Category Archives: Random Blogging

Engage!

There’s no dearth of discussion about the effect of social media on culture and politics. Facebook and Twitter, especially, are credited (if that’s the word) with facilitating everything from the Arab Spring to the surprise victory of Glenda Ritz here in Indiana. Political observers tell us that sophisticated use of social media was a major factor in Obama’s successful GOTV effort, and that bungled use of that same media hampered that of the Romney campaign.

During a discussion about the Media and Policy class we’ve been team teaching this semester, John Mutz wondered aloud whether these forms of communication might be destabilizing government, making it much more difficult to engage in the sort of negotiation and deliberation that democratic theory prizes.  I think he’s right, and I think this is an unfortunate and under-appreciated consequence of our current, frenetic media environment.

It’s not just the speed with which information, innuendo, rumor and half-backed conspiracy theories circle the globe. It’s the partial nature of that information.

The goal of democratic societies is informed participation. Not just voting, not just agitating for this or that change, but thoughtful engagement in self-government. Today’s communication technologies facilitate immediate engagement: Sign the petition to XYZ, telling them to vote for ABC! Join the protest against so-and-so! Don’t let ‘them’ change this program–it’s all that protects grandmas and kittens! We are given tools with which to send a message, but all too often, the message is not based upon a full explanation of the issues involved.

I know there have been several instances where I’ve gotten such a “call to action” that initially seemed appropriate to me, but upon further research into the policies involved, turned out to be promoting a result that was neither practical nor possible. (The federal budget really isn’t like our household budgets–it’s a lot more complicated. Sometimes, well-intentioned programs that are meant to help one population or another have negative unintended consequences that really do need to be addressed. It’s usually more complicated than that email blast would suggest.)

Despite their considerable merits, Facebook and Twitter and all the other methods of rapid communication at our disposal too often get us to fire before we aim.

It’s important to be engaged. It’s important to communicate quickly with our elected representatives when we think they are about to act in ways that will damage important institutions, or harm vulnerable constituencies. Social media allows involved citizens to mobilize others, and to have a much louder and more effective voice than was previously possible. The downside is that the folks most likely to be involved are the partisans, both left and right, who tend to be more ideological than informed.

It’s so easy to click that link and sign your name. Who has time to read up on the arguments, pro and con?

As Captain Picard might say, “Engage!”

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A Meditation on Snark

A regular reader of this blog posted a reasonable–albeit uncomfortable–question the other day. How can someone (me) who regularly inveighs against incivility and ad hominem argumentation routinely “disparage” (his word) others? Is there not an inconsistency–even hypocrisy–there?

Fair question. And if I’m honest, I do go over the line–a line I set–every so often. Sometimes, the urge to engage in snarky characterizations is just too tempting.

The question made me think about what’s fair and what isn’t. Where is “the line”? Certainly, criticism itself is not only inescapable, but often appropriate–as I tell my classes at the start of each semester, reasoned argumentation is expected. Debate and deliberation is a tool that–properly deployed–moves us toward truth.

So how do we distinguish “reasoned argumentation” from the sort of incivility that moves us not toward truth, but further into our warring factions?

I think the first rule is that criticism must be grounded in specifics. There is a difference between saying “this person/these people are wrong because” and simple name-calling. It is perfectly acceptable, in my view, to say “I think Obama has been a lousy leader because he didn’t accomplish XYZ.” I may disagree with you about the desirability of XYZ, or whether Obama was responsible for its failure, but I understand the grounds of your disagreement. It is not acceptable–again, in my opinion–to say “I hate Obama because he’s a socialist/Muslim/gangster.” Not only are these accusations demonstrably untrue, they give those who disagree no clue to what the speaker actually dislikes about the President. They encourage listeners to draw our own conclusions, and those conclusions are likely to be unkind.

Similarly, if criticisms of particular groups are based upon behaviors–living in the suburbs, voting for particular candidates, whatever–they may be intemperate, or may be over-generalizations, but they are specific enough to be countered with logical or factual objections. When groups are disparaged because of their identity–gay, Christian, African-American, etc.–there’s not much room for discussion or nuance.

Readers may be able to flesh out these “rules of the road,” but that’s my first effort. What do you all think?

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“Jane, You Ignorant Slut” and Other Constructive Feedback

Many years ago, one of the evening news shows included a “point-counterpoint” segment, in which a conservative and liberal would have a brief exchange of views on an issue of the day.  As many of you will recall, Saturday Night Live had great fun with its own parody of the segment; I think Jane Curtin and Dan Akroyd played the debaters. Curtin would make her case, after which Akroyd would launch into his response by saying “Jane, you ignorant slut.” It was funny because we all know people who just can’t seem to distinguish between an ad hominem insult and reasoned argumentation.

Anyone who ventures to express opinions through columns or blogs has to be prepared for less-than-civil responses. Between my years at the ACLU (where one critical letter was “hand delivered”– wrapped around a brick and thrown through the window) and fourteen years as a columnist for the Indianapolis Star, I’ve developed a pretty thick skin. Very few responses still have the ability to surprise me. But I still haven’t figured out why people invest time and energy in unproductive invective, whether directed at me or posted to someone else’s comment page.

I was reminded about those questions again the other day, by an email from someone who really, really didn’t like a recent IBJ column. (My favorite part: “I never read your columns, and this is an example why!”)

Disagreements with my columns or blogs come in two kinds. Every so often, I get a message saying something along the lines of “I disagree with what you say, and here’s why,” or “I think you got your facts wrong; take a look at XYZ source.” Those are great. They begin a dialogue. They aren’t always persuasive, but often are. If I’ve misunderstood a situation, or failed to address a perspective, letting me know about that educates me. I’ve altered blogs more than once to reflect new understandings or correct factual errors. Those writers may embarrass me, but they do me–and my readers–a real service.

Those folks are, unfortunately, rare.

Far more common are the (usually ungrammatical) messages that simply name-call. They write only to let me know that I am a blot on the human landscape. And that raises the question: what do those correspondents think they are accomplishing? Surely they realize that calling someone names, or calling their parentage, religion or intellectual capacity into question is unlikely to change the recipient’s opinions, or persuade other readers of the superiority of their own views.

It’s equally unlikely to elicit a response. (I mean, what sort of response to “you left-wing elitist bitch” is available or appropriate?)

If someone isn’t interested in engaging in genuine conversation, if he (it’s usually a he) cannot or will not ground his criticism in fact or evidence or analysis, cannot point out where the offensive opinion is deficient–why write anything at all? What are such “messages” supposed to accomplish?

As the King of Siam famously said in The King and I, “It’s a puzzlement.”

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Why Cynicism is Growing

I’ve been distressed by the growing cynicism of the students I teach–a cynicism about the motives of those in business and public life that has seemed to grow over the past few years. There have always been a few who sneered that “public service” was an oxymoron, who believed that given the chance, everyone would demonstrate greed and disregard for others, but most students were more charitable in their judgments.

Still, as I detailed in my book “Distrust, American Style,” we’ve seen a lot of corrupt institutional behavior over the past couple of decades. Enron, WorldCon, the various scandals in major-league sports, the Catholic Church’s cover-up to protect pedophile priests, the Bush Administration’s assaults on civil liberties and its dishonest case for war in Iraq–there has been plenty of reason for cynicism and distrust. While I’m sure similar examples have existed throughout our history,  the growth of Facebook and Twitter and blogs has brought news of the misbehavior to many more people than might previously have known what was going on.

Student cynicism began to grow more pronounced around the time we headed into the Great Recession, as the public learned much more about the behaviors and compensation levels of the “banksters.” (Rhymes with gangsters….). The widely publicized emergence of SuperPacs funded by corporations intent upon protecting  favorable tax rates and corporate welfare hasn’t helped.

This morning’s news provides two examples, noteworthy only because they’ve become utterly commonplace.

The first example–Brian Bosma’s appointment of a lobbyist with his law firm as parliamentarian–prompted this editorial language from the Indianapolis Star:

Whetstone is coming back to work for Speaker Brian Bosma as the House parliamentarian, even though he will continue to work with the lobbying firm of Krieg DeVault LLP. Whetstone has pledged not to lobby the legislature during his employment as parliamentarian, a job that pays $12,000 a month through the legislative sesion.

Whetstone says Krieg DeVault holds itself to the highest ethical standards. Even so, there’s a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of one. As parliamentarian, Whetstone will advise the House Speaker on rules challenges and other procedural questions that arise. What happens if he’s asked to weigh in on a challenge that would affect legislation supported by one of his former clients, or by clients of other lobbyists working for Krieg DeVault?

The second was a report that the executives who took Hostess into bankruptcy and blamed that decision on “greedy unions” unwilling to take yet another round of pay cuts even while those executives tripled their own compensation have petitioned the bankruptcy court to approve the payment of their bonuses as part of the court-supervised demise of the business. (There’s a yiddish word for this: chutzpah.)

When the daily news consists of little but reports of self-dealing and ethical obtuseness, of evidence that politicians continue to put special interests above the national interest, how can I fault the students who assume that the whole world works that way?

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A Planet of Their Own Devising

I have a friend who takes perverse delight in “sharing” the American Family Association’s newsletter with me. (He’s one of several people I know whose receipt of that “publication” is for monitoring purposes; sometimes, I wonder what percentage of the AFA audience actually agrees with them and what percentage is composed of gay liberals…but I digress.)

The first “article” was an incoherent rant about the IU Law School students who reviewed the Indiana Code and discovered 614 provisions that would be affected by the pending measure to place a ban on same-sex marriage in the Indiana Constitution. Evidently, the report–which included a list of the provisions–should be disregarded because it wasn’t “peer reviewed” (alert: even articles published in prestigious law reviews are not peer reviewed; such review is an attribute of science and social science journals), because the students are “activists,” and because it doesn’t matter anyway. Or something.

The next article presented what purported to be a quotation from Pravda (no kidding!), explaining that the reason American voters returned Obama to office is that we have become an irremediably immoral people. This rant is replete with “quotations” from America’s founders about the importance of religion–not just any religion, of course, just Christianity–and explaining how far the country has fallen from those glorious days of religious purity. The writer bemoaned the fact that the quotations go largely unreported by America’s corrupted media. Hint: this may be because they are bogus. These are David Barton-generated, wholly manufactured sentiments the authenticity of which has long been discredited. (Civic literacy sermon alert! Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the founders to whom these quotes are attributed would recognize how inconsistent the statements are with the philosophy of those to whom they are attributed.)

I could go on, but you get the picture.

The people who generate these sad diatribes are obviously feeling beleaguered. It’s hard not to sympathize; like Rip Van Winkle, they awoke one day to a world they don’t recognize or understand, and these frantic jeremiads are a response–a way of keeping threatening and unfamiliar realities at bay. Take this example:

Such people are the product of America’s decaying society whose reality has been warped by drugs and other selfish pleasures. America has gradually become worse from the drugs, rock and roll of the 60′s and 70′s to the drugs and rap music of today. The communists won while Americans smoked pot.

The alienation of God in society began in the classroom. Today, blasphemies can easily be seen on TV and the cinema. Hollywood portrays the sane as the insane. The abnormal and perverted as normal. The unborn babies are seen as nothing. The silent holocaust continues. Is it any wonder America is in trouble?

The economy destroyed by white-collar crimes were done by men of immoral character. They are not personally responsible for all of America’s failings but are a symptom of America’s spiritual illness most commonly referred to in previous centuries as “sin”. This is the connection that most fail to see. Where there is no God there is chaos.”

Sex, drugs and rock and roll….

What amazes me is a definition of morality that centers on personal behaviors. It never seems to occur to the denizens of Planet AFA that morality might better be measured by how we treat our fellow human beings.  Of course, if righteousness consists in human kindness, in recognition that all creatures created by the God they purport to worship are entitled to human dignity–the inevitable conclusion is that the true immorality is theirs.

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