There won’t be a real blog post today–I’m spring cleaning.
Yesterday, my best friend told me that I’m the only person she knows who still does a full-scale, top-to-bottom spring cleaning. Maybe she’s right, but for me it is as close as I get to performing a religious ritual.
Part of it is rooted in religion: spring is the Passover season, and generations of Jewish women have internalized the yearly search for “chometz”–i.e. yeast–during which they scrubbed the premises not only of the forbidden breadcrumbs, but for dirt of any kind.
But for me, the satisfaction I get from ensuring that my closets and drawers are tidy, my baseboards dust-free and my windows washed is in direct contrast to the degree to which I am unable to control anything else.
I may not be able to stem the recent tide of anti-woman rhetoric. I may not be able to wave a wand and achieve equal civil rights for GLBT folks. I obviously can’t control the public’s tendency to vote for reality-challenged politicians. Hell, I can’t even control my weight.
But dammit, one thing I can control is how clean my closets are!
I know it’s easy to critique a campaign from the sidelines, but it’s really difficult to understand what Dick Lugar is thinking. I catch his television commercials from time to time, and as a past supporter and contributor, I get email blasts from his campaign daily.
It is increasingly painful and off-putting to watch.
The Dick Lugar I used to know and admire was a statesman. I didn’t always agree with him–even when I was still a Republican, he was sometimes too conservative for me–but I always respected him; he was reasoned and thoughtful, gracious to his opponents and informed in his positions. It’s true that, as the party moved right, Lugar moved with it, but never to the fringe. He never stooped to the sort of hateful rhetoric and flat-earth know-nothingness that has so diminished the Grand Old Party. He was never an ideologue.
Until now.
Lugar is being challenged by the worst elements of an increasingly irrational base. Mourdock, his primary opponent, is a bad joke. But as Jim Shella wrote in an earlier column on this race, Mourdock isn’t the point. While there are certainly legitimate criticisms that can be leveled at him (or any other long-serving elected official), Lugar’s opposition is largely fueled by a veritable tsunami of anger and resentment and fear that has focused on him as a part of the hated status quo.
And therein lies the challenge.
Shella was right: the Tea Party fanatics who want Dick Lugar gone don’t care who replaces him. They detest Lugar for the very characteristics that have generated consistent voter support over the years. That very obvious reality puts his campaign squarely between the proverbial rock and hard place–if he remains true to himself and his record, if he campaigns on that record with his head held high, he won’t win the votes of the ideologues most likely to vote in the primary. But if he tries to reinvent himself as a rabid True Believer, he betrays his own principles, diminishes an otherwise admirable legacy–and still may not get their votes.
Despite the risks, the campaign has chosen the latter strategy.
So we are treated to grainy commercials featuring the Senator using “good old boy” terminology he’s never previously employed. We get emails from his campaign demonizing the President of the United States, stooping to a level of disrespect that would have been inconceivable coming from the “real” Dick Lugar. We are assured that the Senator no longer supports measures, like the Dream Act, that he had previously–and admirably–championed. We get messages that are absolutely devoid of the nuance and civility characteristic of the statesman he used to be.
It is so pathetic, so inauthentic, it’s painful.
I don’t know whether this all-out pandering will allow Lugar to eke out one last term. He has a lot of money, and a deep reservoir of good will, and it may be enough–although if I were a wagering woman, I wouldn’t bet on it.
I know a number of Democrats who had earlier considered “crossing over” to vote for Lugar in the GOP primary. I was one of them. Had the campaign chosen a different course–had it mounted a full-throated defense of an impressive record–I think many of those crossover votes would materialize, although probably not enough to change the outcome. Fewer such votes will be cast for a man running away from his own most admirable traits.
The longer this primary contest goes on, the more I want to ask the Senator two questions: is winning another term, at age 80, so important that it is worth this unseemly (and unpersuasive) groveling? And if you win, if you return to Washington after this dispiriting display, which Dick Lugar will you be?
In its business section this morning, the New York Times had a lengthy story about Angie’s List, the Indianapolis-based company that offers members access to reviews of service providers of various kinds. The reviews are provided by the members, and the article noted that–unlike sites like Yelp!–those reviews are not anonymous. While Angie’s list doesn’t publish the names of the reviewers, it does insist that evaluations come from identifiable individuals.
As the company’s public offering explained, they require this because it’s hard to trust anonymous statements and “facts” culled from the internet. The insistence that reviews come from verifiable sources is one way to increase the trustworthiness of the information being provided.
Lack of trust may be the signal characteristic of our times.
Angie’s List isn’t the only organization trying to deal with the wild west that is our current information landscape–far from it. I would argue that much of what ails America these days is either enabled by or a direct result of mis-information, dis-information and information uncertainty.
We are all being constantly bombarded with “news” that we aren’t quite sure we can trust.
The days when Mr. and Mrs. America tuned in to Walter Cronkite–and relied on the accuracy of his reporting–are long gone. Newspapers–with a few exceptions–fill the few pages they still publish with restaurant reviews and diet tips rather than fact-checked reporting. Cable “news” is anything but; it’s spin and talking points, and most Americans recognize that. It is increasingly difficult to determine the credibility of information we find online. No matter how goofy the perspectives or bizarre the conspiracy theories, you are likely to find confirmation of them in some fevered corner of the internet. (Just ask Rep. Bob Morris, who found “evidence” confirming his suspicions about those sneaky, abortion-loving, lesbian Girl Scouts.)
The problem is, when we no longer have authoritative sources and institutions we trust, societies don’t work very well. We lose an essential element of what social scientists call “social capital.” (Warning: shameless plug approaching.) I wrote about the causes and troubling consequences of diminished social and institutional trust a couple of years ago, in my book Distrust, American Style.
It isn’t just the folks who find internet confirmation that aliens landed in Roswell and the government covered it up. We’ve always had conspiracy theorists who are, shall we say, lightly tethered to reality. Today’s information landscape promises consequences far more pernicious than enabling the Holocaust deniers or encouraging the religious zealots convinced that the Rapture is imminent.
When ordinary Americans can’t be sure who is telling the truth, it’s easier to retreat into “us versus them” views of the world; easier to believe that a President who doesn’t look like you is really a secret Kenyan Muslim; easier to believe that an effort to provide healthcare is really an attack on religious liberty.
There is broad recognition that we have a problem.
National Public Radio has just adopted new ethics guidelines. We can only hope they signal the beginning of a wide trend in the media.
The new code stresses the importance of accuracy over false balance; it appears–finally–to abandon the “he said, she said” approach (what I have elsewhere called “stenography masquerading as reporting”) that all too often distorts truth in favor of a phony “fairness.”
At all times, we report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports. We strive to give our audience confidence that all sides have been considered and represented fairly.
One of my gripes over the past several years has been the abandonment of precisely this tenet of good journalism. A good example has been environmental reporting–how many times have media sources reported on climate change, for example, by giving equal time and weight to the settled science and the deniers, without ever noting that the deniers constitute less than 1% of all climate scientists, and are generally regarded as a kooky fringe? That’s “balance,” but it certainly isn’t “fair to the truth.”
A few years ago, this sort of false equivalency was illustrated by one of my all-time favorite Daily Show skits. The “senior journalism reporter” was explaining the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacks on John Kerry to Jon Stewart. “The Swift Boat Veterans say this happened; the Kerry Campaign says it didn’t. Back to you, Jon!” When Stewart then asked “But aren’t you going to tell us who is telling the truth?” the response was dead-on. “Absolutely not, Jon. This is journalism.”
Far too often, reporters pursue artificial balance at the expense of truth. If a Democratic campaign plays a dirty trick, reporters rush to remind their audience of a similar transgression by Republicans, and vice-versa. This search for equivalency may be well-intentioned, but it misrepresents reality and misleads those of us who depend upon the media for accurate information.
NPR’s recognition of this pernicious practice, and it’s new Code of Ethics, are a welcome sign that at least some journalists might be returning to Job One: telling us the unembellished truth.
Some people go through life like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.
Then there’s Rick Santorum. He wants to repeal the Enlightenment.
I’ve been mulling over Santorum’s recent attack on higher education, part and parcel of his rejection of so many aspects of modernity: evolution, reproductive autonomy for women, separation of church and state, equality for gays and lesbians…There really isn’t much about the 21st Century (or the 19th or 20th, for that matter) that he seems willing to accept.
I think Santorum’s hostility toward education is very real, despite his own MBA and Law Degrees, and it is at the very heart of his worldview (I hesitate to call it a “philosophy,” a word he would obviously consider “snobby.”) Many people have suggested that his own degrees are evidence that he doesn’t really believe his charges that colleges and universities “indoctrinate” young people, make them lose their religion and become more like the hated Barack Obama–i.e., intellectual. I don’t agree; Santorum’s degrees are professional ones–high order job training. (I”m not throwing rocks; I have a law degree too.)
What Santorum loathes and fears is education. Real education doesn’t “indoctrinate,” of course–it does something more pernicious. It questions.
Education is the arch-enemy of certitude.
If I do my job properly, my students will leave my classes a bit more confused, a bit less sure they have “the answers” and a lot more aware of the magnitude of the questions. They will encounter the diversity with which we mortals approach the uncertainties and complexities of the world we inhabit. They will have a greater appreciation of what they don’t know. If I do my job well, they will also have some “critical” tools with which to assess the credibility of the information with which they are increasingly bombarded.
That is the education Santorum detests, because he is cut wholly from Puritan cloth.
The Puritans came to America for religious liberty–defined as the right to practice the True Religion, and the even more important right to impose that Truth on their neighbors. They approached education much like TV’s Jeopardy–you started with the correct answer, which the Bible provided, and then you went looking for the explanations that would justify that answer. Usually, in the early colonies, those explanations came from the preachers and biblical scholars who’d preceded you.
The philosophical and scientific movement that came to be called the Enlightenment changed the nature of knowledge. You no longer began with the answer; instead, you examined the world around you, based some initial conclusions on careful empirical observations, and then tested those conclusions, which were always considered conditional and subject to change if new information emerged. The Enlightenment gave us the scientific method–as well as a more scientific approach to questions like “how should governments be constructed.”
The U.S. Constitution was a creation of the Enlightenment. So was ambiguity. If all truth is provisional, if all conclusions are subject to revision based upon new information, how can anyone really, really be sure of anything?
Education–real education, as opposed to job training–prepares students to live with that ambiguity.
