First, a preface: The title phrase was said to me in a recent exchange on another blog, in the typical context of denying that an obviously antagonistic comment couched as a joke was in fact antagonistic. I don’t want to exaggerate it, or imply that I’m holding a grudge: The individual in question may be a very nice and likeable person, all in all. But the phrase has always struck me as being disingenuous, and disingenuous in an instructive way, so I decided to write a post about it.
I’ve come to the conclusion that almost anytime anyone says “it was just a joke,” they’re wrong. The purpose of saying it is to discredit someone who was offended by the “joke,” and whether taking offense was justified or not, the fact that the statement giving offense was couched as a joke tells us nothing. There are many kinds of jokes that few would deny are offensive: racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes, to name a few. So there is nothing about something being a joke which implies that it can’t be offensive.
There are many things the jokester can say that are perfectly legitimate (if not always perfectly kind), such as “I really didn’t mean to offend you,” or “I think you misinterpeted what I’m saying,” or “at least I was trying to insult you in an entertaining way,” or “get used to being the butt of my jokes.” But “it was just a joke” means “I won’t even acknowledge your right to be offended,” and is at least as often used to try to compound an essentially intentional offense as to express sincere and innocent surprise that anyone could have been offended.
It’s the fact that it’s such a common phrase, so normal, so ubiquitous, and so representative of a prevailing attitude, that I find striking. We don’t engage in discourse so much as we engage in verbal and emotional warfare. We don’t seek to learn together, to edify one another, to challenge one another and grow in response to it, so much as we try to smite our enemies and fortify our positions. The title phrase is a verbal military maneuver, a way of check-mating an opponent, saying, “I not only just discredited you in an insulting manner disguised as humor, but if you try to parry, the fact that you do so is the basis for further insult and delegitimation.”
The speaker may win the battle by doing so, but we all lose the war, because “the good fight” is against mutual antagonism, and against ideological entrenchment. Next time someone says “it was just a joke,” tell them the joke’s on them.
(I have also noticed a slightly different use of the phrase, or some variation of it: To insulate a snide or ideological remark not directed at anyone in particular from criticism. So, one FB commenter who voiced appreciation for a post saying we should leave warning labels off dangerous items in order to weed out the “stupid” people by saying that it would be “natural selection” at work, responded to my comment that such uses of the concept of natural selection have long been reviled by declaiming, “it was said in jest…good grief.” In other words, as long as it was said in jest, no matter how much also in earnest, it is insulated from any criticism on the basis of the substance of what has been said. I’ve discussed other methods of insulating one’s ideological declarations from criticism in other essays as well: e.g., Un-Jamming the Signal and Scholarship v. Ideology.)
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I admit it: I lose my sense of humor in the heat of political discourse, all the time. Ironically, in most other spheres of life, I’m known for being a bit of a cut-up. If you ask my seven-year-old daughter to describe her dad with one word, she’d probably say “funny” (of course, seven-year-olds are “an easy room”). But political discourse makes me mad, and sad, and often sick-to-my-stomach.
On SquareState, a progressive blog dominated by blind ideologues I briefly (and wishfully) tried to promote as an alternative to the unfortunately currently alternativeless Colorado Pols (unfortunately, because Jason Bain, the driving force behind Pols, and probably his anonymous partners as well, are arrogant pricks), I was savaged for cross-posting “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: Why Our Tea Party Future Will Be The Left’s Fault” by people on the left who, faithful mirror images of their counterparts on the right, believe that compromise is evil, extremism is good, and demanding from their party what would ensure their party’s long-term demise is their civic duty; my candidacy, hair-cut, and preference in pizza toppings all brought in as arguments to prove why I am both wrong and evil (okay, only my candidacy, but the other two might as well have been for all the relevance of some of the responses). To my immense discredit, I don’t just disregard, or laugh off, these absurd Glenn-Becks-of-the-left, but instead engage them, respond to their nonsense, and, by doing so, let them drag me down into the gutter along with them.
But the truth is, despite all that is at stake, and the consequential significance of current political and ideological trends, there’s no denying that a nation in which one of the most reported on U.S. senatorial candidates starts a campaign ad with “I am not a witch,” and in which the Tea Party Nation in early October cited Campbell’s new halal soups as proof that Shari’a law is infiltrating the United States, is a knee-slappingly funny nation…, though tragically so.
The November 1 issue of Time Magazine includes an excellent article on Jon Stewart and Stephen Cobert, two Comedy Central political satirists who compete with, and highlight, the hilarious reality of modern American political discourse. Cobert, for instance, took Tea Party Nation’s absurdity to the next step, suggesting (in character) that it’s no coincidence that bananas are crescent shaped. Stewart’s “cruelly accurate” parodies of Glenn Beck are hysterical, because they’re true (http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-18-2010/conservative-libertarian).
The article discusses the difficult line Stewart and Cobert tread between comedy and commentary, remaining funny while remaining incisive and relevant. The article also discusses the competition these satirists face from current American political reality, the latter often being more absurd than anything they can invent. Stewart can often just play an authentic newsclip and make a face to receive raucus laughter in response, the joke having already been made for him.
The combination of humor and sincerity, of recognizing absurdity and shining a spotlight on it, so that we can, hopefully, laugh our way to sanity and moderation, may be the most significant contribution to raising the quality of American public discourse that exists today. Cobert’s reference to “truthiness,” the belief that what one feels in their gut is more important than objective reality, draws attention to a real, and tragic, absurdity dominating a broad swath of public discourse. It isn’t just humor; it’s an attempt to interject profound rationality into a profoundly irrational national dialogue.
Let’s all take a deep breath, laugh at ourselves, and scrub the humor of the tragedy, recommitting to being reasonable, and light-hearted, people of goodwill, doing the best we can. We don’t need to privilege the paranoid ravings of a Glenn Beck (or his blogosphere counterparts on the left), or the incredible ingnorance of a Christine O’Donnell. We just need to laugh at ourselves, and then build on the humility that that engenders.
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Religious critics of American public education who, somewhat correctly, observe that the attempt to remove all religious preference from school curricula results in a de facto religious preference defined by that removal (referred to as “secular humanism”) have identified what may be a broader phenomenon: Attempts to preserve some rigid neutrality result in the production of a residual non-neutral position.
The (in my opinion fortuitous) removal from school curricula of all overtly religious beliefs leaves behind a world-view that privileges critical thinking over faith, scientific methodology over indoctrination, and (perhaps less fortuitously) detached and reductionist curiosity over ecstatic and holistic awe. By removing religion from the schools, we have distilled a residual religion of non-religion. There is no neutral position; pursuit of it produces a different perspective, unlike all of those avoided, but not without a substantive integrity of its own. And by making that residual perspective the one that forms the foundation of American education, one of our major socializing institutions does indeed (again, I think overall fortuitously) propagate it.
The same phenomenon takes place in our news media, though instead of religious neutrality, the media try to embrace political neutrality. But since there is no such thing as “neutrality,” what is really embraced, and propagated, is a residual perspective, one which reinforces prevalent national and cultural ideologies (some of which are demonstrably inaccurate or logically flawed). So, though the bulk of the range of political ideological views in America falls, as a whole, a bit to one side of the range of political ideological views in the world, the “neutral” American media preferences the American spectrum, since it is serving an American audience. This is the same kind of “neutrality” found in the media of countries which have, as a whole, biases we find offensive, biases which are reflected in their national media in the same way that American biases are reflected in ours.
I once attended a presentation about media neutrality by the foreign affairs editor of a major East Coast newspaper (I don’t remember which one now). I asked, in response to something she said, whether it’s fair to say that she tries to piss off both ideological extremes about equally. She laughed, and replied that that’s a pretty good synopsis. Then I asked if that doesn’t mean that, by trying to report from the precise “American ideological mid-point” she is not reinforcing nationwide biases. She told me that that was a stupid question (her precise words), because “that’s just not the way stories are written or selected.” Then, later in her presentation, apparently having forgotten our exchange, she said, “of course, we are Americans, and we favor the American perspective in our reporting.” Fine, but, guess what? That’s a bias.
The issue comes to mind today because a story by RealClearPolitics expands the superficially reasonable theme that blaming voters is a sign of weakness, and inherently wrong (http://news.yahoo.com/s/realclearpolitics/democrats_it039s_not_me_it039s_you). But by equating all criticisms of voters, by all candidates and public servants of all stripes at all times, the author reinforces the false neutrality that there are not better and worse informed ideologies, that there are not better and worse informed popular movements, that there are not more and less brutal or dysfunctional or self-destructive currents that flow through a society. By that logic of false neutrality, the Nazi movement in 1930’s Germany was the moral equivalent of the Civil Rights Movement in 1960’s America, since all social movements, all popular ideologies, are moral and rational equals.
This Bias of Neutrality reinforces the popular belief that politics is, and should be, the competition of arbitrary opinions, since no opinion is better informed or more useful or more accurate or more kind or more productive than any other. And by reinforcing this already far too widespread belief, those who adhere to the most dysfunctional, or brutal, ideologies, are less incentivized to engage in self-criticism, to examine their beliefs, to question whether they are indeed the most accurate or responsible or conducive to the public interest of all possible beliefs.
We need a national media that selects as its non-neutral neutral position, like that embraced by public education, something that is disciplined by evidence and reason, rather than whatever is the mid-point of the spectrum of mostly arbitrary beliefs. That would serve us far better.
The blogosphere is a cacophony of arbitrary assertions, unreliable information, angry retorts, and assumption-laden quick commentaries. Long, thoughtful explorations of issues and aspects of our lives are resented on many sites, high volume being instantly equated with low density, and in-depth analysis conflated with unnecessary verbosity. There are reasons for this: The lack of quality control and editorial assistance involved in instantly self-published compositions leadto a lack of confidence on the part of others that investing a large amount of time is worth the effort. And the world has become a more sound-bite driven place, relying more on quick hits of factoids and headlines than insightful discussion of underlying dynamics and implications. The rapid, massive flow of information is a deluge in which no one can swim, and those who try are left grabbing fractured pieces rather than comprehensive narratives.
But lengthy composition does not imply poor quality. Those of us who still read books, read books that are hundreds of pages long, without generally complaining that the author failed to make his or her point in less than 200 words. Even the magazine articles we read are generally of a length that would be greeted with derision in the blogosphere. But those who self-publish are not necessarily writing works of inferior quality, and thoughtful essays cannot be reduced to soundbites without destroying their value entirely.
I started this blog (just over seven weeks ago, as I write) in order to create a more thoughtful haven on the internet, a place where we do something more useful than post links and quick retorts and escalating flame wars. I wanted to create a confluence of thoughts and ideas, a place where people can teach and learn from one another, where we can all lift one another up by using this technology of collective consciousness in a more deeply nourishing way.
But though a fair number of people have been stopping by on a daily basis to read my posts, very few have posted anything of their own. I can’t make this clearing house of ideas and insights and ponderings and contemplations work all on my own; I need the help of others who are also thinking about the world in which we live. Please, post your essays here, on any topic of interest to you, and send the link to this page to everyone you know who might wish to do the same. Let’s create a real confluence of thought, and imagination, and aspiration, right here, and, hopefully, gradually, flowing together with all other such efforts wherever they may be, everywhere.
I look forward to reading your thoughts about the world in which we live, and what we can do to improve the quality of our lives.
An article in the business section of today’s Denver Post titled “Colorado’s Economic Recovery Lags Behind Rest of the Nation” (http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_16128924), using only unemployment numbers as its measure of economic recovery, provided only the following comparison between Colorado and national unemployment rates:
Nationally, the seasonally adjusted jobless rate was 9.6 percent in August, up from 9.5 percent in June 2009. In Colorado, it was 8 percent in July, down from 8.6 percent in June 2009.Huh? The only titles that can be generated by that statistic are “Colorado’s recovery remains ahead of the rest of the nation,” or “Colorado, though better off than the rest of the nation, still mired in high unemployment.” So, does this bizarre mismatch between the article’s title (and narrative position) and what it’s only statistical comparison actually indicates a product of the Post’s conservative agenda (exploiting the reality-inverting meme that our economic woes are the Democrats’ fault), or just incredibly sloppy journalism? Who knows.
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In Sunday’s edition, The Denver Post published an excerpt from Gary Hart’s new book, “The Thunder and the Sunshine: Four Decades in a Burnished Life” (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16096254). In it, Senator Hart describes his participation on the Church Committee, established to investigate the excesses of U.S. intelligence agencies. While discussing how to pry information from these agencies, Senator Hart suggested that maybe they should start by asking the intelligence agencies for the files they had on each of the members of the committee. The silent reaction was broken when Barry Goldwater said, “I don’t want to know what they’ve got on me.”
J.Edgar Hoover’s files on John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. are well-known, and the fact that he used such or similar information, on various occasions, to exercise power over the people to whom it pertained is rarely doubted. Governments, and corporations, employ spies to acquire information about one another, to steel secrets, to plant lies, and, in general, to obtain and manufacture information.
On scales large and small, possession of sensitive information that someone or someones don’t want revealed imparts power over those that have it, and can use it to blackmail those who don’t want it published. On scales large and small, successfully imparting to others a belief, an artifact of knowledge true or false, is the fundamental exercise of political power. Possessing and controlling, to some limited degree, the flow of accurate knowledge in order to manipulate the actions of individuals, and supplementing it by orchestrating or encouraging the flow of inaccurate information in order to manipulate the perceptions of others, is the essence of political power.
By various means, and through various agencies (both public and private), nations, corporations, and other organizations invest large sums of money in research and development, in the production of scientific and technical information, in order to produce goods more efficiently and effectively, or to produce goods not yet offered, or to prevail in military contests, or to conquer diseases, or to achieve some other goal never before achieved (and thus extend human liberty into new domains never before available to it). Knowledge both improves a social entity’s ability to compete and prevail, and expands the range of actions or feats that are possible.
But, ironically, part of the product of this process is expertise in the deception of others. The politics of timed and honed leaks, of intentional gaffs, of the selective release of accurate information supplemented by well-placed falsehood, is part art and part science, increasingly sophisticated and effective. Even so, it is embedded in more complex and organic human processes, the conflicting agendas of various actors with various talents, the uncontrollable forces of profit-seeking and self-aggrandizing propaganda. The real political struggle is played out on the field created by this chaos, by the various professional manipulators of information attempting to impose their preferred order upon it.
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In Sunday’s Denver Post, an editorial asked the title question “Political Theater or Poor Policy?” of President Obama’s proposed new transportation-sector stimulus spending (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16036527). While admitting that Keynesian economists would answer that the proposed spending is too little rather than too much (implying that even Keynesians would have to oppose it on that basis), the author(s) sagely concluded that accruing more debt in order to invest in infrastructure and pump some capital into the economy is absolutely wrong. But there is no transparency of the reasoning behind this conclusion; we are left to assume that the wise editorial staff simply knows.
How, exactly, did the Denver post editorial staff arrive at a cost-benefit conclusion without having done any cost-benefit analysis? How, exactly, did the Denver Post editorial staff arrive at this economic conclusion without having done any economic analysis? This is what we don’t need more of, and particularly not from our information leaders.
It may be the case, or it may not, that taking on more debt now to invest in infrastructure and stimulate the economy costs more than it’s worth. It may be the case that it’s worth more than it costs. Professional economists are lined up on opposite sides of the issue, clustered around a much tighter and better informed battle-line than those whose wisdom is more arbitrary and less disciplined.
Wouldn’t it behoove us all if our last remaining major metropolitan newspaper in Denver were also among those clustered around the much tigher and better informed battle-line of economic literacy, rather than yodelling in the ideological echo chamber of arbitrary opinion?
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