Goodbye to All That
Posted on November 18, 2007
Filed Under Blogging, Language, Teaching |
I have been guilty of a certain utopianism when it comes to life on line. For a while I even believed in the idea that we could have “open discussions” about politics on line. IHE’s discussions disabused me of that idea right quick, though I should have seen it years earlier — sometimes I’m witlessly naive. But what, really, might one hope to accomplish in an “open discussion” in an “open forum”? Those are phrases the editors at IHE used in responding to a couple of my emails about the tenor & tone of the discussions on the site. A tenor & tone of insult & dismissal that I for a while actively participated in, though I like to think I was acting against my better angels. That I in fact have better angels. Where do those angels go when we encounter someone whose politics we despise? In his NYT column the other day Paul Krugman made a remark about partisanship that directly challenges the conventional political wisdom of the corporate media & the pampered & privileged (& bone lazy) political insiders whose fingers grasp the levers of power:
“Washington means by bipartisanship is mainly that everyone should come together to give conservatives what they want. We all wish that American politics weren’t so bitter and partisan. But if you try to find common ground where none exists — which is the case for many issues today — you end up being played for a fool.”
There are things, that is, about which it is foolish to compromise. Krugman was writing about Obama’s remarks on the “crisis” in Social Security as an example of trying to find common ground where none exists. A corollary of this is the “both the right & the left are bashing us so we must be doing some thing right” line you usually hear from journalists. No, it just means that you are morally lax, sir.
And that is why the whole idea of the open forum, in which dispassionate adults discuss the issues of the day in the utopian space of the internet is not just silly, but a dangerous fantasy. Which is not to say that no discussion is possible, but that discussion is only productive when those involved share some basic values. A situation that does not prevail, say, in the discussions at IHE, where those who detest academia & academics gather to throw stones & spit at professors & university staff. It’s probably good for business, though, & I don’t expect IHE’s editors to change their policy; instead, they will perpetuate their fantasy version of free speech. Such speech is certainly free, but it is ultimately empty, useless, unproductive, & perhaps dangerous because of the delusion that communication is actually taking place. It’s not.
Comments
5 Responses to “Goodbye to All That”
There’s been a noticeable culture shift on the internet the past few years. It was bad enough when online games drew the thirteen year-olds (and the mentally thirteen year-olds). Recently, it seems Focus on the Family (ptui!) bought all their members AOL (ptui!) or something. You can’t even go near anything that’s not heavily moderated.
Alas for the days when only geeks used computers.
Even if the “shared values” were no more than an agreement to civilized discourse and respect, the conversation might be more worthwhile. But as it is, the noise machine can only think of overwhelming the discussion.
I thought about this post today, ‘Resistance Is Surrender’, an analysis of the dialectic structure of ‘The Left’, that concludes we have become content with argument.
Perhaps this is the point of the essay: By finding our place amongst a laundry of various protest, we style ourselves within the overall community. Whether our protest is effective has become less important to us, since it’s been recently shown most protest has been ineffective. With only pandering and futility remaining, arguing itself has become our poor substitute.
SNOWBLOOD
Burbling up through white
flattened christ-
massy crusted
powdery snow
pillowed up around
brown trunks
from whose
fir, pine, spruce
holly & yew
rises a deep
warm red shame
of conquest
empire rising
to replace
a republic crucified
democracy transformed
a snowman
for showmen
a deathmask
of snowblood.
EDWARD MYCUE
Brian, I read that piece, too, as well as this response to it.