating people who would otherwise be unable to motivate themselves, or disincentivizing behaviors that are on the wrong side of such reactions? If so, to what extent and under what circumstances? Is anger ever the best possible reaction? Or is it sometimes the best attainable reaction, even if not the best imaginable? Or is it simply dysfunctional, in all circumstances?
A moderate, reasonable poster on a Facebook thread where the angry left-wing ideologue tried to convince Democrats not to vote for Democratic candidates in protest of their not being pure enough for him, gently praised his anger, while opposing his call to inaction. She viewed his anger as a productive, motivating force, putting the feet of the powerful to the fire. This may be the case sometimes, but I think it is grossly exaggerated, and more often an excuse for engaging in something for the most part dysfunctional.
First, we exaggerate the degree to which our public officials are “the other,” serving their own interests at our expense. While there is certainly some of that, I think it is far more often the case that our public officials are sincerely dedicated to some view of what produces the greatest public good, and are passionately working in service to that agenda. More often than not, public service involves accepting a salary well below one’s earning potential (though there are arguably much larger long-term financial benefits), and certainly far more public scrutiny and constraint of personal liberty and personal space than adheres to work in the private sector, or in lower-profile positions. Some of this is off-set by the honor involved, by the prestige conferred, but being an elected official is not an unambiguous boon for those who successfully pursue that path.
Second, the ideological certainties that spark inter- or intra-partisan public anger with elected officials, on average, are wrong more often than they are right (I am not including anger over alleged ethical breaches, which is not the issue here). If we assume, generously, that in interpartisan disputes, one side is on balance wrong and one side is on balance right in any given instance (it may often be the case that both sides are on balance wrong, though it is almost impossible for both sides to be on balance right), then the split between false certainties and justified outrage would be about 50-50. But the intraparty ideological disputes reduce the portion of those who are “right” into some balance of those who are right and those who are wrong once again, leaving significantly more than 50% of the individual instances of angry certainty in the wrong on the substance of the matter (even disregarding the disutility of the form, in those instances in which individuals are in the right on the substance of the matter).
So, if we all employ righteous anger on behalf of those positions we are each absolutely certain are the right positions to advocate, more righteous anger, on average, is being deployed on behalf of positions erroneously held than on behalf of well-founded ones. The Czech author Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, captured both this, and the more general dysfunctionality of anger even when right, by putting in the mouth of his main character, observing an angry protest in Paris, “Don’t they understand that the raised fists are the problem?”
I’ve argued in another post (The Foundational Progressive Agenda: http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=317) that humility is the necessary cure for this defect in our discourse: We have to each strive to recognize, especially in matters that are contested by large segments of our society, that, in any given instance, what we are certain is true may not be, and that by each admitting that, we open up greater opportunities to approach, together, understandings that are closer to the truth.
The perennial counterargument to this, of course, is “but they’re not willing to do this, so by doing so unilaterally, we only weaken ourselves.” I don’t believe that this is accurate (of course, I may be wrong! :)); I believe that those who argue with the most reason, goodwill, and humility are, in the long-run, the most attractive to the persuadable majority, and provide the best and most useful contrast to the unmovable ideological zealots who have almost always dominated public discourse.
What anger does is to divide and entrench us, to divert more of our energies to non-productive conflict and away from productive efforts to serve human needs. The inevitable conflict over how best to govern ourselves, in general and particular, serves us best when it is least rancorous, and most rational. The commitment to striving to be reasonable, humble people of goodwill is the cornerstone of such constructive public discourse. Anger, both within and without, is our common enemy.
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